Spanish Synagogue

Synagogue · Josefov (Old Town)Prague,Czechia

A Prague hall covered floor to ceiling in gilded Alhambra patterns, built in 1868 and now telling the story of Bohemia's Jews beneath them.

The Spanish Synagogue is one room where the eye has nowhere to rest. Painted and gilded ornament in green, red and gold covers it from floor to ceiling, worked from Alhambra pattern books. The same motif returns at several sizes, so what reads as texture from the door resolves into drawn geometry at arm's length. There is no Spanish congregation behind the name, and there never was one. Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann and Josef Niklas built the hall in 1868, and Antonín Baum and Bedřich Münzberger spent 1882 and 1883 covering it. The hall now holds the Jewish Museum's exhibition on Jews in the Bohemian lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the story of emancipation and of what followed it is told inside a building that emancipation produced. The cases and panels stand in the body of the room and under the gallery, and you read them with the ornament going on above your head.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Pick one square metre and find the repeat — Everything here is stencilled: each pattern is a unit repeated to fill a shape; finding where one ends shows how it was made.
Come when the sun is on the windows — The gilding is flat paint until light crosses it, and on a grey afternoon the room reads brown rather than gold.
Check whether a concert is on — The hall is used for chamber and organ recitals, and hearing the organ in a synagogue is the clearest statement of what kind of congregation built this.
Read the exhibition and then look up — The displays cover emancipation, the Hilsner trial and the Holocaust, and the contrast between that history and the confidence of the room is the point of visiting both at once.
Men are given a head covering at the door — The building is a museum today, but the rule stands, and it applies before you reach the exhibition.

Things to do

1
Stand in the middle and turn once slowly
Take the centre of the floor and rotate through a full circle without stopping at anything. The point is the total coverage: there is no plain wall anywhere to rest your eye on. Most decorated interiors give you blank stretches between set pieces. This one does not, and the effect only registers if you take it in as a whole.
2
Find the same motif at three sizes
Choose one pattern, an eight-pointed star or an interlace, and hunt for it on a wall, on a gallery front and up in the ceiling. It will be there at different scales. Working that out shows you the logic of the decoration, which is a kit of parts rather than a single painted picture.
3
Look at the organ, then remember the medieval synagogue nearby
Find the organ in the gallery, then remember that the medieval synagogue a few streets away has no such thing. Instruments in worship were exactly what the older congregations rejected. Two buildings within five minutes' walk stand on opposite sides of that argument.