Rembrandt's Other Jews: The Amsterdam Ashkenazim in the Seventeenth Century

The critical examination of some two hundred notarial deeds relating to the Amsterdam Ashkenazim, offers new insights into the social and cultural history of the Amsterdam Ashkenazim in Rembrandt’s age. These sources, which are often very detailed and descriptive, give voice to the Ashkenazim themselves. The entangled processes of establishing Portuguese Jewish and Ashkenazi communities led to clearly demarcated communal borders, borders that were however rendered porous in everyday social interactions. Moreover, over the course of the century the Ashkenazi community’s social profile diversified, as a vibrant middle and upper class was constituted that connected to translocal Ashkenazi networks. As such, it was a fully diasporic community, simultaneously located in the local and in the translocal spheres.