Because Jewish law prescribes no particular architectural plan for a synagogue, only the fixed elements of ark, bimah and orientation toward Jerusalem, synagogue buildings have absorbed the prevailing architecture of whatever society hosted the community that built them, making synagogue architecture unusually diverse across the diaspora. Ancient synagogues excavated at sites such as Capernaum in the Galilee followed a basilical plan close to contemporary Roman civic buildings, with columned halls and, in some cases, elaborate stone or mosaic decoration despite later, stricter interpretations of prohibitions on figurative imagery.
In Muslim Spain and elsewhere in the Islamic world, synagogues adopted Moorish decorative vocabulary, horseshoe arches, geometric tilework and stucco ornament closely related to contemporary mosque design, visible today in surviving buildings such as the Synagogue of El Transito in Toledo. In Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, timber framed wooden synagogues developed a distinctive local tradition of steeply tiered roofs and elaborately painted interiors, almost all of which were destroyed in the twentieth century, leaving mainly photographs and a small number of surviving or reconstructed examples as evidence.
Nineteenth and twentieth century emancipation era synagogues in Western Europe and the United States frequently adopted historicist revival styles, Moorish, Gothic or Romanesque, as a way of asserting a distinct communal identity within a broader Christian majority society, while more recent synagogue architecture has moved toward modernist forms with no single dominant regional style.