Menasseh ben Israel by Steven Nadler

Author:Steven Nadler [Nadler, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300224108
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

7

The English Mission

THINGS WERE GOING DOWNHILL in Netherlands Brazil, and the Jewish community in Recife was extremely worried. The uprising against the Dutch West Indies Company by Portuguese planters that began in 1645 was now, in the early 1650s, gaining momentum. If Portugal retook Pernambuco province, the Sephardim in the port town and the surrounding countryside would have to flee, and rather quickly, before the Inquisition moved in and began its search for former New Christians now living as Jews.

The rebellion was taking a serious economic and psychological toll not only on the Jewish colonists but on their sponsors in Amsterdam as well. The city’s Portuguese Jews had put a lot of capital into the Brazil trade, and it was all disappearing as the Dutch gradually lost control over their territory there. A panic was setting in on both sides of the Atlantic as investments failed, fortunes were lost, and lives were endangered. When Recife finally fell to the Portuguese in 1654, the Dutch colonial governors, the directors of the West Indies Company, and the Amsterdam Sephardim were all faced with a crisis that was both financial and humanitarian.

For the Jews of Amsterdam, the fall of Recife posed an especially serious refugee problem.1 The Sephardim who relocated to Brazil in the early 1640s had been departing the country for some time now, an exodus of almost a thousand individuals between 1645 and 1650.2 Most of these returned to Holland—over six hundred persons, according to one estimate—with some going to Dutch colonies in the Caribbean.3 With the final reconquest by the Portuguese, the flow of emigrants from Brazil to Amsterdam—along with new arrivals from Spain, where there was renewed persecution of New Christians, and from Venice, mainly for economic reasons—increased significantly. They swelled the ranks of the nearly two thousand Sephardim that were already in the city. The community in the Vlooienburg quarter was overwhelmed. It lacked both the space and the resources to absorb all these returnees and newcomers. Moreover, with the municipal regents unwilling to revise the regulations on Jewish business activities, including restrictions on guild membership, there were only so many opportunities for the new arrivals to make a living.

One solution was to relocate them elsewhere. According to one historian, a new colonization movement brought about a fundamental transformation of the Sephardic diaspora. While Amsterdam remained the “hub of the western Sephardic commercial network,” the city’s Portuguese-Jewish community became a major sponsor of Sephardic migration to the Caribbean, North America, Italy, and eventually—it was hoped—England.4

Among the Jewish returnees from Brazil, there was one who, at least in Menasseh’s eyes, was not especially welcome: their rabbi. By the fall of 1654, Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, who twelve years earlier had left to serve the Recife community, was back in Amsterdam. Menasseh could not have been happy to see his old rival return to the community. Although it did not mean a demotion in rank for Menasseh among the congregation’s rabbis, Aboab was given some of Mortera’s duties as teacher in the highest class of the community’s school and one of the chief rabbi’s monthly sermons.

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