ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly: Totally rewriting art history!! Dura Europos

The presence of Jewish th­em­es in the wall paint­ings and the Torah shrine identified the building as a synagogue, with benches that could seat 65 men. But what sort of Jewish community would decorate its place of worship in this manner? And what can it tell us about the community’s theol­og­ical doctrine, its self-view and its relations with Dura’s non-Jewish popul­ation? The Macedonians built Dura as a frontier town to con­trol the river trade. Silks, spices and precious stones were brought from the east and transferred onto camels for the desert leg of the journey, via Palmyra, to the Mediterranean. Dura clearly had a steady stream of merchants, soldiers and officials, as well as civilians on their travels. Because of its geography and population, then, Dura enjoyed an urban and religiously complex culture. The citizens of Dura mixed freely together, and possibly learned from each other. An Aramaic inscription at Dura Europos helped date the synagogue to 244 AD, which may go some way towards explaining the art. It was during the C3rd that Christians, many of them breakaway Jews, were buil­d­ing their own highly decorated churches. Only in Dura, it would seem, the church and syn­ag­ogue were decorated at the same time. The synagogue consisted of a forecourt and prayer space meas­uring 14 x 9m. The Torah shrine, in the western wall facing Jeru­s­al­em, was critic­al. In a pagan temple, the space occupied by the Torah shrine would have contained the cult statue of a god. In a later Christian church, it would have contained the baptismal font. In Dura-Europos synagogue, the niche became the reposit­ory of the Law, the most rev­ered space in any synagogue. Immed­iately ab­ove the conch on the western wall there was a temple facade, with a 7-branch candelabra and the two symbols of the Feast of Tabern­acles. Thus the holy objects were re­p­res­en­ted here as they had been in the Te­m­ple of Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans c200 years prev­ious­ly. The Syrians transported the synagogue, its panels and gorgeous roof of baked-brick tiles across the desert 480 ks away to Damascus. There it became the centrepiece of the country’s national museum built in 1934. The Dura Europos church was dismantled and re-constructed in Yale in the early 1930s. ** After WW2, archaeological expeditions to Turkey’s Sardis synagogue unearthed another impressive synagogue from antiquity ( late 3rd century) , showing mosaic floor art, elegant columns and Greek and Hebrew inscriptions. The sculpture on each end of the bimah table, used for reading the Torah scroll, featured Roman imperial imag­ery. Like Dura Europos, Sardis seemed to be a great example of ad­ap­tation of secular art forms for Jewish purposes.