How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity

How rabbinic expertise was socially constructed, performed, and defended in Roman Palestine

At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In this groundbreaking study, Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writing...