Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

Chapter Five

AMSTERDAM, THE NEW JERUSALEM

The date was January 16, 1605. Freezing winds blowing off the Atlantic did not deter the citizens of Lisbon from crowding the roadside to jeer the prisoners on their way to the plaza to be tried at the auto-da-fé. The victims, barefoot and naked to the waist, were whipped along the icy cobblestone streets by white-hooded guards of the Holy Brotherhood. On horseback, heading the procession, were the familiars (officials) of the Holy Office, wearing black tunics silhouetted with a white cross. Behind them, the 155 half-naked penitents stumbled along, six abreast, their backs lashed raw by the guards’ studded whips. The Judaizers carried unlit candles to signify that the light of the True Faith had not yet illuminated their souls. Their punishment, known as verguenza (shame), was dealt them for having confessed and declared their desire to join the Church in earnest. Prisoners not admitting their guilt were tortured until they did, and those who remained unrepentant were liable to be burned. Age made no difference: Ten-year-old sisters were tortured, and a ninety-six-year-old woman burned at the stake.

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 Jacob 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.

“Cursed by day and cursed by night; cursed when he goes forth and cursed when he comes in.”³⁰ So reads the condemnation of Uriel da Costa, excommunicated by holier-than-thou Jews who felt compelled to outdo the Christians in orthodoxy. Jews might have been freer in Amsterdam, but they still had to abide by the strictures their religious leaders demanded of the community. Before da Costa wound up killing himself, he wrote an account of his life and of the early community’s severity and religious dogmatism.

So stringent were these constraints that they drove away many young Jews, including members of da Costa’s family, who, seeking personal freedom, settled in the New World and led the fight for Jewish rights. Their parents, having been raised with the strictures of Christianity and being newly returned to Judaism, felt compelled to adhere—or pay lip service—to the numerous tenets of their religion. As if doing penance for all their years pretending to be Catholic, few of the older émigrés looked to confront those rabbis who (like Palache’s brother-in-law) were zealous in their litany of do’s and don’ts, and quick to excommunicate those who didn’t toe the line.

Uriel da Costa was one of those who refused. His autobiography, excerpted below, illuminates this early period as few other sources can.³¹ Born in Oporto, Portugal, in 1585 to a wealthy converso family, he studied for the priesthood and served in the local church before moving to Amsterdam in 1615 with his mother and four brothers. What prompted his return to Judaism is best described in his own words:

I grew up in the Roman Catholic religion, and since I was terribly afraid of eternal damnation I occupied myself with reading the New Testament and other spiritual books…I became completely confused…It seemed to me impossible to confess my sins in accordance with Roman Catholic custom to obtain absolute absolution…I began to doubt if it was really true what I was taught of the life to come and tried to reconcile faith with reason, for it was reason which whispered into my ear something utterly irreconcilable with faith…

Longing to find some satisfaction in any religion, I began to read the Books of Moses and the Prophets, knowing full well there was great competition between Jew and Christian. I found in the Old Testament many things that contradicted the New Testament completely. In addition, the old covenant is accepted by Jews as well as Christians, and the new one only by Christians. Finally I began to believe in Moses and decided to live according to his law because he received it from God, or so he maintained, and he simply considered himself an intermediary.

Considering all this and the fact that in my country there was no freedom of religion, I decided to leave my beautiful house built by my father, and did not think twice about giving up my ecclesiastical office. So we embarked on a ship under the greatest danger, for it is known that those descended from Jews were not permitted to leave the country without a permit by the king. My mother was with me, as well as my brothers whom I had won over to my newly won convictions…It was a daring enterprise and could have failed, so dangerous was it in this country to even discuss matters of religion. It was a long voyage and finally we arrived in Amsterdam where we felt Jews could live in freedom and fulfill the commandments. And since I was imbued with it, my brothers and I immediately submitted to circumcision.

Uriel’s concept of Judaism was based on the Old Testament. He had expected to find a biblical Judaism that no longer existed. Like many conversos, his knowledge was based solely on the Old Testament as transcribed in the Christian Bible. Instead, he encountered the Judaism of the Diaspora, an evolving faith built on interpretations and the commentaries of learned Jews found in the Talmud rather than the Torah. Wishing to live in accordance with the Commandments, da Costa rejected any new rendering of divine law not intoned in the Five Books of Moses.

When a converso moved to Amsterdam, he was immediately embraced by the rabbis. No matter how idolatrous he had been while in “Babylonian exile,” he was absolved. But now that he had returned to the bosom of Judaism, the rabbis smothered him with their laws:

After the first few days I began to understand that the customs and institutions of the Jews in Amsterdam were not at all in accordance with what Moses had written. If Moses’ commandments were observed strictly as written, then the Jews here were wrong to have invented so many things which deviated from them. It was not right for a man who had exchanged security at home for freedom abroad, and had sacrificed every possible advantage to permit himself to be so threatened…

Not reticent about his views, Uriel accused members of the Mahamad, the synagogue’s executive committee, of inventing a new Torah: “They call themselves the sages of the Jewish people, inventing a host of laws which are totally opposed to it [and] do all these things in order to sit in the first row of the Temple and to be greeted in the marketplace with particular respect.”³²

In 1623, two incidents occurred that led to his excommunication. His nephew, “who lives with me, went to the community leaders and accused me of eating food which was not in accordance with Jewish law, and said that I could not possibly be a Jew.” Soon after, da Costa met two new arrivals, who “I advised against joining the Jewish community, telling them they did not know what kind of yoke they were about to be burdened with.”

I asked them not to mention our conversation to the Jews. But these scoundrels betrayed me…As soon as the elders of the synagogue learned of my conversation, they met with the rabbis, who were hot with anger. A public war ensued. The rabbis and the people began to persecute me with a new hatred and did so many things against me that I could only react with utter and justified contempt.

Expelled from the synagogue, he was shunned. “Even my brothers, whose teacher I was, passed me by. So afraid were they of the authorities that they did not even greet me on the street.” When his wife, Sarah, died, his only close companion was a faithful housekeeper. After seven years, he could take it no longer. He asked to be reconciled, and agreed to the humiliating subjugation demanded by the Mahamad for reinstatement. On the appointed day:

I entered the synagogue, which was crowded with men and women who had come to observe this spectacle. When the time came, I went to the pulpit…and read in a loud voice the list of my confessions, concluding “I merit to die a thousand deaths for what I have committed.”…After, the sexton told me to go to a corner of the synagogue and strip off my clothes. I disrobed to my waist, wrapped a scarf around my head, took off my shoes, and the sexton tied my arms to one of the columns of the synagogue. The cantor came, and with leather whip beat me 39 times according to the law which provides for 40 lashes. But these people are so conscientious, they are afraid they might give me more than the law states. While he whipped me I recited the psalm.

When this was over…I dressed and lay down over the threshold of the synagogue while the sexton held my head, [and] all the men, women and children passed over me into the street, stepping with one foot on the lower part of my legs. No monkey could have invented a more despicable, tasteless and ridiculous action. Afterward when everybody left, I rose and someone helped me get the dust off my clothes, so that no one should say that I was not treated honorable. Although they had whipped me just a short time ago, they expressed their pity for me and patted my head, and I went home.

Sometime later, in 1640, Uriel da Costa bought a pistol, went home, put the gun barrel to his temple, and pulled the trigger. No one in his family had openly supported him, but after his death, one brother left for the New World to live free from a Jewish version of the Holy Inquisition, and other relations, exhibiting a similar combative spirit, directed their energies to gaining civil rights elsewhere in Europe and the New World. Indeed, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, everywhere that Jews struggled for rights, the da Costa name is prominent.³³

The trials and tribulations of Uriel da Costa paint a rabbinical portrait of Jewish Amsterdam at its most extreme. Samuel Palache would have been aghast at the treatment accorded da Costa, and certainly many of the congregation who went along did so reluctantly. Although not fanatical about their own beliefs, they deferred to those who were. It is one of history’s anomalies that their religious leaders, themselves survivors of religious fanaticism, should have formed their own Inquisitional tribunal, rather than show tolerance to the new Jews. Granted, no dissidents were held in dark dungeons, stripped naked, and subjected to the rack, or suffered the Holy Terror’s other specified tortures.³⁴ Even so, the lives of those expelled were ruined just the same.

The most notable figure banished from the community was nine years old when he stepped over da Costa’s body in the synagogue entrance. The celebrated philosopher Baruch Spinoza would publicly question every religious tenet of Judaism and deny that the Bible was God’s word. Like Uriel, he was condemned to be “cursed by day and cursed by night; cursed when he goes forth and cursed when he comes in.” However, unlike him, Spinoza is embraced today as a champion of the Enlightenment and considered one of the great men in Jewish history.

Only a handful of Jews were drummed out of the congregation. However, when one considers the oppressive religious atmosphere that permeated the small community, it is little wonder that a younger generation, raised in freedom, wanted out. Among the Jewish youth who quit Amsterdam for the New World were the Cohen Henriques brothers. Moses was fourteen and Abraham eleven when Rabbi Palache was buried, and a decade later they were in Brazil. Little is known of their parents, but the lasting influence of the pirate rabbi is apparent when, after the death of his first wife, Abraham married Samuel Palache’s grandniece, Rebekah, and the couple’s two children also married into the Palache family.³⁵

Moses left Amsterdam as a soldier and spy and embarked on a spectacular piracy career that would span a half century. Abraham soon followed him to the New World, where he became a powerful international merchant and used his economic muscle to orchestrate Jewish settlement. He never used Henriques, his Spanish “oppressor” name. Indeed, his fealty to his ancestry was such that, whenever possible, he signed his patronymic name, Abraham Cohen, in Hebrew.³⁶

During Holland’s armistice with Spain, from 1609 to 1621, Brazilian sugar found its way to foreign countries, transported by Dutch Jews to Portugal and then to Holland, France, Germany, and points east. This traffic, combined with Holland’s own consumption of the granulated product, boosted Brazil’s output by more than 50 percent. Likewise, the number of sugar refineries in Amsterdam increased from four to twenty-five.³⁷ Once a confection only the very rich could afford, the sweetener was fast becoming an affordable treat for everyman.

This traffic came to an abrupt halt in 1621, and the Dutch resumed their fight for independence. The desirability of regaining the sugar market was a major factor in the creation of the Dutch West India Company (hereafter called the Company), a trading combine with privately held shares modeled after the earlier Dutch East India Company. In April 1623, Prince Maurice presided over a conference at The Hague, where it was decided to fight Spain by targeting her colonies, the source of her wealth. To accomplish this, the States General approved the formation of a militant Company with the right and means to wage war against any that stood in its way.³⁸

No private corporation would ever again be granted such power—a monopoly on foreign trade, governorship of settlements, and the right to raise an army, wage war, and negotiate peace. The Company’s mandate was not simply to bypass Portugal and deal directly with Brazil. Rather, its initial mission was to conquer the sugar colony and then seize the silver mountain of Potosí, which for a half a century had financed Spain’s armies and funded her empire. To penetrate the interior of the southern continent where the silver mountain was located (today’s Bolivia), the Company’s plan called for a pincer movement to close in from both coasts—from Brazil on the Atlantic side and Peru on the Pacific.

Jews were not involved in the formation of the Company but were wholly in favor of it and quick to enlist. While the Company’s motives were wholly mercenary and political, the Jews had another, more pressing agenda. In Portugal in 1618, the Inquisition arrested more than a hundred wealthy converso traders who had agents in Amsterdam and seized their cargos from Brazil in transit to the Dutch port. Amsterdam’s Jews, who were related to many of those arrested, and were holding their money, protested to the States General. A formal complaint was duly sent to King Philip, but it had no effect.³⁹ The arrests in Portugal coincided with an Inquisition hearing in Brazil, where ninety conversos were denounced.⁴⁰

For a century, Brazil’s New Christians had been living in relative peace while developing the colony into the world’s richest sugar producer. Owing to its vastness and Portugal’s small population, conversos (along with petty criminals) had been encouraged to emigrate there. By 1623, an estimated 15 percent of the colony’s fifty thousand settlers were conversos. The authorities knew this included a clandestine community of nearly a thousand Judaizers, but as long as its members didn’t flaunt their beliefs, no one at first was particularly concerned.⁴¹

This laissez-faire policy changed after the union of Portugal and Spain in 1580. Inquisition proceedings were initiated throughout the consolidated empire, and over the next decades, hearings by Inquisitors from Lisbon regularly targeted the colony’s Judaizers. The fourth hearing in 1618, in which the ninety conversos were accused, coupled with the arrests in Portugal, was a clear warning to those who were not the Christians they pretended to be.

Although many of the colony’s conversos were sincere Christians, and a small percentage remained loyal to Judaism, by the 1600s most former Jews had become indifferent to religion. Having to choose between a faith that was forced on their ancestors and remaining true to outlawed beliefs, the majority chose mammon. A leading authority on Brazil’s New Christians, Anita Novinsky, opines that it was not so much a question of religiosity as it was “the economic prosperity of the colony [that] awoke the greed of the Inquisitors.”⁴² Conversos constituted most of the wealthy class. The hearings revealed that they dominated the sugar trade and in 1618 owned twenty of the thirty-four largest sugar mills.

The production of sugar, fueled by African slaves, was the main business of Brazil, and the specialty of conversos. To appreciate the role the sweetener played in their New World welcome, we must digress into history to account for this connection.

The association of Brazil’s conversos with this most valuable and contentious industry can be traced to 1503, three years after the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral, accompanied by his Jewish pilot Gaspar da Gama, discovered Brazil. As previously related, Portugal’s King John had leased the colony to the enterprising converso merchant Fernando de Noronha to export brazilwood, a red dyewood that grew there in abundance, and for which the colony was named. From the sale of this timber, prized by Europe’s textile industry, Noronha’s consortium derived an annual profit of fifty thousand ducats. However, his hold on the colony ended when he had the bright idea of transplanting the cane root from the islands of São Tomé and Madeira. The success of his crop, and its potential profits, convinced the king to void Noronha’s contract and reclaim the colony. In 1516, Brazil’s first sugar mill began operating. To encourage the industry, new settlers were supplied with necessary tools and other equipment for the production of sugar.

In 1534, the king appointed Duarte Coelho as feudal lord of Brazil, and directed him to recruit sugar experts from Madeira and São Tomé to establish large plantations. Sugar had been grown in the New World since Columbus brought the first roots from the Canary Islands, but not on the vast scale on which it was then being produced by a particular group of conversos in São Tomé, a small island off Africa’s west coast. What they did in São Tomé, the king would have them do on the vast savannahs of northeast Brazil. So it was that in 1534, the same year Charles V sent Portuguese conversos to salvage Jamaica, Coelho brought over Portuguese conversos—foremen, mechanics, and skilled workmen, principally from São Tomé—to Brazil. In São Tomé, they had transformed the cultivation of sugar into an agro-industry fueled by slave labor, and would do the same in Brazil, a land of three million square miles, larger than Europe and all the other colonies in the New World together.

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.”⁴³ In the 1400s, Morocco was the primary producer of sugar, a commodity so dear only royalty could afford it. But the Mediterranean climate—too cool in winter and too dry year-round—was not optimum for sugar growth. Late in the fifteenth century, the grape growers of Madeira, Portugal’s Atlantic island known for its namesake wine, overtook Morocco in sugar production.

Madeira’s vintners, mostly conversos, had obtained the cane root from their Moroccan brethren and were soon outproducing them.

Madeira’s success inspired the king to introduce the crop to São Tomé, an uninhabited island off the coast of Africa his sailors had discovered in 1470 in the Gulf of Guinea. The island’s lush tropicality was suitable for sugar. Moreover, its location ensured an unlimited supply of slave labor. Enslaving Africans was nothing new. Portugal had been engaged in the slave trade from the time her ships first reached tropical Africa a half-century before. What was introduced in São Tomé for the first time was using slaves in a major agricultural enterprise.

But first the king had to settle his uninhabited island. This proved difficult. None of his countrymen had any interest in migrating to an isolated isle, far from home, populated mostly by snakes and mosquitoes. Soon, however, the king hit upon an answer when his nation was overrun by displaced persons whose sugar-growing skills had already been proven.

In August 1492, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Spain were halted at the border to Portugal. King John, forewarned of his neighbor’s expulsion order, had ordered his guards to permit their entrance with the proviso that they pay eight crusados and agree to depart in six months. On March 31, 1493, when the six-month period elapsed, the king ordered his soldiers to seize seven hundred Jewish children and declare them Crown slaves as an example to all who overstayed. As noted by King John’s chronicler:

Torn from their parent’s arms, the children were forcibly converted and shipped to São Tomé. All youths were taken captive from among the Castilian Jews who did not betake themselves away at the appointed time according to the conditions of their entrance…that, being separated, they would be better Christians; as a result of this the island came to be more densely populated, and to thrive exceedingly.⁴⁴

If their average age at capture was eight to ten years old, they would have been in their midforties in 1534 when Coelho sent his recruiters. Most were probably too settled to accept his offer, but some of their children would certainly have welcomed the chance to carve their niche in the New World. In the ensuing decades, when Brazil sugar entered the market, the plantation model Coelho’s workers established became the New World standard. Portugal dominated the trade and Coelho is credited as the first man to engage in the “systematic and intensive development of the sugar industry.”⁴⁵

The Inquisition hearings in Brazil began with the posting on a church door of an “Edict of Faith,” listing the heretical rites and ceremonies of Judaizers and offering a thirty-day grace period with the promise of confidentiality and merciful treatment for those who came forward. Many conversos did so, either to acknowledge their guilt or, as was usually the case, to accuse others of Judaizing. Although few of those charged were sent to Lisbon for trial, the entire converso community, sincere New Christians and secret Jews alike, was alarmed and saw the hearings as a prelude to the establishment of a permanent seat of the Inquisition.⁴⁶

Such fears were further aroused in the summer of 1623, when Bishop Marcos Teixeira arrived from Lisbon with authority to imprison accused Judaizers and confiscate their holdings. No longer was a trial required; an anonymous charge was enough to destroy one’s life. An unknown number of covert Jews left for the safer climate of neighboring countries, including Columbus’s island, Jamaica. Some who remained took more drastic action: In a coded message to their brethren in Holland, they pledged to serve as a fifth column in support of a Dutch invasion to liberate the colony.⁴⁷

The dissidents’ likely courier was the rabbi pirate’s friend, the slave merchant from Amsterdam, Diego Diaz Querido. Five years before, in 1618, King Philip IV had warned Brazil’s governor that Querido was a known smuggler of contraband and to keep a close watch on his ships. The governor took no action. As it happened, Querido had earlier loaned him thirty thousand crusados “from the stores of his ships.”⁴⁸ It was not an outright bribe—the loan was repaid—but it served the same purpose: Querido continued his triangular trade, carrying manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to Brazil, and sugar to Amsterdam…and on one of his trips may have secreted in his cabin a pouch containing the rebel Jews’ invasion promise.

If, as alleged, Querido was the courier, he would have delivered the message to the Brotherhood of the Jews of Holland, a clandestine group dedicated to fighting the Inquisition. The secret organization was founded in the decade after Rabbi Palache’s death to carry on his struggle for Jewish rights and against Spain. Its existence was revealed in the tortured confessions of four convicted Judaizers.⁴⁹ In separate Inquisition trials in Cartagena and Lima, they described La Cofradia de los Judios de Holanda as an underground organization headquartered in Amsterdam, with cells of three to five men each in various colonies in the New World that forwarded intelligence and funds to Holland to buy arms to aid the war effort against Spain. They testified that the cells also sent money from local conversos looking to move to Holland, which the Brotherhood invested and remitted to the owner when he settled in Amsterdam.⁵⁰

Bento Osorio, the Amsterdam community’s richest trader, is thought to have been the Brotherhood’s leader.⁵¹ He imported olive oil from Turkey, nutmeg and pepper from India, and sugar from Brazil. In a city that taxed the merchants’ dazzling homes (described by visitors as “palaces”), Osorio’s palatial mansion was the most heavily taxed on the Jodenbreestraat.⁵² Although the Dutch West India Company was founded without Jewish participation, an Inquisition document accuses Osorio of being in league with the Company: “[By] maintaining spies in many cities in Castile, Portugal, Brazil & elsewhere [Osorio] gives the orders and plans for plundering…thinking by this means to destroy Christianity.”⁵³

Despite Brazil’s enormous area, the Company reckoned it would suffice to conquer the coastal province of Bahia to secure the colony. Assured by the Brotherhood of fifth-column support, Prince Maurice agreed to a policy of religious freedom in the conquered territory, and that Jewish soldiers could form their own company.⁵⁴ On May 8, 1624, an invasion force of 3,300 men that included “several dozen” Jews arrived at Bahia on twenty-six ships.⁵⁵ In the initial assault, Vice Admiral Piet Heyn easily captured the two main forts guarding the port. His quick victory panicked the defenders, who soon deserted.

The next night, Bishop Teixeira, the conversos’ nemesis, gathered his cassock and beat a hasty retreat. Described as “the most alarmed person in the city,” he fled with his priests into the forest.⁵⁶ As the prince had promised, with victory a policy of religious tolerance was declared, and the Dutch invaders pledged to respect Portuguese property rights. The following day, two hundred conversos came forward to proclaim their adherence to their ancestral faith, and welcomed the Dutch Jews who participated in the invasion.⁵⁷

While Bahia was under attack, a flotilla of Dutch ships sailed around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast to Peru’s Port Callao and laid siege to Lima. When the news reached Portugal that Bahia had fallen and Lima was blockaded, the governing council was understandably alarmed. Their quickly composed message to Philip noted that the Dutch invaders had been aided by the “Hebrea da Nação… not so much to make themselves masters of the sugar of Brazil as of the silver of Peru.”⁵⁸

Spain’s king, convinced the Dutch were bent on further conquest, assembled a massive force to break the siege. He need not have bothered. The Dutch effort was already spent. After blockading the port for three months, they ran out of supplies and withdrew. Meanwhile, back in Brazil, Bishop Teixeira, having regained his courage, organized a guerrilla force that surrounded the city and prevented the Dutch from advancing. On March 29, 1625, a combined armada of fifty-two Spanish and Portuguese warships landed 12,566 men on the coast of Bahia and cordoned off the port. Defeat was inevitable, but for two weeks the Dutch held out, their resistance encouraged by the Jews. As a Spanish soldier noted in his diary:

A Dutch prisoner reported the enemy was very strong and that many Jews and Jewesses who had come with them from Holland, encouraged them to defend themselves and supported them with large sums of money.⁵⁹

On May 1, the Dutch surrendered. To secure favorable terms for his Jewish contingent, Vice Admiral Heyn, in a communiqué to the enemy commander, requested that “Portuguese of the Hebrew nation who remained in Bahia during the occupation not be molested.”⁶⁰ The Spanish leader refused, and demanded that the vice admiral hand over their names; but Heyn held firm. After a standoff, the matter was dropped. Although the surrender terms stipulated that only Hollanders could depart, most Jewish soldiers and their collaborators left with them. The few who remained behind shouldn’t have. In the aftermath of the reconquest, the Spanish commander hanged four of them as traitors. The Inquisitor’s report on the invasion blamed Bahia’s defeat on the Jews:

Secret Jews had written Holland and asked the Dutch to liberate them…had initiated plans for the invasion and agreed to share its costs. [The] Heretics had suckled at the breast of the Mother Church [and when the Dutch came] allowed themselves to be circumcised and openly professed the Jewish faith.⁶¹

Later, an informer identified two of the collaborators who had gotten away:

Bahia was taken by order and plan of one Nuno Alvarez Franco, a Jew of Holland and resident of Bahia for more than 12 years and by order of one Manuel Fernandez Drago. Both lived in the said Bahia. Their fathers lived in Amsterdam and received from the States 200 pounds each year for their support.⁶²

The Dutch occupied Bahia for a year and never took Lima. The ambitious pincer plan to capture Brazil and the silver mountain had failed. Disheartened, the army limped home to a near bankrupt country, made poor by the cost of the invasion and occupation.

Two years later, the nation’s spirits and fortunes were suddenly revived when Vice Admiral Piet Heyn and his young adviser Moses Cohen Henriques sailed into Amsterdam Harbor leading Spanish galleons, their holds filled with silver and gold. It was the biggest haul in history. For the first time since the discovery of the New World, the Spanish silver fleet had been captured and the Dutch were again on the offensive.

In the vanguard would be Moses and other young warrior Jews. Influenced by the likes of the pirate rabbi, the first generation born in freedom dominated Amsterdam’s nascent community. Their numbers tell the tale: In the 1620s, when there were fewer than two hundred Jewish families in the city, “several dozen” of them took part in the Brazil invasion, and the following decade, an Inquisition spy accused a hundred Dutch Jews of planning to invade Portugal and burn down the Inquisition prison.⁶³ There is no record of this happening, but the informer’s charge gives an indication of the mind-set of these rebel youths—they had a Maccabean picture of themselves as militant Jewish deliverers, derived from their parents, their community, and Rabbi Palache. With the Holy Terror raging about them, these youths were called and encouraged to become a generation of warriors for Zion.