Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
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3. Alexandre Herculano, History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, vol. 1, trans. John C. Branner (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 376–78, 380–81: A further indication that Manzuelo’s request for “Portuguese” settlers was for Spanish conversos is the fact that in 1534, when Charles received the communiqué, Portugal’s New Christians were not allowed to emigrate. From 1532 to 1536, Portugal’s king had reversed his policy that for a price permitted conversos to settle his colonies.
4. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (London: Penguin, 1963), 52–53.
5. Laredo is Spain’s port on the Bay of Biscay. Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Corbos, Secretary of the Emperor Charles V (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960), 161: “It was rumored that they were offering 50 ducats for each pregnancy with boy babies to remain in Spain and girls to return with them to Amazonia.”
6. Dudley Pope, The Buccaneer King: The Biography of the Notorious Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1688 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), 29–30: Charles’s average of 3.5 tons of gold each year was equal to the amount the queen of Sheba gave Solomon. In the sixteenth century, Spaniards “found, looted or mined three times the amount of gold and silver which had been in circulation” before Columbus sailed.
7. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain, 1516–1659 (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 47: Jacob Fugger loaned him half of the one-million-florin cost of the election.
8. Germán Arciniegas, Caribbean Sea of the New World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 118–21; Henry Cruse Murphy, The Voyage of Verrazzano: A Chapter in the Early History of Maritime Discovery in America (New York, 1875): an appendix includes letters to Charles informing him of Verrazano’s deed and continued threat.
9. C. H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966; reprint of 1910 edition), 30; Arciniegas, Caribbean Sea of the New World, 118.
10. “Correspondence and Itinerary of Charles V,” ed. William Bradford (London: Bently Publishers, August 31, 1850), 439, 367.
11. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11. In 1391, hundreds of thousands of Jews of Spain were forcibly converted or sentenced to death. “This huge influx of New Christians exacerbated social and racial suspicions and eventually led to what would become known as Toledo’s limpieza de sangre or ‘purity of blood’ statutes of 1449 to limit the rights of the new class of Christians. Those who maintained Jewish blood or lineage deriving from Jewish ancestry were classed as ‘impure’ and excluded from positions of power and prestige, and universities. These laws were applied in Seville in 1515, and Santo Domingo in 1525.”
12. William B. Goodwin, Spanish and English Ruins in Jamaica (Boston: Meador Publishing Co., 1938),
13: “[Jewish] descendants of these Portuguese settlers are found in many parts of the island today.” 13. On July 14, 1534, the sultan’s cavalry of fifty thousand horsemen conquered Tabriz in northern Persia, but rather than moving on to threaten Charles’s eastern empire instead turned east and captured Baghdad that October.
14. Neil Grant, Barbarossa, the Pirate King (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1972), 8–9: The bulky ships of Spain and Genoa were easily outmaneuvered by the corsairs’ galley, a long, slender vessel, driven by massive oars with one main triangular sail called a lateen. The pirates would attack an enemy ship by ramming it with its iron bow (resembling a long beak). The corsairs then leaped on board and a hand-to-hand fight would ensue.
15. Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain, 52–58.
16. Sir Godfrey Fisher, Barbary Legend (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1957), 55: Barbarossa as “General of the Sea” rarely left the land—his functions as admiral were primarily administration and “his naval duties were performed by a lieutenant, until later in the century they were entrusted to a separate officer [Sinan] who, as the local Captain of the Sea, [was] directly responsible to the sultan.”
17. Samuel Tolkowsky, They Took to the Sea (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), 174: On August 16, 1533, Henry VIII’s ambassador in Rome informed his king that a few days earlier “the famous Jewish pirate” was cruising with a strong Turkish fleet of sixty ships off the southern coast of Greece to attack the Spanish fleet defending the western Mediterranean; J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie, eds., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1862–1932), vol. 6, 427: Sinan was referred to in 1528 by the Portuguese governor in India as “the great Jew,” who he mistakenly thought had been sent by Suleiman to assist the king of Calicut to fight the Portuguese; Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), 181, lists many Venetian sources from 1530 that refer to Sinan as “the Jew.”
18. “Correspondence and Itinerary of Charles V,” 349.
19. Keniston, Francisco de los Corbos, 170.
20. E. Hamilton Currey, Sea Wolves of the Mediterranean: The Grand Period of the Moslem Corsairs (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914), 108.
21. “Correspondence and Itinerary of Charles V,” 358–59: Charles’s unshakable courage is epitomized in one of his later battles, when, gout having immobilized his neck and made his feet lame, he had himself tied to his horse and galloped into the heart of the thickest action. Grant, Barbarossa, 46–48; Currey, Sea Wolves of the Mediterranean, 107–9.
22. H. Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, A History of the Jews of North Africa, vol. 2, ed. Eliezer Bashan and Robert Attal (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 480, quotes the contemporary historian R. Josef Ha-Kohen’s account of the aftermath of the battle: “The Jews of whom there were many, in part fled into the desert, hungry, thirsty and completely destitute, and the Arabs plundered everything they brought with them; and many died at that time.”
23. Keniston, Francisco de los Corbos, 176.
24. Cundall and Pietersz, Jamaica Under the Spaniards, 12.
25. Padron Morales, Spanish Jamaica, trans. Patrick E. Bryan (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003), Appendix 6, 278–79: In February 1537, the king gave in to her demand for power over the church: “Upon our consideration…that the resolution of these lawsuits is in doubt…on behalf of Dona Maria de Toledo…and Admiral Don Luis Columbus, her son…we grant leave to thee and thy successors whereby thou mightst appoint persons to the Abbacy, including its revenues, as well as to other offices in the churches on the aforesaid island.”
26. Ibid., 65: The royal edict also granted the family twenty-five square leagues in the province of Veragua, where Columbus had obtained the sixty-three gold pendants, but the land proved to be “swampy and unprofitable” and nineteen years later Don Luis gave up Veragua in return for an annual payment of seventeen thousand ducats.
27. Cundall and Pietersz, Jamaica Under the Spaniards, 13.
28. The Jewish Encyclopedia (JewishEncyclopedia.com), “Antwerp” (by Richard Gottheil): “Antwerp became the center of Portugal’s East Indian trade, and many of the rich merchants and bankers of Lisbon had branch houses there. In 1536, according to a document in the Belgian state archives, Charles V directed the magistrates of Antwerp to allow conversos to settle Antwerp.”
29. Tolkowsky They Took to the Sea, 203.
30. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews of North Africa, vol. 2, 9.
31. Christopher and Jean Serpell, Elba and the Tuscan Archipelago (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977).
32. In his remaining years, Charles made a series of abdications that left the Hapsburg dominions divided between Austria and Spain. By 1555 he had given his son Philip Naples, Milan, and the Netherlands, and in 1556 retired to the monastery of Yuste.
33. Christopher Hare, A Great Emperor: Charles V, 1519–1558 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 199.
34. Gertrude Von Schwarzenfeld, Charles V, Father of Europe (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1957), 278–79: On his bedside table were a Bible, his favorite herald
ic romance Il Cortegiano, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. On penance days, he “beat himself with the rough pieces of a knotted rope till he had worn away the knots.”
35. Tolkowsky, They Took to the Sea, 183.
36. Jane S. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), 166–69.
Chapter Four: Samuel Palache, the Pirate Rabbi
1. The family’s rabbinical lineage goes back to the tenth century, when Moshe ben Chanoch, a famous Talmudic scholar from Babylon, was captured by pirates and taken as a slave to Córdoba. Redeemed by the community, he became its rabbi, married into the Palache family, and along with his son established Spain as a center of Torah study. Down to Samuel’s time, family members rose to prominence as rabbis in Italy, Turkey, and Greece. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Palache” Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2, 212n (extensive note on Palache rabbis).
2. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Palache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, trans. Martin Beagles (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 24–25.
3. The roving rabbi’s influence on the boys brings to mind the uncle in Death of a Salesman.
4. H. Graetz, Popular History of the Jews, vol. 5, trans. Rabbi A. B. Rhine, ed. Alexander Harkavy (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1937), 55: David Jesurun, “the boy poet,” gave the city the sobriquet “New Jerusalem” when, on the run from the Inquisition, he reached the safety of Amsterdam and, inspired, wrote his paean to it.
5. H. I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews in Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Williamsport, Pa.: Baynard Press, 1937), 78n23: “The Jews of Amsterdam are so expert that, after disguising the merchandise by mingling it with other goods, or packing it in another way or remarking it, they are not afraid to go to certain Portuguese ports and resell the goods there.”
6. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 5: The duke wrote that even if they did seduce a few New Christians they were less a threat to His Majesty than the many Barbary Jews in his domain who were spies and should be expelled.
7. Ibid., 6.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. Ibid., 10.
10. Ibid., 11.
11. Isidore Harris, Jewish Historical Society of England, “A Dutch Burial Ground and Its English Connections,” 113.
12. Henrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941), 663.
13. John J. Murray, Amsterdam in the Age of Rembrandt (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 21.
14. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 56.
15. Ibid., 55.
16. Ibid., 76.
17. Ibid., 77.
18. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2, 214–15.
19. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 72.
20. Odette Vlessing, “Samuel Palache: Earliest History of Amsterdam Portuguese Jews,” in Dutch Jewish History, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: The Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, 1993), 52.
21. Ibid., 50; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Palache.”
22. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2.
23. David Carrington, “A Jewish Buccaneer,” Jewish Chronicle, November 4, 1955: Palache obtained from the Netherlands permission to “levee and raise so many mariners and seafaring men as he shall have need with license from the States General…to Barbary where Palache went up to the King…and [received] a commission from him to go to sea and take all Spaniards that he could meet with.”
24. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 85.
25. Ibid., 77–79. In February 1612, Sidan sent an urgent plea to Samuel to hurriedly come to his aid with two ships and a thousand men. The sultan was desperate. His brother, Ibn Abu Mahalli, a radical Islamist warlord hoped to rid the nation of Jews who were overrunning his realm. Mahalli was given undue credibility in July when Morocco’s Dutch ambassador recommended the States General recognize the self-styled “new king” as Morocco’s ruler. When his report reached the Netherlands, Samuel’s brother Joseph and nephew Moses refuted the ambassador’s claim. The following year, Mahalli was killed by an ally of Sidan, and the Dutch diplomat, charged with treason, was briefly imprisoned. Sidan was again recognized as Morocco’s supreme ruler.
26. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 85.
27. Vlessing, “Samuel Palache,” 52.
28. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 88–89.
29. Ibid., 90.
30. Ibid., 91.
31. Jewish Quarterly Review 14 (1902), 358, reprints, letter from London, dated November 4, 1614, from John Chamberlain to his friend Sir Dudley Carleton, the British ambassador at Venice: “Here is a Jew Pirate arrested that brought three prizes of Spaniards into Plymouth…he shall likely pass out of here well enough for he has league and license under the King’s hand for his free egress and regress which was not believed till he made proof of it.” See also the Acts of the Privy Council, December 23, 1614, Privy Council to Sir William Craven, Alderman: “The Lordships give order for the restraint and safe keeping of Samuel Palache, a Jew, lately arrived at Plymouth [charged with] committing piracy and outrage upon the subjects of the King of Spain…Palache hath alleged that he is a servant unto the King of Barbary, and by him employed as his agent unto the States United, and that from the said King his master he had received commission for the arming and setting forth of ships of war, by virtue of which commission (together with license of the States United) he pretends the fact to be justifiable and no way with the compass of piracy.”
32. Robert P. Tristram Coffin, The Dukes of Buckingham: Playboys of the Stuart World (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 73.
33. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 92–93.
34. Ibid., 87: When Sidan thought the Dutch were going over to Mahalli and he was near to losing his kingdom, he had Samuel offer Medina Sidonia the Mediterranean port town of La Mamoa in exchange for military support. When the duke passed the offer on to Philip, the king, suspecting Samuel was a double agent, told the duke not to deal with him.
35. Ibid., 80–82.
36. J. A. J. Villiers, “Holland and Some of Her Jews,” Jewish Review 7 (1912), 10–12: The day after the funeral, the States General noted: “His Excellency [Prince Maurice], and the State Council accompanied the body of Senor Samuel Palache, Agent of the King of Barbary, as far as the bridge in the Houtstraat.”
37. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 62.
38. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews, 14, 15n70: “Six months after the demise of Palache his nephew, Moses representing the estate sold two Torah scrolls to Neve Shalom for 1,000 guilders.”
Chapter Five: Amsterdam, the New Jerusalem
1. On the 1605 pardon, see H. P. Salomon, Portrait of a New Christian, Fernão Álvares Melo, 1569–1632 (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro Cultural Portugués, 1982), 43–46; Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 33–34: “The assessment of 1,700,000 cruzados was divided among all the New Christians of Portugal…And New Christians could not leave Portugal without proving that they had paid their part of the assessment or given the necessary guarantee for its payment…After the expiration of its one year term, the Holy Inquisition resumed the prosecution of Judaizers among the New Christians…any New Christian who tried to leave port without paying the assessment was to forfeit his possessions in favor of the crown. And the person denouncing the offender was to receive one third of the recovered proceeds.”
2. Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), 180–81; H. I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews in Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Williamsport, Pa.: Baynard Press, 1937), 93n70: The Spanish had a different explanation for aliases. In 1654 the Spanish consul in Amsterdam wrote the Spanish ambassador: “The president of the Synagogue signs
himself Cortez instead of Corticos,…his real name…It is the custom of members of his nation to take as many names as they please,…so as not to jeopardize their parents or relatives who are known by the name in Spain.” Daniel Swetschinski, “The Portuguese Jews of 17th Century Amsterdam: Cultural Continuity and Adaption,” in Essays in Modern Jewish History, ed. Frances Malino and Phyllis Cohen Albert (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 58–60: Ninety-one percent of the community men were named after patriarchs. The favorite first names (in order of preference) were Abraham, Isaac, David, Moses, Joseph, Samuel, Aaron, Benjamin, Solomon, Daniel, and Emanuel.
3. Joachim Prinz, The Secret Jews (New York: Random House, 1973), 70–74.
4. Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1970), 589; Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez, 63; Jan Stoutenbeek and Paul Vigeveno, A Guide to Jewish Amsterdam (De Haan: Jewish Historical Museum, 1985), 13: In 1616, Jews were forbidden “physical communion with Christian wives or daughters in or outside the state of marriage even though these women themselves might be of bad reputation.” Bloom, Economic Activities of the Jews, 20: In 1616, Jews were forbidden to employ Christian servants.
5. Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4, 57.
6. Prinz, The Secret Jews, 74: In 1660, Isaac Orobio de Castro described the situation in Amsterdam. “There are those…who undergo circumcision as soon as they arrive, love God’s law and are eager to learn that which they and their ancestors had forgotten during their years of their imprisonment…There is another group who indulge in the idolatry of logic…they are full of vanity, haughtiness and a sense of superiority because they believe they know everything…They place themselves under the happy yoke of Judaism…but their vanity and so-called superiority prevents them from accepting our teachings…The trouble is that the young…admire them and follow suit. They all land quickly in the abyss of atheism and apostasy.”