History Forum / General / General Topics / May 2005

This article in the NYT arts section about a museum exhibit offers some
interesting details/dynamics about refugees from Recife who were
descendants of refugees from the Spanish Inquisition.

See article for the Dutch-appointed Governor's un-enlightened attitude
about them thar Catholics & Lutherans too.

www.nytimes.com

COPYRIGHTED BY THE NY TIMES 2005

Connections
For American Jews, a Home in Exile

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: May 23, 2005

It was not the sort of welcome that would typically inspire
commemoration. Twenty-three men, women and children, exiled from their
homes, arrive in the port of New Amsterdam. The ship's skipper demands
his payment. But the travelers had been robbed by pirates on the high
seas on an earlier part of their journey and stripped of most
belongings.

The courts authorize an auction in which their remaining goods are
sold. The principal debtors are imprisoned. And Peter Stuyvesant, the
Dutch director general of New Netherland, also appeals to his employers
at the Dutch West India Company to deny them permanent residence. He
did not want Jews coming into New Amsterdam, and the human cargo that
had made its way from Brazil consisted of Jews.

But however inauspicious this greeting was in September 1654, it has
now become the spur for a season of commemoration, including at least
three new museum exhibitions - one at the Museum of the City of New
York ("Tolerance & Identity: Jews in Early New York, 1654-1825") and
two at the Center for Jewish History ("Greetings From Home: 350 Years
of American Jewish Life," presented by the American Jewish Historical
Society, and "Starting Over: The Experience of German Jews in America,
1830-1945," presented by the Leo Baeck Institute).

Partly this is because the date of that ship's arrival offers a
numerically satisfying 350th anniversary, but it also marked the first
community of Jews coming to settle in what was to become the United
States.

A bit forced, perhaps, as anniversaries go - but there is still
something unusual and subtle in what transpired during this initial
encounter, something easy to miss amid the celebrations of what Jews
later made of themselves in the United States and what the United
States made of them.

Ultimately, it is a tale of successful immigrations. The exhibition
"Tolerance & Identity," in its portraits and displays, in its accounts
of first synagogues and its samples of early correspondence, shows how
dynasties of Jewish families took root. Some of these family trees lost
branches through assimilation, some through tragedy. But over time they
flourished at the center of New York's cultural, political and
religious life of the 18th and early 19th centuries: writing, engaging
in commerce and politics, donating books to the first public library,
joining the first New York Chamber of Commerce.

More ambitiously, "Greetings From Home" tries to encompass 350 years of
such interaction in two exhibition rooms. Attention is given to such
figures as the Jewish philanthropist Adolphus S. Solomons (1826-1910)
who founded what is now Mount Sinai Hospital and worked with Clara
Barton to create the American Red Cross. Here, too, is a photograph
showing the primal origins of the city's department stores among Jewish
immigrants (Abraham & Straus, Macy's, Gimbel's) and rare items like an
1891 Yiddish-English phrase book for prospective immigrants, which
teaches the aspirant phrases like "I never saw such a handsome head as
yours" or "My hand is tired with working."

There is almost too much in this exhibition, and much of it is familiar
in general character if not in detail. But it also says something about
the tensions of the American Jewish experience to see a 1913 passport
application in which the Hungarian-born Eric Weiss, using sleight of
mind if not of hand, announces himself as Harry Houdini, a native of
Wisconsin. And surely, too, not all was smooth going. A young woman's
college rejection letter from 1947 reads, "It is with regret that we
are obliged to return your application, but our Jewish quota has been
filled for some time."

Nonetheless, the interaction of Jews with the United States was more
profound, more wide-ranging and more successful than with any other
country in recent history. And that success does indeed have a subtle
connection to that first, inauspicious landing in New Amsterdam.

Peter Stuyvesant, after all, did not just oppose the Jewish settlement;
he found Jews' very identity damning. He argued that they were
"deceitful," "very repugnant" and "blasphemous." He believed that if
they stayed, New Amsterdam would start down a slippery slope: let the
Jews in, he wrote to his employers, and then "we cannot refuse the
Lutherans and Papists."

But the Dutch West India Company (which included Jews on its board)
understood something the haughty overseer did not. Running New
Amsterdam was not a matter of plundering colonial assets and shipping
them back home; the Dutch had different ambitions.

As the historian Jonathan D. Sarna points out in his recent book,
"American Judaism," they had also learned how active Jews could be in
industry and trade. New Amsterdam was a destination for Jews who had
fled Spain and Portugal but who spoke their languages and remained in
contact with citizens of their empires.

These were the Jews who, in a short time, helped turn the Dutch-run
Brazilian city of Recife into an important center for Jewish life and a
flourishing center of trade - at least until it was captured by the
Portuguese in 1654, which led to the escape of those 23 Jews to New
Amsterdam.

Colonization, the Dutch West India Company seemed to suggest, is not a
matter of exploitation. It requires certain kinds of relationships.
Tradecraft is more than barter; it presumes a rational system of
exchange, in which the particular individual's identity matters less
than issues of trust and communication across cultural differences.

The company was explicit about this, suggesting to Stuyvesant that he
should "allow every one 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."

The notion that economic life was related to a form of political
freedom, that opportunity and responsibility were intertwined, created
what we now call modernity. It gave the Jews their first home in exile.
And for all the flaws and failings, something similar was offered to
other immigrant groups over the course of 350 years - which is why this
anniversary is more important than it might seem.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every
other Monday.

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