Portuguese Synagogue

The Jewish families who built Amsterdam's Portuguese Synagogue had mostly arrived in the Dutch Republic as refugees from the Iberian Peninsula, where many had lived for generations as conversos, practicing Judaism in secret while outwardly conforming to Catholicism under threat of the Inquisition. Amsterdam, more tolerant of religious minorities than most of Europe in the seventeenth century, let that community worship openly for the first time in living memory, and the synagogue they built between 1671 and 1675 was designed to make that freedom visible.

The result was an enormous building, among the largest synagogues in the world when completed, a deliberate statement from a community that had known what it cost to worship in secret. The interior follows a plan modeled loosely on the ancient Temple in Jerusalem as architects of the period understood it.

What distinguishes the Portuguese Synagogue most from other historic synagogues still in use is a choice about light rather than architecture. The building has never been wired for electricity in its main sanctuary, and services are still conducted by candlelight, using large brass candelabra original or close to original to the building, a practice maintained deliberately rather than out of neglect.

The synagogue survived the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands physically intact even as the Sephardic community that built it was devastated by deportation, one of the few major Jewish institutions in Amsterdam to remain standing through the war largely undamaged. It functions today both as an active synagogue for Amsterdam's smaller postwar Sephardic community and as a major heritage site, its archive among the most important Jewish historical collections in Europe.

The Esnoga's design is credited to Elias Bouman, with the city architect Daniel Stalpaert also named in connection with the plan, and the building the two produced still repays close architectural attention beyond the candlelight the congregation is best known for keeping. The main sanctuary runs roughly thirty six by nineteen meters beneath a soaring wooden barrel vault, carried on twelve tall stone columns, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, with a women's gallery running along three sides above the congregation below.

Underfoot the building keeps a custom now almost extinct among working synagogues. A thin layer of fine sand covers the sanctuary floor, laid down originally to absorb moisture tracked in on worshippers' shoes and to soften the sound of footsteps on stone, and the Esnoga is one of only five synagogues left anywhere in the world still maintaining a sand floor rather than having replaced it with tile or wood at some point in three and a half centuries of continuous use.

The wider synagogue complex, arranged around a small courtyard, houses more than the main sanctuary alone. Smaller buildings hold a winter synagogue used in the colder months, offices, the rabbinate, and Ets Haim, one of the oldest working Jewish libraries anywhere in the world, its collection assembled by the same Sephardic community that built the sanctuary above the sand. Taken together, the columns, the sand and the library describe a congregation that built not one landmark building but a small, largely self sufficient institution, and kept it running as one for three hundred and fifty years.