Tiberias and the Jerusalem Talmud

The Sanhedrin's final seat was Tiberias on the shore of the Kinneret. There Rabbi Yochanan bar Nappacha headed a great academy, gathering the sages of the Land of Israel: Reish Lakish, Rabbi Elazar, Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi, later Rabbi Yose and Rabbi Mana.

What they produced became the Jerusalem Talmud — more accurately the Talmud of the Land of Israel, since Jews were then forbidden to live in Jerusalem. It is written in Galilean Aramaic, terser than the Babylonian: fewer long analyses, more direct conclusions. But it treats the order of Zeraim in full — the laws of harvest, tithes and the sabbatical year that apply only in the Holy Land — and that makes it indispensable.

Its redaction fell in hard years. The Christianized empire pressed harder on Jewish institutions, taxes rose, scholars thinned out. The work was wound up around 4110, in places literally broken off: some tractates end unfinished, and the order of Kodashim is missing entirely. Around 4118 Hillel II published a fixed calendrical reckoning so that months could be set without a Sanhedrin — a sign that the center in the Land of Israel could no longer guarantee its link with the diaspora. In 4189 Rome abolished the office of nasi.

The Jerusalem Talmud remained the younger brother of the Babylonian. But it preserves the voice of the Land of Israel — its farming, its festivals and its hope.