| Amsterdam 1595 to 1619 The first group of Marranos to arrive in Amsterdam may have come as early as the 1590s. Another small group of Sephardim, under the leadership of Moses Uri ha-Levi of Emden, appears to have arrived in 1602. These early arrivals were attracted to Amsterdam because of the relatively tolerant atmosphere which had prevailed here since the northern Netherlands broke away from Catholic Spain in 1571. Indeed, while the Dutch Reformed Church opposed Jewish settlement in Amsterdam, civic authorities encouraged it, and tacitly allowed the Jews religious freedom. Amsterdam's first formal Jewish congregation was established in 1604. |
| Amsterdam's
Jews, reveling in the city's atmosphere of intellectual freedom, developed
a diverse cultural and religious life, and a class of individualist intellectuals
arose to challenge the authority of the Orthodox rabbis. In 1619, Beth
Jacob, the first of Amsterdam's two congregations, split, with one faction
seceding under the leadership of a freethinking physician, Abraham Farrar. 1630 to 1655 By 1630 Amsterdam's Jewish community numbered 1,000. In 1639, despite differences of opinion, the city's three Sephardic congregations merged to form Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah and began using the largest of the three synagogues for worship. In 1642 the community was granted official approval when Prince Frederick Henry of Orange visited thesynagogue with his wife and son. Ashkenazim first began settling in Amsterdam in the 1620s. They held their own services and established their first synagogue in 1640. Many Polish Jews fled to Amsterdam in the wake of the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-1649) and the Swedish invasion of Poland (1655). |
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