The Batavian decree of equality — and the schism that answered it

By the end of the eighteenth century Dutch Jewry was poor. The Sephardi community stood at two and a half to three thousand throughout the century, while the Ashkenazi one grew to twenty-two thousand by 1795; in all some twenty thousand Jews in an Amsterdam of two hundred and seventeen thousand — about a tenth of the city. The great Sephardi houses failed one after another in the 1760s and 1780s, and the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–84 finished off the Caribbean carrying trade. By 1795 some eighty-seven per cent of Amsterdam's Ashkenazim lived on communal relief, against a citywide figure of about thirty-seven.

In January 1795 the French came, the Batavian Republic was proclaimed and the stadtholderate fell. In the same year Felix Libertate was founded at Amsterdam by Dr Hartog de Hartog Lémon, Hermanus Leonard Bromet and Moses Salomon Asser; about a third of its members were not Jews. It translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man into Yiddish and campaigned for civil equality both outside the Jewish community and within it.

On 2 September 1796 the National Assembly of the Batavian Republic adopted the Decree on the Equality of the Jews with all other Citizens: no Jew shall be excluded from rights or advantages attached to citizenship in the Batavian Republic. The Netherlands became the second state in Europe, after France in 1791, to do it.

The resistance came from within. The parnassim of both the Ashkenazi and the Portuguese communities opposed it, because equality dissolved the corporate autonomy on which their courts, their taxation and their disciplinary power rested. The Ashkenazi parnassim refused to revise the statutes; twenty-one men were banned, and in 1797 they founded Adath Jeshurun, the "Neie Kille," with R. Isaac Graanboom as rabbi. A pamphlet war in Yiddish ran through 1797–98; by 1799 the new congregation had a hundred and eight paying members and some seven hundred souls.

A correction about what the decree did away with: seventeenth-century Dutch tolerance was not a gift but an unwritten arrangement. The Union of Utrecht of 1579 gave liberty of conscience, not of public worship; the Amsterdam regulation of 1616 held three prohibitions and was silent on everything else; from 1632 Jews were kept out of the guilds, and the exclusion stood until 1796; burgher-right could be bought but was not heritable and conveyed neither guild access nor eligibility for municipal office. It was exactly this — economic freedom without civic incorporation — that the decree of 1796 ended.