“Noah’s Ark,” by Rembrandt van Rijn, Image from the Art Institute of Chicago, artic.edu, public domain.
Amsterdam was a major shipping port in the 18th century, and I am writing it into my novels.
As a hobbyist in the history of religion, church history in particular, I was fascinated to find that Amsterdam served as a sanctuary city for Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal from the late fifteenth century through the late eighteenth century. Jews were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism or flee, or even be burned at the stake for a time in Portugal.
The artist Rembrandt lived in the Jewish quarter of the city and featured Jewish people and scenes from the Old Testament in his paintings, although he was not Jewish. This PBS special is an interesting look at the speculation about Rembrandt’s involvement in the Jewish community in Amsterdam:
https://watch.wpbstv.org/video/university-place-rembrandts-jews/
Ironically, I married into the Dutch community who fled the Netherlands a century later, in the late 1800s, to escape religious persecution. That community is already well-represented in historical fiction by the works of Lynn Austin, so I turned my research interests back a century from her writings.
Sources:
https://jewishhistoryamsterdam.com/the-jewish-history-of-amsterdam/