The Esnoga — the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam אסנוגה

The decision to build was taken in November 1670, with Hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca as the driving figure; the site was bought in December. The foundation stone was laid on 17 April 1671. In 1672–73 the work halted — the *Rampjaar*, the French invasion and a financial crisis. The dedication was on 2 August 1675, opening an eight-day cycle of ceremonies.

The architect was Elias Bouman, a Christian: guild rules kept Jews out of the building trades. Four years earlier he had built the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue next door, so both buildings are by one hand. The cost was a hundred and eighty-six thousand guilders; the largest donor was Moses Curiel, that is Jeronimo Nunes da Costa, agent of the Portuguese crown.

A rectangular hall on three thousand wooden piles — the ground is marsh; four great basalt columns carry the barrel vault and twelve granite ones the women's gallery; seventy-two windows; room for twelve hundred men and four hundred and forty women — the largest synagogue in the world that day. Twenty-six bronze chandeliers holding over a thousand candles. Sand strewn on the floor. Around it low ancillary buildings: the rabbinate, the mortuary, the winter synagogue and Ets Haim with the Montezinos library, the oldest continuously functioning Jewish library in the world.

The building was never converted and never burned. During the war the ritual objects were hidden in the attic; the synagogue reopened on 9 May 1945. In the restoration of 1955–59 electricity and heating were brought only into the ancillary spaces: the main hall is unelectrified to this day.

Two corrections. The date is not accidental: 9 Av 5435 fell on Thursday 1 August, the dedication on Friday 2 August, 10 Av, and the festivities took in Shabbat Nahamu. The community opened its temple in the days of consolation immediately after the day of the Temple's destruction — without which neither Aboab's sermon nor Romeyn de Hooghe's engravings can be read. And 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 own documents give a hundred and eighty-six thousand.

And last, for scale: by 1674 there were already twice as many Ashkenazim in Amsterdam as Sephardim. The Esnoga is a temple built at the exact moment its builders became a minority in their own city.