A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 205their Judaism—the yall eventuall ybecame Christian or, rather, Christians
came to predominate and the bishops to pla yleading roles in municipal af-
fairs.^10 Tiberias and Sepphoris are not known to have had bishops before 449,
but the partial reconstruction of the latter in the fifth and sixth centuries was
in part a monument to the glor yof the Church—so an inscription informs
us.^11 Nevertheless, the coastal and Decapolitan cities retained some of their
traditional diversity. Their populations included, in addition to Christians,
Jews and probabl ydwindling numbers of Samaritans and pagans until the
Muslim conquest.
Tiberias and Sepphoris, too, retained Jewish populations. Tiberias was of
course the home of the patriarchs until the 420s, which obviousl yinhibited
the spread of Christianit ythere, notwithstanding Epiphanius’s fantas yabout
the patriarchs’ crypto-Christianity. It apparently remained the center of the
rabbinic movement in Palestine, and of the explosive literar yproduction (the
Palestinian Talmud, the Midrash collections, thepiyyut, etc.) associated with
it until and even for several centuries after the Muslim conquest.^12 Whether
the Jews remained a majorit yin this period is unknown. It is surel ynotewor-
th y, though hardl yprobative, that the onl ys ynagogue remains so far discov-
ered are in the northern and southern outskirts of the cit y(though the Talmud
mentions akenishta deBoule, presumabl ylocated in the center of the cit y).^13
Similarly, the insistence of the excavators that Sepphoris retained a Jewish
majorit yunder the late empire is baseless (though not necessaril yfalse).^14
Onl yduring this period can we be certain that the Jewish inhabitants of
the cities built synagogues. Though it would be perverse to doubt that there
were synagogues in Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Caesarea earlier, the earliest ar-
chaeological remains of an urban synagogue—perhaps of any synagogue—in
post-Destruction Palestine are from Hamat Tiberias, probabl yconstructed in
141–83; M. Whittow, “Ruling the Late Roman and Early Byzantine City”; A. Zeyadeh, “Urban
Transformation in the Decapolis,”Aram4 (1992): 101–15.
(^10) See Dan,City, pp. 14–17, on paganism; 90–102, on the role of the bishops; on the Jewish
cities, Epiphanius,Panarion30; Theodoret of Cyrrhus,Church History4.22 = GCS 44.260.
(^11) On the bishops, see Avi-Yonah,Jews of Palestine, p. 168; contra Z. Rubin, “Joseph the
Comes,” Epiphanius,Panarion30. 4.5 (= GCS 25.339) is ver ycareful not to sa ythat Tiberias
had a bishop, either, it would seem, at the time of the writing in the 370s, or of the dramatic date
of his story, in the reign of Constantine. On the reconstruction of Sepphoris, see E. Netzer and
Z. Weiss, “Sepphoris, 1991–2,”IEJ43 (1993): 190–96; the Duke Universit yexcavators claimed
that the faunal remains from the cit ychanged from mainl ysheep and goats in the high empire
to mainly pigs in the sixth century: E. Meyers, C. Meyers, and K. Hoglund, “Sepphoris,”IEJ 45
(1995): 68–71.
(^12) See R. Brody,The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture(New
Haven: Yale Universit yPress, 1998), pp. 100–109.
(^13) Kenishta deBoule: Y. Sheq. 7:5, 50c (the stor yassumes the central location of the s yna-
gogue), Y. Taan. 1:2, 64a; synagogues of Tiberias: Hirschfeld, “Tiberias,” 1468–70.
(^14) See Weiss and Netzer,Promise and Redemption,p.9.