Synagogues Under Islam in the Middle Ages

Chapter 7 Synagogues Under Islam in the Middle Ages

Joshua Holo

Synagogues in the medieval dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, were imbued with and informed by equal measures of spiritual aspirations and communal needs. Shlomo Dov Goitein, the great scholar of the Cairo Genizah, describes the synagogue as

the house of meeting both with God and with one’s fellow man. When the holy ark was opened and the Torah scrolls were exposed to the eyes of the worshiper, he felt himself transported to the presence of God …. At the same time the synagogue served so many cultural and communal purposes that its character as a house of worship became blurred.1

In fact, this blurring derives from Judaism’s complex nature as both a religion and a distinct ethnic community – a “fraternity of fate” that bound Jews across the kaleidoscopic cultural, geographical and political landscape of the known world.2 This shared destiny and its varied facets found common expression in, among other things, the physical structure of synagogues worldwide and those of Islam in particular. The Jews of the Muslim world shared a particular outlook and a condition, perhaps most accurately termed “Islamicate,” as coined by Marshall Hodgson, to indicate “the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims … even when found among non-Muslims.”3 This Islami- cate experience literally shaped synagogues in ways that distinguished them from those in Christendom. In legal terms, the Jews’ status as dhimmi, mean- ing legally sanctioned monotheistic community (the so-called “People of the Book”), enshrined a social contract with Muslim government. This contract, or dhimma, traditionally though dubiously attributed to the Caliph Omar i (ruled 634–644), is remembered as the “Pact of Omar.” It granted official pro- tection, but it also imposed a supplemental poll tax, called the jizya, and other

1 S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–93), 2:156; Samuel Krauss, The History of Jewish Houses of Worship (New York: Ogen, 1955), 3, Hebrew. 2 Zvi Ankori, The Karaites of Byzantium (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 35. 3 Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1:57–60.

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restrictions. These included the prohibition of constructing or repairing synagogues and the curtailing of their height. Islamicate synagogues also betray cultural porosity and shared sensibilities – including some direct Muslim re- ligious influences. Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237), for example, the son and successor of the pre-eminent jurist-philosopher Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), promoted hand- and foot-washing in the synagogue, clearly patterned on Mus- lim practice and reflected in synagogues in the Islamic sphere.4 Despite these and other overarching, shared qualities, synagogue architec- ture also refracted the category of “Islamicate” through at least two prisms: divergent commitments within Judaism, and local cultural, political and ur- ban landscapes across the vast span of the dar al-Islam. A dissenting minority known as Karaite Judaism challenged medieval Judaism’s majority party, namely, Rabbanite (or Rabbinic) Judaism. The latter derives Jewish Law from two sources believed to have been revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai: the Writ- ten Torah and the parallel, Oral Torah, which the Rabbis mediate. The Karaites obviate rabbinic mediation (and authority) by arguing that only the Written Torah was revealed on Mt. Sinai. Though Karaites and Rabbanites mutually recognized each other as Jews, they required different synagogues. Meanwhile, the Jews’ variegated geographical heritage often intersected with doctrine to further diversify Islamicate synagogues. Within the Rabbanite camp, the par- tisans of the so-called “Babylonian” academies, from the environs of Baghdad, and those of the so-called “Jerusalem” academy, with its seat in the Levant, built separate synagogues to reflect their different traditions. Finally, migra- tions also promoted synagogue plurality and diversity. We find Byzantine and Maghrebi (from Western North Africa) settlement in Cairo, constant travel between Egypt and Palestine, and scholarly exchange in all directions. And Je- rusalem, in particular, ever pulled at the Jewish imagination, inspiring Karaite and Rabbanite immigration alike from around the Jewish world. Synagogues therefore served both autochthonous and immigrant communities, so that “Islamicate” refers not only to those that bore the imprint of Islamic culture but also to those from abroad.5 How, then, did Islamicate synagogues reflect the simultaneous unity and plurality of the Jews’ experience? Universally, they provided for four functions: to congregate, to read and study, to lead in prayer and homily, and to deposit

4 Naphtali Wieder, Islamic Influences on the Jewish Worship (Oxford: East and West Library, 1947), 21, Hebrew; S.D. Goitein, “Abraham Maimonides and His Circle,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 148. 5 Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1:58.