As in Mesopotamia, so in Palestine, the rabbis had long since taken it for granted that they should serve as the leaders of the Jewish people. Needless to say, all of their various writings were designed to offer a ringing endorsement of this view. A version of history in which the Jews of Palestine, disoriented and demoralised by the shattering loss of the Temple, had turned for guidance to the rabbis, whose power and prestige had accordingly known no limits, was promoted with gusto. That the truth had been rather different, and that most Jews had for centuries been in the habit of looking for justice from city councillors, local magnates or even the Roman governor, had inhibited the rabbis not at all. They knew themselves, with a sublime self-confidence, to be the embodiments of God’s will—and, sure enough, over the course of the centuries, reality had come to blend with their ideal of what it should be. Their rivals as spokesmen for the Jews of Palestine began to fade from the scene. Their rulings and proscriptions were increasingly accepted. Their understanding of what it meant to be chosen by God started to verge on the definitive. Jewishness, in the Promised Land, had turned decisively rabbinical.
That this was so, however, did not owe everything to the rabbis themselves, and their obdurately learned ambition. A certain debt was owed as well to their bitterest and most inveterate foes. The Jews of Palestine, unlike those of Mesopotamia, were provincials in a Christian empire. As such, they were objects of neurotic fascination to their rulers. Attempts by the imperial elite to spell out precisely what Christianismos might be had repeatedly led them to define its presumed opposite: Ioudaismos. Even at Nicaea, Arians and Catholics had furiously accused each other of being Jews in Christian clothing. Over the subsequent centuries, the same smear would invariably be applied whenever one faction of the Church wished to charge another with heresy. As a result, Christians increasingly came to cast the Jewish faith in terms of a religio that could serve as a mirror of their own: chauvinistic and desiccated where Christianity was universal and fire-touched by the Holy Spirit. The Jews themselves, of course, would hardly have recognised this characterisation, nor the presumption of the Church that they subscribed to and practised a “religion” called Ioudaismos. Religio, after all, was a Christian concept; and so too, for that reason, was “Judaism.”c
Nevertheless, the Church leaders’ great labour of ring-fencing their own faith did have far-reaching implications for the faith practised by the Jews. The border between the two was now more firmly patrolled than ever. Bishops and emperors were not the only ones who stood guard over it. Rabbis did as well. This duty, of course, was one that they had always claimed for themselves; but their neighbours were increasingly content, even relieved, to cede to them their role as the watchmen of God’s will. The Jews of Palestine, confronted as they were by the monumental and menacing edifice of Christian orthodoxy, had grown increasingly fretful about what their own frameworks of authority, and their own orthodoxy, might be. Rather than have it defined for them by the Christian Church, they preferred to turn to the scholars whose massive achievement in compiling the Talmud had been preparation for precisely such a moment. “Why should a rabbi be hailed as a king? Because it is by virtue of the Torah that kings rule.”36 Hardly the most rib-tickling of jokes, to be sure—but one that bore, by the time of Justinian, an unmistakable hint of truth.
And certainly, among the Jews of Palestine, there was a desperate need of leaders. The tide of affairs was palpably flowing against them. Christian authorities in the Holy Land viewed the continued presence of its previous tenants as both a challenge and an embarrassment. Although the Roman state, like the Church, recognised Judaism as a distinct and officially sanctioned religion, that hardly implied beneficence. Rather, toleration was the flip-side of a mounting obsession on the part of Constantinople with regulation of the empire’s Jews. A people hedged about with legal definitions, after all, were a people who could more readily be targeted with restrictions and indignities. Jewish noses were repeatedly rubbed in the brute fact of their second-class status. They were forbidden to join the army; to serve in the bureaucracy; to buy Christian slaves. Synagogues, although protected by law from being burned down or converted into churches, were permitted only to be renovated, and on no account to be built from scratch. Many Jews, it was true, had felt perfectly free to ignore this prescription—so much so that the ban had coincided with a golden age of synagogue construction. Almost every Jewish village had come to boast one. Even the humblest and most remote might be built out of stone, while the larger, urban synagogues tended to be so sumptuously decorated that it was only their orientation towards Jerusalem that made them readily distinguishable from churches. Nevertheless, even for those wealthy enough to have commissioned all the synagogues’ mosaics and gleaming marble, the prosperity these fittings proclaimed was not entirely good news. The boom-time in Palestine owed little to the natives and almost everything to incomers. The mass immigration of Christians into the Holy Land might have generated huge profits for individual Jewish hoteliers and relic-suppliers, but it threatened to swamp the Jews as a people. Those who had not been cowed or seduced into accepting baptism by the triumphant swagger of Christianity were finding themselves obliged to retreat to ever higher ground. By the sixth century, the Jews of Palestine probably numbered no more than 10 per cent of the total population.37 Even though Christians might fret that the Jews were breeding “like worms,”38 the reality was that they had long since become a minority in their own land.
And an ever more embattled one at that. Early in the reign of Justinian, that inveterate sponsor of intimidating architectural statements, a team of workmen climbed a mountain named Berenice, some ninety miles north of Jerusalem.39 Their view from the summit was spectacular: in the distance rose the Golan Heights, a river-scored plateau that marked Palestine’s frontier with Syria; below stretched a glittering lake dotted with fishing boats, so broad that the locals proudly termed it a sea; along its shores, the fields were “a paradise, rich with wheat and fruit, with wine, oil and apples.”40 In fact, so fertile was the land that even the women were renowned for the spectacular bloom of their beauty. The region was known as Galilee—and for centuries it had served as the stronghold of the rabbis of Palestine. Tiberias, a city picturesquely sited on the lower slopes of Mount Berenice, directly beside the lake, boasted the only batei midrash—“houses of study”—that could rival those of Mesopotamia for prestige. The city still remained, in the reign of Justinian, overwhelmingly true to its distinguished heritage: its councillors were all Jewish; it had no fewer than thirteen synagogues; even its bath-houses were rabbinically approved. Nowhere in Palestine could rival it as the conscience and watchtower of Jewish life.