Between the beginning of the second century C.E. and the end of the fifth, the face of Jewish communal government changed quite as much as did the norms of Jewish religious thought and practice. In the process, the balance of forces between the three ketarim was fundamentally transformed. Notwithstanding the failure of Bar Kokhba's revolt against Roman rule in Judea between 132 and 135, other instruments of the keter malkhut did manage to recover some of that domain's ancient prestige and influence. Conversely – although by no means immediately – the domestic authority of the keter kehunah became severely curtailed. Most dramatic of all, however, was the alteration in the communal status of the keter torah. By the end of the period, in both 'Ereṣ Yisra'el (Palestine) and Bavel (Babylonia), all facets of Jewish life had become affected by rabbinic patterns of thought and influenced by rabbinic institutions of scholarship and justice. Admittedly, in neither region did rabbis and their disciples necessarily constitute the majority of the local Jewish population. Nevertheless it remains (in Neusner's words) ‘an extraordinary fact’ that ‘the handful of masters of ca. 140 A.D. had become by 640 A.D. so powerful a force as to affect all Babylonian Jewry and to dominate a substantial and important part of its everyday affairs’. In large measure, the comment is equally true of the situation in 'Ereṣ Yisra'el.

As the rabbinic sources themselves indicate, that transformation was not accomplished in steady sequential stages.