ABSTRACT

No invitation has ever caused me greater anxiety than did the invitation to give the lecture on which this paper is based. I follow the study of synagogues; I certainly do not lead, but here I am in the midst of experts. I shall endeavor to do what Steven Fine asked: offer a perspective on the Judaism in which synagogues developed and flourished. I deliberately do not write ‘in which synagogues originated,’ since I share the universal ignorance of when and where that happened. Ideally, this paper would address both the first and second centuries of the Common Era, in order to cover the transition from synagogues in a world in which the temple still functioned to the world in which it had been destroyed. I shall in fact concentrate on the first century, though at the end I shall add a few words on synagogues and the Mishnah, a large subject that will be covered much more thoroughly by other papers in this collection.