Sephardic Jews of Germany: Hamburg and Altona

Germany did not exist when these communities were founded, and the distinction is not pedantic. It determines which archive holds a given family.

Hamburg was a Lutheran city-state governing itself. Altona was Danish, under the county of Holstein-Pinneberg and then the Duchy of Holstein-Glückstadt, and remained Danish until 1864. Glückstadt was founded by a Danish king. Emden was in East Frisia.

Two Sephardim living a mile apart on the Elbe could be subjects of different crowns, and that is precisely why they lived where they did. A merchant refused a cemetery in Hamburg bought land in Altona, thirteen hundred metres beyond the border, because Altona answered to Copenhagen.

Should Hamburg be read as a German community?

Not really. Almost everyone described here is Western Sephardi — Portuguese and Spanish families who left Iberia through Amsterdam, Antwerp and Venice and moved on to the lower Elbe.

Hamburg was one of the four great Western Sephardi centres alongside Amsterdam, London and Livorno, and it should be read as part of that world. The Hamburg Portuguese corresponded with Amsterdam, sent their sons to Amsterdam to marry, buried their dead by Amsterdam custom, printed their books in Amsterdam, and appealed to Amsterdam when they wanted a Danish tax overturned.

A family lost in Hamburg is usually found in Amsterdam.

The community was never large. About 125 Sephardim lived in Hamburg by 1612 and roughly 600 by 1663. Of the 20,000 Jews in Hamburg in 1925, some 400 were Sephardim. But it was wealthy, commercially formidable out of all proportion to its size, and it kept records.

Where they came from

Portuguese New Christians reached Hamburg around 1577. The first public notice of them is indirect: in that year an imperial envoy reported from Turkey that there were Jews living in Hamburg who had formerly professed Christianity in Portugal. They came by way of Portugal, Amsterdam and Antwerp, and arrived as merchants rather than as refugees.

They were received as the natio lusitana, supposedly Catholic Portuguese, with both sides tacitly overlooking their Jewishness. This fiction was maintained for decades. In 1603 some aldermen complained to the senate that the Portuguese were in fact Jews; the senate ignored it. When they complained again in 1604, the senate replied that it had no indication for the assumption.

Cassuto’s figures for the early growth show how the community concealed itself: about six persons in 1606, ninety by 1611, and 125 by 1612, at which point 44 Portuguese Jewish families were resident. He suspects the early numbers were deliberately understated, to avoid attracting Christian attention, and that a gradual increase was feigned.

A second stream came later from Amsterdam, and a third out of Spain directly. Benjamin Mussaphia was born in Spain around 1600 and came to Hamburg; Francisco Mendosa came to Glückstadt from Málaga in 1695.

How they made a living

Overseas trade, and a great deal of it. A large part of Hamburg’s foreign commerce was in Portuguese Jewish hands, and this is why the senate protected them against its own aldermen and clergy. They were bankers to princes, army contractors, mintmasters, importers of sugar, tobacco and colonial goods, and agents for foreign crowns.

The diplomatic dimension is unusual and generated records. Duarte Nunes da Costa, alias Jacob Curiel, was Agent of the Spanish and later of the Portuguese crown in Hamburg, and was ennobled by João IV of Portugal on 14 June 1641. His son Geronimo Nunes da Costa, alias Moses Curiel, held the equivalent position in Amsterdam; another son, Manoel, alias Selomo Curiel, succeeded him at Hamburg.

Samuel de Casseres, alias Gabriel Gomes, was Finance Commissioner, Court Purveyor and Agent-General to the Danish king, and in 1664 bought the lordship of Herzhorn from Friedrich III for 30,000 taler. Albert Dionis, alias Alvaro Diniz, ran the Glückstadt mint and was the first Jew to hold a Danish royal letter of protection. Several of the Namias de Castro family were physicians to the Danish kings.

Glückstadt produced manufacturers as well as merchants: Gonsalvo Lopes Coutinho, alias Jacob Coronel, built a sugar refinery, an oil mill and a soap works there around 1630. Moises de Campo was a tobacco spinner. Ishac Henriques was a sea captain, master of the Nordstern.

Where they went

Outward, constantly. This was a community of departures.

In 1697 hostile edicts and extortionate taxation drove many of the wealthiest Sephardim out of Hamburg altogether. Some went to Amsterdam. Others crossed into Altona, where they laid the foundation of the Portuguese congregation there. This single event explains most of the movement in the records around the turn of the eighteenth century.

Glückstadt drew families away from 1618 and gave them back again as the town failed. Emden, Stade, Wandsbek and Glückstadt were all places where Sephardi congregations existed, and none survived. Copenhagen took a handful. Others went to London: Caspar Dionis de Casseres appears at Glückstadt in 1721 as a Portuguese from London, and the Hamburg families intermarried with Bevis Marks throughout.

The last Portuguese buried at Glückstadt was Elias Meldola, son of David de Eljasib Meldola, who drowned in the Elbe in 1861 and whose body came ashore there. A Meldola, of the family that gave Bevis Marks its haham, was buried without a stone in a cemetery whose congregation had been gone for a century.

If you lose a Hamburg or Altona Sephardi family, look next at Amsterdam, Glückstadt, Altona, London, Copenhagen and the Portuguese Inquisition records.

Hamburg

The city-state granted no general privilege but a series of toleration agreements, negotiated in the same way as those with Reformed Dutch and Anglican English merchants — as contracts with a foreign community of a different faith, not as a concession to Jews.

The chronology matters because it determines what a family could legally do, and therefore what record it can appear in.

1577 — first report of Portuguese in Hamburg who had been Christians in Portugal
1603 — first official designation as Jews; aldermen complain, senate ignores
1611 — refused a cemetery within the city, the Sephardim buy land from Count Ernest on Altona’s Königstraße
1611 — the senate obtains an opinion from the Lutheran theology faculty at Frankfurt an der Oder that tolerating Portuguese Jews is paternal and Christian
1612 — the Designatio Articulorum, recognising the Sephardim as a protected corporation
1649 — Ashkenazim expelled from Hamburg; only Sephardim permitted
1650 — private religious practice permitted
1652 — Hamburg’s three separate Sephardi congregations merge as the Holy Congregation of Beth Israel
1656 — Ashkenazim return
1697 — increased restrictions and extortionate taxation; emigration to Altona and Amsterdam
1710 — the imperial Reglement der Judenschaft becomes the fundamental law for the next century
1811 — French annexation; residence restrictions dropped, all Hamburgers made French citizens
1815 — Hamburg resumes sovereignty and the senate withdraws the equality granted under French rule
1849 — equal rights granted
1939 — the Sephardi congregation is forced to merge into the Jüdischer Religionsverband Hamburg

Altona

Different rules, because a different sovereign. Altona was in Holstein-Pinneberg under the counts of Schauenburg, then from 1640 in the Duchy of Holstein-Glückstadt under the kings of Denmark. Where Hamburg negotiated grudging contracts, the counts and the Danish crown granted general privileges to communities.

That is why the Ashkenazim organised at Altona first, in 1612, with a fully constituted qehillah, elected council, religious taxes, mikveh, cemetery and synagogue. Sephardim, better protected in Hamburg, mostly did not choose Altona as a residence in the early period. Few were there before 1697.

After 1697 that changed. The Sephardim leaving Hamburg founded a congregation known first as Beit Yacob ha-Katan, and in 1770 established the Holy Community of Neveh Shalom. Altona thus became one of the very few places in what is now Germany where a Sephardi congregation was ever formally constituted, the others being Emden, Glückstadt, Hamburg, Stade and Wandsbek.

Altona’s Sephardim gained legal equality on 14 July 1863, before Hamburg’s. Altona passed to Prussia in 1867, and in 1887 the remaining Sephardi congregants dissolved their community for lack of members.

Glückstadt

Founded on the Elbe by Christian IV of Denmark in 1618 as a deliberate rival to Hamburg, and populated in part by inviting Portuguese Jews from Hamburg, Emden, Amsterdam, France, Portugal and Spain. A second, special invitation followed in 1622.

The charters of 1622, 1630, 1648, 1655, 1664, 1670 and 1684 granted a synagogue, a cemetery, a printing licence, religious education, and rights no German Jew held anywhere, including seats on the town council. Christian IV wanted their capital and said so.

It failed commercially. The Thirty Years’ War, repeated floods and epidemics struck the new town, and experienced Portuguese merchants could see it would never outrun Hamburg. Most stayed only temporarily and never took burgher rights.

By 1665 the congregation was too small for a daily service, and what happened next is the most revealing detail in the Glückstadt record. The Hamburg elders instructed a hazan, Daniel Jessurun, to recite the prayers aloud each morning and lift the Sepharim as though the synagogue were occupied, so that the total absence of Portuguese should not be noticed and the privileges revoked. Hamburg wanted Glückstadt kept alive as a refuge in case its own Jews were expelled. The community was maintained as an insurance policy.

By 1732 no old Portuguese family remained permanently. The privileges were formally revoked that year. The magistrate declared the synagogue unsafe in 1782 and it was auctioned in 1785.

Among the first settlers were Samuel Jachia, alias Albertus Denis, mintmaster to the Danish king; Moses Gideon Abudiente the grammarian, whose Fin de los dias (1660) is the only Spanish book known from a Glückstadt press, and which the Hamburg congregation then suppressed, recalling every copy bound and unbound for fear it would damage them among Christians; Benjamin Mussaphia, physician and lexicographer; and Joseph Salomo del Medigo, who arrived about 1625 fleeing plague in Hamburg and described Glückstadt as “a new, desolate town, without inhabitants, in which there is neither luck nor blessing” — a pun on the name.

Emden, Wandsbek, Stade and elsewhere

Emden was in East Frisia, on the route to Amsterdam. Moses Uri ha-Levy of Emden became the first haham of the Amsterdam Portuguese community. Portuguese Jews received privileges in 1649, renewed in 1703. Alfonso Cassuto’s paper on the Portuguese Jews of Emden records five Portuguese Jewish burials between 1705 and 1708.

Wandsbek and Stade are both named in the sources as places where Sephardi congregations existed, and both need more work than we have been able to give them. We have found no substantive record of either.

Danzig saw substantial trade by Sephardi merchants from Amsterdam, recorded in the Amsterdam notarial archives. David de Lima appears from 1644. Ton Tielen has found Inquisition records reporting Amsterdam Sephardim living in Danzig, and a small Portuguese Jewish community there in the late seventeenth century. They appear to have left.

No permanent New Christian presence is confirmed at Frankfurt, though Portuguese merchants travelled there to trade. At Mannheim, Elector Charles Louis welcomed several denominations, and on 1 September 1660 two Portuguese families were among thirteen granted permission to settle. Hanau-Münzenberg may have had a Portuguese presence and a Jewish printing press is reported.

Cemeteries

The Königstraße cemetery in Altona is the principal burial ground of the Hamburg Sephardim, in use from 1611 until 1871, when it ran out of space. The Portuguese section is distinct from the Ashkenazi ground bought in 1612. Records run 1675 to 1902. It survives, and it is the single most important Sephardi monument in northern Germany.

The Glückstadt cemetery is all that remains of that community. It was bought by the Portuguese probably before 1624, the date of the oldest visible stone. Alfonso Cassuto surveyed it on 12 May 1929 and published an index of 61 Portuguese gravestones running from 1624 to 1783.

He believed roughly 45 further Portuguese stones from 1620 to 1660 lay buried beneath later stones and under earth, having been moved and re-sorted by size when the ground was reduced and renovated around 1900. He urged excavation of the cemetery and of the adjoining plots that had once formed part of it. As far as we know that has never been done, and it remains the most obviously answerable open question on this page.

Dating an undated stone

Cassuto’s observations are useful. Simple stones to about 1620; simple framing thereafter; more elaborate framing to about 1660; ornate stones with armorial bearings from 1660; full pictorial representations, allegorical and biblical, from about 1720; then a reversal from 1730, and from 1750 the plainest stones with long inscriptions.

Glückstadt stones have channels cut for water run-off, which Amsterdam stones have and Hamburg stones do not. Hamburg and Amsterdam stones have hollows cut to hold bread for birds, which Glückstadt stones lack. He concluded the Hamburg and Glückstadt stones came from the same, most probably Portuguese Jewish, workshops.

The Ilandkoppel and Grindel cemeteries in Hamburg hold later burials, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Records

The archives of the Hamburg Portuguese community are divided between two repositories, each holding microfilm of the other’s holdings: the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Record type	Years	Where	Online
Birth registers, vol. I	1749–1864	CAHJP	No
Birth registers, vol. II	1817–1900	CAHJP	No
Marriage contracts (Hebrew), vol. I	1696–1845	CAHJP	No
Marriage contracts (Hebrew), vol. II	1847–1932	CAHJP	No
Original parchment ketubot, 16 items	various	CAHJP	No
Burial brotherhood records	1675–1760	CAHJP	No
Gravestone directory	1874	CAHJP	No
Königstrasse cemetery, Altona	1675–1902	Hamburg / CAHJP	No
Protokollbücher, translated excerpts	1652–1682	Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft	Yes
Records on Portuguese Jews	1812–	Staatsarchiv Hamburg	No
Glückstadt gravestone index, 61 stones	1624–1783	Published (Cassuto, 1930)	Yes
Glückstadt Neubürger roll	1620–1850	Published (Cassuto, 1930)	Yes
Chevra Kadisha minute book, Neve Salom	1774–1797	Jacob Jacobson Collection	No

The Protokollbücher

These are the most important published source. The minute books of the Portuguese congregation were excerpted and translated into German by Isaac Cassuto and published across seven volumes of the Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft between 1908 and 1920. All have been digitised by Goethe University Frankfurt and are freely available:

They are governance records rather than vital records, which means they name people in the act of doing things — holding office, paying fintas, being disciplined, being supported — and they state relationships in passing.

The Glückstadt lists are the other fully published source, and unusually complete for so small a community. The Neubürger roll is valuable beyond its size because it states where each man came from: Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Nantes, Málaga, Portugal, Spain, and Salé in Morocco. Eleven entries name a surety, an established resident vouching for the newcomer. Cassuto’s footnotes supply roughly twenty alias equations, matching a man’s Christian name to his Jewish one.

Why did Hamburg Sephardim use several names at once?

To evade the Inquisition, which sent spies to Hamburg and Amsterdam. Cassuto is explicit about it.

They gave one name to the Christian authorities, their true or traditional Jewish name to the congregation, and a Spanish or Portuguese name in Iberia — changing these repeatedly, so that the same person appears under three or four entirely different names.

His example: a Portuguese in Hamburg bore the German name Simon Ditrichsen, was David Franco to the congregation, had been Simon Rodrigues in Spain, and later took the name Simon Roiz Dias de Malaga. Jan de Castro, on becoming a burgher of Glückstadt, retained only the name Jacob Rodrigues de Mendo. The Abendana family used Mendes de Britto or Britto do Carmo in Portugal, Dias Mendes de Britto in Hamburg, Rodrigues Jorges de Britto to the German authorities, and plain Abendana in the congregation.

The Glückstadt Bürgerbuch is therefore an exceptional document, because it records both the Christian and the Jewish name of the same man. See also our page on Sephardic surnames.

Records elsewhere

Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334, is the single most important external source. The Hamburg and Amsterdam communities were in continuous contact; the marriage banns state place of origin, and Hamburg and Altona appear constantly.

Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen, and the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, for Glückstadt and Altona under Danish rule.

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, for families whose route out of Iberia is being traced, and for the Inquisition denunciations that name Hamburg residents. The 1645 denunciation by Manoel da Motta named the Hamburg residents Joao da Rocha Pinto (alias Zecharia aCoen), Manuel Bocarro (alias Jacob Frances y Rosales), Dr Crasto, and Duarte Nunes da Costa (alias Jacob Curiel).

Bevis Marks archive, London, for the connections between the two congregations.

The Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, Hamburg, which holds an archive with data on Hamburg’s Portuguese Jews.

The Jacob Jacobson Collection at the Center for Jewish History.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Hamburg is well served and Glückstadt is not, but the imbalance is narrower than it looks, because Glückstadt is small enough to be finished.

Studemund-Halevy’s Biographisches Lexikon der Hamburger Sefarden is the essential reference work, and few communities on this site possess anything comparable. Kellenbenz’s Sephardim an der unteren Elbe (1958) remains the standard economic history. Grenville’s The Jews and Germans of Hamburg covers the wider community. Alfonso Cassuto’s work is the foundation of Sephardi Hamburg genealogy, and Isaac Cassuto’s Protokollbücher translations are the foundation of everything else.

What is missing is the linkage. The Hamburg records have rarely been read alongside the Amsterdam and London material, though the families are the same families. The Protokollbücher are published but not indexed for genealogy. The Altona Königstraße cemetery, the largest single body of Sephardi evidence in northern Germany, has no published index that we are aware of.

Glückstadt has Cassuto’s two lists and nothing since 1930. Wandsbek and Stade appear to have been left entirely alone.

Organisations and repositories

Staatsarchiv Hamburg, for Portuguese Jewish records from 1812 and the Kortes manuscript.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, for the vital registers and cemetery records.

Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, Hamburg.

Hamburger Gesellschaft für Jüdische Genealogie.

The Jewish cemetery in Altona, for visiting arrangements.

Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, for Altona and Glückstadt under Danish rule. [LINK NEEDED]

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, for the digitised Jahrbuch.

Stadtarchiv Hanau; Stadtarchiv Mannheim.

Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

An index or transcription of the Königstraße cemetery, Altona, 1611–1871
Any genealogical index to Isaac Cassuto’s Protokollbücher translations
The Hamburg birth registers and marriage contract books, in transcription, index or photograph
The burial brotherhood records, 1675–1760, and the gravestone directories of 1874 and 1902
K. Kortes, “Die Neubürger der Stadt Glückstadt”, the full manuscript, of which Cassuto published only the Portuguese entries
Any survey of the Glückstadt cemetery since 1929, and any record of whether the buried stones Cassuto identified were ever excavated
The 1774–97 minute book of the Chevra Kadisha Hesed Vehemet of Neve Salom, Altona
Any evidence of the Sephardi congregations at Wandsbek and Stade
Any record of the five Emden burials of 1705–08
Family papers from any Hamburg, Altona or Glückstadt Portuguese family

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

German Sephardi research means records split between Hamburg and Jerusalem, a community governed under four different sovereignties within a few miles of each other, minute books in Portuguese, ketubot in Hebrew, registers in German, and families that deliberately maintained three or four different names at once to evade the Inquisition. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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