The Jewish families who built Amsterdam's Portuguese Synagogue had mostly arrived in the Dutch Republic as refugees from the Iberian Peninsula, where many had lived for generations as conversos, practicing Judaism in secret while outwardly conforming to Catholicism under threat of the Inquisition. Amsterdam, more tolerant of religious minorities than most of Europe in the seventeenth century, let that community worship openly for the first time in living memory, and the synagogue they built between 1671 and 1675 was designed to make that freedom visible.
The result was an enormous building, among the largest synagogues in the world when completed, a deliberate statement from a community that had known what it cost to worship in secret. The interior follows a plan modeled loosely on the ancient Temple in Jerusalem as architects of the period understood it.
What distinguishes the Portuguese Synagogue most from other historic synagogues still in use is a choice about light rather than architecture. The building has never been wired for electricity in its main sanctuary, and services are still conducted by candlelight, using large brass candelabra original or close to original to the building, a practice maintained deliberately rather than out of neglect.
The synagogue survived the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands physically intact even as the Sephardic community that built it was devastated by deportation, one of the few major Jewish institutions in Amsterdam to remain standing through the war largely undamaged. It functions today both as an active synagogue for Amsterdam's smaller postwar Sephardic community and as a major heritage site, its archive among the most important Jewish historical collections in Europe.