Today
Branca kept the Law in hiding. The New Christians who managed to flee Iberia kept it in the open, and the communities they founded still pray, sing and cook for Shabbat. You can visit nearly all of them.
The first synagogue in the Americas, on Rua do Bom Jesus, opened under Dutch rule by Portuguese Jews, many of them New Christians who had returned to Judaism, a few miles from where Branca lit her lamp. Today it is a museum and cultural centre, home to the Jewish Historical Archive of Pernambuco.
About the synagogueWhen the Portuguese retook Recife, 23 Jews from the city reached New Amsterdam and founded the first Jewish congregation in North America. It still prays in the Spanish and Portuguese rite.
shearithisrael.orgThe great Portuguese synagogue, still lit only by candles. “Esnoga” is the same word the 1593 witnesses used for the place of prayer at the Camaragibe mill.
Portuguese SynagogueThe congregation of London's Spanish and Portuguese Jews, founded in 1657 by New Christian families. It keeps the liturgy, the music and the Hebrew pronunciation of the “Nation”, as in the Vezot hattorah on Branca's page.
sephardi.org.ukThe oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas, with a sand floor. Its congregation was formed by Jews from Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil.
snoa.comIn Belmonte, families secretly kept into the 20th century what Branca kept: the Friday lamp, prayers said by heart, marriage within the group. Only at the end of the century did they return openly to Judaism; their synagogue dates from 1996. The museum tells the story.
Belmonte Jewish Museum · the communityIn Porto, Captain Barros Basto built a synagogue in the 1930s to welcome returning New Christians; Lisbon's Shaaré Tikvá synagogue dates from 1904. Across the country, the Network of Jewish Quarters guides visitors through the old Jewish streets.
Porto community · Lisbon community · Rede de JudiariasThe stew that spends the night in the oven is still alive in Sephardi homes, above all Moroccan ones, with chickpeas, meat and eggs that come out caramel-coloured. Claudia Roden gathers the versions in The Book of Jewish Food. And Branca's is here.
The book on AmazonIn Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte and Ceará, many families kept customs without knowing where they came from: sweeping the house inwards, lighting candles on Friday, not eating pork. Today descendants of New Christians, the bnei anusim, are returning to study and practise Judaism, often guided by Koren de Lima's genealogies.
Branca's storyThe Nation
Those who fled the Inquisition called themselves “the Nation”. In Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Bordeaux and the Americas they built congregations with a rite of their own, the Spanish and Portuguese, also called Western Sephardi. For centuries the community ran its affairs in Portuguese and said its non-Hebrew prayers in Spanish.
A Spanish hymn sung after meals, alongside the Hebrew grace: “Bendigamos al Altísimo, al Señor que nos crió…”. It probably began among the Jews of Bordeaux, and its melody, one of the rite's best loved, is also used for the Song of the Sea on Shabbat. Moroccan Jews carried it to Manaus and Belém in the 19th century.
The ayin becomes “ng” (Shemang Israel), the tav is always “t”, and the Torah scroll is raised before the reading, to the words of Vezot hattorah.
Amsterdam's Esnoga is still lit only by candles. In Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica and St Thomas the synagogue floors are sand.
The community board is the Mahamad; the synagogue, the esnoga. In Amsterdam some formulas are still said in Portuguese.
Full directory: S&P Central.
Amsterdam. In 1940 about 4,300 Portuguese Jews lived in the Netherlands. In a desperate effort, lawyers and anthropologists asked the Germans to declare them “not racially Jewish”, as descendants of Marranos: the request covered 4,304 people. Hans Calmeyer, the German official who judged such cases, agreed to put forward only the 386 most “convincing” ones. At Westerbork, Nazi experts called them “racial sub-humans”, and on 25 February 1944 the group was sent to Theresienstadt. Of the 4,300, about 3,700 were murdered; fewer than a thousand came back. The Esnoga was left standing, and the Ets Haim library, carried off to Germany, came home after the war.
Bordeaux. In June 1940 the Portuguese consul there, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, defied Salazar and issued thousands of visas to refugees, many of them Jews. Two years later the Great Synagogue became a detention centre from which families were sent on to Drancy and Auschwitz.
Hamburg and Italy. Hamburg's old Portuguese community, from the early 17th century, disappeared. In Livorno, Venice and Rome, Jews of the Western rite were hunted from 1943.
London and the Americas. Bevis Marks came through the Blitz unharmed. New York, Philadelphia, Montreal and the Caribbean kept the rite while Europe was losing it.
Sources: J. Presser, Ondergang, “De Portugese Joden”; community history, esnoga.com.
12–15,000
is our estimate of how many people belong today to congregations that still pray in the Spanish and Portuguese rite, adding up the figures they publish: London (c. 1,300 members), Montreal (c. 800 families), Amsterdam (c. 630), New York and Philadelphia (a few hundred families each), Curaçao (c. 200), Suriname (c. 130), and smaller groups in France, Italy, Gibraltar, the Caribbean and Israel.
But the rite has outlived the families: in London, Montreal or Bordeaux most worshippers today came from Morocco, Iraq or India. Descendants of the old Nation still praying in these synagogues probably number a few thousand. The descendants of the New Christians who stayed behind, like Branca's, are beyond counting, and most of them don't know it.