The Deep Power of Joy. On the 14th of October 1663, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys

paid a visit to the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Creechurch Lane in the city of London.

Jews had been exiled from England in 1290. But in 1656, following an intercession by Rabbi Manassab and Israel of Amsterdam,

Oliver Cromwell concluded that there was, in fact, no legal barrier to Jews living there. So,

for the first time since the 13th century, Jews were able to worship openly. The first synagogue,

the one Pepys visited, was simply a

private house, belonging to a successful Portuguese Jewish merchant, Antonio Fernandez Cauvall

that had been extended to house the congregation. Peeps had actually been in the synagogue once before

at the memorial service for Carvalial, who died in 1659.

That occasion had been somber and decorous, but what he saw on his second visit was something else altogether, a scene of celebration that left him scandalized.

This is what he wrote in the diary.

After dinner, my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson's conduct,

to the Jewish synagogue, where the men and boys in their veils, i.e. their talitot,

and the women behind a lattice out of sight, and something stand up, which I believe is their

law, in other words, the safer terror scroll, in a press,

ae, the Aaron, to which all coming in do bow, and at the putting on their veils do say something,

to which others that hear him do cry amen, and the party do kiss his veil. Their service

all in a singing way, and in Hebrew, and along their laws that they take out of the

press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another,

and whether it is that everyone desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell. Thus they carried it

round the room, while such a service

is singing. But Lord, to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention but confusion

...