JUDAIZATION 247aforementioned .Some of these works may provide evidence for the varie-
gated, even conflict-riddenreceptionof the art (for late antique Jewish litera-
ture is very diverse) but not the motivations of those who commissioned it.
There are strong reasons for rejecting a rabbinizing approach to the inter-
pretation of the synagogue art, reasons provided mainly by the synagogue
remains themselves .It is well-known that the ancient synagogues often vio-
lated rabbinic rules by facing in the wrong directions, having their entrances
in the wrong places, being decorated with images forbidden by the rabbis,
such as those of the ubiquitous seven-branched menorah or of gods holding
scepters and orbs.^16 But such violations may not in fact be terribly significant
in themselves: some can be explained away by clever exegesis of rabbinic laws,
and the rest might be attributed to the ignorance or recalcitrant eccentricity
of a handful of synagogue patrons.^17
A more compelling objection to rabbinizing readings of the synagogue art
is that the rabbis and the synagogue builders had very different notions of the
sacred—a suggestion that may be understood as a modification, a toning
down, of Goodenough’s extreme contention that the synagogue art and the
rabbinic texts are evidence for utterly different varieties of Judaism.^18 The very
idea, apparently universal among the Jews by about 500, that a synagogue
should be housed in a special building, indicates the distance of the villagers
from the rabbinic ideology discussed above .In fact, the essential “otherness”
of the synagogue was overdetermined; it was marked not only by the monu-
mentality of its structure butinvariablyin other ways as well .Every synagogue
so far discovered is decorated, either on its facade or within, with iconographic
indications of sanctity .In some cases these decorations are not specifically
Jewish in content .Eagles, wreaths, and vines, carved on the facades of several
synagogues, were also the standard decoration of the Syrian pagan shrines
surveyed early in the last century by Butler, and they seem to be markers of a
kind of generic sanctity.^19 Even geometric mosaic carpets common in syna-
gogue decoration and simple wall paintings resembling the so-called first style
of Pompeii, for which there is some evidence, mark the synagogue interior as
“other” because of their disorientation of the viewer’s sense of space and sur-
face.^20 Types of decoration that in their original domestic context had been
expressions of a mildly subversive wit became in late antique synagogues and
churches adjuncts of spirituality.
(^16) See Levine, “Sages and the Synagogue,” pp .215–18.
(^17) The most recent attempt to defend the synagogue art in terms of rabbinic halakhah is Stern,
“Figurative Art.”
(^18) SeeJewish Symbols, 12: pp .40–49, for his most concise statement of the issue.
(^19) H .C .Butler,Syria: Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to
Syria in 1904–5 and 1909,9 vols .(Leiden: Brill, 1907–1949).
(^20) Cf .N .Bryson,Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting(Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990), pp .17–59.