The ancient synagogue : the first thousand years

The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, by Lee I. Levine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi +748. $75.00. Discussion of synagogues is central to understanding the social location of both Judaism and Christianity, especially in the early Roman period but no less so up through the Byzantine period. The complex reasons for this centrality include the architecture of Jewish communal buildings, new archaeological finds, the intricate connections between Diaspora and Palestinian Judaism, interpretation of inscriptions referring to proseuchai and synagogai, the development and institutionalization of Jewish groups, analogies to various groups and associations in antiquity, not to mention questions about the nature of pre- and post-70 Judaism and the "parting of the ways" between Christianity and Judaism. Sociology, theology, history, archaeology, and liturgy are among the disciplines involved in examining synagogues. Origins, architecture, development, decoration, identifying features, and functions are among the still-debated issues. Given the spate of recent studies, the range of the controversies, and the new data, one person could hardly be expected to master all the primary and secondary material bearing on these questions. Lee I. Levine (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), a frequent contributor to the debates of the last two decades, has pulled together virtually all the relevant information into a seamless whole in this big book on the first thousand years of the ancient synagogue (the imprecision reflects that we do not know precisely when to fix the synagogue's origins). It falls into two parts, sandwiched between an introductory chapter and a concluding epilogue: "The Historical Development of the Synagogue," divided between the Second Temple period (chs. 2-5) and later antiquity (chs. 6-8), and "The Synagogue as an Institution" (chs. 9-18, organized functionally). He turns effortlessly throughout from textual to archaeological to functional data, fully at home in discussion of any potion of the evidence. This is the sort of extraordinarily well-written book one wishes one might have written oneself. He begins by dismissing in short order H. C. Kee's insistence that there were no synagogues in the pre-70 period. When he reviews the various suggested origins of the synagogue-neatly compressed into six or seven pages-he insists correctly that the institution of the synagogue did not emerge from a crisis or a single event. He offers as his own proposal on origins the city gate (pp. 26-41), looking back to the social importance of the city gate in the Iron Age and Persian period and emphasizing the developmental urban changes that took place in the Hellenistic period. It is true that the gate was where the community met, where justice was dispensed, and where Torah was read, and that these are similar to functions and the roles that synagogues came to play. But there are three historical hurdles in such a claim: (1) most synagogues in Judea that have survived were in small unwalled towns and villages where there was no city gate; (2) there are no transitional structures that show a developmental process from gate to synagogue; (3) the earliest (inscriptional) evidence for synagogues is in the Diaspora, where the city gate model can hardly apply to the Jewish community. Whether one accepts his hypothesis, however, does not affect one's appreciation of the book's astute analyses of the various issues; Levine's judicious and measured evaluations of the data and controversies stand independently of his own conjectured origin of the synagogue. Part 1 considers pre-70 Judea and the Diaspora, then the Second Temple, late Roman, and Byzantine periods, followed by a summary discussion of the Diaspora synagogue. These chapters rehearse briefly and accurately the evidence site by site (especially chs. 3, 4, 6, 8), including assessments of the inscriptional evidence. The evidence, both well known and not so well known, from pre-70 Judea shows that there is no single model for the synagogue in this early period (p. …