Migration
Western Sephardim to Hamburg
← View on the mapWhy it happened
Portuguese conversos (Marranos) who had regrouped in the Netherlands after leaving Iberia pushed on to the free Elbe port of Hamburg, whose Lutheran senate quietly received them from 1590 as the 'Portuguese nation' (natio lusitana).12
The migration
Descended from Iberian conversos expelled from Spain in 1492, these Portuguese-speaking merchants reached Hamburg around 1577 through stopovers in Portugal, Amsterdam and Antwerp.2 Initially disguised as Catholic 'Portuguese,' they built an openly Jewish life once tolerated: three synagogues existed as early as 1611, sharing burial grounds at Altona,1 and on 19 February 1612 the senate's Designatio Articulorum recognised them as a protected corporation.2 They paid 1,000 marks in annual tax in 1612, doubled by 1617.1 The community was a mercantile elite — financiers who helped found the Bank of Hamburg (1619), shipbuilders, and importers of sugar, coffee and tobacco from the Iberian colonies.1 Its three congregations merged as Beth Israel in 1652.1 After hostile edicts and extortionate taxation in 1697, many wealthy Sephardim left, some founding the Portuguese congregation of neighbouring Altona.2