Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (10 page)

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.
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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.”
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One cannot fault his observation. But what Samuel and his family did “for their own benefit” likewise benefited their people.
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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.

Chapter Five

AMSTERDAM, THE NEW JERUSALEM

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

For six successive Fridays, the 155 penitents were subjected to such a parade before being allowed to rejoin the Church. Then, having “seen the light,” they could light their candles and “donate” a fifth of their possessions to the Church. Even then, they could not hold any honorable office or wear jewels or fine clothes. On this, their sixth and final Friday, the penitents were herded to the central plaza opposite the church, where two stages had been erected, one to hold the prisoners, the other for the Grand Inquisitor. One by one, they were called before him to receive their sentence. Only when led off the stage were they told that on this particular day their
verguenza
would end. The week before, King John had agreed to a bribe of two million ducats to forgive their offenses. On the day of the auto-da-fé, a “General Pardon for Crimes of Judaism” was to take effect. Portugal’s other two tribunals in Oporto and Coimbra freed their 255 prisoners at first light, but Lisbon’s Inquisitor, incensed at the pardon, held off until his Judaizers had experienced the parade of shame and been sentenced before setting them free. He then waited another month to inform and release those who had not confessed.
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Two penitents that day were Joseph Diaz Soeiro, who had been “thrice tortured by the Inquisition,” and Antonio Vaez Henriques, one of Lisbon’s principal merchants. It is not known if the two knew each other. The next we hear of them is in Amsterdam, where they fled during the pardon’s one-year grace period. Finally free to live as Jews, they underwent circumcision
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and dropped their baptismal names to signify their return to Judaism. Joseph Diaz Soeiro now called himself Joseph ben Israel, and Manuel, his two-year-old son, was renamed Menasseh (Menasseh was the biblical Joseph’s first son). The merchant Antonio Vaez Henriques replaced Vaez with “Cohen” and, to celebrate his family’s escape from bondage, changed four-year-old Antonio Jr.’s name to Moses. When his wife gave birth, soon after they arrived, he named his new son, born in freedom, Abraham.

Changing one’s name was a common practice among conversos, both men and women, when they came out as Jews. The émigrés had taken upon themselves the burden of Jewish survival and adopted the names of biblical heroes and patriarchs. They called themselves Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, Benjamin; their ships bore such names as
Prophet Samuel, Beautiful Sarah, Prophet Daniel, Queen Esther,
and
King Solomon.
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Menasseh, Moses, Abraham, and the community’s other young boys attended Neveh Shalom’s religious school. Mornings were devoted to Torah studies and, from two until dusk, the Talmud. Their teacher explained the portion being studied and the boys repeated the lesson in singsong voice. They learned Hebrew at school and spoke Spanish and Portuguese at home, where they were also tutored in Dutch.

Menasseh, a gifted student, was the pride of the congregation. He was quoting Scripture and commentary at the age of seven, and was fluent in six languages by the time of his bar mitzvah. Some of his scholarly focus may have been due to squalid circumstances at home. His family lived in New Timber Market, a poor, marshy land, far from Houtgracht Canal Street, where the wealthier émigrés resided. The community paid for Menasseh’s education and supported his indigent family, as the Inquisition had confiscated their possessions, and the tortures his father suffered left him disabled and unable to work.

In contrast to Menasseh’s devotion, Moses Henriques and his friends were more interested in Rabbi Palache’s spellbinding tales and the adventures of their elders. All the boys had to memorize the Talmud’s 613 daily rules of living, but did not have to abide by them. On the Iberian Peninsula, their families had been cut off from Jewish writings, and their clandestine lives limited their observance to the basics they remembered. For generations, they had been Catholics without belief; now they were Jews without knowledge. The religion they were eager to embrace was foreign to them. As one writer observed, they were no longer Christians, but not yet Jews.
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Born and reared in the True Faith, the émigrés had learned that sin was forgiven by going to confession. This was not a part of Judaism. Rabbis, unlike priests, could not grant absolution, but it was comforting to believe they could. Many therefore found it convenient to believe that they might “yield to the impulses of their passions without endangering the salvation of their souls.”
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Polygamy, forbidden under Judaic law, was common, particularly among the North African Jews of Neveh Shalom, who made concubines out of their house servants. The legal status of a “natural child,” born of such a union, was considered equal with the children of the first wife.

Initially, the Amsterdam community connived at this looseness, but after Samuel Palache’s death, his sister’s husband, Isaac Uziel, assumed the rabbinate and condemned what he saw as the evil habits of the community. From the Neveh Shalom pulpit, the new leader of the congregation, whose father had been the grand rabbi of Fez, raged against polygamy and preached that no one could buy indulgence for sins and vices by “mere observance.” Lashing out at the most prominent members of the community, he incurred their hatred and soon fractured the congregation.
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By 1620, the two hundred or so Jewish families in Amsterdam had split into three synagogues of varying orthodoxy—Neveh Shalom, Beth Jacob, and Beth Israel. Finally free to be as orthodox as the Old Catholics they left behind, some were, while others couldn’t be bothered. Many, having rejected the metaphysics of Catholicism, were content with a minimal observance; others were turned off by all religion. The same degree of adherence held true for their children.
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Despite religious differences, the entire community worked together in charitable organizations to support the poor and rescue brethren from the lands of idolatry (as Spain and Portugal were known). Decades later (in 1639), Samuel’s nephew Jacob Palache persuaded the three factions to worship together in a building he bought and named Talmud Torah (Study of Law). In homage to Samuel Palache, the united congregation adopted his emblem, the phoenix, to represent Talmud Torah.
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“Michelangelo’s Moses had horns; Rembrandt’s does not” is how one historian described the artist’s naturalist sketches of his Jewish neighbors and the Dutch everyday acceptance of the Jew in his midst.
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The Dutch tolerated no bigotry when it came to making money. Calvinism was a businessman’s religion—work defined who they were, profit was seen as a part of the scheme of salvation, and prosperity was a sure sign of God’s favor. Unlike Hispanic nobility, which considered the mercantile profession beneath them, Calvinists saw work as a calling; they believed that “to work was to pray.”
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A motto of the Sea Beggars was “Help thyself and God will help thee.”
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Dutch freedom had an economic quotient, and her citizenry welcomed Jews as merchant adventurers who would advance their interests in high-risk areas of the economy. Linked by language, heritage, and trust with others in the Sephardic Diaspora, the newcomers formed the first trade network to span the globe. Palache had opened up North African trade as a gateway to the Ottoman Empire, and early émigrés had capital and access to trading partners in the New World, the Levant, and the Iberian Peninsula, all areas the Dutch had not penetrated.
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While the Sephardim were not as wealthy as the Dutch tycoons, who controlled the trade in herring, grain, and other staples, their economic contribution was considerable. One researcher noted: “Jewish trade, especially the sugar trade, was the engine of the Dutch Golden Age…comparable in scope with that of the Dutch East and West India Companies.”
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By 1636, Amsterdam’s Jews, who numbered no more than 1 percent of the population, controlled 10 percent of the city’s trade and, dealing mostly in luxury items, accrued nearly 20 percent of the profits. Their overall contribution was even more impressive, as these figures do not include their profits from joint ventures with native Dutchmen, nor the commissions they received for transit trade.
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For centuries, Iberia’s Jews had been the peninsula’s merchant class. Forced out at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, they settled everywhere they were permitted and many places they weren’t. Those in Amsterdam, in consort with those on the peninsula, were from the early days of settlement the chief marketers of the Spanish Empire’s colonial goods.
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This was especially true in Portugal, where their partners controlled most of the trade. A prominent converso merchant from Lisbon noted their commanding position in Portugal. Appealing to the Crown for relief from persecution by the Holy Office, he wrote:

The Kings of Portugal are lords of the sea…and the life blood of all this is commerce which is only sustained by merchants of Hebrew descent by whose industry it flourishes and without them all the trade would be lost because the Old Christian gentry do not esteem merchants and do not have the industry of those of Hebrew descent.
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While the trading prowess of Amsterdam’s Jews was an important element in the emerging nation’s financial growth, it is important to note that the Dutch Golden Age was advancing before the Jews came. When Samuel Palache was first meeting with Prince Maurice, Holland was already a flourishing mercantile state: Amsterdam had a commodities market; the Dutch East India Company was pushing the Portuguese out of the Asia market; the Dutch dominated the slave trade; and their builders owned most of Europe’s trading ships.
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Most trade, however, was in bulky products of relatively low value—grain, timber, iron, and salt. This changed with the influx to Amsterdam of Jewish merchants, who specialized in the far more lucrative commodities of sugar, spices, specie, and tobacco. As primary dealers of Iberia’s colonial imports, Amsterdam’s Jews, connecting with converso traders throughout the known world, helped turn what was a grain and herring port into Europe’s richest trade mart, a supermarket to the world.

Amsterdam’s harbor, filled with hundreds of foreign ships, looked like a floating forest of masts and riggings. While each waited to deliver its cargo and carry off the valuable merchandise from the huge brick warehouses lining the canals, their sailors, representing a carnival of nations, filled the dockside bars and brothels. In contrast to the Dutchmen in their sober black and white outfits, turbaned sailors, with rings in their ears and dirks in their belts, were a familiar sight, along with bewigged Frenchmen, flamboyant Italians, and other foreigners in colorful native dress.

The Dutch Republic was an anomaly. In an age of kings and emperors claiming divine rule, the fledging nation was seen as “an island of bourgeois tolerance in an ocean of theocratic absolutism.”
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Sephardim, reflecting the ways of Spanish nobility, possessed the requisite social graces to stand on an equal footing with the city’s leading citizens. Men of considerable secular culture, they were courtly, courteous, and accustomed to moving in the best Christian circles.