judaism without a temple 247
Many were extensively decorated internally in accordance with local
styles, as in the Islamic artistic motifs incorporated into the magnificent
stucco which still survives on the walls of the fourteenth- century El
Transito synagogue in Toledo. That stained glass was used in windows
in the synagogue of Mainz is known to us from the objections raised by
a rabbi in the twelfth century who ordered their removal. Evidently
Jews had come to assume that conspicuous expenditure on embellishing
synagogue worship was an act of piety. Hence also the many fine ex -
amples of Jewish liturgical art, generally executed by Christian artists to
designs presumably agreed with their Jewish patrons, found in the illu-
mination of Hebrew prayer books. Such illustrated manuscripts reached
a peak of sophistication in northern Europe, Italy and Christian Spain
in the fourteenth century in such masterpieces as the Sarajevo
Haggadah.^10
Communal prayer was adapted to suit. Whatever the original word-
ing of the Amidah prayer (on which see Chapter 3), it is certain that it
was adapted after 70 ce by the addition of prayers for the rebuilding of
the Temple. The Sabbath and festival prayers evolved specific wording
in which a description of the sacrifices substitutes for the sacrifice itself:
May it be your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors, to lead us
back in joy to our land and to plant us within our borders. There we will
prepare for you our obligatory offerings ... And the additional offering of
this Sabbath day we will prepare and offer before You in love, in accord
with Your will’s commandment, as You wrote for us in Your Torah through
Your servant Moses, by Your own word, as it is said: ‘On the Sabbath day,
make an offering of two lambs a year old, without blemish, together with
two- tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil as a meal- offering, and
its appropriate libation. This is the burnt- offering for every Sabbath, in
addition to the regular daily burnt- offering and its libation.’Quite when such wording became common among Jews is uncertain,
but the tradition in the Babylonian Talmud that the order, general con-
tent and benediction formulas were standardized at Yavneh by Rabban
Gamaliel II and his colleagues in the late first century ce shows that
these elements were fairly constant at least in Babylon by the sixth cen-
tury. In the following centuries versions of the Amidah were committed
to writing. The kedushah, a prayer which describes the sanctification of
God by the angels in heaven as found in Isaiah and the imitation of such
sanctification by Israel on earth, was already interwoven into the rep-
etition of the Amidah in late antiquity. It reflects an early desire to instil