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Coenen Snyder considers what the architecture and construction of nineteenth-century European synagogues reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. The process of claiming a Jewish space was a marker of acculturation but not full acceptance, she argues. The new edifices, even if spectacular, revealed the limits of Jewish integration.

In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the search for a symbolic Jewish presence in the urban centers of Central Europe led to the emergence of a monumental synagogue architecture in the Moorish revival style. This new architectural convention experienced a sudden breakthrough in April and May 1854, when it was adopted almost simultaneously in the plans for three major synagogues to be built in Leipzig, Vienna, and Pest. In this article, I will demonstrate that the social and aesthetic agendas of the three community leaderships were interconnected and that they must be understood in the context of the international political events transpiring at the time. In the spring of 1854, Europe witnessed the military and propagandistic run-up to the Crimean War. In the spirit of liberal patriotism, Hungarian Jews identified with the Ottomans against the Czarist Empire and saw the contemporary Islamic-Christian alliance as a globalizing extension of the emancipation process.

This article analyses the architecture of women’s sections in eastern European synagogues and argues that two profound changes took place, one in the eighteenth century and the second in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first was moving of the women’s section from an external (but not detached) annex into the main volume of the synagogue; the second was the introduction of women’s galleries into the prayer halls. The first move coincided with the alteration of the woman’s status in Jewish traditional society, while the second move resulted from the arrival of modernity and reflected the changing place of women in eastern European Jewish society.

Coenen Snyder considers what the architecture and construction of nineteenth-century European synagogues reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. The process of claiming a Jewish space was a marker of acculturation but not full acceptance, she argues. The new edifices, even if spectacular, revealed the limits of Jewish integration.