Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue

Steven Fine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134673506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue explores the ways in which divergent ethnic, national and religious communities interacted with one another within the synagogue in the Greco-Roman period. It presents new perspectives regarding the development of the synagogue and its significance of this institution for understanding religion and society under the Roman Empire.

1

COMMON JUDAISM AND THE SYNAGOGUE IN THE FIRST CENTURY

E.P. Sanders

No invitation has ever caused me greater anxiety than did the invitation to give the lecture on which this paper is based. I follow the study of synagogues; I certainly do not lead, but here I am in the midst of experts. I shall endeavor to do what Steven Fine asked: offer a perspective on the Judaism in which synagogues developed and flourished. I deliberately do not write ‘in which synagogues originated,’ since I share the universal ignorance of when and where that happened. Ideally, this paper would address both the first and second centuries of the Common Era, in order to cover the transition from synagogues in a world in which the temple still functioned to the world in which it had been destroyed. I shall in fact concentrate on the first century, though at the end I shall add a few words on synagogues and the Mishnah, a large subject that will be covered much more thoroughly by other papers in this collection.

I

I shall start with the western Diaspora, that is, Greek-speaking Judaism. We do not know when, or under what precise impulses, Jews began to settle in the cities of Asia Minor, Greece, and points west. The Persian empire probably facilitated this settlement, as did the conquests of Alexander the Great, who for the first time brought part of Asia and part of Europe under one power. And, of course, in the Roman empire there were many contacts between Palestine and the Greek-speaking world. The Jews were not the only people who migrated west: so did Persians, Syrians, and others. It was quite natural for the immigrant groups in Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking cities to band together. There was, moreover, a general tendency of people to join together in small groups. Clubs or societies were popular throughout the Greco-Roman world. These were associations for various purposes, usually including worship and social activities.¹ That is, when they met, they usually sacrificed and feasted.² For example, Phoenicians and Egyptians resident in Delos met to maintain their native cults.³ Rulers sometimes looked with suspicion at assemblies of all sorts, because they could be used for seditious purposes, but the tendency of people of like mind and background to come together was hard to suppress.

And so Jews, too, formed associations. Presumably they met for various purposes, first in private homes, then in houses converted to public use,⁴ then in specially designed and constructed buildings. Jews wanted governments to protect their way of life, and basic to it was the right of assembly. They had friends in high places. Palestinian Jews, led by the Hasmonean (‘Maccabean’) high priest Hyrcanus II and the Idumean Antipater (father of Herod the Great), supported Julius Caesar in his war with Pompey. Caesar, who won, was duly grateful, and he conferred several privileges on Jews worldwide.⁵ The various cities in which there were Jewish populations hastened to confirm similar privileges.⁶ A main right was that of assembly. Caesar’s decree, as quoted by Josephus, claims that other religious societies (thiasoi) were forbidden to assemble in the city of Rome, but that the Jews were allowed to do so.⁷ This is probably correct. According to Suetonius, Caesar himself ‘dissolved all guilds, except those of ancient foundation.’⁸ Philo (an Alexandrian Jew writing early in the first century CE) praised Augustus for permitting ‘Jews alone’ to assemble in synagogues;⁹ probably Augustus continued the basic privileges originally granted by Julius Caesar. The question of foreign ethnic or religious assemblies in the city of Rome is a complicated one, but we may accept the implication of our texts, that Caesar conferred special privileges on the Jews, one of which was the right of assembly, and that Augustus continued these freedoms.

From the decrees in favor of Jews in the Diaspora, I have compiled a list of the rights that are most frequently mentioned:¹⁰

1 the right to assemble or to have a place of assembly: 5 times¹¹

2 the right to keep the sabbath: 5 times¹²

3 the right to have their ‘ancestral’ food: 3 times¹³

4 the right to decide their own affairs: 2 times¹⁴

5 the right to contribute money: 2 times.¹⁵

There are, in addition, numerous general references to the right to follow their ‘customs’ (ethê) or to keep their ‘sacred rites’ or ‘regulations’ (ta hiera, nomima).¹⁶

Josephus quotes a later set of decrees, from Augustus and Roman officials of his period, in Antiquities 16:162–73. The main right in these decreees is the right to collect money, house it safely, and convey it to Jerusalem.¹⁷ The right to live according to their ancestral customs also appears;¹⁸ in addition, the decree of Augustus protects Jews from lawsuits that require their appearance on the sabbath or after the ninth hour (c. 4:00 p.m.) on Friday.¹⁹ It is noteworthy that Augustus’ decree prohibits theft of sacred books or sacred money ‘from a Sabbath [building] or from an ark,’²⁰ which helps to confirm the existence of buildings used on the Sabbath—that is, synagogues.²¹

There is, of course, a minimalistic way of interpreting ancient evidence, according to which these decrees would prove only that in a few cities the Jews wished to assemble and keep the Sabbath. Numerous considerations, some of which I shall mention presently, incline me to a maximalistic interpretation: Jews generally wished to be able to assemble, to keep their ancestral customs, to worship in their own ways, to keep the Sabbath, to observe dietary restrictions, to decide their own internal affairs, and to collect money to spend on their own community activities, or to send to Jerusalem, or both.

I think that most ancient Jews regarded most of these points as essential to Jewishness. The rights to assemble, to observe the Sabbath, and so on, meant that a Jewish style of life could be maintained. Because our purpose is to discuss synagogues, I wish to add some important evidence about assembly. Two first-century authors and a third, also probably first-century, all Jewish, wrote that Moses required assembly on the Sabbath, though in fact this requirement is not in the Bible. Philo thought that Moses commanded the Jews to abstain from work on the Sabbath and to give the full day ‘to the one sole object of philosophy,’²² which he elsewhere indicates was done collectively, in ‘schools,’ ‘houses of prayer’ or ‘synagogues.’²³ According to Josephus, Moses ordered that every week people ‘should desert their other occupations and assemble to listen to the Law and to obtain a thorough and accurate knowledge of it.’²⁴ According to Pseudo-Philo, the requirement to assemble on the Sabbath in order ‘to praise the Lord’ and ‘to glorify the Mighty One’ is part of the Ten Commandments.²⁵ This easy assurance indicates that attendance at synagogues was very widespread.

Gentile authors supply the simplest and in some ways the best evidence that supports the view that all the activities just mentioned were common to Jews in the western Diaspora. Such famous Romans as Ovid, Seneca, and Tacitus comment on Jewish observance of the Sabbath, and Tacitus notes also the sabbatical year.²⁶ Seneca, criticizing the Jewish Sabbath, wrote that the gods do not need lamps to be lit on the Sabbath, since they do not need lights, while people should ‘find no pleasure in soot.’²⁷ Jewish avoidance of pork was famous: according to a fairly late passage, Augustus himself remarked that he would rather have been Herod’s pig (hus) than his son (huios), alluding to the fact that Herod had three sons executed, but probably never ate pork.²⁸ Juvenal described Jewish Palestine as ‘that country where kings celebrate festal sabbaths with bare feet, and where a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age.’²⁹ I assume that these kings were in fact the priests, who worked bare-footed. Of course, during the Hasmonean period, the kings were priests. Rather than cite the numerous pieces of evidence offered by Menahem Stern that prove Jewish observance of the various customs already noted in the decrees in Josephus, I shall quote only one more passage, this also from Juvenal, who lived from about 60 to 130.

Some, who have had a father who reveres the Sabbath, worship nothing but the clouds, and the divinity of the heavens, and see no difference between eating swine’s flesh, from which their father abstained, and that of man; and in time they take to circumcision. Having been wont to flout the laws of Rome, they learn and practice and revere the Jewish law, and all that Moses handed down in his secret tome, forbidding to point out the way to any not worshipping the same rites, and conducting none but the circumcised to the desired fountain. For all which the father was to blame, who gave up every seventh day to idleness, keeping it apart from all the concerns of life.³⁰

Here we see ridicule of Jewish monotheism, Sabbath observance, circumcision, the Mosaic law in general, especially the study and observance of that law, and Jewish exclusivism or particularism.

Juvenal, along with many other pagan authors, was well aware that the same general points marked Jewish observance in Palestine and the western Diaspora. I shall offer no Palestinian evidence to show that Jews in Palestine generally observed the same laws as appear in the evidence from the Diaspora that I have just cited. The Palestinian evidence is abundant and conclusive, and adducing it would consume space without increasing knowledge very much.³¹ I shall instead re-organize and repeat only those points that seem to have been common in Judaism, namely:

1 monotheism and refusal to worship statues

2 circumcision of males

3 observance of the Sabbath rest

4 food laws

5 assembly

6 study and general observance of the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface by Steven Fine
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Common Judaism and the synagogue in the first century
• 2 Was the synagogue a place of sabbath worship before 70 CE?
• 3 The early history of public reading of the Torah
• 4 The Rabbis and the non-existent monolithic synagogue
• 5 Art in the synagogue: some Talmudic views
• 6 The Patriarchate and the ancient synagogue
• 7 Sage, priest, and poet: typologies of religious leadership in the ancient synagogue
• 8 Samaritan synagogues and Jewish synagogues: similarities and differences
• 9 The synagogue within the Greco-Roman city
• 10 The Dura Europos synagogue, early-Christian art, and religious life in Dura Europos
• 11 Jews, Christians, and polytheists in late-antique Sardis
• 12 The Torah Shrine in the ancient synagogue: another look at the evidence
• 13 Non-Jews in the synagogues of late-antique Palestine: Rabbinic and archeological evidence
• Index