A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman

Author:Martin Goodman [Goodman, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141978413
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-10-05T23:00:00+00:00

The cultural integration of many Mediterranean Jews into the surrounding society, even as they maintained their ethnic and religious identities, led in due course in the western Mediterranean to the adoption by some communities of Latin for synagogue inscriptions as well as local artistic motifs. In the synagogue found in 1883 at Naro (Hammam-Lif) in Tunisia by French soldiers, the main hall had an elaborate mosaic pavement featuring images of fish, ducks, pelicans, a bull, a lion and two peacocks and a series of other motifs very similar to those found in local churches in the fourth to sixth centuries. A prominent inscription records in Latin ‘your servant, Juliana, who from her own funds paved with mosaic the holy synagogue of Naro for her salvation’. However, the Jews of the city of Rome seem to have been slow to abandon the use of Greek for religious purposes, and the Jews of Elche, on the east coast of Spain near Alicante, preferred to use Greek rather than Latin to refer to the ‘place of prayer of the people’. There is no evidence that Latin-speaking Jews were ever tempted to devise a Latin liturgy in antiquity, although the biblical citations in the curious Collatio Legum Mosaicum et Romanarum (‘Collation of Mosaic and Roman Laws’), a fourth-century composition which juxtaposes excerpts of Jewish law from Exodus with Roman legal rulings, may suggest that a Jewish version of the Pentateuch in Latin existed by that time.13

We have seen in Chapter 11 the limited geographical reach of the rabbinic movement in the first half of the first millennium CE, doubtless in part because Greek-speaking Jews would have required linguistic instruction to participate in rabbinic discourse conducted entirely in Hebrew and Aramaic (although, in view of the esoteric nature of this discourse, which will have precluded proper understanding of rabbinic discussions even by many Jews familiar with the Semitic languages, this linguistic issue should not be exaggerated). But by the reign of Justinian in the mid-sixth century, it is likely that many of the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean had come, to some extent at least, into contact with rabbis in Palestine and Babylonia. Stories in rabbinic texts about journeys by rabbis to Rome to spread their teachings in the second century CE should probably be treated as fanciful – the image of the city of Rome in ancient rabbinic texts is wholly unreal – and there is no evidence of the intensive epistolary contact between communities which bound together scattered Christian groups from the very beginnings of Christianity. But it is possible that rabbinic influence was spread in the fourth and early fifth centuries through authority delegated by the Roman state to the rabbinic patriarch in Palestine. As we noted in Chapter 11, inscriptions from the synagogue of Stobi in Macedonia record in (probably) the third century CE a threat by the donor of the buildings of an enormous fine to be paid to the patriarch by anyone who infringed the financial arrangements stipulated for

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