ABSTRACT
Just as Judaism reconstituted and reorganized itself in the previously insignificant town of Jabneh after the first Jewish war, a fresh start was made after the second revolt. The crucial difference in this case was that Judaea no longer served as the focal point of Palestinian Judaism. The centre now moved to Galilee, a region that had previously been of only marginal importance to Jewish life and whose inhabitants had never been regarded as particularly orthodox. The first place where the rabbis assembled after the catastrophe of the Bar Kochba revolt was the little town of Usha in Upper Galilee. Of this generation of rabbis, central importance must be accorded to R.Shimon b. Gamaliel II, R.Nathan and R.Meir, although their ranking in a hierarchy (Shimon b. Gamaliel as Patriarch and President of the Synhedrion and Nathan and Meir as his deputies) is almost certainly a later convention.
