Class 4: Sephardic Merchants and Synagogues in the Atlantic World

Sephardic Jews in the Dutch Republic were important players in the quickly expanding world of global trade. They capitalized on their family and business connections in the Iberian world to facilitate commerce across political and cultural divides. Their expanding trade networks brought them to settle throughout Dutch and later English colonies in the Americas and elsewhere. The Caribbean was particularly important for the new settlement of these Sephardim, first in the short-lived Dutch colony of Recife (1630–1654) in northern Brazil and then in Suriname, Curaçao, Jamaica, and Barbados. In time, they established communities along the eastern seaboard of England’s North American colonies. There were Sephardic congregations in Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Newport.

Global Trade and Intellectual Exchange

People, goods, ideas, books, and culture circulated throughout these colonial networks. Rabbis trained in Amsterdam would settle in the Americas and bring with them the prayer books and religious approaches of the larger and more established communities back in the Old World. They often wrote books while living in the Caribbean and sent them to London or Amsterdam to be printed. New World delicacies like chocolate, tobacco, and sugar reshaped the economies and daily life of Europeans. American-born Sephardim would often travel across the Atlantic for work or education, bringing with them their American experiences and perspectives and creating a highly mobile, globally influenced culture throughout what can be called the “Sephardic Atlantic.”

Synagogue Architecture across the Atlantic

One of the most striking features of this global network of small but vibrant communities was their religious architecture. In all these locales the Western Sephardim built monumental synagogues—all inspired by the architecture of the ancient Temple, which also shaped the Esnoga back in Amsterdam. Wherever Sephardic Jews would travel, they would find a synagogue with a similar placement of the reader’s table, the teba, and the heichal, the shrine containing the Torah scrolls and the seats arranged along the sides. All the synagogues have prominent windows which allowed for natural light and ventilation but also echoed the windows of the Temple. The visitor would recognize the four columns evoking those that held up Solomon’s Temple and the tablets of the ten commandments placed over the heichal. The visitor would find the same bilingual prayer books printed in Amsterdam and would hear a sermon in Portuguese (at least until the late eighteenth century). Individual synagogues used the building material available to them, like brick in London and Amsterdam or wood and plaster in the Caribbean, and chose color schemes that blended with their surroundings. Still, they shared enough features to be familiar and welcoming to any member of this highly mobile community.

From Amsterdam and London to Curaçao, Barbados, Charleston, and Newport, the Western Sephardim built impressive synagogues in prominent parts of the urban landscape. The synagogues were not hidden behind somber walls or down dark alleyways. These Jews, given basic civil rights, relished their newfound freedoms. They gave their synagogues names that reflected the pain of exile and the hope in God’s redemption of his dispersed people: The Remnant of Israel (Shearith Israel; New York), The Scattered of Israel (Nidhei Israel; Barbados), but also The Salvation of Israel (Yeshu‘at Israel; Newport) and the Hope of Israel (Mikveh Israel; Curaçao, Savannah, and Philadelphia). These synagogues were concrete expressions of classic Jewish hopes at the same time that their elegance and prominent placement reflected these Jews’ sense of economic success and integration into the wider society.

The Reality of Slavery

While Jews in the Anglo-Dutch colonial world did not have equality with their white Christian neighbors, they did enjoy unprecedented rights and freedoms. However, they, like the rest of the free population, benefited from an economic system built on slave labor. The buying and selling of human beings and their forced labor on plantations and in domestic service was widespread throughout the territories where the Western Sephardim lived and Jews were also directly or indirectly involved in this awful institution. Enslaved Africans are mentioned frequently in legal documents and even in religious regulations. An important body of scholarship dealing with the interaction between the Sephardim and Atlantic slavery has deepened our understanding of this difficult historical reality.