Twenty-three refugees in New Amsterdam: the community they tried to expel

In September 1654 the ship Ste. Catherine brought twenty-three people into New Amsterdam—the remnant of the Recife community, stripped of everything on the way. The captain demanded his passage money; the court seized their goods and auctioned them, the sum fell short, and two were held in custody as surety for the rest.

Governor Peter Stuyvesant wrote to the directors of the West India Company on 22 September that they should be "in a friendly way directed to depart", since "the deceitful race" must not "infect and trouble this new colony". The answer from Amsterdam came on 26 April 1655 and was cold: the request was "unreasonable and unfair", particularly in view of the losses these people had sustained in the taking of Brazil and of the large capital they had invested in the shares of the company. Jews might live and trade there "provided the poor among them shall be supported by their own nation".

After that the community won its rights one at a time: to stand guard with everyone else (Stuyvesant preferred to tax them instead), to trade on the Delaware and the Hudson, to own a house, to have a burial ground. From this handful grew Shearith Israel, the oldest congregation in North America and until 1825 the only one in New York.

The clause about the poor mattered most: American Jewish philanthropy begins there, and three centuries later it would buy visas and carry people out of Europe.