Еврейский Амстердам

[shperk]

Sephardic merchant in fashionable dress, pictured at the Jewish cemetery at Oudekerk, Holland, 1681.
(The Jewish Museum, London)

Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam developed the silk and tobacco industries, and were leaders in the sugar, coral, and diamond trades. Their contributions to Amsterdam’s exploding commerce helped them procure religious rights and social privileges for the entire Jewish community. Unlike Jews in other European cities at this time, Dutch Jews were never forced to wear a Jewish badge or live in restrictive ghettos.


Jewish peddler, Amsterdam, 1833.
The Ashkenazim arriving in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century were mostly poor peddlers and butchers with strikingly different social backgrounds and customs from those of the wealthy, educated Sephardim. While rejected socially by the Sephardim, they did receive employment from them, as well as monetary assistance in the form of burial costs, medical expenses, and simple charity.

Rosh ha-Shanah in the Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam, c. 1723. Etching by Bernard Picart.
(New York Public Library)

Founded in the sixteenth century by international merchants, the Sephardic community in Amsterdam became the first European Jewish community with secular – rather than religious –leadership. As former Marranos, their leaders were largely untutored in the language and rituals of traditional Jewish life. In the early years, they turned to Venice – an established Jewish community with a Sephardic cultural base – for a religious and institutional model. Venice provided a source of Jewish authority for the developing Dutch Jewish community.


Holiday meal in the sukkah, Amsterdam, 1722.
Etching by Bernard Picart.
(New York Public Library)
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