PORTUGUESE JEWS IN AMSTERDAM
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Högskolan
på Gotland: Idéhistoria
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Miriam
Bodian on the Sephardic Jews of
Amsterdam
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The
Portuguese conversos who made their way to Amsterdam in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would not have been
conspicuous upon arrival, despite their ignorance of Dutch and their
Iberian dress. Foreign immigration to the United Provinces was at a
peak in these years. In at least one quarter of the city, around the
Bloemstraat, it was easier to make oneself understood in French or
Flemish than in Dutch. Later in the seventeenth century the German
poet Philipp von Zesen described the Amsterdam Exchange as a place
where "almost the whole world trades" - one could find
there "Poles, Hungarians, Walloons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,
Muscovites, Persians, Turks, and even, occasionally, Hindus."
Some of the foreigners were temporary residents, but by the late
sixteenth century thousands of foreigners had already settled
permanently in Amsterdam. Some had fled war, some religious
persecution; others were drawn by economic opportunities in the
bustling metropolis on the Amstel.
It
was into this milieu that a few Portuguese converso merchants and
their families introduced themselves in the last years of the
sixteenth century. By 1603 one could speak of a tiny ex-converso
community which had established Jewish worship with the aid of a
rabbi from Emden. Not long thereafter, in 1609, the community entered
a period of extremely rapid growth. In that year the Twelve Years
Truce ended a Spanish embargo on Dutch commerce and shipping which
had also blocked Dutch trade with Portugal, then under Spanish rule.
The truce opened up rich possibilities in Amsterdam for "Portuguese"
immigrants, who brought with them experience in Portuguese colonial
trade.
What
had begun as a small nucleus of merchant families had developed by
1639 into a relatively conspicuous community of well over a thousand
persons. Portuguese Jews could be seen entering and leaving the
public synagogue they had built, burying their dead at the cemetery
they had established just outside the city, and negotiating on the
Stock Exchange floor.
During
its heyday in the 1670s, the community had a population of about
2,500; its wealth was given concrete expression in the form of an
elegant and monumental new synagogue (still a landmark in Amsterdam);
and with its Hebrew printing press, diaspora-wide welfare activity,
and distinguished rabbis, its reputation in the Jewish world was
firmly established. It would have taken a canny observer indeed to
perceive that the community was in fact facing a precipitous decline.
(pp. 1-2)
[...]
[The
Sephardim] - generally, in the first half of the seventeenth century,
they tended to specialize in Portuguese colonial wares such as sugar,
tobacco, spices, and diamonds, trading almost exclusively with
Lisbon, Porto, Madeira, and the Azores. Being engaged in this branch
of commerce, it was highly advantageous for them to be located in
Amsterdam, which was the main northern entrepôt for colonial
commodities. But as a result they were also highly vulnerable to the
vicissitudes of Dutch-Iberian relations. This situation changed,
however, in the second half of the century (after the signing of the
Treaty of Münster in 1648), when Spanish and Spanish-American ports
were opened to Dutch "Portuguese" merchants. The focus of
their activity shifted in this period to two new routes: trade
between the Caribbean and Spanish America, and the wool trade between
Spain and Amsterdam.
Once
communal institutions had been firmly established, the city became a
magnet for other Jews. Yiddish-speaking Ashkenzi Jews trickled in -
then flooded in - from Germany and Poland, most of them poor and
unlearned. They were not welcomed by the Portuguese Jews and lived,
for all practical purposes, a separate collective existence. The
"Portuguese" community grew almost entirely from converso
immigration. (p. 4)
[...]
Settlement
in Amsterdam was an act of liberation and an opportunity to repossess
the past. From this point of view, the efforts of the Amsterdam
"Portuguese" to reconstitute their Jewishness bear
comparison to the efforts in modern times of once-colonialized or
otherwise culturally dominated peoples to restore an "authentic"
lost heritage. (p. 18)
Miriam
Bodian: Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and
Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1997), pp. 1,2, 4 and 18.
