The Portuguese Nation אומה פורטוגזית
The Amsterdam Sephardim called themselves *a Nação* — the Nation. The word is Iberian and corporate, not religious, and the boundaries it drew were Iberian ones.
The Portuguese New Christians who came to Amsterdam from the 1590s brought with them not only Iberian names and language but an Iberian way of counting their own. *A Nação* is a corporate, lineage term — an inverted *limpieza de sangre*: honour, descent, purity of blood. It embraced Portuguese New Christians who were not yet Jews and excluded Ashkenazim who indisputably were.
This is visible in the deeds, not the words. The Santa Companhia de dotar confraternity (1615) gave dowries to poor girls "of the Portuguese or Hispanic nation" throughout western Europe — including "lands of idolatry," that is to relatives living as Catholics in Iberia. The same community supported the Ashkenazi poor as objects of charity and refused them membership; eighteenth-century ordinances forbade Portuguese Jews to marry Ashkenazim without the ma'amad's consent and denied *tudesco* descendants full membership.
The other side of it was re-education. Adults arriving from Portugal and Spain knew "Judaism" mostly from Christian sources: the Vulgate, anti-Jewish polemic, the Inquisition's edicts of faith. The community's answer was institutional: the Talmud Torah confraternity (1616), a graded school, the Ets Haim yeshiva, catechetical literature in Spanish and Portuguese, and preaching in the vernacular.
The hardest threshold was adult circumcision: irreversible, physically dangerous and legally lethal — after it, return to Iberia meant the stake. Merchants with business in Iberian ports deferred it for years, and the community set deadlines precisely because compliance was incomplete.
On the timeline
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Ascamot and Mahamad books of Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah, Amsterdam — the statutes, admission, circumcision deadlines and the limits of membership
Scholarship
- Y. Kaplan, Wayward New Christians and Stubborn New Jews, Jewish History 8 — a Judaism learned from Christian books, and the community's work of re-education
- M. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, Indiana UP — the Nation as a corporate rather than a religious category
Basis: documents and evidence.