To My Father

                       John R. Swierenga

                       A "Yiddischer Goy"

                             

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1        Netherlands Jewry

Chapter 2        The Dutch Era:  Immigration Before 1830

Chapter 3        New York City:  The Bastion

Chapter 4        Philadelphia:  An Early Base

Chapter 5        Boston:  A Close Community

Chapter 6        Baltimore:  The Fells Point Settlement

Chapter 7        New Orleans:  A Secular Lot

Chapter 8        The Great Lakes Frontier:  The Restless Ones

Chapter 9        San Francisco:  An Instant Elite

Chapter 10       The "Essence" of Dutch Jewry in America

Appendix I       Immigration Statistics

Appendix II      Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Working Adults   in New York, 1850, 1860, 1870 Censuses

Appendix III     Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Working Adults   in Philadelphia, 1850, 1860,1870 Censuses

Note

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Fig. 2.1    Judah Touro (1775-1854) of New Orleans, LA   

Fig. 3.1    Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, New York City, 1830

Fig. 3.2    Reverend Samuel M. Isaacs (1804-1878) of Congregation   Shaaray Tefila, New York, NY

Fig. 3.3    Samauel Gompers (1850-1924) of New York, NY

Fig. 4.1    Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, Philadelphia, 1830

Fig. 4.2    Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, Philadelphia, 1850

Fig. 4.3    Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households, Philadelphia, 1860, 1870

Fig. 4.4    Lit Bros. Department Store, Philadelphia, PA, 1896

Fig. 4.5    Moses Aaron Dropsie (1821-1905) of Philadelphia, PA

Fig. 7.1    Hebrew Wedding Certificate of Daniel Goodman and   Amelia Harris, 1828, New Orleans, LA  

Fig. 9.1    Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger (1852-1908) of Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco, CA

Captions for figures

Fig. 2.1  Judah Touro (1775-1854) of New Orleans, LA. Daguerreotype reprinted by permission of the American Jewish Historical Society, from Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (Waltham, MA, 1969).            

Fig. 3.1  Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, New York City, 1830. Adapted by permission from Ira Rosenwaike, On the Edge of Greatness: A Portrait of American Jewry in the Early National Period (Cincinnati, 1985).

Fig. 3.2  Reverend Samuel M. Isaacs (1804-1878) of Congregation Shaaray Tefila, New York, NY. Reprinted from Simon Cohen, Shaaray Tefila: A History of Its Hundred Years: 1845-1945 (New York, 1945).

Fig. 3.3  Samauel Gompers (1850-1924) of New York, NY, Courtesy of George Meany Memorial Archives.

Fig. 4.1  Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, Philadelphia, 1830. Adapted by permission from Ira Rosenwaike, On the Edge of Greatness: A Portrait of American Jewry in the Early National Period (Cincinnati, 1985).

Fig. 4.2  Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, Philadelphia, 1850. Compiled from Robert P. Swierenga, comp., Dutch Households in U.S. Population Censuses, 1850, 1860, 1870: An Alphabetical Listing by Family Heads, 3 vols. (Wilmington, DE, 1987).

Fig. 4.3  Distribution of Dutch Jewish Households by Ward, Philadelphia, 1860, 1870.  Compiled from Robert P. Swierenga, comp., Dutch Households in U.S. Population Censuses, 1850, 1860, 1870: An Alphabetical Listing by Family Heads, 3 vols. (Wilmington, DE, 1987).

Fig. 4.4  Lit Bros. Department Store, Philadelphia, PA. Reprinted from the Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), December 11, 1896.

Fig. 4.5  Moses Aaron Dropsie (1821-1905) of Philadelphia, PA. Courtest of Maxwell Whiteman.

Fig. 7.1  Hebrew Wedding Certificate of Daniel Goodman and Amelia Harris, 1828, New Orleans, LA. Reprinted by permission of the American Jewish Historical Society, from Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (Waltham, MA, 1969). 

Fig. 9.1  Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger (1852-1908) of Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco, CA. Reprinted by permission of Congregation Emanu-El from Fred Rosenbaum, Architects of Reform: Congressional and Community Leadership, Emanu-El of San Fransisco, 1849-1980 (1980).

 

Tables

 1.1   Jewish Population per Province, City and Country, 1839

 2.1   Dutch Jewish Households as a Percentage of All Jewish Households in Major Cities, 1790 Census

 2.2   Dutch Jewish Households as a Percentage of All Jewish Households in Major Cities, 1820 Census

 2.3   Dutch Jewish Households as a Percentage of All Jewish Households in Major Cities, 1830 Census

 2.4   Dutch Jewish Couples with English and German Jewish Spouses, 1850, 1860, 1870

 2.5   Birthplaces of Dutch Jewish Children:  1850, 1860, 1870

 3.1   Dutch Jewish Household Heads in New York City, 1790 and 1820

 3.2   Dutch Jewish Household Heads in New York City, 1830 Census

 3.3   Dutch Jews in New York City by Ward, 1830-1870

 3.4   Dutch Jewish Occupation Groups in New York, 1830-1870

 3.5   Dutch Jews in New York City, 1831-1835 City Directories

 4.1   Dutch in Congregation Rodeph Shalom Subscriber's List, 1811-1840

 4.2   Dutch Jewish Household Heads in Philadelphia and Northern Liberties, 1820

 4.3   Dutch Jewish Household Heads in Philadelphia, 1830

 4.4   Jewish and Dutch Jewish Households, Philadelphia, by Ward, 1830

 4.5   Dutch Jews as a Percentage of Jewish Population, Philadelphia, by Ward, 1850, 1860 (1870 Dutch only)

 4.6   Dutch Jews with Non-Dutch Spouses by Generation, Philadelphia, 1850, 1860, 1870

 4.7   Nationality of Non-Dutch Spouse, First- and Second- Generation Dutch Jews, Philadelphia, 1850, 1860, 1870

 4.8   School Attendance by Sex, Jewish Children Aged 5-19, Philadelphia, 1850, 1860, 1870

 4.9   Occupations, Dutch Jews as a Percentage of All Jews, Philadelphia, 1830, 1850, 1860 (1870 Dutch only)

 5.1   Dutch Jewish Occupational Groups in Boston:  1850, 1860, 1870

 5.2   First- and Second-Generation Dutch Jews, Boston, 1850, 1860, 1870

 5.3   School Attendance by Sex, Jewish Children, Aged 5 to 19, Boston:  1850, 1860, 1870

 5.4   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Boston, 1850

 5.5   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Boston, 1860

 5.6   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Boston, 1870

 6.1   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Baltimore 1830

 6.2   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Baltimore, 1850

 6.3   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Baltimore, 1860

 6.4   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Baltimore, 1870

 7.1   Dutch Jewish Household Heads, New Orleans, 1830

 7.2   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, New Orleans, 1850

 7.3   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, New Orleans, 1860

 7.4   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, New Orleans, 1870

 8.1   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Buffalo, 1850, 1860, 1870

 8.2   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Pittsburgh, 1870

 8.3   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Cincinnati, 1830, 1850, 1860, 1870

 8.4   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Cleveland, 1860, 1870, 1880

 8.5   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Toledo, 1870

 8.6   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Detroit, 1860, 1870

 8.7   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Chicago, 1860

 8.8   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Chicago, 1870

 8.9   National Stock of Ethnically Mixed Dutch Couples, Chicago, 1870, 1900

 8.10  Dutch Jewish Wards in Chicago, 1870, 1900

 8.11  Occupations, Actively Employed Dutch Jewish Household Heads, Chicago, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900

 8.12  Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Chicago, 1800

 8.13  Occupational Categories, Dutch Jews, and a Sample of All Jews in 1870 Census and 1870 Chicago City Directory

 8.14  Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Chicago, 1900

 8.15  Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, Saint Louis, 1850, 1860, 1870

 9.1   Dutch Jewish Household Heads and Single Adults, San  Francisco, 1860-1880

10.1   Dutch Jewish Urban Population, 1850, 1860, 1870

10.2   Dutch Jewish Occupational Distribution:  1850, 1860, 1870

 A.1   Dutch Jewish Immigration Estimated from U.S. Census Data, 1800-1880

 

Chapter 1.

Sephardim and Ashkenazim

     Organized Jewish life in the Netherlands began in the early seventeenth century, which was relatively late compared to the rest of Europe, and it coincided with the onset of Holland's Golden Age.  This was the 150 years from 1590 to 1740, following the heroic Calvinist revolt against Catholic Spain, when the young republic glittered in the "solid gold of prosperity" and its culture "shone with dazzling brilliance," studded by such men as the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and the Gentile artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). Dutch merchantmen plied the seven seas and planted colonies first in the East Indies and then in the West. Dutch trade and shipping within Europe, particularly in the Baltic, was even more spectacular. Holland suddenly emerged as an economic colossus with Amsterdam as the hub. The city became "the world's warehouse," conveying goods from all continents financed by its powerful money and banking houses.[i]

     The Netherlands at the time was unique in Europe for its tolerance. Although it was a powerful empire driven by a dynamic Calvinism that yielded not an inch to Catholic Spain, Catholic France, or Protestant England, it allowed freedom of conscience and limited civil rights to Jews and other persecuted minorities. Amsterdam's emergence as an international trade center attracted Sephardic merchants from the Iberian Peninsula, men who learned of its irenic spirit and came to take advantage of its economic promise. These Portuguese Jews were known as Marranos or New Christians, because they had been forced to convert on pain of death by the Spanish Inquisition. Between 1590 and 1610 about four hundred Sephardic Jews settled in the Netherlands. By 1635 the first persecuted Ashkenazic Jews arrived from German and Polish centers.[ii]

     Although the number of Jews in Holland did not equal those in England, Germany, and France, Amsterdam by 1650 became the "Little Jerusalem," the largest center of Jewish culture in western Europe, and for the next three hundred years Dutch Jews generally fared better than Jews elsewhere. They found it "pleasant to wait for redemption" in the tolerant Netherlands, where virulent antisemitism, pogroms, and calls for expulsion were unknown.  Nevertheless, the national and city governments imposed restrictions from the outset and Jews remained second-class citizens until 1796, excluded from government posts and the guilds and forced to live by peddling and trade. When they openly adopted Judaism in Amsterdam, the city leaders only reluctantly granted permission to buy a cemetery and build a synagogue. As Moses Asher observed wryly; "They allow us to sing psalms and to die of hunger."[iii]

     It was unique to Holland that Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities developed simultaneously, although the Sephardim arrived a few decades earlier and initially in larger numbers.  The first Sephardi were generally well-to-do merchants and culturally assimilated, but in the eighteenth century the number of poor increased to the breaking point and the Amsterdam synagogue leaders dispatched many to the Dutch West Indies and elsewhere.  The Ashkenazi community had as many poor but fewer wealthy elite to finance deportations.  They spoke only Yiddish and were wholly Jewish in culture.  The two communities lived in close proximity within the Jewish quarters of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and other lesser urban centers.  They gradually became a more amalgamated group, but Dutch authorities frequently distinguished the two groups in administrative reports.[iv]

     Dutch Jews maintained contact with the larger Jewish community of western Europe.  It remained common for Dutch Jews to intermarry with German, English, and Polish Jews, and the Amsterdam Jewish Quarter ("Jodenbuurt") always depended on Germany and Poland for its spiritual leaders.  Most of the chief rabbis and rabbinical teachers until the twentieth century were born outside of Holland.  This influx of foreign Ashkenazic leadership kept Dutch Jewry very Yiddish.  Except for the earliest beginnings, the Sephardic Jews drew their leadership from the Dutch-born or at least Dutch-raised.  The Ashkenazim, therefore, always felt inferior and the more cosmopolitan Sephardim felt superior, even in the mid-twentieth century.[v]  Although the Ashkenazim followed humbler occupations and were less aristocratic, they brought to the Netherlands a zest for scholarship, and their libraries, schools, and printing shops established the reputation of Amsterdam Jewry for broad learn­ing.  They kept as many printing shops busy as did the Sephardim during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which made Amsterdam a principal center of printing in Europe.  Nevertheless, it was the second-generation Sephardi, Spinoza, who rose to the intellectual pinnacle as the great rationalistic philosopher of the seven­teenth century, for which the embarrassed Sephardim excommunicated him; he lies buried in a Lutheran cemetery.[vi]

Mokum and Mediene

     The Jewish population increased slowly in the first half of the nineteenth century and more rapidly thereafter.  It num­bered an estimated 40,000 in 1795, reached 59,000 by 1850, and then nearly doubled to 115,000 by 1920.  Ashkenazic Jews, who were called "Hoogduitse Joden" (later "Nederlandsch Israelieten"), comprised 95 percent and Sephardic Jews, called "Portugese Joden," totaled only 5 percent after 1850.[vii]

     Europe's Jews, historically, lived in the largest cities.  They rarely could own land and were restricted by law to urban occupations in trade and commerce.  Their communal religious life dictated settlement close to the synagogues. Dutch city governments also granted favorable social and economic privileges to Jews in order to attract them and spur economic growth.  As a result, Jews were overrepresented in the large cities in every province (Table 1.1). They comprised 1.8 percent of the national population in 1839 but 4.0 percent of the urban population and only 0.6 percent of the rural population. Compared to a national urban population of 37 percent, the Jews were 81 percent urban, for an overshot of 44 percent.[viii]

     Traditionally, Dutch Jews were divided between those of Mokum (Amsterdam) and those of the Mediene (the provinces).  Although Jews lived in every province, two-thirds in 1830 lived in Noord Holland and Zuid Holland, although only one-third of the total Dutch population lived in these populous provinces.  In 1849, 56 percent resided in large cities, while the general population was not even 25 percent urban.  Over time the Jewish concentration in the two urban provinces became all the more pronounced, reaching 82 percent by 1930.  Likewise by 1930 over 80 percent of Dutch Jews lived in cities over one hundred thousand inhabi­tants.  Jews were an urban populace par excellence and concen­trated in the largest cities.  While the general population became more urban, the Jews "metropolized," specifically in Mokum-Amsterdam.  Already in 1849, 43 percent of all Dutch Jews lived there and by 1880 half lived in Amsterdam.  This city and London were clearly the two preeminent Jewish cities of western Europe.[ix]

     In 1829 Amsterdam's Jews, who had increased by 18 percent since 1812, comprised 10.7 percent of the city's population.  All but a handful lived on the crowded east bank of the Amstel River--the Old Side, and not in the fashionable Jordaan on the West Side, as is often supposed.  Conditions in the overcrowded "Jodenbuurt" were atrocious, compared to elsewhere in the city.  Indeed, Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter had the worst slums in all of Europe.  The row houses were small, dark, and unhealthy.  Trachoma, an eye disease carried from North Africa, was particularly rampant, affecting 40 percent of all Jewish children in the city by 1880, and a whopping 75 percent of students in the ghetto charity school.  The Jews tolerated such coarse conditions in order to live within the religious and social community.  Suffering engendered a sense of solidarity and mutuality.  Only after the revolution of 1848 spawned a rising middle class did the "atmosphere of gloom" gradually lift and the life of the proletariate improve.[x]

     The diamond trade brought increased prosperity to Dutch Jews after 1860.  The Sephardi minority were heavily involved in the diamond industry, which was centered in their neighborhood (the "Weesperstraat") on the fringe of the Jewish Quarter.  Free public schooling under the liberal 1862 education law also opened the future for Jews.  Most were street vendors and petty merchants, dealers in old clothes and rags, cattle traders, and butchers.  They virtually monopolized secondhand clothing, which before the introduction of ready-made clothing was a vital business.  They also peddled fruits and vegetables, potatoes, pickles, fish, flowers, and raffle tickets.  Jews were greatly underrepresented in manufacturing and the professions throughout the nineteenth century.  Only medicine and brokering were open to them.  Except for diamond workers, their home industries of cigar, dress, and shoe making were low paying.  Jews peddled out of necessity and preference.  Although their occupational choices were limited by government regulations and guild restrictions, they enjoyed the freedom of selling, which was compatible with their segregated living, Yiddish speaking, Sabbath and festival observances, and the desire to pass their businesses from father to son.[xi]

     While Amsterdam had ten times as many Jews as any other Dutch city in 1840, and its Jewish ghetto numbered nearly 11 percent of the city population, other regional trade centers also had sizable Jewish communities.  In Hoorn, an international harbor on the Zuider Zee about 25 miles north of Amsterdam, 7.7 percent of the population was Jewish.  During the Golden Age Hoorn was a center of Dutch colonial trade with the East and West Indies, and in the eighteenth century it became the marketplace of West-Friesland.  Lesser Jewish clusters were in the eastern textile centers of Meppel, Zwolle, and Zutphen; the northern capitals and market hubs of Leeuwarden and Groningen; the government center of The Hague; and the port city of Rotterdam.[xii]  Very few lived in the southern Catholic provinces or in rural areas.  Those in the Mediene resembled their compatriots in Mokkum and they flowed back and forth freely.  Thus Holland's Jews were geographically dispersed if not culturally assimilated.

The French Era and "Dutchification"

     One of the primary challenges of Dutch Jewish history is to explain the impact on Jewish legal rights of the Napoleonic "liberation" and creation of the Batavian Republic.  Napoleon Bonaparte liberated German and Polish Jews from their political and religious feudalism and promoted égalité, so German Jews welcomed the French "rights of man."  But Dutch Jews, except for a minority of secular liberals, were "greatly grieved" by the French conquest in 1795; they had long been fervent supporters of the House of Orange.  Although they lacked full civil rights and had been segregated socially, culturally, and economi­cally, they had enjoyed full religious liberty and many other freedoms.  Dutch Jews were never officially ghettoized as in the remainder of Europe.[xiii]  Dutch historian Ivo Schöffer describes the pre-Napoleonic system as a milder form of apartheid, whereas Simon Schama more positively calls it "benign pluralism."  Jews could not marry Gentiles, join craft guilds, or move freely to the inland provinces.  This forced them to concentrate in certain trades such as merchandising.  But their synagogue leaders (parnassim) had almost complete control over religious laws and customs.  Thus, by design and by preference, the "Jewish nation" was a people apart, an "alien community."[xiv]

     French liberals would jeopardize this comfortable situation and force the Jewish nation to become merely a religious congregation of assimilated individual citizens in a unified state. Understandably, therefore, most Jews chose unconditionally for the Dutch Orange monarchy, which had safeguarded their autonomy, and against the Francophile Protestant liberals (known as Patriots) who, in turn, were hostile to Jews for this reason. A few Jewish liberals in Amsterdam formed a separate club, Felix Libertate (Happiness through Freedom), because the Patriots did not accept them. But the Jewish liberals, mostly drawn from the German community, met with opposition within the Jewish camp as well as outside of it. The synagogue authorities considered expelling them, but they forestalled disciplinary action by separating and founding their own congregation.[xv]

     The Protestant Patriots and Jewish People's Society in 1795 welcomed French troops as liberators who would topple the conservative Orange monarchy and impose democratic reforms. Indeed, the National Convention of the Batavian Republic proclaimed full emancipation of all Jews on September 2, 1796, even before the first Constitution of 1798. This famous and controversial decree opened all guilds and government offices to Jews and made them eligible for general poor-law relief. They also became subject to compulsory military service. The Jews thus gained what the benign Orange rulers had not granted, namely, legal recognition as a separate faith community equal with Protestants, Catholics, and Secularists.

     Orthodox leaders and their followers viewed the French reforms as a ruse that would eventually destroy their autonomous community by forced integration.  They would become a mere religion, the Dutch Israelitic Congregation.  In 1806 these fears became real when Napoleon changed the Batavian Republic into the kingdom of Holland and put his brother Lodewijk (Louis) Napoleon on the throne as king of Holland (1806-1810).  The liberators had become occupiers.  The enlightened King Louis was determined to raise the Jews' socioeconomic standing and to integrate them into the larger society.  He terminated congregational authority and for the first time brought the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities together under one organiza­tion by a royal decree in 1808, which instituted a Supreme Consistory for the Dutch High-German Jews.This decree, based on the French consistorial system, marked a radical centralization in Jewish religious life.It removed one of the pillars of Jewish communal life, the autonomous power of the congregations; it forced the parnassim to surrender all authority to the Amsterdam Consistory, now dominated by radical democrats.Louis additionally required the chief rabbi to be Dutch-born or a resi­dent of Holland for a minimum of six years, and he promoted the Dutch language in synagogue worship by ordering the use of a Dutch instead of Hebrew Bible and by requiring all religious instruction in the Dutch tongue. Moreover, rabbis could no longer consecrate marriages outside the synagogue, or face dismissal. The traditional Jewish leaders understandably resisted these organiza­tional and language changes of the new regime. They particularly objected when King Louis suppressed Yiddish, the language of Dutch Jews, and tried to replace it with the Dutch language.[xvi]

     This "Dutchification" was worrisome enough, but there were other forced changes. An 1808 decree compelled all Netherlanders who did not yet possess an official surname to select surnames and register them with civil authorities.[xvii]  The Supreme Consistory subsequently required Jews to use the new family names in all religious ceremonies on pain of being jailed or branded for refusal.[xviii]  In 1810 when Holland was fully incorporated into the French Empire, the new centralized bureaucracy was strength­ened by a host of intrusive laws, taxes, and military conscrip­tion.  In 1811, for example, the French regime required all Dutch citizens to register with the government by name, stating their occupation, the rental value of their home, and the names of all members living in the household.  All this was to levy taxes and conscript young men for the French army.[xix]

     Not all bureaucratic changes gave Jews cause for concern.  Louis Napoleon tried to encourage Jewish legal equality and he opened a few government positions to the Jewish Patriots.  He abolished special oaths for Jews.  Markets held on Saturday were changed to another weekday.  Jews, like other religions, were permitted to collect money to care for their own poor, and they were allowed for a brief period in 1809 to form their own infantry battalions complete with Jewish officers and kosher foods as another way to maintain their identity.  But Jews never warmed to this military corps and King Louis had to abandon his plan within a year.  The men were distributed among the French regiments.[xx]

     All of the legal and religious "reforms" had less adverse effects on the Dutch Jews than did the Napoleonic war, which pitted England against French expansionism.  Because of the war the years from 1793 to 1813 were very difficult economically.  The French occupation and British blockade of 1807 brought trade and shipping to a halt.  The staple market in Amsterdam dried up and the harbor of Rotterdam virtually closed.  Many trading companies shut and international merchants, such as Dutch Jews who traded heavily with London, were devastated economically.  By 1810 many were ruined and faced bankruptcy.  The economic hardships of this severe depression extended to all segments of the Dutch popula­tion owing to widespread unemployment, inflation in food prices, and the shortages of poor relief monies.  The Jewish poor suf­fered more than most because they had long experienced extreme poverty because of discrimination.[xxi]

The Emigrant Stimulus

     The net result of these myriad economic and religious problems resulting from the Napoleonic conquest and wars was that Dutch Ashkenazic Jews began to emigrate to the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century.[xxii]  German Jews, by contrast, did not begin emigrating for another fifteen to twenty years, until after the end of the Napoleonic war in 1815 when French revolutionary ideals were crushed.  In the conservative reaction to Napoleon's defeat in Germany, the ideal of religious freedom also collapsed.  Germany was impoverished and exhausted by the wars and the authorities moved to strengthen traditional institutions, raise taxes, and abridge the rights of Jews.  There were even Jewish pogroms and riots in 1818 and 1819 in Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and elsewhere.[xxiii]

     In the Netherlands Jews enthusiastically welcomed the restored monarch King Willem (William) I.  But William was also an enlightened despot, who continued the "Dutchification" begun during the French era, which further increased government demands, including regulation of the Jewish denominations.  He required that all synagogue announcements and publications on behalf of the government, as well as the synagogue minutes, be written in Dutch.  An 1817 decree mandated that lessons in the Jewish charity schools must be given in pure Hebrew and Dutch "to the exclusion of the bastard Jewish language."  However, he placated the Orthodox parassim by abolishing the odious French creation, the Supreme Consistory, whose arbitrary actions had finally caused riots in 1813 in the Amsterdam Jewish Quarter and other centers, and by restoring the autonomy of the ten (eventually twelve) main synagogues throughout the country.  Most important, the legal emancipation decree of 1796 remained intact in the revised Constitution of 1814.  It forbade traditional discrimina­tion by the guilds, abolished all special fees on Jews as Jews, and guaranteed that Jews would be eligible for public poor-relief.  However, the new government in 1814 created the Israelitisch Kerkgenootschap (Jewish Church Society), which was a centralized, hierarchical body to control both Sephardic and Ashkenazic congregations.  The objective was to end religious independence and integrate Jews (and all religious groups) into Dutch society.[xxiv]

     This latter goal was aimed at elevating the Jewish poor who remained among the poorest of the poor despite French égalité.  Alms statistics in 1799 reveal that over 80 percent of Amsterdam's Ashkenazic Jews and 54 percent of her Sephardic Jews had to rely on the public dole for food and fuel.  Housing conditions were equally atrocious.  Except for a few wealthy merchants who lived in stately mansions, Amsterdam Jews were crowded into their old jodenhoek where the average dwelling housed 2.9 families with 12.5 persons (compared to 2.1 families with 7.9 persons in Christian dwellings).  The French period made conditions even worse, owing to the economic dislocations caused by the abolition of the United East India Company, the imposition of new taxes, and the sharp cuts in govern­ment spending to reduce the national debt.  By 1805, 82 percent (19,600 out of 24,000) of Amsterdam Jews were classified as poor.  In the face of such extreme deprivation, the few prosperous merchants were unable to provide the customary philanthropy to their brethren.[xxv] 

     King Louis's creation in 1808 of the Supreme Consistory inadvertently contributed to the collapse of the Jewish relief system.  One of the new rules abolished the monopoly of the communal meat market of the Amsterdam congregation and allowed the faithful to buy kosher meat (at lower prices) from private butchers.  This was catastrophic for the congregation's Poor Relief Fund because profits from the meat market largely funded the relief system.  The 18,000 persons dependant on the relief fund saw their monthly stipend reduced by 90 percent!  As historian J. Michman aptly noted: The bill for the "liberal" reforms was "paid by the paupers of Amsterdam."[xxvi]  Indeed, despite the new liberal rules, the Jews received very little poor-relief until 1825 when the government created the Dutch Israelitic Charity Board to house the infirm and ailing, pay unemployment relief, and provide fuel and bread to the

indi­gent.[xxvii]

     The impoverishment of already poor Amsterdam Jews was the chief reason, in H. Daalder's view, for their mass exodus from the city in the first decades of the nineteenth century.  As many as a quarter of the Ashkenazim and 15 percent of the Sephardim sought work in the interior provinces, in England, and even in the distant United States.  In 1859, 53 percent of the Ashkenazim and 62 percent of the Sephardim in Amsterdam were still on the public dole.  As late as 1879, 37 percent of the Ashkenazim lived on the dole, 20 percent at full assistance.  This put a great strain on benevolent funds.  In 1868 when 50 percent of the Jews in the city were unable to support themselves, the poor board budget totaled ¦57,000; the government provided ¦48,000 (84 percent) and the city's eight synagogues had to contribute the remaining ¦9,000 (16 percent).  Conditions only improved after new industries developed in diamond manufacturing, cigar making, and the needle trades, all of which offered Jews job opportunities.[xxviii]

From Nation to Congregation

     Dutch Jewish religious and cultural life fragmented in the nineteenth century era of emancipation and integration.  The emancipation law of 1796 and French occupation began a process of secularization and "Dutchification" that was speeded up by the forces of centralization, urbani­zation, democratization, and segmentation (verzuiling) of Dutch society.[xxix]  Intimacy and face-to-face contacts, which had always characterized life in the Jewish quarters of Amsterdam and other cities, gradually lessened.  The Jews were a close-knit minority, a separate subculture, tied by their religion to each other and to the great talmudic centers of eastern Europe, from which their religious leaders came.  But by the end of the century, Jews had transformed themselves into a "disparate people with little affinity to either each other or to world jewry," according to Netherlands historian H. Daalder.  Secularism was rampant and Dutch Jews were alienated from the centers of Jewry in Europe and America.  As one man declared:  "I am a Dutchman of the jewish faith, who does not care about the jewish faith."  Clearly, such Jews were well along the path of assimilation; they had been successfully "Netherlandized," transforming themselves from a Jewish nation into Jewish Netherlanders.[xxx]

     The marker of the assimilation of Ashkenazic Jewry in Holland was the gradual loss of the Yiddish language, which for centuries was the social glue of the community.  Yiddish gave way to vernacular Dutch during the nineteenth century.  The process began during the Revolutionary era.  Leaders of the Dutch Jewish Enlightenment, such as Moses Cohen Belinfante and Jonas Daniel Meijer, viewed Yiddish with "disgust" as a "mixed-language" jargon, and promoted Dutch in religious instruction and Bible translation.  In 1787 young Portuguese Jews in The Hague first translated the Hebrew prayers of the Portuguese worship rite into the Dutch language.  In 1808 Belinfante headed an Amsterdam educational society that began to translate the Hebrew Bible into Dutch.  Meijer, the president of the new Central Consistory in 1809, worked to bring the project to completion.  Although the French conquest in 1810 stalled their efforts, King Louis Napoleon encouraged the use of the national language in religious education.  Belinfante in 1806 had launched the first Dutch-language periodical in the Netherlands, published in Amsterdam.[xxxi]

     In 1813 the French-created Amsterdam Consistory, acting on instructions from Paris, decided in the interest of promoting national unity that in all synagogue services and record keeping, only the French or Dutch language, and not Yiddish or Portuguese, must be used exclusively.  Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities objected, but the Ashkenazim were especially angered.  Most Sephardim at least spoke Dutch, but few Ashkenazim could do so.  They could not understand announcements in Dutch or read Dutch Scriptures.  Since it was often necessary to communicate, syna­gogue authorities repeatedly had to obtain permission to issue publications in Yiddish.  The language rulings so angered the Hoogduitse that when French troops hastily withdrew from Amsterdam in late 1812, riots broke out against the Consistory, which finally yielded on the French language but kept the require­ment of Dutch for official government announcements and synagogue minutes.  Yiddish and Portuguese were permitted, however, in the worship rites.[xxxii]

     The restored monarch Willem I continued the pressure to introduce Dutch.  In 1814 he decreed that all synagogue minutes and official correspondence be in Dutch and that all leaders must know the language.  The chief rabbi must be completely fluent, but the cantor (hazan) need only be able to read Dutch.  Later, in 1827, a government decree offered rewards for the best trans­lation into Dutch of Jewish sermons and educational materials.  But the Jews resisted.  Until 1842 the Sephardic Synagogue of Amsterdam held its proceedings mainly in Portuguese.  Yiddish did not fully disappear from Jewish synagogue schools until the 1870s.  The Leeuwarden Synagogue did not drop Yiddish until 1886, and when they did so, older members seceded in anger.[xxxiii]

     The greatest pressure to jettison Yiddish in favor of the Dutch language came in the last quarter of the nineteenth century under Chief Rabbi Dr. Joseph Hirsch Dünner.  During his lengthy and domineering rabbinate (1872-1911), Dünner banned Yiddish and made Dutch compulsory in the synagogue schools.  This hastened assimilation from within because the denominational schools were the only place to learn Yiddish.  Previously, many youth had attended private Jewish day schools taught in Yiddish, but these schools disappeared rapidly after the 1859 educational reform under which the government established free public schools that were religiously neutral.  Even more of a detriment, the law ordered all denominational schools to close by the end of 1861.  While the more cultured Jews began to speak Dutch thereafter, the masses only gradually interspersed Dutch words in their Yiddish conversations.[xxxiv]

     The enthusiastic espousal by Jews of secular public schools in the 1850s and 1860s speaks volumes.  This was at the same time that Calvinists and Catholics were successfully obtaining public monies to build separate Christian schools.  Dutch society was being restructured at midcentury into confessionally distinct institutional pillars with Calvinist, Catholic, socialist, and liberal (or neutral) schools, newspapers, and labor organizations.  Indeed, one could live from the cradle to the grave within a religious bloc.  But Jewish leaders missed the boat by refusing to accept the challenge of pillarization.  They rejected as "reactionary" the advice of a few leaders to establish state-subsidized Jewish denominational schools and instead sent their children to the so-called neutral or mixed schools where socialist philosophies gained ground.  Rabbi Dünner only belatedly in the late 1890s suddenly changed his views about state schools and called for more denominational Talmud Torah schools such as the lone one in Amsterdam that had survived, but it was too late.  By then, many of their youth were lost to the faith and blended into the increasingly pluriform Dutch society.  Jews "never coalesced into a real pillar" as did the other religious communities in the Netherlands.[xxxv]

     The Jewish failure to meld into a single religious bloc may have been exacerbated by a lack of leadership.  From 1838 to 1874 the Ashkenazim had no chief rabbi, and the Sephardim had none from 1822 to 1900.  As the Ashkenazim lost control of the Yiddish language they also became cut off from the nourishment of eastern European thought.  The synagogues became secularized and increasingly elitist, and this caused the poorer working classes to gradually drift away.  The result was that Jews were successfully integrated into Dutch society and they came to share the general provincialism of the Netherlands in world affairs.  By the end of the nineteenth century, they found socialism more attractive than Zionism and many could no longer speak Yiddish.  Even among the proletariate in the Amsterdam "Jodenbuurt," the physical center of Dutch Jewry, the transition to Dutch was well underway.[xxxvi]

     Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century the liberal and prosperous bourgeois component of Netherlands Jewry was weakened, at least temporarily, by the wars and political centralization.  Then in the second half-century its proletarian members left Orthodox Judaism behind for new ideologies.  No longer did the synagogue and Yiddish language bind the community together as it had before the Napoleonic era, although Jewish community life continued to flourish, especially outside of Amsterdam.  "No to Palestine, Vote Red" proclaimed an election poster in the Amsterdam Jewish Quarter in 1912.[xxxvii]  It was a sign of the times.

     Sigmund Seeligmann, the leading intellectual of Dutch Jewry in the early twentieth century, praised his countrymen for their adaptation to the national culture in his famous article "Die Juden in Holland, eine Charakteristik" (1923).[xxxviii]  Seeligmann coined the phrase "species hollandia judaica" to describe this single essence of Dutch Jews--their assimilative nature.  But contemporary Netherlandic scholars such as Jozeph Michman and Robert Cohen disagree.  Michman notes that Dutch Jews and especially those of Amsterdam in the decades before the Holocaust maintained stronger ties with their Jewish tradition than did German, French, and Italian Jews, as is evidenced by their much lower rate of mixed marriages.  These same data show that the Dutch Jewish sense of identity was stronger than among their gentile compatriots.  While the Dutch Jews had become more secular and acculturated, they had not amalgamated with their non-Jewish neigh­bors.[xxxix]

     Michman credits the survival of the Jewish "essence" to the strong commitment of Amsterdam Jews to a traditional and even "petrified" Orthodoxy throughout the middle decades of the nine­teenth century.  Only in the 1870s and 1880s was Orthodoxy finally destroyed by economic modernization, particularly the expansion of the diamond trade during the "Cape Time," which ruptured traditional insti­tutions such as the synagogue and undermined religious observ­ances such as the Sabbath.  A "revolutionary secularization process" destroyed Orthodoxy suddenly within one generation.  Jews in the higher social strata had slowly been assimilating for some time, but now the masses suddenly in a few decades experienced a rising prosperity that lured them to abandon their traditional values and pious living for a new-found freedom and materialism.  They desecrated the Sabbath by doing business rather than going to the synagogue.  Thereafter, Jewish social solidarity rested primarily on secular bases such as Zionism and socialism.[xl]

     Whether the diamond trade caused the sudden break with tradi­tion rather than the earlier surrender of Jewish leaders to secular public education is debatable.  But, in any case, if the religious declension provided the context for emigra­tion, the cause was primarily economic.  Political and religious freedoms were at stake in the Napoleonic years.  But historic Jewish poverty was worsened by the French conquest with its economic dislocations and increasing government demands on Dutch citizens.  Following the American Civil War, a second Jewish immigrant wave developed because the belated industrialization in the Nethelands left artisans without adequate work and hope for the future.

Chapter 1 Endnotes