The Synagogue
© ITCHS 2024
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DRAFT
[Ed: This essay is a draft chapter for a book-length consideration of the character of the Silent Years, the years between the last canonical prophet of the Old Testament and the prophetic works of the New Testament. The first chapter considers The Seven Day Week as a Jewish conception progressively imported into the Roman Empire. The second considers the development of Monotheism, the third Slavery. The chapter below is one of three considering major Jewish institutions which may have contributed to a growing influence on surrounding cultures.]
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The eyes of the Jewish world were captivated by the Second Temple throughout the supposedly Silent Years. In many ways, the Persians and Medes had planned it that way in funding the enterprise. It was not the only temple that they funded.
From a Jewish perspective, especially from an Hasidic Jewish perspective, the Law could not be fulfilled without a temple and its sacrifices. With a Second Temple, the sins of the entire Jewish nation, presumably including all Jews of the Diaspora, could be expiated in prescribed rites year by year. And as a quite separate reality, the Second Temple through the prescriptions of the Torah became a Mecca for Jewish pilgrimage for at least three major feasts each year. The success of the Second Temple as this national center of an international community is undeniable from the historical record.
During the time of Herod the Great (c. 72 BC – c. 4 BC), the Temple was refurbished and elaborated to accommodate something like a million pilgrims at a major feast of Passover, First Fruits, or Atonement. If we assume that on the completion of the Second Temple commissioned by Cyrus, fifty thousand Jews attended a first-year feast day, the increase in attendance to one million during the Roman Empire suggests a doubling of attendance at the feasts every 120 years. Had that rate of doubling continued for a second half millennium, attendance would have reached 20 million per festival by 500 A.D. It would have made Disneyland look trivial.
This is a chapter about the Synagogue, not about the Second Temple. But the two are inextricably entwined, and routinely the Synagogue gets short shrift. This is altogether understandable given the unquestionable long-term celebrity of the Second Temple.
But for the purposes of this study, it is the Synagogue as idea and as particular reality throughout the dispersed Jewish community of the Mediterranean world that probably was the greater Jewish influence on the thought of what became the Western World. The Second Temple was publicly more than impressive, a light set on a hill. But there was also light in the valley, light in the daily lives of Diasporan Jews ignored in the history of Israel and equally ignored in the formal histories of the lands in which they sojourned. That light in the valley is hard or impossible to document. The current study attempts to suggest how the Mediterranean mind progressed during the supposed Silent Years away from animism, away from multiple gods, away from pagan, syncretic, easy ideas about religion and toward ideas indigenous to Jewish Scripture and undoubtedly carried abroad by Jews assembling locally in synagogues.
Development of the Idea of the Synagogue
With respect to synagogues themselves, there seems to be a great deal of on-going discussion and controversy even today. A major position seems to be that the Synagogue “only crystallized” after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D (Dana Murray, “The Synagogue: Ancient Synagogues in Israel and the Diaspora,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, last modified December 08, 2015, in Jewish Virtual Library https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ancient-synagogues-in-israel-the-disapora. Last visited 02/24/2024). Crystallization is a difficult term, but without debating the point, this study assumes (and the term “crystallization” seems to imply) that there was a “developing” synagogue structure throughout the Persian period. There is no particular reason to think that such a development hadn’t itself grown out of Hebrew assemblies among Assyrian captives after 722 B.C.
For this study then, the Synagogue was a meeting place for a particular Jewish community. As such, while the Temple after 516 B.C. was the international focus of worship and sacrifice, the Synagogue was meanwhile doing the drudge work of calling Jews back to their religious heritage. It provided study space for all the Jewish Scriptures, allowing for the free exchange of ideas about the meaning of those Scriptures, providing a center for a new religious calling outside the Aaronic and Levitical orders, and acting as a binding center of community both physically and intellectually. As such, it was an anchor for resisting accommodation and promoting a fundamentally Hasidic attempt to live up to the commandments of God. In imitation of the Temple, it was a place for prayer and praise. Yet it was a place without relationship to the animal sacrifices required in the Law and in this sense was at an extreme remove from the Temple.
Murray, considering Form and Structure of the Ancient Synagogue, sums up the function of the synagogue: “The synagogue should be understood as a physical mediator between the individual and the community at large” (Ibid).
Crystallized Form after 70 A.D.
Evidently after the destruction of the Second Temple, synagogues began placing a Torah Sanctuary on the Jerusalem-oriented wall of the building. But the Synagogue itself was never used for sacrifice, and in general its precincts have not been considered “holy” other than the items of the Torah Sanctuary itself. There is no architectural structure other than the Torah Sanctuary that is necessary for a synagogue, and thus there may be many Diasporan synagogues that have been excavated but remain unrecognized because they were built before the disaster of 70 A.D with its destruction of Jerusalem and of the Second Temple.
Synagogues were often placed at high points of a road or city or down by a river or stream. These typical sites suggest that the real estate chosen was appreciated and acquired at some expense. There does not, however, seem to have been any formal requirement for the siting of a synagogue. In this regard, it should be noted that in contrast to the specifications for the Temple, there are no biblical specifications for synagogues, and, in fact, the social, political, and worship aspects of synagogues do not fall under biblical prescriptions. “The only quality that the locations share is the convenience they provided to the community, both commercial and communal” (Murray, “Ancient Synagogues in the Diaspora,” Ibid).
The word “synagogue” itself is of Greek derivation and means an “assembly together.” Thus, calling it a meeting house or a community center is appropriate. It is more often and formally referred to as a House of Prayer, in imitation of the Temple, and with the general Hebraic inference that prayer corresponds to “worship” as a range of formal interactions with God. But as an assembly, the synagogue is also the body of those who assemble there.
The Great Synagogue
If there are no biblical prescriptions, there does seem to be a Great Synagogue which could provide precedent for some of the concepts that grew with the synagogue “movement.”
The Great Synagogue itself may be mentioned in the Bible in the historical discussion of Nehemiah 8-10. There it is suggested that Nehemiah, a cupbearer for the Persian king, came to Israel with the purpose of stabilizing an endangered enclave of Remnant Jews who had returned from Babylon a good deal earlier. Nehemiah is known for building the walls of Jerusalem, but along with Ezra the scribe and priest, he was also deeply concerned with establishing a purified religion and government, one can presume all with regal Persian authority.
The Great Synagogue was in this understanding the central law-giving, law-enforcing authority of a theocratic state. The number of councilors in the Great Synagogue evidently varied, but it is at least convenient to think of it as about 70 in number consisting of “elders” of the people and “prophets,” probably more of the former than of the latter at any given moment. The size of the Great Synagogue evidently varied, however, so that “R. Johanan taught that “120 elders including some prophets” instituted the Shemoneh Esreh (Meg. 17b), in TJ Megillah 1:7, 70d he states that 85 elders, among them about 30 prophets established the feast of Purim. . . .” (“The Great Synagogue, Enactments,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-great-synagogue. Last visited 02/24/2024).
Clear documentation for almost any of this, including how long the Great Synagogue existed, is scanty at best. From the bits and pieces, however, this study would argue for something like the following as a ballpark estimate of the reality:
The Great Synagogue derived from Nehemian origins. As such, it carried regal authority which was important to the embattled community. It also recognized the concept of “elders,” upper class representatives of sub-tribes. And it made a real attempt to enlist men known for their special relationship to God, particularly prophets, in their discussions and decisions. Thus, the Great Synagogue carried with it social prestige and spiritual power. The High Priest may have also been of their number. There seems little reason to think that he wouldn’t be interested.
Regularizing Belief and Practice
Probably very early on, either in the lifetime of Ezra and Nehemiah or shortly thereafter while their personal authority was still very much felt (say around 400 B.C.), the Great Synagogue came to formal conclusions on a number of previously less-than-official religious issues. For example, the Synagogue debated and codified some of the most basic liturgies to guide prayer, notably the Shemoneh Esreh liturgical structures still in use in today’s Judaism.
It probably wasn’t that long after such liturgical codification and possibly before it that the Great Synagogue put itself to defining what was sacred Scripture. In addition to the existing canon of the day, the Great Synagogue added as canonical the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther, and the Twelve Minor Prophets.
And consistent with canonizing the Book of Esther, the Great Synagogue established the festival of Purim (“The Great Synagogue,” Ibid.).
Clearly, the Great Synagogue accomplished a very great deal for regularizing belief and practice after the Ezra-Nehemiah reforms. It would seem politically obvious that any such body would claim royal prerogatives under the Persian kings. And therefore, equally politically obvious, the Great Synagogue would lose its pretensions to royal authorization with the fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander. From the bits and pieces, it appears that Greek government did not reauthorize the Great Synagogue but that the institution’s successors, however ragtag, maintained some modicum of respect and religious authority into the second century B.C. The Great Synagogue under this hypothesis would have exercised substantial religious authority for better than 200 years.
Possible Early Origins of the Synagogue
And quite probably the developing sense of the Synagogue as the practical center of the Jewish community, even more in Diasporan exile than in Israeli villages, benefitted by the Great Synagogue bearing their same name.
If we push the hypothesis backward from 400 B.C., there are shards of evidence that the Babylonian captives quickly adopted (say before 580 B.C.) enclave community status with no doubt some central, physical building for a host of community events but held together finally by a religious central purpose. And if this is an easy leap, it is almost as possible that the captives of the Assyrian Captivity, at least those who had remained loyal to the Hebrew God and possibly joined by many who had come to repentance the hard way of national calamity, also sought to build some sort of physical community center that would keep them from evaporation in the hostile climate of a goyim world.
We may not have even a shard of such evidence for the period after the collapse of the Northern Kingdom a century plus earlier, but then, why would organizations of slave workers be noted in anyone’s history? It is convenient for scholarship to dismiss the Northern Kingdom as the Ten Lost Tribes, but we know directly from New Testament sources that Jews of the first century A.D. were sure of the existence of those people. (James writes to “the twelve tribes who are dispersed abroad” (James 1.1)).
If they knew of their existence at a time when for 700 years descendants of the Northern tribes had been without political power or formal social structure, how in the world would anyone—much less evidently everyone—in the Jewish community know of their continued existence? The Synagogue met the needs of exiles. Why not assume that it met the needs of the earliest exiles, no doubt not spoken of the same way, no doubt with a different range of functions, no doubt with different access to physical assets, but meeting, no doubt, similar spiritual and social needs.
These are pedantic details. At some point, there were proto-synagogues, and later there were developing synagogues, and later still there were synagogues recognizable to archeologists. For this study, anything finer is academic detail. What is missing is a general question, “What difference would the presence of synagogues around the Mediterranean basin make—make especially for Gentiles?”
The answers, the high-probability answers, are impossible to find in archeological documentation. But they should be relatively easy to start to imagine.
The Singularity of the Synagogue
Let’s notice first that this text tends to speak of “the synagogue,” not synagogues. Such use relies at least on the documentary evidence of New Testament passages like Acts 18:4 referring to Paul’s first visit to Corinth, Greece, “and he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks.” Corinth was a major city and one of the great trading centers of the ancient world. It must have had a substantial Jewish population, if only because Paul chose to transfer his ministry there from Athens. And yet, he reasons with the Jews in “the synagogue” as if there were only one.
The reference is not, admittedly definitive, and someone might imagine another synagogue in town. But it makes a great deal of sense for a defensive minority community not to spread itself thin, to live in only one sector of town, and to want to associate religiously with all the other Jews of the community. This is speculation, but it agrees with the text. And this community orientation is consistent with 2000 subsequent years.
In more recent times, we know that a town might have two synagogues, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardic. These come from periods where there is some difference in ritual between highly-developed Jewish communities separated by great physical distance. And even in those cases, it is often the case that the two synagogues are virtually back-to-back in a clearly Jewish sector of the town or city.
Commonsense Synagogue Realities
If a single synagogue per city is speculative, several other ideas are axiomatically obvious:
If you, one of the goyim, wanted to talk to a Jew, you knew where to find him any Saturday morning. He had an official address in your town. Maybe you didn’t.
If you, one of the goyim, wanted to worship Aphrodite—get on her right side and make an appropriate request—you could do so. But for all anyone knew, they might see you next at a shrine to Ares. Contrastively, you knew that you’d find your Jewish man at the synagogue, but never at one of quite various alternate-religion sites.
If you lived in Spain, you’d know where to find the Jew, and you could move to Italy, or Greece, or Cappadocia, or even to Mesopotamia and know exactly the same thing. You couldn’t feel that confidence about any of your goyim neighbors. (If you knew that your family had been Hebrew but had gotten evaporated with the Ten Lost Tribes, this meant you had a clue, useful internationally, where to get back in touch with your heritage.) In a great many towns or even cities, the Jews had a corporate identity. It might have been the only corporate identity in town. There wasn’t likely to be, for example, an Aphroditic community or an Aresian assembly.
Jews as Non-citizens
Greek cities—and almost every city by the end of the Silent Years under Roman rule was a Greek city— typically, didn’t have Jewish citizens. The citizen class held a monopoly on social and political power and worked up several other classes, for example “resident aliens,” to hold everyone else in town.
There is a very famous case where the Jewish philosopher Philo led a Jewish delegation to Rome to argue for citizenship of Alexandria to extend to Jews. The Jewish population at Alexandria was one of the largest in the ancient world. The case dragged on into the reign of Claudius, but the verdict when it finally came left Jews disenfranchised. Jews at Alexandria had won a number of special concessions for their unassimilated, synagogue-based community, and other Alexandrians felt that their various exemptions from duties was a disqualification for the rights of citizenship.
(Roman citizenship was something of an exception, and there is the famous case of Saul of Tarsus as a Jew claiming not only to be a citizen of Rome but a citizen-born, not a citizen paid for with a large sum. Northern Minnesota horseradish, like Japanese wasabi, is often said to “knock the socks off” visitors. Saul’s citizenship claims probably had similar effects.)
If from the city’s perspective, Jews were not citizens, from one another’s perspective they from likely “of the synagogue.
Jewish Community, the Synagogue, and the Goyim
If you were of either a philosophic or a religious temperament, you might wonder what Judaism was all about, and especially in an effort to counteract anti-Judaism arising in the Hellenized Mediterranean, the Jews threw the doors of their synagogues open to allow non-Jews, seekers, God-fearers, and the like, to listen in to their prayer services from a suitably restricted back wall.
In other words, there was one avenue after another for the synagogue to practically affect goyim neighbors. The list could go on rather indefinitely, but it is all finally imagination because the documentation was never likely to exist and certainly doesn’t exist for us to study now.
Since we’ve started to use imagination, let’s continue a little further. You are walking down the streets of Philippi, a Roman colony planted on the road to the East around the top of the Adriatic. The road will eventually cross Turkey and meet with the fabulous route to eastern riches like frankincense and myrrh, even silk. The main trade route started across the top of the Fertile Crescent at Damascus, Syria which some would say was a far cry from Israel and mean it fairly literally. Israel had always been near the center of the arch stretching down toward Egypt while the other wing dropped downward to Babylon and ultimately to the Persian Gulf and access to the spices of the Indies.
So, you were quite a way from Rome by traditional sense of distance, on the road to the Old World that had died half a millennium earlier, now watching traders who might be carrying spices or silks, surrounded by Roman citizens, former legionnaires now colonists, and not too far out of shouting distance from the local synagogue. The Apostle Paul found it with ease.
But you’re new in town and don’t know any Jew who could help you find someone else from his synagogue. You start wandering around. But very soon, you know you’ve found a short-cut. Here comes a man with “phylacteries” in his hair. You don’t know what phylacteries are exactly, but you know you’ve found a Jew beneath them. Beyond that, you notice that he is modestly but carefully dressed, and that tells you again that you are right because the trim threads on his cuffs are quite distinctly different from the general thread. The trim thread is sky blue.
You know this man is not a slave. Slaves wear rather standard outfits so that everyone knows they are dealing with a slave. Maybe the man before you is a freedman made small-time good. Or maybe it was one of his ancestors, maybe even an ancestor from the Northern Kingdom who earned his freedom, adopted traditional Jewish clothing, attracted others of Jewish heritage to him and to a small assembly he was founding of like ancestry and belief.
You probably would know little to nothing about such things. But you knew the clothes.
In late twentieth-century Chicago’s North Side, there were people like that seen walking near the Ravenswood el station, or north from there, say at the intersection of Kimball and Peterson, or even on Lake Shore Drive. There could be 3 million other Chicagoans, but an Orthodox Jew stood out, not because the onlooker cared much one way or another.
In the same period, in the highlands of Peru and Ecuador among native Quechuan populations, in any particular place, most of the men wore the same pull-over cap adapted for the very cold nights in tropical Andes mountains. But it was entirely possible to suddenly see someone else with Amerindian features who was nevertheless clearly from somewhere else. His pull-over cap was also suited to the Andes, but it was a different cap which allowed him to blend into the background in his own town and to stand out like a sore thumb in someone else’s town.
A little imagination from these modern examples goes a long way to suggest what a Jewish presence in cities like Philippi around the Mediterranean meant in practice
The Synagogue and Commercial Communication
Before we leave the subject, however, there is at least one non-axiomatic and highly controversial area of Jewish synagogue influence on goyim realities that should be articulated.
Say that you live in New Carthage, Spain. You have an urgent need to send a letter to a friend in Athens, Greece. There isn’t much of a public mail service. But you know someone in the local synagogue. Occasionally members of the synagogue go abroad, even to Athens. If only your contact could get someone to carry your letter to the Athens synagogue and prevail on someone who knew the town to deliver it.
From that modest beginning, one can easily imagine a synagogue community eventually doing some currency exchange or even developing a rudimentary news service about prices in Athens and elsewhere.
We do know that when Saul of Tarsus, become the Apostle Paul, came to Rome, he asked the synagogue community whether or not they had been informed about him and his coming. The response that they had heard nothing easily allows an inference that their news service had let them down.
We know also that by the 10th century A.D. Ashkenazi Jewish communities in the Rhine valley of Germany and France had a certain prestige because of their community contacts down on the Mediterranean.
The controversy develops over how far back such commercial connections might have occurred. It can be pointed out that in Roman times, the phrase “poor Jew” was routinely bandied about, suggesting that Jews were known not as international financiers but as a notably impoverished class. It seems likely, nevertheless, that century by century synagogue communities were developing sophistication in getting international work accomplished.
The Silent Years were years of increasing mingling of national populations (often as Roman slaves from Roman conquests), increasing trade, especially after Pompey suppressed the Pirates in 67 B.C. By then Roman Empire, Rome was living off grain imported from Egypt and playing with wild animals imported from south of the Sahara.
Rome, Athens, and Carthage had all built large trading networks. But Jews were one of the most widely dispersed ethnic groups around the Mediterranean, and no other group had a synagogue structure to protect from assimilation, simultaneously offering access to sister communities throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.
New Jewish Celebrations
Jews in community were united in synagogue. Between communities, they were perhaps fundamentally united through religious and “national” celebrations. In the Law, the Jews were required to be in Jerusalem three specific holy days of the year. We have already seen that the Feasts of Passover, First Fruits, and Atonement brought great, international crowds to the Temple.
But clearly the Temple was too distant for most Jews of ordinary means and living scattered around the Mediterranean to make their way back to Jerusalem. Passover was evidently celebrated in place wherever Jews took up residence. But two newer, celebrations not scripturally commanded were coming to acceptance among Diasporan Jews in these years—Hanukkah and Purim.
Hanukkah was the more recent of the two, the Feast of Lights in memory of the Jewish revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes led by the Maccabees. The more ancient celebration, made canonical around 400 B.C., was the Feast of Purim celebrating Jewish deliverance from genocide in the Persian Empire. These observances were “national” in character (as Thanksgiving is a national, not a sectarian holiday in the United States).
These national celebrations were perhaps particularly important to Jews living in dispersion and clearly without a present nation of their own. The Prophets of Israel consistently spoke of a reconstituted nation. The new holidays, centered in the synagogue, would have presented an opportunity for the Jewish community not just to commemorate but also to look forward to a day of reunion.
At the same time, they would provide an opportunity for Jewish beliefs and traditions to become known to Gentiles. When populations from various cultures inter-mix, special days are one of the most obvious ways for other populations to learn about a different religion’s identity and to start to understand a different culture.
On top of all these international capabilities, as the centuries marched on, more and more Jews had been to Jerusalem for one or more of the great festivals. It is difficult to imagine that none of such pilgrims were using their adventures to form commercially useful contacts around the Mediterranean. It is also difficult to imagine that such pilgrims would not come home with tales of adventure that would leak out into the goyim community and propel interest in things Jewish.
The light on the hill remained the Temple in Jerusalem. The light in the valley, the attention to the Jewish Scriptures and ideas of being related to the God of Israel—to the God Who Spoke and the God Who was The Answer, not just another answer—proliferated in and around synagogues scattered with the Diasporan Jewish population around the Mediterranean and, indeed well beyond.
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