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By Root 1059 0

however, religious heterodoxy and lenience prevailed. Local parishes were permitted to choose how doctrinally pure they wanted to be, and most chose flexibility. Alongside the Calvinist majority, Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Remonstrants all were permitted to establish private, “inconspicuous” places of worship, to open seminaries, and to print their own sacred and scholarly books. In addition, many government officials were only nominal members of the Reformed Church and barely tried to conceal their true anti-orthodox inclinations.”

Thus, in 1616, when Jews in the rest of Christian Europe were being attacked and terrorized, Rabbi Izak Uziel wrote to a correspondent: “At present, [our] people live peaceably in Amsterdam. The inhabitants of this city, mindful of the increase in population, make laws and ordinances whereby the freedom of religions may be upheld. Each may follow his own belief but may not openly show that he is of a different faith from the inhabitants of the city.” Although Jewish prayer sessions were initially held in private homes, by the 1620s several synagogues existed in Amsterdam. Indeed, as early as 1612, Amsterdam's city council “acted as if the Jews had the full right to practice their religion openly.” In 1675, Amsterdam's splendid Sephardic synagogue was constructed. Inspired by the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and accommodating two thousand people, the synagogue, with its soaring columns, dark oak pews, and great brass chandeliers, was not exactly “inconspicuous.” Around the same time, Ashkenazi Jews founded their own synagogue directly across the street, along with their own rabbinical authorities, dietary regulations, and Yiddish publishing houses.12

The Dutch Republic's extraordinary religious freedom became the talk of Europe. There were a few admirers, including one who wrote to Descartes in 1631, “[Is there another] country where you can enjoy such a perfect liberty…and where there has survived more of the innocence of our forefathers?” But most foreigners were appalled by what they saw as the Dutch Republic's religious debauchery. “Is there a mongrel sect in Christendom,” demanded one English propagandist, “which does not croak and spawn and flourish in their Sooterkin bogs?” “Sometimes seven religions are found in one family,” deplored another. Even those who benefited from asylum in the Dutch Republic expressed dismay at what the historian Simon Schama calls “the bargain basement of faiths” in which they found themselves—a “Den of several Serpents,” as one Englishman put it, in which “you may be what Devil you will so long as you push not the State with your horns.”13

There was a keenly calculating side to Dutch toleration. Many of the republic's leading political figures explicitly advocated religious freedom on the grounds that it would be economically advantageous. Pieter de la Court, for example, wrote in his Interest of Holland that “toleration was essential” to “stimulate the immigration so urgently needed to sustain the economy and population of Holland's cities.” Insofar as Dutch tolerance was instrumentally motivated, it was enormously successful.

The Dutch Republic became a magnet for streams of religious refugees from all over Europe—Protestants from the south Netherlands, Huguenots from France, German Lutherans, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe, and Quakers and Pilgrims from England. (The Pilgrims, a separatist branch of Puritans singled out for persecution in England, found a haven in Holland for twelve years before setting out on the Mayflower in 1620 for New England.) Many other immigrants came for purely economic reasons. Between roughly 1570 and 1670, while many European cities were stagnating, Amsterdam's population shot up from 30,000 to 200,000; Leiden's, from 15,000 to 72,000; Haarlem's, from 16,000 to 50,000; and Rotterdam's, from 7,000 to 45,000. Collectively, these immigrants formed the engine that propelled the Dutch Republic—for a brief half century—to global economic dominance in every economic sphere.14