Recife רסיפי
Twenty-four years of Dutch Brazil gave American Jewry its beginning; the capitulation of 1654 gave it its dispersal — from Curaçao to New Amsterdam.
In February 1630 the West India Company took Olinda and Recife; Dutch rule lasted twenty-four years. There were two congregations: Kahal Kadosh Zur Israel at Recife, founded in 1636 in the Rua dos Judeus — today the Rua do Bom Jesus, where the mikveh has been excavated in situ — and Magen Abraham in Mauricia.
In 1642 Hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca and R. Moses Raphael de Aguilar came from Amsterdam with a party of some six hundred. With this, open Jewish worship in the New World begins. In 1639 Jews owned six of the colony's more than a hundred and twenty sugar mills — a visible share, not a dominant one.
In 1645 the Luso-Brazilian insurrection began, and with it nine years of war and siege. In besieged Recife, Aboab wrote Zekher Asiti le-Nifle'ot El — the first Hebrew literary work composed in the Americas.
The community's size at its 1644–45 peak is disputed: Arnold Wiznitzer's much-quoted figure is fourteen hundred and fifty, but Egon and Frieda Wolff's archival recount produced about three hundred and fifty. Honesty requires giving the range and naming the dispute.
On 26 January 1654 the capitulation was signed. Its terms gave the Jews three months to leave, with liberty to liquidate and to carry off movable property — an unusually generous clause extracted by the Dutch negotiators. Every professing Jew left within the term. Most returned to Amsterdam; others went to the Guianas and the Caribbean.
A correction: "the Jews were expelled from Brazil in 1654" is inexact. There was no expulsion decree; there was a capitulation with stipulated terms and a right of removal. Staying was impossible not by an order of expulsion but because with Portuguese rule came back the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, Zekher Asiti le-Nifle'ot El, Recife 1646 — the first Hebrew literary work composed in the Americas
Documents of the period
- The capitulation of Recife, 26 January 1654 — three months to depart and the right to remove movable property
Scholarship
- A. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil; the recount of E. and F. Wolff — the dispute over the community's size: 1,450 against about 350
Basis: documents and evidence.