Susya
Susya is a location in the southern Hebron Governorate in the West Bank. It houses an archaeological site with extensive remains from the Late Roman and Byzantine periods, including the ruins of an archeologically notable synagogue, repurposed as a mosque after the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 7th century. A Palestinian village named Susya was established near the site in the 1830s. The village lands extended over 300 hectares under multiple private Palestinian ownership, and the Palestinians on the site are said to exemplify a southern Hebron cave-dwelling culture present in the area since the early 19th century whose transhumant practices involved seasonal dwellings in the area's caves and ruins of Susya.
In 1982, an Israeli land authority, Plia Albeck, working in the Civil division of the State Attorney's Office, determined that the 300 hectares where Palestinians had been living, and which included an area with remains both of a 5th–8th century CE synagogue and of a mosque that had replaced it, were privately owned by the Palestinian Susya's villagers. In 1983, an Israeli settlement also named Susya was established next to the Palestinian village. In 1986, the Israeli Defense Ministry's Civil Administration declared the entire area owned by Palestinians an archeological site, and the Israeli Defense Forces expelled the Palestinian owners from their dwellings and appointed Israeli settlers from the recently built settlement to manage the site. Some of the expropriated Palestinian land was incorporated into the jurisdictional area of the Israeli settlement, and an illegal Israeli outpost was established on the area of the previous Palestinian village. The expelled Palestinians moved a few hundred meters southeast of their original village.
The Israeli government, which has issued injunctions against the Israeli Supreme Court's decisions to demolish illegal Israeli outposts, made a petition to the High Court to permit the demolition of the new Palestinian village. The state expressed a willingness to allocate what it called "Israeli government-owned lands" near Yatta for an alternative residence, and to assist rebuilding, considering it ideal for the displaced villagers grazing. Though the existence of the Palestinian village is attested on maps as early as 1917, confirmed by aerial photographs in 1980 that show cultivated farmland and livestock pens maintained by Palestinians on the site, the official view of Israel is that no historic Palestinian village ever existed there, just a few families residing seasonally, and that the area was required for archaeological work. It is notable that Jews also reside in illegal structures on the same archaeological site. The attorney for the Palestinians replied that the army was stopping Palestinians building on their own privately owned land, while permitting settlers to seize their agricultural fields.
The population of the Palestinian community has fluctuated. It reportedly numbered 350 villagers in 2012 and 250 residents the following year, constituted by 50 nuclear families, up from 25 in 1986 and 13 in 2008. By 2018 17 families were reported to still be clinging on, working the few fields that remain to them of their former lands.
The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law; the Israeli government disputes this.
Name
The site is called in Arabic Khirbet Susiya, also spelled Susiyeh, which means "Ruin of the Liquorice Plant " after a wild plant species widely growing there.The spelling Susya represents the Hebrew name, as decided by the Israeli Naming Committee, in consultation with the settlers.
History
Late Roman and Byzantine period town
Susiya is considered an important site for the study and research of ancient Jewish village life in Palestine during Late Antiquity. It was the site of a monumental synagogue. The settlement on the hill contiguous to the synagogue seems to have once had a thriving economy. A fine store has been excavated from its ruins. It may have undergone a decline in the second half of the 4th century, and again in the 6th century. Some speak of abandonment though the evidence from the synagogue suggests continuity into the medieval period.According to Israel archaeologist Yonathan Mizrachi, the Jewish population is attested from the 4th to 6th century, after which a population change took place.
Theory: Susya as "new Carmel"
Susya, whether it refers to the site of the ancient synagogue or the ruins of the contiguous ancient and large settlement of some, is not mentioned in any ancient text, and Jewish literature did not register an ancient Jewish town on that site. It is thought by some to correspond to the Biblical Carmel, a proposal made by Avraham Negev. Part of Negev's theory is that, in the wake of the Second Revolt, when the Romans garrisoned Khirbet el-Karmil, identified as the biblical Carmel, religious Jews uncomfortable with pagan symbols moved 2 km south-west to the present Susya and that, while they still regarded their new community as Carmel, the name was lost when the village's fortunes declined in the early Arab period, in part, it has been suggested, because the new Muslim overlords might not have tolerated its wine-based economy.Ancient synagogue
Susiya is the site of an archaeologically notable ancient synagogue. The site was examined by Shmarya Guttman in 1969, who uncovered the narthex of a synagogue during a trial dig. He, together with Ze'ev Yeivin and Ehud Netzer, then conducted the Israeli excavations at Khirbet Suseya, over 1971–72, by the Palestinian village of Susiya Al-Qadime.The excavated synagogue in Susya dates from the 4th to the 7th century CE and was in continuous use until the 9th century CE. According to Jodi Magness, the synagogue was built in the 4th - 5th centuries and continued in use for "at least" another two centuries. It is one of four of an architecturally unique group in the Southern Judean Hills. Only six synagogues have been identified in Judea as a whole; the lower number may be accounted for by a shift in the Jewish population from Judah to Galilee in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The other three of this distinctive group are those of Eshtemoa, Horvat Maon, and 'Anim. Three outstanding characteristics of the Susya-Eshtemoa group, are their width, entrances at the short eastern wall, and the absence of columns to support the roof.
According to David Amit, the architectural design, particularly the eastern entrance and axis of prayer, which differ from the majority of Galilean synagogues, exhibits the ramifications of the earliest halakhic law conserved in southern Judea for generations after the destruction of the Temple. This was forgotten in Galilee, but in Judea there was a closer adherence to older traditions reflecting closer proximity to Jerusalem. The eastern orientation may be also related to the idea of dissuading heretics and Christians in the same area, who bowed to the east, in the belief that the Shekinah lay in that direction.
The synagogue was built as a broadhouse, rather than along basilica lines, measuring 9 by 16 metres built in well-wrought ashlar construction, with triple doorway façade in an eastward orientation, and the bimah and niche at the centre of the northern wall. There was a secondary bimah in the eastern section. Unlike other synagogues in Judea it had a gallery, made while reinforcing the western wall. East of the synagogue was an open courtyard surrounded on three sides by a roofed portico. The western side opened to the synagogue's narthex, and the floor of the narthex composed of coloured mosaics set in an interlaced pattern. This model was of short duration, yielding in the late Byzantine phase to the basilica form, already elsewhere dominant in synagogue architecture.
In contrast to most Galilean synagogues with their façade and Torah shrine on the same Jerusalem-oriented wall, the Judean synagogue at Susya, has the niche on the northern Jerusalem-oriented wall and entrances on the east side wall. The synagogue floor of white tesserae has three mosaic panels, the eastern one a Torah Shrine, two menorahs, one on a screen relief showing two lamps suspended from a bar between the menorah's upper branches,. This was near the reverse mirroring of the menorah pattern in the mosaics, heightened the central significance of the Torah shrine in the hall a lulav, and an etrog with columns on each side. Next to the columns is a landscape with deer and rams. The central panel composed of geometric and floral patterns. A spoke-wheel design before the central bimah, has led Gutman to believe it is the remnant of a zodiac wheel. Zodiac mosaics are important witness to the time, since they were systematically suppressed by the Church, and, their frequent construction in Palestinian synagogue floors may be an index of 'the "inculturation" of non-Jewish imagery and its resulting Judaization'. The fragmentary state of the wheel mosaic is due to its replacement by a much cruder geometric pavement pattern, indicative of a desire to erase what later came to be thought of as objectionable imagery. The defacing of images may indicate changing Jewish attitudes to visual representations and graven images, perhaps influence by both Christian iconoclasm and Muslim aniconism.
A motif that probably represented Daniel in the lion's den, as in the mosaics discovered at Naaran near Jericho and Ein Samsam in the Golan was also tesselated, surviving only most fragmentarily. The figure, in an orans stance, flanked by lions, was scrubbed from the mosaics in line with later trends, in what Fine calls a "new aesthetic" at Khirbet Susiya, one that refurbished the designs to suppress iconographic forms thought by later generations to be objectionable. We can only reconstruct the allusion to Daniel from the remaining final Hebrew letters remaining, namely -el, אל.
Another unique feature is number of inscriptions. Four were laid in mosaics: two in Hebrew, attesting perhaps to its conservation as a spoken language in this region and two in Aramaic. Nineteen fragmentary inscriptions, some of which were in Greek, were etched into the marble of the building. From these dedicatory inscriptions the impression is given that the synagogue was run by donors rather than by priests.