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Before the twentieth century most scholars thought that men and women sat separately in ancient synagogues. However, in the late twentieth century Shmuel Safrai and Bernadette Brooten argued that there was neither literary nor archaeological evidence of separate seating in ancient synagogues. Their arguments eventually led to a new scholarly consensus, recently articulated by Lee Levine: ‘there can be little doubt that throughout late antiquity, Jews gathered in the synagogue for ritual purposes without making any distinctions in seating arrangements for males and females’. The following article suggests that instead of a uniform situation where men and women either sat together or sat separately in ancient synagogues, the literary, archaeological, and cultural evidence allows for both possibilities, and therefore synagogue seating must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
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