Shaqqah (Chaqqa)

The Hauran is a volcanic region in southern present-day Syria, extended south by the Golan and northern Jordan. Its physiognomy is dictated by basalt: the black stone, dense and durable, enabled a singular architecture where wood, rare, is replaced by slabs and stone beams, monolithic doors and ceilings with superimposed slab vaults. This construction technique, known as basalt corbelling, explains the remarkable preservation of the region's ancient buildings, including those of Chaqqa, which rank among the most famous.

At the margins of the great empires, the Hauran was successively dominated by Hellenistic kingdoms, by the Nabataean kingdom of which Bosra was a capital, then integrated into the Roman Empire with the annexation of Nabataea in 106 CE under Trajan, to form the province of Arabia. The region then experienced agricultural prosperity — Hauran wheat supplied the cities and the army — which resulted in urban flourishing in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, then in intense Christianization in the Byzantine period, marked by the construction of numerous churches and monasteries.

This history as a crossroads is essential for understanding the Jewish presence in the Hauran. The proximity of Judea and Galilee, the existence of caravan routes linking Arabia, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, as well as the diffusion of Jewish communities throughout the Roman East after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 and after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, make plausible the settlement of Jewish groups in these peripheral regions. The eastern diaspora, dense in Babylonia and Syria, scattered widely in the countryside and hamlets. It is within this general framework that the Jewish presence in Chaqqa takes on its meaning, as one point among others in a diffuse scatter of which archaeology restores only fragments.

The identification of Chaqqa with the ancient Saccaea rests on toponymic and epigraphic data that scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries progressively established, not without margins of uncertainty. According to learned tradition, the locality would have been elevated to city status and renamed Maximianopolis in honor of the emperor Maximian, colleague of Diocletian in the tetrarchic system instituted at the end of the 3rd century. This administrative promotion would testify to the importance acquired by the agglomeration at that time.

The vestiges of Chaqqa confirm this status: the locality preserves monumental structures in basalt, notably a vast building often designated by travelers as a "palace" or "kaisariyeh," as well as structures interpreted as funerary towers, thermal baths, and basilicas. These monuments, described by European explorers who traversed the Hauran, attest to developed urban life during Late Antiquity. In the Byzantine period, Chaqqa became a Christian center furnished with churches and, according to several authorities, the seat of a bishopric.

It is important to emphasize that the precise eventful history of the locality remains fragmentary. Ancient literary sources rarely mention it; the essentials of what we know about it come from archaeology and epigraphy, disciplines that yield material data but little continuous narrative. This is why the status of "Probable" suits this chapter: the chronological framework is plausible and coherent with what is known of the Hauran, but it rests on reconstructions rather than on abundant narrative documentation. The city revealed by the ruins was a prosperous agglomeration of the Late Roman and Byzantine period, inserted in the network of cities of the Hauran, neither quite large nor negligible.

The heart of the notice that founds this Great Book is the existence, at Chaqqa, of an ancient Hebrew inscription. It is this document — or rather its mention in scholarly literature — that explicitly connects the locality to Jewish history. It is necessary to measure its exact scope and limitations.

An inscription in Hebrew language or characters, found in a locality of the Hauran, constitutes a direct marker of Jewish presence. Unlike a mere theophoric name or ambiguous iconographic motif, the use of Hebrew — the liturgical and identity language of Judaism — signals unequivocally a Jewish context: synagogue dedication, epitaph, votive or pious formula. In Late Antiquity, Jewish communities in the East commonly employed Aramaic and Greek in daily life, but reserved Hebrew for sacred and memorial uses. Such a discovery at Chaqqa therefore suggests that a Jewish group resided there or frequented a place of worship, at a date which, in the absence of known paleographic precision, likely falls between the 3rd and 6th centuries.

This is where archival item and Memory respond to each other, justifying the register of "Intersection." On one hand, the engraved stone is a material fact, an object that the epigraphist dates and deciphers. On the other, this stone bears a memorial charge: it is the vestige of a community that wished to inscribe, in the language of tradition, a trace of its faith or its dead. As Yerushalmi has shown, Judaism maintains a singular relationship to remembrance, where inscription and name stand as preservation against forgetting [Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 1984]. The Chaqqa inscription is thus, at once, an archival fact and an act of Memory.

Nevertheless, honesty demands that we acknowledge the limits of this testimony. It is, according to the notice itself, isolated: a single document, whose dating, exact content and context of discovery are not restored with certainty in the available documentation. One cannot, from a single epigraph, conclude to the existence of a large or structured community. The status "Probable" is required: Jewish presence at Chaqqa is attested in principle by the stone, but its scope and duration remain conjectural.

To give meaning to the Chaqqa inscription, it must be placed within the broader picture of Jewish presence in southern Syria and neighboring regions during Late Antiquity. Rabbinic sources, synagogue remains, and scattered inscriptions outline a Jewish geography that far exceeds the boundaries of Judea-Palestine.

The Golan, immediately west of the Hauran, has yielded numerous remains of ancient synagogues, attesting to a dense Jewish peasantry during the Roman and Byzantine periods. Further south, the region of Batanea and the Hauran was, according to ancient historians, a place of settlement for Jewish populations: Flavius Josephus mentions the establishment, by King Herod, of Jewish colonists from Babylonia in Batanea, tasked with securing roads against brigands. This settlement, straddling the Christian era, may have left a lasting legacy in the region. Thus, the presence of Jews in the Hauran would not be an anomaly, but the continuation of an ancient and documented occupation.

The Jewish diaspora of the Roman East constituted a living network, connected to the Land of Israel through pilgrimage, study, and the authority of the patriarchs and later academies. Rural and urban communities maintained synagogues, practiced Hebrew law, and perpetuated the sacred language in worship. This culture of transmission, in which text and law held the central role, was analyzed by contemporary thinkers of Judaism as the fundamental trait of a people defining itself less by territory than by fidelity to the word [Askénazi, La parole et l'écrit, 1999]. Armand Abécassis similarly emphasized how Jewish thought is rooted in an experience of dispersion and desire, where exile becomes a place of meaning and not merely of loss [Abécassis, La pensée juive. Du désert au désir, 1987].

In this context, the Chaqqa inscription becomes clear: it is not the sign of an exceptional presence, but the punctual witness of a broader regional phenomenon, of which archaeology preserves only scattered traces. The status "Probable" reflects this inference: we reason by analogy and regional coherence, drawing on converging but dispersed indices.

The knowledge of Chaqqa and its antiquities owes much to European explorers who, from the 19th century onward, traversed the Hauran when it was still difficult to access. These travelers, often orientalists, geographers, or missionaries, surveyed the ruins, copied inscriptions, and published their observations, laying the foundations for the epigraphy and archaeology of the region.

The major epigraphic collection enterprises — foremost among them the corpora of Greek and Latin inscriptions from Syria, then specialized collections devoted to the Hauran and Jabal al-Druze — systematized this work. It was within the framework of these surveys that Jewish inscriptions from southern Syria, minority texts among a mass of pagan and Christian texts, were identified and added to the record of Jewish history in the region. The Hebrew inscription of Chaqqa belongs to this category: it was identified through patient reading of stones scattered in the ruins and reused in later constructions.

This rediscovery process illustrates how the Jewish history of the Orient constitutes itself from dispersed fragments, patiently gathered. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, which surveyed localities bearing traces of Jewish presence, stands within this learned tradition of inventory and synthesis, offering the reader a cartography of attested presences [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The approach is cumulative: each inscription, each synagogue vestige enriches an overall image that no narrative document provides. The method itself partakes of what Colette Sirat, with respect to philosophical texts, called attentive reading of manuscripts and materials, alone capable of restoring dispersed knowledge [Sirat, Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages According to Manuscript and Printed Texts, 1983].

This chapter falls under "Established" status because it addresses a verifiable documentary reality: the existence of epigraphic corpora, the work of explorers, the constitution of reference catalogs. It is the methodological foundation upon which everything that can be said of Chaqqa rests.

What to do with a unique inscription? The question, which at first seems epigraphic, is in reality historiographical and spiritual in nature. Chaqqa offers no Jewish community documented by continuous archives, no synagogue excavated with certainty, no rabbinic texts naming it expressly. It offers a stone — and the silence that surrounds it.

This silence is not empty. It is the silence of all that was not preserved: the men and women who engraved or read this inscription, their prayers, their trades, their connections with the neighboring communities of the Golan and Batanaea. The historian of Judaism finds himself here before the ordinary condition of his work: to reconstitute a presence from a single clue, without yielding either to excess of reconstruction or to discouragement. It is in this sense that this chapter is explicitly conjectured: it assumes the hypothesis as such and does not pass off its inferences as certainties.

Contemporary Jewish thought offers resources for inhabiting this silence. Emmanuel Levinas, whose rootedness in the Hebrew source Catherine Chalier has explored, made the trace a major concept: the trace is what signals a passage without rendering it present, what refers to a beyond that cannot be recaptured [Chalier, La trace de l'infini, 2002]. The Chaqqa inscription is precisely a trace in this strong sense: it attests a Jewish passage through the Hauran, without giving us the face of those who passed. Similarly, Marc-Alain Ouaknin's meditation on the book and its erasure reminds us that Jewish tradition lives by interpretation as much as by conservation, and that the fragment calls for commentary rather than completion [Ouaknin, Le livre brûlé, 1986].

Thus, memory and archive answer one another one last time, in a mode of intersection: the stone (archive) becomes the support of a memory (interpretation), and the reader of the Great Book is invited not to conclude, but to gather. Isaiah Berlin, reflecting on the Jewish condition, noted how the identity of a dispersed people is woven from such fragile threads, memories transmitted and stubborn loyalties [Berlin, Three Essays on the Jewish Condition, 1973]. Chaqqa, with its solitary inscription, is one of these threads.

At the end of this journey, Chaqqa appears as a point of convergence between a geography — the basalt Hauran, a land of crossroads and agricultural prosperity —, an urban history — the ancient Saccaea that became Maximianopolis and then a Christian seat — and a fragment of Jewish history: the Hebrew inscription which alone expressly connects the locality to the Jewish world of Late Antiquity. This testimony is isolated but significant, exactly as the initial entry stated.

What this Great Book wished to demonstrate is that this fragment is not orphaned. Relocated within the regional context — the Jewish presence attested in the Golan, Batanea and southern Syria, the early settlement of Jewish colonists by Herod, the density of the eastern diaspora —, it becomes the coherent sign of a vaster phenomenon, of which archaeology restores only fragments. The Jewish presence at Chaqqa is thus probable in principle, though undetermined in its scale and duration.

Yet the essential remains surrounded by silence. We know neither the name, nor the number, nor the fate of the Jews of Chaqqa. Facing this limit, the historian of Judaism adopts the posture that his own tradition teaches him: to collect the trace, to honor the memory, to resist oblivion without inventing what the sources pass over in silence. Chaqqa thus enters the Great Book not as a fully documented community, but as a trace faithfully preserved — a place name where Hebrew was engraved in the black stone of the Hauran, and where, against the erasure of time, something endures.