200 CHAPTER SIXand the local community which now became the chief organizing institutions
of Jewish life and remained so until 1800; indeed, in an attenuated and altered
form, down even to the present. In what way was this development a product
of christianization?
The local Jewish community had certainly existed in the Diaspora as early
as the third centuryB.C.E. But where we know about such communities, they
turn out to have been simply a special manifestation of a general phenomenon.
Groups of immigrants in Egypt, and elsewhere in the Hellenistic world,
though they enjoyed a high level of integration in their environment, often
formed compartmentalized corporations in order to preserve elements of their
traditional cults by building temples dedicated to their national gods. The
Jews were similarly integrated, and they formed similar corporations. Like the
others, they built holy places—but synagogues, not temples—dedicated to the
God of Israel. Some of these Jewish corporations appear to have been more
durable than other ethnic corporations, and the fact that they built synagogues
and not temples may help explain why. The corporations for which we have
evidence were those that had internalized to some extent the monism and
exclusivism of Torah-centered Judaism, and so they are likely to have remained
more separate from their neighbors than other ethnic corporations. But some
non-Jewish groups were probably as durable as the Jews (we know of a temple
of Qos-Apollo in Hermopolis, Egypt, still functioning along traditional lines
four centuries after its foundation in the second centuryB.C.E.byagroupof
Idumaean immigrants),^55 and it must always be recalled that the evidence
favors the most separatist of the Jews—others would be unrecognizable (all
these issues are discussed in more detail below). In any case, such corporations
are very different from what is normally meant by a Jewish community.
In late antiquity, the local community became the predominant form of
religious organization in rural Palestine, where it had never before been sig-
nificant, as we know from the remains of synagogues discovered by archaeolo-
gists. What this development surely implies is the emergence of the local
community as a full-blown social institution—no longer just a practical re-
sponse to a set of perceived needs, as earlier in the Diaspora, but something
freighted with significance, particularly, as we happen to know, religious sig-
nificance, in its own right; it reflects, in sum, a comprehensive reorientation
of Jewish life. These points are confirmed by the emergence, attested in in-
scriptions placed in late antique synagogues, of a new, ideologically loaded
language used to refer to the community. The local community is now the
HolyQehillahorQahal(roughly, congregation or assembly), or the Nation
(^55) See E. Kornemann and P. Meyer,Griechische Papyri im Museum des Oberhessischen Gesch-
ichtsvereins zu Giessen, vol. 1 (Leipzig-Berlin: Teubner 1910–1912), no. 99; F. Zucker,Doppel-
inschrift spa ̈tptolema ̈ischer Zeit aus der Garnison von Hermopolis Magna(Berlin, 1938), 13.