Jews and Others
Greek loan-words (even beyond the transliterated Greek at the beginning),
and gives the impression of representing the language of everyday use in a
multi-lingual environment.^28 The editors suggest that the Aramaic used is
close to Palestinian Aramaic—hardly surprising, above all in a Jewish con-
text, since what other varieties of fifth-century Aramaic dialects (other than
Syriac itself, written in a different script) are available for comparison? There
is however nothing in the way that the parties to the contract are described
to suggest that they are recent immigrants from Palestine.
The composition of a Jewish marriage contract in Aramaic suggests,
against what would surely have been the general expectation, namely the use
of Greek, that it was possible for there to be diaspora communities where
the knowledge of Aramaic (or Hebrew) had not been lost, and where Jewish
law was consciously observed. The composition of such a marriage contract,
even though no explicit reference to a Jewish community or its institutions
appears in the document, clearly implies that that there was such a com-
munity. Once again presumptions as to a clear distinction between ‘‘native’’
Palestinian Judaism and diaspora Judaism may need to be re-thought.
Gerasa, Province of ArabiaOne of the most striking items to emerge from the major excavations at
Gerasa ( Jerash) in Jordan was the foundations and partially preserved mo-
saic floor of a synagogue, directly overlaid by a church which was built, as
an inscription records, in../.^29 This is one of several known cases of
such overlying, as we will see. As regards the synagogue, situated on high
ground to the west of the famous temple of Artemis, the excavators suggest
that it may have been constructed in the late fourth or early fifth century. If
we conceive of it as a diaspora synagogue, it has very distinctive features: the
mosaic floor contained a pictorial, or narrative, depiction of a biblical scene,
with the dove bringing an olive branch to two sons of Noah, who are named
in Greek, Shem (Sēm) and Yaphet (Iaphith), and then a representation of the
animals leaving the Ark. A further Greek inscription in mosaic reads ‘‘To
. For a list of transliterated Greek words (the dating formula, titles, names, place-
names, weights, and objects), see Sirat et al. (n. ), –.
. See C. H. Kraeling, ed.,Gerasa: City of the Decapolis(). See pp. –, ‘‘The
Synagogue Church,’’ with inscription no. (p. ), giving the year of the era of
Gerasa. For the synagogue mosaic, see pp. –, with the mosaic inscriptions nos. –
(p. ). The mosaics of both synagogue and church are beautifully presented and discussed
in M. Piccirillo,The Mosaics of Jordan(), –. For a succinct and useful account, see
L. Levine,The Ancient Synagogue(), –. Not inIJudO.