Haven of Liberty

New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865

Howard B. Rock

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814776926
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Runner-up for the Dixon Ryan Manuscript Award, New York Historical Association Haven of Liberty chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York in 1654 and highlights the role of republicanism in shaping their identity and institutions. Rock follows the Jews of NewYork through the Dutch and British colonial eras, the American Revolution and early republic, and the antebellum years, ending with a path-breaking account of their outlook and behavior during the Civil War. Overcoming significant barriers, these courageous men and women laid the foundations for one of the world’s foremost Jewish cities.

CHAPTER 1
A Dutch Beginning

Upon viewing Manhattan Island in the early seventeenth century, Dutch poet Jacob Steendam remarked, “This is Eden, where the land floweth with milk and honey.” The “sweetness of the Air” transfixed the first explorers, astonished at the freshness and fragrance of the climate and by an island of “hilly, woody Country, full of Lakes and great Vallies.” Visitors marveled at vast meadow grass, at fields flush with strawberries, at woods filled with towering trees of walnut, chestnut, maple, and oak, at abundant wildlife as beavers, wolves, and foxes roamed and doves, swans, and blackbirds took flight, and at waterways where whales and porpoises whirled freely while oysters and lobsters flourished. The trails of the Lenapes, a nomadic confederation of Indian tribes, crisscrossed the island, connecting their fields of maize, squash, melons, and tobacco. On the east side, a dangerous estuary flowed into the Atlantic, while on the west side, a wide stream emptied as well into the sea, a river that was to be named after the English explorer Henry Hudson, who sailed the Halve Maen (Half Moon) into its waters in 1609. Three hundred years later, Steendam’s “land of milk and honey” housed the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish urban population. The journey to this new world begins in fifteenth-century Spain and continues into Portugal, Holland, and Brazil before the landing on Manhattan Island in 1654.¹

Sephardic Exile and Dutch Welcome

On a sultry early August morning in 1492 at the port of Huelva in southern Spain, Christopher Columbus sailed on the first of three epic voyages. On those same docks, a resident might have viewed hundreds of Spanish Jews, part of the 150,000 expelled from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The conjunction of these world-shattering events proved pivotal in Jewish history. The Jews of Spain, known as Sephardic Jews, equipped with mercantile skills and close family networks from centuries of Iberian residency, became significant factors in the new world. As states that became the homes of the exiled Spanish Jews claimed possessions in the new world, the refugees joined colonists risking their fortunes and lives in America, opening a new era for the Jews of Europe.²

The famed Prototype View of 1664 portrays New Amsterdam as a small Dutch village in 1655. Visible are the fort, church, and city hall (far right). Note the gabled Dutch homes. For the interior layout, see the Castello plan in the “Visual Essay.” (Courtesy Museum of the City of New York, Print Archives)

Jews flourished in Islamic Spain as essential aides to Islamic leadership and commerce. Following the “Reconquista,” largely complete by the thirteenth century, Christian rulers welcomed them in similar roles. In Catholic Spain’s reorganization and economic growth, they held important administrative positions in government and vigorously pursued international trade. Jewish support enabled the monarchy to grow at the expense of the aristocracy.³

Spanish Jewish society was largely autonomous before the expulsion. The Spanish government allowed the Jewish community to have its own councils enforce religious and even civil and criminal law, provided they did not interfere with affairs of state and church. While most Jews were not affluent, the well-educated economic and political elite dominated the councils. Many lived in Spain’s grandest villas and produced a rich collection of Judaic law and literature. In the fifteenth century, however, the persecution of Jews, never absent despite their critical contribution to the state, increased, spurred by the inception of the Inquisition in 1478. Over one hundred thousand Jews became conversos, converts to Christianity. While a number of Jewish communities, including one in Barcelona, could no longer survive in the Christian world, a significant population persevered, often with the help of Ferdinand and Isabella, who looked to them for financial aid. The pressures of a militant Catholic Church, however, forced the monarchs to accede to papal pressure and order the expulsion of all practicing Jews in 1492.⁴

The Spanish exile expelled Jews with their household goods except for their gold and silver. The outcast Jews also carried years of mercantile practice with them, as well as family ties to conversos remaining in Spain, who while living as Christians did not sever their bonds of kinship. Spain’s exiled Jewish population found refuge in many parts of the Mediterranean and Asia, including North Africa, Italy, and Ottoman Greece and Turkey. The great majority, however, perhaps 85 percent and numbering 85,000 to 115,000, traveled to Portugal, whose monarch, King Emmanuel I, welcomed this well-connected group. An Iberian nation, it offered Jews the greatest continuity with their former lives. In Portugal, Sephardic Jews continued to trade with Spain and strove to maintain a coherent community. However, in 1497, Emanuel I forcibly converted all Jews, while promising not to inquire into their religious beliefs for forty years. Not wishing to lose their valued commercial expertise and wealth, he forbade Jews, now unwilling conversos, to leave the country. A few managed to flee, but most remained. With the death of Emanuel in 1521 and the inception of the Portuguese Inquisition ten years later, however, emigration increased, not so much in the chaotic manner that marked the Spanish exodus but through planned departures. Some Jews left in fear of religious persecution and some for greater economic opportunity. As the Inquisition had not yet begun operation in Portuguese Brazil, a number of Portuguese conversos emigrated there as well as to France and Holland.⁵

The Portuguese Jews (as they were known) who chose to immigrate to Holland, a country that had never housed a sizable Jewish population, found a land in transition. They arrived during the long birth of the Dutch Republic, one of the great accomplishments of early modern Europe. Beginning in 1568, the United Provinces (the seven Dutch-speaking provinces of northern Netherlands, with Holland as the largest province and Amsterdam the largest city) waged an eighty-year war of independence against Spain, which had inherited the Netherlands in 1517. During these years of conflict, the Dutch people witnessed thousands of their brethren put to death and withstood long sieges. At the core of their endurance and final victory in the seventeenth century were the Netherlands’ heritage of constitutional freedoms, representative government, and a strong Protestant faith founded in the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church.⁶

The Netherlands, with vibrant stock and commodities exchanges, innovative banking and credit facilities, a strong army, heterogeneous population, and republican government, stood at the forefront of what historian David Israel terms the “Age of Mercantilism.” In this world, commerce and the good of the state prevailed over religious conflict and dogma. The state determined to intervene in the economic life of the nation to ensure its continuing growth. The movement toward a mercantile Europe, neither a clear-cut nor simple transition, reflected a steady if uneven shift over two hundred years (1550-1770). By 1570-1600, a new religious skepticism and statecraft emerged that held the economic, political, and military health of the state primary.⁷

The Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century was “the most tolerant of European societies.” Within this framework, the Jewish population grew and flourished, its numbers rising rapidly from 800 in 1610 to around 2,000 in the 1640s and 1650s to 3,350 by 1680. Most Jews were Sephardic, descendants of immigrants from Spain and Portugal; a smaller, separate, less influential Ash-kenazi community was also present, immigrants from German states and eastern Europe. Portuguese Jews built on their legacy of internal governance, crafting a largely autonomous society. Its governing body, the Mahamad, whose membership included the city’s most prominent Sephardic Jews, conducted schools (in Hebrew and Portuguese), supervised the morals of the city’s Jews, monitored religious observance, took responsibility for social welfare, censored the increasing number of books published by the Sephardic population, and negotiated with Christian society. Its ultimate form of discipline was excommunication for those who violated community norms, and it wielded that discipline against rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The Mahamad also built the famed magnificent Esnoga synagogue, completed in 1675, which served the needs of the city’s Jewish community for generations.⁸

Many occupations were either foreign to Jews or forbidden by the guilds of the city’s craftsmen, but the Sephardic legacy of commercial expertise fit well within Amsterdam’s economy. Leading Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were merchants. While Jews constituted only 1.5 percent of the population, they composed between 4 and 6 percent of the major stockholders of the Dutch West India Company and more of the Bank of Exchange. They engaged in commerce with their former homelands, Spain and Portugal, particularly Portugal, a trade that reached its height during a twelve-year truce between these nations and the Dutch Republic from 1609 to 1621. With trade restrictions lifted, numerous Dutch ships entered Iberian harbors or Iberian colonial harbors; Sephardic merchants built fifteen ships a year for the Brazilian trade alone. The Dutch Republic understood the value of Jewish capital, commercial acumen, and mercantile connections.⁹

Brazilian Community

In 1621, the Netherlands granted the Dutch West India Company, a joint stock company formed by Netherlands merchants and well capitalized at 7.5 million guilders, a state monopoly of trade in Africa and the Americas. The company had the power to maintain garrisons, to appoint directors, and to sign alliances with other nations. Under the supervision of the Estates General, the Netherlands legislature, it could procure troops and warships. Its most important initial objective was to seize control of Brazilian sugar production and its European markets from the Portuguese. In 1630, the company captured a sector in northeast Brazil; from Recife, the region’s largest city, it maintained control there until the Portuguese recaptured it in 1654.¹⁰

Dutch Recife was the prelude to Jewish immigration to New Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company, not having adequate resources, relied on Jewish wealth and expertise. Dutch Jews possessed manpower, capital, and important connections with Portuguese merchants and the Brazilian trade. Recife and its environs attracted Amsterdam’s Jews; as many as a third of the city’s Jewish population emigrated. At the outpost’s height, it housed between 850 and 1,000 Jewish residents, nearly half the colony. Recife tempted Jewish artisans precluded from their craft in Amsterdam as well as wealthy traders; prominent Portuguese Jews purchased sugar plantations. While the Jews of Brazil did not achieve full religious or political equality, and while their prominence produced resentment among non-Jewish immigrants, they attained considerable autonomy and protection amid financial opportunity. When Christian merchants complained that “every contact with a Jew ends in bankruptcy,” the governor reported that Jews were “reliable political allies.”¹¹

Recife’s Jewish community mirrored Amsterdam’s. Control of Jewish life lay with the Mahamad, five leading members of the community. The Mahamad protected synagogue property, provided regular services, supervised religious observance, maintained a cemetery, established schools for Jewish children, and provided poor relief. The colony housed two major synagogues, Zur Israel in Recife and Magen Abraham in the outlying town of Mauricia. The Recife synagogue, built of stone and caulk, boasted two stories. Its spiritual leader, the first rabbi in the new world, was Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, a grammarian, mystic, and popular preacher.¹²

The First “Twenty-Three”

When Henry Hudson arrived in North America, he sailed under a Dutch flag. Commissioned by the Dutch East India Company, Hudson’s reports of abundant furs aroused the interest of the merchants of the sister West India Company walking the docks of Amsterdam. In quest of these skins, the company founded the colony of New Netherland. In 1623-1624 settlers were sent to Fort Orange (later the site of Albany) and along the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers to harvest furs. When the first ships returned brimming with pelts, more settlers were sent, and the tip of the island named Manhattan (“Island of Hills” based on Indian language) was chosen as the site of a fort to protect the company’s possessions throughout the province. (Governor Peter Minuit purchased the island from the Indians for the famous sixty guilders [$24] of trade items.) Because of intense warfare for furs among Indian tribes, and the shifting alliances of Iroquois and Mahicans near Fort Orange, the West India Company focused its settlement on Manhattan, its immediate surroundings, and the Hudson River valley.¹³

Poet Steendam’s vision notwithstanding, early New Amsterdam was largely a horror story. The company’s directors—most notoriously, Willem Kieft, who arrived in 1638—mismanaged the settlements. While Kieft provided settlers the opportunity to acquire private property, repaired a number of the buildings on the island, and fostered the settlement of nearby outposts, he was personally corrupt while cruel to the Lenape native peoples. The colony, meanwhile, soon housed a collection of various nationalities, from Danish to French, speaking eighteen different languages and known for drunkenness, promiscuity, and disrespect for law and order. Kieft’s downfall followed a war that killed sixteen hundred Indians and a few hundred colonists, destroying new settlements. Kieft was recalled, and the fate of New Netherland hung in the balance. Unlike Recife, which produced valuable goods and a clear profit for the company, New Amsterdam was less productive, had fewer valuable foodstuffs, was constantly under English threat, and never became the focus of the company’s directors.¹⁴

In a final effort to salvage the outpost, the company appointed Peter Stuy-vesant director general, a position he held from 1647 until the British conquest in 1664. Stuyvesant fought for the West India Company in the Caribbean and in a battle in St. Martin lost his right leg, which was replaced by his famous wooden limb. The son and son-in-law of Reformed Dutch clergymen and a strict Dutch Calvinist, he brought order and growth to New Amsterdam, requiring landowners to replace the run-down dwellings that littered the island with sturdy buildings. New immigrants arrived, a municipal government system similar to that in Amsterdam matured, and Stuyvesant refurbished the fort. Houses rose in the Dutch gabled style as the population grew slowly to fifteen hundred by 1660. The company remained powerful but no longer controlled daily life. The city’s burghers wrested increasing power from Stuyvesant as they instituted laws for the price of bread, regulation of markets, and provision of orphans. The transition of a tavern into the noted Stadt Huys (city hall) signaled that New Amsterdam was a seaport dominated, like its namesake, by a prominent merchant class, whose efforts produced an entrepôt for furs, tobacco, and foodstuffs.¹⁵

Such was the site of the first North American Jewish settlement. Nearly every community has a mythic founding. So it was with the Jews of America. The original myth, based on a 1784 article written in Hebrew by Dutch poet David Franco Mendes, tells of a group of twenty-three Jews fleeing Recife who were captured by a Spanish ship and recaptured by a French warship. In Mendes’s words, “God caused a Savior to arise unto them, the captain of a French Ship, . . . and he conducted them until they reached the end of the inhabited earth called New Holland.” Contemporary research questions this tale. In the exodus of Jews from Brazil following Dutch capitulation to the Portuguese, Jews received the same right as other Dutch residents to leave freely within three months and to take all their “movable property.” Almost all returned safely to the Dutch Republic. One group, however, planning to sail to Martinique and from there to New England or New Amsterdam on the Valck, encountered adverse winds, forcing them to land in Spanish Jamaica (rendered “Gamon-ike” by Dutch officials of New Amsterdam). Obtaining permission to depart from Spanish authorities, this band, which historian Jacob Marcus estimates consisted of “four married males, six adult married and widowed women and thirteen children of various ages,” traveled to Cape St. Anthony, Cuba. There they hired the French vessel St. Catrina to take them to New Amsterdam with their goods, at the high cost of 2,500 guilders, likely more than the worth of their possessions.¹⁶

The choice of New Amsterdam by these refugees fit within the vision of Amsterdam’s Jewish elders that the vast lands of New Netherland replace Brazil as a haven for Portuguese Jews. An enticement may have been the description of New Netherland published in Holland...