High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Talmudic Academies in the Land of Israel were yeshivot that served as centers for Jewish scholarship and the development of Jewish law in the Levant and had a great and lasting impact on the development of world Jewry.According to an oft-quoted tradition of Hoshayah, (a collector of traditions of the tannaim, who lived in Caesarea in the first half of the third century), there existed in Jerusalem 480 synagogues, all of which were destroyed with the Temple. Each of these synagogues was provided with a school for Biblical instruction, as well as one for instruction in the oral law. Besides these schools of the lower and middle grades mentioned by the tradition (which is not to be too readily discredited, though it may have exaggerated their number for the sake of a good round figure), there existed in Jerusalem a sort of university or academy an institution composed of the scribes (sages and teachers), whose pupils, having out-grown the schools, gathered around them for further instruction and were called, therefore, talmidei hakhamim ("disciples of the wise").