Of Brick and Wood: Multicultural Masterpieces

Humans are the dominant species in our age.  We are the most destructive to each other and to our environment.  But the upside is that we are creative and inventive in this environment too, and produce things that are beautiful to us--and often starting with the humblest of materials.  As art historians, we like to study these things, classify, organize and group them according to norms we establish within our lifespans.  Great stone cathedrals come to mind, or Norwegian stave churches, or the formidable structures that are driven by technological advances like those towering skyscrapers of Dubai and Singapore.

Cervera de la Cañada, Santa Tecla: Interior detail

Gwozdziec Synagogue: Portal of the Rabbis by Isidor Kaufman

For me, some of the most remarkable of these structures are those that are very regional and time-restricted, and that make something remarkably beautiful out of very modest materials.  There are many over time and geography, but I just wanted to mention two: 13th-16th century brick churches in the region of Aragon in Spain, and 17th-18th century wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe--now long gone but well-documented by pre-World War II photography.  Both were built by artisans of one religion for another.  Within the last sixty years or so, both groups of buildings have been well studied and analyzed, and I'll give you excellent links to detailed sites below.

Spain: Aragon at Upper Right

Art Historians have given a name, Mudéjar, to the Aragonese churches.  The term Mudéjar generally refers to the Muslim residents of Christian Spain during the Reconquest period.  In Aragon, Mudéjar artisans and builders dominated the construction trade and their principal building material was brick: they made brick and ceramics as well.  Presumably, the Mudéjars also made mosques for themselves and perhaps synagogues for Aragonese Jews,  but none of these survive.  A number of the Christian churches were built on the sites of former mosques in this region as the Christians continued

Ateca: Santa María.  Minaret-Bell Tower

to vanquish Muslims up to 1492.  Some of the towers we call minarets from these conquered mosques were appropriated, extended higher and converted into bell towers when they became churches, though most often the church proper was rebuilt to conform to the shape and orientation of Christian practice: longitudinal nave, polygonal apse.

 

Morata de Jiloca, San Martín

The builders of the churches were these Mudéjar craftspeople, who used local and inexpensive brick, and their own time-tested building methods.  Following their own traditions, they adorned the repurposed or new towers, apses and facades with geometric decorations of raised and angled brick as well as colored ceramic inserts to liven them up.  The interiors were plastered and painted with patterns to imitate stone, or repeated geometric motifs; windows and their supports were filled in with geometric patterns too.  Several of these buildings remained reasonably intact, such as those in Tobed, Cervera de la Cañada, Maluenda and Torralba de Ribota, and in the last few decades meticulously restored.

Cervera de la Cañada: Apse (with later retablo and painting)

What makes these structures so interesting is that this profusion of motifs merged with the interior objects and adornments provided by their Christian users: big brightly colored and gilded multi-paneled altarpieces called retablos were in most side chapels and over the high altar; elaborate stucco pulpits and choir screens use a Mudéjar technique but also Gothic pattern motifs.  The interior effect was a riot of pattern and color, but the long nave, sometimes side-aisles, lateral chapels and the apse with its high altar were undeniably and proudly Christian. So these churches were a design collaboration of Muslims and Christians that resulted in a unique fusion.

This fusion produced a very regional kind of architecture that achieved its opulence through brick, ceramic, stucco and painted and gilded wood: inexpensive materials that combined to produce something unique and rich.  There is a website that serves as a visual and informational treasure trove for this architectural movement illustrated with meticulously photographed details for all of them that are out there, maintained by José Antonio Tolosa.  I give the link below.

Map of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

If brickmaking materials abounded in late medieval Aragon, so did trees in eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Wooden architecture developed in the region and encompassed both housing and places of worship.  It is readily seen in old photographs of small towns in the countryside, in large manor houses, cottages and both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in the region, as well as spectacular Jewish wooden synagogues. The greatest flowering of this multi-cultural renaissance took place during the existence of what was known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795).

Wolpa Synagogue: Bimah (c); Ark (r)

While masonry synagogues were built in larger cities, synagogues in the countryside were constructed of timber, and though the present consensus has it that the builders and carpenters themselves were not Jews, their  methods conformed to those of the general type of all architecture of the period.  As in the case of Mudéjar churches in Aragon, this was modified to meet the needs of Jewish practice. Interior synagogue space was basically a square, and had two liturgical focus points: the Ark, which held the Torah scrolls, generally located on the eastern wall, and the Bimah, here a pavilion-like platform in the middle of the room, where the Torah portions were read each Sabbath and on holidays, with seating around it.

 

Due to less durability and fires, these synagogues were often modified over time, with their roofline raised to accommodate interior cupulas of complex construction.  Exteriors were relatively plain, though as roofs were raised, the exterior profiles became multi-tiered.  Also, extra galleries, porches and other rooms were successively added, resulting in complex exteriors such as at Zabludow.

Zabludow: Synagogue

But much as the altarpieces and stucco screens of the Aragonese churches transformed their appearances to conform to a profound Christianity, the wooden synagogues' interiors were adorned with structures, and often wall and ceiling paintings that expressed their Judaism.  Torah Arks became tall narrow often filigreed affairs, often richly colored and sometimes gilded.  The bimahs rivaled the baldacchinos of Italian Baroque churches, with elaborate wooden carving.  And in some synagogues, the walls were covered with painted Hebrew religious texts, while the ceilings and painted cupolas could offer Zodiac imagery, various animals and painted ornament: human form might not be represented (except for the painted hands offering the Priestly blessing above some arks), but anything and everything else was.  It's not clear who actually executed the interior carvings, but the wall and ceiling painters were Jewish: they signed their work and formed itinerant teams who traveled from town to town, much like the Romanesque church

Khodorow: Ark and wall painting

painters in medieval Catalonia.

There is one irony, though: this superb environment was for men only.  Originally most of these structures had no accommodation for women at all; subsequently a narrow side upper or lower room for women was added on in many of them, but the only visual access was through a heavy grill or a narrow slit.  At least Aragonese Catholic women could sit or stand alongside of the men.

If any of these synagogues survived, they would surely be Unesco World Heritage Sites, but some vanished in the late 19th - early 20th century as small-town populations became very impoverished, and many Jews emigrated.  Those that did make it up to Hitler's invasion of Eastern Europe perished in the Holocaust.  Fortunately, many of them were photographed, analyzed and documented in the 1920's in a project sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute.  A good portion of this archive survived World War II, and was utilized by the architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka in their superb wooden synagogue studies beginning in 1957 (I cite a reference to the later English edition below).  Building on this, the architectural historian Thomas Hubka produced a marvelous monograph on one Synagogue, that of Gwozdziec, and this inspired the new Museum of Polish Jewry and the American Handhouse studio to recreate the Synagogue's ceiling and bimah as the museum's centerpiece, joining an earlier recreation of the painted Chodorov ceiling at the Beit Hatefutsoth Museum in Tel Aviv.

 

The reconstructed bimah and ceiling from Gwozdziec

A more curious reconstruction is of the Wolpa Synagogue in the town of Bilgoraj, integrated into a reproduced Jewish Shetl, --is this a sort of Shtetl theme-park?  Bilgoraj now has no Jews, but it did--and a synagogue too, but not this one!

We often forget about the multicultural artistic collaborations found in so many places in the world at so many different time periods; human beings can coexist and produce masterpieces, but histories and the current news so often accentuate the negative.

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The very best place to see an encyclopediopic collection of images and many details of Aragonese Mudéjar architecture is José Antonio Tolosa's website Aragón Mudéjar:

https://www.aragonmudejar.com

The two superior works on Wooden Synagogues are Books:

1. María and Kazimierz Piechotka, Heaven's Gates.  Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Krupski i S-ka, 2004.

There are earlier versions, Wooden Synagogues, both in Polish and English, going back to 1957. There's a later edition published by Polin, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and a sister volume on masonry synagogues in the same region: pricey, but worth seeking out.

2.Thomas C. Hubka, Resplendent Synagogue. Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth=Century Polish Community, Brandeis University Press, 2004, also pricey--but easier to find.

A short film on reconstructing the Gwozdziec ceiling can be found at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc-s-GfPrFs

For discussions of many and varied aspects of Jewish art, including synagogues of all places and times, I recommend Samuel Gruber's wonderful website:

http://samgrubersjewishartmonuments.blogspot.com