ABSTRACT
Attracted by the booming economy of Amsterdam and fleeing persecution, wars and economic malaise in the German territories, the first Ashkenazi Jews settled in Amsterdam in the early decades of the seventeenth century. At first they were highly dependent on the Portuguese Jewish community, although in 1635 they established their own congregation and in 1642 bought a plot of land for a cemetery in Muiderberg. A second wave of Ashkenazi immigrants came from further east, out of Poland and Russia, as a result of the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648–49 in Ukraine and the war between Russia, Poland and Sweden of the 1650s. This second group initially formed a kehillah of its own in 1660, to the immense displeasure of the existing Ashkenazi congregation, but in 1673, on the orders of the city authorities, it was forced to back down and join Amsterdam’s High German synagogue.
