Peter the Jerk
Anniversaries come and go, but before last fall recedes forever, I hope that you’ll make a mental note. At the risk of sounding full-bore ethnocentric, last year was the three-hundred-seventieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. On September 7, 1654, twenty-three Jews landed in New Amsterdam after being expelled from Recife, Brazil.
They were probably heading back to Europe, but their ship was blown off course as it headed north. Trouble enough, not to mention the pirates of the Caribbean. According to the record, they were a Sephardic community, “big and small,” meaning that there were children among them. They were met by three Ashkenazic Jewish men who had preceded them in the New World by a matter of weeks. Sixteen-fifty-four was a very good year for the Jews.
But not so good that their settlement was uneventful. They were, after all, refugees from the Inquisition, which had been established in South America for over a century. Brazil was a New World Portuguese colony, right behind Spain in the ferocity of its Jew-hatred. It was reconquered by Portugal in 1654.
To compound their difficulties, they were met in New Amsterdam by Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who seems to have been infected by a strain of ethno-nationalism. Please forgive me if he is one of your heroes, but from my perspective he was a twitchy jerk. Determined to maintain the purity of the Dutch colony, he impounded the belongings of the Recife 23 and wrote to the Mother Ship in Amsterdam for instructions.
There is a huge historical literature on this exchange and voluminous scholarship on precisely what happened. If you need a potted history of Stuyvesant and the Jews, many accounts are easily available. But the key thing is that the Mother Ship was the Dutch West India Company, one of the great engines of New World colonization, with a number of influential Jewish investors. The verdict they handed down was that the Recife 23 should stay.
You could take this story and spin it many different ways. A plucky band survives and thrives. Ethno-nationalists (almost) always meet their comeuppance. I prefer to see it in a different light. We are now four hundred years into an experience that has been very good for the Jews and others, especially religious and cultural minorities. For all the savagery of human history, America has been a fortunate final destination marked by abundance, opportunity, and uninterrupted settlement. No Inquisition was ever established in this country. No mass deportation was ever undertaken by its rulers. It cannot be said often enough that, darker undercurrents aside, America has sometimes lived up to the promise of its covenant.
And that, in turn, is a function of its origins. In the many millennia before First Contact, North America was a multiplex. Great Native American nations lived singly and in confederation without any attempt to impose ethnic purity. There was no one ring to rule them all.
In that sense 1654 was a chapter, another step in the development of a civilization that has been marked by its diversity, its multidimensional differentness. We are a cosmopolitan society of members, joined in loyalty to ideas like liberty, the rule of law, and mutual deference. There is no tribal sameness about us, but a respect for the strength that comes of our origins as a society of immigrants, pilgrims, and refugees. My immediate family has been in North America for a century. My people arrived in 1654. I bless this country as it has blessed me, with a promise of freedom and opportunity my European ancestors could only have imagined.