Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Netherlands gathers two cities that show the young Dutch republic's religious character from two directions at once, one welcoming a persecuted people in and the other fixing what the republic's own church would believe.

Amsterdam took in Portuguese and Spanish Jews fleeing the Iberian inquisitions, and the community they built produced the Portuguese Synagogue of 1675 and printing houses that supplied Hebrew books across Europe. That same community expelled Baruch Spinoza in 1656 with a writ of herem whose terms were unusually severe and which was never lifted. The city's Protestant establishment tolerated Catholic worship only in hidden churches, of which Ons Lieve Heer op Solder survives today as a museum.

Dordrecht, the oldest city of the county of Holland, chartered in 1220 at the meeting of three rivers, was where the free States of Holland first assembled against Spanish rule in 1572. An international Reformed synod met there from 1618 to 1619 with delegations from eight foreign churches, condemned the Remonstrant party, and issued the Canons of Dort, the doctrinal statement later English usage compressed into five points. The same synod commissioned the Statenvertaling, the Dutch state Bible translation that shaped the written language.

One city drew a persecuted community across an ocean of religious difference and then turned on its own dissenter; the other settled, in one synod, what the whole Dutch Reformed church would hold.