Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [57]
The Rembrandthuis
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands | The Old Jewish Quarter | Gassan Diamonds |
The Jews in Amsterdam
From the late sixteenth century onwards, Amsterdam was a haven for refugee Jews escaping persecution throughout the rest of Europe. The Union of Utrecht, ratified in 1579, signalled the start of the influx. Drawn up by the largely Protestant northern Dutch provinces in response to the invading Spanish army, the treaty combined the United Provinces (later to become the Netherlands) in a loose federation, whose wheels could only be greased by a degree of religious toleration then unknown elsewhere across the Continent. Whatever the Protestants may have wanted, they knew that the Catholic minority (around 35 percent) would only continue to support the rebellion against the Spanish Habsburgs if they were treated well – the Jews benefited by osmosis and consequently immigrated here in their hundreds.
This toleration did, however, have its limits: Jewish immigrants were forced to buy citizenship; Christian-Jewish marriages were illegal; and, as with the Catholics, they were only allowed to practise their religion discreetly behind closed doors. A proclamation in 1632 also excluded them from most guilds – effectively withdrawing their right to own and run most types of business. This forced them either to excel in those trades not governed by the guilds or introduce new non-guild trades into the city. Nonetheless, by the middle of the eighteenth century the city’s Jewish community was active in almost every aspect of the economy, especially in bookselling, tobacco, banking and commodity futures.
The first major Jewish influx was of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, where persecution had begun in earnest in 1492 and continued throughout the sixteenth century. In the 1630s the Sephardim were joined in Amsterdam by hundreds of (much poorer) Ashkenazi Jews from German-speaking central Europe. The two groups established separate synagogues and, although there was no ghetto as such, the vast majority settled on and around what is now Waterlooplein, then a distinctly unhealthy tract of low-lying land that was subject to regular flooding by the River Amstel. Initially known as Vlooyenburg, this district was usually referred to as the Jodenhoek, or “Jews’ Corner”, though this was not, generally speaking, a pejorative term and neither did the Dutch eschew living here; Rembrandt, for instance, was quite happy to take up residence and frequently painted his Jewish neighbours. Indeed, given the time, the most extraordinary feature of Jewish settlement in Amsterdam was that it occasioned mild curiosity rather than outright hate, as evinced by surviving prints of Jewish religious customs, where there is neither any hint of stereotype nor discernible demonization.
The restrictions affecting both Jews and Catholics were removed during Napoleon’s occupation of the United Provinces, when the country was temporarily renamed the Batavian Republic (1795–1806). Freed from official discrimination, Amsterdam’s Jewish community flourished and the Jewish Quarter expanded, nudging northwest towards Nieuwmarkt and east across Nieuwe Herengracht, though this was just the focus of a community whose members lived in every part of the city. In 1882, the dilapidated houses of the Jodenhoek were razed and several minor canals filled in to make way for Waterlooplein, which became a largely Jewish marketplace, a bustling