Afterword

Ra‘anan Boustan, in ‘Rabbinization and the Persistence of Diversity in Jewish Culture in Late Antiquity’, offers some closing thoughts on the overall theme of the volume. He begins with a brief history of the concept of “rabbinization”, a twentieth-century neologism that only recently came to designate the process by which rabbinic institutions became normative. He also catalogues the written and archaeological sources that are used in order to study this process, most of which are covered in the present volume. In addition to rabbinic literature itself, he mentions synagogues, piyyutim, inscriptions, the writings of the Church Fathers, legal corpora, Geonic writings, and Jewish magic. At the same time, Boustan sounds a note of caution that the varieties of non-rabbinic Judaism should not be lumped together as a homogenous entity in opposition to the emerging power of the rabbinic Sages.