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A variety of practical obstacles prevented the Vilna Ga’on’s disciples from settling in Jerusalem as soon as they arrived in the Land of Israel in 1808-1812. Instead, they settled in the Galilean city of Safed, where they sought to hasten the redemption through mystical and spiritual practices, and through the purchase of land to be able to fulfill the commandments contingent on the Land of Israel. In 1813, the community was decimated by an epidemic, which some of the survivors, led by Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Shklov, interpreted as punishment for not having immediately endured the rigors of settling in Jerusalem; they accordingly established a colony there. That step was opposed by another group of survivors, led by Rabbi Israel of Shklov. He regarded settlement of Jerusalem as premature, adhering to a doctrine that the redemption would begin with the Sanhedrin’s restoration in the Galilee, where it had last functioned before being disbanded. Restoration of the Sanhedrin required the renewal of classical ordination, which had lapsed in late antiquity or early medieval times and could be renewed only by an ordained sage. To that end, intensive efforts were launched to locate the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, among whom ordination had presumably not lapsed. Among those efforts was the ultimately ill-fated venture of Barukh ben Samuel of Pinsk, dispatched by Israel of Shklov in 1830.

Despite his relatively small role in the Gospels, Caiaphas is frequently portrayed in film as Jesus' main enemy and the one who bears moral, if not legal responsibility for Jesus condemnation and death on the cross. It is Caiaphas who presides over Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin, pronounces him guilty of blasphemy, and delivers him to Pilate. Like the Pharisees, Caiaphas challenges filmmakers to maintain the tension and conflict so essential to the biopic genre, and yet avoid antagonizing viewers who might be sensitive to the ways in which a Jewish leader, even a long dead one, is brought to life on the silver screen.

Jesus suffered crucifixion by the Romans. Is this because he was a rebel against Rome? Not according to the evangelists, who claim that the Sanhedrin under Caiaphas initially arraigned Jesus on a capital charge of blasphemy. References to Jesus’ death in Jewish sources (notably Josephus and the Talmud) also claim primary responsibility for the Jerusalem authorities. Having condemned Jesus, the Sanhedrin referred the case to Pilate, as would be necessary, given Rome’s normal practice of reserving the death penalty to itself. For Pilate’s benefit, the charge was restated in terms of maiestas laesa—high treason. The gospels describe Pilate as initially unconvinced and prepared to deal with Jesus of Nazareth as Albinus would later deal with Jesus ben Hananiah. Then, perhaps because he fears a riot, Pilate is persuaded to apply the death penalty. There is no good reason to doubt the essential truth of this record.

The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of the direct impact of Selden’s uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship. It is not the least of Selden’s historical and philological achievements that he can represent the synagogue as a positive model of church institutions, and the Sanhedrin as a civil court that the English Parliament would do well to imitate. Even in the 21st century, those two cold Greek words respectively connote Jewish inferiority and cruelty: synagoga, the decrepit old woman vanquished by a vital and young ecclesia, and Sanhedrin, the tribunal that handed Christ over to the Romans to be crucified. If contemporary readers of Selden can remove the overlay of prejudice that begrimes not only the words synagogue and Sanhedrin but also Pharisee (whose negative connotations Selden, a partisan of the oral law, did much to expunge), then his cultural influence will not have ended.

A mishnah in tractate Sanhedrin shapes Selden’s understanding of the trial of Jesus and reflects authoritative legal opinions that predate the New Testament. What interests Selden is not the divinity or humanity of Christ, but rather the way both he and his interlocutors behaved according to the systematized legal precepts of halakha, the Jewish legal code that expands and clarifies the gospel’s account of the proceedings. Although Selden considers in De Jure whether Jesus was guilty of blasphemy as legally defined, and in De Synedriis whether the Sanhedrin was empowered at the time to pronounce a death sentence, he approaches an emotionally fraught topic — the passion of the Christ — with a rare degree of scholarly impartiality. By citing as many opposed points of view as he does, he shakes one’s confidence in the perfect followability of the events. Selden’s reading of the passion narrative influenced Henry Stubbe’s An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause.

In this chapter, it is argued that Paul left for Jerusalem about the age of 20 and lived in there for over 15 years before becoming a Christian. Prior to this, his obedience to the Law was like that of a Pharisee. The chapter discusses the possibility that Paul may have never married or was a widower, and that he was a persecutor of early Christians, being a member of the Sanhedrin. Luke mentioned in The Acts Paul's dark past and his eventual conversion to Christianity, as he had become one of its staunchest evangelists. This chapter also mentions Paul's initial struggle in his ministry—some would not believe him as he was someone who used to persecute the very faith he was advocating.

The rabbis developed two rabbinic instruments designed to prevent the instigation of holy war after the destruction of the Temple. One was to categorize all biblical wars into categories and then limit the possibility of extended discussion about them. The other was the discovery that God had charged certain behaviours to both Jews and Gentiles that enacted a kind of balance between them. Exegetes understood a repeated motif in the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) to refer to three vows imposed by God on Jews and the world. Jews were commanded through their two vows not to rebel against Gentile hegemony nor engage in mass movements to settle the Land of Israel until God wished, meaning that Jews would not initiate such activities of their own accord. Gentiles, for their part were required to vow that they would not treat the Jews living among them too harshly.

The mortal enemies of Israel become schematized in Rabbinic Judaism into two paradigmatic entities: the seven Canaanite nations and the Amalekites, both of which disappeared from history. The Amalekites, although destroyed physically, live on as a metaphor for both the external and internal evil that weakens Israel. Jewish aggression is thus redirected to imagined paradigms rather than real groups, further limiting the possibility of Jewish war in real time. A further limitation is imposed by the rabbis by insisting that a discretionary war may be prosecuted only under the authority of both the king and the Sanhedrin, a court of seventy-one rabbis.

This chapter summarizes the major claims of the study and offers observations on how the nascent church and the Tannaim reinterpreted earlier Jewish theologies of resurrection. Both the church and Judaism charted their own responses to theodicy in continuity with the earlier discourse of resurrection that originally developed within the Second Temple era, yet they did so in strikingly different ways, as illustrated in Mishnah Sanhedrin and Paul’s letters. Sanhedrin allows considerable freedom regarding the finer details of what form resurrection might take. What is more significant is the relevance of resurrection to the collective survival of “all Israel” and the restoration of the land. Paul illustrates how resurrection became increasingly invested in the person of Jesus and, thus, took on an entirely new meaning. He further illustrates the relationships between resurrection and the restoration of God’s dominion over the world that can also be identified in earlier Jewish writings.

This chapter deals with the effects of legal centralization on the institutions and procedures of the Chief Rabbinate of Palestine and, after 1948, Israel. An institution established by the British Mandate, the Chief Rabbinate became far more powerful in the late 1940s and early 1950s, under the tenure of Isaac Herzog and Benzion Ousiel. During that time, a series of reforms were enacted that imported the structure and procedures of modern European law into the Israeli rabbinate. As part of these reforms, regional rabbinical courts were, under protest, made subordinate to a rabbinical court of appeals in Jerusalem and made subject to new procedural rules. Rabbinical enactments were crafted to create a uniformity of practice among Israel’s diverse Jewish communities. At the same time, rabbinical court rulings were published for the first time in the format of secular law reports and rabbinical committees composed halakhic law books, in the model of modern legal codes, which they intended to be the law for all citizens of Israel.

The chapter investigates the role of ancient Jewish letters in promoting a shared identity in a polycentric geopolitical situation. This could not be done by coercion: it required diplomacy and persuasion. Alexander explores how Jews based in Jerusalem used letters for the purpose of asserting leadership, starting with the two festal letters at the beginning of 2 Maccabees that invite the Jews in Egypt to adopt the festival of Hanukkah celebrating the rededication of the Jerusalem temple and thus to acknowledge Jerusalem’s primacy. He also finds reflections of Jewish letter-writing in three passages of the book of Acts and reviews the use of letters as transmitted in rabbinic literature. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the genre of responsa, which began to flourish in the Islamic period, developed from exchanges of letters and participated in their ‘soft’ power structures.