The synagogue as a typical Roman civic institution
To this point, I have discussed the synagogue as a holy place for communal prayer
and the public reading of scriptures – in Greek (and perhaps for some congregations
in Rome and Italy, in Latin). In passing, I have noted that Jewish holy men/healers
operated at least some of the time out of the synagogue premises and that the
synagogue council and the Jews’ courts usually sat in the synagogue. It is clear, then,
that the synagogue was not simply a place for communal religious functions. Just as
the synagogue was much more than a “place of prayer” (proseuche, the designation
preferred among Jews in Egypt) offered in service and devotion to YHWH, so too
it was much more than the Roman Diaspora Jews’ counterpart to the other temples
in the urban landscapes. Rather, as an edifice, the synagogue’s use overlapped, even
if it did not entirely coincide, with the typical functions of a number of public
buildings in the city; for example, the basilica (a general-purpose civic building); the
gymnasia (a place for education); the civic council building (bouleuterion, or in Rome,
the curia hostilia); the city’s treasury building; the city archives; the place where the
city’s justices held judicial proceedings (sometimes in the basilica, sometimes else-
where, like the forum/agora). Clearly the synagogues were for Roman Diaspora Jewish
communities the Jewish civic building(s) par excellence, the seats of the “corporate”
functioning of the Jewish communities within their host cities (Smallwood 2001:
139– 41, 225f.; Barclay 1996: 65–71). Even more important, as the foregoing (and
partial) list of civic institutions having some parallel in the synagogue indicates, the
functions and institutions associated with the synagogues resemble in structure
and function the principal civic institutions and functions of a typical Roman
imperial-era city.
Permit me to expand upon this assertion, since it is key to understanding the “fit”
between the two “worlds” in which the Roman Diaspora Jews lived simultaneously
as an ethno-religious minority in Roman imperial urban society: (1) a “world”
particular to the Jewish minority; and (2) a “world” shared with other non-Jewish
inhabitants of the city, in the life of which the Jew must meaningfully participate
and be accepted as a meaningful co-participant. I repeat the basic point, because of
its importance. Precisely in their most parochial setting, the Jews replicated quite
stunningly patterns and institutions characteristic of their host society. This pattern
of imitation and replication in the parochial setting of that which is typical, norm-
ative, and valued in the host, non-parochial society is, as far as I can see, a primary
strategy of Jewish ethno-religious success, persistence, and identity (re)formation
in the Roman Diaspora. In socio-anthropological terms this parallel between inner-
community institutions, roles, and structures, on the one hand, and extra-community
civic institutions, roles, and structures shared with non-Jews, on the other, allowed
Diaspora Jews to experience their communal life as Jews as “normal” and self-
evidently “appropriate,” as it reflected normative civic life and society. At the same
time, many of the structures and institutions of non-Jewish civic life could be experi-
enced by Roman Diaspora Jews, not only as having the normative force of the
majority host society behind them, but as “fitting” in light of how Jews organized
their own religious and ethnic affairs.
372 Jack N. Lightstone