Spanish discovery suggests Roman era ‘church’ may have been a synagogue

Oil lamp fragments point to presence of previously unknown Jewish population in Ibero-Roman town of Castulo

Seventeen centuries after they last burned, a handful of broken oil lamps could shed light on a small and long-vanished Jewish community that lived in southern Spain in the late Roman era as the old gods were being snuffed out by Christianity.

Archaeologists excavating the Ibero-Roman town of Castulo, whose ruins lie near the present-day Andalucian town of Linares, have uncovered evidence of an apparent Jewish presence there in the late fourth or early fifth century AD.