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New Christian Girls and Jewish Merchants: the role of the Santa Companhia de Dotar in constructing the New Jews of the Portuguese Nation

Mon, December 17, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 2 Ballroom

Abstract

This paper explores the entanglements created across political, cultural, and religious lines by the Santa Companhia de Dotar Orfas e Donzelas Pobres - a welfare institution centered in the wealthy seventeenth-century Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam that provided dowries for orphaned and poor girls of the “Portuguese Nation,” both Jewish and Catholic. The Dotar itself has only been studied within the context of community building in Amsterdam by former-converso Portuguese Jewish elites. This paper expands that analysis by showing how the Dotar helped maintain contact across geographical, cultural, and religious divides at the same time as it was cementing Amsterdam’s place at the center of this wide and diverse web.

One of the most striking, yet understudied, outcomes of this network is the relationship of impoverished New Christian girls who were still living in Catholic realms to the promise of security offered by the Dotar. Support was offered to New Christians only under the condition of resettlement in one of the Portuguese Jewish communities of the “Nation,” conversion to Judaism, and marriage to an Iberian Jewish man. These men, in turn, had incentive to marry poor girls in exchange for the financial patronage of a Dotar controlled by the Portuguese Jewish elite. In such a way the Portuguese Jewish elite managed to create a concrete system of patronage at the locales where such unions existed. In this paper I address the problems inherent in the relationship between impoverished New Christian girls who accepted the Dotar conditions in exchange for security and economic support and the Judaism of a community composed of families whose religion was conditioned upon economic incentive, urging scholars to reexamine how the “Jewishness” of this specific community should be defined.

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