Rimonim, the Torah Finials

A Torah scroll has two wooden rollers, the trees of life, and the ends that project above the parchment are where the ornaments go. Rimonim are the pair that sit on those ends when the scroll is dressed. The name means pomegranates and the earliest recorded forms follow the fruit, but the type that spread most widely across Europe and the Mediterranean is architectural: a shaft carrying tiers of open arcading, sometimes several storeys of it, topped with a finial, and hung about with small bells on wire loops. When the scroll is lifted and carried through the synagogue the bells sound, and the congregation stands to that sound before it sees the scroll.

The ornaments are a family rather than a fixed set. A crown covers both staves at once and is used instead of rimonim in many communities; a breastplate hangs on the front of a dressed scroll in Ashkenazi practice; a pointer, the yad, is used to follow the text without touching the parchment. In North African, Middle Eastern and Italian communities the scroll is kept in a rigid case rather than dressed in a mantle, and the rimonim are then set on top of the case, so the same object serves two quite different systems of housing the same text. Almost all of this metalwork is donated, and dedicatory inscriptions on it name donors, dates and occasions, which makes synagogue silver a documentary record as well as a liturgical one.

Jewish life in Iberia was long, large and, in its material culture, almost entirely erased. Castile and Aragon expelled their Jews in 1492 and Portugal followed in 1497. Synagogues were converted or destroyed, and the portable silver either went with the exiles, was melted, or passed into other hands. As a result, Iberian Jewish metalwork made before the expulsions barely exists in situ, and the identification of what does survive is contested. A pair of rimonim kept in the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca is generally taken to be the oldest surviving European example, and specialists differ over whether they were made in Majorca or in Sicily, which is a question about the origin of the earliest known object in a whole category.

The tradition itself did not stop, it moved. Exiles rebuilt communities in Morocco and across the Maghreb, in Salonica and the Ottoman lands, and later in Livorno, Amsterdam, London and the Americas, and Sephardi synagogue silver in those places carries the Iberian inheritance forward in its forms and in its naming. The atlas already holds figures of the same world: Moses de Leon, associated with the appearance of the Zohar in thirteenth century Castile, and Abraham Abulafia, whose ecstatic Kabbalah belongs to the same peninsula and the same century. The silver and the books come out of one society, and only one of the two survived the expulsion in quantity.