Between Welfare and Vagrancy: Migrants, Refugees and Travellers between Hamburg and the Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

As in many other merchant nations of early modern Europe, the communities of the Western Sephardic Diaspora assumed as one of their main responsibilities the social and religious duty of assisting their coreligionists, both within and beyond the boundaries of their congregations. Within this context, a wide range of charitable and social activities were provided directly by their communal governments, including travel allowances and grants for the needy and foreigners, as well as communal aid for captives and Jewish communities throughout the Holy Land. This article aims thus to understand how the philanthropic policies of Northern European Sephardic communities affected the lives of Jews in the Mediterranean basin and, conversely, how Jewish mobility to and from the Mediterranean impacted on these communities, their agents and their philanthropic networks, with the Portuguese-Jewish community of Hamburg in the seventeenth century being taken as a case study. This article is part of the special theme section on Mobility and Displacement in and around the Mediterranean: A Historical Approach, guest-edited by Catia Antunes and Giedrė Blažytė.