276 CHAPTER TEN
The inscriptions found among the remains of synagogues constitute our
main evidence for the late antique local religious community. We must be
careful not to approach these inscriptions too positivistically. One reason for
such restraint is that these little texts must be understood primarily as nuggets
of ideology: in their common use of a language drawn equally from the Greco-
Roman urban culture of euergetism and the Hebrew Bible’s conception of
the congregation of Israel, the inscriptions construct a religious world whose
relation to embedded social and economic realities is indeterminate. The
inscriptions, that is, cannot be used to describe the social structure of rural
late antique Palestine; nor is it even clear how much they can tell us about
actual social and economic relations within the religious community itself.^5
Another reason for interpretative restraint is that our evidence is so paltry—
about seventy-five usable epigraphical texts. The types of information avail-
able to historians of other periods, like the rich documentation found in the
Cairo genizah, which has made possible the excellent and detailed studies of
the Jewish communities of medieval North Africa by S. D. Goitein, Mark
Cohen, and Menahem Ben-Sasson, are not available for antiquity.^6 Such doc-
umentation enabled Goitein and his students to produce full accounts not
only of how communities functioned, but of the exceptionally complex tripar-
tite relationship between the community as expression of religious ideology,
the community as legal, social, and economic corporation, and the cities and
towns in which the communities were situated. Nothing comparable is possi-
ble for late antiquity.^7
Notwithstanding all these qualifications, the communal ideology, which
most Jewish settlements shared by the end of antiquity, is important in itself
because it could influence, in however limited a way, social relations, patterns
of expenditure, and mentalities. Thus, though it never eradicated local and
(^5) For detailed discussion of the inscriptions, making some points similar to mine, see H. Lapin,
“Palestinian Inscriptions and Jewish Ethnicity in Late Antiquity,” in E. Meyers, ed.,Galilee
through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures(Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), pp.
239–67.
(^6) See S. D. Goitein,A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as
Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967–1988), esp. vol. 2; M. R. Cohen,Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt: The Origins
of the Office of Head of the Jews, ca. 1065–1126(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
M. Ben-Sasson,The Emergence of the Local Jewish Community in the Muslim World: Qayrawan,
800–1057(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996).
(^7) Z. Safrai was able to write an entire book on the subject (The Jewish Community) by missing
the point adumbrated by Salo Baron (The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the
American Revolution, 3 vols. [Philadelphia: JPS, 1942]) and emphasized by Baer that the town
and theqahalare not identical, and that the Talmud has little to say about the latter. Safrai also
reads all rabbinic statements, including prescriptive and idealizing ones, as if they were descrip-
tive, believes them, and combines them to produce an impossible description of the ancient
Jewish town.