Sephardic sacred space in colonial America

Abstract

The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest extant synagogue building in the United States, has provoked a certain amount of controversy regarding its origins: while the architect is known, scholars have disputed whether the essential attributes of the structure should be traced to eighteenth-century English pattern books, descriptions of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam provided to architect Peter Harrison by congregants, or the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. The origins of the structure are important, as most of the Portuguese synagogues in colonial American and the Caribbean bear the same basic and unusual design features as the Touro structure. This essay argues that the resolution to this controversy lies in the structural ideal behind both the pattern books and the synagogues in Amsterdam and London: the Biblical Tabernacle and Temple as described by Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon de Templo in his messianic study, the Retrato del Templo de Selomo (1642). Early modern synagogue architects mimicked both the proportions prescribed by Leon de Templo and key symbolic design features of the Temple. By echoing the divinely-inspired structures, eighteenth-century Sephardic Jews in colonial America hoped to draw their worship closer to God and to help bring about the messianic era.