Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

234 CHAPTER EIGHT

as aninterpretationoftheMishnahbutasa practicalapproachtocommunal
ownership, is obvious.^59 It may generally be compared to the neglect of the
corporation in Roman law before late antiquity (though, significantly, late
imperial law began to develop a theory of the corporation precisely to cope
with problems created by the rise of the parish, that is, the local religious
community).^60 Thereis,however,nowayoftellinghowJewishtownsbehaved
in reality. That synagogues were usually built, as the inscriptions infor mus,
by a combination of communal exertion and private benefaction may have
complicated matters. A wealthy benefactor in Macedonia, around 300C.E.,
threatened his community with fines if they altered the synagogue he had
donated without the approval of his heirs, but his threat demonstrates his
powerlessness to control the community’s behavior, and perhaps also the ab-
sence of a legal foundation for any attempt to do so.^61 Be this as it may,
communities presumably had some way of disposing of their property in a
manneracknowledgedtobelegal,notwithstandingtheviewofthePalestinian
Talmud.
The palpable crudeness of the Talmud’s theory of communal ownership
probably indicates that its formulators or editors were, even in the fourth cen-
tury, uncomfortable with, or basically unconcerned about, the community as
a legal entity.In the followinghalakhah, the Talmuddiscusses laws of agency
thatimplicitlycontradicttheopinionofR.Shmuelb.Nahmanandconcludes
that seven townspeople are empowered to represent the town in the sale of a
synagogue, provided the townspeople have not expressed a priori their disap-
proval of such an action (cf. Digest 3.4.2). This at least implies, following the
Mishnah,thatthetownmayactasalegalcorporation,butinfacttheTalmud
here proposes no theory to replace that of R. Shmuel b. Nahman.

AnEconomyofSanctity

Arethererestrictionsontherightsofthesynagogue’spurchaser?Thatis,does
the synagogue retain its sanctity after it has been sold?

(^59) The common rabbinic concepts ofreshut harabbimandreshut hayahidrefer not to owner-
ship but to accessibility.
(^60) Only two brief titles in the Digest, 3.4 and 47.22, concern corporations, and they evince no
great conceptual sophistication—though Ulpian could at least assert that in (some types of?)
corporations, “thatwhich is owedto the collectivityis not owedto the individual” andvice versa;
thatis,thecorporationhassomelegal personalityapartfromitsindividualmembers(thatUlpian
is apparently referring to cities here, notcollegia, makes little difference). On corporations in
Roman law, see L. Schnorr von Carolsfeld,Geschichte der juristischen Person, vol. 1, Universitas,
Corpus, Collegium im klassischen ro ̈mischen Recht(Munich:Beck,1933);C.Saumagne,“Corpus
Christianorum,”RIDA7 (1960): 437–78.
(^61) See CIJ 1.694, with comments of Lifshitz; but, pace Lifshitz, there is no suggestion here
that the donor ascribed ownership of the building to the patriarch.