Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger, Batei Knesset Atiqum be-Galil. Edited and translated by Ronny Reich, (Modi’in, Israel: Ronny Reich, 2021).
The great project known as the Wissenschaft des Judentums created scholarship of monumental proportions, the basis of all later work in the history, culture, and religion of Jews and Judaism. Cut down in its prime by the Nazi scourge, this amazing project of modern Jewish creativity continues to bear fruit in America and Europe, but most especially in the State of Israel.
The first generations of Judaic Studies scholars in America and in mandatory Palestine/Israel were deeply conversant in the German language. Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Zecharias Frankel were culture heroes to all. Their works were read and argued at one of the world’s great “German universities”—the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – just as they had been for generations at the Jewish seminaries of Europe and the New World (most of the faculty were trained in Germany).
For the generations that followed, though, German became a foreign language. The rich culture of Imperial and Weimar Germany in which the Wissenschaft des Judentums took to flight is now a memory washed away by the Nazi onslaught and increasing temporal and spatial distance. German immigrants to Eretz Yisrael during those turbulent years were well aware that their classic scholarship and belles lettres – their entire civilization – could easily be lost if not translated. German Jews in Israel set out to translate the “classics” into Hebrew, particularly scholarship related to prayer and midrash. These ranged from Leopold Zunz’s foundational Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur (Berlin, 1818), which became Ha-Derashot be-Yisrael (translated and updated by Hanoch Albeck, Jerusalem, 1947); Ismar Elbogen’s Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1913), which was translated and updated by Joseph Heinemann as ha-Tefilah be-Yiśraʼel be-hitpatḥutah ha-historit (Tel Aviv, 1975); Richard Krautheimer’s Mittelalterliche Synagogen (Berlin, 1927), which was translated as Batei Keneset bi-Yeme ha-Benayim (Jerusalem, 1994), and most recently Zunz’s Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin, 1865), which was translated by Ze’ev Breuer as Minhagei Tefilah u-Fiut be-Kehillot Yisrael (Jerusalem, 2016). These and numerous other translations of classical wissenschaftliche scholarship have enriched Israeli culture immeasurably, making these books useful not only to scholars, but also to teachers, students, and lay readers.
Happily, Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger’s Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (Leipzig, 1916) now joins this eminent company. This is the foundational volume for the study of ancient synagogue archeology. Unlike the authors mentioned above, neither Kohl nor Watzinger was Jewish – which in their world added gentile respectability to this volume (though the project architect, Ernst Hiller, was Jewish). Published in a large format by the prestigious Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, this volume reports the results of DOG expeditions to Palestine in 1905 and 1907. This project was quietly supported and funded by the eminent German Jewish philanthropist and founder of the DOG, James Simon. Simon’s participation was camouflaged in plain sight, likely to keep this campaign from being tainted in the larger society as a “Jewish” project (still, alas, an occupational hazard to this day).1
Antike Synagogen in Galiläa was a monumentally important accomplishment. This was the third book of “Jewish archeology” published in Germany, and the most beautiful. E.L. Sukenik later called it “sumptuous.”2 This volume was certainly meant to be noticed and – like the great historicized synagogues of Germany (including Berlin’s Neue Synagoge, where Simon was active) – to make a statement of Jewish normality and aesthetics in a society dripping with antisemitism. This publication followed on Nicholaus Müller’s Die Jüdische Katakombe Am Monteverde Zu Rom: Der Älteste Bisher Bekannt Gewordene Jüdische Friedhof Des Abendlandes (Leipzig, 1912) and Samuel Krauss’s important synthetic study, Talmudische Archäologie (Leipzig, 1910–1912). Antike Synagogen in Galiläa established and asserted the Jewish place in Roman art and architecture at a time when Jewish visual culture, especially synagogue architecture, was of particular interest to Jewish culturalists – including Simon.3
Kohl and Watzinger dated the synagogues of the Galilee and Golan to the period of the Antonine and Severan emperors (second century CE), asserting that they developed as a result of the reported special relationship of Patriarch Judah the Nasi with “Emperor Antoninus.” Assuming the ingrained “Jews don’t do art” trope with which readers of Images are all too aware, they claimed that the synagogues at Capernaum, Chorazin, Arbel, H. Ammudim, Meiron, Nabratein, Gush Ḥalav, a-Dikke, Umm al-Qanatir, and H. Sumaqa, which were decorated with human, mythological, and animal images, were gifts from the Emperor that Jews just could not refuse. In their time, this theory was not as far-fetched as it sounds to contemporary ears. Synagogues were occasionally built by German nobles for the use of Jews. This theme, incidentally, reappears later in S.Y. Agnon’s “Tale of the Menorah,”4 where a local Galician community has to cope with a good-willed though religiously objectionable gift of a seven-branched menorah from a local ruler. Further, this volume asserts that the history of the Christian basilica began with Jewish synagogues, granting emancipated Jews (themselves then building large “cathedral” synagogues at a fever pace) a place of honor in the history of Western art and religion. Unfortunately for this narrative, the Galilean-type synagogues are now thought to date two centuries later, to the fourth and fifth centuries, and most basalt Golan synagogues a century later – contemporaneous with Christian basilicas of similar construction.
There is much contemporary value to be gained from Antike Synagogen in Galiläa. The exacting archeological descriptions (including dimensions), numerous photographs (Fig. 1), plans of each synagogue as they stood at the turn of the twentieth century (when they were in danger of disappearing as their stones were pilfered by the local population), and beautiful reconstruction drawings (Fig. 2) are important resources. Historical geographers will also find much of interest here. The authors drew fully on Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian sources and archeological parallels across the Empire in their drive to make sense of the ancient synagogue remains. There was hardly a scrap of archeological evidence anywhere or a literary source that Kohl and Watzinger did not consider. They even explored Samaritan sources. Knowing their own limitations, our authors turned to the eminent Semiticist Paul Ernst Kahle for assistance, reproducing a very long letter written by Kahle detailing possible evidence preserved in Samaritan chronicles (pp. 248–251).
Reconstruction of the Capernaum Synagogue, watercolor, from the frontispiece of Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger’s Antike Synagogen in Galiläa. (Leipzig, 1916).
Citation: IMAGES 14, 1 (2021) ; 10.1163/18718000-12340143
Nave of the Chorazin Synagogue, from Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger’s Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (Leipzig, 1916): illustration 79.
Citation: IMAGES 14, 1 (2021) ; 10.1163/18718000-12340143
Antike Synagogen in Galiläa was published at the height of World War I. It marks the zenith of German involvement in Palestinian archeology and the end of German exploration of ancient synagogues in Palestine. With the British Mandate, Zionist scholars such as Nahum Slouschz, L.A. Mayer, Adolf Reifenberg, Benjamin Mazar, and especially E.L. Sukenik picked up the mantle. Sukenik in particular returned to the sites studied by Kohl and Watzinger, building on the magnificent foundation that they created, and adding many more synagogues and artifacts to the corpus. While the sponsors of Antike Synagogen in Galiläa camouflaged the Jewishness of their project in order to gain prestige, these Zionist scholars were exuberant in expressing the Jewish “national” significance of this work.
Ronny Reich, Professor Emeritus of Archeology at the University of Haifa, has produced an excellent and appealing translation in fluid and jargon-free Hebrew. A leading Israeli archeologist, Reich occasionally corrects identifications and other errors, provides a short introduction to this volume that focuses upon issues of archeological interest and a glossary of architectural terminology. Page number correspondences to the original volume add to the functionality of this translation. This volume is published in large format on glossy paper, its design follows the original by embedding the illustrations directly into the text. These high production values are particularly noteworthy because Batei Knesset Atiqum be-Galil was self-published by the translator/editor.
We owe Professor Reich many, many thanks for this edition of Antike Synagogen in Galiläa. He has single-handedly bequeathed this important study to generations of future archeologists, historians, tour guides, teachers, and students. This publication will surely bring renewed and welcome attention to the impressive work of Kohl, Watzinger, and Hiller – and to the still-exciting synagogue remains that they explored more than 113 years ago.
Steven Fine is the Dean Pinkhos Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, where he is also director of the YU Center for Israel Studies. Fine’s Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (2005; rev. ed. 2010) received the Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in 2009. His The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel was published by Harvard University Press in 2016 and The Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome and Back by Brill in 2021.
On Simon’s part in this project, see Gabriele Faßbeck, “ ‘The Longer, the More Happiness I Derive from This Undertaking’: James Simon and Early German Research into Galilee’s Ancient Synagogues,” in Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: Vehinnei Rachel, Essays in Honor of Rachel Hachlili, ed. Ann E. Killebrew and Gabriele Faßbeck (Boston: Brill, 2016), 101–120.
E.L. Sukenik,“The Present State of Ancient Synagogue Studies,” Bulletin of the Louis M. Rabinowitz Fund 1 (1949): 21–53.
Faßbeck, “ ‘The Longer, the More Happiness I Derive from This Undertaking,’” 116–118; Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12–52.
Atidot: Rivon le-Noar, (Winter, 1956–1957), 3–11; S.Y. Agnon, Ir uMeloah (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1973), 29–37; Steven Fine, “Agnon’s ‘Tale of the Menorah’ and Its Historical Contexts,” in Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel, eds. Jeffrey Saks, Shalom Carmy (Portland: Wipf and Stock, forthcoming).
