Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  Charles next turned his attention to capturing Algiers, the Ottoman outpost closest to Spain. As he had taken Tunis, so he would conquer the sultan’s primary stronghold in his sector of the Mediterranean. In the fall of 1541, Charles advanced on Algiers with a force of fifty warships, two hundred support vessels, and an army of nearly twenty thousand. As the port was lightly defended by a garrison of four thousand men, he had good reason to be confident.

  But on the night of October 23, as his army was disembarking on a beach near Algiers, thunderous black clouds out of the northeast darkened the landing site and burst upon them. For three days, an unceasing storm and gale-force winds wracked the invaders. Fourteen warships were dashed against the rocks and a hundred transport vessels destroyed, with the loss of eight thousand men. Those who made it ashore were stuck in a muddy quagmire. At the end of the tempest, Moorish horsemen charged down from the hills, their swords flaying the imperial troops. Charles, soaked to the skin, with sword in hand, tried to rally his men, but considering the situation, ordered his army to re-embark. When the fleet regrouped fifteen miles down the coast, the conqueror of Mexico, Hernando Cortés, whom Charles had invited along, advised a counterattack. But the emperor, his troops dispirited, exhausted, and ill-equipped, reluctantly ended the expedition, blaming its failure on the weather. During the invasion, the two thousand Jews of Algiers, knowing the fate that had befallen their brethren in Tunis, lived in great fear. Afterward, in commemoration of the three days when the heavens opened up in their defense, they instituted a special holiday with three days of fasting and celebration.30

  In 1544, a year after his Algiers disaster, Charles left Spain for Flanders and did not return until 1556. As Charles departed in sadness, Sinan rejoiced. The Jewish corsair was at the Red Sea port of Suez that year, building a fleet to support an Indian prince’s effort to evict the Portuguese, when he got word that Barbarossa had rescued Sinan’s kidnapped son. Five years before, the boy had been taken by imperial forces on his way to rejoin his father after Sinan’s latest victory. He was eventually delivered to the Lord of Elba, who baptized the child and raised him at court. Several times Barbarossa tried to ransom the boy without success. Finally in 1544, when sailing near Elba, he sent an envoy to bargain for the youth’s return, only to be told that the ruler’s “religious scruples forbade him to surrender a baptized Christian to an infidel.” A furious Barbarossa landed his men, sacked the town of Piombino, and blew up the fort. At this point the Lord of Elba agreed to surrender his “boy-favorite.”31

  In 1551, after a stint as governor of Algiers, Sinan, now Kaptan Pasha, commander of the Turkish navy, captured Tripoli. Occupying the port, he imprisoned the Knights of Malta, who had moved there from their island. After first hauling them back to Constantinople and parading them in chains before the sultan, Sinan—gracious in victory in contrast to Charles’s crusaders at Tunis—set the humbled knights free.

  In May 1553, in his final recorded action, Sinan sailed down the Dardanelles from Gallipoli with 150 ships, including twenty French galleys, and ravaged the coastal districts of southern Italy and Sicily. Before returning to Constantinople, he landed on Corsica at the behest of the king of France and expelled the Genoese. That is the last we hear of “the famous Jewish pirate,” noted for his humane treatment of prisoners and his magical powers. His untutored crew bragged that he needed no more than a crossbow to find the height of the stars to determine their position at sea. (In truth, his crossbow was a “Jacob’s staff,” an early form of sextant.)

  Charles’s final years were not as fortunate. In 1556, the pressures of the job drove him to abdicate in favor of his son Philip II, give half his empire to his brother Ferdinand, and retire to a monastery.32 The Venetian ambassador wrote that he was “not greedy of territory, but most greedy of peace and quiet.”33 Yet war was his constant affair and he was utterly worn out by it. In the company of monks, the emperor spent the last two years of his life fishing for trout from a tower window over a rushing stream and trying to synchronize his sizeable collection of 159 clocks. He is said to have exclaimed after giving up in vain: “How foolish I have been to think I could make all men believe alike about religion or unite all my dominions when I cannot even make these clocks strike the hour together?”34

  In September 1558, after a long illness and tormented by the gout that left him an invalid, Charles cried, “Oh Lord, I go,” and died. Sinan, who had always been a thorn in his side, also died that year. His tombstone at Istanbul’s Scutari cemetery reads in part:

  Towards his friends, Sinan was another Joseph; his enemies dreaded him like a dart. Let us pray to Heaven for Sinan; may God cause his soul to rejoice…The Kaptan Pasha has entered the realm of Divine Mercy.35

  An assessment of Charles’s reign has to conclude that he overreached and overspent. The empire was too big, his enemies and the forces against him too powerful. The tides of history were not in his favor. Spain had stopped producing. Relying on gold and silver from the New World to import most everything doubled the prices of goods. Europe thereby profited, while Spain’s treasury by the time he abdicated was 20 million ducats in debt.

  Moreover, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German in 1534 proved a capstone to Protestants. Although they would be fiercely opposed by the Society of Jesus, founded that same year, whose members saw themselves as soldiers of God and whose Counter-Reformation was supported by Charles, there was no stopping the heretical sect that spread like plague through his empire. Even Charles’s vaunted prestige as conqueror of Tunis dissipated when the son of his vassal there dethroned (and blinded) his father and thereafter favored the Turks; at La Goletta as well, his Spanish commander wound up renouncing his faith and became a Muslim.

  Charles could not hold back the winds of change. He resented that his enemies made a point of aiding and abetting Sephardim, whom he saw as his heretics. By midcentury, France’s new king, Henry II, allowed “Portuguese merchants” known as “New Christians” to settle at Bordeaux and Bayonne, two ports on the Atlantic just north of Spain enriched by peninsula trade, while in Constantinople an estimated fifty thousand Sephardim contributed their talents to his rival empire. In 1551, a Spanish visitor to Turkey cursed the Portuguese Jews’ rearming of the military:

  Would that it had pleased God that they had drowned in the sea in coming hither! For they taught our enemies the villainies of war such as how to make harquebusiers, gunpowder, cannonballs, brass ordnance and firelocks.36

  As they had in the Mediterranean during Charles’s reign, Sephardim would come to dominate Caribbean commerce and the flow of wealth. The discovery of the Americas and the establishment of new sea routes to the East placed world trade within the ambit of Sephardim resettled throughout the known world. By midcentury, the land routes of the Middle Ages had given way to ocean highways. In Jamaica, before her death in 1549, Doña María worked with converso merchants to transform a nonperforming colony into a major transshipment port, a natural development (albeit illegal) for an island astride Spain’s trade routes to and from the New World.

  Although Charles eventually expelled all New Christians from Antwerp, he continued to abide their presence in the New World. His son Philip II likewise found it in his fiscal interest to turn a blind eye to converso merchants and administrators and knowingly licensed New Christians to serve there as crown treasurers, notaries, and judges. As long as they genuflected to Jesus, no one questioned their faith. However, once they had established the lucrative commercial routes that directed all trade through Seville and Lisbon, they were expendable. When their presence was no longer needed, Old Catholic “purebloods” wanted in. Their means was the Inquisition.

  The union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 brought with it a resurgence of Inquisition activity. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, as the Holy Terror descended on the New World, covert Jews began to look to Europe’s other powers to provide a haven outside the reach of the Grand Inquisitor. They would find one in the Low Countri
es on Europe’s northeast coast, in a corner of the empire battling for liberty, in revolt from Spain.

  Chapter Four

  SAMUEL PALACHE, THE PIRATE RABBI

  In Morocco, ancestral home of the Moors, a youth named Samuel Palache came of age around the time that Sinan was ending his life. Although the boy was raised in the mellah, the Jewish ghetto of Fez, and never met “the famous Jewish pirate,” he knew of his exploits and emulated his deeds—with one defining difference: Samuel’s swashbuckling career was supplemented by a religious one as a rabbi. Samuel thus followed his father and uncle in carrying on a centuries-old family tradition.1

  Jews lived in Morocco centuries before the Arabs conquered the native Berber tribes in the seventh century and introduced Islam. When Fez was founded as the Arab capital in the ninth century, the city’s Jews prospered as moneylenders and dealers in precious metals, professions the followers of Mohammed avoided. In 1428, in light of Muslim riots over allegations that Jews had placed wine in the mosques, the sultan confined them to the mellah, a gated area near the palace.

  When Samuel was growing up, the walled ghetto, swelled by new arrivals from Spain, rivaled Constantinople as a Jewish haven. An estimated fifty thousand Jews crowded the narrow streets lined with shops, stalls, and tall buildings with apartment-like quarters. The wealthy lived apart, in luxurious homes of Moorish design bordering the palace gardens. The mellah became a renowned center of Jewish life. Its many synagogues and religious schools were a magnet for Talmudic scholars who came from all over the Mediterranean to discuss and debate the commentaries of Rashi and North Africa’s celebrated seer Maimonides.

  Within the confines of the mellah, Israelites lived free, but outside, in the city proper and in the grand bazaar where they sold their wares, they faced a familiar hostility. A Spanish visitor noted this dichotomy:

  [Inside the mellah] Jews have a sort of governor who administers justice and delivers their tributes to the king. They pay taxes on everything and are left undisturbed…Outside they are greatly despised and made to wear a black cloth on their heads and a piece of colored cloth on their clothing [to make] them known to the Moors…Wherever they go, Moors spit in their faces and beat them…If any becomes wealthy and the king manages to find out he takes their riches away. But they are so hard-working and know so much about business they commonly administer the estates of Moorish gentlemen [who] do not hold trading in much esteem, nor understand as do the Jews the little details and subtleties, so each one endeavors to have a Jew as his majordomo to govern his estate. In this way the Jews enrich themselves greatly.2

  Like the Catholic clergy, the mullahs castigated financiers as parasitic usurers and forbade their followers from engaging in such matters. The vagaries of finance were thus left to the Jews, who minted coins, collected taxes, loaned capital, and backed proven ventures like the marauding voyages of the corsairs.

  Samuel and his younger brother Joseph, from the time they were four, attended religious school with other boys in the mellah. Their father was the school rabbi, and his watchful presence weighed heavily on the brothers as they studied Torah and Talmud. The boys were fluent in many languages. They spoke Spanish at home, were conversant in Arabic and Portuguese, and learned Hebrew and Chaldean at school. Because their family’s rabbinical lineage stretched back six centuries, Judaism in all its aspects was inculcated in them and permeated nearly everything they did. The sporadic visits of a roving uncle, an itinerant preacher who roamed the Mediterranean exhorting the faithful, sparked in them a desire to venture beyond the mellah.3

  Judaism and piracy were dominant influences that shaped the brothers’ lives after they left the cloistered ghetto behind. For derring-do and profit they turned to piracy, especially targeting enemies of their people, and parlayed that success with other activities that would one day gain Jews a haven in Amsterdam, which would become known in the Diaspora as New Jerusalem.4

  In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Morocco’s sultan, although officially at peace with Spain, did not rein in his corsairs. The Palache brothers were then living in the mellah of Tetuán, a pirate port astride the Strait of Gibraltar. Although the gates of the Jewish quarter were locked at night, the brothers’ reputation as merchant pirates allowed them to go and come at will. It was said by their compatriots that after a successful cruise the brothers would brazenly enter Spanish ports pretending to be innocent traders and boldly seek out buyers for their repackaged booty.5

  In 1602, their audacious conduct reached the ear of the sultan. Sensing they had the requisite skills to deal with his traditional enemy Spain, he sent them to Lisbon as his trade representatives to broker a deal for jewels in exchange for the beeswax needed to make candles and seals. To enter the forbidden peninsula, the brothers required an entry permit from the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the ruler of Melilla, the Spanish outpost in Morocco.

  Conferring with him, the brothers intimated that they had more to offer than a few tons of beeswax. In approving their passage, the duke wrote his sovereign, Philip III, that they had intelligence concerning Morocco and recommended that he meet with them. However, when the brothers arrived in Madrid in January 1603, Philip, having been warned by a counselor that they were maestros dogmatizadores (dogmatizing tutors) out to win back conversos, declined to meet with them: “They will do much harm among those of their nation,” he wrote the duke, “as experience has taught us.”6

  Their sponsoring duke thought otherwise. That was not their intention, he wrote. Had he known what Samuel, the older brother, intended when he left Spain in 1603 and journeyed to the Netherlands, he would not have been so quick to dismiss the king’s suspicions.

  In the fall of 1605, the brothers were back in Spain, seeking Philip’s permission to settle there. In exchange, they promised to divulge a secret plan to halt the Ottoman advance along the North Africa coast, which, if unchecked, would soon have the Turks at Spain’s doorstep across the narrow divide of Gibraltar. The brother’s scheme entailed the capture of Larache, Morocco’s strategic port southwest of Tangiers. Its possession had become important the previous year when the sultan had died and his son, Muley Sidan, assumed the throne. However, the Duke of Medina Sidonia now suspected Samuel was a double agent. When the king asked him if Palache was to be trusted in “finding things out about Barbary,” the duke was blunt in his reply: “His business is all trickery.”7 Philip’s adviser seconded the duke’s judgment, saying: “It would be good to stop the Jew from deluding himself,” and recommended he “be given something to get rid of him.”8

  But Samuel was not easily dissuaded. Persuasively loquacious, over the next two years he won over other influential Spaniards to endorse his petition for domicile. In March 1607, his persistence got him again invited to the palace for an audience with Philip. Again he promised to divulge intelligence on the Barbary States and spoke of his family’s deep desire to convert to the True Faith so as to better serve “Our Lord and Your Majesty.”9 Whatever doubts the king had were swept aside by Samuel’s effusive spiel, and he gave the pandering Jew a royal cédula (license) to go to Morocco to collect his family.

  How this might have turned out is not known because agents of the dreaded Inquisition were suddenly on the brothers’ trail. Had their bravado and haughty disdain for Spanish authority let out that their intended conversion was a sham? Did a rival Jew seeking royal patronage alert the Holy Fathers? No answer was forthcoming, but when the brothers learned that the Inquisitors were after them, they took refuge in the Madrid home of the French ambassador, Count de Barrault. The count knew their professed loyalty to Spain was feigned because they had earlier approached him with an offer to share (for a price) Spanish intelligence with his monarch, Henry IV.

  Over the summer and into the fall of 1607, while the brothers were safely ensconced in the diplomat’s home, in the nearby Plaza Mayor, dozens of suspected Judaizers were paraded half-naked to be tried and sentenced in successive autos-da-fé. In September, when the opportunity a
rose to flee Spain, Samuel wrote Philip a farewell letter denying any wrongdoing and vowing continued fealty: “Wherever we may happen to be, we are and shall be servants of Your Majesty. May God increase your life and estate.”10

  That said, he turned his back on Spain and the following spring (April 1608) was in Amsterdam conferring with Prince Maurice of Nassau on a grand scheme to combat Spain. Samuel shared with him an idea he had meditated upon during his confinement, namely that Holland and Morocco should form an alliance. Since both peoples, Calvinists and Muslims, were viewed as heretics by Spain, it was natural that these nations should ally against their common enemy. Sultan Sidan and his father had fought Spain most of their lives, as had Holland’s Prince Maurice and his father, William of Orange. As Dutch privateers, known as Sea Beggars, defeated Spanish attempts to crush their rebellion and funded the war with plunder, so too had Morocco’s corsairs crippled Spanish shipping.

  Maurice was receptive to the proposal, and Samuel left for Morocco to present it to Sidan. The treaty came about as Samuel proposed. But for a clearer understanding of what follows, a digression is necessary to account for the prince’s trust in Samuel and what lay behind the Jew’s mendacious dealings with Spain. Before he went to Spain with the beeswax, Samuel was a familiar figure in Dutch ports, and it was his actions then that made the Statholder credit his intent in this new venture.

  In 1579, when the rest of Europe was still a dangerous place for Jews, Prince Maurice’s father lit a lamp of political and religious liberty when he unilaterally declared his nation’s independence from Spain. Assembling the six other leaders of the northern provinces, they agreed in the Union of Utrecht to support his war effort and affirm “freedom of conscience” as a founding principle of the United Netherlands.11