Amsterdam

At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the Iberian Inquisition hunted down the descendants of Jews forcibly converted, a young republic born of the revolt against Spain opened its doors to the outcasts: the United Provinces. Amsterdam, a merchant port in full ascent, became for these Portuguese Marranos a land of refuge where one could at last return openly to the faith of the ancestors. From this encounter between the commercial opulence of the Dutch Golden Age and the return to Judaism of men long forced into concealment was born one of the most brilliant communities in the Jewish history of Western Europe. It has rightly been called the "Jerusalem of the North": a crossroads of printers, rabbis, merchants, and thinkers, the stage of Spinoza's herem as well as of the splendor of the Esnoga. This monograph traces its entire arc, from the Marrano dawn to the annihilation of the Shoah and the reconstructed memory.

The story begins in clandestinity. Since the forced conversions of 1497 in Portugal, thousands of Jewish families had lived outwardly as Christians while preserving, sometimes confusedly, the memory of their rites: they were called conversos, or, contemptuously, marranos. When the Inquisition intensified its surveillance, many sought to flee toward more clement lands. In the 1590s, the first of these Portuguese merchants settled in Amsterdam, drawn by the prosperity of the port and by the pragmatic tolerance of a Protestant republic at war with Catholic Spain. According to tradition, it was around Jacob Tirado that the first nucleus took shape; the first synagogue, Beth Jacob, is said to have been consecrated for the New Year in the autumn of 1597. These newcomers formed what they themselves called the "Nation" (a Nação): a Sephardic community of Iberian language and culture, proud of its origins, gradually rediscovering an orthodoxy it had been forced to relearn. Three distinct congregations arose—Beth Jacob, Neve Shalom and Beth Israel—before merging in 1639 into a single community, the Talmud Torah, which survives to this day. The Dutch authorities, without granting full and complete emancipation, allowed the Jews to practice their faith and prosper in commerce. This singular status, made of freedom of conscience without formal citizenship, founded the originality of the "modern refuge": neither a forced ghetto nor civic equality, but a negotiated autonomy that allowed flourishing.

The Portuguese community of Amsterdam enjoyed remarkable prosperity in the seventeenth century, inseparable from the Dutch Golden Age. Possessing family and commercial networks spread across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the New World, the Sephardic merchants took an active part in Atlantic trade: sugar from the Antilles and Brazil, tobacco, diamonds, spices, precious metals. Their familiarity with the Iberian languages and trading posts made them valuable intermediaries, and several distinguished themselves in colonial commerce and brokerage. This affluence translated into communal patronage of rare density. Amsterdam also became a capital of Hebrew printing. In 1626, the rabbi and scholar Menasseh ben Israel founded there the city's first press in Hebrew characters; soon, the Amsterdam workshops radiated throughout the Jewish world, exporting bibles, Talmudic treatises, and prayer books as far as Poland and the East. The educational institution of the Talmud Torah structured intellectual life, instructing the children of the Nation in Hebrew and in the Law. It was within it that the Ets Haim library (« Tree of Life ») was founded, as early as 1616, considered the oldest Jewish library still in operation in the world. Rich in manuscripts and precious printed works, it remains today a patrimonial treasure inscribed in the UNESCO register. The community also maintained close ties with the painters of its time: Rembrandt, who lived in the Jewish quarter, engraved and painted several of its figures.

The architectural crowning of this golden age was the erection of the great Portuguese synagogue, the Esnoga (a Judeo-Spanish word for synagogue). Built by the architect Elias Bouman between 1671 and 1675, it was inaugurated in 1675 at the considerable cost of some 186,000 florins. A monumental building, one of the largest in Amsterdam upon its completion, it was said to have been inspired by the model of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. Its immense volume of brick, its tall windows, its hekhal of precious wood, and its hundreds of candles — the building has never been electrified and retains its original lighting — make it a striking witness to the power and pride of the Portuguese Nation. If stone embodied material success, the book expressed its learned soul. The Ets Haim library, attached to the rabbinical school, was transferred in 1675 to the Esnoga complex, where it remains to this day. It survived, almost miraculously, both the Inquisition that had driven its founders into exile and the Nazi occupation that nearly engulfed it. Its holdings — biblical commentaries, treatises of Kabbalah, poetic collections in Hebrew and Portuguese, community registers — constitute a source of the first order for the history of Western Sephardic Judaism. Together, the Esnoga and Ets Haim form an eloquent diptych: the greatness of a community is measured as much by its walls as by its manuscripts.

Amsterdam's relative freedom also made the community an intellectual laboratory shot through with tensions. Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), rabbi, printer, and diplomat, embodied its radiant side: he corresponded with Christian scholars and, during a mission to Oliver Cromwell, argued for the return of the Jews to England. But the difficult reconstruction of an orthodoxy among former conversos, raised in doubt and Iberian culture, gave rise to crises. Uriel da Costa, a Marrano who had returned to Judaism only to clash with its dogmas, contested the immortality of the soul and rabbinic authority; struck with excommunication, forced into humiliating retractions, he eventually took his own life around 1640, a tragic figure of the gap between the expectation of return and the rigor of the Law. The most famous case remains that of Baruch (Bento) Spinoza. Born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a family of the Nation, he developed opinions deemed heretical by the community's leaders. On July 27, 1656, at the age of twenty-three, he was struck with the herem — the ban — the most virulent ever pronounced by that community, written in Portuguese and calling down curses upon him day and night. The text denounces his "evil opinions" without ever specifying the content of his theses; historians suppose they prefigured the pantheism and biblical criticism of his future works. Spinoza never sought reinstatement and became, under the name Benedictus, one of the greatest philosophers of the classical age. His banishment illustrates the fragility of a community anxious to preserve, in a tolerant city, its cohesion and its peace with the Christian authorities.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, a second community, Ashkenazi, was added to the prestigious Portuguese Nation, coming from Germany and Central and Eastern Europe. Fleeing the Thirty Years' War and then the Khmelnytsky massacres in Poland (1648-1649), these Jews settled beginning in the 1620s and formed their own congregation as early as 1635. Poorer than the Sephardim, they soon outnumbered them: around 1674, there were some 5,000 Ashkenazim to about 2,500 Sephardim. The two communities lived side by side in the same neighborhood without merging, giving Amsterdam a plural Jewish face. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the economic decline of the Republic, followed by the civic emancipation brought by the French period (1796), profoundly altered the balance. The Nazi occupation, beginning in May 1940, abruptly shattered this long history. Around 140,000 Jews were then living in the Netherlands. From 1942, the deportations were organized via the Westerbork transit camp, a hub from which the convoys departed for Auschwitz and Sobibor. Among the deportees who passed through Westerbork was Anne Frank, whose Diary, written in a hiding place in Amsterdam, became the universal testimony of murdered youth. The toll was catastrophic: about 75% of Dutch Jews perished, the highest proportion in Western Europe. After the war, memory was slowly rebuilt: the Joods Historisch Museum, the Anne Frank House, the Esnoga reopened for worship, and the safeguarded Ets Haim library testify today to a presence that refuses to be forgotten.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam offers one of the most striking paradigms of modern Jewish history: that of a refuge where freedom of conscience, won in exile, allowed an unprecedented flourishing. From Marranos forced into silence, the Portuguese Jews became, within a few decades, prosperous merchants, renowned printers, builders of the Esnoga and guardians of Ets Haim; the Sephardic Nation and the Ashkenazi community together made Amsterdam a "Jerusalem of the North." Yet this same history also bears the mark of its internal tensions — the herem of Spinoza, the drama of Uriel da Costa — and the indelible wound of the Shoah, which annihilated three-quarters of Dutch Jewry. Today, through its museums, its still-living synagogue and its library that survived both the Inquisition and Nazism, Amsterdam continues to bear witness: to a refuge, to its splendor, to its loss and to its reconstructed memory.