21 - The Jews of the Netherlands in the Early Modern Period

Summary

The other essays in this volume describe the tragic history of the Jews in German lands from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. In this chapter, I focus on a quite different world that existed in the Netherlands, just across Germany's western border. (A somewhat similar story could be told about the condition of Jews living across the eastern border of Germany, in Lithuania and Poland, in the first half of the seventeenth century.) In the Middle Ages, Jews lived in various Dutch cities without the accompanying purges that occurred in German towns. After the success of the Dutch in the rebellion against Spain and the emergence of a new polity, in the Dutch Republic, however, a different kind of Jewish life emerged, different from what existed anywhere else in Europe.

What happened in the Netherlands suggests that there may not necessarily be any connection between the medieval persecutions of Jews in Germany, the repressions associated with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the decimation of Jewish communities during the Thirty Years' War, and the Nazi era. What happened in the Netherlands was an alternative scenario, in which the Jewish community was accepted and flourished, until the German army under Hitler conquered the country. There had been no ghettos in the Netherlands until 1940. Although seventeenth-century Dutch Jews lived mainly near the synagogues, as a matter of law they could live where they pleased. Christians too lived in the heart of the Jewish community. Let us remember that Rembrandt lived and painted in his house at 1 Joodenbreestraat, a block from the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue and just behind the house where Spinoza was born. Moreover, Rembrandt's house belonged to Baron Francis Boreel, the Dutch ambassador to France.