AMSTERDAM from an INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: TOLERANCE and KEHILLAH in the PORTUGUESE DIASPORA1 Bernard D. Cooperman Introductio

AMSTERDAM FROM AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: TOLERANCE AND KEHILLAH IN THE PORTUGUESE DIASPORA1

Bernard D. Cooperman

Introduction

In the Jewish historical narrative, early modern Amsterdam is known for two things: ﬁ rst, the great measure of religious tolerance the city fathers displayed towards Portuguese converso refugees, allowing them to settle, revert to Judaism, and prosper; and second, the authoritarian Jewish community that those refugees subsequently created, a community that famously had the power to excommunicate and expel the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in July of 1656.2 The nexus between these two phenomena—tolerance and autonomy—is neither obvious nor necessary. Freedom to settle did not automatically include Jews’ right to corporate identity, to self-government, judicial recognition, or the power to decide who might (and might not) be a part of their community.

1 The present article is part of a broader investigation of the relationship between the structural development of Jewish autonomy in early modern Europe and the conditions under which those communities were formed. 2 Yosef Kaplan has explored the use and signiﬁ cance of excommunication in the kehillah of Amsterdam (and other Sephardi communities) in a number of important studies; see, for example, “The Social Functions of the Herem in the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century,” in Dutch Jewish History [1], ed. J. Michman and T. Levie ( Jerusalem 1984), pp. 111–55; and the useful summary in “Deviance and Excommunication in the Eighteenth Century: A Chapter in the Social History of the Sephardi Community of Amsterdam,” Dutch Jewish History 3, ed. J. Michman ( Jerusalem, Assen, Maastricht 1993), pp. 103–115. Much of his work on this broad topic has been conveniently collected in An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden 2000) and in the somewhat expanded Hebrew version, From New Christians to New Jews ( Jerusalem 2003), esp. chapters 5–8. The literature on the excommunication of Spinoza is far too extensive to cite here; for two recent (and quite different) treatments of what lay behind the ban of Spinoza, see J. Israel, “Philosophy, Commerce and the Synagogue: Spinoza’s Expulsion from the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish Community in 1656,” in Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture (1500–2000), ed. J. Israel and R. Salverda (Leiden 2002), pp. 125–39, and O. Vlessing, “The Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza: A Struggle between Jewish and Civil Law,” ibid., pp. 141–72. 2 bernard d. cooperman

Papal Rome, for example, had long tolerated a Jewish settlement, but it had also systematically refused Jews the dignitas of judicial autonomy and in 1492 had famously rejected Roman Jews’ effort to control the immigration of other Jews.3 We may ask then how Amsterdam’s Jewry was able to establish such a powerful and autocratic authority structure. To put the question more pointedly, what was the relation between the conditions and logic of tolerance, on the one hand, and the nature of communal power, on the other? Shall we assume for example that the herem, the community’s right to expel individuals and thus to control membership, had been explicitly granted to the Jews in a privilege from the city fathers?4 Does Jewish self-governance demonstrate that Amsterdam extended tolerance not to Jews as individuals (as has been sometimes asserted) but to Jews as an organized group?5 The answer to these questions will depend upon detailed research into the legal standing of Amsterdam’s Jews and the functioning of their community, a task properly left to local historians.6 But perhaps I can make some small contribution to the investigation by putting policy in Amsterdam in a broader context, by suggesting a pan-European terminological and legal provenance for Dutch tolerance. Speciﬁ cally, I will argue that by looking at the freedoms granted to New Christian

3 For a recent discussion, see my “Ethnicity and Institution Building among Jews in Early Modern Rome,” AJS Review 30 (2006), pp. 119–45. 4 Kaplan, “Social Functions of the Herem,” p. 113. Kaplan acknowledges that no ofﬁ cial document to this effect is known to exist, but he is nevertheless certain “that the Portuguese community received explicit permission from the city authorities to excommunicate . . .” because of references to this power in the proposed Haarlem charter (1605) and the arrangements for tolerating Jews proposed by Hugo Grotius in 1615 (ibid., n. 4, translated into English on p. 145). The language of David Franco Mendes’s 1772 chronicle likewise clearly implies that the power of excommunication was granted the Jews by the Amsterdam council (ibid., p. 151, n. 102). Kaplan also notes that the city council speciﬁ cally acknowledged the community’s right to excommunicate deviants and rebels on more than one occasion (p. 145). 5 Cf. Spinoza’s famous declaration that Amsterdam above all promoted individual freedom of thought and that formal involvement by the state in religious “politics” had only led to sectarianism and strife: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [1670], chapter 20 (Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. S. Shirley 2nd edition [Indianapolis 2001], p. 228); Spinoza, Opera, ed. C. Gebhardt (Heidelberg 1925), vol. 3, p. 7; but Jonathan Israel understands this as propaganda on behalf of a level of intellectual freedom and expression that in fact did not exist in Holland at the time (“Religious Toleration and Radical Philosophy in the Later Dutch Golden Age (1668–1710),” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and H. van Nierop (Cambridge 2002), p. 148. 6 See e.g. D. M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans. The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth- Century Amsterdam (London and Portland, Oreg. 2000).