Talmudic Academies in The Land of Israel

The Talmudic Academies in the Land of Israel were yeshivot that served as centers for Jewish scholarship and the development of Jewish law in the Levant between the destruction of the Second Temple in c.70CE and the deposition of Raban Gamliel VI in c.425CE. The academies a great and lasting impact on the development of world Jewry, including the creation of the Palestinian Talmud. Land of Israel is a religious name for the region which during the Talmudic period was officially known as Syria Palaestina (under the Romans) and Palaestina Prima / Palaestina Secunda (under the Byzantines).

According to an oft-quoted tradition of Hoshayah, (a collector of traditions of the tannaim, who lived in Caesarea in the first half of the third century), there existed in Jerusalem 480 synagogues, all of which were destroyed with the Temple. Each of these synagogues was provided with a school for Biblical instruction, as well as one for instruction in the oral law. Besides these schools of the lower and middle grades mentioned by the tradition (which is not to be too readily discredited, though it may have exaggerated their number for the sake of a good round figure), there existed in Jerusalem a sort of university or academy—an institution composed of the scribes (sages and teachers), whose pupils, having out-grown the schools, gathered around them for further instruction and were called, therefore, talmidei hakhamim ("disciples of the wise"). There is, however, no certain information as to the organization of this institute, or of the relation in which it stood to the Great Sanhedrin, whose Pharisee members certainly belonged to it. The most important details of its activity are afforded by the accounts concerning the schools ("houses") of Hillel and Shammai, whose controversies and debates belong to the last century of the period of the Second Temple, and relate not only to the Halakhah, but also to questions of Biblical exegesis and religious philosophy. For example, it is said that the schools of Shammai and Hillel occupied two and a half years in discussing the question whether it had been better for man not to have been created.