Within
the last hundred years, archeologists have synagogues
in countries from Israel to Greece, Italy, and Spain.
While most were constructed sometime between the second
and the seventh centuries, a recently excavated site
near Jericho, in the Jordan valley, dates back to
the first century BCE. In Egypt, fragments of inscriptions
and scraps of papyri have been found that suggest
synagogues were commonplace long before that. Each
new discovery has challenged scholars to reexamine
their assumptions about ancient Jewish communities.
Most important, the dispersion and antiquity of the
archeological sites tell us that in the centuries
immediately after the Second Temple was destroyed,
synagogues were the dynamic centers of Jewish life
throughout Palestine and the Diaspora.
