Talmud Torah: three congregations become one

The three Portuguese congregations of Amsterdam — Beth Jacob, Neve Shalom and Beth Israel — lived apart for three decades, though from 1622 they had a joint Imposta board for taxation and charity. The merger agreement was signed in 1638 by two hundred and eighteen householders; in 1639 the single Kahal Talmud Torah was constituted, and the Ascamot of that year carry some three hundred and twenty signatures, soon about four hundred and sixty. Hakham David Pardo brokered the terms; each of the three former congregations was given a copy of the statutes signed first, so that no one lost honour. One former synagogue was sold, one kept in use, one turned into a schoolroom.

The essential thing here is the structure of authority. The kahal is governed by the *ma'amad*, a lay board of parnassim drawn from the merchants. The hakhamim are its salaried employees: not its superiors but its servants. That single fact explains at once Spinoza's herem, the Uriel da Costa affair, the Hayyun affair, and why Amsterdam calmly received the Ramchal after the Venetian and Frankfurt rabbinates had banned him: foreign rabbinic decrees did not bind the Amsterdam ma'amad.

In the same year 1639 a separate Ashkenazi community was constituted, with R. Moses ben Jacob Weile of Prague as its first rabbi. Thereafter the two communities ran alongside and apart: the Ashkenazim had their own cemetery from 1642 and their own Great Synagogue from 1671, and by 1674 they already outnumbered the Sephardim two to one — some five thousand to two and a half. By 1795 the gap was more than sevenfold: some twenty-two thousand to three.

A correction on the dates: the agreement is of 1638 and the constitution of 1639; both numbers circulate separately and each is half right.