Portuguese Synagogue

Catholics in 17th-century Amsterdam had to hide their churches in attics. The city’s Jews were allowed to build this.

The people who built it had been hiding for generations. They were descended from Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forced to convert, and who went on practising their religion in secret under the eye of the Inquisition. From about 1600 they began arriving in Amsterdam, where nobody asked what they believed, and they became Jews openly again.

Many were merchants with connections across the Atlantic world, and the community grew rich. In 1670 it bought this ground and commissioned one of the largest synagogues in the world. When it opened in 1675 the celebrations lasted eight days.

It is big on purpose. The building stands in full view, taller than the houses around it, and no attempt was made to disguise what it was. Visitors came from across Europe to look at it, and synagogues in London and the Americas were modelled on it.

Inside, almost nothing has changed in three and a half centuries. There is no electric light and no heating. Services are lit by around a thousand candles in brass chandeliers, and the floor is strewn with fine sand, which soaks up damp and softens the sound of footsteps. The building came through the German occupation undamaged. Most of its congregation did not.