THE NEED for a general survey of the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, accessible to a wider public and based chiefly on the literature, was keenly felt by the Committee for the History and Culture of the Jews in the Netherlands, which works under the auspices of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 1989 the Committee took the initiative and appointed an editorial board charged with the production of such a work. Following the example of the Geschiedenis der Joden in Nederland (History of the Jews in the Netherlands), which was begun shortly before the Second World War but never completed, it was decided to present a chronology of successive periods that would be consistent in thematic approach and involve the collaboration of various leading authorities, the editorial board ensuring that their contributions fitted into a coherent whole. It is thanks to that initiative that this book has now been completed.

There has indeed long been a need for an authentic survey of the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, few such works having been published even in the past. Although the few surveys which have appeared over the course of four centuries remain valuable historiographic sources and on occasion still yield useful information, they must be considered antiquated. Yet these precursors of the present work deserve honourable mention by way of an introduction.

From 1590 onwards, growing numbers of Portuguese Spanish (Sephardi) Jews became established in Amsterdam, although many years passed before they found their historian in Daniel Levi (Miguel) de Barrios (1635-1701), a co-religionist. Unlike several earlier writers, who confined themselves to a small number of persons and events, De Barrios sought in his Triumpho del Governo popular y de la Antiguëdad Holandesa (1683), written in Spanish, to provide an unbroken history of the Amsterdam ‘colony’ from the Start of the settlement up to 1680 and beyond, concentrating in the main on the life and work of prominent Sephardi Jews and on local Sephardi institutions. De Barrios himself left Spain in about 1660 and by 1663 had settled in Amsterdam, where he attempted to make a living by his pen.