Talmudic Academies in The Land of Israel - Council of Jamnia

Council of Jamnia

The Roman destruction of Jerusalem put as abrupt an end to the disputes of the schools as it did to the contests between political parties. It was then that a disciple of Hillel, the venerable Johanan ben Zakkai, founded a new home for Jewish Law in Yavne (Jamnia), and thus evoked a new intellectual life from the ruins of a fallen political existence. The seat of the Patriarchate at Yavne, which at once constituted itself the successor of the Great Sanhedrin of Jerusalem by putting into practise the ordinances of that body as far as was necessary and practicable, attracted all those who had escaped the national catastrophe and who had become prominent by their character and their learning. Moreover, it reared a new generation of similarly gifted men, whose task it became to overcome the evil results of still another dire catastrophe—the unfortunate Bar Kokhba war with its melancholy ending. During the interval between these two disasters (56-117), or, more accurately, until the "War of Quietus" under Trajan, the school at Yavne was the recognized tribunal that gathered the traditions of the past and confirmed them; that ruled and regulated existing conditions; and that sowed the seeds for future development. Next to its founder, it owed its splendor and its undisputed supremacy especially to the energetic Gamaliel II, a great-grandson of Hillel. To him flocked the pupils of Johanan ben Zakkai and other masters and students of the Law and of Biblical interpretation. Though some of them taught and labored in other places — Eliezer ben Hyrcanus in Lydda; Joshua ben Hananiah in Peki'in; Ishmael ben Elisha in Kefar Aziz, Akiva in Bene Barak; Hananiah ben Teradyon in Siknin — Yavne remained the center; and in "the vineyard" of Yavne, as they called their place of meeting, they used to assemble for joint action.