Besides the year 1492 being famous for the year that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it’s also famous for the beginning of the Second Diaspora. It is the year when the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain and found new homes throughout the world. One of those places they migrated to was with Columbus to the New World.
Firstly, the Jews settled in large numbers in Portuguese-owned Brazil. Many of them became wealthy landowners and slave-owning planters who set up lucrative trade routes between the colony and Portugal. Due to the laws of the Inquisition in which Portugal was a part, the Jews here were forbidden from practicing their religion openly, and so they practiced in secret. The Jews here eventually helped found the large-scale planting of the sugar cane crop, which became the core foundation of the New World colonies’ economy until the 18th century.
At this time Spain dominated most of Europe, including Holland. Largely Protestant Holland though revolted in the 16th century and achieved independence in 1581. After being dominated for years by the ultra Catholic Habsburg monarchy, the Dutch enshrined religious tolerance in their new constitution. After the Spanish lost their armada in their failed invasion of England in 1588, their power waned which gave the newly independent Dutch an opportunity. Portugal's power at this time began to decline.
In the 1630s the Dutch invaded the northeastern corner of Brazil and took the port town of Recife from the Portuguese. The Dutch were not alone though for the local Jews aided them for the Portuguese religiously persecuted them and so they threw in wholeheartedly with the religious tolerant Dutch newcomers.
At the same time many Jews from Spain had been immigrating to Amsterdam for decades, and when the Dutch began gaining territories in the new world they enlisted the Jews to go and help settle this new land. These Jewish colonists called themselves the “Holy Congregation”. They were now allowed to openly practice Judaism and build Synagogues, and excelled as traders, merchants, famers, and plantation slave owners.
However, in 1654 the Portuguese sent a fleet and army to retake their lost colony. The Jews fought alongside their Dutch allies, but the local Portuguese settlers and native tribes sided with Portugal and so they lost a brutal siege battle after ten bloody years. Immediately after winning and expelling the Dutch, the Portuguese turned to the Jews and made them convert back to Catholicism, and if they did not they were killed or exiled.
The Portuguese provided the leaving Jews with sixteen ships. Their destinations included New York, Amsterdam, and British, French, and other Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. Among them were Issac Aboab de Fonseca, America’s first Rabbi.