Dozens of ancient synagogue buildings have been discovered around the Mediterranean and Near East. One of the first such buildings to be found — and, arguably, the most spectacular — came to light in the 1932 excavations at Dura Europos. Dura Europos was a caravan city by the Euphrates River (in modern Syria). Originally founded in the Hellenistic period, the city later came under Parthian control and finally was occupied by the Romans, until it was destroyed by the Sasanid Persians in 256 C. E. The synagogue was installed in a house on the western side of the city. During the Sasanid siege, the inhabitants piled an earthen rampart against the inside of the city's fortification wall to buttress it. The synagogue was buried under the rampart, preserving the mud-brick walls and the wall paintings covering them. The paintings were divided into three registers, with each register containing panels with biblical scenes. A Torah shrine niche built into the western (Jerusalem-oriented) wall was also decorated with paintings, including a depiction of the Jerusalem temple and the binding or offering of Isaac. The extensive painted program in the Dura synagogue has been the subject of much scholarly interpretation and debate. Presumably other ancient synagogues had similar painted programs, but unfortunately, their wall paintings have not survived.
The largest ancient synagogue building discovered so far is located at Sardis, in central western Asia Minor (Turkey). It came to light in the 1960s during excavations in a Roman civic bath-and-gymnasium complex. The ancient Jewish community acquired a room in the complex and converted it into a synagogue by installing liturgical furniture, including two Torah shrines flanking the main doorway, a marble table on which the Torah scrolls could be opened and read, and benches. The synagogue was decorated lavishly with mosaic floors resembling carpets and colored marble panels covering the walls. Scholars estimate that the hall could have held up to 1,000 congregants!
In the early 1960s, the construction of a road to the Leonardo de Vinci airport brought to light a synagogue in Rome's ancient port city of Ostia. Like the synagogues at Sardis and Dura Europos, the Ostia synagogue was installed in a pre-existing building — a house or possibly a collegial hall (a hall belonging to a guild or social club) — that was converted for use by the addition of liturgical furniture, including a Torah shrine. Dozens of other examples of Diaspora synagogue buildings or architectural fragments and inscriptions belonging to synagogues exist at sites around the Roman world.
Sidebar: Women in Ancient Synagogues
For a long time scholars assumed that women played little, if any, role in ancient synagogues. In some archaeological reports, the second-story gallery found in a few synagogue buildings is described as a “women's gallery," on analogy with contemporary Orthodox synagogues. However, rabbinic literature says little about the participation of women in synagogues, and we know even less about the ancient liturgy. We do not know to what extent women participated in synagogue services, and, if they did participate, whether they were segregated from the men. In the 1980s a scholar named Bernadette Brooten published a book called Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue. She documented about two dozen of ancient inscriptions that refer to women with Jewish leadership titles including archisynagogos (leader of the synagogue). Brooten argued that if we assume such titles are not merely honorific but indicate real leadership roles for men, the same must be true for women. Brooten's book created a paradigm shift in the field of synagogue studies, and it is still widely cited as authoritative.
Brooten's work was a product of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the theoretical models that inform it are outdated by today's standards. For example, there is no need to assume that these titles were functional rather than honorific for men or women. The possibility that these titles were
Honorific — bestowed on wealthy patrons and their families — is suggested by the discovery of a few inscriptions in which young children hold titles such as leader of the synagogue. Furthermore, Brooten considered the body of evidence as a whole, rather than distinguishing between inscriptions from different centuries and different parts of the Mediterranean. Inscriptions naming women with leadership titles generally date to the fourth and fifth centuries, and most of them come from western Asia Minor and the Aegean (with no examples from Palestine). This evidence suggests that the status of women within Jewish communities varied, and that some women might have enjoyed more prominence in the synagogue setting in western Asia Minor. It is important to bear in mind that even so, only a small number of women — all of whom belonged to the upper class — attained any prominence.
World History
