how do you say this name do you say Amsterdam do you say Amsterdam or do you say Amsterdam well however you say it we all know that we are referring of course to the capital of the Netherlands but did you know that for a large part of its history and still today it also has another name this is Mom a name that many people from Amsterdam and indeed some from outside of Amsterdam also know is short for the longer expression mom but this sounds nothing like Amsterdam is this some kind of local dialect or some weird fian name for the place well if we write it in its original script this may give you a clue this is in fact Yiddish of course the words being taken from Hebrew for Safe Haven and this was the name that was given to Amsterdam by its Jewish population of whom there were quite a few throughout history and indeed still today now this became known in the 17th and later centuries as the Jerusalem of the West and in today's video I'd like to find out how did Amsterdam become the Jerusalem of the West what is its Jewish history and why did it get this mon well to find out why we have to go back to 1492 the year in which the Spanish Queen Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada from the MS ending the period of History we know as Lon but also signing into law the alhamra decrees at that famous castle in Granada which basically forced the remaining Jewish and Muslim populations to either convert to Christianity or to leave many of the Jewish population and indeed the Muslim population decided to leave Spain for good moving to a variety of destinations around Europe and North Africa but what's less well known is that four years later in 1497 the Portuguese King also issued such an ultimatum except there was one key difference which was that people were not allowed to leave at all but simply had to convert so the Jewish population in Portugal had to convert to Catholicism and they became known as conversos however in reality most of the Jewish population were Jews still in secret but outwardly identified as Catholics to comply with the law this state of affairs was continued for around a century because while in Spain the Inquisition was rampant nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition in Portugal the Inquisition hardly got off the ground and so many Jews were able to continue being covertly Jewish however the Portuguese government did start to turn the screw as time went on meaning that for its converto population they started to look for a a new place to call home now Amsterdam and the rest of the low countries may not have been a very obvious choice for one it was cold it was far away there were hardly any Jews living there or other communities that they could easily attach themselves to but in 1579 those Northern provinces of what would become the Netherlands signed the union of UT this bound being between those Northern provinces who would fought for independence against the Spanish and continued to do so what was important about this Union was that because of the Protestant or calvinist religion of many of the northern Dutch they had enshrined within their constitution in this Union of UT a degree of religious toleration for various religions when they wrote this in the law it seems unlikely that they specifically were targeting this towards other non-christians rather towards various Protestant denominations but for the Jews of Portugal looking for a home it was like a beacon had been lit at the same time many Portuguese Jews or conversos were involved in the merchant business being very skilled Traders and Merchants and so Amsterdam which was rapidly becoming one of the largest ports in the late 16th century became a rather attractive location for them both economically and in terms of being able to practice their faith once again and so Portuguese Jews started to move to the Netherlands the conversos going back however having lived underground for so long and not being able to openly practice crucial elements of the Jewish religion the Portuguese Jews were unsure of what it meant to be Jewish in the fullest religious sense and so going back to Amsterdam where they were allowed to practice in the open they actually had to get help from other Jewish communities from Eastern and Central Europe the ashkenazim communities to teach them in the Torah and indeed in religious practice this was done when a rabbi from emden in Germany was sent for of course modern day Germany at the time Germany was many different states his name was Moses Yuri halevi and under his Tage the burgeoning Portuguese Jewish Community were able to reconnect with their traditional faith and to practice in the open however not everything was plain sailing and it turned out to be a very lengthy process to get an actual synagogue up and running in Amsterdam which happened in 167 70 when the plot of land was bought and the synagogue was built but when that synagogue was built it was the largest synagogue in the world at that time pug or as it was called in the language of the Portuguese Jews the esa or SN became a staple of Portuguese Jewish life in Amsterdam and unlike Catholic Cathedrals which were also in Amsterdam but had to look from the outside as ordinary buildings this was quite clearly a synagogue different also to other areas where Jews lived in Europe was the lack of ghettoization of the community in Amsterdam which partially came as a result because this community had moved in uh from abroad as migrants many of the inhabitants of Amsterdam at this time which was a booming city were also migrants and so the fact that these Jews had arrived they were not too dissimilar from other people also arriving in the area they were also not forced to live in one part of the city as had been done in other cities in Europe and so were able to spread around several areas even though a Jewish District did develop some of the very wealthiest Portuguese Jewish Merchants would also live in the fanciest houses in Amsterdam aside non-jewish or Gentile houses as well many famous Jews settled and were born in Amsterdam one of them was Manassa Ben Israel who would be one of the foremost philosophers and rinic authorities at the time his student baruk Spinosa would perhaps even outlive his Fame although in the end they would come to blows over philosophical and rinic Authority baruk Spinoza in 1656 being excommunicated from the community by his former Masters for his views on God on religion and the authority of the rabbis of course Spinosa would tally along many of the Great philosophers of Europe together with his ideas uh that were in some ways shared by Renee dear who at that time also lived around the Netherlands he wrote about Amsterdam that the city of Amsterdam reaps the fruit of this freedom of conscience in its own great prosperity and in the admiration of all other people for in this most flourishing State and Splendid City men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest of Harmony his religion is considered of no importance for it has no effect before the judges in gaining or losing a cause and there is no sect so despised that its followers provided that they harm no one pay every man his is duw and live uprightly are deprived of the protection of the magisterial authority the city's merchants and the government of the Dutch Republic also stood to gain much from these newcomers from the Iberian Peninsula particularly when the Dutch would go to war on the high seas with the Portuguese who were allied with the Spanish their enemy to the South because many of these Jews had been important merchants in Portugal they had Insider information of how the Portuguese Mercantile Empire worked and so they were able to give this information to the Dutch and indeed together with the Dutch they were able to rest many of these Portuguese colonies from their former Masters and give it to the Dutch particularly the East Indies company one such example is that through connections of one of the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam with family members living in Portuguese Brazil the Dutch were able to surprise the Portuguese and capture the colony of Brazil which remained Dutch for several decades before being won back by the Portuguese indeed many of those first Dutch trading settlements in India and around the Indies and the Pacific were originally Portuguese colonies that the Dutch were able to capture from them perhaps even more important than this military information were the commercial ties and networks between various Sephardic Jewish populations around the world which these now in the Netherlands settled Jews were able to tap into partially because they could speak the same Latino language or at least a very closely related form um of this language with which they were able to create trading connections with Partners in the Caribbean in trading posts in Africa as well as in the Indies and across Europe for more see this video on the judeo Spanish language for what this language actually looked like now in 1748 it was thanks to the intervention of the a depinto family member which was a sapharic Jewish Family in Amsterdam that alone was given to the Dutch stower villam IV which with which he was able to oppose the French army that had invaded the Netherlands later he would say that the pinto had single-handedly managed to save the state his successor villam I is known to have visited both the Portuguese and the new German synagogue in the Dutch Republic in Amsterdam and so these sapharic Jews had many connections with various other trading areas that the Dutch also traded with it's known for instance that they had close contact with the Jewish community in antan often that Brides would come from Ant verin to marry the men of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam there were also Portuguese Jews who would end up in New Amsterdam today's New York where their descendants remain others would go to silon today's Sri Lanka to Batavia which is today's Jakarta in Indonesia and so from Amsterdam members of this community were exported globally as well as remaining and flourishing in the city now throughout this video I've been referring to them as Portuguese Jews but not actually all of the Jews that came to Amsterdam had directly come from Portugal some had been in Exile in other countries others had actually come from Spain and had then settled in North Africa or other places and then ended up in Amsterdam however because of the fighting between the Dutch and the Spanish most of the Jews that settled in the Netherlands even if they had come from Spain preferred to identify as Portuguese Jews also because this became the accepted Mona of the community today we might refer to safadi or safic Jews all use the Hebrew plural of sepharim to refer to this population as in Hebrew sepharad is the name that is given to Iberia or to Spain more specific now apart from those that came from Spain there were also Je Jews that had come from Central and from Eastern Europe who from the 17th century onwards also started to come into the Netherlands now unlike the Portuguese Jewish Community they had actually fled not as a result of official expulsion but rather because of the violence that was mounting in these areas of Central and Eastern Europe particularly following the 1618 start of the 30 Years War as well as various other riots pogroms and rebellions that had targeted Jewish people in these areas now they were not as accepted as the Portuguese Jewish Community by either the Gentile Dutch Community or the Portuguese Jews already established and so many of these ashkenazim actually settled outside of Amsterdam in more rural areas forming medana which are a communities in much smaller areas however as time went on some of these ashkenazim would settle in Amsterdam and form a community there themselves El while they were both Jews there were some significant differences between what became known as the German Jewish population and the Portuguese Jewish population one was the form of religion that they practiced as Sephardic Judaism had grown somewhat different to that being practiced in northern Europe during this time in terms of language as well while the sapharic Jewish population had originally spoken a kind of Portuguese version of Latino and then switched to Dutch those coming from Eastern and Central Europe spoke the Yiddish language as their first language however despite these differences in communal organization religious following and language unlike in almost every other place where Jews from West and East met in Amsterdam there was a quite a large level of interaction between the two communities even extending to intermarriage between them which wasn't seen anywhere else in 1671 the German Jews were also allowed to build their own synagog ogue which unlike the Portuguese synagogue became known as the German synagogue this would be much the State of Affairs of the Jews in Amsterdam for the next centuries although as the 19th century wore on the society began to secularize a lot more with many Jews becoming less religious and integrating into other parts of the society as well uh at the dawn of the 20th century there were around 51,000 Jews in the Netherlands as a whole most of those being in Amsterdam that made up around 2% of the entire Dutch population as secularization increased these Jews often formed a rather well educated underclass inside the Netherlands with Jews winning the Nobel Prize becoming prize-winning painters that were well known throughout the Netherlands and abroad as well as founding many of the largest Dutch companies that still exist to this day the football team of aax in the capital Amsterdam also became known for its connection with the Jewish population as in 1934 when the mayor ston was built following Chance by the opposition that highlighted the fact that there were many Jews among the supporters or alternatively that they had had to walk through the Jewish area of Amsterdam to get there the aox fans then adopted the chant of yoden yoden as their own which means Jews Jews later on throughout their history they would also adopt the star of David and many Israeli symbols such as the flag although of course in the 1930s that was still to come in the future and the nickname of super Jews is still used today however in 1940 all of this would come under terrible threat as the German invasion and subsequent occupation of the Netherlands specifically targeted the Jewish population in the Years running up to the war in the late 1930s some 30,000 German Jews had sought asylum in the Netherlands after they had been abused and removed from Germany following the rise of the Nazis to power now they would also not be safe in the Netherlands of course anaf Fran and the Fran family are the most famous example who had moved into the yordan neighborhood the Germans began by taking an official census of the population and they declared that when they had taken power there were 154,155 Jews living in the Netherlands 880,000 of whom lived in Amsterdam however by 1947 following War's end only 14,33 46 out of that total remained in the Netherlands meaning that 34 of the Jewish population of the Netherlands had been murdered during the War years it should be noted that that 1947 census in the Netherlands differed slightly in its definition of who counted as a Jewish person than the German census as the German census was based on National or racial lines whereas the 1947 census was based on self-identification as Jewish however it's still staggering that 34s of the entire Jewish population were murdered during the War years now why was this the case this was significantly higher than most other countries that the Germans had occupied so had the Gentile inhabitants of Amsterdam finally turned on the Jews who they had previously welcomed into their homes well that is part of the answer the Netherlands did have a national socialist movement the national socialising or NSB who were involved in hunting down Jews and ratting them out to the German authorities however and partially even scarier I think is the nonchalance of both many of the Gentile population and the Dutch Jewish population in typical Dutch fashion of keep your head down and we'll see how things go things will probably be all right this is noted that in their preparations for the extermination of the Jews living in the Netherlands the Germans could count on the assistance of the greater part of the Dutch administrative infrastructure the occupiers had to employ only a relatively limited number of their own Personnel Dutch policemen rounded up the families to be sent to their deaths in Eastern Europe trains of the Dutch Railways staffed by Dutch employees transported the Jews to camps in the Netherlands which were Transit points to aitz soor and other death camps with respect to Dutch collaboration ikman is quoted as saying the transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see of course most of those employees and policemen had no idea where they were sending the Jews at this point but still this is a rather haunting passage to read about one's own countrymen however at the same time in February of 1941 the Communist Party of the Netherlands in Amsterdam organized the February stacking or February strike which was a general strike as a response to the treatment of Jews and the beginning of deportation of Jewish people from Amsterdam and other parts in the Netherlands it specifically points out as its aim that they wish the Germans to stop abusing the Jewish population and to stop sending them from their homes of course this strike would have little effect on German policy within the Netherlands and the Jews would continue to be rounded up and exported to their deaths as the war continued however this is the only case in all of occupied Europe in the second world war that a protest was organized by non-jews on behalf of the Jews to protest their deportation and treatment by the Germans so perhaps some of that Spirit of mom Alf did remain others of course like those who helped Ana Fran would take Jews into their homes as under ders those who had to hide from the German forces another element that plays a role in the large number of the Jewish population that were killed during the second world war in the Netherlands is that it was the most densely populated area in Western Europe at this time with a wide open landscape without many forests or marshes or mountains in which to hide and get people out it was incredibly difficult to hide and remove people before the Germans could get them this coupled with the fact that most of the Jewish population living in Amsterdam were fairly poor meant that they didn't have many opportunities to actually Escape especially given the lightning campaign for the German takeover of the Netherlands before the borders were closed following the war there was a general lack of comprehension by non-jewish people in the Netherlands of what the Jews had exactly faced those that had come back from the extermination camps and many Jews were unable to gain their property or regain their property that they had left before the war had started this began to change around 1960 when several documentaries were AED on Dutch TV showing the full extent and horror of the Holocaust and the final solution this began to really change attitudes in the Netherlands and the Jewish Community was given more support by non-jewish people at this time indeed the Dutch State and the West German State both paid reparations for the Jewish Community for what had happened during the second world war nonetheless this time showed a large migration of Dutch Jews to both the United States and to Israel in the 21st century alone some 10,000 Dutch people have migrated to Israel but there is also a return migration with some 7,000 uh unsure if these are the same people or different people coming back or moving to the Netherlands for the first time from Israel so today there is a population of around 45,000 Jews in the Netherlands around a third of whom live in Amsterdam and Amsterdam is still the city with the most synagogues the largest Jewish population in all of the Netherlands and several cultural and educational Jewish centers that can still be seen today but that is all that I have time for in this video did you know about the relationship between Amsterdam and the Jewish population starting with the Portuguese or sodic Jews that had come in the 17th century and later the ashkenazim that came from Eastern and Central Europe let me know in the comments Below had you heard of this name of the Jerusalem of the west or that Amsterdam had been called Mom Al and continues actually to be called Mom Alf I found this out from my father who was born in Amsterdam and uh even though we are not a Jewish family but he knows a lot of Yiddish words because these words have ended up in the Amsterdam dialect uh and so yes you can uh find out a lot about history by looking back at these words which is a fun little intersection more videos to come on similar topics indeed on that dialect and all the Yiddish that has ended up in Dutch that you may not even be aware of if you are dut speaker but let me know your thoughts in the comments below thank you very much for watching I have been Hilbert and this has been the history
