Johanan ben Zakkai

Judaean religious leader

• Born: c. 1 c.e.
• Birthplace: Judaea (now in Israel)
• Died: c. 80 c.e.
• Place of death: Beror Heil, west of Jerusalem, Judaea (now in Israel)

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 c.e., when the Temple cult—the center of Jewish life—lay in ruins, Johanan was responsible for reorienting Jewish life around faithful observance of the law (Torah).

Early Life

Little is known of the early life of Johanan ben Zakkai (joh-HAHN-uhn behn ZAK-ay-i). Of the three most important sources of information for Roman-occupied Judaea during the first century, two of them, Flavius Josephus’s Bellum Judaium (75-79 c.e.; History of the Jewish War, 1773) and the New Testament, contain no reference to Johanan. The rabbinical writings from the Talmud, which constitute the sole source of information regarding the life of Johanan ben Zakkai, were compiled between the third and fifth centuries and at best testify to carefully handed-down memory.

The Talmud pictures Johanan as a leader among the Pharisees, a group of especially devout observers of the Torah (the first five books in the Hebrew Bible) who first came to prominence in the late second or first century b.c.e. and who, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e. by the Romans, became the sole shapers of what is today normative Judaism. The main tradition concerning Johanan relates that he “occupied himself in commerce forty years, served as apprentice to the sages forty years, and sustained Israel forty years.” He was one of four Jewish leaders believed to have lived for 120 years, the others being Moses, Hillel the Elder, and Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph. Johanan was considered to have been the last of eighty students of Hillel, who, in similar manner, “went up from Babylonia aged forty years, served as apprentice to the sages forty years, and sustained Israel forty years.”

Johanan actually was born near the beginning of the first century and died during its last quarter, probably around 80. “Johanan” means “the Lord gave graciously”; Ezra and Nehemiah record 760 sons of Zakkai (“righteous man”) among nearly forty-five thousand exiles returning to Jerusalem and Judah from Babylonian exile during the sixth century b.c.e. Johanan was descended from commoners rather than priests; his halakic (legal) rulings sternly criticize the conduct of the upper classes toward the poor. Some of his rulings reflect a detailed knowledge of business affairs and support the claim that he engaged in business in his early or mid-life. As a young man, he entered the rabbinic academy of Hillel in Jerusalem. Whether he studied under the Master himself is problematical; Hillel died probably around 10 c.e. or, at most, a few years thereafter.

What is certain is that, of the two great Pharisaic schools of Torah interpretation—those of Hillel and Shammai—Johanan was schooled in the traditions of Hillel, which are generally pictured as more irenic in approach to the law and more patient in dealing with students as well as more widely accepted among the middle classes. Hence, Johanan developed traits of flexibility in casuistry and gentleness toward students that enabled him to make a lasting contribution to the development of Judaism.

As a student, Johanan was famed for both intellectual acuity and self-discipline. He never traveled 4 cubits (6 feet, or 1.8 meters) without words of the Torah, even in winter. No one preceded him into the schoolroom, nor did he ever leave anyone behind there. “If all the heavens were parchment,” said Johanan, “and all the trees pens, and all the oceans ink, they would not suffice to write down the wisdom which I have learned from my masters.” One of his students later made a similar statement regarding his own education at the feet of Johanan. Tradition pictures Hillel endorsing Johanan, conferring as it were his own mantle on his young student. When he completed his studies in Jerusalem, Johanan moved to a village in the northern province of Galilee—the other end of the country from Jerusalem and far removed from its scrupulous observance of the Torah. There, with his wife and his young son, he undertook his career as a teacher, a missionary for the Torah. In the Pharisaic manner, he supported himself, probably in business, while he attempted to teach the Galileans.

Life’s Work

A political event—the destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e. by the Romans—intervened in Johanan’s life to thrust him, at seventy years of age, onto the center stage of Jewish history. Johanan had given his life to scholarship and teaching and was not involved in politics. His eighteen years in Galilee and the subsequent three decades that he spent as a teacher in Jerusalem together consumed his prime years. He reached the biblical “threescore and ten” offstage from history, and his decades of labor in Galilee and Jerusalem are historically noteworthy only as part of the story of a life made unexpectedly significant in the context of the destruction of the center of Judaism—the Temple—and the consequent reorientation of the Jewish religion around the law.

There is no specific evidence that Johanan’s purpose in going to Galilee was to serve as a missionary of the Torah, but it is clear that this is the significance of the years he spent there. He resided in Arav, a small village in the hill country of central Galilee, where he generally failed to make an impression on the religious life of the region. During his entire stay he had only one student, Hanina ben Dosa, and only two cases of halakic law were brought before him for judgment. The Galileans, recent converts to the Jerusalem cult, sought a religion of miracle-working, messianic fulfillment, the piety of the Temple pilgrimage, and salvation in the next world. Johanan, by contrast, offered only the discipline of a humble life of faithful observance of the law set forth in the Torah. A third century Talmudic source records the closing of Johanan’s ministry in Galilee: “Eighteen years Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai spent in ‘Arav, and only these two cases came before him. At the end he said, ‘O Galilee, Galilee! You hate the Torah! Your end will be to be besieged!’”

Disappointed, Johanan took his ailing son and wife and returned to Jerusalem. There he set up a school near the site of the Temple and spent the next three decades patiently teaching the Torah. His quiet success is demonstrated in his rise through Pharisaic ranks. Pharisaic leadership had often been shared between pairs—Shemaiah and Abtalion, Hillel and Shammai. Two halakic rulings sent to Galilee from Jerusalem during this period bear the names of both Gamaliel I—the acknowledged leader of the Pharisees—and Johanan ben Zakkai, who probably served as his partner or deputy. Johanan, nearing his seventieth year, could look back with satisfaction on a life of quiet scholarship, but he had accomplished nothing to earn for himself a permanent niche in history.

Just at this point in Johanan’s life, an explosion occurred in the political life of Judaea. Judaean independence had been won from the Greeks in 166 b.c.e., but after 62 b.c.e. the nation had had to live in uncertain peace under Roman occupation. The Pharisees, for whom the heart of Judaism lay in personal fidelity to the Torah rather than in political sovereignty, had accepted tenuous coexistence with Rome. From 5 b.c.e. onward, however, there had grown among the people a Zealot movement that anticipated messianic fulfillment in the overthrow of Roman rule and the establishment of a divine monarchy in place of Caesar’s. In late 65 c.e., a contingent of Zealots ambushed and defeated the twelfth Roman legion, inaugurating what is in Roman annals the famous Bellum Judaicum of 66-70. In face of the Zealot revolt and the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, Johanan made the most critical decision of his life—one that made him for a brief moment the single most important figure in Judaism.

In 68, Johanan abandoned the war and the Zealot-controlled city of Jerusalem, fleeing for safety to the camp of Vespasian. He allowed himself to be smuggled past the Zealot watchguards and out of Jerusalem inside a coffin borne by two of his rabbinical students. Pharisaic leaders such as Gamaliel I who remained behind with the Zealots perished in the massacre that followed the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans.

The main Talmudic tradition regarding what happened next represents the following encounter when Johanan arrived at the camp of Vespasian:

They opened the coffin, and Rabban Yohanan stood up before him. “Are you Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai?” Vespasian inquired. “Tell me what I may give you.”

“I ask nothing of you,” Rabban Yohanan replied, “save Yavneh, where I might go and teach my disciples and there establish a house of prayer, and perform all the commandments.”

“Go,” Vespasian said to him.

Moreover, Johanan allegedly predicted that Vespasian would become emperor, a prophecy fulfilled three days later.

A different interpretation has suggested that Johanan was held under house arrest at Yavneh by the Romans. Whether Johanan was Vespasian’s guest or his detainee, however, he spent the decade following the fall of Jerusalem in the Roman-protected town of Yavneh, instructing a contingent of Pharisees who had survived the destruction. There he husbanded and nurtured the most important remnant of Pharisees, and in so doing patched together the torn fabric of Jewish national life and rescued Judaism as a law-centered community now that it could no longer continue as a temple cult.

The period of Johanan’s service at Yavneh was brief, no more than a decade. The manifest yield of his labors was sparse; few chose to sit at the feet of one who seemingly had turned his back on the nation in its hour of need. So difficult was his reception that he was even compelled to remove from Yavneh to the neighboring settlement of Beror Heil, where he died, probably around 80, surrounded by a very small number of students.

Succeeding generations, however, proved the permanent worth of Johanan’s years at Yavneh. His small academy laid foundations that guaranteed the survival of Pharisaism. Furthermore, his tenure there afforded sufficient time for Gamaliel II, the true successor of Gamaliel I, to emerge from the political shadow of his family’s support of the rebellion against Rome. The next decade at Yavneh—the 90’s—was pivotal in the history of Judaism: Gamaliel II led five of Johanan’s students, among others, in constructing the basis for what eventually emerged, in the vacuum remaining after the destruction of the Temple, as normative Talmudic Judaism.

Significance

According to rabbinic tradition, Johanan ben Zakkai acted out the nation’s response to the fall of the Temple: It was he who rent his garments on hearing the news. His physical appearance is undocumented; what is emphasized instead is the high rabbinical estimate of Johanan, whom the Jewish teachers ranked alongside Moses, Hillel, and Akiba ben Joseph as one who indeed “sustained all Israel.” His title, “Rabban,” indicates that he was considered the rabbi of primacy during his own period.

“My son,” Johanan once replied to a student who despaired that the destruction of the Temple would mean that there could be no more atonement for sins, “be not grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this. And what is it? It is acts of loving-kindness, as it is said, For I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” In accord with this principle, Johanan’s halakic rulings at Yavneh readjusted the Jewish ritual calendar to suit the demands of the new situation in which the synagogue, rather than the Temple, would be the center of Jewish life.

In the age of a Judaism beset with messianic movements such as those of the Zealots themselves, of Jesus of Nazareth, and of Simeon bar Kokhba, Johanan set a standard of caution that became normative in Judaism through the succeeding nineteen centuries:

If you have a sapling in your hand, and it is said to you, “Behold, there is the Messiah”—go on with your planting, and afterward go out and receive him. . . . Do not haste to tear down [the altars of Gentiles], so that you do not have to rebuild them with your own hands. Do not destroy those of brick, that they may not say to you, “Come and build them of stone.”

So Johanan had cautioned the Zealots. His advice became the watchword of the tradition of political restraint necessary for survival during the long centuries of persecution and statelessness of the Jewish people between the fall of the second Jewish commonwealth in 70 c.e. and the establishment of the third in 1948.

Bibliography

Alon, Gedalyahu. Jews, Judaism, and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud. Jerusalem: Magnes Press of Hebrew University, 1977. A series of articles on a wide variety of critical issues dealing with the history of the Jewish people from the first century b.c.e. through the third century c.e.

Ben-Sasson, H. H., ed. A History of the Jewish People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Written by six eminent scholars, this is the best one-volume interpretive history of the Jewish people. Places Johanan ben Zakkai in the context of the entire stream of Jewish history.

Neusner, Jacob. Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1970. A detailed criticism of the Talmudic texts that are the sole source of evidence for the life of Johanan.

Neusner, Jacob. From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. A brief popular account of Pharisaic Judaism during the era of Johanan ben Zakkai.

Neusner, Jacob. A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai, ca. 1-80 C.E. 2d ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1975. The single scholarly biography of Johanan ben Zakkai written in English. Neusner contests Alon’s view that Johanan was under house arrest at Yavneh and argues for the more widely accepted tradition that he was allowed to reside in Yavneh as a favor from Vespasian.

Shanks, Herschel, ed. Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999. History includes numerous color and black-and-white photos, maps, charts, and time lines.

Zeitlin, Solomon. The Rise and Fall of the Judaean State: A Political, Social, and Religious History of the Second Commonwealth. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978. An excellent narrative account of this period of Jewish history. One chapter treats the work of Johanan ben Zakkai at Yavneh.