The Jewish Diaspora

Flight from persecution

Conversos return to Judaism in Amsterdam

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1590–1650 CEChristian Iberia (Castile & Aragon) → Amsterdam

Why it happened

Portugal's forced conversion of its Jews in 1497 created 'New Christians';1 the Portuguese Inquisition (established 1536; first auto-da-fé 1540) hunted these as secret Jews,1 driving many to flee toward the tolerant, newly independent Dutch Republic.2

The migration

Around 1593, Portuguese Marranos began reaching Amsterdam, some after being refused admission to Middelburg and Haarlem.2 Guided by Rabbi Moses Uri ha-Levi, Jacob Tirado 'confessed the Jewish faith openly' and underwent circumcision, founding the city's first synagogue-congregation, Bet Ya'akov (Beth Jacob).3 Two more congregations arose, and the three merged into the united Talmud Torah around 1638.2 Drawn by the new state's tolerance and thriving economy,2 the 'Portuguese Nation' flourished: Menasseh ben Israel founded Amsterdam's first Hebrew printing press in 16264 and later negotiated the Jews' readmission to England in 1655.4 By 1674 roughly 2,500 Sephardim lived in the city;5 their monumental Esnoga, begun 1671, opened in 1675.5 From Iberia these seeded further Western Sephardic communities across Western Europe and the colonial Americas, 'formally reverting to Judaism.'6

Genetic corroboration

  • mtDNAAmong sampled crypto-Jewish descendants in northeast Portugal, five maternal haplogroups were putatively identified as founding lineages.7 The result is geographically specific and does not establish the ancestry of Amsterdam's individual returnees.
  • Y-DNAAdams and colleagues estimated a mean -Jewish contribution of 19.8% to the modern Iberian paternal gene pool, with wide regional variation.8 The estimate does not determine what share of emigrated, remained, or joined Amsterdam's Portuguese community.

Sources

  1. BSaraiva AJ, Salomon HP (tr.), Sassoon ISD (tr.). 2001. The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians, 1536–1765. Brill link
  2. BBodian M. 1997. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam. Indiana University Press link
  3. BGarcía-Arenal M, Wiegers G. 2003. A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press doi:10.1353/book.14092
  4. BRoth C. 1934. A Life of Manasseh Ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat. Jewish Publication Society of America link
  5. BSwetschinski DM. 2000. Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization link
  6. BKaplan Y. 2000. An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe. Brill link
  7. ANogueiro I, Teixeira J, Amorim A, et al.. 2015. Echoes from Sepharad: signatures on the maternal gene pool of crypto-Jewish descendants. European Journal of Human Genetics 23 693–699. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2014.140
  8. AAdams SM, Bosch E, Balaresque PL, et al.. 2008. The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. American Journal of Human Genetics 83 725–736. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.11.007