As the site of regularly performed religious rituals, religious buildings are permanent, institutionalised sites for producing the Holy. But the religious building also produces and reproduces – mainly through its architectural style and its location – the relationship between the religious organisation and the wider community where the building stands. Here, the religious is produced along with its relationship to the secular. The religious buildings of minority faiths, in particular, create and reflect their version of the Holy along with the struggle to define the status of the minority religion vis-à-vis not only the majority religion but also the secular polity where majority and minority live together. This essay examines the case of the nineteenth-century so-called “Moorish-style” synagogue, through the particular example of the Israelite Temple (tempio israelitico) of Florence.

The history of the Florence temple is a specific example of the difficult negotiations that must take place when a not-quite-welcome, not-quitetrusted minority wishes to advertise its rights and achievements – its integration without losing its identity – through an architectural landmark. The actors making decisions on what and how to build were the community as well as the architects, and also the arbiter of local bourgeois taste, the Reale Accademia delle Arti del Disegno.

Other than the painful dictates of cost, the community had a number of priorities. These concerned the dimensions of both space (size and location) and style. The history of most Moorish-style synagogues reflects a local community's struggle to build large synagogues in conspicuous places and to negotiate a style that asserts the greatness of Judaism as a modern religion with respectable ancient roots. Taking place in the context of the struggle for legal and social emancipation, this struggle to present a grandiloquent image of the Jews would be taken to the very limits, just a little shy of offending even sympathetic gentiles. It required decades of difficult negotiations between the Jewish community and the Florentine elite. ‘

Moorish Style’: The Jew as Oriental

Moorish-style synagogues are instructive in part because they suggest parallels to mosque building in the Western world today. Parallels exist not only in the social and political function of the two kinds of religious building but also in their aesthetic execution.