ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION OF THE SYNAGOGUE
THE SYNAGOGUE was not invented in late antiquity. By the time it reached the point of its greatest diffusion, it had been in existence for at least eight hundred years. What follows is intended as a warning against overestimating the social and cultural importance of the synagogue before late antiquity.
Such a warning is necessary because Judaic scholars are often overly concerned with origins. In one recent article, “the problem of the synagogue’s origin” is declared “one of the most important issues in the history of the Jewish people.” And the “invention” of the synagogue, that is, of institutionalized communal participatory prayer and study without a sacrificial cult, is sometimes said to have constituted a revolution, not just in Judaism but in religion in general.1 The synagogue was, in this view, one of the most important elements of Judaism’s alleged “democratization,” to use Shaye Cohen’s term, in the Second Temple period.2
There is nothing wrong a priori in trying to recover originary moments. Aside from their inherent interest (which I think even the most analytically inclined historians could not honestly deny), they may help us, if only in some small way, to understand the dynamics of change. Nevertheless, there is something disquieting in allowing narratives of origins to dominate accounts of the history of an institution or an ideological system, as it has to some extent in the case of the synagogue. For such a narrative tends to presuppose that genesis determines destiny—an essentialist notion that, if not entirely false, is surely simplistic.
From the perspective of a history concerned with the questions of how past societies functioned and why they changed, the obsession with origins, even when they are not unrecoverably obscure, as those of the synagogue are, is problematic for two additional reasons. First, at its point of origin a phenomenon may have been little more than a subcultural, or even a personal, peculiarity, of no special importance in the society that generated it. There may, for instance, have been several synagogues in first-century Palestine, but few Jews had regular contact with them and there is little justification for giving them an important role in an account of first-century Palestinian Jewish society.
Second, because phenomena at their point of origin are usually small-scale, they are inexplicable. This is because societies, even “primitive” ones, are so complex and quirky that we can begin to make sense only of gross shifts: the smaller the scale of the phenomenon, the less useful the usual historians’ (or social scientists’) tools are in explaining it. For example, we can at least speculate usefully about the causes, progress, and consequences of the christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, but about the origins of Christianity, scholars can be safely said to have drawn a blank, and certainly not for lack of industry.
In sum, the invention of the synagogue was “revolutionary” only in terms of a deeply problematic genetic narrative, one in which ideas and institutions float free of their social context, so that their first appearance, rather than their maximal diffusion, is what really matters. That the synagogue came into being sometime in the Second Temple period does not tell us as much about Jewish society, then, as has often been claimed. In my view, it is the diffusion of the synagogue that demands more careful consideration, for we can only speak meaningfully about it, and with some hope of being right, when it becomes a significant factor in Jewish society. Origins and the process of diffusion must be addressed because we need to know what it is we are talking about when we talk about the synagogue and the community, and we need furthermore to discuss the dynamics of their diffusion in order to see if we can determine when and why they began to attain more than marginal significance. In this chapter, I will argue that this did not occur before the fourth century.3
Origins: Prayer House and Community in Ptolemaic Egypt
There is no way of determining whether the synagogue began as a response to the Josianic reforms of the late seventh century B.C.E., the Babylonian exile in sixth century, the rise of the Jewish Diaspora in the centuries that followed, or as a Palestinian expression of hostility to the temple and priesthood, all theses that have been proposed by modern scholars. Nor do we know whether it originated in one place—rural Egypt, say, the location of the earliest evidence—and spread, or developed independently in several different places. Nor, finally, can we tell whether the fact that synagogues might be called by various names—synagogé, proseuché, sabbateion, and on rare occasion even hieron or naos—implies that the synagogue originated in several different institutions whose functions took centuries to coalesce, or rather that the single institution had from the start a variety of functions or simply a variety of names.4 In the absence of information, there seems little point in continuing to debate these issues.
The most we can say is that buildings called proseuchai (sing., proseuché), a term later definitely applied to synagogues, were erected by Jewish ethnic corporations in some Egyptian villages as early as the third century B.C.E.5 It is worth pausing briefly to consider the case of Ptolemaic Egypt because only here does the evidence permit us to do more than guess about the nature of the Jewish community before late antiquity. Let us, then, begin with the proseuché.
The term, first of all, is peculiar, since it means simply prayer or vow, not prayer house, yet in the inscriptions that serve as our only evidence for the institution, it unambiguously designates a building. The word proseuché also provides the only hint of what went on in the buildings, but this exiguous fragment of information is deeply significant for several reasons. All ethnic corporations in Ptolemaic Egypt (and in other places where we know about them, e.g., Delos) cultivated the worship of their ancestral gods. Although pagans built temples—naoi or hiera in Greek—some Jews did not. We cannot in fact be certain that sacrifices were never offered in the proseuchai.6 After all, in some ways they were very like temples: the Jews sometimes called them “sacred precincts,” one of the proseuchai may have had the sort of monumental gateway typical of Egyptian temples, and one Jewish corporation claimed for its proseuché the right of asylia, or inviolability, a right generally restricted to temples.7 Yet these Jews refrained from using the word “temple,” which implies very strongly that unlike their predecessors at Elephantine they had at least partly internalized the Deuteronomic insistence on the uniqueness of the temple of Jerusalem.
Not all the Jewish residents of Hellenistic Egypt had done so, however. Apart from those who offered sacrifices at the Oniad temple in Heliopolis (who may have argued that their activities were not a violation of the Torah but merely an emergency measure, necessitated by the defilement of the Jerusalem temple by Antiochus IV and/or the Hasmoneans), some self-described Jews made offerings to “the (anonymous Jewish? temple’s?) god” at a temple of Pan.8 How numerous such Jews were, and how widespread the proseuché was, it is impossible to know.
The other implication of the term is that at some early period in the history of the institution in Egypt, prayer and not Torah study or reading—or for that matter periodic assembly for basically secular purposes—was the activity most closely associated with it.9 Only in the first century can we be certain that Torah reading became a regular activity in at least some prayer houses or synagogues, since it is mentioned by Philo, Josephus in Against Apion, in the Acts of the Apostles, and in a dedicatory inscription from a first-century synagogue in Jerusalem (see below).10
The construction of the Hellenistic Egyptian prayer houses was usually a group project, so the inscriptions claim. Generally, they read something like, “The Ioudaioi in Village X made this proseuché for the Most High God on behalf of King Y and Queen Z.” A few commemorate gifts by individuals. In one case, the “makers” are identified as “the Jews in Athribis” and Ptolemy, son of Epikydes, the local police chief (Horbury-Noy 1992, no. 27). When compared with late antique synagogue inscriptions or even with some contemporaneous inscriptions from foreign temples in Egypt that provide lists of contributors, though, these are strikingly opaque about the funding of the building. Perhaps lists of contributors were made but have not survived. The mention of an apparently non-Jewish euergetes in one case would be interesting if its implications could be generalized;11 also noteworthy is the fact that all the prayer houses, like all Egyptian temples, were dedicated to the royal family and so commemorated (wishfully?) the Jewish corporations’ alliance with the Ptolemies—an important theme also in some Egyptian-Jewish literature of the same period, like the Letter of Aristeas. But the prayer house inscriptions tell us little about the structure of the groups that built them.
What seems clear, though, from the papyri of Ptolemaic Egypt is that adherence to Judaism made little difference from the perspective of civil law. To make a long story short, the inhabitants of Ptolemaic Egypt were divided into two categories for legal purposes—the native Egyptian majority and the privileged minority of immigrants and their descendants. The latter, who naturally included the Jews, were deemed “Hellenes,” regardless of their ethnic origins. The Hellenes theoretically had the right to use their politikoi nomoi, that is, the laws of their native cities or countries, but in fact a sort of Greco-Egyptian common law soon developed and came to prevail. The Jews thus had the right to use the laws of the Torah, which were their politikoi nomoi, but the extant papyri provide only a single more or less secure reference to a Jew’s exercise of this right—an allusion to a divorce performed according to the politikoi nomoi of the Jews (i.e., by the husband’s unilateral repudiation of his wife). This reference appears, significantly, in a document from a suit brought by the wife for a monetary settlement in accordance with Greek law (CPJ 1.128). The legal historian J. Modrzejewski, for all his diligence and ingenuity, was able to find no further trace of Jewish civil law in the papyri of Ptolemaic Egypt.12 It may be worth adding, though, that some as yet unpublished Heidelberg papyri may refer to Jewish courts administering justice in the Egyptian countryside. If this proves to be correct, what I have written will require some revision, though not complete reversal, since the general pattern is unaffected by a single exceptional case.13
At least in the countryside, then, Jews generally seem to have married, divorced, lent each other money, and sued each other, in accordance with Greco-Egyptian common law, not Jewish law. Modrzejewski was so intent on finding evidence of the Jewish politikoi nomoi in the papyri because he had argued that the Torah was translated into Greek, at royal initiative, to serve as such. He had in mind the parallel case of the translation into Greek in the third century of the Egyptian laws compiled originally at the command of Darius I. But the parallel is imprecise: Egyptians were compelled to patronize Egyptian courts and submit to judgment in accordance with Egyptian law, whereas Jews had the right, but were not compelled, to use their own laws. (The Jewish politeuma, a totalizing corporate structure similar to the medieval community, is now generally regarded as an invention of modern scholarship based on elementary misinterpretation of the evidence.)14
Nevertheless, despite the mainly negative evidence of the papyri, all from the Egyptian countryside, Modrzejewski’s ingenious thesis should not be dismissed out of hand. There may well have been Jewish courts in Alexandria, where the texture of Jewish life was inevitably different from that in the countryside because of the density of the Jewish population, the constant flow of immigration from Palestine, and so on. But even there, Jews were never formally obliged to patronize their own courts, and it is unclear how many of them ever felt under any pressure to do so. Philo, writing toward the beginning of the period of Roman rule in Egypt, informs us that the Jews of his native city had attitudes toward Jewish law ranging from careful adherence to complete apathy, and yet all of them were Jews, at least as far as Philo was concerned, and none are said to have suffered any penalties for their disbelief or practical neglect.15
In sum, in several places in Ptolemaic Egypt, Jews constituted voluntary ethnic corporations, one of whose activities was the construction and maintenance of buildings devoted to the worship of their ancestral God through prayer. Whether or how they observed Jewish law in other ways is unknown, but the ethnic corporations seem not to have had control over most of the Jews’ legal activities. The corporations were voluntary, compartmental institutions, concerned primarily with cultic activities. It is overwhelmingly likely that not all Jews in rural Egypt formed corporations or patronized prayer houses; in some places the Jews may have been too few, in others, too diffident, and in still others they may have had ways of expressing their Judaism that we cannot recognize. In all these respects, the Jews were no different from other groups of immigrants in Hellenistic Egypt.
For the first century there is fragmentary and scattered evidence for prayer houses or synagogues and the corporate structures that sustained them for various parts of the eastern Mediterranean, including Palestine. Most important are references to synagogues and prayer houses in literary works. Philo gives the impression that synagogues were a fully naturalized part of Jewish religious life in Alexandria in his day (early first century C.E.) and states that the service featured a reading from the (Greek) Torah.16 In Antiquities, book 14, Josephus quotes letters and decrees, mostly from the later first century B.C.E., that concern the rights and privileges allegedly enjoyed by some Jewish settlements in Asia and on the islands in the Aegean—documents that if not authentic, are at least plausible forgeries (Ant 14.185–264).17 Most concern the right of the Jews to use their own laws, and so suggest that there were in each of these cities groups of Jews who constituted corporations. Here as in Egypt, the corporations had mainly a cultic function. Though some of the documents acknowledge the Jews’ right to have their own courts, most simply allow the Jews to assemble to conduct their sacred rites, and to be free from civic obligations on their holy days. Some of the documents, in specifying the character of the Jews’ rites, speak of prayers, and a few in addition mention sacrifices; two allow the Jews to build prayer houses (one actually uses the word proseuché, the other, a periphrasis). Remarkably, the most commonly mentioned ritual activities are neither prayer nor sacrifice but common meals and fund-raising. Torah reading is not mentioned. If these documents are taken seriously, they show that even in places where the Jews constituted ethnic/religious corporations, the corporations were not in every case synagogue- and Torah-centered, though they were in some places, and everywhere the Sabbath played a role in the life of the corporations.18 The importance of common meals shows that the corporations had an egalitarian aspect, though there is no way of determining the frequency of the meals, and so whether they actually performed a significant redistributive role and loosened thereby the individual members’ dependence on the patronage of the city elites. Perhaps they were primarily a symbolic expression of solidarity and had insubstantial social and economic effects. It must once again be stressed that there is no reason to think that all the Jews living in an Asian city participated in the local Jewish corporation, nor that every Jewish settlement had a corporate structure of any sort.
Acts of the Apostles may indicate that synagogue- and Torah-based communities were increasingly common in Asia and Greece by the later first century.19 If this were true, it could perhaps be seen as a result of the integrative pull of the Herodian state. But we should perhaps be wary of the current tendency to take Acts seriously as a description of reality—more a counsel of desperation (what other evidence is there?) than a methodological advance.
Palestine20
A corollary of my discussion of first-century Jewish Palestine in part 1 of this book is that the local community was insignificant there as a mode of social and religious organization.21 Villagers—the vast majority of the population—did not view themselves as constituting religious corporations, at least not in any way that has left traces either in literature or archaeology. God and his subordinate deities may have been everywhere, but they were to be pacified not primarily by villages but by individuals, families, the priesthood of the Jerusalem temple, and similar intermediary figures.
Yet communities did exist, most conspicuously, sectarian communities.22 Such communities may have influenced the development of the local Jewish community, but mostly perhaps in peripheral ways. The common meals of the Asian Jews remind us that even local Jewish communities might assume sectarian or collegial trappings.23 Indeed, these have never been totally absent in any Jewish community, even if the participants have been unaware of their implications.
Of greater interest, though, are the first-century Palestinian synagogues, apparently nonsectarian, which may imply the existence of some limited and specialized religious corporations with a partly local character. The New Testament mentions synagogues in Capernaum, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, and the Synoptic Gospels take for granted the presence of synagogues at least in relatively large settlements (komopoleis, “village-cities,” presumably what we would call towns: Mark 1:38–39; in the Lukan parallel, “cities”: 4:43–44; in Matthew 9:35, “cities and villages”). But caution is in order: although the synagogues in Nazareth and Capernaum figure as the scenes of important stories in all the Gospels and so need to be taken seriously (and there were unquestionably synagogues in Jerusalem), other mentions of synagogues appear in “redactional” passages and thus reflect the efforts of the authors of the Gospels to provide traditional stories and sayings with settings they considered realistic. But the authors of the Synoptic Gospels all lived in the Diaspora, and it is presumably no coincidence that the Gospel writer with the strongest interest in the Diaspora, Luke, mentions synagogues most frequently. Nor is it coincidental that John, the Gospel most likely to have been composed in Palestine, mentions the synagogue only once, in connection with Capernaum (6:59), as in the Synoptics.24 (The silence of Paul may also be noted.) In sum, the Gospels may show that there were synagogues in some of the largest villages, at least in Galilee. But the silence of John, not to mention of Josephus, and for the most part of archaeology (see below), warn us against supposing that they were widespread.25
The “synagogue of Theodotus” in Jerusalem, whose existence is attested in a Greek inscription, was almost certainly built at least in large part to serve pilgrims from the Diaspora.26 The Jewish inhabitants of the coastal cities, unsurprisingly, conformed to patterns that were emerging elsewhere in the urban Roman east, that is, some of them formed in some cases synagoguecentered communities. Josephus (who mentions no rural synagogues in Palestine) informs us that a synagogue in Caesarea contained holy books and that the procurator Florus deemed the removal of these books from the synagogue by the Jews at the outbreak of the Great Revolt an act of sacrilege. Levine suggested that Florus regarded the scrolls as among the protectors of the city, presumably because he thought the God of Israel was one of the city’s patron deities, and the scrolls were somehow representations of the God (as statues were of the Greek gods), or were necessary for securing the God’s goodwill.27 Did the Jews share Florus’s view? If so, what would this imply about the relationship between the Torah scroll and the building that housed it?28
Josephus also mentions a prayer house, a “huge building,” in Tiberias where Jews congregated on the Sabbaths (Life 276–79).29 Tiberias must be mentioned separately from the coastal cities because its population was mainly Jewish before the outbreak of the revolt and almost entirely so afterward. But we know next to nothing about the religious life of the city before the second century. The city’s constitution was Greek, but there is no way of knowing whether, as later, the Jews conducted a public religious life of pagan character, or whether they thought of themselves as constituting simultaneously the citizen body of a Greek city and a Jewish religious corporation, or several such corporations; or perhaps Jewish religious practices were somehow incorporated into the civic constitution. Josephus mentioned the rebels’ destruction of the Herodian palace, decorated with figurative paintings (Life 65–67) but says nothing of their destruction of temples, shrines, or idols. Were there none or were they destroyed (unremarked by Josephus) along with the city’s Greeks (Life 67)? Was Josephus, committed as he was to what we might call religious pluralism, embarrassed by and thus silent about their destruction?30 The synagogue, finally, played a role in the city’s public life during the revolt, but had it done so earlier?
This last consideration inescapably evokes the alleged archaeological synagogues of first-century Palestine, at Masada, Herodium, Gamala, Jericho, and Qiryat Sefer, the first two said to have been built by the rebels who occupied the fortresses, the third located in a fortified royal town whose largely military population may have rebelled against Rome and Agrippa II in 66.31 (The fourth is part of a Hasmonean-Herodian palace complex, and the fifth is located in a settlement of unknown character; the identification of these remains as synagogues is even more problematic than that of the remains at Masada et al.) The identification of these structures rests on circular reasoning: each contains a large assembly hall, and each was located at a site whose occupants were presumably Jewish—what could they be but synagogues?32 However, though the reasoning is circular, the conclusion is not necessarily false.
If the conclusion is true, then the structures have some important implications. First, synagogues already possessed their most distinctive feature, shared to the best of my knowledge only by Mithraea and to a limited extent churches: the congregation assembled in a large room that had no completely separate space for a clergy, in contrast to Near Eastern and many classical temples (including the temple of Jerusalem), in which the people assembled in a courtyard while the priests officiated within. At Gamala, benches were built into the walls, which presumably left the floor free for ritual activity, which was thus entirely surrounded by the observing congregation. This in turn implies that there was an officiant, as in later synagogues.33 The location of the synagogues, if that is what they are, may imply some connection (but what?) between them and the interests and activities of the Jewish rebels of 66.34 Alternatively, it may imply a connection between the synagogue and a sense of autonomy or self-enclosure, for in first-century Palestine, synagogues were apparently found mainly in cities and fortresses (or only in cities, if the archaeological structures are not in fact synagogues).
The Second and Third Centuries and the Rabbis35
Despite the absence of archaeological evidence, it is certain that synagogues existed in second- and third-century Palestine.36 One possible explanation for their absence from the record is that though the institution quickly spread in the wake of the Destruction, the synagogues were not monumental but, like Christian churches of the same period, were situated mainly in private dwellings. If this were so, however, we should expect that at least in some places, the private houses would have been “monumentalized” in the fourth century—a development that leaves detectable material traces and is in fact attested for several Diaspora synagogues. But such a development is almost unknown in Palestine; the only example that I am aware of is the so-called Bet Leontis, in Beth Shean, a private dwelling transformed into a synagogue in the sixth century.37 The monumental village synagogues seem to have been built from scratch. It is more plausible to suppose that the synagogue was still not widespread in the second and third centuries, that it was found, as earlier, only in the largest settlements.38
That synagogues existed in the second and third centuries is certain because they are mentioned in the Mishnah and the Tosefta. The latter, especially, incorporates enough circumstantial detail in its discussion to make it almost impossible to imagine that the synagogue was a purely theoretical construct. The Palestinian Talmud also reports stories about third century rabbis’ dealings with synagogues, not all of which are likely to be anachronistic. The Mishnah and Tosefta also provide us with what we may consider the earliest theoretical account of the synagogue’s character, the sources of its holiness, and its relationship with the townspeople who used and maintained it.
The same works also provide some very limited evidence for the existence of the religious community, or rather occasionally seem to have thought of the Jewish town as a partly self-enclosed locus of religious obligation. The main manifestation of this view, aside from their association of the synagogue and the town, is that they briefly discuss communal charity requirements. But on the whole, the Mishnah and Tosefta seem not yet to have considered the possibility that the community was an appropriate subject of legislation or a significant locus of religious meaning.39 We will see that even the Palestinian Talmud, which was compiled at a time when the synagogue and community were becoming well established and frequently refers to them in passing, has still not entirely assimilated their existence. It has, for example, a remarkably impractical conception of communal ownership—necessarily more so than the conceptions that prevailed in reality. Its avoidance of the word qahal, except in its biblical sense of the Congregation of Israel at a time when village communities were regularly using it to refer to themselves, is perhaps intentional.40 We will see below that the rabbinic conception of the synagogue and the Jewish town differed in important ways from those implied by the physical remains.
Redistribution
Like its contemporary, the democratic constitution of the classical Greek city, the Pentateuch is implicitly opposed to the institution of patronage. Rather, imagining Israel as an egalitarian community, it prescribes a complex of redistributive laws incumbent on every male Israelite—an occasional tithe of crops, the obligation to leave parts of fields for the poor, the provision of interestfree loans, and periodic cancellation of debts and redistribution of land (roughly, that is, the program of the protodemocratic tyrants of the Greek cities).41 The obvious intention of these laws is to avoid the proliferation of relationships of dependency within the community of Israel: “for the children of Israel are my slaves,” God says (Leviticus 25:55), not, as the rabbinic exegetes helpfully added, the slaves of slaves (B. Qiddushin 22b). And though the Pentateuchal legislators acknowledged that debt bondage continued to exist, they tried to limit its effects (Exodus 21).
The local community has no place in the Pentateuch’s redistributive program. Like Israel’s relationship with God, redistribution is personal and national. In the main, the Mishnah and Tosefta retain the Bible’s emphases, refining, sometimes mitigating, sometimes extending, always complicating, its legislation concerning the poor tithe, the septennial cancellation of debts, the leaving of corners of fields, and the provision of interest-free loans. In all these cases, the rabbinic legislation is directed at the individual Jew as member of the nation of Israel; the local community does not enter into the discussion. Of course, the nation of Israel no longer had any real existence, and many of the rabbinic laws had no conceivable practical application. That there was any mechanism for the collection and distribution of the poor tithe after 135, for instance, is unlikely, to say the least. But the rabbis’ utopian vision, their Israel of the mind, was remarkably like that of the authors of the Pentateuch: Israel as a single nation united by their obedience to, their exclusive relationship of dependency with, their one God.
Yet there are in the Mishnah and especially in the Tosefta the beginnings of the idea that the town (’ir in rabbinic Hebrew)42 constitutes a meaningful religious entity. This conception in no way emerges from rabbinic exegesis of the Bible, so its appearance may constitute an attempt, clearly at this stage halting and ambivalent, to assert control over an institution that by the third century was becoming important in their circles. It may be no coincidence that it was in just this period that rabbis or, perhaps more accurately, men at the fringes of the rabbinic movement were beginning to work as religious functionaries in the larger country towns (see chapter 3), and the majority of the rabbis began to live in the cities, both places in which communities and synagogues were concentrated.
The Mishnah’s main deviation from the Pentateuch’s redistributive program is in its discussion of the kuppah (lit., “box” or “chest”) and the tamhui (lit., “cooking pot”), charitable funds whose precise character the Mishnah does not specify (M. Peah 8:7–9). In fact, though the second part of the Mishnah’s discussion seems to concern impoverished local townspeople, the Mishnah never says that the local poor have priority over others, nor that the people have any special obligation to contribute to local funds. Indeed, 8:7 specifies the itinerant poor as the main clients of the kuppah and tamhui. The Mishnah is also atypically homiletic: “Whoever does not need to take but takes will not pass from the world until he becomes dependent on his fellow creatures; and whoever needs to take but does not, will not die of old age until he supports others from what is his” (8:9). Such moralizing may be an attempt to compensate for lack of real control; or, like the emphasis on the itinerant poor, it may reflect an urban environment whither itinerants would tend to gravitate, and where even the local poor might be unknown to the charity distributors. Indeed, the Mishnah may be legislating here primarily for groups consisting of rabbis and their close followers, who lived mainly in cities, and for them the distribution of charity may have been less a redistributive than a publicistic strategy.
A slightly different picture emerges from the parallel passage in the Tosefta (Peah 4:8–21). It is, in the first place, massively more detailed than the Mishnah. Some of the detail simply adds specificity; for example, where the Mishnah states that the itinerant pauper who spends the Sabbath is to be given food for three meals, the Tosefta specifies that he is to be given (in addition to bread, presumably) oil, beans, fish, and vegetables (which seems remarkably generous). This type of expansion is characteristic of the Tosefta. The same passage also provides details about the differences between the tamhui and the kuppah; for example, the former is open daily and the latter functions only on Fridays. But here the Tosefta introduces a distinction that is foreign to, indeed, contradictory of, the Mishnah: the tamhui, which apparently provides only the most basic sustenance, is open to all the poor, while the kuppah serves “only the poor in its own town.” (In the Mishnah, both funds seem to be intended for itinerants.) Similarly, T. Gittin 5[3]:4–5 presupposes the primarily local character of charity distribution: “In a town which contains both Israelites and gentiles, the parnasim collect from both Israelites and gentiles, because of the ways of peace; they support (both the Israelite and) the gentile poor, because of the ways of peace; they eulogize the gentile dead, and console the gentile mourners, and bury the gentile dead, because of the ways of peace.”43 Finally, T. Megillah 2[3]:15 states the matter most explicitly: “An individual who pledged charity in his town gives it to the poor of his town; in a different town, he gives it to the poor of that town; parnasim who pledged charity in their town give it to the poor of their town; in another town, they give it to the poor of that town.” This rule simultaneously asserts the essentially local character of charity collection and imposes a significant limitation on the importance of the ’ir, that is, the community.
While the Palestinian Talmud occasionally describes rabbis of the later third and fourth centuries serving as charity collectors (gabba’im or parnasim),44 the Tosefta still takes it for granted that charity collection is not under rabbinic control: “At first they said that a haver (literally, associate) who is made a gabbai is expelled from his havurah, but then they said that while he is a gabbai, he is not trustworthy [i.e., is not permitted to be a haver], but when he ceases to be a gabbai, he is trustworthy” (T. Demai 3:4). On the common assumption that all rabbis were haverim,45 this rule effectively bars rabbis from serving as gabbaim and implicitly assumes that there was no substantial overlap between the groups and that rabbis had no influence over appointments of gabbaim. Why did the rabbis keep their distance? Perhaps because charity collectors had to deal with the ’am ha’aretz—people who were careless about the laws of purity and priestly gifts; such dealings are forbidden for haverim. Perhaps also because a suspicion of dishonesty adhered to gabbaim, as to tax collectors. T. Bava Metzia 8:26 may confirm the second suggestion without excluding the first: “The repentance of gabbaim and taxcollectors is difficult: they may return [scil., what they have extorted] to acquaintances, but the rest they must use for the public good.”
The Synagogue in the Mishnah and Tosefta
The Mishnah attributes religious importance to the town in only two connections: it ambiguously and fleetingly implies that public supplicatory fasts during droughts are conducted by towns,46 and it acknowledges, in its brief discussion of the issue, that synagogues are built and used by towns.47 Its discussion of the public fast is equivocal: the bet din (court) is required to decree public fasts, apparently for the entire nation, if rain has not fallen by 1 Kislev (M. Taanit 1), and the ceremony of supplication is to be graced by the the presence of the patriarch and the “father of the court” (the patriarch’s deputy in the rabbinic scheme: M. Taanit 2:1), though the Mishnah assigns them no further role.48 Yet the same Mishnah notes that the ceremony of supplication begins when “they (who?) bring the ark into the town square,” and the prayers are led by “the oldest among them (whom?).” It is tempting to think that the editors have juxtaposed two conceptions of the public fast, the national and the local, without trying to reconcile them.49 Indeed, public fasts described elsewhere in rabbinic literature are usually local, town-based rituals, not decreed by any central body or presided over by the patriarch.50 The Tosefta, for example, in a discussion that closely parallels the Mishnah, acknowledges the local character of the ritual, for in its version, the bet din, the patriarch, and his deputy are not mentioned, and the supplicatory prayers are led by the oldest of the town elders and by the hazan of the synagogue (T. Taanit 1:8, 14). The Mishnah has apparently once again, as in the case of charity collection, transformed what in real life was a locally based religious act into a national one.51
The Mishnah discusses the synagogue incidentally, in the context of its legislation concerning the production and use of holy books (M. Megillah 3[4]). In elaborating on the inherent and nontransferable sanctity of the Torah scroll, the Mishnah for the only time clearly acknowledges the town and the synagogue as loci of limited sanctity:
Townspeople who sold the town square may buy with the proceeds a synagogue; a synagogue—they may buy an ark; an ark—they may buy wrappings (for scrolls); wrappings—they may buy scrolls (of the Prophets—see Rashi ad loc.); scrolls—they may buy a Torah scroll. But if they sell a Torah scroll, they may not buy scrolls; scrolls—they may not buy wrappings; wrappings—they may not buy an ark; an ark—they may not buy a synagogue; a synagogue—they may not buy a square. The same rules apply to the money remaining (either, after the licit transactions are complete, or, from funds raised for the purpose of the purchase).52
If the commentators were right to read this Mishnah as a locus classicus of the legal principle ma’alin baqodesh ve’eyn moridin (one raises up in sanctity, and one does not lower), as they seem to have been, then the Mishnah is proposing that the religious property of the community falls into a neat hierarchy of sanctity.53 The essential principle is that the Torah scroll alone is inherently and immutably sacred—a point elaborated on not only in the continuation of the Mishnah but also in the Tosefta’s expansion of this Mishnah. For the Tosefta recognizes that a synagogue is in fact merely a building, an ark a cabinet, and Torah wrappings pieces of fabric, which acquire sanctity (if at all; see below) only by an act of dedication or through the intention of the maker. The Torah scroll alone is sacred in itself and cannot be desacralized. The Talmud debates elsewhere whether scrolls written without the proper intentions (e.g., by Christians or magicians) are considered holy for halakhic purposes (do they, for example, “render the hands impure”? May they be rescued from a fire on the Sabbath?), but no one could deny their potency.54 But a cloth, according to the Tosefta, becomes sacred only when its owner donates it for use as a Torah wrapping; and if he has merely lent it to the synagogue, its return to his possession desacralizes it.
Though intention and dedication are the formal mechanisms by which an item enters the state of sanctity, the source of sanctity, the Mishnah strongly implies, is proximity, physical or conceptual, to the Torah scroll.55 This is obviously why inexpensive and easily produced items like wrappings and cabinets are holier than the synagogue structure itself. It is of some interest that the Mishnah seems to ascribe a minimal level of sanctity to the town square. This could conceivably be understood to imply that the Mishnah regards communal ownership, not just proximity to the Torah scroll, as conferring sanctity, thereby acknowledging the claims of communities to be holy societies whose possessions are all holy. Such a conception is reflected not only in the language of later Palestinian synagogue inscriptions, in which the townspeople call themselves “holy communities,” but also in inscriptions from the Diaspora, some of them roughly contemporary with the Mishnah, in which communal treasuries, for instance, are often designated “most holy” (see below). It would be rather surprising to encounter the traces of such a conception in the Mishnah, despite its acknowledgment (3:1) that the communally owned synagogue is holier than the privately owned.56 The Talmudim and the commentators were thus probably right to read this law in conjunction with M. Ta’anit 2:1: the town square is holy because the Torah scroll is brought there during droughts for the ceremony of supplication (see above).
Communal Ownership
The Mishnah acknowledges that synagogues may be either communally or privately owned, but it has no theory of what communal ownership entails.57 It quotes R. Meir’s disapproval of the sale of a public synagogue to an individual (even, we must assume, if the individual intends to use it as a synagogue) but seems to reject this view by reductio ad absurdum. The Palestinian Talmud, however, introduces two contradictory approaches to communal ownership, both of which it seems to accept:
Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahman said in the name of Rabbi Jonathan: “That which [the Mishnah] says (that is, that it is possible to sell a synagogue) applies only to a privately owned synagogue; but it is forbidden to sell a publicly owned synagogue because it is possible to argue that someone from the end of the earth owns a share of it.” But have we not learned (in the Tosefta): “It happened that R. Elazar b. R. Zadok purchased the synagogue of the Alexandrians and did what he wished with it”? Rather, the Alexandrians (apparently not a local community but a limited corporation of Alexandrian immigrants elsewhere) had built the synagogue with their own funds (and so counted for legal purposes as a private individual).
This opinion, which explicitly contradicts the Mishnah, is based on an oddly primitive conception of communal ownership: it views the community as a set of individuals or, rather, a partnership, not a corporation with a constantly shifting membership consisting of whoever is living in a town at a particular time, a conception that would allow the community to act.58 Since, in this view, the heirs of the builders of the synagogue are still its owners and they have presumably scattered undetectably to the winds, any sale necessarily lacks their approval and so is invalid. The inadequacy of this view, not only as an interpretation of the Mishnah but as a practical approach to communal ownership, is obvious.59 It may generally be compared to the neglect of the corporation in Roman law before late antiquity (though, significantly, late imperial law began to develop a theory of the corporation precisely to cope with problems created by the rise of the parish, that is, the local religious community).60 There is, however, no way of telling how Jewish towns behaved in reality. That synagogues were usually built, as the inscriptions inform us, by a combination of communal exertion and private benefaction may have complicated matters. A wealthy benefactor in Macedonia, around 300 C.E., threatened his community with fines if they altered the synagogue he had donated without the approval of his heirs, but his threat demonstrates his powerlessness to control the community’s behavior, and perhaps also the absence of a legal foundation for any attempt to do so.61 Be this as it may, communities presumably had some way of disposing of their property in a manner acknowledged to be legal, notwithstanding the view of the Palestinian Talmud.
The palpable crudeness of the Talmud’s theory of communal ownership probably indicates that its formulators or editors were, even in the fourth century, uncomfortable with, or basically unconcerned about, the community as a legal entity. In the following halakhah, the Talmud discusses laws of agency that implicitly contradict the opinion of R. Shmuel b. Nahman and concludes that seven townspeople are empowered to represent the town in the sale of a synagogue, provided the townspeople have not expressed a priori their disapproval of such an action (cf. Digest 3.4.2). This at least implies, following the Mishnah, that the town may act as a legal corporation, but in fact the Talmud here proposes no theory to replace that of R. Shmuel b. Nahman.
An Economy of Sanctity
Are there restrictions on the rights of the synagogue’s purchaser? That is, does the synagogue retain its sanctity after it has been sold?
“They may sell the synagogue only on the condition that the new owners must return it on demand;” so said R. Meir. The sages say, “they may sell it in perpetuity (and the new owners may use it for any purpose) except as a bathhouse, a tannery, a ritual bath [bet hatevilah], or as a urinal.” R. Judah says, “They may sell it to be a courtyard, and the purchaser may do with it as he pleases.”
The opinion attributed to R. Meir suggests that the synagogue retains some of its sanctity even after its sale, that the site itself has a kind of inherent sanctity. This conforms in a rough way with the common conception, traceable inscriptions dating from the third century B.C.E. to the seventh century C.E., that the synagogue is a holy place, very much like a temple (see below). But aside from the isolated view of R. Meir, the Palestinian rabbis seem generally to have embraced such a conception only with serious qualifications.62 The Palestinian Talmud seems to accept the view of R. Judah recorded in the following Mishnah that a ruined (as opposed to a sold) synagogue retains some trappings of sanctity. But the Mishnah itself, and the Tosefta following it, promote the view that there are few or no restrictions on what the purchaser may do with a synagogue. It would, according to “the sages,” be disrespectful to transform the former synagogue into a urinal or tannery. In the Tosefta’s version of this rule, R. Judah, who believed the purchaser’s rights were unrestricted, and the sages were in essential agreement; the sages only forbade use of the site as a urinal, and so on, as long as it continued to be called “the synagogue.” In other words, neither the sages nor R. Judah believed the synagogue, once sold, retained any substantial residual sanctity. Rather, the sanctity of the synagogue was in effect transferred to the money the townspeople received from the sale. The synagogue’s sanctity is thus, in the standard rabbinic view, not inherent in the place but is a formal attribute, conferred and removed by the actions of the townspeople.
Some Complications
We have already seen that the Mishnah’s legislation is frequently characterized by tension, sometimes explicit, sometimes subtle, untheorized, perhaps even scarcely conscious, between what may have been popular conceptions and practices, and rabbinic formalism. This is true also of M. Megillah 3. Though no law in the Mishnah contradicts the hierarchy of sanctity described in the first Mishnah, the laws that follow interestingly fail to discuss anything but the synagogue. Though the ark and the Torah wrappings are holier, the second and third mishnayot give the unmistakable impression, by failing to discuss them, that there is after all something special about the synagogue—a status implied not by the Mishnah’s laws but by its rhetoric.
As is often the case, the Tosefta completely subverts this Mishnaic tension but introduces a new one of its own. First, it presents, in a way that conforms with the Mishnah’s hierarchy, more detailed discussion about the synagogue’s furniture than about the synagogue itself (T. Megillah 2[3]:13–16). Indeed, its agenda differs from that of the Mishnah. The Tosefta is concerned primarily with laws of dedication, with the question of how the act of donation transforms common objects into sacred ones, whereas the Mishnah is concerned with the sanctity of the synagogue. That the synagogue is sacred, the Tosefta simply assumes.
In fact, the Tosefta may go even further in subverting the Mishnah by presenting a view that the synagogue is not really sacred after all or, at any rate, that the Mishnah’s notion that its sanctity is transferred to the proceeds of the sale is incorrect: (2[3]:12):
R. Menahem ben R. Yoseh says, “[if they sold] a synagogue, they may not purchase the town square” (this view accords with that of the Mishnah). R. Judah said, “When does this statement apply? Only if the parnasim of the town have not made with the townspeople a prior condition [to purchase the square, for example]; but if the parnasim have made such a condition, then they can use [the funds] for anything they wish.”
On the face of it, the statement attributed here to Rabbi Judah utterly contradicts the laws of the Mishnah, for if there is a hierarchy of sanctity in which the synagogue ranks higher than the town square, and if the principle of ma’alin baqodesh is correct, then how can a mere statement by the parnasim legitimate the sale of the synagogue to purchase something less holy? Some medieval commentators (e.g., Nachmanides and R. Shlomo ibn Adret) argued that Rabbi Judah’s law implied that the synagogue was not sacred in any sense, that it was a mere tashmish mizvah (an item used in the performance of a commandment), comparable to a lulav. Others, however, rejected what appears to be the plain meaning of the Tosefta in an attempt to harmonize it with the Mishnah and read Judah’s comment as a reaction not to that of R. Menahem ben R. Yoseh but to the final clause of the first Mishnah (“The same rules apply to the money remaining”). If this were so, then R. Judah’s statement would constitute only a small qualification of the Mishnah’s law. This harmonistic interpretation was preferred by Lieberman, not to mention Maimonides, and surely deserves serious consideration, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that it does excessive violence to the text.63
Yet the continuation of the Tosefta reveals tensions of its own. Whatever reservations the corpus may manifest about the sanctity of the synagogue, it is striking that it repeatedly uses language associated with the Jerusalem temple in its discussion of synagogue dedications.64 Thus, in 2:13, it states: “If one makes an ark or scroll wrappings, as long as gavoah has not yet used them, a hedyot is permitted to use them.” Gavoah, “the exalted,” is the term the rabbis normally use to refer to the temple establishment, in contrast to the hedyot, borrowed from the Greek idiotes, a lay private citizen. In light of this, halakhah 16 is particularly odd, at least rhetorically:
If a gentile dedicated a beam to a synagogue, on which was inscribed “[dedicated] to God” (that is, the tetragrammaton was inscribed on the beam), they examine him; if he says, “I donated this beam to heqdesh (the temple treasury),” they hide it (i.e., in a genizah, and do not use it); if he says, “I donated it to the synagogue,” they scrape off the name, hide the shavings, and may use the remainder. Objects belonging to gavoah may be used by a hedyot as long as gavoah has not yet used them, etc.
What is striking here is the tension between the anxiety that temple and synagogue not be confused, manifest in the law of the beam inscribed with the name of God,65 and precisely the same confusion in the law that immediately follows.
Though the various tensions that characterize the rabbinic discussions of the synagogue—the occasional slippage between the formalism of rabbinic theory and the presumably popular, nonrabbinic sense that synagogues are rather like temples, in sum, the messiness of rabbinic discourse—need to be taken seriously, it still may be possible to accept some of the generalizations about rabbinic conceptions of “sacred space” described by the late Baruch Bokser. In his view, the rabbis’ conception was founded on two principles, the first of which is that God is present everywhere and therefore every place is potentially sacred; the second principle is that the one actual holy place, the site of the Jerusalem temple, is still in fact holy but no longer functioning. The rabbis thus “overcame the loss of the sacred center … (by finding) alternative centering objects, in particular the Torah…. They made the center mobile, enabling individuals to enter it by reading or studying the laws of the cult.” The holiness of places outside the temple “needs to be activated…. The Rabbis preserved the idea of sacred space in a manner that enabled the group to function without a single center.”66
The Rabbis, the Synagogue, and the Community
It is obvious that neither the synagogue nor the community were rabbinic inventions, and unlikely that the rabbis played a role in their diffusion.67 That the existence of the community is scarcely acknowledged in the Mishnah and is only slightly more evident in the Tosefta probably conforms to the fact that its diffusion was still very restricted in the third century. Nor was the synagogue common. The Mishnah takes it for granted that it could be found only in the ’ir, the large town; villagers would have to come to town to participate in public religious ceremonies, such as the reading of the scroll of Esther (M. Megillah 1:1).
But even later, the rabbis’ embrace of these institutions was half-hearted. They rejected the widespread conception of the local community as a “holy congregation,” a miniature Israel, and of the synagogue as a holy place, both well attested in inscriptions. They suspected the honesty of communal officials, though by the later third century they began themselves to serve in such positions. Though there is little evidence for rabbinic opposition to the synagogue as such, as the strenuous efforts of scholars to discover traces of such opposition demonstrate, they certainly disapproved of much that went on in specific synagogues. Some anecdotes in the Palestinian Talmud inform us that public feasts, conducted in the synagogues, were still an important feature of communal life (e.g., Y. Sanhedrin 3:2, 26b), yet both the Tosefta and the Palestinian Talmud regarded them as forbidden (T. Megillah 2[3]:18; Y. Megillah 3:3).68 Other anecdotes report the rabbis’ disapproval of liturgical practices they encountered in synagogues (Y. Berakhot 5:3, 9c). Though many passages in the Palestinian Talmud unambiguously—indeed, perhaps a bit too insistently—regard the synagogue as the most appropriate place for prayer (e.g., Y. Berakhot 5:1, 8d–9a), others remind us that the synagogues the rabbis had in mind were not the standard local synagogues, but their own. How else are we to understand the law forbidding Jews from Haifa, Beth Shean, and Tivon to lead the prayers (because of what the rabbis regarded as their imprecise pronunciation of Hebrew), obviously not an option in the synagogues of Haifa, Beth Shean, and Tivon (Y. Berakhot 2:4, 4d)?
Rabbinic literature provides evidence of the rabbis’ gradually intensifying attempt to regulate synagogues and communities. By the fourth century rabbis probably preached in synagogues, at least in some places, fairly frequently. The occasional employment of rabbinic figures as religious functionaries, schoolteachers, and charity collectors has already been discussed. Yet we should be careful not to infer too much from this. As we will see later, there is little evidence that the rabbis’ exertions had much impact before the sixth century. By the fourth, some rabbis were claiming proprietary rights over synagogues: as embodiments of Torah, they belonged to the synagogues and the synagogues to them. But a story the Talmud tells to illustrate this point serves mainly to underline its ambiguity. The rabbis themselves may have been the only ones aware of their proprietary claims (Y. Megillah 3:3).
R. Berechiah came to the synagogue of Beth Shean and saw a man washing his hands and feet in the fountain. He said to the man, “This is forbidden to you.” The next day, the same man saw the rabbi washing his hands and feet in the fountain. He said to him, “Rabbi! It is permitted to you, but to me it is forbidden?” The rabbi responded, “Yes.” The man said, “Why?” The rabbi responded, “So said R. Joshua b. Levi, ‘Synagogues and study houses belong to the sages and their disciples.’ ”
1 R. Hachlili, “The Origin of the Synagogue: A Re-assessment,” JSJ 28 (1997), 34; S. Cohen, “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” p. 160: “The invention of the synagogue was a revolutionary step in the development of ancient Judaism, indeed, of ancient religion generally.” See already M. Hengel, “Proseuche und Synagoge: Jüdische Gemeinde, Gotteshaus, und Gottesdienst in der Diaspora und in Palästina,” in G. Jeremias, H.-W. Kuhn, and H. Stegemann, eds., Tradition und Glaube: Das frühe Christentum in seiner Umwelt, Festgabe für Karl Georg Kuhn zum 65. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), p. 158. And note Levine, Ancient Synagogue, p. 1.
2 E.g., S. Cohen, From the Maccabees, p. 22, 66–68; and so in almost every one of the many collections of essays about the ancient synagogue that have appeared in the past fifteen years.
3 Contrast Levine, Ancient Synagogue, who seems to set the diffusion of the synagogue in the Hellenistic period, or at any rate very early in the synagogue’s history. He regards it as universal, in both Palestine and the Diaspora, starting in the first century, at latest. Levine is trying to be careful not to infer the nonexistence or unimportance of the synagogue from the absence or paucity of evidence for it. But this leaves changes in the character and quantity of the evidence unexplained and turns the relative neglect of the institution by almost all literary sources before the fourth century into a mystery. It has seemed preferable to me, at least in this case, to try to follow the contours of the evidence, in particular because there are excellent reasons to posit the rise of the synagogue in the fourth century and following.
4 For a comprehensive, though rather positivistic, survey, see Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 19–41.
5 See Horbury-Noy, nos. 9, 13, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 117, 125.
6 S. Cohen, “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” p. 163.
7 Horbury-Noy, no. 125; J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Egypt and the Rise of the Synagogue,” in D. Urman and P. Flesher, eds., Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1: 3–16; S. Fine, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 25–26.
8 Horbury-Noy, nos. 121–24. In Onias’s letter to the king and queen, quoted by Josephus, the priest expresses his disapproval of the multiplicity of “temples” built by the Egyptian Jews and claims that his temple will replace them (Ant 13.64–68). The argument sounds Deuteronomic but continues by observing that the multiplicity of temples is wrong because it disunites the Jews. In any case, the temples are presumably prayer houses, and Onias’s letter a forgery; see G. Bohak, “Joseph and Aseneth’ and the Jewish Temple in Heliopolis,” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1994), pp. 73; 120–24.
9 Contrast the puzzling comments of J. Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), pp. 95–96, based on Levine, “Second Temple Synagogue.” See also Levine, “From Community Center to ‘Lesser Sanctuary’: The Furnishings and Interior of the Ancient Synagogue,” Cathedra 60 (1991): 36–84 (cf. Ancient Synagogue, pp. 124–59, 291–356): the title summarizes the argument. On the significance of the term proseuche, and the importance of prayer as opposed to Torah reading, see Hengel, “Proseuche und Synagoge,” p. 162.
10 In fact, prayer is scarcely mentioned in sources of the first century (except in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 11.8), which has led some scholars to conclude that it did not occur in the synagogues then. This silence is intriguing, but I am not sure its implications can be pressed. For recent discussions of this issue, see R. Langer, “Revisiting Early Rabbinic Liturgy: The Recent Contributions of Ezra Fleischer”, Prooftexts 19 (1999): 179–94; P. van der Horst, “Was the Synagogue a Place of Sabbath Worship before 70 CE?” in S. Fine, ed., Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Greco-Roman Period (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 18–43. Van der Horst also offers compelling criticism of H. C. Kee’s view that there were no synagogues in Palestine before 70, and of H. McKay’s view that Jews did not conduct communal worship on the Sabbath before 200 C.E.; Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 124–59, deemphasizes prayer but does not deny that it occurred.
11 There seem no grounds for Modrzejewski’s near certainty (p. 94) that Ptolemy was Jewish.
12 Jews of Egypt, pp. 107–19.
13 Personal communication from Roger Bagnall; Modrzejewski knows of these papyri but has not discussed them in the 1997 paperback edition of his book published by Princeton. They will be published by James Cowey.
14 The essential criticism is provided by C. Zuckerman, “Hellenistic Politeumata and the Jews: A Reconsideration,” SCI 8–9 (1985–1988): 171–85.
15 For discussion, see A. Mendelson, Philo’s Jewish Identity (Atlanta: Scholars, 1988), pp. 51–62; G. E. Sterling, “ ‘Thus Are Israel’: Jewish Self-Definition in Alexandria,” Studia Philonica Annual 7 (1995): 1–18.
16 See especially De Specialibus Legibus 2.60ff.; Vita Mosis 2.213ff.; De Somniis 2.123–24; H. Weiss, “Philo on the Sabbath,” Studia Philonica Annual 3 (1991): 88–89; Hengel, “Proseuche und Synagoge,” pp. 162–63.
17 For a detailed commentary on these documents, see Ben Zeev, Jewish Rights in the Roman World.
18 For a full discussion, see S. Cohen, “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” 165ff. See also G. Kippenberg, “Erstrebenswertes Prestige oder falscher Schein: Das öffentliche Ansehen des gerechten in jüdisch-frühchristlichen Auseinandersetzung,” in G. Kippenberg and G. Stroumsa, eds., Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 203–24. A renovated house of the first century B.C.E., discovered on Delos, may have been a synagogue—it contained dedications to the Most High God, like the Egyptian synagogues, but also apparently statues and lamps decorated with pagan imagery. Did it belong to Jews, Samaritans (who formed a separate organization on the island), or God fearers? See L. M. White, “The Delos Synagogue Revisited: Recent Fieldwork in the Graeco-Roman Diaspora,” HTR 80 (1987): 133–60. For general discussion, Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 74–123.
19 See especially Acts 15:21: James tells the Jerusalem church that Moses has those who read him “every Sabbath in the synagogue in every city [polis].” Note also Philo, Leg ad Gaium 370–71, a highly rhetorical passage which takes for granted that the synagogue was fairly widespread in cities.
20 See in general L. L. Grabbe, “Synagogues in Pre-70 Palestine: A Re-assessment,” JThS 39 (1988): 401–10; Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 42–73.
21 This point is made already by M. Weinberg, “Die Organisation der jüdischen Ortsgemeinden in der talmudischen Zeit,” MGWJ 41 (1897): 589–91; by contrast Y. Baer, “The Origins of the Organization of the Jewish Community of the Middle Ages,” Studies in the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem: Israel Historical Society, 1985), p. 62 (= Zion 15 [1950]: 3) claimed that the local community was “immanent” in Judaism (which is not to say that it was always widespread or highly developed or ideologized; for Baer, these are characteristic of the community only in late antiquity)—the weakest element of this fundamental and brilliant article rarely cited by ancient Jewish historians.
22 Which I believe Baer, “Origins,” p. 68 (= 9), was mistaken to conflate with the local community.
23 Cf. Philo, De Vita Contemplativa 80–1, and J. E. Taylor and P. R. Davies, “The So-Called Therapeutae of De Vita Contemplativa: Identity and Character,” HThR 91 (1998): 10, passim; on common meals, see Baumgarten, Flourishing of Jewish Sects, pp. 91–100.
24 The other possible mention, 18.20, seems more likely to refer to “assemblies.” John furthermore believed that the Jews had decided that believers in Christ should be aposynagogoi (expelled from the synagoge: Jn 9.22; 12.42; 16.2). But as Schrage acutely observed (see next note), this refers to expulsion not from a local community/synagogue, but from the Congregation of Israel as a whole. In that case—whether the world was in common use, despite being unattested elsewhere, or is a Johannine invention—it is likely to reflect either the Septuagint’s normal usage of the word synagoge to translated ’edah or qahal, in the sense of all Israel, or perhaps an environment, presumably either sectarian or diasporic, in which the local synagoge was in effect coextensive with Isreal.
25 The evidence on the synagogue from the New Testament is assembled by W. Schrage, “synagoge,” in TDNT 7.830–38. For some rather positivistic discussion, with up-to-date bibliography, see Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 43–49.
26 See CIJ 2.1414; Lifshitz, Donateurs, no. 79; Roth-Gerson, no. 19, with extensive discussion. The inscription makes special mention of the construction of guest rooms for foreign visitors, complete with plumbing, attached to or somehow associated with the synagogue. Note also the emphasis on Torah study, to the exclusion of prayer, as the chief function of the synagogue. I am assuming, incidentally, that notwithstanding the strictures of H. C. Kee, “Early Christianity in the Galilee: Reassessing the Evidence from the Gospels,” in Galilee, pp. 3–14, which are too vague to evaluate, the Theodotus inscription predates 70 or at least 132. The presence of a synagogue in Aelia Capitolina, or Christian Jerusalem, and the existence of a substantial Jewish pilgrimage, would be surprising, though they are not impossible.
27 See War 2.285–92; Levine, Caesarea under Roman Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1975), p. 30, including note 198.
28 For an account that attempts to answer this question, though it does not mention the incident at Caesarea, see Fine, This Holy Place, pp. 28–32.
29 In Life 134, Josephus writes that Jesus b. Sapphias, archon of Tiberias during the revolt, brought a Torah scroll to the hippodrome of Tarichaeae, not far from Tiberias. Had he taken it from the synagogue of Tarichaeae? Of Tiberias? Did he own it? Was a Torah scroll kept for some reason in the hippodrome of Tarichaeae?
30 On Josephus’s pluralism, see Josephus, pp. 175–200.
31 On Gamala, see S. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and His Development as a Historian (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 160–69; on these synagogues, see Grabbe, “Synagogues in Pre-70 Palestine”; and Levine, “Second Temple Synagogue.” The structures at Jericho and Qiryat Sefer are partially published in Qadmoniot 1999.
32 Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 51–69, expresses doubt only about Jericho.
33 See L. Levine, ed., Ancient Synagogues Revealed (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981), pp. 19–41.
34 Perhaps rebel groups had a heightened sense of fellowship: Bar-Kokhba’s men addressed each other as “brother”; see Y. Yadin, “Expedition D,” IEJ 11 (1961): 47; B. Lifshitz, “The Greek Documents from Nahal Seelim and Nahal Mishmar,” IEJ 11 (1961): 60–61; perhaps Benoit, Milik, and De Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabba’at, no. 45.
35 I thank Catherine Hezser for her comments on this section. T. Zahavy quotes and briefly discusses all mentions of synagogues in the Mishnah and Tosefta, and also lists their counterparts in the Palestinian Talmud, in Studies in Jewish Prayer (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990), pp. 45–84; the Tannaitic material is discussed in more detail in Fine, This Holy Place, pp. 35–59. The latter is problematic in several fundamental ways, apart from its incompleteness (though parts of the discussion are unobjectionable): the Mishnah and Tosefta are not treated separately but are thought simply to reflect the views of the tannaim, as if the documents were unaffected by editorial intervention; Fine believes that fundamental to the Mishnah and Tosefta is the sense that the post-Destruction period is essentially different from the time of the Temple and that in the former, the synagogue was, for the rabbis, the centrally important institution of Jewish life. No doubt the rabbis did regard the post-Destruction period as different, but the Tannaitic corpora strikingly and pointedly fail ever to articulate such a notion (which is found only in a single baraita, i.e., an allegedly Tannaitic statement quoted in the Babylonian Talmud). It is obvious that in the worldview of the documents, the synagogue was of little importance: its existence was taken for granted, but it is mentioned only a handful of times and treated in detail only in the passages discussed below. For the Tannaitic corpora, the Temple, not the synagogue, continues to stand at the center of Jewish life. The most important account remains Baer’s, “Origins.”
36 On Qasyon, see previous section. Outside Palestine, the synagogue at Dura is securely datable to 244 C.E.; but most Diaspora synagogues were constructed in the fourth century and following: see L. Rutgers, Hidden Heritage, pp. 125–35.
37 On the archaeology of the Diaspora synagogues, see “Diaspora Synagogue,” with some updating by L. M. White, “Delos Synagogue”; and White, “Synagogue and Society in Imperial Ostia: Archaeological and Epigraphical Evidence,” HTR 90 (1997): 23–53; and see the extensive survey by L. V. Rutgers in Fine, Sacred Realm, pp. 67–95; and Fine, Hidden Heritage, pp. 97–124; on the Bet Leontis, see N. Zori, “The House of Kyrios Leontis at Beth Shean,” IEJ 16 (1966): 123–34.
38 Contrast Levine, Ancient Synagogue, pp. 165–72, who tries to explain away the paucity of rabbinic, and the absence of archaeological, evidence for the synagogue in the second and third centuries.
39 See Baer, “Origins,” pp. 1–18.
40 See Baer, “Origins,” p. 8. The Babylonian Talmud sporadically mentions a qahala qadisha di bi-Yerushalem. Gaonic tradition regarded this as identical with the edah qedoshah (no location given) mentioned once in the Palestinian Talmud in no discernible context (Y. Maaser Sheni 2:4, 53d); there it is identified as the common designation (though it appears nowhere else in the Talmud) for two rabbis of the late second century. Qohelet Rabbah 9.9 attributes a wisdom saying to the edah qedoshah and then notes, following Y.M.S., that this is the name for two rabbis, who were so called because they devoted a third of their time to prayer, a third to study, and a third to manual labor. The representation in a text of approximately the sixth century of this enigmatic entity in terms manifestly derived from coenobitic monasticism is of great interest, but it is unlikely to tell us anything about the actual edah qedoshah, if any. At most, these shadowy traditions may inform us of the persistence or reemergence of the ideologically loaded language of the sectarian community in or near rabbinic circles at a time when it was being widely adopted by the local community; cf. M. Avot 3:6. For some rather harmonistic discussion, see S. Safrai, “The Holy Assembly of Jerusalem,” Zion 22 (1957): 183–93.
41 As was long ago observed by Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties, pp. 96–112.
42 On the meaning of the term (a nucleated nonurban settlement and, less certainly, a “villa,” that is, a large farmstead), see the discussion in Safrai, Jewish Community, pp. 34–38.
43 Cf. also T. Demai 3:16; T. Bava Metzia 11:23.
44 Levine, Rabbinic Class, pp. 162–67; Hezser, Social Structure, pp. 270–73.
45 Levine, Rabbinic Class, p. 55 n. 56; M. Beer, “On the Havura in Eretz Israel in the Amoraic Period,” Zion 47 (1982): 178–85; see, however, Hezser, Social Structure, pp. 74–75.
46 On this see H. Lapin, “Rabbis and Public Prayers for Rain in Later Roman Palestine,” in A. Berlin, ed., Religion and Politics in the Ancient Near East (Potomac: University of Maryland Press, 1996), pp. 105–29. For more detailed discussion, see D. Levine, “Communal Fasts in Talmudic Literature: Theory and Practice” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1998).
47 T Bava Metzia 11:23 adds: “Townspeople may compel one another to build a synagogue, and to buy scrolls of the Torah and the Prophets, etc.” Also, M. Berakhot 4:7, perhaps implying a connection between some sort of local autonomy and the obligation to commemorate the special sacrifices on Sabbaths and festivals. But the Mishnah’s language is unusual here and its interpretation is difficult.
48 Jacobs, Die Institution, p. 87, ascribes their presence in this Mishnah to the work of a glossator.
49 Cf. Lapin, “Rabbis and Public Prayers for Rain,” p. 112. The Mishnah allows for local fasts, but only in the case of a localized drought or plague (M. Taanit 3:1).
50 Which is not surprising, considering the various and broken topography of Palestine and the wide local variations in annual rainfall that result: see D. Ashbel, in the Israel Pocket Library Geography (Jerusalem: Keter, 1973), 94–111. See Y. Taaniyot 1:1, 63d, and passim throughout the tractate; 2:1, 65a: “R. Yosah said, ‘the public fasts which we make are not really fasts, because the patriarch is not with us.’ ” For a full listing of such stories, see D. Levine, Communal Fasts, 254–72.
51 Cf. M. Taanit 3:3–4, which states explicitly that towns declare fasts, but also 3:7, where the “elders” (of the “high court”) do so.
52 Cf. discussion in Fine, This Holy Place, pp. 38–40.
53 For an alternative Mishnaic hierarchy of sanctity, centered on the Temple rather than the Torah, see M. Kelim 1:6–9. On Tannaitic views of “sacred space,” see B. Bokser, “Approaching Sacred Space,” HTR 78 (1985): 279–99.
54 A point made repeatedly in Y. Shabbat 16:1, 15c. Though one may not save amulets containing quotations of biblical verses from a fire on the Sabbath, a magician who destroyed his amulets because he feared being caught by a rabbi, was regarded as a worse sinner for having destroyed his work than for having produced it in the first place; also, T. Shabbat 13:4.
55 See Fine, Sacred Realm, pp. 24–25.
56 Presumably on the principle of berov ’am hadrat melekh (the glory of the king is in the multitude of the people, or the more the merrier), as the commentators observe.
57 See Baer, “Origins,” pp. 6–8.
58 Contrast the cunning reworking of the same material in B. Megillah 26a: “Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani said in the name of Rabbi Jonathan, ‘The teaching of the Mishnah [that a synagogue may be sold] refers only to the synagogues of villages; but the the synagogues of cities may not be sold because people come to them from all over, and so they belong to the general public (and not just the Jews of the city).’ ” Baer, “Origins,” p. 67 (= 8) observes that rabbinic halakhah never abandoned its conception of the community as a partnership rather than a corporation, while simultaneously assuming, describing, or even prescribing corporate-style behavior on the part of the community.
59 The common rabbinic concepts of reshut harabbim and reshut hayahid refer not to ownership but to accessibility.
60 Only two brief titles in the Digest, 3.4 and 47.22, concern corporations, and they evince no great conceptual sophistication—though Ulpian could at least assert that in (some types of?) corporations, “that which is owed to the collectivity is not owed to the individual” and vice versa; that is, the corporation has some legal personality apart from its individual members (that Ulpian is apparently referring to cities here, not collegia, makes little difference). On corporations in Roman law, see L. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Geschichte der juristischen Person, vol. 1, Universitas, Corpus, Collegium im klassischen römischen Recht (Munich: Beck, 1933); C. Saumagne, “Corpus Christianorum,” RIDA 7 (1960): 437–78.
61 See CIJ 1.694, with comments of Lifshitz; but, pace Lifshitz, there is no suggestion here that the donor ascribed ownership of the building to the patriarch.
62 Note also the beraita quoted at B. Shabbat 32a: “R. Ishmael b. Elazar says, ‘For two sins do the ’ammei ha’aretz die, because they call the holy ark ’arona’, and because they call the synagogue ‘bet ha’am.’ ” The former usage is attested in inscriptions (see Levine, “Sages,” p. 212 n. 61), the latter is not. Arona may be objectionable because it is the name of the ark of the Temple or perhaps because it is the normal word for coffin (any explanation is rendered difficult by the fact that R. Ishmael himself calls the synagogue ark aron haqodesh), and bet ha’am, instead of bet hakeneset, because ’am should refer to the people of Israel as a whole, not the members of a local community. Notwithstanding R. Ishmael’s usage here, Tannaitic (but not Amoraic) sources normally call the synagogue ark tevah, that is, box or bookcase; see Levine, “From Community Center,” 71 n. 182.
63 See Lieberman, Tosefta Kifshutah, Moed, 1151–53, upon which my discussion is based.
64 This issue is discussed at length by Fine, This Holy Place, pp. 41–59.
65 Also interesting is the rabbis’ assumption that a pagan might not know the difference between a temple and a synagogue.
66 “Approaching Sacred Space,” 298–99.
67 My conclusions in this section agree in the main with Levine, “Sages and the Synagogue”; and see Ancient Synagogue, pp. 440–70.
68 Cf. Naveh, On Mosaic, no. 110, supplemented by Naveh, EI 20 (1989): 305, no. 2, an inscription from a synagogue in Qasrin in the Golan commemorating the construction of a banquet room.