It is expected that those who have responded, or will respond, to this chapter’s call share a “hunch” that is not yet a well-supported conclusion—namely, that the early Palestinian Rabbinic document called the Mishnah proffers important, but still underutilized, evidence for the understanding of Palestinian Jewish society and culture in the latter half of the second century CE and the first half of the third century. Consequently, an anticipated aspect of the scholarship for which this chapter provides prolegomena is to explore that hunch in order to (1) indicate whether, how, and to what degree the hunch warrants being restated as a strong, well-supported claim and (2) provide, where appropriate, cogent examples of reconstructing social and cultural aspects of Palestinian Jewish life, and social and cultural constructs representative of the era under scrutiny on the basis of Mishnaic evidence (taken on its own or, when appropriate methodologically, in conjunction with cognate evidence).

But is it not strange that a document, the Mishnah, which has been extant for about 1800 years, that has been studied continuously within Rabbinic-Jewish circles since its production, and that has also been analyzed within early modern and modern academic circles since the 1840s⁴ should be deemed in the second decade of this twenty-first century to be still-underutilized, albeit important, evidence for the society and culture within which it first emerged? How can this be? The answer to the first question is: Not so strange as one might think, when one has a flavor for the answer to the second question, which will come to light as I proceed through this paper.

What, therefore, this essay seeks to achieve is several-fold.

First, it strives to provide some preliminary indication of why one might come to share the hunch that Mishnah’s evidence ought to be plumbed to learn more about Palestinian Jewish society and culture in the period that Mishnah was produced, plus or minus 50 (to 100) years. There are two subtopics related to this first task. One is to give some heuristic indication that knowing more about this period in Palestinian Jewish society and culture is something that ought to be of greater scholarly interest—not only for those who specialize in the academic study of this place and time, but also for scholars with cognate interests and areas of specialty. The other is to give some indication as to why scholars should turn to Mishnah.

Second, this chapter rehearses some of the more overarching (and by now, often recognized) challenges encountered in using Mishnaic evidence for the purposes indicated. This second undertaking aims to provide at least a general understanding of why the evidence of Mishnah will have remained underutilized to date. That is, it provides a preliminary answer to the earlier question, “How can this be?” Again, two subtopics will be addressed. I provide a very brief survey of Mishnah’s most pervasive literary and substantive traits, since it is these that underlie the challenges faced when using Mishnaic evidence for our purposes. The chapter then spells out some of those challenges, by way of example. The interface between these two subtopics has much to do with how one chooses to account historically for how and why Mishnah came to be produced and to have the most pervasive traits that we observe.

Third, this chapter will outline in broad terms the three potentially most compelling questions or topical directions of inquiry for the study of Mishnah’s evidence called for in this programmatic chapter. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that there are three logical avenues or topical directions that one might take. They are:

All three of these avenues of inquiry should bear fruit; each will provide important insights about Palestinian Jewish society, culture, or social “visioning” in the Roman imperial period. But it is not the case that they are, or will be, equally fruitful. Why? Because they are not all equally fraught with methodological and conceptual challenges, as I shall indicate. In the final analysis, only from the work of those who respond to this chapter’s call will it become clearer which avenue, relatively speaking, bears more fruit, and with what level of significant qualifications and caveats. Moreover, one outcome will be to highlight that scholars legitimately differ with respect to how fruitful each of these avenues of inquiry are, because, first, they disagree concerning the levels at which the qualifications and caveats should be set on the “dial” of the “warning meter,” and, second, they will differ about the kind and degree of mitigation strategies that may be used to reduce such methodological difficulties.

Such is the outline of this introductory chapter. Now to the task at hand.

Arguably, it is a historically cogent hypothesis that Jews in Palestine immediately prior to the era in question experienced significant social and cultural (including religious) dissolution and dislocation. Let me “play off of” the influential work of Seth Schwartz at several junctures in the arguments that follow. Schwartz⁵ in particular has argued that the first two-thirds of the first century CE represent the slow decline into ever more pronounced social and political chaos in Roman Palestine, especially for the Jews of Palestine, in the aftermath of Herod’s reign. With Herod’s kingdom divided in three, and distribution of authority spread across multiple players (e.g., local Roman authorities, the vestiges of Herodian-Hasmonean royals, local aristocratic families that emerged during the Hasmonean and Herodian periods, authorities in and associated with the Jerusalem Temple, and the nearby more highly ranked Roman governor of Syria) and with growing tension between Jews, Greeks, and Syrians in the Land of Israel, matters went from bad to worse, Schwartz argues.

Then, as is well known and widely acknowledged, the years from 66 CE to 135 CE brought multiple, catastrophic upheavals. In the Land of Israel, the Great Revolt (66–71) and the Bar Kokhba Rebellion (132–135) were disastrous for the Jews of Palestine. In the second decade of the second century CE, the malaise resulting from the failed Diaspora Rebellion of Jews in Egypt, adjacent North Africa, and Cyprus (and probably independently and to a more limited extent in Syria) may also have spilled over into Palestine to some degree. The more pronounced social and cultural shock to the well-established Jewish communities of the Roman Diaspora seems to have been primarily limited to Jewish communities in Egypt and immediately adjacent North Africa, which did not recover, according to Seth Schwartz, until the fourth century.

The remainder of the Jewish Diaspora seems largely to have ticked along reasonably well. Not so in the Land of Israel, and especially Judea. The Jewish population of Judea was significantly “thinned” in the aftermath of the failed Bar Kokhba Rebellion. What remained of Jewish life, society, and culture to be rehabilitated in the Land of Israel was concentrated on the coastal plain and the Galilee. How long and how steep the incline that had to be mounted to recovery depends on how deep one thinks the hole was dug.⁶

Yet for all of this, if one takes the very “long view,” the developments within Judaism and Jewish society of Roman Palestine during the second and third (and fourth) centuries CE ultimately proved to be among the more seminal in the subsequent history of Judaism and of the Jewish communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, through Late Antiquity and the Medieval Periods, indeed into the modern period itself. There and then, in the several centuries following the destruction of Jerusalem Temple and the two faile...