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Okay well this is interesting. Yesterday I was toasting King of the Jews Ben Shapiro and the history of French Jewry in the 12th thru 14th century. So today I learned that Notre Dame cathedral is largely the work of Bishop Maurice de Sully. He's the bishop who decided to ...
2/ tear down the old cathedral and build the new one that has existed ever since. It was his project and most of it was built under his very long episcopal reign (1160-1196). (Paris only became an archbishopric about 500 years later.) So Maurice was still around during one of ...
3/ the times France expelled its Jewish population. When it happened in 1182 the King (Philip II, only 15 at the time) seized one of their synagogues that was on a prime piece of Paris real estate. I mean, they were leaving so they weren't going to be using it.
4/ And Maurice "converted" the synagogue into the Church of Mary Magdalene, the Église de la Madeleine. So the guy who built Notre Dame also at the same time took a confiscated synagogue and turned it into a church.
