Johanan ben Zakkai

The story is told in several versions and they agree on the essentials. During the Roman siege of Jerusalem the zealot factions controlling the city forbade anyone to leave. Johanan ben Zakkai, who had argued for negotiation, arranged with his disciples to be reported dead and carried out of the gates for burial, since a corpse could not remain in the city overnight.

Once outside he was brought to Vespasian, and greeted him as emperor. Vespasian objected that he was a general and not the emperor, and that this was treason; Johanan replied that if he were not emperor he would become one, since only a king could take this city. A messenger then arrived from Rome with news of Nero's death and Vespasian's elevation. In gratitude, or in amusement, Vespasian offered him a request. He asked for Yavneh and its sages, for the survival of a rabbinic family, and for a physician for a colleague.

Whether it happened is not recoverable. The story appears in rabbinic compilations centuries later, it draws on a prophecy motif reported of others in the same period, and it is doing obvious work: it explains, in a single scene, why the tradition's continuity was legitimate and why its founder had not fought. What is not in doubt is the outcome. When Jerusalem fell and the Temple burned, there was a functioning school elsewhere, and a body of scholars in it.

The problem after 70 was total. The religion of Israel as the scriptures describe it is built around a Temple, a priesthood and a sacrificial system, and all three had just ceased to exist. What Johanan ben Zakkai did at Yavneh was to transfer what could be transferred and to authorise a substitute for what could not.

The enactments attributed to him are practical and specific: the palm branch is to be taken for seven days everywhere, as it had been in the Temple; the shofar is to be sounded at Yavneh when the New Year falls on a Sabbath, as it had been in the sanctuary; testimony about the new moon may be received all day; priests may pronounce the blessing without shoes. Each moves a Temple practice into the world that survived it.

The theological substitution is stated in a short exchange. Joshua, seeing the ruins, cries out that the place where Israel's sins were atoned for is destroyed. Johanan answers that there is another atonement as effective, and quotes Hosea: I desire mercy and not sacrifice. Acts of loving kindness take the place of the offerings.

One thing he did not do is close the canon. Nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship spoke confidently of a Council of Jamnia around the year 90 which fixed the Hebrew scriptures and expelled Christians from the synagogue, and Jack P. Lewis showed in 1964 that the received account rested on inference rather than evidence. The academy debated whether particular books defile the hands, which is a question about the status of individual books, not a canon-fixing session. The atlas holds the phantom council as its own entry precisely because it is still cited.