In 1883, a French army captain stationed in Tunisia, Ernest de Prudhomme, went outside to dig in his garden and happened upon a trove of mosaics. It was quite a find: The mosaics dated to the sixth century, the period known as Late Antiquity. They included images of two menorahs, and a Latin inscription between them read "Your servant, the girl Juliana, paved the holy synagogue of Naro for her own salvation out of her own resources."
They came from the floor of an ancient temple.
Rome ruled North Africa in the sixth century, and Roman law forbade Jews from building synagogues or repairing them. But scholars say the law was not strictly enforced; indeed, many synagogues thrived.
Twenty-one of Prudhomme's mosaics from the ancient city of Naro (now Hammam Lif, Tunisia) lie at the heart of "Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics From the Roman Empire," an intriguing exhibit at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. The show was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, which acquired many of the mosaics in 1905.
Mosaic mavens will remember "Antioch: The Lost Ancient City," a blockbuster show staged by the Worcester Art Museum in 2000. Built around that museum's remarkable sixth-century "Hunt Mosaic," the exhibit featured other Roman mosaics and scores of additional relics that evoked life in this multicultural city, located in present-day Turkey.
"Tree of Paradise" is smaller, and it doesn't have the knockout centerpiece of "Hunt Mosaic." Still, shedding light on Rome's Jewish diaspora and the interrelationships among Jews, Christians, and pagans in the last centuries of the Roman Empire, it's an enlightening corollary to "Antioch." Since Prudhomme dug up these mosaics, archeologists have found evidence of hundreds of other synagogues in the Mediterranean region, dated 220 to 770.
At the time of Prudhomme's discovery, another French soldier, Corporal Peco, made a watercolor sketch of the floor in the Naro synagogue's main sanctuary. When Prudhomme left France, he took 25 of the Naro mosaics with him, 21 of which ended up at the Brooklyn Museum, many from that sanctuary. But some pieces were left behind, and exactly where all the missing mosaics have gone remains a mystery. For this exhibition, Peco's sketch has been enlarged to scale, evoking the entire sanctuary floor. About a dozen mosaics lie on top of it, like pieces of an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle.
Packed with symbolic import, the panels on the floor dance with geometric design and bold characters. In addition to the menorahs, there are baskets of bread and fruit, images that might have had different import to pagans and to Jews. To pagans, they signified the earth's bounty. To Jews, they were also offerings once made to the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed by Romans centuries before.
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