Being Black in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam vs. New Amsterdam

By Jeroen Dewulf

Due to a paucity of original sources, many questions regarding the social and religious behavior of New Amsterdam’s Black population have remained unanswered. One way of approaching the existing scholarship with new insights is by using a comparative methodology. Naturally, the observation that similarities in behavior existed in more than one place does not automatically imply that the origin and historical development of one corresponds to that of the other. However, since it is unlikely that many new sources about Manhattan’s earliest Black inhabitants will still be uncovered in the coming decades, a comparative perspective is probably the best strategy to shed new light on this historically marginalized community.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Two African Men. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

One place of particular interest in this respect is 17th-century Amsterdam. Recent research by Dutch historian Mark Ponte revealed that several dozens of Black people resided temporarily or permanently in the Dutch Republic’s largest city.[1] Many of them had accompanied their Sephardic Jewish owners to the Netherlands after Portuguese forces expelled the Dutch from Brazil in the 1650s. Not by accident, thus, most Black Amsterdammers lived in the city’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood. It was there, in his house in the Jodenbreestraat, that Rembrandt painted two of them, in his 1661 masterpiece Two African Men depicting one in a speaking pose, with the other leaning over his shoulder, listening attentively.

A crucial difference with the Dutch colony in Manhattan is that slavery was banned in the Dutch Republic and that all enslaved people had to be set free as soon as they reached Dutch soil. This is confirmed by Abraham Idaña, who in his 1685 description of Amsterdam explained that “slavery is not permitted here” and that “enslaved people are immediately freed upon arrival. The many Black people who arrived here from Brazil and other territories all work for a salary.”[2] Ponte illustrated this with the case of Juliana, a Black woman whom the merchant Eliau Burgos had bought in Dutch Brazil and brought with him to the Netherlands. When Burgos later wanted to take Juliana with him to the Caribbean, she refused because in Amsterdam she was free.

An important parallel, however, is that the Black communities in Amsterdam and New Amsterdam shared the same roots. In both places, several people originated from the Iberian Peninsula, Brazil, and the African Atlantic islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé, while the majority had roots in the regions of Kongo and Ndongo (today’s northwestern Angola) in Central Africa. Since all these territories were shaped by a history of Iberian influence, the data Ponte uncovered in Dutch archives about the Black community in 17th-century Amsterdam turned out to be highly valuable to further explore a theory I presented in my earlier research about New Netherland. In The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo (2017), I argued that we could reach a better understanding of the Black community in 17th-century Manhattan by switching our focus from the search for indigenous African elements to a study of the Afro-Iberian commonalities they may have shared. While recognizing that their ethnic and geographical origins were very different, I claimed that members of this community were likely to have bonded over their shared familiarity with Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements.[3]

While much of this remained speculative due to the limited number sources on this community, a comparative analysis with Amsterdam’s Black population revealed astonishing parallels. One example is naming patterns. Not just in 17th-century Manhattan, but also in Amsterdam, members of the Black community identified themselves with an Iberian Catholic baptismal name or what was known in Portuguese as a nome de igreja (church name). Since names such as Francisco, Manuel, Isabel, Maria, Domingo, António, Afonso, and Henrique were typically Iberian and Catholic, it would be wrong to assume that they had been imposed by the (Protestant) Dutch. In fact, these Iberian names were commonly used in Central Africa prior to the Atlantic slave trade. That the identification with an Iberian name was their own choice can also be demonstrated with reference to the 17th-century Dutch Cape colony (today’s Cape Town in South Africa), where some of the enslaved population originated from parts of Africa with a strong Portuguese influence while others came from regions where this influence was insignificant. While the latter identified themselves with indigenous African names, the former consistently used Iberian names.[4] This show us that the use of an Iberian, Catholic name by enslaved Africans from Cape Verde, São Tomé, Kongo, and Angola in New Amsterdam must have been a voluntary decision. Building on Ira Berlin’s theory that these “Atlantic Creoles” tended to perceive themselves as “cosmopolitans” rather than “provincials, for whom the Atlantic was a strange, inhospitable place,” one could hypothesize that they understood the use of an Iberian name as a sign of modernity, which reflected a desire to be seen as a man or woman of the world.[5]

We also find fascinating parallels in terms of language use. I demonstrated in a recent study that several members of New Amsterdam’s Black community were able to express themselves in an Afro-Portuguese pidgin. Hence, my theory that neither English or Dutch but Portuguese (or an Afro-Portuguese pidgin) was probably the first language that allowed enslaved Africans to transcend ethnic boundaries in Manhattan.[6] Ponte’s research strengthened this theory. It revealed that members of Amsterdam’s Black community who were involved in court cases frequently requested the presence of a Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking interpreter. Even more, the Dutch historian found evidence of mixed relationships between Africans and people who originated from Portuguese possessions in Asia, such as Goa (in today’s India) and Malacca (in today’s Malaysia), which suggests that people of color in 17th-century Amsterdam bonded over their shared familiarity with Portuguese culture and language.

Another element of interest in this discussion is religion. Contrary to the stereotypical assumption that all enslaved Africans perceived Christianity as a religion of oppression or, as Mechal Sobel phrased it in her influential study Trabelin’ On (1979), that “at the outset of interreligious contact in North America, the African has a basic disrespect for white religion,” historical documents reveal that there was a strong desire among New Amsterdam’s Black community to get married and have their children baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church.[7] In my forthcoming book Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians, I focused on the religious identity of Manhattan’s earliest Black community and further explored Willem Frijhoff’s theory that many of those who voluntary joined and had their children baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church did so primarily to win goodwill and obtain favors from the Dutch. Despite their conversion to a Protestant church, the Dutch historian believed that many continued to be attached to their Afro-Iberian, Catholic traditions.[8]

Original building of the Mozes en Aäronkerk (Amsterdam), used between 1649 and 1839 in the Jodenbuurt, before it was replaced in 1841 by a proper church next door. Wikimedia Commons.

A comparative analysis with the Black community in 17th-century Amsterdam renders credibility to this theory. Ponte noted that many of those who joined the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam might primarily have done so to obtain doles. Moreover, he found evidence that many of those who married in a Protestant church continued to have their children baptized in the Catholic House Moyses. The latter was a clandestine house church, located in the city’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood (at today’s Moses and Aaron Church), where people had to worship in secret since the public display of Catholic services was not tolerated in 17th-century Amsterdam. The fact that parents would take this risk reveals that their Afro-Catholic identity was very dear to Amsterdam’s Black community and strengthens the assumption that this was also the case of many of those who resided in New Amsterdam. This conclusion has far-reaching consequences. It implies that we need to rethink Black Christian identity formation in North America. Instead of starting this narrative with 18th-century white missionaries such as John Wesley or George Whitefield, scholars should adopt a Black perspective and recognize that there is a much older, 17th-century, layer to this history, which started when enslaved communities introduced an Africanized form of Iberian Catholicism in North America.

This comparative analysis between the Black community in New Amsterdam and 17th-century Amsterdam reveals how useful it is to study the history of Manhattan not from a narrowly Anglo-Saxon, American perspective but, instead, from a multifaceted and multilingual point of view that places the island and its peoples at the heart of world history.

Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and director of UC Berkeley's Center for Portuguese Studies. He works on Portuguese and Dutch colonialism, with a focus on Atlantic history.

[1] Mark Ponte, “‘Al de swarten die hier ter stede comen’: Een Afro-Atlantische gemeenschap in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 15, No. 4 (2019): 33-62.

[2] B.N. Teensma (ed.), “Abraham Idaña’s beschrijving van Amsterdam, 1685,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum vol. 84 (1991): 131.

[3] Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 40.

[4] Karel Schoeman, Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1717 (Pretoria: Protea, 2007), 60–61.

[5] Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 92.

[6] Jeroen Dewulf, “Iberian Linguistic Elements among the Black Population in New Netherland (1614–1664),” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 34, no. 1 (2019): 49-82.

[7] Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 40. For New Netherland, see Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 312-18.

[8] Jeroen Dewulf, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2022); Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz: Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995), 779. Susanah Romney also discussed the appeal of Reformed Christianity surrounding baptism and god-parentage in her work on Reytory Angola. For more, see Susanah Shaw Romney, “Reytory Angola, Seventeenth-Century Manhattan (US),” in Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Sneyder eds., As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Freedom in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 58-78.