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Many Jews fleeing the Inquisition were actually "New Christians" - Spanish and Portuguese converts to Catholicism. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they found refuge among "a carnival of nations", alongside French Huguenots, North African Sephardi merchants, and Spanish Muslims. But none of these groups linked identity and "nation" as decisively as the Jews.
In a rediscovery of their ancestral faith, these former Catholics dreamt of messianic redemption and a return to Jerusalem. For them, their Naçao (Nation) in Amsterdam was the last step on the long road of exile. This extraordinary development radically altered the old idea of the Wandering Jew, creating a prototype Jewish nation 200 years before Zionism. Despite this commitment to the "Hope of Israel", the community settled and prospered, enjoying high status and unparalleled freedom at a time when Dutch Catholics were repressed and Jews elsewhere were confined to the ghetto.
Lipika Pelham traces the captivating history of Amsterdam's Jews, from their integral role in the Dutch economic miracle and the Enlightenment to a somber coda in 1942, when the Nazis herded them into the "Jewish Theater" to be deported and murdered.
