Steven Nadler

There is no reason to believe that any of the marranos in the United Provinces showed their true Jewish colors until around 1603, and then they did so slowly and cautiously.

Thus, by 1614, the year the Portuguese Jewish community was finally able to purchase some land close to Amsterdam – in Ouderkerk – to serve as a burial ground, there were two well-attended congregations.

The council also demanded that the Jews keep to a strict observance of their orthodoxy, adhering scrupulously to the Law of Moses and never tolerating deviations from thebelief that there is “an omnipotent God the creator . . . [and] that Moses and the prophets revealed the truth under divine inspiration, and that there is another life after death in which good people will receive their recompense and wicked people their punishment.”

Because most of the founding members of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam were either conversos returning to Judaism or Judaizing New Christians who now, for the first time, practiced openly, the Judaism inherited by the community had a special, rather unorthodox character.

There was, for example, a concern with eternal salvation, albeit by way of the Law of Moses and not Jesus Christ. There were also various cults around Jewish “saints.”

Their everyday language in the street and in the home was Portuguese, with some Hebrew, Spanish, and even Dutch words thrown in.

(Spanish was considered the language of high literature and Hebrew was reserved for the liturgy.

It was even more difficult to assimilate the Ashkenazic Jews who started arriving from Germany and Poland in the second decade of the seventeenth century

By the end of the century, the German, Polish, and Lithuanian Jews would outnumber the Sephardim by almost two to one.

Slowly, the Ashkenazim managed to organize themselves socially and religiously independently of the Portuguese community, and in 1635 they established their first congregation.