216 CHAPTER EIGHTity, of no special importance in the society that generated it. There may, for
instance,havebeen several synagoguesinfirst-century Palestine, butfew Jews
had regular contact with the mand there is little justification for giving the m
an important role in an account of first-century Palestinian Jewish society.
Second,becausephenomenaattheirpointoforiginareusuallysmall-scale,
they are inexplicable. This is because societies, even “primitive” ones, are so
complex and quirky that we can begin to make sense only of gross shifts: the
smaller the scale of the phenomenon, the less useful the usual historians’ (or
socialscientists’)toolsareinexplainingit.Forexample,wecanatleastspecu-
late usefullyabout the causes,progress, and consequences ofthe christianiza-
tion of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, but about the
origins of Christianity, scholars can be safely said to have drawn a blank, and
certainly not for lack of industry.
In sum, the invention of the synagogue was “revolutionary” only in terms
of a deeply problematic genetic narrative, one in which ideas and institutions
floatfree oftheir socialcontext,so thattheirfirstappearance,ratherthantheir
maximaldiffusion,iswhatreallymatters.Thatthesynagoguecameintobeing
sometimeintheSecondTempleperioddoesnottellusasmuchaboutJewish
society, then, as has often been claimed. In my view, it is the diffusion of the
synagogue that demands more careful consideration, for we can only speak
meaningfully about it, and with some hope of being right, when it becomes a
significant factor in Jewish society. Origins and the process of diffusion must
be addressed because we need to know what it is we are talking about when
we talk about the synagogue and the community, and we need furthermore
to discuss the dynamics of their diffusion in order to see if we can determine
when and why they began to attain more than marginal significance. In this
chapter, I will argue that this did not occur before the fourth century.^3
Origins: Prayer House and Community in Ptolemaic Egypt
There is no way of determining whether the synagogue began as a response
totheJosianicreformsofthelateseventhcenturyB.C.E.,theBabylonianexile
insixthcentury,theriseoftheJewishDiasporainthecenturiesthatfollowed,
(^3) Contrast Levine,Ancient Synagogue, who seems to set the diffusion of the synagogue in the
Hellenistic period, or at any rate very early in the synagogue’s history. He regards it as universal,
in both Palestine and the Diaspora, starting in the first century, at latest. Levine is trying to be
careful not to infer the nonexistence or unimportance of the synagogue from the absence or
paucity of evidence for it. But this leaves changes in the character and quantity of the evidence
unexplained and turns the relative neglect of the institution by almost all literary sources before
the fourth century into a mystery. It has seemed preferable to me, at least in this case, to try to
follow the contours of the evidence, in particular because there are excellent reasons to posit the
rise of the synagogue in the fourth century and following.