Antwerp

Christophe Plantin's press produced between 1568 and 1573 an eight volume Bible setting the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac texts in parallel, with grammars and dictionaries for each language in the closing volumes. Philip II of Spain paid for it and sent his chaplain Arias Montano to supervise, and the result is one of the great works of scholarship of the century. It was also nearly condemned in Rome, on the grounds that it had leaned too heavily on Jewish scholarship in establishing the Hebrew text, and it took years of argument to secure approval. Plantin himself had been associated with the Family of Love, a quiet spiritualist movement that held outward confession to be secondary, which is a fair description of the position a printer in that city needed to occupy in order to work at all.

The presses stood in a city that was tearing itself apart. In August 1566 the wave of image breaking that began in the Flemish countryside reached Antwerp, and over several days crowds went through the cathedral and the parish churches destroying altarpieces, statues and glass. Contemporary drawings of the cathedral's interior before and after record what was lost.

Spanish troops sacked the city in 1576, and Antwerp fell to Spain again in 1585, after which Protestants were given four years to convert or leave. Tens of thousands left for the northern provinces, taking their trade and their printing with them, and Amsterdam is in large part what Antwerp stopped being.

Jews had lived in Antwerp since the sixteenth century, when families of Iberian converso origin settled there, but the community that shapes the city today formed after 1880, when eastern European migrants arrived and many stayed rather than sailing on. The diamond trade concentrated in a few streets beside the central station, and it suited a community whose members could work in a business conducted on trust between people who knew each other, without machinery or premises.

After 1945 that community was rebuilt by survivors, and Hasidic groups established institutions there in numbers unusual for western Europe: several courts with their own synagogues, Yiddish speaking schools, kosher supply and a visible street presence. Antwerp is one of very few European cities where a Hasidic quarter functions as a quarter rather than as a remnant.

The wartime record is severe. Belgian Jews were assembled at a transit barracks at Mechelen, between Antwerp and Brussels, and deported from there to Auschwitz; roughly half of Belgium's Jewish population did not survive, and the Antwerp community lost a larger share than Brussels because it was more concentrated and more easily identified.

A contemporary question concerns religious slaughter. Flanders legislated in 2017, with effect from 2019, to require stunning before slaughter, which both Jewish and Muslim communities challenged as a restriction on the practice of their religion. European and Belgian courts upheld the measure, and the argument about how far animal welfare law may constrain religious obligation continues.