The dedication of the Esnoga

The decision to build was taken in November 1670; the driving figure was Hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, whose sermon launched the subscription. In December the site on the Muiderstraat was bought. The foundation stone was laid on 17 April 1671. In 1672–73 the work halted: the *Rampjaar*, the French invasion, a financial crisis. The dedication was on 2 August 1675, opening an eight-day cycle of ceremonies; the dedication sermons were printed as a volume and Romeyn de Hooghe made engravings.

The architect was the Christian Elias Bouman: guild rules kept Jews out of the building trades. Four years earlier he had built the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue next door. The cost was a hundred and eighty-six thousand guilders; the largest donor Moses Curiel, that is Jeronimo Nunes da Costa, agent of the Portuguese crown. The hall stands on three thousand piles; four basalt columns carry the vault and twelve granite ones the women's gallery; seventy-two windows; room for twelve hundred men and four hundred and forty women; twenty-six chandeliers holding over a thousand candles; sand on the floor.

The date is not accidental. 9 Av 5435 fell on Thursday 1 August, the dedication on Friday 2 August, that is 10 Av, and the eight days of festivity took in Shabbat Nahamu. The community opened its temple in the days of consolation immediately after the day of the Temple's destruction; without that neither Aboab's sermon nor the Temple imagery of de Hooghe's plates can be read.

Three corrections. The cost: the "thirty-three thousand guilders" of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia is a slip — the same figure stands on the same page for the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue; the community's documents give a hundred and eighty-six thousand. "Twelve columns for the twelve tribes" is a later homiletic reading: the community's own description has four large basalt columns carrying the vault and, separately, twelve granite ones supporting the gallery, and Bouman's model was the Dutch Protestant hall church in van Campen's classicist idiom. And "the oldest working synagogue in the world" — no: Prague's Altneuschul is four centuries older. The defensible claim is the oldest surviving monumental, publicly visible synagogue in western Europe, and the largest of its century.

And last, for scale. By 1674 there were about five thousand Ashkenazim in Amsterdam against two and a half thousand Sephardim. The Esnoga was dedicated a year after its builders had become a minority in their own city.