THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 221The First Century
For the first century there is fragmentary and scattered evidence for prayer
houses or synagogues and the corporate structures that sustained the mfor
various parts of the eastern Mediterranean, including Palestine. Most im-
portantarereferencestosynagoguesandprayerhousesinliteraryworks.Philo
gives the impression that synagogues were a fully naturalized part of Jewish
religious life in Alexandria in his day (early first centuryC.E.) and states that
the service featured a reading fro mthe (Greek) Torah.^16 InAntiquities, book
14, Josephus quotes letters and decrees, mostly from the later first century
B.C.E.,thatconcerntherightsandprivilegesallegedlyenjoyedbysomeJewish
settlements in Asia and on the islands in the Aegean—documents that if not
authentic, are at least plausible forgeries (Ant14.185–264).^17 Most concern
the right of the Jews to use their own laws, and so suggest that there were in
each of these cities groups of Jews who constituted corporations. Here as in
Egypt, the corporations had mainly a cultic function. Though some of the
documentsacknowledgetheJews’righttohavetheirowncourts,mostsimply
allow the Jews to assemble to conduct their sacred rites, and to be free from
civicobligationsontheirholydays. Someofthedocuments,inspecifyingthe
character of the Jews’ rites, speak of prayers, and a few in addition mention
sacrifices; two allow the Jews to build prayer houses (one actually uses the
wordproseuche ́, the other, a periphrasis). Remarkably, the most commonly
mentionedritualactivitiesareneitherprayernorsacrificebutcommonmeals
and fund-raising. Torah reading is not mentioned. If these documents are
taken seriously, they show that even in places where the Jews constituted
ethnic/religious corporations, the corporations were not in every case syna-
gogue-andTorah-centered,thoughtheywereinsomeplaces,andeverywhere
the Sabbath played a role in the life of the corporations.^18 The importance of
(^16) See especiallyDe Specialibus Legibus2.60ff.;Vita Mosis2.213ff.;De Somniis2.123–24; H.
Weiss, “Philo on the Sabbath,”Studia Philonica Annual3 (1991): 88–89; Hengel, “Proseuche
und Synagoge,” pp. 162–63.
(^17) For a detailed commentary on these documents, see Ben Zeev,Jewish Rights in the Roman
World.
(^18) For a full discussion, see S. Cohen, “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” 165ff. See also G.
Kippenberg, “Erstrebenswertes Prestige oder falscher Schein: Das o ̈ffentliche Ansehen des ger-
echten in ju ̈disch-fru ̈hchristlichen Auseinandersetzung,” in G. Kippenberg and G. Stroumsa,
eds.,Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Reli-
gions(Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 203–24. A renovated house of the first centuryB.C.E., discovered
on Delos, may have been a synagogue—it contained dedications to the Most High God, like the
Egyptian synagogues, but also apparently statues and lamps decorated with pagan imagery. Did
itbelongtoJews,Samaritans(whoformedaseparateorganizationontheisland),orGodfearers?
See L. M. White, “The Delos Synagogue Revisited: Recent Fieldwork in the Graeco-Roman