EIGHT

ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION OF THE SYNAGOGUE

T

HE SYNAGOGUE was not invented in late antiquity. By the time it
reached the point of its greatest diffusion, it had been in existence for
at least eight hundred years. What follows is intended as a warning
against overestimating the social and cultural importance of the synagogue
before late antiquity.
Such a warning is necessary because Judaic scholars are often overly con-
cerned with origins. In one recent article, “the proble mof the synagogue’s
origin” is declared “one of the most important issues in the history of the
Jewishpeople.”Andthe“invention”ofthesynagogue,thatis,ofinstitutional-
ized communal participatory prayer and study without a sacrificial cult, is
sometimes said to have constituted a revolution, not just in Judaism but in
religion in general.^1 The synagogue was, in this view, one of the most im-
portant elements of Judaism’s alleged “democratization,” to use Shaye Co-
hen’s term, in the Second Temple period.^2
There is nothing wrong a priori in trying to recover originary moments.
Aside fro mtheir inherent interest (which I think even the most analytically
inclined historians could not honestly deny), they may help us, if only in
some small way, to understand the dynamics of change. Nevertheless, there
issomethingdisquietinginallowingnarrativesoforiginstodominateaccounts
ofthehistoryofaninstitutionoranideologicalsystem,asithastosomeextent
in the case of the synagogue. For such a narrative tends to presuppose that
genesis determines destiny—an essentialist notion that, if not entirely false, is
surely simplistic.
Fro mthe perspective of a history concerned with the questions of how past
societies functioned and why they changed, the obsession with origins, even
when they are not unrecoverably obscure, as those of the synagogue are, is
problematic for two additional reasons. First, at its point of origina phenome-
nonmayhavebeenlittlemorethanasubcultural,orevenapersonal,peculiar-

(^1) R. Hachlili, “The Origin of the Synagogue: A Re-assessment,”JSJ28 (1997), 34; S. Cohen,
“Pagan and Christian Evidence,” p. 160: “The invention of the synagogue was a revolutionary
step in the development of ancient Judaism, indeed, of ancient religion generally.” See already
M.Hengel,“ProseucheundSynagoge:Ju ̈discheGemeinde,Gotteshaus,undGottesdienstinder
Diaspora und in Pala ̈stina,” in G. Jeremias, H.-W. Kuhn, and H. Stegemann, eds.,Tradition und
Glaube: Das fru ̈he Christentum in seiner Umwelt, Festgabe fu ̈r Karl Georg Kuhn zum 65. Geburts-
tag(Go ̈ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), p. 158. And note Levine,Ancient Synagogue,
p. 1.
(^2) E.g., S. Cohen,From the Maccabees, p. 22, 66–68; and so in almost every one of the many
collections of essays about the ancient synagogue that have appeared in the past fifteen years.