The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

One of those synagogues associated with La Senyora, damaged many times by fires, earthquakes and brutal wars, can still be found in a narrow street behind the Izmir fish market. A low door opens onto a perfectly beautiful garden courtyard planted with fig and lemon trees. The interior, gracefully restored, principally by American funds, is a song of cream, blue and gold, vaulting Moorish arches and cushioned seating set around the perimeter in the Sephardi style. But it is the women’s gallery, painted with delicate pastorals – deer leaping over low hills, the statutory birds a-flutter and a-twitter – which bear the stamp of its patroness, or at least an acknowledgement of her generosity. In Istanbul in the old Jewish quarter of Balat there is another synagogue, the Ahira, which has also survived the trials of time and history. Though the present structure is eighteenth century, its reading dais, known in Sephardi communities as the tevah, is claimed as much older, a survivor from the time of the nightingales. Fashioned in the form of a collective memory, the tevah is shaped like the rounded stern of a caravel, or perhaps Noah’s ark (tevah also means ark). The lectern itself is set high, as if the reader of the Torah were a helmsman (which in many ways of course he was), sails filled with billowing hope.