Ernest Renan, the most influential — if not the most reliable — nineteenth-century historian of Judaism, summarizing the historical achievements of the Jews, declared trenchantly: ‘Rien dans l'art.’ The twentieth century has radically changed the purchase of such a remark, not because of figures such as Chagal, but because of some of the most startling discoveries of modern archaeology. The synagogue at Dura Europos with its amazing murals, which shocked the scholarly and religious world when revealed in the 1930s, is the most celebrated of dozens of recently excavated synagogues, many decorated with lavish mosaics, inscriptions and even wall-paintings, from the third to the seventh centuries in the eastern Empire. The first attempt to collect and synthesize this burgeoning material was Goodenough's Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (1953–68), which presented a wealth of material in a grand theoretical framework, which proposed a pervasive Jewish mysticism, set in opposition to the dominant rabbinical authority. This agenda has been almost wholly rejected by scholars, but his work brought to the fore the sheer richness of the material record for this period, and the need to relate it to its social context. The nineteenth century, with the usual hangover into twentieth-century scholarship, knew three things for sure: that Jewish society severely declined after the failed rebellions of the second century; that this decline was marked by a submissive response to the newly dominant Christian rule; that Jewish commitment to aniconic representation was a sign of the link between Torah, rabbinical regulation and social practice. Archaeological evidence has destroyed each of these grounding claims of Jewish history. There was a marked increase in Jewish settlements in Palestine and in their prosperity in Late Antiquity. Many of the buildings are visually stunning in their grandeur: the fourth-century synagogue in Sardis was 80 metres long and 20 metres wide — a massive structure for any town in the Empire. The inscriptions, mostly in Greek, demonstrate lively interaction between Jewish and other communities. The material record shows the extraordinary ‘resilience, creativity as well as [the] remarkable self-confidence’ of the Jewish community, as Levine convincingly articulates (466). Most strikingly, it is clear that the synagogues indicate not just scant influence of rabbinical authority, but also, and repeatedly, blatant transgression of rabbinical principles. Who would have thought that a synagogue could have a wall-picture of Pharaoh's daughter naked, as Dura does, or that Jews would display a mosaic of Leda and the swan or Odysseus and the sirens, as there are in rooms in the Bet She'an synagogue and in the Bet She'arim necropolis? It is true to say that archaeology has completely revolutionized the historical understanding of Jewish society in Palestine in Late Antiquity.

The time is ripe for a further attempt at a grand synthetic account of this still provocative and growing body of evidence. This is precisely what Lee Levine, best known for his work on the history of the early synagogue, has attempted in this book. It is certainly a full treatment with 475 pages of analysis and a 75-page bibliography, which at very least will make it the starting point for anyone who wishes to broach this fascinating subject. The detailed story L. tells has some simple contours. The earliest remains indicate a flourishing Israelite representational tradition, which suddenly and resolutely becomes aniconic in the Hasmonean period (second century b.c.e.). This era is associated with the rapid growth of an ideologically-informed identity based on the Torah as the central text of the community — with the resistance of the Maccabees to Antiochus expressed as a triumph of Jewish religious and national self-determination against foreign repression — and so it is easy to imagine this turn to aniconism as part of a political agenda. There is a marked gap in the material record in the first two centuries of the common era, but from the third century onwards there is an unexpected explosion of decorated religious buildings and tombs. What L. shows especially well is the variety of such projects. One synagogue may have a floor inscription with a precise and lengthy religious law and no figural representation; another may have the zodiac, pictures from the Bible, and Greek names galore. He also insists on the degree to which the visual régime of the synagogues can precisely contradict rabbinical law. The tensions and differences between sections of the Jewish community is a crucial rejoinder to oversimplified claims of the homogenized growth of rabbinical Judaism. L. is cautious, unwilling to press evidence or to speculate. This pays off overall, though it produces a book that is solid rather than full of flair or surprises. There could have been a stronger analysis of how synagogue ritual developed after the loss of the Temple. The menorah does appear, as L. notes, in places where the cross is used in Christian art, which suggests a self-conscious practice of competitive cultural expressiveness. But the Jewish symbols that become pervasive — menorah, lulav, etrog — are also precisely those elements that were not emphasized in Temple ritual, but became central in synagogue services only after the destruction of the Temple — and this may well explain their pervasiveness in this later art as signs of the growth-pangs of new cultic organization. There are some repetitions, and plenty of details to argue over in L.'s book, but it has made a fine job of summarizing the intricate current state of affairs for a hugely important topic.