judaism beyond the rabbis 295
we get a glimpse from the excavation of the monumental synagogue
located outside the city wall at Ostia, with its fine tripartite entrance
way leading to a columned propylaeum over 15 feet in height, and a
large main hall with a raised podium and an apse, presumably for hous-
ing the Torah scrolls. Among the decorations found in the synagogue
were images of a menorah, ram’s horn, lulav and etrog, and (on the floor
of the main hall) a small fragment of a stone lion. The original date
when the building became a synagogue is much disputed. There can be
no doubt that its main function, by its final phase in the fourth to the
fifth centuries ce, was for the reading of the Torah as envisaged in an
earlier inscription (part in Latin, part in Greek) found reused in the ves-
tibule outside the building entrance: ‘For the safety of the Emperor,
Mindius Faustus with his family built and made [it] from his own gifts,
and set up the ark for the holy law.’ But the design of the building fol-
lows local practices, as in Dura, and it is similar to other buildings in
Ostia erected to house religious guilds.^10
The decorative images found in these synagogues (as also in syna-
gogues in late Roman Palestine) presumably carried symbolic religious
meanings for people at the time, although it is hard for us now to go far
beyond their significance as assertions of Jewish identity and, in some
cases, such as the menorah (which became the most ubiquitous of Jew-
ish symbols) and the incense shovel, a reminder of the Jerusalem Temple.
The same images are found in the Roman catacombs, along with the
totemic use of occasional words in Hebrew (most often shalom ). But
there are obvious problems in deducing from these uses the contours of
the religious lives of Roman Jews, for Jewish symbols could be used by
non- Jews (as was indeed often the case with the use of Hebrew and Jew-
ish divine names in magical papyri). Conversely, Jews could appropriate
pagan images: hence, for instance, as we have seen, the depiction of
Orpheus playing his lyre, which a Hebrew label in the synagogue at
Gaza of the sixth century informed worshippers was meant to represent
David.
A remarkable late fourth- century Jewish inscription found in Aphro-
disias (in modern Turkey) which honours fifty- three theosebeis
(‘ god- reverers’) with non- Jewish names alongside a number of Jews and
three individuals specifically designated as proselytai suggests that, at
least in this locality and at this time, Jews accepted converts to their
community but that they were also prepared to accord recognition for
their piety to a large number of gentile supporters of the Jewish com-
munity. This raises the possibility that such gentiles might adopt Jewish