Sanhedrin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Sanhedrin was a Jewish legislative and judicial assembly in the ancient land of Israel, and its name carries within it the echo of Greek: the word comes from Synhedrion, meaning simply "sitting together." It was not one court but two tiers of courts operating in tandem. Lesser councils of 23 judges sat in each city, hearing local cases and carrying the sole authority in all Israel to impose capital punishment. Above them all stood one Great Sanhedrin of 71 judges, meeting in Jerusalem in a building the sources call the Hall of Hewn Stones.

  That peculiar building straddled the northern wall of the Temple itself, half inside the sanctuary and half outside. Its stone was hewn by iron implements, which distinguished it from the ritual spaces nearby. Every day except the sabbath and festivals, 71 judges gathered there to hear the cases that lesser courts could not resolve and to make decisions that shaped the religious and political life of an entire people.

  What gave the Sanhedrin its authority? Where did the number 71 come from? And how did an institution rooted in a Temple that no longer exists continue to operate, move across the country, fight off Roman persecution, and still inspire revival attempts more than a thousand years after it was officially disbanded?

• 2. Biblical Roots

  ›

  Moses declared that the task of leading the Israelites was too difficult for one man, and God responded by instructing him to appoint 70 elders to share the burden. According to the Mishnah, those 70 elders plus Moses himself became the source for the number 71 that would define the Great Sanhedrin for centuries.

  Those elders are described in the source texts as "the elders of the people and its officers." A midrash identifies them more specifically as the same officers who were beaten in Egyptian slavery for failing to meet Pharaoh's quota of bricks. Their suffering under Pharaoh, the midrash holds, earned them membership on the first Sanhedrin after the Exodus.

  The number 23 for the lesser councils rested on a different kind of reasoning. A verdict required both conviction and exoneration to be possible, so a minimum "community" of 10 judges for each side was needed, making 20. One more judge was added to enable a majority, bringing it to 21. A simple majority still could not convict alone, so a 22nd was added. And because an even number risked deadlock, the final count was set at 23. The scripture commanding the Israelites to establish courts also called for a supreme court at the central sanctuary to handle cases too difficult for local judges, which is the textual basis the tradition points to for the institution as a whole.

• 3. From Hasmoneans to Herod

  ›

  The first historic mention of a Synedrion in Greek texts appears in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish religious book translated into Greek. The Hasmonean court in Judea, presided over first by Alexander Jannaeus until 76 BCE and then by his wife Queen Salome Alexandra, carried the name Synhedrion or Sanhedrin, though its exact character was not settled. It may have been a council of sages or priests, or a political and judicial body, or some combination.

  The Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, reorganized Judea in 57 BCE by abolishing its existing form of government and dividing the country into five provinces. Josephus records that Gabinius placed a synhedrion at the head of each province, with Jerusalem as the seat of one. Rome at that stage cared about sedition, not religion, and the councils were tools of provincial administration.

  Herod, then governor of Galilee, was summoned before the synhedrion presided over by High Priest Hyrcanus II. The charge was that he had executed alleged criminals without the body's permission. Herod survived the encounter. In time, however, he would go on to kill many of that same court's members. Before 191 BCE, the High Priest had served as the automatic head of the Sanhedrin. In 191 BCE, when the Sanhedrin lost confidence in the High Priest, the assembly created a new office called the Nasi, a Hebrew word meaning "prince" and often translated today as "president."

• 4. Powers and Procedures

  ›

  Only the Great Sanhedrin could try the king. Only the Great Sanhedrin could authorize extending the boundaries of the Temple and Jerusalem. Only the Great Sanhedrin could send the people to a war of free choice. These powers set it apart from every other court in the land.

  The Hall of Hewn Stones where the body met was built into the northern wall of the Temple, with doors opening both into the Temple grounds and to the outside. The name distinguished it from ritual spaces in the Temple complex, which could not be built from stones shaped by iron tools.

  The full panel of 71 judges convened only for matters of national significance, such as a declaration of war, or when a 23-judge panel had failed to reach a conclusive verdict. Judges voted one at a time, and the last to cast his vote was the head of the court. The uneven numbers at both levels were designed from the start to make ties impossible.

  The second-highest-ranking officer was the Av Beit Din, a title that translates literally as "father of the house of judgment." This official presided specifically when the Sanhedrin sat as a criminal court. After the time of Hillel the Elder, who served in the late 1st century BCE and early 1st century CE, the Nasi was almost invariably a descendant of Hillel, and through Hillel's lineage, a descendant of King David.

• 5. Survival After Destruction

  ›

  When Roman forces destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the institutional basis of the Sanhedrin vanished overnight. The body was re-established in Yavneh by an agreement between Yochanan ben Zakai and the Roman emperor Vespasian. Vespasian accepted in part because he perceived that the Pharisees had not participated heavily in the revolt. As a result, the reconstituted Sanhedrin in Yavneh was composed almost exclusively of Pharisaic scholars.

  Rome recognized the new body and treated its head as a paid government official with the status of a prefect. Roman legislation cut back the Sanhedrin's range of authority but left its role in religious matters intact. In effect, the imperial government declared one form of Judaism to be the only officially recognized religion, which led to persecution of other sectarian groups and to attempts by those groups to find fault with the Sanhedrin before Roman authorities.

  The seat of what the sources now called the Patriarchate moved repeatedly. Under Gamaliel II it shifted to Usha around 80 CE, moved back to Yavneh in 116, then returned to Usha. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, the court moved to Shefaram in 140 under Shimon ben Gamliel II, then to Beit She'arim and Sepphoris under Judah ha-Nasi, who served from 165 to 220 and compiled the Mishnah. Judah ha-Nasi's son Gamaliel III brought the court to Tiberias in 220, and it remained there, where excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 2004 uncovered a structure from the 3rd century CE that may have been the building where the court convened.

• 6. The Calendar Decision and Dissolution

  ›

  Roman persecution intensified in the late 4th century. The emperor Theodosius I, reigning from 379 to 395 CE, forbade the Sanhedrin from assembling and declared ordination illegal. Capital punishment was prescribed for any rabbi who received ordination, and complete destruction of the town where the ordination took place was also decreed.

  Before that point, during the presidency of Gamaliel IV from 270 to 290, the body had already quietly dropped the name Sanhedrin to avoid persecution. Its authoritative decisions were issued instead under the name Beth HaMidrash, meaning "house of learning."

  The Hebrew calendar at that time still depended on witnesses coming forward to testify about the new moon, a practice that had become dangerous. Rabbi Hillel II recommended switching to a mathematically fixed calendar. At what the sources describe as a clandestine, and possibly final, meeting in 358 CE, the change was adopted. This was the last universally binding decision the Great Sanhedrin ever made.

  Gamaliel VI, the last president, died in 425. Theodosius II immediately outlawed the title of Nasi, extinguishing the last formal remains of the ancient institution. A decree issued in 426 redirected the tax that Jewish communities across the world had paid to support the Patriarchate directly into the imperial treasury. Even so, a law from 429 still referred to a Sanhedrin existing in each province of Roman Palestine, and in Tiberias the court continued in some form into the 6th century, led by officials called rashei haperek, or "heads of the chapter."

• 7. Revival Attempts

  ›

  Maimonides, the philosopher and legal authority who lived from 1135 to 1204, proposed a rationalist path for re-establishing the institution through a renewal of semikhah, the rabbinic ordination that Rome had once made a capital crime. His proposal became the framework that subsequent revival efforts tried to implement.

  Rabbi Jacob Berab made the first documented attempt in 1538. Later attempts came from Rabbi Yisroel Shklover in 1830, Rabbi Aharon Mendel haCohen in 1901, Rabbi Zvi Kovsker in 1940, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon in 1949, and a group of Israeli rabbis in 2004.

  Napoleon Bonaparte convened what he called the Grand Sanhedrin on a different basis entirely. On the 6th of October 1806, the Assembly of Notables issued a proclamation to Jewish communities across Europe, inviting them to send delegates to a session set for the 20th of October. The proclamation was written in Hebrew, French, German, and Italian and described the revived institution in extravagant terms. Napoleon's purpose was to give legal sanction to the answers the Assembly of Notables had given to twelve questions posed by his government. The Grand Sanhedrin did not follow traditional halakhic procedures. Napoleon himself, during the war against Prussia in 1806-07, remarked while laughing that "the sanhedrin is at least useful to me." Critics in Berlin, including David Friedländer, described the event as a spectacle Napoleon offered to the Parisians. The institution that eventually grew from the ancient Sanhedrin's last years in Tiberias was the Palestinian Gaonate, which relocated from Tiberias to Jerusalem by the mid-tenth century.