## *Amsterdam to the Americas: *## *The Making of a Sephardic Atlantic*## *Wim Klooster*## *Sephardic World, Sunday 26 October 2025 *1492 was a fateful year: the expulsion of Jews from Spain coincided with Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Soon after, people of Jewish descent began settling in Spain’s American colonies. Some practised Judaism in secret. Their later connections with Amsterdam—where a new Jewish community emerged in the 1590s—enabled a return to open Jewish life. Iberian New Christians also used Amsterdam as a springboard to Dutch Brazil, where the first Jewish congregations in the Americas were founded in the 1630s. There, New Christians lived again as Jews until the Portuguese reconquest of 1654. As Dutch Brazil fell, Jewish settlers dispersed to the Caribbean, the Guianas, and the eastern seaboard of North America, where they engaged in trade and tropical agriculture.***Wim Klooster*** is Professor and Robert H. and Virginia N. Scotland Endowed Chair in History and International Relations at Clark University. He has written widely on Dutch colonialism, smuggling, Jewish history, and the age of revolutions. His books include The Dutch Moment and Revolutions in the Atlantic World, and he is editor of The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and coeditor of Jewish Entanglement in the Atlantic World.This meeting is live for patrons only. **Please remember that clocks go forward in Europe this Sunday, so the meeting time this week is an hour later for people in the Americas. **Patrons can join us live on Sunday 26 October 2025, at 12 noon in LA, 3pm in NYC, 7pm in London, 8pm in Paris/Amsterdam, 9pm in Jerusalem, and 4am the next morning in Sydney.If you want to support our work, join events live, and put your questions direct to speakers, please sign up here: [[https://www.patreon.com/sephardi](https://www.patreon.com/sephardi)](https://www.patreon.com/sephardi)*** ******The New Amsterdam Search ***PortalThe Amsterdam City Archives are launching its new search portal soon. Not everyone is excited about this, and personally, I think they are making a big mistake. In short: all finds are equal, big and small, archive, photographs, individual document are presented in a random way. But context is missing, the tree structure that tells you where your are within an archive is missing, You can't access an archive anymore to browse its holdings, it's hit and miss, but mostly hit and miss. The website is here: [[https://archief.amsterdam/inventarissen/search/context/withscans/0/start/0/limit/10/flimit/5](https://archief.amsterdam/inventarissen/search/context/withscans/0/start/0/limit/10/flimit/5)](https://archief.amsterdam/inventarissen/search/context/withscans/0/start/0/limit/10/flimit/5)The new website is here: [[https://beta.archief.amsterdam/](https://beta.archief.amsterdam/)](https://beta.archief.amsterdam/) The following was published by Judith Pollmam et all, in Dutch:The Amsterdam City Archives, essential for researchers and citizens alike, is about to introduce a new, impenetrable search system. That would have major consequences, write Professors Judith Pollmann, Charles Jeurgens, and Fred van Lieburg.Archive institutions face major challenges. Archival materials are increasingly born digital (emails, Word documents), which requires new ways of access. At the same time, digital tools offer new opportunities to approach existing archives in innovative ways.The Amsterdam City Archives aims to be a frontrunner in these developments. It has commissioned a new search system that is currently offered as an alternative version but within a few weeks will become the only access point. Researchers and users have long been warning that this is anything but an improvement, but so far their concerns have fallen on deaf ears. The result will be that the fifty kilometres of archives managed by the institution will, in practice, become inaccessible. That is troubling not only for historians but for any citizen seeking historical information or wishing to hold the government accountable.*Diversity of identities*What is the problem? In an archive, documents, personal data, and images are not regarded as isolated elements but as parts of a larger whole. In the case of the Amsterdam City Archives, these archives consist of government processes (the administration of the city) but also the records of countless other organisations, individuals, and companies that have entrusted their archives to the institution.An archive is consulted to uncover those processes and their outcomes. That is not only interesting and educational for researchers and the public but also reveals the great diversity of identities within the city. It can serve as evidence in legal cases or enable citizens to scrutinise government actions and demand justice.To make archives accessible, institutions create an inventory: a kind of table of contents in which archival materials are arranged into categories, subcategories, and descriptions. Here you might find series of minutes, appendices, correspondence organised by year, or committees. The inventory gives users a foothold because it reveals the structure of the archive and clarifies the relationship between an event (process) and its administrative record (archive).*Branches on a tree*Inventories were once offered on paper but now appear online using a dynamic “tree structure” in which a branch (category–subcategory–series) can be opened or collapsed. Documents can be viewed in the reading room or digitised via a “scanning on demand” service. This approach has allowed the Amsterdam City Archives to fulfil its duty of care and meet information needs very effectively.The new search interface, however, is based on a completely different principle. Each document is now presented as a separate item in a flat list without structure. The inventories have become invisible, and users are expected to find materials by typing in search terms, Google-style. At first glance, this may seem to offer a broader perspective on the archive than the inventory system. The opposite is true. A search query will almost always return some results—but it then becomes a puzzle to figure out how the pieces fit together. And often, the very piece you need is missing.*Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater* (Rendering of the Dutch idiom)An archival inventory is like a floor plan of an unlit house. You can turn on lamps in different “rooms” of related information. But in the new situation, the user must navigate in pitch darkness with a laser pointer—without knowing how big the house is, what is inside, or where anything is located.Granted, not every inventory created by past archivists is ideal; it depends on how effectively the content of the materials was described. But in the new system, this problem becomes much worse. The less insight you have into the structure of the archives, the less useful a minimal description of individual items becomes. The lamp of the inventory remains indispensable.Whether it concerns a theatre like Carré, a company like Heineken, the preservation society Heemschut, the Cyclists’ Union, universities, schools, or churches (or synagogues, too)—all these institutions have deposited their archives in the City Archives, trusting that they would remain well preserved and accessible for use by themselves and others.*Grabbing at random*The City Archives will soon, however, be sending visitors into the woods by making necessary signposting unnecessarily difficult. The neatly stored and organised files are, as it were, dumped into one big pile at the service counter, where users must take a random grab—using a so-called “smart” search term—in the lucky dip.The new search interface is not an adequate replacement for the current system. The promise enshrined in the Archives Act—that public archives be maintained in a “good, orderly, and accessible state”—is not being upheld. The same goes for the many private archives from all sectors of society.We call on the City Archives to develop a sound search system that offers new possibilities while retaining proven methods. Researchers, university lecturers, and other users have already provided extensive constructive feedback on the beta version, but little has been done with it so far. It is time to go back to the drawing board before irreversible steps are taken.*About this piece*This article is a submitted contribution to the daily Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool, written by Judith Pollmann (Professor of History, Leiden University), Charles Jeurgens (Professor of Archival Studies, University of Amsterdam), and Fred van Lieburg (Professor of History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). ***Share your Family Story!***Every Sephardic family has a unique story to tell. Do you want to share yours? If you would like to speak but haven’t given a presentation before, we are happy to provide support and to practice with you. If you don’t want to talk for a full 45 minutes, we can have a series of shorter presentations. If you are very nervous about public speaking, we can pre-record. Our only requirement is that you have archival evidence to support what you say. Send us an email at [society@sephardicgenealogy.com](mailto:society@sephardicgenealogy.com) ***Support the Sephardic Genealogical Society ***The Sephardic Genealogical Society is now the largest producer of educational material in the Sephardic world — and we rely on your support to keep going.If you value our free lectures and wider work, please consider becoming a patron for as little as $5/month via our Patreon page. Your support directly funds new content, events, and research.We are also seeking major donors to help us expand key projects. If you are in a position to help, we would be pleased to hear from you.[[https://www.patreon.com/c/sephardi](https://www.patreon.com/c/sephardi)](https://www.patreon.com/c/sephardi) ***From the Sephardi***c ***Archives ***Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825. Aviva Ben-Ur examines the Portuguese Jewish community of Suriname as part of the Atlantic world, highlighting its plantation economy, autonomy, and Portuguese identity. She shows how slavery shaped every aspect of life, with Afro-Jewish families active in religious and communal life. Drawing on Portuguese and Hebrew sources, she traces Suriname’s unique blend of Jewish self-government, colonial negotiation, and African influence, offering a wider understanding of Jewish experience in Atlantic slave societies.[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49g-AGWnBTA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49g-AGWnBTA)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49g-AGWnBTA) *Best wishes**Ton and David **Sephardic World **Image: The capture of Olinda, Pernambuco by the Dutch, 1630*