180 CHAPTER SIXgogues, which, we may infer, were found in all but the very smallest settle-
ments. The rise of the synagogue will be discussed in detail below; for now
we may observe two of its chief implications. The first is that some version of
Judaism apparently now reemerged as an important feature of Jewish life, and
the second is that Jewish religious life was organized in local, partly autono-
mous, and self-enclosed communities, as has just been suggested. The syna-
gogue remains also introduce us to the beginnings of a dynamic, novel, and
distinctive religious culture. They provide evidence of the development of
a specifically Jewish iconography and art, which in turn are obliquely and
complicatedly related to a renewed literary culture, whose remains include
the Palestinian Talmud, the Midrash collections, the massive quantities of
innovative liturgical poetry produced in the sixth century and following,
calledpiyyut, a magical/cosmological literature including the Hekhalot books,
the Sefer Yezirah, and the Sefer HaRazim, as well as the beginnings of a
medieval-style halakhic literature.
I have been careful not to write of a late antique Jewishsocietybecause
the Jews in late antiquity (unlike in the later Second Temple period) were
fragmented politically, socially, and economically. Though loosely bound to-
gether by a complex and varied religious ideology, they lacked any sort of
institutional centralization, especially after the end of the patriarchate, around
- This ideology may have come to provide Jewish life everywhere with a
certain sameness, just as it did in the Middle Ages. Even in northern Palestine,
where there was a concentrated Jewish population, routine social and eco-
nomic relations may not have been marked as Jewish, and there may have
been no way of excluding Christians and pagans from the networks created
by such interactions. Alternatively, such networks as existed may, even if sepa-
rated by religion, have been too localized to contribute to the integration of
a still large regional population. In sum, it may be more useful to think about
a late antique Jewishworldthan a society.^3
Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity
Though it is not my intention to present a synthetic reappraisal of the history
of the Jews in the later Roman Empire, my argument—that Jewish life was
transformedby Christian rule—has important implications for the wider his-
tory of the Jews in the later Roman Empire, which I shall consider briefly
(^3) See B. Musallam, “The Ordering of Muslim Societies,” in F. Robinson, ed.,The Cambridge
Illustrated History o fthe Islamic World(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 164–
207, who uses the concept of the Islamic world to describe the similarly fragmented not-quite
society of the high Middle Ages.