The Huqoq Excavation Project : 2014-2017 interim report

Excavations at Huqoq in Israel’s eastern Lower Galilee are bringing to light a Late Roman synagogue, a medieval public building, and the remains of ancient and modern (pre-1948) villages. In this interim report, we describe the major discoveries of the 2014–2017 seasons, including the extraordinary figural mosaics decorating the synagogue floor. Our discoveries provide evidence of a Galilean Jewish community that flourished through the 5th and 6th centuries c.e.—a picture contrasting with recent claims of a decline in Jewish settlement under Byzantine Christian rule. The possibility that the medieval public building might also be a synagogue has important implications for understanding Galilean Jewish settlement in the Middle Ages, about which almost nothing is known. The excavations also shed light on the last phase of the settlement’s long history: the development of the modern village of Yakuk in the 19th through 20th centuries.peer-reviewe

Jewish Culture and Society in a Christianizing Empire

One hallmark of the Christianization of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity was a preoccupation with dividing people into discrete categories. Primarily motivated by concerns over the porous boundaries that imperfectly separated various religious communities from one another in social reality, this drive to define "self" and "other" represented a potent means for managing - while never homogenizing or eliminating - difference. Indeed, this period saw the rapid crystallization of the ideological desire and institutional capacity of both church and state to classify, manage, and, in some cases, subject to targeted acts of violence various dissident religious groupings with whom Christians might feel themselves to be in conflict, Jews among them. Jewish historians and scholars of rabbinic Judaism have persuasively stressed the formative impact that the Christianization of the Roman Empire had on the nature of Jewishness as a social category, as well as on the forms and structures of Jewish culture and society from the late fourth to early sixth century. Yet, at the same time, it has been rightly observed that, to a significant degree, the Jewish populations of the Roman Empire remained fully integrated in the venerable structures of Mediterranean life well into the sixth century. What, then, are we to make of this puzzling juxtaposition between the far-reaching impact of Christianization on Jews and Judaism, on the one hand, and the broad continuities in the fabric of Mediterranean society, on the other

Walking in the shadows of the past: The Jewish experience of Rome in the twelfth century

The Jewish and Christian inhabitants of twelfth-century Rome viewed the urban landscape of their city through the lens of its ancient past. Their perception of Rome was shaped by a highly localized topography of cultural memory that was both shared and contested by Jews and Christians. Our reconstruction of this distinctively Roman perspective emerges from a careful juxtaposition of the report of Benjamin of Tudela’s visit to Rome preserved in his Itinerary and various Christian liturgical and topographical texts, especially those produced by the canons of the Lateran basilica. These sources demonstrate that long-standing local claims regarding the presence in Rome of ancient artifacts from the Jerusalem Temple and their subsequent conservation in the Lateran acquired particular potency in the twelfth century. Jews and Christians participated in a common religious discourse that invested remains from the biblical and Jewish past reportedly housed in Rome with symbolic capital valued by the two communities and that thus fostered both contact and competition between them. During this pivotal century and within the special microcosm of Rome, Jews and Christians experienced unusually robust cultural and social interactions, especially as the Jews increasingly aligned themselves with the protective power of the papacy.PublishedJournal Articl

Bible stories in the Huqoq Synagogue mosaic floor : interim report on the 2011–2017 seasons [in Hebrew]

Interim report on the 2011-2017 seasons of excavations at Huqoq, Lower Galilee.peer-reviewe

The Ḥuqoq excavations : interim report on the 2014–2017 seasons

This is an interim report (in Arabic) of the 2011-2017 seasons of the Huqoq Excavation Project.peer-reviewe

Huqoq-2018 : preliminary report

Preliminary report on the 2018 excavations at Huqoq, Israel.peer-reviewe

Huqoq 2019 - preliminary report

This is a preliminary report of the 2019 season of the Huqoq Excavation Project.peer-reviewe