THE RABBIS AND URBAN CULTURE 171of the divine, even if only because they turned men’s minds to piety.^18 And
evenessentiallydecorativeimages,likeAphroditeinthebathhouse,Dionysus
on the mosaic pavement of the city councillor’s triclinium, the Capitoline
Triad on the city coins, all had real religious meaning, or at very least were
meaningful as decoration only within a pagan religious scheme. Aphrodite
may have been thought present in the bath that housed her image, notinthe
image itself but as patron goddess (or for the more skeptically inclined, as
the allegorical personification) of physical pleasure.^19 Even such decorative
representations underlined the omnipresence of the gods; they also under-
lined what seems at first glance to be an essential difference between Jewish
and Greco-Roman, indeed, general eastern Mediterranean, religiosity. The
latter had long been characterized by a slippage between impersonal natural
orsocial forcesandpersonifieddeities, whichallowedpeople toviewFortune
or Youth as gods deserving of worship, and Aphrodite and Zeus as metaphors
forhumansocialrelations,whileyetremaininggods,allofthemreadilyrepre-
sentable. Their images, even when not meant as objects of cult, were unam-
biguously part of an ethos of paganism. I would add here parenthetically that
apart fro mthe issue of representation, Judais mwas not as re mote fro mits
environmentaswe, andtherabbisbefore us,mightliketothink, fortheJews,
too, had endowed natural and social forces with personality and made them
not gods, perhaps, but demigods or angels.
I am trying, in sum, to problematize the rabbis’ creation of the category of
thepurelydecorative;thisisnecessarybecausetherabbiniccategoryresonates
all too closely with our own preconceptions. It is, for instance, perfectly obvi-
ous that the Gorgon’s heads and classicizing busts that decorate the facades
of the apartment buildings on the Manhattan avenue where these pages were
written have no religious meaning whatever, and it is all too easy to suppose
that the comparable deployment of similar iconography in a Roman town of
the third century did not either. But on closer examination, the decoration of
the buildings proves deeply meaningful. The residents of the street sense that
they live in a neighborhood with depth and resonance, not with classical
antiquity but with the near past of baroque Rome and nineteenth-century
Paris. The street does not feel as if it had been built up hastily in the 1920s
on the ruins of workers’ quarters to accommodate a rising bourgeoisie. Even
residents who have never visited Paris or Rome cannot miss the implications
of the classicizing decorations and Berniniesque fac ̧ades. The street is grand
but restrained, its inhabitants substantial but unaddicted to excess. Here, the
images of the gods indeed have no religious meaning, but their status as cul-
tural signs is unmistakable. The rabbis’ world was, in contrast to ours, per-
vaded with gods. To take for granted the “naturalness” of the rabbis’ dismissal
(^18) Clerc,Culte des Images,p.38.
(^19) See the extensive discussion in Dunbabin,Mosaics of Roman North Africa, p. 137–87.