NINE

JUDAIZATION

T

HE DIFFUSION of the synagogue is evidence for judaization .By
this I mean the reemergence of some version—altered but recogniz-
able—of the ideological complex described in part 1 of this book as
the ordering principle of the public life of most Jews .These qualifications are
necessary because we have no way of knowing, for late antiquity as for the
Second Temple period, how Jews actually lived their day-to-day lives, to what
extent they conformed to Pentateuchal prescription .The synagogue remains
and other artifacts provide excellent evidence for the symbolic importance of
the Torah, but for only certain aspects of the lives of the Jews.
How are we to reconcile the claim that in late antiquity Judaism served to
integrate the Jews with the obvious diversity of the synagogue remains, as well
as the fragmentation of Jewish religious life implied by their very existence? I
would argue that, as in the case of the literary remains of the Second Temple
period, here too the diversity of the particular artifacts has drawn attention
from the larger pattern .Clearly, by about 500 almost all Jewish villages,
though they regarded themselves as religiously discrete, participated in a
common ideology; all utilized surplus capital to build and maintain syna-
gogues, all had placed the Torah at the the physical and perhaps symbolic
centers of their world, and all regarded themselves as constituting “Israel,”
or rather an agglomeration of discrete Israels .We may not be able to speak
ofaJewish state or polity, but we can speak of the beginnings at least of a
Jewish world, a collection of little Jewish polities loosely bound together into
a community of shared symbols and discourse that, however diverse in their
details, nevertheless served to mark them off from their (by now) mainly
Christian neighbors.

The Centrality of the Torah

We have already seen that the reading or study of the Torah may not have
been an original part of of the synagogue’s program .Whether the earliest
communities possessed Torah scrolls and, if so, whether they kept them in
the prayer houses, is unknown .Presumably, they were fantastically expensive,
especially if written on parchment, which is, once again unknown, and this
may argue against their general diffusion .It is certain, though, that by the first