The Jews Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire by Judith Lieu John North Tessa Rajak

Author:Judith Lieu, John North, Tessa Rajak [Judith Lieu, John North, Tessa Rajak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Ancient History, Religion & Spirituality
ISBN: 9781135081959
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Diaspora in a Greek Environment

The Diaspora of the eastern part of the Empire has certainly left far fuller evidence, both documentary and archaeological, than is available for the west; and some of this evidence needs to be set out, to establish a framework, before we look at the much more complex issue of the relations between religious groups. But as it happens, some, though not all, of the archaeological evidence itself also illustrates with the greatest clarity the effects of religious conflict, above all in the fifth century.

We may begin with the well-known synagogue at Stobi in ancient Macedonia, in the south of present-day Yugoslavia. A substantial inscription of the late second or early third century records that a private house was made over to the Jewish community, and converted for use as a synagogue. If the conditions of its use were broken, a very large fine was to be paid to the patriarchēs: this was surely not the nasi or ethnarchēs, far away in Palestine (the forerunner of the fourth-century patriarcha), whose rise to power had hardly begun (Goodman 1983: 11 If.). More probably, legal evidence suggests (p. 98), this will have been a local official. Later the synagogue was replaced by a more elaborate one. But before the end of the fourth century this synagogue was to be destroyed, and replaced by a Christian basilica built directly on the site (Schiirer 1986-7: 67-8).

A very similar story is revealed by the Belgian excavations at the great city of Apamea in Syria. For near the centre of the city, not far from the famous Great Colonnade which runs north-south, and some 120 m south of the main east-west street, the excavators discovered the mosaic floor of a late fourth-century synagogue, with nineteen mosaic inscriptions recording the names of those who paid for the laying of the mosaic in and around the year 391 (J. C. Balty 1981: 139f.; J. Balty 1986: 6f.). The mosaics are strictly geometric and non-representational; the inscriptions, all in Greek, show a number of Hebrew names in transliteration: 'Nemeas' (Nehemiah), 'Phineas', 'Eisakios', 'Saoulos'. They also illustrate the complexity of office-holding within Diaspora communities, revealing archisynagōgoi, gerousiarchoi, presbyteroi and a man described as (h)azzan or diakonos. One of the donors was Ilasios son of Eisakios, 'archisynagōgos of the Antiochenes' - the Jewish community of Antioch to the north, of which more later (p. 115). It would be difficult to find better evidence of a Jewish community established at the heart of the Greek city - except that, once again, a Christian church was built exactly on the site of the synagogue in the fifth century, to be enlarged and adorned in the sixth (Napoleone-Lemaire and Balty 1969).

A very similar progression is visible at Gerasa in Jordan, where the mosaics of a fourth- or fifth-century synagogue - this time with representational elements depicting the story of Noah underlie a Christian church which seems to have been constructed in ad 530-1.3 But here we are in a bilingual

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