Synagogue

UNEARTHING THE SYNAGOGUE

In 1932–33, the sixth season of Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters’ excavation project at Dura-Europos, the team made an extraordinary discovery within the earth of the embankment along the city’s western fortification wall: a synagogue with elaborately painted wall and ceiling decoration. 

The building covered an entire city block, just north of the western wall’s main gate (the Palmyrene Gate). Much of the excavation of this structure was overseen by Count Robert du Mesnil du Buisson, who had been appointed by the French Academy as associate director of the excavation.

In the following year, Yale University sent Herbert Gute, a recent graduate from the Yale School of Fine Arts, to Dura-Europos to copy the synagogue’s wall paintings before Henry Pearson, another member of the Yale team, removed them from the walls. The original paintings from the synagogue eventually went to the National Museum in Damascus, but the entire set of Gute’s copies went to Yale.

The synagogue began as a private house that was converted into a meeting place for the Jewish community during the Romans’ occupation of Dura-Europos, sometime between A.D. 165 and 200. It was renovated, enlarged, and elaborately decorated in a later phase of construction, dated by an Aramaic inscription to A.D. 244/45.

One of the oldest known synagogues, the structure is unique because of its remarkable preservation and the cycle of figural images painted on its walls. The building features a large private residence, which provided access to a forecourt. At least part of the house probably served as guest quarters for travelers visiting the synagogue.

From the forecourt, worshippers were able to enter the assembly room, which featured a Torah shrine in the middle of the western wall (according to Judaic tradition, the most important wall, as it faces Jerusalem). The shrine was painted with faux-marble decoration, geometric patterns, and clusters of pomegranates, grapes, oranges, and cedar cones.

The walls of the assembly room were covered with painted scenes, arranged in three levels, including narrative images as well as single figures from the Old Testament. There are fifty-eight images preserved in all, probably representing about 60 percent of the original number. 

The pictorial sequence in the Dura-Europos synagogue is surprising to many scholars, given the prohibition against figural imagery in the Jewish tradition. Study of this building and its decoration has fundamentally altered our understanding of religious iconography and the development of Judaism in antiquity.

The ceiling of the synagogue’s assembly room was also elaborately decorated. Wooden beams supported the flat roof and held rows of baked clay tiles. Each tile was about 16 inches square and 2 inches thick. A total of 234 complete or fragmentary tiles were discovered in the excavation of the synagogue, just over half of the estimated 450 tiles that would have originally formed the ceiling of the space.

The tiles were painted with a wide variety of decorative motifs, including personifications, astrological symbols, animals, flowers, fruit, grain, apotropaic designs to ward off evil, and inscriptions (in both Aramaic and Greek). 

The construction and decoration of the synagogue’s ceiling is not unique; similar ceiling tiles were found in several other buildings at Dura-Europos, including the nearby and virtually contemporary House of the Scribes. This use of comparable materials indicates that, rather than being set apart, the synagogue fit into the overall architectural fabric of the city.

The presence of a prominent synagogue in close proximity to other religious buildings supports the theory that there was a mutual respect among many of the different religious groups in the city. The scenario at Dura-Europos is paralleled in other cities throughout the Roman Empire where Jewish communities have been identified.

When the Dura-Europos synagogue paintings were executed in the mid-third century A.D., Jews were not persecuted in the Roman Empire, nor were they isolated. They constructed major synagogues in several of the big cities of the realm, and some of those synagogues were near churches or pagan sanctuaries. At Dura-Europos, the large and elaborately decorated synagogue suggests that members of the Jewish community made no effort to keep a low profile but instead interacted with many of the other religious and cultural groups in the city.

VISUALIZING THE SYNAGOGUE WALL PAINTINGS

In the mid-third century A.D., not long after the construction of the synagogue, Roman Dura-Europos was besieged by Sasanians. In a defensive effort, the Roman soldiers built a large earthen embankment along the western wall of the city, burying the buildings that were located there, including the synagogue. 

The embankment preserved almost the entire western wall of the synagogue’s assembly room, including its central Torah shrine and surrounding paintings. The northern and southern walls are preserved to the height of a sloping line that marks the upper edge of the embankment (visible in the image at right), as is the lower part of the eastern wall. 

Each of these walls, as well as the ceiling, were covered in decorative paintings. The wall paintings of the synagogue were arranged in horizontal registers, with rectangular panels bordered by ornamental bands. The subjects of the scenes draw from the Old Testament and represent one of the earliest known examples of biblical images depicted in a Jewish context.

Following the discovery of the synagogue, Yale University sent Herbert Gute, a recent graduate from the School of Fine Arts, to Dura-Europos to copy the wall paintings before architect Henry Pearson initiated the task of removing them from the walls. Yale received the entire set of Gute’s copies, which document the original paintings that were eventually moved to the National Museum in Damascus.

The painting above the Torah niche is the oldest of the murals and was painted in the A.D. 240s. Directly in the center of the painting is a representation of a temple with the Ark of the Covenant inside. To the right of the temple is a scene showing Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, and to the left are evocative emblems of Judaic ritual, including a lighted menorah.

The wall paintings surrounding the Torah shrine include a wide variety of biblical scenes, but scholars have yet to reach a consensus about the content of the iconography.

These paintings seem to include representations of Solomon receiving the Queen of Sheba; the Exodus and Crossing of the Red Sea; the wilderness encampment and the miraculous Well of Be’er; the consecration of the Tabernacle; a temple, whose precise identity is still debated; the Ark in the land of the Philistines; Elijah reviving the widow’s child; Mordecai and Esther; Samuel anointing David; and the finding of Moses. Centered above the shrine were King David and the generations of Israel, flanked by panels of single figures, generally identified as Moses, Ezra, and Abraham. 

Other biblical scenes such as the vision of Ezekiel and Hannah and the child Samuel at Shiloh adorned the remaining walls, although little was preserved of the synagogue’s east side, opposite the Torah shrine.

The style of the synagogue paintings and sculpture is typical of art in other contemporary buildings at Dura-Europos; it is likely that here, as in other cities across the Roman Empire, artists and workshops were commissioned to create for a range of patrons.

Although some figures, such as individuals like Moses, Ezra, and Abraham, are slightly Hellenistic Greek in style, the rest wear Persian garments, displaying little that is reminiscent of Greco-Roman art. This is in striking contrast to figural representations in cities like Antioch, where the Greek artistic tradition remained strong. The American archaeologist James Henry Breasted, who was the first to publish the Dura-Europos wall paintings, called the paintings “the oriental forerunners of Byzantine painting.” The paintings certainly show a preference for frontal poses, schematic rendering of the human figure, and attention to decorative detail and linear pattern at the expense of naturalistic proportions, anatomical veracity, and movement, all of which can be described as Eastern traits.

The most striking element of the decoration is the presence of figural paintings. The paintings were surprising to scholars since many thought that early synagogue decoration adhered to the prohibition against figural images in the biblical second commandment.

Although few synagogues with such painted decoration are known, recent discoveries of figural mosaics in early synagogues in Israel suggest that the Dura-Europos example is not unprecedented. Furthermore, elaborate cycles of wall paintings are characteristic of other religious buildings at Dura-Europos, and their use in the synagogue could be explained as conformity to local custom. Additionally, the members of the congregation may have been making a distinction between statues or cult images that were regarded as embodiments of the deity and actually worshipped, and paintings that conveyed messages of Jewish unity and redemption. Although we do not fully understand why, it is apparent that the Jewish community at Dura-Europos was exceptionally liberal in its attitude toward the scriptural injunction against images.