SYNAGOGUE AND COMMUNITY 289Conclusion
In constructing synagogues and decorating them with a sacred iconography
and with monumental writing, the Jews of late antique Palestine were con-
structing a religious world that bore an oblique and shifting relationship to
the social world in which it was embedded. The local religious community
was autonomous, self-contained, and egalitarian, although at the same time
influenced by old Greco-Roman urban ideas about euergetism and honor.
The ideology of the local community not only reflected the disembedding of
religion as a category of human experience but, in its turn, also affected
the social and economic structure of rural settlements by imposing on them
common patterns of expenditure. The Jewish community was in the details
of its ideology and function distinctively Jewish. But the Jews, in imagining
their villages as partly autonomous loci of religious obligation and meaning,
and in acting on this idea by producing monumental religious buildings,
were participating in a general late antique process, itself a consequence of
christianization.
while in the Greek inscription the corresponding blessing readserene [sic] te synagoge(On Mo-
saic, no. 50; Lifshitz,Donateurs, no. 78), raising the possibility that Yisrael might sometimes refer
primarily t othe c ommunity.