SYNAGOGUE AND COMMUNITY 281
There is a trivial reason for the location of the dedicatory inscriptions: they
commemorate donations and so tend to mark the items donated. For the same
reason the most expensive items, which were paid for by several donors, mo-
saic floors for instance tend to have several inscriptions. But the location of
the inscriptions has more profound implications, some of which were briefly
noted in chapter 9. The mosaic pavements, which is where inscriptions com-
memorating the generosity of the community as a whole are invariably lo-
cated, are the symbolic representations of the synagogue’s otherness, its special
sanctity; among other things, the inscriptions mark the community’s, and its
leaders’, participation in that sanctity, their place in the cosmic order.^16
Monumental writing is a distinctive practice that is most typical of Greco-
Roman culture and was inherited to some extent by its European and Middle
Eastern epigones. All public dedicatory inscriptions, on whatever sort of build-
ing they are inscribed and however they are phrased, are concerned to memo-
rialize the dedicators and so are, among other things, expressions of a kind of
“individualism,” whatever precisely that may mean.^17 All mark the inscribers’
participation in a loosely constituted but broadly shared set of social and cul-
tural assumptions. It has recently been argued that the explosion of the “epi-
graphic culture” in the early and high Roman Empire was a response by a
more or less individualistic culture to a fear of oblivion intensified by condi-
tions of perceived change and instability, in a society in the throes of expan-
sion. By means of public writing, individuals expressed in a powerful and
durable way their desire “to fix (their) place within history, society, and the
cosmos” (Woolf 1996, 29).
In a very general way, this argument is convincing, though an attempt to
apply it to the rural monumentalization characteristic of late antique Syria,
Asia, and Egypt obviously raises problems, which need not detain us here.
We may perhaps begin to make some sense of the synagogue inscriptions by
paying close attention to some of their distinctive characteristics. There are
two complementary and related ways of thinking about the synagogue inscrip-
tions. One is as religious artifacts, parallel to the writing that filled pagan
temples and Christian churches, and the other is as a set of social acts, related
to the sort of public writing generated by the urban culture of euergetism. In
reality, these two aspects of the inscriptions are separable only with difficulty,
but there is s ome heuristic value in attempting t od os o. We begin with their
religious aspect.
(^16) Cf. M. Beard, “Writing and Religion:Ancient Literacyand the Function of the Written
Word in Roman Religion,” in M. Beard et al., eds.,Literacy in the Roman World, JRA suppl. 3
(1991): 35–58, especially 39–48; and see above on the location of the dedicatory inscription at
En Geddi.
(^17) See G. Woolf, “Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society in the Early
Empire,”JRS86 (1996): 22–39.