Who hasn’t heard of a rabbi? In American culture, they are ubiquitous. TV shows are filled with them. Movies too. In literature, high and low, from Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow to airport reads by John Grisham, rabbis are everywhere. If you are a religious Jew, they are an anchor of your daily life. But even if you are a Jew who is an adamant atheist – or even if you are non-Jew with a Jewish friend – they are hard to avoid, whether you are at a wedding, or a bar/bat Mitzvah, or a burial ceremony, or even just vaguely aware of popular culture. They are often bearded and all in black, but sometimes they look not all that different from the rest of us. Some of them are even – gasp! – women. But who are these rabbis? Where have they come from, and what is it, exactly, that they do? And why do the tens of thousands of these men and women across the globe all choose to use the title “rabbi” to define what they are. My current project sets to answer these questions by presenting a clear and secular history of these misrepresented, myth-shrouded, and utterly fascinating individuals, who lived and functioned  over some ten generations, nearly two thousand years ago, and that still are so present in our world today.

Research Methodology and Project Goals

Normally the rabbis are studied from within the confines of Judaism, and only thought about in isolation. Indeed, the most influential scholars of rabbinic literature in the past century (Epstein, Lieberman, Halivni are the three prime examples), were also, to one degree or another, rabbis themselves. Even in our era of transdisciplinary emphasis, we typically focus on the ancient texts these men produced—some 45 loosely related books of different sizes and genres in Hebrew and Aramaic, usually referred to as Rabbinic Literature—and use the ancient rabbis’ own descriptions in order to reconstruct their story. In contrast, my study wishes to turn the tables – to study the rabbis from the outside and integrate them into the vast and varied fabric of their place and time. The first people who described themselves as rabbis lived in the Roman world. And so, my current project (and ensuing book) utilizes the full gamut of tools available to modern scholars of this era in order to reconstruct the story of the ancient rabbis. To do so, I introduce a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, resting primarily on archaeology.

Excavation throughout the Mediterranean has yielded numerous artifacts – buildings, inscriptions, texts written on papyri and parchment – which provides ample, though rarely used, information about the rabbis. Some artifacts mention rabbis directly, others provide physical and documentary evidence that sheds light on matters of prime interest to them. In addition, classical Greek and Latin literatures, as well as the writing of early church scholars and leaders (anachronistically called Patristics), also provide invaluable data. My work will apply these resources and external records to the vast literature of the ancient rabbis themselves. The result will be a potent, and nearly unprecedented, assemblage of sources, from which I aim to create a new collective portrait. I share these methodologies with other current scholars in the field (the work of Hayim Lapin and Catherine Hezser are the two best examples). Yet, up to this date, despite important publications devoted to specific case-studies in rabbinic history, a full new monograph that reconstructs their origin and first 500 hundred years of history, based on material outside of traditional rabbinic texts, is yet to be produced. My goal is to fill this gap and to write a rabbinic history that is primarily based on archaeological, epigraphical and classical, Graeco-Roman material.

The project will aim to answer the basic questions about the original meaning of the term rabbi, and the origin of its application, but then will move to broader historical, cultural, and social questions that will place these men, their efforts, and life’s work within the huge context of the ancient Mediterranean during the first 500 years of the Common Era. The answers, I think, will dramatically shake some of our current understandings (and many misunderstandings) about the rabbis and the office they assumed over the generations. I believe that these original protagonists were a far cry different from what modern rabbis and their congregations wish them to be; indeed, as this project and book will reveal, at times our modern assumptions are diametrically opposed to the actual reality of this fabled group.