Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

Chapter Four

SAMUEL PALACHE, THE PIRATE RABBI

In Morocco, ancestral home of the Moors, a youth named Samuel Palache came of age around the time that Sinan was ending his life. Although the boy was raised in the mellah, the Jewish ghetto of Fez, and never met “the famous Jewish pirate,” he knew of his exploits and emulated his deeds—with one defining difference: Samuel’s swashbuckling career was supplemented by a religious one as a rabbi. Samuel thus followed his father and uncle in carrying on a centuries-old family tradition.¹

Jews lived in Morocco centuries before the Arabs conquered the native Berber tribes in the seventh century and introduced Islam. When Fez was founded as the Arab capital in the ninth century, the city’s Jews prospered as moneylenders and dealers in precious metals, professions the followers of Mohammed avoided. In 1428, in light of Muslim riots over allegations that Jews had placed wine in the mosques, the sultan confined them to the mellah, a gated area near the palace.

When Samuel was growing up, the walled ghetto, swelled by new arrivals from Spain, rivaled Constantinople as a Jewish haven. An estimated fifty thousand Jews crowded the narrow streets lined with shops, stalls, and tall buildings with apartment-like quarters. The wealthy lived apart, in luxurious homes of Moorish design bordering the palace gardens. The mellah became a renowned center of Jewish life. Its many synagogues and religious schools were a magnet for Talmudic scholars who came from all over the Mediterranean to discuss and debate the commentaries of Rashi and North Africa’s celebrated seer Maimonides.

Within the confines of the mellah, Israelites lived free, but outside, in the city proper and in the grand bazaar where they sold their wares, they faced a familiar hostility. A Spanish visitor noted this dichotomy:

[Inside the mellah] Jews have a sort of governor who administers justice and delivers their tributes to the king. They pay taxes on everything and are left undisturbed…Outside they are greatly despised and made to wear a black cloth on their heads and a piece of colored cloth on their clothing [to make] them known to the Moors…Wherever they go, Moors spit in their faces and beat them…If any becomes wealthy and the king manages to find out he takes their riches away. But they are so hard-working and know so much about business they commonly administer the estates of Moorish gentlemen [who] do not hold trading in much esteem, nor understand as do the Jews the little details and subtleties, so each one endeavors to have a Jew as his majordomo to govern his estate. In this way the Jews enrich themselves greatly.²

Like the Catholic clergy, the mullahs castigated financiers as parasitic usurers and forbade their followers from engaging in such matters. The vagaries of finance were thus left to the Jews, who minted coins, collected taxes, loaned capital, and backed proven ventures like the marauding voyages of the corsairs.

Samuel and his younger brother Joseph, from the time they were four, attended religious school with other boys in the mellah. Their father was the school rabbi, and his watchful presence weighed heavily on the brothers as they studied Torah and Talmud. The boys were fluent in many languages. They spoke Spanish at home, were conversant in Arabic and Portuguese, and learned Hebrew and Chaldean at school. Because their family’s rabbinical lineage stretched back six centuries, Judaism in all its aspects was inculcated in them and permeated nearly everything they did. The sporadic visits of a roving uncle, an itinerant preacher who roamed the Mediterranean exhorting the faithful, sparked in them a desire to venture beyond the mellah.³

Judaism and piracy were dominant influences that shaped the brothers’ lives after they left the cloistered ghetto behind. For derring-do and profit they turned to piracy, especially targeting enemies of their people, and parlayed that success with other activities that would one day gain Jews a haven in Amsterdam, which would become known in the Diaspora as New Jerusalem.⁴

In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Morocco’s sultan, although officially at peace with Spain, did not rein in his corsairs. The Palache brothers were then living in the mellah of Tetuán, a pirate port astride the Strait of Gibraltar. Although the gates of the Jewish quarter were locked at night, the brothers’ reputation as merchant pirates allowed them to go and come at will. It was said by their compatriots that after a successful cruise the brothers would brazenly enter Spanish ports pretending to be innocent traders and boldly seek out buyers for their repackaged booty.⁵

In 1602, their audacious conduct reached the ear of the sultan. Sensing they had the requisite skills to deal with his traditional enemy Spain, he sent them to Lisbon as his trade representatives to broker a deal for jewels in exchange for the beeswax needed to make candles and seals. To enter the forbidden peninsula, the brothers required an entry permit from the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the ruler of Melilla, the Spanish outpost in Morocco.

Conferring with him, the brothers intimated that they had more to offer than a few tons of beeswax. In approving their passage, the duke wrote his sovereign, Philip III, that they had intelligence concerning Morocco and recommended that he meet with them. However, when the brothers arrived in Madrid in January 1603, Philip, having been warned by a counselor that they were maestros dogmatizadores (dogmatizing tutors) out to win back conversos, declined to meet with them: “They will do much harm among those of their nation,” he wrote the duke, “as experience has taught us.”⁶

Their sponsoring duke thought otherwise. That was not their intention, he wrote. Had he known what Samuel, the older brother, intended when he left Spain in 1603 and journeyed to the Netherlands, he would not have been so quick to dismiss the king’s suspicions.

In the fall of 1605, the brothers were back in Spain, seeking Philip’s permission to settle there. In exchange, they promised to divulge a secret plan to halt the Ottoman advance along the North Africa coast, which, if unchecked, would soon have the Turks at Spain’s doorstep across the narrow divide of Gibraltar. The brother’s scheme entailed the capture of Larache, Morocco’s strategic port southwest of Tangiers. Its possession had become important the previous year when the sultan had died and his son, Muley Sidan, assumed the throne. However, the Duke of Medina Sidonia now suspected Samuel was a double agent. When the king asked him if Palache was to be trusted in “finding things out about Barbary,” the duke was blunt in his reply: “His business is all trickery.”⁷ Philip’s adviser seconded the duke’s judgment, saying: “It would be good to stop the Jew from deluding himself,” and recommended he “be given something to get rid of him.”⁸

But Samuel was not easily dissuaded. Persuasively loquacious, over the next two years he won over other influential Spaniards to endorse his petition for domicile. In March 1607, his persistence got him again invited to the palace for an audience with Philip. Again he promised to divulge intelligence on the Barbary States and spoke of his family’s deep desire to convert to the True Faith so as to better serve “Our Lord and Your Majesty.”⁹ Whatever doubts the king had were swept aside by Samuel’s effusive spiel, and he gave the pandering Jew a royal cédula (license) to go to Morocco to collect his family.

How this might have turned out is not known because agents of the dreaded Inquisition were suddenly on the brothers’ trail. Had their bravado and haughty disdain for Spanish authority let out that their intended conversion was a sham? Did a rival Jew seeking royal patronage alert the Holy Fathers? No answer was forthcoming, but when the brothers learned that the Inquisitors were after them, they took refuge in the Madrid home of the French ambassador, Count de Barrault. The count knew their professed loyalty to Spain was feigned because they had earlier approached him with an offer to share (for a price) Spanish intelligence with his monarch, Henry IV.

Over the summer and into the fall of 1607, while the brothers were safely ensconced in the diplomat’s home, in the nearby Plaza Mayor, dozens of suspected Judaizers were paraded half-naked to be tried and sentenced in successive autos-da-fé. In September, when the opportunity arose to flee Spain, Samuel wrote Philip a farewell letter denying any wrongdoing and vowing continued fealty: “Wherever we may happen to be, we are and shall be servants of Your Majesty. May God increase your life and estate.”¹⁰

That said, he turned his back on Spain and the following spring (April 1608) was in Amsterdam conferring with Prince Maurice of Nassau on a grand scheme to combat Spain. Samuel shared with him an idea he had meditated upon during his confinement, namely that Holland and Morocco should form an alliance. Since both peoples, Calvinists and Muslims, were viewed as heretics by Spain, it was natural that these nations should ally against their common enemy. Sultan Sidan and his father had fought Spain most of their lives, as had Holland’s Prince Maurice and his father, William of Orange. As Dutch privateers, known as Sea Beggars, defeated Spanish attempts to crush their rebellion and funded the war with plunder, so too had Morocco’s corsairs crippled Spanish shipping.

Maurice was receptive to the proposal, and Samuel left for Morocco to present it to Sidan. The treaty came about as Samuel proposed. But for a clearer understanding of what follows, a digression is necessary to account for the prince’s trust in Samuel and what lay behind the Jew’s mendacious dealings with Spain. Before he went to Spain with the beeswax, Samuel was a familiar figure in Dutch ports, and it was his actions then that made the Statholder credit his intent in this new venture.

In 1579, when the rest of Europe was still a dangerous place for Jews, Prince Maurice’s father lit a lamp of political and religious liberty when he unilaterally declared his nation’s independence from Spain. Assembling the six other leaders of the northern provinces, they agreed in the Union of Utrecht to support his war effort and affirm “freedom of conscience” as a founding principle of the United Netherlands.¹¹

The following year, Spain annexed Portugal, thereby uniting the lands of the Inquisition, and suspect New Christians became the object of a renewed purge. Tribunals of the Inquisition, operating in Portugal’s three major cities, convicted thousands of Judaizers.

In 1591, Samuel decided to test the Netherlands’ promise of religious freedom. He established residence in Middleburg, the prosperous capital of Zeeland, and petitioned the city fathers to allow further Sephardic settlement. In return, he promised they would “develop the city into a flourishing commercial center by means of their wealth.” The magistrates initially favored his petition but the intolerant attitude of the Calvinist clergy prevented them from granting it.¹² Seven years later in Amsterdam, a similar situation occurred. The burgomasters of the City Council, who had power “next to God and the Prince,”¹³ agreed to grant conversos admittance, but when the local clergy objected, they backed off, adding the proviso, “confiding they are sincere Christians.”¹⁴

So it was that the first conversos who followed Samuel to Holland found that it was one thing for a nation to declare religious toleration and another for that nation to practice it. Although the newcomers no longer had to fear the Inquisition, any public display of their faith was deemed illegal and, as on the peninsula, they had to Judaize in secret. It was because of that clandestine need that their observance of the Day of Atonement in 1603 has been preserved in police record books as the first Jewish service in Holland.

As we have seen, this was the year the Palache brothers and their beeswax were turned back from Spain. Samuel thereupon proceeded to Amsterdam, having moved there after his failure in Middleburg. What happened next lends credence to the charges of chicanery made by their Spanish foes. With Passover approaching, Samuel invited the covert community to hold services in his home. The holiday that year began on Sunday evening, a time when Roman Catholics attended their devotions. Samuel’s Calvinist neighbors were thus suspicious when they noticed Spanish-speaking men entering his home. Believing they were a group of Catholics holding secret Easter services, they alerted the authorities.

Without warning, the police burst in on the frightened assembly, who surmised that the Inquisition had somehow uncovered them. Their attempt to flee only made their guilt more certain in the eyes of the police. Sixteen men and a number of women were arrested. Samuel tried to explain to the authorities in all the languages he knew but he was not understood. However, the congregants’ leader, Jacob Triado, who knew a little Latin, was able to convince the officers that while they all had Spanish names, they were not idolatrous papists. Rather, they were Jews who had fled the lands of the Inquisition, where their people were persecuted even more than Calvinists. Thus the incident was peacefully resolved. Henceforth the authorities looked the other way as Jews congregated in one another’s homes for services. As long as they did not parade their religion in public, their presence was tolerated.

The early community, numbering about fifty merchant families, represented the elite of Iberian Jewry, whose forebears, rather than leave their ancestral home, had converted but continued to follow the Laws of Moses. When the émigrés left the peninsula, they took with them investment capital from conversos who stayed behind. Each community served as the other’s agent. Thus the riches of the New World, via Lisbon and Seville, followed them to Amsterdam.

So the matter stood six years later in 1609, when Prince Maurice, who was undoubtedly familiar with the machinations of Samuel, approved the proposed alliance with Morocco. Samuel then engaged in shuttle diplomacy between the two countries, first to Morocco to deliver the prince’s endorsement of the proposal, then back to Holland with the sultan’s letter confirming Palache as “our servant and agent” and authorizing him to negotiate the treaty.¹⁵ He then returned to Morocco, this time leading three warships loaded with munitions that the prince had agreed to loan the sultan for his ongoing fight against his brother who, backed by Spain, was trying to usurp him. When Samuel reached Morocco, a Spanish agent in the sultan’s court sent a hurriedly worded dispatch to King Philip, noting that along with the ships

[Palache] brought 1000 lances, 1000 alfanjas [short, curved sabers] 600 guns and a gift of weapons from Count Maurice [whereupon] Sidan ordered them to go with the ships to the coast of Spain to make a fine capture of Spanish ships. Sidan fancied that in a short time he would be the lord and master of many ships and that the world would become too small for his conquests, for they (Samuel and the Dutch ambassador who had accompanied him) had filled his head with airy notions.¹⁶

Sidan’s “airy notions” were quickly deflated. The borrowed ships had barely left Moroccan waters when, according to the agent, “the galleons of Spain came and sank them.” Samuel and the Dutch ambassador escaped, but among documents found in Samuel’s cabin was one that stipulated the expedition was to attack Spanish shipping.¹⁷ Spain and the Netherlands were then at peace, having agreed in 1609 to a twelve-year truce. In righteous anger, Philip wrote Prince Maurice protesting this blatant violation. The prince, pleading ignorance, wrote back that he had loaned the ships to Morocco and should not be held accountable for their misuse. Philip was not mollified by this flimsy excuse and issued a stern warning that Spain would not tolerate the buildup of a Moroccan navy of Dutch origin.

In January 1611, Samuel’s proposed treaty between Calvinist Holland and Muslim Morocco was signed by Prince Maurice, with Samuel signing for Sultan Sidan. Holland’s governing body, the States General, thereupon awarded Samuel a gold chain, a gold medal, and six hundred florins, and his nephew Moses (Joseph’s eldest son) was honored with a gold medal for serving as interpreter. When Samuel delivered the signed treaty to Sidan, a grateful sultan awarded him “the monopoly of trade with the Netherlands.”¹⁸

In the spring, Samuel returned to Amsterdam with diamonds and rubies to exchange for Dutch arms, and an ambitious proposal from Sidan to test the new pact. According to the Spanish ambassador’s letter to his king, Samuel asked for eight ships and two thousand harquebusiers (riflemen) to join a “company of moriscos banished from Spain.” Together they would sail under Samuel’s command and raid “the coast of Malaga where they are bound to make off with many captives and much wealth.”¹⁹

Maurice was to supply the ships for a percentage of the booty. However, mindful of Philip’s previous warning, he did not want to jeopardize the truce with Spain that had virtually established the independence of the Netherlands. Unwilling to get involved in what he considered Sidan’s personal vendetta, but not wanting to offend his new ally, the prince granted Samuel permission to organize a pirate fleet to carry out the mission. Samuel thereupon recruited Dutch Sea Beggars to join his Barbary Corsairs and placed his younger brother Joseph in command.

So it was that in the summer of 1611, a Dutch flotilla, flying the flag of Morocco and led by a Jew, sailed for the Mediterranean. The result of this expedition is not reported. But in the wake left by Sinan, once more the sea became the arena for a Jewish pirate to assail Spanish ships.²⁰

As a fillip to the Holland-Morocco treaty, Jacob Triado’s group, known for its leader as Beth Jacob (the House of Jacob), no longer hid their observance, and in 1612 Holland’s first synagogue, called Neveh Shalom (the Abode of Peace), opened in Amsterdam. Samuel, now addressed as “Rabbi,” was elected its president.²¹

Unfortunately, there is no known portrait of Samuel Palache. If his looks bore any relation to his character, he was a giant—merchant, pirate, conspirator, rabbi, ambassador, and founder of Amsterdam’s Jewish community. While his Christian neighbors addressed him as “Don Samuel,” and his wife, Malica, as “Reina” (Queen), within the Jewish community he was called “Rabbi.” Though often absent from Neveh Shalom, he bore his title proudly and it is inscribed on his tombstone.²² Sailing to and fro between Holland and Morocco, a fifty-day sail each way, he engaged in a brisk arms trade, selling gunpowder, muskets, and other munitions to the corsairs in return for sugar, spices, diamonds, and Spanish booty.

Age neither lessened Samuel’s ardor nor slowed him down. In the fall of 1613, Rabbi Palache was in his seventh decade when he informed synagogue elders that he was again taking leave to lead a pirate crew to seize Spanish ships. In October, at the urging of Prince Maurice, the States General granted him a commission and a loan of five thousand florins to equip “a voyage to Barbary.”²³ The onset of winter delayed his departure until the following spring. In March, “by strike of drum,” he recruited his crew, and appointing himself “general,” selected two Dutchmen to captain his ships—an English warship and a locally built jaght (yacht). In deference to the Spanish truce, the States General identified Palache as Sidan’s agent, averring that his expedition was to combat pirates off the coast of Morocco. However, given that his crew, as one later testified, was “mainly made up of former pirates, as the general knew full well,” it is not likely that anyone believed he intended to fight other pirates.²⁴

From Amsterdam, Samuel sailed to Morocco to consult with Sidan, now finally secure on his throne and thirsty for vengeance. The murder of his rebellious brother (by a former supporter) had ended Spain’s support for his overthrow, and enabled Sidan to redeploy his army to defeat an uprising of radical Islamists who wanted to rid the nation of Jews and otherwise “restore the pristine purity of Islam.”²⁵ With an eye to exacting payment from King Philip for having backed his brother, Sidan issued Samuel a privateer’s license with specific instructions to “harm the Spaniards and make war on them.”²⁶

Samuel, having had the foresight to obtain a safe-conduct pass from England, sallied forth on a mission that united the three foes of Spain—the Dutch, the Moors, and the Jews. Carved on the bow of his ship was a phoenix, a mythical bird that lives a thousand years, is consumed by fire, and rises afresh from the ashes. It was his way of saying that Inquisition flames might burn individual Jews, but could not destroy their ancestral faith.²⁷ It is interesting to note that Samuel’s allegiance to the strictures of his faith included his diet, and he brought along a Jewish chef to prepare kosher meals.

The pirate rabbi captured a Portuguese caravel and a Spanish galleon returning from Santo Domingo with sugar and animal hides and sent them on to Holland. When their owners protested, the States General replied that Palache was sailing for Morocco and they were not responsible for the actions of a foreign privateer.²⁸

In the fall of 1614, Palache was sailing back to Holland when he ran into a squall and had to land at Plymouth, England. When that nation’s Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar, was alerted to his presence, he immediately petitioned the Privy Council to bring an action against him for piracy. Palache, he argued, was a Christian and a Spanish subject who converted to Judaism and became a pirate: “[He] is guilty of piracy, spoil and outrage at sea upon vassals of the king, my lord, who has apostatized from the faith of Christ our Redeemer to become a Jew, then became a corsair as an ally of the Moors, and has captured two ships of the realm.”²⁹

On November 20, 1614, Samuel was arrested and so charged. Gondomar called for him to be hanged. When Prince Maurice received news of his arrest, he immediately wrote King James deriding the “sinister accusations made by the ambassador of the king of Spain. [Rather] the said Palache has done no more than follow the orders of the king of Barbary his lord, with whom the States General have a treaty of peace and alliance.”³⁰

Maurice’s letter asked James to release Palache. James demurred, but rather than send Palache to the Tower of London, the king treated him as a quasi-royal visitor. Palache was placed under house arrest in the home of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Craven, and the two regularly supped together. Sir William even stood his bail and allowed him to travel freely about the city.³¹

Samuel’s popularity with Londoners was matched by their dislike of Count Gondomar. When Samuel’s carriage actually collided with Gondomar’s, leaving the fuming Spaniard stranded in the road, London’s broadsheets reported that the “passersby considerably enjoyed themselves at the Ambassador’s expense.” Another time, as Gondomar was being carried in a litter near Convent Garden, a passerby shouted, “There goeth the Devil in a dung cart!” When Gondomar’s servant confronted the Londoner, the man gave him “a box on the ear that struck up his heels.”³²

In defending himself before the Privy Council, Palache maintained that Morocco was at war with Spain and that he held a legitimate privateer’s license, as well as a safe-conduct from England. The Dutch ambassador, Noel de Caron, testified in a long, roundabout speech that while it was well known that Palache was “a Jew and a Barbarian” (i.e., from Barbary), and did not warrant better treatment than “a dog,” there was an overriding need to respect international law. As a licensed pirate, in service to a recognized sovereign, his action was legal and for reasons of state he should be released. A delegation of prominent English barristers also called for the charges to be dropped, citing the safe-conduct Palache had wisely obtained. The Privy Council agreed and dismissed the case. When Gondomar complained that it seemed the English favored Jews over fellow Christians, Caron replied there was a reason for this, as the Spaniards did not differentiate between Englishmen and Jews but burned both equally.³³

On March 20, 1615, the pirate rabbi returned to a hero’s welcome in Amsterdam. Palache would live only another ten months, but not one to rest on his laurels, his final year was the stuff of high drama. In August, the man of many coats donned another when he put into play a convoluted scheme that has historians today questioning his loyalty and faith. That month, Gondomar heard from the Spanish ambassador in Flanders that Palache had contacted him, promising to divulge intelligence that would serve Spain’s interest. So skilled was Palache in the art of subterfuge that Gondomar, despite his stated abhorrence of “that damn Jew,” recommended his recruitment. Negotiations followed. In November 1615, Samuel agreed to spy for Spain for two hundred escudos a month. Beyond conveying intelligence on Holland and Morocco’s dealings with England, France, and Turkey, he promised to get Sidan to stop trading with those countries. King Philip himself signed the agreement, but obviously did so with reservation. Over the years, Palache had periodically briefed him on enemy plans, but as the king once confided to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, he always suspected Palache was “a double agent.”³⁴

In the agreement, there is a clause about “captive books” that may offer a clue to Samuel’s apparent betrayal. The reference is to a library of four thousand books and manuscripts that Sidan inherited from his father, but never received. Instead they were captured en route by a Spanish pirate and taken to Spain. Sidan’s offer of 100,000 ducats for their return was rejected by Spain’s Council of State. Instead they demanded that he free all Spanish captives before they would even discuss the issue. This was untenable. King Philip then upped the stakes by donating the books to El Escorial monastery. After viewing the collection, Turkey’s ambassador, when asked their worth, replied “infinite ducats.”³⁵ The so-called captive books had become a major sore point dividing the two nations, and it is thought Samuel was in league with Sidan when, feigning disloyalty, he offered to spy for Spain, seeking the books as his reward. Nothing came of the spy pact, however. Shortly afterward, Samuel fell ill and spent the winter months bedridden in his Amsterdam home.

On February 6, 1616, the pirate rabbi died. Six mounted horses draped in black pulled the hearse. Prince Maurice and the city magistrates marched behind the bier, honoring the man and the community he led.³⁶ Next came the Jewish elders, heads covered and cloaked in black. Each and every one of the 1,200 men, women, and children of the nascent Jewish community also turned out. Among the marchers were Samuel’s brother Joseph, who would succeed him as the sultan’s agent, and Joseph’s five sons, who continued their uncle’s work in cementing relations between Morocco and Holland, and regularly used intrigue and double-dealing to further their aims. The new French ambassador in Madrid, Monsieur Descartes, concluded that the Palaches were always “cheating one side and the other for their own benefit.”³⁷ One cannot fault his observation. But what Samuel and his family did “for their own benefit” likewise benefited their people.³⁸

The funeral procession wound through the wealthy Jewish quarter to a bridge over the Amstel River, where the coffin was transferred to a flat-bottomed skiff and rowed with muffled oars to the new cemetery at Ouderkerk, five miles north. The community’s youngsters ran along the riverbank following the barges that carried the mourners to the cemetery. It was the most impressive thing they had ever witnessed. To them, the rabbi was a hero who went out and captured enemy ships when he might have been home studying the Talmud. It is true that Samuel was often absent and his relationship with the boys can only be conjectured. But their later lives are indicative of his influence and the high esteem they held for him. Following his example, they never stopped fighting those who would persecute Jews. Before the century was out, they would succeed in winning their people’s rights in a hostile world.