Haifa, Feb. 16.—I described in my last letter the discovery of the ruins
of an ancient Jewish synagogue at a spot on the east bank of the Jordan,
about three miles north of the upper end of the Lake of Tiberias. As the
question of ancient Jewish synagogues is one of great interest, in
regard to which considerable misapprehension prevails even among
archæologists, I may be excused for entering upon a short disquisition
upon the subject, as I am not aware that the great light which has been
thrown upon it by recent Palestinian research has yet been distributed
in a popular form to the general public, and the old and recognized
authorities are often misleading. For example, “Smith's Dictionary of
the Bible” contains a long article on Jewish synagogues which has
hitherto been considered the great authority on the subject, in which I
observe that it states under the sub-head “Structure:”
“Its position, however, was determined. It stood, if possible, on the
highest ground in or near the city to which it belonged. Its direction,
too, was fixed. Jerusalem was the Kibleh of Jewish devotion. The
synagogue was so constructed that the worshippers, as they entered and
as they prayed, looked towards it.”
This may have been the case in respect of the earlier synagogues, long
anterior to the time of Christ, the traces of which have been lost, but
in the case of eleven which have been discovered by the officers of the
Palestine Exploration Fund, since the above was written, no such rules
have been adhered to. These all date either from the time of Christ, or
shortly before it, to three centuries after it. We know they were
synagogues, and can approximately calculate their dates, from the Hebrew
inscriptions found on some of them, and from the emblems with which they
were ornamented, such as the pot of manna, the seven-branched
candlestick, and other purely Jewish devices. In the cases of these
synagogues, many of which I have seen, the builders have by no means
selected the most prominent positions; the existing remains have, with
two exceptions—at Irbid and at ed-Dikkeh, where the ground would not
admit of such an arrangement—their doors on the southern side, so that
every Jew entering would have to turn his back on Jerusalem. The ark, if
there was one in these synagogues, would necessarily, in that case, be
placed at the northern end, and the worshippers would therefore have to
pray with their backs to Jerusalem.
We know, besides, how abhorrent to the Jews were the figures of animals,
and the popular impression has been that none such were permitted to
decorate their synagogues; yet in these synagogues we find them
prominently carved in stone in six out of the eleven. The carved figure
I found at ed-Dikkeh makes a seventh, and they probably existed in the
others and in greater quantities than those already noted, but have been
destroyed by the Mohammedans as contrary to their religion. As may be
supposed, as they were all built at nearly the same period, there is a
great similarity in the architecture of the synagogues recently
discovered. It is of an extremely florid and somewhat debased Roman
type. In all of them the same class of mouldings is observable. There is
a great resemblance in the niches and cornices, while the capitals show
some variation, being Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic. There is also a
great similarity in the ground plan and in the position of the columns.
In the case of a Roman temple these are all in colonnades outside the
building, in cases of synagogues they are all within it. There should be
no possibility, therefore, of confusing a synagogue with a Roman temple,
even though it abounds with Roman architecture; but it is not always so
easy to distinguish it from an early Christian church, or basilica,
where the columns were also inside. The reason that the architecture of
these latter synagogues was so purely Roman in character is to be found
in the conditions under which they were built. Shortly after the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jewish Sanhedrim was
established at Tiberias, under a patriarchate whose authority was
recognized by the foreign communities at Rome and in Asia Minor, and
large numbers of these came to live in the district, while alms poured
into the treasury at Tiberias from all directions. It thus became very
wealthy, and the centre of a great Jewish population. It was recognized
by the Romans, and by them granted many indulgences, and, during the
reign of Antoninus Pius, A.D. 138–161, increased in power and influence.
At the beginning of the third century the Jews were in high favor with
the Emperor Alexander Severus, who was even called the Father of the
Synagogue, and this name may have been given him from his influence over
the erection and architecture of these buildings. It seems, therefore,
almost a certainty that the Roman emperors aided and inspired the
erection of these synagogues. They were built by Roman labor, for the
Jews, being immersed in commercial pursuits, by using Roman workmen,
obtained much finer results than we are led to think they would
themselves have been capable of. No synagogues of the kind have been
found in other countries, though there were many in Babylon and in the
colonies of the Jews, and this type has never been perpetuated in later
works, while we have seen how many points in their religion were
disregarded in their design and ornamentation. We may therefore suppose
that they were forced upon the people by their Roman rulers at a time
when they were completely submissive to their power, and directly they
were able they deserted such pagan buildings as a disloyalty to their
religion. It is stated that Rabbi Simon, son of Jochai, is the founder
of many of these buildings. Indeed, it is related that he built with his
own money twenty-four synagogues in this part of the country. As he was
a most fanatical teacher of the law, it is evident that if he erected so
many buildings in such violent contradiction to many points of his own
religion, he must have done it under great pressure. These synagogues
built under Roman auspices were probably only an alternative evil; they
had to choose between having them or none at all. With the exception of
one on Carmel, and a problematical one at Shefr-Amr, about six miles
from Haifa, all the synagogues hitherto found have been within the
immediate limits of what was formerly the patriarchate of Tiberias. The
fact that the building at ed-Dikkeh would be included in this district
is an additional reason for assuming it to have been one of this class
of synagogues, and, if so, we should probably be accurate in fixing its
date at somewhere in the first or second century after Christ.
From ed-Dikkeh I proceeded under the guidance of the old sheik, who was
much pleased at the satisfaction which I evinced at his successful
leadership thus far, in an easterly direction to another place, where he
assured me that the villagers had also been at work getting out stone
during the summer, and had unearthed some more old ruins. Our way led us
along the flank of the Jaulan hills, with the plain of the Butêha on our
right, and, after a ride of about an hour, we reached a village of huts,
in the midst of which was the anticipated excavation. I could not quite
expect such another stroke of luck as that which had befallen me at
ed-Dikkeh, but yet I had no reason to be dissatisfied. Here, upon a
terrace built of large blocks of basalt about five inches in height, I
found a curious condition of things. The villagers had laid bare,
eighteen inches below the surface of the earth, the cement floor of an
old chamber about twenty feet in one direction. I could not tell how far
it went in the other, as it was still covered with earth, but where it
abruptly terminated it revealed, about eighteen inches beneath, another
floor of some building of much older date, across which it had been
built diagonally. This floor was of stone. It, too, had been cleared for
some distance by the natives, and upon it was standing, at intervals of
six feet apart, five solid cubes of stone, measuring two feet each way,
which had probably been the foundations or lower stones on which had
been placed the pedestals of columns. As this lowest floor was three
feet below the present surface of the ground, the top of these stones
was one foot below it, and the line of them may have continued, though
only five had been uncovered. I have no means of conjecturing what the
building may have been. I found many fragments of columns and capitals
strewn around among the ruins, which covered a larger area than those at
ed-Dikkeh, and which, like them, are a new discovery, though what its
results may be must depend very much upon further excavation. I
impressed upon the villagers here, as I had already done at ed-Dikkeh,
if, in the course of their excavating for stone, they came upon any with
inscriptions or pictorial representations, to preserve them; but I felt,
as I did so, that my words fell upon deaf or rather unwilling ears. They
gazed at me with alarmed stolidity, either not understanding or not
caring to understand, and evidently dominated by the fixed impression
that my proceedings implied in some way the future ownership of the
soil. I looked from here wistfully up a valley, at the mouth of which
this ruin was situated, and at the head of which others were reported to
exist, but circumstances prevented me at the time from pushing my
explorations in this direction. Indeed, travel in this part of the
country is attended with many difficulties, some political and some
material, among the latter the chief one being, if one is unprovided
with a tent, the question of where one is to spend the night. If, on the
other hand, one is provided with a tent, it involves a much larger
retinue, increased expense, excites even more distrust among the
natives, and becomes sometimes dangerous from arousing their cupidity,
and this necessitates having guards and escorts, which are the cause of
endless quarrels and annoyance, as the more people you have with you the
less are you your own master to go where you like, and the more
difficult it is to provide for man and beast. It is a choice of evils at
best of times, and the worry and discomfort can only be compensated for
by good luck in obtaining results, and this is by no means always to be
secured, though thus far on this particular journey I had had no reason
to complain. I now propose to tempt fate on the highlands to the east of
Lake Tiberias, with what success remains to be seen.