Introduction

Population figures for the early modern period are generally no more than reasonable estimates. This is as true for Amsterdam as for any other city or country. It is even more difficult to put precise figures to demographic trends. The Amsterdam censuses of 1622 and 1795 have given rise to a variety of interpretations. Even though by the end of the sixteenth century both London and Paris were significantly larger in population terms, between that point and about 1670 Amsterdam underwent a spectacular expansion, its population growing from about 30,000 in 1578 to more than 200,000 in 1672. The pace of growth then tailed off, though the number of inhabitants continued to increase to 240,000 in 1735.

Much of this population growth is attributable to a very large influx of immigrants, which included ex-Conversos from the Spanish and Portuguese empires and Sephardi, Italian, North African, Levantine, German, and Polish Jews. Various estimates of the numbers of Jewish immigrants were made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to more recent calculations by Jonathan Israel, published in the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, Jews accounted for no more than a small proportion of the total population of Amsterdam at this time, rising from just 1.4 per cent (2,400) in 1650 to about 10 per cent (20,335) in 1795. The figures quoted by Israel indicate that at the end of the seventeenth century the Sephardim in the city were for the first time outnumbered by the Ashkenazim, whose ranks were greatly swelled by immigration at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth. Between 1700 and 1750 their number more than quadrupled (from 3,200 to 14,000), and from 1750 to the end of the eighteenth century it grew by another 50 per cent, to around 20,000.

According to my own calculations, Israel's (and before him Nusteling's and Kaplan's) estimates of the Jewish population of Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are too low, because they fail to include the presence of paupers (registered or not).

Numbers of poor people are also elusive as it is by definition difficult to determine the extent of poverty. An important count of the Jewish population conducted in 1797 yielded higher totals of Jews living in Amsterdam, namely 20,304 for Ashkenazi Jews and 2,800 for Sephardi Jews.