Poverty of the first Jewish immigrants to New Amsterdam―― Stuyvesant’s opposition overruled by the Dutch West India Company――Privileges and restrictions――Contributions to build the wall from which Wall street takes its name――The first cemetery――Exemption from military duty――Little change at the beginning of the English rule――The first synagogue after a liberal decree by the Duke of York――Marranos brought back in boats which carried grain to Portugal――Hebrew learning―― Question about the Jews as voters and as witnesses――Peter Kalm’s description of the Jews of New York about 1745――Hyman Levy, the employer of the original Astor. The wealth which made the Spanish and Portuguese Jew welcome, or at least insured him sufferance, in the other Dutch and English colonies of the New World, was absent in the case of those who first settled in what is now New York. In September, 1654, the year in which the Dutch lost control of Brazil and the great Jewish community of Recife was scattered, there arrived in the port of New Amsterdam (as New York was called by its Dutch founders) the barque St. Catarina, of which Jacques de la Motthe was master, from Cape St. Anthony (Cuba?), carrying twenty-seven Jews, men, women and children. These passengers, the first Jews to arrive in what is now the United States, were so poor that their goods had to be sold by the master of the vessel by public auction for the payment of their passage. The amount realized by the sale being insufficient, he applied to the Court of Burgomaster and the Schoepens that one or two of them, as principals, be held as security for the payment of the balance in accordance with the contract made with him by which each person signing it had bound himself for the payment of the whole amount, and under which he had taken two of them, David Israel and Moses Ambrosius, as principal debtors.