294 A History of Judaism
we have seen (Chapter 11) that pagan imagery such as the depiction of
the sun god Helios could be used on synagogue mosaics even in the
most rabbinic areas of Palestine, such as Hammat Tiberias. Some of the
motifs in the Dura paintings, such as the depictions of the infant Moses
in the River Nile with his eyes first shut and then opened, seem to pick
up motifs found in later rabbinic midrashim, and finds of Aramaic and
Hebrew inscriptions alongside the Greek suggest a community that
could have participated in the evolving religious culture of the rabbis in
nearby Babylonia. But nothing in the material unearthed at Dura indi-
cates any direct relation with rabbis.^8
One aspect of Judaism evidently shared by the Jews of Sardis and
Dura was a willingness to expend large amounts of money on their local
place of worship. In Apamea in Syria in the late fourth century, in a
synagogue located in the heart of the city, a group of wealthy donors
commemorated their gifts of sections of the mosaic floor with its com-
plex geometric patterns and menorah : ‘Thaumasis with her spouse
Hesychius and [their] children and his [or her] mother- in- law Eustathia
made 100 feet [of mosaic].’ Most of the inscriptions commemorate
donations by, or in honour of, a family, and nine of the donors are
women. The synagogue was perhaps of more than just local concern,
since much of the floor was donated by a certain Iliasos, ‘archisyna‑
gogos of the Antiochians’. Antioch was not far from Apamea, and
presumably the two communities had close relations, so that it was dip-
lomatic for Iliasos to pray for ‘peace and mercy upon all your holy
congregation’. The grand synagogue does not seem to have lasted long;
by the early fifth century, it had been destroyed and converted into a
church.^9
No synagogue building from antiquity has been found in Rome, but
funerary inscriptions from the communal catacombs, which were in use
from the late second to the fifth century ce, refer to somewhere between
ten and sixteen synagogues in the city, most of which were probably
situated in Trastevere, on the right bank of the Tiber, where Jews had
already settled in the time of Augustus. The practice of burial in cata-
combs may itself reflect absorption by Roman Jews of many aspects of
local culture, despite their obstinate preference in most cases for Greek
as a religious language rather than Latin even down to the fifth century.
Their fondness for including in the catacombs glass objects with gold
inlay portraying Jewish images such as the menorah reflects their adap-
tation of a local fashion for their own religious purpose.
Of the possible appearance of at least some of the Roman synagogues