Ancient Hebrew Motifs Meet on a Shavuot Stage in 1624 Amsterdam

On Shavuot morning in 1624, the congregation at Amsterdam’s Beit Yaakov synagogue saw an unusual Hebrew play, “Dialogus dos Montes,” or “The Debate of the Mountains.” The work was written by Reuel Yeshurun, formerly Paolo de Pina, who had been on the path to Catholic ordination in the Vatican before Dr. Eliyahu Montaltu brought him back to Judaism, together with the synagogue’s chief rabbi, Saul Levi Morteira, a student of Montaltu.

The audience was largely made up of Jews who had fled Spain and Portugal and were former conversos who had only recently returned to open Jewish life. For them, the idea of “seven mountains” was familiar from Christian sermons in Spain, not from Jewish sources. The play used that image to deliver a different message: instead of one mountain crushing the rest, the Jewish version makes room for many voices.

The drama expanded the familiar Talmudic motif of mountains competing for the Torah. Here, seven mountains appeared on stage, Sinai, Zion, Hor HaHar, Nebo, Gerizim, Carmel and the Mount of Olives, each arguing for the crown before King Jehoshaphat. The article traces the older background of the seven-mountain idea to Second Temple literature, especially the Book of Enoch, and to early Shavuot piyyutim preserved in the Cairo Geniza, where mountains such as Tabor, Carmel, Lebanon, Siryon, Snir, Hermon and Sinai are named.

The text says Jehoshaphat’s verdict, following Yalkut Shimoni, was that Sinai gets the crown for now, but will pass it to Mount Zion in the end times. Ultimately, God will bring Sinai, Tabor and Carmel together and build the Temple upon them. The play’s message, the article says, was aimed at Amsterdam’s divided Jewish community, riven by tensions between mystics and rationalists, rabbis and lay leaders, and by identity questions among the newly returned conversos: the Torah can hold all of them together.