Search Results

The archaeology of religious monuments and of religious practice forms the subject of this chapter. The first section is devoted to the archaeology of the mosque, and uses three case studies to explore the ways in which these building were changed and adapted over time. These changes could occur through the patronage of different rulers or dynasties or simply because places of worship needed expand in order to accommodate a growing Muslim population. The second section looks at the archaeological study of Muslim burial, and questions why there should be divergences from the practices defined in Islamic law. The last section considers the experience of non-Muslim communities living under Islamic rule, with a particular emphasis upon the churches and synagogues of early Islamic Greater Syria.

This chapter introduces Rabbi Dr Salis Daiches and maps his migration from the Lithuanian part of the Russian Empire to East Prussia, Berlin and then Britain, arriving in Edinburgh in early 1919. His educational, linguistic and cultural voyage across Europe presents the context in which to analyse his religious ideology and outlook on life in a secular society. Daiches presented both an opportunity and a challenge for the Chief Rabbis under whose authority he served in various congregations across the United Kingdom. Daiches possessed the learning of an Eastern European rabbi and the eloquence of an English clergyman, and used these advantages at once to forge a bridge between residents and immigrants and to challenge the hegemony of the Chief Rabbi which he saw as ineffective outwith London’s United Synagogue. Thus, Daiches emerges as a case study that illustrates well the key issues in the debates about the bundling of religious authority in the Chief Rabbi and his court, the frustrations of immigrant rabbis whose religious training far surpassed that of the English Jewish ministers who excelled in preaching, and knowledge of civil law, but were embarrassed by their lack of halakhic competence.

This chapter describes a typical Sabbath on the Lower East Side, including the early Sabbath services at the Bialystoker Synagoge. There is discussion of Hasidic traditions, including those of the Kotsker Rebbe. The problem of the Lower East Side eruv (Sabbath boundary) is described.

As in nineteenth-century Morocco, Jews in other Muslim lands were either victimized by certain stringent aspects of Islamic jurisprudence or sought to benefit from its contents that proved advantageous to them. This appears to have been the case for Yemen in the 1930s, where issues concerning both Islamic Law and Halakha emerged. This chapter is a case in point. In 1935, Jews in San'a were in conflict over whether the Kuhlani Synagogue was private property or within the domain of a pious endowment. The Jews enlisted the ruling Imam to help resolve the crisis and prominent Muslim jurists also became involved. What was the decision adopted by the Imam? Did it differ from the recommendations offered by the Muslim jurists? To what extent were non-Muslim legal systems regarded as legitimate in post-Ottoman Islamic Yemen? This chapter addresses these and other intriguing issues.

This chapter explores narratives of return in a series of documentaries filmed on the sites of memory of Jewish life in Poland. It focuses on the role played by the Poles in the persecution of the Jews and on the memory of the events. It also addresses the ways in which a traumatic past is still inscribed in present-day landscapes.

The Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews was established by Pope Paul VI on October 22, 1974. This chapter discusses the precedents of the Commission and its beginning, its configuration in the context of the Roman Curia, and the chief moments of its work between 1974 and 1986. The Commission is not the absolute beginning. Already before 1974, during the Second Vatican Council, the very difficult and frequently discussed topic of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism had come to the fore when the fathers were preparing the document known as Nostra Aetate. In the debate preceding the redaction of the declaration, especially in the various interventions by Cardinal Augustin Bea and other Council fathers, the special character of Judaism and of its relationship with the Catholic Church had also been emphasized. The visit of Pope John Paul II to the Great Synagogue of Rome on April 13, 1986, has been one of the three decisive moments of his pontificate concerning the history of relations between the Catholic Church and Judaism.

This chapter discusses the use of religious symbolism to disempower others. It surveys recent cases of anti-Semitism in Venezuela that are directly related to Hugo Chávez's attempts to stabilize his position as the nation's leader. It argues that the attack on the Tiferet Israel Synagogue in Caracas on January 30, 2009, is part of a continuous stream of anti-Semitic statements and acts in Venezuela, which associate the Jews with Adolf Hitler and the devil through the symbolism of swastikas and the number 666, the Mark of the Beast in Revelation 13:18. Such anti-Semitism, combined with populism, military uniforms, and homophobia, helps to construct the regime's opponents as enemies of the state by associating them with Zionist imperialism and the Jews. It thus legitimates either expelling these outsiders from the body of the nation or subjecting them to the will of the people. This ideology has a firm basis in the work of the Argentine Holocaust denier Norberto Ceresole, who acted as Chávez's adviser, rather than in the writings of the great liberator Simón Bolívar.

This chapter details how the congregation of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw reflected the social dynamics that had transformed the face of Warsaw Jewry. They included an increasingly large proportion of Jews whose way of life distanced them from the devoutly Orthodox masses. Many showed clear signs of acculturation, Polonization, and an ongoing process of assimilation, although such behaviour may not have been motivated by any clear ideology of integration into the Polish nation. While many of the Great Synagogue's leaders tried to influence the views of the congregation, it was the members themselves who shaped the image of the synagogue. Their loyalties represented the spectrum of allegiances in the Jewish population of Warsaw at the time, and as Jews from the countryside joined their brethren in the capital, the Great Synagogue came to reflect the social and ideological transformations taking place among Polish Jewry in the early part of the twentieth century, especially between the two world wars.

This chapter provides an overview of Jewish hymnography. Synagogue hymnography, compared to its Christian and Muslim counterparts, is distinctive in both its focus and its volume. There is nothing comparable in Christianity or Islam to the vast Jewish liturgical corpus. The disparity in output is due both to the difference in focus and to the rabbinic encouragement to be creative in prayer. Lay leaders in the synagogue responded enthusiastically to the rabbinic advice, and urged their cantor-poets to compose additions to the obligatory šemaʻ and ʻamidah, as well as celebrations and observances of life-cycle events. A constant feature of the Jewish experience emerged with the hymnic ritualization of the great events of human life. There is also a difference in the historical experience of the Jews exiled from their national home. Given a life in exile, the synagogue poet would often appeal to God for national restoration. This book studies Jewish hymnography in the eastern Mediterranean and in western and central Europe, demonstrating how its literary history was largely determined by contemporary culture.

This chapter presents updated information on the Old Town Synagogue in Łódź. It reveals new inter-war files which contain extremely important references to the history of the synagogue in the old town on Wolborska Street. In addition to a less interesting, undated blueprint for a synagogue at Północna Street, a large file bearing the call number 457 and described in Russian as ‘Plany sinagogi’ (Blueprint for the Synagogue) contained architectural drawings of the utmost importance. These are: the design for the renovation of the Wolborska Street synagogue, dated 1895; an inventory drawing of the building from 1894; and a plan for renovations to a smaller prayer house on Wolborska Street — all done by the well-known Łódź architect Adolf Zeligson. The first two items greatly expand our knowledge of the Old Town Synagogue, which served as the main prayer house for the Jewish community of Łódź.

This chapter examines Olyka's main synagogue, known as the Great Synagogue, reconstructing it as a virtual site of memory. At the centre of a fertile area populated by Ukrainians and ruled at different times by members of the Ruthenian/Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian nobility, it attracted a community of Jews, who settled there and plied their various trades and crafts for three and a half centuries. Though these activities connected them to the local population and to the rulers of the city, the Jews preserved their identity in a local population dominated by Christian denominations, including Orthodox, Calvinist, and Greek and Roman Catholic. Central to both Jewish and Christian communities was the visible sacred symbol of the synagogue or church, and in their synagogue architecture, Jews felt a need to substantiate a Jewish presence, organized around their sacred space, in their own eyes and in the eyes of other communities. Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish historiographies are informative concerning the Jewish past of Olyka, while Jewish sources are largely silent, or give a legendary narrative of events. Thus, both legend and history contribute to the construction of a place of memory.

This chapter discusses the major function of the synagogue from the ancient period until the present as a 'little sanctuary' and a somewhat substitute for the Temple. It explains how a synagogue is seen as the abode of the Divine Presence, in which the concept was expressed by the sages in the talmudic literature and became embedded in the Jewish tradition. It also cites the physical building of the synagogue that serve as a replacement in the absence of the Temple, which made the entire manner of worship to undergo fundamental change. The chapter reviews practices, such as sounding the shofar or the procession with the Four Species, that were performed in the synagogue instead of the Temple. It mentions points out how daily worship of animal sacrifice being performed on the altar was replaced by the reading of Torah and reciting of prayers.

This chapter reviews the concept of the synagogue as a little sanctuary that stems from Ezekiel's prophecy, and the identification of this sanctuary as the gateway to heaven based on Jacob's words. It talks about Jacob's words that became a popular inscription in houses of prayer and were painted above the entrance to the prayer hall of the synagogue in Lyuboml, Ukraine. It also explores the concept of a gateway to heaven through which prayers reach the Almighty that is deeply embedded in Jewish thought and finds expression in the annual cycle of prayers. The chapter talks about the earliest known use of biblical citations on an ark to express the concept of the gateway to heaven that was done in the Ben-Ezra synagogue in Fustat. It reflects the traditional concept of a virtual gateway to heaven as the main actual representation of a gate in the design of arks in the facade form.

This chapter talks about how the Temple is manifested in the synagogue through indirect motifs. It reviews events with motifs represented on the Torah arks that will take place concurrently with the rebuilding of the Temple in the days of personal and national redemption or in messianic times. It also discusses the tradition that is based on early expressions of eschatological expectations, mainly in the Talmud and midrashic literature that emerged as a result of continual disappointment at the delayed redemption. The chapter looks at literary motifs referring to the times of the messiah that appear on arks, such as the leviathan and the ox that are expressions of personal redemption. It mentions Aaron's rod, the manna jar, and the jug of anointing oil that are traditionally believed to have been set aside in anticipation of the coming of the messiah.

This chapter explores how, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Jewish world was shaken spiritually more profoundly than at any time since the expulsions of the late fifteenth century. A mounting turmoil of inner pressures erupted in the 1650s and 1660s in a drama which was to convulse world Jewry for decades. Moreover, although this Jewish upheaval had some separate and independent roots, unconnected with the current intellectual preoccupations of Christian Europe, it took place during, and shared some causes with, the deepening crisis besetting seventeenth-century European culture as a whole. Inevitably, the ferment within the Synagogue interacted on the wider upheaval within European devotion and thought, the one chain of encounters pervading the other in a remarkable process of cultural transformation. Ultimately, the upheaval is perhaps best understood as a cultural reaction to the immense disruptions and migrations of the previous two centuries and the many unresolved contradictions the vast treks, first to the East and then to the West, had given rise to. It may be true that the reintegration of Jews was more economic than cultural, yet the rifts and disintegrative tendencies within western Christendom had placed the age-old confrontation of Christianity and Judaism on a totally new basis. The chapter then looks at the Shabbatean movement, Spinozism, philosemitism, and anti-Semitism.

This chapter examines the years spent in Vilna, Warsaw, and Russia by Moshe Koussevitzky, one of the greatest cantors of the twentieth century. It recounts Moshe's path to the position of chief cantor at the Great Synagogue of Vilna. It also mentions Shlomo Scharf, who had returned with other Lithuanian refugees from Russia and sang in the choir of Taharat Hakodesh synagogue. The chapter discusses Moshe's marriage to Raya Zrankin and their settlement into an apartment on Dominikanska Street, in the Jewish quarter. It points out how Moshe was deeply influenced by Eliasz Zaludkowski's easy handling of the nusah hatfilah.

The chapter covers the first phase of social mobility when large numbers move from the Leylands to Chapeltown, exemplified in the opening of the splendid New Synagogue in 1932. There was insidious anti-Semitism in the barriers placed in the professions of medicine and law and it was a tribute to the determination and talent of many Jews that they were able to surmount them. The Battle of Holbeck Moor is cited as an important statement of Jewish resistance to the Fascism of Oswald Mosley. The chapter identifies the retail and other businesses which developed, including the crucially important factory of Montague Burton.

The final chapter falls into two parts, a survey of developments in the second half of the twentieth century and some final thoughts analysing the key themes of the book as a whole. Social mobility, economic success and residential concentration are notable characteristics of the modern community. Divisions persisted and one of the aims of the Jewish Representative Council was to speak for the diverse range of opinion, from the liberal Sinai Synagogue to the ultra-orthodox Lubavitch supporters. Much is made of the achievement of integration without assimilation and the penetration of the professions is highlighted. The case of Arnold Ziff is cited as a prime example of a major contribution to the economic and social life of Leeds, including benefactions to a range of causes, while retaining a committed Jewish identity.

This chapter describes Solomon Schechter's efforts to turn his vision of a united American Jewry into reality. In 1912 Schechter was resigned to the fact that his vision for American Judaism was failing, with only a handful of congregations receptive to his message. Faced with the realization that he could not implement his vision on his own, he turned to his disciples. Initially, they worked closely with congregational lay leaders whom they felt might be receptive to Schechter's message. But it soon became clear that this unorganized and haphazard approach was bearing little fruit. Hoping to create a more effective system, Schechter's disciples pressed their teacher to create the United Synagogue of America, which would allow them to coordinate their efforts on a national scale. Schechter supported this idea, provided that the organization welcomed all disciples, regardless of their differences. Already aware of a vague group consciousness, the disciples heeded Schechter's call to work together, and this internal unity was institutionalized through the United Synagogue's inclusive leadership structure. That leadership structure remained in place after Schechter's death, and the group consciousness strengthened, sustaining the internal unity upon which Schechter had insisted.