The Synagogue

Why this Chapter exists

A house of assembly, with a history of its own.

The synagogue is the central institution of Jewish communal life. It grew up while the Temple in Jerusalem still stood. After the Temple was destroyed, it answered a historical problem: how could Jewish communities pray, study, assemble, and govern communal life without it? Its history, its vocabulary, and its furnishings are its own, distinct from those of the church and the mosque.

Where the synagogue came from

Born in the Temple’s shadow, and built for its absence.

The Temple in Jerusalem stood in two phases. The written record places the First Temple under King Solomon around 957 BCE, and Babylon destroyed it in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was completed about 516 BCE, expanded by Herod the Great, and destroyed by Rome in 70 CE. Its story is treated in its own Chapter: The First and Second Temples. That Chapter covers what the buildings looked like, where they stood, what survives, and what stands on the Temple Mount today.

What matters here is the consequence. With the Temple gone, Jewish religious life faced a structural problem: the central sacrificial institution that had organized worship for nearly a thousand years no longer existed. The synagogue, already a place of reading and assembly before 70 CE, became the institution that met it.

After 586 BCE, the exiles in Babylonia could not access the Temple. After 70 CE, the Temple no longer existed. In both periods, Jewish communities required a way to maintain religious and communal life without the central sacrificial institution that had organized it. One answer was the beit knesset: the “house of assembly,” named for the act of gathering rather than for a sacred location. The Greek word synagōgē also meant “assembly.” Historians still debate the institution’s origins. The earliest hard evidence comes from Egypt in the third century BCE, and the historian Lee Levine places its emergence in the Hellenistic period rather than in the exile itself. In Jerusalem, a Greek inscription from the late Second Temple period records that a priest named Theodotus “built the synagogue for the reading of the Law and the teaching of the commandments,” along with lodging for travelers. The institution was portable. In later rabbinic law, communal prayer needed a quorum of ten, not a building.

The synagogue was not designed to replace the Temple. The Temple’s central function, sacrificial worship, was suspended. Rabbinic tradition taught that other acts could take its place until the Temple was rebuilt. In one account, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, the leading sage after the destruction, comforts a grieving student at the Temple ruins. Acts of loving-kindness, he says, atone as sacrifice did, and he cites the prophet Hosea: “For I desire goodness, not sacrifice” (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 4). One view in the Talmud holds that the daily prayers were instituted to parallel the daily offerings (Berakhot 26b), and it credits those who study Torah as though they served in the Temple (Menachot 110a). The synagogue became the setting for prayer, study, and communal kindness.

The result was an institution that could travel. A synagogue did not require sovereignty, a priesthood, or a single sacred building. It required a community, a Torah, and the act of gathering. That portability helped Jewish civilization remain continuous across Babylonia, Alexandria, Rome, Cordoba, Vilna, Salonika, New York, and the many other places the diaspora, the Jewish communities scattered outside the homeland, reached.

Early Jewish art: the visual record

A figural tradition, sustained and influential.

The synagogue is older as an institution than any of its surviving buildings. The earliest synagogue buildings found in the Land of Israel date from the late Second Temple period: Gamla in the Golan, Masada, Herodium, and the recently excavated synagogue at Magdala on the Sea of Galilee. Those are first-century BCE to first-century CE examples. But the buildings that kept enough of their interior decoration to tell us what Jewish religious art looked like in antiquity come from a different group. They survive in three regions. In Roman Syria, there is the painted synagogue at Dura-Europos. In Roman and Byzantine Palestine (roughly the 300s to 600s CE), there are mosaic floors at Hammath Tiberias, Beth Alpha, Sepphoris/Tzippori, Huqoq, Ein Gedi, Naaran, Susiya, Yafia, Huseifa, and Khirbet Wadi Hamam. Around the wider Mediterranean are the Jewish catacombs of Rome, the synagogues at Sardis in Asia Minor and Stobi in Macedonia, and the Naro/Hammam Lif mosaic in Tunisia. Together, they record a Jewish artistic tradition that pictured human figures and biblical stories and drew on the visual languages of the surrounding cultures.

Dura-Europos · the painted synagogue on the Roman frontier (244 CE)

The find that overturned a long-standing assumption.

In 1932, an expedition excavating the Roman frontier town of Dura-Europos in modern Syria uncovered the walls of a synagogue, buried since 256 CE and preserved virtually intact. Its paintings are dated by inscription to 244 CE.

The discovery completed a reversal that the mosaic floors found in the Land of Israel, Beth Alpha above all, had already begun. Many art historians had assumed that observant Jews of late antiquity would never have produced an elaborate figural decorative program for a place of worship, based on a particular interpretation of the Second Commandment’s prohibition on graven images. The walls of the Dura-Europos synagogue showed the opposite. They depict, in sustained figural narrative, scenes from across the Hebrew Bible. Among them are the Sacrifice of Isaac, Moses receiving the Tablets, Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, and the Crossing of the Red Sea. Others show scenes from the Book of Esther, the resurrection of the dry bones in Ezekiel, the anointing of David by Samuel, and the Ark of the Covenant in the land of the Philistines. The paintings establish that, at least in this third-century Jewish community on the Roman frontier, the Second Commandment did not preclude figural religious art.

The synagogue’s preservation is also a methodological gift. Because the building was sealed shortly after its decoration was completed, and untouched for nearly seventeen centuries, Dura-Europos is the most intact example of late-antique Jewish visual culture that exists. The murals and the Torah-shrine niche went to the National Museum of Damascus, where the synagogue interior was reconstructed. Yale University Art Gallery holds many of the painted ceiling tiles, Herbert Gute’s full-size painted copies of the murals, and the bulk of the excavation’s other finds. The remains of the city itself were severely damaged and looted during the Syrian civil war. What we know of Dura-Europos is what is preserved in those collections and in the photographic record produced by the excavation between 1928 and 1937.

For deeper study: Carl H. Kraeling, The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report VIII, Part I: The Synagogue (Yale, 1956); Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge, rev. ed. 2010); Annabel Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem, and Ravenna (Cambridge, 1995).

The Hand of God

The earliest Jewish convention for representing divine presence.

One element of the Dura-Europos murals is an early Jewish artistic convention in its own right, and the same convention later became standard in Christian art.

Across multiple panels at Dura-Europos, divine intervention is represented not by a figure but by a single hand emerging from the upper register of the painting. The Hand of God reaches down at the moment of Isaac’s near-sacrifice. It points toward the drowning of the Egyptians at the Red Sea. It appears in the Ezekiel resurrection panel. In each case the convention is the same. The God of Israel is not depicted. God’s action is shown by the hand alone, the part of the body that in many visual traditions stands for action and authority.

The convention appears again, nearly three centuries later, in the floor mosaic of the Beth Alpha synagogue (sixth century CE), where a small hand emerges from a stylized cloud at the Sacrifice of Isaac panel. The hand also became a standard convention in Byzantine and Western medieval Christian art for showing divine presence, in scenes such as the baptism of Christ and the giving of the Law. Some scholars trace parts of that development to lost Jewish models, a question still debated. The earliest known examples of the convention inside a scriptural narrative cycle are the Jewish ones at Dura-Europos.

The hand is one of several conventions found in Jewish religious art of late antiquity. Others include the biblical story cycles, the decoration of the Torah shrine, and the menorah, the seven-branched lampstand, shown with other ritual objects. Seen in this order, the convention appears first in the Jewish visual record of late antiquity, and only later in Christian art.

Hammath Tiberias · the earliest known Jewish zodiac mosaic (4th c. CE)

Sol-Helios in a synagogue floor.

The Hammath Tiberias synagogue was excavated on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and is usually dated to the fourth century CE. Its floor contains the earliest extant version of a composition that would recur in several later synagogues across Roman and Byzantine Palestine. The mosaic is organized into three panels. At the top, a Torah shrine flanked by menorot (the plural of menorah) and ritual objects. In the center, a zodiac wheel surrounding a depiction of Helios driving his sun-chariot. At the entrance, an inscription panel naming the donors in Greek. The figure of Sol-Helios in the central medallion is rendered in full Hellenistic-Roman style: a young god with a radiant crown, his hand raised, holding a globe. The signs of the zodiac surround him, each labeled in Hebrew. The four seasons, personified as young women, fill the corners.

Why a sun god in a synagogue. Scholars propose several readings, and they do not exclude one another. Sol-Helios may have served as a visual symbol of the orderly rhythms of God’s creation, the way the zodiac itself served as a cosmological calendar. Or the Jewish community of fourth-century Palestine may have used Sol-Helios as a visual claim on the cosmos, one that set it apart from the new Christian iconography. That community lived under growing Christian imperial pressure after Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, in the early 300s CE. Or the composition may be, in part, a polemic: a visual argument that the Jewish people, not the Christians now favored by Rome, remained the heirs of the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the precise interpretation, the composition recurred in synagogue floors across nearly two centuries.

Beth Alpha · a celebrated Jewish floor mosaic (6th c. CE)

Akedah, zodiac, and Torah shrine on one floor.

The Beth Alpha synagogue was uncovered in 1928 by members of Kibbutz Beit Alfa, a communal farming settlement, who stumbled on the mosaic floor while digging an irrigation channel. Excavation began in 1929 under Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University. The synagogue is a small basilica on the northern slopes of Mount Gilboa, in the Beit Shean Valley, but its mosaic floor is one of the most-photographed Jewish artworks of antiquity. A Greek inscription names the artisans: Marianos and his son Hanina, the same father-and-son team whose names appear on the nearby Beth Shean synagogue floor. The Aramaic inscription dates the mosaic to the reign of Emperor Justinus, probably Justin I (518–527 CE).

The floor is organized in three panels. The northern panel (closest to the entrance) shows the Sacrifice of Isaac in stylized, almost folk-art form. Abraham raises a long knife, and Isaac is suspended in mid-air above the altar with his hands bound. A ram is tethered to a tree by a rope. The Hand of God emerges from a small flame-bordered cloud in the upper center, with the Hebrew inscription “Do not stretch out [your hand]” above. The central panel is the zodiac wheel with Sol-Helios. The southern panel (closest to the apse where the Torah ark stood) shows a stylized Torah shrine. Around it are two seven-branched menorot, a shofar (the ram’s-horn trumpet), a lulav and etrog (the palm branch and citron carried at Sukkot, the autumn harvest festival), and an incense shovel. Together they form a visual catalog of the ritual objects that connected the synagogue to the destroyed Temple.

What is happening here. The Sacrifice of Isaac, or Akedah (“binding”), is among the central scenes in Jewish religious thought. The same scene appears at Dura-Europos (244 CE) and at Sepphoris (5th c. CE), which makes it one of the most documented narrative subjects in late-antique synagogue art. At Beth Alpha the figures carry Hebrew labels (“Yitzhak,” “Avraham”), and the panel quotes Genesis 22. Scholars read such labels both as identification and as a marker of the building’s Jewish identity in a province where Christianity was by then the imperial religion.

Sepphoris/Tzippori · one of the most elaborate synagogue mosaics yet found

Genesis through Temple ritual on one floor.

The Sepphoris (Hebrew: Tzippori) synagogue mosaic was discovered by chance in 1993, by a parking-lot construction crew at the edge of the Sepphoris National Park. It is among the most elaborate and most fully planned synagogue floors yet found. The building dates to the early fifth century CE, and it is unusual in several ways. Its bimah, the raised reading platform, was oriented westward, not toward Jerusalem. Its narrative program covers Genesis through Temple ritual. It also carries Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic inscriptions across the same floor.

The mosaic is organized in seven panels running the length of the central aisle. Near the entrance: the angels visiting Sarah (Genesis 18), a band that survives only in fragments. Behind it: the Sacrifice of Isaac. The central panel holds a zodiac wheel, with the four seasons in the corners and the signs labeled in Hebrew. At its center the sun appears as a rayed disc in its chariot, with no human figure at all. It is the one known version of the composition that leaves Helios out. Beyond it come panels showing the implements and offerings of the Tabernacle (the portable tent-sanctuary that preceded the Temple) and the Jerusalem Temple. Aaron, the first high priest, stands at the altar. Nearby are the showbread (the loaves set out weekly in the sanctuary), the menorah, the basin, the incense shovel, and the daily sacrifices. The full program runs from the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) through the zodiac of the year to the Temple service.

The Sepphoris floor includes Hebrew inscriptions naming each ritual object. Zeev Weiss reads the program as a statement of the promise to Israel and the hope of restoration, and Steven Fine has traced how the synagogue itself took on the Temple’s sanctity in these centuries. In these readings, the floor pictured a Temple service that could no longer be performed.

Huqoq · the recent excavations

The earliest images of Deborah and Yael.

The Huqoq synagogue sits in the Galilee, three miles west of Magdala and Capernaum. Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has led an international excavation there since 2011. In Magness’s words, the mosaics “revolutionize our understanding of Judaism in this period.” The synagogue was built in the late fourth to early fifth century CE. Its floor holds one of the most varied programs of mosaic imagery found in any ancient synagogue.

The subjects range wide, and these are only some of them. Samson appears, one of only two known depictions of him in an ancient synagogue (the other is at nearby Khirbet Wadi Hamam), including the scene of Samson tying torches between the tails of foxes. Deborah and Yael appear, from the Book of Judges, the earliest known depictions of these biblical women. There is Noah’s Ark. There is the Crossing of the Red Sea, with Pharaoh’s soldiers drowning and being swallowed by fish. There is the Tower of Babel, a zodiac with Sol-Helios, and Jonah being swallowed by a series of three increasingly large fish. One panel depicts a meeting between a high priest in Jewish vestments and a Greek ruler with war elephants. Some read it as the legendary meeting between the High Priest and Alexander the Great. The panel’s own publishers read it as a Seleucid-era episode. That panel is the first historical episode, rather than a purely biblical one, ever found in an ancient synagogue mosaic.

The finds document several points. Biblical heroines such as Deborah and Yael were depicted in synagogue art. According to the excavators, the villagers of Huqoq flourished under early fifth-century Christian rule. The range of subjects was also wider than the previously known sites suggested.

The mosaic photographs are held by the excavation’s photographer and are not in the public domain. To see the finds and read the project’s own account of each panel, visit the Huqoq Excavation Project (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

Galilean and Golan synagogue architecture

Capernaum, Bar’am, and the type.

The mosaic floors document the iconographic record. The architecture holds a parallel record. Archaeologists call it the Galilean-type synagogue, best preserved at Capernaum but documented at Bar’am, Korazin, Meiron, Nabratein, Gush Halav, Arbel, and a dozen other sites. The type has its own visual identity: monumental three-doored facades facing Jerusalem, large hewn stone blocks, flagstone floors, stone benches along the side walls, columned interiors, and carved relief decoration on lintels, friezes, capitals, and architraves. The Capernaum synagogue is sometimes called the “White Synagogue” because its white limestone stands out against the black basalt of the town around it. It rose over an earlier basalt building.

The relief carving at Capernaum, Korazin, and Bar’am repeats a set of motifs, a Jewish iconographic vocabulary in stone. There are menorot and shofarot. There is the Ark of the Covenant on wheels, an image of the portable sanctuary. There are palm trees and grape clusters, and the Star of David as a geometric motif, long before it became the modern national symbol. Lions of Judah flank the Torah ark in formal heraldic pairs. Amphorae, storage jars, appear as well. These are the same motifs that appear on the floor mosaics. Stone carvers and mosaicists drew on one shared set of Jewish symbols.

The catacombs of Rome: Jewish symbols outside the homeland. Outside the homeland, the visual record of Jewish life in late antiquity is preserved most extensively in the Jewish catacombs of Rome. Six catacombs are documented: Monteverde, Vigna Randanini, Villa Torlonia, Vigna Cimarra, Via Labicana, and Via Appia Pignatelli. Two are currently accessible. Together they contain more than 500 inscribed epitaphs, written in koine Greek, in Latin, and bilingually. That is the largest single corpus of Jewish inscriptions from antiquity outside the homeland. Some of the catacombs also hold painted chambers decorated with menorot, shofarot, lulavim, etrogim, ritual objects, and the Torah ark. The menorah appears with such consistency here that some archaeologists argue that the menorah’s status as the principal symbol of the Jewish people, after the Temple’s destruction, was consolidated in the Roman diaspora rather than in the homeland.

The illuminated Hebrew manuscript

A medieval continuation of an ancient visual tradition.

The visual tradition documented at Dura-Europos, Hammath Tiberias, Beth Alpha, Sepphoris, and Huqoq did not stop in late antiquity. It moved into the codex. From at least the tenth century onward, Jewish communities produced Hebrew manuscripts as illuminated and decorated books. They made them in the lands of Islam, especially Egypt, the Holy Land, Yemen, and the Maghreb. They made them in Sephardic Spain and Provence, and in Ashkenazic central and northern Europe, the two great regional Jewish traditions defined later on this page. The forms varied with the surrounding visual culture, but the project was continuous: the Hebrew word, written and ornamented, as the central object of a visual tradition.

Among the best-known illuminated Hebrew manuscripts is the Sarajevo Haggadah (a Haggadah is the book read aloud at the Passover seder meal), produced in Catalonia, probably Barcelona, around 1350. It may have been made as a wedding gift for a Jewish family with ties to the rulers of Aragon. It opens with thirty-four pages of full-page illuminations of biblical scenes. They run from the seven days of Creation through Adam and Eve, the Cain and Abel narrative, the Lot story, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Joseph cycle, to the Exodus, the Crossing of the Red Sea, and Moses’s blessing. Then comes the Haggadah text itself, hand-written on bleached calfskin vellum in the square Hebrew script characteristic of medieval Spain. The book’s later life is a story of its own. It probably left Iberia with the Jews expelled in 1492, and it surfaced in Italy in the sixteenth century. The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo acquired it in 1894. During the Nazi occupation in 1942, the museum’s chief librarian, Derviš Korkut, smuggled it out, and a Muslim cleric hid it in the mosque of a remote mountain village. It was hidden again during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. It is now displayed in a climate-controlled vault at the museum, and it was inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2017.

The Sarajevo Haggadah belongs to a group of about ten surviving fourteenth-century Spanish illuminated Haggadot. The group includes the Golden Haggadah (Catalonia, c. 1320, now British Library), the Rylands Haggadah (Catalonia, c. 1330), the Sister Haggadah (Catalonia, mid-14th century, now British Library), and the Kaufmann Haggadah (Catalonia, late 14th century, now Hungarian Academy of Sciences). All share a common structural feature: a full-page biblical picture cycle before the Haggadah text proper.

Outside Spain, the most distinctive Ashkenazic illuminated manuscript is the Bird’s Head Haggadah, produced in the Upper Rhine region of southern Germany around 1300 (now Israel Museum, Jerusalem). It is one of the oldest surviving Ashkenazic Haggadot. Its human figures are rendered with the heads of birds. Scholars have read that stylization in several ways. Some see a conservative response to the Second Commandment’s prohibition on representational images. Others see a marker of Jewish identity in a region where church rules that followed the Fourth Lateran Council’s dress decree (1215) required Jews to wear the conical “Jew’s hat.” The figures wear that hat on their bird heads. Still others read the bird heads as a device with several meanings at once.

Other major Hebrew illuminated manuscripts survive as well. The Leningrad Codex (Cairo, 1008/1009 CE) is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, with sixteen full carpet pages in micrographic decoration. The Aleppo Codex (Tiberias, c. 930 CE) is regarded as the most authoritative manuscript of the Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew text of the Bible. The Damascus Crown (Burgos, c. 1260) is an illuminated Hebrew Bible now at the National Library of Israel. The Rothschild Mahzor was made in Florence in 1492. The Rothschild Miscellany (Northern Italy, c. 1480) is perhaps the most sumptuously illuminated Hebrew manuscript of the Renaissance, with over 800 illuminations.

Micrography

The Hebrew word as visual form.

One visual tradition developed inside Hebrew manuscript culture and became a distinctively Jewish art. It is called micrography: drawing with minute Hebrew script. The script is often the text of the Masorah, the body of traditional notes on the spelling, pronunciation, and accentuation of the Hebrew Bible. Scribes used it to form abstract decorative patterns, geometric carpet pages, architectural designs, animals, plants, and sometimes full figurative scenes. The text is fully legible. The image is built from the words themselves.

The technique is traditionally traced to the Cairo Codex of the Prophets. That book’s own colophon dates it to 895–896 CE and attributes it to Moshe ben Asher in Tiberias, though later scholars have questioned both the date and the attribution. Micrography emerged among the Masoretic scribes of Tiberias and Egypt in the late ninth and tenth centuries. They used the technique to record and decorate the masoretic apparatus around the biblical text. From there it spread across the Jewish world. In Yemen it became a highly developed art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The British Library’s MS Or. 2348, a Yemenite Pentateuch of 1469, includes a decorated page of ten fish drawn in micrographic verses from the Book of Psalms. In Sephardic Spain, micrography decorated some of the Catalan Haggadot. In Ashkenazic Germany and France, the so-called Masorah figurata tradition produced figurative scenes built from biblical and masoretic text.

What is inside a synagogue

The same essential elements, in every era.

Traditional synagogues, across eras and regions, share a set of essential elements. Their arrangement varies, but the elements recur.

The Ark (aron kodesh, “holy ark”) is the cabinet that holds the Torah scrolls. It is typically built into the wall facing Jerusalem: east in Europe and the Americas, north in Yemen, west in Iran. The orientation is intentional: the congregation faces Jerusalem during the central prayers. The ark is often the most ornate element in the building, with carved wooden doors, an embroidered curtain (parochet) in front, and a crown above. Inside are the Torah scrolls themselves, each handwritten on parchment by a trained scribe over the course of about a year.

The Bimah is the raised platform from which the Torah is read aloud. In classic Ashkenazi practice it stands in the center of the room, and in the Spanish-Portuguese rite at the far end facing the ark. Placing it on a platform beside the ark is a nineteenth-century modernization now common in American synagogues. The reader places the Torah on the bimah, opens it, and chants from it using a system of musical notation called cantillation, a melodic tradition passed down orally for many centuries.

The Ner Tamid (eternal lamp) hangs in front of the ark. It is kept lit continuously, day and night, as a deliberate echo of the perpetual lamp the Torah commanded for the Tabernacle and Temple. It was once placed in a niche in the synagogue’s western wall, recalling where the menorah stood in the Temple, and later hung before the ark. Traditionally an oil lamp, today it is usually electric, but the symbolism and the custom that it never go out are the same.

The Menorah. The seven-branched menorah was the central candelabrum of the Jerusalem Temple, carried away by Titus’s legions in 70 CE. Its image survives on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Rabbinic law forbids replicating the Temple’s lamp, a functioning seven-branched metal menorah, so a synagogue’s working lamps carry a different number of branches, while seven-branched menorot appear freely as ornament and symbol. The nine-branched Hanukkiah, lit during the eight days of Hanukkah, the winter festival recalling the rededication of the Temple in the 160s BCE, is a separate ritual object.

The Mezuzah is a small case affixed to the doorposts of a Jewish home. (A synagogue, not being a dwelling, is technically exempt, though many affix one.) Inside it is a small parchment scroll bearing two passages from Deuteronomy, including the Shema, the central declaration of Jewish monotheism. The word mezuzah simply means “doorpost.” It is touched in passing, with the fingertips brought to the lips, by many observant Jews.

Seating. In most synagogues, the congregation sits facing the ark, meaning, ultimately, facing Jerusalem. Orthodox synagogues seat men and women separately, divided by a partition called a mechitzah. Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist synagogues generally seat men and women together. In medieval Italian and Ottoman synagogues, women often sat in a separate gallery upstairs.

How a service operates

Ten adults, a Torah, and a weekly cycle.

A traditional Jewish service requires a minyan: a quorum of ten adult Jews. (Orthodox practice counts only men. Conservative and other movements count adults of any gender.) The Talmud derives the number ten from the word “congregation,” which the Torah uses of the ten spies (Megillah 23b). Without a minyan, certain central prayers cannot be recited, including the Kaddish, the prayer recited by mourners. In practice, a minyan needed ten adult Jews (ten men, in Orthodox communities) living within walking distance of one another, and communities organized themselves around it.

The standard weekly cycle of services follows this pattern. Morning service (Shacharit), afternoon service (Mincha), and evening service (Ma’ariv) are recited daily, with the Torah also read on Monday and Thursday mornings. On the Sabbath, from sunset Friday to nightfall Saturday, these services are expanded. The central event of the week, the public reading of the weekly Torah portion (parashah), takes place on Saturday morning, and a fourth service, Musaf (the “additional” service), follows it. Today the entire Torah is read this way over a one-year cycle in traditional synagogues around the world. In antiquity, communities in the Land of Israel followed a longer cycle of about three years. Today’s cycle is synchronized: apart from stretches when Israel and the diaspora fall a week apart because of the festival calendar, the same passage is read on the same Sabbath in traditional synagogues the world over.

The service is led by a prayer leader (chazan or cantor). No ordination is required. Any knowledgeable congregant can lead, though the chazan has been a recognized communal office since the early Middle Ages. In larger synagogues, a professional cantor is employed for musical leadership, especially of the Sabbath and holiday services. A rabbi may give a sermon (drash), but the rabbi’s traditional role is that of scholar, teacher, and decisor (judge) of Jewish law rather than priest. The synagogue service does not require a rabbi to be present at all.

Types and traditions

Three regional streams, plus modern movements.

Jewish religious tradition is often grouped into three main regional streams, each with its own liturgical text, melodies, ritual variations, and architectural conventions.

Ashkenazi tradition developed among the Jews of the Rhineland, France, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. The historical vernacular was Yiddish. The liturgical melody and pronunciation are distinct. So are the cycle of religious poetry (piyyutim) and many ritual customs.

Sephardi tradition developed among the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. After the 1492 expulsion from Spain, it carried into the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, the Netherlands, and the Americas. The historical vernacular was Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). The liturgical melody differs from Ashkenazi tradition. So do the pronunciation of Hebrew and several ritual practices.

Mizrahi tradition covers the Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That includes the Iraqi, Yemenite, Persian, Bukharan, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, Libyan, Syrian, and Egyptian communities. They are diverse, and each has its own ritual customs. Most North African and Levantine communities absorbed the Sephardi rite after 1492, which is why many North African Jews also call themselves Sephardi. The Yemenite Baladi rite kept its own form. Outside these three traditions, the Romaniote Jews of Greece and the Italian Jews also kept rites of their own.

Modern denominational movements grew up within these traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They arose primarily in the Ashkenazi world. Increasingly, though, they reach across all traditions. Orthodox Judaism observes traditional Jewish law (halakha) as binding. Reform Judaism began in early-nineteenth-century Germany. It treats halakha as historically contingent and emphasizes prophetic ethics. Conservative Judaism (in the United States) and Masorti (elsewhere) developed in the late nineteenth century. They retain halakha but allow for historical evolution and modern adaptation. Reconstructionist Judaism was formalized in twentieth-century America. It treats Judaism as an evolving religious civilization. Each movement has its own associated synagogues, prayer books, and ritual conventions. Each also regards itself as part of one Jewish people.

Architecture across the diaspora

The institution is constant. The building is local.

Synagogue architecture can be compared across regions. The interior elements (ark, bimah, ner tamid, orientation toward Jerusalem) are constant. The exterior frequently mirrors the surrounding civilization’s vernacular: Gothic in medieval Prague (the Altneuschul), Mudejar in fourteenth-century Toledo (El Tránsito), Georgian in eighteenth-century Newport (Touro Synagogue), Moorish Revival in nineteenth-century New York (Eldridge Street). The institution stays the same, and the building responds to local time and place.

A tour of synagogues across the diaspora is also a tour of the architectural history of the regions where Jews lived. The Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City (destroyed by the Jordanian Arab Legion in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and reconstructed in 2010) is built in the Ottoman-influenced style of nineteenth-century Jerusalem. The Great Synagogue of Florence (1882) is Moorish revival. The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest (1859) is the largest in Europe and combines Romantic and Moorish elements. Each is a synagogue, with the same ark, the same Torah, and the same weekly reading. Each is also a building shaped by its city.

Several of the synagogues discussed here are explored in greater depth in the Virtual Field Trips collection, where their architecture, objects, and historical context can be examined in place. →

Object Spotlight

The Dura-Europos synagogue, sealed 256 CE.

Look at the wall before you label it. A woman stands waist-deep in a river, lifting a tiny baby from the water. Other figures wait on the bank. It is painted in flat, bright colors, the figures outlined and frontal, more like a storyboard than a photograph. The scene is the rescue of the infant Moses, and it is painted directly onto the plaster wall of a room, the way you might paint a mural.

That room was a synagogue, a Jewish house of prayer and study, in a frontier town called Dura-Europos, on the edge of the Roman Empire in what is now Syria. The paintings are frescoes, pictures done on a wall while or after the plaster sets. The walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with people: Abraham, Moses, Queen Esther, the prophet Ezekiel, King David, dozens of biblical scenes full of human figures, painted around 244 CE.

For a long time people assumed that the Second Commandment, the ban on graven images, had stopped ancient Jews from making religious pictures of people, that Judaism was a religion of words and never of images. Dura-Europos is direct evidence against that assumption: an entire synagogue, painted wall to wall with figures by its own Jewish community.

Look closer at one recurring detail: in several scenes a single disembodied hand reaches down from the top edge, the “Hand of God.” It shows God acting without drawing God’s body, and the same device would later turn up in Christian art.

The way it survived is its own story. Around 256 CE the town was under siege. To brace the city wall, the defenders packed earth against the buildings along it, burying the synagogue and its paintings. The town fell, was abandoned, and the dirt sat undisturbed for nearly seventeen centuries until archaeologists uncovered it in 1932 and 1933. The paintings came out largely intact and were moved to the National Museum in Damascus, where the room was rebuilt. Yale University Art Gallery holds full-size painted copies made at the dig. The site itself, back in Syria, was severely damaged and looted during the Syrian civil war. The siege preserved the most complete record of ancient Jewish painting known today.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History & Belief Systems: Judaism beside Christianity and Islam, with the synagogue as the comparative anchor.
• Ancient & Classical History: the synagogue’s emergence in the Second Temple period and its new role after 70 CE.
• United States History: immigration-era America through the Eldridge Street Synagogue (1887), with the colonial-era congregations treated in the American Jewry Chapter.
• Art History & Museum Education: Dura-Europos, the Galilean mosaics, micrography, and synagogue architecture across the diaspora.
• Archaeology: the excavated synagogues at Dura-Europos, Sepphoris, and Huqoq.
• Historical Thinking: how one well-preserved find can overturn an assumption, and the continuity of an institutional form across two millennia.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.2 (Belief Systems) and 9.3 (the classical world).
• NYS United States History: 11.1 (colonial foundations) and 11.5 (immigration and industrial America).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.2 (central ideas of primary sources): the Sepphoris floor inscriptions and the Dura-Europos Torah niche.
• C3 Framework: Dimension 2 (D2.His.2 and D2.His.14: continuity and change across the institution’s form).

Further Teaching Resources