The Synagogue

Nobody knows exactly when the first synagogue was built. A long-held theory traces the institution to the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, when Jews far from the Temple in Jerusalem may have gathered to pray and read their scriptures. The earliest firm evidence comes from Egypt, where inscriptions of the third century BCE dedicate Jewish “prayer houses”, in Greek proseuche, to God in honour of the Ptolemaic kings. By the first century CE, synagogues stood in towns across the land of Israel and in Jewish communities around the Mediterranean.

While the Temple stood, it remained the only place where sacrifices could be offered, and synagogues served for prayer, reading and teaching the Torah, and community meetings. The New Testament and the historian Josephus both describe Jews gathering in synagogues on the Sabbath to hear the scriptures read and explained. Archaeologists have found buildings of this period at Gamla, Masada, Herodium and Magdala: simple halls with stepped benches along the walls facing a central space.

The Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE transformed the synagogue’s place in Judaism. The rabbis taught that prayer and study could take the place of sacrifice, and the synagogue became the focus of Jewish worship. Synagogues of late antiquity were often richly decorated, with mosaic floors showing the Temple menorah, the ark and sometimes the zodiac, as at Beth Alpha in Galilee. Over time the Torah shrine, once a portable chest, became a fixed ark set into the wall facing Jerusalem, giving the building the layout it still has.

In medieval Europe and the Islamic world, synagogue building was often restricted by law. Christian and Muslim rulers at various times forbade new synagogues, limited their height so that they would not rise above churches or mosques, or required them to be inconspicuous from the street. Many synagogues were therefore modest from outside, set back in courtyards, with the floor of the prayer hall sometimes lowered below street level to gain height inside. Some communities linked this to the verse of the Psalms, “Out of the depths I have called you, O Lord.” The interior, by contrast, could be richly furnished, with a carved ark, embroidered curtains and silver ornaments for the Torah. Only with the legal emancipation of Jews in much of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did large, freestanding synagogues on main streets become common.

Jewish tradition sets three daily prayer services, in the morning, afternoon and evening, and a synagogue with an active community may hold all three. The most important gatherings are on the Sabbath, from Friday evening to Saturday night, and on festivals. The high point of the Sabbath morning service is the reading of the Torah. The ark is opened, a scroll is carried in procession through the congregation, who often touch it with the fringes of their prayer shawls or with a prayer book, and it is unrolled on the bimah and chanted aloud.

The Torah is read in sections so that the whole of the Five Books of Moses is completed in a yearly cycle, which ends and begins again on the festival of Simchat Torah, when the scrolls are carried around the synagogue with singing and dancing. The year also brings the solemn High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when the ram’s horn, the shofar, is sounded and the synagogue is at its fullest, as well as Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.

A synagogue is as much a community centre as a place of worship. The three traditional names express this: house of prayer, house of study and house of assembly. Many synagogues have a study hall with shelves of books, a school for children and rooms for celebrations. Life-cycle events take place there, above all the bar and bat mitzvah, when a young person first reads from the Torah, and often weddings. The rabbi is a teacher and guide rather than a priest, and the service is often led by a cantor or by members of the congregation.

Because Jewish law sets few rules for the shape of a synagogue, Jewish communities usually built in the style of their neighbours. In medieval Prague, the Old New Synagogue of around 1270 has a Gothic vault. In Toledo, the building now known as Santa María la Blanca, built as a synagogue around the late twelfth or thirteenth century, has the horseshoe arches and white plaster of Spanish Islamic architecture; it became a church in the early fifteenth century, after the anti-Jewish violence of 1391 and the pressure that followed.

The Sephardi communities who settled in Amsterdam after leaving Spain and Portugal built the great Portuguese Synagogue, completed in 1675, with the bimah and ark at opposite ends of a long hall. Bevis Marks in London (1701), the oldest synagogue in Britain in continuous use, was modelled on it, and Sephardi congregations carried the tradition to the Americas, where the Touro Synagogue of 1763 in Newport, Rhode Island, is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States. In Poland and Lithuania, carpenters built wooden synagogues with tiered roofs and painted interiors; almost none survived the destruction of the Second World War.

In the nineteenth century, newly emancipated Jewish communities in Central Europe built large city synagogues, often in a Moorish Revival style meant to recall the Spanish golden age. The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, completed in 1859, is the largest in Europe, and the Choral Temple in Bucharest, from the 1860s, is another example of the style. Modern synagogues range from such grand buildings to small rooms in apartment blocks, all still turned towards Jerusalem.