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By Root 7539 0

challenges to the supremacy of the Reformed Church. The revised Freedoms and Exemptions of 1640 and 1650 had stipulated that “no other religion shall be publicly admitted in New Netherland except the Reformed,” as defined by the Synod of Dort. That was the rule in the Netherlands as well, where it had been interpreted over the years to mean that other Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews wouldn’t be molested by the authorities so long as they worshiped in private. The West India Company expected that similar allowances would be made for immigrants to New Netherland who didn’t belong to the Reformed communion: they could worship as they pleased, providing they did so out of the public eye. But the company underestimated Stuyvesant’s fanatical loyalty to the national church. On several important occasions during the 1650s it would be embarrassed to discover that he, Megapolensis, and Drisius seemed bent on imposing a degree of religious conformity on the colony that was unthinkable as well as impracticable in the Netherlands.

First to feel the heat of Stuyvesant’s displeasure was New Amsterdam’s growing Lutheran population—mostly Swedes, Germans, and Finns. At issue was their opposition to the Reformed rule that at baptism both parents be present and acknowledge the authority of the Synod of Dort. In 1653 the Lutherans asked Stuyvesant to let them organize their own church. He refused, and New Amsterdam’s two dominies urged the Classis of Amsterdam to advise the directors of the West India Company to support Stuyvesant’s decision. If they didn’t, the two said, other sects would want similar privileges and “our place would become a receptacle for all sorts of heretics and fanatics.” The directors did as asked.

The Lutherans didn’t go away, though, and in 1656 Stuyvesant learned they were holding conventicles—unauthorized services—in Newtown and perhaps elsewhere on Long Island. He issued a strongly worded ordinance banning all such gatherings and threw a few offenders in jail. Unluckily for him, the directors of the West India Company (three of whom were Lutherans) now began to worry that too much zeal would discourage settlement. They told Stuyvesant to let the Lutherans enjoy “free religious exercises in their houses.” He did so, but it was all he did, and the controversy continued to simmer for years. (Megapolensis and Drisius were pointedly warned that if they failed to accept the compromise the company would replace them with younger ministers who weren’t “infected with scruples about unnecessary forms, which cause more division, than edification.”)

As with the Lutherans, so with the Jews. New Amsterdam’s first known Jewish residents, two traders from Holland named Solomon Pietersen and Jacob Barsimson, arrived in the summer of 1654. A little while later, around the beginning of September, they were joined by twenty-three exhausted refugees from Brazil. Mostly Sephardim, the newcomers—four couples, two widows, and thirteen children—had been trying to get to Holland since Recife fell to the Portuguese the previous January. After their first ship was captured by Spanish pirates, they were rescued by a French privateer, which then took them to New Amsterdam.

Their ordeal was far from over, however. When they couldn’t raise the money to pay for their passage, the magistrates authorized the French captain to auction off whatever property they had brought with them and held a few in jail as hostages until the entire sum had been paid. Stuyvesant let it be known that he wanted no Jews in New Amsterdam. “Their usual usury and deceitful business towards the Christians” made them undesirable colonists, he explained to his superiors in the company.

More Jews arrived from Holland in 1655—five wealthy merchants and their families, to whom the company gave passports, partly in the hope they would “take care of their own poor.” Rumors flew around New Amsterdam that many others were on their way and that construction would soon begin on the town’s first synagogue. To Stuyvesant, Drisius, and Megapolensis, this sounded even more