In September 1654 a French frigate put twenty-three Jewish refugees ashore at New Amsterdam, and a few weeks earlier a handful of Jewish traders had arrived from Amsterdam on their own account. These were the first Jews in what would become the United States.
Holland was the most liberal nation in Europe towards its Jews. Sephardic Jews owned houses among the wealthiest Amsterdam merchants, worshipped openly, and held a real if deliberately limited form of city citizenship. For most of the medieval centuries a Jew in Christian Europe could not own land, making the Jew a licensed guest rather than a rooted member of any place. Amsterdam was where that rule had bent. The Jews who sailed for Manhattan already knew what a measure of equality felt like, and they meant to keep it.
On Manhattan they met a governor determined to take it away.
Most Americans who know the name Peter Stuyvesant at all know him as a peg-legged Dutch official from a Washington Irving story. What the record shows is a man who tried to keep the Jews out of the colony entirely and, failing that, spent years working to make their lives there untenable, and who was candid about why. When the refugees landed he wrote to his employers in Amsterdam for permission to expel them, calling the Jews a “deceitful race” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” who should be required “in a friendly way to depart” before they could “infect and trouble this new colony.”
New Netherland was a commercial venture of the Dutch West India Company, whose directors in Amsterdam answered to profit and to their own shareholders, a number of whom were Jews. When Stuyvesant asked to expel the refugees, the directors refused him, citing the “considerable loss” the Jews had suffered in the fall of Dutch Brazil and the “large amount of capital” that Jews still held in Company stock. They ordered him to let the Jews “travel,” “trade,” “live and remain” in the colony. This handed the small Jewish community two things a royal colony never would have: an appellate authority above their local tormentor that could be moved by commercial interest, and a written grant of rights they could hold the colony to. Every fight that followed, they fought on that ground.
And fight they did. Stuyvesant would move against them, the community would appeal over his head to the same directors, and the community would win. When he forbade them to trade at Fort Orange and on the Delaware, confining their commerce to Manhattan, they cited the Company’s own grant that they might trade “like other inhabitants,” and the directors reversed him again. Having failed to expel them, he had tried to fence in their livelihood, and that failed too. This was a community that knew its rights and pressed them forcefully.
In the fall of 1655, with the colony ordered to arm against the Swedes on the Delaware, the council ruled that Jews would not stand guard alongside the other townsmen, citing the “disinclination and unwillingness” of the Christian militia to share a guardhouse with “the aforesaid nation.” In place of service the Jews would pay a special monthly tax, sixty-five stivers a man. It was a tax laid on Jews alone, dressed as an exemption from a duty they had been forbidden to perform.
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The colony still refused to let Jews own real property, blocking Salvador d’Andrada’s purchase of a house he had won at public auction, and here the community pressed the point they had already won. In a March 1656 petition the Jews noted that if they were taxed and burdened like other burghers, they should “enjoy the same liberty allowed to other burghers,” to trade and to own land. Obligation and right were two halves of one thing, and a government that wanted the first could not forever withhold the second. That is the moral logic of citizenship, argued from the floor of a Dutch trading post more than a century before Jefferson wrote a word of it.
Levy again was in the forefront. In April 1657, when the city made burgher status a precondition for trade, he appeared in court two days later to demand it, resting his claim on the very guard duty the colony had first tried to deny him. He kept watch and ward like any burgher, he said, and held a burgher’s certificate from Amsterdam besides. The court, taken aback that he would ask, refused him and referred the matter up to Stuyvesant and the council, who reversed it: Jews would be admitted as burghers of New Amsterdam.
Levy went on winning. When the city licensed him as a sworn butcher in 1660, the oath of the office required slaughtering hogs; Levy asked to be excused on religious grounds, and the magistrates agreed.
In 1662 Levy became the first Jewish landowner in North America, with a house on Stone Street in what became New York City.
By 1664, when the wealthiest inhabitants were called on to lend the city money against the English threat, Levy was the only Jew among them, and he lent his hundred florins with the rest.
In 1673, he sued the City Weigher, Dietloffson, for “affronts” — probably antisemitic remarks. The court decided in Levy’s favor. That’s a Jew in colonial New York suing a city official for what was likely an antisemitic insult and winning.
What the Dutch records show most of all is Levy in court, again and again, arguing his own cases and mostly winning them. His tireless fighting for Jewish rights earned him respect among the Christians. Property in dispute was placed in his keeping. Christian merchants named him executor of their wills. When a Jew ran into trouble with the authorities in Connecticut, Levy intervened and got the fine remitted, and the court recorded that it did so “as a token of its respect to the said Mr. Asser Levy.” A man who had refused to accept second-class terms, and who forced colonial courts to treat him as an equal, ended up trusted rather than despised. The fighting was what earned the respect.
We’ve discussed the importance of Washington’s letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, where he said "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” But the Jews were not granted those rights in pre-Revolutionary America. They earned them. And Asser Levy was one of the leaders in that fight.
Louis Marshall saw this clearly when he wrote about Levy for the Buffalo Jewish Review at America’s sesquicentennial in 1926. He said that the records of Levy’s civic victories were “more potent in their consequences than those won on the bloody fields of battle.” He was right: a battlefield victory secures a country while a courtroom victory of Levy’s kind defines what kind of country it will be. Equality in America was not handed to the Jews as a gift of the founding. Some of it was already theirs before the founding, because men like Asser Levy had walked into court and fought for it.
Drawn from Louis Marshall’s “The Ascent of American Israel” (Buffalo Jewish Review, July 30, 1926) and Samuel Oppenheim’s “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664” in the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Stuyvesant’s 1654 letter to the Amsterdam Chamber and the Company’s 1655 reply survive in the Dutch colonial records; the Asser Levy entry draws on Leon Hühner’s biography.
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