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By far the most impressive and significant of all Jewish sources surveyed here saw the light of day after the end of the Second Revolt in 135 CE. This is that vast corpus of texts commonly called “Rabbinic Literature,” many of whose foundational, classical texts were produced and redacted in the years following the revolts against Rome and preceding the outbreak of Islam in the early seventh century CE (for all sources mentioned hereafter, consult individual entries in Stemberger 2011). The roots of the Rabbinic movement lie deep in Jewish history and culture; but its distinctive teaching of the dual Torah – the written Torah enshrined in Scripture, and the autonomous Oral Torah transmitted and preserved by the Sages of Judaism (Jaffee 2001) – is explicitly articulated only after 70 CE. Indeed, it was the fall of the Temple which encouraged the growth of Rabbinic ideas, with their agenda of sustained and rigorous study of Torah both Written and Oral as a primary religious duty; statutory prayer; faithful adherence to and performance of the commandments of the Torah; and the master–disciple relationship in the building up of scholarly tradition. Some recent research suggests that Rabbinic Judaism’s journey toward the commanding position it eventually came to hold may have been less straightforward, and more prolonged, than was once held to be the case (Lightstone 2002; Lapin 2006; but see also Rosenfeld 2010); but this view of things must still take into account the fact that the historical evidence available allows us only partial glimpses of non-Rabbinic forms of Judaism which are often difficult to assess. Here we should mention the Synagogue, an institution which seems only gradually to have come under direct Rabbinic supervision: mosaics and inscriptions from sites such as Hammat Tiberias (late third to early fourth century CE); Sepphoris (fifth–sixth century CE), and Beth-Alpha (sixth century CE), to say nothing of Dura-Europos (before mid-third century CE) (Figure 12.2), reveal a rich cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews, of which several explanations may be offered (Levine 2005). Crucial as these sites are for the investigation of Jewish social and religious conditions, they offer the researcher comparatively little in the way of direct evidence for political history, although they can provide valuable enrichment of the historical sources available in the writings of Greek and Latin authors.