A Precarious North American Beachhead

O N F EBRUARY 24, 1654, a month after the Portuguese reconquest, the Dutch schooner Valck , one of the two remaining vessels carrying Brazilian Jewish refugees, sailed out of Recife. Its intended first port of call was the French island of Martinique. En route, however, the Valck was intercepted by a Spanish privateer and compelled to drop anchor in Jamaica, then under Spanish rule. The passengers were despoiled of all possessions except their clothes and furniture. Several baptized Sephardim among them were incarcerated by the local Inquisition. The rest, twenty-three professing Jews, were allowed to depart with the Gentile majority. These included four men, six women (married and widowed), and thirteen children. Most were Dutch or Italian Sephardim, but a few probably were Ashkenazim—Jews of Central European ancestry. The little group's next anchorage was Cape St. Anthony, on the western tip of Cuba. Here they anticipated securing passage for New Amsterdam, the West India Company's outpost on mainland North America. Thus, at the Cape, they negotiated a contract with the captain of the French barque Ste. Catherine (later mistakenly identified as the St. Charles ), who agreed to transport them for the exorbitant fee of twenty-five hundred guilders, nine hundred to be paid in advance. In mid-summer, then, the Ste. Catherine headed north, and in early September 1654 it sailed into the mouth of the Hudson River, on the western tip of Manhattan Island, where it dropped anchor at the little fortress-town of New Amsterdam, “capital” of the New Netherlands.

In fact, the twenty-three hapless refugees on the Ste. Catherine were not the first Jews to set foot in this ramshackle village. Occasional Jewish traders from Dutch Brazil and the West Indies had passed through in earlier years. One of these, Jacob Barsimson, a young Central European Ashkenazi, had arrived directly from Holland only three weeks before the Recife passengers. Conceivably he was among the group of onlookers who witnessed the landing of the Ste. Catherine . It could not have been a happy sight. When the Jewish refugees failed to produce the balance of their passage money, the irate captain immediately sought and obtained a court order to attach their furniture. And when a public auction did not cover the debt, two of the Jews were promptly clapped in the stockade. There they remained until October, when kinsmen in Amsterdam finally dispatched the needed funds.

The ordeal of the Recife immigrants had only begun. Thus far they had subsisted on handouts provided by Jacob Barsimson and by one Solomon Pietersen, who may also have been a Jew. But winter was coming and the newcomers would require shelter and hot meals. At the last moment, Dominie Johannes Megapolensis and his colleagues of the local Dutch Reformed Church provided a few hundred guilders, for the “Jews have come weeping and bemoaning their misery.” The churchmen were influenced less by Christian charity, as it happened, than by expectation that the newcomers soon would be gone. New Amsterdam's governor, Pieter Stuyvesant, was known to be hostile to Jews. Earlier, as governor of Curaçao, he had been exasperated by the local Jewry's aversion to farming, by their incorrigible preference for commerce. Stuyvesant had not presumed to exile them from Curaçao, for the West India Company favored toleration as a mercantilist principle. Nor would he act on his own now in expelling the Recife fugitives. Yet, writing to the Dutch West India Company board in Amsterdam, he warned that the Jews were notorious for “their usury and deceitful trading with the Christians.” They should be ordered out.

Before a reply could arrive, still another contingent of Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, in March 1655. The newcomers—five families and three unmarried males—had sailed direct from Holland. They were not indigent. Neither were they obsequious. Rather, they made clear their intention of organizing a congregation and conducting Hebrew religious services. The prospect was altogether too much for Johannes Megapolensis. Adding his appeal to Stuyvesant's, the dominie warned, in his letter to the Church classis in Amsterdam, and through them to the company, that

As it happened, the “obstinate and immovable Jews” were not without contacts of their own. Among these were several important Jewish stockholders in the West India Company. They in turn reminded the board that the original Recife fugitives had “risked their possessions and their blood in defense of the lost [Brazilian] Dutch colony,” that Jews had brought only economic benefit wherever in the Dutch Empire they had settled. The argument registered. In its response, the board instructed Stuyvesant to allow the Jews to settle, worship, and trade in New Netherlands, provided “the poor among them shall not become a burden to the Deaconry or the Company, but be supported by their own nation.” When Stuyvesant ventured a second protest, suggesting that “giving them liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and Papists,” the board had an answer for that, too. It was for the Jews to conduct their religious activities in private, to refrain from building a public house of worship.

The newcomers meanwhile set about earning their livelihoods. They subsisted as butchers, metalworkers, importers, peddlers. Renting their lodgings, securing access to their own burial ground, they also managed somehow to provide for their indigent and orphaned. The feat was accomplished in the face of Stuyvesant's endless harassment. Evading the Company's injunction at every opportunity, the governor forbade Jews to trade with the Indians, to buy homes or business premises, to open shops for retail trade, to vote (as by then they could in the Netherlands itself), to hold office or serve in the militia. It does not appear that Stuyvesant was animated by bigotry alone. In their financial desperation and wary demeanor, the Jews seemingly confirmed his charge that they were “very repellent ... to the people.” Early court records suggest that their ordeal had stripped them of the civilities common even to a frontier society. Asser Levy van Swellem (a man possibly of Ashkenazic origin), one of the Ste. Catherine twenty-three, sued a Jewish butcher who had accused him of consorting with thieves. Mrs. Abraham de Lucena called one of her fellow Jews a rogue. He called her a whore. Jacob Barsimson and Isaac Israel exchanged blows in Abraham de Lucena's storehouse. Moses de Lucena was caught in a fistfight with a Dutch burgher. Elias Silva was arrested for carnal intimacy with a Negro woman, another man's slave, and thereupon departed New Amsterdam. Among the Dutch settlers, the very word “Jew” became a term of reproach. Gisbert van Imbrough brought suit against Altjen Syrnats when Syrnats, in the heat of quarrel, called van Imbrough a Jew.

Despite all constraint and public contumely, the early Jewish settlers gradually circumvented their restrictions. They were still white people, after all, subjects of the Dutch Crown in an outpost vulnerable to economic shortages, marauding Indians, and covetous British neighbors. Bit by bit, they won their way into the fur and retail trades. The energetic Asser Levy soon was marching with local militiamen against the Algonquin Indians. As early as 1656, a second Company directive allowed Jews to own real estate, to trade freely, to be spared discriminatory taxes. Numbering perhaps sixty at the end of the decade, the Jews had extended their foothold. They were openly conducting religious services, albeit in a rented house. When Jacob Barsimson refused to appear before a magistrate in a civil case on the Jewish Sabbath, he was not held in default. It was all the more ironic, therefore, that, even as it stood on the threshold of civil parity, the tiny Jewish enclave suddenly began to atrophy. In common with not a few Gentiles, they discerned a precarious future in an outpost flanked north and south by much larger British colonies. Once London passed the Acts of Trade and Navigation in the early 1660s, it appeared to be only a matter of time before the little Dutch frontier station would fall into English hands. In these years, then, most of New Amsterdam's Jews sailed off. A few traveled direct to the Netherlands, others to Curaçao and Surinam, still others to Barbados. In 1663 the last departing group carried its Torah scroll back to Holland. Of the pioneer Jewish settlers, only Asser Levy remained. BZ22XusWJLm948oIWibMkr+lezbclm8QqsVkyaI9cKX0x5z9kOpO31cekjaYxW8w