Considering Dura: Part IIPart I does not appear to be online.
Richard McBee
Posted Jul 07 2010 (Jewish Press)
Dura Europos looms large in the history of Jewish Art not only because of its place as the earliest example of Jewish Art but also because its achievements are seemingly at odds with the conceptual and halachic problems it presents. The complexity and variety of Torah subjects depicted are more ambitious and extensive than any Jewish Art until the advent of the illuminated Haggadahs in Spain one thousand years later. The notion of a synagogue interior fully decorated with images does not reappear until the famous painted shuls of Poland, Lithuania and Russia in the 17th century. All that said the images we see are, at times, problematic.
Aside from the fact that the extensive figuration, especially on the Western wall toward which congregants would pray, flies in the face of the injunction against graven images in the context of worship, other issues arise upon closer inspection. Many of the Torah figures - Abraham, Moses, Samuel and Elijah - are depicted in Roman costume as contemporary statesmen-heroes, blurring the distinction between Jew and Gentile. There are troubling factual inconsistencies: the last two sections of the Exodus panel are out of narrative sequence; the consecration of the "Temple of Aaron" seems to show a bull about to be killed with an ax - contrary to normative Jewish slaughter - and the panel frequently labeled as "Solomon's Temple" shows the Temple doors decorated with recognizable pagan figures. Finally the panel "Rescuing Moses" from the Nile depicts Pharaoh's daughter as unclothed. Nonetheless, these contradictions to our notions of appropriate synagogue decoration must not distract us from attempting to understand the earliest example of Jewish narrative art.
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UPDATE: Joseph Lauer directs me to Part I here. Excerpt:
"Aladen's Lamp had been rubbed and suddenly from the dry, brown, bare desert had appeared paintings, not just one nor a panel nor a wall but a whole building of scene after scene, all drawn from the Old Testament in ways never dreamed of before" exclaimed Clark Hopkins, one of the first archeologists to see the newly discovered frescoes from the synagogue at Dura Europos in 1932.This part has a detailed overview of the site and its layout.
In that one exciting location there are no less than 14 major narratives depicted on the walls of the synagogue. They are not symbolic ciphers; rather they are fleshed out scenes that evoke in a complex and often midrashic style well-known Torah narratives. They had been painted for this synagogue sometime around 245 CE in the frontier Roman town of Dura. The town was overrun and destroyed by the Persians in 256 CE and forgotten until the British accidentally uncovered it in 1920.
UPDATE (10 July): More on the Dura Europos synagogue here.