Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands
In 1638 a reconciliation was achieved, whereby one synagogue was sold, one remained in existence and the third continued to be used as a schoolroom which merged to Talmud Torah, a united Sephardic congregation.
In part, such general religious toleration arose before Jews came to Amsterdam, as city officials adopted a policy of freedom of conscience in joining the Union of Utrecht.
These factors made Amsterdam officials and even residents less susceptible to labeling the entire Jewish community by their negatively perceived history in Christian tradition.
Besides providing for and overseeing the institutions of Portuguese Jewry in Amsterdam, the Ma'amad also closely controlled the process of rejudaization, helping those who were outwardly Catholic return to a Jewish life.
The most famous of those to receive a full ḥerem was philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose intellectual contributions were very important in his time and continue to influence thinkers to this day.
Ayllon was no doubt the rabbi who laid charges against Tzvi Ashkenazi before the Amsterdam magistrates, and thus made an internal dissension of the Jewish community a matter of public discussion.
[citation needed] The migration of Jews from Portugal and Spain to many places other than Amsterdam allowed them to build a strong international trading network that was unique to diaspora members.
In a letter dated November 25, 1622, King Christian IV of Denmark invited Jews from Amsterdam to settle in Glückstadt, where, among other privileges, the free exercise of their religion would be assured to them.
Besides merchants, a great number of physicians were among the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam, including Samuel Abravanel, David Nieto, Elijah Montalto, and the Bueno family.
Jews were admitted as students at the university, where they studied medicine as the only branch of science which was of practical use to them, for they were not permitted to practise law, and the oath they would be compelled to take excluded them from the professorships.
Exceptions, however, were made in the case of trades which stood in peculiar relations to their religion: printing, bookselling, the selling of meat, poultry, groceries, and drugs.
[12] The migration of Portuguese Jews from the Netherlands to the Caribbean Antilles began in the mid-17th century, after the Dutch fleet captured the island of Curaçao from Spain in 1634.
One generation later, several waves of migrant Jewish and Protestant families from the Netherlands had established a shipping and trading settlement in Willemstad, a natural harbor controlled by the Dutch West Indies Company.
The process of emancipation, granting Jews full Dutch citizenship in the late 18th and early 19th century, continued the erosion of power the Mahamad held over the community.
The Holocaust ended the existence of the Sephardic community in The Hague, with its Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps and with no post-war resettlement in any numbers.
