judaism beyond the rabbis 293
signal at the end of blessings, so that the congregation would know
when to respond ‘Amen’:
Said R. Judah, ‘Whoever has never seen the double colonnade [the basilica-
synagogue] of Alexandria in Egypt has never seen Israel’s glory in his
entire life. It was a kind of large basilica, one colonnade inside another.
Sometimes there were twice as many people there as those who went forth
from Egypt. Now there were seventy- one golden thrones set up there, one
for each of the seventy- one elders, each one worth twenty- five talents of
gold, with a wooden platform in the middle. The minister of the syna-
gogue stands on it, with flags in his hand. When one began to read, the
other would wave the flags so the people would answer, “Amen”.’^5
Both the Alexandrian synagogue (which must have disappeared with
the demise of the community in 117 ce) and the Sardis synagogue were
were much more substantial buildings than the other diaspora syna-
gogues of which remains have been found, from Elche in Spain at the
western edge of the Mediterranean to Dura- Europos on the Euphrates
in the east. Identified primarily by inscriptions and Jewish images –
above all, the menorah – they share an orientation towards Jerusalem
and, in almost every case, a Torah shrine as a prominent fixture in their
main halls, but in most other respects they vary hugely in size, design
and decoration.^6
We have already mentioned with reference to the possible later influ-
ence of Philo (Chapter 7) the rich iconography of the synagogue
discovered in 1932 in Dura- Europos in Syria which was used from the
late second century to the mid- third, when it was destroyed during the
siege of the city by the Sasanians in 256. The synagogue, originally con-
structed inside a private house, was expanded by incorporation of a
second building just a decade before its destruction. It was adorned
with frescoes depicting biblical scenes. The very richness of the iconog-
raphy in the building of a small community in a small town on the
eastern fringes of the Roman empire suggests strongly that the artists
drew on a wider tradition of synagogue art of this time, but nothing
comparable has as yet been found either in the diaspora or in Palestine.
On the other hand, the Dura images reflect in part the local environ-
ment, with, for instance, a Torah shrine similar in construction and
appearance to the aediculae in local pagan temples.^7
When the frescoes were uncovered in Dura- Europos in the 1930s it
was widely assumed that adoption of Greek artistic norms must reflect
a Hellenized form of Judaism comparable to the Judaism of Philo, but