Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  7. 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.

  8. Simon M. Schama, “A Different Jerusalem: The Jews in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam,” in The Jews in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Susan Morgenstein and Ruth Levine (Rockville, Md.: The Judaic Museum of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, 1981), 3.

  9. Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in Europe’s Other Sea: The Adventure of Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish Historical Society (December 1982), vol. 2, 216–17: “Old Christian Portugal traditionally disdained the mercantile profession…It was therefore natural for many New Christian outcasts to assume a position in that segment of Portuguese society that was numerically understaffed and socially underrated…New Christians constituted about 65%–75% of the total Portuguese mercantile community while hardly totaling more than 10% of the population.”

  10. John J. Murray, Amsterdam in the Age of Rembrandt (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 49.

  11. Schama, “A Different Jerusalem,” 8: “There was a willingness to use Jews in high risk areas of the economy where more prudent or nervous investors were reluctant to venture.” Jews were only let in on Holland’s more speculative ventures like invading the New World and attacking the Spanish silver fleet. When these paid off the brothers were set, big-time: on page 642 Schama quotes Elie Luzac, The Wealth of Holland, vol. 1 (1778), 63, 501: “It was only in 1612, in imitation of certain Jews who had taken refuge among them, and who had it was said set up counting houses everywhere, that the Dutch began to set up their own and to send their ships all over the Mediterranean.”

  12. Vlessing, “Samuel Palache,” 53.

  13. Ibid., 54, 62–63: From the time they entered Amsterdam, Jewish merchants dominated the sugar trade. In an address to the States General, Amsterdam’s Portuguese merchants wrote: “During the 12 year truce, thousands of cases of sugar were brought each year to Holland in our ships…shipping and commerce increased so considerably that each year 12 to 15 ships were built and added to the trade…We were so successful that we drove all the Portuguese caravels that used to carry the sugar from these waters.” The merchants wrote of other benefits Holland derived from their trade with Brazil: “The greatest benefit gained from this trade, namely, the sugar refineries…increased from three or four, 25 years ago, to 25 in Amsterdam alone, supplying Holland with sugar [as well as] France, England, Germany, and the East.” Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast 1580–1680 (Asen, the Netherlands: Von Gorcum, 1971), 149: During the truce, the Dutch-Portuguese link controlled as much as two-thirds of the Brazilian trade with Europe.

  14. Jonathan I. Israel, “The Changing Role of the Dutch Sephardim in International Trade, 1595–1715,” in Dutch Jewish History, vol. 1, ed. Jozeph Michman (Jerusalem: Tel Aviv University, 1984), 33: “Dutch Sephardim overseas commerce is characterized by the primacy of dealings with Portugal and its colonies…via Lisbon.”

  15. Ibid., 36: “During the Truce years, the vast bulk of the freight-contracts signed by Dutch Sephardim were for voyages to and from Portugal.”

  16. Dorothy F. Zeligs, A History of Jewish Life in Modern Times (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1940), 109: In the seventeenth century the Dutch owned more than half the merchant ships of Europe.

  17. Schama, “A Different Jerusalem,” 6: “The Dutch Republic represented a prototype of that liberal pluralist socialist society—the imagined arcadia of 19th century Jews—that would enable each faith to practice as it wished without having to…suffer the stigma of dual allegiance.”

  18. Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of 17th Century Amsterdam (Portland, Ore.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 62.

  19. Egon E. Kirsch, Tales from Seven Ghettos (London: Robert Uncombed & Co. Ltd., 1948), 182–83.

  20. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews, 19–20: “Philosopher and jurist Hugo Grotius…commissioned to draw up regulations regarding Jews…said they should be admitted but limited to three hundred families; they were not to hold political office nor marry the daughters of the land.” Sabbath was respected and they could swear by “the Almighty who has…given His Laws through Moses” 23–24: In 1632 magistrates ruled: “The Jews in this city who [are] or shall become burghers [are] forbidden to start a retail business.” Also they could not join or form craft guilds.

  21. Edgar Samuel, “The Trade of the New Christians of Portugal in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Sephardi Heritage, vol. 2., ed. R. D. Barnett and W. M. Schwab (Grendon, U.K.: Gibraltar Books, 1989), 109.

  22. Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 28.

  23. Ibid., 15–16, lists his Jewish neighbors.

  24. Jonathan Israel, “Sephardic Immigration into the Dutch Republic, 1595–1672,” Studia Rosenthaliana 23, no. 1 (1989), 51.

  25. P. J. Helm, History of Europe, 1450–1660 (London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1966), 234.

  26. Israel, “Sephardic Immigration into the Dutch Republic,” 51: Manuel Pimentel’s will showed he had money invested in Venice, Constantinople, Spain, and Holland. His bookkeeper Hector Mendes Bravo, who reconverted to Christianity, was a spy who in 1614 submitted the names of 120 families from Amsterdam and the names of their correspondents.

  27. Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 46–47.

  28. Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain, A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 10: The holding of Jewish slaves was ruled illegal in the Talmud; therefore the slave who converted was immediately freed. Such conversions were commonplace since the Talmud prohibited Jews from keeping uncircumcised slaves; Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 17: Regulation of Brazil’s Zur Israel, the first synagogue in the New World: “A slave shall not be circumcised without first having been freed by his master, so that the master shall not be able to sell him from the moment the slave will have bound himself [to Judaism].”

  29. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 47: In 1618, Alvaro Sanches informed the Inquisition’s inspector in Bahia that a Jewish friend (Díego Lopes, a candy manufacturer) told him of the incident.

  30. Schama, “A Different Jerusalem,” 16.

  31. Prinz, The Secret Jews, pp. 75–87; full account in autobiography of Uriel da Costa, A Specimen of Human Life (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1967).

  32. Yosef Kaplan, “The Intellectual Ferment in the Spanish-Portuguese Community of 17th Century Amsterdam,” in The Sephardi Legacy, vol. 2, ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 295.

  33. Five years after his brother’s suicide, Abraham da Costa as head of the Mahamad authored the petition that led the States General to grant burgher rights to Dutch Jews, and a few years later, Joseph da Costa, the son of another brother, made use of this privilege in joining with other Jews in New Amsterdam to secure their civil rights.

  34. Two other tortures commonly applied to negativos (prisoners who did not confess) were the strappado and water torment: For the strappado, a naked prisoner, with his hands tied behind his back and the rope connected to an overhead pulley, was raised to the ceiling, then let go, but before his feet touched the ground, he was jerked to a halt so that his arms were pulled from their sockets, dislocating both shoulders. This process was usually repeated for an hour. In the water torment, a wet cloth was placed over the open mouth and nostrils of a prostrate prisoner. Because a constant stream of water was poured into it, the prisoner could not help but suck in the cloth, which the torturer then suddenly removed, drawing with it the innards of the victim’s throat.

  35. The Conversion & Persecutions of Eve Cohan, a 1680 pamphlet found in Harvard University’s Houghton Library for rare books and manuscripts. Donated 1780. The pamphlet states that af
ter the death of his first wife, Abraham Cohen married Rebekah Palache, Samuel’s grandniece, and two children from the marriage also married Palaches. The third child was Eva. The pamphlet is written by an ex-Jew about Eva’s tribulations after running off and marrying the Christian servant of her elder stepbrother, Jacob Cohen Henriques.

  36. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 171.

  37. Odette Vlessing, “The Marranos’ Economic Position in the Early 17th Century,” Dutch Jewish History, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: The Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, 1993), 173: From the time they entered Amsterdam, Jewish merchants dominated the sugar trade. This continued after the Dutch conquered Recife and considerably increased Brazil’s sugar production.

  38. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/westind.htm; DWIC charter provisions XL and XLII grant the Company the right to build and garrison forts, and maintain warships.

  39. Israel, “Sephardic Immigration into the Dutch Republic,” 16: The States General protested to the king that “Portuguese citizens should not be treated any differently than other subjects and urged the release of the goods and money involved.” Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Disapora, 1540–1740, Brill Series in Jewish Studies (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 140–41; Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 114.

  40. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 36.

  41. Anita Novinsky, “Sephardim in Brazil: The New Christians,” in The Sephardi Heritage, vol. 2, ed. R. D. Barnett and W. M. Schwab (Jacksonville, NC: Gibraltar Books, 1989), 443; Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 41.

  42. Anita Novinsky, “Sephardim in Brazil,” 443.

  43. Jane S. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), 169–73: From the time of the Crusades, when the cane root was transplanted from Asia to the Mediterranean basin, the making and selling of sugar was dominated by Jews. Page 173: In the 1590s, England’s Queen Elizabeth annually imported eighteen thousand pounds of Moroccan sugar for her household.

  44. David Raphael, The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles (Hollywood, Calif.: Carmi House Press, 1992): More than thirty years later, the terrible scenes still lived in the mind of the old Bishop Coutinho who “saw many persons dragged by the hair to the font. Sometimes, I saw a father, his head covered in sign of grief and pain, lead his son to the font, protesting and calling God to witness that they wished to die together in the law of Moses. Yet more terrible things that were done with them did I witness, with my own eyes.” Afterward, King Manuel informed the Catholic kings of Spain, “There are no more Jews in Portugal.”

  45. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 10. São Tomé remains an open chapter. An early account of the forced exodus reported many of the seven hundred children drowned in the initial stormy voyage, and later others were ransomed. However, it is hard to square the accuracy of this account with the continued presence there of so many conversos. In 1632, a foreign visitor wrote that conversos of São Tomé numbered about half the population, and were still looked upon as Jews: “The island is so infested with New Christians that they practice the Jewish rites almost openly” (from Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, vol. 2, p. 814, quoting J. Cuvelier, “L’ancien Congo d’apres les Archives romaines, 1518–1640” [Brussels: Royal Academy of Colonial Sciences, 1954], 498). For an excellent article on the island’s conversos for the period 1492–1654, see Robert Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora: The Jews of Sao Tome Island, 1492–1654,” in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994); see also Gloria Mound, “Judaic Research in the Balearic Islands and Sao Tome,” in Jews in Places You Never Thought Of, ed. Karen Primack (Jersey City: KTAV, 1998), 60–63. How the descendants of those original kidnapped children were able to maintain their heritage is a mystery. Perhaps, like Moses’s mother, their parents secretly emigrated with them. Estimating their average age at eight to ten years old, they would have been in their midforties when Coelho sent his recruiters. Some of their children would certainly have welcomed the chance to carve their niche in the New World.

  46. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 12–14, provides a detailed list of dozens of heretical acts whose continued observance by conversos expose them as Judaizers. These include obvious ones such as circumcision and reciting Jewish prayers and obscure ones such as changing into fresh underwear on Friday evening and blessing children without making the sign of the cross.

  47. Ibid., 57–58; Liebman, The Jews in New Spain, 213, describes the secret code used in Jewish correspondence.

  48. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 47.

  49. The secret organization was exposed by the historian Seymour Liebman, who spent much of his scholarly life translating thousands of Inquisition trials in the New World.

  50. Seymour Liebman, New World Jewry 1493–1825: Requiem for the Forgotten (New York: KTAV, 1982), 80, 84, 92, 93.

  51. Ibid., 94.

  52. H. I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Williamsport, Pa.: Baynard Press, 1937), 64–65n146, 86–87n55; Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein, (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951), 184: “Travelers admired the splendor and luxury of the houses of these refugees who dwelt in what were really palaces. If you turn to a collection of engravings of that period, you discover that the most magnificent mansions in Amsterdam were inhabited by Jews.”

  53. Cyrus Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial Relating to Damages to Spanish Interests in America Done by the Jews of Holland (1634),” American Jewish Historical Society, 45–47. Informer’s statement: “Bento de Osorio, alias David Ossorio gives the orders & makes the plans for plundering and destroying, thinking by this means to destroy Christianity. It is with this object in view that they try to maintain so many spies in so many cities of Castile, Portugal, Biscay, Brazil & elsewhere.”

  54. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 49.

  55. Ibid., 52.

  56. Ibid., 51.

  57. Ibid., 52.

  58. Seymour Liebman, “The Great Conspiracy in Peru,” Academy of American Franciscan History 28, no. 2 (October 1971), 182: The quote is from a letter from the Council of Portugal to Philip IV.

  59. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 54.

  60. Ibid., 54.

  61. Ibid., 60.

  62. Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial,” 45–47.

  63. Ibid., 45–47.

  Chapter Six: Zion Warriors in the New World

  1. Cyrus Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial Relating to Damages to Spanish Interests in America Done by the Jews of Holland (1634),” American Jewish Historical Society, 48; Jonathan I. Israel, Diaspora Within a Diaspora, 1540–1740, Brill Series in Jewish Studies (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 148–50.

  2. Mendel Peterson, The Funnel of Gold (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 248–67.

  3. Nigel Cawthorne, Pirates: An Illustrated History (Edison, N.J.: Chart-well Books, 2005), 29.

  4. H. I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Williamsport, Pa.: Baynard Press, 1937), 92: In 1655, the Spanish consul in Amsterdam with the aid of spies collected the names of Jewish merchants trading with Spain together with the names of their correspondents there. Leading the list was Bento Osorio. King Philip IV submitted the list to the Inquisition.

  5. Information about the Spanish treasure fleet comes from Robert F. Marx, Shipwrecks of the Western Hemisphere: 1492–1825 (New York: World Publishing Company, 1971); Dave Horner, Shipwrecks, Skin Divers and Sunken Gold: The Treasure Galleons (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965): In April 1628, the Tierra Firme set sail for the New World. Skirting the north coast of South America, the galleons, after two months at sea, docked at Cartagena, where they unloaded trade goods and collected the treasures brought to port: gold and diamonds from Venezuela, pearls from Margarita Island, and gold and emeralds from the mountains of Colombia. The Tierra Firme then proceeded to Portobelo, on Panama’s Caribbean coast, where the galleons fill
ed their holds with Potosí silver that had been transported six thousand miles from Lima, first by ship to Panama, and then across the isthmus by mule train. After loading the silver, now converted into seventy-pound bars, the galleons returned to Cartagena to collect the remainder of the riches that had come in. For another month, the port took on the appearance of a tumultuous bazaar with merchants, peddlers, prostitutes, sailors, and adventurers gambling, drinking, playing, and trading for luxury goods and manufactured items from Europe. In August 1628, the annual fiera ended, and the Tierra Firme sailed north to Havana to meet up with the flota.

  6. Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial,” 45.

  7. Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 59.

  8. Ibid., 58. This was disclosed by the defeated Portuguese governor in his diary.

  9. Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1954), 3n2.

  10. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews, 129–30.

  11. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 64.

  12. Ibid., 62; Dudley Pope, The Buccaneer King: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1688 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), 53.

  13. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 59.

  14. Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew 1492–1776, vol. 1 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 70.

  15. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 88.

  16. Ibid., 74, 129.

  17. Ibid., 63.

  18. Ibid., 90–91.

  19. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. 1, 77.

  20. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 64.

  21. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1957), 115–16.

  22. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 48.

  23. Primary sources for this chapter are quoted from the works of Arnold Wiznitzer and Rabbi Herbert Bloom.