Sinagoga (Synagogue) and Jewish Museum

Home to the Jewish community of Florence

The center of the 1,400-strong Jewish community in Florence is this imposing Moorish-Byzantine synagogue, built in the 1870s and opened in 1882.

In an effort to create a neo-Byzantine building, the architects ended up making it look rather like a church, complete with a dome, an apse, a pulpit, and a pipe organ.

The intricate polychrome arabesque designs, though, lend it a distinctly Eastern flavor, and the rows of prayer benches facing each other, and the separate areas for women, hint at its Orthodox Jewish nature.

Though the synagogue is technically Sephardic, the members of the Florentine Jewish community are Italian Jews, a Hebrew culture that has adapted to its Italian surroundings since the 1st century BC when Jewish slaves were first brought to Rome.

(The Florentine community dates roughly from the 14th century, and was largeyl protected—if sometimes marignalized—under Medici and Napoleonic rule, however it was persecuted under Savonarola and during other Medici interregna. Then, of course, there were the Nazi-allied Fascists of the middle 20th century.)

More on Jewish life, sights, and keeping kosher in Florence: jewishflorence.org.

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