Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

  On February 14, 1630, the Dutch fleet landed seven thousand soldiers at Recife. The next day, Moses, identified only as the Company’s “guest,” led three thousand more men ashore at a beach north of the port. Meeting him there was Antonio Dias Paparrobalos, the local underground leader who brought “two native mulattoes” to guide the invaders.8 Encountering little resistance, inside of two weeks the Dutch were masters of northeast Brazil, an area embracing Pernambuco Province, the port of Recife, and outlying districts.

  For the second time in a decade, Brazil’s conversos came out of the closet. This was noted by a Portuguese priest, Father Manuel Calado, who lived in Dutch Brazil from 1630 to 1646, and hated the Calvinists as much as the Jews: “[The conversos] welcomed the Dutch, greatly relieved that their double lives had come to an end, and they could cease feigning loyalty to Catholicism.” In his clerical report, Father Calado described the initial rush of freedom:

  The Jews who had come from Holland had many relatives in Pernambuco who had lived in conformity with the law of Christ. However, after the Dutch had conquered the country, they lifted the mask which had disguised them and circumcised themselves, and declared themselves publicly as Jews…I heard it said many a time by the Jews that there was no man of their nation [i.e., conversos] in Pernambuco who was not a Jew, and if they did not declare themselves as Jews it was because of the fear that the world might turn and Brazil might return to Portugal, otherwise all of them would have already publicly declared themselves Jews.9

  One converso had cause to regret his unbridled enthusiasm. As Dutch officers, haughty in victory, strutted past his shop, the wine merchant Simon Drago threw open the doors of his cellar and welcomed them inside. Proudly, he declared himself a Jew, and in celebration of their victory and his personal freedom, he offered the officers a case of his finest wine. Quaffing that, they wanted more. Claiming they were entitled for having liberated his “kind,” they departed with eighty barrels of wine. This incident was revealed years later when Drago filed suit in Amsterdam, charging the officers had emptied his warehouse.10

  After the conquest, Moses settled in Recife and pursued a successful career as a licensed pirate, a privateer. With his share of the booty, estimated at one ton of silver, he bought ships, munitions, and an empty island off Recife to serve as his base. As a jab against his country of origin, he named the island, which today forms the heart of Recife, Antonio Vaz, cynically christening the redoubt with his old converso name.11 Joining him, as officers and crew, were other recusant Jews who, having rejected the stifling embrace of Amsterdam, shared his quest for unbridled adventure at the expense of the evil empire. It is not known how many enemy ships Moses seized, but Dutch privateers in the New World were very successful. For the period 1623 to 1636 (the year that Moses sold his island to Governor Maunce), Dutch privateers captured 547 Iberian ships, an average of nearly one a week.12

  Unlike Moses, who was a firstborn son, most Jewish settlers were younger sons. As such, they had not acquired a stake in the family business. It was reported they usually arrived with “only the ragged clothes they wore upon landing,”13 to find their status quickly changed for the better. Fluent in Dutch and Portuguese, they bridged the language barrier between the newly arrived Dutch and the established Portuguese. Soon many occupied a profitable niche in Holland’s colony as middlemen in commercial dealings between the two groups. Prominent among them was Moses’s younger brother Abraham, who rose to become the colony’s buying agent, and was so widely respected that, in times of trouble, all sides turned to him to mediate their squabbles.

  New Holland was the Company’s name for the captured colony. Despite this conceit, the new owners were not so provincial as to expel the people responsible for the region’s wealth. Portuguese sugar growers may have been despised as papist idolaters, but as with the Jews, they were urged to remain and grow rich. Again Prince Maurice issued an edict of religious toleration, pledging that “the liberty of Spaniards, Portuguese and natives, whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews [will] be respected, [and no one] permitted to subject them to inquiries in matters of conscience.”14

  By his decree, New Holland was officially a land of freedom: Catholics, New Christians, Jews, Calvinists, and Indians lived and worked side by side. Most Jews lived in Recife, where they formed the first legal settlement of Jews in the New World and ran their community as a self-contained government. The Portuguese Catholics accepted the newcomers, but considered traitors the native conversos who, with the coming of the Dutch Jews, had shed their Christian robes to embrace their ancestral faith. Still, compared to the religious intolerance elsewhere, there was relative harmony in the colony. Each group had a share of the wealth and contributed to transforming Dutch Brazil into the world’s richest sugar-producing area.

  Much of New Holland’s success was due to its governor, Johan Maurice van Nassau, who arrived in January 1637 with an entourage of scholars, artists, and scientists and ruled for seven years. The Prince of Nassau (as he liked to be addressed) was a cultured man at home with the arts and sciences, and an extraordinary diplomat who related well to all factions. The Portuguese felt him simpatico to their situation; the Calvinists knew him as one of their own, and the Jews called him “wise,” their ultimate compliment.15

  Within weeks of his arrival, the governor received a complaint from a delegation of Calvinist merchants that there were too many Jews in New Holland: “The country is flooded with Jews. Every boat is filled with them.”16 The petitioners requested that Christians, rather than Jews, be encouraged to come, bringing up all the historic reasons that “Christ killers” should be suppressed. The governor interrupted. Brandishing a copy of the colony’s charter, he told the Calvinist complainers there would be no favoritism: “Article 32 guarantees protection for persons of Jewish and Catholic faith.”17

  While the governor rejected the petitioners, it wasn’t the whole truth. As in Amsterdam, there were restrictions: Jews were not allowed to hold government office, hold religious services in public, or take a Christian lover.18 But, again, these restrictions were relatively minor in the seventeenth-century Diaspora world. The People of the Book might be despised, but those in Brazil had fundamental rights. More important, they were needed. They called their congregation Zur Israel, Rock of Israel—a pun on Recife, which means “rock of Brazil.” But it also imparted a messianic message from the book of Isaiah (30:19–29): “For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem…when they come to the Rock of Israel.”19

  For security reasons, the governor wished to establish his residence on Antonio Vaz Island, as it commanded the harbor entrance. Moses agreed to sell. Living in the Diaspora as strangers in a strange land, the Hebrew nation had long ago learned the importance of being on good terms, especially fiscal ones, with the ruling class. Moses had no need of the governor’s money, but welcomed the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the self-styled Prince of Nassau. Coincidentally or not, the governor then hired Moses’s brother Abraham and nephew Jacob as buying agents for the colony.

  When the governor acquired the island, it was a barren place. Moses had built a dock and some shacks, referred to as “smugglers’ cabins,” and there were the crumbling remains of a deserted convent.20 Immediately the governor brought in work crews to develop the island, which he now named Maurica in line with his princely tastes. A magnificent castle of brazilwood timber was built, as was an aviary, a zoo, and a fishpond (“He brought thither every kind of bird and animal.”). He also created parks with bandstands and planted thousands of coconut palms and orchards of fruit trees. A new town, Mauritania, was raised, and two bridges connected it to the mainland. “Hither came the ladies and friends to pass the summer holidays, enjoy picnics, drinking parties, concerts and gambling…The Prince liked everyone to come and see his rarities and delighted in showing and explaining them.”21

  When the Dutch first arrived, Recife was a rural village of 150 houses; when they left two decades later, it was a bustling port of
two thousand homes.22 During the colony’s peak years, it was a rare family in Amsterdam who did not have a relative or friend living in Recife. Brazilian Jewry numbered about 1,500; Amsterdam Jewry, 1,200. Working together as financiers, brokers, shippers, importers, and insurers, they dominated commerce between the two nations.23

  In the 1640s, the Jews had a hundred ships plying the sugar trade and the Periera family in Amsterdam owned the refineries that turned the brown sweetener into the white crystal grains everyone desired. Recife became known as “the port of the Jews,” and its main thoroughfare was Rua dos Judios, the Street of the Jews.24

  Although their number in Recife was only somewhat greater than in Amsterdam, relative to the latter’s Christian population the difference was huge. In 1640, Amsterdam’s Jews numbered less than 2 percent of the populace, while those in Recife constituted 30–40 percent of the white population. Given their merchandising bent, “Christian merchants soon found themselves reduced to the role of spectators of the Israelite business.”25 However, once they learned Portuguese and no longer needed the Jews as intermediaries, their leaders objected: “Almost the entire sugar trade is dominated by Jews [who] lie, use false weights, and practice usury.”26

  Competing merchants called on the colony’s governing body, the Supreme Council, to force the Jews, if they couldn’t be exiled, to at least wear red hats or a yellow insignia: “Everywhere else in the world this cheating and dishonest race is compelled to wear distinguishing signs on their clothing to identify them and show their inferiority.”27

  Against the envy and hostility of the Calvinists, and the grudging acceptance of the Portuguese planters, La Nação was defended by the ruling authorities, the Prince of Nassau, the Company, and Holland’s States General, all of whom recognized and valued their indispensable role in transforming Recife into the richest port in the New World outside of Havana. Also, they were cognizant that, threatened by the Inquisition, the Jews more than any other group could be counted on to defend the colony.28

  While the Company held a monopoly on the slave trade, and made a 240 percent profit per slave, Jewish merchants, as middlemen, also had a lucrative share, buying slaves at the Company auction and selling them to the planters on an installment plan—no money down, three years to pay at an interest rate of 40–50 percent. As debts were usually paid in sugar, Jews became the major sugar brokers. With their large profits—slaves were marked up 300 percent and dry goods 700 percent—they built stately homes in Recife, and owned ten of the 166 sugar plantations, including “some of the best plantations in the river valley of Pernambuco.”29

  Given their commanding position, and the time-honored prejudice against them, it is not surprising that competing merchants grumbled. “[The Jews] have become masters of the entire business of trade,” and, sugar growers lamented, they “could not prosper because Negroes were too dear and interest too high.”30 These complaints were noted by a Dutch traveler to Brazil in the 1640s, who observed: “For the most part the Jews [are] concerned with business which would have been advantageous had their trade been confined to the ordinary rules of business and not reached such excesses.”31

  While their profits and interest rates appear excessive, in their defense, one must take into account that New Holland was a frontier society, a New World outpost surrounded by enemies. In spite of the colony’s apparent wealth, capital was scarce and investments high risk. Jews, numbering approximately one-third of the population, were entitled to a third of the broker licenses. To offset this restriction, they sold shares in their licenses to other Jews. This aroused the ire of their competitors, who objected to the governor that “[the Jews] purchase the entire cargo of a trading ship, and divide it according to paid shares.” Dismissing their complaint, he reminded them, “in the early days, Dutch brokers and merchants had lost the people’s confidence through speculation and carelessness, which resulted in advantages for the Jews.”32

  During New Holland’s existence, the Company transported 26,000 slaves to Brazil.33 Over the course of the next two centuries, this number increased a thousandfold, and the slave trade spread to every New World colony and involved every European nation that had an oceangoing ship. Along the West African coast, men from Sweden, France, Denmark, Portugal, Germany, Holland, England, and Spain sailed slave ships and manned the slave forts.

  While the Arabs controlled the East African slave trade, the West African trade was essentially a European-African enterprise—Africans sold Africans to Europeans to serve other Europeans. The Jews’ role in the commercial process shows them to be neither better nor worse than others in an era when the morality of slavery was a nonissue. Color was not a criterion: Whites also bought and sold other whites, and Africans enslaved Africans. Slaves were coin in every realm, and Europe’s seagoing nations bid for and zealously guarded the right to sell Africans to a Christian New World. As the historian Eli Faber documents in Jews and the Slave Trade, after the demise of New Holland, Jewish involvement in the trade was negligible.34

  Brazil’s Jews were more liberal in their observance than those in Holland. Whereas in Amsterdam, synagogue officers might rule for decades with an iron hand, those in Recife served only a year and could not stand for reelection. Disputes in the colony were settled by a majority vote of the Mahamad, and any member of the congregation could request an alternate judge if he felt the presiding one was biased. In Holland, Jews had to wait three years after being circumcised to join the congregation; in Recife the wait was one year. Ashkenazic Jews could not join Amsterdam’s Sephardic synagogue, nor marry a member; in Recife, all Jews were treated equally. Their hazan (spiritual leader) was Isaac Aboab, a Cabala-practicing rabbi who later returned to Amsterdam, voted to excommunicate Spinoza, and subsequently followed the false messiah Sabbatai Zvei to Salonika.

  Zur Israel funded a number of charitable programs: a ransom committee for captured brethren; dowries for poor unmarried women in Holland desiring a mate in Brazil; a fund that sent money to Israel; and another that served as a bank of last resort for debts to Christians. To finance these initiatives, members remitted a portion of every commercial transaction to the Mahamad and could be excommunicated if they failed to do so. Moses and other privateers were not exempt from the ruling, which specified a payment of 3 percent of the net proceeds of their booty.35

  These payments comprise most of the entries in Zur Israel’s minutes book. Others deal with laws and rulings made by the Mahamad to govern the community. Two that forbade social indulgences are of particular interest as they illuminate what must have been all too common vices: gambling and philandering. The Mahamad outlawed gambling on Friday afternoons, as too many members arrived late for Sabbath dinner, and in an effort to cool excessive libidos, imposed a whopping fifty-florin fine on any member caught bathing with a Christian woman in the mikvah (the ritual bath).36

  Most members were from Holland, but Zur Israel’s congregation also included Sephardim from Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and North Africa, as well as Ashkenazim from Germany, Poland, and Hungary.37 If they philandered and gambled too much, well, this was the New World. Few settlers were overly concerned with morality. Indian and African concubines were common, but Christian women, however tempting, were out of bounds. Not all Jewish settlers were merchants, but whatever their vocation, their Judaism was always up front. Once during the holiday Simat Torah, they loudly paraded in the streets carrying the Torah. So enthusiastic was their celebration that the Calvinists accused them of “shameless boldness” and slandering the Christian religion. In response, Prince Maurice ordered them to hold their ceremonies in private, “so secretly that they should not be heard.”38

  An insight into the character of these pioneers is found in the further testimony of the informer who disclosed the role of Moses Cohen Henriques.

  The spy, Captain Esteban de Fonseca, was a renegade Jew who left Amsterdam to return to Spain. In Madrid in April 1634, he appeared before the Inquisition. Testifying on “the damage done to His Maj
esty by the Jews of Holland,”39 he alleged that eighteen ships were then being readied in Amsterdam to transport a hundred Jews to Brazil. But first they intended to go ashore near Coimbra, Portugal, the seat of the Inquisition, where two hundred Judaizers had recently been burned: “The men are to go to Coimbra…to sack the Inquisition and set its prisoners at liberty, and to plunder the convent of Santa Cruz.”

  Fonseca claimed that funds for the expedition had been “raised by subscription among all the Jews of Holland,” and that the armada was “governed by a Jew who takes in his company 100 Jews…I shall name only the principal ones, for I should never get through if I named them all.” Fonseca then named ten Jews—a minyan—including Moses’s close friend Abraham Israel, whom he identified as the fleet’s adjutant (administrative officer). Beyond elaborating on Moses’s piracy and spying, Fonseca also accused him of concocting a particularly bold plan to capture Havana with African warriors disguised as slaves: “The landing is to be made under a flag of truce, pretending they escaped from the Hollanders, and [once inside the city] under cover of night, they would arm themselves and slaughter the soldiers.”

  Neither event occurred: There is no record of a Brazil-bound fleet stopping off in Portugal to sack the Inquisition, nor a Trojan horse ploy to capture Havana. Perhaps the backers of the Jewish-led armada learned their plans had been exposed and canceled them. Or perhaps Fonseca’s charges were nothing more than barroom talk—he claimed to be a former crew member. In either case, his statement affirms the mettle of Moses and his mates. Over card games, they drank rum, smoked cigars, and discussed their various enterprises—shipping sugar, selling slaves, smuggling silver from Potosí—and plotted the overthrow of the Inquisition empire.