Dura-Europos Synagogue Frescoes

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sometime around 244 or 245 CE, the Jewish community of Dura Europos, a Roman garrison town on the Euphrates in what is now eastern Syria, enlarged and redecorated a modest synagogue that had served the community since around the turn of the third century. An Aramaic inscription over the building's Torah niche records the exact year of the work. What the renovation added was extraordinary: the walls of the assembly hall were covered, register upon register, with roughly seventy painted panels retelling the Hebrew Bible, from the infancy of Moses and the crossing of the Sea of Reeds to the binding of Isaac, the story of Esther and the visions of Ezekiel. The paintings were made in tempera on dry plaster rather than true fresco, a technique called al secco, which left them vivid but fragile once exposed to light after their rediscovery.

Discovery of the synagogue in 1932, by a joint expedition of Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, startled scholars for a reason that had nothing to do with archaeology and everything to do with theology. Ancient Judaism was widely assumed to have avoided figural images altogether, out of the Second Commandment's prohibition on graven images, and here was a synagogue whose walls were filled with human and divine action, God himself represented indirectly by a hand reaching from the top of the frame rather than by any human figure. The paintings did not overturn the commandment so much as reveal that its force varied by time, place and community: a diaspora congregation in a Roman frontier town read its own scripture on its own walls, in pictures, most plausibly as visual instruction and shared memory for a community that used the building as its living meeting place, not as a museum.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The paintings did not stay where they were found. Dura Europos itself had been abandoned since the third century, after a Sasanian siege overran the Roman garrison not long after the synagogue's own redecoration, and its ruins had lain buried in desert sand for some sixteen centuries by the time archaeologists reached them. Following the standard practice of major excavations of that era, the Yale and French Academy team removed the fragile wall paintings from the ruined building rather than leave them exposed to the desert climate, and the panels were reassembled, piece by piece, inside the National Museum of Damascus during the 1930s, where the reconstructed synagogue interior remains on display today.

That survival was tested again in the twenty first century. During the Syrian civil war, which endangered museums and archaeological sites across the country and saw the destruction of parts of the ancient city of Palmyra by armed groups, staff at the National Museum of Damascus hid a substantial portion of its holdings, reported at more than three hundred thousand objects, to protect them from looting and destruction. The Dura Europos synagogue paintings remained among the museum's protected holdings throughout the conflict and are still counted among its most significant exhibits, a set of ancient Jewish wall paintings that has now survived a Sasanian siege, sixteen centuries under the sand, and a modern civil war, far from the region where most of the world's other great illuminated Jewish artworks were made.