Schwab: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: I’m Yael Steiner and this week I have the distinct honor of being taught by Doctor Jonathan Schwab and I’m looking forward to hearing what you have for me Schwab
Yeah, was a quick, quick disclaimer when we say doctor, I am neither a medical doctor, nor a historian. My doctorate is in an unrelated field, higher education administration. But it’s just that nobody gets the wrong idea about what my.
Yael: Don’t diminish your accomplishments.
Schwab: It’s extremely important you don’t volunteer on an airplane when they say, is there a doctor on board?
Schwab: If the reason they’re saying is there a doctor on board is they want to have a sense of, I don’t know, how changes in scholarship rates might change enrollment and retention in an institution, then I will raise my hand.
Yael: I’m sure that comes up a lot.
Schwab: Yes, yeah, yeah. That’s a come up. So we’re continuing our season here talking about objects and symbols. And the one we have today is a…
Schwab: Kind of different one. It’s also kind of a place. And I think this conversation will take us to a lot of interesting places within it. Yael, I’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think fair to say you’ve been to a synagogue in your life.
Yael: I’ve been to several.
Schwab: Several. OK, great. You’ve probably not been to the synagogue that we’re going to talk about today, but it does, I think, say a lot and is going to give us a lot to think about when we think about the role and place of a synagogue in Jewish life.
Yael: Okay, I’m excited to hear. I just want to throw out there, by the way, I don’t want it to seem like I was bragging, like I’m not a three times a day shul-goer. So I don’t want anyone to think I was in a synagogue today, because I most definitively was not.
Schwab: Okay, good to know. Thank you for that disclaimer.
Yael: That’s getting cut.
Schwab: That question actually I think will maybe get there in the conversation of how often and what percentage of a Jewish population of an area goes to synagogue. How important is that?So the synagogue we’re gonna talk about, I really wanna get to talking about it and talking about the design of it and what we know about it and what we can glean from that and what it tells us. But like so many things we’ve discussed this season, there is an amazing story behind its preservation and discovery. It’s not the main story here, but I really want to talk about it for a few minutes. because it’s a really, really cool story and really relevant to it.
Yael: Amazing.
Where in the world are we?
Schwab: So great, we are in a it’s not really a town called Dura Europos, which is in eastern Syria. I assume you have not heard of it. Tell me if you have, I will be surprised.
Yael: I haven’t heard of it, but what I’m curious about is why it has the Europos sound name in it if it’s in Syria, which is to my understanding not in Europos.
Schwab: Okay, so.so, I think that this Europos name actually predates calling Europe, like they are both coming from the same Greek origin, but it’s not because of a connection to Europe. Europe was named this because of the same reason that it was named. So it has these two names, Dura Europos, this town, which is very much a part of it. It’s in the eastern part of Syria. It’s on the banks of the Euphrates River.
Schwab: If you’re trying to figure out where is this now, unfortunately a sad part of this story is that a lot of the important architectural sites were looted by ISIS, because this is very firmly in the middle of ISIS land now, like eastern part of Syria, western part of Iraq.
Yael: Got it. So not somewhere we’ll be vacationing soon.
Schwab: We’re not anytime soon, I think, going to visit the actual site of Dura Europos. So it’s this town that exists, and it’s for much of its history on the border between different empires. So it was established, I think, originally as Dura, but kind of changes hands between the different empires, the Parthians, the Greeks, the Romans, and it’s like changing hands because it’s exactly on the border between all these different empires, which also lends a lot to this eclectic, multilingual culture of this town. It’s not a particularly really important town in any way.
it was at some point part of the Silk Road, but this is not like a major, huge thoroughfare. We call it Dura Europos now just to clarify which place we’re talking about because there are multiple towns called Dura and there are multiple towns called Europos, but when we say Dura Europos, we’re talking about this specific place. So in the third century, it has…
Like a mix of different populations. It has a Greek history and flavor to it. It has Roman soldiers stationed there. It’s on the eastern boundary of the Roman Empire there there is a Jewish minority in the city.
Yael: When you say there’s a Jewish minority in the city, you mean during like the Hellenistic period, how far back are we going when we talk about this?
Schwab: Great question, I’ll explain why we know exactly what the city looked like at a certain point, but I don’t think we know exactly when the Jews started arriving. know that sometime around, I think the first century or the second century, a synagogue was established. This town.looks a lot, I don’t know, familiar to us as New Yorkers, like the Romans planned it out along a grid, so the city is like very neatly laid out with these like city blocks, grid areas, surrounded by a wall. And maybe the original city planners didn’t take this into consideration, but there were a lot of houses of worship, but it seems like the houses of worship started out as houses that were then converted to these. So there’s a house that was turned into a church, a house that was turned into a synagogue, houses that were turned into to temples for Zeus, multiple Zeus temples, a Zoroastrian temple, like a couple of other ones, right? So it’s like, you know, this diverse town and it’s got a lot of different, you know, religious houses of worship within the town.
Yael:Nice. And. in the Ashkenazi world or more Yeshivish world, if any of our listeners are familiar with that, I would say it sounds similar to what we would call a shteeble.
Schwab: Yes, yeah, that’s a good way to think this. Obviously, we’re talking about the 200s. So this is predating Yiddish and even the existence of Ashkenazi Judaism. yes, start right. It’s built into a house. then, presumably as the Jewish population expanded at some point, this synagogue, this shul, if you will, although certainly would not have been called that.
Yael: So ashkinormative of you.
Schwab: Yes, yes,
yeah. It was renovated and expanded, so there was another building incorporated into it. We don’t know for sure, but we’re pretty confident that the reason it was expanded, it was to accommodate more Jews. There were more Jews in the town, or more Jews were coming to worship, and they needed more space in the synagogue.
Yael: Was there building fund?
Schwab: Okay, so like there’s so much to get and we’re just like, okay I have to lay out a bunch of things that are but there there are so many parts of this synagogue that are so Identifiable to us today and of course there were inscriptions and donors and like there are not plaques in the way we would see about them now but like yes, there was funds raised by the community there was an important person who was sort of like the patron of the of this synagogue like we yeah, okay,
Yael: Sorry, I’ll stop asking questions.
Schwab: We’re going to talk so much more about the synagogue. I want to say why we know so much about it. So this synagogue was renovated in, I think it’s 244, expanded in a whole number of beautiful ways in 255 or 256. Again, it’s on the eastern boundary of the Roman Empire. The Sassanid Persian Empire is expanding its boundaries and encroaching. And the Roman soldiers posted in Dura Europos want to defend the city.
Sassanids are great at breaching walls of, yeah, I refer to it as a city, it’s a town. Like I really don’t want to, like overemphasize, like we’re not talking about a huge number of people. But the Romans know that the Persians, I did not know this, but now you’ll notice Sassanid Persians were great at breaching fortified walls. So the Romans were constantly thinking of ways to like make stronger and better walls.
So their idea that they come up with to stronger fortify the wall, the way the city was laid out, like I said, there’s city blocks and then the houses or buildings closest to the wall, there’s a street between those buildings and the wall.
Yael: Mm-hmm. Right, obviously.
Schwab: Which archaeologists refer to as Wall Street, because that makes sense. think that’s why Wall Street in New York City is also named that. There was a wall there at one point.
Yael: Schwab: So to fortify the wall, the Roman soldiers say, OK, here’s what we’re going to do to make sure that this wall isn’t going to collapse. We are going to excavate huge amounts of earth, a lot of which is desert sand, fill in this entire wall between the buildings and the wall like this. Sorry, this street like fill the whole thing up with with earth. And then also or is part of the same plan.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: get everybody out of the building adjacent to the wall, fill that up with earth also, and we’ll create like a super wall that’s much, much thicker, that’s just like really difficult to get through because it’s just tons and tons and tons of earth and sand. So they kick everybody out of the synagogue, I assume, and fill the entire thing up with sand and fill the street behind it, you know.
Yael: Okay.
Schwab: Between it and the wall up with sand. And this plan does not work. And the Sasanids conquer the town anyway.
Yael Okay. It was a valiant effort.
Schwab: And it was a valiant effort by our friends, the Romans. Good try, didn’t work. The Sasanids don’t really have any interest in the town. And it sort of just gets completely abandoned. And then because it’s in the desert, the sands of the desert, you know, shift and blow and the entire town ends up covered in sand and disappears under the dunes for 1700 years.
Yael: Wow. Okay, that is probably a great way to preserve a building.
Schwab: So right, so then in the 1930s, I think the British military post-World War I, they like kind of uncover this. They’re like, I guess there’s a town here of some sort. And as they get more scholars in, they realize what they’re looking at and they start excavating it. And when they take the sand out of the synagogue, they find that the synagogue has basically been preserved not in pristine condition, but in really, really, really great condition, considering, compared to other things of that era which were exposed to the elements for a millennia and a half.
Yael: The entire town was preserved this way, just the synagogue or the entire town. Got it.
Schwab: The synagogue, because it was adjacent to the wall, was filled up with sand first. So it’s very well preserved. A lot of the town is very well preserved, and other houses of worship are well preserved and are good things to compare the synagogue to. But a lot of the town is preserved in just really, really good condition.
Yael: Got it. Mm-hmm. I have a question. So in the first episode of this season, we talked about the Star of David and whether or not it was always inherently a Jewish symbol. And we talked about, okay, how later on in Jewish history, it’s used on buildings to denote a synagogue or a Jewish center. And I’m curious how we know this building was a synagogue.
Schwab: Yes. I love it. I, this morning, I had this question of just like, the Star of David. As far as I can tell, there was no Star of David among the many, many designs on this synagogue.
Yael: Yeah, I wouldn’t think so.
Schwab: We know it’s a synagogue because when they excavated it, in addition to just the structure itself being preserved, the walls, which were absolutely filled with, it’s hard to even, fully illustrate this picture, the walls were absolutely covered every inch with these gorgeous paintings of biblical scenes, of lots of things. Like there is zero question this was a synagogue. We absolutely are 100% sure like this was a Jewish place of worship based on everything we found in it.
Yael: And I guess because of the age, we assume it’s not a Christian place of worship, because if it’s first or second century, Christianity is not yet fully developed enough for these to have been their paintings.
Schwab: Okay, there also is a church in Dura-Europos. So we do have like a comparison. It is the oldest house church like preserved in the world. The Dura Eropos Church is also significant as a historical artifact of just
Yael: Is this synagogue not the oldest preserved synagogue in the world?
Schwab: It depends, I guess, how you want to define it. It’s the oldest synagogue preserved at this level. There is nothing else like this that’s been preserved like this. And the paintings is something we’ll talk a lot about, but the paintings, because the synagogue was filled with sand, the paintings are in really great condition. When they were uncovered, the discoverers are looking at these paintings.
Yael: Got it. Okay.
Schwab: usually have paintings that are 1700 years old that we can look at because they fade.
Yael: So you know what they were painted with that they didn’t fade?
Schwab: Tempera I think
Yael: Okay. I’ve seen that word on paint before. I’m assuming they didn’t buy it at Michael’s. So it must be something that you can make naturally.
Schwab: In the town map, there’s a Michael’s. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, like these paintings are incredibly well preserved. And one of the writers writing about, you know, when it was discovered, as soon as they were exposed to light, the paintings started fading almost instantly.
Yael: so sad.
Schwab: So they, you know, tried to like capture it, preserve it, but like, they also could see like the, the outer layer of paint starting to faint and other paintings underneath that they were painted over starting to emerge. And yeah, like it’s really this almost magical story of like, what must it have been like to be there in this moment to just dig the past out of the desert and see it.
They have done a very good job of preserving. They have removed much of this from this site. The paintings were removed from the walls very carefully. It’s reconstructed in a museum, I think in Damascus. Also a place that I don’t think either of us is visiting anytime soon, but you can see this reconstruction of a lot of these things. You also can see it online, and we’ll put a link in the show notes, but you can take a digital tour and see a lot of these things for yourself and it really is worth looking at.
Yael: That’s really, really cool. Were the paintings, I’m assuming you’ve seen them, you’ve seen photos of them.
Schwab: I’ve seen photos of them, I’ve looked at them.
Yael: Are they more like hieroglyphics? Are they more like the Renaissance paintings? Do they look like, do the people look like what we look like? Do they look like the demons from the magic bowls? What do they look like?
Schwab: So great question. Let’s talk about what’s in these paintings. So these paintings were really significant in our view of Jewish art, because we actually don’t really have many things of this age that are like Jewish art. The style is an interesting mix, as is very typical for Duryuropos in this hybrid place between empires.
There’s clearly Greek and Roman influence. There’s clearly Persian influence. A lot of the paintings, almost all of them, are depicting biblical scenes, which is very interesting to see. Like, OK, it’s like, here’s Moses, but he’s dressed in Roman dress or Persian dress. Also really interesting because, and this is like the
Yael: Mm-hmm. That’s awesome. So cool.
Schwab: The more shocking or controversial part of it, we don’t usually do that in synagogues.
Yael: Yeah, I was not, you don’t often see murals on the walls of synagogues depicting biblical things. Like you might have a stained glass window of a Torah or something, you know, or a-
Schwab: Yeah, exactly. Or like figurative representations of the 12 tribes or of the holiday cycle. And this goes back to the second commandment. Of the 10 commandments, like you cannot have other gods, you should not make graven images, I think is the English translation. And there’s this very long Jewish tradition of like avoiding certain types of depictions of animals or humans, especially if it’s in a religious context. So most synagogues don’t have anything like this. And this synagogue is literally wall to wall pictures of humans and animals and portrayals of like people in biblical stories.
Yael: Interesting. I’m assuming there’s only a limited number of walls. What were the biblical stories that they found important enough to paint?
Schwab: All of them? Not all of the walls are preserved equally well, and not all of the paintings are clear exactly what they’re showing. Some of them are labeled, and there’s a whole interesting, I think, side discussion of just like, what’s the deal with all of these writings? Because a lot of the writings on the walls are after the paintings are finished. So is it like, it wasn’t clear, so someone labeled it. There’s a scholar by the name of Karen Stern, who’s a professor at Brooklyn College, and she’s done a lot of research on just these small inscriptions or writings that might look to us like graffiti, which seems just like the idea that people were walking into synagogue and writing on the walls, like, I was here, this is what’s going on.
Her theory, and she makes a very strong argument for this, is that actually that a lot of those writings were a form of devotion or a form of worship that seems far into us now, but was very much part of the practice then. Yeah, so a lot of these panels are labeled, a lot of it in Aramaic, but also a lot of labels in Greek, very little in Hebrew, interestingly.
Yael: Interesting.
Schwab: Seems like Aramaic was the main language. also Parthian or Palmyran, like languages I’ve never even heard of appear on the walls of the Duryiropos synagogue.
Yael: Is the use of the different languages how we are able to date the building or?
Schwab: Ah, great question. We basically know exactly when the building was filled in it and when this invasion occurred. Not from contemporary writings, but because the other objects that were found in the excavations are very clear. Like there’s like a coin that’s dated to a specific year, so we’re just like, okay, this like up and the Sasanid invasion was in 255 or 256.
Yael: Mm-hmm, got it.
Schwab: Like we know exactly when it happened. And we know the synagogue was renovated about 10 years or I think it was 244 because that is dated. Like this renovation was completed. Thanks to the generous donors, the Katz family and the Steinbergs, we completed the renovation. Any synagogue you go into in New York, you’re gonna find them.
Yael: Mm-hmm. Cornerstone. Those are very generous families. We used to have our Kiddish in the Katz lounge in the old building before the renovation.
Schwab: Classic. So yeah, like the old building, right? Then they turn, a whole theory also on just like the different outbuildings of this synagogue. Like, was one of them a women’s section? Was one of them like a sort of entrance way into the building? The jury, just on that, like it seems like the jury’s still out on what the seating arrangement was in the synagogue, which is really interesting, just like, was there separate seating or not? There’s no permanent separation, right? Which doesn’t mean that there wasn’t one, but like, there’s some scholars.
Yael: It could also mean that women never went to the synagogue and therefore there was no need for separate seating.
Schwab: Yeah, one of the scholars had a good argument for why it seems clear to us that women were coming to the synagogue. There were clearly two entry ways. It seems like there’s areas in the floor, like these holes in the floor that maybe were for poles that would have held up some sort of barrier to separate, but maybe not. There are two different types of benches.
Schwab: We love academics on this show.
Yael: We do.
Schwab: And it’s really interesting, but it’s one of those things where just when you’re describing it, it sounds almost comical. It was a scholar questioning an earlier estimate for how many people could sit in the synagogue. And he was using the updated methodology for ancient synagogue seating arrangements to argue that based on the space, this is how many people actually could be seated in the synagogue at one time, and were there different shifts as is common in many synagogues today? Like, well, we’re using the updated methodology, so I’m challenging the original assumption of based on this many square meters, how many people could fit, but also actually like,
Yael: Right, could be hashkama.
Schwab: One of the things that we’re interested in is how many Jews lived in Dura Europa and how many of them went to the synagogue.
Yael: Did we find any other synagogues or this was the only one that was identifiably Jewish? Also unusual, what kind of town only has one shul? Isn’t there need to be one that you go to and one you’ll never step foot in?
Schwab: This is the one synagogue. Obviously we’re talking about a very ancient… Yeah, that’s exactly where I was gonna go. This is a very ancient form of Judaism where we hadn’t yet adopted the practice of exactly that, of the shul that I go to and the shul I would never go to.
Yael: Like one of the things that is interesting about it, situating it in sort of what we know about contemporary synagogues, because we obviously have found synagogues of the same age not preserved at all in the same condition in Israel or in other areas of the Middle East. And I believe there’s one in Greece also, of around the same time.
The synagogue was a much more important center of Jewish communal life the farther you got from Israel, which makes a lot of sense.
Yael: It still is, I think, today.
Schwab: And it’s still, and more and more important as a center of Jewish life, the more removed you were from a larger community. So the Jews who were this small minority of Dura Europos, like the synagogue was very important to them. Whereas like Jews living in larger numbers in larger cities tended to either have multiple synagogues or other places of gathering or expression, but like this was the, like the thing.
Yael: Yeah, people don’t changeSo right, like this synagogue, this synagogue that’s so old isn’t there are some things about it that are so different, but there are some things about it that are like so familiar, like, we could walk, we could walk into this shul and like, you know, just start praying just like any other Shabbos.
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Yael: Mm-hmm. Do we have any sense of whether or not there was an ark for a Torah scroll?
Schwab: Yes, yes.
Yael: Amazing.
Schwab: So on the western wall of this synagogue, right, which like might give you pause for a second, I’m just like, exactly. We face, exactly, right, in New York, the eastern side is where people would face, but it’s on the western wall of this synagogue because it is east of Israel, so they would face west towards Israel.
Yael: Because it’s on the other side. We face east, but they face the other side.
Mm-hmm.
Schwab: On the Western wall, that is the most decorated wall, and smack in the middle of all the decoration is this niche that’s carved out into the wall that’s right exactly where you would expect it and right exactly the size that you would think. And we did not find a Torah scroll there, but that’s what that was, right? We are 99% sure.
Yael: Amazing. That is really cool.I am flabbergasted and astounded by this and really, really excited to take a look at the photos.
Schwab: Yeah, really amazing. So just going back to those for a second, just like the different paintings that there are, there’s like all the top hits, right? So like Abraham and the binding of Isaac, Jacob and the blessing of his sons, a ton of Moses and Exodus stuff, like Moses’ whole life is up there, right? Like from a baby, he’s in the water, he’s saved from the water, this is worth mentioning, by the daughter of Paro, as I assume you’re familiar from the story, right? Baby Moses is put in the river to protect him, and then he’s taken out of the water by Pharaoh’s daughter. Pharaoh’s daughter is depicted in this painting in the complete nude.
Yael: Yes. Okay?
Schwab: which like don’t see a lot of paintings of people in synagogues nowadays, certainly would be very surprised to see a nude woman in like the front of the synagogue in a painting.
Yael: Are there any other women depicted in any of the paintings? And are they all nude?
Schwab: There are so many women, Pharaoh’s daughter I think is the only one like in the full nude. But yeah, lots of paintings of women, lots of like, so tons of Moses.
Yael: Fascinating. Okay.
Schwab: Aaron, the temple, the ark, David being anointed as king. Like, the story of Esther, which I’m like, whoa, that’s so cool because they, like, they are, I mean, it’s not at the same time, it’s a couple of hundred years after, but like, they’re very familiar with the Persian Empire and Persians.
Yael: Yeah.
Schwab: So there’s a whole interesting analysis there of like in the depiction of Esther who’s wearing Persian dress and who’s wearing Roman dress and like, it’s really really really cool.
Yael: That’s really cool. I know that I’ve now said that 40 times and I apologize to our listeners, but it’s, it brings up a whole host of questions for me. I know obviously that our enemies on the internet and in the world don’t necessarily need logic or evidence to stake their claims, but this is just something that I would want to shove in the face of anyone who has any, puts any stock in the Khazarian hypothesis. Like, oh, there weren’t Jews before the year 700? There absolutely were.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And again, ieven though we don’t have paintings in synagogues today, it’s the same, like it’s the same stories. It’s the same things that we’re thinking about, a lot of the paintings in some of their details, in addition to the fascinating stuff about dress and how they’re like sort of cast as contemporary characters, a lot of the specifics of some of the paintings are not necessarily based just on the biblical text, but also draw from from midrashim again, which would be like familiar to us, is, which is also tells us something really important that this that this was in widespread use. This was at least for this community, but probably for others like this was the standard, the way that people were looking at and understanding these stories.
Yael: Mm-hmm. And what’s particularly amazing, and this is true of a lot of the things we talk about, but it’s standing out now in relief to me, is that this is all before the printing press.
Schwab: Way before the printing press. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Yael: So this is all before, significantly before, and this is all before widespread dissemination of the written word. So whether or not there was a Torah scroll in this synagogue, there likely, even if there was one, there likely was only one or very few. It’s not as though the masses had access to the written word. Probably a lot of people were not literate. I’m again, hypothesizing.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Right, that may be, yeah, and that might be one of the purposes that this served. That the paintings were clear, were not, this was not like, I don’t know if like your synagogue puts up like a sukkah or something and invites all the kids to come decorate it and the decorations are sort of like haphazard and whatever. Like the paintings were clearly very deliberately thought out, planned, painted by an expert artist, or we think likely at least two different artists.
Who we don’t know whether the artists themselves were Jewish.
There’s like some interesting questions there of some artistic style seem extremely similar to other houses of worship. So was it possible that there was like a very skilled artist who was given, you know, the commission to paint the synagogue, but also had the commission to paint the church or the other, you know, houses of worship.
Yael: Interesting.
Schwab: In addition to like, yes, to your point of just like, they serve some sort of educational purpose and way of sharing some of these stories. And that might be why some of these writings were later added to these inscriptions to sort of just say, this is this story. This is this story. And for some of the panels that we only have part of it or we don’t have those either, they weren’t labeled or we can’t read the labels, we’re not always sure what it’s depicting exactly because there’s a lot of them, like I said, and some of them are prophetic visions. There’s the vision of the dry bones. A lot of later prophets’ visions get pretty out there. So we don’t know always exactly what we’re looking at, but for most of them, we do.
Yael: Interesting. But there seem to be expressions of the full canon of Judaism.
Schwab: Yeah. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Yael: It’s not just Abraham, it’s also Ezra, it’s also Esther. It’s the entire scope of what we currently know to be biblical, Judaic history.
Schwab: Yes. And when we say the canon also, you know, just like sign, this is more in the realm of speculation, but like we know the Esther story. It’s so clear. There’s one panel that’s unlabeled that some scholars think is a depiction of the Maccabees and the Maccabean War, but there’s some disagreement about that. Like,
Yael: it seems like the people of Dura Europos had a very clear vision of the stories that were important and made sure that their entire community was able to access those stories, if not in text, then in art.
Let’s take a quick break.
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Schwab: Getting to another sort of controversial bit of here, in addition to the pictures, right, which is surprising, and especially the nude picture, some of the representations do seem like representations of other deities, either stylistically or…
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: Or like the way some of these things are presented and-
There are different approaches, I think, to how people are doing. Some of them are, there are biblical stories of the story of Elijah disproving the false prophets. interesting to me, because I never thought of it, but in disproving the false prophets, this artist chose to show those other gods the way that people would be familiar with those representations as a rejection of them.
Yael: Interesting.
Schwab: But there are weird, symbols, animals, things like that that like are, I don’t know, strange to see in a synagogue. Like it would be surprising, you know, to see that in a synagogue today. But part of it is it. And again, this is like a debate of the scholars, like we don’t we have these, these well-preserved buildings, but we don’t really have written accounts or anything like that. We can sort of only infer a lot. But it does seem like there’s some permeability between the different communities. And also based on some of these written inscriptions in the synagogue, it seemed like there were non-Jews who came to the synagogue sometimes. Were they greeted as visitors? Were they come? Were there also other people who like sometimes came to the synagogue and sometimes went other places? Like, and what does that mean?
We don’t know if that means they were worshiping in the synagogue or they were just visiting, you know, or that was just kind of like, the way things went down in Dura Europa, everyone’s hanging out in everybody else’s spaces.
Yael: Right. I was, we are on the eve of Passover as we record this, not the literal eve, but just a few days away. And I was talking to someone yesterday about, you know, eating matzah on Passover, someone who was in Jewish. And I said that I had a friend when I was in college who was very serious about Passover, but was not otherwise kosher. And I do remember one day sitting outside, eating matzah, eating a matzah sandwich for lunch. And this person coming over to me and also unwrapping his matzah sandwich, which was a ham and cheese matzah sandwich. So people then and now have their own ways of interpreting Jewish tradition and Jewish law. And it’s certainly possible that there were people who found meaning in both places or were from mixed families or, you know, who knows? There’s a whole host of reasons why that could be true.
Schwab: Yeah. Yes, exactly. We know that there’s a mix of different cultures and that’s always going to result in different people having different affiliations and understandings. I think it’s interesting, I don’t know, when I think about this synagogue today, especially you and I as New Yorkers, tend to live in communities, like you said, where there are a lot of distinct synagogues and you’re able to go to a synagogue with a lot of very like-minded people. But this was the one synagogue in this community, it needed to serve some spectrum of Jews, right? Like some wider group of Jews who were looking for something in common in the synagogue and yet remain open to whatever extent we don’t fully understand, but like too different types of Jews.
Yael: I think that’s one of the things that we miss out on as New York Jews. When you leave New York, at least in the US, I can’t speak for other places, and you go to communities where there is a much smaller sized group of Jews,They have their one synagogue, their one school, their one Jewish community center, and it caters to a whole spectrum of people. And I think that’s, it creates a really beautiful sense of unity among different types of Jews.in New York, we are so, because we are so blessed with choice, we tend to silo ourselves off into very small groups of people who have the same nuanced views on certain things as we do.
Schwab: Yes.
Yael:We have such a wealth
of choices that we end up in our own spaces and they end up in their own spaces. And it is nice to see that even as far back as the first or second century, there was what seems to be a cohesive Jewish community in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic town.Schwab: And I will say, there’s only some things that were preserved. There were for sure, like is always the case, were for sure arguments in this Senate. There were for sure things, none of that is preserved. So it’s sort of this utopian ideal of a synagogue, because that’s what’s left over. One final detail that it’s not the most important one, but just wanted to share because it’s really interesting. In addition to the paintings on the walls, the ceiling was also decorated with these decorative tiles. There were over 200 of them. I think it’s like 230 total of these like square tiles, each which had different designs on them, ranging from like, the interesting and the familiar to us to the truly bizarre.
Like there’s pictures of grains, pictures of fruit, pictures of different types of animals, pictures of weird animal hybrids, like a goat with a fish tail and centaurs. The evil eye, a lot of depictions of like the evil eye, but all these beautiful ceiling tiles, which also had these inscriptions on them, what’s very fascinating about them is the ceiling was very high. It was about, it’s like seven meters, I think it’s at, which is like, 20 feet. Yeah, like that’s very, very high. And the way that it’s described in some of like the scholarly articles is like, this would be difficult for congregants to be able to read. like, just say no one could read it. Like, you donated a tile to this, yeah, right?
Yael: Just going to say, I feel like the average Jew at the time was probably like 4’10”.
Schwab: Yeah. You know, with poor eyesight. just like the tiles were perhaps like, you know, donated and inscribed with like the donor’s name or something like that, but then put up on the ceiling where you can’t even read the inscription. But it’s an interesting choice to have such a high ceiling and who knows if there was.
It’s an interesting choice to decorate such a high ceiling, I guess, in that way. it does seem like it’s part of, I don’t know, the style of just decorating every inch of the space.
Yael: And that is a Jewish custom and a religious tenet for certain things where, you know, we do make our synagogues beautiful. And that clearly was already taken seriously by these folks in Dura Europos.
Schwab: Yeah, yeah.
So it’s, yeah, I love that idea and that image and thinking about the vivid colors of the paintings and these ceiling tiles because I think when I picture an ancient synagogue, I picture places that I’ve been to in Israel, Like synagogues that have been excavated, you know, and it’s all monotone. Everything’s like the same, like washed out stone color because it’s faded by hundreds of years, you know, and just like,this synagogue of 17, 1800 years ago was not in black and white. It was not in like sand colored limestone or whatever it is. Like it was in very vivid color. You walked in and you were probably dazzled by the imagery. Perhaps even more colorful, I think than like 21st century American synagogue decorating, which does not.
Yael: Right.
Schwab: I used lots and lots of color. Yeah, right? And like that’s given me a whole new vision of like, whoa, what did synagogue worship look like a long time ago? Like literally a lot more colorful than we think.
Yael: A lot of beige.
All right, something to keep in mind for the next renovation. I think I’ve heard that they’re going to put you in charge.
Schwab: I would love to renovate my local synagogue into a recreation of the Dura-Europos synagogue with all the fishtailed goats and no stars of David, obviously.