part, the synagogue was holy because the sacred scrolls of scriptures (the relic of
YHWH’s word) were kept there. John Chrysostom (Against the Jews) clearly attests
that such a view was rampant not only among the local Jews, but among many of
his Christian congregants as well (see Meeks and Wilken 1978: 85–127). And, in
part, the consistent use of the location as a place for communalprayer and the
publicreading of scripture seems to have made the synagogue holy (Fine 1997). Of
course, no synagogue could rival the Jerusalem Temple in holiness and in efficacy
as a nexus between heaven and earth. And even after the Temple’s destruction, the
location on which it had stood remained the most holy site for all Jews. But our
point has not to do with the perceived relativeholiness of one site versus another,
or even of the persistent importance of the site of the Jerusalem Temple for Roman
Diaspora Jews. Rather, the matter herein being emphasized has to do with funda-
mental patterning and perceptions of the world. In one such patterning, namely
by the centralizers who redacted, promulgated, and promoted scripture, the world
was ordered around one holy place, the Jerusalem Temple. According to another
patterning evident among Roman Diaspora Jews (and seemingly shared with many
ancient Israelites), the world had a multiplicity of such places, even if some were far
more holy than others.
None of this is to say that Roman Diaspora Jews explicitly and self-consciously
rejected the biblical Judaism of the radical centralizers’ scriptures in order to rehab-
ilitate an ancient Israelite model soundly criticized in scriptures. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Rather they repatterned the scriptures’ world precisely in order
to appropriate scriptures’ narratives, teachings, rituals, and social injunctions in a
Diaspora setting.
As stated earlier, the basic patterning of the world by Roman Diaspora Judaism
is not only reminiscent of ancient Israelite religion; it is also thoroughly Greco-Roman.
The urban landscape of Roman Italy, Greece-Macedonia, Asia Minor, north Africa,
and the upper Levant was dotted with temples and altars to both local and other
gods. Some were Hellenized and Romanized versions of pre-Roman or pre-
Hellenistic “indigenous” deities; many were imported deities from Greece and
Rome; others were “foreign” deities from Egypt, the Near East, and, of course,
Judea (YHWH). To these one must add the increasingly important cult of the Roman
emperors practiced in cities across the empire. Moreover, the activities of many of
the private and quasi-private voluntary associations and professional guilds involved
some cultic and/or liturgical performance. Pagan (and Christian) holy men too
dispensed potions, amulets, and incantations that enlisted the powers of the super-
natural good against the supernatural evil that brought disease, family strife, and
unhappiness, as the Greek magical papyri demonstrate (Preisendanz and Henrichs
1973– 4; Betz 1986). Jews simply had their own means of doing the same, their
own set of holy persons and saints, their own common holy site and institution, the
synagogue, in all very Greco-Roman – with the sole major exception that Jews would
not participate in the religious institutions of their non-Jewish neighbors. This aside,
Roman Diaspora Jews could perceive their religious life and institutions as entirely
consistent with the “best practices” of their host society, whose basic patterning of
reality was not entirely dissimilar from their own, even while Diaspora Jews accorded
themselves the basis for their distinctive social identity as Jews.
Roman Diaspora Judaism 371