A Classicist’s Encounter with the Synagogue at Ostia

The fence was about ten feet high, standing at the end of a dusty dirt road, flanked by the crumbling concrete walls of long-abandoned inns, houses, and public restrooms. It was a standard chain-link fence, festooned with unambiguously prohibitory signs: “CHIUSO,” “VIETATO ENTRARE.” Closed. No entry. I read the signs and sized up the fence, trying to figure out the best way to climb it.

Tomorrow, I would be boarding a plane at Fiumicino Airport to return to the States after a wonderful jaunt of a research trip. I’d spent the last two weeks taking fastidious notes in the underground chambers of Nero’s Domus Aurea, tracking down an inscription in storage at the Capitoline Museums, and hammering away at a Microsoft Word document as I devoured a few too many cups of stracciatella in a cozy gelateria. But today, there was one last thing I needed to do. Not for my research, but for myself.

Now, this might be the time to mention that, as a classicist, I stumble across the Jews fairly often. But they’re not exactly the Jews I learned about in Hebrew school: not the Chosen People, not the venerable Avot v’Imahot, not the resolute Israelites whose miraculous liberation brings my family and so many other families together at Passover seders. Instead, in the context of classical antiquity, Jews are peripheral curios, side characters who pop up from time to time throughout the sweeping saga of the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome. These classical Jews are wily insurgents, whose guerrilla tactics managed to stem the Hellenizing influence of Antiochus’ mighty Seleucid dynasty. They’re the Roman residents whose quirky cult was strategically recognized as an official religion as a result of Julius Caesar’s realpolitik. They’re the rebellious extremists whose rocky fortress collapsed under the exemplary siege of General Lucius Flavius Silva. And, as it happens, they’re also the pious devotees who decided to build a small synagogue in the cosmopolitan port city of Ostia.

At the height of the Roman Empire, Ostia was the nexus of trans-Mediterranean trade, the place where grain, olive oil, and all kinds of other imports were unloaded from cargo ships and carted off to the capital just fifteen miles inland. Two millennia later, the once-bustling port has become, as with most other remnants of ancient Rome, an archaeological site. A quite well-preserved and well-excavated site, but one lacking the big name and corresponding crowds of more famous attractions like Pompeii or Herculaneum.

So, as I walked down the main street of ancient Ostia on that sunny Sunday before I caught my flight out of Fiumicino, I wasn’t surprised to find the oft-overlooked town to be empty and quiet. But I was surprised when I got to the chain-link fence with the unambiguously prohibitory signs. Why was it blocked off? I reached into my pocket, unfolded my map, and checked for an indication of the obstacle standing in my way. But I couldn’t find anything; on the map, it was an easy straight-shot down the road, past the ruins of the municipal bathhouse, then a sharp left turn to that tiny first-century synagogue at the edge of the site.

Peeping through the fence, I figured out the problem: there was an archaeological dig in progress. On the other side of the fence, trowels and tape measures lay scattered about, and open pits and trenches pockmarked the expansive field. This part of the site was off-limits to tourists because archaeologists were using it.

They weren’t, however, using it at that exact moment. Sunday must have been the archaeologists’ day off, since I couldn’t spot any of them on the premises. I thought about this as I pressed my face against the fence, squinting until the synagogue’s rectilinear outlines came into view. I took a quick glance over my shoulder (the coast was clear), leapt onto the chain-link fence, and began climbing.

This decision — to hop the fence and to trespass on an archaeological dig overseen by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities just so I could set foot inside the foundations of an old synagogue — was wrong. In fact, in scampering across that active dig site, I was violating not only Italian law but also the teachings of the great Sephardic philosopher Moses Maimonides.

In his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides professes that the value of tikkun — of repair, of welfare, of community well-being — “is tantamount to every individual among the people not being permitted to act according to his will and up to the limits of his power, but being forced to do that which is useful to the whole.” As I trampled over freshly excavated earthwork, kicking up dust and disturbing a delicate scientific operation, I was pushing far beyond the limits of my power, acting according to my will in a selfish quest to gain access to something that was indisputably off-limits. Far from repairing a community, my illicit footsteps were impairing the painstaking labor of a team dedicated to uncovering artifacts that contribute to humanity’s collective knowledge about our past and ourselves.

And yet, when I finally made it to the synagogue, when I stepped across the stone threshold placed there by an ancient Roman Jew — a fellow Jew, who worshipped my same G-d, who read my same Torah — I could not help but feel a sense of tikkun. For, in Maimonides’ view, tikkun also “consists in the acquisition by every human individual of moral qualities that are useful for life in society.” In a distant, forbidden corner of an archaeological park, I was standing in a synagogue, a gathering place, where twenty centuries ago diasporic Jews like me came together to study Torah for the sake of doing exactly what Maimonides said was so important to do — acquiring, through our shared religion, the moral qualities that are useful for life in society. In the ruins of the synagogue at Ostia, I was standing in a Jewish community that exists across space and across time, that still somehow remains somewhat intact as a building constructed a decade before the Second Temple was destroyed. I was standing, indeed, in a place of tikkun, but it was a place of tikkun I accessed by taking decisive action against that very value — by hopping the fence.

In the ruins of the synagogue at Ostia, I was standing in a Jewish community that exists across space and across time.

My presence at the synagogue was thus one of sacred profanity, of concordant discordance, of regardful disregard. As my feet came down over the threshold, they brushed up against dry weeds and cracked stones. It was still a few hours until evening, a few hours until modern-day synagogues would be filled with the sounds of the Ma’ariv Aravim. But at that moment, in that ancient synagogue, the evening prayer nonetheless wormed its way into my mind.

“Ma’ariv Aravim,” for the poetically inclined, can be translated as “He Who Mixes the Twilight,” He who rolls light into dark and dark into light. As a reverent trespasser on the crumbling remains of an ancient Roman house of Jewish worship, I was that mixed twilight. I was a bad classicist but a good Jew, or perhaps a bad Jew but a good classicist. I was simultaneously so close to classical antiquity, yet so destructive to classical archaeology, so connected to my Jewish heritage, yet so dismissive of its teachings. Baruch atah Adonai, I whispered, almost voicelessly, ha-ma’ariv aravim.

After breathing these words, I lingered for a while longer in the synagogue. And then I walked back across the dig site to that ten-foot chain-link fence, and I hopped back over.  

Justin Ross Muchnick is a writer and teacher based out of Boston, MA.