appointed to close an important epoch and to lay the foundation of a new one. The academy at Sepphoris, to which eminent students from Babylonia also flocked, erected an indestructible monument to itself through Judah's activity in editing the Mishnah, which attained to canonical standing as the authentic collection of the legal traditions of religious practise. In the Mishnah, the completion of which was accomplished soon after the death of its author or editor (about 219), the schools both of the Land of Israel and of Babylonia received a recognized text-book, upon which the lectures and the debates of the students were thence-forward founded. The recognition of Rabbi Judah's Mishnah marks a strong dividing line in the history of the Academies and their teachers: it indicates the transition from the age of the Tannaim to that of the Amoraim. Centers of learning After Judah's death Sepphoris did not long remain the seat of the patriarch and the Academy. Gamaliel III, the unpretentious son of a distinguished father, became patriarch; but Hanina bar Hama succeeded him as head of the school, and introduced the new order of things that commenced with the completion of the Mishnah. In Hanina's lifetime the last migration of the Sanhedrin occurred. His pupil, Johanan bar Nappaha, settled in Tiberias, and the patriarch Judah II (grandson of Judah I) soon found himself compelled to remove to that city. The imposing personality and unexampled learning of Johanan rendered Tiberias for a long period the undisputed center of Levantine Judaism, the magnet which attracted Babylonian students. When Johanan died in 279—this is the only settled date in the whole chronology of the Amoraim—the renown of the Tiberias Academy was so firmly established that it suffered no deterioration under his successors, although none of them equaled him in learning. For a time, indeed, Caesarea came into prominence, owing solely to the influence of Hoshaya, who lived there in the first half of the third century, and exercised the duties of a teacher contemporaneously with the Church Father Origen, with whom he had personal intercourse. After Johanan's death the school at Cæsarea attained a new standing under his pupil Abbahu; and throughout the whole of the fourth century the opinions of the "sages of Caesarea" were taken into respectful account, even in Tiberias. Sepphoris also resumed its former importance as a seat of learning; and eminent men worked there in the