1666: Hebrew

Sephardic Jews

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Amsterdam made its acquaintance with Portuguese and Spanish Jews. Together they were referred to as the Sephardim, taken from the Hebrew word for Spain, 'Sefarad'. Some of them came directly from the Iberian peninsula, from which they had fled because of the Inquisition. Some were wealthy Portuguese merchants from places such as Antwerp who had come to Amsterdam at the request of the States General to promote trade and prosperity. For them, Amsterdam was an attractive city in both religious and economic terms. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Ashkenazim also appeared in Amsterdam, Jews from Germany who spoke Yiddish. But the Sephardic community constituted the majority in Amsterdam and would develop into the wealthiest Jewish community in Europe. The Sephardic Jews settled primarily in Vlooienburg, the area where the City Hall and the Music Theatre are located today. Here Spanish and Portuguese long remained the colloquial means of communication. In order to study the Talmud it was necessary to have a good grasp of Hebrew, so thorough instruction in this language became part of the curriculum in Jewish schools.

Calendario facil y curiozo

Selomoh (Salomon) de Oliveyra, rabbi of the Portutuese Jewish community, was a well-known poet and teacher of Hebrew in the second half of the seventeenth century. He was the author of a Hebrew rhyming dictionary and also compiled this Calendario facil y curiozo for the Jewish year 5427, which coincides with the Christian year 1666. The Calendario, often bound into the Pentateuch, contains tables for the Jewish calendar for the years 5423 through 5500, and tables for converting the Jewish year to the Gregorian calendar.

Jewish calendar

The Jewish calendar is a lunar-solar calendar with roots in the Babylonian calendar. The counting of years begins with the Creation, calculated by Jewish scholars to have occurred on 7 October 3761 B.C. according to the Julian calendar. The current year 2000 is the year 5760 according to the Jewish calendar. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, falls on the first day of the seventh month, Tishri, which according to the Christian calendar occurs in the month of September or October.

1666

During the 'miracle year' of 1666 the Jewish community was in a state of great commotion because of the prophesied coming of the Messiah. Great was the disappointment when the pseudo-Messiah, Zvi Sabbatai (1626-1675) of Smyrna, was unmasked as an apostate and forced to convert to Islam by the Turkish sultan. The publisher David de Castro Tartaz, otherwise so active, was so disillusioned that he published not a single book in all of 1667!