THE EARLY DECADES (1595-1648)

As for the Jews, their role in the Republic and in Dutch culture constitutes a unique chapter in world history. In Holland there was resurrected what formerly arose in Spain and Portugal and was later expelled—a Jewish community tolerated and even esteemed by its neighbours: the ‘Portuguese’ community of Amsterdam, the circle in which Rembrandt sought his inspiration, subjects and friends, and the circle which produced Spinoza. True, many Jews, streaming into the eastern provinces from Germany or else crowding into Amsterdam, shared neither the prosperity nor the great respect enjoyed by their Portuguese brethren. People and state alike thought them deceitful and often felonious; they were made to share the age-old obloquy of Israel, but not too harshly. They were neither persecuted nor cut off from the rest of the population.

This is how J. H. Huizinga, the greatest Dutch historian of modern times, characterized the special place of the Jews in the Republic of the United Netherlands, and the unique role of Dutch Jews in Jewish history. On many counts the position of Dutch Jewry, certainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was atypical of Jewish history in the wider sense. Huizinga was right to stress that it was as unique as it was important. For it was thanks to that unique position that Dutch Jewry gained a measure of prominence quite out of proportion to its relatively small size.

Judged by demographic standards, the Republic was never one of the great centres of Jewish life, but judged by the importance of Dutch Jews in international trade, finance, culture, and politics, Dutch Jews from the early seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries constituted one of the most influential Jewish communities in the world and by far the most prominent in north-western Europe. In other words, during the first centuries in which Western civilization developed its essentially transatlantic character, based on the interaction between Europe and the American continent, Dutch Jews formed by far the most important Jewish Community on the Atlantic coast, easily exceeding in prominence those in England, Ireland, France, North America, and Scandinavia.