Let us begin with a frank avowal not only of the incompleteness of our evidence from the Jewish side, but also of its one-sidedness. Tannaitic sources reflect the pietistic leadership of the scribes and sages, successors of the pharisees. It should not be assumed that the rabbinic views were enthusiastically endorsed by the entire community; indeed, as regards their minutiae, at the periphery of the community perhaps no more than lip service was given. Alternative religious groupings (e.g. Qumran, the Jewish Christians), occasionally disapprobated in the Mishnah, were either disappearing fast, or were in process of disassociating themselves from (or being extruded by) the main Jewish community. The ‘Am ha-’ares – scholastically unreachable common folk – were regarded by the rabbis with a barely tolerant contempt, reminiscent of fifth-century Greek attitudes to ‘the masses’ as contrasted to ‘gentlefolk’. One need not doubt that emotional ties and an inarticulate sense of ethnic identity linked them with more obviously practising Jewish circles, but their ethnicity was without self-consciousness, and they probably described themselves in Palestine – as in the Diaspora all Jews were described – as ‘Judaeans’ (yehudim, Aramaic yehuda'e): a term not thus used in rabbinic literature, where an individual Jew is called (an) Israel (ite). The great suffering of Jews in Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica, in the wars and revolts against Rome will have made it difficult or impossible for Jews to ignore the reality of Jewish–Gentile distinctions, even when, as individuals, they may have wished to play them down or attempt to overcome them by assimilative integration in the gentile world.