Jewish Art and Architecture in the East European Context: The Gwozdziec-Chodorów Group of Wooden Synagogues
Jewish Art and Architecture in the East European Context: The Gwozdziec-Chodorów Group of Wooden Synagogues
This chapter focuses on a specific group of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues — labelled the Gwoździec–Chodorów group — within their east European context. It identifies the architectural ideas and building traditions which generated these synagogues, and particularly to emphasize the role of ideas from Jewish sources and from the Jewish community in this process. This entails investigating all phases of building development, including sponsorship, inspiration, liturgy, design, construction, and painting, and then differentiating between non-Jewish east European sources and sources from the local and the broader Jewish community. The role of Jewish ideas requires careful differentiation because their influence on the architecture of the synagogues has been so loosely assumed and insufficiently documented in current scholarship. The chapter then suggests that the explosion of interest in kabbalah in Jewish society during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have informed the architecture of the synagogues.
Keywords: wooden synagogues, Gwoździec–Chodorów group, architectural ideas, building traditions, Jewish community, Jewish ideas, kabbalah, Jewish society, Jewish art, Jewish architecture
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