Rabinic Judaism

Rabbinic Judaism is the form of Judaism that grew out of the Pharisees after the Temple's destruction in AD 70 — centered on the study of Torah, the synagogue, and the teacher (rabbi) rather than on Temple sacrifice. (This entry's filename is spelled "Rabinic"; the correct spelling is "Rabbinic.")

Overview

• Rabbinic Judaism is the mainstream of Judaism from late antiquity to today, the direct heir of the Pharisees.
• When the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70, the priestly religion of the Sadducees collapsed with its altar; the Pharisaic way — Torah study, the synagogue, and the authority of the learned teacher (rabbi) — needed no Temple, and so survived.
• Its inherited oral interpretation of the Law was eventually written down as the Mishnah (c. AD 200) and expanded in the Talmud, the foundational texts of the rabbinic tradition.

Summary

Rabbinic Judaism is the religion that emerged from the ruins of the Second Temple. With the Temple gone and sacrifice no longer possible, the future of Judaism belonged to the one movement that had never depended on the altar: the Pharisees, whose religious life had always centered on the study and practice of the Torah in the synagogue and the house of study.[^jant] Their teachers, the rabbis, became the authorities of a Judaism built on the conviction that God gave both a written Torah and an oral Torah of interpretation, handed down and developed by the sages. This oral tradition was gathered into the Mishnah around AD 200 and elaborated over the following centuries in the Talmud, which remain the classic texts of rabbinic Judaism. It is, in a real sense, one of the two heirs of the first-century Jewish world — the other being the Christian Church, which carried its own inheritance out of the same matrix, not least through a Pharisee named Paul. Cross-link Pharisees, Judaism, Mishnah, The Torah.

Sources

[^jant]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament (eds. Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, Oxford Univ. Press), essay "Jewish Movements of the New Testament Period" (Daniel R. Schwartz) — the Pharisees as a "proto-rabbinic" movement whose Torah-and-synagogue religion survived AD 70 to become rabbinic Judaism, with its written and oral Torah, (in-copyright scholarly reference; paraphrased).