ABSTRACT
The majority of the Jewish communities lived under the Roman and Persian Empires in Eretz Israel, Babylon, Egypt and to a smaller degree in other provinces of these Empires. The life of the great majority of Jewish people was, however, probably confined to the exigencies of daily existence; of struggle for survival and escape from persecution. The courts never faced the problems already prominent in the period of the First Temple, but crucial in the period of the Second Commonwealth, and later on in the State of Israel, of the confrontation between the law and the Jewish State and the higher authority of the Halakha. The counter-oligarchic tendencies could also sometimes be reinforced by some of the members of Rabbinical elites, especially those based on autonomous transcommunal institutions of learning, but in most places the Rabbinical elite was closely related to the prevailing oligarchy, often even directly dependent on it.
