judaism beyond the rabbis 297
this feast, nor to perform any of their customary ceremonies. Many of
them were brought to trial by those appointed governors and charged with
an offence against the laws of the state, in that they had eaten lamb at this
period. They were then sentenced to pay heavy fines.^12
The cultural integration of many Mediterranean Jews into the sur-
rounding society, even as they maintained their ethnic and religious
identities, led in due course in the western Mediterranean to the adop-
tion by some communities of Latin for synagogue inscriptions as well
as local artistic motifs. In the synagogue found in 1883 at Naro
(Hammam- Lif) in Tunisia by French soldiers, the main hall had an elab-
orate mosaic pavement featuring images of fish, ducks, pelicans, a bull,
a lion and two peacocks and a series of other motifs very similar to those
found in local churches in the fourth to sixth centuries. A prominent
inscription records in Latin ‘your servant, Juliana, who from her own
funds paved with mosaic the holy synagogue of Naro for her salvation’.
However, the Jews of the city of Rome seem to have been slow to aban-
don the use of Greek for religious purposes, and the Jews of Elche, on
the east coast of Spain near Alicante, preferred to use Greek rather than
Latin to refer to the ‘place of prayer of the people’. There is no evidence
that Latin- speaking Jews were ever tempted to devise a Latin liturgy in
antiquity, although the biblical citations in the curious Collatio Legum
Mosaicum et Romanarum (‘Collation of Mosaic and Roman Laws’), a
fourth- century composition which juxtaposes excerpts of Jewish law
from Exodus with Roman legal rulings, may suggest that a Jewish ver-
sion of the Pentateuch in Latin existed by that time.^13
We have seen in Chapter 11 the limited geographical reach of the
rabbinic movement in the first half of the first millennium ce, doubtless
in part because Greek- speaking Jews would have required linguistic
instruction to participate in rabbinic discourse conducted entirely in
Hebrew and Aramaic (although, in view of the esoteric nature of this
discourse, which will have precluded proper understanding of rabbinic
discussions even by many Jews familiar with the Semitic languages, this
linguistic issue should not be exaggerated). But by the reign of Justinian
in the mid- sixth century, it is likely that many of the Jewish communi-
ties of the Mediterranean had come, to some extent at least, into contact
with rabbis in Palestine and Babylonia. Stories in rabbinic texts about
journeys by rabbis to Rome to spread their teachings in the second cen-
tury ce should probably be treated as fanciful – the image of the city of
Rome in ancient rabbinic texts is wholly unreal – and there is no