JUDAH HA-NASI

Head of Palestinian Jewry and codifier of the mish nah; b. probably in Galilee, c. 135; d. Galilee, c. 220. Judah was the son of Simeon II ben Gamaliel II, who was the grandson of gamaliel (mentioned in Acts 5.34;22.3), who was in turn the grandson of Hillel. As the patriarch or head of Palestinian Jewry, Judah received as a permanent epithet the title ha-Nasi (the Prince), originally given to the president of the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. In the Mishnah he is referred to simply as Rabbi (the teacher par excellence), and in the gemarah he is often called Rabbenu (our teacher) or Rabbenu ha-kadosh (our saintly teacher). He was instructed in the halakah of the Oral Law by the most famous rabbis of his time, but he summed up his experience as a student, and later as a teacher, in the words: "Much of the Law have I learned from my teachers, more from my colleagues, but most of all from my students"(Mak. 10a).

According to his contemporaries, humility and fear of sin were his dominant traits. Although he was very rich, he led a simple and unassuming life because he was convinced that "he who accepts the pleasures of this world is deprived of the pleasures of the world to come" [Avot de-Rabbi Natan 28, ed. S. Schechter (New York 1945) 85]. When he succeeded his father as leader of the Jews in Palestine, he established the seat of the patriarchate and the academy, first at Bet Shearim and later at Sepphoris. (Both of these places are within a ten mile radius of Nazareth.) He conducted the patriarchate with royal dignity, and his authority was recognized by the Romans as well as by the Jews. His tomb was discovered in one of the catacombs of Bet Shearim during the excavations made there in 1953 [Israel Exploration Journal 4 (1956) 88–107].

Rabbi Judah's greatest and lasting contribution to ju daism was his compilation and codification of the Oral Law in the collection of legal sayings called the Mishnah. Other collected teachings of earlier rabbis had been attempted before his time, but his collection soon eclipsed these and became the sole authoritative expression of the Halakah. Until his time, the traditional interpretation of the Mosaic Law was handed down orally, and hence was known as the Oral Law as distinctive from the written Law of Moses. Judah's revolutionary procedure consisted of recording the Oral Law in writing (in Mishnaic Hebrew). The earlier transmitters of the Oral Law, the Tannaim (repeaters), belonged to different schools that held variant opinions. This resulted in uncertainty as to what was really binding, and the divergent opinions ascribed to the ancient sages could be accepted or rejected at will. Judah's main contribution lay in the judicious selections he made from the copious material at his disposal. Since the publication of his Mishnah at the end of the second or beginning of the third century, the primary pursuit of Jewish sages has been commenting on its contents.

See Also: talmud.

Bibliography: w. bacher, The Jewish Encyclopedia. ed. j. singer (New York 1901–06) 7:333–33. d. j. bornstein, Encyclopaedia Judaica: Das Judentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart. (Berlin 1928–34) 8:1023–35. l. lazarus, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (New York 1939–44) 6: 229–230. k. schubert, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner (Freiberg 1957–65) 5:889. a. guttmann, "The Patriarch Judah I: His Birth and Death," Hebrew Union College Annual 25 (1954) 239–261.

[m. j. stiassny]