Jewish Sanctuary in the Old and New Worlds

The mobility of Jews before the age of the mobile telephone, email, and budget airlines never ceases to amaze. Throughout their long history, Jews have indeed wandered to the “four corners of the earth” and, in some cases, back again. As Sam Gruber expresses it in his foreword to Barry Stiefel’s Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: “Even in an age before modern communications, in a big watery world, distant Jewish communities stayed in close contact” (p. xii). Stiefel’s pair of publications is the product of his PhD from Tulane University, which he continued pursuing at the University of Michigan after New Orleans was inundated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He has now returned to the American South as an assistant professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

Of the two books, Jewish Sanctuary is clearly the more important and accomplished one. Through the medium of historic synagogues, it traces the trade routes of Jewish merchants westward across the Atlantic Ocean following the Iberian expulsions of the 1490s. In the Old World, the story of the Western Sephardim who migrated northward to the Netherlands and from there to Britain is well known. They were only too glad to flee the Spanish Inquisition to more tolerant Protestant Dutch and English lands. Stiefel explores the less familiar parallel story of Jewish merchants in the New World. Not surprisingly, they favored colonies where the Dutch and the English superseded the Spanish and Portuguese in the seventeenth century.

Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture covers much the same time frame, what historians call “early modern,” but deals mainly with Europe. A couple of the chapters have in essence already been published elsewhere.¹ One gets the impression that the rest of this book consists merely of off-cuts from Stiefel’s PhD that could not be included in Jewish Sanctuary. The text does not appear to have been edited: it is peppered with typos, poor grammar and syntax, abstruse headings, and tedious repetition. One may wonder why the editors of the series (“Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World”) let such raw material make it into print. The pressure in academia to publish should be resisted: what really counts is quality.

Although it too is based almost entirely on secondary sources (in my day, a PhD in History could not be earned without trawling the archives), Jewish Sanctuary is a useful addition to the growing historiography on synagogue architecture. Far more social and political than architectural history, it is a worthwhile “synthetic” study that successfully draws together primary research by others (including myself) from a very large geographical area. The Caribbean and America’s eastern seaboard are prone to earthquakes and hurricanes, a fact that partially explains the dearth of physical and documentary evidence of historic synagogues in the Atlantic World.

Stiefel was ably assisted in his project by English specialist David Rittenberg (who should have been set to work on the other book as well), and by his wife, Lori Stiefel, who accompanied him on his travels. It was she who took the photographs (a pity that they are all printed in black and white) and produced the occasional line drawings that supplement the (mostly familiar) archive images reproduced throughout the book. Her Computer-Aided-Design-generated façade of the Nefusot Yehudah Synagogue in Gibraltar adorns the inside flap of the dust jacket. This is evidently “after” a hand-drawing to scale executed by my former colleague (retired) architect Barbara Bowman for our guidebook Jewish Heritage in Gibraltar, which was published in 2007. Our book is the only reference cited in Stiefel’s inventory for the entries on Gibraltar synagogues.

Indeed...