Juifs de la Nação (séfarades d'Amsterdam)

At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the young Republic of the United Provinces then emancipating itself from the Iberian crowns, one of the most singular Jewish communities of modern history took shape: the one its own members designated under the name Nação — the "Nation," meaning the "Portuguese Nation." This appellation, inherited from the conversos of the Iberian Peninsula, covered a complex reality: descendants of Jews forcibly converted to Christianity at the end of the fifteenth century, long held suspect by the Inquisition, and who, having reached the banks of the Amstel, chose to return openly to the faith of their ancestors [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversion of the Jews of Portugal in 1497 had produced, at the heart of Iberian Christendom, a population of "new Christians" — cristãos-novos — living in a religious in-between that historiography has called marranism [Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos]. Many of these families preserved, in secret and often fragmentarily, Judaizing observances passed down from generation to generation. Inquisitorial pressure, the confiscation of property, and social stigmatization drove many of them into exile. Amsterdam, a mercantile city, tolerant out of calculation as much as conviction, became one of the most welcoming refuges of this second diaspora [Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism].

The community that formed there was not merely a religious congregation: it was a complete institution, endowed with its charitable confraternities, its schools, its printing house, its poets, and its merchants engaged in world trade. It gave birth to the first flourishing Hebrew printing house of Northern Europe, welcomed the rabbi and diplomat Menasseh ben Israel, and engendered, by its very rigor, the scandal of the young Baruch Spinoza, struck with anathema in 1656 [Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life]. Its most enduring monument remains the great Portuguese synagogue, the Esnoga or Snoge, inaugurated in 1675, a stone witness to a collective prosperity and pride. This Great Book sets out to retrace the history of this Nation: its Marrano origins, its rooting in Amsterdam, its institutions, its intellectual controversies, and its influence.

The collective memory of the Sephardic Nação of Amsterdam is rooted in a founding narrative: that of Marranos fleeing the Inquisition to recover, on free soil, the open practice of Judaism. This narrative, handed down within the community and confirmed in its essentials by the archive, nonetheless contains its grey areas, which the historian must qualify.

According to communal tradition, the first Portuguese conversos settled in Amsterdam around 1590-1595, at a time when the young Republic was still fighting Spain in the Eighty Years' War [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The most widespread account attributes the founding of the first religious assemblies, around 1602-1604, to a group led by the Tirado family and by Maria Nunes. Historiography has however shown that these dates stem in part from a later reconstruction, and that the formation of the first congregations was gradual rather than punctual [Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity].

What is established is that from the very first years of the seventeenth century several distinct congregations came into being: Beth Jacob, founded around 1602 under the aegis of the rabbi who came from Germany or the Ottoman Empire, Neve Shalom shortly afterwards, then Beth Israel in 1618 [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The plurality of these communities bears witness as much to the migratory influx as to the internal tensions characteristic of a group in the process of re-Judaization. For the challenge was immense: these men and women, raised in Catholicism and often ignorant of Hebrew and halakha, had to relearn a religion of which they had retained only fragments. Masters were brought in from abroad, notably from Venice and the Ottoman Empire, where fully constituted Sephardic communities still survived [Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation].

The attitude of the Amsterdam authorities was decisive. The city, governed by a merchant patriciate, never formally recognized Judaism through a general edict of toleration, but it did in fact tolerate Jewish worship, on condition that it remained discreet and refrained from any proselytism and any mixed union [Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism]. This pragmatic tolerance, founded on the commercial interest represented by the Sephardic networks — extending as far as Brazil, the West Indies and the Mediterranean — radically distinguishes Amsterdam from the other European metropolises of the period, where Jews were confined to ghettos or simply banished. The Portuguese Nation never had a ghetto in Amsterdam: its members settled freely in the Vlooienburg district, to the east of the city, where houses, synagogues and institutions were concentrated.

The decisive event in the institutional history of the community was the merger, in 1639, of the three existing congregations — Beth Jacob, Neve Shalom and Beth Israel — into a single unified community: the Kahal Kados de Talmud Torah, the "Holy Congregation of the Study of the Torah" [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. This unification, sealed by a set of statutes (the Ascamot), endowed the Nation with a centralized, hierarchical and durable organization, which survived essentially until the upheavals of the late eighteenth century.

The government of the community rested on an oligarchic council, the Mahamad, generally composed of six or seven parnassim elected from among the notables [Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity]. This body held considerable powers: it administered finances, levied internal taxes (the finta and the imposta), appointed rabbis and religious employees, oversaw orthodoxy and public decency, and above all wielded the formidable weapon of excommunication, the ḥerem. Far from being a democratic assembly, the Mahamad embodied a social order founded on wealth and honor, concerned above all with preserving the reputation of the Nation in the eyes of the Christian authorities and maintaining internal discipline [Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation].

The Ascamot meticulously governed collective life. They prohibited the creation of any rival congregation, regulated trade with the Iberian Peninsula, governed funerals and charity, and ensured that no one undermined the cohesion of the community through public disputes [Yosef Kaplan]. The Portuguese language remained the language of administration, preaching and culture, while Hebrew was reserved for the liturgy and Spanish served for scholarly literature and the translation of sacred texts. This trilingual identity — Portuguese, Hebrew, Spanish — constituted a distinctive trait of the Nation, which set it clearly apart from the Ashkenazi Jews, immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, poorer and arriving later, with whom the Sephardim maintained relations that were often condescending [Jonathan Israel].

The community provided itself with a dense network of social and educational institutions. The Dotar confraternity (founded in 1615) constituted dowries for poor young women, particularly for those from families still caught in the nets of the Iberian Inquisition [Miriam Bodian]. The communal school, the Ets Haim ("Tree of Life"), organized into graded classes, provided religious instruction and was associated with a library that remains today one of the oldest functioning Jewish libraries in the world [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Hospital, orphanage, fund for the assistance of the poor and of captives: the Nation aspired to be a complete, self-sufficient society organized according to an ideal of order and benevolence.

The seventeenth century in Amsterdam was, for the Nação, a true intellectual golden age. The conjunction of a cultivated merchant elite, a relative freedom of thought, and the proximity of the Dutch presses made Amsterdam a major center of printed Jewish culture and Sephardic thought [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The emblematic figure of this flourishing was Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), rabbi, scholar, and printer. Born into a family of conversos, he founded in 1626 the first Hebrew printing house in Amsterdam, whose carefully produced editions circulated throughout the diaspora [Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel]. A polyglot in contact with Christian scholars — among them Rembrandt, who engraved his portrait, and Protestant theologians — Menasseh ben Israel symbolizes the intellectual openness of the Nation to the surrounding world. His most famous work, the Esperança de Israel ("The Hope of Israel," 1650), linked messianic speculations to the discovery of supposedly lost tribes in the New World [Steven Nadler]. Above all, in 1655-1656, he traveled to London to plead before Oliver Cromwell for the readmission of the Jews to England, from which they had been banished since 1290; although no official act was promulgated, his initiative contributed to the de facto tolerance that allowed the return of Jews to English soil [Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel].

Sephardic printing was not limited to Menasseh. Other workshops, such as those of Joseph Athias and Immanuel Benveniste, made Amsterdam the world capital of the Hebrew book, producing bibles, talmudic treatises, prayer books, and works of controversy [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The literature of the Nation was also written in Portuguese and Spanish: poetry, theater, apologetic treatises intended to strengthen in faith conversos who had recently returned to Judaism. Figures such as Isaac Orobio de Castro, a physician and philosopher who had fled the Inquisition, or the poet Daniel Levi de Barrios, illustrate this dual culture, at once Iberian and Jewish [Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism].

This ferment was not without tensions. The return to Judaism of marranos formed in Iberian skepticism and rationalism gave rise to currents critical of rabbinic orthodoxy. The most resounding case before that of Spinoza was that of Uriel da Costa (Acosta), who contested the immortality of the soul and the authority of the oral tradition, was excommunicated several times, and ultimately took his own life around 1640 [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. These tragedies reveal the difficulty, for a community concerned with respectability, of integrating minds shaped by an extraordinary spiritual trajectory.

No episode in the history of the Nação has marked posterity like the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza. On 27 July 1656 (the 6th of the month of Av 5416), the Mahamad of the Kahal Kados of Talmud Torah pronounced against the young man, then twenty-three years old, the most severe of anathemas [Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life]. The text of the ḥerem, written in Portuguese and preserved in the community's registers, remains one of the most striking documents in modern Jewish history.

Born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a family of merchants of Portuguese origin, Baruch — or Bento — Spinoza received the traditional education of the Ets Haim before entering the family business [Steven Nadler]. The precise grounds for his exclusion are not made explicit in the text of the ḥerem, which merely speaks of "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Historiography agrees that he was reproached for opinions already close to those he would develop in his philosophical work: the rejection of the personal immortality of the soul, the denial of Providence in the traditional sense, and a conception of God identified with Nature [Steven Nadler]. The severity of the decree — which forbade anyone from communicating with him, reading his writings, or coming near him — is explained less by doctrinal audacity alone than by the community's political context.

Here, archive and memory answer and qualify one another. Tradition has often presented Spinoza's ḥerem as the timeless confrontation between free thought and religious obscurantism. The historian sees rather a fragile institution, living on the precarious tolerance of the Christian authorities, which could not afford to shelter a member publicly accused of atheism — an accusation liable to compromise the entire community in the eyes of the Calvinist Republic [Yosef Kaplan]. The ḥerem, in this perspective, was as much an act of collective self-defense as a doctrinal condemnation.

Spinoza never converted to Christianity and did not seek to rejoin the community. He latinized his first name to Benedictus, earned his living as a polisher of optical lenses, and developed, in the relative solitude of the Dutch province, one of the most influential philosophies of the modern age, whose Ethics appeared after his death in 1677 [Steven Nadler]. Paradoxically, the one excluded from the Nação became the most famous of its sons — a symbol, for posterity, of the emancipation of reason, but also an involuntary witness to the internal tensions of a community of Marranos in search of identity.

The peak of the Nation's collective power and self-confidence was embodied in stone. Between 1671 and 1675, the community erected, in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, a great synagogue of a scale unprecedented in Western Europe: the Esnoga, or Snoge, also known as the Portuguese Synagogue [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Its solemn inauguration, on 2 August 1675, was celebrated with a week of festivities and marked the apogee of a community now wealthy, self-assured and recognised.

The edifice was designed by the architect Elias Bouman in a classical style inspired, according to Sephardic tradition, by the Temple of Solomon. Of vast dimensions, supported by four monumental Ionic columns and illuminated by tall windows, the interior preserves the characteristic plan of Sephardic synagogues: the tevah (reading platform) facing the holy ark (hekhal), the faithful seated on the sides. The building, which was never fitted with electricity, is to this day still lit by hundreds of candles arranged on great brass chandeliers, lending it an atmosphere that has remained faithful to the seventeenth century [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The whole is completed by outbuildings housing the Ets Haim library, the study halls and the community archives.

The Esnoga was not merely a place of worship: it was a declaration. Its monumentality proclaimed, in a city where the other dissenting confessions (Catholics, Mennonites) had to make do with clandestine churches concealed within houses, the singular status of the Portuguese Nation and the solidity of its tacit alliance with the merchant patriciate [Jonathan Israel]. It also bore witness to the fortune amassed by the Sephardic families in the trade of sugar, tobacco, diamonds, spices and colonial goods, as well as in finance and maritime insurance.

The Nation's influence extended far beyond Amsterdam. The Sephardic networks spawned daughter communities in Hamburg, in London after 1656, in Bordeaux and Bayonne in France, in Livorno in Italy, and above all in the New World — in the Dutch Brazil of Recife, in Curaçao, in New Amsterdam (the future New York) and in Suriname [Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism]. Amsterdam was, for this Atlantic diaspora, a true spiritual and institutional "metropolis," supplying rabbis, books, statutory models and financial support. The Esnoga remains its most visible symbol, having survived intact through the centuries, including the German occupation and the destruction of the neighbouring Ashkenazi community during the Second World War.

The splendor of 1675 was not to last. From the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the Sephardic Nation of Amsterdam experienced a slow economic decline, paralleling the progressive eclipse of the Republic of the United Provinces before the rise of England and France [Jonathan Israel]. The loss of Dutch Brazil, reconquered by the Portuguese in 1654, had already dealt a blow to the community's Atlantic commercial networks; the wars and financial crises of the eighteenth century completed the impoverishment of some of its members.

Nor did the community escape the spiritual upheavals of the age. The affair of the false messiah Sabbatai Tsevi, in 1665–1666, aroused considerable messianic enthusiasm in Amsterdam, shared by many notables, before the apostasy of the supposed redeemer plunged the Nation into dismay and rekindled fresh suspicions toward any deviation [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. These episodes reveal the persistence, beneath institutional respectability, of intense religious expectations inherited from the Marrano experience.

The political emancipation of the Jews of the Netherlands, proclaimed in 1796 under the influence of the French Revolution and the Batavian Republic, radically transformed the status of the Nation [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Now citizens, the Sephardim lost the corporate autonomy that had grounded the authority of the Mahamad and the Ascamot. The gradual integration into Dutch society, the declining use of Portuguese, and the relative demographic decrease compared with the Ashkenazi community, which had become largely the majority, weakened the distinct identity of the Nação over the course of the nineteenth century.

The most tragic ordeal came in the twentieth century. The occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945 led to the deportation and extermination of the great majority of Dutch Jews, Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The Portuguese community, several thousand strong on the eve of the war, was decimated. By a singularity that borders on the miraculous, the Esnoga escaped destruction and desecration, and was able to reopen its doors after the war. Today reduced but living, the Sephardic community of Amsterdam continues to hold services in the synagogue of 1675, and the Ets Haim library, inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register, perpetuates the memory of a Nation that knew, for nearly four centuries, how to transform exile into civilization.

The history of the Sephardic Nação of Amsterdam is one of an improbable rebirth: that of men and women torn from Judaism by inquisitorial violence, who, within the span of a single generation, rebuilt on the banks of the Amstel a Jewish community of exceptional vitality. Born of Marranism, this Nation bore throughout its existence the mark of that ambivalent origin: torn between fidelity to a partially lost tradition and the critical spirit forged in the Iberian crucible, mindful at once of piety and respectability, of orthodoxy and openness.

Its greatness rests in this very tension. It was this tension that produced the Hebrew editions of Menasseh ben Israel and his embassy to Cromwell; it was also this tension that, by way of defensive reaction, pronounced the ḥerem against Spinoza, paradoxically giving rise to one of the founding figures of philosophical modernity. The Esnoga of 1675, still lit by candlelight, remains the tangible witness of that fragile balance between memory and reason, between fidelity and freedom.

From the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean, from Hamburg to London, the Portuguese Nation wove a diasporic network of which Amsterdam was the metropolis. Decimated by the Shoah, it survives today as a living memory, guardian of archives, books, and a heritage that continue to illuminate the history of Jewish plurality. In this, the Nação was not merely one community among others: it was a laboratory of modern Jewish identity, where, for the first time with such intensity, the questions of tolerance, of exile, of faith, and of free thought were bound together.