Jewish New York

The Remarkable Story of a City and a People

Deborah Dash Moore, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard B. Rock, Daniel Soyer, Diana L. Linden

• Éditeur: NYU Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479864478
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire du peuple juif

The definitive history of Jews in New York and how they transformed the city Based on the acclaimed multi-volume series, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city’s most important ethnic and religious groups. Spanning three centuries, Jewish New York traces the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Jewish immigrants transformed New York. They built its clothing industry and constructed huge swaths of apartment buildings. New York Jews helped to make the city the center of the nation’s publishing industry and shaped popular culture in music, theater, and the arts. With a strong sense of social justice, a dedication to civil rights and civil liberties, and a belief in the duty of government to provide social welfare for all its citizens, New York Jews influenced the city, state, and nation with a new wave of social activism. In turn, New York transformed Judaism and stimulated religious pluralism, Jewish denominationalism, and contemporary feminism. The city’s neighborhoods hosted unbelievably diverse types of Jews, from Communists to Hasidim. Jewish New York not only describes Jews’ many positive influences on New York, but also exposes the group’s struggles with poverty and anti-Semitism. These injustices reinforced an exemplary commitment to remaking New York into a model multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious world city.

PART I

1654–1865

Restitutio View (detail), made by Hugo Allardt to honor the brief reconquest of New Amsterdam by the Dutch in 1673. The image shows a prosperous seaport with two docks, farms on the right, and a seafaring ship. Courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, New York Public Library.

1

Foundations

“This is Eden where the land floweth with Milk and Honey,” proclaimed a Dutch poet upon seeing Manhattan Island in the seventeenth century. Three hundred years later, two million Jews would call this “land of milk and honey” home, making New York the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish city. In the process, Jews fashioned in New York their own Zion in America.1

The Jewish journey to this new world began in Spain and continued via Portugal, Holland, and Brazil before reaching Manhattan Island in 1654.

* * *

August 1492. Christopher Columbus gazed at the docks of the Spanish port. Thousands of Jewish refugees crowded under a sultry sun desperately trying to book passage. Facing a choice to either convert to Catholicism or flee Spain, these Sephardic, or Spanish, Jews held fast to their faith. Many others had already crossed the border to Portugal. But Portugal’s reprieve lasted only five years. Then all Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Some of them secretly retained elements of Judaism, passing a dim consciousness of their former Jewish identity to their children.2

Over many centuries, under Muslim and Christian rulers, Jews had lived and flourished in the Iberian Peninsula. Sephardic Jews occupied important positions in government; they counted in their ranks many creative Jewish poets and philosophers; their rabbis transformed Jewish mysticism into a complex system of kabbalah; they worked as artisans in Spanish cities; but most of all, they developed extensive trading networks throughout the Mediterranean. Built on bonds of family, trading partnerships survived the expulsion of Spanish Jews. Whether they settled in Italian city-states or the Ottoman Empire, in southern France or the Netherlands, Sephardic Jews stayed connected with converted family members who remained behind. As Columbus’s journeys of discovery opened up new lands for European colonization, Sephardic Jews gradually forged a network linking port cities around the Atlantic Ocean.3

Sephardic Jews settled in Amsterdam as the Dutch Republic won its freedom from Spain in 1581, less than a century after the expulsion. A Protestant republic, Holland adopted principles of religious toleration and constitutional freedoms along with representative government. Its vibrant stock and commodities exchanges, innovative banking and credit facilities, strong army, heterogeneous population, and republican government offered Jews entrée into a new political and economic order. In Amsterdam, Sephardic Jewish merchants thrived in a milieu that appreciated Jewish capital, commercial acumen, and mercantile connections. The board of directors of the Dutch West India Company, established in 1621, included a significant minority of Amsterdam Jewish merchants. When the company established a foothold in Recife, Brazil, as many as a third of the city’s Jewish population emigrated. Dutch Jews possessed manpower, capital, and connections with Portuguese merchants and the Brazilian trade.4

By contrast, the company’s outpost on Manhattan island, ambitiously named New Amsterdam, offered pitifully few opportunities. Notwithstanding the poet’s vision, early New Amsterdam bore more resemblance to Babel than Eden. Notoriously mismanaged, the colony attracted various nationalities, speaking eighteen different languages, and gained a reputation for drunkenness, promiscuity, and lawlessness. If Recife produced a profit for the company, New Amsterdam produced headaches.5

The company, attempting to salvage its North American outpost, appointed Peter Stuyvesant as director. A strict Dutch Calvinist, seasoned soldier (he had lost part of a leg in battle), and determined autocrat, Stuyvesant ruled New Amsterdam from 1647 until the British conquest in 1664. The peg-legged director brought order and growth, instituted a municipal government system, and refurbished the port. New immigrants arrived, houses rose in Dutch gabled style, and a merchant class assumed dominance. The seaport exported furs, tobacco, and foodstuffs.6

Just before the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah in September 1654, the St. Catrina sailed into New Amsterdam’s harbor and unloaded its cargo, including twenty-three Jewish refugees from Recife. Fleeing the Dutch surrender of Recife to the Portuguese, these refugees are often hailed as the first Jewish presence in what became New York, even if four other Jews preceded them. Their arrival has assumed legendary dimensions, as recounted by a Dutch Jewish poet. First captured by a Spanish ship and then recaptured by a French warship, the refugees looked to Providence for succor. “God caused a Savior to arise unto them, the captain of a French Ship,” wrote the poet, “and he conducted them until they reached the end of the inhabited earth called New Holland.” The poet’s imagination successfully transformed a more complex and mundane reality into a providential arrival.7

In fact, messianic dreams coincided with pragmatic mercantile realities. Both motivated Sephardic Jewish merchants in Amsterdam to expand their Atlantic network and open new lands as havens for Jews. Their diasporic consciousness interpreted Jewish dispersion throughout the world as forerunner to the Messiah’s arrival. In 1654, the Amsterdam merchant Jacob Barsimon left for New Amsterdam; the following year, his fellow Amsterdam Jew Menasseh Ben Israel traveled to London on a mission to secure the readmission of Jews to England.8

The 1654 fall of Recife to the Portuguese spurred the return of most Jews to Holland, except for the small group of twenty-three Jews. Four married men, six women (two widowed), and thirteen children intended to head to a Dutch colony in the Caribbean, one with a growing Jewish population. Forced by rough weather to land in Spanish Jamaica, they paid a heavy fee for passage to New Amsterdam, disembarking before Rosh Hashanah. They celebrated the holiday most likely with four other Jews who had preceded them on a ship from Europe: Barsimon, the attorney Solomon Pietersen, and Asser Levy, a butcher from Vilna, and his wife, Miriam Levy.9

Stranded in New Amsterdam, the twenty-three lacked sufficient funds to pay for their just-concluded passage. The captain sued for his money. Following the Dutch policy of religious toleration, the court first granted a delay in the proceedings for the two days of the Jewish New Year. Then the court agreed with the captain that he was owed money. But sale of the Jews’ possessions failed to produce enough cash, although Christians helped them to raise funds. Desperate, the twenty-three appealed to Amsterdam Jews, who paid their debts.10

Stuyvesant, believing that “diversity and toleration would undermine social harmony” in New Amsterdam, petitioned the West India Company’s directors for permission to deport the refugees. This “obstinate and immovable” people’s settlement, he argued, would cause even more confusion by adding their practices to those of Catholics, Quakers, and Lutherans. He decried Jews’ economic behavior, their selfishness, and their “customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians,” and he belittled their religion as poison. A “deceitful race,” he pronounced, “such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” He warned that these Jews “owing to their present indigence … might become a charge in the coming winter.” Thus, he concluded, it would be “useful for them in a friendly way to depart.” Local magistrates and burgomasters affirmed Stuyvesant’s request and pressed the recently arrived Jewish merchants to leave as well. With such a welcome, most left.11

What, then, is the significance of these first Jews? Although they left behind few other traces than their tale of woe, their celebration of the Jewish New Year, their refugee status, and their family composition speak to later self-understandings of American Jews. Like the poet, they, too, saw providential continuity and a potential haven for the displaced and persecuted as characteristic features of America, and especially of New York.12

Learning of Stuyvesant’s letter to the West India Company asking to oust the recently arrived Jews, Jewish elders in Amsterdam wrote to both their city fathers and the company’s board of directors. They explained that the “Jewish Nation” declared itself “well disposed” to set out for New Netherland, “on the same footing and condition extended to all,” there to “enjoy freedom to exercise their religion as they were permitted in Brazil.” If these conditions were met, as in Recife, many would settle in North America and “contribute considerably” to peopling the new colony. Jews sought “the same protection” as “other inhabitants,” including “the same rights of housing, commerce, trade and liberty.”13

Given the weight afforded economic reasoning in the Netherlands, substantial Jewish contributions to Recife, the influence and wealth of Amsterdam’s Jews, and their presence in the West India Company, the company rejected Stuyvesant’s proposal. If messianism contributed to Jewish efforts to win economic rights in port cities around the Atlantic and Mediterranean, mercantilism animated Amsterdam’s merchants. Noting Jewish sacrifice in Recife and the “large capital which they still have invested in the shares of the company,” the directors declared that Jews could travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there, provided the poor among them would not become a burden to the company or to the community but would be supported by their own.14

Without the Amsterdam Jewish community, Jews in New Amsterdam would have had no opportunity to contend for their rights and Dutch citizenship. Nonetheless, those in New Amsterdam carried on the struggle. The company’s directive allowed them to pursue their quest in a hostile climate. The next two years proved critical. Barsimon, Pietersen, and Levy led the mission to seek rights possessed by their Dutch brethren. These three Jewish merchants, who arrived before the twenty-three, possessed considerably greater stature than the Recife refugees did. Their political pursuit resembled similar efforts subsequently undertaken by Jews in other port cities, shaped, in part, by the spread of Enlightenment ideas.15

First these Jewish merchants sought religious privileges to build and worship in their own meeting place. Stuyvesant denied their request, explaining that giving Jews religious liberty, “we cannot refuse the Lutherans and the Papists.”16 Yet Jews persevered. They regularly refused to appear in court to answer a summons on a Saturday, their Sabbath, a position respected by the court. They obtained permission to “purchase a burying ground,” which became the Chatham Street cemetery. They received a Torah scroll from Amsterdam. Jewish butchers were excused from slaughtering hogs, unkosher animals. Still, New Amsterdam proved unfriendly. Only Asser and Miriam Levy lasted the decade until the British arrived.17

Religious liberty did not suffice if one could not earn a living. New Amsterdam’s Jews sought free access to the marketplace. Despite orders from the West India Company to give Jews full “civil and political” rights, Stuyvesant and the burgomasters resisted. Asser Levy and Jacob Barsimon requested permission to stand guard with other citizens rather than pay a tax for a substitute. They were denied due to “the disgust and aversion” of the citizens and because Jews were not citizens. When both men complained of the tax burden, the municipality instructed them to “go elsewhere.” Levy persisted; eventually he won the right to do guard duty. Repeated appeals to the company’s directors in Amsterdam also gained Jews rights to trade and purchase property, privileges long common to their Dutch counterparts.18

Yet full citizenship eluded Jews. Jewish merchants supported Asser Levy’s petition for burgher rights of citizenship. Since Jews enjoyed these privileges in Amsterdam, New Amsterdam Jews were not requesting anything unprecedented. Finally, the city fathers caved. Jewish merchants prevailed, but not without repeated attempts and vital support from Amsterdam’s Jewish community and directors of the West India Company.19

Jews built on the rights that had been hard won in New Amsterdam after the British arrived in 1664. They obtained permission to worship in public and to construct a synagogue. Without an established church in New York, unlike in some of the other British colonies in North America, Jews enjoyed religious liberty in the context of a multireligious, multilingual, and multiethnic society, exactly what Stuyvesant had feared. Not only Lutherans, Catholics, and Quakers but diverse Protestants, including Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, all erected churches in the city. The 1740 naturalization act confirmed Jewish citizenship. New York, however, went further than other colonies. It fully emancipated Jews, granting Jewish men rights to vote and hold office on the basis of their economic standing. Enlightenment values of religious toleration influenced politics, as did mercantilist ideas. Jews traded freely throughout the colonies an...