The Portuguese Merchants of the Elbe

There is a special comedy in the way Hamburg admitted its Jews. It did not admit them at all, officially. It admitted a useful population of Portuguese merchants, men with the right account books and the right trading connections, and it agreed not to look too closely at what they did on Saturdays. Everyone knew. The Senate knew, the Lutheran clergy knew and complained, the merchants themselves were hardly secretive. But the fiction was profitable, and a port city will swallow a great deal of fiction for the right margin. Commerce, in Hamburg, outran the policemen of belief.

These were conversos, the descendants of Jews forced into Christian baptism in Spain and Portugal a century or more before, who had carried their hidden faith north through the Netherlands and into the German trading cities. In Hamburg they found a place that wanted their Atlantic networks badly enough to overlook their religion. Slowly, under the cover of being Portuguese, they stopped hiding. The cover story became the community, and the community became one of the founding chapters of Sephardi life in northern Europe.

The bargain on the Elbe

Portuguese conversos were living in Hamburg by the 1590s, and by 1603 more than a hundred of them were settled in the city, prosperous enough to draw a formal complaint to the city parliament. The arrangement was finally written down in 1612, when the Senate, the citizenry and the Portuguese concluded a binding contract permitting their residence in exchange for an annual payment - a thousand marks a year, doubled within five years. It granted them the right to trade and live in Hamburg. It pointedly did not grant them the right to practise Judaism in the open. They paid, they traded, and they worshipped quietly in private houses, which fooled precisely no one and was never meant to.

What they built on that grudging foundation was substantial. The Sephardim of Hamburg plugged the city into the great Western Sephardi trading web that ran through Amsterdam to the colonies, dealing in sugar, tobacco and coffee from across the Atlantic. They produced physicians like Rodrigo de Castro and freethinkers like Uriel da Costa, whose quarrel with rabbinic authority made him one of the first great heretics of the modern Jewish world. They brought money and learning and argument, all the things a port city secretly wants and pretends to be wary of.

Three congregations become one

For decades the Sephardim of Hamburg worshipped in several small congregations - Talmud Torah, Keter Torah, Neveh Shalom - each gathered around its own circle of families. In 1652 they merged into a single community under the name Beth Israel, with David Cohen de Lara as chief rabbi. It was the moment a clandestine scattering became one organised Jewish body, openly enough constituted to have a name and a head. The city that had admitted only Portuguese merchants now had, in plain sight, a Sephardi kehillah.

Hamburg's Jewish story is not only Sephardi, and the layers are worth keeping straight. Across the river in Danish-ruled Altona, and in nearby Wandsbek, Ashkenazi communities took root and in 1671 joined with Hamburg's Ashkenazim into the famous Three Communities under one chief rabbinate. It was there, a century later, that the bitter Emden-Eybeschütz controversy split the rabbinic world over a charge of secret heresy. And it was in Hamburg, in 1818, that the New Israelite Temple opened its doors as the first permanent home of Reform Judaism, a revolution in how Jews prayed that began on the Elbe and spread across the world.

What the port remembers

By the early twentieth century Hamburg's Jews, Sephardi and Ashkenazi together, numbered close to twenty thousand, and their grandest synagogue, the Bornplatz, consecrated in 1906, dominated its square. The Nazis destroyed it, deported the community from October 1941, and murdered the great majority of those who could not flee. The square where the Bornplatz stood became a void. Hamburg is now planning to fill it again, rebuilding the synagogue as both memorial and renewal - the old argument between continuation and reconstruction, settled in favour of doing both.

The deepest joke of the Hamburg story is also its deepest truth. A city let Jews in by pretending they were only merchants, and the pretence built something real - a cemetery of carved Portuguese stones, the first Reform temple, four centuries of Jewish life on a northern river. Hamburg kept calling them Portuguese long after the word had stopped describing anything but a memory. The merchants outlasted the euphemism. They usually do.