Jerusalem on the Amstel
The Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a cosmopolitan "carnival of nations:" French Huguenots, North African merchants, Spanish Moriscos--and Iberian New Christians, formerly Jewish families forcibly converted to Catholicism, now fleeing the Inquisition and rediscovering their ancestral faith.
This is the extraordinary tale of Amsterdam's prosperous Sephardi community during the Dutch Golden Age. Trading, writing, publishing, staging plays and being painted by Rembrandt, this Nação (Nation) of formerly wandering Jews not only settled but thrived, enjoying high status and unparalleled freedom. At a time when Dutch Catholics were repressed and Jews elsewhere were confined to the ghetto, this community dared to nurture the 'Hope of Israel', sowing the seeds of Zionism.
Lipika Pelham charts the captivating history of Amsterdam's Jews, from their integral role in the Dutch economic miracle and the Enlightenment to a somber coda in 1942, when the Nazis herded them into the "Jewish Theater" for deportation to the camps. But this was not the death of the resilient Nação--Pelham also seeks out its descendants in present-day Amsterdam, offering poignant reflection on the meaning of nationhood, the Holocaust and what remains of Jerusalem on the Amstel.
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Journalist, documentary filmmaker, and memoirist Pelham (The Unlikely Settler) tells the history of Amsterdam's Jewish community. Pelham starts with the exodus of Jews from Portugal in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, due to the threat of the Inquisition. Many Jews with the means to flee sought homes elsewhere, and a large number settled in Amsterdam; the Dutch Republic, Pelham explains, had no penal legislation against Jews and quickly welcomed the newcomers as citizens and merchants. Pelham discusses the establishment of the first Jewish congregations, the building of synagogues, and the involvement of immigrant Jews in mercantile life up through WWII. In the second half of the book, Pelham transcribes her conversations with descendants of three of the original Jewish immigrant families, their thoughts on the history of Jewish Amsterdam, and the future of the now small Jewish community still in the city. Pelham is clearly enthusiastic about her subject, but the switch from textual analysis to oral history at the halfway point is jarring. The second half of the book, however, is much better reading; Pelham is more adept at relating conversations and describing her own travels than she is at dealing with archival material. Pelham's part history, part oral record, paints a full portrait of a little-studied aspect of European Jewish history.
