The Jews in America Trilogy (78 page)

By now the Jews and their predicament had become the talk of New Amsterdam, and the pros and cons of the case were being argued all over the colony. As a result, when
the four days had passed, with no salvation in the form of a ship appearing, and when the Jews' property was brought ashore and arrayed on the pier to be sold at auction, a group of New Netherlanders who had been defending the Jews arrived early, began buying up items at nominal prices, and then handed them over to their original owners. It was one of the earliest recorded examples of what might be called Christian charity in America. This was not, however, a development calculated to please M. de la Motthe, who, as soon as he learned what was happening, ordered the sale stopped. He then turned matters over to a young Dutch lawyer named Jan Martya.

Under normal procedure, petitioners before the Worshipful Court of Burgomasters had to bring their cases to the court on days when it was scheduled to be in session, and each case had to wait its turn. But a ruling did exist which stated that in return for “each member of the Council, five guilders; and for the Court Messenger two guilders,” the Worshipful Court would hold a special hurry-up session and forget about what other cases might be pending. It was a provision that obviously favored the rich, and Martya, acting in de la Motthe's behalf, paid the necessary guilders and an “Extraordinary meeting” was promptly announced at the
Stadt Huys
(State House), which was actually a chamber over a taproom where “beer was sold by the whole can, but not in smaller quantities.” One gathers that beer had its place in the normal proceedings of the court.

All over again, the case against “David Israel and the other Jews” was recited, and Martya added in sterner tones:

Whereas their goods sold thus far by venue do not amount to the payment of their obligations, it is therefore requested that one or two of the said Jews be taken as principal which, according to the aforesaid contract or obligation, cannot be refused. Therefore he
hath taken David Israel and Moses Ambrosius
*
as principal debtors for the remaining balance, with request that the same be placed in confinement until the account be paid.

This, revealing that legal language has grown no less convoluted over the years, was the first time prison had been mentioned. And the Jews, who had no guilders with which to pay for their share of the court's attention, could do nothing but ask for the mercy of the court. But the court decreed:

… having weighed the petition of the plaintiff and seen the obligation wherein each is bound
IN SOLIDUM
for the full payment [we] have consented to the plaintiff's request to place the aforesaid persons under civil arrest (namely with the Provost Marshall) until they have made satisfaction.

It was not, however, a total victory for de la Motthe, because the decree contained a proviso that may have come as a surprise to him. The order sent the two men to debtor's prison only provided that “He, de la Motthe, shall previously answer for the board, which is fixed at 16 stivers per diem for each prisoner, and is ordered that for this purpose 40–50 guilders proceeding from the goods sold shall remain in the hands of the Secretary, together with the expenses of this special court.” Collecting his money was becoming an increasingly expensive chore for de la Motthe.

With two men jailed and the sale resumed, the prospects for the twenty-three were discouraging. September passed, and October nights were growing chilly. Though there was scattered help from sympathetic residents of the little colony, the encampment by the river faced slow starvation. Then Solomon Pietersen—who had made himself the chief defender of the twenty-three—stepped to center stage again.

In the small print of the agreement the Jews had signed when taken aboard, Pietersen uncovered a helpful fact. The passage money was not owed to de la Motthe alone. The other officers, and even the crew, of the
Saint Charles
were entitled to a share. Armed with this, Pietersen went to each officer and sailor and, in individual pleas, asked each to wait for his money until the ship's next call the following year. Each would be paid then, he promised, and with full interest. To de la Motthe he pointed out that the proceeds of the sale nearly equalled his personal share, and this he could keep. On October 26, 1654, the Worshipful Court declared:

Solomon Pietersen appeared in Court and exhibited a declaration from the attorney of the sailors, relative to the balance of the freight of the Jews, promising to wait until the arrival of the ship from Patria. Wherefore he requests to receive the monies still in the Secretary's hands for Rycke Nunes, whose goods were sold, over and above her own freight debt, in order to obtain with that money support for her. Whereupon was endorsed: Petitioner Solomon Pietersen as attorney was permitted to take, under security, the monies in Secretary's hands.

And so, after an ordeal of nearly two months, the settlers who had inadvertently become America's first “minority group” were free—or at least somewhat free—to make a living.

And they could practice their religion. With the boys over thirteen, there were probably enough males to form a minyan to celebrate the first Rosh Hashanah in America on September 12, 1654 (5415 according to the Hebrew calendar). Within a year, the congregation of Shearith Israel—“Remnant of Israel”—was founded. The settlers were not allowed a house of worship, but they could hold services in their own houses; a few years later, they were permitted to rent quarters for services. At first they were
refused land for a cemetery but, by 1656, they had acquired “a little hook of land” for a burial ground. Its exact location is unknown. By 1682, the congregation was permitted to purchase the Chatham Square Cemetery, which exists today. It was not until 1730 that the congregation succeeded in erecting the first synagogue building in America, a tiny structure in Manhattan's Mill Street.

The parnas, or president, of the synagogue that year was Emily Nathan's great-great-great grandfather, as Aunt Ellie would remind the children. A Nathan—Emily's brother, Justice Edgar J. Nathan, Jr.—was parnas until his death in 1965. His son Edgar Nathan III now serves.

Today, New York families such as the Nathans, the Seixases, the Cardozos, and the Hendrickses—who are all able to locate the names of the earliest settlers far back in the tangled branches of their family trees—can view the settlers' accomplishments with a certain quiet pride. In the years around the turn of the last century, when Mrs. William Astor was throwing her celebrated balls for the people Ward McAllister had labeled “the Four Hundred”—and when a later-arriving German-Jewish elite had begun high-hatting Mrs. Astor and calling itself “the One Hundred”—one of the little Nathans, no stranger to the family's intense sense of hubris, asked his mother, “Who are
we
?” “We,” said Mrs. Nathan with a little smile, “are the Twenty-Three.”

*
From Ashkenaz, a people mentioned in Genesis, who in medieval rabbinical literature became identified with the Germans.

*
Probably Mose Lumbroso.

5

“THESE GODLESS RASCALS”

At the heart of the Jews' early difficulties, and a factor that would continue to cause them grief for a number of years, was the openly hostile and anti-Semitic attitude of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. In the land where the Pilgrims, just a few years earlier, had come to find religious freedom, bigotry was no rarer, nor were its expressions much different, than today. At the height of the de la Motthe affair—on September 22, 1654—Stuyvesant had written to the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam to say:

The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here, but learning that they (with their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians) were very repugnant to the inferior
magistrates [members of the Worshipful Court] as also to the people having the most affection for you; the Deaconry also fearing that owing to their present indigence they might become a charge in the coming winter, we have, for the benefit of this weak and newly developing place and the land in general, deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart; praying also most seriously in this connection, for ourselves as also for the general community of your worships, that the deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ—be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony, to the detraction of your worships and the dissatisfaction of your worships' most affectionate subjects.

Peter Stuyvesant, a harsh and despotic man, was a bigot in the classic sense. He had already been reprimanded by the company for his persecutions of Lutherans and Quakers in the colony, and he had made himself generally unpopular with everyone by his efforts to increase taxes and prevent the sale of liquor and firearms to the Indians. What was the basis of his distrust, even fear, of a handful of impoverished Jews? The charge of “usury” was a common one, and Jews had learned, in a grim way, to be amused by it. The ironic fact was that usury was invented by a seventeenth-century Dutch Christian, Salmasius, who published three books on the subject between 1638 and 1640 urging the adoption of usury as an economic tool. His views had been quickly adopted by most Christian, as well as Jewish, moneylenders. Among the Jews, meanwhile, were men who, in Brazil, had been respected businessmen, as they had been in Holland before that. There could have been no real reason to suppose they had come to New Amsterdam to indulge in anything dishonest.

There were, however, certain characteristics of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews that Christians found off-putting. The Sephardim were characterized by a certain dignity of manner, an implacable and unbroachable reserve. They
possessed not a little of the Spanish temper. From early portraits we see their high-cheekboned, often haughty, faces. There was a sense of aloofness, of distance, about them that passed for arrogance or extreme self-pride. The records of the de la Motthe hearings all describe the Jews as sitting rigidly in their seats, saying nothing, retreated into the grandeur of silence. But Peter Stuyvesant's attitude shows, more than anything else, that the spirit of the Inquisition had crept, in little ways, all over the world, and that the ancient superstitions and accusations against the Jews had followed it—that the Jews were sorcerers, ritual murderers of children, poisoners of wells, killers of Christ.

There were others who shared Stuyvesant's views. The Reverend John Megapolensis, head of the Dutch Church in New Amsterdam, had, the same year as the Jews' arrival, succeeded—with Stuyvesant's full help—in denying the Lutherans permission to build their own church in Manhattan. A few months later, in a state of alarm, Megapolensis wrote to his archbishop in Holland:

Some Jews came from Holland last summer, in order to trade. Later a few Jews came upon the same ship as De Polhemius;
*
they were healthy but poor. It would have been proper that they should have been supported by their own people, but they have been at our charge, so that we have had to spend several hundred guilders for their support. They came several times to my house, weeping and bemoaning their misery. If I directed them to the Jewish merchants, they said they would not even lend them a few stivers. Some of them have come from Holland this spring. They report that still more of the same lot would follow, and then they would build here a synagogue. This causes among the congregation
here a great deal of complaint and murmuring. These people have no other God than the unrighteous Mammon, and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property, and to win all other merchants by drawing all trade towards themselves. Therefore we request your Reverences to obtain from the Lords-Directors [of the West India Company] that these godless rascals, who are of no benefit to the country, but look at everything for their own profit, may be sent away from here. For as we have Papists, Mennonites and Lutherans among the Dutch; also many Puritans or Independents, and various other servants of Baal among the English under this Government, who conceal themselves under the name of Christians; it would create a still greater confusion if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here. Closing I commend your Reverences with your families to the protection of God, who will bless us and all of you in the service of the divine word.

Though the Jews petitioned Megapolensis, it is unlikely that they came “weeping and bemoaning.” This seems quite out of character. The Jews, who had plenty to weep about and bemoan, and who were under no misapprehensions about the very limited degree of welcome they were being given, were not emotional but methodical in their approach to the problem. Early in 1655 they drafted and sent off a lengthy petition to the directors of the West India Company in Holland. This document is remarkable not only in its coolheadedness and tact, its diplomacy and relentless logic, but also for the clarity with which it defines the political and economic position of the Jews in western Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century.

The petition begins with a deferential salutation “To the Honorable Lords, Directors of the Chartered West India Company, Chamber of the City of Amsterdam” and proceeds to a detailing of the Jews' specific grievances. Stuyvesant had refused to give them passports or to let them travel outside the settlement, making it impossible for them to trade. This, the petition points out, “if persisted in will
result to the great disadvantage of the Jewish Nation. It also can be of no advantage to the Company, but rather damaging.” The petition reminded the directors that “The Jewish Nation in Brazil have at all times been faithful and have striven to guard and maintain that place, risking for the purpose their possessions and their blood.” Next the Jews pointed out the economic advantages to be gained by allowing settlers to disperse about the country. “Yonder land,” they wrote, “is extensive and spacious. The more … people that go and live there, the better it is in regard to the payment of taxes which may be imposed there.” They reminded the “high illustrious mighty Lords” that in the past they had “always protected and considered the Jewish Nation as upon the same footing as all the inhabitants and burghers. Also it is conditioned in the treaty of perpetual peace with the King of Spain that the Jewish Nation shall also enjoy the same liberty as all other inhabitants of these lands.”