Synagogue versus Ecclesia: mediaeval antagonists

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The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City

By Nina Rowe

It seems that every survey textbook of art history features the svelte pair of 13th-century pendant personifications, Synagogue (defeated and blindfolded) and Ecclesia (triumphant and crowned), which grace the facades of medieval cathedrals in both France and Germany.  Moreover, scholars of medieval allegory and of specifically Jewish imagery have found contemporary texts that show similar allegories engaged in a theological disputation.  But the particular urban contexts in which Jews and Christians alike experienced these figures form the core of this new social and cultural study of Jewish life in principal cathedral cities: Reims, Bamberg, and Strasbourg (1225–40).  Similar figures were destroyed on the facades of both Notre Dame of Paris and Chartres (ca. 1220). 

With this book Nina Rowe, a professor of medieval art history at Fordham University in New York City, has contributed a nuanced set of local studies of medieval history in Jewish Ashkenaz Europe, which should have resonance well beyond art history.  This epoch saw increased Christian antagonism to Jews and Judaism, which found embodiment in the form of fully realized, three-dimensional cathedral sculptures.

Regional differences matter, Rowe asserts.  Reims Cathedral formed the site for French royal coronations, and the paired figures appeared there beside the rose window and amidst sculptures of kings.  At Bamberg the allegories were sited atop pillars astride the Fürstenportal, the bishop’s ceremonial entrance, where Jewish weakness contrasts with Christian fortitude.  Strasbourg’s figures flanked an image of King Solomon on the south façade opposite the bishop’s palace but also near the Jewish district.  This site coincided with a plaza for public punishment and penance in accord with canon law. 

Thus the experience of these contrasting personifications varied considerably, not just for each religious community but also for each location, especially its cathedral chapter, although in all three of these urban cases (unlike other juxtapositions of the two figures in all media) the role of rulers and of Christian authority was underscored, with Christ as model judge. 

Rowe is the first scholar to give focused and sustained attention to the specific contexts of this shared episode of visual culture, proclaiming the Church triumphant.  She also subtly notes the interaction between conceptions of Jews as theological constructs, like the statues, and actual, living, neighbourhood Jews who shared the same cities during a period of increasing tension and hostility between the two religious groups.  A first chapter, making use of recent books on Jewish history, sets the pictorial tradition, growing out of ancient allegories; it also surveys Christian attitudes, largely supersessionist, towards the older religion.  Thus Jewish docility before Christianity becomes the dominant message of the portal allegories.

A Conclusions chapter on the afterlife of this figural juxtaposition expands both the range of media and periods where this antagonistic iconography reappears: manuscripts, ivories, enamels, stained glass, and panel paintings, all display Synagogue versus Ecclesia.  They appear, however, amidst related, more generalized iconography on portals, such as the Wise and Foolish Virgins and the contrast between Virtues and Vices.  Penitence, even for the Christian faithful, already conditioned by the placements at Bamberg and Strasbourg, acquired a new moral self-consciousness within emerging lay piety. 

Meanwhile, in 14th-century France and the Rhineland (as well as England and Aragon), riots, pogroms, or outright expulsion became recurrent facts of Jewish life in late medieval Europe.  Precious few Jews remained after the period of the Black Death to see their earlier personified representation on Christian cathedrals.

The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City by Nina Rowe is published by Cambridge University Press, 2011. 312 pp. 161 illus, $90.00. ISBN 978-0-521-19744-1