Jews were to be found all over Asia Minor. The travels of Paul and his
colleagues brought them regularly to Jewish synagogues of that region.
And Roman pronouncements, collected through the documentary re-
searches of Josephus, guaranteed the rights of Jews to construct and as-
semble in synagogues.
The institution surfaces quite strikingly in Greek cities on the north
and east coasts of the Black Sea. A remarkable group of documents from
the first centuryc.e.records the emancipation of slaves by Jews in the syn-
agogues of those cities and provides for the continued association of the
freedmen with the Jewish community, which took responsibility for their
guardianship—aclear sign of collective solidarity.
Numerous other examples can illustrate the geographic spread of the
synagogue. Paul’s journeys, for example, took him to synagogues in vari-
ous cities of Macedon and Greece. An actual structure, almost certainly a
synagogue, emerged from excavations at the island of Delos in the Aegean.
That a Jewish community settled in that holy site, the legendary birthplace
of Apollo, dramatically attests to the comfort of Jews and their own insti-
tutions even in a key center of pagan religion. Jews indeed went as far from
the homeland as Italy to establish thriving communities. The presence of
Jews in Rome is well attested not only by literary texts but by funerary epi-
taphs from the Jewish catacombs that convey the names of at least eleven
synagogues in the city. And archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a
synagogue in Ostia, the principal harbor of Rome, situated near the bank
of the Tiber. Here, as often elsewhere, the finds disclose characteristic Jew-
ish features like an apsidal structure for Torah scrolls and images like the
menorah, lulav, shofar, and ethrog, thus making the identification clear.
Jewish synagogues of the Second Temple period stretched from the Black
Sea to North Africa, and from Syria to Italy.
The synagogue supplied a vehicle for a wide range of activities that
promoted the shared interests of Jews. These included study and instruc-
tion; discussion of the Scriptures, traditions, law, and moral teachings;
prayers, rituals, and worship; communal dining, celebration of festivals,
and commemoration of key events in Jewish history; adjudication of dis-
putes, passage of decrees, meetings of members; maintenance of sacred
monies, votive offerings, dedicatory inscriptions, and archives of the com-
munity. To be sure, not all synagogues performed all these functions. Local
circumstances doubtless dictated numerousdivergences. But the spectrum
of services was broad. And they did not occur in hidden enclaves. Syna-
gogues stood in public view; congregations had their own officialdom,100erich s. gruenEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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