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De New York Times City Room had deze week een Question and Answer met Michelle en James Nevius, auteurs van het boek Inside the Big Apple. Bezoekers van de site konden vragen stellen over de geschiedenis van Manhattan.

Interessant aan de beide auteurs is dat James Nevius een verre nazaat blijkt te zijn van Johannes Nevius, de laatste stadssecretaris van Nieuw Amsterdam voordat de stad overging in Engelse handen.

NLNY.nl stelde Nevius de vraag hoe groot de invloed van de Nederland nu werkelijk is geweest op het gebied van vrijheid van religie en tolerantie.

A question for James, as a descendant of the Dutch. The writer Russell Shorto writes in his book “The Island at the Center of the World” that the Dutch planted religious freedom, tolerance and commerce in New York. To what extent do you think that is true?

Dit was het antwoord:

Though famous for their tolerance, James’s Dutch forbears were not particularly broadminded when it came to religion. The only official religion in New Amsterdam was Dutch Calvinism (now known as the Dutch Reformed Church). A small group of Jewish refugees were grudgingly granted the use of the upper story of an old mill, but no other Christian denominations were accepted. This led to violent clashes between city officials, led by Peter Stuyvesant, and religious dissenters, such as Robert Hodgson, a Quaker.

Charged with illegal proselytizing, Mr. Hodgson was fined 600 guilders and sentenced to two years’ hard labor; when he insisted he had done no wrong, he was repeatedly flogged. Only when Stuyvesant’s wife and sister intervened did the Dutch officials reduce his sentence to banishment.

This constant persecution of non-Calvinist faiths ultimately led to the Flushing Remonstrance in 1657, one of the first calls for religious tolerance in America.

However, many other people in New Amsterdam were not members of Dutch Reformed Church and were never flogged. Why? Because if you kept your religion private and kept your attention focused on the real matter at hand — making money — no one would bother you.

And just to return to the Jewish refugees for a moment. Their mill-cum-synagogue is sometimes put forward as an example of Stuyvesant’s anti-Semitism and intolerance. But the mill had, in fact, been the first house of worship for the Dutch colonists before a permanent church was built and thus already had a history as sacred space.

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