16 INTRODUCTIONJews as constituting a separate and discrete religious community. This is one
reason, though not the only one, for the revival of Judaism in late antiquity to
which archaeology and an explosion of literary production testify.
This revived Judaism was Torah and synagogue centered. One of its chief
manifestations was the widespread conviction, absent or rare as far as we can
tell in the Second Temple period, that the village was a religiously meaningful
entity. In this part I trace the spread of the synagogue and the ideology of the
religious community,attending tothe ways inwhich theyare characteristically
late antique—not only a consequence of state policies but also ways in which
the Jews shared general (i.e., Christian) cultural norms but appropriated them
and marked them as distinctively Jewish. I do not see the late antique revival
of Judaism as in any way a product of rabbinic influence, though the revival
may in the long run have contributed to the rabbis’ medieval rise.