Western Sephardim (the 'Portuguese Nation')

Origins

The Western Sephardim descended not from the Jews expelled in 1492 but from the New Christians (conversos) created by the forced conversions of 1391, 1492 and 1497, many of whom preserved a crypto-Jewish 'double existence' under the Iberian Inquisitions.¹ From about 1590, converso merchants migrated to mercantile, comparatively tolerant havens — Amsterdam, Hamburg, southwestern France (Bordeaux and Bayonne), Livorno under the Medici 'Livornina', and, after 1656, London — where they openly returned to Judaism.¹ There they reconstituted a normative Jewish life many had known only in fragments, aided by rabbis and books drawn from the wider Sephardi world.²

Religious life

Rebuilding Judaism among people raised as Catholics was the Nação's central task.² Amsterdam's three congregations merged in 1639 into the Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah, which ran the Ets Haim yeshiva under an oligarchic lay board, the Mahamad, governing through binding ordinances (escamot).³ The community wielded the herem (ban) to enforce conformity — most famously against Uriel da Costa and, in 1656, Baruch Spinoza.² Yet the converso legacy — a Judaism first learned from the Latin Bible and Christian polemic — also bred skeptics and heterodox thinkers, making the western communities a laboratory of doubt as much as of restored orthodoxy.²

Language & culture

Uniquely among Sephardim, the Nação's vernaculars were Iberian and written in Latin script: Portuguese for everyday and communal use, and Castilian Spanish for literature, philosophy and liturgical translation — the 1553 Ferrara Bible its monument — with Hebrew reserved for prayer and scholarship.² This distinguished them from the Hebrew-script Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) of the Ottoman east.² Amsterdam became a great centre of Hebrew printing, where Menasseh ben Israel founded its first Jewish press.⁴ The community cultivated literary academies, Spanish poetry and drama, and sat for portraits by Dutch masters — a self-consciously cosmopolitan, mercantile Sephardi culture.²

Relations with neighbours

The western communities were creatures of mercantilism: Protestant and Italian states valued the Sephardim's Atlantic and Mediterranean trading networks and tolerated their worship without granting full civic equality.⁵ Calvinist Amsterdam permitted open synagogues, Tuscany's 'Livornina' invited Portuguese merchants, and England's tacit toleration after 1656 rested on commercial calculation, while Hamburg's Lutheran clergy periodically agitated against its 'Portuguese'.⁵ The Sephardim moved with unusual ease through Christian commercial society as merchants and physicians while remaining a corporate minority.⁵ Toward the poorer Ashkenazi migrants who soon arrived, the Nação kept a guarded distance, maintaining separate congregations and a proud sense of Iberian lineage.²

Decline & dispersal

The Nação's golden age faded through the 18th century: as Dutch and Sephardi commercial primacy waned, the western communities grew poorer and more dependent on charity, and Ashkenazim became the demographic majority.⁵ Civic emancipation in the Batavian Republic (1796) and revolutionary France dissolved the community's corporate autonomy and hastened assimilation and a shift to Dutch, French and English.⁵ Portuguese-Jewish identity survived mainly in distinct 'Spanish and Portuguese' congregations in Amsterdam, London and the Americas.² The decisive blow was the Holocaust: during the German occupation of the Netherlands the Germans and their Dutch collaborators 'deported some 107,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor', annihilating historic Amsterdam Jewry.⁶

Notable figures

• Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) — Rabbi, printer and diplomat. Amsterdam rabbi and founder of its first Hebrew press whose 'Hope of Israel' and mission to Oliver Cromwell helped reopen England to Jewish settlement.⁴
• Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677) — Philosopher. Amsterdam-born philosopher of converso descent, expelled by the community's herem in 1656; his rationalism made him a founder of modern secular thought and biblical criticism.⁷
• Uriel da Costa (Acosta) (1584–1640) — Freethinker and heterodox writer. Oporto New Christian who returned to Judaism, then assailed rabbinic tradition and the soul's immortality; twice banned, he recanted and took his own life in 1640.⁸
• Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–1693) — Rabbi and translator. Converso-born Amsterdam hakham who led the Sephardi congregation of Dutch-held Recife, Brazil, becoming the first rabbi in the Americas.⁹
• David Nieto (1654–1728) — Rabbi, physician and scientist. Livorno-trained physician who became Haham of London's Bevis Marks congregation and defended rabbinic Judaism against Spinozism and Deism in 'Matteh Dan'.¹⁰

Key events

• 1602 Conversos return to Judaism in Amsterdam. Portuguese conversos began worshipping openly in Amsterdam and organized their first congregations (Beth Jacob, Neveh Shalom), founding the flagship community of the Western Sephardi diaspora.³
• 1639 Union of the Talmud Torah congregation. Amsterdam's three Portuguese congregations merged into the Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah, with its Ets Haim yeshiva and governing Mahamad — the model institution of the western Sephardi world.³
• 1642 First rabbi in the Americas (Recife). Isaac Aboab da Fonseca reached the Amsterdam-linked Sephardi congregation of Dutch-held Recife, Brazil, becoming the first rabbi in the Americas before the Portuguese reconquest scattered its Jews.⁹
• 1656 Excommunication of Spinoza. On 27 July 1656 the Talmud Torah community issued its harshest herem against the 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, expelling the future philosopher for 'abominable heresies'.⁷
• 1656 Readmission of Jews to England. After Menasseh ben Israel's mission and the 1655 Whitehall Conference, London's Sephardi conversos were tacitly readmitted: by December 1656 they had rented a synagogue, ending the 1290 exclusion.¹¹⁴
• 1675 Dedication of the Portuguese Synagogue (Esnoga). Amsterdam's monumental Esnoga was dedicated in 1675, becoming the architectural model for Spanish and Portuguese synagogues across the western Sephardi diaspora.³
• 1701 Bevis Marks Synagogue consecrated. London's Spanish and Portuguese Jews consecrated Bevis Marks, built in 1701 — the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the United Kingdom.¹²

Where they lived

• Amsterdam · 1590
• Hamburg & Altona · 1600
• Livorno (Leghorn) · 1593
• Southwestern France (Bordeaux & Bayonne) · 1500