The Alexandria synagogue, the Talmud remembers, was so large that a cantor had to wave a flag when the congregation was meant to answer Amen — no human voice could carry from pulpit to wall.
The people did not scatter to their seats at random. They sat in guilds. Goldsmiths sat together, silversmiths together, blacksmiths together, coppersmiths together, embroiderers, weavers, tentmakers, ropemakers — each craft in its own quarter of the vast hall. When a poor craftsman new to the city walked in, he knew exactly where to go. His guildsmen took him in, seated him among them, and maintained him until he found work. The synagogue was not only a house of prayer but a jobs board and a mutual aid society with a roof.
Yet the tradition reports a bitter end. Abaye teaches that the whole of that immense Jewish population of Alexandria was eventually massacred by Alexander of Macedon's successors. Why did the tragedy befall them? Because they had transgressed the Torah's command, "You shall henceforth return no more that way" (Deuteronomy 17:16) — the warning against resettling Egypt.
The sages preserved both halves. The beauty of the synagogue with its guilds, and the grief of its ending. Community without memory of where you came from, they are saying, is not enough.
(From the 1901 Hebraic Literature anthology, drawing on Sukkah 51b.)