4 - The Jews in the Republic until about 1750: Religious, Cultural, and Social Life

Summary

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE COMMUNITY

BOTH the Spanish Portuguese and the Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe who reached Amsterdam during the first third of the seventeenth century had to create the organizational infrastructure of their communities ex nihilo. The beginnings were modest enough and gave no hint of the flourishing Jewish life that was to develop in the city during the time of the Republic. At the start of the seventeenth century it would have been hard to imagine that the Portuguese New Christians settling in the city would manage to develop any Jewish life worthy of the name. With the exception of a few who had already experienced some form of Jewish life before turning up in Amsterdam, most of the Jewish immigrants arriving at that time fell into the category of ‘New Jews’—both because institutional Judaism was a complete novelty to them and also because the Jewish life they were about to create exhibited new characteristics, which may be considered as harbingers of modern European Judaism.

Their knowledge of the Jewish religion was limited and superficial, and reflected the spiritual situation of Iberian New Christians at the time—people whose Jewish heritage had been weakened for objective as well as for subjective reasons. Most of the New Christians then arriving in Amsterdam had never before come across a true Jewish community, and the first one they did encounter was that which they themselves created. This process was repeated from the end of the sixteenth century onwards wherever Sephardi communities were established in western Europe, since they were all built by New Christians who had just returned openly to Judaism. But in Amsterdam this phenomenon was unique because of the particularly impressive achievements of these conversos, in respect of both community organization and cultural creativity.

In contrast to the impressive economic and cultural presence of the first Portuguese merchants to gain a foothold in Amsterdam, the grinding poverty of the few Ashkenazi immigrants who arrived in the city during the first two decades of the seventeenth century was strikingly obvious; most were butchers or pedlars, who lived on the margins of the Sephardi community and were employed by it as meat vendors and slaughterers.