Description of the Synagogue in Alexandria

y. Sukkah 5:1, 55a

220–400

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Alexandria already had a substantial Jewish population at its founding by Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, and the first Ptolemies assigned the Jews their own section of the city (see Alexandria). By the first century BCE, numerous synagogues were spread around Alexandria. One in particular, the Great Synagogue of Alexandria, was exceptionally grand. The description in the Palestinian Talmud is grandiose, citing its opulence and claiming hyperbolically that the building could hold hundreds of thousands of people, as many as took part in the Exodus from Egypt.

It was stated: R. Judah said: Anybody who did not see the double stoa of Alexandria did not ever see the glory of Israel. It was like a large basilica with a stoa inside a stoa. Sometimes there were there twice as many in it as left Egypt. Seventy golden chairs were there, inlaid with precious stones and pearls, corresponding to the seventy elders,¹ each of them costing 250,000 gold dinars. A wooden platform was at the center, and the congregation’s beadle stood on it. If one of the congregation came to read in the Torah, the official waved cloths, and they answered after him, “Amen.” For every benediction that he said, the official waved cloths, and they answered after him, “Amen.” Nevertheless, they were not sitting mixed, but those of each single profession were sitting separately, so that a stranger could associate with those of his profession, and from there he could find support. And who destroyed it? Trajan the evil one.

Adapted from the translation of Heinrich W. Guggenheimer.

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Notes

This likely refers to the Sanhedrin, although in the Babylonian Talmud and elsewhere the number is understood to be seventy-one.

Credits

Adapted from The Jerusalem Talmud, ed. and trans. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999–2015), https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud/Yerushalmi. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 2: Emerging Judaism.