Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage

From Spinoza's birthplace and the candlelit Portuguese Synagogue to the Dock Worker, the Names Memorial, the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Resistance: four centuries of Jewish Amsterdam, its flourishing and its destruction

Amsterdam · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Zwanenburgwal: Where Spinoza Was Born

Amstel 3, 1011 PN Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stand where the Zwanenburgwal meets the broad Amstel, with the long modern bulk of the city hall and opera house beside you, and the water slapping at the quay. Nearby, a memorial remembers the Jewish men and women who resisted the occupation between 1940 and 1945, and a few steps along the canal a bronze philosopher stands in a cloak covered with birds and plants. Start with him.

His name was Baruch, or Bento, de Spinoza, and he was born in 1632 into a family of Portuguese Jewish merchants, on the island of Vlooienburg, which lay just about where you are standing. His parents had come from a world of fear. In Portugal and Spain, Jews had been forced to convert, and the Inquisition hunted those suspected of practising in secret. Amsterdam was different. Here they could live openly as Jews again, trade, pray and argue.

And argue Spinoza did. He began to question everything: whether God could be separate from nature, whether scripture was written by God at all. In 1656, at the age of twenty-three, his own congregation expelled him with a ban of exceptional severity, cursing him by day and by night, and forbidding anyone to speak with him or read his words. He never went back. He ground lenses for a living, and wrote some of the most radical books of his century.

The statue, by the artist Nicolas Dings, was unveiled in 2008, and on its base is a line from his political writing: the purpose of the state is freedom. It is a strange and beautiful irony that the city which gave his people refuge, and the community which cast him out, both now claim him with pride.

Spinoza's Amsterdam was the beginning of something extraordinary: for three centuries this corner of the city was the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish quarter, so much a part of Amsterdam that the city's own nickname, Mokum, comes from the Hebrew word for place. This walk follows that quarter from its flourishing to its destruction. Walk a few steps east, into the bustle of the Waterlooplein market.
2. Waterlooplein: The Market of the Jodenbuurt

Waterlooplein, 1011 PG Amsterdam, Netherlands

Wander in among the stalls for a minute: leather jackets, bicycle bells, old cameras, vinyl records, tulip bulbs, a heap of second-hand everything. The Waterlooplein flea market is one of the most famous in Europe, and one of the scruffiest, and Amsterdammers love it for exactly that.

The square itself is younger than it looks. In 1882 two canals here, the Houtgracht and the Leprozengracht, were filled in, and the open space that appeared became the Waterlooplein. Within a few years the street traders of the Jewish quarter, who had crowded the nearby streets with their carts, moved onto it, and the market was born.

Before the war this was a market of the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish quarter, loud with Yiddish and Amsterdam slang and the cries of sellers. Most of the traders were poor Jewish families, selling rags, fish, fruit, old iron and second-hand clothes. The Amsterdam dialect still carries their words: mazzel for luck, gajes for riff-raff, and many more, borrowed from Yiddish and Hebrew on squares like this one.

Then the war came. From 1941 the occupiers squeezed Jewish traders out with one decree after another, and from 1942 they were deported, family after family, until the market fell silent. In the bitter Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945, the empty houses of the deported were stripped of their wooden beams, stairs and floors by freezing neighbours looking for fuel, and many collapsed. After the war, much of what was left of the old quarter was demolished.

The great building behind you, city hall and opera house in one, rose on this ground in the 1980s, after years of protest under the slogan Stopera, which is still its nickname. The market came back, and the stalls are still here, though the voices calling out the prices have changed. Now cross the square northeast, past the Mozes en Aäronkerk, and follow the canal towards the old island of Uilenburg.
3. Uilenburg: Diamonds and a Hidden Synagogue

Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 91, 1011 LM Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk along the Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat and you are on an island, although it hardly feels like one: water on both sides, brick warehouses, quiet modern housing. Uilenburg was dug out at the end of the sixteenth century for shipbuilders. Within a few generations the shipyards had moved away, and the island filled with the poorest of Amsterdam's Jews.

Behind the houses on this street hides the Uilenburger Synagogue, built in 1766 for the Ashkenazi Jews of the island. You could pass a hundred times without noticing it, because it stands inside the block, as so many synagogues did, a house of prayer reached through a gateway rather than displayed to the street. It survived the war, was used for other purposes for decades, and has been restored.

What made Uilenburg famous, though, was diamonds. Amsterdam was one of the great diamond cities of the world, and the cutters and polishers were overwhelmingly Jewish, partly because the trade was one of the few crafts not closed to them by the old guilds. When vast diamond fields were discovered in South Africa from the late 1860s, the city enjoyed a frantic boom, the Cape Time, and factories with steam-driven polishing wheels rose right here on the island. One of them still stands down the street, built in 1879.

But the work was precarious, the wages swung with the market, and the island's alleys were notorious slums. In 1894 the diamond workers founded their own union under a young Jewish leader called Henri Polak, and it became one of the strongest in the country, winning shorter hours and paid holidays long before most trades. You will pass the street named after him later, in the Plantage.

In the early twentieth century much of Uilenburg was cleared as a slum, and the war emptied what was left of its Jewish life. Now walk south across the bridge towards the two great synagogues facing each other across a wide, busy square.
4. Portuguese Synagogue and the Dock Worker

Mr. Visserplein 3, 1011 RD Amsterdam, Netherlands

In front of you rises a massive brick building, plain and almost severe from outside, with tall arched windows: the Portuguese Synagogue, the Esnoga. When it was inaugurated in 1675, it was one of the largest synagogues in the world, and Amsterdam's visitors came to gape at it.

It was built by the Sephardim, the descendants of Jews from Spain and Portugal who had fled the Inquisition and found in Amsterdam a place to live openly. They were merchants, doctors and printers, and they built big. Inside, there is still no electric light. For services the great brass chandeliers are lit with hundreds of candles, and the floor is covered in fine sand, which absorbs dust and moisture and muffles footsteps. Some like to say it also recalls the secret worship of their ancestors, or the desert of Exodus. In the side buildings is the Ets Haim library, founded in 1616 and one of the oldest Jewish libraries still in use anywhere.

Now turn round and look across the square at the statue of a broad-shouldered man in work clothes, the Dokwerker, the Dock Worker, by Mari Andriessen. On the twenty-second and twenty-third of February 1941, German police sealed off this area and rounded up 425 young Jewish men, beating them as they herded them together on this very square. They were deported to Buchenwald and then Mauthausen. Almost none survived.

Amsterdam answered. On the twenty-fifth of February the city went on strike: tram drivers, dockers, shipyard and factory workers, office staff, tens of thousands of people. It was the first and largest open protest against the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe, and it was crushed within two days.

Every year on the twenty-fifth of February, people gather around the Dock Worker to remember. Now walk back along the square to the other great synagogue complex, on the corner of the Nieuwe Amstelstraat.
5. Jewish Museum: Four Synagogues in One

Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1, 1011 PL Amsterdam, Netherlands

Take in the long brick front on the corner, the round-arched windows, the different rooflines pressed together. It looks like one large building, but it is really four synagogues, built one beside the other over eighty years, and today they hold the Jewish Museum.

They belonged to the Ashkenazim, the Jews who came to Amsterdam from Germany, Poland and further east. They arrived later than the Portuguese, mostly poor, speaking Yiddish, and for a long time the wealthy Sephardim kept a polite distance from them. But they grew in numbers until they far outnumbered the Portuguese, and in 1671 they opened their Great Synagogue, the Grote Sjoel, designed by the same architect who would soon build the Portuguese one across the square. Rivals, neighbours, and sharing a builder.

The community kept growing, so they kept building: the Obbene Sjoel, the upstairs synagogue, in 1686, the Dritt Sjoel, the third synagogue, in 1700, and the New Synagogue in 1752, with its great dome. Inside the Great Synagogue you can still see the ritual bath, the mikveh, discovered under the floor, and the marble ark where the Torah scrolls were kept.

During the occupation the synagogues were plundered and their community largely murdered. Before the war around eighty thousand Jews lived in Amsterdam, about one in ten of the city's people. Most of them were deported and killed. After the war the empty buildings decayed for decades, until they were restored and, in 1987, the Jewish Museum moved in, a museum founded in 1932 that had itself lost much of its collection to the occupiers.

Today the museum tells the story not as an ending, but as the life of a community, its festivals, kitchens, quarrels and jokes, which is the life the deportations tried to erase. Now walk south along the busy Weesperstraat, and look for a wall of red bricks and mirrored steel.
6. National Holocaust Names Memorial

Weesperstraat 4, 1018 DN Amsterdam, Netherlands

Step off the noise of the Weesperstraat into the narrow passages between walls of brick, and slow down. Every brick carries a name. Every name was a person. Read a few: a date of birth, an age. Some of the ages are two, or four, or nine. Some were babies only weeks old, others were in their nineties.

This is the National Holocaust Names Memorial, opened in September 2021. It holds the names of more than 102,000 Jews from the Netherlands who were murdered in the Holocaust, and of some two hundred Sinti and Roma. There is no grave for almost any of them. Most were deported through the transit camp of Westerbork to Auschwitz and Sobibor, and of the Jews of the Netherlands, roughly three out of four did not survive the war, one of the highest proportions in Western Europe.

The memorial was designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, whose own parents were Polish Jewish survivors. From above, the walls form four Hebrew letters that together spell a word meaning in memory of. Above the bricks rise mirrored steel shapes, so that when you look up you see the sky, the trees, and yourself, among the names.

The idea grew from survivors who wanted a place where every name could be touched. It took years of discussion, and even neighbours objecting to the design, before the first bricks were laid. Many families have adopted a brick, and people come here to search for grandparents, great aunts, classmates of their parents, and to leave small stones in the Jewish tradition.

Take a moment here. There is no need to read all of them, nobody can. But try to remember one name when you leave. Then walk on along the Plantage Middenlaan, into the green district called the Plantage, where the next stop is, surprisingly, a garden.
7. Hortus Botanicus: The Coffee Plant That Crossed the World

Plantage Middenlaan 2a, 1018 DD Amsterdam, Netherlands

Behind the railings on the corner of the Plantage Middenlaan you can see glasshouses, palms and old trees: the Hortus Botanicus, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world. After the Names Memorial it can feel strange to step into a garden. But the Plantage was always the place where Amsterdam came to breathe.

The Hortus was founded in 1638 as a garden of medicinal herbs, at a time when plague kept returning to the city and doctors and apothecaries needed living plants to make their remedies. In 1682 it moved here, to the newly laid-out Plantage, and the ships of the East and West India Companies began to bring it specimens from every corner of their trading world.

The most famous of them was a coffee plant. Around the start of the eighteenth century a coffee plant arrived here from Java, and it thrived in the greenhouse. In 1714 the city of Amsterdam presented one of its offspring to King Louis the Fourteenth of France. From the royal garden in Paris, so the story goes, a seedling travelled to the Caribbean island of Martinique, and from there coffee spread across the Americas. Historians argue about the details, but the Hortus likes to claim that a great deal of the world's coffee has its roots right here.

The garden still holds extraordinary survivors, including a South African cycad believed to be several centuries old, often called one of the oldest potted plants in the world. And notice the neighbourhood around you. In the nineteenth century the Plantage, once a district of pleasure gardens, filled with elegant homes, and many prosperous Jewish families moved here from the crowded old quarter.

That is why the war came to these quiet, leafy streets as well. Cross the Plantage Middenlaan to the small park with tall trees and a gate on the canal side, the Wertheimpark.
8. Wertheimpark: The Broken Mirrors of Auschwitz

Plantage Middenlaan 1, 1018 DA Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk into the park, under the tall trees, and look for a flat area of glass panels lying on the ground. They are mirrors, and they are cracked, shattered on purpose. Bend over them, as many visitors quietly do, and you see the sky above you, broken into pieces, and your own face among the cracks.

This is the Auschwitz memorial, called Nooit Meer, Never Again, made by the writer and artist Jan Wolkers. It was first unveiled in 1977 at a cemetery in the east of the city and moved here, close to the old Jewish neighbourhoods, in 1993. Beneath it, an urn holds ashes brought from Auschwitz. Wolkers explained the idea simply: after Auschwitz, the heavens could never again be reflected whole.

Every year, at the end of January, around the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the national Auschwitz commemoration is held here. Survivors, and now their children and grandchildren, walk past the broken mirrors and lay flowers.

The park itself carries the name of Abraham Carel Wertheim, a Jewish banker, politician and philanthropist of the nineteenth century, who supported hospitals, schools and the arts across the city, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. When he died in 1897 the city named this garden after him. A few steps east of the park runs the Henri Polaklaan, named after the leader of the diamond workers you met on Uilenburg. The handsome brick building there, De Burcht, designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, was his union's headquarters, built around 1900, and its name means the stronghold.

So in a few metres you have the whole arc: a Jewish banker who gave to the city, a Jewish union leader who fought for its workers, and the memorial to what was done to their people. Now continue along the Plantage Middenlaan to a theatre facade with a garden behind it.
9. Hollandsche Schouwburg and the National Holocaust Museum

Plantage Middenlaan 24, 1018 DE Amsterdam, Netherlands

On one side of the street stands the facade of a theatre, with only a garden and a memorial behind it. On the other side, a tall brick school building. Between them runs the tram line. Remember the tram.

The Hollandsche Schouwburg opened in 1892 and was one of the city's favourite theatres. In 1941 the occupiers turned it into the Joodsche Schouwburg, where only Jewish artists could perform for Jewish audiences. Then, from the summer of 1942, it became the assembly point for deportation. Families were summoned or dragged here, held for days in the dark auditorium, and then taken to trains for Westerbork. Tens of thousands of people passed through this building. Today the wall inside carries the family names of the Jews of the Netherlands who were murdered.

Small children were separated from their parents and held in a crèche across the road. And there an extraordinary rescue began. Walter Süskind, a German Jew who worked at the theatre, the crèche director Henriëtte Pimentel, and Johan van Hulst, head of the teacher training college next door, worked together to smuggle children out. Records were altered, names left off lists, and children were passed over the fence into the college garden, or carried away in bags and baskets... often at the moment a passing tram blocked the guards' view.

Hundreds of children were saved this way, perhaps around six hundred, and hidden with families across the country. Henriëtte Pimentel was murdered in Auschwitz, and Süskind died in the camps. Johan van Hulst survived, was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations, and lived to the age of 107.

In March 2024 the National Holocaust Museum opened, in that same teacher training college, together with the theatre memorial across the road. Now walk along the Plantage Kerklaan to the building on the corner, home to the Resistance Museum.
10. Verzetsmuseum: The Choices of the Occupation

Plantage Kerklaan 61, 1018 CX Amsterdam, Netherlands

Look up at the building on the corner, with its stately classical front: it looks like a temple of the arts, and in a way it was. The Plancius building was put up in the 1870s for a Jewish choral society, and for decades concerts and festivities filled it. Today it houses the Verzetsmuseum, the Dutch Resistance Museum.

The museum asks a quiet, uncomfortable question: what would you have done? Under the occupation, most people simply tried to get by. Some collaborated. A minority resisted, and resistance came in many sizes. Listening to forbidden radio from London, printing illegal newspapers, forging documents, hiding a neighbour in the attic, or, very rarely, taking up arms.

Forgery was an art in itself. The Dutch identity card introduced during the occupation was one of the hardest in Europe to fake, with photograph, fingerprint and watermarks, and the authorities were proud of it. Resistance workers stole blank cards, copied stamps by hand, and later printed near-perfect fakes. Thousands of people in hiding, called onderduikers, those who dived under, depended on them for ration coupons and for their lives.

It was dangerous work. Thousands of Dutch resistance fighters were executed or died in camps, and every person in hiding needed a whole chain of helpers who risked the same. Anne Frank's family, a short walk west of here in the canal ring, was hidden for two years by just such a small circle of helpers, before they were discovered and arrested in August 1944.

The museum tells these stories through ordinary objects: a false bottom in a cupboard, a radio in a hollow book, a ration card. That is what the resistance mostly was, small acts of courage in ordinary homes. Now cross the street to the old main gate of the zoo, where one of the boldest acts of all took place right next door.
11. Artis: The Zoo Gate and the Raid on the Register

Plantage Kerklaan 38-40, 1018 CZ Amsterdam, Netherlands

In front of you is the old entrance of Artis, Amsterdam's zoo, with the garden and its century-old trees behind the railings. It is one of the oldest zoos in continental Europe, and the Plantage grew up around it.

Artis was founded in 1838 by three gentlemen of the city as a society, Natura Artis Magistra, nature is the teacher of art, and for its first decades only members could enter, mostly well-off families who strolled among the animals on Sundays. Ordinary Amsterdammers were let in only on special occasions, at a reduced price. The zoo was a club, a garden, a concert venue and a museum, all at once.

In 1941 signs went up all over the city: Voor Joden verboden, forbidden for Jews. Parks, cinemas, swimming pools, markets, and Artis too. Jewish families who had lived for decades around this very gate could no longer walk through it. Stories are told of people who were hidden on the zoo grounds during the war, but the details are hard to confirm.

What is certain happened in the building right next to the gate. During the war it housed the city's population register, the files the occupiers used to find Jews and young men for forced labour. On the night of the twenty-seventh of March 1943, a group of resistance fighters, some dressed as policemen, entered the building, drugged the guards, stacked up the files and set them on fire. Among them was the sculptor Gerrit van der Veen and the artist and writer Willem Arondeus.

Only part of the files burned. Many of the group were caught, and a dozen were executed that summer; Van der Veen was shot the following year. Arondeus, openly gay in an age that punished it, asked that people be told that homosexuals were not cowards. Now follow the Plantage Middenlaan along the side of the zoo towards the east, to the old city gate where this walk ends.
12. Muiderpoort: The Gate to the East

Alexanderplein 1, 1018 CG Amsterdam, Netherlands

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.