Category: Old Synagogues

In the closing years of the sixteenth century, families began arriving in Amsterdam from the Iberian Peninsula, many of them Portuguese conversos who had to live as Catholics. The Dutch Republic, still consolidating its independence from Spain, offered something unusual in early modern Europe: a city where Jews could settle, trade, and, within limits, worship openly. By the time the new century was well underway, Amsterdam had become one of the principal centres of Jewish life in Europe, known in Yiddish as Mokum (the Place), and increasingly referred to, by Jews and Christians alike, as the Jeruzalem van het Westen, the Jerusalem of the West.

The city’s appeal was above all commercial. Amsterdam’s harbour was the busiest in Europe, its exchange the most sophisticated, and its merchant class pragmatically tolerant of anyone who could contribute to the flow of capital. Sephardic Jews, arriving with trade connections that stretched from the sugar plantations of Brazil to the spice routes of the East Indies, fitted naturally into this world. They were excluded from the guilds, which barred them from most established trades, but this restriction pushed them towards newer sectors: international finance, diamond cutting, the tobacco trade, bookselling, and Hebrew printing. The result was a community that was at once deeply traditional and strikingly modern, holding fast to Iberian liturgical forms and the Portuguese language while operating within a network of global commerce.

The Sephardic community was soon joined by Ashkenazi Jews migrating from Central and Eastern Europe, and the two groups established separate congregations and institutions. Together they settled in the eastern part of the city, around the Waterlooplein and the streets running off it, in the quarter that would become known as the Jodenbuurt. Jewish life was not confined there by law in the manner of a ghetto. But guild restrictions, kinship networks, and proximity to the synagogues gave the neighbourhood its particular character, and by the early twentieth century it was home to around eighty thousand Jewish residents.

Among the area’s most distinguished residents, though not himself Jewish, was Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), who lived at what is now Jodenbreestraat 4 from 1639 to 1658. In his time the street was called Sint Anthoniesbreestraat, and it functioned as an artists’ quarter, home to painters such as Govaert Flinck (1615–1660), Paulus Potter (1625–1654), and the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh (c.1587–1661). Rembrandt did not move there to live among Jews, as a sentimental tradition has suggested, but he was clearly interested in his neighbours: he drew and etched their faces, and recent scholarship, including the 2021 exhibition The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt at the Jewish Historical Museum, has complicated the long-standing assumption that he and the rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) were close friends.

Menasseh ben Israel is perhaps the most internationally visible Jewish person of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Born Manoel Dias Soeiro in Lisbon to a converso family that had suffered under the Inquisition, he arrived in Amsterdam as a child in 1610 and was appointed rabbi of the Neve Shalom congregation by the age of eighteen. He established Amsterdam’s first Hebrew printing press in 1626, published prolifically in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin, and corresponded with scholars and statesmen across Europe. His campaign for the readmission of Jews to England, culminating in his 1655 audience with Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), was only partially successful in his lifetime, but it opened the door through which a new Sephardic community would soon establish itself in London.

If Menasseh represented the diplomatic and scholarly face of the community, its most disruptive intellect was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), born into a family of Portuguese Jews who had returned to open observance in Amsterdam. Spinoza’s rejection of rabbinic authority and his questioning of the divine origin of scripture led to his excommunication (cherem) from the Portuguese congregation in 1656, an episode that exposed the tension between the community’s intellectual openness and its determination to maintain religious boundaries. His radical philosophy would come to influence the entire trajectory of European thought, and yet his expulsion was an act of communal self-preservation by a community that could not afford the disapproval of the Dutch Reformed authorities. Other significant figures of the period include Saul Levi Morteira (c.1596–1660), Menasseh’s rival and the community’s senior rabbi, who was among the signatories of Spinoza’s ban, and Joseph de la Vega (1650–1692), whose Confusión de Confusiones (1688) remains the earliest known study of a stock exchange.

It was against this background of prosperity and intellectual confidence that the Sephardic community resolved, in 1670, to build a new synagogue. The inscription above the entrance, drawn from Psalm 5:8, reads: ‘In the abundance of Thy loving kindness will I come into Thy house.’ It sets the tone for a building that would become one of the great symbols of Jewish presence in the early modern world.

The architects were Elias Bouman (1636–1686), a master mason who was not himself Jewish and who had previously worked on the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue across the street, and the city architect Daniel Stalpaert (c.1615–1676). Construction ran from 1671 to 1675 at a cost of 186,000 florins, an enormous sum even by Amsterdam standards. The design draws consciously on biblical descriptions of Solomon’s Temple, and when it opened with great ceremony on 2 August 1675, it was the largest synagogue in the world. The fact that its planned inauguration in 1672 was postponed by the Rampjaar, the catastrophic Year of Disaster in which France, England, and two German bishoprics invaded the Republic simultaneously, only underlines the resilience of the community that built it.

The interior follows the bipolar plan traditional in Sephardic synagogue architecture. The Ark (Hechal) stands on the south-eastern wall facing Jerusalem, its gilded tablets of the Ten Commandments prominently displayed. At the opposite end stands the Tebah, the reading platform from which the Torah is chanted, the two poles of the liturgy linked by the congregation seated between them on two banks of wooden benches that face one another across a central aisle. The floor is strewn with fine sand, a Dutch domestic custom adopted here to absorb moisture and muffle the sound of footsteps.

One of the most striking features is the women’s gallery, carried on twelve stone columns widely read as a reference to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Running along three sides of the sanctuary, the gallery maintains the traditional separation of men and women while ensuring visibility and participation. Four large brass chandeliers hold a total of around one thousand candles, all of which are lit for services. The synagogue has never been fitted with electric lighting, and the candlelit interior preserves an atmosphere that even seventeenth-century visitors found remarkable: the Dutch painter Emmanuel de Witte (c.1617–1692) made three paintings of the interior, and the engraver Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) produced commemorative prints of the inauguration, depicting both the architectural grandeur and the diversity of the congregation.

The surrounding complex adds further depth. It includes the winter synagogue, used for smaller services in winter months, the residences of synagogue officials, and the celebrated Ets Haim (‘Tree of Life’) library. Founded in 1616 and housed in its present quarters since 1675, Ets Haim holds a remarkable collection of Sephardic manuscripts, printed books, and community records. Its holdings include works printed by Menasseh ben Israel himself, as well as liturgical and philosophical texts that chart the intellectual history of the Sephardic diaspora across four centuries.

The Esnoga became a model for Sephardic congregations far beyond Amsterdam. Its most direct descendant is Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, opened in 1701 by a community whose founders had come directly from Amsterdam. The connection was not merely demographic: the Amsterdam congregation donated a roof beam for the London building as a gesture of solidarity, and the architectural resemblance between the two interiors is immediately apparent to anyone who has visited both. The London synagogue was built by Joseph Avis (d. 1709), a Quaker carpenter who reportedly returned his profit, saying he would not benefit from building a house of God. It was the readmission campaign of Menasseh ben Israel in the 1650s, though it yielded no formal edict, that had made such a building possible; Cromwell’s informal permission for Jews to settle in England eventually produced the congregation that would commission it. Bevis Marks remains the only synagogue in Europe to have held regular services continuously for over three hundred years, and its sermons were delivered in Portuguese until 1833. Further afield, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, dedicated in 1763 and the oldest surviving synagogue in North America, was also founded by Sephardic Jews with Amsterdam connections and carries forward elements of the same architectural tradition.

The history of the Esnoga in the twentieth century is inseparable from the destruction visited upon the community that built it. At the outbreak of war in 1940, approximately 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands, the majority in Amsterdam. By 1945, more than 107,000 had been deported, overwhelmingly to Auschwitz and Sobibór; fewer than five thousand of those deported returned. The proportion of Dutch Jews killed, over seventy-five per cent, was among the highest in Western Europe, a fact attributed in part to the efficiency of the Dutch civil administration and its detailed population registers.

The Esnoga itself survived the occupation physically intact, for reasons that remain unclear. Across the street, the four Ashkenazi synagogues were gutted and vandalised, and would not be restored until the 1980s, when they became the Jewish Historical Museum. The wider Jodenbuurt suffered a slower, layered destruction. Wartime deportation emptied the neighbourhood. During the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, starving Amsterdammers dismantled the vacant buildings for firewood. And after the liberation, post-war urban planning inflicted what the war itself had begun: the widening of the Weesperstraat, the construction of the metro, and, most controversially, the building of the Stopera complex (the combined city hall and Dutch National Opera, opened in 1986) on the Waterlooplein, the site of the old Jewish market and the heart of the former community. The Stopera provoked intense protest, with squatters and activists framing the project as the erasure of a neighbourhood whose residents had been murdered. The irony was not lost on critics: a building devoted to civic prestige and cultural entertainment rose on ground from which Jewish families had been taken to their deaths a few decades earlier.

Perhaps the ugliest episode of the post-war years came to light only recently. In 2011, Charlotte van den Berg, working part-time in the Amsterdam city archives, discovered letters written by Jewish Holocaust survivors protesting against demands from the municipal government to pay back leasehold taxes and fines that had accumulated on their properties during the years they had been in hiding or in the camps. Many of their homes had been sold to collaborators or occupied by strangers, who left the bills unpaid and vanished at the war’s end. Survivors returned to find not only their houses in other hands but official notices demanding payment, sometimes including the accumulated gas bills for fuel consumed during their absence. A study by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies identified 217 cases and established that Amsterdam was the only Dutch city to have levied additional fines on top of the unpaid taxes. In 2016, the city pledged ten million euros to the Jewish community in compensation.

What remains of the Jodenbuurt today is preserved largely as a cultural quarter: the Esnoga, the Jewish Historical Museum, the Hollandsche Schouwburg (the former theatre used as a deportation assembly point), and the National Holocaust Memorial of Names, designed by Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946) and inaugurated in 2021, with its 102,000 inscribed bricks. These are important institutions, but the community that animated the streets around them is gone. One can walk from the Portuguese Synagogue to the Rembrandt House in a matter of minutes and encounter almost nothing of the neighbourhood as it once existed: the post-war rebuilding replaced the old urban grain with wide roads, apartment blocks, and the smooth granite curve of the Stopera. Whether this constitutes a memorial landscape or a form of amnesia is a question the city has not resolved.

The Esnoga continues to hold regular Sephardic services, still lit by candlelight, still strewing sand on its floors. The congregation is small. Whether we read the building as an architectural survival, a monument to diasporic survival, or a sanctuary whose community was all but annihilated and never reconstituted at anything approaching its former scale, depends on what we expect a living synagogue to be, and whether continuity of worship in the absence of a living quarter can sustain the meaning the building was built to carry.

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References

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Cohen Paraira, D. (1999) ‘The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam’, in Schwartz, G. (ed.) The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum

Fuks-Mansfeld, R.G. (2002) ‘Enlightenment and Emancipation: From 1750 to 1814’, in Blom, J.C.H., Fuks-Mansfeld, R.G. and Schöffer, I. (eds.) The History of the Jews in the Netherlands. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, pp. 164–191

Israel, J.I. (1995) The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Nadler, S. (2018) Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam. New Haven: Yale University Press

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Swetschinski, D.M. (2000) Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

Van der Woud, A. (2011) Het lege land: De ruimtelijke orde van Nederland 1798–1848 [The Empty Land: The Spatial Order of the Netherlands 1798–1848]. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff

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