Chapter Six
ZION WARRIORS IN THE NEW WORLD
Antonio Vaez Henriques alias Moses Cohen is nothing but a spy to learn when the fleet comes and goes and when an assault can be made…as he did at the capture of the fleet by Piet Heyn in whose company was said Antonio Vaez.1
Sunrise, September 8, 1628: On board the admiral’s flagship, the Amsterdam, a few miles west of Havana, Moses Cohen Henriques, with his reputation on the line, was looking westward, scanning the sea. Unexpectedly, over the northern horizon, the topsails of the Spanish silver fleet, the flota, appeared: twelve ships loaded with ninety-two tons of silver, and treasure chests filled with pearls, rubies, and gold worth 16 million guilders, or in today’s currency, nearly one billion dollars.
Closing in on the unsuspecting fleet, the twenty-five ships of the Dutch armada cut off and captured nine ships without incident; but the three leading galleons, including the grand admiral’s, fled down the coast to the nearby port of Matanzas. The Dutch, in hot pursuit, boldly entered the harbor and drew abreast of two of the ships. Their soldiers, armed with cutlass, pistol, and musket, quickly clambered up the sides.
As quickly as we boarded, the Spaniards went over the side, swimming and paddling toward shore. Within minutes the flag of the United Provinces flew where the lions & castles had been. We then came to the admiral’s ship. We attacked with a musket charge and boarded her, calling to them “Buena Guerra.”2
Writing in his cabin on his victorious voyage home, Vice Admiral Piet Heyn noted that this sardonic greeting (“Good War”) so demoralized the defenders that “upon hearing [it] they put down their muskets and went below deck.”
One lone sailor who jumped overboard, hoping to swim ashore, was hauled up from the sea and brought before the vice admiral.
I asked him how many Spaniards were aboard. He said about 150…I told him to go back and tell them I promised them quarter and would put them ashore. He asked me what kind of person I was. I said I was the fleet general, at which he asked me to let one of our men go with him so that he would not be killed by our people on board to which I consented.*6
The next day:
We unloaded the silver as fast as possible and divided it among all our ships. We figured there were about 46 lasts of silver, consisting of minted reals of eight, and bars of silver and silverware, altogether 2,851 pieces.
The plate fleet had been captured in a little more than three hours without the loss of one Dutchman’s life. A fast yacht carried the news to Holland. In early January, Heyn returned home, leading his fleet into the port of Amsterdam with the grand admiral’s galleon bringing up the rear. It took five days to unload the bounty on a thousand mule carts, which were then paraded in triumphal procession through the streets of Amsterdam behind the vice admiral’s coach. “Heyn was received as a visiting prince might have been.”3 The country blazed with bonfires. Since the defeat at Bahia, the nation’s finances had been in dire straits. The government had exhausted its credit. Public debts were unpaid. Now suddenly Holland was rich again. The Company declared a dividend of 50 percent and, with its new wealth, prepared the fleet to again invade Brazil.
Moses Cohen Henriques, who had celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1616, sometime after the death of his mentor, had learned from Rabbi Palache to live as he dreamed. Moses wasn’t royal, but his ambitions were as grand as any aspiring noble’s. An early and valued member of the Brotherhood, he was sent undercover to Seville, where he soon acquired information that convinced the Company it made more sense to attack at sea the Spanish fleet that carried the ore to Seville rather than to mount a land invasion to capture the silver mountain. At twenty-five, Moses was half the admiral’s age, but he had proven himself in the Bahia invasion four years before, and so was invited by Heyn to sail with him.
Spain’s treasure fleet consisted of two heavily guarded armadas of twenty to thirty ships. The Tierra Firme group gathered the wealth of the Spanish Main; the flota picked up silver from Mexico at the port of Vera Cruz, along with the riches of Asia brought by the Manila galleons. After securing their bounty, the two fleets rendezvoused in Havana for a joint return to Spain. In 1628, when the Tierra Firme sailed north to Havana to meet up with the flota, it arrived too late. Except for the grand admiral’s galleon, all the ships were there, but their holds were empty; the plundered cargo was on its way to Holland.
The treasure fleet’s departure from Spain was a ceremonious occasion, but for security reasons the sailing date shifted radically from one year to the next, and was a closely guarded secret—one that young Moses Cohen Henriques somehow became privy to. How he acquired this vital intelligence is not known. Possibly he learned it from Bento Osorio’s agent there, who was fronting the Brotherhood leader’s illegal trade.4 In any event, Moses was able to alert the Company of the flota’s intended sailing date. This allowed sufficient time to man and outfit twenty-five ships under the vice admiral’s command to sail to Cuba and await the fleet’s arrival.
To avoid the hurricane season, the flota had left Spain a month after the Tierra Firme. As always, its arrival in July 1628 transformed the marshy port of Vera Cruz into a carnival town swelled by merchants, gamblers, hustlers, and revelers. Traders from all over descended on the port, desiring not so much the flota’s cargo of European goods as the treasures of the Orient, the silks, jade, rugs, ivory, porcelain, and spices that had been carried by the Manila galleons to Acapulco, then by mule to Vera Cruz. The town rollicked until early August, when the flota sailed for Cuba, its holds filled with silver from Mexico’s mines and the bounty of Asia.5 Havana was only a few hundred miles to the west, but that year contrary winds, the northers, forced the flota to follow the currents to the Florida Keys and approach Cuba from the north. Piet Heyn and his anxious young associate were waiting, having arrived two weeks earlier. In the course of two centuries, fifty attempts were made to capture the treasure galleons. Only theirs succeeded.
When the victorious fleet returned to Amsterdam, the young Jewish adventurers, who a few years before had joyfully participated in the Bahia invasion only to be depressingly dislodged, greeted Moses’s triumph with an enthusiasm that reflected their resurgent morale as much as his extraordinary deed. His victory, on the heels of their bitter defeat, had shown them that failure and success are best measured over time. It was a lesson they might have learned from their parents, who overcame Inquisition trials before gaining the free air of Amsterdam, or from Rabbi Palache, who first fled in retreat to the French diplomat’s home before renewing his fight.
Moses didn’t remain long in Amsterdam. The next year found him in Recife, the capital of Brazil’s Pernambuco province, plotting with the local underground to prepare for a renewed Dutch invasion. Moses then returned to Amsterdam to join the fleet. This was revealed four years later at a Madrid tribunal investigating the invasion. A turncoat who sailed with the Dutch testified:
The Jews of Amsterdam were responsible for the capture of Pernambuco & the principal one was Moses Cohen Henriques who went with the Hollanders & instructed them & gave them plans showing how to take the place, for he had spent many days in Pernambuco & was well acquainted with the entrances & the exits. The Hollanders did this by his secret counsel.6
Historians have overlooked the audacious role of this dauntless young man who (1) participated in the first invasion of Bahia; (2) plotted and took part in the flota’s capture; (3) infiltrated Recife as an advance spy to coordinate fifth-column support; and (4) returned to Amsterdam to accompany the fleet for the second invasion. Scholars note only that in 1630 Moses was invited to go as a “guest of the Company,” but do not explain why he was so honored.7 If not for the traitor’s account, quoted above, Moses’s role in Holland’s military adventures would be unknown. It was, however, no more than an opening salvo of an action-packed life, in which he would reign over his own pirate island, and later advise Jamaica’s famed buccaneer Henry Morgan.
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 Majesty 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.
As long as Johan Maurice was governor, New Holland thrived. The colony’s disparate groups regularly condemned one another, but ultimately got along. Annual sugar production doubled, from fifteen thousand tons at the beginning of the seventeenth century to thirty thousand tons during Maurice’s tenure. In the process, the retail price of sugar was halved, thereby spreading consumption from the banquet table of the rich to the penny candy counter.40
While the Cohen Henriques brothers and their friends were carving a niche for themselves in Brazil, their cousins in Amsterdam were growing rich importing and exporting goods from all over the known world. Dutch captains, trading illegally with converso agents in ports throughout the Spanish Empire, brought cargo direct to Amsterdam. In Peru, where Jews controlled the silver trade, ore skimmed from the mines was exchanged for silk from China via Mexico; pimento spice from Jamaica found its way into Holland’s smoked herring; pearls from Venezuela were a viable currency most everywhere. Spanish traders could match neither the price nor the quality of the goods the contrabandistas (free traders) had to offer.41 Jews in Amsterdam in contact with Sephardic merchants in Europe, the Mediterranean, and points east passed the New World’s resources on to them, and their goods on to the New World. As middlemen in this commerce, Amsterdam Jews made profits to and fro.
In 1640, after sixty years of union with Spain, Portugal again achieved its independence, the result of a bloodless coup in Lisbon by followers of the Duke of Braganza. The duke, now reigning as King John IV, sent a delegation to Holland to sign a peace pact and form an alliance against Spain.
The resulting treaty created a peculiar situation in Brazil. Holland was now an ally of Portugal, yet occupied a major part of her New World colony. Rather than acknowledge this anomaly, and perhaps award Brazil’s Portuguese certain privileges in recognition of their new status, the States General instead ordered Prince Maurice to capture as much surrounding territory as he could. The prince lost no time in carrying out this Machiavellian move. While he was ostensibly negotiating a truce with leaders of adjacent provinces under Portugal’s control, his soldiers occupied their territory. At the same time, he sent a naval force to Africa to capture São Tomé and the port of Luanda in Angola.
By 1642, New Holland ruled most of northeast Brazil and the African entrepôts that transshipped most of the colony’s slave labor.42 The colony was at its zenith, but not for long. When the prince’s contract was up, the States General decided his administration was too costly, and did not renew it. Admittedly, New Holland had become the most expensive colony in the Dutch empire, but she also produced the most money. Nevertheless, in September 1643, the prince was notified to return to Holland forthwith. To no avail did the leaders of New Holland’s religious communities formally request he remain. The Jews’ letter praised his “wise and happy rule,” and thanked him for “the protection he had granted [them].” If he stayed, they promised to triple his income with an annual annuity.43 But if he had to go, they wished to buy his castle and make it their synagogue. The Calvinists objected strongly to this, and persuaded the governor to decline.44
Whatever compelling reasons the States General may have had, the move to recall Maurice was shortsighted. In retrospect, the States General apparently had not taken into account that Portugal would not honor a peace treaty the Dutch themselves had voided. As soon as the prince stationed troops in the neighboring provinces, Portuguese nationals in New Holland began plotting to regain their colony, and two months before his departure, he received news that a border state had fallen to Portuguese rebels. It was March 1644, the beginning of the end of New Holland.
The revolt was led by João Fernando Vieira, a leader of the Portuguese community, who vowed to put his life and property at the service of “the restoration of our fatherland.”45 He, along with eighteen compatriots, concocted an assassination plot. They would invite “our Dutch chiefs” to a June banquet at Vieira’s home to celebrate a saint’s birthday, and then murder them all. Among the conspirators was a covert Jew, Sebastian Carvalho, who passed word of the plot to the leader of the Mahamad, Dr. Abraham de Mercado. The doctor, in turn, gave a letter to Abraham Cohen detailing the conspiracy and signed it “A Verdade Plus ultra” (The Ultimate Truth). When Cohen informed Prince Maurice of the deadly scheme, the ex-governor asked him to aid in the capture of the traitor.46
Vieira, having learned his plan had been exposed, gathered his men and escaped into the forested countryside. Cohen armed some comrades to go after them. In a brief skirmish, two Jews were slain. Cohen and other prosperous Jews, pledging “the dead must be avenged,” financed a government expedition to track down the guerrillas. Six hundred Dutch soldiers and three hundred Indians were soon on Vieira’s trail. Confidently, they marched in formation into the bush, only to fall into a rebel ambush and be routed. So began a civil war that was abetted by a run of poor sugar harvests in 1642, 1643, and 1644 that gained the rebellion the financial support of the major Portuguese planters. Faced with economic ruin, they renounced their debts and sided with the rebels.
In the summer of 1645, a horrific incident took place, with major repercussions. Rebel soldiers, attacking an island off Recife, captured a Dutch militia that included a squadron of thirteen Jews led by a Jewish captain. Separating the Jews from the other Dutch prisoners, they hanged them all. To the rebel commander, the Jews were more than enemy soldiers: they were traitors. The Portuguese leader therefore felt no qualms about stringing them up and burning their captain alive.47
When news of the atrocity reached Recife, the Supreme Council sent a formal communiqué to the Portuguese commander that caustically asked: “Why are Jewish prisoners of war martyred unto death in so beastly a manner? Are they worse people than we?”48
In Amsterdam, the Jewish council, the Parnassim, led by Uriel da Costa’s younger brother, Abraham, petitioned the States General, “With tears of blood running from [our] hearts, order the government in Brazil to insure that in all agreements with the enemy, members of the Hebrew Nation should be treated like other Dutch subjects.” The Jewish soldiers, they wrote, had been volunteers “vigilant in their efforts against the rebels [and] their undying loyalty had been proven by their denunciation of the conspiracy headed by Johann Vieira which failed thanks to Abraham Cohen and Dr. Mercado.”49
Appealing to the Calvinists’ devout belief in the Old Testament, in which Israel is called the people of God, the petitioners reminded the States General that the Lord loved and protected His people “at all times and will help and deliver from all danger those whom He has named His people…because God rewards those who have acted kindly towards this poor, dispersed Nation.” They concluded their memorandum, quoting Queen Esther’s plea to King Ahasuerus: “If it pleases the king, give me my life—that is my petition! Grant me my people—that is my request!”50
Responding to the Parnassim, the States General issued the Patenta Onrossa (Honorable Charter) declaring Holland’s Jews to be Dutch subjects, entitled to nearly all rights pertaining to the burgher class. This decree on December 7, 1645, represents the first charter of equality a sovereign state conceded to the Jewish nation in the Western Hemisphere.51 The Supreme Council in New Holland was thereupon instructed:
The Hebrew Nation in Brazil [is] to be protected from any damage to person or property, in the same manner as all the citizens of the United Netherlands…[and] we shall favor…the Jewish nation on all occasions…without…making any distinction…between them and those of our other nationals…The Jewish nation will thereby…be animated and encouraged to further the service in this state and that of the West India Company.52
Owing to the civil war, by the fall of 1645 many Dutch colonists had returned to Holland, and the 1,450 remaining Jews now comprised nearly half of the white settlers. Recife had come under siege. A German working for the Company, informed that a regiment of 350 Jews was among the city’s defenders, reasoned: “The Jews, more than anyone else, were in a desperate situation and preferred to die sword in hand than face their fate under the Portuguese yoke: the flames.”53
The chief rabbi would later write: “Rich and poor alike could not obtain food…we starved…there was nothing left. Any dried up bread was considered a delicacy.”54 The rebels gave the Dutch three days to surrender, and promised the Jews “quarter if they accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior.” The offer was rejected after a “fierce debate” when Abraham Cohen told his comrades not to delude themselves that the rebels would be taken in by a sham conversion, and warned “if they fell into Portuguese hands they would be burned at the stake.”55 Later, four Dutch fugitives who deserted the city told the rebels, “None were opposed to surrender more than the Jews…[who swore] to sell their lives dearly.”56
Despite the Jews’ loyalty, some clergy continued to fault them. When the siege began, they complained to the Supreme Council that “on the Lord’s day,” the Jews keep their stores open, send their children to religious school, and make their slaves work. The Jews, rather than assert that they observed a Saturday Sabbath, chose to appease the petty minds of the ministers and agreed to also honor Sunday as a day of rest. With the city under siege, they had more vital concerns than contending over the Lord’s Day.
Cohen took up a collection of money that sustained the war effort until the following spring, when the long-awaited relief ships arrived from Holland. Not everyone was pleased by his action. Those who favored surrender accused Cohen of bribing the Supreme Council to continue what they saw as a Jewish war.57 (After the siege, the charges were dismissed, and Cohen was honored by the Council for his deed.)
The Patenta Onrossa was put to a test two years later, when rebels seized ten Jews from a Dutch ship and sentenced them to die as “blasphemous apostates.”58 The States General protested to Portugal’s King John with a demand that Jews be treated like other Dutch subjects. In August 1649, the king replied that the rebels assured him those Dutch Jews who had not been baptized would be set free, but added that he could not interfere in “heretical matters involving false conversos.”59 Among the latter was a cousin of the Cohen Henriques brothers, Abraham Bueno Henriques. Born and baptized in Portugal, he was declared a heretic and handed over to the Inquisitions; his sentence is unknown.
King John, at the time, denied supporting the rebellion while preparing to do just that. Moreover, in 1649, he secured the support of Portugal’s New Christians by promising them a blanket pardon and trade concessions. Anticipating victory, one of Portugal’s richest conversos, Duarte da Silva, arranged with the king to set up the Compania du Brasil on the lines of the Dutch West India Company. Once victory over the Dutch was attained, the company would deal in Brazilian sugar, dyewood, and other imports, and supply the colony with wine, oil, and flour. No mention was made of the slave trade. In return, King John pledged that the estates of converso shareholders would be exempt from confiscation by the Inquisition, and he pardoned them for past offenses.
It is one of the sad ironies in the history of these beleaguered people that the cost of the reconquest and the destruction of the first open Jewish community in the New World was borne by Portugal’s gente da Nação (people of the Nation). Da Silva assumed that he would head up the new company, but it didn’t turn out that way. A year before “the war of divine liberty” was won, he was imprisoned as a Judaizer, and the business of Brazil became the province of the king.60
The final battle began on December 20, 1653, when a Portuguese armada—paid for by her New Christians—sailed into Recife. Although the few remaining settlers had enough food and munitions to hold out until Holland sent reinforcements, morale was understandably low. Two months before, Holland had recalled home the two warships guarding Recife to defend her ports against a possible sea attack by England.
In early January, Abraham Cohen informed New Holland’s military commander that he had overheard Dutch soldiers say they would rather sack the houses of the city’s rich Jews than continue fighting. This development so enraged the commander that he immediately mobilized everyone in the city and called on them “to protect themselves from their own troops.” It was a futile move. All knew the desertion of the troops signaled the end.61
New Holland’s historical record supports the notion that nothing of consequence happened in the colony without Abraham Cohen knowing and abetting it. When the Supreme Council decided to capture the guerrilla leader Vieira, they hired Cohen to spring the trap; when the Dutch ran out of money to pay troops, Cohen advanced the funds; when merchants looked to flee, he had the Supreme Council issue arms to Jews who vowed to stay. A sonnet composed by a Jewish poet of Amsterdam, Daniel Levi de Barrios (1625–79), celebrated Cohen’s patriotic behavior.62 It reads, in part:
Today Abraham Cohen enjoys the spotlight of the Empire…in nine years continuous, with great magnanimity [he] helped without number Jew and Christian alike in the atrocious misery with what they needed.
On January 26, 1654, New Holland surrendered. Two days later, Recife was occupied; agents of the Inquisition moved into Prince Maurice’s castle, and Zur Israel was converted into an army barracks.63 Jews were given three months to leave or be handed over to the Inquisition. Among the 650 Jews who remained to the very end were the Cohen Henriques brothers and their Amsterdam comrades. For twenty-four years, Recife had been a Rock of Israel. Now, threatened with the Holy Fire, the Jews were forced to hit the familiar Diaspora road again. The question that concerned them was, Where next?
While the Rock of Israel still stood firm on the Rock of Brazil, elsewhere in the New World, Inquisition flames blazed. In Peru and Mexico in the late 1630s and 1640s, the leaders of the empire’s two major secret Jewish communities were arrested for conspiring to overthrow Spanish rule. In each case the Judaizers were charged with being part of La Complicidad Grande, the Great Conspiracy. Peru’s Jewish leaders were imprisoned for three years before being burned at the stake, while those in Mexico were confined in “secret cells” for up to eight years before suffering the same fate.
The destruction of the New World’s two major covert colonies of Jews weighed heavily on those about to flee Recife. To realize the Holy Terror’s impact on the psyches of all pioneer Jews, we need to review the rise and fiscal dominance of these mercantile outlaws. The following accounts are condensed from the writings of noted historian Seymour Liebman on the Great Conspiracy in Peru and Mexico.64
The richest Jewish community in the richest colony in the New World began when a shepherd pulling up a weed bush saw, to his astonishment, that the stones sticking to the roots were actually chunks of silver. A mountain of silver had been discovered, and in its shadow a community of Jews evolved to manage it. From all over the New World, they came to deal in the precious metal that circulated as pieces of eight, the major currency of the period. The best became the silver merchants of Potosí.
With its silver mountain and gangs of Indian slaves, who kept the mine working nonstop, Potosí was a surreal combination of California during the gold rush and Pharaoh’s Egypt. In 1622, the city was the largest in the New World (population 120,000, mostly Indian) and was reported to be “overrun” with Jews. The Inquisition report stated: “Potosí is filled with Portuguese, all of the Hebrew nation…the export of silver is almost exclusively in the hands of crypto Jews.”
In the 1630s, before the arrival of the Grand Inquisitor and his white-hooded minions, the Jews in Recife, Peru, and Mexico were in regular contact with one another, their transactions fueled by the silver merchants. Jewish wealth and power in the New World was at its peak. But by the end of the decade, the mountain of silver had attracted holier-than-thou claim jumpers crying heresy, and Peru’s secret Jews were targeted. Thousands of names are contained in the trial records of the Lima Inquisition. Chief Inquisitor Andrés Juan Gaitan, who presided over the trials, said that heresy and conspiracy, not greed, had caused him to act. Others questioned his motives when he began traveling about in a silver coach drawn by six horses in silver harness, sporting silver horseshoes.
Still, considering what happened in Brazil, where false conversos assisted the Dutch invasion, there is no reason to doubt that overthrowing Spanish rule, in league with the Dutch, was an option Peru’s covert Jews considered. As previously noted, when the Portuguese authorities received the news, they immediately warned Spain’s king that the capture of Brazil by Hollanders and Jews was “not so much to make themselves masters of the sugar of Brazil as of the silver of Peru.”
In Lima, Peru’s capital, the silver merchants’ agents funneled silver skimmed from the mines out of the country, and soon were as wealthy as their suppliers. Not content to play by the rules of mercantilism, they avoided Seville and dealt directly with Europe. At the time of Peru’s Great Conspiracy of 1636, their contraband trade with Europe was greater than Peru’s legitimate trade with Spain. An informer’s letter to Inquisitor Gaitan, as quoted by Liebman, charged:
The city is thick with them. Everything goes through their hands. They are in absolute control of the traffic in merchandise ranging from brocade to sackcloth, diamonds to cumin seeds…to the most precious pearl and vilest Guinea black. They are the masters of commerce.
Jewish merchants reportedly regarded Spanish Christians as “interlopers” whose interest was “confined to the extraction of silver,” and allowed them entry into the silver market only if they took on a Jewish partner approved by Manuel Batista Pérez, described in the Inquisitor’s report as the city’s “wealthiest and most cultured Jew.” Born in Seville in 1593, Pérez moved to Lima with his wife and three children and a hefty bankroll to invest for his brothers-in-law back in Spain. Though Spanish, Manuel called himself Portuguese because, as noted, Spanish New Christians were not allowed in the New World.
The Inquisitors reported that Pérez had a huge library, “[was] well versed in theology…foremost in the observance of the Law of Moses, [and was] held as an oracle by the Hebrew nation.” He owned silver shops, invested in banking, and owned a number of mule trains that carried the bars of silver on a thousand-mile journey across the Andes to Lima (and on the sly, via the Río de la Plata, south to Buenos Aires).
Pérez, addressed by fellow Jews as “the Great Captain,” was tried as the head of La Complicidad Grande. He was accused of having raised funds to finance a Dutch invasion, and of plotting to assist the Dutch army. The conspiracy began unraveling when a Lima merchant was charged with “adhering to the Law of Moses” for refusing to trade on a Saturday. Tortured, he revealed names; additional arrests and tortures followed, revealing more names.
In two days, over a hundred Jews were arrested. More would have been taken except, as the Inquisition reported, “the prisons are full. For lack of space we do not carry out a number of warrants in this city…people no longer trust each other, but go about in constant astonishment at the charges against a friend or comrade of whom they thought so much.” The city’s “most Christian gentlemen” were arrested:
No one of the accused Judaizers is being taken into custody who did not go about loaded with rosaries, relics, images, the ribbon of St. Augustine, the cordon of St. Francis and other devotions and many with horsehair shirts and disciplines; they know the whole catechism and they always say the rosary.
In Lima’s public square on January 23, 1639, an auto-da-fé condemned sixty-one Jews, and consigned Pérez and eleven others to be purified by fire. Many of the rest were sentenced to serve as oarsmen on Spanish galleys, in effect a death sentence, as oarsmen usually died before their time was up.
Pérez’s estates were auctioned off for the modern equivalent of nearly $20 million. And that amount was undervalued: Inquisitor Gaitan had his agents bid for the property, and it was probably not a good idea to challenge their bids. When leading merchants accused Gaitan of having used his powers for mercenary reasons, he justified the arrests: “First because they are Judaizing heretics. Second, they conspired with the invading Dutch to blow up the city of Guadalupe by which they had begun to bore a hole in the powder magazine.”
Whatever the truth of the charge, a noted researcher concluded that Gaitan’s primary motive was greed: “The real crime against these and the two thousand Portuguese residing at that time in the country was that they made great fortunes…a plot imputed to them to seize the Kingdom of Peru from Spain was a political pretext to go with a religious pretext. Branded Jewish revolutionaries, there was no escape for them.”
In the aftermath of the great auto-da-fé of 1639, the money world of Peru was overturned, Lima’s leading bank failed, and Old Christians became the new power brokers. Gaitan and his assistants “speculated with the money of the Holy Office, and waxed rich thereon, took mistresses and dressed like young bloods in silk and lace.”
Some of Lima’s Jews escaped to Mexico, including Manuel Pérez’s cousin, who married into the “first family” of Jews there, headed by Simon Vaez and his wife, Juana Henriquez. But there was no escape. The following year the Inquisition descended on Mexico.
In a period of relative peace, before their eight-year nightmare, about three thousand Jews were secretly settled throughout Mexico. In Mexico City, there were three congregations that can be roughly classified as orthodox, conservative, and reformed. There were contacts between them, but each had its own social structure and business dealings that carried over into imprisonment. Their downfall came when a priest’s servant claimed that he overheard four Portuguese speaking on a city street one summer night. They reportedly said: “If there were four more men as courageous as they in the city, they would set fire to the House of the Inquisition and the Inquisitors would burn.”
On July 7, 1642, the resulting investigation announced: “The Kingdom of Mexico is in the hands of Judaizers!” Authorities sealed the borders, and Jewish leaders began disappearing. Seized after midnight, they were confined to “secret cells.” Eventually more than four hundred Jews were imprisoned, overflowing the Inquisition prison and a convent next door (the nuns had to move).
Spies and tortured interrogations with the porto had the prisoners scrambling to keep their confessions in line with those of others in the community. The porto was Mexico’s version of the rack: a naked prisoner lay faceup on an iron bedframe, tied by cords attached to handles on the side of the bed. Each turn of the handle tightened the cords’ viselike pressure. The torturer was limited to six turns of a handle, as more would cause the cords to cut through to the bone, and it was against Inquisition rules to draw blood. At first each group resisted, confident that they would be released, that their connections or plan would work. But as time went on, and their expected release did not occur, confessions were made. Individual files, compiled over the decade, run to hundreds of pages. The torturous years produced extreme effects, including an alleged Messiah; when he proved not to be the one, another group looked to a baby born in an Inquisition cell; others said a lovely child they called “Little Dove” was to be the Madonna.
In 1646, four years after the first arrest, the trials began. Each year, from 1646 through 1649, an auto-da-fé was held and a few dozen Jews were tried and sentenced. The autos-da-fé were treated as a fiesta, and the whole country turned out for these Judgment Days in the capital. No prisoner knew until the eve of the auto-da-fé if he or she would be tried on the morrow. Some of the accused spent eight years in the secret cells before being brought to trial. Only four Jews were acquitted. The usual sentence was two hundred lashes and life imprisonment. Nearly a hundred were burned at the stake.
During this nightmare decade, the prisoners never stopped seeking their release: Rumors were hot—“the Portuguese are sending an Armada to conquer New Spain and liberate us.” Plots were convoluted—one leader’s uncle was married to the sister of the wife of the king’s attorney…and a little more “George” (money) would do the trick. Wishful thinking was the order of the day—“The Holy Pontiff and the king will send a general pardon on the next flotilla because they would not permit such important families to go out in autos.” But they did.
Portugal’s independence at the beginning of the decade had halted the penetración Portuguesa, the flow of Portuguese Jews to Spanish colonies, and in the 1640s those who were there came under increasing scrutiny. King Philip no longer relied on Jews for assistance in his colonies, and without his intercession, the arrests and autos-da-fé in the aftermath of Mexico’s Great Conspiracy destroyed the community.
By the time of the Brazil exodus, the elimination of these two enclaves once again made the New World off-limits to Jews. On the eve of their expulsion, their options were few: They might settle one of the small Caribbean islands,65 return to Holland, or venture farther north to a colony known as New Amsterdam. Moses Cohen Henriques at this time was fifty-three and Abraham forty-nine. They and their mates had been championing Jewish rights most of their lives. Taking a cue from their childhood rabbi, who had shown that age was irrelevant when it came to continuing the struggle, Rabbi Palache’s old boys were spurred into action. Although they had been defeated in Brazil, and were well into middle age, their determination, creativity, and courage over the next two decades would win most of the freedoms that Jews in the West enjoy today.