Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History

Foreword

Foreword In April 2007 I joined scores of people to attend a special service at the Snoa—the venerable synagogue of Curaço, built in 1732, home to Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas, where no Sabbath or major holiday has gone uncelebrated in 278 years. Inside , through the arched entrance portal with the inscription from Psalm 26, B’makhelim abarekh ha-shem (“In the congregations I will bless the Lord”), all 144 candles were burning in the three large chandeliers and the sconces attached to the four big columns. In the past twenty years I have visited many of the “Jewish sanctuaries in the Atlantic World” described by Barry Stiefel in this book, including the wellknown synagogues of Amsterdam, London, Newport, and Charleston. But when I was at the service in Curaçao held to commemorate the 275th anniversary of the dedication of the building, I felt the strength of the historical continuum of Judaism in the New World, and the richness of the traditions of the Atlantic Jewish communities. Through their language, liturgy, and architecture , these communities—originally exclusively Sephardic—reach back to a distant past. In their establishment in circumstances of freedom and tolerance, however, they are the foundation on which modernAmerican Judaism is built. The survival of the Snoa represents centuries of a culture of tolerance and cooperation of the sort Jews have rarely enjoyed elsewhere in the world. The great columns and the wooden ceiling vaults recall those in the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (known as the Esnoga), the “mother” congregation of Curaçao’s Jews, who first settled “on the island” in 1651, making Willemstad the oldest surviving Jewish community in the Western Hemisphere. It was the erection of the monumental Amsterdam Esnoga in 1675, celebrated with a week’s festivities that recalled the rededication of the Temple at the time of the Maccabees, that signaled a new age of opportunity for Diaspora Jews, and it was in the successful colonies established by Jews from Amsterdam , and later London, that this freedom was most fully realized over the next 350 years. The foundation of Jewish liberty and opportunity in the United States—a country where George Washington emphatically pronounced to the Sephar­ dic Jewish congregation of Jeshuat Israel (better known as the Touro Synagogue ) in Newport, Rhode Island, that government “to bigotry gives no xii Foreword sanction, to persecution no assistance”—this foundation has its strong roots in the tolerance and support provided to Jews by Dutch Protestant reformers in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, capital of Europe’s first modern republic, and then in the Dutch colonies. And yet this is a history that today remains distant and continues to dim for most American Jews, who are mostly Ashkenazic, not Sephardic, and who trace their roots to central and eastern Europe, not to the world of Atlantic Judaism. Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World should help bridge that distance. Stiefel brings these oft-forgotten communities back into the historical narrative, so that their history is a vital link in the Atlantic and American historical continuum. But he also makes the case that they constitute through their circumstances, customs, and architecture a distinct and successful phase of Jewish history from which we still benefit, and from which we should still learn. Even in an age before modern communications, in a big watery world, distant Jewish communities stayed in close contact. This is symbolically represented in the Snoa in the three great wooden barrel vaults of the synagogue’s ceiling, which also contribute to the Snoa’s excellent acoustics. They are shaped like the inverted hulls of ships, reminiscent of those that carried Jews to this safe haven. Their appearance suggests ships that were somehow beached but were raised on walls to make a sanctuary. (In truth, the vaults were cut and fitted in the Netherlands, then shipped to Curaçao for on-site assembly—an early instance of prefab construction.) The long benches of the Snoa on which I and the entire community sat are narrow and hard, and only a few had cushions (they predate our modernday era of extra-wide Jewish posteriors). The old benches are arranged in the common Sephardic fashion, as in Amsterdam, London, and Venice, and throughout the Caribbean. They face the open central space between Hechal (Ark) and Tebah (Bimah), which functions as a (rectangular) arena where the drama of the service, including processions with the Torah scrolls, takes place. Behind one range of benches...