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  • Day 18

    Recently located maybe oldest synagogue

    April 27, 2023 in Spain ⋅ 🌙 66 °F

    Sinagoga Major de Barcelona
    Today I found the location of a Sephardi synagogue dating to the 3rd or 4th century. That would be years with numbers like 252 or 353. Those dates put the synagogue historically right with the Romans here on the Iberian Peninsula.
    Spain, for its own part, been as cruel as anyone in history to Muslims and Jews. Barcelona itself stands out having massacred thousands of Jews in the streets, stealing everything from them and then expelling anybody left in 1391, a good hundred years before of the rest of Spain got around to the same crimes in 1492.
    I could go on.
    The short story is the research, architecture and archeology all line up for this little hole in the ground with a bar/restaurant on top of it.
    The kicker is the magnificent gothic cathedral built down the street used Jewish grave stones, with Hebrew inscriptions, to build the walls.
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