288 CHAPTER TEN
who knows their names, and those of their sons and the members of their house-
hold, inscribe them in the book of life with all the righteous. (They are) friends
t oall Israel. Peace [Amen].
The language of this inscription was derived from a communal prayer that
until recently was known (in Aramaic) only from the prayer books of Kaffa-
Feodosiya in the Crimea, and Cochin in India, both known only in copies
printed in the eighteenth century.^35 Traces of the prayer have now been de-
tected among the fragments of the medieval Palestinian liturgy discovered in
the Cairo genizah, and the Jericho inscription seems to prove beyond a doubt
that the prayer originated in late antique Palestine.^36 How widespread it was
there we cannot tell, though components of the Jericho inscription are paral-
leled at Hamat Gader, Alma, Dalton, Susiyah, and Chorazin.^37 Of special
interest is the conclusion of the inscription,haverim lekol Yisrael, a formula
preserved in the traditional Ashkenazic prayer book, with a slight change, to
haverim kol Yisrael(all Israel are friends), only in the inappropriate-seeming
context of the conclusion of the blessing of the new moon.^38 It seems obvious
that this exclamation is intended to qualify or mitigate the powerful expression
of the religious significance of the local community that it follows; contrary
to what we may sometimes imagine, it seems to say, we are part of the larger
community of Israel.
Two other inscriptions, both in Hebrew and carved by the same artisan on
the lintels of the synagogues of Baram and Almah, probably a few centuries
before the Jericho inscription, seem to convey a similar message: “May there
be peace on this place and on all the places of Israel” (On Mosaic, nos. 1, 3).
Nowhere else, though, is this point made so explicitly, and we cannot rule out
the possibility that some communities had a very strong sense of their self-
enclosure and only a weak sense, if any, of belonging to the larger community
of Israel. In other words, they were practically sectarian. Other communities
may have been so secluded in reality that their self-enclosure was almost real;
for them, the community of Israel was purely imaginary. Others still might
have conveyed their sense of belonging to the community of Israel obliquely,
for example, in the expressionshalom ’al Yisrael(peace on Israel), which
appears in several synagogues, or in ways that have left no material traces.^39
(^35) See Foerster, “Ketovot,” 23–26.
(^36) See Wieder, “Jerich oInscripti on.”
(^37) Foerster, “Ketovot,” 25.
(^38) “May He who performed miracles for our fathers and redeemed them from slavery to free-
dom redeem us soon and gather our dispersed members from the four corners of the earth. All
Israel are friends, and let us say, Amen.” Here the local community is implicitly represented as a
by-product of the exile, an imperfect condition from which we pray to be released, while we
continue to affirm the unity of the people of Israel. The message is different from that of the
Palestinian communal prayer.
(^39) Butshalom ’al Yisraelis uncommon, appearing at Gerasa and Susiyah, and ambiguous. At
Gerasa, the Semitic inscription contains the blessingshalom ’al kol Yisrael amen amen selah,