The Curasao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th Centuries Yosef Kaplan Following a number of pogroms, decrees of forced conversion, deportations and examinations by the Inquisition in Spain and Por tugal, the Jewish population of the Iberian Peninsula scattered throughout the entire world. This process of emigration continued from the persecutions of 1391 until the 18th century, almost unin terruptedly. The various events which took place in Spain and Por tugal throughout this period left their imprint on the different waves of emigration. Ceaselessly and with considerable effort, the men and women of this dispersion tried, generation after gener ation, refugees and deportees as well as Marranos who openly re turned to Judaism, to transfer to their new homes the unique life style and religious liturgy which characterized Sephardi Jewry in the Middle Ages. But there is a considerable and very significant difference between the character of the Spanish-Jewish dispersion in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic countries and that of the Sephardi communities in the Christian countries of the West: most Sephardi communities in the countries of the East were established by expellees from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th cen tury, whereas virtually all Spanish-Jewish communities in Christian America and Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries were founded by former Marranos, who had overtly returned to the religion of their forefathers. In most cases, these were "Conversos" who had been born several generations after the expulsions and educated as Christians, in total physical and spiritual isolation from any Jewish center. This basic difference is also the cause for the rather signifi cant cultural differences between the Sephardi dispersion in the East and that in the West: whereas the Spanish communities in the East maintained, in one way or another, a consistent Jewish Spanish way of life in terms of religious law and ways of life, in forms of prayer and the language of everyday speech, the Sephardi communities of the West had to overcome the generations-long de tachment from their source. Moreover, as a consequence of their prolonged stay in the countries of their forced conversion and their considerable involvement in the cultural life of Spain and Portugal, the Marranos who settled in Western Europe brought with them a rich cultural and educational heritage, which was substantially dif ferent from the spiritual assets of the expellees from Spain and Portugal. But, in spite of the clear differences between the various centers 193