Among the foreign merchants mingling in the city was one group that stood out for its great wealth: the Portuguese, who dominated the spice trade. Although that was the official designation, the term “Portuguese” was often used during the 1500s to describe crypto-Jews from Portugal and Spain. The most famous of the Portuguese crypto-Jews doing business in Antwerp was the Mendes family, whose members included Gracia Mendes Nasi, better known as Dona Gracia, and her nephew, Don Joseph Nasi.
The Netherlands, including Belgium, had come under Spanish rule in the late 1400s. While the local Spanish authorities did try to expel the crypto-Jews, the commerce-minded Belgians, who had their own reasons for hating Spain, refused to cooperate. Antwerp, in particular, was a religiously tolerant city, and Portuguese crypto-Jews were allowed to settle there in 1536.
Although commerce was the city’s main activity, Dona Gracia used her considerable wealth and influence to help her fellow crypto-Jews still trapped in Portugal escape from the Inquisition, and Antwerp became one of the stops along the clandestine path to freedom. In 1544, Dona Gracia herself fled Antwerp for Venice. Her eventual destination was Constantinople, because the Ottoman Empire allowed Jews to practice Judaism openly.
Dona Gracia left Antwerp before the city was destroyed in the late 1500s by Spanish troops. By then the Protestant Reformation was sparking revolts throughout the Low Countries, and many of the crypto-Jews sided with the Protestants. When the Inquisition was introduced – the Spanish liked Protestants almost as much as they liked Jews – and trade between Antwerp and Spain came to an end, the crypto-Jews knew it was time to leave. Fortunately, they didn’t have to go far. By the end of the century, international trade had moved up the coast of the North Sea to a new port: Protestant Amsterdam.
All That Glitters
While Amsterdam’s star rose, Antwerp practically sank into oblivion. Yet there was one lucrative trade that remained, at least partially: the diamond industry.
Diamonds were discovered in India and brought to Europe during the time of Alexander the Great. Eventually, Venice managed to acquire a monopoly on the precious stones. Diamonds were sent north, first to Bruges and later to Antwerp. When Antwerp collapsed as a trade center, much of the diamond industry moved to Amsterdam. However, Amsterdam’s diamond merchants sent their second-rate stones to Antwerp, and soon Antwerp’s highly skilled diamond cutters were creating gorgeous finished gems from the inferior stones. Many of these expert craftsmen were Sefardim, descendants of the Jews who had fled from Portugal and Spain.
After diamonds were discovered in South Africa in the mid-1800s, Antwerp regained its prominence as the diamond capital of the world. By then many Ashkenazic Jews were fleeing from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and some of them ended up in Antwerp. First, they were hired as unskilled workers in the diamond trade, but soon many of them were heading their own shops.
The number of Ashkenazic Jews further increased in the early 1900s, when Antwerp became a major port of embarkation for ships sailing to the United States. Poor Jews saw that work was plentiful in the diamond industry and some of the approximately 500,000 Eastern European Jews passing through Antwerp decided to stay. The city’s Jewish population rose from about 1,000 souls in 1880 to about 35,500 by 1927. Yiddish became the lingua franca in Pelikaanstraat, the diamond district’s main street, while Yiddishkeit flourished.
Back to Brussels
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht brought an end to Spanish rule in Belgium. Under the new Austrian and French rulers, Jews from Germany, the Netherlands, and Alsace began to settle in Brussels, thus ending a nearly 400-year absence from the city. When Belgium gained its independence in 1830 – there were about 1,000 Jews living in Belgium at the time – Brussels became the country’s new capital. In 1831, the Jewish religion was legally recognized and the Consistoire Israélite de Belgique became the community’s official organization for interacting with the Belgian authorities. Construction for the city’s magnificent Great Synagogue began in 1876 and was finished a year later.
