Nineteenth-century Reform synagogues deliberately used Moorish design to reject Gothic aesthetics

Evidence

After the Christianization of the Holy Land, Graetz reports that there remained only one Jewish intellectual center: the academy of Mar Zutra in Tiberias. Yet interestingly, while he laments the loss of their academic institutions, Graetz found that the Jews still retained the aesthetic upper hand, noting that, “Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity, where the most beautiful women in all Palestine were to be found, seems to have been mostly populated by Jews” (5:18). After its definitive separation from Judaism, Christianity, with its “senseless and absurd doctrines” was indeed repugnant to Graetz but here he betrays the belief that Christians themselves were not so beautiful as Jews, even in the birthplace of their religion (3: part 1, 305). Indeed, for nineteenth-century German Jews, so concerned with the reform of their religion’s outer appearance, the relative aesthetics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam played a major role in their extolling the beauty of Islamic culture. Indeed, it was no accident that the synagogues built by many Reform congregations in the middle of the nineteenth century were of Moorish design, a conscious decision to reject the contemporary neo-Gothic revival in architecture. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 390

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Modesty moral-panic article (architecture as identity signaling); also to interior design histories of Moorish revival as orientalism.
• SEED: A potential essay angle: ‘Moorish architecture as Jewish identity performance’ — how an oppressed minority adopted the aesthetic of another religion to define itself against Christian Europe.