=2. The New Jerusalem.=――The emigrants who thus sought the hospitality of the States were, in truth, of a sort to make the Dutchmen very satisfied with their own unfashionable virtue of religious tolerance. It was no hungry, pushing crowd of traders, eager only for bare livelihood, who made their way to this new country. Spain, for all the fetters she had laid for centuries on the consciences of her subjects, had also for centuries given full opportunity for every energy which they might possess to develop in the service of the state. Jews do not restrict themselves to commerce when they have chance and choice of other pursuits. As open and declared Jews so long as they could, and then, when they could not, as Marannos, the Jews of the Peninsula, since the occupation by the Moors, had held office as statesmen and as finance ministers, and had been distinguished among the physicians and scholars and poets of their country, as well as among its landowners and its merchants. It was thus a highly intelligent, and cultivated, and fairly well-off little community which threw off its disguise of New Christians, and hastened to settle down as self-respecting Jews in Amsterdam. They lost no time in building themselves a synagogue, and in establishing schools. Their first synagogue was built in 1598, and seventy years later there were several prosperous places of worship. The old scholarly instinct of Judaism, which had asserted itself in so many epochs, and in so many parts of the world, at Jamnia and at Sora, at Alexandria and at Cordova, revived again, and Amsterdam grew into a quaint Dutch likeness of them all. The men of light and leading in Holland gave a glad welcome to these congenial spirits from Spain, and Amsterdam, with its happy, honoured, and rapidly increasing Jewish colony, came to be called the New Jerusalem. In 1619, sufficiently full legal rights were secured to the immigrants, and the Jews of Holland gradually became no inconsiderable addition to the commerce and the culture of the country.