The Altneuschul

The Altneuschul in Prague was built around 1270 and has been in continuous use ever since, apart from the years of the German occupation. That makes it the oldest active synagogue in Europe, and the qualifier is doing necessary work: the Erfurt synagogue's fabric is older, dendrochronologically dated to the 1090s, but it spent some five centuries as a storehouse, a ballroom and a bowling alley; the Worms synagogue was founded earlier still but was destroyed in 1938 and rebuilt in 1961.

Judah Loew, and the story attached to him

Judah Loew ben Bezalel (c. 1520-1609), the Maharal of Prague, was a serious legal authority, a philosopher and an educational reformer whose actual writings are substantial and are now read mainly by specialists.

He is famous instead for making a man out of clay.

The story is that the Maharal formed a golem from the mud of the Vltava to defend the Jews of Prague against blood-libel accusations, animated it with a divine name, and that its remains lie in the synagogue's attic, which is therefore not to be entered.

It is not a medieval tradition, and it has nothing to do with the historical Loew.

• The golem appears nowhere in Prague sources of the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
• It appears nowhere in Loew's own extensive writings.
• It is not attached to Loew in any source during or near his lifetime.
• Its earliest appearances in print connecting a golem to Prague are in German literature of the 1830s and 1840s.
• The familiar full version was fixed by Yudl Rosenberg in a Hebrew work of 1909, which presented itself as a manuscript three hundred years old preserved in Metz. It was not; Rosenberg wrote it, and lifted material from other popular fiction of his day while doing so.

Gershom Scholem's verdict was that these are not ancient legends but modern fiction. The golem motif itself is genuinely old in Jewish mystical literature, the making of an artificial man appears in the Talmud and in medieval commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah, but its attachment to Loew and to Prague is a nineteenth-century literary event.

The museum, and a claim that should be retired

The Prague synagogues and their contents survived the war because the German authorities permitted a Jewish museum in the city, into which the property of liquidated Czech Jewish communities was gathered and catalogued.

This is very widely explained by saying the Nazis intended a "museum of an extinct race."

The claim is not supported by evidence, and the Jewish Museum in Prague itself says so. The documented sequence is that the proposal came in 1942 from within the Prague Jewish community, as an attempt to preserve the property of communities being destroyed, and that the occupying authorities approved it because a cataloguing operation staffed by Jewish specialists was administratively convenient for them. Most of the staff who assembled the collection were subsequently murdered.

Where the phrase originated has not been established. It persists because it is memorable and because it supplies a satisfying motive; it should not be repeated as fact.

The Altneuschul's roof was built with an odd number of vaults, a design choice some accounts tie to a specific religious discomfort rather than to structural necessity.

An unusual ceiling

Built around 1270 in an early Gothic style, the synagogue's main hall is covered by five vaults rather than the four that a square hall of its proportions would ordinarily call for, since a four-vault design would have produced a cross shape overhead, a form some interpretations suggest the builders wished to avoid inside a Jewish house of worship. Whether this was the actual reason or a later explanation attached to an already unusual structure is not confirmed by any surviving building record.

The oldest still functioning

The Altneuschul is widely cited as the oldest active synagogue in Europe still used for regular worship, having survived fires, sieges and repeated periods of persecution against Prague's Jewish community across more than seven centuries without falling permanently out of use.

Preserved by the people who wanted to erase the community

During the Nazi occupation, Prague's synagogues and Jewish ceremonial objects were deliberately catalogued and preserved rather than destroyed, reportedly intended for a planned museum documenting what the occupiers expected to be an extinguished people, an intention that inadvertently left much of the city's Jewish architectural and ritual heritage physically intact when other communities' material culture across occupied Europe was destroyed.