THIS BOOK has focused on poverty and welfare in an early modern Jewish community of world renown. Many subjects have passed under review. Although the story centres on one city, it does not begin and end in Amsterdam, or indeed in the Dutch Republic, for it has international ramifications.

We have looked at the slow but steady process of migration of poor people into the Amsterdam Portuguese community from early in the seventeenth century to late in the eighteenth. This was a time of high mobility across the western world, of people coming and going, including many Jews and (former) Conversos circulating from the Iberian peninsula throughout the Sephardi diaspora, travelling in Europe, the Levant, North Africa, and the New World, often with Amsterdam as the hub of their journeys. These continuous movements were not a phenomenon unique to the Jewish world, but were characteristic of the behaviour of many people in pre-industrial Europe.

The Jews arriving in the city included nuclear families but also broken units, each with a history of its own, and single individuals. Overall, more Jews from other regions than Conversos from territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule came to the Portuguese community of Amsterdam; but people belonging to ‘the nation’, a nação portuguesa e espanhola, wherever they came from, were generally allowed to join the community as permanent members, whereas those of other ‘nationalities’ remained peripheral. All these new arrivals were drawn by the city's reputation. This renown was not undeserved. Speaking in relative terms, Amsterdam formed a heaven in the contemporary Jewish arena: no ghettos, no numerus fixus, no collective tax; religious freedom in a rising centre of global economic activity, where prosperity had created a rich upper class, among the Portuguese Jews as in the wider city. This glowing image inspired many poor Jews and Conversos everywhere to pack up and go to see it for themselves. In Amsterdam there was hope: hope for work, in the city and overseas; hope for material well-being; hope for freedom and an existence without fear; hope for a Jewish life without limitations. Religious impulses thus went hand in hand with socio-economic motives in the desire of many Jews and Conversos to settle in Amsterdam.