Dutch Sephardic Genealogy: The Amsterdam Archives

The Netherlands is the best-documented Sephardi community in the world, and Amsterdam is the centre of it.

If you have Western Sephardi ancestry anywhere — London, Hamburg, Curaçao, Suriname, New York, Charleston, Jamaica, Barbados — the line very often runs back through Amsterdam. The Amsterdam records are older, fuller and more accessible than anything you will find at the other end.

The community began in the 1590s, when Portuguese merchants living outwardly as Catholics settled in a city that had just declared independence from Catholic Spain and made freedom of conscience a founding principle.

They were not, at first, practising Jews. Most were New Christians, descended from Jews forcibly converted in Portugal in 1497, who had lived for a century as Catholics and had to be taught Judaism from the beginning. The first rabbi, Moses Uri Halevi, came from Emden and was Ashkenazi, because there was no one else to do it.

What they built within two generations was substantial: three congregations merged into one in 1639, the Esnoga of 1675 still in use, a yeshiva, a printing industry that supplied the Jewish world, and a network of charities whose records survive almost intact. By the 1670s Amsterdam was the reference point for the whole Western Sephardi diaspora.

Two things that shape the records

It was never only merchants. The wealthy Portuguese families are the ones the histories describe, but the community’s own accounts show a large and permanent poor population supported by charity. There was also a middling group, too poor to pay tax and too well-off to receive relief, who are the hardest to trace because they appear on neither list.

It was numerically overtaken quickly. By 1674 there were around 5,000 Ashkenazim in Amsterdam against 2,500 Sephardim. By 1795 the Ashkenazi community was some 20,000 against perhaps 4,000 Sephardim. The Sephardim have been roughly five per cent of Dutch Jewry ever since. Almost everything written about Dutch Jewry is about the other ninety-five per cent.

Where did the Amsterdam Sephardim come from?

This can be measured rather than guessed. The Amsterdam civil marriage banns record each party’s place of origin, and of the entries we hold, 1,706 give one, across 250 distinct places.

The largest single origins are Hamburg (173), Lisbon (137), Bayonne (90), Venice (82), Livorno (82), Bordeaux (69), Madrid (68), Antwerp (51), London (49), The Hague (46), Seville (40), Porto (38) and Rouen (38).

Then Curaçao (36), Salé in Morocco (27), Peyrehorade (22), Brazil (17), Málaga (16), and smaller numbers from Paris, Vila Real, Suriname, Bragança, Rotterdam, Cádiz, Gibraltar, Smyrna, Trancoso, Tetuan, Mantua, Granada, Barbados, Ferrara, Glückstadt, Padua, Viseu, Constantinople, Ancona, Genoa and Belgrade.

Around 27 per cent of stated origins are Iberian, meaning people who came directly out of Spain and Portugal. That proportion matters, because it contradicts the common assumption that direct migration from Iberia was a sixteenth and seventeenth-century phenomenon. Roughly a quarter of Sephardi migrants arriving in Amsterdam in the first half of the eighteenth century still came directly from Portugal or Spain.

The Balkan refugees of the 1690s

One group deserves separate mention.

In the late 1680s and 1690s, refugees arrived from Buda, Belgrade and Sarajevo, displaced when Habsburg armies drove the Ottomans out of the Balkans and burned the Jewish quarters. There were around a hundred people, some two per cent of the community and six per cent of those on relief.

They were Eastern Sephardim, Ladino- and Hebrew-speaking, and the Amsterdam Portuguese did not know what to make of them. They were recorded separately in the charity books, given noticeably less than refugees arriving from France, and encouraged to move on. Many did, returning to Belgrade after 1699 or going to Italy.

Those who stayed contributed disproportionately as teachers, scribes, calligraphers and correctors in the printing houses, the Belinfante and Sarphati families among them. If your line includes a name like Abenatar, Aboab, Alfosea, Arama, Belinfante, Gabay, Papo or Russo, or given names like Buena, Flor, Joya, Malka or Mazaltov, this is likely where it enters Amsterdam.

Where they went

Outward, constantly, and this is why Amsterdam matters to researchers everywhere else.

The community operated a system of despachos, payments to help poor members leave. This was charity and population management at the same time, and it seeded communities across the Atlantic world. Amsterdam families are ancestral to Curaçao, Suriname, New York, Newport, Jamaica, Barbados, Charleston and London.

Brazil is the great episode. Around 600 Jews left Amsterdam for Dutch Brazil in 1642, with Isaac Aboab da Fonseca and Moses Raphael de Aguilar. When Portugal retook Recife in 1654 they scattered — to Curaçao, to New Amsterdam and to the Guianas — and that dispersal created much of the Caribbean and North American Sephardi world.

London took over as the primary destination from about 1750. The wealthy went first, through the eighteenth century; the poor followed in the 1850s and after, many of them tobacco workers and cigar makers. At one point the London community wrote to Amsterdam asking it to stop sending people.

Amsterdam also exported religious professionals well into the twentieth century. Ets Haim trained hazanim, teachers and rabbis who went to Curaçao, Suriname, New York, London, Montreal and Latin America. Abraham Lopes Cardozo, trained in Amsterdam, then Suriname, then Shearith Israel in New York, was the last of that line.

If you lose a Dutch Sephardi family, look at London, Hamburg, Curaçao, Suriname, and then back at Livorno, Venice, Bayonne, Bordeaux and Iberia.

Communities

Amsterdam

Three Portuguese congregations formed in the early seventeenth century: Beth Jacob, Neveh Shalom and Beth Israel. They merged in 1639 into Talmud Torah, a merger achieved by a piece of diplomacy: Haham David Pardo had three copies of the new statutes made and told each congregation it had the honour of signing first.

The Esnoga on what is now Mr Visserplein was inaugurated in 1675 and remains in use. It survived the war. The community around it did not: some 75 per cent of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and Amsterdam lost over 80 per cent of its 79,000 Jews.

Today the Portugees-Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap has around 270 families. There is also a thriving young independent Portuguese-Jewish congregation, Bendigamos.

The Hague

Two congregations: Beth Jacob, with a synagogue from 1707, and Honen Dal from 1726. They merged in 1743 as Honen Dal, on the Princessegracht.

The Hague community was smaller than Amsterdam’s and more dependent on cooperation with the Ashkenazim. When the united structure broke up in 1870, The Hague wanted to stay in it and Amsterdam did not. Amsterdam prevailed.

Honen Dal survived the war as a building. The congregation was dissolved afterwards and the synagogue sold to the Liberal community. There is a Jewish Cultural Quarter page for The Hague and a dedicated Jewish heritage website.

Middelburg

The commercial capital of Zeeland, with Jews present by 1668 and possibly a synagogue from 1655. Jacob Judah Aryeh Leon Templo, known for his model of Solomon’s Temple, is reported as Haham there before 1643.

The community had connections to Dutch Brazil and the Canaries, remained small, and declined through the later eighteenth century as families moved to Amsterdam and The Hague. It has a Sephardi cemetery with notable burials, for which there is a chronological list of graves.

Rotterdam

Portuguese merchants settled from 1610 under permits for trade and worship, and from 1647 held rights equal to those in Amsterdam. There were synagogues, a Talmudic school and cemeteries. The community was primarily commercial, declined in the early eighteenth century, and by 1736 had ceased to exist independently, its remaining members joining the Ashkenazi community.

A warning for researchers. Rotterdam records of the Jewish community as a whole are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi — Abrahams, Anspach, Boas, van Cleef, de Jong. Genuine Sephardi entries are sparse. Do not assume a Rotterdam Jewish record is Sephardi.

Groningen, Haarlem and elsewhere

Jews were barred from Groningen until 1683 and settled in nearby Appingedam. Around fifty Jews lived in the city by 1700; they were banned again in 1710 after an accusation of theft, returned in the 1730s, and numbered about ninety by 1744. Several were tobacco merchants. See the Jewish Cultural Quarter page for Groningen.

Haarlem is an instructive failure. Portuguese merchants attempted to settle in 1605 and were refused, on the unusual ground that there were not enough of them, the city requiring fifty families before it would permit a synagogue. Haarlem appears to have been trying to draw the Jews away from Amsterdam; the negotiators wanted greater religious freedom than Amsterdam allowed; neither side conceded enough.

Naarden also had a Portuguese congregation for a period. Nijkerk is a curiosity worth knowing: the only synagogue in the Netherlands founded by Italian Jews, whose Torah scroll came from Venice.

Cemeteries

Beth Haim at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, from 1614, is the Portuguese cemetery and one of the most important Jewish burial grounds in Europe, with some 28,000 graves.

The community was refused burial rights in Amsterdam in 1606 and 1608 and initially buried at Groet on the North Holland coast. Most of those bodies and some stones were later moved to Ouderkerk. A Hebrew gravestone from Groet was found a few years ago serving as a step in the local Reformed church, and returned.

Unlike Ashkenazi practice, the Portuguese permitted figurative carving on their stones, and the Ouderkerk monuments are correspondingly elaborate.

The burial cards indexed from Ouderkerk are the single most-used Sephardi genealogical source in the Netherlands. Read them with care: they were compiled by people who sometimes guessed, and they are not wholly reliable. When something looks wrong, go back to the community’s own burial registers.

The Hague’s cemetery on the Scheveningseweg was shared between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, with around 9,000 burials, of which 3,000 have headstones. The earliest Portuguese burial is Jacob Israel Mello, 1699, hazan of Beth Jacob. The Foundation for the Preservation of the Jewish Cemetery maintains it, and there is an index of names.

Zeeburg, founded 1714, was the Ashkenazi cemetery for the poor, with some 100,000 burials to 1942. Whether any Sephardim were buried there is not established, and it would be worth knowing.

Records

The volume here is the problem, not the scarcity. What follows is a route through it.

The Portuguese community archive

Held at the Amsterdam City Archives as inventory 334. Earlier documents are largely handwritten in Portuguese, later ones in Dutch, with Hebrew throughout. There is now also an automated search tool covering handwritten material.

The structure follows the community’s own history: archives 1, 2 and 3 are the three original congregations; 4 is the joint board of the Imposta; 5 onward is the merged Talmud Torah.

The Escamot, the resolution books, are the heart of it: statutes, appointments, rulings on taxes, the poor, real estate, individual members, bans, and international correspondence. The first volume runs to 849 densely written pages and carries around 320 signatures on the 1639 statutes, rising to about 460 a few years later. Maxim Kerkhof has published a complete transcription as Livro dos Acordos, in two volumes.

Birth registers survive from 1736. Circumcision registers, with copies from several mohalim covering 1693 to 1725 and 1705 to 1740, reach back forty years before the birth registers. Ketubot survive from 1673. Burial records run from 1680, with earlier volumes to 1639 and for 1640 to 1648, and a gap between 1648 and 1680 that has to be filled from the Livros Longos, the financial registers recording payments for a boat and a coffin for each pauper’s burial.

The financial registers from inventory 172 onward are underused and hold the actual payments: who paid finta, promessa and imposta, and how much. The Imposta was a levy of one per mille on international trade, so those figures indicate the scale of a merchant’s business. A payment of 144 guilders means trade of some 144,000.

Tax and membership lists appear roughly every three years in theory, and about twenty times over a century and a half in practice. Combined with the poor-relief lists, they show when a person appears in the community and when they stop appearing, which is often how you date an arrival or a departure.

Dotar: the dowry society

The Santa Companhia de Dotar Orphas e Donzelas Pobres, founded in 1615 and still operating, is one of the most valuable and least used Sephardi sources anywhere.

It awarded dowries by lottery to orphan girls and young women of Iberian descent, and it accepted applicants from across the whole Sephardi world — from Saint-Jean-de-Luz to Danzig, and from Brazil, Curaçao, Jamaica, New York, Bayonne, Livorno, Constantinople, Salé and Cairo. Between 50 and 150 candidates applied each year. Ton Tielen counts 6,516 candidate entries to 1735 alone, of which over 2,000 come from outside Amsterdam.

Two features make it genealogically powerful. Membership was heritable and numbered — Joseph Pardo was member number one, and that number passes down his family into the nineteenth century, with each succession recorded. And the dowry amount depended on the applicant’s degree of relationship to a member, in three defined grades, so the sum awarded encodes a family relationship.

The archive sits within inventory 334 at numbers 1141 to 1185.

Civil records

Marriage banns survive from 1598. Jews were required to marry before the civil authorities as well as religiously, and the banns give ages, addresses, the assisting relative and, most usefully, the place of origin. This is the principal route from Amsterdam back to Iberia.

Civil registration proper begins in 1811, under French rule: births, marriages, deaths, and population registers from 1850.

The notarial archives

Around four kilometres of shelving and roughly 20 million deeds, from the 1570s to 1900. The Amsterdam City Archives is digitising and indexing the whole series through a volunteer project; several million scans are online and something over five per cent is indexed.

This matters more than it may sound. Portuguese Jews used notaries constantly, because before the eighteenth century there was no other way to establish a fact or begin a dispute. Contracts, wills, prenuptial agreements, powers of attorney, declarations and insolvency settlements all pass through them. A prenuptial agreement drawn before a notary took legal precedence over the ketubah, and often names people, including mothers, that the ketubah does not.

Notaries who served many Portuguese clients, and who worked in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, include Benedict Baddel, Dirck van der Groe, Adriaan Lock and Dominicus van den Brink. Many protocols carry their own index at the front or back.

Use the wildcard when searching: spellings vary, and Pereira, Perera and Pereyra are the same family.

Other city and state records

The Orphan Chamber, inventory 5073, appointed guardians for minor children when there was no will, and had to certify that a widow or widower’s children were provided for before a remarriage could proceed. Both series name family members and often the relationship.

Collateral succession tax records, inventory 5046, cover estates passing to siblings, parents or cousins rather than children, with inventories of the property.

The Chamber of Insolvent Estates holds bankruptcy settlements listing every creditor. These are often overwhelmingly Jewish and give a picture of a person’s commercial network.

War taxes of 1674 and after assessed half a per cent of wealth, with the Jews listed together, and amount to a directory of the wealthier community.

The Vestiges registers of Amsterdam house ownership are indexed and online.

Records elsewhere

The Nationaal Archief at The Hague, for colonial material, including the archives of the Portuguese Jewish community of Suriname, with nearly 200,000 scans available free, and ketubot from 1702.

Akevoth, archived but still accessible, holding the Ouderkerk burial cards and a Portuguese marriages index covering roughly 1675 to the early twentieth century.

WieWasWie and Open Archives, the general Dutch genealogical portals.

The Nederlands-Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente archive of The Hague: looted by the Nazis, captured by the Red Army, held in Moscow, and returned in 2003. Seven metres of records covering 1708 to 1941. The Haags Gemeentearchief also holds civil death certificates and the municipal civil registers.

The Ets Haim / Livraria Montezinos library at the Esnoga, the oldest working Jewish library in the world, holds circumcision registers among much that remains uncatalogued. Six are digitised: EH 49 B 17, EH 48 D 18, EH 48 E 18, EH 48 E 03, EH 49 B 26 and EH 48 D 33. [VERIFY: the live page names a mohel against each of these, but the titles are truncated in the export and I have not confirmed which name belongs to which manuscript.]

For Zeeland, the Zeeuws Archief. For Rotterdam, the Rotterdam City Archives and its notarial deeds. For Groningen, the Groninger Archieven.

Sephardic World lectures on the Netherlands

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Netherlands is exceptionally well served by historians, and the genealogical infrastructure is the best in the Sephardi world. The gaps are specific.

The scholarship is outstanding: Miriam Bodian, Daniel Swetschinski, Yosef Kaplan, Jonathan Israel, Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld on poverty and welfare, and Bart Wallet on the nineteenth century. Studia Rosenthaliana is the journal of record.

The eighteenth century is the least worked period, which is precisely when Amsterdam was the largest Jewish community in Europe and when a quarter of arrivals still came directly from Iberia.

The ketubot have no name index linked to the images. There is an index at dutchjewry.org giving the couple and both fathers, but it does not connect to the scans. An index linking the two would be a substantial contribution and, at around 3,000 ketubot, is a finite task.

The circumcision registers of 1693 to 1740 are not indexed online at all, and reach back four decades before the birth registers.

Nobody has systematically worked the Escamot, the finta and imposta lists, or the poor-relief registers as a series to reconstruct the membership year by year, though Kerkhof’s transcription now makes the first of those possible.

The notarial archives, once indexed, will transform Sephardi genealogy across the whole Atlantic world. That work is happening now and needs volunteers who can read seventeenth-century Dutch.

Further reading

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, 1997).

Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Littman Library, 2000).

Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam.

Yosef Kaplan (ed.), The Dutch Intersection (Brill, 2008).

Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda (eds), Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture 1500–2000 (Brill, 2002).

Bart Wallet and others, Reappraising the History of the Jews in the Netherlands.

Maxim Kerkhof, Livro dos Acordos, two volumes.

Frederik Nagtglas, Eene rustplaats der bannelingen: de graven der Portugesche Joden te Middelburg (1864).

Organisations and repositories

Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Vijzelstraat 32. Archive 334 is the Portuguese Jewish community; 5075 the notarial archives; 5073 the Orphan Chamber; 5046 collateral succession.

Portugees-Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap and the Esnoga, Mr Visserplein 3, Amsterdam.

Ets Haim / Livraria Montezinos, within the Esnoga complex.

Nationaal Archief, The Hague, for colonial and Suriname material.

Joods Historisch Museum and the Jewish Cultural Quarter, Amsterdam.

Nederlandse Kring voor Joodse Genealogie.

Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, The Hague. [LINK NEEDED: the address on the live page is malformed and does not resolve]

Menasseh ben Israel Institute, Amsterdam.

West-Indische Compagnie, for the colonial trading company records.

The Sephardic Diaspora discussion group.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

  • An index to the Amsterdam ketubot linking names to the scanned images
  • Transcriptions of the circumcision registers of 1693 to 1725 and 1705 to 1740
  • Dotar candidate lists sent abroad, which were circulated to Hamburg, Bayonne, Livorno, Brazil and elsewhere
  • Burial records covering the Ouderkerk gap between 1648 and 1680
  • Any list of Sephardim buried at Zeeburg
  • Middelburg community records beyond the cemetery lists
  • Rotterdam Portuguese congregation records before 1736
  • Naarden Portuguese congregation records
  • Any register from the Groet burial ground before the move to Ouderkerk

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

Dutch Sephardi research means the richest archive in the Sephardi world, in Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew and Aramaic, with a website that is largely untranslated and a notarial series only partly indexed. The material is there in extraordinary quantity; knowing where to look, and being able to read it, is the difficulty. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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