Image: Delft porcelain clock from a family collection, no maker’s mark. Photo by Karen Nyenhuis.
Shipping Hub for the Sugar Trade
In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was a shipping hub for the Atlantic sugar trade. The sugar was grown on islands such as Barbados and Jamaica, farmed by slaves, and refined and distributed in Amsterdam. England owned Barbados in the seventeenth century, and Jamaica was owned by Spain until England captured it in 1655. France owned St. Croix, and Denmark purchased St. Thomas in 1672. The dark side of the wealth of the seventeenth century sugar trade was its reliance on slave labor.
Yda Schreuder of the University of Delaware states that Brazil was the largest producer of sugar in the first half of the seventeenth century, but the English and French Caribbean islands overtook Brazil in the second half. Throughout the seventeenth century, Lisbon and Amsterdam were the primary distribution centers for sugar (Schreuder, p. 6).
Religious City of Refuge
As a hobbyist in the history of religion, I was fascinated to learn that Amsterdam served as a sanctuary city from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, a canal house owned by the deGeers family, known as the House of the Heads, served as a haven and meeting place for religious exiles, including the Moravian John Amos Comenius and German spiritualist Friedrich Breckling (Andrews, p. 3).
According to Joke Spaan, the Union of Utrecht in 1579, when the northern Low Countries gained their independence from Spain, guaranteed freedom from religious inquisition or persecution. There were sanctions against Roman Catholics, a nod to the Spanish rule they had freed themselves from, but those were rarely enforced. Membership in the national Reformed Church was voluntary, although non-members could not run for public office. The Netherlands was the only European country at the time that wasn’t a confessional state (Spaan, p. 3).
According to a study from the Getty Conservation Institute by Foekje Boersma, there were no Roman Catholic churches in Amsterdam from the sixteenth until the nineteenth century. Sanctions against Roman Catholics means that their places of worship could not be visible from the street, nor could their mass be celebrated in public. A wealthy German merchant, Jan Hartman, purchased a canal house in 1661 and converted the attic into a Catholic house of worship. Services were held in the attic from 1663 until 1887. The attic cathedral remains to this day as a museum called Our Lord in the Attic (Boersma, pp. 22-23).
The French Huguenots, Calvinist protestants in Roman Catholic France, fled after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. Many settled in Amsterdam.
There were also immigrants from Morocco in Amsterdam. An article by Mark Ponte describes Moroccan Jewish families in the jewelry trade who still wore turbans when they emigrated to Amsterdam (Ponte, p. 2). The celebrated artist Rembrandt lived in the Jewish quarter of the city and featured Jewish people and scenes from the Old Testament in some of his paintings, although he was not Jewish.
For Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal from the late fifteenth century through the late eighteenth century, Amsterdam was an important city of refuge. Portuguese Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism or be arrested, so those who could not flee converted but continued to live privately as Jews, known as Conversos.
The Jewish quarter was an area of Amsterdam rather than a ghetto because many of the Sephardic Jewish residents were wealthy merchants. Schreuder’s book, cited below, gives a lengthy treatment of Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam who were involved in the sugar trade in the seventeenth century, along with their Sephardic trading partners in Barbados and Jamaica.
SOURCES:
Schreuder, Yda. “Amsterdam’s Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century.” Springer EBooks, 2019. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97061-5. [read via academia.edu]
Spaans, Joke. “Religious Policies in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic.” Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, 2000. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511496769.005. [read via academia.edu]
Ponte, Mark. “Samuel, Mahamet and Hamet, Moroccans in Seventeenth Century Amsterdam– Voetnoot,” n.d. [read via academia.edu]
Andrews, Corey. “Conference Report: Amsterdam as Haven for Religious Refugees in the Early Modern Period.” H-Soz-Kult & Ritman Research Institute, 2023. [read via academia.edu]
Boersma, Foekje. “Our Lord in the Attic: A Preventive Conservation Case Study,” n.d. [read via academia.edu]