Jews and Others
the inscriptions, all in Greek, show a number of Hebrew names in trans-
literation: ‘‘Nemeas’’ (Nehemiah), ‘‘Phineas,’’ ‘‘Eisakios,’’ ‘‘Saoulos.’’ They also
illustrate the complexity of office-holding within diaspora communities, re-
vealingarchisynagōgoi,gerousiarchoi,presbyteroi, and a man described as(h)azzan
ordiakonos. One of the donors was Ilasios son of Eisakios, ‘‘archisynagōgosof
the Antiochenes’’—the Jewish community of Antioch to the north, of which
more later (see text to n. below). It would be difficult to find better evi-
dence of a Jewish community established at the heart of the a Greek city—
except that, once again, a Christian church was built exactly on the site of
the synagogue in the fifth century, to be enlarged and adorned in the sixth.^12
A very similar progression is visible at Gerasa in Jordan, where the mosaics
of a fourth- or fifth-century synagogue—this time with representational
elements depicting the story of Noah—underlie a Christian church which
seems to have been constructed in../.^13 But here we are in a bilin-
gual Greek/Aramaic setting, almost in the Holy Land itself; and it is better
to turn to a contrasting case, the vast synagogue of Sardis in western Asia
Minor.^14 In this instance the building which eventually became a synagogue
was not originally built as such, but comprised one part of a complex of
buildings in the centre of the city, including a bath-house and a gymnasium.
The section which by the third century had come into use as a synagogue
consisted of a large basilica-like hall with a forecourt; its dimensions far sur-
pass those of any other ancient synagogue, for the main building is some
eighty by twenty metres, and the forecourt some twenty metres square. It
seems to have reached its completed form as a synagogue in the fourth cen-
tury, as coins trapped under the mosaic floor show. Some marble revetment
also dates to this period, and some adornment still seems to have been added
in the fifth and perhaps the sixth century. Some of the dedicatory inscrip-
tions from the mosaic floors and the marble revetments of the walls were
published in full long ago,^15 but now the entire corpus has been published by
J. H. Kroll.^16 Taken as a group, they clearly support the impression of a firmly
Jewish community which is also integrated in the wider city. A number of
. J. Napoleone-Lemaire and J. C. Balty,L’église à atrium de la grande colonnade().
. C.H.Kraeling,Gerasa,CityoftheDecapolis(), –, –, ff.; inscriptions,
nos. –.
. A. R. Seager and A. T. Kraabel, ‘‘The Synagogue and the Jewish Community,’’ in
G. M. A. Hanfmann,Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times(), chap. ; Schürer, Vermes,
and Millar,HistoryIII., –.
. L. Robert,Nouvelles inscriptions de SardesI (), –.
. J. H. Kroll, ‘‘The Greek Inscriptions of the Sardis Synagogue,’’Harv. Th. Rev.
(): . See nowIJudOII, ff., nos. –.