Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [59]
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands | The Old Jewish Quarter |
Mozes en Aaron Kerk
Just behind the Muziektheater, on the corner of Mr Visserplein, is the Mozes en Aaron Kerk, a rather glum Neoclassical structure built on the site of a clandestine Catholic church in the 1840s. It takes its unusual name from a pair of facade stones bearing effigies of the two prophets that adorned the earlier building. Earlier still, the site was occupied by the house where the philosopher and theologian Baruch Spinoza was born in 1632. Of Sephardic descent, Spinoza’s pantheistic views soon brought him into conflict with the elders of the Jewish community. At the age of 23, he was excommunicated and forced out of the city, moving into a small village where he survived by grinding lenses. After an attempt on his life, Spinoza moved again, eventually ending up in The Hague, where his free-thinking ways proved more acceptable.
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands | The Old Jewish Quarter |
The Esnoga
Unmissable on the corner of Mr Visserplein is the brown and bulky brickwork of the Esnoga (Portuguese Synagogue; Sun–Fri 10am–4pm; closed Yom Kippur; €6.50; www.esnoga.com), completed in 1675 for the city’s Sephardic Jews. One of Amsterdam’s most imposing buildings, the central structure, with its grand pilasters and blind balustrade, was built in the broadly Neoclassical style that was then fashionable in Holland. It is surrounded by a courtyard complex of small outhouses, where the city’s Sephardim have fraternized for centuries. Barely altered since its construction, the synagogue’s lofty interior follows the Sephardic tradition in having the Hechal (the Ark of the Covenant) and tebah (from where services are led) at opposite ends. Also traditional is the seating, with two sets of wooden benches (for the men) facing each other across the central aisle – the women have separate galleries up above. A set of superb brass chandeliers holds the candles that remain the only source of artificial light. When it was completed, the synagogue was one of the largest in the world, its congregation almost certainly the richest; today, the Sephardic community has dwindled to just 250 families, most of whom live outside the city centre.
In one of the outhouses, a short film sheds light on the history of the synagogue and of Amsterdam’s Sephardim; the mystery is why the Germans left the building alone – no one knows for sure, but it seems likely that they intended to turn it into a museum once all of the Jews had been slaughtered.
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands | The Old Jewish Quarter |
Jonas Daniel Meijerplein
Next to the Esnoga, on the south side of its retaining outhouses, is Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, a scrawny triangle of gravel named after the eponymous lawyer, who in 1796, at the age of just 16, was the first Jew to be admitted to the Amsterdam Bar. It was here in February 1941 that around four hundred Jewish men were forcibly loaded up on trucks and taken to their deaths at Mauthausen concentration camp, in reprisal for the killing of a Dutch Nazi during a street fight. The arrests sparked off the February Strike (Februaristaking), a general strike in protest against the Germans’ treatment of the Jews. It was organized by the outlawed Communist Party and spearheaded by Amsterdam’s transport workers and dockers – a rare demonstration of solidarity with the Jews whose fate