Asser Levy

Asser Levy (died 1680), also known as Asher Levy, was one of the first Jewish settlers of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

Life and career

Asser Levy was probably born in Vilna, Poland. He left Poland for Amsterdam, possibly to escape the pogroms of the Khmelnytsky uprising. Although he lived for a time in Amsterdam, he was not given burgher (citizenship) rights, and probably was not granted poorter (permanent residency) rights either. He might also have lived for a time in Schwelm, a town in the County of Mark in modern-day Germany. Two archived documents from Amsterdam reveal that on April 26, 1660, he was there seeking payment of a debt owed to him, and on May 24, 1660, he announced he was going to Germany. Levy might have married his wife Miriam (whose maiden name was probably Israel) while living in Amsterdam, but this cannot be verified; no record of this marriage exists in the Amsterdam archives, but this might be due to the fact that Jews were not required to register their marriages in Amsterdam until 1695. While in Amsterdam, he learned about the opportunities in the New World, and migrated there. Levy might have initially moved to Dutch Brazil; he has been mentioned as one of the 23 Jewish refugees who fled from Recife after the end of Dutch rule in the area. However, Levy is not listed in the extant congregational minute books of the Brazilian Jewish community, which casts serious doubt on this theory. It is known that he eventually ended up in New Netherland, having possibly arrived in New Amsterdam aboard the St. Catherine or St. Charles in early September 1654.

Asser

Asser (died c. 909) was a Welsh monk from St David's, Dyfed, who became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. About 885 he was asked by Alfred the Great to leave St David's and join the circle of learned men whom Alfred was recruiting for his court. After spending a year at Caerwent because of illness, Asser accepted.

In 893 Asser wrote a biography of Alfred, called the Life of King Alfred. The manuscript survived to modern times in only one copy, which was part of the Cotton library. That copy was destroyed in a fire in 1731, but transcriptions that had been made earlier, together with material from Asser's work which was included by other early writers, have enabled the work to be reconstructed. The biography is the main source of information about Alfred's life and provides far more information about Alfred than is known about any other early English ruler. Asser assisted Alfred in his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, and possibly with other works.

Asser is sometimes cited as a source for the legend about Alfred's having founded the University of Oxford, which is now known to be false. A short passage making this claim was interpolated by William Camden into his 1603 edition of Asser's Life. Doubts have also been raised periodically about whether the entire Life is a forgery, written by a slightly later writer, but it is now almost universally accepted as genuine.

Asser (disambiguation)

Asser may refer to:

Asser (name)

Asser is both a surname and a given name. Notable people with the name include: