202 CHAPTER SIXwhy did the community emerge only in the fourth century and following? In
response, I would suggest that a purely socioeconomic approach is insufficient
(as we should have expected in any case) because it leaves unanswered the
question, Why synagogues? And why the community?
What we are actually witnessing is a change that, though it certainly had
important social and economic causes and effects, was essentially cultural,
and was not restricted to the Jews. As we will see, the entire Palestinian, and
Syrian, landscape changed in late antiquity. The great period of synagogue
construction was also the great period of church construction. The many im-
portant similarities and differences in detail between the village church and
the village synagogue, as well as in the ideological factors that justified their
construction (see below), cannot conceal the gross similarity in pattern: both
Jews and Christians came to view the small settlement as religiously important
and to some extent self-contained. Both acted on this idea by producing mon-
umental construction and public writing that commemorated both the reli-
gious self-determination of the town or village and the generosity and piety of
relatively well-to-do donors. Both synagogues and churches testify to the
spread of the Greco-Roman urban culture of euergetism to the countryside
and to the various transformations of that culture. And both point to the grow-
ing importance of religion in the self-understanding of the villagers. From the
rise of the synagogue, we learn of the importance of appropriation in the
construction of the novel Jewish culture of late antiquity. In the chapters that
follow, I will examine these developments in greater detail.