Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  For six successive Fridays, the 155 penitents were subjected to such a parade before being allowed to rejoin the Church. Then, having “seen the light,” they could light their candles and “donate” a fifth of their possessions to the Church. Even then, they could not hold any honorable office or wear jewels or fine clothes. On this, their sixth and final Friday, the penitents were herded to the central plaza opposite the church, where two stages had been erected, one to hold the prisoners, the other for the Grand Inquisitor. One by one, they were called before him to receive their sentence. Only when led off the stage were they told that on this particular day their verguenza would end. The week before, King John had agreed to a bribe of two million ducats to forgive their offenses. On the day of the auto-da-fé, a “General Pardon for Crimes of Judaism” was to take effect. Portugal’s other two tribunals in Oporto and Coimbra freed their 255 prisoners at first light, but Lisbon’s Inquisitor, incensed at the pardon, held off until his Judaizers had experienced the parade of shame and been sentenced before setting them free. He then waited another month to inform and release those who had not confessed.1

  Two penitents that day were Joseph Diaz Soeiro, who had been “thrice tortured by the Inquisition,” and Antonio Vaez Henriques, one of Lisbon’s principal merchants. It is not known if the two knew each other. The next we hear of them is in Amsterdam, where they fled during the pardon’s one-year grace period. Finally free to live as Jews, they underwent circumcision*5 and dropped their baptismal names to signify their return to Judaism. Joseph Diaz Soeiro now called himself Joseph ben Israel, and Manuel, his two-year-old son, was renamed Menasseh (Menasseh was the biblical Joseph’s first son). The merchant Antonio Vaez Henriques replaced Vaez with “Cohen” and, to celebrate his family’s escape from bondage, changed four-year-old Antonio Jr.’s name to Moses. When his wife gave birth, soon after they arrived, he named his new son, born in freedom, Abraham.

  Changing one’s name was a common practice among conversos, both men and women, when they came out as Jews. The émigrés had taken upon themselves the burden of Jewish survival and adopted the names of biblical heroes and patriarchs. They called themselves Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, Benjamin; their ships bore such names as Prophet Samuel, Beautiful Sarah, Prophet Daniel, Queen Esther, and King Solomon.2

  Menasseh, Moses, Abraham, and the community’s other young boys attended Neveh Shalom’s religious school. Mornings were devoted to Torah studies and, from two until dusk, the Talmud. Their teacher explained the portion being studied and the boys repeated the lesson in singsong voice. They learned Hebrew at school and spoke Spanish and Portuguese at home, where they were also tutored in Dutch.

  Menasseh, a gifted student, was the pride of the congregation. He was quoting Scripture and commentary at the age of seven, and was fluent in six languages by the time of his bar mitzvah. Some of his scholarly focus may have been due to squalid circumstances at home. His family lived in New Timber Market, a poor, marshy land, far from Houtgracht Canal Street, where the wealthier émigrés resided. The community paid for Menasseh’s education and supported his indigent family, as the Inquisition had confiscated their possessions, and the tortures his father suffered left him disabled and unable to work.

  In contrast to Menasseh’s devotion, Moses Henriques and his friends were more interested in Rabbi Palache’s spellbinding tales and the adventures of their elders. All the boys had to memorize the Talmud’s 613 daily rules of living, but did not have to abide by them. On the Iberian Peninsula, their families had been cut off from Jewish writings, and their clandestine lives limited their observance to the basics they remembered. For generations, they had been Catholics without belief; now they were Jews without knowledge. The religion they were eager to embrace was foreign to them. As one writer observed, they were no longer Christians, but not yet Jews.3

  Born and reared in the True Faith, the émigrés had learned that sin was forgiven by going to confession. This was not a part of Judaism. Rabbis, unlike priests, could not grant absolution, but it was comforting to believe they could. Many therefore found it convenient to believe that they might “yield to the impulses of their passions without endangering the salvation of their souls.”4 Polygamy, forbidden under Judaic law, was common, particularly among the North African Jews of Neveh Shalom, who made concubines out of their house servants. The legal status of a “natural child,” born of such a union, was considered equal with the children of the first wife.

  Initially, the Amsterdam community connived at this looseness, but after Samuel Palache’s death, his sister’s husband, Isaac Uziel, assumed the rabbinate and condemned what he saw as the evil habits of the community. From the Neveh Shalom pulpit, the new leader of the congregation, whose father had been the grand rabbi of Fez, raged against polygamy and preached that no one could buy indulgence for sins and vices by “mere observance.” Lashing out at the most prominent members of the community, he incurred their hatred and soon fractured the congregation.5

  By 1620, the two hundred or so Jewish families in Amsterdam had split into three synagogues of varying orthodoxy—Neveh Shalom, Beth Jacob, and Beth Israel. Finally free to be as orthodox as the Old Catholics they left behind, some were, while others couldn’t be bothered. Many, having rejected the metaphysics of Catholicism, were content with a minimal observance; others were turned off by all religion. The same degree of adherence held true for their children.6

  Despite religious differences, the entire community worked together in charitable organizations to support the poor and rescue brethren from the lands of idolatry (as Spain and Portugal were known). Decades later (in 1639), Samuel’s nephew Jacob Palache persuaded the three factions to worship together in a building he bought and named Talmud Torah (Study of Law). In homage to Samuel Palache, the united congregation adopted his emblem, the phoenix, to represent Talmud Torah.7

  “Michelangelo’s Moses had horns; Rembrandt’s does not” is how one historian described the artist’s naturalist sketches of his Jewish neighbors and the Dutch everyday acceptance of the Jew in his midst.8 The Dutch tolerated no bigotry when it came to making money. Calvinism was a businessman’s religion—work defined who they were, profit was seen as a part of the scheme of salvation, and prosperity was a sure sign of God’s favor. Unlike Hispanic nobility, which considered the mercantile profession beneath them, Calvinists saw work as a calling; they believed that “to work was to pray.”9 A motto of the Sea Beggars was “Help thyself and God will help thee.”10

  Dutch freedom had an economic quotient, and her citizenry welcomed Jews as merchant adventurers who would advance their interests in high-risk areas of the economy. Linked by language, heritage, and trust with others in the Sephardic Diaspora, the newcomers formed the first trade network to span the globe. Palache had opened up North African trade as a gateway to the Ottoman Empire, and early émigrés had capital and access to trading partners in the New World, the Levant, and the Iberian Peninsula, all areas the Dutch had not penetrated.11

  While the Sephardim were not as wealthy as the Dutch tycoons, who controlled the trade in herring, grain, and other staples, their economic contribution was considerable. One researcher noted: “Jewish trade, especially the sugar trade, was the engine of the Dutch Golden Age…comparable in scope with that of the Dutch East and West India Companies.”12 By 1636, Amsterdam’s Jews, who numbered no more than 1 percent of the population, controlled 10 percent of the city’s trade and, dealing mostly in luxury items, accrued nearly 20 percent of the profits. Their overall contribution was even more impressive, as these figures do not include their profits from joint ventures with native Dutchmen, nor the commissions they received for transit trade.13

  For centuries, Iberia’s Jews had been the peninsula’s merchant class. Forced out at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, they settled everywhere they were permitted and many places they weren’t. Those in Amsterdam, in consort with those on the peninsula, were from the early days of settlement the chief marketers of the
Spanish Empire’s colonial goods.14 This was especially true in Portugal, where their partners controlled most of the trade. A prominent converso merchant from Lisbon noted their commanding position in Portugal. Appealing to the Crown for relief from persecution by the Holy Office, he wrote:

  The Kings of Portugal are lords of the sea…and the life blood of all this is commerce which is only sustained by merchants of Hebrew descent by whose industry it flourishes and without them all the trade would be lost because the Old Christian gentry do not esteem merchants and do not have the industry of those of Hebrew descent.15

  While the trading prowess of Amsterdam’s Jews was an important element in the emerging nation’s financial growth, it is important to note that the Dutch Golden Age was advancing before the Jews came. When Samuel Palache was first meeting with Prince Maurice, Holland was already a flourishing mercantile state: Amsterdam had a commodities market; the Dutch East India Company was pushing the Portuguese out of the Asia market; the Dutch dominated the slave trade; and their builders owned most of Europe’s trading ships.16 Most trade, however, was in bulky products of relatively low value—grain, timber, iron, and salt. This changed with the influx to Amsterdam of Jewish merchants, who specialized in the far more lucrative commodities of sugar, spices, specie, and tobacco. As primary dealers of Iberia’s colonial imports, Amsterdam’s Jews, connecting with converso traders throughout the known world, helped turn what was a grain and herring port into Europe’s richest trade mart, a supermarket to the world.

  Amsterdam’s harbor, filled with hundreds of foreign ships, looked like a floating forest of masts and riggings. While each waited to deliver its cargo and carry off the valuable merchandise from the huge brick warehouses lining the canals, their sailors, representing a carnival of nations, filled the dockside bars and brothels. In contrast to the Dutchmen in their sober black and white outfits, turbaned sailors, with rings in their ears and dirks in their belts, were a familiar sight, along with bewigged Frenchmen, flamboyant Italians, and other foreigners in colorful native dress.

  The Dutch Republic was an anomaly. In an age of kings and emperors claiming divine rule, the fledging nation was seen as “an island of bourgeois tolerance in an ocean of theocratic absolutism.”17 Sephardim, reflecting the ways of Spanish nobility, possessed the requisite social graces to stand on an equal footing with the city’s leading citizens. Men of considerable secular culture, they were courtly, courteous, and accustomed to moving in the best Christian circles.

  From the outset, Sephardim were at home in this cosmopolitan setting, and displayed a worldly lifestyle marked by opulent self-confidence. They lived in palatial mansions, held musicals, staged theatricals and poetry competitions, and entertained sumptuously. They formed literary and philosophical academies and a score of social organizations covering every aspect of community life. They also frequented gambling houses run by Samuel Pereira and Abraham Mendes Vasques, and a popular brothel that featured Jewish prostitutes from Germany.18

  Along with other religious dissidents who gained sanctuary here, the émigrés found they could be loyal both to their religion and to Holland. Outwardly, they didn’t appear far different from their Dutch neighbors, but their long ancestry on the peninsula left them loyal to its language and culture. Whether they came directly from Iberia or elsewhere in the Diaspora, all referred to themselves as members of La Nação, the Portuguese Nation. On the banks of the Amstel River, the Jodenbreestraat (Jewish Broad Street) came to resemble a miniature Lisbon or Madrid:

  No caballero could outdo them in dignity; no grandee could bear himself with more grandezza than they. The Jewish caballeros of Amsterdam strutted about in jeweled garments of golden threads adorned with pearls and precious stones, and rode about in fancy coaches emblazoned with their coat of arms. Even the cases of their prayer shawls were decorated with coats of arms.

  Their spice boxes were of ivory, their wives’ bonnets of Brabant lace…19 There were still restrictions: Jews could not join craft guilds, engage in retail business, or hold political office. Neither could they marry Christians, employ them as servants, or have sexual relations with “the daughters of the land,” even prostitutes.20 Despite such legal restraints, they had more freedom and security in Holland than anywhere in Europe and are thought of as “the first modern Jews.”21 Proud of their heritage and accomplishments, they may have felt, in the words of one period historian, that “if the Jews were God’s chosen people, then they were God’s chosen Jews.”22 It is little wonder that their children blossomed unafraid and determined to live free.

  Rembrandt, who lived in the Jewish quarter at 2 Jodenbreestraat, drew his neighbors as they appeared, an assimilated group, for once no longer caricatured as mistrustful aliens. An example is his painting of the biblical scholar Menasseh ben Israel, who, dressed in a familiar broad-brim hat and white-collared coat and sporting a Vandyke beard, looks no different from other Dutch burghers.23 Rembrandt also used his neighbors in his biblical paintings, seeing in their countenance the patriarchs and prophets, including Jesus and Matthew.

  While the economic impact of this first generation is impressive, a simple recounting of facts and statistics does not convey the emboldened character of the men who created it. As much as their livelihoods, it was their remarkable lives their Dutch-born children emulated when, still in their teens and early twenties, they invaded the New World and, in an unremitting struggle lasting decades, took on and defeated those who would deny Jewish rights. Two adventurous role models who strutted along the Jodenbreestraat, and whose deeds were bandied about with awe, were a cardsharp and a slave trader.

  Samuel Palache was the second man interred at the Jewish cemetery, having been preceded by his friend Don Manuel Pimental, who had purchased the cemetery two years before. Like Palache, his friend exemplified the diverse character and bravado of Amsterdam’s Jewish pioneers. Pimental (alias Isaac Ibn Jakar) was the wealthiest member of the Neveh Shalom congregation, and owed his fortune to his skill in the era’s favorite pastime—playing cards. He had honed his skills at the French court during the reign of King Henry IV. The king’s nightly passion, when not dallying with one of his sixty-four mistresses, was gaming at cards. One night, after losing heavily to Pimental, the lustful and humorous monarch told him: “I am the king of France, but you are king of gamblers.”24

  Jews were then outlawed from France, and while Pimental had converted, he freely admitted being a Judaizer. His honorific title “Don” is evidence that he was comfortable with the court etiquette that required regal dress and appropriate manners. Henry, known for tolerance, defended his Jewish friend: “Those who honestly follow their conscience are of my religion, and mine is that of all brave and good men.”25 Pimental’s presence in France was cut short in 1610, when his royal protector was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic schoolmaster who, fearing Henry intended to destroy the Catholic Church, leaped onto the king’s passing carriage and stabbed him to death. After Henry’s demise, the gambler moved to Venice, and three years later settled in Amsterdam. He joined Neveh Shalom, and in 1615, one year after purchasing the Ouderkerk cemetery, was buried there. In his honor, Palache’s congregation passed a resolution to recite a yearly Sabbath prayer in memory of the king’s favorite cardsharp.26

  In 1611, Spain’s Grand Inquisitor, in his annual aviso to the Madrid Council, reported that the Dutch Jew Diego Diaz Querido

  employs several Negro slaves, natives of the coast, who had received instruction in the Portuguese and Dutch languages so that they could serve as interpreters in Africa to assist him in his Africa dealings…[Furthermore] in his house, the Negroes are given instruction in the Mosaic Law and converted to Judaism.27

  If true, Querido, a religious man, would have first freed his slaves, as Jewish law forbade their conversion unless previously set free.28 Querido was born in Portugal and lived many years in Bahia, Brazil’s capital, until he was denounced as a Judaizer in 1595. He then left for Amsterdam, where he joined the Beth Ja
cob group, and in 1612 was one of the twelve founders of Neveh Shalom. He may have been among those arrested at Palache’s home on Yom Kippur the night the Dutch police raided.

  In the Inquisitor’s denunciation, he accused Querido of “large scale transactions damaging to the royal treasury.” Reportedly, his ten ships were illegally engaged in triangular trade between Amsterdam, Africa, and Brazil. Their holds filled with manufactured goods, his ships left the Dutch port for the Guinea coast to barter for slaves for Brazil, where they were exchanged for sugar.

  In 1609, the slave trader was one of the twenty-five Jewish merchants who established bank accounts at the opening of Amsterdam’s Exchange Bank. The Inquisitor, however, wasn’t so much troubled by Querido’s lucrative trade as by the fact that he was a proselytizer for Judaism. Evidence of this was disclosed at a 1595 Inquisition hearing in Brazil, when an informer testified that a friend had told him that when he first arrived in Bahia, Querido had said to him: “I am glad you came here to save your soul,” and urged him to marry his sister. The friend, a candy manufacturer, told the informer he declined “because she was a Jewess.”29 Querido, in doing business on four continents (he also traded with India), was a man on the move. In an age when ocean voyages were perilous and took months, Jews like him and Palache strode over continents and oceans. They braved new worlds, negotiated with kings, and robbed them as well. Querido’s story does not end here.