The Jewish national revival of our times has stimulated scholarly interest in the historical origins and manifestations of Jewry's distinctive traditions of constitutional thought and political action. This study is a contribution to that inquiry. Focusing on the structures of communal rule forged during the first five centuries of the common era, the book presents a novel analysis of the processes whereby the rabbis and their disciples replaced both priests and civic rulers as foci of political loyalty and instruments of domestic government throughout the Jewish world. Cohen argues that much of Jewish political history during the age of the Mishnah and Talmud can be read as a record of the attempt to reinterpret the ancient concept of the three crowns (or clusters of rulership that determined Jewish public behavior) and adapt it to rabbinic purposes. Drawing on recent scholarship in Hebrew as well as in English, this is the first book to advance a sustained and overtly political analysis of these developments, as opposed to simply a religious one. Throughout, its author illuminates the conceptual dimensions that have influenced Jewish institutional practice for much of the past two millennia.