our Dominion dressed as Christians, or were reputed to be Christians ...
and perform all of your ceremonies, rites, laws, and customs according to
Jewish law ... we grant you all of the privileges, rights, and favors which
our merchants ... and Christians enjoy.Within a few decades, the Jewish community of Livorno grew from a few
hundred conversosand crypto-Jews at the end of the sixteenth century to a
community of several thousand Jews by the mid-seventeenth century, and the
city of Livorno, formerly a “paltry fishing village,” became a thriving center
of Italian maritime commerce.
A similar course of events took place in Amsterdam following the Dutch
revolt against Spain that began during the 1570s. Although this revolt lasted
until 1648, Spanish rule and the influence of the Inquisition had been drasti-
cally curtailed already by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The
Dutch, in effect, replaced the religious persecution and intolerance embodied
by the Spanish Inquisition with a spirit of religious ecumenism between
Dutch Catholics and Protestants. This mood was keenly expressed by the
Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, who decried the religious coercion embodied in
Spanish Catholicism: “One who is forced to believe does not believe, but only
pretends to believe” (“Coactus qui credit, non credit, sed credere simulat”). During
the first half of the seventeenth century, this ecumenism dovetailed with a
powerful economic realism. The Dutch, acknowledging that commercial suc-
cess had helped them field and provision an army that defeated a seemingly
all-powerful Spain, placed a premium on commerce and subordinated all
impediments, religious and otherwise, to the demands of trade and profit.
The combination of religious ecumenism and economic realism created a
highly favorable situation for Jews. In this atmosphere, conversosand crypto-
Jews began returning to Judaism, leading to the growth and transformation
of Dutch Jewry. Alongside immigration from central Europe, the Jewish
community of Amsterdam increased from 400–500 conversosand crypto-Jews
in 1570 to 2,000 openly practicing Jews by 1650.
The status of Jews in Amsterdam combined elements of the premodern
with novel elements. The Jewish community still had a measure of communal
autonomy, and was run by Jewish communal leaders – parnassimin the case of
the Ashkenazic community, and a mahmadfor Sephardic Jews – who were
empowered to regulate ritual, though not civic and criminal, matters. More
novel was the fact that Jews in Amsterdam were not saddled with special
Jewish statutes, or a badge or other stigmatizing dress. Jews were not excluded
from honorable activities such as riding horses and carrying swords. They were
allowed to engage in most occupations, and permitted to own property.
This added up to Jews having a limited form of citizenship by the mid-
seventeenth century, implicitly affirmed in 1657 when the Estates General of
the United Provinces demanded that Spain recognize “that those of the afore-
mentioned Jewish nation are truly subjects and residents of the United
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 139