The chronological boundaries of this chapter are based on well-known events in world history. The year 235 saw the end of the Severan dynasty of Roman emperors, while the Muslim invasion of Palestine began in 634. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the suppression of the Second Revolt in 135 were the beginning of the end of a Jewish majority in Israel. They also believed that the steady decline in demographic strength, coupled with an increasingly precarious political standing when the Roman Empire became Christianized, led to a loss of hegemony within the Jewish world. The older historiography tended to accept most of the evidence at face value and combine it all into a harmonizing account of the Patriarchate from its origins to its demise between 415 and 429. The accumulated archaeological and epigraphic evidence and the application of more sophisticated social scientific analysis have contributed to a reassessment of rabbinical status in Late Roman-Byzantine Palestine.