Recife: the end of Dutch Brazil and the dispersal that made American Jewry

Dutch Brazil lasted twenty-four years: in February 1630 the West India Company took Olinda and Recife. There were two congregations — Zur Israel at Recife, founded in 1636, and Magen Abraham at Mauricia. In 1642 Hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca and R. Moses Raphael de Aguilar came from Amsterdam with a party of some six hundred, and with that open Jewish worship in the New World begins.

In 1645 the Portuguese insurrection began, and nine years of war with it. On 26 January 1654 the capitulation was signed; the Jews were given three months to leave with liberty to liquidate and remove movable property — an unusually generous clause extracted by the Dutch negotiators. Every professing Jew left within the term.

One of the ships, the St. Catrina, brought a party of impoverished refugees to New Amsterdam a few days before 7 September 1654. The captain sued those who could not pay their passage; two heads of household were held until money came from relatives in Amsterdam. The figure "twenty-three" comes from that suit.

Peter Stuyvesant wrote to the Company's directors on 22 and 25 September and 27 October asking that "people of the Jewish race" not be admitted to the new territories. On 26 April 1655 the directors overruled him, and their letter names the motives plainly: the losses the Jews had sustained in the taking of Brazil, and "the large amount of capital which they have invested in the shares of this company." The permission was conditional: the Jewish poor were to be maintained by "their own nation."

Four corrections, all from Leo Hershkowitz's work. The ship was the St. Catrina, not the "St. Charles": the latter is a nineteenth-century editor's error repeated for a century. The twenty-three were not the first Jews in New Amsterdam: Jacob Barsimson arrived on the Peereboom on 22 August 1654, at least a fortnight earlier. They did not sail direct from Recife but through the Caribbean, probably with a detention at Jamaica or Cuba. And they were not founders: all but Asser Levy left within about two years, no congregation was organised at the time, and Asser Levy himself came not from Brazil but from Vilna.

The size of the Recife community is disputed: Wiznitzer's much-quoted figure is fourteen hundred and fifty, the Wolffs' archival recount about three hundred and fifty. And there was no "expulsion": there was a capitulation with stipulated terms; staying was impossible not by order but because with Portuguese rule came back the Inquisition.