ON Shabat Nahamu of 5435 (2 August 1675), the senior haham of the Kahal Kados de Talmud Tora, the Portuguese Jewish religious community of Amsterdam, delivered the first sermon in the recently completed Esnoga. In his appropriately baroque Portuguese discourse Ishac Aboab da Fonseca compared the newly erected structure to the two Temples of ancient Israel and expressed the hope that ‘this celebrated house, though [only] a small Temple … be rendered great by the greatness of God’ (‘esta famoza caza ainda que piqueño Templo … que a sua grandeza a fassa grande’), echoing the opinion of his Portuguese Jewish contemporaries who regarded their community as striving for and approaching, if only in miniature, the ancient glory of Jerusalem. A little more than a hundred years later Dutch maskilim (that is, Jews espousing the philosophy of the En light en - ment) gave a wholly new twist to the Amsterdam–Jerusalem analogy. Upon receiving the coveted equality of rights in 1795, these enlightened Jews sang:

A new Jerusalem of freedom, brotherhood, and reason replaced the ancient Jerusalem of the Temples of Solomon, Ezra, and Herod. And the new Jerusalem was here and now, neither in miniature nor in expectation, in Amsterdam. Another century later, after the exaltation of the emancipation had worn off, Amsterdam came to be known deceptively simply as ‘Mokum’ (the Dutch spelling of the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Hebrew makom, ‘place’), an appellation which affectionately expressed the place Amsterdam occupied in the hearts of the then mostly Ashkenazi Jews.