CHRISTIANIZATION 201(’amorlaos), and in some places possibly even Israel—terms that in their
original scriptural context refer to the community of Israel as a whole.
There are important gaps in our knowledge about these local religious com-
munities. For example, we know nothing about the role of charitable founda-
tions. They were an essential part of the medieval and modern Jewish commu-
nity and are sporadically attested in rabbinic literature. But they are never
mentioned in inscriptions and are invisible in archaeology.^56 But we do know
that one of the main tasks of the community was to build and maintain a
synagogue, which even in small villages was likely to be an elaborate structure
decorated with surprising luxury and urbanity. Why did Jews begin to imagine
their villages as loci of religious meaning and spend so much of their presum-
ably unabundant surplus capital to construct monumental commemorations
of their local religious autonomy?
Obviously, in the absence of detailed information we cannot answer such
a question satisfactorily. But certain factors may be profitably considered. It is
generally and plausibly thought that the great period of synagogue construc-
tion in Palestine, probably around 350–550, was also a period of unprece-
dented prosperity in Syria and Palestine. It is often considered a period when
the village economy was unusually independent of urban influence, and un-
usually highly integrated—a view that seems to me far more speculative, based
as it is on highly ambiguous archaeological remains, but especially on a single
celebrated passage in Libanius’s Eleventh Oration. Prosperity should mean
that more surplus was available for rural construction projects, and rural eco-
nomic integration can help explain the large-scale presence in the ancient
synagogues of nonlocal items, although there is good evidence that many of
these items came from cities or were made by craftsmen who did. If we accept
this scenario, then we might conclude that the local community and the syna-
gogue reflect an attempt by well-to-do villagers (who clearly were the main
funders of the community and its institutions) to institutionalize local loyalties
that increasingly lacked a real material foundation. At a time when most peo-
ple’s social connections were elsewhere, the old patrons felt the need to stress,
by public commemoration, their honor and generosity all the more strongly.
But we should be careful of exaggerating the effects of the economic boom.
It certainly did not benefit every town and village equally and, in any case,
was not significant enough to alter the fact that in nucleated settlements, most
social and economic relations presumably remained local. If, then, the reli-
gious community was deeply embedded in the rural economy and social struc-
ture, which werebasicallyunchanged from what they had been previously,
(^56) With the remotely possible exception of the famous “godfearers” inscription from Aphrodi-
sias: see J. Reynolds and R. Tannenbaum,Jews and Godfearers at Aphrodisias, Cambridge Philo-
logical Society Supplementary Volume 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1987),
pp. 26–28. But Tannenbaum’s interpretation is very implausible.