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

SYNAGOGUE AND COMMUNITY 287

ties: there was n oJewish ecclesiastical hierarchy, n or, by the fifth century,
many, or any, government officials who had anything to gain by displays of
pious generosity to Jewish communities.^32 Furthermore, smaller communities
may not have had many formally appointed officials. It may be worth remem-
bering the Talmudic stories discussed previously telling of villagers appointing
a single functionary to “fulfil all their (religious) needs.” But the implications
of such stories should not be generalized. It is overwhelmingly likely that there
were archisynagogues,parnasim, gabbaim, and the like, in the larger villages,
some benefactors may have lived elsewhere, and before 425 the patriarch
and his men may, as already stated, sometimes have made gifts to Jewish
communities. At very least it would have been sensible for them to do so—
apart from the fact that a law in the Theodosian Code takes it for granted
that one of the last patriarchs commonly helped fund the construction of
synagogues (16.8.22, given at Constantinople, 415). Thus, the inscriptions’
consistent failure to mention patriarchs, identifiable outsiders, and even local
officials may be the result of conscious decision. The villagers thought of
their communities as local, self-enclosed, and egalitarian: the only honorifics
recorded are the unconstruable title “rabbi” and the hereditary biblically de-
rived designations “kohen” and “levi.” The inscriptions thus tell us disappoint-
ingly little about how rural communities actually operated, but a great deal
about how they thought about themselves.

TheLocalCommunityandtheCommunityofIsrael

We have already seen that the ideology of self-enclosure may often have been
in tension with wider social and economic realities. That it was in tension
even with religious realities is obvious enough. After all, by around 500 all
Palestinian Jewish settlementssharedthe ideology and all that went with it—
the synagogue, the symbolic centrality of the Torah, and so on. Some commu-
nities, furthermore, were aware of the tension between their self-conception
as loci of religious obligation and meaning, and the biblical view of Israel,
inherited by the rabbis, as a single people. On the mosaic pavement of the
narthex of their sixth- or early seventh-century synagogue, the Jews of Jericho
wrote the following:^33

May they be remembered for good, may their memory be for good, all the holy

congregation (qahalah qadishah), great and small, whom the King of the Uni-

verse helped s othat they pledged^34 and made [i.e., paid for] the mosaic. May He

(^32) Despite the impression created by the law codes that until c. 425 there was a Jewish ecclesi-
astical hierarchy at whose head stood the patriarch. Some such structure may have existed, but
it was certainly loose; see above and contrast Goodman, “Roman State,” who supposes that the
patriarch was in fact much like a Christian bishop.
(^33) Naveh,On Mosaic, no. 69.
(^34) ’ithazqun; for the meaning, see Wieder, “Jericho Inscription,” pp. 563–64.