Many years ago one of my dissertation advisors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University proclaimed that there was no such thing as Jewish art in antiquity and the late Roman world, there was only Jewish iconography. His claim reflected the view of the generation of scholars that Steven Fine characterizes, somewhat ungenerously, as following the “Jews don’t do art” school of thought (2). The leading figure in this historiography is Erwin R. Goodenough, whose monumental Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (13 vols., New York: Pantheon, 1953–68), argued that Jewish imagery was created by “another stream” of Jews who were not in line with the mainstream religious beliefs of the rabbis. Although Fine recognizes at least one scholar, Morton Smith, who did accept the notion that Jews “did art,” he notes Smith’s caveat that Jews did so without the approval of the rabbis, who, Smith maintained, were “aniconic” (2). Fine’s goal in this extensive and learned study is “to finally lay to rest the last vestiges of the insidious (and often anti-Semitic or anti-rabbinic) trope of Jewish ‘aniconism’ in antiquity by exposing its roots as it pertains to the Greco-Roman period” (2). In this, he does an admirable job.

Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World is divided into four major sections: part 1, “The ‘Most Unmonumental’ People of the World: Modern Constructions of Ancient Jewish Art”; part 2: “Art and Identity in the Greco-Roman World”; part 3: “Jewish ‘Symbols’ in the Greco-Roman World”; and part 4, “Reading Holistically: Art and the Liturgy of Late Antique Synagogues.” These four sections comprise thirteen chapters, of unequal size and complexity.

Fine’s approach is original: from the modern world to the ancient world and back again. Chapter 1 discusses a synagogue built in Philadelphia in 1901 by the architect Arnold W. Brunner, who may have been the first American-born Jewish architect (14). Renowned for his synagogue architecture, in this building he rejects the common stylistic idiom of the genre, which at the time consisted of imitations of Romanesque architecture with Islamic and Byzantine elements (14). His design for the synagogue of the Jewish Hospital of Philadelphia was inspired by the ancient synagogues of the upper Galilee, chiefly the Kfar Baram synagogue, images of which had been published in The Jewish Encyclopedia (13). Chapter 2, “The Old-New Land” is, of course, a play on the title of Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland about the new Zionist Utopia. Here, Fine discusses the beginnings of modern “Jewish Archaeology,” which emerged from the desire to prove that modern Palestine was indeed the ancient homeland of the Jews. The pioneers of the new discipline (more accurately called “Palestinian archaeology”), especially E. L. Sukenik, “the true father of Jewish archaeology” (23), were driven as much by ideology as by scholarly aims (33). Chapter 3, “Archaeology and the Search for Nonrabbinic Judaism,” is an extensive review of the work of Goodenough and Smith, and its reception by scholars grounded in Talmudic scholarship. Chapters 4 and 5, together a mere six pages in length, cover the treatment of “Jewish art” in important art-historical publications such as H. W. Janson’s canonical History of Art. Such works treat Jewish art as an anomaly, thereby reinforcing what Fine calls the “rhetoric of Jewish artlessness.”

Parts 2 and 3 of the book are the longest and most densely annotated, and it is here that Fine makes his strongest arguments for a new “Jewish Archaeology.” The three chapters that comprise part 2, “Art and Identity in the Greco-Roman World,” focus on key monuments of the Second Temple period and the Late Antique era in both Palestine and the Diaspora. Chapter 6, “The Hasmonean Royal Tombs at Modi’in,” traces Jewish monuments erected between 166 BCE and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, starting with the Hasmonean royal tomb complex, but also considering a number of other, contemporary royal tombs in and around Jerusalem. Fine argues that these tombs are thoroughly Hellenized—up to a point. The tomb at Modi’in is known only from literary sources, chiefly Maccabees I, where it is described as being decorated with weapons, ships, and armor. Such iconography is characteristic of many Hellenistic royal tombs (61). Fine’s point is that the Jews were willing to use the imagery of armor, “but unwilling to cross that threshold and decorate the royal tombs with unambiguously human imagery.” In this way they balanced their local concerns with full participation in “universal” Hellenistic culture (64).

There is a lengthy literary account of Herod’s Temple in Josephus’s Antiquities and The Jewish War, which proclaims it the most magnificent building ever built; but as Fine points out, “the Temple, its platform, and its porticoes are typical of Roman architecture in the Age of Augustus” (69). What then separates the Jewish idiom from the Roman? After all, Jewish writings are replete with descriptions of the Tabernacle, the Temple and its vessels of precious metals, and the Torah Shrine. Here, I think Fine has succeeded admirably in sensing what was acceptable and what was forbidden. Jews, indeed, took most seriously the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” It is a disdain for idolatry that is crucial: “what Jews did not like was the religious imagery of peoples whom they considered to be idolatrous” (69). Fine throughout emphasizes that Jews were not “aniconic” or “iconophobic”—they were “anti-idolic” (82).

Chapter 7, “Art and Identity in Late Antique Palestine,” is the longest chapter by far and covers some seven hundred years up to the Islamic conquest. It begins with a description of the synagogue of Na’aran, with its pavement mosaic depicting the circle of the zodiac and the image of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. From here, Fine proceeds to a broader discussion of late antique synagogues and attitudes toward “art” in rabbinic literature. The best-known citation is that of the Jerusalem Talmud, written in Palestine in about 400 CE, Avodah Zara, which states, “In the days of Rabbi Jonathan they permitted (or began to make) images on the walls, and he did not stop them. In the days of Rabbi Abun they began to make images on mosaics and he did not stop them.”

Late antique synagogues in Palestine are replete with “pagan” images of all kinds. Even the burial place of many famous rabbinic families, the Beth Shearim catacombs, abounds with images, ranging from Leda and the Swan to that of a man with a menorah on his head (82ff). In this chapter, Fine connects a liberal attitude toward images with numerous rabbinic texts and piyyutim (liturgical poems) read in the synagogues. These texts are replete with imagery deeply rooted in Greco-Roman traditions, with references, for example, to the zodiac, seasons, and agricultural activities. Fine uses such texts to argue that the Jews were adapting to their relatively new status as a minority in their own land. “Whereas Biblical sources leave little leeway in regard to idolatrous images, the rabbis were equivocal—reflecting the ambiguities of acting upon Biblical ideals in what for them was the less than ideal world of late antiquity” (110).

In the following chapter, “Art and Identity in Diaspora Communities in Late Antiquity,” there is less of an attempt to understand synagogues within their larger social or religious context. This is perhaps due to the fact that excavated synagogues from this period, the late fourth and fifth centuries, are so massively outnumbered by Christian churches. Disparate synagogues and the decorative frescoes of the Jewish catacombs are here bound together for no other reason than that they are in the Diaspora.

Part 3, “Jewish ‘Symbols’ in the Greco-Roman World,” encompasses chapters 9 and 10, “Between Rome and Jerusalem: The Date Palm as a Jewish Symbol” and “The Lamps of Israel: The Menorah as a Jewish Symbol.” Here, Fine contrasts the radically differing connotations of the date palm, which had featured as a symbol on both Jewish and Roman coins. For Jewish audiences, the date palm of the coins of the Second Temple were a symbol of the fecundity of the land. For the Romans, the date palm was meant to suggest the conquest of that land: the palm features on the “Judea Capta” coins issued to celebrate the Flavian suppression of the Jewish revolt. The Menorah is a much more complicated topic, but Fine’s attempt to claim this as a widely used symbol of Jewish identity before the influx of Christians (155) is unpersuasive. There are, in fact, only a few examples from the Second Temple period; most of the surviving examples are from the third and fourth centuries, just as the Christian population began to increase.

Part 4, “Reading Holistically: Art and the Liturgy of Late Antique Synagogues,” encompasses “Liturgy and the Art of the Dura Europos Synagogue” (chapter 11); “Synagogue Mosaics and Liturgy in the Land of Israel” (chapter 12); and “Sanctity and the Art of Ancient Synagogues” (chapter 13). Part 4 is the book’s least satisfying as a result of its attempts to read unified decorative programs in various synagogue interiors. The record, however, is too patchy to allow for such an approach. In terms of preservation, there is no equivalent to the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna or to early Christian churches in Rome.

A final section near the end of part 4 considers the motif of the zodiac in late antique synagogues. This section felt disappointing. Fine dismisses any interpretation of the motif other than his own, namely that the composition was a “projection of the dome of heaven” and “represented different notions of time, notions that were especially Jewish” (204). He does not provide any explanation of why this theme is so common in Palestinian synagogues during the late antique period, appearing in synagogues built across the region over the course of several centuries. Avi-Yonah argued that it was related to the Jewish calendar (“The Caesarea Inscription of the Twenty-Four Priestly Courses,” The Teacher’s Yoke: Studies in Memory of Henry Trantham, Dallas: Baylor University Press, 1968, 46–57). In my own work, not cited by Fine, I have related the prominence of this composition to the Torah Shrine and the liturgical objects that are always represented with it, and argued for a coherent program that expresses Jewish political and eschatological hopes (Lucille A. Roussin, “The Zodiac in Synagogue Decoration,” Archaeology and the Galilee: Texts and Contexts in the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Periods, eds. Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCullough, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997, 83–96; see also, Jodi Magness, “Heaven on Earth: Helios and the Zodiac Cycle in Ancient Palestinian Synagogues,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59 (2005): 1–52).

Although the intent of his subtitle, “Toward a New Jewish Archaeology,” is much appreciated, Fine’s book is essentially about art history, not archaeology. He succeeds admirably in placing ancient Jewish art within the context of the Greco-Roman world. Fine’s command of rabbinic literature and his use of it to reconstruct the lost physical evidence make his book a most valuable addition to the literature on the Jewish people in the ancient world.