Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

206 CHAPTER SEVEN the earl yor middle fourth centur y.^15 Rather surprisingly, the urban synagogues (unlike the prayer house of ...

A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 207 well with the well-attested situation in northern Syria), many more such vil- lages existed in late ...

208 CHAPTER SEVEN grimage site. Others were Jewish villages that became Christian, perhaps like er-Rama, in western Galilee.^22 ...

A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 209 Jews’ general failure to date synagogues and graves is a puzzling fact that will not detain us here. ...

210 CHAPTER SEVEN One of the most serious problems with the old chronolog ywas a piece of information long known but easil ydism ...

A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 211 of much of their work) were not the onl yreasons, important as the ywere, for the Israeli archaeolog ...

212 CHAPTER SEVEN uit yas a discrete field of stud y(and therefore lives on as a prejudice), that is, that high-qualit y“classic ...

A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 213 ited in the great churches came ultimatel yout of the taxpa yers’ pockets and benefited onl ythe inv ...

214 CHAPTER SEVEN In sum, it is not unlikel ythat late antiquit ywas a period of unprecedented prosperit yin Palestine, as in S ...

EIGHT ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION OF THE SYNAGOGUE T HE SYNAGOGUE was not invented in late antiquity. By the time it reached the point ...

216 CHAPTER EIGHT ity, of no special importance in the society that generated it. There may, for instance,havebeen several synag ...

THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 217 or as a Palestinian expression of hostility to the temple and priesthood, all thesestha ...

218 CHAPTER EIGHT at least partly internalized the Deuteronomic insistence on the uniqueness of the temple of Jerusalem. Not all ...

THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 219 one case, the “makers” are identified as “the Jews in Athribis” and Ptolemy, son of Epi ...

220 CHAPTER EIGHT Greco-Egyptian common law, not Jewish law. Modrzejewski was so intent on finding evidence of the Jewishpolitik ...

THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 221 The First Century For the first century there is fragmentary and scattered evidence for ...

222 CHAPTER EIGHT commonmealsshows thatthecorporationshadan egalitarianaspect,though there is no way of determining the frequenc ...

THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 223 community, but mostly perhaps in peripheral ways. The common meals of the Asian Jews re ...

224 CHAPTER EIGHT pilgrims from the Diaspora.^26 The Jewish inhabitants of the coastal cities, unsurprisingly, conformed to patt ...

THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 225 city’s Greeks (Life 67)? Was Josephus, committed as he was to what we might call religi ...