Saskia Coenen Snyder. Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 119; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/119.3.972
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Tourism and Spaces
Resumo“Synagogues are great storytellers” (p. 253), writes Saskia Coenen Snyder in her comparative study of synagogue architecture in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris. Indeed, Coenen Snyder succeeds well in telling the story of these four different but comparable Western European communities in this innovative, informative, and well-presented study that builds on her dissertation. Her book tells us what we can learn about these communities when we look at how they built their houses of worship. We learn, for example, that German Jews, who were not yet emancipated in the 1860s when Berlin's New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße was built, felt a strong need to impress their neighbors; hence their desire for visibility and the structure's fancy exterior, prime location, and Moorish Revival architectural style. They were also under pressure, Coenen Snyder argues, to adopt religious reform in order to finally achieve legal equality. British Jews, being already emancipated, were more low-key when it came to showing their status to the Gentiles. They adhered to Orthodox rites inside the new London Central Synagogue and remained modest in designing its architectural exterior, which reflected Victorian codes of public and private display.
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