Naro Synagogue (Hammam-Lif)

The Jewish community

Nothing is known of the Jews of Naro except what the building itself records. The place was a thermal resort on the coast near Carthage; Prudhomme knew its ancient name as Ad Aquas, and the main inscription supplies the name Naro. The three inscriptions are in Latin, with spellings such as 'sinagoga', 'arcosinagogi' and 'istrumenta'. They name a woman donor, Juliana (the Brooklyn Museum reads Julia of Naro); Asterius; his father Rusticus, who bore the title archisynagogus; and the owners of the 'instrumenta' kept in a side room. One line of the vestibule inscription may call Asterius or his father a margaritarius, a dealer in pearls or jewels: Renan proposed this and called the line an enigma, while the Tunisian writer Zaher Kammoun finds a woman named Margarita there instead. Renan suggested that Juliana was a proselyte; Salomon Reinach preferred to read a title, pateressa. The size of the community, its origins and its dealings with its neighbours are unknown. A newspaper account of the Brooklyn Museum's 2005 exhibition took the Roman character and workmanship of the floor as a sign of mutual acceptance between the congregation and the people around it.

Architecture and design

Prudhomme's plan, printed in 1884, shows a nearly square building of about sixteen rooms, roughly twenty metres on each side, laid out like a Roman house. The entrance, on the south, was marked by two columns and led across a forecourt paved with coarse white pebbles and through a vestibule, which the inscription calls a portico and which had a lozenge-pattern mosaic, into the main hall. The hall measured 9 by 5.25 metres and had a semicircular niche in the middle of its west long wall. Its floor was divided into three fields: a wide carpet of acanthus scrolls enclosing birds, baskets and animals; a narrow one with a duck and a lion; and a central field with fish, ducks and a wheel above the dedication and, below it, a fountain flanked by peacocks and date palms. A small room off the hall held the 'instrumenta' inscription. The building stood about fifty centimetres above sea level, without cellars or deep foundations, on a thick layer of hydraulic cement. Two broken columns, a marble capital and two terracotta lamps were found. Proposed dates run from the fourth to the sixth century; the builder is unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The inscriptions are the only evidence for how the building was used. The dedication in the main hall, flanked by two lampstands, one with a citron and a horn beside it, reads in Renan's transcription 'Sancta sinagoga Naron pro salutem suam ancilla tua Juliana p. de suo propium teselavit': your servant Juliana paved the holy synagogue of Naro with mosaic, at her own expense, for her salvation. In the vestibule, 'Asterius filius Rustici arcosinagogi margaritari ddei partem portici tesselavit' records that Asterius, son of Rusticus the archisynagogus, paved part of the portico. The third text, in two columns, reads 'istrumenta servi tui Naritanus' and 'istrumenta servi tui a Maroni'. Renan took 'instrumenta' to mean the scrolls of scripture, so that this little room was where the holy books were kept; Reinach doubted the reading of the last word. Renan placed the seat or platform of the archisynagogus in the niche, facing the dedication and the door of the scroll room. Marble fragments from the dig were taken by Father Delattre for pieces of a seven-branched lampstand, and one of the lamps bore a menorah. Nothing is recorded about services, teaching or other officers.

Destruction

How the building ended in antiquity is unknown. No source consulted reports traces of fire or gives a date of abandonment, and Prudhomme found only foundations, floors and a few architectural fragments under the soil. What destroyed the excavated remains was their treatment after 1883. In March of that year the mosaic was fully cleared, protected and guarded by sentries. Salomon Reinach wrote in 1886 that it then became the object of a dispute between two persons, neither of whom had the least right to claim it; that it was clumsily detached from the floor of the building; and that the fragments, more or less damaged, went into crates, part of them, he believed, to the Saint-Louis museum at Carthage and the larger part to Lyon. He named nobody. Later accounts say that Captain Ernest de Prudhomme of the French army had the floor cut into panels, sent them to Toulouse for restoration, kept them at his home in Lyon and sold them. Mosaics in the other rooms were never recorded and are lost. The Brooklyn Museum acquired twenty-one panels from his collection in 1905. An expedition in 1909 failed to find the building again.

The community’s fate

The fate of the Jews who used the synagogue is unknown. No text read for this entry mentions the community of Naro, and nothing from the excavation dates its end. The Brooklyn Museum dates the main floor to about 500 CE, a period Zaher Kammoun describes as late Vandal or Byzantine, and its exhibition text places the synagogue's life broadly between about 200 and 700 CE without saying when or why it closed. The same museum's curator, Edward Bleiberg, points out that imperial law then restricted synagogues: a decree of 415 CE barred the building of new ones and the repair of old ones, although enforcement was uneven, and the laying of a costly new floor suggests that the congregation still felt secure. Whether the community later declined, moved away, converted or was driven out is not recorded. Jewish communities are known in Tunisia from Roman times onward, but no link between the ancient congregation of Naro and any later community is documented in the sources read.

The site today

The find-spot was never fixed on a published map. Prudhomme described it as fifty metres outside the buildings his battalion occupied at Hammam-Lif, at most two hundred metres from the sea, in the strip between the beach and Mount Bou Kornine; a notice of 1883 put it a few metres from the shore. An expedition in 1909 did not find the building, and it is now regarded as lost. What survives underground, if anything, is unknown, and the area is part of the modern seaside town. The pieces of the floor are divided: the Brooklyn Museum in New York holds twenty-one mosaic panels, and the Bardo National Museum in Tunis holds the inscription panels. The map pin marks the centre of Hammam-Lif, not the synagogue.

Notable names