Studia Rosenthaliana - Volume 49, Issue 2, 2023

As some historians have noted, already in the 1770s a significant group within the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam had forsaken the benches of the study house and the synagogue and abandoned traditional Jewish clothing in favor of the temptations of the leisure culture of the big city: theaters, dance parties, taverns, reading modern novels, and wearing the finest of European fashion. At the same time, they had become lax in the observance of the mitzvot.

In this article I describe the various aspects of this phenomenon in the 1770s and the 1780s, based on writings by the members of the community, and the records of the community. I also examine how the leadership of the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam tried to contend with this phenomenon, during those years.

The community found it difficult to enforce sanctions against the new behavior adopted by many, which were not considered clear offenses. Along with the existing strategies, it had to resort to new approaches to try to curb the new trend.

This article examines the final seventy years of street trade in Jewish Amsterdam, from 1880 to the 1930s. It highlights the long-standing struggle of Amsterdam city officials to get a grip on an elusive phenomenon that was inextricably linked to public life for centuries, but increasingly clashed with the demands of modernity: ever since the Jewish street riots against the removal of peddlers in 1880, the social and administrative problems related to peddling kept reappearing on the political agenda. This was partly due to the elusiveness of the profession as well as political choices. It was only in the mid-1930s that the peddler’s question was, at least administratively, resolved by Salomon de Miranda, a socialist alderman and a Jew. In his struggle to elevate all proletarians, he made no distinction between the disadvantaged Jewish population and others. De Miranda had hoped the problematic peddling business would gradually ‘die out’ because of official regulation. During the German occupation a few years later, business in Jewish Amsterdam indeed came to an end, abruptly and definitively.

This article studies the rise of Jewish urban history and argues for a diasporic reading of Jewish urban cultures that addresses three lenses: location, bilocation, and dislocation. The eighteenth-century history of Amsterdam Ashkenazim serves as a prime case study for analysing diasporic bilocation and the formation and growth of a local Amsterdam Jewish identity. Spatial practices demonstrate how Jews and non-Jews mixed and testify to the entangled nature of late early modern Jewish urban cultures.