Western Sephardic Prayer Books and an Evolving Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam

Although historians have illuminated Portuguese Jewish identity in social, political, and cultural contexts, the community’s religious development is less clearly understood. Emerging from Iberian converso backgrounds, Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews lacked direct continuity with rabbinic life and initially depended on rabbis from Ashkenazic and Italian backgrounds. This paper examines how the community evolved into what became the Western Sephardic ‘tradition,’ focusing on the formation and standardization of liturgy as recorded in seventeenth-century prayer books printed in Amsterdam. These texts reveal how printers, rabbis, and lay leaders together shaped a new religious culture for former conversos adapting to rabbinic Judaism. Considered alongside the community’s growing educational and institutional framework, this process marks the gradual consolidation of a distinctive identity within early modern Jewish history.