Spinoza

The Amsterdam community was horrified when it received word of the public burning of Isaak de Castra-Tartos, one of its own, in 1647. He had left Amsterdam as a young man, traveling to Spain and Portugal to try to convert marranos back to Judaism.

During the first three decades of the century, the most important routes for Jewish traders were those between Holland and Portugal and its colonies (especially Brazil).

Ashkenazic/Sephardic marriages were strongly discouraged

From their hairstyles, hats, and capes to their stockings and boots, the Portuguese affected the manners of the Amsterdam mercantile class, with whom they had regular business and social contacts. The Ashkenazim, on the other hand, clearlystood out, in their long dark coats, untrimmed beards, and unfashionable caps.

They resented their shabby clothes and their archaic and “uncultivated” habits and practices.

Even if they were not particularly learned, the Ashkenazim who settled in Amsterdam had not been cut off as a group from normative Judaism and forced to assimilate into local gentile society, as the marranos from Portugal and Spain had been.

Slowly, the Ashkenazim managed to organize themselves socially and religiously independently of the Portuguese community, and in 1635 they established their first congregation.

By the end of the century, the German, Polish, and Lithuanian Jews would outnumber the Sephardim by almost two to one.

It was even more difficult to assimilate the Ashkenazic Jews who started arriving from Germany and Poland in the second decade of the seventeenth century

(Spanish was considered the language of high literature and Hebrew was reserved for the liturgy.