What Were the Early Rabbis?

“Jack N. Lightstone is in top form as he guides the non-specialist reader to his vision of the origins of rabbinic Judaism. The author utilizes all his considerable academic and pedagogical talent to create a lucid and cogent introduction to the rabbis of late antiquity and the movement they spawned. In doing so, he contributes to a better, more nuanced understanding of a crucial era in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike.”


—Ira Robinson, professor emeritus of Judaic studies, Concordia University





“What Were the Early Rabbis? addresses intriguing questions and provides stimulating and challenging analyses. The special focus is on the broad emergence of Rabbinic Judaism using social science perspectives but without the burdens of its jargon and always connected to historical and literary contexts. With analytic clarity, Jack N. Lightstone identifies rabbinic culture, its legitimacy, and provides the reader essential ways to understand and study the core rabbinic text, the Mishnah.”


—Calvin Goldscheider, professor emeritus of Judaic studies, Brown University





“This book is a very readable introduction to the core profile and expertise of the cadre of the rabbis just before and after the turn of the third century CE, a seminal era in the evolution of the group that later became the most influential institution in Jewish religious and civil life. Jack N. Lightstone skillfully places the early rabbis in their Judean, Middle-Eastern, and Greco-Roman social and cultural settings. Based on sound scholarship, the book adopts an engaging style of an experienced teacher and storyteller.”


—Simcha Fishbane, professor of Jewish studies, Touro University Graduate School of Jewish Studies





“What Were the Early Rabbis? both translates the best of current academic scholarship on the early phases of Rabbinic Judaism and offers non-experts and scholars alike a fresh and insightful approach to tracking these developments. By drawing upon social-scientific approaches, Jack N. Lightstone moves away from a typical focus on individuals and ideas alone to social institutional factors that led to and sustained the formation of a group that over time changed the lives of Jews and others in the West.”


—Joel Gereboff, associate professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University