Books in Brief

006

Fortifications and the Synagogue: The Fortress of Babylon and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo

ed. Phyllis Lambert

(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994; available from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 514–939-7028) 279 pp., $65

For centuries, worn-out sacred writings and everyday documents were tossed into the dark genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo (Fustat).^a Rediscovered by western scholars in the second half of the 19th century, this treasure revealed much about Jewish life and traditions in the medieval Near East. The bulk of the Cairo Genizah documents were taken, by Solomon Schechter, to Cambridge, England, and housed in the Cambridge University Library.

The Genizah manuscripts have contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of the Bible’s transmission. The Bible manuscripts found there help us understand the establishment of the Masoretic Text^b as the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible. In the Middle Ages, the Ben Ezra Synagogue was the home of a Masoretic Bible manuscript vocalized by the tenth-century Masorete Aharon Ben Asher; the great Jewish scholar Maimonides declared it superior to the vocalizations of other Masoretes. So powerful was Maimonides’s influence that Ben Asher’s version became the standard text—the one that appears in Hebrew Bibles today. Ultimately, the Ben Asher manuscript ended up in the possession of the Jewish community of Aleppo, Syria; today it is known as the Aleppo Codex and is kept in Jerusalem.

Many scholars have studied the Cairo Genizah manuscripts, but little attention has been paid to the Ben Ezra Synagogue itself. Phyllis Lambert’s Fortifications and the Synagogue is, therefore, most welcome. Part of a recently completed project to restore the synagogue, the volume includes articles by leading specialists describing the synagogue’s structure, restoration and history. Photographs and architectural drawings of the modern site, as well as photographs and illustrations from earlier periods, complement the text.

The walls of the present structure date from the synagogue’s reconstruction in 1892 on the foundations of an earlier building—datable to the 11th century A.D. The tradition that the original building was a church, which was only later converted into a synagogue, is unsubstantiated. Charles Le Quesne suggests that the sources are referring to another synagogue in Fustat known as the synagogue of the Iraqi Jews. However, it is difficult to accept his proposal that the church purchased by the Iraqi Jews was the Melkite Church of St. Michael, since the Church of St. Michael and the synagogue of the Iraqi Jews are referred to as independent buildings in Genizah documents dating to the 11th century.

When restorations were begun in the 1980s, the 19th-century synagogue was abandoned and badly deteriorated. The initial work, from 1982 to 1985, repaired the roof, which was letting in rainwater. From 1988 to 1991, the synagogue was restored to its condition at the beginning of the present century, when it was a regular place of worship. Where possible, only traditional materials were used in repairs, such as lime mortar instead of cement; structural changes were only made if the preservation of the building depended on them—as in the case of the roof repairs.

Accompanying the restoration was a thorough investigation into the history of the synagogue building and the surrounding area. The historical background was established by study of documentary sources and through archaeological surveys of the site (archaeological excavation was not permitted by the Egyptian government).

The Ben Ezra Synagogue is situated within the ancient Roman fortress known as Babylon. Sections of the surrounding wall of this fortress are still standing. Particularly conspicuous are two round towers; a Greek 008Orthodox church has been built over one. The origin of the name “Babylon” is uncertain. Historical sources attribute its founding to Babylonian exiles in the pre-Roman period; some sources say it was built by refugees fleeing the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

In the Roman period, the fortress of Babylon was occupied by one of the legions, and a city grew up around it. After the Arab conquest, it became a Christian and Jewish enclave. Later, Muslims settled there, but it retained a high concentration of non-Muslims. The synagogue itself is thought to have been founded in the tenth century. But this original building was demolished in the 11th century on the orders of the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim. Shortly afterwards, still in the 11th century, it was rebuilt.

A sizeable part of the book focuses on the social history of the synagogue within the local Jewish community from the Middle Ages down to the 20th century.

Charles Le Quesne describes the many legends that became associated with it, such as the tradition that a Torah scroll stored in the synagogue had been written by Ezra the Scribe. First recorded in the 15th century, this tradition gave rise to the present name of the synagogue. In the earliest medieval records, the building is referred to as the synagogue of the “Palestinians”—that is, those Jews who followed the Palestinian rite and tradition of law. In other legends, the synagogue is associated with Moses, Jeremiah and Elijah. Magical healing properties were attributed to a chamber in the building known as “Elijah’s cave.” Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the synagogue was known as “the synagogue of Elijah.”

Menahem Ben Sasson examines the medieval historical sources from the 10th to 14th centuries, consisting of Cairo Genizah manuscripts and several inscriptions on wood. He finds that the synagogue was not only a place of worship but also the center of communal life; it served as a place of study, a religious court and a financial institution, where people pledged their property to charitable funds. Toward the end of the 11th century, wealthy Jews began to move out of the Roman fortress to neighboring Cairo, founded by the Fatimids in the second half of the tenth century. Consequently, the neighborhood around the synagogue declined.

During the period from the 15th to 18th centuries, travelers visited the Ben Ezra Synagogue and wrote accounts describing it. Studying their reports, Joseph R. Hacker discovered that most of the Jewish community had left Fustat and moved to Cairo. The synagogue became a place of pilgrimage and tourism rather than a center of ritual and communal activity. By the 15th century, it was used for worship only on the Sabbath; later, in the Ottoman period, worship took place only once a month.

By the 19th century, the Ben Ezra Synagogue lay derelict. In 1888, much of the building collapsed; in 1892, a new structure was built on the medieval foundations. This restoration was a consequence of a new consciousness of Jewish heritage brought about by extensive Jewish immigration to Egypt. The Genizah manuscripts were discovered—in a remote upper chamber, only accessible by a ladder—after the synagogue had been rebuilt.

Fortifications and the Synagogue stands not only as an important contribution to the history of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, but provides crucial insight into the world of the Egyptian Jewish community over a thousand-year span.

009

From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and the Babylonian Woman

Karel van der Toorn

(Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1994; distributed by Cornell Univ. Press), 151 pp., $18.50

Karel van der Toorn’s goal is “to give the readers an inkling of the religious milieu in which ancient Near Eastern women had to live and how it affected their lives.” More specifically, he aspires to describe “the religious experience of the Israelite woman.” Because the usefulness of Biblical texts for this task is limited, however, van der Toorn draws on extra-Biblical materials—comparative evidence from Mesopotamia—to supplement his descriptions. Then he organizes and presents his data “biographically,” documenting a woman’s religious experiences as she moves through her life cycle “from her cradle to her grave.”

Van der Toorn is surely right in his reluctance to use the Hebrew Bible as his sole source for describing the Israelite woman’s religious life. The process of canonization, inevitably and deliberately, edited out texts describing Israel’s religious diversity, including facets of women’s religion. What van der Toorn does not add, but should, is that the canon’s portrait of Israelite religion is flawed in a second way: It often presents only an idealized picture of what the Biblical authors wanted Israelite religion to be and not a historically reliable description of what it was. Nowhere is this more of a problem than in Genesis, whose written versions postdate the patriarchal stories they purport to describe by a thousand years. Can we really use the story of Tamar in Genesis 38, as van der Toorn does, to argue that a sacred prostitute (the very notion of which is problematic) “could use the public road as her work station.” Similarly, what can we reliably infer from the story of Rachel’s theft of her father’s teraphim (Genesis 31)? Does it really demonstrate that when a “woman had to take leave of her household gods, it was not an easy thing to do”?

Van der Toorn’s introduction of comparative evidence from Mesopotamia also raises certain methodological concerns. While I agree that comparative data are crucial, it is not at all clear to me why Mesopotamian materials are the appropriate ones to use. Van der Toorn never addresses this question directly, although he does suggest that the advantage offered by the Mesopotamian texts is their randomness. Unlike the Bible, that is, Mesopotamian texts never went through a process of canonization and so present a degree of diversity the Bible’s editorial process eliminated. But many other collections of ancient Near Eastern texts offer this same advantage; for example, the texts from the Late Bronze Age archive from the Canaanite city-state of Ugarit have a similar randomness, and they have the added benefit of coming from Israel’s own West Semitic orbit and from the time of the beginnings of Israelite nationhood. Mesopotamian materials, on the other hand, are from the rather different eastern Semitic sphere of the ancient Near East. Worse yet, although there are Mesopotamian texts contemporaneous with Israel, others that van der Toorn draws on are separated from Israel chronologically by more than a millennium. This is the case, for example, with the Sumerian birthing texts van der Toorn compares to the Bible.

Those are not the only problems with Mesopotamian materials. Only rarely does the Mesopotamian evidence augment our knowledge of Israelite women by filling in gaps in the Biblical record. Rather, van der Toorn’s evidence is often of a “See they did it too!” variety: An Israelite woman is given a prophetic name (Lo-Ruhamah, “Not Pitied,” in Hosea 1), and so are Mesopotamian women (for example, Tagid-nawum, “The steppe has become friendly,” at Mari). But is there a conclusion about Israelite women to be drawn from this? Does the Mesopotamian parallel suggest that, even though there is only one instance of the prophetic naming of women in the Bible, it may have been a common practice? Are we to believe that Israelite women had more of a prophetic function than the Bible intimates? Van der Toorn is silent.

Finally, I have concerns regarding van der Toorn’s “biographical” mode of presentation, tracing a woman’s life through five stages: nursing, girlhood, puberty, marriage and widowhood. There seems a certain arbitrariness about some of these stages; for example, in the ancient world, was the time of puberty really so different from that of marriage? And is not marriage, particularly a long marriage, a multifaceted experience for women? If women’s religious experiences change from puberty to adulthood, why must they remain static thereafter—through child-bearing, child-rearing, menopause and old age? I have elsewhere suggested that queen mothers in the ancient world were able to wield considerable religious power in their son’s royal courts precisely because they were post-menopausal and their child-rearing obligations had ended.

Uncovering the religious experiences of ancient Israelite women is increasingly attracting the attention of Biblical scholars. Unfortunately, I found this book to be a disappointing exploration of this otherwise fascinating issue.

010

Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery

Dan Urman and Paul V.M. Flesher, eds.

(Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2 volumes, 677 pp., vol. 1 $94, vol. 2 $113.75

Described in its introduction as “the most complete picture of the international state of ancient synagogue scholarship to date,” does Ancient Synagogues live up to its billing?

Not quite.

These volumes contain 17 articles published in English, Hebrew or French within the last 20 years, plus six pieces written especially for this edition. Five studies originally appeared in American and European publications; the most influential have been J. Gwyn Griffiths’s “Egypt and the Rise of the Synagogue” and Alf Thomas Kraabel’s “The Diaspora Synagogue: Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence After Sukenik.” Griffiths discusses Jewish “prayer places” in Ptolemaic Egypt within the context of contemporaneous religious institutions; he argues that the Egyptian “prayer place” (proseuche) was an indigenous phenomenon and suggests that the synagogue may have first developed in Egypt.

Kraabel takes a broader scope, summarizing the state of archaeological knowledge of synagogue buildings subsequent to Eleazar L. Sukenik’s pioneering 1934 work, Synagogues in Palestine and Greece. Unfortunately, Kraabel’s important survey, which first appeared in 1979, is reprinted here without an update. Thus the essay does not deal with significant new discoveries from Bova Marina, in southern Italy, and Plovdiv, in Bulgaria. Nor does it incorporate scholarly treatments of diaspora synagogues of the last 17 years, such as Bernadette J. Brooten’s Women Leaders in Ancient Synagogues (Scholars Press, 1982) and L. Michael White’s Building God’s House in the Roman World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

The bulk of Ancient Synagogues, 12 translations of articles from Israeli publications, provides a useful cross-section of recent Israeli archaeological and historical (though not literary) scholarship. Seven of these were delivered at a 1984 conference in Tel Aviv and published as Synagogues in Antiquity (Ben-Zvi Institute, 1987). Conspicuously missing are Ezra Fleischer’s recent studies of Second Temple period and early rabbinic liturgy; the omission is particularly unfortunate in light of those studies’ broad influence within Israeli scholarly circles.

Nonetheless, Flesher and Urman have done a great service for students and interested non-professionals in translating these essays. The English is clear and precise; the articles have generally been improved through the translation process and minor errors corrected. In some of the articles, however, substantial revisions were made, so specialists must still refer to the original Hebrew versions.

The translations of Aharon Oppenheimer’s “Babylonian Synagogues with Historical Associations” and Isaiah Gafni’s “Synagogues in Babylonia in the Talmudic Period” are particularly welcome. These are the only recent studies on the history of the synagogue in Talmudic Babylonia (modern Iraq). No archaeological remains of synagogues in this strong diaspora community are extant, making these essays all the more important.

Zeev Safrai’s study, “The Communal Functions of the Synagogue in the Land of Israel in the Rabbinic Period,” will be useful to scholars interested in rabbinic sources. Safrai’s strength lies in his broad knowledge of post-Talmudic halakhic literature from Israel. This literature, though rarely discussed in English-language scholarship, is essential to our understanding of ancient synagogues, as are such liturgical texts as liturgical poetry (piyyut), Aramaic paraphrases of Scripture (Targums) and late midrashic 069collections. Outside of Safrai’s essay, Ancient Synagogues essentially overlooks evidence from these valuable sources, despite the existence of a number of important historical studies in Hebrew and English that might have been included.

The six studies written specifically for this anthology are all useful contributions. Dennis R. Groh’s “The Stratigraphic Chronology of the Galilean Synagogue from the Early Roman Period Through the Early Byzantine Period (ca. 420 C.E.)” is both an introductory essay on the ancient synagogues of northern Israel and a convenient synopsis. Asher Ovadiah’s “Art of the Ancient Synagogue in Israel” introduces and competently surveys the artistic aspects of ancient synagogues. His interpretations of historical issues and rabbinic literature, however, are less helpful.

Joan R. Branham’s “Vicarious Sacrality: Temple Space in Ancient Synagogues” draws on theories of relationships developed in literary studies and in the “history of religions” school. Branham explores notions of the sacred in antiquity, and is among the first to apply these important perspectives to the study of the ancient synagogue. Although her conclusions are generally insightful, she might have buttressed her theoretical discussion by giving more attention to philological issues. Like most modern studies of synagogue sanctity, Branham’s essay overstresses the relationship between the Temple and the ancient synagogue, underestimating other sources of sanctity—particularly the sanctity of the Biblical scrolls as expressed in rabbinic, patristic and archaeological sources.

In “Rereading the Reredos: David, Orpheus and Messianism in the Dura Europos Synagogue,” Flesher turns to one of the most difficult issues in the interpretation of the Dura Europos synagogue wall paintings. The images above the Torah shrine of the synagogue were repainted in antiquity, and their preservation is problematic. Using computer imaging on existing photographs, Flesher is able to identify, behind the right shoulder of the image of David, “a shepherd’s crook—a long, straight pole with three-quarters of a circle on the end.” The remainder of the article discusses the religious implications of the David image and the place of messianism—which, as Flesher observes, scholars have overly emphasized—in the Dura Europos wall paintings.

Flesher, however, underestimates the significance of messianism in the Dura Europos paintings: He brings to the wall paintings a method of interpretation imported from literary studies of rabbinic literature that tends to atomize individual literary traditions and collections, interpreting sources in relative isolation rather than examining them in their full historical context. This is particularly unfortunate, for example, in light of the prominence of the images of the Raising of the Dry Bones and of Samuel anointing David, the “messiah,” in the wall paintings. Note even that the inscription identifying this image reads, “Samuel when he anointed David”; moreover, the word “anointed” (meshah) is from the same root as the Hebrew word for “messiah” (mashiah). In the direction of overinterpretation, Flesher errs in assuming, without proof, that the image of David as Orpheus retains Orphic religious meaning and is not merely the result of artistic convention.

Dan Urman, co-editor of this volume and a senior lecturer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has contributed two new pieces. The first, “Early Photographs of Galilean Synagogues,” analyzes 14 photographs of synagogue remains from the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Some of these have not been published before and thus constitute an important resource. These pictures often show architectural elements that are no longer in situ; they also reveal how a number of important sites looked before their excavation earlier this century.^c

Urman’s other contribution, taking up most of volume 2, is entitled “Public Structures and Jewish Communities in the Golan Heights.” This long monograph, based on Urman’s extensive fieldwork and exhaustive survey of rabbinic sources, discusses 65 sites in the Golan that show evidence of Jewish settlement during the latter Roman and the Byzantine periods. Urman collects and analyzes the remains of synagogues within the broader context of village life. The article as a whole, however, is not focused on the issue of synagogues. So why is Urman’s study included in this collection of short articles dealing specifically with synagogues? This valuable survey of Jewish culture in the Golan during late antiquity deserved to be published as a separate book.

Despite these qualifications, Ancient Synagogues is an important collection of articles on the synagogue in the Greco-Roman period. Two exceptionally useful aspects of this anthology are its cumulative bibliography and its general index. Its publication by an American and an Israeli scholar with a Dutch press demonstrates once again how deep scholarly interest in the ancient synagogue runs throughout the world.

Fortifications and the Synagogue: The Fortress of Babylon and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo

ed. Phyllis Lambert

(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994; available from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 514–939-7028) 279 pp., $65