"Before there was a place called New York, there was Anthony the Turk."
So begins Alan Mikhail's thought-provoking new book, "Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York" (Liveright/W.W. Norton).
Relying on archives in the Netherlands, Istanbul, Spain, Morocco, and New York, Mikhail, the Chace Family Professor of History in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, pieces together a detailed and nuanced account of one of the first couples to settle in North America's one Dutch colony of New Netherland, now New York, in the 1630s.
Anthony Jansen "was a man who projected Christianity throughout his life but was nearly always perceived as being Muslim," possibly, Mikhail surmises, because he may have been held captive in North Africa for a period of time. His actual beliefs are uncertain.
Grietje Reyniers was from western Germany. As a young woman, she left home to find employment in the booming Dutch cities of the time, eventually becoming a maid servant, before beginning to work in the seedy areas around Amsterdam's docks as a barmaid and possibly an occasional sex worker.
She and Anthony met in Amsterdam and married there in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1629. A few years later, they sailed to New Netherland.
"On the rough edge of an unconquered Native continent, they were a couple with even rougher edges, in between racial and national categories, settlers who put down roots in a tiny, fledgling colony nestled between Massachusetts and Virginia that would last but 40 years before being subsumed by what we now know as New York," Mikhail writes.
Mikhail's interests in Islam in early America grow out of his work on the history of the early modern Muslim world, mostly the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, and the history of Islam in the Atlantic world. His last book, "My Egypt Archive" (Yale University Press, 2022), was based on a journal he kept over a decade of conducting research in the Egyptian National Archives.
Mikhail sat down with Yale News to talk about Anthony and Grietje, their worlds on either side of the Atlantic, what it meant to be perceived as a Muslim by colonial-era Europeans in America, and how the couple managed to thrive despite obstacles. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
I hadn't heard of this couple, but I gather that they are very well known among scholars of early New York history.
Alan Mikhail: Yes and no. They are all over the sources from New Netherland, and many historians reference them in passing. The usual image of them is as almost cartoonish figures - "the Turk" and "the whore." That's where it begins and ends for most historians. They're either taken as exemplars of the limits of the society that was New Netherland - his supposed Islam and her supposed sex work make them so beyond the pale that they're eventually banished. Or, as some see it, they feed into the myth of New Amsterdam, New York City before New York City, as tolerant, cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multireligious, liberal, capitalist, and so forth. So diverse, tolerant, and liberal was New Amsterdam that there was even a Muslim who lived there!
No one has dedicated a book to them. Mine is the first serious treatment of the couple, the first to weigh everything we can know and what we can't, the first to think deeply about why we are so invested in the various mythologies that have grown up around them.
Would you set the scene for what the Dutch colony of New Netherland was like? What area are we talking about, and who and what was there?
Mikhail: At its greatest extent, the borders of New Netherland stretched from what the Dutch called the South River (today the Delaware) to the North River (the Hudson) and up into central Connecticut. The canonical years for the colony are 1624 to 1664, when the English took over making New Amsterdam New York. In terms of the settlers who came to inhabit this place, it probably peaked around 8,000 to 10,000 towards the end. In New Amsterdam itself, lower Manhattan today, around 2,500. These were European settlers of all kinds, not just Dutch, and enslaved West Africans. The first enslaved Africans were brought to New Amsterdam in 1627. Of course, all of the Americas, including what is today New York harbor, was the vast domain of America's First Nations. The area that becomes New York City was the homelands of the Lenape, Canarsee, Massapequa, and others. They were semi-nomadic so it's hard to pinpoint an exact population, but probably around 30,000 to 50,000 in total, depending on the season.
The colony was always fledgling. It was hard to get settlers to go there, and it was hard to get them to stay. Most people came and tried to get furs to sell back in Europe. Food was always scarce. Obviously, winters were very harsh, and summers were very hot. As in most places in the Americas, if it wasn't for interactions with Native peoples, most of these settlers probably would not have survived. It was a tough place for Europeans.
One of the revelations in the book is that even though Anthony was considered a Muslim by the New Netherland community, you found that the record suggests otherwise.
Mikhail: Yes. He married twice in the Dutch Reformed church, baptized a daughter, and proved himself a leader in the church community later in his life. We have no evidence that he ever did anything "Islamic." We can't know what was in anybody's heart, of course, in the past, or the present. He may have been a Christian believer. He may have been a closeted Muslim feigning being a member of the Dutch Reformed Church to get along. There are any number of possibilities. My main point is that we should be humble in the face of the sources. They do not allow us to know for sure whether or not he was Muslim. They suggest though that he at least outwardly projected Christianity in New Netherland and that the standard story that is told about him is incorrect.
The important point for me is why people around him and historians since seem so convinced of his Islam. My story is in part then one about the perceptions of Islam in New Netherland and among Americans since. In an early modern European colony like New Netherland, being a Muslim meant being an outsider to European Christianity. It meant being oppositional to the dominant culture, being a rabble rouser, a problem. It also often involved a racialized othering. That was true in Anthony's case.
And what about the perception of Grietje?
Mikhail: Her story has the greater arc. She was, of course, subject to the historical patriarchy of the time, in Europe and in America. There is some evidence that she was a sex worker in Amsterdam, and that identity followed her to New Amsterdam. It was often used to malign and insult her, thought to be the sum of her person. When the couple was banished from Manhattan to what is now Gravesend in Brooklyn, tales about her salacious behavior and immoral character were used to disparage her and as part of the justification for the couple's banishment. Grietje though, much more than Anthony, always punched back. When insulted as a whore, she was more than ready to throw an insult back. She questioned the morals and motivations of those who accused her of all kinds of things, something difficult to imagine in, say, contemporary Salem. Overall, she wasn't going to let her society take her down.
Even though the couple was perceived as "other" and faced challenges as a result, they ended up thriving in the colony. Why?
Mikhail: There are some structural elements and perhaps some personality traits that help to explain that. First, going back to the earlier discussion, they stay. They don't come, as most settlers did, for a few years and then go back to Europe. They put down roots in the area. They had their children there. Their futures were there, not back in Europe. They lived in New Netherland almost for the entirety of its existence. That made them very different than most other settlers. Longevity won them status, knowledge, authority.
The other major structural element that changed their fortunes was that they happened to be banished to Long Island just at the start of the most important war in the colony's history. In the 1640s, their farm served as a kind of defensive outpost for the Dutch in their war against Native peoples, and sometimes against the English as well. They proved themselves to be reliable during these hostilities, that they could be trusted with arms, that their property could serve as a spore for further settlement in that area. Proving their trustworthiness and utility to the colony helped to change their reputations after the war. Thus, we see that no longer was Grietje "the whore," but she came to serve as a witness at baptisms. Given his long tenure on Long Island, Anthony becomes an authority on property lines and farming in the area. And as the conflict between the Dutch and the English started ramping up on Long Island, the Dutch saw the couple's estate as a bulwark against the encroachment of the English.
Their farm grew very large and very productive agriculturally, so much so that they even hired laborers from the Netherlands to come and work for them. By the 1650s, we can think of them as a kind of landed gentry on the outskirts of the colony. On maps of Brooklyn from the early nineteenth century, their farm was still identified as having belonged to them.
This period was also when their four daughters began marrying into well-placed European families. These marriages produced descendants that include the Vanderbilts and President Warren G. Harding.
As for the couple's personalities, we have to say that their rising status in the colony has a lot to do with both their persistence in the face of obstacles, their obduracy, and their abilities to be adaptable to changing and trying circumstances.
Grietje died in 1669. Anthony remarried and lived another seven years. Why is their story worth telling now and pondering?
Mikhail: Well, first, theirs is a fabulous story! Unusual, harrowing, illuminating, and with lots of rich sources to tell it. And it is a story of people who lived in the colony of New Netherland longer than most and who contributed to it more than most. As we said, unlike the fur traders who came for just a few years and left, Anthony and Grietje made their lives and futures in what would become New York and are therefore vital to the telling of Dutch New York's history.
More to the point though - in all that has been written about the colonization of the Americas and the history of the Atlantic world, one of the most important historical influences from, let's call it, the Old World is usually missing. That is the story of Islam. What happens to this most formative of geopolitical forces, one that shaped Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean for centuries, once Europeans start crossing the ocean? As someone interested in the global history of Islam, and specifically here in the story of Islam in the Atlantic and in early America, coming across a figure some of the secondary literature referred to as "the first Muslim of New York City" was tantalizing to say the least. The story I ended up telling was somewhat more complicated than this. But the point is that this history helps us to see one small piece of the story of Islam in early America.
And so what would it mean to understand Islam as part of the history of early America? The dominant and obviously correct way we've generally thought about early America is as the history of First Nations, European colonists, and enslaved Africans. This is the story in many ways, and my book engages with all of this, as it must. A sizeable portion of the enslaved Africans in the Americas were Muslims or had at least some familiarity with Islam. Anthony adds to this specific history and to the overall history of early America by asking us to weave different strands into the primary story. He invites us to think about the histories of those who don't fit into any of the dominant categories we have for understanding early America, offering as well an early example for tracing later trajectories of immigration. Thinking about the various ways Islam had a presence in the Americas before, let's pick, 1776, helps us to tell a story of connection between the Mediterranean and the Americas and gives a more complicated and nuanced understanding of culture, religion, and race in early America.
Is that something you're going to continue to explore?
Mikhail: I hope so. I've been thinking about writing a broad history of Islam and early America, and I've been lucky to get to teach courses on this topic to our wonderful students over the past few years. This has helped me to think about the contours of what such a project might look like.
