To be sure, trade networks began to shift when itinerant merchants or descendants of major transcontinental spice-trade dynasties of Jews, Moors, and Arabs clandestinely entered the New World on the ships of the Spanish and Portuguese. They came to harbors near major spice production, and at least a few began to function as merchants there. Sephardic Jews reached the Yucatán Peninsula by the 1570s, Suriname by 1630, and Ashkenazi Jews may have joined them there as early as 1652. What is now the oldest continuously active Jewish congregation in the Caribbean was established in Curaçao by 1651. Fortuitous circumstances led me to first look at Jewish and Moorish (Mudejar) influences in Mérida, Yucatán, which in many ways is as much a part of the Caribbean as it is a part of Mexico. As early as 1575, the Mexican Inquisition contended that Cristóbal de Miranda, then dean of the Mudejar-style cathedral in Mérida, was a judaizante (Judaizer). Other Jews of Miranda’s cohort were already in control of the slave trade from Yucatán back to Spain, causing resentment (if not jealousy) among less economically successful Catholics in Mérida. And just as early, many immigrants from Andalusia were accused of maintaining Muslim beliefs and ritualized practices of consuming or fasting from certain foods and beverages. In the 1570s, Diego de Landa Calderón, the bishop of Yucatán, ordered the torture of over forty-five hundred men and women convicted for their religious beliefs and the whipping, fining, or public humiliation of another sixty-three hundred suspects. Many of them had Jewish or Muslim ancestry. He was also known for forcibly converting Mayans to Christianity and for destroying their centuries-old codices.
MAP 4. Spice trails of the New World
Because my first visit to Mérida occurred 430 years after Bishop de Landa’s death, I was not quite sure if any remnants of Arab or Jewish influences would remain in the city or its surrounds. At first, I tried to orient myself to the natural wonder of the Yucatán Peninsula, rather than trying to probe into the shadows of its past cross-cultural conflicts.
My daughter, Laura, and I watch as flamingos lope ahead of us. They are taking refuge in the backwaters of the ancient harbor of Yucalpetén, just off the Gulf of Mexico and about twenty miles from Mérida, the Spanish colonial trade center founded in 1542 and the capital of the state of Yucatán. Yucalpetén is a harbor like many others in tropical Mexico and the Caribbean—one that saw Spanish galleons for centuries before tourism became more lucrative than the spice trade. We head to Progreso, a modern beach town about four miles from Yucalpetén, where we decide to take a canoe out into the nearby mangrove lagoons, swatting mosquitoes and smelling brine and sulfurous muds as we skim along the water. We are surrounded on all sides by vestiges of ancient salt-drying ponds where the Mayans had once obtained this essential mineral, this geological spice. It feels just as I had always imagined it would: so humid that I can hardly tell my own sweat from the drizzle pervading the air and dampening my clothes; and sweltering hot until a sky strewn with dark purple clouds lets loose with a thunderstorm that cools down the air to a tolerable temperature.
We bus back into downtown Mérida, a centro filled with buildings that reflect the Mudejar architectural tradition of the Moors.11 There we visit the giant market pavilion where Mayan vendors in brightly colored booths sell spices, vegetables, and fruits of all kinds. They carry both native seasonings, like epazote, habanero chile, achiote, chocolate, and vanilla, and introduced ones, like cinnamon, cloves, cumin, and lime juice. We eye the piles of complex spice mixtures and pastes called moles and recaudos that blend plants of the East and West together in a single pot of native turkey broth.
Laura walks me down winding streets until we reach the Alameda, where Mayan street-food vendors are selling ground lamb and vegetables wrapped in tortillas, a snack they call quibbe. The smells of wood smoke, lamb fat, grilled onions, cinnamon, cumin, and allspice pervade the air around the food carts. One man I ask about quibbe says it is una comida típica for the Mayans of the Yucatán; Laura and I smile at each other, aware of its centuries-old link to the Middle East. We walk a few blocks farther to Café Siqueff, a restaurant owned by a twentieth-century Lebanese immigrant. It has a hint of Mayan influence in its menu, since Jorge Siqueff Febels has Mayan as well as Lebanese kin.
There on Don Jorge’s menu, the quibbe is spelled kibi, the fatayer (meat pie) is Hispanicized as eftoyer, and the yogurt has returned to its ancient Arabic name of labneh. The signature dish of the Siqueff dynasty, huevos motuleños, was first prepared at Café La Sin Rival in Motul in response to a request for “something different” for the breakfast of Yucatán governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto sometime before his death in 1924. I look at its ingredients: eggs, black beans, ham, tortillas, bananas, peas, cheese, and chives. It is as much a transcontinental hybrid as any dish I have ever eaten, part of what is sometimes called Lebanese-Mayan fusion cuisine.
I once imagined that Spanish colonization of places such as Yucatán would have resulted in colonies with cultural sensibilities much like those of the imperialistic colonizers. In Mérida, I could see the flaws in my own earlier assumptions. Many of the people who came from the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not attempting to advance the Spanish empire; in fact, they were fleeing from it. The people who had lost the most and who were the most threatened by the ongoing Inquisition were among those who were driven to take refuge elsewhere, including the brave new world that Rodrigo de Triana had glimpsed. And once relocated on an island or the mainland of the Americas, the newcomers reinitiated the livelihoods that their families had championed over the centuries, including the trading of spices.
But first, the traders had to get off of the Iberian Peninsula and on their way. Fortunately, despite the ongoing Inquisition, passage was not too difficult to negotiate, because sympathetic Christians had formed an underground railroad to help Muslims and Jews leave the peninsula. At a major port in Spain with ships headed for the Canary Islands, it was common knowledge that “whoever wants to purchase a license to pass to the West Indies can do so on his own at the port of San Juan y la de Santestevan. Look for the road that leaves for Tudela, at the end of the stone bridge, and there on the street you can ask for Francisca Brava or Nicolás Losada the cleric, who will sell you a license to travel to the West Indies.”12
By the end of the sixteenth century, more than nineteen thousand individuals from Andalusia alone had legally emigrated from Spain to the Americas, while others secretly arrived bearing pseudonyms and false credentials fabricated in places such as the Canary Islands.13 Of course, Andalusia was the region of the Iberian Peninsula where most of the crypto-Muslims and a good many of the crypto-Jews originally resided. The emigrants included not only laborers but also many skilled and educated professionals: doctors, lawyers, notaries, pharmacists, shoemakers, blacksmiths, accountants, slave traders, and, of course, spice traders.
Many Andalusians were among those who had left for Portugal or for the Canary Islands, before taking the final leap to harbors in the West Indies. Some of them later found ways to reach the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Bahamas, and finally the American mainland, particularly through Mexico. The best indication that so many Jews and Muslims came early to the New World can be found in accounts of the belated—and mostly futile—attempts by the Spanish government to curb the flow. At first, Spanish bureaucrats established a whole set of laws and regulations to prevent Muslims and Jews from even entering the Americas. Portugal, of course, followed in proliferating its own anti-Semitic laws and regulations. Even though Portugal had granted one hundred thousand Jews asylum for the eight months following their expulsion from Spain in July 1492, the Portuguese later withdrew the right for any Jew to live and work legally in its lands on the Iberian Peninsula or in any of its American colonies. But it was too late. And once these new immigrants had arrived in the Caribbean or on the American mainland, they undoubtedly took notice of what spices, herbs, and other aromatics their new home offered. Of immediate interest were allspice, achiote, five species and scores of cultivars of chiles
, chocolate, several kinds of oregano, copal incense, and vanilla.
Not surprisingly, most of these aromatics traveled the same route out of the New World that the diaspora Jews and Muslims traveled to get there. The spices and other goods most often went out through the ports of Veracruz and Mérida in Mexico, Spanish Town and Port Royal in Jamaica, Havana in Cuba, and through other ports in the Lesser Antilles and on the islands of Barbados, Cayenne, Curaçao, and Martinique. These are exactly the places where crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims who had nominally become cristianos nuevos went when they fled Cádiz, Jerez, Palos de la Frontera, and Lisbon in droves.14 Once they had gotten the dried plants into American and Caribbean ports, they did not necessarily declare all of them as cargo, but may have hidden many of them in the ballast of the ships. From there, they set off for the Canary Islands before reaching Europe. In the ports of the Canaries, these items could have easily and surreptitiously been unloaded and slipped onto ships leaving for Morocco, not Spain.
Soon, they saw which plants could enter the very same trade routes in Europe, Asia, and Africa that their forefathers had employed, and then, beginning along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, they found ways to get an entire set of New World aromatics across the ocean and into those routes. Shipping records? What smugglers keep such things?
In 1520, the Catholic Church, realizing that emigrated Jews and Muslims were now not only practicing their faiths but also controlling a good deal of commerce in their new homes, appointed Pedro de Córdoba, a Dominican missionary, to be the first inquisitor of the West Indies and, by default, Mexico. Following his death in 1525, no new inquisitor was named, though for the next five decades, the reigning bishop of Mexico typically assumed inquisitional powers. In 1539, the Spanish government, alarmed by reports about the cristianos nuevos from its representatives in the colonies, issued a decree that explicitly prohibited “the transfer to the West Indies [including Mexico] of sons or grandsons of persons of Muslim or Jewish ancestry.” Just four years later, as if acknowledging that these strategies to keep recent Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity from going to New Spain had largely failed, Charles V ordered the expulsion of such converts, particularly Muslim-born Christians, currently living in the Americas. Then, in 1571, Pedro Moya de Contreras was named the first inquisitor of New Spain and immediately began to investigate the conversos who had already become prominent in managing trade between the ports of Veracruz and Cádiz.
By that time, the inquisitors would be lucky to find Jews or Muslims overtly practicing their faith in the Americas at all, let alone find enough of their neighbors willing to cooperate in the effort to deport them. In short, most were well integrated into the society of New Spain as merchants, bankers, doctors, or community leaders. We cannot be sure how many were of Muslim or Jewish descent, but at least one-third of all of the “Spaniards” emigrating to the Yucatán Peninsula in the first two centuries after 1492 came from families in Andalusia.15 The Sephardic Jews and Mozarabic Muslims were widely scattered across the Caribbean and the Americas, and some of them were already re-engaged in the trading of spices, herbs, and other flavorings. It is my hypothesis—still no doubt to be tested—that they not only took on pivotal roles in moving chiles, chocolate, and vanilla across the ocean to integrate them into well-established trade routes but also may have captured the processing and trade of these spices among European American populations rather than let them stay under the control of indigenous peoples.
With a few exceptions, such as the trials of Jewish chocolate hedonist Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche, historical documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reveal little about the lives of crypto-Jewish and crypto-Muslim merchants or spice traders in the New World.16 We learn that a group of Jews thought to be conversos settled in Jamaica in 1530, in the harbor first christened Santiago de la Vega and later known as Spanish Town. By the time these traders moved to nearby Port Royal, their community was not only flourishing but Judaism was also clearly being practiced once more. They exported Jamaica’s fine allspice berries and moved chiles, cocoa, cochineal, and vanilla from Mexico.17 They had become multilingual spice merchants just as their Jewish ancestors had been, but they were now plying their trade sixty-eight hundred miles to the west of the Souk al-Attarin in the Old City of Jerusalem.
FIGURE 20. Cacao plants were successfully introduced to the West Indies at the end of the seventeenth century. This photograph from 1909 shows the processing of the cacao pods. (General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)
The demand for vanilla, like chocolate, began to grow beyond its natural range. By 1655, the Jews of Jamaica had a monopoly over the shipping of vanilla to Europe and began to recruit other Jews to obtain either chocolate or vanilla from elsewhere in the Caribbean and from the northeast coast of South America. And so, in late 1658, two conversos, Josua Nuñez Netto and Joseph Pereira, settled in the Dutch plantation colony of Pomeroon, now part of Guyana. They encouraged settlement there by other crypto-Jews, who learned the Arawak dialects of the tribes along the Pomeroon River in order to find out how to extract vanilla from the orchids. One particular Jewish speaker of Arawak, Salomon de la Roche, mastered the entire traditional extraction process by watching his Arawak workers, and then worked with them on innovations that modernized the process to obtain higher yields.
Other multilingual Jews began to move vanilla for de la Roche out of Cayenne (now French Guiana) and Martinique, then on to Jamaica, where it was destined for Jewish traders and confectioners in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bordeaux, and Bayonne. But so much of the vanilla production for export became dependent on de la Roche that when he died in 1683, vanilla trade nearly came to an end. Fortunately, it was revived by one of his understudies.
At about the same time, another Jew, Benjamin d’Acosta de Andrade, played a similar pivotal role in the cocoa trade.18 A half century later, yet another Jewish cocoa merchant, Nathan Simpson, regularly moved 150,000 pounds of chocolate through Curaçao every three months. Fluent in Dutch, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Yiddish, Simpson was known to manage twenty-three shipments of spices in and out of Curaçao over a fifteen-month period.19 Although many of these Jewish traders advanced the globalization of trade in spices of American origin, some of them were also involved in the selling of their harvesters of cocoa or vanilla into slave markets. The cruelty of these traders prompted uprisings among enslaved Africans, who then killed their owners.
As multilingual money changers and maritime merchants, the New World traders coordinated the flow of spices and other flavorings, dyes, and cane sugar from Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Thomas, Veracruz, Mérida, and Curaçao on the western side of the Atlantic with Jews working in Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam, London, Constantinople, and the Indian ports on the Malabar Coast. Jews in Cochin and other Malabar ports would then disperse these same goods farther eastward.
Not all of these shipments were above board. Oral histories passed down among Sephardic Jews hint that many of the items entered Spanish and Portuguese ports hidden among the ballast in the hold of ships returning from the Americas. Once the “official” goods were offloaded and most of the crew had dispersed, the remaining crew members with ties to the Jewish or Muslim merchants moved the secreted goods into the hands of those who could smuggle them across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco.20 We know that chiles made it back to Ceuta by 1514, only about a decade after Columbus’s own physician took them to Spain. By 1542, Jewish purveyors of American-grown chiles may have facilitated their trade along Sephardic Jewish shipping routes and Arab camel caravan routes all the way to Goa. Of course, by that time, chiles had arrived there through the hands of the Portuguese.
Old World spices flowed in the opposite direction. Soon, Jamaican and Mexican Jews and Muslims were demanding black pepper, coriander, aniseeds, cloves, cinnamon, and sesame, among other items, from across the Atlantic. These were sometimes incorporated into t
he spice rubs of chile and allspice that Carib- and Taino-speaking natives of the Caribbean used on the fish, fowl, or game they smoked over racks of freshly cut wooden sticks called coa. Once beef, pork, and goat were introduced and prepared in a similar manner, the term barbacoa spread throughout the Americas as the name for marinated meats and fish cooked over a wood fire outdoors.21
Perhaps the most inspired mixture of New World and Old World spices anywhere on earth is mole, which emerged from the Puebla and Oaxaca regions of Mexico. The best-known version is mole poblano, though Oaxacans claim seven equally fine examples. Some food historians have conjectured that this dish originated with the Aztecs, but there is no historical evidence to substantiate the claim.22
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 32