INTRODUCTION
On August 1, 1492, when Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World, ethnic cleansing was the order of the day: 100,000 Jews left Spain, expelled as mandated by the Royal Edict of Expulsion of the Jews. Those who remained behind, or crossed the border to Portugal, converted to Catholicism. The more adventurous went on to the New World. It is about this group that our story is told.
Long before Spain was Spain, Jews were living there. King Solomon’s trading post (1000 B.C.) developed over the millennium to become Sephard, a strategic outpost of the Roman Empire. It was there, in the first century A.D., that Emperor Titus, after conquering Israel and burning the Temple, exiled thousands of Jews. Although the Jews of Sephard flourished, they were always tenants. The Visigoths who replaced the Romans made it illegal for them to own land, and Spain’s subsequent rulers, the Vandals, Moors, and Catholics, found it expedient to continue the ban. Despite this and other restrictions, the tribe of Moses grew and prospered.
In Spain’s feudal society, Jews were an educated elite, a merchant class also respected as physicians and financiers. At the end of the fourteenth century, after some 1500 years of residence, the 500,000 Jews of Sephard (half the Jews of Europe) represented the oldest and largest Jewish community outside Palestine. Their leaders boasted lineage to King David and considered themselves the aristocracy of Jewry. These were halcyon days for a people who were unwelcome in most of Europe. But their very prosperity and superior lifestyle were resented by an uneducated mass whose all-consuming religious beliefs could be inflamed by virulent anti-Semitism.
Ferrant Martínez, a friar in Seville, provided the spark. Following a frenzied sermon in which he accused Jews of everything from causing the Black Plague to killing Christian children and drinking their blood, he incited the crowd to rise up and destroy this accursed race. Descending on Seville’s Jewish quarter, the rabble slaughtered four thousand men, women, and children. What is known in Jewish history as the Massacre of 1391 had commenced. Pogroms spread from city to city. The mob’s admonition “Convert or die” resulted in 100,000 dead Jews, and 100,000 converts for Jesus.
After a bloody year, peace was gradually restored. Spain’s 300,000 remaining Jews came forth from hiding places and reconstructed their lives. Those who remained faithful continued to live as Jews but under a host of restrictions. But the 100,000 converted Jews, freed from religious bondage, rose over the next century to positions of power that had been denied them as Jews. Called conversos, or New Christians, to distinguish them from the dominant “Old” Christians, they achieved major positions in government, the army, and universities, and married into the highest nobility. They were prominent at court and in the hierarchy of the Church. However, conversion by coercion rather than conviction had an unforeseen consequence. Forced baptism had brought infidels into the Church, but in doing so, created heretics within.
In the last decades of the fifteenth century, there began what came to be called the Holy Terror. Queen Isabella vowed she would root out all heretics from her kingdom once the Catholic reconquest of Spain from the Moors was complete. Meanwhile, she would begin by ferreting out heretics in Seville, a city known for Jews pretending to be Christians. Her means was the auto-da-fé (act of faith), the church’s idea of Judgment Day on earth, with a Grand Inquisitor playing God. In 1482, Isabella gave that role to her confessor, Tomás de Torquemada. In the course of his eighteen-year reign, the former Dominican friar personally condemned nine thousand Jews to the stake at the quemadero (burning ground) outside the city walls. He also exhumed the bodies of seven thousand dead heretics and burned their remains. (Whenever Torquemada appeared in public, he was accompanied by fifty agents on horseback and two hundred armed guards.)
Ten years later, on the very day Columbus set sail, Spain’s monarchs banished her Jews to purify and thereby unite their nation. Jews settled everywhere they were permitted and, disguised as Portuguese New Christians, where they weren’t. Along with other pioneers in the far-off New World, they carved out a niche for themselves, living possibly the most original experience the world has ever known. They thought themselves safe, but the white-hooded Inquisitors soon followed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thousands of New World conversos were arrested, tortured, and tried. Found guilty, they saw their wealth confiscated, and they were first flogged, then imprisoned, strangled, burned, or condemned either to work in the salt mines of Venezuela or to row galley ships across the Pacific, a sentence from which none returned.
Inquisitors were thorough in their questioning of heretics, and the trial transcripts offer an intimate look into the condemned Judaizers’ secret lives. During the day, they went about as exemplary Catholics, attended Mass, went to confession, and had their children baptized. But on certain nights they met secretly in one another’s homes, reverted to Hebrew names, and read from the Torah. History would come to call these secret Jews Marranos, meaning pigs. Though this term has generally lost its pejorative meaning, I prefer to call them what they called themselves in the sanctity of their homes: Jews.
Each New World colony had an underground community of Jews known only to one another and their brethren in other colonies. Together, conversos in the New World dominated commerce. In the sixteenth century, when the known world doubled in size and international trade became big business, they established a trade network that spanned the globe.
• In Lima, Peru, the Inquisition reported: “The city is thick with [Jews]. Everything goes through their hands…from brocade to sackcloth, diamonds to cumin seeds…to the most precious pearl and the vilest Guinea black.”
• In Potosí, Bolivia, with its silver mountain, the Inquisitor reported the silver trade “is almost exclusively in the hands of crypto Jews.”
• In Port Royal, Jamaica, English merchants protested, “Descendants of the Crucifiers of Blessed Jesus eat us and our children out of all trade. [They] purchase the entire cargo of a trading ship, divide it according to paid shares, and distribute the goods through agents in each of the colonies.”
In concert with their fellow Jews, scattered worldwide by the Sephardic Diaspora, they formed a global tribe of inside traders, bonded by heritage, language, and a hatred for Spain. New World Jews traded with covert brethren on the Iberian Peninsula, and later sold directly to Jews in Amsterdam and London, often in ships leased from Jewish shipowners in Amsterdam and Antwerp.
Dealing with the People of the Book was very attractive. Their innovative letters of exchange and credit made capital portable. For instance, a shipping merchant trading in pirate waters doubled his risks if he returned with gold. On the other hand, if he could leave the gold and return instead with a draft on a Jewish banking house, he was safe. As a link in a world trade network at the onset of international trade, Jewish merchants were the world’s most coveted capitalists. The historian of capitalism Fernand Braudel writes: “It has too quickly been assumed Jews did not invent capitalism; certainly they participated wholeheartedly in its beginnings…It is not unrealistic to refer to…the 17th century as the ‘age’ of great Jewish merchants.”1
Piracy was another lucrative area of commerce in which these Jewish merchants specialized. Questions of morality did not apply. It was the normal business of every nation to license mercenaries to seize and rob enemy ships and share the proceeds. The only difference with the Jews was they did not have to license their freebooters. In coded correspondence with fellow merchants in other colonies, they were able to ascertain what ship was sailing when; its cargo, route, and destination; and what its captain may have secreted in his cabin. Thus informed, Jewish merchants were the brains behind the brawn—financing, advising, and sometimes leading the Caribbean’s emerging fighting force: a ragtag crew of misfits of every nation that coalesced as the dreaded pirates of the Spanish Main.
A precedent for this unholy alliance was set by fellow Sephardim in North Africa who had assured their welcome among the Moors by profitably backing and sometimes leading the Barbary pirates. Sinan, Barbarossa’s second in command, was referred to in Crown correspondence with England’s Henry VII as “the Great Jewish pirate,” and the brothers Samuel and Joseph Palache would go from commanding pirates to founding Amsterdam’s Jewish community.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, rival Christian merchants wanting a share of the fabulous wealth being generated by trade in the New World sought to expose the conversos as heretics before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Thus threatened, covert Jews, beginning in the 1620s, conspired with Holland and England to seize a New World colony. Writing in code to agents in Europe, they proposed to serve as a fifth column in the body of the enemy. “They are good and useful spies,” said a confidant of Oliver Cromwell, regarding the Jews who advised Cromwell in the conquest of Jamaica.2
Positioned to assist Spain’s enemies, they did. Jewish trade links, cultivated since 1492, when Sephardim settled the far corners of the globe, doubled as a worldwide intelligence network. From the time Jews in Portugal got word to Queen Elizabeth that the Armada was sailing, they shared secret intelligence with the enemies of Spain.
Jews had been outlawed from living in France since 1394 and from England since 1290. However, when those two nations and Holland settled a dozen small, uninhabited Caribbean islands between 1624 and 1635, Jews were welcome. Their connections and knowledge of New World trade were indispensable to the success of the new colonies. And they spoke the language. Who else but Sephardic merchants could better pursue illegal trade with the Spanish colonies? How else could these small settlements survive? The islands constituted mere footholds in what was called the New Spanish Sea. Together they totaled less than 1,500 square miles, while the Spanish New World encompassed millions.
The first openly Jewish settlement in the New World was in Brazil. In 1624, the Dutch captured Brazil’s capital, Bahia, from Portugal with an invasion force that included “several dozen declared Jews.” The invaders were assisted by local conversos who had gotten word that an Inquisition office was to be established in their province, where two hundred of them were living as counterfeit Christians. A year later, King Philip IV of Spain sent a twelve-thousand-man army and temporarily threw the Dutch out. Afterward, the Inquisitor’s report charged: “[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]…openly professed the Jewish faith.”3
In 1630, Holland’s forces again invaded. Landing north of Bahia, they conquered Recife and surrounding provinces in northeast Brazil. Under Dutch protection, a Jewish community thrived there for twenty-four years. They called their congregation Zur Israel (Rock of Israel), marketed sugar, and taxed Jewish privateers 3 percent of their booty. Sugar and piracy transformed Recife into the richest trading port in the New World outside of Havana, and Jews, integral participants in both industries, lived a high life. Their favorite pastimes may be glimpsed from what they outlawed: Synagogue leaders banned card playing on Friday afternoon (as too many members missed Sabbath service), and levied whopping fines on members caught taking Christian women into the mikvah, the ritual bath.
The situation in Brazil was unique. Elsewhere in the New World, as the midcentury approached, the long-established secret Jewish communities in Peru and Mexico came to a flaming end, with each found guilty of a “great conspiracy.” In 1638, hundreds of Peru’s Jews were arrested. Their leaders, accused of plotting to blow up Lima’s harbor in advance of a Dutch invasion, were burned at the stake. In the 1640s, Mexico’s Jews were charged with conspiring to burn down the House of the Inquisition, and by 1650 the methods of the Inquisition—the dungeon, the rack, and the stake—marked a decade-long succession of autos-da-fé that decimated the Mexican community. In both countries, the heretics’ wealth was equally divided between the Crown and the Inquisitors, and their property was auctioned off to Old Christians.
In 1654, a similar end threatened the congregants of the Rock of Israel when Portugal reconquered Recife. After twenty-four years, the only legal Jewish community in the New World was no more. Jews were given three months to leave or be turned over to the Inquisition. The destruction of brethren communities in Mexico and Peru convinced the refugees the New World was again off-limits. They departed Recife on sixteen ships: The fifteen that sailed for Holland arrived safely; the ship that went north to New Amsterdam did not.
This ship ran into a storm that, “by the adverse,” drove it into Jamaica’s enemy waters, where it was seized. The island was home to a secret Jewish community called “Portugals” who had been living as merchants and traders since Columbus’s son had settled the island in 1510. The Columbus family owned Jamaica and, in deference to their converso settlers, had kept the island out of bounds to the Inquisition. But when the identity of the Dutch refugees became known, Jamaica’s leaders, looking to oust the Columbus family, used the arrival of these “suspect heretics” to invite Inquisitors from Colombia to Jamaica.
Fearing an investigation of the refugees might lead to their own exposure, Jamaica’s Portugals sent a note to Cromwell’s agent: Jamaica could be conquered with little resistance, and they pledged their assistance. The following year, a Jew from Nevis led thirty-six English ships into the harbor, and two local Jews negotiated and signed the peace treaty surrendering the island to England. The treaty exiled the Spanish, and Cromwell invited Jamaica’s Portugals to stay on openly as Jews.
Welcomed by the English, Jews from all over the New World shed their converso cloaks and emigrated to Jamaica. The community soon included shipowners from Mexico and Brazil, traders from Peru and Colombia, and ship captains and pilots from Nevis and Barbados. Together their knowledge of New World trade was unsurpassed. By 1660, Jamaica had become the Jews’ principal haven in the New World. Unlike the small, isolated isles in the eastern Caribbean, Jamaica was a major island in the middle of the shipping lanes, an ideal base from which to strike at Spanish shipping, and well positioned to engage in contraband trade with the Spanish Main.
Soon after the English conquest, Jamaica’s Jews convinced the island’s new leaders that the best way to defend the colony and have it prosper was to invite the pirates of the Caribbean to move there. The Spanish would think twice about attacking Jamaica if its principal port was the home base of the feared buccaneers of the West Indies. In return for a safe harbor, these pirates, the Brethren of the Coast, became Jamaica’s defense force and piracy its principal industry.
In the 1660s, Port Royal, with its wealthy Jewish merchants, shipowners, and synagogue, was known as the “Treasure House of the Indies” for all the booty brought there. Catering to a transient pirate population with one bar and brothel for every eight persons, the pirate capital acquired a reputation as the world’s “wickedest city.” Within fifteen years, pirate raids from Jamaica on the Spanish Main, organized and financed by the merchants of Port Royal, broke the back of the Spanish Empire. In Henry Morgan, the Jews found their Joshua. The buccaneer admiral’s six raids on Spanish ports, culminating in the burning of the “Golden City of Panama,” brought the Spanish Empire to its knees. In the Treaty of Madrid in 1670, Spain acceded to Europe’s right to settle the New World…and Jews were finally free to be Jews.
The seventeenth century commenced with Jews outlawed in most of Europe and the New World; it ended with their freedom. The participants in their liberation struggle are known. They were the children of refugees from the Inquisition who in the early 1600s, after having led underground lives in Spain and Portugal, settled in Amsterdam. Accepted by the Dutch as a valued merchant class, they raised their children in the free air of Holland, where a select group of them, following the example of their warrior rabbi, took it upon themselves to change things. Over the course of a half century of leadership (1623–75), they invaded the New World, battled the Inquisition, and orchestrated their people’s freedom.