American Jewish Archives Journal, Vol 44, No. 01 (1992)

156 American Jewish Archives
ish-Portuguese," and, as we shall demonstrate, often challenged
Sephardi domination. Until well into the nineteenth century, howev-
er, the Sephardic minhag (rite) was the American way of Jewish wor-
ship in the congregations we shall describe.
New AmsterdamlNew York
As is well known, the first Jewish settlement in what became the
United States was in Dutch New Amsterdam. The generally accepted
history is that in late August or early September of 1654, a French
ship, called variously the St. Cafherine or St. Charles, captained by
Jacques de la Motthe, arrived in the harbor of New Amsterdam with
a number of Dutch refugees, including twenty-three Jewish men,
women, and children, presumably from Recife. The surviving docu-
mentary references have given rise to a number of theories regarding
the route and circumstances that brought these pioneers to Peter
Stuyvesant's small village.
At least two Jews met the boat: Solomon Pieters or Petersen, who
appears briefly in the Dutch records as advocate for the Jews in their
first dealings with Stuyvesant; and Jacob Barsimson, an Ashkenazi
trader who had just arrived in the colony. Captain de la Motthe sued
his Jewish passengers for the promised fare, and when they were
unable to meet his demands, two heads of family were imprisoned as
hostages until funds to pay the debt could be obtained from relatives
in Amsterdam.
Stuyvesant, who objected to any settlers who were not members of
the Dutch Reformed Church, attempted to evict the Jews, but Jewish
stockholders in Amsterdam prevailed on the Dutch West India Com-
pany to order the narrow-minded governor to let them remain. Possi-
bly at the instigation of the Amsterdam Jewish community, six heads
of Sephardic families, led by Abraham de Lucena, went to New Am-
sterdam as settlers in March 1655 to investigate its business potential.
They brought a Torah scroll with them, an indication that a private
synagogue was created.
Stuyvesant, determined to drive the Jewish settlers out of New
Amsterdam, made efforts to restrict their trade, prohibited their own-
ing property, and taxed them to pay for the town watch. When Bar-