Sephardic Jews of Denmark: Glückstadt, Copenhagen and the Portuguese Nation

Denmark had a Sephardi presence rather than a Sephardi community.

From 1619 the Danish kings invited “Portuguese” Jews to settle for commercial reasons, granting individual letters of protection and, later, collective trading privileges. Those privileges attracted perhaps a few dozen families over a century, chiefly to Glückstadt in Holstein and to Copenhagen. They never became numerous: of the eleven Jewish families living in Copenhagen in 1682, three were Sephardi.

Ashkenazim, who initially could not enter Denmark at all without a letter of safe conduct, quickly outnumbered them and dominated the community that emerged. The Sephardim organised separately in 1715 with their own cemetery, held to their privileges until the emancipation decree of 1814 made them redundant, and then disappeared as a distinct group.

This is a page about individuals and families rather than a congregation, and about a presence that largely ended in the nineteenth century. It is short because the evidence is thin — but the evidence is not absent, and most of it has never been worked.

Everyone described here is Western Sephardi: Portuguese and Spanish families who left Iberia for Amsterdam, Hamburg and Altona, and moved on to Danish territory from there. There was no Eastern Sephardi presence in Denmark.

What does “Denmark” mean here?

More than the modern kingdom, and the distinction decides which archive you write to.

Denmark proper — Copenhagen, Fredericia, and the provincial towns. Records are in Danish repositories.

The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, ruled by the Danish king but not part of Denmark, and today in Germany. Glückstadt, where the first settlement was, is here. So is Altona, which the Danish crown ruled until 1864 and which held the important Sephardi community of the region. Records for both are in German archives.

Norway, in personal union with Denmark until 1814. Jews were barred, and the 1814 Norwegian constitution made the ban explicit.

The Danish West Indies — St Thomas, St John and St Croix, purchased by the United States in 1917 and now the U.S. Virgin Islands.

A family traced in “Denmark” may therefore be found in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein or the Caribbean. Glückstadt in particular is a German-archive problem, not a Danish one.

Why did Christian IV invite Portuguese Jews to Glückstadt?

To rescue a failing town.

Christian IV founded Glückstadt on the Elbe in 1616 as a rival to Hamburg, and it very nearly failed. In 1619 he appointed Albert Dionis to run the mint there — a Sephardi merchant, “of the Portuguese nation” as the Danish records put it, who had settled in Hamburg in 1605 and built up an import–export business. Dionis was the first Jew to receive a Danish royal letter of protection.

On Dionis’s advice, Christian IV in 1622 invited Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam and Hamburg to settle at Glückstadt, offering extensive trading privileges and freedom of religion to attract merchants with capital. About thirty Portuguese families came. By 1628 their position was formalised: protection, the right to hold private religious services, and their own cemetery.

The town’s economy stagnated and the families moved away. This is the only occasion on which a group of Sephardim settled together on Danish-ruled territory, and it did not last.

The privileges outlived the settlement. Through the seventeenth century Portuguese Jews supplied luxury goods to the Danish court and arranged large loans for the kings, and their trading rights were repeatedly broadened until they could trade freely throughout the kingdom. In 1667 the Jews of Altona were empowered to travel and trade freely in Denmark, Norway and Schleswig-Holstein — an extension that in practice opened Danish trade to Ashkenazim as well.

A note on the name Dionis

Albert Dionis appears also as Alvaro Diniz, Denis and Dionysius, and is sometimes identified with Samuel Jachia. It has been suggested that Dionis renders the Portuguese Dinis, and that he may connect to the Dinis family of Pontevedra in Galicia.

We record this as a suggestion, not a finding. It is an inference about the form of a name, with a second inference built on top of it, and we are not aware of evidence for either.

What happened in Copenhagen?

Jewish settlement in Denmark proper began in the 1670s, when the government admitted tobacco manufacturers and dealers to Copenhagen and a few provincial towns on mercantilist grounds, without religious concessions.

Gabriel Gomez was the figure who secured a Sephardi position. In 1647 he persuaded Frederik III to allow Sephardi Jews to reside in Denmark for the purposes of trade. In the same year he organised a Danish trading expedition to the Caribbean, led by the de Casseres brothers; it failed, in part because of the disorder in Barbados arising from the English Civil War. A second expedition followed in 1651.

By 1682 there were eleven Jewish families in Copenhagen. Three were Sephardi.

The Ashkenazi community dates from 1684, when Meyer Goldschmidt — a court jeweller — was granted the right to hold services in his own house, without preaching. That event is conventionally taken as the founding of the Copenhagen community, the Mosaisk Troessamfund. Abraham Salomon of Moravia was appointed its first rabbi in 1687, and a cemetery was established in Møllegade in 1694.

The Sephardim waited eleven years for the same permission, receiving it in 1695, and organised as a separate community with their own cemetery in 1715.

They remained small and their commercial position in Copenhagen was weak. Trautner-Kromann’s judgement is that opportunities for Portuguese Jews in the Danish capital “were few and far between”, and that it was the German Jews who became dominant. The remaining Portuguese families kept their own small prayer rooms and held to their old privileges until civil equality arrived in 1814 and made those privileges meaningless. After that they cease to be visible as a group.

Fredericia was not a Sephardi settlement. The 1682 extension of the town’s privileges to include religious freedom attracted poor German Jews, mostly in tobacco manufacture and retail, and a house there was converted into a synagogue in 1719. It is sometimes described as Sephardi; it was not.

A caution on Portuguese names in Danish records

Some German Jews are believed to have adopted Portuguese names and attached themselves to Sephardi congregations in order to benefit from the privileges attached to the Portuguese nation.

A Portuguese surname in a Danish record is therefore not by itself evidence of Sephardi descent — and the reverse also holds, since the two groups intermarried early, given how few Sephardi families there were.

What about the Danish West Indies?

Jews settled in the Danish West Indies from 1655. The community was substantial in a way the Danish one never was: at its height in the mid-nineteenth century it made up around half the non-Black population of St Thomas, and the first synagogue was inaugurated in 1796.

Gabriel Milan, one of the early governors of the colony, was a Sephardi Jew.

The islands are St Thomas, St John and St Croix — Danish until 1917, then the U.S. Virgin Islands. Their records and their families are treated separately on this site; the Danish connection is administrative, and a family traced through the Caribbean will more often lead to Curaçao, Amsterdam and London than to Copenhagen.

Is there a Sephardi cemetery in Denmark?

There was one, and we do not know what became of it.

The Sephardi community established its own cemetery on organising in 1715, and the Glückstadt settlers had been promised one as early as 1628. No separately identified Sephardi burial ground appears in the Danish records available to us.

The Ashkenazi cemetery in Møllegade, Copenhagen, dates from 1694 and survives.

JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project lists Danish burial locations at Aarhus, Ålborg, Assens, Copenhagen, Faaborg, Fredericia, Horsens, Jutland, Nakskov, Odense, Randers and Slagelse; the data was supplied by René Loeb of the Swiss Society for Jewish Genealogy with corrections by Elsebeth Paikin in 2001. None is identified as Sephardi. The Glückstadt and Altona cemeteries are in Germany and are covered by the Hamburg-area surveys.

Establishing what became of the 1715 Sephardi cemetery, and whether any of its stones survive, is an open question we would like answered.

What records survive?

The Sephardim of Denmark left few records of their own, but they did leave two series, and both are specifically Portuguese.

Record type	Years	Where	Online
Probate Protocols of the Portuguese Jewish Congregation	1782–1800	Rigsarkivet, ref. 10411 / 10748	No
Probate Cases: The Portuguese Nation	1805–1815	Rigsarkivet, ref. 10411 / 10748	No
Records of Jewish organisations in Denmark (89 series)	1584–2014	Rigsarkivet, ref. 10411 / 10748	No
Sound Toll Registers	1497–1857	Online, free	Yes
Censuses of Denmark	1787 onward	Rigsarkivet	Partly
Royal letters of protection and trading privileges	17th–18th c.	Rigsarkivet	No

The two probate series are the most important Sephardi genealogical source in Denmark. Probate names the deceased, the heirs, the executors and the creditors, and states relationships between them. For a group whose congregational registers do not survive, this is where the families are — and the dates, 1782 to 1815, cover precisely the last generation before emancipation dissolved the Portuguese nation as a legal category.

The Rigsarkivet collection Det jødiske samfund i Danmark runs to 89 archival series covering 1584 to 2014, assembled from material delivered by the Mosaic Faith Community between 1983 and 2000, by the National Archives of Zealand in 1986, by the archivist Bent Blüdnikow in 1997, and by Chief Rabbi Bent Lexner in 2002. The finding aid is Rigsarkivet’s online catalogue, Daisy. As far as we know, no one has worked the Portuguese series for genealogy.

The Sound Toll Registers record every ship passing through the Øresund between 1497 and 1857, with the master’s name, home port, cargo and destination. They are digitised, searchable and free. For a merchant community defined by trade rather than by congregation, this is the record type most likely to catch a Portuguese Jewish name that appears nowhere in a synagogue register, and it covers the whole period.

Where else should you look?

Hamburg State Archives and the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, for Glückstadt and Altona. This is where the first settlement’s records will be, and where the Altona Sephardi community — the parent body for much of the region — is documented.

Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334, the archive of the Portuguese-Israelite community. The families invited to Glückstadt in 1622 came from Amsterdam and Hamburg, and the Amsterdam marriage banns record place of origin.

Rigsarkivet’s colonial records, for the Danish West Indies.

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, for families whose route out of Iberia is being traced.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Very little, and one article stands out by its isolation.

Thorsten Wagner’s ‘Port Jews in Copenhagen: The Sephardi Experience and its Influence on the Development of a Modern Jewish Community in Denmark’, Jewish Culture and History 7:1–2 (2004), pp. 49–60, is the only scholarly treatment of this subject we are aware of. We have not been able to consult it, and this page would be better if we had.

Otherwise the Sephardim appear as a paragraph or two in general histories of Danish Jewry — Conrad Kisch’s survey, Hanne Trautner-Kromann’s history for the JewishGen Scandinavia SIG — which are concerned, rightly, with the Ashkenazi community that Danish Jewry actually became.

We are not aware of any published genealogical work on the Sephardim of Denmark at all: no reconstruction of the Glückstadt families, no work on the probate series, no study of the 1715 community, no cemetery survey. It is not even established whether any Sephardi family has been continuously settled in Denmark since the seventeenth century. If you know otherwise, we would very much like to hear from you.

Organisations and repositories

Rigsarkivet (The National Archives of Denmark), Søren Kierkegaards Plads 1, 1221 Copenhagen — rigsarkivet.dk

Det Kongelige Bibliotek (The Royal Library), Copenhagen — kb.dk

Jewish Genealogical Society of Denmark

Selskabet for Dansk-Jødisk Historie (Society for Danish-Jewish History)

Det Jødiske Samfund i Danmark (The Jewish Community in Denmark), Ny Kongensgade 6, 1472 København K

Sound Toll Registers Online — soundtoll.nl

Help us find records

We are looking for:

The Probate Protocols of the Portuguese Jewish Congregation (1782–1800) and the Probate Cases: The Portuguese Nation (1805–15) at Rigsarkivet — a transcription, an index, or photographs. These are the best surviving source for Danish Sephardi families and we believe no one has worked them.
Thorsten Wagner’s 2004 article on Port Jews in Copenhagen
The location and fate of the Sephardi cemetery established in Copenhagen in 1715
Any record of the thirty Portuguese families who settled at Glückstadt from 1622 — names, origins, or where they went when the town’s economy failed
Royal letters of protection issued to individual Sephardi merchants
Any evidence for or against the identification of Albert Dionis with the Dinis family of Pontevedra
Family papers from any Danish or Glückstadt Portuguese family

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Danish Sephardi research means a handful of families spread across Danish, German and Dutch archives, records in Danish, German, Portuguese and Hebrew, and a group that had no congregational registers of its own and merged into the wider community after 1814. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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