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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Chung-Greffo, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm sitting here with Professor Stephen Fine, he's the director of the Center for Israel Studies at Yeshiva University. He's authored Jewish Religious Architecture from Biblical Israel to Modern Judaism.
Professor Fine, thanks so much for sitting down with us. I'm so happy to be with you. Thank you. So I want to get to one of the chapters that you co-authored in this book is Herod's Temple and Orment to the Empire.
This is really fascinating, and so just wondering if you can give our listeners a little taste of the significance of Herod's Temple and why it was so difficult to create a model of this based on what we could find in both literature and in excavations. Sure, you know, the Temple of Herod was called by one Roman author, a jewel to the Empire, and then by another, the most important building in the East. And so we're dealing with a building that Romans looked at with the same arm that Jews looked at it when they say whoever's never seen Herod's building has never seen a beautiful building all of his life. And so it was quite a monument, the largest Temple compound in the entire Roman world.
The problem with it is that it doesn't exist anymore. We have the Temunos, we have the platform, and that's this very large area surrounded on the Western side by the Western Wall. And then of course it was also in the Northern and the Southern and the Eastern side, but the Western Wall has continued with the significance. We know a lot about it.
We know a lot about it because the Jewish historian of the 1st century, Flavius Josephus, wrote a lot. We know a lot about it because Roman authors mention it, we know a lot about it because the ancient rabbis have quite a bit to say about it. And we know a lot because the platform in which it stood still exists and the area around that platform has been excavated. What don't we know?
The top of the mountain where the Temple actually stood is the site of the Dome of the Rock and the Aloximos. And so there's no excavation up there. So we don't know what's on the mountain. And we probably will never know what's underneath those buildings.
And so we're dealing with a major, major piece of architecture of the 1st century, of which we know a lot from literary sources. We know a lot from archaeological material, but we don't know enough to really reconstruct it, to visualize it without parallels from throughout the Roman world. And so I teamed up with my friend and co-author, Peter Schurps, who is a classical archaeologist. And we together with my skills in the text and the history of art and those sorts of things.
And his in archaeology and the history of art, together we know more or less everything you can know about this building. And so it required the two of us to use our imaginations to fill in the spaces. And what was unique about this article, I think, was that we forced rightly said, we can't do this. Now let's try.
And I think this is a really introduction to one of the themes that runs through your book, which is that so much of Jewish architecture, specifically temples, are ephemeral. They are built and they are destroyed over time and then rebuilt. Can you tell us, you know, why is that running theme through here? And then why was Herod's temple destroyed when even Flavius Josephus writes himself that it is this great architectural jewel.
And the Romans seem to have really revered it themselves. Look, our book is the history of Jewish architecture, which goes from the tabernacle to the desert, as described in the book of Exodus, all the way till yesterday. There are very few themes in Western culture that you can stretch over all of the history of Western culture. This is one of them.
After all, the tabernacle is central to Western thought going through the 18th century into the present. Though, of course, you can't see it. It's written about the temple of Solomon the same, the temple of Herod the same, and the book then continues through synagogues, which in the 19th and 20th century, some communities began to call temples in memory of that temple injury. And then onto the present.
Now, why was it destroyed because of serious culture clash between Judean culture and the imperial Roman culture as Rome set itself up in the east? Most principally that notion that God's chosen people should not be ruled by a foreign power in the first century. And what are the implications of a pagan culture taking over? Now, they were used to pagan cultures taking over since the time of the Persians and the Greeks, since the time of Alexander the Great.
But what they weren't used to was the level of cultural domination that was taking place in the first century BCE and the first century of the common era that was startling. Now, why was it so? And what happened with that? Well, there were some groups that became closer and amalgamated themselves to the empire.
There were other groups that romanized even in their apocalyptic disdain for the empire and lots of other people in between. Now, those people are called the Devsys world people at one extreme at the extreme extreme and the saddest of the other with Pharisees and the believers in a prophet from the Galilean in Jesus in the middle. And so we have this place that was a cauldron of interaction and of stress when Herod started to build his temple in 2019 BCE, rebuilding the temple that was rebuilt after the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. When Herod began to rebuild the temple that was rather modest, Josephus tells us that the local hierarchy made sure that he collected the money and the priests who were going to do the ministry.
And we're all trained before he ever was allowed to start. Herod was building a monument to what he saw as his balance as a Rome supported king to the Jewish population, his balance between Rome and Jerusalem. In his personal life, you can go to his palace and see that he lived more or less like a Roman. You can go all over the Mediterranean world and see temples and streets and even column based on the statue bases that have used the whole statues and this basis, say right on them.
This was given by Herod the Great. He was the master builder as where his descendants who went among the Jews built for the Jews went among the polytheist built for the polytheist and tried to maintain that very precarious balance between Rome and Jerusalem, the temple being the epitome, the focal point and the crown for that balance. That's why all of this effort into reconstruction. Yeah, I think so.
I mean, you talk about that balance and that's what's so interesting about Herod and you mentioned specifically with this temple. He used the Roman architectural form. You talk about, you know, how elaborate this temple was, but then conformity to Jewish values of anti-idolism. So he didn't put any statues in this temple or he read that it lacks sculpture.
So, you know, what is that reflective of his way of ruling and his legacy. Well, if you went to his polytheistic temples, whether in the Golan Heights or outside of contemporary Nabluso or in Caesarea or anyplace else, you would likely find lots of images of deities throughout in the standard Roman way. Since the time of the Maccabees in the second century was people of the Hanukkah story. Today I had been a place where Greek visual imagery wasn't welcome.
Meaning visual imagery that could be construed, seen, imagined as religious, not visual imagery that was average, you know, birds, sometimes even people, plants, rocks, geometry, all sorts of stuff as possible, and was brought in. But they created this environment that I once called in the middle of the Gulf War, an idol-free zone on the basis of military terminology. They spread Judea and they made sure that imagery that they didn't like wasn't readily central to the culture. This continued and became a standard of what Jews did, but I point out that to the north in Samaria, the Samaritans, the other Israelite nation, had to say rural and much stricter, and across the Dead Sea and in the south, the Nabataians also avoided this kind of imagery.
So it was a regional take that was specific to Jews and Samaritans for religious screw-balls that was violated by the coming of Hellenistic and Roman culture into this region. And so there was a force within the culture that would use Roman coins, even in the temple, would use all sorts of basic pieces of the empire, but within the public sphere wouldn't allow images of mythology, images of divinities, that sort of stuff. In fact, when this process began to become ideological in the second century, at the end of the second century BC, the story developed that Abraham, when he left from Or, not just because he found God, but in finding God, his father still the story goes. An idol maker was a priest.
And the clash then ultimately set him on his way to the Promised Land was the breaking of his father's idols. In other words, this became so central that having the imagery of alternate religious communities within their sphere just wasn't acceptable. Does that mean that Jews have a problem with art? No.
Does that mean that Judaism has this second temple phobia against making images? No. And our book shows that as well. What it does mean is that it is a restrictive vocabulary that attends not to do sculpture, but rather painting and other forms.
That it is what I'd like to call anti-dollip, which is the word I sort of made up, as opposed to an iconic. It doesn't do like images. It's like certain kinds of images. So is this similar to in Islam, we see that as well, where there are no depictions of the prophets, the way that you might see in Christianity?
Is that because this is all rooted in, as you mentioned, the story of Abraham, like in the very earliest roots of Judaism? It was just a big book that came out about exactly the subject called the Image Debate. And I wrote the Jewish chapter there. Look, Islam is not as imageless as some parts of Islam would like you to believe.
In some countries, there's all sorts of imagery. In Persia, they used to make images of the Prophet. This has to do a lot with the modernization of the Islamic world and the creation of a modern Islamic ideology, religion, belief system. Though it's all rooted in traditional Islam, of course.
Now, Judaism, similarly develops changes, evolves over time in regard to exactly these kinds of questions. Islam is drawing on Jewish proclivities, for sure. Christianity, in most of its history has not. It's taken a very different path for Christians, at least for Mediterranean Christians in the ancient world.
The icon can be the image of the divinity or an important person, like the Virgin Mary. And by looking at that icon, which is like the icon before, which is like the icon before, which is like the icon before. If you look through your icon straight through all those other icons that stand before it, you can come to the image and to the relationship with a Virgin Mary, or with a Himara else that you're trying to communicate with. For Jews, the text serves that function.
So every tourist world looks more or less like every other tourist world. Throughout history, going back to the revelation of Moses at Sinai. And so where Christians developed a visual icon, Jews who developed a textual icon, Samaritans developed the same textual icon, so did Muslims. They developed a textual icon.
The letter itself becomes a pathway to the holy. Hannah, how does that emphasis on the text affect the way all of these temples and synagogues are actually structured over the years? It seems like they are actually physically surrounding the tector, physically surrounding the Torah, or we see the evolution of that over the centuries. Well, that's absolutely true.
I wrote a book once in my dissertation on the development of exactly that notion, where I argued that the text is the holy object that's used by the holy people in what became the holy place. And then how do you create the stage upon which the liturgy is important to that community, life cycle of that community, take place. And that's what makes Jewish architecture Jewish architecture. It's not about style.
It's not about for most of the time. It's about taking that centrality of certain fixed features, the most important one being the place where the Torah archives kept, or where the Torah is kept in the ark. In other words, wherever this community has lived, over a very long time, its forms have been the forms of the general culture. I like to say often that Jews are the same as everyone else.
If they live in the Islamic world, they do what Muslims do, and if they live in the Christian world, they do what Christians do. But that statement has a stipulation, which is until they're different. And it's the nuance thing that allows a small community to distinguish itself, which from the outside may seem trivial, but the inside can be central to the identity and the way it builds its environment and its identity. And again, in this chapter that you write, some dogs in the Greco-Roman world, you talk about that sort of that balance, but also that conflict between Jews living in the Greco-Roman world.
You write about how the Greeks attached communal life in Alexandria by once again placing statues inside the prayer places. Something else that I found interesting is that in one of these synagogues, it's the synagogue at Beth Alpha. You have a picture of it in the book. It's this beautiful Byzantine period, Mosaic, and in the center panel of the Mosaic is the Zodiac Helios, which is the personification of the sun.
And so, can you talk about why Jewish people continued using images of the Zodiac after Christians abandoned it? And what does this have to do with Jewish construction of the time? Well, the most interesting thing is that it continued. Jews used them in the 5th century, the 6th century, and then it shows up again in the Middle Ages, and then it shows up up again in modern times.
The Zodiac wheel, the 12th symbols of the Zodiac became a really important decorative feature, both in architectural context and in the Middle Ages in illustrated books. So the question is, what are they seeing when they see this image? When you look at the Florida Bay, where it's cousins all over the Galilean, other regions in Israel, you'll see that the 12 regions of the Zodiac are labeled in Hebrew, and each of the seasons in the corners is also labeled. But Mr.
Helios isn't labeled. Mr. Sundod on his chariot. And any of these floors, not only that, in some of the floors, he's not even in the chariot, but there's rather a sundisc in his place.
What's going on with this? I'll tell you what I think happens. Jews borrowed the Zodiac motif for their floors from the general Roman culture. As Christianity strengthened in the 4th, 5th, 6th centuries, the Zodiac became a forbidden image for Christians.
Why? Because the heavens are now populated with the saints, not with these pagan symbols. As a place that's populated with the saints, the proper image might be the starry starry night, as you see in one of the tombs in Ravenna, in Italy, with a huge cross in the center, and the heavens as you look up. But for Jews it was different.
The signs of the Zodiac mark the 12 months of the lunar year, and the Jewish year is a lunar year. And so for Jews when they look up at the sky and see the Zodiac signs, or see a full moon or a partial moon or a moon that isn't even there, even my little kids can look up and see, oh, it's the beginning of the month. Oh, it's the end of the month from a big moon in New York City, where it's hardly possible to see anything in the sky because of the light pollution. So going back to the 6th century, when there was no light pollution, the heavens were really, really close.
And these folks had deep beliefs about what were up there. As the song says, God is watching us from a distance, but the distance isn't so far when the stars are looking in at you. And you believe that the planets are the eyes of God flickering through the heavens. And so the Zodiac signs had real presence.
And lots of people believed that if you knew when something happened and what the calculation of the Zodiac was, you could actually understand something better about a world where they didn't have telescopes, they didn't have a settlement. And with Garrata, we understand things that we can't understand or that we can't control a little bit better than we might have a month and a half ago. These people couldn't control the universe. Their control of the universe was by interpreting the phenomena around them.
But more than that, they believed that up there was God on his throne and surrounded him with zillions of angels. And in their prayer, they would say that amazing phrase from Isaiah, holy, holy, holy as the Lord of hosts, raised up their feet as if they were raised in heaven. I think that the angels are reaching out to them. And so what we're looking at is what one scholar called the Dome of Heaven projected into this space.
Now, did they think that this was idolatrous? Well, some people were clearly uncomfortable with Mr. Helios in the middle of the floor, as I said before. But in general, no.
In fact, they wrote sacred poetry to you team around the theme of the Zodiac. And you can almost imagine people in these synagogues listening to a liturgical poem that goes for month to month and talks about, for example, each of the Zodiac signs of the 12 months crying at the destruction of the temple on the day that it was destroyed in the month of August, the 9th of August. You can see these people living in a space that's between heaven and earth. Now, let's not overstate that.
They borrow this imagery from a Roman context. I don't think it's particularly mystical that some people would like to have it. I think that it fits with their general worldview, which is not our worldview, which doesn't seem odd at times. Like everybody dead worldview seems weird to us at some point or another because they didn't live in our world.
But in the sixth century, this seems to have made sense to borrow this imagery and long after the Christians abandoned it to keep it, which is an interesting thing. Now, what did they see when they saw Mr. Helios? I've got to tell you, every time a new discovery is made, you can almost imagine what the scholars are going to say.
There are those who are going to say that whatever image it is is going to be deeply related to Hellenistic Jewish mystery religions. There's somebody else who's going to say that it's deeply related to the writings of the ancient rabbis. There's someone else who's going to say that it's deeply related to the art of the whatever world. There's somebody else who's going to say that it is a very specific image and there are those who are going to say it's a generalizing image.
Now, the fact that we come up with so many interpretations almost of every element tells you the truth, which is that we don't know, which is okay to not know. But I'll tell you my own take is that we are dealing with imagery that can serve a lot of functions within a liturgical space. That was part of a religious consensus that a mystic would look at and see the mystical and a non-mystic might see the months and how to live the months and might look at the month of the sun, which is in the spring and say, oh, it's almost half over time. And look at the month of T-Shray, which is in the fall and say, oh, look, it's almost the Jewish New Year and all of those things together, sometimes in the same person at the same time, give you a series of windows through a prism or through a crystal of different ways that these people might have looked at a floor.
And there's a lot more piece to remember about these floors, and that is a floor is a floor is a floor is a floor to paraphrase. It is not an icon on a wall. It is not a illustrated prayer book. It is something to walk on something for children to play on something to put furniture on.
And while we may focus on these floors, it's probably because we don't have any walls and we don't have any ceilings and we don't have any lamp and we don't have any wall paintings and we don't have any art and we don't have human beings. When we add all of those features, the floor is part of a larger the churchable space. It's really interesting. Professor Fine, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Professor Fine's book is Jewish religious architecture from biblical Israel to modern Judaism. Thank you folks. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast.