Going Dutch

"Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of 17th-Century Amsterdam" by Daniel M. Swetschinski, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 394 pages, $55

What makes the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in the 17th century so fascinating is that there was nothing inevitably Portuguese or Jewish about its members. They were in fact Marranos, descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and resettled in Portugal, where they were forced to convert to Catholicism in 1497. Many remained insincere Christians, continuing to practice Jewish traditions in secret, but when the Inquisition was introduced in Portugal in 1536, they were forced to seek friendlier terrain.

They turned from being "Catholics without faith to being Jews without knowledge, acquiring their Judaism by will" - as Daniel Swetschinski, a Jewish historian, notes. Swetschinski grew up in Amsterdam; he has worked for the Jewish museum there and taught in several American universities.

Their attachment to things Iberian is fairly easily explained. The author argues that their secular Iberian cultural heritage combined with that of Holland to afford them a biculturalism that proved to be an asset in international trade. He further contends that their Iberian love of gambling helped propel them to prominence on the burgeoning Amsterdam stock exchange.

However, this community's ties to Judaism, ultimately, remain puzzling. Swetschinski brings to bear abundant evidence that the community, which came to number about 3,000 souls, maintained deep linguistic, cultural and economic ties to the Iberian Peninsula while at the same time establishing a full Jewish life - complete with worship in synagogues, Jewish schools, charity organizations, and meticulous attention to the dictates of Jewish law.

But when it comes to the question of how and why the descendants of the New Christians came to act so much like Jews, the author admits he has no ready answer. He fails to show us - nor does he indicate whether he truly tried to discover - how these "Jews by will" became so knowledgeable about religious law, ritual and practice. Who were their teachers? How did they initially acquire their Jewish education? How much of their Judaism had they retained during the period of the Inquisition in Portugal? What was lost?

The author notes that their reintegration into Judaism was fairly smooth, but fails to describe that process. Nor does he provide any insight into why the vast majority of these Portuguese Jews chose to adhere to Judaism at a time when thinkers such as Baruch de Spinoza, Daniel de Prado, and Daniel de Ribeira - all excommunicated members of the community - were arguing along with some Christian-born thinkers against the immortality of the soul and in favor of the autonomy of human reason.

Swetschinski deluges us with information. He goes to great lengths to list the titles of books in the private libraries of the community's leading members, to detail marriage records in order to show migratory patterns, and to explain the various commercial routes and the products which the Portuguese Jewish community - initially almost entirely made up of merchant families - used to trade with the world. He describes and explains the entry of Jews into fields such as diamond-polishing, publishing, sugar-refining and tobacco-processing.

Furthermore, the author outlines the history of the various congregations, the internal disputes, the method of communal taxation and the charities these levies supported. But his study falls short in integrating the abundant data he has collected into a conceptual framework.

Swetschinski posits any number of interesting ideas: He suggests, for example, that the large proportion of the community followed (the "false messiah") Shabbetai Zvi because they saw in him a validation of their rejection of the role of Jesus as messiah, and a chance to redeem their sins through penitential prayer and fasting. But this idea is just thrown in, without development or sufficient proof. He sticks in a lot of other ideas, particularly in his final chapter, but without guiding the reader in a clear direction, leading from the evidence to his conclusions.

Tacked-on conclusion

Futhermore, I spent most of the way though the book puzzled by its title. In the final pages, he concludes that the Portuguese Jews were reluctant cosmopolitans because of their "cosmopolitan" yearning for religious and ethical harmony, and their "reluctant" definition of a Portuguese Jewish identity - "a new identity that was neither Iberian or Jewish, a hybrid that had no direct continuity from the past but coupled their Portuguese past with a Judaism that was ancestral and biblical."

This conclusion comes after some 300 pages describing how enthusiastically Jewish and Iberian the community was - and how unconflictedly bicultural and willing to live with ambiguity it proved itself to be. Thus, Swetschinski's conclusion - and title - seemed to me tacked on, and not an integral outcome of the balance of evidence he himself presents.

Moreover, it seems to me that Swetschinski under-emphasizes the Dutch aspects of Portuguese Jewish life. He notes that Portuguese Jews referred to Amsterdam as a "New Jerusalem," but fails to mention that Dutch Christians of the period also referred to their city thus. The Dutch, like the Jews, traditionally consider themselves to be the Chosen People, and view the wresting of their low-lying land from the sea to be part of a divine plan.

This is not the only area in which Swetschinski may have sold us short on the Dutch influences on the community. I was intrigued by a charity set up by the Portuguese Jewish community to encourage the re-emigration of poor members, as their leaders put it at the time, "to countries of Judaism where they can live more easily." Swetschinski attributes this to the commercial traditions of the community. But this particular form of charity struck me as very Dutch in being utilitarian, self-serving and generous all at once. It is not vastly different from post World War II policies in the Netherlands of giving financial inducements to Dutch citizens to emigrate to Canada and Australia due to fears of overpopulation. And it bears some resemblance, too, to modern-day policies in the Netherlands, which has at times provided economic inducements to encourage foreign Turkish workers to go back to their native land, or to its policy of providing job-retraining for foreign women caught in the web of illegal prostitution before repatriating them.

The Dutch, like the Jews, are a highly practical people, able to live quite well with ambiguity and to finesse their own laws and regulations out of practical considerations Swetschinski describes well the basic attitude of tolerance with which Holland has long been imbued. But he also notes that the Jews were never officially granted freedom of worship by Amsterdam. They were recognized as a community in 1598 and allowed to become burghers (citizens of the city) under condition, as was stated at the time, "that before making the oath [of citizenship], they be warned that in this city no other religion can nor may be practiced than that practiced publicly in the churches."

But in the ensuing years, the community established synagogues and when there was protest against this "public" form of non-Christian worship, it became "private" by transferring ownership of the synagogue to an individual citizen - a practical solution that strikes me as both typically Jewish and typically Dutch.

Swetschinski's study is, however, not only weak when it comes to bringing Dutch culture to bear on the lives of the Portuguese Jewish community. It suffers more generally from a lack of context and background. His chapter on Portuguese Jewish commercial activity is virtually impossible to follow without a good grounding in the history of Dutch-Spanish and Spanish-Portuguese relations.

This book may well be of interest to the expert, as well as to well-versed members or descendants of the Portuguese Jewish community seeking information about the lives of their ancestors. But for the general lay reader, it is not particularly accessible in either content or style. This is most unfortunate because the history of the Portuguese Jewish community provides an interesting counterweight to the usually lacrimonious narrative of the Jewish people. It provides an example of how a Jewish community, voluntarily created, evolved and flourished in an atmosphere of exceptional tolerance and acceptance.

The reporter is a member of the Ha'aretz-IHT editorial staff, spent four years in the Netherlands as a correspondent for Reuters News Agency.

	View of the Portuguese synagogue (left) and the two Ashkenazi synagogues of Amsterdam, in 1710.