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

Conclusion

Conclusion In retrospect there is an almost uncanny homogeneity governing Atlantic World synagogue-communities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries .1 So vast a geographic space, such embryonic settlements touching “new” continents, seas, or islands, so small a number of Sephardic colonists—and yet the far-flung Jews were identifiably bound to the Spanish-Portuguese religious tradition. All congregations followed the paradigm set by Amsterdam ’s Sephardic Talmud Torah in 1639, a pattern that would, until the second decade of the nineteenth century, provide religious, administrative, and material support to Jews who settled across great arcs of the Atlantic. There was seemingly a cart-before-horse development of new Jewish communities, if the cart stands for a colony and the horse for the imperial center. So we find in the Dutch and Danish colonies more Sephardic purpose-built synagogues than in, respectively, the Netherlands or Denmark. Recall that “purpose -built” differs as both a physical and a sociological category from the numerous provisional, unobtrusive religious meeting places that Jews first used when first allowed to live and worship in a polity. As for Britain, its Atlantic possessions had more purpose-built Sephardic synagogues than did the combined total (Sephardic plus Ashkenazic) of synagogues in the home islands. It was the Caribbean periphery, not the European homelands, that saw the first appearance of British and Danish synagogues. Nor were disembodied artificers at work here. It is people who construct buildings : synagogues are the visible signs of a population. The French, too, were prepared to confer rights on Jews abroad that the monarchy would deny within the kingdom itself. According to the 1664 agreement by which the French regained Cayenne (Guyana) from the Dutch Republic, the Bourbons recognized the nascent Sephardic community and its rights (already granted by the Dutch) to maintain a synagogue—that is, to worship publicly. It was not until 1723 that the Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne received the official sanction that allowed them to officially put aside their Catholic convert status. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Protestant countries joined somewhat by France, were havens for Jews. But it was the European imperial project, especially in the Caribbean (including Surinam), that provided the forward momentum for Sephardic settlement in the Atlantic World. Conclusion 203 Wherever Jews thrived synagogues appeared. Seldom did these modest structures aspire to anything besides utilitarian efficiency: they were small, simply designed, and built as economically as possible. Larger, more aesthetically ambitious synagogues—mostly Ashkenazic—would find a place in later nineteenth-century architecture, both in Europe and the Americas. But with the notable exceptions of Amsterdam, London, and a few extraordinarily tolerant outposts (such as Curaçao and Charleston, South Carolina) Jews between c. 1600 and 1825 lacked the financial means, political power, and demographic concentration to assume a more enduring posture—in either the socioeconomic, cultural, or the built environment. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this posture would change substantively and exponentially . However formulaic, the bromide that modernity was the creation of three Ashkenazic Jews—Marx, Freud, and Einstein—still touches a historical nerve. By looking at the origins of the gestation, so much of which took place in the Atlantic World and specifically the Americas, the scope of Jewish development in the modern era can be gauged. If the Sephardic template set in Amsterdam and London was maintenance of a single sanctuary by a single Jewish community in a single locality, it must be said that England and the Netherlands were precisely where such a template first eroded, and quickly. In the larger urban areas or towns of both Protestant countries, once major prohibitions against Jews were removed after 1655, multiple synagogues, almost always Ashkenazic, appeared: there was not a cohesive community inasmuch as Iberian and central European Jews worshipping in separate spaces according to different ritual traditions. This segmentation happened in the mid-seventeenth century in the Netherlands, during the eighteenth century in Great Britain. Among the Sephardim religious and lay leaders worked hard, for the most part successfully, to control their members within the unitary synagoguecommunity . Conformity often required a measure of discipline or, alternatively , benevolent co-option. On the one hand, to name the most notorious instance, there was the harsh rejection of the heretic Baruch Spinoza; on the other, focused attentiveness to congregants in matters personal, ritual, and financial. Hence pressure was exerted on matters of doctrine (Spinoza again) or institutional organization (rooting out potential cults, as with Jewish mulattos in Surinam). If such control strikes...