The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. was a major turning point in the development of Judaism. Without the Temple or the ability to replace it, Judaism could no longer function as the religion of sacrifice and sanctification God had detailed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Over the following centuries, one institution arose to take the Temple's place in the life of the Jewish community, namely, the synagogue. It provided for a life of holiness without animal or vegetable sacrifice-for becoming sacred without performing the biblically sanctioned means of sanctification.The means by which the synagogue became the dominant Jewish institution forms an arena of active scholarly analysis. The issue begins with the question of the synagogue's origins, but does not stop there. The ultimate question lies in how the synagogue became an accepted replacement for the Temple. Looking back from our perspective in the twentieth century, the transformation of a Temple-based Judaism into a synagogue-centered religion seems a natural development. But looking forward from 70 C.E.-just after the Temple's destruction-the picture must have seemed quite different. How could Jews worship God without a Temple? Even the Hebrew Biblethe reading of which became a central rite in synagogue worship-said that God should be worshipped by sacrifice in the Temple. It contained no comment about the synagogue at all, let alone a positive endorsement.But the synagogue succeeded. When Islam conquered much of the Middle East in the early seventh century, synagogues had long been the dominant Jewish institution. Indeed, archaeological and literary records reveal that synagogues had been built not only in Palestine and surrounding areas, but also across the Mediterranean world and into the Tigris-Euphrates region. The literary record also shows that the synagogue was understood as a native Jewish institution, without which Jewish life and worship was impossible to envision. The rabbinic sages even imagined that during Temple times a synagogue had stood on the Temple Mount. They believed that worship in that synagogue had actually been more important than altar sacrifices.Although published in two volumes, this collection of essays has a single focus-the synagogue during the centuries between the Temple's destruction and the rise of Islam, for it is at this time that the synagogue gained its central place in Judaism. The exploration of how this achievement occurred is divided into six different areas. In Section I, the essays examine how the synagogue began and try to delineate the evidence for the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.