Dutch Notarial Records Pertaining to Asser Levy, 1659-1692

Abstract

Among the voluminous records found in the Gemeente Archief (Municipal Archive) in Amsterdam are notarial archives, many of which relate to the New Amsterdam Jewish experience 350 years ago. Here can be found legal and business papers, as well as ones that contain such vital statistics as marriages, births, and deaths. While these records make the past more understandable and help to answer many questions, paradoxi cally they also raise new issues in their wake. Letters, diaries, journals, and the like are largely absent for the earliest period of American Jewish history, the mid-seventeenth century. Mer chants and entrepreneurs seem to have had little interest in commenting on their lives so that future generations could readily comprehend their motives and desires. The absence of such windows makes the Gemeente Archief notarial materials all the more important. They are a major link with what was. Published here are several documents selected from the Archief that pertain to Asser Levy, the first permanent Jewish inhabitant of New Amsterdam. Like Levy, a number of Jews arrived at that frontier settlement in 1654, but he is the only one to have remained, dying in 1682 in English New York. There are no other known prior deaths of Jews in the city. His career as merchant, land speculator, and butcher provided a cornerstone for a future Jewish presence. A better and fuller understanding of the Jews of New Amsterdam, as these documents clearly demonstrate, necessitate research not only in Dutch archives but also those that exist in other European countries. For example, Levy surely was born in or came from Vilna, then in seventeenth-century Poland, but by the middle of the seventeenth century, probably as a result of Cossack pogroms, he went to Schwelm, a town near Dusseldorf in the Ruhr valley, then to Amsterdam, and finally, in 1654, to New Amsterdam. In 1660, he returned to Germany on business and then returned to New Amsterdam. The questions are obvious. Why the visit to and from the Ruhr? What was he doing there? A contemporary, Joseph d' Acosta, frequently went to Hamburg. Why? What records exist in German archives that could shed some light on these activities? What was Levy doing in Amsterdam? Why did he choose to live his life in New Amsterdam? While the questions abound, to date there exist few answers. To understand this early history better, what is obviously needed is a comprehensive, careful study of various relevant European archives.