TO this very day both Jewish and non-Jewish Amsterdammers colloquially refer to their city as ‘Mokum’—‘the place’. Nothing expresses so simply and eloquently the very special place of Amsterdam in Jewish history. This reputation derives, in large measure, from the city's centuries-long toleration of Jews and the flourishing of Jewish life that this attitude made possible.

Toleration is as old as Jewish diasporic history itself. Not, admittedly, toleration as we have come to know and value it where it has existed in the last two centuries: prior to the modern era no toleration, anywhere, was ever absolute. Unlike the modern concept of toleration, in which religious liberty is based on acknowledgement of the individual's natural or inalienable rights, pre-modern toleration was more nearly synonymous with permission, granted by an authority. Whether the case involved Jews or, in Europe, fellow Christians, the authority more or less seriously disapproved of the tolerated belief or practice, but had, for reasons of its own, decided not to press its case and apply the full weight of its coercive power against the dissenting group.

Needless to say, there was a great deal of variety in the reasons inspiring dominant groups to extend toleration to dissenting minorities. Sometimes toleration was based on tradition, as, for instance, when the Christian Roman emperors inherited the doctrine of Judaism as religio licita from their pagan