JUDAIZATION 273tion .The Jews once again began to construct their symbolic world around
the Torah, the (memory of the) temple, and related items, and they began
once again to think of themselves as constituting Israel.
Of whatever else their Judaism may have consisted, precisely what effect
the symbolic importance of the Torah had on their lives, apart from its occa-
sional public reading, we can scarcely say .The decoration of the synagogues,
which is our main evidence outside rabbinic literature and its midrashic and
piyyutic offshoots, though obviously “Jewish,” is irreducible to theology .It
provides some hints, though: the synagogue was a holy place and for some
Jews its sanctity may have consisted partly in the fact that it was a kind of
microcosm, a reflection of the heavens, so that the rituals performed in the
synagogue both reflected and influenced a heavenly ritual .In some syna-
gogues, especially in the sixth century, both the floor decoration and such
items as chancel screens served to demarcate zones of special sanctity, culmi-
nating in the niche containing the Torah scroll .This tends to conform with
the rabbinic idea that the Torah was not simply read but performed, in what
the rabbis regarded as a reenactment of the giving of the Torah on Mount
Sinai .How widespread the rabbis’ interpretation was we have no way of know-
ing, but this development, together with the emergence of the professional
class ofpayyetanim, suggest the increasing importance of the synagogue as a
site of elaborate performance, led by a clergy, of a numinous type .The religios-
ity of the synagogue was very much like that of the church.
But the very emergence of thepiyyut, and of a discernible iconophobic
tendency among some Jews in the sixth century, hints at the appearance of a
new tension, or rather the surfacing of an old one .Thepayyetanimwhose work
is extant relentlessly rabbinized .Their poems were constructed largely out of
complex webs of allusions to biblical texts and rabbinic lore; they propounded
rabbinic halakhah in rhymes; in theqerovot, they transformed the prayer service
into an extended paraphrase of and commentary on the weekly Torah reading;
concurrently, they strove to read the synagogues’ decoration in the light of the
Deuteronomist’s historical mythology of Israel in its rabbinic version .They
tried, in sum, to transform the synagogue from a space that marked Israel’s
place in the cosmos to one that marked its place in a historical drama.^86
(^86) Somehow connected to this may be the inscriptions listing the twenty-four priestly “courses,”
mainly from the sixth century, and thepiyyutimbased on them .It is worth noting that these
inscriptions have so far been found only on separate plaques and not worked into the mosaic
pavements, unlike donor inscriptions .For discussion, see L .Levine, “Caesarea’s Synagogues and
Some Historical Implications,” in A .Biran and J .Aviram, eds .,Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990:
Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, (Jerusalem: IES, 1993)
666–78; Levine,Ancient Synagogue, pp .491–500; and cf .Yahalom,Poetry and Society, pp .107–
36 .Levine concludes that there was a genuine revival of priestly power in late antiquity, in a way
that challenged the rabbis, a theme taken up by several participants at a conference on Jewish
culture in late antiquity held at the Hebrew University in July 1999 .While possible, the evidence
seems to me poor.