The great Yeshiva of Yavneh (Jamnia) – founded by Rav Johanan ben Zakkai, the leading Pharisee, with the acquiescence of General Vespasian, who was laying siege to Jerusalem.
Johanan ben Zakkai was a key tanna (sage of the Mishnah).
Britannica –
“Even before 70 CE, he acted as a leading representative of the Pharisees in debate with priestly and Sadducean authorities. (The Pharisees stressed rigorous observance of the Law, inclusion of the oral tradition as normative, and an interpretative adaptation of traditional precepts to new situations; the Sadducees, an elitist conservative group, accepted only the Written Law as authoritative and were more literalist and static in their interpretation.) Johanan’s school was apparently famous, and one in search of learning would go to extremes, if need be, to be admitted there. Furthermore, Johanan was opposed to the policy of those who were determined on war with Rome at all costs. By quitting beleaguered Jerusalem according to most accounts in 70 CE (though it is possible that he left as early as 68 CE) and being brought to the Roman camp, he somehow succeeded in getting permission to set up an academy in Jamnia (Jabneh), near the Judaean coast, and there he was joined by a number of his favorite disciples. Two of them, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Joshua ben Hananiah, who are credited with having smuggled their master out of Jerusalem in a coffin, were to become, by the end of the century and the beginning of the following one, the leading teachers of their generation and had a profound influence on the greatest scholars of the next generation.
By establishing in Jamnia a major academy and authoritative rabbinic body, Johanan fixed the conditions for continuing Judaism’s basic traditions after the destruction of the Temple; and that, by his lively sense of the need for reinterpreting inherited concepts in new circumstances, he laid the foundations on which Talmudic and rabbinic Judaism built their structure.
Of all the Palestinian Jewish sages of the first century A.D. [CE], none apparently proved so fundamentally influential in his own time and for subsequent generations of scholars and spiritual leaders as Johanan ben Zakkai. In the history of Talmudic literature and thought, Johanan is rightly seen as continuing the Hillelite tradition, although this should not be interpreted to mean that he inherited only Hillel’s teachings.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/304443/Johanan–ben–Zakkai (accessed July 1, 2009)
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Yavneh, a west–central Judean town, 7 km (4.35 miles) east of the Mediterranean town, remained the center of Jewish rabbinical authority, centered in the Yeshiva of Yavneh [Yavneh Academy], for 62 years, until the Bar Kochba Revolt (c. 132 CE), when the city of Usha in western Galilee superseded it, evolving as the 130s CE center of rabbinic Judaism.