Introduction

The voice of the poor is only seldom heard, but occasionally it breaks through, as here: ‘Embittered, busy with temporal cares and the difficulties of making a livelihood, earning hardly enough for his needs and troubled by other domestic concerns.’ These are the words of Hiyya Coen de Lara, describing the precarious economic position of a rabbi in the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus far the poor have spoken too little for themselves; mostly they have had light shed upon them from above. In this chapter I shall try to redress the balance, though the task is a difficult one.

Sometimes fragments of information about a pauper lie buried, scattered in the literature. More often we hear a pauper's voice, directly or indirectly, in petitions like that of Coen de Lara quoted above, written on small scraps of paper which frequently lie neglected, sometimes torn, between the sand-blotted pages of the poor-relief ledgers of the Portuguese community or hidden in the files of the various welfare organizations. Through them we are brought face to face with the many crises affecting Sephardi paupers during their lives: as refugees, as heads of young families, as widows or orphans, as the infirm, the disabled, or the elderly.

Occasionally we learn something about their descent into poverty. In a discussion between two women, one of them, Sara, dwells on the discrepancy between the former wealth of her parental home in the Iberian peninsula and her present status in Amsterdam, where she toils away as a domestic servant. Clara Franca Serrana must have had a brighter past, too. Once a wealthy widow, she gave her daughter a dowry of 8,700 guilders out of the estate of her late husband Joseph Franco, and in the 1620s was involved in financial transactions at the Bank of Amsterdam. Thirty-five years later, in 1659, this same Clara Franca Serrana was found on the welfare list of the Portuguese community, where she remained for the ten last years of her life. The orphan Ester Fonseca, reaching Amsterdam from Livorno, experienced a similar regression, setting out in her petition how she had grown up in great prosperity in her parents’ home but had now been reduced to poverty: ‘Ester Fonseca from Livorno, now living in this city, is an orphan girl, without father and mother.