Nadene Goldfoot
The colony of New Netherland was established by the Dutch West India Company in 1624 and grew to encompass all of present-day New York City and parts of Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. A successful Dutch settlement in the colony grew up on the southern tip of Manhattan Island and was christened New Amsterdam.
New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw Amsterdam, pronounced [ˌniʋɑmstərˈdɑm] or [ˌniuʔɑms-]) was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The initial trading factory gave rise to the settlement around Fort Amsterdam. The fort was situated on the strategic southern tip of the island of Manhattan and was meant to defend the fur trade operations of the Dutch West India Company in the North River (Hudson River). In 1624, it became a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic and was designated as the capital of the province in 1625.
New Amsterdam was renamed centuries ago, and the hills and copses once known as New Netherland – the short-lived, 17th-Century Dutch colony in North America – now lope gently through a stretch of the US states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut.
Fort, Wall, Windmill, Church, Gallows, and Pillory of New Amsterdam, 1659
Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrenders New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, to an English naval squadron under Colonel Richard Nicolls. Stuyvesant had hoped to resist the English, but he was an unpopular ruler, and his Dutch subjects refused to rally around him. Following its capture, New Amsterdam’s name was changed to New York, in honor of the Duke of York, who organized the mission. So, in the final analysis, there would be no New York without the Dutch West India Company establishing it.
The Dutch West India Company was a chartered company of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors. Among its founders was Willem Usselincx and Jessé de Forest. The area where the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and the eastern part of New Guinea. The intended purpose of the charter was to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish or Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants.
The company became instrumental in the largely ephemeral Dutch colonization of the Americas (including New Netherland) in the seventeenth century. From 1624 to 1654, in the context of the Dutch-Portuguese War, the GWC held Portuguese territory in northeast Brazil, but they were ousted from Dutch Brazil following fierce resistance.
The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions began in the 15th Century and continued until the mid-1800s, as hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism and then were later tortured and executed for continuing to practice Judaism in secret. They were called Marranos,, which was an ugly term. Today they are referred to as the the B’nei Anusim, a Hebrew term. The descendants of the Jews who were forcibly converted, were also known more pejoratively as “Conversos,” or “New Christians”. The inquisitioners chased down Jews even into Mexico in the 1800's.
When Recife, Brazil became a prosperous center for sugar production in the 16th and 17th centuries, Portuguese New Christians were already living in the city and its environs and in many regions of the Brazilian Nordeste (North East). They worked mainly in sugar production and commerce. The significant number of New Christians in Recife took part in a variety of activities, and some bound themselves through intermarriage to prestigious Old Christian families. The Spanish Inquisition was unrelentless in searching for Jews to persecute. The first organized Jewish community in Brazil was established in Recife during the period of Dutch colonial occupation (1630–1654) that brought Jews among other Dutch colonists and permitted religious freedom. The West India Company came to Brazil attracted by the sugar plantations and more than 120 engenhos (sugar mills) in Pernambuco.
The Jewish arrival in New Amsterdam of September 1654 was the first organized Jewish migration to North America. It comprised 23 Sephardi Jews, refugees "big and little" of families fleeing persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition after the conquest of Dutch Brazil. It is widely commemorated as the starting point of New York Jewish and Jewish-American history.
The first Jews known to have lived in New Amsterdam arrived in 1654. First to arrive were Solomon Pietersen and Jacob Barsimson, who sailed during the summer of 1654 directly from Holland, with passports that gave them permission to trade in the colony.
Peter Stuyvesant c. 1592 – August 1672) Stuyvesant, himself a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, opposed religious pluralism and came into conflict with Lutherans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Quakers as they attempted to build places of worship in the city and practice their faiths. However, Stuyvesant particularly supported Antisemitism, and loathed Jews not merely through religion, but also through race. His parents were Balthasar Stuyvesant, a Reformed Calvinist minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein.
Then in early September, 23 Jewish refugees arrived from the Brazilian city of Recife, which had been conquered by the Portuguese in January 1654. The director of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, sought to turn them away but was ultimately overruled by the directors of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam. (One of the directors was in the boat).
Asser Levy, an Ashkenazi Jew who was one of the 23 refugees, eventually prospered and in 1661 became the first Jew to own a house in New Amsterdam, which also made him the first Jew known to have owned a house anywhere in North America. Asser Levy (died 1682), also known as Asher Levy, was one of the first Jewish settlers of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.
Asser Levy was probably born in Vilna, present-day Lithuania. He left Poland for Amsterdam, possibly to escape the pogroms of the Khmelnytsky uprising. Although he lived for a time in Amsterdam, he was not given burgher (citizenship) rights, and probably was not granted poorter (permanent residency) rights either. He might also have lived for a time in Schwelm, a town in the County of Mark in modern-day Germany. Two archived documents from Amsterdam reveal that on April 26, 1660, he was there seeking payment of a debt owed to him, and on May 24, 1660, he announced he was going to Germany. Levy might have married his wife Miriam (whose maiden name was probably Israel) while living in Amsterdam, but this cannot be verified; no record of this marriage exists in the Amsterdam archives, but this might be due to the fact that Jews were not required to register their marriages in Amsterdam until 1695. While in Amsterdam, he learned about the opportunities in the New World, and migrated there. Levy might have initially moved to Dutch Brazil; he has been mentioned as one of the 23 Jewish refugees who fled from Recife after the end of Dutch rule in the area. However, Levy is not listed in the extant congregational minute books of the Brazilian Jewish community, which casts serious doubt on this theory. It is known that he eventually ended up in New Netherland, having possibly arrived in New Amsterdam aboard the St. Catherine or St. Charles in early September 1654.
My comment: As an amateur genealogist, I know that Levy is such a common surname, and so is Asher. No doubt there were several Asher Levys.
Stuyvesant did not tolerate full religious freedom in the colony, and was strongly committed to the supremacy of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1657 he refused to allow Lutherans the right to organize a church. When he also issued an ordinance forbidding them from worshiping in their own homes, the directors of the Dutch West Indies Company, three of whom were Lutherans, told him to rescind the order and allow private gatherings of Lutherans. The Company position was that more tolerance led to more trade and more profit.
Freedom of religion was further tested when Stuyvesant had refused to allow the permanent settlement of Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil in New Amsterdam (without passports), and join the handful of existing Jewish traders (with passports from Amsterdam). Stuyvesant attempted to have Jews "in a friendly way to depart" the colony. As he wrote to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company in 1654, he hoped that "the deceitful race, — such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ, — be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony." He referred to Jews as a "repugnant race" and "usurers", and was concerned that "Jewish settlers should not be granted the same liberties enjoyed by Jews in Holland, lest members of other persecuted minority groups, such as Roman Catholics, be attracted to the colony." (He sounded like a Nazi !)
Stuyvesant's decision was again rescinded after pressure from the directors of the company. As a result, Jewish immigrants were allowed to stay in the colony as long as their community was self-supporting, however, Stuyvesant and the company would not allow them to build a synagogue, forcing them to worship instead in a private house.
Their numbers grew slowly, and by 1812 did not exceed 400. They had been denied certain civic rights and permission to engage in crafts. These rights were obtained gradually and the naturalization law accepted only by 1715. The Jews were not at first allowed to erect a synagogue, and the first mention of one dates from 1693. This developed into the Sephardi congregation, Shearith Israel, which was unique until the Ashkenazi synagogue, B'nai Jeshurun was founded in 1835.
Immigration from Europe grew greatly in the 1820's and 1830's and the Jewish population in 1846 had reached 10,000. By the end of the 19th century, there were in New York, including Brooklyn, 250,000 Jews and by 1940, over 2 million.
The JE (Jewish Encyclopedia) has an article on the surname, Barassa. a Spanish physician, Diego Barassa, a Marrano who lived in Amsterdam in 1640, born Diego de Barros.
The EJ (Encyclopedia Judaica) has an article about the surname, Bargas, an 18th century Marrano author, Abraham Bargas, of Spain, France and Italy.
References
The New standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/new-amsterdam-becomes-new-york#:~:text=The%20colony%20of%20New%20Netherland,and%20was%20christened%20New%20Amsterdam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_arrival_in_New_Amsterdam
https://netivyah.org/the-marranos-a-forgotten-treasure-being-discovered-today/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/recife-brazil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant
Finding Our Fathers by Dan Rottenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asser_Levy
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