Bible Review

y. Meg. 1:11, 72b; y. Sanh. 10:5, 29c; y. Abod. Zar. 3:1, 42c; b. Pesah. 104a; b. Abod. Zar. 50a; Eccl. Rab. 9:10. Arthur Marmorstein, The Doctrine of Merits in Old Rabbinic Literature and the Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God (New York: Ktav, 1968), pp. 215–216.

The best discussion of rabbinic attitudes toward art is still Joseph Baumgarten, “Art in the Synagogue: Some Talmudic Views,” Judaism 6 (1970), pp. 196–206.

Carl Watzinger, following H.H. Kitchener, theorized that the synagogues in Galilee had been constructed on behalf of the Jews by Roman authorities during the Severan dynasty. When this dynasty fell into political turmoil in the mid-third century, the Jews took this opportunity to remove offensive Roman images from their synagogues. The notion of Roman imperial sponsorship of synagogues reflects the misconception, common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that art and Judaism are incompatible.

Carl Watzinger, “Die Antiken Synagogen Galiläas: Neue Ausgrabungen und Forschungen,” Der Morgen 6 (1930), pp. 362–363.

Samuel Yeivin, “Excavations in the Land of Israel 1925 Season),” Zion: Yedyiot ha-Hevra ha-Eretz-Yisraelit le-Historia ve-Etnographia 2 (1930), p. 15.

Samuel Klein, The History of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine (Jerusalem: Mitzpeh, 1935), pp. 36–37 (Hebrew). I discuss evidence for the Christian destruction of synagogues in my “Non-Jews in the Synagogues of Palestine: Rabbinic and Archaeological Perspectives,” in Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction During the Greco-Roman Period, ed. Steven Fine (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 233–236.

See Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), pp. 269–271; Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), esp. pp. 43–98.

John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew—Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991).

John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus—The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).