A bowl of figs, fresco from the main triclinium at Villa of Poppaea in Oplontis.
I once attended a barbecue hosted by a colleague who lived in my neighborhood. Amidst the clinking of glasses and occasional bursts of laughter, I was introduced to a neighbor. We hit it off. We spent much of the evening looping in and out of conversation. A few weeks later, we met up for the lunch special at a local sushi joint. We met again at yet another dinner party. Our kids played together at the park, and so on. A few months into our acquaintance, she texted me and asked whether I would consider donating to a candidate for local office, whose campaign she was supporting. I clicked the link with little thought and sent off $54 virtual dollars through my credit card.
I tell this story in the introduction to my new book, How the Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2025), in order to illustrate the hunch that I brought to rabbinic stories about donors. How should we understand my gift? Some might analyze my donation in strict political or geographic terms, mapping out my investment in local politics and drawing assumptions about me as a voter. Or, they might frame my neighbor’s interest in me as part of a disingenuous long-game attempt to solicit my funds. These are standard approaches to premodern source material, but neither seemed to me quite right. My donation emerged in the context of casual acquaintanceship, built upon soft exchange of dinner and conversation that formed a sense of mutual obligation to each other.
I argue that a similar dynamic informed the exchange of gifts with rabbis in late antiquity. While important scholarly works have assessed different categories of gifts in rabbinic sources, among them those labeled charity or tithes, I wanted to know what happens when we expand our purview to less formal sites of social exchange. How might gifts of charity, tithes, patronage, and direct donations, especially when directed toward rabbis, configure as part of a wide web of social relationships facilitated by mutual obligation? Why would people feel compelled to give? What did rabbis provide in return? What soft social situations contributed to rabbinic material support?
In the book, I demonstrate how gifts for rabbis were situated amidst a broader landscape of Jewish piety and socialization. I examine major gift transactions alongside dinner parties, conversations between neighbors, and more in order to consider the everyday instances of mutual exchange that, I argue, lay at the heart of these gifts.
By examining the social circles of late antique rabbis, I draw attention to the significance of these social relationships to the cultivation of rabbinic expertise. Many assume the rabbis were natural legal and ritual experts because of their technical skill and interpretive methods, but I argue that expertise is always enacted through social means. Drawing from the interdisciplinary subfield of expertise studies, I demonstrate how expertise denotes more than the acquisition of specialized knowledge. Expertise describes the social enactment of would-be-experts making claims about what they know, while others interact through those claims whether through acceptance, value, or even rejection. The processes of public recognition, persuasion, and social pressure contribute to the perception of who people should trust as expert.
While rabbis cultivated skill and technical knowledge in Torah, their status as experts required validation and recognition from others. Rabbis socialized and noshed with neighbors and offered advice and legal favors to friends. In exchange for their expert judgments, they received invitations, donations, and communal appointments. I argue that their status as Torah experts did not arise by virtue of being scholars but from their ability to persuade others that their mobilization of Jewish cultural resources was beneficial.
This meant looking at sites of exchange with attention to how rabbinic expertise was deployed, claimed, defended, and at times rejected. I uncovered a persistent tension in rabbinic sources. On the one hand, social relationships with wealthy non-rabbis offered rabbis a major benefit. Rabbis were invited to join elite social circles, validated by the attention of other people, and received material support in the form of lodging, dinner, gifts of food, and patronage as an extension of these friendships. At the same time, these gifts came with strings attached. I show rabbinic apprehension at those who naturally expected reciprocal favors. Not only did such expectation place rabbis in the difficult position of navigating social pressure and unwanted demands, but it could tarnish their credibility as impartial judges and ritual specialists. This risked not only the perception of rabbis as qualified Torah experts, but the virtue of the Torah itself.
This book plunges us deep into the social relationships that made the production of rabbinic expertise possible. Weaving together accounts of tangible material support with sites of contact between rabbis and other people, I explore how rabbinic expertise was continually enacted and challenged through social interactions.
The significance of emphasizing the social is that it changes how we understand both material gifts and the relationship of rabbis with non-rabbis. While rabbis claimed expert status, this did not, as is sometimes assumed, mean that Jewish society was dissected into two separate strata. Instead, my book demonstrates how vital contact between rabbis and non-rabbis were to the production of rabbinic expertise. These relationships did not come without complications, but the affective feelings and material support generated through friendship, mutual obligation, and social interaction played a critical role in cultivating the recognition that experts require.
Krista Dalton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.