Moorish Influence At Home in the City
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The holiday season is a good time to reflect on how the world’s religions have influenced one another’s architecture. A case in point is Central Synagogue, Congregation Ahawath Chesed, on Lexington Avenue and 55th Street.
The German Reform congregation began on the Lower East Side in 1846 and erected its present home in 1872. Architect Henry Fernbach chose a Moorish style for the new building. He was influenced by the famous Dohany Street Synagogue, designed by Ludwig Foerster and built in Budapest in 1854–59. Dohany Street itself came out of a 19th-century movement in synagogue architecture in which two of the greatest German architects, Friedrich von Gärtner (Munich Synagogue, 1832) and Gottfried Semper (Dresden Synagogue, 1839–40), helped develop the idea that the Moorish style of medieval Spain was the most appropriate style for the houses of worship of a religion that lacked an architectural tradition like those of the Gothic in Christian churches.
The first Moorish-style synagogue in America was Plum Street Temple (B’nai Jeshurun), built in Cincinnati in 1866, followed closely by New York’s first Temple Emanu-El, on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, built in 1868, designed by Leopold Eidlitz, assisted by Henry Fernbach.
A couple of anomalies present themselves. First, the Ashkenazic Jews of Germany were responsible for the vogue of the Moorish style of the Sephardic Jews of Spain. Second, weren’t the Moors Muslims? Yet the Moorish style recalled what for many Jews was a golden age, the Caliphate of Córdoba, when Muslims, Jews, and Christians more or less peaceably coexisted in the socially and culturally most advanced society in medieval Europe.
Central Synagogue has a distinctive exterior, with polychromatic stonework, inset tiles, elaborately traceried windows, and twin octagonal towers capped by onion domes. The interior is spectacular. Its eye-popping quality is partly the result of recent reconstruction following a disastrous 1998 fire. The interior is all about the colors, which are as fresh as when the building first opened. The sanctuary features elaborate stenciling in, it is said, 69 colors. The geometric forms came from British designer Owen Jones’s monumental “Grammar of Ornament” (first issued in 1856).Jones was a leading exponent of Islamic design. His influence led to Islamic style finding a place in the picturesque eclecticism of 19th-century America. Temple Emanu-El’s Leopold Eidlitz designed P.T. Barnum’s Bridgeport home, “Iranistan,” and we see the Islamic influence in Frederic Church’s “Olana,”in Hudson, N.Y.(co-designed by Central Park’s Calvert Vaux) and in much of Louis Tiffany’s work. Most notably we see it in Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace, by Jacob Wrey Mould, who had worked for Owen Jones.
Moorish synagogues flourished in New York: Eldridge Street Synagogue (1886–87) and Park East Synagogue (1890) on East 67th Street are two notable examples. But in 1897 Arnold Brunner designed Congregation Shearith Israel, on Central Park West and 70th Street, in a stately classical style, as different as can be from the riotously picturesque Moorish, which he said gave “the impression that the Jew was necessarily an alien, and did not wish to be regarded as an American.” Shearith Israel is very beautiful. But Moorish synagogues are no more “alien” than Central Park.