The first documented Jew to set foot in North America was the Prague-born Joachim Gaunse (or Gans) who, recruited by Sir Walter Raleigh, arrived in 1585, served as the metallurgist and mining engineer for the ill-fated English colony on Roanoke Island, and conducted soil experiments in Carolina. Returning to England, he gave Hebrew lessons, was accused by the Bishop of Chichester of being a Jew – as if that was a crime – and was tried for blasphemy in 1589. Some historians maintain that he was the model for the Jewish scientist Joabin in Sir Francis Bacon’s utopian novel, New Atlantis. Thereafter, a small number of Jews made brief stops at various American ports to conduct trade.
The first organized Jewish migration to North America, which arrived in the New Amsterdam colony founded by the Dutch West India Company in September 1654, was a group of twenty-three Sephardi Jews, men, women, and children, fleeing persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition after Portugal’s conquest of Dutch Brazil. Their arrival in America is broadly considered to be the commencement of the history of Jews in New York and in the United States.
The twenty-three Brazilian Jews were the descendants of some 5,000 Jews who had been living in Recife since the mid-1500s, most having become conversos and holding themselves out as Christians. When the Dutch captured portions of Brazil from the Portuguese in 1624, some Brazilian Jews openly returned to the practice of their Jewish faith, but their newly-found religious freedom was to be short-lived. When Portugal recaptured Brazil only thirty years later in 1654, Recife’s 600 Jews all fled the Spanish/Portuguese Inquisition, most finding their way to Dutch-ruled territories in the West Indies or to Amsterdam itself, seeking the relative tolerance of religious diversity allowed by the Dutch authorities.
The twenty-three fleeing Jewish refugees were en route to Amsterdam aboard the ship Valck when, after a stop in Jamaica, their ship was attacked by a Spanish privateer, who stripped them of their valuables. With a return to Europe now impossible and having no other choice, the refugees were forced to agree to a usurious demand by Jacques de la Motthe, the captain of the French frigate St. Catrina (some historians refer to the ship as the St. Charles) – later characterized by scholars as “the Jewish Mayflower” – to take them to New Amsterdam, which they thought would be a hospitable destination. They arrived in New Amsterdam harbor in September 1654, just a few days before Rosh Hashana.
Soon after their arrival, de la Motthe filed suit against the Jews for failure to pay the balance of their passage. Peter Stuyvesant, who had become the Dutch colonial Director-General and Governor of New Amsterdam on July 28, 1646, seized the Jews’ meager remaining possessions and ordered them sold at auction and, when this failed to raise funds sufficient to satisfy de la Motthe’s claim, he jailed two members of the group.
The Jews were supported by some Ashkenazi Jewish traders – including notably Jacob Barsimson and the Polish-born Asser Levy – who had arrived only a month before them from Amsterdam via London on the ship Peereboom. As reflected by the Court Minutes of New Amsterdam (1654), the tribunal ruled against the Jews:
Jacques de la Motthe, master of the Bark St. Charles, by a petition, written in French, requests payment of the freight and board of the Jews whom he bought here from Cape St. Anthony according to agreement and contract in which each is bound in solidum, and that, therefore, whatever furniture and other property they may have on board his Bark may be publickly [sic] sold by order of the Court, in payment of their debt. He verbally declares that the Netherlanders, who came over with them, are not included in the contract and have satisfied him. Solomon Pietersen, a Jew, appears in Court and says that nine hundred and odd guilders of the 2500 are paid, and that there are 23 souls, big and little, who must pay equally. The Court having seen the petition and Contract, order that the Jews shall, within twice 24 hours after date, pay according to contract what they lawfully owe; and in the meanwhile, the furniture and whatever the Petitioner has in his possession shall remain as Security, without alienating the Same.
Early colonial life did not reflect contemporary notions of religious freedom and, in particular, Jews, Quakers, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Catholics were forcibly expelled from Puritan colonies in New England. Until 1759, Jews and Protestants were barred from French North America and, throughout the Spanish colonies, the Inquisition actively persecuted – and executed – converted Jews who proclaimed Catholicism but were suspected of secretly continuing to practice Judaism. Even the far more tolerant Dutch tried to exclude all but members of the Dutch Reformed Church from their American colonies, and the new Jewish community in America faced vicious antisemitic opposition to their settlement.
Leading the antisemitic discrimination against the Jews in New Amsterdam was Stuyvesant, who was strongly committed to the supremacy of the Dutch Reformed Church, determined to promote morality and social cohesion through the enforcement of Calvinist orthodoxy, and unwavering in his desire to deport Jews from the colony. His antisemitism had manifested itself earlier in the years 1642-1644 when, as governor of Curaçao, he had sought to restrict Jewish immigration to the Dutch colony and prohibited Jews from owning slaves.
As he wrote to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company on February 22, 1654, he hoped that the Jews, “with their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians, the deceitful race – such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ – be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony.” Referring to Jews as a “repugnant race,” he was concerned that Jewish settlers, who would “infect” the colony, would become financially dependent on the other hard-working colonialists. He contended that Jews should not be granted the same liberties enjoyed by their co-religionists in Holland, lest members of other persecuted minority groups, such as Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, Papists, and other undesirables be attracted to the colony.
In a correspondence that may be found in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society, the Jews of New Amsterdam wrote to their fellow Jews in Holland seeking assistance. The “merchants of the Portuguese Jewish Nation” in Amsterdam petitioned the Dutch West India Company on behalf of their co-religionists in the New World, arguing that Jews were permitted to reside in Holland and even to invest in the Company and that, as such, there was no rational reason why the situation should be any different in New Amsterdam:
To the Honorable Lords, Directors of the Chartered West India Company, Chamber of the City of Amsterdam The merchants of the Portuguese nation residing in this City [of Amsterdam] respectfully remonstrate to your Honors that it has come to their knowledge that your Honors raise obstacles to the giving of permits or passports to the Portuguese Jews to travel and to go to reside in New Netherland, which if persisted in will result to the great disadvantage of the Jewish nation. It can also be of no advantage to the general Company but rather damaging. There are many of the nation who have lost their possessions at Pernambuco and have arrived from there in great poverty, and part of them have been dispersed here and there. So that your petitioners had to expend large sums of money for their necessaries of life, and through lack of opportunity all cannot remain here [in Holland] to live. And as they cannot go to Spain or Portugal because of the Inquisition, a great part of the aforesaid people must in time be obliged to depart for other territories of their High Mightinesses the States-General [the Dutch government] and their Companies, in order there, through their labor and efforts, to be able to exist under the protection of the administrators of your Honorable Directors, observing and obeying your Honors’ orders and commands. It is well known to your Honors that the Jewish nation in Brazil have at all times been faithful and have striven to guard and maintain that place, risking for that purpose their possessions and their blood. [The Jews distinguished themselves in the defense of Pernambuco, remaining there until its fall in 1654.]
Yonder land [New Netherland] is extensive and spacious. The more loyal people that go to live there, the better it is in regard to the population of the country as in regard to the payment of various excises and taxes which may be imposed there, and in regard to the increase of trade, and also to the importation of all the necessaries that may be sent there…
Your Honors should also please consider that many of the Jewish nation are principal shareholders in the Company. They having always striven their best for the Company, and many of their nation have lost immense and great capital in its shares and obligations. [The Dutch West India Company lost heavily through the capture of Brazil by the Portuguese.] The Company has by a general resolution consented that those who wish to populate the Colony shall enjoy certain districts of land gratis. Why should now certain subjects of this State not be allowed to travel thither and live there?…
Therefore the petitioners request, for the reasons given above (as also others which they omit to avoid prolixity), that your Honors be pleased not to exclude but to grant the Jewish nation passage to and residence in that country; otherwise this would result in a great prejudice to their reputation. Also that by an Apostille [marginal notation] and Act the Jewish nation be permitted, together with other inhabitants, to travel, live, and traffic there, and with them enjoy liberty on condition of contributing like others…
The directors of the Dutch West India Company rescinded Stuyvesant’s decision and Jewish immigrants were permitted to remain in the colony, provided that their community remain self-supporting. Company directors were motivated not by great affection for Jews or devotion to the principles of religious freedom but, rather, because it had great economic need for increased settlement in New World territories and because it faced internal pressure from the company’s Jewish shareholders; at the time, 4% of the Company’s chief investors were Jews and, by 1658, that percentage had grown to 6.5%. On April 26, 1655, Company Directors wrote back to Stuyvesant:
Honorable, Prudent, Pious, Dear, Faithful [Stuyvesant]… We would have liked to effectuate and fulfill your wishes and request that the new territories should no more be allowed to be infected by people of the Jewish nation, for we foresee therefrom the same difficulties which you fear. But after having further weighed and considered the matter, we observe that this would be somewhat unreasonable and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss sustained by this nation, with others, in the [Portuguese re-] taking of Brazil, as also because of the large amount of capital which they still have invested in the shares of this company. Therefore after many deliberations we have finally decided and resolved to apostille [i.e., to note in the margin] upon a certain petition presented by said Portuguese Jews that these people may travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there, provided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation. You will now govern yourself accordingly.
Nevertheless, Stuyvesant, refused to abandon his campaign against the Jews of New Amsterdam. Taking a different tack to rid the colony of Jews, he put unyielding pressure on the Colonial Council to bar Jews from serving in the volunteer home guards until the Council levied a special tax of 65 stivers (approximately 3 Dutch guilders) on Jews to pay for others to serve in their place. On August 28, 1655, the governing council of New Amsterdam decreed that the Jews of the colony would not be permitted to serve beside other residents in the local defensive militia because “disgust and unwillingness” of Gentile members of the citizens bands to “to be fellow-soldiers with the aforesaid nation and to be on guard with them in the same guard house.”
On November 5, 1655, Asser Levy (?-1682) and Joseph Barsimson filed petitions with the colonial court seeking an order to permit them to stand guard as any other citizen or be relieved of the tax. In rejecting the petition, the court added insult to injury ruling that if the Jews were unhappy with the tax, they were free to take their leave of New Amsterdam at any time. After a bitter two-year battle, Levy, who would emerge as the great champion of Jewish rights in New Amsterdam, won the right for Jews to stand watch.
By 1655, the Jewish community of New Amsterdam had grown to the point that they had secured a separate Jewish burial ground and had secured the loan of a Torah scroll from the Amsterdam synagogue, which was brought to them by Abraham de Lucena, a Sephardic merchant. But in a May 15, 1656 correspondence to Stuyvesant, the Company clarified that, while Jews in the colony would henceforth be permitted to trade and own real estate, they still would be prohibited from holding public office, opening a retail shop, or establishing a synagogue:
The consent given to the Jews to go to New Netherlands and then to enjoy the same liberty that is granted them in this country [i.e., Holland] was extended with respect to civil and political liberties, without the said Jews becoming thereby entitled to license to exercise and carry on their religion in synagogues or gatherings…
Perhaps encouraged by this correspondence, Stuyvesant refused to cease his efforts against the Jews, even after the Dutch West India Company forbade him from ejecting them from New Amsterdam and overruled his attempt to prevent them from serving in the colonial guard. Continuing his effort to circumscribe the Jews’ ability to participate meaningfully in the colony’s economic and civic life, he denied Jews the right to purchase and own real estate in the colony and, when Dutch troops captured the Swedish territory along the Delaware River in December 1655, he refused to issue trade permits to Jewish settlers in the new territory. Levy and others wrote to their associates in Holland protesting this discrimination and, this time, the very angry Company disciplined Stuyvesant for his actions. In a stern and strongly-worded June 14, 1656 correspondence, the Holland Directors beat Stuyvesant down:
We have here seen and learned with displeasure that [you], against our apostille of the 15th of February, 1655, granted to the Jewish or Portuguese nation at their request, have forbidden them to trade at Fort Orange and South River, and also the purchase of real estate, which is allowed them here in this country without any difficulty, and we wish that this had not occurred but that [you] had obeyed our orders which you must hereafter execute punctually and with more respect.
The Company added that the Jews
May quietly and peacefully… exercise in all quietness their religion within their houses, for which end they must without doubt endeavor to build the houses close together in a convenient place on one of the other side of New Amsterdam at their choice – as they have done here [in Holland].
A year later, Levy was granted one of the first trading permits in America and, denied the right to practice a trade in 1657, he prevailed on his petition for reversal. Interestingly, when he received his butchers license in 1661 – he served as the Jewish community’s shochet – it explicitly exempted him from having to slaughter hogs. In January 1678, Levy – who Jewish historical scholars believe was the son of Benjamin Levy, an Ashkenazi shochet in Recife – received permission to build a slaughterhouse near Wall Street which, upon its completion in October, became the first strictly kosher slaughterhouse in America.
Interestingly, in the wake of Dutch West India Company orders to Stuyvesant, Dutch tolerance for Jews in New Amsterdam was such that the authorities accepted a Jew’s Sabbath observance as grounds for his failure to attend court on a Saturday. In fact, court minutes in a 1658 case against Jacob Barsimson reflect a denial of a default judgment against him because he had failed to appear on Shabbat.
Stuyvesant feared that opening the colony to Jews would also lead down the “slippery slope” to pluralism and to permitting other abhorrent minority faith into the communal life of New Amsterdam and, in this regard, he was proven correct. When he banished a Quaker from the colony and vociferously condemned “sectarians” in 1663, he was again strongly admonished by the directors of the Dutch West India Company:
We doubt very much whether we can proceed against rigorously without diminishing the population and stopping immigration which must be favored at a so tender stage of the country’s existence… You may therefore not shut your eyes, at least not force people’s consciences, but allow everyone to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbor and does not oppose the government.
When the English captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed it New York, Jews were accorded even greater civil rights. Levy became, among other “firsts,” the first Jew in North America to own a house and to serve on a jury, and he was a founding member of Congregation Shearith Israel, which still survives today as the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.
Notwithstanding Stuyvesant’s overt antisemitism, there was no stigmatization of Jews by Christian colonialists, nor were there any pogroms or even serious Jewish encounters with the Church, but, by the time the English conquered New Amsterdam, most Jews had concluded, after decades of Stuyvesant’s persecution, that their future prospects in New Amsterdam were poor and all, except for Levy and his family, had left the colony and gone elsewhere.
Finally, the mental illness that drives leftists to destroy every work of art, statue, and remnant of persons now deemed to be “racist” or “unacceptable” has spread to some who are determined to erase all trace of Stuyvesant from American history and who, in particular, are demanding the removal all Stuyvesant statues in New York and across the United States. While they’re at it, they may as well change the name of Stuyvesant Park, beloved to so many; Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan at 16th Street and 2nd Avenue, with its own statue; Stuyvesant High School, which used to be one of New York’s greatest schools until the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DIE”) haters killed it in the name of “equity”; and the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, etc. In today’s idiocracy, perpetrated and promoted by the American left’s attack on patriotism and traditional American education, most people have never heard of Stuyvesant, and those who have recognize him as a leading figure in American and world history. I continue to argue that the threat from historical revisionists and the “politically correct” masses is far greater than allowing a statue of a vile antisemite of historical importance to remain.
