Jewish arrival in New Amsterdam
Jewish arrival in New Amsterdam | |
|---|---|
Colony | |
| New Amsterdam, New Netherland | |
View of the city of Maurícia (Recife) by Peter Schenk the Elder (1660–), 1645. | |
|
Flag Seal | |
A map of New Netherland and New England, with north to the right. In 1654, the first Jews arrived. | |
| Established | 1624 |
| Population | |
• Estimate | 1,500 |
blank1_info_sec1, blank1_info.The Jewish arrival in New Amsterdam (September 1654) describes the first known migration of a Jewish community to North America, namely 23 Sephardic Jews, refugees "big and little," families fleeing persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition after the conquest of Dutch Brazil. It is widely commemorated as the starting point of the history of Jews in New York and the United States.
The Jews had sailed from Recife, Brazil on the ship Valck, one of at least sixteen that left for the Netherlands at the end of the Dutch–Portuguese War, after the Dutch lost. Valck was blown off course in the Caribbean, en route to either Jamaica or Cuba.
According to the accounts of Saul Levi Morteira and David Franco Mendes, the ship's passengers were then taken by Spanish pirates for a time. In Cuba, the Jews eventually boarded the St. Catrina, which historians would later refer to as "the Jewish Mayflower," which took them to the New Netherland colonial capital New Amsterdam, nowadays known as Lower Manhattan.