Muiderpoort: The Gate to the East
Why is it significant?
At the end of the Plantage Middenlaan the traffic swirls around a stately stone gate with columns and a small dome, standing alone on its island like a stage set: the Muiderpoort.
Key Facts
| Place | Muiderpoort: The Gate to the East |
|---|---|
| Address | Alexanderplein 1, 1018 CG Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36370, 4.91950 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
At the end of the Plantage Middenlaan the traffic swirls around a stately stone gate with columns and a small dome, standing alone on its island like a stage set: the Muiderpoort. Built around 1770, it is one of the last city gates of Amsterdam still standing, and it marked the edge of the city for more than a century.
Through this gate ran the road east to Muiden and to the little village of Muiderberg. And for the Jews of Amsterdam, this was a road they knew well. From the seventeenth century the Ashkenazi community buried its dead in a cemetery at Muiderberg, among the dunes by the water, and later also at Zeeburg, just east of the city. The Portuguese had their own cemetery to the south, at Ouderkerk on the Amstel. For generations, funeral processions left the old quarter and passed out through the eastern gates.
The gate saw grander parades too. In October 1811 Napoleon himself rode into Amsterdam through the Muiderpoort, as emperor of a France that had swallowed the Netherlands. Fifteen years earlier, in 1796, the Batavian Republic, born under French influence, had granted the Jews of the Netherlands equal civil rights, among the first in Europe.
And beyond this gate, in the eastern districts, lay the stations from which some of the trains of the deportations departed. The road of funerals and emperors became, between 1942 and 1944, the road towards Westerbork, Auschwitz and Sobibor.
Today the Jewish community of Amsterdam is small but alive, with synagogues, schools and kosher bakeries in the south of the city, and the old quarter lives on in museums, names on bricks, and the words of the Amsterdam dialect. You have walked from Spinoza's birthplace to the city gate, through four centuries of refuge, flourishing, loss and memory. Mokum, remember, means simply place. The place is still here, and so are the names.