SYNAGOGUE AND COMMUNITY 285rai—roughly the equivalent ofqorbanot(offerings, or sacrifices) and in Ara-
maic,mizwata(i.e.,mitzvot). Christians used precisely the same language in
their public inscriptions, though we have seen other ways in which the Jews
strove to distinguish their language of donation from that of the Christians.
Some of Rajak’s other observations are as true of late antique Palestinian as
of high imperial Diaspora communities. Most important of these is that in
contrast to public buildings in cities, which were usually gifts of a single bene-
factor, synagogues were almost always built and decorated by several benefac-
tors. (The few exceptions are diasporic and early and will not detain us.) We
must wonder why this should have been so.
It is likely that in some cases the multiplicity of donors reflected social and
economic realities. In some communities there may simply have been no indi-
vidual rich enough to fund construction on his or her own.^26 But this cannot
always have been the case. I have already indicated that little is known about
the social and economic history of late antique Palestine. But it is overwhelm-
ingly likely that some rural communities enjoyed the patronage of an individ-
ual grandee. In the first century there had been in Galilee an influential class
of great landowners who in some cases controlled villages; this may contradict
the archaeological record—no country villas, and only a few large town
houses, have yet been discovered in Galilee—but emerges clearly from Jose-
phus’s accounts of his own activities in the district.^27 Such quasi-dynastic land-
owning families, who may not have been terribly rich by the standards of Italy,
North Africa, or coastal Asia Minor, are sporadically attested in the Palestinian
Talmud (which also knows, and disapproves, of the institution of patronage)^28
and may have continued to exist until the end of antiquity. Like the self-confi-
dent and prosperous villages of northern Syria classically discussed in Libani-
us’s orationde patrociniis, some Palestinian villages may have been under
the protection of influential military officers, government officials, or, indeed,
(^26) Cf. high imperial rural Syria: G. Tate, “The Syrian Countryside during the Roman Era,” in
Early Roman Empire in the East, p. 67. But a case is also known of a village belonging to a single
owner.
(^27) See above; and S. Schwartz, “Josephus in Galilee.” For the view, based on archaeology, that
there were n overy rich pe ople in late antique Galilee, that (what is a very different matter) it was
a “largely egalitarian society,” see D. Groh, “The Clash between Literary and Archaeological
Models of Provincial Palestine,” inArchaeology and the Galilee, 32 (art. 29–37). But archaeology
does not tell the whole story. Goodman,State and Society(p. 33) expresses himself more moder-
ately and probably more accurately: “the wealth distinctions in Galilee between classes seem to
be much narrower than in other parts of the empire.” See next note.
(^28) For example, Horayot 3:9, 48c, where thepaganayyaare obviously great country landown-
ers, described in this story as paying court to the patriarch; on patrons, see the remarkable series
of homilies in Y. Berakhot 9:1, 12a-b; additional rabbinic material is collected in D. Sperber,
Roman Palestine, 200–400: The Land: Crisis and Change in Agrarian Society as Reflected in
Rabbinic Sources(Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1978), pp. 119–35. Patronage serves as
a pervasive metaphor (“patron” is a common name for God) in the recently published Aramaic
piyyutim(Sokoloff and Yahalom,Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry, p. 361, s.v.ptryn/ptrwn).