SYNAGOGUE AND COMMUNITY 279which goods, services, and coins flowed at a brisk pace, the entirety corres-
pondingly bound together by frequent relationships of friendship, depen-
dency, and family (complicated by the issue of religious difference), in other
words, a small but remarkably cosmopolitan society, upon which an ideology
of local religious self-enclosure was superimposed almost arbitrarily, perhaps
mainly by local elites looking for ways to spend their money and memorialize
local loyalties that increasingly lacked material foundation?^12 Or should we
rather suppose that religious self-enclosure was more thoroughly embedded
in a society that was in any case characterized byinfrequencyof outside con-
tacts, in which coins and “manufactured” goods were available but hard to
come by and in which most relationships—social, economic, and familial—
were local?
Though this question cannot be answered, it may be worth observing that
“late antiquity” lasted three hundred years, in the course of which there were
presumably rises and falls in the velocity of trade, both locally and regionally;
social and economic practices also varied over time and from place to place.^13
This is not to dismiss the value of generalization, but only to observe that what
remained stable in the period, or progressed incrementally, was, as far as we
can tell from the inscriptions and patterns of construction, the ideology of the
self-enclosed religious community. That is, though this ideology was certainly
embedded in some sort of social and material context, it was only loosely so.
Similar sorts of synagogues were constructed both by wealthy communities,
like that of Meroth in the fifth century, whose treasury contained, by around
500, vast quantities of untouched gold, obviously acquired through fairly ex-
tensive trade, and poor ones, like that of Bet Alfa in the sixth century, whose
(^12) On the theory of the booming rural economy of late antique Syria-Palestine, see above. A
quasi-modernizing view of the economy and society of late antique Palestine, like that suggested
here, can be extracted from the work of Tchalenko and various followers, and it is influenced
by a passage in Libanius’ Eleventh Oration. For Jewish Palestine, this is more or less the view
of Z. Safrai,The Economy of Roman Palestine, as well as of a school of New Testament–oriented
archaeologists/social historians, whose views may be found in such collections as D. R. Edwards
and C. T. McCullough,Archaeology and the Galilee: Texts and Contexts in the Graeco-Roman
and Byzantine Periods, South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 143 (Atlanta: Scholars,
1997). Such views have been bolstered by the rash conclusions that have been drawn (in some
but not all cases by the author himself) from D. Adan-Bayewitz’s meticulous study of the diffu-
sion of the pottery of Kefar Hananiah:Common Pottery. In sum, Adan-Bayewitz’s sample of
material is too small to be convincingly stratified chronologically, and so its implications about
the velocity of trade—a crucial but always overlooked consideration in evaluating the Galilean
economy—are weak; it is furthermore uncertain that common pottery can be used unproblem-
atically as a tracer for trade in general; finally, the patterns of diffusion observed by Adan himself
disprove his assertion that Sepphoris and Tiberias played a central mediating role in the market-
ing of the pottery. His findings remain suggestive, but their implications must not be pushed too
far.
(^13) Cf. the situation in rural northern Syria: Tate,Les campagnes, pp. 85–188; Foss, “Near
Eastern Countryside,” pp. 218–9.