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 Manassabin 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 peeps visited,

was simply a private house,

belonging to a successful Portuguese Jewish merchant, Antonio Fernandez Calvayal,

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

before at the memorial service for Carvayal, 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, i.e 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 are men,

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 burdens 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

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