Synagogue Discovered at Ancient Site of Limyra in Southern Turkey

Synagogue ruins  discovered in Finike (ancient Limyra), Turkey. AA photo

Synagogue Discovered at Ancient Site of Limyra in Southern Turkey

(ISJM) The Anatolian News Agency reports that an ancient synagogue has been excavated at the city of Limyra in southern Turkey.  The news reports is not very clear, but its seem the synagogue dates from before the fourth century, and was subsequently repaired.  We will have to await a fully report and also photos of the finds. Is the menorah mentinoed an image of an menorah as was common in ancient synagogues, or a three-dimensional functional menorah, or a sculpted representation (also known from elsewhere.  Was the bath that is mentions a mikvah, or some other water element for either ritual or functional use - also as known elsewhere?  Here is what has been released:

Researchers initially thought the house of worship was a glass furnace, according to the head of the excavations, Dr. Martin Seyer of the Austrian Archaeology Institute. “We first found a bath and a menorah. After some [further] investigation, we found out that it was a synagogue,” he said.

Second synagogue in the Lycian city

The synagogue in Limyra, which is located in Turunçova in Antalya’s Finike district, is the second to be found in the historical Lycian region after one discovered in 2009 in the ancient city of Myra in Antalya’s Demre district. Limyra was the former capital of the Lycian Federation, which some have called the first democratic union.

“We have excavated a small part of the synagogue field, but we think that the synagogue was on a very large field,” he said, citing the relevant law under Emperor Theodosius that only permitted the restoration of existing synagogues rather than the construction of new Jewish houses of worship. “There was a wide and rich Jewish group of people living there. The synagogue is a very important discovery for Jews and the ancient city of Limyra. Thanks to this synagogue, we have chance to see the Limyra excavations and its history.”

Excavations will continue in the area around the synagogue next year, Seyer said, adding that the ancient city would attract many more tourists once the archaeological work is complete. 

Limyra was part of the Lycian League, a confederation of coastal cities later annexed as a province of the Roman Empire. The region of the excavation is rich in archaeological remains of ancient towns of cities of many eras (I remember well the thrill of discovery when I hitch-hiked through the region in the summer of 1978.  Ancient ruins seemed to be everywhere.)

Of course, other synagogues have been discovered in western and southern Turkey, notably at the coastal city of Priene and the inland Lydian (later Roman) capital of Sardis where the most impressive of all ancient western Diaspora synagogues was found as part of a major public building complex in the center of the city.  The existence of a large and prosperous Jewish community in ancient Anatolia is well-known from archaeological finds and documentation, not to mention the person of Saint Paul, originally a Jew from the southern city of Tarsus, a city further east along the Anatolia's southern coast.

It is with sadness that I report the death of Cesare Colafemmina, the Italian scholar who pioneered the documentary study of Jews of Southern Italy. In over two hundred publications Colafemmina persuasively made the case for the broad settlement of Jews in Southern Italy, and their extreme significance in the history of the region. Colafemmina brought to light and international attention physical monuments of the Jewish past at Venosa, Trani and elsewhere, and published hundreds of documentary references to Jews in Bari, Taranto, Otrano and other southern Italian locales. Together with scholars Ariel Toaff, Shlomo Simonsohn and others, he strove to reinsert the Jewish presence in Italian medieval history.  I re-post here the report of Colafemmina's death from Jewish Heritage Europe, with links to an Italian obituary and a list of his publications. 

A conference “Gli Ebrei nell'Italia meridionale e nel Mediterraneo dall'Età romana all'Altomedioevo” (The Jews in southern Italy and the Mediterranean from the Roman era to the Early Middle Ages)  will be held on October in Prof. Colafemmina's memory.  See  www.cerdem.com - SDG

Death of Italian scholar Cesare Colafemmina

Posted on September 13, 2012 by admin

General view of the Jewish section of the Trani Diocesan museum. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Prof. Cesare Colafemmina, an Italian scholar who was a pioneering researcher on the historic Jewish presence in southern Italy, has died at the age of 79. Colafemmina died Sept. 12 after a long illness.
Colafemmina taught at the University of Bari and the University of Calabria and wrote and researched extensively on the Jewish presence in Calabria, Apulia and elsewhere in southern Italy, from ancient times until the present. His fields included ancient Jewish history and epigraphy, as well as archeology. He made important discoveries, including burial chambers and inscriptions, at the Jewish (and Christian) catacombs in Venosa, in Potenza province. Much of his work centered on the medieval period and also the aftermath of the expulsion of Jews from the south in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Colafemmina oversaw the installation of a  Jewish museum, a section of the local Diocesan Museum, that opened recently in the “Scola Grande,” one of the two thirteenth century synagogues that remain standing in the town of Trani, in Apulia. He was on the executive committee of the Italian Association for Jewish Studies and was the editor of «Sefer Yuḥasin», a bulletin on Jewish studies in southern Italy, which he founded in 1985.

The Cesare Colafemmina Center for the Research and Documentation of Judaism in the Mediterranean Region was recently founded in his honor. He donated his extensive library and papers to the Center, which is organizing a memorial symposium in October.

A full obituary (in Italian) can be read here, on the Center’s web site.
A Bibliography of Colafemmina’s publications can be found HERE.