Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (8 page)

Although Charles eventually expelled all New Christians from Antwerp, he continued to abide their presence in the New World. His son Philip II likewise found it in his fiscal interest to turn a blind eye to converso merchants and administrators and knowingly licensed New Christians to serve there as crown treasurers, notaries, and judges. As long as they genuflected to Jesus, no one questioned their faith. However, once they had established the lucrative commercial routes that directed all trade through Seville and Lisbon, they were expendable. When their presence was no longer needed, Old Catholic “purebloods” wanted in. Their means was the Inquisition.

The union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 brought with it a resurgence of Inquisition activity. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, as the Holy Terror descended on the New World, covert Jews began to look to Europe’s other powers to provide a haven outside the reach of the Grand Inquisitor. They would find one in the Low Countries on Europe’s northeast coast, in a corner of the empire battling for liberty, in revolt from Spain.

Chapter Four

SAMUEL PALACHE, THE PIRATE RABBI

I
n 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.