Schwab
When we think of New York Jews, we think the Lower East Side and Eastern European immigrants and bagels and working in sweatshops and things like that. But this is hundreds of years before that.
From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the show where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael
I’m Yael Steiner and today we’re kicking off a very special series for America’s 250th birthday — starting from the earliest arrival of Jews in the New World to some pretty recent history.
Schwab
This series has been a really long time coming. People have written to us throughout the years asking for some of these stories or asking for us to do more stories about the Americas. And here it is.
Yael
Schwab, I am ready to learn about American Jewish history. What do you have?
Schwab
So if we want to start learning about American Jewish history, we need to start at the beginning. And it is a very good place to start. And what that means is figuring out where the beginning actually is — whether it’s in New Amsterdam, which becomes New York, as we know really well, or in a city called Recife in Brazil.
Yael
A very good place to start. So I just returned from Central America. I had a wonderful trip with my family to Panama. And one of the things that I really tried to take away from my trip to Panama is that America is not just the United States — with respect to certain elements of history. And I think Bad Bunny did an amazing job of reminding us all of that during his Super Bowl halftime show. But having just been there, I do think maybe it is in Recife.
Schwab
Yes. So we’ll start our story actually in very recent history — two years ago in New York City in 2024. New York City has been, I think we can say it, the capital of American Jewry, and for a lot of its time, the capital really of world Jewry. It is the city that’s home to the largest number of Jews in the world today of any city and has really been the central location for Jews in the American story.
Two years ago in 2024, the New York City Council passed legislation to commemorate annually a day called Landing Day — early September; note the date — that on September 1654, the first real community of Jews landed in what later becomes New York but was called New Amsterdam at the time.
Yael
I’m embarrassed that I don’t know this. I should really read more news.
Schwab
This is probably a story that you have heard or that listeners have heard. I know when I started talking about this, my kids said they learned this in school in fourth grade. But in 1654, sometime in early September, a week or so before Rosh Hashanah of that year, a boat carrying 23 Jews — although slight asterisk on that number — “23 souls big and little” as they are described in a court filing, arrive in New Amsterdam. They were refugees that had been up and down the Atlantic Coast and found safe haven in New Amsterdam. This is the first real group of Jews, and they even start a congregation there in New Amsterdam that goes on to be called Shearith Israel.
Yael
Well, I was going to ask you where they were refugees from, but now I’m going to assume that they were refugees from Amsterdam?
Schwab
We’ll get to that. So they’re Spanish-Portuguese Jews, right, who have a connection to Amsterdam, but they are actually refugees from Recife in Brazil.
Yael
That was not on my bingo card.
Schwab
Yes, so we’re going to have to go there and explain what it is that they were doing in Brazil. But first, I want to just pin this story — this idea of a boat full of Jews who have been turned away from multiple harbors, who are fleeing persecution. This sort of foundation myth of Jews in New York City sounds an awful lot like another popular foundation myth in American history, which is the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. And we’ll talk about this at the end, but it’s — like many foundation myths — very helpful in framing the story of Jews in America, but historically there’s quite a bit to unpack and untangle.
Yael
I am excited because I knew that there were Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam and founded Shearith Israel, a Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. I’m familiar somewhat with that story, but I had no idea that they came from elsewhere in the New World. I just assumed they came from Europe like everybody else.
Schwab
And that’s right — that’s not usually what we think. We think they probably were fleeing Europe in some way, but they were actually fleeing Brazil. So to get to that story of what were they doing in Recife, Brazil, and what were they fleeing, we need to wind back much farther than 1654. And I think we need to start with two very consequential events that I know you know about in 1492. And at the center of that story is my least favorite couple of all time.
Yael
Brad and Angelina.
Schwab
Yeah.
Yael
Ferdinand and Isabella. I know how you feel about them. You have spilled the tea on them before.
Schwab
Ferdinand and Isabella. Yes. We have discussed them a bunch before, including in a great episode last season on the Crypto-Jews of Portugal. But in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella do two very important things. The first is that they expel all Jews from the united kingdom of Spain. They made it increasingly difficult for Jews to live in Spain — which they had created by their union — and a lot of Jews converted. Finally in 1492, if you had not converted, you needed to leave. So all of a sudden, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been living in Spain as part of that community for a very long time needed to leave Spain and were dispersed all throughout Europe. A lot of them go to Portugal, which we talked about last season.
Yael
And they eventually get expelled from Portugal as well.
Schwab
Right, and yeah, they end up getting expelled from Portugal a few years later in 1497. Same thing in Portugal — you had to leave if you were a Jew. If you convert, you’re allowed to stay. And the Portuguese actually forcibly converted a lot of them rather than letting them leave.
Yael
Bad for the economy. Right? Is that what we talked about?
Schwab
Yes, yes, yeah — great memory. That’s exactly what it is. So the Portuguese were not so quick to get rid of their Jews. They really appreciated their value to the economy and wanted them to stay. But if you have to not be Jewish — okay, then we’ll convert you. So after these series of events in the late 1400s, there’s now all throughout Europe this huge group of — and there are various names for this — conversos, Crypto-Jews, New Christians. Jews who converted to Christianity in varying degrees of sincerity. Sometimes they converted just because it’s what allowed them to stay. Sometimes they converted more sincerely. Even within families it wasn’t always equal.
I’ll use the term Crypto-Jews, but may sometimes use some of the others. There are all of these Crypto-Jews in Spain, in Portugal, and also now all throughout Europe — in France — and then increasingly as the 1500s go on, a lot of them move to Amsterdam. And a lot of these Crypto-Jews are sort of connected as a community. They actually have their own term for it, this Portuguese phrase: A Nação — the Nation. And that was like: we’re all part of something together. And as this gets handed down over multiple generations, there’s still a sense of unified identity among these Crypto-Jews, conversos, whatever you want to call them.
Yael
Kind of like the way we talk about the diaspora.
Schwab
Exactly. It is a diaspora because they are spread out from their main locations. And this becomes, as trade is expanding a lot in the 1500s, this incredibly valuable mercantile network all throughout Europe. Because in every port city, you can find someone who’s a member of A Nação — like your people — who you trust, who you can deal with.
What this kind of reminded me of: when my wife was applying in her fourth year of medical school for residency, we traveled to a bunch of different cities because she was applying in those places. Everywhere we went, we were able to connect with someone we knew, or someone we knew knew somebody. It’s like the Orthodox Jewish network.
Yael
You’re saying Jewish geography is a valuable tree.
Schwab
So we would play that Jewish geography game and find someone who was happy to host us in their home for two days in Pittsburgh and go to somebody else for a meal, talk to someone who also moved there for residency. And my wife’s classmates would ask: how do you know someone in every city? And I was like: we don’t really know somebody, but we’re part of this community and network and someone’s happy to connect us — the same way that we sometimes host people in our home who we don’t know but are part of our same community. So A Nação, yeah. The original Jewish geography was that. Anywhere from Amsterdam to Lisbon to any port in Europe, there was someone where you’d say: I don’t know you, but my grandmother says she grew up near you as neighbors originally in the other city, or I recognize your last name.
Yael
We’re on a sow, they’re on a sow.
Schwab
And that is very important when you have to trade in some way — because here’s a person you can trust, you can work with, and you can create this really valuable network.
In some cases this network — and these “port Jews” as they’re called in different places — actually allows people to move and find better places to live. To ground it in a specific example: there’s a young man born in 1605 by the name of Isaac Aboab da Fonseca. He’s born in Portugal in 1605, so this is a hundred years after the Jews have been forcibly converted. He is a descendant of a family of conversos. He’s part of A Nação, right? His family has been living outwardly as Christians but secretly as Jews for a hundred years in Portugal.
Yael
Mm-hmm.
Schwab
They flee the Portuguese Inquisition, which is really looking into people like this and persecuting them. They go first to France and then later to Amsterdam, where Jews could live much more openly. He gets to Amsterdam when he’s 12 or 13, and there he’s able to be raised much more openly Jewish and actually gets a really great Jewish education. He’s sort of a rising star in the rabbinic scholarly world of Amsterdam — most of which is Spanish and Portuguese refugees or people of Spanish and Portuguese descent — and he becomes a recognized Chacham in Amsterdam who is also working with the community to bring more people to Amsterdam.
Yael
Chacham being the equivalent of a scholar-communal rabbi in a Sephardic community. Rabbi, yeah.
Schwab
Right, that’s what we would call rabbi, but the term at that time is Chacham.
Here’s the second track — the other thing that Ferdinand and Isabella did in 1492, which ties into this story, and these two are going to connect in a major way. I’m sure you know this one as well.
Yael
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Schwab
This supposedly Genoese man named Christopher Columbus — and we do not have time to get into this, but there’s a lot of discussion about Columbus’s own possibly Crypto-Jewish heritage — comes to Ferdinand and Isabella with this idea for a voyage. They fund it. He sails across the ocean and discovers — big air quotes around “discovers” — the Americas and the New World. And that launches an entire age of exploration and colonization that we’ve all learned many times in grade school.
And very quickly, all of the European monarchies — at first very much Spain and Portugal — think about all the ways they can exploit the resources of this New World. Spain and Portugal originally decide it all belongs to the two of them. They draw a line and decide half — east of this line — belongs to Portugal, which is mainly just Brazil. And everything to the west, which they did not realize was two entire continents, would belong to Spain.
Yael
And sort of famously until today: huge Portuguese influence in Brazil, even post-colonization era.
Schwab
Right, so yes. The Portuguese colonize Brazil and plant and harvest the immensely profitable sugar cane, which was very much powered by slave labor, but becomes hugely profitable for Portugal. They bring that sugar back to Europe. And in addition to their spice trade from the east, it establishes Portugal as a pretty major power, even though Portugal is actually just a very small part of Europe.
This catches the attention of the other European monarchies — the Dutch and the French and the English — who are like: we need to get ourselves some colonies in the New World. And important for our conversation here, the Dutch hate the Spanish and the Portuguese because they fought their own war for 80 years — it’s called the 80 Years’ War — for independence from the Habsburg monarchy and the right to be their own independent republic. Also, there’s the whole Reformation happening at the same time. So not just is there this huge Crypto-Jew-converso network spreading all throughout Europe, but also now there’s a huge network of trading that incorporates the whole other side of the planet.
Yael
Right, right, right, right. Jews up until this point in history — and until today, unfortunately — are very used to relocation. So I’m kind of wondering if they were more likely to set out to the New World and try to stake their claim because they weren’t necessarily devoted to Amsterdam or anywhere else they were living. Like it wasn’t as though they were citizens or at home among the other people in Europe. So why not try somewhere else?
Schwab
100% exactly correct. A lot of people who set out for the New World are Jews or are Crypto-Jews who, like you’re saying, are not deeply rooted because they don’t feel necessarily so safe or accepted in the places that they are. And I’ll go even further: in some cases they specifically want to move away from the center of these things. The Portuguese are colonizing Brazil — you know who are excellent candidates to go to Brazil? Portuguese Crypto-Jews who want to move away from the center of the Inquisition. People who can climb the social and economic ladder. People who see: okay, maybe several thousand miles away in Brazil, there’s just less accuracy in genealogical records. People aren’t going to remember that my family converted 60 years ago. I have more of a chance to remake myself. In the New World, you can be a new man.
Yael
Start fresh.
Schwab
Yes. Another gentleman who exemplifies this — a man by the name of Diogo Diaz Querido. He’s born in Portugal, also to a converso family, and he goes to Brazil to stake his claim and make his fortune in the 1580s. By 1591, the Portuguese Inquisition had moved to Brazil because it was so necessary — there were so many Crypto-Jews in Brazil, they needed to set up the Portuguese-Brazilian Inquisition.
In 1591, he flees from this Brazilian Inquisition and goes to Amsterdam. He was shipping sugar back to Europe and actually using contacts in Amsterdam for insurance — because the Dutch invented stock companies and insurance and a whole bunch of things like that. So he flees to Amsterdam where he’s able to live openly as a Jew, he converts fully back to Judaism, and starts recruiting others like Isaac Aboab — becomes a leader in this community and tries to pull more people like him with a similar background into it.
What eventually happens in Brazil, as it becomes really prosperous, is — as is often the case — some of the Europeans look at a successful colony and think: you know what’s a lot easier than starting our own colony? Taking somebody else’s already successful one. And that is what happens later with New York, as we all know.
In 1630, the Dutch — who again hate the Portuguese — seize Brazil. They send a massive number of ships. It’s not the official Dutch army; it’s the Dutch West India Company, which is like one of the largest armies in the world.
Yael
Right. It’s a corporate mercenary force.
Schwab
Actually one of the most powerful military forces, really. They seize Brazil because Brazil is a great colony to have. So the Dutch take it over in 1630 and seize Recife, which is this very important city and trading post in Brazil. And now this is under Dutch control.
A whole bunch of Jews from Amsterdam — because Amsterdam was the place Jews were fleeing to — start coming over to Recife. And they realize the population of Recife, even before they get there, is by some estimates more than half Crypto-Jews. Because that’s exactly who would be willing to risk a journey to the New World, and then if they were successful, would bring over a lot of their friends and family.
Now Recife has this mix of Amsterdam Jews and Crypto-Jews, and the Crypto-Jews — now that it’s Dutch Brazil, now that they’re allowed to live in the open — sort of come out and are able to re-Judaize and establish this really prosperous and flourishing Jewish community. They build multiple synagogues.
Yael
Obviously can’t have just one.
Schwab
So there’s this thriving Jewish community. And what do you need in your synagogue? A rabbi. So they send for a rabbi from Amsterdam. The person that they send is our friend from before, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca — who is exactly this story in a nutshell. He’s born in Portugal to a converso family. He goes to Amsterdam. He’s able to live openly. He studies the texts. And now he’s the guy who can go be the head of this congregation that’s a mix of Amsterdam Jews who have been Jews their whole lives and Portuguese Crypto-Jews who are in varying degrees of having hidden this.
Yael
He’s the perfect candidate. The search committee would be proud.
Schwab
He is the perfect candidate. And I think — if that’s where the story had ended, and as you know, that’s clearly not where the story ends — but if the Dutch had retained control of Brazil, we would be talking about Recife the way that we talk about New York now. Here’s this bright young rabbi, here’s this community that’s emerging, connected to all of the important mercantile ports throughout the world, with the right political power, the right economic power — a haven that they start calling Jews toward: hey, come to Recife. This is the place. This is the haven we’ve been looking for.
But that’s not what happens. The Portuguese are never particularly happy about losing their colony, and they want it back. So they go to war to reclaim it. The Jews fight for the Dutch — not just the Amsterdam Jews who were actually Dutch, not just the Amsterdam Jews who came there, but the Jews who had settled there originally as Portuguese also fight for the Dutch, understandably.
Yael
Yeah, I was going to say — it’s not like the Portuguese did that much to endear the Jews to them.
Schwab
Yeah. The Jews fight hard, the Dutch fight hard. Aboab da Fonseca came in 1641. The war intensifies over that decade. In 1646 there’s a siege of Recife, and there’s a quite serious famine in the city because they’re really not able to access anything. Aboab writes a number of things, all of which are firsts: the first Hebrew poetry written in the New World, the first prayer written in the New World.
He writes this vidui — this confession — that addresses some of the sins in the community. He’s worried about two things that are very fascinating. He’s worried about his own failure to get the Crypto-Jews to abandon some of their Christian practices, which is probably pretty hard to do. But also — and this is so interesting as a prelude to the story of Jews in America — he is very concerned that with all of the opportunities, a lot of people in his community are chasing material success, and he’s worried about the effect this has on their souls and on their religious practices.
Yael
Feels very prescient. The biggest danger in America is how easy life is, right? That’s the biggest problem for the continuation of Jewish life.
Schwab
There’s a siege, there’s a famine — right. Eventually the Dutch lose this war, despite the Jewish fighters on their side and despite Aboab’s prayers and poetry. In 1654 — which brings us back to the year we started with — the Portuguese take it back over. And part of their motivation, at least from the writing at the time, is that the Portuguese are offended by how openly Jews are able to live. One of the Jesuits writes to the king in Portugal and says: Jews are practicing and worshiping openly in synagogues to the scandal of Christians worldwide. This is so bothersome to us that there are Jews worshiping in synagogues openly? You need to come conquer this and put an end to it.
Yael
I don’t want to jump the gun, but one thing I did learn on my trip to Panama is that the Inquisition came to Panama. Jews were burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Panama. So I’m wondering: did the Inquisition then return to Brazil? Is that why the people leave?
Schwab
So yeah — the Portuguese take it back over. The Dutch cede it; they say, all right, fine, you can have it back. It’s over — 1654. They hand it back over to the Portuguese, and the Portuguese say: okay, obviously all Dutch people have to leave. And all Jews of any kind — regardless of their national origin, whether Portuguese, Dutch — any Jew, we don’t care where you’re from, needs to leave. No Jews in this colony at all.
Yael
Judenrein.
Schwab
Judenrein, right? Again. Like this — 160 years after 1497, when they’re expelled from Portugal, Jews are now expelled again. This time from Recife in Brazil.
So they scatter all over the place. At this point they have this wealth of contacts because Jews have been expelled so many times that they know places they can go and they have this network. So a lot of them return to Amsterdam or go to Amsterdam if they weren’t from Amsterdam. A lot of them go to the Caribbean where the Dutch retain colonies, including Curaçao and Barbados, where there was a Jewish community for a time. If you ever happen to find yourself in Barbados, there’s a great Jewish museum which has what I think is the oldest still-extant mikvah in the Western Hemisphere.
Yael
Amazing. So cool.
Schwab
So they scatter all over the place, and 23 of these Jews from Recife — which is a very small number of them — wind up on a French ship called the Saint Katrina, which goes to a bunch of different places and ends up going much farther north for some reason to New Amsterdam, where they arrive in September of 1654.
We don’t fully understand exactly how that series of decisions got made. But it is fascinating because so many of them went to Amsterdam that some of them wound up in New Amsterdam — this Dutch colony in a much colder part of North America that was really not a major place at all. It literally wasn’t New York; it was New Amsterdam.
Yael
Right. New York wasn’t New York. New Amsterdam. But it wasn’t New York City, center of the universe.
Schwab
It was founded in 1625 as an outpost for trading fur, which people would get farther upstream in what we would call Albany now. Manhattan — which, you know, the foundation myth is that it was purchased for like a box full of trinkets — was just useful as a trading outpost and really not a major site of anything at all.
Yael
$24. But it was the site of the first Jewish community in what is now the United States.
Schwab
Yeah. And what has become the largest Jewish community in the United States.
Yael
Right. And what’s fascinating to me — and I think you’ll probably cover some of this — is that the foundational Jewish community in the United States was not the Eastern European Ashkenazi stereotypical New York Jew that we talk about today. It was very much not that, a totally different type of cultural Judaism. Their community — and there is still a Spanish-Portuguese community here — but it’s not what other people think of, right?
Schwab
Right, it’s not — we think of, when we think of New York Jews, we think of the Lower East Side and Eastern European immigrants and bagels and working in sweatshops and things like that. But this is hundreds of years before that.
But it’s a very powerful myth. This group of 23 Jews — none of whom were wealthy; they fled Recife with whatever they had. When they arrive in New York, the biggest problem is that they owe money for their passage, which they don’t have. That is the first problem they have to confront: someone has to pay the captain of the ship. And several of them are held by the court until someone can come up with the sum of money that needs to be paid. So this is 23 poor, huddled — it’s really, I think, a very American story. Poor, huddled, tempest-tossed, fleeing persecution, this group of men, women, and children who then finally are allowed to stay in New York.
Here’s where there are so many things that we have to unpack and challenge about that narrative. First of all, they are defended in court — that’s how we know there’s the court filing that describes them as “23 Jews, big and small” — by this man named Solomon Pietersen, who is a Jew who was there before them. Otherwise, how would he be able to defend them? So they’re not the first Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam.
Yael
How did he get there?
Schwab
He’s an Ashkenazi Jew of European extraction and we don’t know exactly why it is that he came, but probably for some sort of business. He was there as far as we can tell alone. And the 23 — asterisk on that number, because there’s just one source for this specific number and some people challenge it. But there are at least three other Jews already in New Amsterdam because they are working with this group. There’s Solomon Pietersen and another person who also becomes a sort of important figure named Asher Levy — which is a classic Jewish name.
The governor of New Amsterdam at the time, Peter Stuyvesant — yeah, you’ve heard of him. Did you know he’s like a horrible person — or was a horrible person?
Yael
It’s certainly not the first thing that comes to mind.
Schwab
Right, like what I know about him is that he had a wooden leg from some sort of previous campaign. But he writes a letter shortly after they arrive back to the Dutch West India Company, who are really in charge — he’s the governor of New Netherland — and he says: we have a huge problem. These Jews showed up and I very much would like them to leave. I won’t read his entire letter, but he says, for ourselves as also for the general community of your worships, this “deceitful race, such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ, be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony.” So — not great. There’s a lot that Peter Stuyvesant would not like about what New York looks like today.
Yael
He would not like what’s transpired in the past 400 years.
Schwab
And I will say — not to defend in any way Peter Stuyvesant, because this is pretty awful stuff — but it wasn’t just a Jews thing. He hated anybody who wasn’t exactly like him. But he really doesn’t like these Jews and really doesn’t want them to stay. His overseers in the Dutch West India Company do not agree with his bigotry. They are very aware of the fact — and this is an interesting historical note — that about 4% of the major shareholders in the Dutch West India Company were Jews, because it’s an Amsterdam-based large trading company. So they are like: look, if we can figure out how it is that they can contribute to the general welfare and not become a drag on the community, they should be allowed to stay. It’s not a “we actually care about Jews” or “we support religious freedom” thing — it’s more like: we don’t want to upset our shareholders.
Yael
You’re going to have to get over it.
Schwab
You’re going to have to get over it — provided that it can be shown that they’re going to contribute positively.
Yael
Well, already by the time of the American Revolution, we know that there were some prominent New York Jews who helped finance the revolution. So presumably from these 23 — or 26, if you include the people who are already there — there is some springboard to success within 100 years.
Schwab
Yes, and that’s exactly the question I had. And here’s the most interesting sort of strange twist in this story. Solomon Pietersen defends them in court. Asher Levy, who supports them, is able to work with a bunch of connections and helps them. He becomes the first to sue for full citizenship. The Recife 23 are establishing the community. They have a Sefer Torah brought from Amsterdam. They make this synagogue that eventually becomes Shearith Israel. And Asher Levy — who is Ashkenazi, from Vilna, and arrived about two months before them — is very happy to work with them but is sort of pursuing his own thing of getting actual citizenship rights.
This community does not seem to fully last. In 1663 the Torah was sent back to Amsterdam, I guess because it wasn’t getting used. And in 1664, 10 years after the Jews landed in New Amsterdam, the English take over New Amsterdam and rename it New York, as we know. All citizens need to publicly swear allegiance to the English Crown, and they kept record of that. In 1664, there are only two Jews in what’s now called New York to swear allegiance to the British Crown: Asher Levy and one other. Neither of them are from this group of Jews from Recife. So they either all left, went somewhere else, or kind of disappeared into assimilation — I don’t know. But it’s this foundational myth, yet it’s not what actually sets things in motion.
Yael
They’re like the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Like they’re there and then they’re gone.
Schwab
Right. And that sort of explains this question you had about Roanoke. They set a precedent. I think that’s why it’s interesting going back to the city council declaring Landing Day, because it is the first time that Jews arrive and are officially given permission to be here and to establish a congregation — but that actual group of people and community isn’t contiguous with the rest of the history of Jews in New York.
These protections stayed in place. They are recognized, and that sets the stage for Dutch recognition of Jews — which the English then keep in place. The English, who had a checkered history by that point of recognizing Jews, allow them to stay in New York, allow this recognition of the Jewish community to continue. But these actual Jews don’t end up staying and keeping it going. Shearith Israel is still that synagogue, but at some point it was presumably totally defunct and then revitalized.
Yael
Right. Presumably with only two people it was hard to keep it going. So how did these two people become more than two people?
Schwab
More Jews eventually come, just as New York grows. And again, like New York in 1664 is not New York yet. It’s not really much of anything. But as it booms, more and more Jews end up coming. And really, New York doesn’t become what it becomes for Jews until much, much later. There is not a huge Jewish presence — Jews are like 13% of residents of the city of New York today or something like that — but they were a negligible portion of residents of New York at the time of the revolution.
Yael
I recently spent some time at Fraunces Tavern, all the way downtown in Manhattan, which is where Washington said farewell to his troops. And it has a really nice small museum about the revolution. And there are several pre-revolutionary maps — one of them is of the lower tip of Manhattan, which was really the only part of Manhattan where immigrants to the New World lived. And on this map, which is pre-Revolutionary War, there is a notation for Shearith Israel — both for the synagogue and for the cemetery. Which is impressive given the short amount of time in which they were there, and it’s not as though every single structure was on this map.
Schwab
So going back to this idea of the myth — and what do we take from it — because that story of 23 Jews landing in New York City: there’s a whole bunch of parts we don’t typically think about with it, including that all of those Jews ended up leaving at some point. But it also is a story of America taking in religiously persecuted people — and yet that’s also not exactly what happened. In discussing this with our education lead, Henry Abramson, he pointed out that what really saved the Jews more than any progressive ideas about religious freedom was the fact that they had economic power back in the Netherlands and in other places. And maybe that’s the essential American lesson: that Jews need to be powerful enough to look out for Jews wherever it is that they go. Which is a very — I don’t know — something I would hear my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, say.
The Amsterdam community is what saves the Jews of Recife. What allows them to go to New Amsterdam. That very strong Jewish community in Amsterdam — and when we say strong, it was not just religiously vital but also commercially vital — is able to exert influence all over the world and be, in this case, a steward of Jews very far away, because it was that powerful vital center.
And as we’re going to see in the unfolding of these episodes about America: what becomes the new vital center for Jews around the whole world is America, and specifically New York. I wrote in my notes: New Amsterdam is the new Amsterdam. It’s funny that it works out that way. But it takes the place of Amsterdam as this very powerful center of Jewish life, Jewish community, and Jewish power.
The other thing I want to mention — just because it’s so interesting — going back to the siege in 1646 and Isaac Aboab: he does not stay. He goes back to Amsterdam and is an important part of the Amsterdam Jewish community. He is part of the group of rabbis who excommunicate Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam.
Yael
I was just about to ask if he was one of the people who — yeah, interesting.
Schwab
Uriel da Costa. But he — I mentioned this before — he writes this poem during the siege, one of the firsts: the first Hebrew poem written in the Americas. And he has this pun in there where he refers to Brazil as Kur HaBarzel — this Hebrew phrase from Deuteronomy, but also appearing in other places. It means sort of like an iron furnace, an iron crucible. And it’s a pun because barzel is iron in biblical Hebrew, but it also sounds like Brazil. Brazil is like the Kur HaBarzel. And it’s this crucible of affliction that they will pass through — perhaps also referencing the idea of Jews passing from slavery in Egypt, which is interesting because there are actual slaves in Brazil, which we have not dwelt that much on. So, as difficult as the experience was for Jews — it was also more difficult for others.
Now I’m forgetting who it was so I’m sorry that I’m not attributing it properly, but: Kur HaBarzel — another possible translation for it, as like a furnace in which things are heated and mixed together — is a melting pot. And this is like in 1646, way before anyone is using that metaphor, he is describing Brazil as a place where things are heated and forged and brought together. It ends up being in North America, not in Brazil.
And it’s just fascinating — the idea of New Amsterdam taking the place of Amsterdam, but also this image of a melting pot, the image of affliction being turned into an opportunity for aspiration, the concept of huddled people fleeing persecution. These are all such essential elements of an American mythos — an Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty way of looking at things. But these were all happening hundreds of years before that.
Yael
I thought about that when you said that the ship they were brought on was French — the Statue of Liberty was also brought to us courtesy of the French — and then being the icon of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I think you’ve done a really good job of exemplifying how these people — and what you said before about “tempest-tossed” —
Schwab
Yeah, and it is a deliberate reference. I think we’re doing an episode later this season on Emma Lazarus and on her poem on the Statue of Liberty. But Emma Lazarus is a descendant of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. This is part of her history — this idea.
Yael
So we bring it all full circle. And also Emma Lazarus is not the same person as Emma Goldman, which I thought for a very long time.
Schwab
To start us off on our season of the American Jewish story: this is where it all starts, with this complicated, not-so-simple myth, this idea of the first Jewish community and all of the things that come after it. But it really does set the stage in a lot of different ways for what Jews are and their relationship to America.
Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael
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Schwab
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Yael
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Schwab
And by me, Jonathan Schwab. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson, and our editors are Rob Perra and Ari Schlacht.
Yael
We’re produced by Jenny Falcon. Thanks for listening.