Philologos Mailbag: Readers Help Solve the Pepys Puzzle

I’ve received four letters concerning my most recent column in Mosaic, “The Mystery of Simḥat Torah 1663, at the First Synagogue in England in 350 Years.” Three of my correspondents express doubts about my conclusions in the column, which dealt with the English diarist Samuel Pepys’s October 1663 visit to the Shaar Hashamyim synagogue in London. The fourth correspondent explains what must have been going on in that visit better than I managed to do, and in doing so he answers the doubters.

In my column I argued that the hakafot (parading of the Torah scrolls) of the Simḥat Torah service that Pepys apparently witnessed were in fact “second hakafot” conducted on the night after the holiday’s end. Such hakafot, I pointed out, were instituted in Palestine in the 16th century by the Safed kabbalist Isaac Luria and spread under his influence to some localities in the diaspora—among them, I theorized, Amsterdam, whose Spanish and Portuguese Jews, settling in London after England abolished its ban on Jews, founded Shaar Hashamayim.

My correspondents Yehuda Herskowitz, Yitzchok Feldman, and Abe Katsman all question this analysis, which was based on several assumptions—including that the prayer shawls or tallitot described by Pepys might have been worn at night, as tallitot almost never are, and that Pepys and his wife could have witnessed a nighttime ritual and then proceeded to do all the other things that the diary has them doing before going home.