The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  How to rebuild Jerusalem in the imagination and memory: that was the task. Could it be done with just words words words? That would once have seemed to be the authentically Jewish answer. Now, thanks to the Dura revelation, we know that the density of texts could be matched, and augmented by a complementary density of pictures. Not only were the two ways of remembering and sustaining Torah memory not in contradiction, they actually nourished each other. Even more unsettling to our usual assumptions about Judaism at the moment it was taking form is the knowledge that the site in which word and image went most closely together was the synagogue itself! Dura was unusual, but only in that its dominant imagery was on the walls. There were other spaces that could be filled with the signs and symbols of shared Jewish recognition, and they were horizontal. The ceiling at Dura was in fact covered in painted tiles, many of which featured those familiar emblems – menorot and the like. But the surface of synagogues built in the budding time of the third to the sixth centuries – both inside Palestine and the diaspora – which was packed with pictures was the floor, and the medium was mosaic.

  This was not evidence of backsliding. That same seed time of Judaism was the moment when the mighty Mishnah was defining the good Jewish life. Yet there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that there were Mishnaic-strict synagogues and flashy mosaic-covered ones. For that matter, the Mishnah is conspicuously and uncharacteristically skimpy in its discussion of images. Such as it is, it occurs in a tractate within the larger book on ‘Damages’ and is immediately packed with aggadic contradictions. Rabbi Meir takes the hard line, saying flatly ‘all images are prohibited’, but is followed by unnamed sages who say only those featuring ‘a staff, a bird or a sphere’ are forbidden. Almost certainly ‘sphere’ meant the sun or moon and their worship, but evidently no one took any notice. The rest of the tractate is devoted entirely to the asherah devotional trees and fashioned idols and what kinds of purposeful desecration may be applied to rob them of their aura: ‘cut off the tip of [their] ear, nose, finger’, and so on.8 (This is part of the compulsive anachronism of much of the Mishnah since asherot, those carved or standing trees, had in any case not been around for many centuries.)

  About painted images the rabbis have nothing at all to say and silence was obviously taken as assent, especially since the writing of the Talmudic books and the appearance of synagogues happened at exactly the same time. The single surviving synagogue of the original eighteen that once flourished in Sepphoris in Galilee was built and decorated in the city where the Mishnah was first essayed and where Judah the Prince’s assembly sat. It is at once a city of classical elegance, deep piety and eye-popping mosaics.

  In the diaspora of late antiquity, too, there was no furtiveness about synagogue mosaics. No less than forty such floors have been excavated and uncovered so far inside Palestine and out, and there is every chance of finding many more.9 Profusely decorated synagogues, in the centuries when the institution was being created, were the norm, not the exception, from Asia Minor all the way to the western Maghreb. At Hammam-Lif (or Naro, as the Phoenicians called it) on the coastal outskirts of Carthage in what’s now Tunisia, a fourth-century synagogue has some of the most brilliantly vivacious mosaics of the ancient world.10 Much of the decoration is purely geometric and ornamental into which the usual emblems of the lost Temple – menorah and shofar – have been inserted. But another chamber is a mosaic menagerie. One band teems with birds; another has a more mysterious arrangement of a dolphin and a great fish, oddly separated by a pair of ducks. Beneath them two peacocks flank a playing fountain. And it is this fount of life which gives the clue that the Hammam-Lif mosaic is not just a playful bestiary but an evocation of the paradisial Creation itself. Whether the fine, plump-cheeked, though sharp-toothed fish lurking in the deep is the sinister leviathan or (as I prefer) an emblem of happiness, apt for a Tunisian seaport, depends on which scholarship you find most persuasive.

  With mosaic this splendid, the benefactors who made it possible ensured they would be credited and remembered by having their names recorded in Aramaic inscriptions amid the pictures. ‘Juliana of her own funds,’ one such inscription emphasises, ‘paved the mosaic of this holy synagogue of Naro for her salvation.’11

  That a Jewish woman celebrated her benefaction at Hammam-Lif should come as no surprise. The tightly confined role assigned to women in the Mishnah, principally as the recipients of male judgements about their rights and claims, may be an inadequate guide to social reality. That reality was that women and men sat together in these synagogues with no separation whatsoever. In fact neither the Torah nor the Mishnah has anything to say on the subject, and from the wealth of evidence available from synagogues of this period, not one sign of any gallery or other kind of partition has ever been found. Like much else assumed to be immemorial Jewish practice, the obligation was instituted many centuries later. It was an innovation, not a tradition. The same goes for the abandonment of full prostration – probably from a need to differentiate from Muslim practice (doubly ironic, since Islam almost certainly took prostration, along with many other of its rituals like the removal of shoes, from the Jews). The relevant verse in the Mishnah book Avot assumes prostration as regular practice.

  But then the profusely decorated synagogues of the third to sixth centuries shake up all our preconceptions about Jewish houses of Torah reading and prayer. They make it clear that Judaism as it was being remade was, in some respects, actually constituted from images almost as much as texts. In this crucial respect it was linked to, not separated from, the cultures which surrounded it. To begin with, those mosaics – not just of animal and plant life, but also of the human figure – could of course be seen in any well-to-do private house in towns like Hammam-Lif, Tiberias, Scythopolis (Beit She’an) or Sepphoris. Synagogues in those towns – like Jewish life in general – were strikingly an extension of the culture at large rather than an immured withdrawal from it. The style and iconology of the mosaics were drawn from the pagan world amid which Jews had lived relatively unproblematically. Vines, date palms, dolphins, lions were the shared cultural property of both monotheisms (as was the Hebrew Bible of course) and, for that matter, of pagans as well. As at Dura, David or Daniel are as likely to show up in churches as in synagogues.

  If more evidence is needed of the openness of Judaism to the cultures amid which it dwelled and prospered, there are the calendar girls who stare moodily out at us from the mosaic floors of synagogues built in this seed time of rabbinic Judaism. They are personifications of the seasons, characterised in months. So, at Sepphoris in Galilee, perhaps the most spectacular of all these floors, Tevet, the winter girl with the teardrop face, looks out wistfully from beneath the folds of a gown (uncannily like a modern Islamic hijab) concealing her hair, more from seasonal chill than any obligation of modesty. Nissan, the springtime girl, on the other hand, has thick tresses of golden hair piled up and held with exactly the kind of showy headband the Mishnah frowned upon for Shabbat wear. Worse, or better yet, from her left ear dangles an unmistakably bling-heavy pendular earring. Tammuz, the summertime month, sometimes associated with the moment the fickle Israelites took to worshipping the golden calf, sports a spiffy flat-top beret and an enticingly bare shoulder.

  In cities like Sepphoris, mosaics of female beauties, as well as the full repertoire of what we think of as profane pagan imagery – animals, in particular rabbits, ducks, and deer – could be found on the floors of the opulent houses lining its streets and avenues. With every new excavation, yet more of these spectacular decorations reveal the city to have been drunk on paradisial and arcadian imagery.12 Sepphoris is so lavishly ornamented, and shows so many signs of the Romano-Greek style – a substantial theatre (close to the surviving synagogue), the grand colonnaded avenues of the cardo and the decumanus – that its aesthetic looks unmistakably pagan-classical. But Sepphoris was not, in fact, pagan-Gentile. It was overwhelmingly a Jewish city, the membership of its town council (the boule) predominantly Jewish. The
theatre was made for Jewish, not Roman, audiences who regularly went there as indeed they did elsewhere in the late-Roman Empire, as well as flocking to chariot races and gladiator shows. There is no reason to suppose that the extravagantly built and decorated houses – such as the ‘House of the Nile’ with its painted festival of Osiris and a complete Egyptian river bestiary (crocodiles, hippos, the lot) – did not belong to a Jew. And the most exquisite mosaics in the entire city – including a ravishingly beautiful woman, possibly Aphrodite, as well as Hercules and other standard classical themes – decorate the ‘Villa of Dionysos’, situated on the western slopes (not far from the theatre and synagogue) in an area known from the discovery of painted menorot and the like to have been densely Jewish. To whom might this Villa of Dionysos have belonged? There is much disagreement but some scholars at least are open to the startling possibility that the house might have been the residence of Yehudah Hanasi, patriarch friend of emperors, redactor in chief of the Mishnah and head of the Sanhedrin assembly.13

  The basic urban form of wealthy, cosmopolitan but also pious Sepphoris had taken the shape we see now in the second and third centuries, when it was renamed Diocaesarea, but in the middle of the fourth century the city suffered two catastrophes, one political, the other natural. In 351, it was the centre of a violent revolt against the government of the co-emperor Cestus Gallus, partly a matter of tax impositions. Its leader was one ‘Isaac of Diocaesarea’ who succeeded in fielding a force formidable enough to take strongholds as far south as Lydda before succumbing to defeat in a battle somewhere near Acre. The price of the city’s involvement in this last of the great rebellions against Rome was its military destruction. Twelve years later in 363, a massive earthquake with its epicentre in Galilee brought down what remained. Sepphoris/Diocaesarea was rebuilt, the great streets restored in fine late-classical style, and among the new buildings were synagogues, one of which is the surviving basilica-shaped structure, long and narrow, which boasts the mosaics that seem to translate, so unproblematically, images from residential to communal sacred space. If they are not of quite the quality of the Villa of Dionysos, they are still exceptionally impressive, not least as evidence that Judaism, in the generations of its rabbinical formation, made a place for pictures.

  Modern Jews grow up with an assumption that images in houses of prayer and Torah, where they are present at all, are confined to the occasional, modestly stained-glass window. But here in one of the places where synagogues took their original shape and form, images – the great majestic sweep of a carpet-floor mosaic, running from end to end of the space – dominate everything else, optically expanding what was in fact a narrowly confining barn-like gable-roofed space. Nor would these images have been hidden by seating or an assembly of standing congregants. Though there are no stone benches at Sepphoris, we know that worshippers would have sat – probably on wooden benches – along three sides of the perimeter beneath the roof of the Jewish basilica. So from any position they would have had a good view of those pictures, which would help the power of memory defeat the facts of politics.

  As you might imagine of Jewish iconography, they are wordy images. Texts, inscriptions and labels are themselves embedded in the mosaics in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, indicating the zodiac signs, the months, the names of benefactors. There is also the strong sense of the Bible scenes being informed by the beginnings of midrash, the systematic interpretative discussion of the Torah and the Bible that was proceeding alongside the elaboration of the Mishnah into the Talmud. Contrary to received wisdoms about the Jewish tradition, texts and images work with each other, not against each other. The pictures are not some sort of illustrative accessory to textual Judaism. For the Jews who came to this and other synagogues – and who in all likelihood were very different in education and inclination from the rabbinical community of the Beit Hamidrash, or house of study (but who, as we can tell from the revolt, were fierce Jews nonetheless) – the pictures structure their understanding of what it was to inherit Jewish memory, and to translate that memory into actual social practice. They trigger visual mnemonics. The calendar girls, and the great wheel of the zodiac at the centre of many synagogue floors of this period, coexist with icons of the lost Temple – the menorah candlestick, the shofar trumpet and the shewbread table – and stories from the Bible that (as at Dura) are weighty with redemptive meaning.

  None of these images were arbitrarily chosen. The fact that they not only recur in synagogues as far apart as Beit Alpha on the hilly eastern edge of the valley of Jezreel, and at Hammath Tiberias, much closer to Sepphoris, means that from the fourth century at the latest, there must have been some sort of standardised pattern book of mosaic imagery for synagogue floors which mosaicists, whatever their sophistication or lack of it (and the Beit Alpha work is cartoonishly crude), would be expected to follow. More strikingly, such a pattern book must have won the approval of rabbinical authorities for it to have recurred so frequently and identically. Mishnah and mosaic were, then, not at all mutually exclusive but complementary: just as at Dura, a word-and-image programme for Jewish gathering and worship.

  The formal division of the floor space was crucial to the way this programme worked on the eye and mind. Closest to the entry were the Bible stories and references, invariably featuring the Binding of Isaac, often the consecration of Aaron (as would befit a mini-temple) and sometimes the visit of angels to Sarah. Mosaicists (or those who commissioned them) were then free to vary the anecdotal details which could be very charming but always loaded with small matters of big significance. The Sepphoris version of the Binding of Isaac touchingly includes two pairs of shoes, one for father Abraham and a much smaller pair for Isaac. (All early representations of the scene make Isaac a young boy, not the thirty-something of later Talmudic insistence.) Side by side, the shoes poignantly humanise the unnatural demand YHWH is making of Abraham, but they also allude to the sacred space on Mount Moriah requiring the respectful removal of shoes.

  The detail would have cued other moments of significant barefooted epiphanies in the Jewish story – such as Moses at the Burning Bush, the memory of which (again as at Dura) would have been perpetuated by barefooted worshippers in their contemporary synagogue. Rows of sandals by the door would have linked the Sepphoris Jews to the lives of their ancestors. Likewise the presence of the providential substitute, the ram, would have been a reminder of Temple sacrifices, above all the Passover, and of its symbolic memento included in the Passover meal. Both Christian and Jewish cults at exactly this moment were heavily and mutually preoccupied with lamb icons and meanings.

  At the far end of the synagogue floor, closest to the Torah shrine, or aedicule, were gathered the visual signs and symbols of the lost Temple, for which the synagogue was not so much an approximation as a kind of memory chamber. Centrally placed was a stylised image of the Holy of Holies with recessed, multiple doors and sometimes (as at Dura) twisted Solomonic columns. On either side were guardian-protector lions or twin menorot candlesticks, as though they were being liberated in Jewish mind and memory at least from Roman captivity. Around them were arrayed the furnishings and implements of the Temple: the trumpets that summoned worshippers at the beginning of fasts, festivals and Sabbaths; incense shovels and (occasionally) tongs; the golden shewbread table. So, while the scriptural origins of the covenant were depicted at the near end, the realisation of the covenant covered the far end.

  The scriptural making of the covenant and its establishment at the Temple were both organised in horizontal bands of images. Between them, though, is the great wheel of the zodiac, which because it seems to orbit on the floor is always the most spectacularly arresting and dynamic area of the mosaics. It is also the most directly indebted to pagan iconography. The calendar girls themselves are classical icons of the seasons, but at the centre of the zodiac wheel is the very unrabbinical figure of Helios the sun god, the special favourite of Antoninus Pius and many of the last pagan Roman emperors. Solar devotion as a kind of emanation o
f the otherwise formless Creator had an ancient history in Yahwism, which long pre-dated classical culture.14 At Sepphoris he is euphemised into a burst of rays pulled by a fiery chariot team, but at Hammath Tiberias and Beit Alpha, the full face and form of the celestial being is unblushingly depicted. Within the wheel are arrayed the signs of the zodiac, their names given in either Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic, sometimes a mix of all three, and with very little regard for what one might (unhistorically) suppose to be Judaic canons of modesty. When the signs call for human figures, as with Gemini or Aquarius, the mosaicists supply them: winsome childlike twins at Sepphoris and a muscle-rippling full nude for the Aquarius at Hammath Tiberias. The centrality of the Helios images seems at first sight astonishingly out of keeping with Judaism in the period of the Talmud’s creation. But Judaism has always been a calendrical religion, its festivals and holy days closely following the agricultural year. All the mosaic floors feature baskets of first fruits and the ‘four species’ – palm, myrtle, willow and citron – that had been brought by pilgrims to Jerusalem at the autumnal Feast of Tabernacles and brought into the synagogue then as now. And among the Dead Sea Scrolls are documents that make it clear that an absolute commitment to Judaism was not at all incompatible with an intense engagement with astronomy – and astrology. Some of the scrolls are filled with heaven-scanning observations and speculations. This was another instance, of course, of Jews taking on a passion of the classical world, but without any sense at all that to do so was to flirt with paganism. Helios the sun god could only have occupied that central place on the carefully designed synagogue floors of Galilee if he had not in some sense been understood as an attribute of YHWH – the source of light. The sun-chariot at the heart of the cosmos could have been associated with the merkavah, the chariot of ascent to the heavenly palaces that was already appearing in mystical writing and poetry at exactly this time.15