Ethnic Identity rates Greek inscriptions recording the names of dedicators or donors, and a
fragmentary inscription in Aramaic.^76
The mosaic synagogue-inscriptions of late Roman Palestine would de-
serve a full scholarly edition on their own, as uniquely vivid testimony to
the values of an ethnic and religious community—but values which could
be expressed in three languages, whose co-existence reflected the complex
history of the region. If Hebrew was what above all distinguished the Jewish
community, it was also shared with the Samaritans. But Greek was a Jewish
language too, just as it was also a pagan, a Christian, and indeed a Samari-
tan one. All four religious communities, it seems clear, also used ‘‘the Syrian
language.’’
Finally, in the fringe of the settled zone, there were the Arabs, Saracens,
or Ishmaelites. They could be found anywhere, from Osrhoene to Syria, to
Palestine, the Negev, and Sinai. We owe to Jerome a particularly vivid picture
of the world of unsettled peoples which began not far south of Bethlehem,
in the area of Tekoa, and stretched to Africa and central Asia.^77 Ihaveex-
plored elsewhere the significance of the fact that, following Josephus, Chris-
tian writers identified ‘‘Arabs’’ as the descendants of Hagar and Ishmael, and
hence came both to give them an ethnic identity—of a purely legendary
character—as ‘‘Ishmaelites,’’ and as a consequence to see them as having a
particular claim on the inheritance of Abraham, which had been lost in the
intervening centuries.^78
Contemporary conceptions and representations of Arabs as a distinctive
group (or as a set of related groups), and as a strongly felt presence on the
fringes of the settled zones, would be well worth exploring in detail, and
would have to take into account allusions to them in Jewish and Syriac writ-
ings. But that is too complex and extensive a topic to embark on here. In
this context we may, however, think briefly of the aspects highlighted in
this paper, namely ethnicity, language, and religion. Firstly, as we have seen,
mythical history taken from the Bible was deployed, by Christians and ap-
parently also by Jews, to father on the ‘‘Arabs’’ or ‘‘Saracens’’ a common ethnic,
and potentially religious, identity which cannot possibly have had any gene-
alogical justification. As regards religion, while this attributed ‘‘ethnicity,’’
which was unthinkable except by readers of the Bible, offered the Arabs a
. Z. Weiss and E. Netzer,Promise and Redemption: A Synagogue Mosaic from Seppho-
ris().
. Jerome,Ep. , .
. F. Millar, ‘‘Hagar, Ishmael, Josephus and the Origins of Islam,’’Journ. Jew. Stud.
(): ( chapter of the present volume). The key text is Sozomenus,HE, .