292 A History of Judaism
There is no reason to believe that the types of Judaism which flour-
ished in the Greek diaspora over these centuries all developed in identical
ways. Without the central institution of the Jerusalem Temple to pro-
vide a common focus for their religious devotions, each Jewish
community will have been shaped by distinctive local influences, as in
Sardis in Asia Minor, where a huge building, probably a synagogue,
containing Jewish symbols such as menorot (candelabra), has been
excavated. Erected on the site of a former bath and gymnasium com-
plex, this building was in use probably by the fourth century ce and
possibly earlier, and continued in use at least to the sixth century. A
forecourt with a marble fountain has a colourful mosaic floor in which
inscriptions by donors are incorporated into the geometric patterns.
The main hall, which is estimated to have held a thousand people, has a
circular apse at the west end lined with marble benches and a mosaic
with images of peacocks. Statues of lions (a common artistic motif in
the region of Sardis) and a large marble table decorated with an eagle
were placed in the centre of this hall, and the walls, inlaid with marble,
were covered with some eighty inscriptions, almost all in Greek, record-
ing donations by individuals variously identified by their secular status
in the city or wider empire, by their occupations (for example, as gold-
smiths, marble sculptors and mosaicists) and by their piety: six of the
donor inscriptions describe the individual concerned as theosebes
(‘ god- reverer’).
The accoutrements of this building in Sardis suggest a very grand and
impressive liturgy. But whether this liturgy always included teaching
and the reading of the law, as in other synagogues, is less certain since
the size of the building must have made it hard to hear the Torah being
read. It is not impossible that the building, which is far bigger and more
impressively decked out than other buildings identified as synagogues,
was originally created not by Jews but by gentile worshippers of the
Jewish God who appropriated the symbols of the Jewish divinity in the
eclectic fashion common in the Roman world particularly in the fourth
century ce. If so, the synagogue seems to have been adapted for use as
a synagogue by Jews in the fifth and sixth centuries, when the name of
‘Samoe, priest and wise teacher’ was inserted into the mosaic floor of
the hall of the building.
That the liturgy was sometimes experienced by much of the con-
gregation only from a distance is recorded specifically for the great
synagogue of Alexandria in which, according to a legendary description
in the Tosefta, an official was required to wave a cloth to give a visual