Is Modern Rabbinic Judaism Based on a Myth?

The story of Yavneh is dramatic — heroic, even. A famous rabbi is smuggled out of Jerusalem prior to the violent destruction of the Second Temple. He wins Roman assent for his prescient plan: to establish a great yeshiva at Yavneh, to reconstitute the Sanhedrin and to guide a traumatized people. He succeeds. Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai and the rabbis gather to decide which texts to include in the biblical canon and to replace the service of sacrifice with one of prayer. They preserve the law and write liturgy; they adapt and democratize. They “save” Judaism.

Except they didn't. Back in the sixties, Jacob Neusner and his students began looking at rabbinic tradition in its historical context as one of several “Judaisms,” creating long-overdue doubt about Talmudic rabbis-as-saviors narratives. In the preface to his groundbreaking “Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah,” published in 1981, Neusner explicitly informs his readers that he is exploring the work of a given and specific elite which is speaking for itself, not for Judaism as a whole. In 1975, Peter Schäfer published an article on the “sogennante Synode von Jabne” (the “so-called synode of Yavneh”). Scholars now take his choice of words for granted: they know that there is no evidence that Yavneh is anything other than a rabbinic myth. In 2000, Daniel Boyarin called the Yavneh trope “a series of changing legends of foundation” on page 28 of “A Tale of Two Synods: Nicaea, Yavneh, and Rabbinic Ecclesiology.”