Isaac Mayer Wise Wanted Minarets in Cincinnati

A Rabbi's Architectural Argument

Isaac Mayer Wise arrived in Cincinnati in 1854 with a project larger than any single congregation: the systematic reform and unification of American Jewish practice. His pulpit was K.K. Bene Yeshurun, and when the congregation resolved to build a permanent home on Plum Street, Wise understood that the building itself would carry an argument. He commissioned architect James Keys Wilson, a Cincinnati practitioner whose portfolio ran to churches and civic work, and directed him toward the Moorish Revival — a style that had been sweeping across European synagogue design since the 1840s as a deliberate assertion of Jewish distinctiveness, drawing on Andalusian Islamic precedent rather than Christian Gothic.

Wilson's design, completed in 1866, delivered two octagonal minarets flanking a façade of horseshoe arches, polychrome brickwork and ornamental detail that owed more to the Alhambra than to anything else on Plum Street. Inside, the sanctuary continued the theme: striped arches, elaborate stencilling and a colour palette of red, blue and gold that read as emphatically non-Protestant at a moment when that distinction mattered. The Plum Street Temple has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a recognition of its architectural integrity as much as its congregational significance.

Wise used the building as the physical address of a movement. In 1873 he founded the Union of American Hebrew Congregations here, and in 1875 Hebrew Union College — the first permanent Jewish institution of higher learning in the Western Hemisphere — opened in Cincinnati under his leadership. The Hebrew Union College ↗ remains on Clifton Avenue today, still the principal seminary of Reform Judaism in North America. Together, the temple and the college gave Cincinnati a claim on the institutional origins of American Reform Judaism that no other city disputes.

K.K. Bene Yeshurun still holds services at the Plum Street Temple, making it one of the oldest continuously used synagogues in the United States. Wilson's minarets, improbable as they must have looked when they went up among the Italianate cornices of a mid-century Ohio city, have simply become part of what Plum Street looks like.