Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive study examining the impact of emancipation on the lives of Amsterdam's Jews. The enactment of equality in 1796 failed to provide these Jews with similar rights and opportunities as the non-Jews; two thirds of Amsterdam's Jewish community remained poor for much of the nineteenth century. Even though the declaration of emancipation should have provided the Jews with legal and social equality, the Dutch authorities continued to retain their perception of the Jews as a separate and different group of predominantly uncultured paupers and never made it their priority to remove all restrictive measures.