The Synagogue of the Freedmen

In my book, I talk about the diverse ethnic neighborhoods, or ghettos, in First Century Jerusalem and about the Synagogue of the Freedmen. I've done a little research in this area (some would say, "Very little,") and I think that I can make the following deductions.

1.     In or around 63 BCE (that would be "Before the Common Era"), Pompey the Great freed a great number of Jewish slaves who had been culled from the Roman Provinces of Libya, Egypt and the various smaller provinces in Asia Minor. My guess is that Pompey would not have granted these people land and honors along with their freedom, and so, lacking anything else to do or anywhere else to go, they returned to their ancestral Promised Land, settled in Jerusalem, utilized their own skills and started their own little shops and businesses in the Lower City where real estate was cheap.

2.     Then, as now, most large cities probably had little ethnic neighborhoods in the low-rent parts of town. Even now, Jerusalem has its own sub-sections based on religion and ethnicity.  It is also logical to assume that, over two thousand years ago, the Jewish folks who returned to the Promised Land from different countries would set up their own little ethnic neighborhoods where the food, goods and languages were all the same from this block to the next:  Little Persia, Little Egypt, Little Ethiopia, Little Phoenicia, Little Rome and Little Greece. (Little Rome would be where the married Roman soldiers lived because it is unlikely that their wives and children would be allowed to reside in the Roman barracks.)

3.     The former slaves of Pompey's army would have settled in Little Egypt and Little Phoenicia, and would have built a relatively large synagogue, the Synagogue of the Freedmen. Given its name, its construction may have been funded fully by the former slaves of Pompey instead of at the order and expense of Herod the Great. There may also have been other smaller synagogues in Jerusalem, but since we know for a fact that there was a Synagogue of the Freedmen, we're going to stick with that. It would have been finished, in all likelihood, sometime around 60 BCE. However, in around 20 BC, the eastern edge of the Mediterranean (the "Great Sea,") suffered a horrendous earthquake, and it is likely that the Synagogue of the Freedmen would have been damaged and would have needed to have been rebuilt, possibly by the children of the former Jewish slaves of Pompey.

4.     Since most of the Jewish population, even those from foreign countries, were Pharisees at the time, this rebuilt synagogue would have looked a lot like the rather plain synagogues in Capernaum and in Ostia outside of Rome: A plain stone building, lined with benches, with a raised platform in the center and a pulpit from which to read the Torah and give sermons. There the Jewish folk from the Lower City could gather, study, debate, pray and probably hold Bar Mitzvah ceremonies, including, in all likelihood, the Bar Mitzvah ceremony of Jesus, a.k.a. Yeshua bar Yosef.. It may have had four columns in front that held up the roof to the archway front door and was probably built of limestone, and if it were not destroyed by the Romans when they sacked Jerusalem in 66 CE, then it was probably destroyed by the many earthquakes in the area in the years since.

5.    The Synagogue of the Freedmen is mentioned in the New Testament, Book of Acts, when the first official martyr, Stephen, tried to preach to the assembly there that Jesus/Yeshua was the Messiah, the Son of God and the Risen Christ. They would have been the ones to have reported him to the Beth Din, which led to his being stoned to death for blasphemy in the mud pits of Golgotha.