Jewish communal prayer needs ten adults, not a building
A synagogue can hold a Torah ark, classrooms and a social hall, yet Jewish law says none of that is required for communal worship. Ten adults, a minyan, are enough anywhere. That portability mattered enormously after Rome destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and prayer replaced sacrifice.
The Hebrew name, bet knesset, means house of assembly, and the Greek-derived synagogue says the same thing. Its oldest attestation is the Theodotos inscription from 1st-century Jerusalem. Ashkenazi Jews say shul, a Yiddish word traced to Greek schola, the root of English school. Sephardi and Romaniote communities say kal, from qahal, community, while Spanish and Portuguese Jews say esnoga and Persian Jews kenesa.
Inside, the focus is the ark holding the Torah scrolls, known to Ashkenazim as aron qodesh and to Sephardim as hekhal, with a raised platform, the bema, before it. The Five Books of Moses are read through in weekly portions across a year, or in some congregations over three years. Anyone may build a synagogue: wealthy patrons, whole villages, occupational guilds, immigrant groups, or followers of a single Hasidic rabbi gathered in a small shtibl.
The institution was born away from Jerusalem. During the First Temple period, worship centred on the Temple itself and on pilgrimages for Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, and there is no sign of non-sacrificial worship then. The first synagogues most likely arose in the diaspora after the Babylonian Exile of 586 BCE. By the Hellenistic era they existed in Alexandria, then the leading Greek-speaking city, where they were called proseukhai, places of prayer.
Archaeologists have found more than a dozen Second Temple period synagogues used by Jews and Samaritans. In 2018 Mordechai Aviam counted at least nine excavated examples older than 70 CE, among them Magdala, Gamla and Masada, and concluded that almost every Jewish settlement of the time probably had one. After the Temple fell, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai urged communities to establish their own houses of worship, and the synagogue became a system of worship Jews could carry wherever they went.
Source: Synagogue
