page_title: Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg
section_title: Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg / Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
caption_attribution_description: English: The Portuguese synagogue Neveh Shalom in Altona, dedicated 1771, razed in 1940.Deutsch: Die Synagoge war ein Fachwerkgebäude mit vorgesetzter Steinfassade, die durch Pilaster gegliedert wurde. Über dem Eingang ist gut erkennbar der Schmuckstein mit dem Spiegelmonogramm des Königs Christian VII. von Dänemark.
context_page_description: From about 1590 on, there had been a Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg, whose qehilla existed until its compulsory merger with the Ashkenazi congregation in July 1939. The first Sephardic settlers were Portuguese Marranos, who had fled their country under Philip II and Philip III, at first concealing their religion in their new place of residence. Many of them had emigrated from Spain in the belief that they had found refuge in Portugal.
context_section_description: In 1710 an imperial commission, which visited the town for the purpose of making peace between the senate and the aldermen, fixed the position of Hamburg's Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews by certain regulations ("Reglement der Judenschaft in Hamburg sowohl portugiesischer als hochdeutscher Nation", Regulation of the Jewry of Portuguese as well as of High German Nation in Hamburg), promulgated in the name of Emperor Joseph I. This edict became the fundamental law for the treatment of the Jews in Hamburg during the ensuing century.
  The Portuguese, proud of their noble lineage, were very dissatisfied at being put on a level with the German Jews, and segregated themselves more and more from them. As a result of this exclusiveness, and for want of fresh accessions, their community declined in the course of the eighteenth century and lost its leading position among the Hamburg Jews. Still, it had some well-known Ḥachamim, for example Jacob de Abraham Basan, who wrote an order of prayers (still extant) for a fast-day held after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and Benjamin Benveniste (d. 1757). But learning and interest in Jewish affairs waned in the Portuguese community, and its institutions were neglected. The shechitah, formerly under its sole supervision, went over to the Ashkenazi community, which in exchange had to pay to the Portuguese one-fourth (since 1856 one-eighth) of the total proceeds of the meat-tax.
  By the annexation of Hamburg into the first French Empire in 1810, all Hamburgers became French citizens of equal rights, though the Jews among them were discriminated by Napoléon Bonaparte's so-called décret infâme. The Holy Community of the Sephardim of Beit Israel became subject to the French Jewish Consistory. In 1814 Hamburg resumed independence and sovereignty as a city-state, and in the following year the senate deprived the Jews their legal equality. Arguing it was the French state and not the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg which had emancipated the Jews in town, the senate took the decisions of the German Confederation on the rights of the Jews, in Johann Smidt's manipulated formulation, as the legal grounds. The old Reglement der Judenschaft regained legal validity.
  The Portuguese congregation's principal synagogue in Alter Wall was burned in the great city fire of 1842. From 1855 to 1935 the Sephardim possessed a smaller new place of worship in Markusstrasse 36, the service being maintained with all the old Spanish rites and melodies. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century they had no Ḥacham. The members of the congregation were granted equal rights (Jewish emancipation) by the city-state on 21 February 1849, adopting the legislation of the Frankfurt National Assembly. Their last preacher and spiritual chief was Judah Cassuto, who officiated as Ḥazzan (חזן) from 1827 to 1893. It is thought that in 1905 the Portuguese community numbered about 400.
  In Altona, Prussian since 1866, but incorporated into Hamburg in 1937, Sephardim had settled since before 1647. Their congregation was first known as Beit Yacob ha-Katan (בית יעקב הקטן). In 1770 they founded the Holy Community of Neveh Shalom (נוה שלום). They gained legal equality on 14 July 1863 through an act of the Danish-Holsteinian government. In 1887 the few remaining congregants had to dissolve the community due to lack of members.
caption: The main façade of stone of the else half-timbered Portuguese synagogue Neveh Shalom in the courtyard of then Bäckerstr. 12-14 (today's Hoheschulstr.), Altona, dedicated in 1771, closed in 1882. Thereafter Altona's Ashkenazi congregation used the building as winter synagogue, before it was demolished in 1940.[3]
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:11:27 22:53:14", "Image ExifOffset": "484", "Image XPComment": "[80, 0, 111, 0, 114, 0, 116, 0, 117, 0, 103, 0, 105, 0, 101, 0, 115, 0, 101, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "620", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7083", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1801", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2052"}