Rabbis, Nonrabbis, and Synagogues in Roman Palestine: Theory and Reality Ruth Langer I. Introduction and a Discussion of Method When and how did the communal synagogue become ‘rabbinic’ and rabbinic lit- urgy become Jewish liturgy? Related of course is the question of when rabbinic aspirations to leadership succeeded. 1 The collected evidence demonstrates that a non-sacrificial Jewish liturgical system had emerged by Late Antiquity; its prayer texts, though, have been preserved only from the late first millennium CE. Until the 1980s, all historians of Jewish liturgy presumed communal prayer to be among the functions of the Second Temple synagogue and hence located the lit- urgy’s origins there. By 1986, Shmuel Safrai opened these questions anew with his now widely accepted recognition that, while there is good evidence for Torah reading, there simply is no evidence for rabbinic-style prayer in the Second Tem- ple-era synagogue. 2 The only fairly comprehensive theory of liturgical development to emerge in the wake of Safrai’s realization has been that of Ezra Fleischer, published in a book’s worth of articles beginning in 1990. 3 Fleischer claims that rabbinic liturgy emerged de novo as a response to the covenantal and spiritual void left by the loss of the Jerusalem Temple. Under Rabban Gamliel, the rabbis developed an alter- native, universally obligatory, form of verbal worship. In order to spread this wor- ship, they immediately co-opted the pre-existent synagogue. 4 While in the last quarter-century, various scholars have probed elements of Fleischer’s theory, no international consensus has emerged around it. Fleischer’s theory is built upon a  1 Others who have asked these questions explicitly in liturgy or synagogue-related discussions include: Fleischer 2012, with relevant essays dating from 1990; Levine 2005: especially chaps. 13, “The Sages and the Synagogue”, and 16, “Liturgy”; and Miller 1999: 64. 2 In an article first published in 1981, Shmuel Safrai posited prayer as a function of the Second Temple synagogue, at least towards the end of that period. However, he taught otherwise in a graduate seminar on the synagogue I attended at Hebrew University in 1986/87. That spring he presented his new under- standing at a conference on the synagogue in Haifa, Safrai 1989. 3 For the Hebrew articles themselves, see Fleischer 2012; for a review essay on most of them, see Langer 1999 and the published correspondence between us, Fleischer and Langer 2000. 4 This last point appears in “Annual and Triennial Reading of the Bible in the Old Synagogue” (in Hebrew) in Fleischer 2012: 37–38 (section 7). downloaded from www.vr-elibrary.de by Ruth Langer on February, 19 2021 For personal use only.