On a step of the Library of Celsus, easy to miss and impossible to forget once seen, someone long ago scratched a menorah — the seven-branched lampstand. It is the smallest monument in Ephesus, and it marks one of the city’s oldest continuous communities: the Jews of Ephesus, present here for centuries before either the church or the finished Library existed.
Jewish settlement in the city goes back at least to the Hellenistic era, part of the great Mediterranean diaspora that made Greek-speaking Jewish communities a fixture of every major port. The historian Josephus preserves a remarkable paper trail about Ephesus specifically: Roman decrees, quoted at length, confirming the community’s rights — to assemble, to keep the Sabbath, to send the temple tax to Jerusalem, and exemption from military service, since Roman armies did not pause for Sabbath. That such rights needed repeated confirmation tells its own story of friction with the city; that Rome kept confirming them tells another about the community’s standing.
The synagogue of Acts
The Book of Acts assumes what archaeology has not yet found: a synagogue. Paul’s method in every city began there, and in Ephesus he reasoned in the synagogue over months — his longest synagogue ministry recorded — before the split that moved him to the hall of Tyrannus. Apollos, the eloquent Alexandrian Jew, taught there before him; Priscilla and Aquila, Jewish tent-makers exiled from Rome by Claudius’ edict, hosted the first believers. The earliest Ephesian church was, in composition and vocabulary, a Jewish argument about the Messiah.
The building itself remains one of Ephesian archaeology’s open quests — inscriptions mention the community, lamps and gravestones carry menorot, but the synagogue’s foundations presumably wait somewhere in the unexcavated majority of the city. Given that only a fifth of Ephesus has been dug, its absence proves nothing except how much work remains.
The community’s later story follows the region’s: Byzantine restrictions, medieval thinning, and continuity shifting to nearby İzmir, whose Jewish community — swelled by Sephardic exiles after 1492 — became one of the Ottoman world’s most vibrant. The menorah on the step, meanwhile, has outlasted the empire that carved the step itself.
