Led by dissident priests, this sect believed that the Jerusalem Temple had been profaned by the Hasmonaeans and saw itself as a purified Temple exiled in the wilderness.
The Qumran group can probably be identified with the Essenes described by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and other ancient writers. Josephus Also described two other groups, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, for whom no identifiable firsthand sources have been found. The Pharisees (perushim, “separatists”), like the Qumran group, put forth their own traditions of biblical law, which were disputed by the Sadducees, an aristocractic priestly group. The Pharisees were the lineal forerunners of the rabbinic movement after AD 70. All the religious factions of this period, particularly those opposed to the Temple administration, appealed to the authority of Scripture, to which each gave its own distinctive interpretation.
Messianic-apocalyptic fervor increased when Judean political independence was brought to an end by Roman legions in the middle of the 1st century BC and climaxed in the outbreak of an unsuccessful revolt against Rome in AD 66-70. (Christianity began as one of these messianic-apocalyptic movements.)

Development of Rabbinic Judaism
The Romans' destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 and their suppression of a second messianic revolt in 132-35 led by Simon Bar Kokhba were catastrophes for Judaism of no less magnitude than the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC. The priestly leadership was decisively discredited. In this context the rabbinic movement emerged. Because the Jewish people had lost control of their political destiny, the rabbis emphasized their communal and spiritual life. They taught that by conformity in daily life to the Torah as elaborated in the rabbinic traditions—through study, prayer, and observance—the individual Jew could achieve salvation while waiting for God to bring about the messianic redemption of all Israel. Some rabbis held that if all Jews conformed to the Torah, the Messiah would be compelled to come. Institutionally, the synagogue (which had existed before AD 70) and the rabbinic study house replaced the Temple that had been destroyed.

Medieval Judaism
The rabbinization of all Jewry, including the growing Mediterranean and European Diasporas, was a gradual process that had to overcome sharp challenges from the Karaites and other antirabbinic movements. The Arab conquest of the Middle East in the 7th century by Muslim Arab armies facilitated the spread of a uniform rabbinic Judaism. Near the seat of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the heads of the Babylonian rabbinical academies (geonim; pl.