A shopkeeper helps a customer at the Azra Alyahoodi (Azra the Jew) market also known as the “Jewish market,” in the city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria, on July 27, 2023. (Photo by Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)
(JTA) — The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has opened up a sea of uncertainty about Syria’s future — and about the treasures of its past, including the remnants of its Jewish history.
A 13-year civil war has cost the country more than 600,000 lives and saw some 100,000 people “forcibly disappeared” into prisons by the Assad regime. The war has also wreaked havoc on Syria’s most important cultural sites — from ancient monuments, castles and mosques to the vestiges of a rich Jewish culture.
Well before the war, Syria’s historical synagogues and other Jewish sites languished in neglect after Jews left the country en masse surrounding Israel’s establishment. Now, archaeologists are beginning to assess how much more was lost to bombardment and wartime looting.
Syria was home to well established Jewish communities for more than 2,000 years, dating back to the Roman period, including Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and European Jewish merchants. But the 20th-century rise of Arab nationalist movements, along with a set of anti-Jewish laws and violence surrounding the establishment of Israel, resulted in waves of Jewish emigration.
About 100,000 Jews lived in Syria at the start of the 20th century, dropping to 15,000 in 1947. An anti-Jewish riot that year, followed by the creation of Israel in 1948, spurred many of the remaining Jews to leave — though they were not legally permitted to do so in most cases despite facing persecution in Syria. The Aleppo Codex, a landmark 10th-century copy of the Hebrew Bible, was damaged and secreted out of the country to Israel around that time.
By 1992, when Assad’s father acceded to pressure to let the Jews emigrate, there were about 4,000 Jews remaining in Aleppo and smaller numbers in Damascus and Qamishli. Most left the country shortly afterwards.
In 2011, a now-infamous Vogue profile of Asma al-Assad, Bashar’s wife, quoted her as saying that Jews fit into her vision of religious diversity in Syria. “There is a very big Jewish quarter in old Damascus,” she told the interviewer, who noted that homes in the quarter had been boarded up since the 1992 exodus. (The article was removed from the internet after drawing criticism for sanitizing the wife of a dictator, and his regime, but remains accessible in an archived form.)
In 2022, an estimate of Syria’s Jews counted only four; this year, the widely circulating number is three. Many Jewish sites have had no caretakers for decades, said Emma Cunliffe, an archaeologist with the Cultural Property Protection and Peace team at Newcastle University.
“In a conflict situation, that neglect intensifies,” said Cunliffe. “Those few people who remained to look after them were then unable to reach them. But then as the war progressed, the damage increased significantly.”
By 2020, nearly half of Syria’s Jewish sites were destroyed, according to a report from the Foundation for Jewish Heritage. The Jobar Synagogue in Damascus, one of few Jewish places of worship still visited by a handful of elderly Jews before the war, was mostly turned into rubble in 2014. A host of ancient Torah scrolls, tapestries, chandeliers and other artifacts from the synagogue went missing, with some resurfacing in Turkey.
The al-Bandara Synagogue, one of the oldest synagogues in Aleppo, also suffered damage during heavy fighting in the region. The synagogue had been renovated in the 1990s but was damaged again during the civil war in 2016. Cunliffe, who conducted a study of the site in 2017, said some parts of the building were destroyed and its courtyard was littered with debris. (A recent virtual reality exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem allowed visitors to explore the famed synagogue as it stood in 1947, using photographs taken by a local woman who later emigrated.)
Tadef, a town east of Aleppo, was once a popular destination for Jews because of its shrine to the Jewish scribe and prophet Ezra, who was said to stop there on his way to Jerusalem. But after a long period of neglect, the shrine was illegally excavated and looted both by rebel groups and Syrian government forces between 2021 and 2022, according to the rights group Syrians for Truth and Justice.
Scholars also worry about the ruins of Roman-era synagogues in Syria’s ancient cities, such as Apamea and Dura-Europos. Satellite imaging has shown that Dura-Europos was heavily looted while being held by Islamic State forces, according to Adam Blitz, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Remnants from the synagogue of Dura-Europos are treasured by museums, including the Yale University Art Gallery, which displays 40 tiles from the synagogue’s ceiling. But Blitz said other artifacts from the site are feared to have been pilfered by combatants.
“There has been tremendous fear about mosaics being looted,” he said.
The extent of the damage to Jewish sites is still difficult to assess, according to Cunliffe, who said the skills and training needed for forensic damage collection remain limited in the war-torn country. Investigations through satellite imagery will also take several months. It may take much longer to establish protection for these sites, as Syria’s cultural sector has been overlooked during the war and the Syrian Antiquities Authority has been consigned to a tiny budget.
As Syria hurtles into a new era, the fate of its heritage sites hangs in the balance. The country’s gems of Jewish history will only survive as far as its next regime allows, said Cunliffe.
The new regime has its roots in Islamic fundamentalist movements but in recent years has taken a pragmatic turn, leaving open questions about the fate of minorities and their interests under its governance.
“Support for the people who are in a position to access them and protect them is critical, and also the need for an inclusive society that will allow that to happen,” Cunliffe said about the historic Jewish sites. “We don’t know what the future of Syria looks like. Certainly, there’s a lot of fighting, and which group ultimately wins will dictate a lot of what is possible.”
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