A Historic Document for Mayor Mamdani To Read

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is on vacation, his office says. Yet if he gets back by this weekend it won’t be too late for him to view an extraordinary document that applied to one of his predecessors, Peter Stuyvesant, the first de facto Mayor of the city. He was formally a director general of the Dutch West India Company.The New York Historical’s creatively-curated exhibit “Old Masters, New Amsterdam”features paintings from (old) Amsterdam of the 1600s that capture what life was likely like in the homes and taverns of New Amsterdam. A Rembrandt self-portrait not often on public display stands out. It includes, too, a parchment copy of a document that changed life in the city in ways that continue to resonate — a guarantee of religious tolerance.The “Flushing Remonstrance” of 1657 was the result of resistance to Stuyvesant, an intolerant and, not to put too fine a point on it, anti-Jewish Mayor. The Dutch leader had insisted on a New Netherland state religion, as per its 1640 Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions. “No other Religion shall be publicly admitted in New Netherland except the Reformed, as it is at present preached and practiced in the United Netherlands.” Stuyvesant barred other forms of Protestant worship, including the English Quakers and Anglicans. In 1654, Stuyvesant invoked the rule to attempt to bar the immigration of 23 Dutch Jewish refugees who had fought, unsuccessfully, against the Portuguese in Brazil. They were, per Stuyvesant, “blasphemers of the name of Christ be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony.”Yet, in what was then the village of Vlissingen, now Flushing, Queens, resistance emerged in the form of what has become known as the Flushing Remonstrance — a petition to Stuyvesant’s overseers, the board of the Dutch West India Company in Old Amsterdam — where religious tolerance, including for Jews who had fled the Spanish inquisition, was the norm. As per the account of the New York Historical Society of Courts — which deems the “remonstrance” to be a key historical document — several New Amsterdam merchants, including one Govert Loockermans, “urged toleration for the Jews, the Lutherans and the Quakers, alerting the Company to the danger that religious repression would reduce immigration.” On April 16, 1663, the company instructed Stuyvesant to “allow every one to have his own belief as long as he behaved quietly and legally, gave no offence to his neighbors, and did not oppose the government.”Notably, Stuyvesant still did not allow the Jews to build a synagogue. Although Congregation Shearith Israel was founded by Dutch Sephardic Jews in 1654 it did not have its own building until 1730, on Lower Manhattan’s Mill Street. The congregation meets today in a neo-classical building on 79th Street at Central Park West, having long survived the anti-Semitism of a previous New York “mayor.”So it was that the tolerant DNA of a city based on commerce and immigration, was formalized. It was a sharp contract to the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts — and helps explain the subsequent cultural and economic dominance of New York. The New York Historical exhibit permits one to see a period English copy of the Remonstrance (no Dutch copy survives) and to read its words of the petition, excerpted below. Mr. Mamdani would do well to review it — or even deliver it aloud at Flushing.“Wee desire therefore in this case not to judge least we be judged, neither to condemn least we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own Master. Wee are bounde by the law to do good unto all men, especially to those of the household of faith. “The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, soe love, peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage.“Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences, for we are bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men and evil to noe man. “And this is according to the patent and charter of our Towne, given unto us in the name of the States General, which we are not willing to infringe, and violate, but shall houlde to our patent and shall remaine, your humble subjects, the inhabitants of Vlishing.”The New York Historical exhibit closes on Sunday but perhaps a private viewing might be arranged for Hizzoner, who is much in need of one.

A Historic Document for Mayor Mamdani To Read

A Historic Document for Mayor Mamdani To Read

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