Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Saskia Coenen Snyder (review)

Building a Public Judaism is an impressive study that reflects the growing scholarly interest in the role of space and place in history. Using secondary works in architectural, urban, and Jewish communal history and drawing upon her own intensive research in local archives, Saskia Coenen Snyder uses the construction and function of synagogues to illustrate the complexity and variety of the Jewish experience in nineteenth-century northern Europe. As the author explains in her introduction, “Buildings … matter. They have stories to tell—stories about the need for their existence, about the people who use them, and about the events taking place within or around them” (9).

Coenen Snyder concentrates on the construction of major new synagogues in four cities: Berlin, Paris, London, and Amsterdam. Each chapter contains useful discussions of the urban environment, the character of the Jewish community, the debates and discussions surrounding the planning and eventual erection of the buildings, and the influence of architectural movements and styles. The book includes photographs of the exterior of the synagogues and of their interior design. There are also descriptions of smaller houses of worship built by nonaffiliated organizations (hevrot) in Paris, London, and Amsterdam.

In contrast to the prevailing view that the construction of monumental synagogues in the major cities of northern Europe in the nineteenth century was a clear indication of Jewish acculturation and socioeconomic embourgeoisement, Coenen Snyder argues for a more nuanced and complex understanding that recognizes the limits of assimilation and the multivaried factors influencing the style and form of the new buildings. While pointing out the express desire of building committees to make the synagogues public statements of Jewish identity and symbols of equality and integration, the author emphasizes other influences, including budgetary considerations, demographic development, geographic patterns of settlement, the local and national political situation, the attitudes of government authorities and non-Jewish architects, as well as architectural styles and aesthetic movements. In recounting the development of the synagogue as a public display of Jewishness, Coenen Snyer points out the irony that, in general, the less frequently Jews went to pray in nineteenth-century Europe as a result of secularization, the more important and conspicuous their religious structures became. In turn, the emergence of “public Judaism” forced German, Dutch, French, and English non-Jews, who had previously paid little attention to synagogues, to examine their own attitudes towards questions of religious and cultural pluralism and tolerance.

Coenen Snyder convincingly demonstrates that there were significant differences in the nature and style of synagogue construction in the four communities, which reflected varying degrees of acculturation and acceptance, as well as local social, political, and economic realities. In London, the relatively conservative nature of synagogue architecture and the community’s failure to build a central house of worship attested to its “self-sufficiency and good citizenship” (18), as well as its dispersed nature. In Paris, a relatively secure Jewish population, which had been “emancipated” during the French Revolution, was nevertheless forced to confront pressures from government authorities which ensured that the exterior of its new central house of worship on the rue de la Victoire would be less flamboyant and visible than community leaders desired. The Amsterdam Jewish community refrained completely from building monumental synagogues. Lacking financial resources, faced with the need to care for its largely working-class population, and enjoying civil equality for more than a half century, the Jews of Amsterdam felt no need for what Coenen Snyder describes as “an architecture of emancipation” (21).

Of special interest to the readers of this journal is the author’s excellent discussion of the history of the construction of the large Moorish-style synagogue on the Oranienburger Straße in Berlin in the 1860s. (The building itself was destroyed in the violence of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. It was reopened with much fanfare in the 1990s as a Jewish cultural...