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THE JEWS AND THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE TO THE WEST, 1450 TO 1800
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EUROPEAN EXPANSION AND GLOBAL INTERACTION

GENERAL EDITORS
Pieter Emmer, Institute for the History of European Expansion,
Leiden University
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University
H. G. Roeber, Penn State University

Published in association with the Forum on European Expansion and

Global Interaction

VOLUME 1
The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492 to 1800
Edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering

VOLUME 2
The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800
Edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering
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THE JEWS AND THE EXPANSION

OF EUROPE TO THE WEST,
1450 TO 1800

Edited by
Paolo Bernardini
and
Norman Fiering

h h Books
Berghahn
NEW YORK • OXFORD
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Published in 2001 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2001 The John Carter Brown Library

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any form or by any means
without the written permission of Berghahn Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Jews and the expansion of Europe to the west, 1450 to 1800 / edited by Paolo
Bernardini and Norman Fiering.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-57181-153-2 (alk. paper)
1. Jews—Latin America—History. 2. Jews—North America—History.
3. Jews—Migrations. 4. Europe—Emigration and immigration. 5. Latin
America—Emigration and immigration. 6. North America—Emigration and
immigration. I. Bernardini, Paolo. II. Fiering, Norman.
F1419.J4 J52 2000
980'.004924—dc21 99-044924

This collection of essays derives, selectively, from a conference of the same name held at
the John Carter Brown Library, 15–18 June 1997. The John Carter Brown Library is an
independently funded and administered center for advanced research in history and the
humanities, located at Brown University since 1901. For 150 years the Library has been
collecting books relating to the Americas, North and South, printed before ca. 1825. In
order to facilitate and encourage use of the collection, the Library offers fellowships, spon-
sors lectures and conferences, regularly mounts exhibitions for the general public, and
publishes catalogues, bibliographies, and other works that interpret its holdings. For fur-
ther information, write to: Director, John Carter Brown Library, Box 1894, Providence,
Rhode Island 02912, or visit www.JCBL.org.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viii

Preface by Norman Fiering xi

A Milder Colonization: Jewish Expansion to the New World,

and the New World in the Jewish Consciousness of the
Early Modern Era 1
Paolo Bernardini

I. THE OLD NEW WORLD: IDEAS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF

AMERICA IN EUROPEAN AND JEWISH CONSCIOUSNESS AND
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
1. Biblical History and the Americas: The Legend of
Solomon’s Ophir, 1492–1591 27
James Romm
2. Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands among Jewish
Communities of Europe (from 1492 to the Thirty Years’ War) 47
Noah J. Efron
3. Jewish Scientists and the Origin of Modern Navigation 73
Patricia Seed
4. The Hope of the Netherlands: Menasseh ben Israel and the
Dutch Idea of America 86
Benjamin Schmidt
5. Israel in America: The Wanderings of the Lost Ten Tribes
from Mikveigh Yisrael to Timothy McVeigh 107
David S. Katz

II. IDENTITY AT STAKE: CONCEALING, PRESERVING, AND RESHAPING

JUDAISM AMONG THE CONVERSOS AND MARRANOS OF
SPANISH AMERICA
6. New Christian, Marrano, Jew 125
Robert Rowland
7. Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America in the
Seventeenth Century 149
Nathan Wachtel
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vi | Contents

8. Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office in the

Seventeenth Century 172
Solange Alberro
9. The Participation of New Christians and Crypto-Jews in
the Conquest, Colonization, and Trade of Spanish America,
1521–1660 186
Eva Alexandra Uchmany
10. Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile 203
Günter Böhm

III. THE LUSO-BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE: JEWS IN PORTUGUESE

LATIN AMERICA
11. Marranos and the Inquisition: On the Gold Route in
Minas Gerais, Brazil 215
Anita Novinsky
12. Outcasts from the Kingdom: The Inquisition and the
Banishment of New Christians to Brazil 242
Geraldo Pieroni

IV. FROM TOLERATION TO EXPULSION: IDENTITY, TRADE,

AND STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN FRANCE AND
CARIBBEAN FRENCH AMERICA
13. The Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne:
The American Dimension 255
Gérard Nahon
14. Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants in
Eighteenth-Century France: The Case of Bordeaux 268
Silvia Marzagalli
15. Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean
(Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cayenne) and the
“Black Code” 287
Mordechai Arbell
16. New Christians/”New Whites”: Sephardic Jews,
Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French
Saint-Domingue, 1760–1789 314
John D. Garrigus

V. BLOSSOMING IN ANOTHER WORLD: THE JEWS AND

THE JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN DUTCH AMERICA

17. The Jews of Dutch America 335

Jonathan I. Israel
18. The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao 350
Wim Klooster
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Contents | vii

19. An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights

and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland, and New York 369
James Homer Williams
20. Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne: The Synagogues
and Cemeteries of the First Permanent Plantation Settlement 394
of New World Jews
Rachel Frankel

VI. “THE BROKERS OF THE WORLD”: AMERICAN JEWS,

NEW CHRISTIANS, AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE
21. Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade 439
Seymour Drescher
22. New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade, 1550–1750:
Two Centuries of Development of the Atlantic Economy 471
James C. Boyajian
23. New Christians as Sugar Cultivators and Traders in the
Portuguese Atlantic, 1450–1800 485
Ernst Pijning
24. The Jewish Moment and the Two Expansion Systems
in the Atlantic, 1580–1650 501
Pieter Emmer

VII. THE JEWS IN COLONIAL BRITISH AMERICA

25. The Jews in British America 519
Jonathan D. Sarna

Notes on Contributors 532

Name Index 537
Place Index 554
Subject Index 561
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES
(Unless otherwise indicated in the figure captions, all of the figures are from the collection
of the John Carter Brown Library.)
1.1 T-O map showing continents identified with the three
sons of Noah 35
1.2 Ethnographic map of Benito Arias Montano 38
1.3 Detail of Montano map in Fig. 1.2 39
2.1 Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, [Iggeret orhot ’olam]
(Venice, 1586) 51
2.2 Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, Itinera Mundi (Oxford, 1691) 52
2.3 David ben Solomon Gans, [Sefer Nehmad ve-Na im]
(Jessnitz, 1743) 62
2.4 David ben Solomon Gans, [Sefer Nehmad ve-Na im]
(Jessnitz, 1743), a sketch of the Ptolemaic universe 63
4.1 Frans Post, Sacrifice of Manoah, 1648 87
4.2 Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert, Sacrifice of Manoah, ca. 1649 89
4.3 Frans Post, Varzea Landscape with Plantation, 1652 90
5.1 Menasseh ben Joseph ben Israel, [Sefer Mikweh Yisrael]
(Amsterdam, 1697) 109
6.1 The inquiry 129
6.2. “A man condemned to be burnt but hath escaped by
his confession” 139
6.3 The “samarra” worn by those sentenced to the stake 140
6.4 An auto-da-fé 141
10.1 Royal letters patent establishing the Holy Office of the
Inquisition in Chile. Madrid, 25 January 1569 204
10.2 Title page of a pamphlet relating to the auto-da-fé in Lima,
23 January 1639 211
20.1 Remains of the synagogue Bracha veShalom, Jodensavanne,
Suriname 395
20.2 Map showing “Jews” on the upper reaches of the Suriname
River, 1667 396
20.3 Solomon’s Temple according to Jacob Juda Leon Templo 399
20.4 Southwest view of Amsterdam’s Esnoga, inaugurated in 1675 400
20.5 View from the west of the synagogue Bracha veShalom 401
20.6 Interior view, facing east, of Amsterdam’s Esnoga 403
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Illustrations | ix

20.7 Plan of the Amsterdam Esnoga complex 405

20.8 Plan of the extant remains of Bracha veShalom 406
20.9 View of Jodensavanne with Bracha veShalom 407
20.10 Ohelim (prism-shaped) tombstones at Cassipora cemetery 410
20.11 Tomb at Cassipora cemetery with two graven images 411
20.12 Map of Suriname and Commewine Rivers, with “Joodese
Synagoge” noted 412
20.13 Tomb at the second Jewish cemetery in Suriname 414
20.14 Tomb at the second Jewish cemetery, with Portuguese text 415
20.15 Courtyard entrance gate posts and the remains of the west
wall of Bracha veShalom 417
20.16 Preliminary interpretative drawings of the plan and
section of the synagogue Bracha veShalom 418
20.17 Looking west at the cemetery and east façade of the
synagogue of Jodensavanne 421
20.18 Shops in Suriname, painted by Benoit, 1839 424
20.19 Exterior view of the south and west façades of the
synagogue Neveh Shalom, Paramaribo, Suriname 427
20.20 Interior view of the synagogue Neveh Shalom, Paramaribo 428
20.21 Exterior view of the north and east façades of the
synagogue Tsedek veShalom, Paramaribo 429
20.22 Tomb with sankofa (or akoma) on horizontal gravestone from
Jodensavanne’s “Creole” cemetery 430
20.23 Vertical grave marker with sankofa from Jodensavanne’s
“Creole” cemetery 431
20.24 Tombs with horizontal gravestones, vertical wooden
markers with sankofa finials, and akoma heart symbols,
Paramaribo 432
20.25 Vertical wooden post with sankofa finial and Star of David 433
23.1 “Brasilise Suyker Werken.” The different stages of sugar
production in Brazil 490

TABLES
12.1 Banishment to Brazil 246
12.2 Exile to Brazil by Century 246
17.1 The Inter-American Trade of Curaçao and St. Eustatius 347
18.1 Urban Settlement Patterns, Curaçao, 1789 355
18.2 Urban Distribution of Social Groups, Curaçao, 1789 355
21.1 Coerced African Migrants Leaving for the Americas by
National Carrier 440
21.2 Estimated Traffic and Destination of Slaves Delivered
by the Dutch to Curaçao, 1658–1732 451
21.3 Jewish Population Centers in the Western Hemisphere,
1500–1800 460
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x | Illustrations

23.1 New Christians’ Professions, According to the Pernambuco

Visit of the Inquisition, 1593–1595 492
23.2 Professions of New Christians in Salvador, Bahia, 1618,
According to Inquisition Records 493
23.3 Professions of Male New Christians Found Guilty by the
Inquisition, Bahia, 1700–1749 (According to Place of Birth) 494
23.4 Professions and Places of Birth of Male New Christians
Prosecuted by the Inquisition, Rio de Janeiro, 1700–1749 494
23.5 Professions of Partners of Carioca Female New Christians
Prosecuted by the Inquisition, 1700–1749 495

MAPS
1. Europe and the Mediterranean
2. South America
3. North America
4. Caribbean Basin
5. West Africa
6. Indian Ocean
(Maps 1–6 follow Preface)
7. Expulsion of the Jews in Europe
(on page 124 in Chapter 6)
8. Lands of the Saint-Domingue Company, 1698–1720
(on page 315 in Chapter 16 )
9. Depas Family Properties, Saint-Domingue
(on page 318 in Chapter 16)
10. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade
(on page 441 in Chapter 21)
11. Participation of Amsterdam’s Jews in Dutch Trade
in the Seventeenth Century
(on page 449 in Chapter 21)
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PREFACE

T HE PRECISE ORIGINS of the international conference held at the John

Carter Brown Library from 15 to 18 June 1997, from which this col-
lection of essays is derived, are impossible to specify. Over the course of
six or seven years, various stray ideas, influences, and trends coalesced,
until finally we knew what we wanted to do. I will sketch out here some
of the elements that contributed to the concept of this book.
The basic idea of approaching the subject of “Jewish” history in the
early modern period from an Atlantic and a hemispheric perspective was
one that itself had diverse sources. The first Touro National Heritage
Trust Research Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, Judith Laikin
Elkin, who arrived in 1990, was also the founder, as it happens, of a new
scholarly group, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association. It was
evident from talking to Dr. Elkin that the history of “Jews” in Latin Amer-
ica was relatively undeveloped territory, especially for the colonial
period. The subsequent Touro Fellows in continuing succession, all con-
centrating in their research on some aspect of the history of the Jewish
experience in the Americas, North or South, prior to ca. 1825, increased
our awareness of the validity of a hemispheric approach.
In general, students of the discrete and bounded subject areas of
Spanish America, Portuguese America, French America, Dutch America,
and English America, which incorporate, as well, diverse populations of
African Americans and American Indians, need encouragement and
inducement to broaden their horizons. Some fifteen years ago, the
Library established a Center for New World Comparative Studies, the
purpose of which is to encourage specialists in the colonial period of the
Americas to peek over the wall of their academic confinement and try to
incorporate the findings of Americanists in geographic areas other than
their own.
Jews were settlers throughout the Western Hemisphere and partic-
ipants (often as conversos) in the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch,
and English empires. This breadth of involvement, which uniquely cut
across the Protestant/Catholic divide, was accidental rather than by
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xii | Preface

design, but the dispersion of the New Christians and Jews—sometimes

tolerated, sometimes persecuted—offers unusual opportunities for com-
parative study.
From 1977 to 1997, a team at the Library—headed initially by John
Alden and then for seventeen years by Dennis C. Landis—compiled and
edited a massive chronological guide to European books about America
printed before 1750. This work, European Americana (New Canaan,
Conn.: Readex, 1980–1997), available in six hefty volumes, is by far the
best bibliography of European commentary about America in the first
250 years following the great Encounter. The work includes books pub-
lished in seventeen different languages, Hebrew among them, but the
editors of the series know that its record of titles in Hebrew is far from
complete. Rectifying this particular deficiency was another factor
behind the “Jews and the Expansion of Europe” project at the John
Carter Brown Library.
In 1991 the Library sponsored a conference, “America in European
Consciousness, 1493–1750” (also subsequently published as a book,
edited by Prof. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, University of North Carolina
Press, 1995), which addressed the question of the development of Euro-
pean awareness of the New World in the three centuries after the Dis-
covery. In that instance, no one formally asked, “What did the Jews of
Europe, generally segregated in ghettos and everywhere marginalized,
know about the New World, or think about it?” But it was a question that
remained to be considered and one pregnant with implication, because,
among other things, it was Jewish destiny to find freedom and fulfillment
in America as nowhere else.
The John Carter Brown Library was instrumental in the founding in
1994 of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, as an
American counterpart to the Institute for the History of European Expan-
sion at Leiden University. The idea behind this new scholarly organiza-
tion, FEEGI, is that the contention between so-called “multiculturalists”
and “eurocentrists” in the historical profession misses the great point that
the global European expansion beginning in ca. 1400 was the single most
consequential fact of modern history and deserves close study as a com-
prehensive, coherent phenomenon, regardless of how that expansion
may be morally judged and subdivided.
Giving early modern European expansion its due has the peculiar
effect of considerably rearranging the standard European History cur-
riculum in the United States, by compelling academic departments to pay
far more attention to the history of Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands
and far less to Germany and Russia than is now customary. As it hap-
pens, one cannot study Portugal and the Netherlands without taking into
account their significant populations of Jews and of Christians descended
from Jews.
In both 1992 and 1993, the Library organized and sponsored four-
week-long summer institutes on early modern maritime history, funded
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Preface | xiii

by the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the 1993 institute,

Jonathan Israel of the University of London delivered a lecture on mar-
ginal “in-groups” that had an important impact on Atlantic trade in the
colonial period, citing individual merchant networks of Portuguese New
Christians, Jews, Huguenots, and Armenians (the last functioning mostly
in the Portuguese empire in the east), which made possible trade that
crossed conventional political boundaries. Professor Israel’s work on this
subject—because of its originality and high scholarly merit, and its link-
ing of an aspect of Jewish history to the larger network of world com-
merce—has been something of an inspiration to the Library.
The problems posed by the conference on the Jews and expansion
were not unlike those dealt with at another conference, “Scotland and the
Americas, 1600 to 1800,” which took place in June 1994 at the John Carter
Brown Library. The goal of that conference was manifestly not to cele-
brate isolated Scottish contributions, as an exercise in “heritage,”
although the Scots were enormously involved in trade, empire, war, and
education. But certain questions arose from the conference quite natu-
rally, such as: Did it make any difference that Scots as a group were par-
ticipants in any particular event or string of events? The practice of
historical research and writing is in good part the development of precise
tools for analyzing and describing the past. All of the participants in the
conference on Scotland came away with a much more developed sense of
who the Scots were and what they did and did not do. Our ambition in
collecting essays on the Jews was similar.
The 1997 conference “The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the
West,” then, and this resulting book were both founded on three princi-
ples that are not commonly applied to “Jewish” history and indeed go
against current academic conventions: that when it comes to the study of
Jews in the Americas in the early modern period, (1) European history
and American history should not be separated; (2) one should also not
separate North American history and South American history; and (3)
“Jewish” history for this period and this place must include also the thou-
sands of Christians who were descended from Jews (known as New
Christians, Cristãos novos, in the Portuguese empire and conversos in the
Spanish empire) for the precise reason that despite their conversion, how-
ever far back it occurred and regardless of their actual practices, these
people continued to be commonly regarded as “Jewish.”
In compiling and editing this book, Dr. Bernardini and I have striven
to produce a work that not only contributes to Jewish history but also is
illuminating about the New World in general in this period. By making
every effort to transcend filiopietism and parochialism, we hope that
these essays will be useful and suggestive to a wide range of historians of
the Americas who have no particular interest in Jewish history per se.
As is evident from all of the above, this book has numerous origins.
We did have, however, for the 1997 conference an informal planning com-
mittee whose advice and suggestions were essential to the organization of
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xiv | Preface

the program and hence to the contents of this volume. The committee con-
sisted of Mordechai Arbell of the Ben Zvi Institute, Hebrew University;
Seymour Drescher of the University of Pittsburgh; Judith Laikin Elkin of
the University of Michigan; Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University;
and Paolo Bernardini, who has been affiliated with a number of institu-
tions in Europe and the United States, including recently the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Dr. Bernardini’s enthusiasm for this project, above all, was the key
factor in our moving ahead. Moreover, the Library’s alliance with him, I
can say here with pleasure, is not yet over. Dr. Bernardini is compiling the
data for an exhibition of books, drawn entirely from our distinguished
collection, that will be illustrative of the central theme of this anthology,
the Jews and the expansion of Europe to the west. This exhibition has
been under consideration for some time, but from the beginning Dr.
Bernardini and I believed that the publication of these essays was a nec-
essary prerequisite, since only with this work behind us would it be pos-
sible to bring out in an exhibition all of the dimensions of this
complicated and largely unrecorded subject.
Numerous agencies and individuals provided grant money and gifts
that underwrote the conference and the later editing and production of
this volume. We received major support from the Lisbon-based Fundação
Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, from InterAmericas/Society
of Arts and Letters of the Americas/Sociedad de Artes y Letras de las
Américas, from the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, and
from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. In addition, we were helped
substantially by the Touro National Heritage Trust, the Abramson Fam-
ily Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. J. Allen Yager, Joseph F. Cullman III, the
Joseph and Rosalyn Sinclair Foundation, the Charles and Donald
Salmonson Foundation, and the Ira S. and Anna Galkin Charitable Trust.
Mr. Bernard Bell, representing the Touro Trust, was the Library’s ally
beyond the call of duty in helping us to find the needed funding. Our
fondest hope is that these generous supporters are gratified by the mate-
rial accomplishment seen here, which is of course far outweighed by the
intangible results and ramifications.
In the concrete editing of the manuscript and its preparation for the
publisher, Dr. Jennifer Curtiss Gage was of indispensable help. In the
final stages of formatting and proofreading this complex book, Ms.
Shawn Kendrick played a stellar role.
Finally, it would be a mistake to leave the impression that this ven-
ture by the John Carter Brown Library into Jewish history in the Atlantic
world of the early modern period is now over and done with. A forth-
coming exhibition has been mentioned. The Touro National Heritage
Trust Fellowship, also mentioned earlier, which was supported formerly
by annual grants, has recently been fully endowed by a combination of
matching gifts from the Dorot Foundation and the Touro Trust. Hence,
Touro Fellows will be coming to the Library in perpetuity. Moreover, in
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Preface | xv

the area of acquisitions, the Library’s incentive to collect relevant Judaica

has been much enhanced by the revelations in this book.
The John Carter Brown Library’s mission is to collect and preserve
books, maps, and manuscripts, and to promote research. The entire his-
tory of the Americas—from Hudson Bay to Patagonia, from the time of
Columbus to the attainment of independence from European domina-
tion—falls within the Library’s purview. No element of that history is
beyond our interest, and the Library has been collecting Judaica-Ameri-
cana for more than a century. But this field needed definition and consol-
idation within the larger enterprise of the Library’s work, a definition
which we feel has been achieved with this publication.

Norman Fiering

Editorial Note
The editors of this volume have attempted to bring as much stylistic and
orthographic consistency to the book as a whole as has been practicable.
There are some differences among the authors’ contributions, however,
that we have permitted to remain. For instance, there are numerous ways
to transliterate Hebrew letters into English spelling, and we have allowed
each author discretion in this matter. Also, systematic use of accents in
Spanish names was not common in early manuscripts. In the seventeenth
century, the name “Perez” might have appeared without an accent,
whereas today it would be written as “Pérez.” In these instances as well,
we have simply let each author follow his or her preferred practice.
 0 Prelims

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MAP 1 Europe and the Mediterranean

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0 500 km

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120° W 110° W 100° W 90° W 80° W

MAP 3 North America

 0 Prelims

0 250 km
FLORIDA
0 250 mi
1/24/01

B
Gulf of Miami A T L A N T I C
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5:09 PM

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Page xix

DOMINICAN
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90° W 85° W 80° W Demerara R.

MAP 4 Caribbean Basin

0 Prelims 1/24/01 5:09 PM Page xx

GERMANY

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0 500 km

0 500 mi

30° W 20° W 10° W 0° 10° E

MAP 5 West Africa

 0 Prelims

ISRAEL AFGHANISTAN
IRAQ IRAN East

N
Alexandria
CHINA China 30° N

A
JORDAN
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KUWAIT PAL
KI
1/24/01

L I B YA S AU DI BAHRAIN PA BHUTAN
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Page xxi

DEM. REP. MALAYSIA

UGANDA KENYA
OF THE Lake Victoria EQUATOR SINGAPORE EQUATOR

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0 1000 km
Cape of Good Hope
0 1000 mi île Amsterdam

20° E 30° E 40° E 50° E 60° E 70° E 80° E 90° E 100° E 110° E 120° E 130° E

MAP 6 Indian Ocean

0 Prelims 1/24/01 5:09 PM Page xxii
00 Intro 1/24/01 11:08 AM Page 1

A MILDER COLONIZATION:
JEWISH EXPANSION TO THE NEW WORLD,
AND THE NEW WORLD IN THE
JEWISH CONSCIOUSNESS
OF THE EARLY MODERN ERA

Paolo Bernardini

I T IS BOTH AN HONOR AND A PLEASURE to write the introductory pages to

a book that includes essays written by the major international special-
ists in the field.1 In the following pages I attempt to offer the reader a
frame of reference for entering the fascinating and complex worlds exam-
ined in these essays. Every one of them offers an uncommon perspective
and is the result of a major scholarly effort. This volume provides not
only a broad overview of the complex encounter(s) between a European
ethnic and religious minority and an entire continent newly “discovered”
and immediately colonized, but also enlightens us with single, seemingly
minor episodes that took place in the shadow of this major encounter.
These essays—written by specialists in economic, social, political, and
Jewish history, as well as in anthropology and geography—tell a story
that has been scarcely told thus far, at least in its entirety. Since the time
of the conquest, the Jewish presence in the Americas—North, South, and
the Caribbean, as dealt with extensively in this volume—has been
extremely meaningful. It is not an exaggeration—as will become clear by
reading these essays—to state that Jews, both real Jews and crypto-Jews,
marranos and conversos, have contributed deeply to the shaping of the
political, social, and economic patterns of the New World. The contrary
will also prove to be true; the New World has deeply influenced the des-
tiny, as well as the character, of the Jewish “Nation,” especially in liberal
North America, but also in Central and South America and in the
Caribbean islands.
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2 | Paolo Bernardini

The terminus ante quem of the essays presented in this book is set by
the revolutions for independence in South America, in the early decades
of the nineteenth century. For this reason, the most important chapter in
the socioeconomic and demographic history of the American diaspora—
the migration flood in the last decades of the nineteenth and the early
decades of the twentieth centuries—is not touched upon. The book deals
with the very first encounters, the first “colonization” by European Jews
in the New World. For the most part these were Jews who were free to
profess their own faith in the British and Dutch Americas, to a certain
degree also in French America, and crypto-Jews, marranos, and Cristãos
novos in Spanish and Portuguese America.

The “Jew” Christopher Columbus

Jewish involvement in the discovery and “conquest” of America begins

as early as Columbus’s enterprise. His daring esprit, his constant uneasi-
ness with the Catholic establishment, and his twofold if cunning dealings
with the highest political authorities of his time has turned Cristoforo
Colombo, in the eyes of historians and writers, into a quasi-archetypal
embodiment of the Renaissance taste for free, individual inquiry, intel-
lectual freedom, and skepticism. Notwithstanding his personal uncer-
tainties, actual difficulties, and greed, he cherished for a long time a
dream that was eventually to be realized, even though in the end it
turned out to be a felix error, for he aimed at opening up a new route west
to reach the East Indies.
In a certain sense, Columbus was the first American, long before any
white person settled in the vast if untamed landscapes of the Western
Hemisphere. Not surprisingly, his quite extensive if utilitarian knowl-
edge of contemporary sciences, as far as they were relevant to his enter-
prise—astronomy, geography, navigation—combined with his taste for
action and adventure, lead some historians today to identify him as a per-
fect Renaissance man. Moreover, he faced the destiny of being identified
as a Jew, or, at least, as a descendant of an Italian Jewish family only
recently converted to Christianity. Undoubtedly, the “Jewish” factor in
Columbus’s personality is almost one with his peculiar Renaissance char-
acter: individualism, skepticism, willingness to challenge the powers that
be while at the same time pleasing them.
The historiographical assumption about the Jewishness of Columbus
and his family—from Hermann Kellenbenz in the late nineteenth century
to Sarah Leibovici in the 1980s, and including Salvador de Madariaga—
has been fiercely attacked by historians, on the grounds of substantial, if
incomplete, documentary evidence to the contrary. Columbus does
incarnate, however, a kind of adventurous and learned man, who chal-
lenges the established authorities, both political and intellectual, to reach
into the unknown. If not a Jew, he was certainly a man of the Renaissance,
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A Milder Colonization | 3

as much as Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, all

of whom dared to venture where others would or could not.
Although Columbus’s “Jewishness” can be questioned and regarded
as a myth, the very fact that the question is raised is worthy of reflection.
The Renaissance, in its “spirit of initiative”—to paraphrase Felipe Fer-
nández-Armesto—owes something to the Jewish spirit of inquiry and
“skepticism.” The most daring scientists and philosophers of the Renais-
sance, such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico, were decisively influenced by
Jewish mysticism, and scholars are beginning just now to understand and
reappraise the role of Kabbalah, prominent and so far neglected, in late
Renaissance authors, such as Giordano Bruno. This is probably only the
beginning of what is bound to become a major reassessment of Christian
Renaissance thought.

An Old New World: Biblical Geography and the

Impact of the New World on the Old

The idea of a “new world” was difficult to understand, even in the Renais-
sance. Time and space were somehow intertwined, leaving little or no
room for novelty. The world was conceived of, according to a Classical
paradigm, as getting older and older with the course of time. New begin-
nings in either space or time were not considered. According to the
authority principle, to the unchallenged voice of the auctoritates—whether
Jewish, Greek, or Latin—new lands had to be identified with those lands
belonging to Classical geography. As is well known, Columbus himself set
off to discover a new route to the Indies and never realized that he had in
fact discovered a route to altogether new lands. The authority of the texts
was rarely attacked, even in the intellectually daring context of the Renais-
sance, as Professor Anthony Grafton has brilliantly demonstrated. Thus,
Columbus well epitomizes the spirit of his time. Daring, but not daring
enough even to understand the full potential of his discoveries, the full
meaning of the fruits of his spirit of initiative.
The first section of the present collection of essays deals with this set
of problems. It offers the reader a prehistory of Jewish settlement in the
New World. At the same time, this first part provides a wide intellectual
framework, which will prove useful to better understand and assess the
future role of the Jewish factor in the colonization of the New World, as
well as the multiple relationships (social, economic, religious, intellec-
tual) between Old and New World.
James Romm,2 an expert on the geography of the “extremes,” pro-
vides, in the opening essay, a learned and revealing reading of Colum-
bus’s and his contemporaries’ geography, as it was related to biblical and
Classical scholarship and sources. As was common in European biblical
interpretation—at least until the time of Richard Simon, who began the
tradition of critical and philological interpretation of the Scripture in the
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4 | Paolo Bernardini

second half of the seventeenth century—Columbus and his contempo-

raries treated the Bible as a unique and unchallengeable source of knowl-
edge. Biblical geography offered not only names but even “clear”
coordinates to locate places. When he landed on Hispaniola’s wild
shores, Columbus thought he had landed on Ophir, the mythical shore of
King Solomon’s travels (Gen. 1: 29, but especially I Kings 9: 28). Unfortu-
nately, deeper readings of the Bible demonstrated that those geographi-
cal coordinates were far from precise—they were even vague and
contradictory. It was therefore empirical investigation, along with more
accurate readings of the text, that helped establish a better identification
and naming of the known and unknown worlds after Columbus’s path-
breaking voyages.
Cosmography and the art of mapmaking acquired, slowly but defin-
itively, the status of science. The process of undermining the ancient
authorities had just begun, but the weight of those millennial authorities
remained heavy nonetheless. Even the boldest freethinkers, anarchists of
philosophy and philology such as Guillaume Postel and Isaac La Peyrère,
had to come to terms with those auctoritates, and all their works seem
entangled in this never-ending, potentially devastating confrontation.
For even after the novelty of geography was eventually established and
conventionally accepted, what about the ethnography? Where did those
bizarre peoples come from? In what way did their existence confirm, or
deny, the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Second Coming
announced by the prophet Daniel? Could we convert them all to Chris-
tianity, in order to fulfill the prophecies and make the Second Coming
come faster?
James Romm’s essay raises questions that are historically fundamen-
tal, the answers to some of which can be found in David S. Katz’s and
Benjamin Schmidt’s essays, the first devoted to the “wandering of the lost
ten tribes in America” from Menasseh ben Israel to present-day millenni-
alism, and the second to “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Idea of
America.” Here, biblical geography and ethnography—the myth of the
Lost Ten Tribes—become matters of religious enthusiasm and political
concern. In the seventeenth century, an era obsessed and fractured by
religious fanaticism, millennialism, and judeophobia, Menasseh ben
Israel made good use of the argument that the Lost Ten Tribes could be
identified with the Native Americans—as support for the cause of the
readmission of the Jews into England, a goal that he partially achieved.
Benjamin Schmidt3 offers, in a highly informative essay, an original
interpretation of America in Dutch history, politics, arts, and imagination
during Menasseh ben Israel’s time. Schmidt places Menasseh in the con-
text of contemporary Dutch culture and Dutch proto-Americanism. The
idea of applying a “Dutch republican dimension” to the “Sephardi pro-
file” proves to be fertile and heuristically groundbreaking. In the early
modern Jewish vision of the New World, the “republican,” “freedom”
factor plays a fundamental role, along with millennialism and other
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A Milder Colonization | 5

peculiar adaptations of the “revelation” of the New World to particular,

politically oriented visions and aims. What Schmidt says about Menasseh
could be applied to other outstanding figures of the contemporary
Sephardi community of Amsterdam, including the fascinating baroque
poet Miguel Levi de Barrios (1635–1701), who traveled to Tobago in his
youth and constantly kept the image of the New World in his poetic mind
while at the same time praising Dutch republicanism and independence.
David S. Katz, the major international authority on Anglo-Jewish his-
tory, and the author of a fundamental book about the “readmission” of
the Jews into England under Cromwell4—where the role played by
Menasseh ben Israel in this context is somewhat reduced—offers a daring
perspective on the offspring of millennial thought, from Menasseh to the
contemporary fanatical sects haunting the United States and, to a lesser
degree, Europe. Menasseh’s Hope of Israel (Mikveigh Yisrael), in which mil-
lennialism plays a positive role in presenting the Jews in the most favor-
able light, in the Old as well as the New World, turns into an ill-fated,
ill-starred nightmare when the Bible undergoes misleading, distorted
interpretations by fanatical sects, rabble-rousers, anti-Semitic groups, and
pseudo-pagan cults, such as the notorious “Children of Satan.” Katz care-
fully describes four centuries of evolution/involution of millennial
thought, showing how biblical exegesis, especially the exegesis of the
prophetic books, is far from being a dead letter or just a matter for aca-
demic disputes.
The other two essays in the first part of the volume are concerned
with what we could label the “view from within.” Patricia Seed’s and
Noah J. Efron’s essays offer a view of Jewish “technical contributions” to
the discovery of the New World and of Jewish views and interpretations
of America in the early modern era, respectively.
Patricia Seed, the author of an acute volume on the symbolic Euro-
pean “conquest” of the Americas,5 offers a brief overview of the “Jewish”
cosmography and sailing technology behind Columbus’s and Vasco da
Gama’s enterprises. Without the first mariner’s astrolabe, assembled by
the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto, who presented it personally to
Vasco da Gama in 1497, not only da Gama’s voyages but also subsequent
travels to America would have been much more problematic.
Noah Efron’s essay illuminates an area fairly neglected by previous
scholarship. He analyzes the ways in which Jewish scholars, writing
mainly in Hebrew and thus aiming at a Jewish public, understood and
interpreted the discovery of the New World. The overall picture we get is
more shaded and differentiated than that we can draw from contempo-
rary non-Jewish authors. Millennial and apocalyptic veins are present, as
well as the identification of the New World with the biblical Ophir, espe-
cially in Azariah de’ Rossi and David Gans, but there are other, peculiarly
Jewish, aspects that are not to be found in Christian authors. Often Jew-
ish geographers and scientists saw in the New World an unexpected
resource for their hopes of a better life, more or less theologically or
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6 | Paolo Bernardini

eschatologically founded. They perceived that the discoveries meant that

the world was changing. For a people oppressed from time immemorial,
a New World implied a new set of expectations, possibly a way out from
disgrace and suffering. In this, the Jews were no less fascinated by the
New World than other European minorities. In fact, they often antici-
pated and occasionally cherished an American, the American, dream.
Like contemporary Christian scholars, Jewish geographers and historians
tended toward a utilitarian, often parochial, vision of the New World. As
Efron brilliantly demonstrates, Jewish understanding of the New World
was closely related to Jews’ understanding of their own biblical past as
well as their dire contemporary plight. “Pure” science—interest in the
natural world for its own sake—was hard to be found at that time, even in
contemporary Christian thought. Erasmian utilitas and scriptural evi-
dence were the keywords in humanist interpretation and in Renaissance
thought in general. Efron’s essay contributes in a special way to the long
overdue rediscovery and reappraisal of Jewish science—in its positive,
open-minded, and reciprocal relationships with gentile science—through-
out the early modern period. This relationship has brilliantly emerged in
recent scholarship, notably in the path-breaking works of André Neher,
David B. Ruderman, and Raphael Patai, among others.

The Question of Identity: Marranos, New Christians,

Conversos in Spanish and Portuguese America

While the first section of the volume addresses questions pertaining to

intellectual history, the history of science, and theology, the second sec-
tion approaches themes belonging more properly to socio-anthropologi-
cal history. Whereas in British, Dutch, and to some extent French America
the Jews could openly profess their faith, protected by toleration and,
after the War of Independence, granted the full rights of citizens by the
American constitution, the Jews in Spanish and Portuguese America had
to conceal their identity. Their legal status and social condition mirrored
exactly that present in the Iberian Peninsula after 1492 (for Spain) and
1497 (for Portugal). The Jewish migration to what we now call “Latin
America” should be renamed, more precisely, the “New Christian migra-
tion.” The fact that the New Christians in Latin America in the colonial
era by far outnumbered the “daylight” Jews in North America makes the
treatment of New Christian identity almost compulsory in this book.
Before analyzing the prominent role that New Christians played in Amer-
ican society and economy, it is necessary to investigate who they in fact
were, and how they represented themselves—or more often, were repre-
sented—by external sources (the Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authori-
ties, the surrounding society).
Threatened by the Inquisition—”tribunal de los infiernos,” according
to a contemporary marrano poet, Antonio Enríquez Gómez (ca. 1600–63)—
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A Milder Colonization | 7

and regularly surrounded by the hostility of the “pure blood” popula-

tion, the New Christians in the New World often succeeded, nonetheless,
in securing for themselves a stable position and a sound income by
engaging in trade with Europe and North America, and by coming to
terms with the hostile social and natural environment.
Robert Rowland, an international expert in historical demography
and early modern social European history,6 provides in his essay the
methodological coordinates needed to identify, as well as to further ana-
lyze, the phenomenon of “marranism” and the figure of the marrano in
the Iberian Peninsula before and after the expulsion of 1492. Rowland,
partially accepting I. S. Revah’s seminal definition of marrano religion as
a “religion of will,” describes the complex shape taken by Judaism in the
practices and self-understanding of the New Christians. Marrano
Judaism was primarily a religion constructed according to remembrance,
to recollection, even to the image and understanding of it held and prop-
agated by the Inquisition itself, occasionally labeled by historiography
and New Christian popular opinion alike as a fábrica de judeus.
Referring to the Iberian Peninsula, Rowland deals with the key prob-
lem of “dual identity” (Catholic in the external world, Jewish in the
secrecy of home and in familial networks) that characterized marranos
well before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 or their forced,
even tragicomic, conversion in Portugal in 1497. Marrano identity thus
becomes a sort of schizophrenia, although neither Rowland nor Nathan
Wachtel in the following essay arrives at this extreme conclusion. The
social and intimate conflicts that shaped marrano identity and conscience
in the Old World were reproduced, with subtle differences, in the New
World when the Inquisition was reproduced there with all its power,
which was diminished only by the vastness of the territory. Marranism
has certainly been a developing rather than a static faith. Even well-
rounded faiths, such as Catholicism and Judaism, often unthreatened by
social forces and much easier to grasp and define, were far from being
frozen in the early modern era. Both were affected by reformatory
streams, Protestantism in the first case, and Karaitism, Sabbateanism,
Hassidism, Frankism, and other heresies in the other. Catholicism and
Judaism underwent, at a theological and a social-individual level, major
changes from 1400 onward.
Finally, Rowland correctly emphasizes the primary role played by
Portuguese New Christians, both in Spain—to which they emigrated
massively after 1580, the year of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese
crowns—and in the New World. Their impact was felt not only in Brazil,
of course, but also in the Spanish dominions, where they maintained for
a long time a key role in trade.
Nathan Wachtel’s essay should be read in close conjunction with
Rowland’s. Wachtel, whose most recent work, written together with
Lucette Valensi, has shed a new, keen light on Judaism, memory, and iden-
tity in modern and contemporary Europe,7 widens Rowland’s concept of
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8 | Paolo Bernardini

“dual identity” to encompass the cognate one of “dual sincerity.” Wach-

tel’s unsurpassed knowledge of Andean historical anthropology8 guides
his masterly reconstruction, on the basis of selected cases, of marrano reli-
gious practices and beliefs in the seventeenth century. He demonstrates
the complex syncretism of marrano religiosity—well exemplified by the
awkward cult of “Saint” Moses—and the ways in which contemporary
identity mingled with memories of the past (original Judaism) and mes-
sianic and political expectations (as in the hopes that arose among Por-
tuguese New Christians, at home and in Hispanic America, regarding the
reconquered independence of Portugal in 1640). The way in which mar-
ranism slowly lost its religious meaning and helped to bring about, in a
certain sense, through memory and recollection, the reconstruction of a
Jewish national identity is particularly interesting. Both Rowland’s and
Wachtel’s essays invite a closer, serial as well as analytical investigation
of marrano religiosity using the huge and invaluable sources of Inquisi-
torial trials and other external records. It is in the spirit of this book not
only to offer a vast amount of new historical evidence and interpretation,
but also to stimulate new research in uncommon directions and from
original perspectives.
Solange Alberro’s essay is based on her previous, extensive research
on the Inquisition in New Spain.9 Alberro describes the complex and fas-
cinating ways in which the New Christians reconstructed and changed
their own social and religious identity in Mexico during the seventeenth
century. Outwardly acting as Spanish Christians—even singing the poems
of Lope de Vega, an author who was certainly not a philosemite—they
practiced their own version of Judaism at home. Alberro’s essay illumi-
nates the twofold interaction between New Christians and the Inquisition
in New Spain. Belonging to the same social elite, Inquisition officers and
New Christians to a certain extent shared a range of values; they even had
reciprocal social intercourse on a friendly basis. Crypto-Judaism often
could be so cryptic as to escape even the keen eyes of the Inquisition. The
New Christian community in New Spain proved hard to destroy, and the
Inquisition was frequently too weak to destroy crypto-Judaism.
After 1640, however, the situation changed for the worse. The newly
reacquired independence of Portugal, after sixty years of Spanish domi-
nation, helped to create a web of suspicion in the Spanish American
empire against the New Christians, most of whom were of Portuguese
descent (at a certain point “portuguese” became another name for Jew,
along with marranos and conversos). The New Christians were accused of
being part of the complicidad granda (“Great Plot”) to subvert the Spanish
crown. From the point of view of the history of political thought, this is
one of the first appearances of the conspiracy theory on a vast scale, long
before Augustin Barruel (1741–1820) assigned it a firm status in political
thought. The persecutions of the 1640s accelerated the process of assimi-
lation of the New Christians, at the same time enlarging the gap between
New Christian social layers, and, paradoxically, bringing about the
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A Milder Colonization | 9

decline of the Inquisition itself, due to the dissolution of its major targets.
Alberro’s essay shows how the Inquisition followed a political formula,
the creation of Sozialdisziplinierung (social discipline)—according to Otto
Brunner’s seminal definition—which was its main task in Europe
(including Italy, as has been recently demonstrated by Adriano Prosperi).
Eva Alexandra Uchmany, the author of a lavishly illustrated and
highly informative book on the New Christians in Spanish America,10
offers in her essay a narrative description of the New Christians’ and
crypto-Jews’ involvement in the colonization of Spanish America from
the early sixteenth century until 1660. Uchmany’s essay closes with an
overview of the development of the New Christian community from 1660
to the late eighteenth century, almost on the eve of the Wars of Indepen-
dence that freed Latin America from Iberian rule. Her approach, encom-
passing political, social, religious, and economic history, is most useful
for understanding particular phases and aspects of New Christian his-
tory as they are dealt with in the essays that follow. Uchmany draws a
distinction between the New Christians of Spanish and of Portuguese ori-
gins—to help us better identify the changes that affected the marrano
presence in the New World—while analyzing in detail some peculiar,
individual personalities. The profile and destiny of those New Christians
belonging to economic and social elites is particularly striking. While
they constituted an upwardly mobile social cluster, because of their (con-
cealed) faith they were at the same time subject to constant fear, black-
mail, and pressure exerted by authorities as well as by the surrounding
community. Their future was often doomed, and their lives uneasy. Uch-
many’s views of the New Christian experience in Spanish America is less
positive than that offered by Alberro. At the same time, the two perspec-
tives can—if carefully read and understood—co-exist.
The last essay in this section of the book, by Günter Böhm, deals with
the experience, in the long term, of the crypto-Jews and conversos in colo-
nial Peru and Chile. Professor Böhm,11 a leading authority on this subject
and a follower of the masterly scholarly tradition inaugurated by José
Toribio Medina, offers a brief account of the problem of historical sources
for the study of the New Christians in Chile. At the same time, through
some individual examples as well as a serial overview of the Inquisitor-
ial trials, Böhm demonstrates how the evolution of marranism in Chile
paralleled the trend throughout Spanish America, with an increased
number of trials in the 1630s and 1640s during the time of the “Great
Plot.” That New Christians did not emigrate to Chile before a compara-
tively rich economy had emerged bears a certain typicality. New Chris-
tians and crypto-Jews tended to migrate where the economy was
already flourishing, or where at least it showed promise of growth. New
Christians and Jews alike were rarely pioneers in wastelands, where
everything, including trade and markets, had to be built. This fact differ-
entiates those minorities from other religious sects—such as Quakers,
Mormons, and Hutterites in North America—endowed with a more
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10 | Paolo Bernardini

“pioneering” spirit and more able to start in an undeveloped land the pri-
mary economic activity needed to make it grow: agriculture.

The Jews in Portuguese America

Anita Novinsky,12 a well-known expert on Brazilian-Jewish history, dis-

closes a new chapter in the history of the New Christian community in
Brazil. Focusing on a relatively late time period, the first half of the eigh-
teenth century—a time of decline for the New Christians in Spanish
America—Novinsky offers a detailed view, based on extensive archival
research, of the marranos in the vast Brazilian region of Minas Gerais.
The results of this case study show interesting differences between the
New Christian experience in Spanish America and that in Portuguese
America. In the latter, for instance, a still vigorous New Christian com-
munity proved to be more daring in colonization and participated, along
with some 300,000 Portuguese, in the rush for gold that exploded at the
beginning of the eighteenth century. Novinsky’s essay casts new light
also upon the process of secularization undergone by the New Christians
in the first half of the eighteenth century, which can be fruitfully com-
pared with the same occurrence in Europe among professing Jews. Skep-
ticism—not as a philosophy but as a way of life—and agnosticism
became common among the Minas Gerais New Christians in this period.
Novinsky discerningly discusses both current and classical (Max
Weber) interpretations of the social and economic meaning of religion. Of
particular interest is the assumption, shared by some contemporary his-
torians, including Novinsky herself, that the introduction of the Inquisi-
tion in Portugal was “a reaction to European economic growth, namely,
the development of a competitive and upwardly mobile mercantile mid-
dle class, which inserted itself into the spheres of power, thereby threat-
ening the aristocracy’s political and financial hegemony.” Can this theory
be applied to Brazil as well? In her brilliant and massively documented
essay, Novinsky addresses this fundamental question. The competition
between New and Old Christians in Brazilian markets seems to have
offered the latter a comparative advantage over the former, in that New
Christians could be accused of crypto-Judaism, which had the effect of
diminishing their economic power. Religion and economy play, in this
context, a role even subtler than that conferred on them in Max Weber’s
or Werner Sombart’s classical analyses. Finally, the process of seculariza-
tion led the New Christians slowly to attach to Judaism not a religious
but an ideological, “national” meaning. From this perspective, Novin-
sky’s conclusions seem to coincide with the interpretation of marranism
put forward by Nathan Wachtel in his essay.
Geraldo Pieroni’s essay deals with the prehistory of New Christian
settlement in Brazil, namely the banishment of New Christians from Por-
tugal to Brazil, and is mainly derived from his in-depth analysis of the
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A Milder Colonization | 11

phenomenon presented initially in his doctoral dissertation.13 Pieroni

gives a substantial account of Portuguese trials and the subsequent exile
to America. He shows how this form of punishment fit into the legal and
theological schemes of the Inquisition and was conceived of as a kind of
“purgatory” to prepare for full conversion to Christianity and the return
home. It was a purgatory that turned into hell for many, but also into a
paradise for quite a few, who decided not to return home and to settle in
the bountiful New World. Pieroni’s essay is in conformity with the most
recent European historiography about the Inquisition, which includes
such works as Francisco Bethencourt’s pioneering research on European
Inquisitions in comparative perspective.

The New Christians in French America

The fourth section of this book deals with a subject that has so far
received very little scholarly attention: the history of the Jews and the
New Christians in the French colonies in the Americas. Gérard Nahon,14
a leading authority on Sephardi and French-Jewish history, offers a pre-
cise overview of the “American dimension” of the Jews in Bayonne. Con-
trary to Bordeaux, which has been studied in depth, Bayonne, a relatively
minor harbor on the French Atlantic coast, has been generally neglected
by scholars, at least with relation to its Portuguese Jewish community.
The Portuguese Jews of Bayonne, whose religious identity (Jews? New
Christians?) was socially and legally unclear until the French Revolution,
played an important role in commerce with the Americas. As so often
happens—and Fernand Braudel has once and for all demonstrated—
trade at the same time implied and fostered cultural exchanges. This is
true not only at the level of elite culture—and the case of Daniel Lopez
Laguna, the author of a splendid translation of the Psalms into Spanish
(1720), seems quite isolated—but especially at the level of cultural prac-
tices and imagination. Bayonne Jews cherished a certain kind of “Ameri-
can dream” which “pervaded conversations and thoughts”; as Nahon
presents it, they “interiorized” American spaces in a peculiar way. Some
of them once again brought credibility to the myth that the Lost Ten
Tribes were located in America. Nahon, focusing mainly on the eigh-
teenth century, solidly demonstrates how the American dimension was
also instrumental in enabling Bayonne Jews to strengthen their own
socioeconomic position in France. This fact can be confirmed by the sub-
stantial weight carried by the French Atlantic Jewish community during
the French Revolution.
Silvia Marzagalli15 brings a new and fresh perspective to one of the
most studied among the Jewish communities in France: that of Bordeaux.
Focusing once again on the eighteenth century—when Bordeaux rose to
national prominence as a port of trade—Marzagalli analyzes the commer-
cial and familial réseaux that gave to the Sephardi merchants of Bordeaux
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12 | Paolo Bernardini

a comparative advantage in Atlantic colonial trade. By using Zvi

Loker’s argument to identify this advantage that the Jews possessed in
comparison to non-Jewish merchants—namely, “family networks,”
“higher geographical mobility,” and “knowledge of foreign languages”
—Marzagalli sketches out a line of continuity and evolution in the eco-
nomic history of the Bordeaux Jews. She demonstrates that the compar-
ative advantage was to be found especially in the “tertiary” sectors of
the economy: banking and insurance. She also most appropriately
regards political and social history as deeply intertwined, while pre-
senting some notable examples of Jewish mercantile families. Marza-
galli takes into account both the direct and the indirect (investments,
finance, insurance) participation of Jewish merchants in the Atlantic
trade. Her conclusion goes against any typicality in the Bordeaux case.
On the basis of the evidence, and for a variety of historical reasons, the
case of Bordeaux appears to be unique. Only some comparisons can be
made—though merely in quantitative terms—with the Jewish mer-
chants of Bayonne, studied by Nahon.
Mordechai Arbell16 provides, in his long and detailed study, a most
useful mapping of the social, legal, and political conditions of the Jews
in the French Caribbean colonies. Arbell shows how the conditions
under which the Jews lived were altered by the passage from the overtly
tolerant regime of the Dutch to French rule. The legal entitlements of the
Jews became unclear and shifting, and the restrictive power of the
Catholic Church often overwhelming. Arbell clearly describes the vari-
ous economic activities practiced by the Jews in the Caribbean area,
especially sugar production and trade. He also stresses the political
weight of the coalition of Jesuits and French planters—how a mix of
social envy and religious hatred blended and resulted in the expulsion
of the Jews from Guadeloupe and Martinique. The relationship between
the political events in France and those occurring in the colonies is of
particular interest. Often, policy toward the Jews in the French
Caribbean mirrored and followed developments at home; occasionally,
it went its own way. The situation in Haiti is of particular interest, espe-
cially after the revolution, when a large number of Jews married freed
slaves, gradually constituting the Haitian middle class—a phenomenon
not easily found elsewhere.
A gem of scholarship, John Garrigus’s17 essay addresses the complex
question of citizenship in Saint-Domingue in the quarter-century preced-
ing the French Revolution. The flow of racial, geopolitical, and religious
ideas from France into the colonies—from Montesquieu to Buffon and
Grégoire, from the Enlightenment to revolutionary ideology—is ana-
lyzed here with a particular reference to the evolution, in terms of social
standing and legal status, of all the social and ethnic components of colo-
nial Saint-Domingue: Jews, free people of color, French whites. The first
lines of the essay—which somewhat epitomize its main points—are
worth quoting in full:
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A Milder Colonization | 13

The case of Saint-Domingue’s Sephardim illustrates that the story of the Jews
in Europe’s expansion westward is about more than the survival or mutation
of deeply rooted family traditions. Old World questions about Jewish politi-
cal identity did not disappear in the Americas. Rather, these persistent issues
forced colonists and their children born in the New World to reconcile new
European philosophies with American conditions. In the case of the largest
slave colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue’s Jews helped translate emerg-
ing French nationalism into an attack on racial prejudice that eventually pro-
duced the Haitian Revolution. By raising complex issues of national identity
and citizenship in French America after 1763, Sephardic merchants and plant-
ers provided a model for another group whose place in colonial society was
equally ambiguous: Saint-Domingue’s free people of color.

Garrigus’s essay sets methodological guidelines that can be fruitfully

applied to other situations, such as those of the Jews in Dutch and British
America. Legal status, social aspirations, and economic positions interact
in this analysis, and it appears clearly that a precise picture of the New
Christian plight cannot be gained without simultaneously taking into
account all of these factors. Saint-Domingue became the playground for ill-
fated attempts at racial integration and for the formation of a “New White”
elite with racial (and not necessarily religious) connotation. Finally, it was
there that Jews and free men of color cooperated in the creation of Haiti, in
1804, “a new American nation with a racial identity all its own.”

The Jews in Dutch America

Jonathan I. Israel, the author of a recent and comprehensive survey of

Dutch history,18 as well as several other groundbreaking works of socioe-
conomic and political history19—among them, the most challenging
account of the social role of European Jewry in the early modern age20—
opens the fifth section of this volume. His essay deals with the Jewish
experience in Dutch America in its entirety, offering a panoramic view of
the subject. Israel’s essay shows how Jews could flourish in the
Caribbean colonies under Dutch rule, constructing a powerful trade net-
work and engaging in the production of sugar cane and other colonial
goods. While the Caribbean Jews gained an overwhelming economic
weight in the eighteenth century, the Jews in Dutch Brazil—for the rela-
tively short span of time during which Brazil was under Dutch control,
before returning to the Portuguese flag—thrived in the 1630s and 1640s.
This period, studied by Israel mainly from a socioeconomic perspective,
appears to be extremely interesting if also approached from a religious
and social point of view. Under Portuguese rule, New Christians could
not legally and openly practice their Jewish faith, whereas during the
brief though intense period of Dutch control over Brazil, New Christians
had the possibility of reverting to open Judaism. Did they do so? How
many made this choice? The subject is of particular interest because this
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14 | Paolo Bernardini

kind of sudden change of political rule is quite unique in Latin Ameri-

can history.
Israel’s essay is mainly concerned, however, with economic matters.
It depicts in great detail the differences between the two main Jewish
communities in the Dutch Caribbean, namely Curaçao—the “Amsterdam
of the Caribbean”—and Suriname, while offering also a brief sketch of
Barbados and Jamaican Jewry. Its conclusions are of the greatest signifi-
cance. In the first place, it appears clearly that in religious matters the
Dutch were far less tolerant in the colonies than at home. The flourishing
of Jewish trade was thus due more to a socioeconomic conjuncture than
to a peculiarly liberal toleration policy. Furthermore, with pertinence to
the Jews both in the brief Dutch-Brazilian period, and to the Caribbean
Jews under Dutch rule, Israel highlights the ways in which Jews in
“another environment” (to quote Robert Cohen) built a new kind of Jew-
ish society, based on economic activities—such as tropical agriculture—
quite different from any European model.
A closer analysis of the Jews in Dutch Suriname and Curaçao is pro-
vided by Wim Klooster, to whom we owe two outstanding recent publi-
cations on the colonial Dutch experience in the New World.21 Klooster’s
essay—based on a vast amount of archival materials—portrays in detail
the life of Jews in Suriname and Curaçao. The former constructed a
remarkably solid agricultural colony, based on sugar cane; the latter
instead developed, during the same period, a strong mercantile economy,
originally based on smuggling. The experience in Suriname contradicts
ipso facto the latent judeophobic assumption, commonly held in Europe
at that time, that Jews could not practice agriculture and did not like it. It
comes as no surprise that the Surinamese Jews sent a note of thanks to the
Prussian writer Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, who, as late as 1781, pub-
lished in Berlin a strong plea in favor of the betterment of the civil and
legal conditions of the Jews in Europe. In that work Dohm maintained
that the Jews could indeed be good farmers, as they were in biblical
times. The case of Suriname and Curaçao Jewry well demonstrates the
truth of all pro-Jewish literature from Simone Luzzatto in the early sev-
enteenth century to Henri Grégoire in the late eighteenth: if granted a cer-
tain degree of toleration and liberty, Jews could substantially contribute
to any kind of state economy. The staple market of Curaçao and the sugar
plantations of Suriname were a convenient outlet for investments from
Holland, when investment opportunities had decreased in the homeland.
Well into the eighteenth century, these two Dutch-Jewish colonies flour-
ished, starting to decline only in the last third of the eighteenth century
in conjunction with a major decline in the world (and especially Euro-
pean) economy. Those colonial societies offered a splendid testing
ground for daring businessmen and adventurers. Klooster’s essay closes
with a biographical sketch of one of these men (Felipe Henriquez,
1589–1656), who moved from marranism to international diplomacy,
from smuggling to high society.
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A Milder Colonization | 15

James Homer Williams’s essay opens still another chapter in the his-
tory of the Jews in Dutch America. His perspective is comparative in its
methodology and highly enlightening in its results. Williams takes into
account side by side the development of the legal and social position of
the Jews in Amsterdam and that of the Jews in New Amsterdam and
Dutch Brazil. If compared to the situation in Amsterdam, the plight of the
Jews in Brazil, and especially in New Amsterdam, appears to be far less
happy. Especially in New Amsterdam the Jews faced a twofold hostility:
on the one hand, they entered a market where Dutch merchants already
held a prominent position; hence, there was no empty space for Jewish
traders to conquer. At the same time, New Amsterdam’s governor Peter
Stuyvesant was a fierce enemy of the Jews—whom he constantly defined
as a “deceitful race”—along with all faiths other than the Reformed. After
1664, when New Amsterdam fell into British hands, and was renamed,
faute de mieux, New York, things started to change, and the Jews began to
enjoy a much more tolerant regime. Williams carefully describes the par-
allel evolution of British policy toward the Jews at home and in the
colonies; as a result, it seems clear that in New York Jews enjoyed a toler-
ation even more advanced than was the case in London.
A different economic situation—namely, a broader array of opportu-
nities—was to be found by the Jews in Dutch Brazil. Williams underlines
the different personality of Brazil’s governor, Johan Maurits, who was no
less a Calvinist than Stuyvesant but far more oriented toward a pragmatic
form of toleration. The West India Company encouraged Jewish migra-
tion to Brazil, where Jews could serve—as Williams describes it with a
most acute definition—as “cultural brokers” with the Portuguese. The
Calvinist zeal of Stuyvesant—at a time and in a city affected by a peculiar
religious laxity that touched upon almost every faith and believer—pre-
vented the Jews from blossoming in New Amsterdam. The moderate
open-mindedness of Count Maurits, on the other hand, made Brazil a
place where Jews were able to reach a remarkable degree of well-being.
The “force of personality”—evoked here with the utmost opportunity by
Williams, and a for a long time considered as a quantité négligeable by his-
toriography—clearly played a major role in the two different destinies
faced by the Jews in Brazil and New Amsterdam respectively.
The final essay of the “Dutch” section brings us a new and fresh per-
spective on Surinamese Jewry. Rachel Frankel offers here the fruits of her
long-lasting, passionate involvement in the architectural history of
“Jodensavanne,” the flourishing Jewish colony on the Suriname River.
The essay shows all the potential of architectural history as a form of,
inter alia, historical anthropology of space. The focus is on the synagogue
and the cemetery of the Jodensavanne. Though the model remained that
of Dutch religious and civic architecture, the Jodensavanne Jews, freed
from any external pressure and free to confer on public and private
spaces new meanings and functions, erected their own synagogue in
1685, ten years after the construction of the main Sephardic temple in
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16 | Paolo Bernardini

Amsterdam. The synagogue, ideally located at the very center of a very

linear village, served as a symbol of faith and social cohesion.
The differences characterizing this building, internally and exter-
nally, in comparison with the Amsterdam model are full of meaning; they
point toward a new appraisal both of the social significance of faith in
Suriname and of the social structure of the community. Here, Jews were
not only free, but also at the top of the social hierarchy. Though a minor-
ity, they constituted the ruling class. The population counted an over-
whelming majority of black slaves, few whites, and some Ashkenazi and
even black Jews, the latter newly converted to the faith of the elite. Jews
found themselves for the first time in a situation of privilege, certainly not
shared by their co-religionists in even the tolerant United Provinces. For
the first time in the Jodensavanne, according to Frankel’s fascinating
account, “Jews had the opportunity to design virgin landscape and con-
struct it according to their needs, beliefs, and hopes.”
Frankel’s detailed description of Jodensavanne architecture pro-
vides a clear view of what this meant at a practical level. Of utmost
interest also is the interaction—expressed even in architectural terms—
between Jewish and African culture. There is evidence, such as in Para-
maribo’s (the capital city of Suriname) Jewish cemetery, that the two
different cultures and religions found points of contact, especially
anthropologically, for they took place in the exceptionally symbolic ter-
rain of death and remembrance. Frankel’s essay closes with an analysis
of other important Surinamese synagogues, those of Paramaribo built in
1723 and 1735 respectively. Here, the space seems to lose, in its squared
essentiality, all the messianic hopes and sense of freedom present in the
Jodensavanne synagogue.

The Jewish Factor in the Atlantic Economy

The opening essay of this section, devoted to Jewish involvement in the

Atlantic economy during the colonial era, is a definitive reassessment of
the role played by Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade.
This subject—which carries an enormous meaning not only at the histo-
riographical, but also at the “ideological,” public opinion level—has been
addressed by a leading specialist in the history of the British involvement
in the slave trade, and in the history of slavery in general. Seymour
Drescher22 provides a detailed analysis of the Jewish and New Christian
participation in the Atlantic slave trade from the beginning until the late
eighteenth century. His study takes into account not only purely eco-
nomic factors, but also the ways in which those factors were interrelated
with social background and legal distinctions using the classical division
(in three phases) of the Atlantic slave trade: the first phase, from 1500 to
1640, during which a relatively minor number of black slaves were
exported to the Americas; the second phase, from 1640 to 1700, which
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A Milder Colonization | 17

saw the number of slaves forcibly embarked to the New World triple in
number; and the final phase, between 1700 and the British abolition of
1807, when the number of slaves exported from Africa reached a peak
(6,686,000, according to the most accurate estimate, outnumbering by far
the sums in the forced migrations of the two previous phases).
Drescher demonstrates that only in the second phase did Jews play a
major role in the trade, especially in the Dutch Caribbean colonies. As for
the first phase, he concludes that “the only accounts of prominent Jewish
presence in this initial process of oceanic exploration and trade are
related to the scientific and cartographic experts mobilized by Prince
Henry the Navigator to track his African exploratory expeditions.” The
matter was different for the New Christians. They had a large share in the
Iberian slave trade, which was never to be matched by that played by
observant Jews, not even in the second phase of the Atlantic slave trade.
According to Drescher, they could count on “trustworthy interlocking
agents and trained apprentices,” vital in this kind of trade. Furthermore,
in broader terms, “if their quasi-pariah religious status kept them at least
once removed from institutional power, that same status tended to make
them most effective in a world where opportunities for long-term credit
were dependent upon kinship and trust.” Drescher also analyzes the
function of the Jews in the French slave trade, identifying the Bordeaux
Gradis family—an extremely interesting though rather unique case of
extraordinary Jewish socioeconomic success—as one of the major slave
traders in eighteenth-century France. In the last and massive phase of
African slave traffic, however, the Jewish role was much constricted by
the competition of other mercantile, often quasi-government, networks,
and Jews clearly played a minor role in this trade.
On the other hand, Jews, and especially New Christians, played a
very substantial part in a milder and less risky trade, that of sugar. James
C. Boyajian, a leading authority on Portuguese economic history, partic-
ularly in its international dimension,23 offers a carefully documented pic-
ture of Jewish and New Christian involvement in the sugar trade from
1550 to 1750. The essay shows how and why Jews and New Christians
achieved a prominence in this particular trade. The New Christians had
developed a production-trade cycle, financing sugar cane production
through the slave trade, but also through the trade of sugar itself.
At a certain point between 1650 and 1750, when sugar consumption
lost its luxury character and became, along with other colonial products,
a staple consumed massively in Europe, its producers reached the peak
of wealth. Boyajian highlights the international dimension of New Chris-
tian trade in the American colonies, the ways and routes that linked the
West and the East Indies, and the value of the import of Oriental luxury
commodities, such as silk, which became fashionable not only in Europe,
but also among the New Christian elites in the New World. In general,
the commercial activities of the New Christians followed the ebb and
flow of Atlantic trade throughout the early modern era. At a certain point,
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18 | Paolo Bernardini

with the possessions of Angola, Brazil, and Goa, the Portuguese could
have—and indeed had—control over a large portion of international
trade. It comes as no surprise that New Christians took advantage of this
fortunate situation.
Ernst Pijning’s24 essay provides a close description of the New Chris-
tian sugar cultivators and traders in Brazil until ca. 1800. Here economic
history is fruitfully intertwined with social and religious data. Pijning’s
study, which includes a detailed survey of the terminology that identified
the social layers in Portuguese Brazil, is revealing of the social plight and
mobility of the New Christian elite of traders and planters. New Chris-
tians generally wanted to be seen as Old, in order to ascend the social lad-
der and integrate into the majority. This was true especially for the elites:
a phenomenon that broadly mirrored what was happening in Europe
between 1750 and 1900, when socially prominent Jews, in order to
increase their prestige and enter public careers, converted to Christianity.
New Christians, already more or less forcibly converted for generations,
had on the contrary to demonstrate to the external world that they could
be considered in toto as Old Christians.
Pijning offers a fascinating view, almost from within, of Portuguese
colonial society. He demonstrates that the Inquisition acted with the con-
cealed aim of attacking an upwardly mobile socioeconomic cluster and
that religious dogmatism served as an external justification. He also
shows that, in spite of legal restraints, New Christians surprisingly suc-
ceeded in acquiring public office, which was a means of protecting them-
selves from the Inquisition and securing a firm place in the social
hierarchy. Finally, it is of particular interest to learn that sugar cultivation,
although less economically rewarding, enabled cultivators to gain much
more prestige than they could have obtained by engaging in trade, a sit-
uation that once more reflects, in the New World, a common European
mentality deeply rooted in the European upper class well into the nine-
teenth century.
Closing this section of the book, Pieter Emmer’s study skillfully
locates the “Jewish moment,” from 1580 to 1650, in a broad, world-history
context of the two expansion systems in the Atlantic. Emmer,25 an author-
ity on Dutch colonial and economic history, provides an international and
comparative framework that enables us to understand the Jewish role in
the Atlantic economy from a macro-historical perspective. His views,
which could arouse vigorous debate among historians, help us to under-
stand better the contents and general implications of what has been writ-
ten by the other authors in the section. The essay displays in chrono-
geographical detail the differences between the Iberian and the British-
Dutch-French expansion systems, and the reasons that the Spanish econ-
omy never reached the prominence it could well have gained thanks to
its immense possessions. It also shows why and how the Portuguese
reached international prominence, which was later lost owing to the rel-
ative backwardness of their political and religious systems. Finally, the
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A Milder Colonization | 19

essay deals with the felicitous momentum of the Dutch economy between
1600 and 1650, and with the emergence of the British to international
prominence in the late seventeenth and particularly in the eighteenth cen-
turies. The role the Jews played in those macro-systems was dependent
upon, and subordinate to, the trends of development and decline of those
systems themselves. Rather than determining them, the Jews were, as
individual economic agents, almost completely conditioned by them. The
Jews, normally very flexible, could not adapt, however, to the new, global
economic international system that emerged in the eighteenth century. In
their capacity of economic actors, as were the Genoese, the British, the Ger-
mans, and so on, the Jews were affected by historical ebbs and flows. Their
economic importance occasionally reached the highest peaks; occasionally,
also, the global economic momentum was unfavorable to them: as in Eng-
land before the expulsion of 1290, or during the Genoese prominence in
world trade until 1600, or, to cite but another example, in Germany before
and during the Weimar Republic. It is against this background of world
history that the Jewish (and New Christian) socioeconomic factor must be
located and understood.

The Jews in Colonial British America

The final section of this book contains a single essay. The research that has
been done on the Jews in colonial British America is—relative to the
actual number of Jews living in North America before 1800—immense.
No more than two thousand were in North America before 1800, a figure
comparable to the Jews living in the Italian Ghetto of Mantua alone at the
same time. From Salo Wittmayer Baron to Jacob Rader Marcus, scholars
of Jewish history have offered multiple accounts of this subject. They
have dug out from archives and other repositories a huge number of doc-
uments, and published some of them. The flood of publications on the
subject seems unlimited, and even major scholars normally more
engaged with other subjects, such as Arthur Hertzberg, have devoted
volumes to the Jewish experience in Anglo-America before and after the
birth of the United States.
Still, as is always the case in historiography, a much plowed field has
not, for that reason alone, to be deserted. The Jews in North America were
far from isolated, and the vertical line of their trade to Central and South
America, often involving New Christian partners, for instance, is fascinat-
ing, although not comparable, in scope, to the Atlantic “horizontal” routes.
It is a matter of pride to conclude this volume with an essay by
Jonathan D. Sarna. His commitment to, and his knowledge of, American-
Jewish history, from the colonial time to the present, is unsurpassed.
Sarna’s research encompasses a wide variety of aspects of this history,
from the relationship with Israel to single case studies, such as Jewish
communities (Cincinnati, Boston) and Jewish personalities. They are too
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20 | Paolo Bernardini

numerous to quote in a single footnote.26 His constant effort to overcome

a parochial approach to Jewish history has become a model for scholar-
ship. Attention to the interactions among cultures—and not only between
a majority and a minority (concepts themselves particularly risky in the
American “melting pot”)—is heuristically and methodologically the
most rewarding way not only to approach Jewish history but also to
understand other histories, other stories.
Sarna’s essay leads us back to the religious dimension of the Jewish
experience in colonial America, that is to say, to the core of Judaism, for it
can be argued that Judaism is first and foremost religion, faith—much
more than the “ethnic” or “racial” or later “national” character, insofar as
these factors can ever be separated from “religion.” It is traditional reli-
gious observance that explains the unique bond of the people of Israel (at
least from the Middle Ages, if not from 70 A.D.) that Sarna painstakingly
traces, the peculiarities of North American colonial Judaism, and the mul-
tiple ways in which it “was becoming increasingly distinctive from its
European counterpart.” Jewish religion had to confront a new environ-
ment and a new society, and at the same time, the first Jews who migrated
to the New World in the seventeenth century aimed at preserving
Judaism, in its religious and messianic dimension, against the potential
threat of this new, wild, and untamed environment. This was also true of
the spiritual leaders of every religious minority that migrated to the New
World. Thus, the leaders of the Jewish communities acted more in the
religious than in the social and legal spheres. They did not maintain the
overwhelming power of the European kahal, the communal organization
that served as a guild, dominating every aspect of the life of families as
well as individuals. Because of this difference in America, the violent con-
frontations between single individuals and Jewish communal authority,
which we find in eighteenth-century Euro-Jewish history, did not take
place in the Western Hemisphere.
Nothing comparable to a Jewish “state within the state” took root on
American soil. Before and especially after the American Revolution,
American Jewry tended to rely on the laws of the secular state for every
aspect of their social life, whereas religion itself became an intimate way
to preserve tradition and to adore God. Still, as Sarna brilliantly demon-
strates, there were tensions between the “demands of Jewish law and the
norms of the larger secular or Christian society in which Jews moved.”
“Religious laxity” was also very frequent. “Diversity” was a peculiar
mark of distinction in American religious life in a more radical way than
was the case in Europe, at least for the same period: “Within every com-
munity, even within many individual families, a full gamut of religious
observances and attitudes could be found, a spectrum ranging all the
way from deep piety to total indifference.” At the same time, American
colonial Jews—probably, but not necessarily, because of this phenome-
non—”felt more comfortable interacting with Christians than Jews did in
most parts of the world.” Intermarriage between Jews and Christians—
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A Milder Colonization | 21

a phenomenon not infrequent in Europe, but which required preliminary

conversion to Christianity of the Jewish partner—was impressively
recurrent, for 10 to 15 percent of all Jewish marriages in the colonial
period were intermarriages, a figure not found anywhere else in the Jew-
ish world.

A Milder Colonization

Jews and New Christians came to America along with all the other
“nations,” at the very beginning of the colonization. Contrary to the other
nations—Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Britain—they had no fleet or
army, no West India Company or major public support, for they had no
state of their own. In some of its peculiar traits their colonization of the
New World followed the main character of every national colonization.
Yet the fact that they did not have a nation-state at home fostered in them
the desire to settle if not in their own state at least in a free country that
could eventually become a secure haven to protect their faith and exis-
tence. This is precisely what happened in North America. In South Amer-
ica, after the revolutions of the nineteenth century, freedom of conscience
was allowed, but anti-Semitism was and is still present to a degree
unknown in North America. Jews came to America full of hope.
Menasseh ben Israel’s messianic and political work, Hope of Israel, which
helped bring about the readmission of the Jews in Britain, also became
(though without probably any direct or implicit reference to that work)
the name of two important early synagogues in two major centers of
American Judaism, Curaçao and Philadelphia. It is in the hope that this
volume will help bring about better understanding and offer valuable
insight into American Judaism—in its multiple interactions with Europe
and the rest of the world—that I would like to close this introduction and
invite the reader to approach the text.
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22 | Paolo Bernardini

Notes

1. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Antonello Gerbi and Giuliano Gliozzi. It was
completed during my stay at The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) as a Mem-
ber of the School of Historical Studies in the academic year 1998–1999.
2. James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration and Fic-
tion (Princeton, 1992); Herodotus (New Haven, 1998).
3. Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the Representation of the
New World (Cambridge, forthcoming).
4. David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford, 1994); idem, Philo-Semitism
and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982).
5. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of The New World (Cam-
bridge, 1995).
6. Robert Rowland and Isabell Moll Blanes, eds., La demographia y la historia de la familia
(Murcia, 1997); Robert Rowland and Renzo Derosas, eds., Informatica e fonti storiche
(Bologna, 1991); Robert Rowland, Antropologia, historia e diferenca: alguns aspectos
(Porto, 1987).
7. Lucette Valensi and Nathan Wachtel, Memoires juives (Paris, 1986) (English translation,
Berkeley, 1991).
8. Nathan Wachtel, Le Retour des ancêtres: les indiens Urus de Bolivie, XXe–XVIe siècle: essai
d’histoire regressive (Paris, 1990); La Vision des vaincus: les indiens du Perou devant la con-
quête espagnole 1530–1570 (Paris, 1971) (English translation, New York, 1977).
9. Solange Alberro, La actividad del Santo Ufficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España (Mexico,
1981); Inquisition et société au Mexique 1571–1700 (Mexico, 1988); Les Espagnols dans le
Mexique colonial. Histoire d’une acculturation (Paris, 1992).
10. Eva Alexandra Uchmany, La vida entre el Judaismo y el Cristianismo en la Nueva España
1580–1606 (Mexico City, 1994).
11. Günther Böhm, Historia de los Judios en Chile (Santiago, 1984); Judios en el Peru durante
el siglo XIX (Santiago, 1984).
12. Anita Novinsky and Diane Kuperman, eds., Iberia judaica: roteiro de memoria (São Paulo,
1996); Anita Novinsky, Inquisicão: rol dos culpados: fontes para a historia do Brasil (seculo
XVIII) (Rio de Janeiro, 1992); Cristãos novos de Bahia (São Paulo, 1972).
13. Geraldo Pieroni, Les exclus du Royaume: l’Inquisition portugaise et le bannissement au
Brésil, XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1996). See also his Purgatorio colonial: inquisicão portuguesa e
degredo no Brasil (Lisboa, 1994).
14. Gérard Nahon, La Terre sainte au temps de kabbalistes 1492–1592 (Paris, 1997); Métropoles
et périphéries séfarades d’Occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jerusalem
(Paris, 1993); Inscriptions hebraiques et juives de la France médiévale (Paris, 1986). Nahon,
together with Henri Méchoulan, has also provided the contemporary reference edition
of a work most relevant to this text, Hope of Israel by Menasseh ben Israel (Paris, 1979).
The introductory essay and the commentary by Nahon and Méchoulan have been
translated into English, in the reprint of the 1652 English translation of the Esperança de
Israel by Moses Hall (Oxford, 1987).
15. Silvia Marzagalli, I negozianti delle città portuali in età napoleonica. Amburgo, Bordeaux e
Livorno di fronte al blocco continentale 1806–1813 (Ph.D. diss., EUI) (Florence 1993).
16. Mordechai Arbell, La Nacion. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the Caribbean (Tel Aviv,
1981) (bilingual, English-Hebrew account of Arbell’s archeological trips to the
Caribbean islands); Mordechai Arbell, comp., Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the
Caribbean and the Guianas: A Bibliography (Providence and New York, 2000).
17. John D. Garrigus, A Struggle for Respect: The Free Coloreds of Pre-revolutionary Saint-
Domingue 1760–1769 (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University) (Baltimore, 1998).
18. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995).
19. Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in the World Trade 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989); Empires
and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London, 1990);
00 Intro 1/24/01 11:08 AM Page 23

A Milder Colonization | 23

Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy
1585–1713 (London, 1997).
20. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Portland, 1998).
21. Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean 1648–1795 (Leiden, 1998); The
Dutch in the Americas: A Narrative History with the Catalogue of an Exhibition of Rare
Prints, Maps and Illustrated Books from The John Carter Brown Library (Providence, 1997).
22. Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of
Atlantic Slavery (New York, 1999); Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in
Comparative Perspective (London, 1986); Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition
(Pittsburgh, 1977).
23. James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs 1580–1650 (Baltimore,
1993); Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain 1620–1650 (New Brunswick, 1983).
24. Ernst Pijning, Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy and Society in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Rio de Janeiro (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University) (Baltimore, 1997).
25. Pieter C. Emmer and Femme Gaastra, eds., The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in
European Expansion 1450–1800 (Aldershot, 1996); Pieter C. Emmer et al., eds., Wirtschaft
und Handel der Kolonialreiche (Munich, 1988); Pieter C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic
Economy 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Aldershot, 1998).
26. But see, e.g., Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience (New York, 1997);
Jonathan D. Sarna and Nancy H. Klein, eds., The Jews of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1989);
Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordechai Noah (New York, 1981);
Hebrew Sources in American History (Cincinnati, 1981).
00 Intro 1/24/01 11:08 AM Page 24
01 1/24/01 11:12 AM Page 25

PART I

THE OLD NEW WORLD: IDEAS AND

REPRESENTATIONS OF AMERICA
IN EUROPEAN AND JEWISH CONSCIOUSNESS
AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
01 1/24/01 11:12 AM Page 26
01 1/24/01 11:12 AM Page 27

– Chapter 1 –

BIBLICAL HISTORY AND THE AMERICAS:

THE LEGEND OF SOLOMON’S OPHIR, 1492–1591

James Romm

O NE CAN ONLY IMAGINE how delighted Columbus would have been to

know that his discoveries would one day be studied in a city called
Providence. To him, and to many of his contemporaries, the geography of
the New World could best be understood within the framework of the
Holy Bible, and within the historical scheme of a Divine Providence that
had determined the fate of humankind from the moment of its creation.
Moreover, the names of places were immensely important to Columbus
and his age as signposts of how those places fit into biblical mythology—
or into the body of myth and science inherited from Classical antiquity.
Indeed, one wonders what he would have thought of the fact that this
essay was first presented in a place called Salomon Hall. As I shall show
in what follows, he would almost certainly have taken this name as proof
that King Solomon had sent ships to the New World long before Spanish
caravels went there, and would assert, as he did in fact believe, that his
own travels were only a reprise or a reenactment of the voyages des-
cribed in the Bible to the rich trading port of Ophir.
The name Ophir occurs at various points in the Hebrew Scriptures,
though in two very different contexts. First, in an important chapter of Gen-
esis (10:29) tracing the lines of descent begot by Noah, Ophir is named as
one of the sons of Yoktan, a descendant of Noah’s eldest son Shem. Later, in
parallel passages of the books of Kings (1 Kings 9:26–28, 10:11, 10:22) and
Chronicles (2 Chronicles 8:17, 9:10, 9:21) concerning the reign of King
Solomon, the same name designates a place, the land from which Solomon’s
ships had brought back gold, silver, exotic animals, and a precious variety
of wood called almug. Probably no connection should be drawn between
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28 | James Romm

the personal name and the toponym, as though the Ophir of Genesis were
a settler of the land that bore his name1—though such links were com-
monly made by early interpreters in the cases of other Noachic descen-
dants listed in the same passage of Genesis (indeed, the three sons of Noah
were identified throughout the Middle Ages with the three parts of the Old
World, a scheme we shall return to below). Significantly, the authors of the
Septuagint and early commentators often write the name of the place as
“Sophir” or “Souphir,” whereas the name of the person never takes this
form. However, Renaissance scholars who were unaware of this linguistic
distinction made much of the apparent homonymy, as we shall see.
Incidental references elsewhere in the Bible (Is. 13:12, Job 28:16) speak
of the “gold of Ophir” as a very fine gold, and an eighth-century B.C.
Hebrew inscription found on a potsherd also contains this phrase in a
similar context,2 showing that the land of Ophir was well known in bib-
lical times for its mineral wealth. Modern attempts to locate “King
Solomon’s mines” have been unsuccessful, though speculation has gen-
erally centered on southern Africa, Arabia, or the western coast of India.
The trading port of Sofala in East Africa was recognized as a possible cor-
relate as early as the sixteenth century (see below), while the Indian city
called Souppara by Ptolemy (7.1.6) and Arrian has been championed by
more recent interpreters.3 The modern state of Israel, in an effort to link
its own topography to the biblical past, assigned the name Ofira to the
Red Sea port of Sharm el Sheik after capturing the Sinai Peninsula in
1948; but this was in fact the region where Solomon built and docked his
treasure fleet, not the destination of its voyages.
Our purpose here, however, is not to join the modern debate over the
location of Ophir but rather to survey its early history and examine how it
figured into later thinking about the significance of the Americas. Already
in the first few centuries A.D., Josephus and other commentators on the
Bible placed Ophir in India, based on inherited notions about the riches of
that fabled land. The Greeks had associated gold with India since the time
of Herodotus, and Classical geographers sometimes imagined that an
island called Chryse (Golden) lay opposite the mouth of the Ganges; Jose-
phus seems to have equated this Chryse with Ophir.4 Jerome, in his Latin
translation of the Bible, once translates the phrase “gold of Ophir” to “gold
of India.” This tradition was not universally followed by later mapmakers,
however, who seem to have been troubled at the thought of ancient vessels
sailing so far. The author of the Hereford Map, for example, gives the name
Ophyr to one of four imaginary islands in the Red Sea, a much closer des-
tination for Solomon’s vessels, docked as they were at the tip of the Sinai.
However, Martin Behaim, whose 1492 globe is thought to have been known
to Columbus, drew Ophir as an island in the mouth of the river Ganges, fol-
lowing the identification with Chryse first established by Josephus.5
Columbus himself took a strong interest in the question of Ophir’s
location, and, perhaps well before the Behaim globe was created, used the
Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles to support the hypothesis that
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Biblical History and the Americas | 29

he could reach Asia by sailing west. Columbus made many references to

Ophir in his annotations to Pierre D’Ailly’s Imago Mundi and Pius II’s His-
toria rerum ubique gestarum, and on several occasions he quotes either the
relevant passages of Scripture or the learned discussions he had looked
up in Josephus and other commentaries.6 None of these postils can be
dated with any certainty, but some scholars believe they predate the first
voyage to America; if this is the case, they show that passages from the
Hebrew Bible helped convince Columbus that such a voyage was possi-
ble.7 That is, according to how Columbus saw it, one could reach the east
by sailing west—and the first place one would thereby arrive at would be
the easternmost point of Asia, Solomon’s Ophir. The Hebrew Bible thus
should be counted among the ancient texts that informed the discovery
of the Americas, as well as the more familiar Classical sources such as
Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Seneca along with their medieval redactors.
Not only Ophir, moreover, but another then mysterious biblical locale,
Tarshish, figured into Columbus’s calculations concerning the feasibility
of a voyage across the Atlantic. In one of his postils to D’Ailly’s Imago
Mundi, for instance, Columbus discusses the import of 2 Chronicles 9:21:
“Solomon’s ships went to Tarshish with the servants of Hiram; once every
three years the ships of Tarshish used to come bringing gold, silver, ivory,
peacocks, and apes.” The Tarshish referred to here may be identified as the
city of Tarsus in Asia Minor, or, alternatively, the Iberian port the Greeks
called Tartessus.8 But Columbus was more inclined to equate it with
Ophir, especially since he had read elsewhere in the Bible (I Kings 22:48)
that “ships of Tarshish” (meaning, perhaps, ships sturdy enough to reach
Tartessus) were ordered to sail to Ophir for gold. Indeed, the two trade
routes, already partly confused in the Hebrew Scriptures, came to be
entirely conflated in Columbus’s mind, as we can see from his notes to the
Imago Mundi. Here Columbus cites two learned Bible commentators,
Nicholas of Lyra and Jerome, who placed “Tarshish” neither in Asia Minor
nor on the Atlantic coast of Spain but on the eastern fringe of Asia, based
presumably on the fact that all the exotic trade goods mentioned in the
Chronicles passage could be found there. Then, carrying the discussion fur-
ther, Columbus cites Josephus, once again, for the idea that Ophir, too,
belonged in India. The juxtaposition of the two hypotheses shows clearly
the direction of Columbus’s thinking: Both Tarshish and Ophir were in the
Far East, and thus could be considered more or less the same place. Fur-
ther speculation along these lines emerges from a presumably later work,
the Libro de las profecias, in which Columbus (as we shall see below) argues
strenuously that the Tarshish of the Bible is an island, just as Ophir was
thought to be, and thus a different place than the city of Tarsus in Cilicia.
The crucial verse from Chronicles, therefore, with its mention of fleets
returning from Tarshish “every three years,” told Columbus something
remarkable about the eastward extension of Asia. Interpreting this “three
years” to mean the duration (not the frequency) of the round-trip voyages
of the ships of Tarshish, Columbus concluded that the Asian land mass
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30 | James Romm

must be so vast as to require more than a year’s travel between Jerusalem

and its eastern edge (more precisely, a year and thirteen days, the figure
he cites elsewhere in the Imago Mundi based on the biblical commentary
of Jerome).9 With so much of the globe taken up by Asia, he reasoned, the
space left for the Atlantic Ocean must be narrow indeed. The same verse
from Chronicles, moreover, is quoted by Columbus in a postil to the His-
toria rerum, along with a long excerpt copied out of Josephus’s discussion
of Solomon’s fleet and its voyages to Ophir. Evidently, Columbus had
done considerable research on the location of Ophir and Tarshish in an
effort to prove to himself that the two places were one and that they lay
so far to the east that a ship sailing westward could reach them.
After he had himself made that westward crossing, moreover,
Columbus remained focused on King Solomon and Ophir in his thinking
about where he had gone and what he had found. According to Peter
Martyr, Columbus identified the island of Hispaniola with Ophir very
early on in this thought process, perhaps at the first moment of discov-
ery.10 And other evidence attests that the idea stayed with him over the
course of his life. In an undatable postil he wrote in his copy of Pliny’s
Natural History, he spoke of the first place he had found in the New World
as “Feyti, or Ofir, or Cipangu, to which I have given the name Spag-
nola.”11 This note reveals Columbus’s remarkable ability to entertain
numerous diverse and conflicting geographic hypotheses at the same
time; Ophir, traditionally located near India, could hardly be the same
place as Cipangu, the name Marco Polo had given to the island of Japan.
Moreover, the idea that either place would need to be renamed by
Columbus—since both were well known and written of under their orig-
inal names—also raises troubling questions. But what concerns us here is
his readiness to identify as Ophir the island called Feyti by its inhabitants
(the origin of the modern name Haiti). Moreover, in a letter to the Pope
dated February 1502, Columbus repeats the identification of Hispaniola
as both Ophir and Cipangu, and also adds two new identities, “Cethia”
or Cethim and Uphaz—two more placeless biblical toponyms, the former
an obscure island (Isa. 23:1–2, 23:12, Jer. 2:10–11), the latter, more signifi-
cantly, a land from which gold is brought (Jer. 10:9).12
Columbus’s ten-year insistence that Hispaniola was really Ophir, or
Uphaz, or Cipangu—all places which were known to be rich in gold or
other rarities—were on one level good public relations; after all, the sover-
eigns who were financing Columbus’s journeys, Ferdinand and Isabella,
had to be convinced that their efforts were worthwhile even though very
little precious cargo had in fact returned to their shores. But it would be
wrong to see Columbus as a mere self-promoter in his use of biblical names
for his own discoveries. He was, after all, a man of deep piety and Christ-
ian faith who earnestly desired the universal triumph of the Catholic
Church under the leadership of the Spanish monarchs—monarchs who
had already struck a great blow on behalf of the Church by reconquering
Granada from the Muslims, just before the first voyage to the New World.
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Biblical History and the Americas | 31

Throughout his life Columbus exhorted Ferdinand and Isabella, and the
Pope, to the further propagation of the faith and even the reconquest of
Jerusalem from the infidels in a new crusade.13 The gold he sought in the
New World, or at times claimed he had found, was to serve as the endow-
ment of this Christian mission. In this context, the legend of Ophir loomed
large indeed in Columbus’s mind, for it had not escaped the admiral’s
notice that, in the Books of Chronicles and Kings, Ophir’s gold was used to
finance the building of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, and its precious
almug wood actually served as the supports14 for that holy structure.
The treasure from the new Ophir in the Americas, then, would serve
to build a new temple in a newly sanctified Jerusalem. Such are the impli-
cations of the letter Columbus sent to Ferdinand and Isabella from his
fourth voyage, the so-called lettera rarissima, dated 7 July 1503. In a famous
passage of this letter, Columbus extols the power of gold to further the
mission of the Christian faith. “O, most excellent gold!” Columbus writes.
“Who has gold has a treasure with which he gets what he wants, imposes
his will on the world, and even helps souls to Paradise.” There follows a
brief ethnographic note about the burial of gold among the Indians, and
then, abruptly, Columbus turns his thoughts to King Solomon. Invoking
yet again the well-worn passages from Chronicles and Kings, together
with Josephus’s commentary on them, Columbus reckons the golden
treasure that Solomon collected from Ophir, the place Josephus had called
Aurea, or “Land of Gold.” “Josephus says that this gold was obtained in
Aurea; if so, I declare that those mines of the Aurea are but a part of those
in Veragua,” Columbus writes, speaking of the South American coast he
was then exploring. “Solomon bought all that gold, precious stones, and
silver; but you may send orders to collect it if you see fit.”15 Then, citing a
new biblical passage concerning the legacy of Solomon’s father, King
David, Columbus asserts that the gold used in building the Temple had
come from the Indies, that is, from the lands known to Josephus simulta-
neously as Aurea and Ophir.16 The endpoint of this convoluted train of
thought suddenly becomes clear in the next sentence, startling in its clar-
ity and conviction: “Jerusalem and the Mount of Zion are now to be
rebuilt by Christian hands,” as foretold in a psalm that, Columbus goes on
to imply, foretold his own leading role in this enterprise.
Nor was this the largest of the spiritual implications Columbus saw
in his supposed rediscovery of Ophir. For the rebuilding of the temple in
Jerusalem, as Columbus knew from his readings of Scripture, was one of
a series of events that would lead to the End of Days, the Apocalypse, and
the universal reign of Christ on earth. Columbus’s apocalyptic or mes-
sianic fantasies have been well documented in several recent studies, but
the specific role within them of his thinking about Ophir has not as yet
been fully explored. That role can be discerned not only from the lettera
rarissima but also from the unfinished manuscript called the Libro de las
profecias, compiled during the years 1501 to 1503 by Columbus, his son
Ferdinand, and a Carthusian friar by the name of Gorricio.
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32 | James Romm

In the final section of this work, Columbus and his collaborators trot
out the familiar verses from Kings and Chronicles describing Hiram’s treas-
ure fleet and the voyages to Ophir, together with a new set of citations refer-
ring to Tarshish, the land from which Solomon brought silver.17 Columbus,
in his marginal annotations to these quotes, insists over and over on the
insular character of this silver-bearing Tarshish, distinguishing it carefully
from the city Tarsus in Asia Minor, so as to bolster the claim made in the
postils to the Imago Mundi and repeated here in the Libro that Tarshish and
Ophir are one and the same place. Columbus further identifies both places
with yet another biblical island, Cethim, as he also does in his February
1502 letter to the Pope (written during the same period as the composition
of the Libro). Though he does not here make any attempt to equate these
places with Hispaniola, as he does in that letter, the implications of his
thinking are clear within the messianic context of the Libro as a whole.
As noted in an important article by Pauline Moffitt Watts, many of the
citations in this complex work speak of the recovery of Mt. Zion and the
conversion of all humanity to one universal faith as signs of the coming
Apocalypse.18 In both cases, historical time is conceived of as returning to
its beginnings as it comes to its end, uniting alpha and omega in one eter-
nal circle. Columbus presumably thought of his voyages to Solomon’s
Ophir in similar terms: If a modern mariner were to recommence trading
with ports forgotten since the ninth century B.C., the world would in some
sense be restored to its biblical condition. Columbus becomes an avatar of
the ancient past as well as a forerunner of the apocalyptic future—exactly
the same combination of roles he took upon himself in his reinterpretation
of a passage from Seneca’s tragedy Medea, as I have discussed elsewhere.19
Whereas, in his references to the Medea, Columbus identifies himself with
Tiphys, the navigator who had once piloted Jason’s epochal voyage and
who (according to a spurious reading in the manuscripts of Seneca’s play)
would ply the seas once again at the end of that epoch, he seems in his
treatment of biblical legend to have seen himself as a latter-day King
Hiram, supplying naval wherewithal to a noble monarchy and collecting
the riches required for a rebuilding of the ancient Temple.20
Columbus’s idea of his discoveries as both a return to earliest biblical
history and a step forward toward the Apocalypse assumed its most dra-
matic form during the third voyage, just before the compilation of the
Libro de las profecias. In a justly famous passage of a letter to the Spanish
sovereigns recounting this voyage, Columbus claims to have arrived at
the very outset of biblical time, that is, at the earthly paradise of the Book
of Genesis. He was in fact off the coast of the South American continent,
at the mouth of what is now the Orinoco River—a river whose breadth
and volume of fresh water, as Columbus realized, surpassed what was
possible for any ordinary “island.” His ideas about Ophir and Tarshish
being thus inapplicable, Columbus began a new line of speculation about
the geography of the earth. In his letter he explains to the Spanish mon-
archs that the globe is not quite spherical, as Ptolemy had believed, but
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Biblical History and the Americas | 33

rises to a summit in its Southern Hemisphere—a summit he compares, in

a sublime pair of similes, to the stalk of a pear or the nipple of a woman’s
breast. Ptolemy had been oblivious of this elevation because he knew
nothing of the Southern Hemisphere; Aristotle had speculated about it
but had not known where to place it. Now Columbus claims to have
found it, as proved by the immense flow of fresh water spilling down
from its slopes. Then, in another awesome leap of mythic thinking,
Columbus links this immense river with the four rivers said in Genesis to
flow out of Paradise—another locale sought but not found by ancient
authorities, though agreed by all to lie somewhere in the east.
Columbus then reasons that he is in fact sailing upward toward the
summit of Paradise, which lies atop the stalk of the global pear or at the
nipple of the breast, and that, though he can never approach the top, the
river he has found must be flowing directly from that distant place.
Whether or not the Admiral was aware that in medieval mythic geogra-
phy the garden of Eden stands directly opposite Jerusalem on the other
side of the earth, his “discovery” of Paradise on the third voyage seems
closely connected with his growing apprehension of the coming End of
Days. The return to the starting point of human history, in the biblical
scheme that Columbus clearly adopts in the Libro de las profecias, signals
and perhaps even initiates the approach of its close; the ends of the time
line would be joined to form a circle, and the ancient kingdom of
Jerusalem would be resurrected as the Christian New Jerusalem.21
Columbus, as many students of his writings can attest, had an astound-
ing ability to find resonance between his own circumstances and the narra-
tives of ancient myth, whether those of the Bible or of Greco-Roman
antiquity. The legend of Solomon’s treasure fleet was only one of the many
tales that figured into his understanding of his life and discoveries, but an
important one, given the support it lent to his presentiments of the Apoca-
lypse and to his understanding of his own role in Christian eschatology. As
a new Hiram, voyaging once again to Ophir and supplying the wealth
needed to rebuild the ancient temple, Columbus saw himself taking part in
a grand reenactment of a glorious moment in the biblical past; and such
returns to early mythic patterns confirmed his belief that the ancient
prophecies were being fulfilled and that history was at last reaching its end.

Ophir and Ethnography—the Later Sixteenth Century

Columbus indicates in the Libro de las profecias that the biblical prophets
had foreseen not only his crossing of the Atlantic, but also his efforts to
convert the inhabitants of the Americas to Christianity; but who were
these inhabitants, in biblical terms? Columbus seems not to have been
troubled by this question, since in his eyes the natives of the Americas
were simply inhabitants of the Asian littoral or of the islands offshore—
subjects, in other words, of the Great Khan (who had already become a
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34 | James Romm

target of Christian missionaries in the fifteenth century). Though preoccu-

pied throughout his life with the geography of Scripture, Columbus had lit-
tle interest in its relevance to ethnography; indeed, he seems not to have
noticed, or not to have cared, that Ophir is not only a place but a person—
one of the descendants of Shem, listed in the great roll call of Noah’s off-
spring in chapter 10 of Genesis. Had he remarked on this homonymy, his
lines of inference might have gone far indeed; as Samuel Eliot Morison has
remarked, for Columbus, two plus two did not equal four, but rather
twenty-two. It was left instead to those who followed Columbus, and who
tried to assimilate his discoveries to their understanding of the world, to
wrestle with the question of how the natives of the Americas fit into the
biblical scheme of the peopling of the earth. Though few went as far as the
Portuguese artist Vasco Fernandes, who in the early sixteenth century
painted a Brazilian Indian as one of the three wise men adoring the Christ
child, most had their own theories as to how the American natives were
connected to the peoples of the Bible—theories that were hotly debated for
more than a century after Columbus’s death and that have continued to
inform religious and racial mythology right up to the present day.22
Let us return for a moment to the interpretive dogma that underlies
this debate. Since only Noah and his sons had survived the Flood, all the
peoples of the earth had descended from them, according to the “family
tree” of humankind in Genesis 10; only heretics like La Peyrère claimed
that other, non-Noachic or Pre-Adamic peoples were included among the
nations known to sixteenth-century Europeans. But the three sons of
Noah had traditionally been linked to the three continents of the Old
World, before the discovery of the New (Fig. 1.1).23 How, scholars and
clerics wondered, had one of Noah’s descendants traveled into the New
World so as to fill it with his offspring? And from which line had that
ancient colonist come—from that of Japheth, Ham, or Shem? All the new
tools of Renaissance humanism were brought into play in an effort to
answer these questions. In the new age of printed books and of the
revival of Classical learning, scholars and theologians had an immense
array of material on which to draw in formulating their theories of Indian
origins; and since all educated men were now being trained to read
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, a kind of pseudo-science of spurious linguis-
tics and false etymologies came into play in support of these theories.
Guillaume de Postel, for example—a French scholar who had trav-
eled to the East in order to learn and record Asian languages—showed in
the treatise Cosmographicae Disciplinae (1561) how a little linguistic expert-
ise could go a long, long way.24 Postel constructed a bizarrely detailed
scheme of the migrations of Noah’s progeny across the face of the globe,
and correlated these wanderings with the early human history recorded
by Classical Roman mythologists like Cato the Elder. Noah, claims Postel
citing Cato, was the same person known to the Romans as Janus, since
Janus had traveled to Italy from Armenia, which is the landing place of
Noah’s Ark, and had been accompanied by a tribe called the Galli, whose
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Biblical History and the Americas | 35

FIGURE 1.1 T-O map showing continents identified with the three sons of Noah, from
1472 Augsburg edition of Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX. (Courtesy
of The Newberry Library, Chicago)

name Postel derived from the Hebrew gal meaning “flood.”25 Having
thus traced Noah, a.k.a. Janus, to Rome, Postel gives him a third name,
Hattal, a Hebrew alias meaning “dew” or “mist,” and derives the word
“Italy” (or Hattal-y) from this name. The linguistic contortions get carried
even further as Noah orders his son Japhet, who had accompanied him
to Europe, to spread the three Hebrew letters of his name Hattal through-
out the rest of the world. Thus Japhet, as he moved south into Africa and
west beyond the shores of Spain, had named both the Atlas Mountains
and the island known to Plato as Atlantis. It was but a short step from
there to the New World, since the residents of Atlantis, according to Plato,
had been great sailors and navigators who had explored the “true conti-
nent” lying to the west of their land. So the Atlanteans had colonized the
Atlantic coast of the New World, spreading the seed of Japhet, along with
the linguistic sign of his father, into the Caribbean and North America.
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36 | James Romm

But Postel did not stop there, for he had yet to include the famous
Ophir in his ethnographic scheme—and Ophir was, after all, a son of
Shem, not Japhet. In yet a further extension of his etymological fancies,
Postel traced Ophir to the Pacific shore of the New World, to Peru, or
“Pheru,” as Postel names it in an alternate spelling, presumably to bring
the name into closer association with Ophir. Thus, whereas the line of
Japhet had traveled west to reach the New World, the line of Shem had
gone east, beyond the furthest shore of Asia. “Nam ex altera parte, nempe
ab ortu, ex Semia Ophir in suam Pheru vel Peru possessionem venerat, qui
rebus sacris praeesset” [For from the other direction, that is from the east,
from Asia, Ophir came into his estate, Pheru or Peru, in order to be in
charge of Divine matters], Postel wrote.26 From this dual ethnography, Pos-
tel derives a remarkable Christian theology. The line of Shem, he explains,
being descendants of Noah’s blessed and first-born son, had been charged
by their father with the Divine mission of spreading monotheistic faith
throughout the world; their descendants, after all, had become the first
Jews, many generations later. Thus, it was part of God’s plan for the prop-
agation of faith that the Shemites, too, had made it to the New World—“in
order to be in charge of sacred matters,” as Postel puts it.
Again turning to Roman mythology for confirmation, Postel notes
that the great prophetess of ancient Rome, the Sibyl, had predicted the
eventual triumph there of the Christian faith, another case in which an
Asian and a descendant of Shem had spread monotheistic faith beyond
the borders of his ancestral homeland. Noah, or Janus as he was known
to the Romans, had evidently made his plan for the spread of monothe-
ism clear to the Sibyl before his death. The arrival of Ophir in Peru had
thus been an early forerunner of the journey of Christ’s apostles to Europe
and other pagan lands, and part of God’s plan for the proselytization of
His faith. “Nec enim fieri aliter potest, quin summus ille seculi aurei min-
ister et institutor Ianus ita instituisset ut ubivis in toto orbe esset unus
minister ex Semi auctoritate.… Sic in Atlantide est credendum ut ex
Iectani filliis aliquis una cum Iapetitis fuerit missus, ita ut Peru posset esse
Ophiri pars” [It cannot be otherwise but that that greatest overseer and
founder of the Golden Age, Janus, thus established that everywhere in the
whole world would be a single overseer from the high office of Shem.…
Thus in the Atlantic region, it must be believed that someone from the
sons of Jectan (i.e., the grandsons of Shem) was sent along with the
Japhethites, in such a way that Peru became the inheritance of Ophir].27
The project of Postel’s Cosmographicae Disciplinae—the tracing of all
the wanderings and settlements of the sons of Noah in an effort to explain
the location of the earth’s races—was taken up ten years later by the
learned Spanish humanist Benito Arias Montano in a treatise titled Pha-
leg. This treatise (named for one of the descendants of Noah—phaleg
meaning “division” in Hebrew—because, according to Genesis 10, “in his
days the earth was divided”) was then included in Arias Montano’s
learned 1572 work, Antiquitatum Iudaicarum. Arias Montano had earlier
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Biblical History and the Americas | 37

learned Hebrew and had directed the immense Spanish Polyglot Bible of
1572 with its detailed commentary on many abstruse questions about
biblical times.28 In Phaleg he used his knowledge of Hebrew to assert not
only that Ophir had founded Peru, which thereafter (as Postel implied)
bore a metathesized version of his name, but that this South American
land was known to the Old Testament under the name Parva’im. Par-
va’im, mentioned in the 2nd Book of Chronicles, is another unlocatable
biblical toponym like Ophir or Uphaz, and, not surprisingly, another land
from which gold was brought to Jerusalem in the days of Solomon. Arias
Montano noted that the “-im” portion of this word could be understood
as the Hebrew dual ending, and hence understood the name to mean “the
two Parvas” or “the two Perus,” and further interpreted this to mean “the
two Americas.” He writes, “Ophir… secundum abyssi magnae littora
genus nomenque produxit suum, ad duas regiones angusto terrarum, sed
longo Isthmo interiecto distinctas, quae ad Salomonis usque atque ulteri-
ora etiam tempora integrum retinuere vocabulum Ophir; quod paulo
post inversum utrique parti seorsum adscriptum est, atque alterutra pars
Peru; utraque autem simul dualis numeri pronuntiatione Pervaim sive
Parvaim dicta est” [Ophir … carried forward his name and his race along
the shores of the great abyss, and to the two regions of these lands sepa-
rated by a long isthmus between; and these retained intact the name
Ophir up to the times of Solomon and even afterward; but the name was
shortly afterward reversed, and assigned to both portions of this region
on their own; and so each part was called Pervaim or Parvaim, using the
pronunciation of the dual number].29
In good scholarly fashion, Arias Montano illustrated the ethno-
graphic scheme of Phaleg with a map (also published in his Polyglot
Bible)30 showing with numbers and letters the places to which each of
Noah’s sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons had migrated (Figs. 1.2 and
1.3). One can see from this map that he has postulated a land bridge
across the Bering Strait (known to the Renaissance as the Straits of
Anian), so as to make the intercontinental journey of Ophir possible. He
has also been careful to give two locations for the number nineteen, des-
ignating Ophir’s settlements in North and South America, to account for
the dual form of the Hebrew word parvaim. This beautifully drawn map
represents the first detailed attempt, so far as I know, to use cartography
as a tool for investigating historical anthropology, and is also the first to
posit a land bridge across the northern Pacific—the very route by which,
as most scientists now believe, humankind crossed into the Americas.
But Arias Montano was not satisfied with merely tracing Ophir into
the New World as Postel had done. He seems to have assumed that the
descendants of Noah were listed by Genesis in geographic order, moving
from west to east, and that therefore Ophir’s eastward travels had been
surpassed by those of his brother Iobab, represented as number twenty-
one on the map, the last mentioned and therefore the easternmost
Shemite. (An intervening brother, Havilah, represented by number
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38 | James Romm
Page 38

FIGURE 1.2 Ethnographic map of Benito Arias Montano, Antiquitatum Iudaicarum Libri IX (Lugduni Batavorum 1593).
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Biblical History and the Americas | 39

FIGURE 1.3 Detail of Montano map in Figure 1.2.

twenty, was situated by Arias Montano in the Asian land known to Gen-
esis [2:11] as Havilah, and therefore this number alone does not fit the
map’s scheme of eastward progression.) Moreover, Iobab and his broth-
ers, the sons of Ioktan, were said by Genesis to have settled in lands as far
east as a mountain named Sepher, and even beyond that. If Iobab, then,
had settled to the east of Ophir, the founder of Peru, then, reasoned Arias
Montano, the Mountain of Sepher could only be the Andes range, repre-
sented by the number twenty-two here—the only physical feature
included in the key to this otherwise purely ethnographic map. Here an
etymological problem presented itself. Why, if Ophir had left such clear
memorials of his name in “Peru” and “Parva’im,” had the names of Iobab
and the Sepher Mountain so entirely changed or perished? Arias Mon-
tano has a solution, which he proposes in the notes that accompany his
ethnographic map. Under the rubric “Sepher Mountain” he admits that
these peaks are “called Andes by our times,” but adds: “In this part of the
world there remains to this day a very ancient city Yuctan, which retains
the name of the founder of this race.” Iobab, in other words, had memo-
rialized not himself but his father Ioktan in the New World, just as,
according to Postel, Noah’s son Japhet had spread his father’s alternate
name Hattal throughout the earth.31
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40 | James Romm

Like Postel, Arias Montano made his ethnographic inquiries serve the
purposes of a larger theology. In an extended discussion of the biblical
Ophir—not just the person, but the place named for him, i.e., the destina-
tion of Solomon’s treasure fleet—Arias Montano concludes that virtually
all the gold known to antiquity had been brought out of this port and
spread throughout the world. The other sources of ancient gold (rivers
like the Pactolus and the Haemus), he reasons, simply could not have pro-
duced enough of the precious metal to account for the vast quantities spo-
ken of in Greek, Roman, and biblical texts. A provident deity had created
one source of gold for the entire earth, just as he had isolated its other
resources in one land or another, in order to compel the races to share
their goods and thus restore the original, Adamic unity of all humankind,
Arias Montano argues. The three sons of Noah may have scattered in
three different directions, but their descendants had been brought
together again by their quest for natural resources like the gold of Ophir.32
In this remarkable exegesis of the story of Solomon’s ships, as noted in
Gliozzi’s study Adamo e il nuovo mundo, Arias Montano supplies a Divine
mandate for the great commercial enterprise of his day, the systematic
Spanish plunder of the gold of Mexico and Peru.
Such were the theological and eschatological themes that dominated
the scholarly discussions of Ophir, the person and the place, in the third
quarter of the sixteenth century, but in 1578 a new approach, more gen-
uinely scientific and modern, was applied to the subject by the great Jesuit
thinker and New World sojourner José de Acosta. In that year he pub-
lished his Latin treatise De Natura Novi Orbis, later translated into Spanish
and reprinted as the first two books of the famous Historia natural y moral
de las Indias.33 In two chapters devoted to the Ophir debate (1.13 and 14),
Acosta attacked the etymological approach of bookish scholars such as
Arias Montano and, in particular, dismissed the correlation of Yucatan
with Ioktan as a mere linguistic coincidence. As for the derivation of
“Peru” from “Ophir,” Acosta put forth the devastating counterargument
that the natives of South America, among whom he had done firsthand
research, never used “Peru” themselves to refer to their own homeland,
but regarded it as a Spanish term, derived accidentally from the name of
a local river. Later commentators took up Acosta’s argument and
expanded it, producing a marvelous anecdote to explain the origin of the
name “Peru”: The first Spanish conquistadors to encounter a Peruvian
native, as they sailed up one of the coastal streams, eagerly demanded to
know where they were, and were told by the innocent native, “Beru,
Beru,” meaning “in the river.” In another version of this story, designed to
cast even greater ridicule on the Ophir-Peru etymology, the native whom
the Spanish interrogated thought he was being asked for his own name,
which happened to be Beru.34
It would require more space than this essay can accommodate to
describe all the ingenious arguments Acosta brings to bear on the ques-
tion of whether Solomon (or any ancient navigator) had sailed to the New
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Biblical History and the Americas | 41

World, or whether the American Indians were descended from Ophir.

Suffice it to say that he changed the framework of this debate forever, and
that anyone who took part in it from that point onward had to wrestle
with Acosta.35 For example, the question of whether ancient navigators,
who lacked the use of the compass to determine position at sea, were
capable of making oceanic voyages was raised by Acosta for the first
time, touching off a desperate search by Ophir-partisans through the
Bible and Greco-Roman literature for references to the compass. Further-
more, Acosta pointed out the thereafter notorious problem that the New
World contained animal and plant life unknown to the Old; surely, he
argued, Solomon’s ships had not brought llamas and jaguars with them
on their voyages to the so-called land of Ophir. In the end, Acosta rules
out the idea of ancient transoceanic voyages either in biblical or in Greco-
Roman times, and supports the idea first raised by Arias Montano that
early humans had crossed into the New World over a land bridge
between Asia and North America. But he refutes the notion that any
knowledge of the Americas had thereafter been passed back to Asia, so as
to leave its traces in the Bible or in ancient Greek or Latin writings, in
which, as a Jesuit scholar, he was thoroughly versed.
Though he arrives at these conclusions by keen scientific reasoning,
Acosta was nevertheless a man of God, and in the final chapters of the De
Natura Novi Orbis he, like Arias Montano and Postel before him, turns to
theology as a way of understanding the meaning of Columbus’s discov-
eries. God had revealed to Acosta’s own Christian Age the great secret of
the Western Hemisphere, a secret He had kept veiled from pagan and
from Jewish antiquity. Indeed, the Divine Providence that had led
Columbus to the New World was visible in the supernatural properties of
the magnet, Acosta claimed, and of the compass fashioned from it. This
strange, northward-pointing stone, without which oceanic travel was
clearly impossible, embodied within itself the infinite wisdom and
unfathomable mystery of the Divine mind, and demonstrated to Acosta
that faith ultimately must take precedence over reason.36 The discovery of
the Americas proved to Acosta that his own era, the era of the magnetic
compass, was the blessed Golden Age in which God had chosen to reveal
the half of the globe kept hidden since its first creation.
The impact of Acosta’s writings can be judged from the reaction it
produced in one of his contemporaries, a figure who perhaps best pre-
serves a sense of the intellectual and spiritual ferment surrounding the
Ophir question in the Renaissance. Abraham Ortelius was neither a cleric
like Arias Montano nor a philosopher like Acosta, but a humble map pub-
lisher and amateur humanist working in the town of Antwerp.37 Ortelius
is best known for his atlas of maps covering the entire earth, the Theatrum
Orbis Terrarum, published in numerous editions and in various different
languages from 1570 on; but he also produced a geographic reference
work, the Synonomia, later renamed the Thesaurus Geographicus, a diction-
ary of ancient place names and their latter-day equivalents. In both
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42 | James Romm

works, the Theatrum and the Thesaurus, Ortelius was forced to confront
the question of Solomon’s Ophir and its relationship to Peru, but his com-
ments reveal that he was confused about the issue and torn between con-
flicting arguments. Moreover, he changes his mind as the course of the
scholarly debate changes, as can be seen by comparing the various edi-
tions of his two principal works between 1570 and his death in 1598.38
In his first editions of the Theatrum Orbis and Thesaurus Geographicus,
published before Acosta’s treatise had appeared, Ortelius cautiously
accepts the arguments of Postel and Arias Montano that ancient Ophir was
the modern Peru, although he also notes the opposition of Gaspar Bar-
reiros, who had argued that King Solomon’s gold mines should be located
in Indonesia instead.39 Ortelius introduces yet a third possibility, based on
his own readings in the exploration literature of the day. In 1502, a Por-
tuguese sailor named Thomas Lopez, who had accompanied Vasco da
Gama to Africa, recorded a peculiar encounter he had witnessed in the
trading port called Cefala or Sofala.40 A group of Moors who resided there
approached da Gama and told him they had discovered native texts that
spoke of King Solomon’s ships taking gold away from that spot once every
three years. Ortelius, noting that the region around Cephala is indeed rich
in gold, seems tempted to believe this curious account of Thomas Lopez,
which he had read in the great collection of explorers’ logs published by
the Italian Ramusio. But his respect for the learning of Arias Montano wins
out, for the moment, and tilts the scales toward a Peruvian Ophir.
By 1596, however, Ortelius had read the writings of Acosta, and his
opinions about Ophir had shifted. Whereas formerly he had written, in
the Latin text of the Thesaurus, “Montani sententiam amplector,” or “I
embrace the opinion of Arias Montano,” he now changes the verb to a
subjunctive, “amplecterer”—“I would accept”—and adds, “if the vastness
of the intervening Ocean, which all antiquity judged to be unnavigable,
did not deter me.” Ortelius goes on to cite Acosta’s opinion regarding
ancient ignorance of the magnet as a decisive argument in the case. With
Arias Montano thus discredited, Ortelius turns back once more to his
own personal theory, based on Thomas Lopez’s report of the writings
found in African Cephala. Ortelius now chooses to believe this report and
to identify Cephala with Ophir. Not only is this region rich in gold, as
Ortelius had mentioned already in 1578, but, as he now adds, it contains
ivory as well: “[T]he Scriptures report that Solomon got ivory from
Ophir, but ivory does not come from Peru, which never had any ele-
phants.”41 With such matter-of-fact reasoning and shrewd weighing of
the evidence, Ortelius reluctantly turns away from the idea of Solomonic
voyages to the Americas, an idea first proposed by Christopher Colum-
bus more than a century earlier.
The humanistic and scientific approaches of men like Ortelius and
Acosta could not put an end to the line of speculation Columbus had
begun concerning the biblical identity of the Americas or the eschatolog-
ical meaning of its “rediscovery.” Indeed, as the Protestant Reformation
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Biblical History and the Americas | 43

progressed and the response of the Church became harsher and more
dogmatic, the debate surrounding Ophir took on religious and political
significance far beyond what Columbus had ever imagined. Thus,
toward the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
turies, we find the idea of the New World as Solomon’s Ophir promul-
gated by Church apologists and counter-reformists, in an effort either to
demonstrate the infallibility of Scripture or to establish more firmly the
continuities between the present and the ancient past.42
For example, at around the same time that Ortelius was abandoning
the train of thought begun by Columbus, another writer, Thomas Bozio,
was picking it up more or less exactly where Columbus had left off. In his
religious treatise De Signis Ecclesiae Dei (1591), Bozio discusses passages
from Hebrew Scripture that seem to refer to the Americas or to discuss its
future role in world salvation, just as Columbus had done in the Libro de
las profecias. And like Columbus, Bozio turns with intense interest to any
passage concerning Tarshish or Ophir, in particular the verse predicting
that “The kings of Tarshish and the islands shall bear gifts, and the kings
of the Arabians and of Saba will offer presents” (Psalms 71:10)—a verse
that Columbus had cited not once but three times in the Libro, more fre-
quently than any other single verse.43 Bozio explains that the verse clearly
refers to his own times: “Regio namque Tharsis est illa, ad quam classis
Salomonis, triennium totum in itinere ponens, appellabat.… Quocirca clas-
sis Lusitanica … defert inde nobilissima atque ingentia munera ad nostras
oras, quae Catholici nationi et sacris usibus maxime serviunt” [The land of
Tarshish is that place at which the fleet of Solomon landed, spending a
whole three years en route.… From these parts the Spanish fleet … brings
vast and very excellent “gifts” to our shores, and these serve the Catholic
realm and its sacred purposes].44 Not only had King David, the supposed
author of this Psalm, correctly predicted the rediscovery of Ophir, but the
eschatological meaning of his prophecy gave sanction, in Bozio’s eyes, to
the plunder of its gold by a Catholic country, Spain.45
In further support of the idea that Columbus’s voyages had fulfilled
a Divine mandate, Bozio proved that he could play scriptural word
games as well as any of his humanist contemporaries. Citing a verse of
Isaiah that refers to doves (columbae in Latin) and directly precedes
another prophecy concerning the precious cargoes of the ships of
Tarshish, Bozio claimed that the greatest of Hebrew prophets had here
explicitly predicted that a man named Columbus would one day claim
those riches.46 Never mind that Isaiah’s words had originally been writ-
ten in Hebrew, not Latin!
We may be tempted to see the product of the fantastical and undisci-
plined Renaissance mind in this use of Scripture as a source of elaborately
encoded prophecies with which to link contemporary events to remotest
antiquity, but the same game is still being played today. As this essay was
being prepared, a book called The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin, which
rearranges the Hebrew letters of the Pentateuch into grids to produce
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44 | James Romm

prophecies concerning Hitler, Kennedy, and even Bill Clinton, stood in

the fourth position on the New York Times bestseller list, with 350,000
copies in print in the U.S. and nine translations appearing in foreign
countries. It seems that not only the late sixteenth century but also the
late twentieth century sought a sacred text that contains within itself the
pattern of all subsequent history and that gives eschatological meaning to
an otherwise chaotic welter of world events. The oldest and most author-
itative of “Western” writings, the Hebrew Bible continues to be our most
popular refuge from this chaos, provides new “prophecies” of our expe-
rience as our methods of decoding it become more sophisticated. We con-
tinue to seek, as Columbus did five centuries ago and Bozio did a century
later, a sense that our long voyage through history was foreknown to, and
is guided by, a Divinity that shapes our ends.47

Notes
1. This point is stressed by Vassilios Christidès in “L’énigme d’Ophir,” Revue Biblique 77
(1970):240–47. Christidès is to my knowledge the first scholar to take account of the
interpretive consequences of the confusion of the two names; indeed, he points out
himself (242 n. 14, e.g.) that other recent interpreters have persisted in this confusion.
2. Published by B. Maisler in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 10 (1951):266–69.
3. Especially Jacques Schreiden, “Les entreprises navales du roi Salomon,” Annuaires de
l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientale et slave 13 (1953):587–90.
4. See Jewish Antiquities 8.164, where it is unclear whether the Greek word chrysen should
be treated as a proper noun. Other early commentators are cited by Christidès,
“L’énigme d’Ophir,” 241–44.
5. The note is quoted by E. G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and Globe (London,
1908), 94; see also G. E. Nunn, Geographical Conceptions of Columbus: A Consideration of
Four Problems (American Geog. Soc. Research Series no. 14, New York, 1924), 75–76.
6. These and other annotations are discussed by Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of
Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992), chap. 2, see esp. 54–55, 62, 70. The postils them-
selves can be found in Cesare de Lollis, Scritti di Cristoforo Colombo (vol. 1, part 2, of the
larger Raccolta di Documenti [Rome, 1894]), and those Columbus made in his copy of
D’Ailly are included in the edition of Ymago Mundi by Edmond Buron (Paris, 1930).
7. The position of Valerie Flint (Imaginative Landscape, 46–48) seems to me a reasonable
one: Some of the postils to Imago Mundi and Historia Rerum, if not the other works
annotated by Columbus, predate the first voyage, though others were certainly added
later. The one postil that has been firmly dated is found in one of the opuscula in the
D’Ailly volume, where Columbus refers explicitly to “this year 1491” (Pauline Moffitt
Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of the Enterprise of the
Indies,” American Hist. Rev. 90, 1–2 [1985]:85–86).
8. Discussion of this point can be found in Rhys Carpenter, Beyond the Pillars of Heracles:
The Classical World Seen through the Eyes of Its Discoverers (New York, 1966), 60f., 216–19.
9. Buron, Ymago, vol. 1, 306–7; translation quoted by Flint, Imaginative Landscape, 124.
10. Martyr cites this opinion in order to contest it in Decades I.3.1, an entry dated 13
November 1493; see the edition of J. Torres Asensio, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1892) 100.
11. De Lollis, Scritti, 472; see Flint, Imaginative Landscape, 70f. and 125.
12. De Lollis, Scritti, 164–66.
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Biblical History and the Americas | 45

13. On this topic, see Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery,” 95–99, and chap-
ter 3 of Delno C. West and August Kling, “The Piety and Faith of Christopher Colum-
bus,” an introductory chapter in their edition of The Libro de las Profecias of Christopher
Columbus (Gainesville, Fla., 1991).
14. The Greek word in the Septuagint is staseis (2 Chronicles 9:10), presumably meaning
pillars. However, it bears noting that the parallel passage in Kings (3 Kings 10:11 in the
Septuagint) refers instead to huposterigmata, a rare word that can mean “supports” but
is sometimes translated “stools.”
15. Translations are those of Samuel Eliot Morison in Journals and Other Documents on the
Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1963), 383.
16. Both Morison (ibid., 385 n. 3) and Flint (Imaginative Landscape, 185 n. 7) mistakenly take
the term “Aurea” in this passage as a reference to the Golden Chersonnese, thus obscur-
ing the point behind Columbus’s citations of Josephus. It was the link to King Solomon
and the Temple at Jerusalem that made his discovery of the Veraguan (Ophirian) gold
fields so important, as West and Kling recognized (“Piety and Faith,” 62).
17. West and Kling, “Piety and Faith,” 239–49.
18. Ibid., 92–94.
19. James Romm, “New World and novos orbes: Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over
Ancient Discoveries of the Americas,” in vol. 1 of The Classical Tradition and the Ameri-
cas, eds. W. Haase and M. Reinhold (Berlin and New York, 1994), 81–84. See also
Gabriella Moretti, “Nec sit terris ultima Thule: La profezia di Seneca sulla scoperta del
Nuovo Mundo,” Columbeis I (Publicazioni dell’Istituto di Filologia Classica e
Medievale, Genoa, 1986), 95–106; and Diskin Clay, “Columbus’s Senecan Prophecy,”
American Journal of Philology 113 (1992):617–20.
20. See West and Kling’s discussion in “Piety and Faith,” 61–63. The “fit” of the Solomon-
Ophir myth with Columbus’s voyage was not perfect, since Columbus himself, and
others, had identified King Ferdinand of Spain with the biblical David rather than with
Solomon, as West and Kling make clear. But Columbus also believed, as shown by the
lettera rarissima, that Solomon had used the money bequeathed by his father David to
construct the original Temple.
21. West and Kling, “Piety and Faith,” 67–69. See also the discussion of Columbus’s third
voyage in Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writ-
ing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), chap. 5, and in Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus
(Berkeley, 1993).
22. See the essay by David S. Katz in this volume, and Richard Popkin, “The Rise and Fall
of the Jewish Indian Theory,” in Y. Kaplan, H. Mchoulan, and R. Popkin, eds., Menasseh
Ben Israel and His World (Leiden, 1989), 63–82.
23. Discussed by Don Allen Cameron, The Legend of Noah (Urbana, Ill., 1949), 85–89; more
recently, see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and
Geographic Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary
Quarterly 54 (3rd series, 1997):103–42.
24. On Postel’s scheme of New World ethnography, see Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo
mundo: La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale, dalle genealogie bibliche alle
teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence, 1977), 29–30, 149–50.
25. Guillaume de Postel, Cosmographicae disciplinae (Basel, 1561), 27–30. The identification
of Noah and Janus, which as far as I know originates with Postel, goes on to assume a
prominent place in Renaissance scholarship, such that Sir Walter Raleigh felt com-
pelled to refute it in his Historie of the World (1614).
26. Postel, Cosmographicae disciplinae, 32; see Gliozzi, Adamo, 29–30, 149–50. Though Pos-
tel’s methods were far from scientific, his conclusions have recently been endorsed by
a small group of anthropologists who believe that the Americas were settled by
migrants from both Europe and Asia. A feature article by Douglas Preston in the 16
June 1997 issue of the New Yorker describes the controversy over the recent find of
“Kennewick man”—a skeleton uncovered in Oregon and found to be more than 9,000
years old, yet clearly showing European-type facial features in its still intact skull. This
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46 | James Romm

and other similar finds have convinced some anthropologists that the earliest settlers
in the Americas were of European origin, and came to the New World either by cross-
ing Asia and the Bering Strait or by walking over a then frozen North Atlantic. These
first arrivals would subsequently have been overcome by other, later arriving groups
of Asiatic stock.
27. Ibid. Of course, Postel’s scheme ignores the obvious difficulty that the Aztecs of Peru
were not monotheists at the time of the Spanish conquests. But Postel bypasses this
point in silence, perhaps relying on reports of the advanced character of South Amer-
ican civilization, compared with that of the North, as proof of their kinship with the
world’s other “civilized” (i.e., monotheistic) races.
28. For Arias Montano’s rather complicated blend of Erasmian humanism and Church
orthodoxy in his approach to the Bible, see Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne (Paris,
1937), 765–67, 781–93.
29. Quoted from page 20 of Phaleg, published in Benito Arias Montano, Antiquituatum
Iudaicarum Libri IX (Lugduni Batavorum, 1593).
30. Benito Arias Montano, Biblia Sacra Hebraice, Chaldice, Graece et Latine, tome VIII
(Antwerp, 1572); Arias Montano, Antiquitatum Iudaicarum, 26f.
31. Discussed by Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the
Shock of Discovery (with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi) (Cambridge, Mass., and Lon-
don, 1992), 149, and by Gliozzi, Adamo, 151–53.
32. Arias Montano, Antiquitatum Iudaicarum, 3–5.
33. José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Salamanca, 1590); modern edition
by E. O’Gorman (Mexico, 1962), and English translation by E. Grimson, The Natural and
Moral History of the Indies, Hakluyt Society, ser. 1, no. 60 (London, 1880).
34. Gliozzi, Adamo, 158–59.
35. On the importance of Acosta, see Barbara Beddall, “Father José de Acosta and the Place
of His Historia natural y noral de las Indias in the History of Science,” pp. 12–98, in her
edition of the work (Valencia, 1977).
36. Acosta, Historia 1, chaps. 16–17; see Romm, “New World and novos orbes,” 112.
37. For an account of Ortelius’s life, see C. Koeman, The History of Abraham Ortelius and His
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Lausanne, 1964).
38. For a more extensive discussion of this comparison, see my “Abraham Ortelius as
Classical Humanist: The Sixteenth-Century Debate over Ancient Discoveries of the
Americas,” Allegorica 15 (1994):49–69.
39. See, for example, the entry on Ophir in the first edition of Abraham Ortelius, Synono-
mia geographica (Antwerp, 1578). Barreiros’s essay “De Ophyra regione” was published
initially as part of that author’s Cosmographia (Coimbra, 1561).
40. Lopez’s account can be found in Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi
(Venice, 1550), vol. 1, no. 8, where the Sofala story appears on p. 134.
41. Abraham Ortelius, Thesaurus geographicus (Antwerp, 1596), s.v. “Ophir.” Ortelius
thought this entry definitive enough that he made cross-references to it in the later edi-
tions of two of his other geographic works, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (preface to the
map of the New World) and the Parergon (preface to the map of Geographia sacra).
42. For a summary of this material, most of which falls outside the temporal limits of the
present essay, see Gliozzi, Adamo, chap. 4, part 3, 162–74.
43. West and Kling, “Piety and Faith,” 121, 243, 249. Other portions of Psalm 71 are cited
in two other places in the Libro de las Profecias, making it, once again, the most fre-
quently cited text in the compilation. The King James Bible has this psalm as Psalm 72.
44. Thomas Bozio, De Signis Ecclesiae Dei 20.6 (Rome, 1591), 333.
45. See Gliozzi, Adamo, 162–63.
46. Ibid.
47. See the commentary on the popularity of The Bible Code by critic Edward Rothstein, “Is
Destiny Just a Divine Word Game?” New York Times, 12 August 1997, p. C11.
02 1/24/01 11:15 AM Page 47

– Chapter 2 –

KNOWLEDGE OF NEWLY DISCOVERED LANDS

AMONG JEWISH COMMUNITIES OF EUROPE
(FROM 1492 TO THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR)

Noah J. Efron

Introduction

I N1707, TOBIAS COHEN PUBLISHED Ma’aseh Tuviyah, a book that has

justly been called “the most influential early modern Hebrew text-
book of the sciences.”1 He described his own efforts without undue
modesty: “I have composed a book containing the knowledge and
scholarly disciplines that every literate man must know.”2 One of these
“scholarly disciplines” was geography, and the “knowledge” needed by
early eighteenth-century Jewish literati included rudimentary facts about
the New World. Cohen devoted a small section of his book to what he
called “the discovery of a new land on the continent of America, which
was discovered by the foreigners.” This is what he wrote, in its entirety:

There is much I could tell about the new land, in their language Nuovo
Mondo, but understand that it is not my intention [to do anything more] than
spare you from the gentiles who deride our writers as knowing nothing about
the ways of the world. Therefore I will tell you a small bit: how Christopher
Colombus discovered it in the year 1492, by Christian reckoning, and after
him, at the command of Frederick in the year 1600, Oliver from the land of
Holland expanded it further and after him in our day a Spaniard whose name
was Ferdinando de Cuéllar3 expanded still further and up to our day, they
spread throughout that land and the land is expansive before them, and they
go and conquer and build store houses and fortresses. They also call them by
the names of the Christian lands, and act according to their custom, and their
dress is the dress of the foreigners of our day.4
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48 | Noah J. Efron

Though it recounts little,5 Cohen’s account says much about what the
New World meant to him, and about what he thought it meant to his Jew-
ish contemporaries. Cohen included such elementary facts because he
believed that his readers knew nothing at all about the Americas, even as
late as the early eighteenth century. Cohen did not lament this, for he
viewed the New World as a decidedly foreign affair.6 He emphasized that
the discoveries were achieved by “the foreigners,” who quickly imposed
their foreign names, customs, and dress. Being foreign, the discoveries
and conquests were of little moment to Jews. The only reason why a Jew
might need to know about America was to escape the ridicule of gentiles.
Taken for its own sake, it was not an unhappy fact that Jews of his day
neither knew nor cared much about the New World.
There is something surprising in this perspective, because by Cohen’s
time there were Jewish communities in hubs of New World trade, there
were active Jewish communities in the New World, and the material and
economic impact of the New World throughout Europe was certainly
strongly felt in this period.7 One might expect these conditions to stimu-
late greater interest than what Cohen observed and advocated.8
It may also be surprising to learn that even before these conditions
existed, Jews in Europe were interested in the maritime explorations. At
least eleven books with accounts of the voyages of discovery were pro-
duced by Jews in the period between 1492 and the start of the Thirty
Years’ War in 1618. At least six more books with such accounts remained
in manuscript, several of which had wide circulation.9
More significant than statistics of this sort is the fact that virtually
every Hebrew book that one might expect to include an account of the
voyages of discovery did include one. With only two exceptions, the
chronicles and historical accounts produced in the sixteenth century all
included information about newly discovered lands.10 So, too, did books
with a significant natural philosophic or natural historic component.11 It
is hard to say how many Jews read these books, and harder still to say
how many Jews learned about the New World from Latin or vernacular
sources. A 1595 inventory of books owned by 430 Jewish families in Man-
tua included a total of sixty-three copies of four Hebrew books with sig-
nificant accounts of the voyages of discovery. The inventory also
included as many as fourteen copies of nine books in Latin or Italian that
included such accounts.12 The Mantuan community at this time was
hardly representative and displayed more interest in contemporary lib-
eral arts than most communities.13 But it may give some measure of the
order of magnitude in which accounts of the explorations found their
ways into Jewish hands.
Despite this diffusion of accounts, Jewish interest in the voyages of
discovery remained limited and idiosyncratic. Though the first Hebrew
references to them appeared in manuscript not long after the voyages, the
first printed accounts did not appear until the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Even these were neither widely nor closely read, so it was reasonable
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 49

for a Jew writing near the start of the seventeenth century to note of the
discovery of the New World that “this matter is a bit of a new thing for
us [Jews].”14 Accounts by Jews also tended to be sketchy, including little
detail and often misinformation—discoveries in the New World and voy-
ages to Africa and Asia were sometimes conflated or confused. Jewish
accounts showed relatively little regard for the fortunes of the explorers
or the outposts they established, and, more generally, showed little
regard for the voyages and discoveries themselves. When Jews were con-
cerned about adventures overseas, it was typically because of what these
adventures implied for the Jews of Europe themselves.
This is hardly surprising. Scholars have long argued that the explo-
rations and discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries served to
confirm European self-perceptions and beliefs about Europe, European
history, and European faith.15 There is nothing unusual, or particularly
interesting, about people finding parochial meaning in far-flung events,
or confirmation of old belief in new information. What is interesting,
however, is the question of which parochial uses in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries Jews found for explorations and discoveries, and
why. Overseas adventures were deemed significant by Jews most often
for what they implied about the relationship between Europe’s Jews and
Europe’s Christians.16 For some, these adventures were a harbinger of
forthcoming redemption; for others they were a sign of Jewish intellectual
superiority; for still others they were a herald of increased collaboration
between Europe’s Jews and Christians. What all of these interpretations
shared was a conviction that shifting world boundaries mattered to Jews,
first and foremost, for what they might imply about the shifting social and
intellectual boundaries between Jews and Christians in Europe.

Interpretations of the Discoveries of New Lands17

Interpretations in a Millennial Vein

In the earliest Jewish accounts, the voyages of discovery were sometimes
seen as one among many signs that the End of Days was approaching.
Though most accounts of this sort were produced by writers of Spanish
descent, for whom the expulsion loomed large, the earliest was written
by Abraham Farissol (1452–c.1528), who spent his childhood in Avignon
(where his family had lived for a century or more) and most of his adult
life in Mantua, Florence, and Ferrara.18 Farissol’s background is signifi-
cant. In contrast to many of those who followed him, he made almost no
reference to the expulsion from Spain (mentioning, in passing, only that
the expelled Jews had settled in this or that location). As one might
expect, the eschatological strains of this account were more muted and
less fraught than those that would later be written by writers more
directly affected by the expulsion.
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50 | Noah J. Efron

Farissol’s account of the voyages of discovery appear in a volume

called Iggeret Orhot ‘Olam, which he wrote in 1525, and which was first
published in 1586 (see Figs. 2.1 and 2.2). As David B. Ruderman has
shown, most of this account was drawn directly from a popular volume
of the day compiled by Fracanzano da Montalboddo and entitled Paesi
novamente retrovati e nova mundo da Alberico Vesputio riorentino intitulato.19
It included descriptions of the Amerindians, emphasizing their odd sex-
ual practices (“they use their women like animals,” “a son will take his
mother, a brother will take his sister,” and so forth), their anarchic social
organization (“they have no ministers or leaders or law or deity”), their
lack of property (“they have no possessions that are theirs alone.… They
eat and find sustenance together, and the men take [whichever] women
come to hand”), their superior health (“they live longer than 150 years”),
the richness of their wildlife (“there are great and excellent fish … and
species different than ours,… and forests filled with great and small
predators), and their wealth in gems and metals (“there is endless excel-
lent gold in the sand and … precious stones … and mother of pearl”).20
All of this is familiar enough, and because it was translated and tran-
scribed with little interpolation, it is hard to draw conclusions from this
material about Farissol’s own attitudes toward the discoveries, and those
he was trying to inspire in his readers. More telling than his actual
account, though, is the context in which Farissol chose to embed it.
Farissol positioned his accounts of the Amerindians between two
chapters that represent his most novel and telling contributions to his
book. The first of these concerned the Ten Lost Tribes and David Reuveni,
a supposed emissary from these tribes who had appeared in Farissol’s
day. The last concerned the location of the Garden of Eden.
Farissol began his account of Reuveni as follows:

For the benefit of this epistle that I, Abraham Farissol, have written to unveil
for those who do not know geography, I chose to write this chapter about the
travels of the Jew from the [Ten Lost] Tribes, or who may be from [the tribe of]
Judah, who is called David b. Solomon Supreme Commander of Israel, who
arrived and we saw in our regions, the region of Italy, how he came from the
dessert [sic] of Habor, in his telling, and those who visited with him found
peace for their souls, and rest from toils.21

Farissol’s account was unembellished. He described how Reuveni

arrived in Venice in 1523 and set out to enlist the weapons and soldiers of
the Christian continent in a battle of his Jewish legions against the Mus-
lims. Farissol recounted how Reuveni succeeded in gaining an audience
with the Pope. Farissol himself neither endorsed nor rejected Reuveni’s
claims. For him, this was beside the point. “It is enough for us, in our
exile in these regions,” Farissol wrote, “that it was verified by many hon-
est kings and the courts of Rome that the tribes of Israel still exist in great
numbers and that they have many kings.”22
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 51

FIGURE 2.1 Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, [Iggeret orhot ’olam] (Venice, 1586). The title
may be translated as Epistle of the Ways of the World.
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52 | Noah J. Efron

FIGURE 2.2 Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, Itinera Mundi (Oxford, 1691). First published
in Hebrew (Venice, 1586) under the title [Iggeret orhot ’olam]; translated into Latin by
Thomas Hyde. This translation also included the original Hebrew text.
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 53

In his other original contribution to his book, Farissol brings to bear a

rigorous combination of textual evidence with geographic and climatic evi-
dence to determine the location of the Garden of Eden, a matter that “per-
plexed many scholars who did not know where it might possibly be.”23
Both Farissol’s presentation of the Garden of Eden and his presenta-
tion of Reuveni evinced confidence that elemental mysteries of the dia-
spora were being unraveled in his time, owing to the explorations and
discoveries he described. It was in light of this confidence that Ruderman
concluded that “Farissol was thrilled by the new discoveries because they
offered unexplored possibilities for Jewish existence in other parts of the
globe” and that he held the “hope that, with the location of the Ten Lost
Tribes, Israel’s redemption was near at hand.”24 One of the most endur-
ing impressions produced by Iggeret Orhot ‘Olam was that the world was
being unveiled, and that a new order would soon emerge. Indeed, pro-
ducing this impression seems to have been one of Farissol’s principal
goals. And his descriptions of the explorations and discoveries were
among his principal means of creating this impression.
If, in Farissol’s account, the voyages of discovery hinted or implied
that the End of Days might be near, the eschatological significance of the
explorations was more marked still in the works of three significant writ-
ers publishing in the 1550s: Solomon ibn Verga (fl. c. 1510), Samuel Usque
(c. 1497–c. 1555), and Joseph b. Joshua ha-Kohen (1496–1578). Each of
these men had direct links to the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. Ibn
Verga had fled Spain for Portugal at the time of the expulsion, and was
later forced briefly to live as a crypto-Jew in Portugal before finally set-
tling in Flanders.25 Samuel Usque was a Portuguese converso, whose fam-
ily had also emigrated from Spain in 1492. Joseph ha-Kohen was born in
Avignon to Spanish parents who had been expelled from Spain. He
moved to Italy when he was five years old. Each of these men declared
that the conversions and expulsions in Spain and Portugal provided his
motive for writing historical accounts.26
The first two—ibn Verga and Usque—did not, in fact, recount the dis-
covery of the New World in their essays (though they were often taken to
have done so; as Joseph ha-Kohen believed, for instance, as I will describe
below). But both were fully aware of the voyages of discovery, and each
took these as yet another sign of the misery of Europe’s Jews. Both wrote
impassioned descriptions of the banishment of Jewish children from Lisbon
by John II to the newly discovered island of São Tomé, off the coast of West
Africa, as a site of exile. “The greatest of the enormous troubles [of the Lis-
bon persecutions] was the gathering of youths and casting them to the lost,
uninhabited Islands,” went ibn Verga’s account. “[W]hoever has not seen
the tears and wails of the women, has not seen or heard worry and grief and
evil in his life.”27 Samuel Usque’s description was no less dramatic:

To my misfortune, the island of São Tomé had recently been discovered. It

was inhabited by lizards, snakes and other venomous reptiles, and was
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54 | Noah J. Efron

devoid of rational beings. Here the king exiled condemned criminals, and he
decided to include among them the innocent children of the Jews.… Mothers
scratched their faces in grief as their babies, less than three years old, were
taken from their arms. Honored elders tore their beards when the fruit of
their bodies were snatched.… One mother … lifted her baby in her arms, and
paying no heed to its cries, threw herself from the ship into the heaving sea,
and drowned embracing her only child.… When those innocent children
arrived at the wilderness of São Tomé, which was to be their grave … almost
all were swallowed up by the huge lizards … and the remainder … wasted
away from hunger.28

While these descriptions did not concern the Americas, it is clear that the
new discoveries played a role in defining the epoch that ibn Verga and
Usque lamented. Usque begins his account of the “hardships we have
been enduring” in the diaspora by invoking, at the start of his first dia-
logue, the new knowledge of far-flung places and the wealth that was
accumulating in Europe from these places:

O Asia … sown with precious gems and planted with rich and noble trees
[and] infinite wealth and soft and marvelous fragrances.
O Africa … pregnant with the finest gold … buried wealth and the savory
foods of Nature.
And Europe … swelled by crafty stratagems … into a terrestrial paradise.…29

In light of the newfound marvels of the world, and the wealth Europe
continues to wrest from its explorations, the state of the Jews is especially
pitiable: “Now Europe, O Europe, my hell on earth, what shall I say of
you, since you have won most of your triumphs at the expense of my
limbs?”30 For Usque, as for ibn Verga, the expansion of Europe was
closely knit to the miseries that Jews had suffered since 1492. So, too, was
it tied to their redemption. Now that some Jews had been cast to the
newly discovered lands, and others have been discovered in far-flung
places, Usque writes, the Jews have “run the entire gauntlet of misfor-
tunes, and reached the end of [their] tribulations.” Jews are returning
“not only from all corners of Europe, but also from other parts of the
world.… The ancients were unable to attain their proof, as were we, for
we find ourselves living it in experience.”31 Again, the discoveries of
Usque’s day were associated both with the suffering of Jews, and with
their incipient redemption.32

* * * *

THIS SAME ASSOCIATION was made by Joseph ha-Kohen, who wrote more
in Hebrew letters than any of his contemporaries about the explorations
and the New World. Joseph ha-Kohen included accounts (or at least men-
tion) of the voyages of discovery in three compositions. In the last of
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 55

these, his martyrology Emek ha-Bakha (finished in 1575, when he was 78

years old), he provided a spare paraphrase of Usque’s description of São
Tomé. (Joseph ha-Kohen’s account was economical: for example, “And
when they were in São Tomé, they became food for alligators, and the rest
died of starvation.”33)
Joseph ha-Kohen’s earlier two accounts included much more infor-
mation and were less obviously martyrological. In these as well, however,
his attitude toward the discoveries was ambivalent. The first of these
accounts (and the most influential, for it was the only one to be printed
and widely read in his century or the next) appeared in his chronicle,
Divrei ha-Yamim le-Malkhei Zarefat u-le-Malkhei Beit Ottoman ha-Togar.34
Joseph ha-Kohen divided Divrei ha-Yamim into two unequal parts.35
The first covers the period from the decline of the Roman Empire to the
deaths of Maximilian I (in 1519) and Selim I (in 1520). The second volume,
which was larger than the first, covers the thirty-three years between 1520
and the date of the book’s completion. This lopsided division reflects
Joseph ha-Kohen’s conviction that the recent period was an important
break from the past, that it signaled a new era. In it, he tells of the rise of
Sulimann and of Charles V, the ascent of Luther, the burning of the Tal-
mud, and other events of great, epochal significance.36
It is noteworthy that Joseph ha-Kohen chose to begin this volume
with a relatively long account of the discovery of the New World, partic-
ularly because to do so he had to transgress the chronological ordering
that was the organizing principle of the book, placing his account of the
discovery of the New World between the death of Selim in 1520 and Mag-
ellan’s voyage, which Joseph ha-Kohen also dates in 1520. That he chose
to torture his chronology in order to begin the second volume, devoted to
the new epoch, with accounts of the voyages of discovery and the dis-
covery of the New World suggests that these were topics of some
moment to him.37
The account in Divrei ha-Yamim emphasizes the rapaciousness of the
Portuguese and Spanish crowns. It begins: “And it was in those days, the
ships of the King of Portugal traveled to pillage plunder and to seize
spoils in the land of Ethiopia.…” He continues:

and they came to Tarshish and Calcutta, which was ruled by the Turks, and
they arrested their kings in shackles and their dignitaries in chains and the
land was theirs and they made with the inhabitants a compact and they were
servants to the king of Portugal to this day. And they brought from there
spices and silver and gold and they filled their vaults.…38

His description of the first voyages to the New World has a similar
emphasis:

And when the Spaniards were there, they conquered the inhabitants of the
land and made them slaves and servants and they were subject to forced labor
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56 | Noah J. Efron

to this day. The Spaniards also took their daughters to cook and to bake and
they had no savior and the wailing of the inhabitants of this land wafted to
the heavens.39

Likewise, his account of Magellan’s voyage does not describe the cir-
cumnavigation, but focuses instead upon how the inhabitants of what
would one day be known as the Philippines “prostrated themselves
before [the Spaniards] and said, we are here to be servants to the Great
Emperor, and he set them to hard labor.”40
Joseph ha-Kohen’s account, then, is ambivalent. It is in most ways a
straightforward (though partial and highly selective) narrative of impor-
tant voyages of discovery to Africa, India, and America. Its placement at
the beginning of his chronicle of his own time suggests that Joseph ha-
Kohen thought it of epochal importance. And its purposeful emphasis on
the cruelty and rapaciousness of the Spanish and Portuguese echoes their
cruelty and rapaciousness in expelling the Jews, an event that loomed
larger than any other in Joseph ha-Kohen’s historiography.
These impressions are further reinforced by Joseph ha-Kohen’s mas-
sive unpublished compendium of edited translations about the voyages
and the world they reveal, Meziv Gevulot ‘Amim.41 The compendium in-
cludes material taken from three works, Joannes Boemus’s Omnium gen-
tium mores leges et ritus (an “anthropological” work about the customs of
Africans, Asians and Europeans42), and two books by Francisco López de
Gómara: La conquista de Mexico (1552) and La historia general de las Indias
(1554). Though Joseph ha-Kohen deleted much of the material he found
in his sources, he added relatively few interpolations. When he did, his
editorial choices again reflect some ambivalence about the events he was
describing. He added the following to the end of his translation of Boemus
(the body of which had not concerned the Americas):

In our time, Columbus the Genoan discovered great islands and kingdoms in
the west, the names of which were not known before this day. And many fol-
lowed him from Spain. And they too found nations that Columbus did not
see. And in all the lands of Peru in which there was gold … they battled with
the nations there. And they took them as servants, and they remain such to
the kings of Spain to this day. And from there they bring gold every year.…
And the worshipers of Ba’al that inhabited those cities prior to the arrival of
the Spanish, they took out from darkness to the fog.… And they found na-
tions of beastly people who eat human flesh to this day. The servants of the
King of Portugal also discovered the island that is known today as San Thomé
[sic]. And they found nothing there but the great fish that come out from the
seas that are called Lagartos43 and snakes and vermin and vipers. And the
king sent there all those meant to be executed; he also sent Jews there. And
they had no savior … and the servants of the king of Portugal settled there.
And they built houses to live in. And they worked their land. And the land
gave fruit and they remained there safely.… They also planted sugar cane
there. And they multiplied greatly. And they brought back the syrup which is
called sugar to Portugal.44
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 57

Joseph ha-Kohen had interpolated the account that he found in Usque

and would later include in Emek ha-Bakha, this time placing it in the
New World.
The mere fact that Joseph ha-Kohen chose to produce these manu-
scripts at all attests to his interest in both the voyages of discovery and
the exotica they uncovered. It also further attests to his belief that these
were major events in history, connected to the changing order in
Europe—an order that was at present unhappy for Jews, but one that, at
the same time, might betoken dramatically different and perhaps better
times to come.45
A decade after Joseph ha-Kohen died, Gedaliah ibn Yahyah, an Italian
of Portuguese descent, published yet another compressed account of Jews
exiled from Portugal to São Tomé.46 In his continuation of the story of the
expulsions, Gedaliah inserted the following notice about Columbus:

In the days of Ferdinand and Isabella his wife, they sent Christofo Columbo,
a commander and a great astrologer to the Islands across from the rivers of
Ethiopia and many islands were found there which are called the “New
World.” And there are many Jews there, as can be seen in the books written
about these voyages.47

Just what Gedaliah ibn Yahya meant by this last statement is unclear.
Like Joseph ha-Kohen, ibn Yahya may have situated the São Tomé story
in the New World. Whatever the case, it is not unreasonable to conclude
that—like David Reuveni and Solomon Molkho—this event had escha-
tological resonance for him. In this, Gedaliah ibn Yahyah’s accounts
reprised the interpretation of the discoveries that one finds in Farissol,
ibn Verga, Usque, and Joseph ha-Kohen, one that reflected some
estrangement from the New World, but at the same time a belief that its
discovery was one of many signs that a new, perhaps millennial epoch
was approaching.48

* * * *

IT SHOULD BE NOTED that for none of these writers were the maritime
explorations and discoveries a consuming concern, and none meditated
much about their meaning. The discoveries did not function as explicit,
singular symbols of Jewish degradation or of incipient salvation. At the
same time, all of these writers included accounts of the discoveries
because they did perceive these to have some meaning, which fit partic-
ularly well with what they were trying to achieve in their writing.
As has often been noted,49 the chroniclers of the generations follow-
ing the expulsion perceived themselves as living in a time that was
uniquely pained and propitious.50 The voyages of discovery highlighted
both of these characteristics of the day. For all these writers, the fact that
new worlds were being discovered was significant because it reinforced
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58 | Noah J. Efron

their feeling that they lived in a new, historically unique situation, and at
the same time reinforced their conviction that matters were rolling
toward a new and better millennial epoch.51
Nearer to the end of the sixteenth century, however, for Jewish writ-
ers with no immediate tie to the expulsions from Spain and Portugal,
such a view held little attraction. Gone were most traces of millenarian-
ism in their accounts of the New World. Gone, too, was the association of
the discoveries with exotica like the location of the Garden of Eden or the
location of the Ten Lost Tribes. The explorations were still interpreted as
events with particularly Jewish significance, but this significance was now
understood differently.

Interpretations in an Epistemic Vein

In his 1590 Historia natural y moral de las Indias, José de Acosta wrote:

Having read what poets and philosophers write of the Torrid Zone, I per-
suaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would not be able to endure
the violent heat, but it turned out otherwise. For when I passed [the Equator]
… I felt so cold that I was forced to go into the sun to warm myself. What
could I do then but laugh at Aristotle’s Meteorology and his philosophy?52

Some Jews of the day had similar reactions, concluding that the discov-
ery of the New World had given the lie to philosophic and natural philo-
sophic texts that had long been held authoritative by many Christian and
some Jewish scholars. Of course, these similar reactions had very differ-
ent resonances for Jewish scholars than they might for Christian scholars.
If for Acosta the discoveries might elevate the authority of observation
and other new ways of gathering and producing knowledge, for Jewish
scholars it served to denigrate the very notion that knowledge about the
temporal world is of any value at all. If for some Christians the discover-
ies were taken to undercut the authority of ancient texts in favor of new
ones, for these Jews it seemed to be a way to reinforce the authority of
Jewish texts, particularly ancient ones. If for some Christian scholars the
discoveries might invite a reordering of the hierarchies of scholarly
authority, for Jews it might invite a conservative return to traditional texts
treating traditional, unworldly subjects.
Tendencies like these can be discerned in the reaction of Judah Loew
ben Bezalel (Maharal; c. 1526–1609) to the discovery of the New World,
which he considered in the context of a long discussion of the arrival of
the Messiah and the Ten Lost Tribes:

And there are people who say that the scholars of the nations have recorded
each and every place on the earth, and there are no more places that are not
written in their books and everything is known to them, and there is no place
in which the ten tribes are known [to reside]. But this is evidence of nothing,
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 59

they speak nonsense, because it is highly possible that there is a place in the
world that is not known to them, as [for instance] if it is divided from inhab-
ited areas by mountains or some such thing. And they have said that recently
a place was discovered which they call in their language “New World” which
was previously unknown, and it is likewise possible that another place will
be found.53

Joseph ben Isaac ha-Levi expressed a similar view in his Ketonet Pasim.
Astronomy, he wrote:

has not been perfected as have the other sciences.… For each one who comes
in every succeeding generation disagrees with the other.… And so it is in the
matters of inhabited lands: we have found inhabited lands in a region which
astronomers had stated could not be settled, and these lands are called the
“New World.”54

For both men, the discovery of the New World (like the proposals of the
Copernican and Tychonic systems) served notice that existing wisdom
about the world, geography, and, more generally, natural philosophy and
natural history was in principle unreliable and susceptible to change. If
one New World had been discovered, so too could another one, and then
another. The New World betokened the temporality of knowledge about
the physical world, thereby diminishing its value. Rather than increasing
the interest of such knowledge, the marvels that explorers discovered
served only to circumscribe it.
The interpretations of Maharal and Joseph ha-Levi evince a certain
alienation from the wisdom and undertaking of Christians, suggesting
that the sorts of knowledge that Christians (and Jews who take interest in
their philosophies) produce is different in kind, separate and inferior to
that which Jews have traditionally produced and can produce. They sug-
gest the existence of a gulf between the types of knowledge produced and
imbibed by Christian scholars and the types that engage Jewish scholars.

Interpretations in an Irenic Vein

Other Jews of the day were persuaded that whatever gulf might exist
between Christian and Jewish knowledge could be minimized and in cer-
tain realms entirely bridged. This persuasion informed very different atti-
tudes toward the discoveries of the day.
Azariah de Rossi (1511–1578), as is well known, was castigated
(most famously by Maharal) for incorporating information he found in
gentile sources in his analyses of Jewish texts, including religious texts.55
De Rossi, who spent the bulk of his life in Mantua and Ferrara, was him-
self highly versed in a variety of contemporary and ancient sources, as
even a glance at his Meor ‘Einayim makes clear, and he had significant
contacts with Christian scholars. In light of his obvious predilections, it
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60 | Noah J. Efron

is not surprising that he planned to translate a portion of the Hermetic

corpus into Hebrew.56
De Rossi was keenly interested in synthesizing scholarship of gentile
and Jewish provenance. He was at pains to synchronize the intellectual
tradition of the Jews with those of the Christians and of Classical culture,
sometimes suggesting Jewish influences on Classical and Christian schol-
ars57 and sometimes gentile influence on Jewish luminaries.58 In addition
to highlighting mutual influences, de Rossi vigorously advocated harmo-
nizing Jewish texts with the statements of the natural philosophers when-
ever this could be done without doing violence to statements rooted
explicitly in Torah.59 Indeed, de Rossi argued that it was valuable to use
gentile sources, especially concerning natural philosophic questions, even
to adjudicate questions, resolve confusions, and correct mistakes in Jew-
ish sources.60 Though he was persuaded that Judaism represented prisca
sapientia, he at the same time believed that Greeks and Christians had
inherited and much improved upon ancient Jewish wisdom.61 De Rossi’s
penchant for apologetics has long been noted, and Meor ‘Einayim does
include passages insisting that Jews should know gentile languages and
sources, strive to be good citizens, learn from gentiles, and at the same
time demonstrate their wisdom to gentiles.62 But de Rossi was driven by
more than apologetic impulses. When he hoped that Christians would
find value in his book, and when he explained that Jews were beholden
by custom to pray equally for all nations, and when he insisted that Chris-
tian kings were guaranteed Jewish fealty, and so forth,63 de Rossi was also
expressing his sincere belief that Jewish and Christian scholars could and
should maintain close relations marked by mutual respect.
The irenic impulses that I have been describing had much influence
on de Rossi’s interpretation of the voyages of discovery of his day. He
begins his account by declaring that these voyages conclusively dis-
proved Talmudic statements that implied the world is flat:
If the scholars, may their memories be blessed, who believed that the earth is
flat had been informed about what became well-known in our generations
about the Spanish sailors who discovered the New World in the northern
hemisphere the inhabitants of which find their perch opposite our feet …, all
of them, in a single voice, would answer and affirm for us the sphericality of
the earth.64

He then describes at some length (though with an imperfect grasp of the

details), Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, completed by del
Cano, concluding with a description of the crest, engraved with the state-
ment Primus circumdedisti me, that the latter explorer received from
Charles V. De Rossi then argues that, in fact, the New World was known
to King Solomon:

Believe with certainty that in the time of King Solomon this settlement was
known and famous, and wayfarers regularly went to and fro to it for trade
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 61

and other purposes. And the land of Ophir and Paruvim from which the ships
of Tarshish sailed once every three years as is written in the book of Kings and
Chronicles would bring him gold and silver and spices and ivories and so
forth, which are all things that in a period of time like that between leaving
and returning is appropriate and these were brought too by [del Cano’s] ship
Victoria. There is no doubt that this is the country of Peru that is located in the
aforementioned New World.65

This ancient Jewish knowledge had, in de Rossi’s day, been perfected by

Christian scholars: “Now from day to day they add to their expertise
perfection and can go now in a single week a distance that in the days of
the aforementioned caption and also perhaps in the days of Solomon
they would need a month to traverse.”66 True to his predilections, de
Rossi had given the New World an irenic spin, arguing that it was part
of the body of ancient Jewish wisdom that in his day had been recovered
and improved upon by the masterful Christian scholars in whose midst
he lived.67
David Gans (1541–1613), a German Jew, educated in Poland, who
lived most of his adult life in Prague, arrived at an interpretation similar
to that of de Rossi, whose work he much admired. Like de Rossi, Gans
wanted very much to promote joint Jewish-Christian scholarship; this was
indeed the driving force behind his life’s work. He believed that his rela-
tionship with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and other astronomers
attending the court of Rudolf II might serve as a model for relations
between other Jewish and Christian scholars.68 Indeed, Gans described the
entire history of astronomy as a history of joint activity and mutual influ-
ence between Jewish scholars, on the one hand, and Chaldean, Egyptian,
Greek, Muslim, and Christian scholars on the other.69
Gans described the New World in both his extant works, a chronicle
entitled Zemah David (1592) and an astronomic epitome named Nehmad
ve-Na’im (prospectus, 1612; full text, 1743), and he may have written an
independent volume about the voyages of discovery that has not sur-
vived. His accounts in the first book, which was published in Prague in
1592, were skeletal, and were excerpted from accounts he had found in
German chronicles, as well as accounts by Joseph ha-Kohen and Azariah
de Rossi. His accounts in the latter book, which he completed in 1612,
were much richer and synthesized the findings of a number of contem-
porary cosmographies (see Figs. 2.3 and 2.4).70
In both sources, Gans approvingly cited de Rossi’s conviction that the
New World is the same as the biblical Ophir, suggesting that it was first
discovered by Jews.71 Though this original Jewish knowledge was now
firmly in the hands of Europe’s Christians, Gans still saw in the discov-
ery of the New World many and varied opportunities for real collabora-
tion between these Christians and Jews. When he realized, for instance,
that the circumnavigation of the globe could create confusion about when
to celebrate the Sabbath, Gans chose to consult Kepler about this halakhic
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62 | Noah J. Efron

FIGURE 2.3 David ben Solomon Gans, [Sefer Nehmad ve-Na im] (Jessnitz, 1743). The title in
English would be A Pleasant and Agreeable Book.
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 63

FIGURE 2.4 David ben Solomon Gans, [Sefer Nehmad ve-Na im] (Jessnitz, 1743). A sketch of
the Ptolemaic universe, including the four elements (of which only fire and air are labeled),
the planetary spheres, and the diurnal sphere with the constellations of the zodiac.
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64 | Noah J. Efron

problem rather than Maharal or Heller or Jaffe or any of the other rab-
binic luminaries with whom he had personal contacts.72
Even more than de Rossi, Gans emphasized the majesty of the
achievements of the Christian explorers. Gans begins his account in
Nehmad ve-Na’im by declaring that the discoveries reflect “great and
exalted wisdom, requiring the greatest contemplation.”73 Gans hails
Columbus as “a great scholar and philosopher,” and Vespucci as “a wise
man of understanding and a warrior,” and describes their patrons and
their voyages in heroic terms.74
Gans also emphasized that Jews of his day could understand and
even participate in the achievements of Christian explorers through globes
and maps. Gans included a detailed legend to a Hebrew mappa mundi he
had drawn, encouraging his readers to retrace the routes of the explorers.

You the reader should know that these things [i.e., geographical facts] were
unknown and mysterious to the early scholars; they labored and troubled
over this all the days of their lives. Kings as well expended thousands and
tens of thousands [to attain this knowledge]. And here [in maps] all of this is
made known to us in our time wisely and easily, in such a way that every
wise man can educate and explain to his small son and show him with his
finger, in his own home and in his own room, most of the countries and
inhabited places of the entire earth, with the borders of the seas. [He can do
this] much better than if he traveled there with a wise, old man and saw it all
with his own eyes.75

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Christian scholars, every child in heder

could now know the true geography of the world.
Gans was effusive about the discoveries since Columbus, but he
labored to ensure that this enthusiasm did not take on a millennial cast.
In contrast to Maharal, he insisted that the entire earth was in his day
charted.76 He castigated Abraham Farissol and Abraham Zacut for sug-
gesting that the Ten Lost Tribes might be found in the kingdom of Prester
John in Ethiopia.77 For Gans, like some of the earlier writers I have dis-
cussed, the discovery of the New World was a sign of a changing world.
But for him, the change was anything but eschatological. For him, what
was developing—through continued collaboration of Jews and Chris-
tians—was a more miraculous and peaceable secular world for all.
Both de Rossi and Gans, then, tried to enlist Jews not only to marvel at
the new maritime discoveries, but also to identify with them and with the
explorers. They did this by insisting that Peru was the biblical Ophir, posit-
ing that Solomon had been the first to regularly voyage to the New World
(bringing back great treasures of gold). In so doing, they at the same time
implied a likeness between the recent kings of Spain, Portugal, France,
England, etc., and King Solomon. They did this also by encouraging Jews
to familiarize themselves with the discoveries, by referring to atlases, by
describing the voyages and the principal explorers, and especially by
insisting that these Christian discoveries and voyages were of great
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 65

moment to contemporary Jews, who reaped the intellectual and practical

benefits of the maritime discoveries as did the Christians of their day.
De Rossi and Gans saw great value in Jews knowing (and teaching
every schoolchild) about the new discoveries because they represented
knowledge that ancient Jewish scholars had helped to produce and
because they represented human knowledge of extraordinary human
value that could be enjoyed equally by Jews and Christians. The discov-
eries were an excellent demonstration of the hope so fondly held by both
men that in their day the mutual alienation that had for so long marked
Jewish-Christian relations might finally disappear.78

Conclusion

The interpretations of the discoveries that I have presented were all

parochial. Jewish interest in the New World was rarely interest in the
New World per se, but rather in what it might mean back home in
Europe. Jews who described the explorations and discoveries tended to
impute to them special meaning for Jews. They used these events to cast
light on questions that had long engaged Jews, and that had little or noth-
ing to do with the events themselves.
None of this is surprising. Catholics and Protestants also often inter-
preted the explorations and discoveries in narrow and provincial terms.79
What is most interesting about Jewish interpretations of these events is
not that they are parochial or that they are incorporated into discourses
that themselves have nothing to do with the discoveries but rather the
specific parochial concerns they are taken to address.
In his study of Jewish accounts of the European expansion to Amer-
ica, Abraham Melamed found that Jews were “especially late in applying
the discovery to the Jewish question.”80 This overlooked “Jewish ques-
tion,” for Melamed, concerned the “possible far-reaching implications …
the discovery of America [might] have for [Jewish] theological ques-
tions.”81 Melamed is right that the explorations and discoveries had no
immediate impact on Jewish “theology.” He argues further that when
Jews eventually did “apply the discovery to the Jewish question,” they did
so in “two theological contexts: the querelle between ‘moderns’ and
‘ancients,’ and the question of the ‘ten lost tribes.’”82 Here Melamed is
mistaken; the questions of whether or not the ancients knew of the New
World and whether or not Jewish tribes had ever lived there are hardly
theological questions at all. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
Jewish descriptions of the explorations and discoveries typically had lit-
tle to do with theology.83
When Jews considered what these events might mean for the Jewish
people, their conclusion was almost invariably that the explorations and
discoveries illuminated not the relationship of Jews to their God but
rather the relationship of Europe’s Jews to Europe’s Christians. Men like
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66 | Noah J. Efron

Joseph ha-Kohen took these events as a further token of the mistreatment

of Jews by Christians and, at the same time, as a harbinger of a new age
in which such suffering would be ameliorated. Men like Maharal took
them as a demonstration of the superiority of Jewish over Christian sapi-
ence. Men like Azariah de Rossi took them as a further demonstration of
the complementarity of Jewish and gentile scholarship, and of the impor-
tance of Jews in any translatio studii account of the accumulation of
human knowledge. In a world in which boundaries were radically chang-
ing, Jews found in the explorations and discoveries an opportunity to
redefine the borders between Jews and Christians. Changes in world
geography concerned Jews, but only insomuch as they affected the social
geography of Europe.

Notes

1. David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe
(New Haven, 1995), 229.
2. Tobias Cohen, Sefer Ma’aseh Tuviyah (Bnai Brak, 1978; 1st printing: Venice, 1707),
Author’s Introduction, 26, col. 1.
3. “Oliver” probably refers to Olivier van Noort, who circumnavigated the globe
between 1598 and 1601. (I am grateful to Dr. Norman Fiering for this identification.)
Francisco Fernández de la Cueva Enriquez, Duqe de Albuquerque, Marques de Cuéllar
was Capitan-General de la Nueva España at the start of the eighteenth century. See
Archivo Biográfico de España, Portugal e Iberoamérica (ABEPI), Fiche F 320, 293–327.
4. Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviyah, 63a.
5. Later chapters supplemented this account with information about new herbs and med-
icines imported from America, which catalogued the virtues of sarsaparilla and sas-
safras (which purifies urine), tobacco (which, when smoked, purified within and
without, especially the chest, head, and stomach, and when applied topically, reduced
the pain of podogra, or podiatric gout), and more. See Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviyah, 63a–64b.
6. There is some irony in this, in light of the passage in Jacob Aboab’s introduction to
Ma’aseh Tuviyah, in which he likens Cohen’s greatness to the great heroism of Colum-
bus. See Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviyah, Introduction, 19, col. 1.
7. See the essays by Eva Alexandra Uchmany, Anita Novinsky, Silvia Marzagalli,
Jonathan I. Israel, Pieter Emmer, James Boyajian, Ernst Pijning, and Seymour Drescher
in this volume for more information about these developments.
8. Some of Cohen’s contemporaries were certainly more interested in the New World;
indeed, some made their fortunes in New World trade (see the essays cited in note 7,
above). Cohen himself was interested in some of the goods procured there (see note 5,
above). Still, there can be no doubt that Cohen, at least, took his readers to be ignorant
of even the most rudimentary facts, and that he did not find this ignorance lamenta-
ble. The New World, Cohen believed, was of little inherent interest to Jews.
9. These books are described in some detail below. For other general surveys of accounts
of the discoveries written by Jews, see Mendel Silber, “America in Hebrew Literature,”
Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 22 (1914):101–37; Mendel Silber,
“America in Jewish Literature,” Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 236–38; R. J. H.
Gottheil, “Columbus in Jewish Literature,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical
Society 2 (1894):129–37; and especially Abraham Melamed, “Gilui America ba-Safrut
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 67

ha-Yehudit bi-meot ha-16–17,” in Be-’Ikvot Columbus: America 1492–1992, ed. Miriam

Eliav-Feldon (Jerusalem, 1996), 443–64.
10. About this genre, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Mem-
ory (Seattle and London, 1996; orig. pub., 1982), 54–75. The two exceptions are Abra-
ham Zacut’s Sefer Yohasim (1566) and Eliahu Capsali’s Seder Eliahu Zuta (mss, pub.
1975). Capsali lived and wrote exclusively in the Ottoman Empire, where accounts of
the explorations were fewer and harder to come upon. For the reception of the voyages
of discovery in Ottoman culture, see Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the
New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hind-i garbi” and Sixteenth Century Ottoman Americana
(Wiesbaden, 1990); and Thomas D. Goodrich, Ottoman Knowledge of Columbus and the
New World in the Sixteenth Century (Washington, D.C, 1991).
11. A noteworthy exception is Mattityahu Delacrut’s Zel ha-’Olam (1733), which evinces no
trace of the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. This is
doubtless because the book is a fourteenth-century Hebrew rendition of an anony-
mous thirteenth-century French text. Why Delacrut chose not to interpolate contem-
porary material is impossible to say. About Zel ha-’Olam, see L. Zunz, “Essay on the
Geographical Literature of the Jews from the Remotest Times to the Year 1840,” in The
Itinerary of R. Benjamin of Tudela, ed. A. Asher (New York, 1841), 264, 274–75.
12. The Hebrew books were Iggeret Orhot ‘Olam (1586) by Abraham Farissol (of which
twenty copies were distributed between seventeen families), Meor ‘Einayim (1573–75)
by Azariah de Rossi (of which twenty-nine copies were distributed between twenty-
seven families), Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah (1587) by Gedaliah ibn Yahya (of which twelve
copies were distributed among twelve families), and Divrei ha-Yamim le-Malkhei Zarefat
u-le-Malkhei Beit Ottoman ha-Togar (1554) by Joseph ha-Kohen (of which two copies
were held among two families). The list of Latin and Italian texts includes several that
are difficult to identify. Among the texts, however, was Joannes Boemus’s Gli costumi,
le leggi et l’usanze di tutte le genti (1558), Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s Historia de L’Indie
occidentali (1534), Giovanni Maria Bonardo’s La minera del mondo (1585), Giacomo
Gastaldi’s La universale descrittione del mondo (1562), and a score of other historical,
medical, and natural philosophical books that may well have contained mention or
description of the New World. See the tables included in Shifra Baruchson, Sefarim ve-
Kor im: Tarbut ha-Keriah shel Yehudei Italiah be-Shilhei ha-Renesans (Ramat Gan, 1993), 167,
172, 180–90.
13. Prof. Matt Goldish has recently begun a study of the meta-halakhic interests of Man-
tuan Jewry from this time.
14. David ben Solomon Gans, Nehmad ve-Na’im (Jessnitz, 1743), 27b. Though the first edi-
tion of Nehmad ve-Na’im was published in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was
written in the years spanning from approximately 1590 to 1612.
15. See Anthony Grafton, April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The
Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992), 1–10;
as well as J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New: Cambridge Studies in Early Modern His-
tory (Cambridge, 1970); G. Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo (Florence, 1977); and M. T.
Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981):519–38, which are cited in Grafton et al.,
New Worlds, Ancient Texts.
16. Though this was not always the case. One also finds among Jews of the age some
descriptions of the explorations and discoveries that differed in kind or emphasis from
contemporary Christian accounts. Abraham Yagel’s description of odd customs of
Amerindians, for example, or Abraham Portaleone’s description of the novel fauna of
the New World are both the sorts of occasional descriptions of wonders and novelties
that one might just as easily find in contemporary Latin or vernacular accounts. See
Abraham Yagel ben Hananiah dei Goliccho, Beit Ya’ar ha-Levanon, Bodleian: Ms. Reg-
gio 9 (Neubauer, 1304), chap. 106, 241a–242b.; and Abraham ben David Portaleone,
Shilte ha-Gibborim (Mantua, 1612), 83a. On Abraham Yagel, see David B. Ruderman,
Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician
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68 | Noah J. Efron

(Cambridge, Mass., 1988). On Abraham Portaleone, and particularly the attitudes

toward natural history, natural philosophy, and wonders of nature displayed in Shilte
ha-Gibborim, see Matt Goldish, “The Sanctuary of Science: Rabbi Abraham Portaleone’s
Shilte ha-Gibborim,” in Volume Accompanying an International Conference on Jewish
Responses to Early Modern Science (Jewish Treatments of Science from De Revolutionibus to
the Principia and Beyond) (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 1995).
17. I have found no discussion among Jews in this period in which the discovery of the
New World was treated as distinct from other discoveries, particularly those in Africa
and Asia. For Jews of this time, the expansion of Europe, the discoveries of new won-
ders, the growing knowledge of the earth, and the growing conviction that the earth
was all known were all of particular moment and were often conflated. All the writers
I will consider understandably viewed the explorations in Africa and Asia as a piece
with those in lands previously unknown. The constant identification of the further
exploration of known lands and the new exploration of new lands is perhaps best illus-
trated by Joseph ha-Kohen’s decision to join into a single volume his translations of
Boemus and Lopez de Gomara, the one being an account of the exotic habits of the
three known continents, and the other being primarily an account of the conquest of
the West Indies, or the new lands. This tendency was not unique to Jews. See, for exam-
ple, Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, “Columbus’ Outro mundo: The Genesis of a Geographical
Concept,” Renaissance Studies 6.3-4 (1992):336–51.
18. See David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham
ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati, 1981).
19. Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 134, and especially 231n. 19. I have consulted an
imperfect edition of this book printed in Milan in 1508 (and presently located in Har-
vard University’s Houghton Library).
20. Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, Iggeret Orhot ‘Olam (Venice, 1586), chap. 29.
21. Farissol, Iggeret, chap. 14.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., chap. 30.
24. Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 137.
25. Solomon ibn Verga’s biography has been a matter of some dispute. A good account can
be found in M. Benayahu, “Makor ‘al Megurashei Sefarad be-Fortugal ve-Zeitam
aharei Gezeirat RaSaV le-Saloniki,” Sefunot 11 (1978):233–65.
26. Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah (Adrianople, 1554), Author’s Introduction, 1;
Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, trans. Martin A. Cohen (Philadel-
phia, 1965; 1st ed., Ferrara, 1553), Prologue, 38–40; Joseph ben Joshua ha-Kohen, Divrei
ha-Yamim le-Malkhei Zarefat u-le-Malkhei Beit Ottoman ha-Togar: Milhamotehem Ve-Korote-
hem Ve-Hol Ha-Telaot Asher Matsu Et Am Yisrael Tahat Shevet Malkhutam (Jerusalem,
1967; 1st ed., Sabbionetta or Venice, 1554), Frontispiece, Introduction, and 36b, and
Joseph ben Joshua ha-Kohen, Sefer Emeq ha-bakha (Jerusalem, 1961; 1st ed., Vienna,
1852), 10.
27. Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, chap. 57.
28. Usque, Consolation, Dialogue III, chap. 27, 201–2. See, too, the coda to this story, in
which John II’s son Alphonse was thrown off a horse and died at his own wedding in
Divine retribution for this act of cruelty, Part III, 29. (Alphonse in fact died two years
before the banishment from Lisbon.)
29. Ibid., Dialogue I, 43.
30. Ibid., 44.
31. Ibid., Dialogue III, 236.
32. Another sign of this incipient redemption, for Samuel Usque, was the Protestant Refor-
mation. He opined that the new Lutherans had generations earlier been forcibly con-
verted to Christianity. The Reformation was “an indication of the non-Catholic origin”
of these people, and a sign that the strong-armed tactics of Christianity had begun to
fail. See Usque, Consolation, Dialogue III, 185, 193.
33. Joseph ha-Kohen, Sefer Emeq ha-Bakha, 104–5.
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 69

34. Joseph ha-Kohen, Divrei ha-Yamim. About this book, its background, and its reception,
see Reuven Michael, Ha-Ketivah Ha-Historit Ha-Yehudit (Jerusalem, 1993), 29–34.
35. This is true of the version that he brought to print. He later added a third part as well,
which remained in manuscript until 1955. See Joseph ha-Kohen, Divrei ha-Yamim, and
the Introduction there for the circumstances of its composition.
36. Joseph gives the numerological sign “yehash atidot le-mo” (from Devarim 32:35: “and
he speeds what is forthcoming to them”), with its eschatological overtones, to date
the book.
37. Or he could simply have been mistaken about the dates of the discovery. David Gans
took him at his word when he was compiling Zemah David, and dated Amerigo
Vespucci’s voyages to 1520. But there is good reason to think that Joseph ha-Kohen
was himself aware that the first voyages to the New World took place decades ear-
lier than the placement of his account implies. First, he uncharacteristically omitted
dates from all his accounts of voyages of discovery until he reached his account of
Magellan. Second, Joseph ha-Kohen’s entry was based on one or several books that
were unlikely to report such skewed dating. It is likely that he already had a copy of
Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s detailed works when he composed Divrei ha-Yamim. It
is difficult to believe, then, that he thought the New World had been discovered as
late as 1520.
38. Joseph ha-Kohen, Divrei ha-Yamim, Part II, 1a.
39. Ibid., Part II, 1b.
40. Ibid., 2a.
41. Meziv Gevulot ‘Amim was never published, and the precise date of its composition is
impossible to determine. I consulted the manuscript in the Columbia University Rare
Books Collection, sig. K82.
42. For an excellent short description of Boemus and this work, see Grafton et al., New
Worlds, Ancient Texts, 99–100.
43. Lagarto is a generic term for a lizard. Joseph ha-Kohen was probably referring to alli-
gators, known then as lagarto de Indias.
44. Joseph ha-Kohen, Meiziv Gevulot ‘Amim (Columbia University: K82, 73a-b), reprinted
in Rafael Weinberg, “Yosef ben Yehoshua ve-Sifro Meziv Gevulot ‘Amim,” Sinai 72, no.
7 (1973):363–64.
45. It is also significant that Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s Historia general de las Indias itself
had millenarian strains. Lopez de Gomara associated the Indies, for instance, with the
mythical Atlantis. See Harold J. Cook, “Ancient Wisdom, the Golden Age, and
Atlantis: The New World in Sixteenth-Century Cosmography,” Terrae Incognitae 10
(1978):25–43.
46. Gedaliah ibn Yahya, Sefer Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1981; 1st ed., Venice, 1587),
273: “… and the [Portuguese] King investigated whether the exiles [from Spain] had
paid the requisite head tax, and he found many of them who had not, and he was infu-
riated with them, and he took in bond, because they were poor, their sons from ages
three to ten, and led them to an island called Stomi which was a thankless wasteland,
owing to the alligators, which are poisonous snakes and serpents that kill. And he
wanted to settle this island, but it was not worth his while, because most of them died
from the snakes and some from hunger.”
47. Ibid., 274.
48. Abraham Melamed has recently argued that the first Jew to view the discoveries of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in millenarian terms was Menasseh ben Israel, in the
middle of the seventeenth century. Writing of Menasseh ben Israel, Melamed concluded
that “thus, more than one hundred and fifty years after the great event [of the discov-
ery of America], a direct link was finally forged between the discovery of America and
the messianic question.” (Melamed, “Gilui America,” 464). Melamed is correct that
Menasseh ben Israel’s famous Esperança de Israel was the first to consider the idea that
some among the Ten Lost Tribes had once lived in the New World (though Melamed
overstates the Dutch rabbi’s enthusiasm for the idea; see the excellent introduction to
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70 | Noah J. Efron

Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel, trans. Moses Wall, ed. Henry Méchoulan and
Gérard Nahon (Oxford, 1987; orig. English publ., London, 1652). Prior to 1650, Jewish
millenarianism was in no way affected by the discoveries in the west, in Melamed’s
view, as evidenced by the fact that sixteenth-century inquiries into the location of the
Ten Lost Tribes of Israel invariably concluded that they could be found in Asia or
Africa. Melamed’s distinction between the explorations to the east and those to the
west is too sharp, however. As Gans’s account exemplifies, Jews (like all other Euro-
peans) tended to view the discoveries in the east and the west together. The voyages
of discovery, put in the context in which they were perceived by their contemporaries,
were interpreted in a millennial framework by the writers I have been describing.
49. For example, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor, chap. 3; Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Dor Golei
Sefarad ‘al ‘Azmo,” Zion 26 (1961):23–34; and Reuven Michael, Ha-Ketiva He-Historit
Ha-Yehudit (Jerusalem, 1993), chap. 1.
50. David Ruderman has rightly emphasized that these eschatological accounts were
often, despite their martyrology, notably optimistic. Indeed, most of the accounts I
have described see in the explorations and discoveries both exemplars of Jewish mis-
ery and, at the same time, significantly, hints of Jewish ascendancy.
51. The reactions that these writers had to the discoveries of their time were intriguingly
similar to the reactions of many of the same writers to the Protestant Reformation.
(About this, see Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish
Eyes,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities IV [1971]:239–327.)
None took the Reformation, in and of itself, as a clear sign of the End of Days (they had
seen Hus and others, and indeed some contemporaries took Luther to be simply more
of the same). For some, however, it did fuel a general feeling of millennial expectation.
The same sort of attitude pertained to the explorations and discoveries. They did not
occasion obvious shock or anxiety, but they did support the view (which owed more
to the expulsions and the turbulence of the times for Jews than to anything else) that a
new epoch had arrived, and that the old epoch, marked by countless persecutions and
degradations in Europe, might be drawing to a close. Like the Reformation, the explo-
rations mattered most to the writers I have been discussing for what they said about
their times and for what they implied about how the lives and stocks of Jews might
soon be changing.
This view, of course, was not unique to Jews. See, for example, Leonard I. Sweet,
“Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision of the New World,” The Catholic His-
torical Review LXXII.3 (1986):369–82; and Cook, “Ancient Wisdom, the Golden Age, and
Atlantis.” It is certainly possible that Christian millennial interpretations of the explo-
rations and discoveries served to reinforce similar interpretations among Jews.
52. Quoted in Grafton et al., New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 1, 99–100.
53. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Nezah Yisrael (Bnai Brak, 1980; 1st ed., Prague, 1599), 156, col.
2. Maharal concluded that the Ten Tribes were not geographically isolated at all, but
rather metaphysically isolated. No new discovery, then, could in principle shed any
light on their whereabouts.
54. Joseph ben Isaac ha-Levi, Ketonet Pasim (Lublin, 1614), chap. 9, 13a-b. For a discussion
of this passage, see Joseph Maurice Davis, “R. Yom Tov Lipman Heller, Joseph b. Isaac
ha-Levi, and Rationalism in Ashkenazic Jewish Culture 1550–1650,” Ph.D. diss., Har-
vard University, 1990, 320–21.
55. See Judah Loew b. Bezalel, Be’er ha-Golah (London, 1960; 1st ed., Prague, 1598), 126ff.
56. See Salo Wittmayer Baron, “Azariah de’ Rossi: A Biographical Sketch,” History and Jew-
ish Historians: Essays and Addresses, ed. Salo W. Baron (Philadelphia, 1964), 167–73, and
the references there.
57. For instance, Azariah de Rossi, Meor ‘Einayim (Vilnius, 1865; 1st ed., Mantua, 1573–75),
vol. 1, 85, in which he suggests Jewish influence on Hermes Trismegistus.
58. For example, ibid., vol. 2, 75, in which he suggest the influences of Ptolemy and Hip-
parchus on Talmudic scholars.
59. For example, ibid., chaps. 27 and 28, vol. 1, 254–64, and also vol. 1, 85.
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Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands | 71

60. See especially the second chapter of Imrei Binah, entitled, “The Necessity of Our Citing
in Some Cases Evidence Which Is Not from Our Nation,” in de Rossi, Meor ‘Einayim,
vol. 1, 68–76.
61. For example, ibid., 73–74.
62. See the discussions of de Rossi’s apologetic tendencies in Robert Bonfil, “Some Reflec-
tions on the Place of Azariah de Rossi’s Meor ‘Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian
Renaissance Jewry,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Coop-
erman (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 23–48; Salo Wittmayer Baron, “Azariah de’ Rossi’s
Attitude to Life,” in History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses, ed. Salo W.
Baron (Philadelphia, 1964), 174–204; and Salo Wittmayer Baron, “Azariah de’ Rossi’s
Historical Method,” in History and Jewish Historians, 205–39.
63. See Baron, “Attitude to Life,” 187–88, and the notes there.
64. De Rossi, Meor ‘Einayim, vol. 1, 145.
65. Ibid. The question of the locations of Ophir and Tarshish was also pondered by a vari-
ety of Christian scholars and explorers of the day. In 1526, Sebastian Cabot had sailed
from Spain in search of Ophir and Tarshish in the Pacific. In 1568, Alvaro de Mendaña
discovered islands that he was certain included the biblical sites, and for this reason
named them the Solomon Islands. The hypothesis that the New World might contain
Ophir was widely entertained through much of the sixteenth century. See the essay by
James Romm in this volume.
66. De Rossi, Meor ‘Einayim, vol. 1, 145.
67. Abraham Melamed has recently interpreted de Rossi’s identification of Peru with the bib-
lical Ophir very differently than I have. Melamed writes that de Rossi’s statements must
be seen as part of a debate about the relative status of ancient and modern scholars—
what he calls “the querelle between ‘moderns’ and ‘ancients.’” “Farissol, Joseph ha-Kohen
and Tuvia ha-Cohen (‘harofeh’) adopted the radical position,” Melamed writes, “ which
emphasized the superiority of the moderns. Azariah dei Rossi represented the more
moderate position, namely that the moderns rediscovered what had been already known
but forgotten” (Miriam Eliav-Feldon, ed., Be-’Ikvot Columbus: America 1492–1992
[Jerusalem, 1996], xxi–xxii; and Abraham Melamed, “Gilui America,” 451–59). The notion
that de Rossi or Gans, who endorsed de Rossi’s view, might champion the ancients over
the moderns is inconsistent with the attitudes each man expressed throughout his writ-
ing. Both men believed strongly that recent achievements in natural philosophy and,
more generally, in humane studies had outstripped those of the ancients. A more plausi-
ble explanation is that both de Rossi and Gans believed that the identity of Peru and
Ophir enhanced the status of ancient Jews relative to modern Christians, but not that it
demonstrated the superiority of the ancients to the moderns in general.
68. Noah Efron, “Irenism and Natural Philosophy in Rudolfine Prague,” Science in Context,
10:4 (1997), 627–49.
69. David ben Solomon Gans, Nehmad ve-Na’im (Jessnitz, 1743), 8a–9b.
70. I have not been able to determine the exact identities of these sources.
71. David ben Solomon Gans, Zemah David (Jerusalem, 1983; 1st ed., Prague, 1592), Part II,
1533, 391; and Gans, Nehmad ve-Na’im, 28a.
72. Gans, Nehmad ve-Na’im, 29a.
73. Ibid., 27b.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 29a.
76. Ibid.
77. Gans, Zemah David, Part I, [4]205, 48.
78. A similar view was later adopted by Judah Del Bene, among others. See Judah Del
Bene, Kissot le-Veit David (Verona, 1646), 3:17, 42b. I am grateful to Prof. Ruderman,
who drew my attention to this reference.
79. See the references cited in note 15.
80. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, ed., Be-’Ikvot Columbus: America 1492–1992 (Jerusalem, 1996), xxi.
The emphasis is mine.
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72 | Noah J. Efron

81. Melamed, “Gilui America,” 444.

82. Eliav-Feldon, Be-’Ikvot Columbus, xxi.
83. The single exception being when they were taken to supply further evidence for the
coming of the Messiah. Yet even in this case, the events themselves were never taken
to have explicit theological import. Rather, they were seen as one of many indica-
tions—the Christian Reformation was another, as were the large and small expulsions
of the Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and there were many others as
well—that the world was changing rapidly and dramatically. This broader phenome-
non of widespread change was taken to provide evidence, though never theological
justification, for the incipience of the Messiah’s arrival.
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– Chapter 3 –

JEWISH SCIENTISTS AND THE ORIGIN

OF MODERN NAVIGATION

Patricia Seed

S TANDING ON THE WINDSWEPT SHORES of the Atlantic west of Lisbon in

1400, it would be hard to imagine the dizzyingly rapid set of changes
that the next hundred years would bring. A simple fisherman watching
the waters of the Tagus River slide smoothly into the Atlantic would
have seen simple blue and white fishing boats setting out in search of
sardines and tuna. His grandson, standing on those same shores a hun-
dred years later, would observe a different scene. Alongside the custom-
ary low-slung blue and white fishing boats gliding out to sea would be
tall-masted ships, called caravels and naus. These new, towering sea-
going vessels would slip easily into the ocean, their long ropes slapping
against the wooden masts as the sails were raised, sturdy sails snapping
as they caught the wind, setting forth for worlds unimagined even a
hundred years before. While the waters of the Tagus would glide into
the North Atlantic on 1 January 1500 just as they had on 1 January 1400,
the fisherman’s grandchild standing at the mouth of the Tagus would
know that a vast, previously unattainable world was now reachable
beyond those shores.
In 1400, sailing anywhere in the world was still a matter of guess-
work and approximation, but on the decks of the tall-masted ships in
1500 were men with devices capable of measuring location with numbers
as accurate today as they were five hundred years ago. Also onboard
these ships were charts and chart makers to accurately map uncharted
lands; they could depict coasts as accurately as they appear on contem-
porary globes.1 When some, not all, of the men on the departing tall ships
eventually returned to the mouth of the Tagus, returning sailors brought
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74 | Patricia Seed

back information that jolted the conventions by which medieval men and
women had interpreted their world for centuries.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the relatives of simple sailors
who had put out to sea on those ships knew that widely held beliefs
about the uninhabitable torrid zone were untrue, for they had seen
densely inhabited regions of equatorial West Africa. Educated pilots also
knew that Aristotle’s assumptions about how to understand the earth (as
qualities, not numbers) were wrong. If this were not enough, by 1501, one
year after the start of the century, the Portuguese would become the first
to know of the immense continents that lay across the ocean.
For Portuguese, not Spanish, navigators discovered the new land-
masses of the Western Hemisphere. Christopher Columbus (a former
longtime navigator for Portuguese leaders) by 1503 had merely discov-
ered a handful of islands; on a single occasion he caught sight of a larger
body, about which he could only speculate. Neither Columbus nor his
Hispanic contemporaries had any idea of the size of the larger land-
masses beyond.2 Spaniards, for example, had no idea of the existence of
Mexico until Cortés happened upon it in 1519, nearly thirty years after
first landing in the Caribbean.
While Spanish navigators, like Columbus, cautiously crept around the
nearby Caribbean guided by native pilots, Portuguese explorers boldly set
forth on the unexplored and stormy seas of the North and South Atlantic.
During the fateful voyages of Corte-Real and Gonçalo Coelho in 1501 and
1503,3 only one and three years respectively after they first landed in the
Americas, Portuguese scientists and officials learned there were not just
islands but huge continents on the other side of the Atlantic. By 1503, Por-
tuguese sailors, scientists, and mapmakers knew of the existence and were
able to draw the contours of two major Atlantic coastlines, the very large
landmasses of America north and south of the Spanish discoveries in the
Caribbean—landmasses that a passenger on these voyages, Amerigo
Vespucci, would subsequently publicize and christen “a New World.”
While the Portuguese sailors had undeniable courage in setting forth
onto open oceans that no one had ever sailed, they did not embark upon
these expeditions foolishly. Rather, unlike many Western Europeans at
the time, they were armed with a knowledge of oceanography and
astronomy that would allow their caravels to set forth into the unknown
stormy, and often dangerous, waters of the North and South Atlantic
Oceans for weeks on end, while they mapped the coasts they encoun-
tered. Where did the mathematical precision in numbers and accurate
charts come from? The answer is that the instruments and the calcula-
tions came from Jewish scientists on the Iberian Peninsula, heirs to (and
innovators in) the great astronomical and mathematical traditions of the
golden age of Arabic science. Using the achievements of this tradition,
Jewish scientists expanded their horizons to create the mathematical
equations and instruments for modern navigation, transforming sailing
from guesswork into the precise proceeding that we recognize today.
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Origin of Modern Navigation | 75

The foundation of modern scientific navigation rests upon accurate

understanding of both astronomy and mathematics. These sciences, how-
ever, were not well developed in fifteenth-century Christian Europe. Dur-
ing the Middle or Dark Ages, Christians produced little of enduring
worth in physics, optics astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. By con-
trast, sustained innovation flourished in two influential centers in the
Muslim-controlled world.
Between 800 and 1400 A.D., scientists in the Islamic world had
invented algebra, taken the idea of the sine and developed trigonometry,
transformed mathematical notation from the awkward Roman numerals
to the forms we use today, and incorporated zero into counting systems.
Al-Farabi calculated the circumference of the earth (close to its modern
measurement), and other scientists created sophisticated instruments of
astronomical observation from earlier primitive devices.
Science in the Muslim world showed another valuable characteristic
as well. While Christian leaders kept their institutions of higher learning
closed to Jews, Islamic leaders encouraged cooperation between Jews and
Muslims in scientific inquiry. While Christians were welcomed into such
dialogues as well, they rarely embraced the study of science with the
same enthusiasm as did Muslims and Jews.
The scientific advances of Islamic and Jewish scientists did not con-
tinue forever. As the Muslim empire in Iberia (one of two major scientific
centers) began to lose its territory and revenue, its scientific preeminence
began to deteriorate as well.
New Christian overlords of what is now Spain proved less willing or
less able to protect Jewish scientists from anti-Semitic elements in their
midst. Pogroms in eastern Spain in 1391, in which a prominent Mallorcan
astronomer was killed, began the exodus of Jewish scientists. As anti-
Semitic agitation increased in Castile and Aragon, Portugal became the
haven for Jewish scientists seeking refuge from increasingly anti-Semitic
surroundings. Encouraged by the official toleration promoted by Catholic
rulers in Portugal, Jewish scientists migrated to Portugal, where they
could live in peace and tranquility.
Portuguese leaders—and Prince Henry, nicknamed the Navigator, in
particular—had another reason for encouraging the immigration of Jew-
ish scientists. Trying to develop a new route to the gold-producing
regions of western Africa, he patronized seafaring expeditions off the
African coast. But the challenges of navigating the mid-Atlantic proved
seemingly intractable. More powerful tidal surges in the Atlantic than
sailors had experienced in the Mediterranean made knowledge of the
cycles of the moon imperative for the basic timing of entering and depart-
ing from ports. Welcoming Jewish mathematicians and astronomers with
the knowledge of such cycles to Portugal created a critical mass of
knowledge that would eventually contribute not only to the voyages to
West Africa, but eventually to knowledge of how to sail around the
world. Offering the prospect of both physical safety and a new scientific
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76 | Patricia Seed

challenge, Portugal thus became an attractive place in which to settle for

fifteenth-century Iberian Jews.
After Prince Henry’s death, Jewish astronomers and mathematicians,
drawing upon their own as well as their shared scientific traditions with
Muslims, created lasting solutions to the problem of navigation in unknown
waters. They created the modern science of navigation—the use of astro-
nomical calculations to fix locations on the earth; they themselves, along
with mathematical formulas, instruments, and charts, often piloted the
giant tall-masted ships across the south Atlantic and eventually the world.4
The crowning achievement of Jewish scientists working for the
crown of Portugal was the scientific determination of latitude—creating
both the precise instruments and mathematical equations necessary to
find the latitude (a numerical description) of unknown parts of the world.
While Babylonian and later Greek scientists had theoretically under-
stood latitude and longitude coordinates for the heavens, they had never
managed to apply them accurately even for the tiny part of the globe they
knew, namely the Mediterranean; thus, latitude and longitude remained
remote and abstract ideas known only to a few scientists. No means for
accurately fixing latitude or longitude existed.
Jewish mathematicians on the Iberian Peninsula, however, recog-
nized the theoretical potential of latitude and longitude for creating what
we now know as celestial navigation, or the technical ability to determine
precisely any location on the globe. But even more innovatively, the Jew-
ish scientists in Portugal created a scientifically accurate means of navi-
gation that did not require years of training and practice to use. Instead,
they created both the necessarily precise instruments and the measure-
ments that would allow any sailor with relatively brief training to deter-
mine a ship’s position in an exact, scientific manner.
On the deck of a wooden caravel in the fog-shrouded morning calms
in the equatorial Atlantic, or in the near gale force springtime winds off
the Cape of Good Hope, sailors wanted more than prayers or even guess-
work; they wanted the security that those guiding the boat knew both
where they were and where they were going. And that certainty came
from numerical calculations and measurements that could be repeated
over and over again with the same results. Numbers, the Portuguese
came to realize, could be used by anyone to navigate.
The proof of this novel insight had come dramatically in 1446. Dur-
ing an expedition to the west coast of Africa, arrows containing an unex-
pectedly deadly poison killed a landing team consisting of the captain,
pilots, and leaders of the expedition. The sailors left guarding the ship
observed with horror as, one after another, their leaders collapsed either
dead or seriously injured from even slight contact with the venom. A six-
teen-year-old boy with a rudimentary knowledge of astronomical navi-
gation successfully piloted the expedition’s ships back to Lisbon.5 But
while that knowledge was precise enough to be used to allow anyone to
navigate, it could not be created by anyone.
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Origin of Modern Navigation | 77

To establish the measurements that would predict the sun’s path in

the sky and the correspondence to positions on the earth required inti-
mate familiarity with mathematical specialties, such as trigonometry, and
astronomical knowledge of the exact length of the solar year and of phe-
nomena such as the precession of the ecliptic. Familiarity with such meas-
ures—widespread in the worlds of Jewish and Muslim scientists—was
rare outside of occasional isolated individuals in the fifteenth-century
Christian world. Indeed, the accurately calculated solar year—absolutely
required for accurate measures of latitude—was not incorporated into
Christian knowledge until 1583, over a century after a Jewish scientist in
Iberia had created the first scientifically accurate means of finding lati-
tude based upon a precise knowledge of the solar year.6
The knowledge, the data, and the manuals that provided the launch-
ing pad for modern nautical science were composed in Arabic and
Hebrew. While Latin translations were made, the works translated were
not always the ones needed to solve the problems presented by naviga-
tion. To provide a simple example, Al-Zarqel had proposed a method of
using the first scientific instrument of navigation, the astrolabe, in the
daytime. Alfonso the Wise had ordered this work translated into the
Libros de saber de astronomia, but Al-Zarqel’s solution for the daytime
astrolabe was incorrect. The answer lay in a different approach, available
only in Arabic and Hebrew, and understandable only to someone edu-
cated not in the Latinized universities of Western Europe but in the
Hebrew-language schools of Iberian Jews.7
The role of Jews in introducing such changes in ways of thinking
makes sense from yet another perspective. When we think of the stran-
glehold of religious orthodoxy that the Catholic Church exercised over
scholarship during the Middle Ages, it makes sense that those who first
openly contested the wisdom of church fathers in such matters would
come from a tradition in which their authority was irrelevant. Who bet-
ter than Jewish scientists to question widely repeated statements by
prominent churchmen about the uninhabitable tropics? Who better than
Jewish scientists to represent the earth with numbers when the Catholic
establishment believed (following Aristotle) that the earth could only be
understood qualitatively?8
During the early years of the fifteenth century, Portuguese monarchs
began to draw upon Iberia’s distinguished tradition of astronomical and
mathematical learning to create scientific approaches to navigation,
employing Jewish scientists on a regular basis. The kings consulted Jew-
ish astronomers to establish more accurate timekeeping, to fix lunar
cycles to determine high and low tides using the computations of the Mal-
lorcan Jewish astronomer Abraham Cresques. Jewish scientists also began
to instruct sailors prior to voyages in using the position of the guard stars
around the Pole in nighttime navigation to pinpoint more specifically the
direction of travel (e.g., southwest, northeast) or to describe the direction of
a place relative to Lisbon using a primitive conception of celestial latitude,
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78 | Patricia Seed

but all of these accomplishments were surpassed during the final three
decades of the fifteenth century.
Beginning with the voyages of the shadowy Lopo Gonçalves in
1473/74,9 the Portuguese approached a territory unknown by Classical
Greek scholarship, unfamiliar even to the legendary Arab travelers and
geographers of the Middle Ages.10 They had reached territory that few in
Europe had ever even imagined existed, and they had no models, charts,
or even local nautical traditions to fall back on.
Previously, all of European sailing had been done in latitudes north
of the equator—the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and even the northern
reaches of the Indian Ocean all lie north of the equator—nor had Euro-
peans often ventured by land south of the equator. Europe’s overland
traders with Arabia, Persia, and China primarily traversed terrain north
of the equator.
By 1470, the Portuguese monarch’s oceanic ambitions lay beyond the
limits of existing seafaring knowledge and navigation organized around
the Pole Star, which becomes invisible slightly south of the equator. Con-
sequently, navigational computations by land and sea based on the fixed
point of the north would no longer be useful.
While the challenges were great, so too were the potential rewards.
Sailing south of the equator, Portuguese ships could reach the oft-tra-
versed Indian Ocean where rare spices could be readily purchased. Lusi-
tanian kings shared another ambition: finding the lost Christian kingdom
of Prester John located somewhere in the Horn of Africa. Surprisingly,
Jewish scientists shared this goal with the monarchs, for Portuguese Jew-
ish folklore of the time held that a lost tribe of Israel—now identified as
the Ethiopian Jews—was located in the same part of Africa as the Christ-
ian kingdom of Prester John.
In the years between 1473 and 1481, the Jewish scientific community
on whom Portuguese monarchs relied for their scientific knowledge
decided to use the position of the sun as the best measure of determining
latitude south of the equator, for unlike the Pole Star, the sun was visible
in both hemispheres.11
To transform this idea into a uniform set of numbers, however, Jew-
ish scientists would have to overcome two major obstacles: one mathe-
matical, and one practical. To find one’s position on the surface of the
earth from astronomical information, two separate measures had to be
fixed. (Fixing two variables allows you to solve an equation for the third,
which in this case was latitude.) Since sailors would be taking only a sin-
gle measure—the position of the midday sun in the sky—they had to
have an additional accurate measurement of where the noonday sun
stood in relation to other objects in order to then determine the variable:
latitude. Neither this equation nor the instruments to measure the angle
of the midday sun existed in scientifically accurate forms.
Dealing with the mathematical obstacle required solving different
problems. One of these difficulties was the absence of a concept of negative
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Origin of Modern Navigation | 79

numbers, which would have made the equation far easier to solve. Neg-
ative numbers, however, did not come into existence until nearly two
centuries later.12 Furthermore, mathematical prediction of the sun’s place
in the sky on every day of the year demanded an absolutely precise solar
calendar with accurate accounting of leap years. In 1473, the Jewish
astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto composed his Rules for
the Astrolabe, the mathematically correct prediction of the sun’s seasonal
position in relationship to the earth.
With regard to the practical obstacle, in 1470 there was no instrument
accurate enough to measure the position of the sun in the sky consistently
and precisely. After experimenting with a number of different devices
over the course of a decade (including Levi Ben Gerson’s invention, the
backstaff), the Jewish scientists working for the Portuguese king settled
on remaking a traditional Iberian Islamic astronomical device, the astro-
labe, as the most precise device for the purpose of fixing the exact angle
of the midday sun above the horizon.
The astrolabe was a popular instrument for nighttime astronomical
observation in Spain, but originally it could only be used to observe
from specific latitudes. Changing one’s latitude meant changing the
plates, the largest and bulkiest part of the astrolabe, which typically
extended between ninety-five and two hundred millimeters in diameter,
and weighed between one and four kilos (roughly two to nine
pounds).13 The customary single latitude astrolabe would have been of
no use to navigators or indeed to any traveler intent on exploring
unknown regions and defining new latitudes. Furthermore, despite
their beauty and complexity, many of the medieval land-use astrolabes
were highly inaccurate.
In the eleventh century, two Muslim astronomers in Spain ‘Ali ibn
Khalaf and al-Zarqello, independently created the first universal astro-
labes that could be used for nighttime observation.14 Even with two mod-
els of a universal astrolabe that could potentially be used anywhere on
the globe, the Jewish scientists collaborating with the Portuguese still
faced an even more difficult task; they needed to transform the nocturnal
astrolabe into an instrument of daytime observation.
The solution was found around 1480 by following a hypothetical sug-
gestion originally proposed by Ibn Assafar, a twelfth-century Muslim
astronomer from Cordoba. The Portuguese astronomers altered the
design of the astrolabe so that when held by an outstretched arm at the
waist, with the needle pointing to the sun, the sun passed through two
small holes in small squares attached to the top and bottom of the needle.
This produced a small circle of light (against the shadow of the squares),
which fell upon numbers providing the height of the sun above the hori-
zon.15 The technique, popularly called “weighing the sun,” avoided the
difficulty of having to stare directly at the sun, as would have been nec-
essary using the traditional nighttime astrolabe. In so doing, scientists
were not only physically transforming an old-fashioned instrument; they
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80 | Patricia Seed

were turning it into a device capable of accurately translating the height

of the midday sun above the horizon into a number.
Thus, the two factors needed to determine latitude at sea in daytime
were in place: a set of numbers indicating the position of the noonday sun
for every day of a four-year cycle, as worked out by Abraham Zacuto,
and an instrument that sailors could use to measure the sun’s angle above
the horizon. Using the sun’s angle, and looking up the date of the solar
calendar, ordinary sailors could then look up the latitude that would pre-
cisely describe where they or anyone else was standing anywhere on the
globe with respect to the equator.
The earliest record of such use of an astrolabe and tables occurred in
the 1480s. Diogo d’Azambuja captained the West African voyage of 1481
during which accurate latitudes were first fixed south of the equator. In
1485, José Vizinho in Guinea and in 1487 Bartholomeu Dias also calcu-
lated precise latitudes on land using the tables and new astrolabe.16
The new sun-measuring astrolabe had been designed only for use on
land. It established the coordinates of a new place only once pilots were
able to disembark. The final step in developing celestial navigation was
finding a way to fix latitude while onboard ship. This process required
maintaining the scientific precision of the new sun-oriented astrolabe
while making the object both sturdy and stable enough to withstand the
motion of a boat at sea.
In 1497, the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto created the first
mariner’s astrolabe, handing it over personally to Vasco da Gama before
the latter set sail on his first voyage to India and back.17 This new nauti-
cal astrolabe was made of brass in the shape of a circle. It was thin and
narrow at the top, where a ring was attached, and thick (and therefore
heavy) on the bottom so it could remain stable on the high seas. On
Cabral’s voyage to Brazil and India, the converso scientist onboard, Mas-
ter John, was surprised by the consistent results provided by the nautical
astrolabe measurements on all five of the expedition’s major vessels.
This modified and simplified, yet remarkably accurate, mariner’s
astrolabe soon became widely adopted in Western Europe together with
Zacuto’s accompanying mathematical tables. Shortly thereafter, Por-
tuguese sailors began identifying their position anywhere on the earth by
a set of numbers, not as a rare or unique event, but as common, everyday
practice onboard ships. These latitude calculations (and accompanying
charts) were so accurate that they would allow the able Portuguese pilot
named Fernão Magalhães (better known in English as Magellan) to accu-
rately fix the eastern boundary of the Portuguese and Spanish spheres set
by the Treaty of Tordesillas, on the island of Melaku in what is presently
Indonesia, during the voyage around the world of his little fleet.
The achievement of being able to find latitude at sea was soon
reflected in more accurate maps. In 1504, Portuguese mapmakers—who
also traced their scientific tradition from a Jewish founder or founders—
constructed the first map of the world with accurate latitude lines. On
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Origin of Modern Navigation | 81

that same map, they placed the first global prime meridian, the starting
point for measuring longitude. This first global meridian ran through the
Portuguese Madeira Islands, where it remained until 1884 when it was
shifted to Greenwich, home of the nineteenth century’s dominant naval
power, England.
In determining longitude, the Portuguese Jewish scientists were
never able to match the scientific precision of their multiple achievements
with latitude. But João de Castro, Portugal’s only prominent Christian
astronomer, correctly declared in 1540 that clocks were the only way to
solve the longitude problem. The clocks produced at the time, he noted,
failed to meet the necessary standards of scientific accuracy.18 In the
meantime, they would continue to use astronomical calculations to esti-
mate time, and thus successfully sail the world over.
Armed with accurate knowledge of the size of the earth and scientif-
ically precise latitude, Portuguese officials knew that the only viable
route to Asia lay around the southern tip of Africa. When approached by
Christopher Columbus with his improbable suggestion that he could
reach Asia by sailing west, the king and his largely Jewish scientific tri-
bunal rightly derided Columbus’s knowledge of the circumference of the
earth as absurd. Given the size of the ocean lying between Portugal and
Asia, no sailing vessel could carry sufficient supplies to last even the out-
bound portion of such a voyage.
Fifteenth-century Jewish scientists thus turned ancient notions into
real usable knowledge of the earth. The idea of a coordinated geographi-
cal grid came from Ptolemy and the Alexandrian Greeks, but converting
that idea into a working reality was the achievement of Iberia’s Jewish
scientists. They transformed latitude and longitude from little known
and impractical oddities into realistic tools for navigation throughout the
globe. While it was Galileo who most famously asserted that the book of
nature is written in mathematics, we owe the origin of this understand-
ing to Iberian Jewish mathematicians and astronomers who were the first
to practically describe the world as a set of numbers. Their numbers were
not abstract notions, but a concrete daily practice of finding latitude
onboard the oceangoing ships of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The nautical voyages launched from Portugal after 1470 produced
incontrovertible evidence not only that numbers could be used to
describe the world, but also that in the real world of sailing, numerical
indications and mathematically designed nautical charts were an
immensely powerful means of survival and a successful means to reach
the rest of the world.
Jewish scientists’ expertise provided the basis for accurately locating
the latitude of any place on the globe, and estimating longitude well
enough for the world to be circumnavigated for the first time. For indeed,
all the world soon adopted the methods created by Portuguese Jewish
scientists, for the great advance of their methods was that they made sci-
entifically accurate latitude accessible to everyone.
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82 | Patricia Seed

Given the extent of this achievement, it is easy to wonder why the

Portuguese Jewish role has remained so little noticed, leading to the final,
and perhaps most obvious, question: Why have the contributions of Jew-
ish scientists at this time—mathematicians, astronomers, cartographers—
been so little recognized before? There are many reasons, some perfectly
innocuous, and others, unfortunately not.
In the first place, the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries mark a
significant decline for science in the Muslim world, a decline that corre-
sponded to military defeats in Iberia and a simultaneous waning of
Islamic influence. It should not be surprising that historians of Islamic
science would concentrate instead upon the great achievements of the
early and middle periods: the perfection of trigonometry and major
achievements in refraction and optics. The fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies offer nothing as stunningly original to the world of pure math or
pure astronomy as do those earlier contributions.
Secondly, historians of European science, for similar reasons, have
concentrated primarily upon the northern European tradition rather than
looking southward in Europe. The modern academic study of the history
of (European) science began in the nineteenth century, with many of its
founding works coming from Germany. This field has concentrated upon
innovations in mathematics and physics that took place primarily in
northern Europe beginning in the seventeenth century.
As a result, Jewish scientific accomplishments in Portugal presently
fall in between two distinct scholarly specializations, whose researchers
concentrate on eras both well before and well after the Iberian innova-
tions. Furthermore, since nearly all of the scholarly and technical work in
this field has appeared in Portuguese, a language that few historians of
science are familiar with, the terrain has often simply remained unknown
in the English-speaking world. Daniel Boorstin, for example, was able to
assert (quite inaccurately) in The Discoverers19 that the process of discov-
ering latitude was a simple, trivial matter, but such assertions are only
possible if one has not delved into the scientific literature written in Por-
tuguese, Arabic, and Hebrew. This literature reveals that the human and
material costs of discovering latitude were high.
In addition to such linguistic and scholarly barriers, there are two
additional factors, neither of which is entirely benign and both of which
have prejudiced subsequent accounts of the role of the Jews in scientific
and technical innovation. The first factor is a persistent Anglo-centrism,
which Ian Hacking has characterized as the tendency to produce “scep-
tered-isle versions” of the history of science.20 The tendency has be-
come exaggerated when it comes to innovations at sea. When Great
Britain became the dominant naval power at the start of the nineteenth
century, British writers began to celebrate nautical achievements in
which Englishmen played a critical role, even though as in the case of
longitude they required a single mechanical invention rather than a
major shift in forms and types of knowledge.21 In a similar vein, the
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Origin of Modern Navigation | 83

Greenwich observatory’s history of the prime meridian (the current start-

ing point for measuring longitude) only in the 1990s began to include an
account of the international votes for and against Greenwich at the 1884
conference. Omitted entirely is the history of the prime meridian, and the
fact that moving to Greenwich entailed only an incremental shift—17
degrees east of where it was first placed by the Portuguese cartographer
Pedro Reinel in 1504 and had conventionally appeared on nautical charts
and world maps for nearly four hundred years.22 The scientific advances
that made the maritime expansion of Europe technically possible origi-
nated in Portugal.
The final problem is that the scientific understanding of navigation
emerged on the border between two great competing political tradi-
tions—one Muslim, the other Christian. Since the innovators in the tradi-
tion of nautical science were Jewish, they have not been claimed
powerfully by either tradition. Even in Portugal, where one might expect
this scientific heritage to have been celebrated, remembrance has been
muted in regard to its Jewish origins. Portuguese historians of science
have downplayed, or even ignored, the Jewish faith of all of the mathe-
maticians, pilots, and astronomers (save one) who invented nautical sci-
ence in Portugal.
Indeed, nowhere in modern Portugal is there evidence or remem-
brance of this Jewish past. In the great monuments to the discoveries
along the banks of the Tagus, in the museums rightfully displaying the
technical and scientific achievements of the fifteenth century, there are no
Stars of David, no portraits of Jews or even of those forcibly converted
who remained behind for much of the sixteenth century to continue the
scientific tradition of their forefathers. Even in the National Maritime
Museum in Portugal, which contains exhibits of the scientific instruments
created by Jewish and converso scientists, the only portrait that hangs on
the walls is that of the lone Christian astronomer, João de Castro, who
wound up (by accident rather than design) in the astronomy and mathe-
matics classes being taught the royal princes by a converso scientist.
Furthermore, in this present era of intense Muslim-Jewish hostility in
the Middle East, it has become immensely difficult to suggest that Jews
were the major conduit (and innovators of) a scientific tradition in astron-
omy and mathematics that was created and shared with the Muslim
world. Vehement Muslim-Jewish animosity has also rendered it politically
unpalatable to acknowledge that Jews transmitted the Islamic tradition of
astronomy and mathematics to Christian Europe, and transformed these
subjects into the modern science of navigation.
Therefore, it should not be surprising that the great achievements of
this era of Jewish scientific innovation and creativity are relatively
obscure at present. Emerging on the cusp of the decline of one great sci-
entific tradition and the rise of another, the Iberian Jewish period was too
remote from the central and easily recognizable achievements of either
great tradition.
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84 | Patricia Seed

The evidence of the powerful and indispensable role of Jews in the

invention of scientific calculations of latitude and in the invention of nau-
tical science can be seen in the unnecessarily tragic decay of Portuguese
science in less than a century after its powerful apogee. The rapid decline
of Portuguese science paralleled the loss of its greatest figures to the
expulsion or conversion decrees of 1497. As the heavy hand of the Inqui-
sition fell increasingly upon the descendants and heirs of the fifteenth-cen-
tury Jewish scientists, the sciences in which Portugal had once excelled,
mathematics and astronomy, vanished. Pedro Nunes, the most justifiably
famous of the sixteenth-century converso scientists, lamented that by the
1560s the training in mathematics elsewhere in Europe was surpassing
that of Portugal,23 but without the Jewish scholars who had introduced the
subject, and with books on astronomy and mathematics increasingly sub-
ject to Inquisitorial confiscation, there was no likelihood of recovery.
Evidence of the achievements of those Jewish scientists remains in
their invention of celestial navigation, the principles by which sailors still
navigate in the event that their global positioning satellite receivers fail,
for the modern science of navigation remains the single resounding suc-
cess of a Judeo-Arab-Christian experiment in cooperation occurring in a
tiny seafaring kingdom perched on the westernmost edge of Europe. Not
only were there new routes, but also there were new continents. There was
America. The shape of the known world had altered, and not long after
1500 even a simple fisherman standing on the banks of the Tagus knew it.

Notes

1. For the conformity of Portuguese nautical maps to elliptical (spherical) projections, see
www.rice.edu/latitude.
2. Spanish maps, such as the Juan de la Cosa map, show only Caribbean shores, and even
then the information is limited to the traditional sea routes of their native informants—
north to Florida and south to what is now Venezuela.
3. Carlos Malheiro Dias, “A Expedição de 1501” and “A Expedição de 1503,” História da
colonização portuguesa (Porto, 1921–24), chaps. 8 and 10.
4. The pilot who gave the latitude of the discovery of Brazil was a converso, known only as
Master John. Another of the great “converted” pilots was John of Lisbon (João de Lisboa).
5. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, Crónica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné (Lisbon, 1985;
orig. pub. 1453), cap. 86. The boy’s age was not specified, but he was called a moço, a
term used only for children aged sixteen and under.
6. The book is Abraham Zacuto’s Rules for the Astrolabe (1476).
7. The more religiously fundamental members of the central synagogue in fifteenth-cen-
tury Lisbon founded a separate school because science, not the Torah, was not the cen-
tral educational focus of the main synagogue (the largest in Lisbon and in Portugal). It
remains to be seen whether scientific instruction in the Jewish community was supple-
mented by tutoring—the means of educating members of the royal family in science.
8. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600
(Cambridge, 1997), 13.
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Origin of Modern Navigation | 85

9. Junta das Missões geograficas e de investigaões coloniais, Atlas de Portugal Ultramarino

(Lisbon, 1949), map 2.
10. J. Spencer Trimingham, “The Arab Geographers and the East African Coast,” “Notes
on Arabic Sources of Information on East Africa,” in H. Neville Chittick and Robert I.
Rotberg, eds., East Africa and the Orient: Cultural Syntheses in Pre-colonial Times (New
York, 1975); Costa Brochado, Historiógrafos dos descobrimentos (Lisbon, 1960), 51.
11. João de Barros dates the decision to use the sun from the period after the discovery of
Guinea: “verdade de caminho a altura [do sol] e muy certa mostrador.” João de Bar-
ros, Da Asia (Lisbon, 1777–88), 24 vols., Dec. 1, liv. 3, cap. 2. See also Luís de Albu-
querque, Introducção a história dos descobrimentos portugueses, 4a ed. (Lisbon, 1989), 201.
12. The process also required combining two separate mathematical series. The first series
was the set of numbers derived from calculating the place of the sun relative to the
equator; the second set required the accurate solar calendar to determine the date.
These were originally put into two separate tables, and only subsequently combined
(sometime between 1481 and 1485).
13. Joaquim Bensaude calculated the Arabic astrolabe of 95 to 125 mm in diameter, weigh-
ing 1 kilo; and that of 1632 being 184 mm in diameter and weighing 3.84 kilos. The Ara-
bic ones are 360 degrees, the nautical ones go four times from 0 to 90 degrees. Joaquim
Bensaude, L’astronomie nautique au Portugal (Berlin, 1915), 79.
14. Both astronomers dedicated their works to the penultimate Muslim ruler of Toledo
before the Christian conquest. Emile Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” in History of
Cartography, ed. J. Brian Harley and David Woodward, vol. 2, pt. 1, Cartography in the
Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago, 1992), 12–70, esp. 28–31.
15. An early sixteenth-century account describing how the Portuguese used this instru-
ment is in the letter of Alessandro Zorzi, reproduced in Luís de Albuquerque, ed., Por-
tugal-Brazil: The Age of Atlantic Discoveries (New York, 1990), 56–57. An early drawing
illustrating how to use this astrolabe is in Pedro Nunes, Tratado da sphera (Lisbon, 1537).
16. Bensaude, L’astronomie nautique, 111. David Waters, “The Sea or Mariner’s Astrolabe,”
Revista da Faculdade de Ciencias, vol. 39 (Coimbra, 1966):5–36.
17. Bensaude, L’astronomie nautique, 40, 79; Barros, Asia, Dec. 1, liv. 3, cap. 2, describes it as
“3 palmos” in diameter but does not mention that Zacuto was its creator. Modern equiv-
alents of these dimensions are from Roger C. Smith, Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Explo-
ration in the Age of Columbus (New York, 1993), 56. Fourteenth-century astrolabes were
usually more than double this size, 7 palmos. Millás, Pedro el Ceremonioso, 67–69. Luís de
Camões’s description of the “new astrolabe” (a “sage and wise invention”) is thought to
refer to Zacuto. Luís de Camões, Os Luisadas (Lisbon, 1584), canto V, stanza 25.
18. D. João de Castro, Obras Completas de D. João de Castro, ed. D. João de Cortesão and Luís
de Albuquerque (Coimbra, 1968–76), vol. 1, 177–78, 286–89; Ramon Abadal y Vinyals,
Pedro el Ceremonioso y los comienzos de la decadencia politica de Cataluña (Madrid, 1966).
19. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York, 1983).
20. Classic examples of this tradition include Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and
Society in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1970), and Herbert Butterfield, The
Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (New York, 1957). But even many more recent and
sophisticated histories, such as Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996),
are oriented toward the English experience.
21. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific
Problem of His Time (New York, 1995); William Andrews, ed., The Quest for Longitude:
The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, November 4–6, 1993 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); David Waters, The Art of Navigation
in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London, 1958).
22. For close-up views of the prime meridian as it appeared in a 1517 Portuguese nautical
chart, see www.ruf.rice.edu/~feegi/longitude.html.
23. Pedro Nunes, Livro de Álgebra (Anvers, 1567).
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– Chapter 4 –

THE HOPE OF THE NETHERLANDS:

MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL AND
THE DUTCH IDEA OF AMERICA

Benjamin Schmidt

T HE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE NEW WORLD combined in a number of

curious ways in the culture of the seventeenth-century Dutch Repub-
lic. The mixture of the two, if sometimes improbable and somewhat infre-
quent, can be revealing nevertheless of the setting of religious history and
the shape of geographic imagination in the early modern Netherlands.
Consider, among the more exotic blends, the tropical Sacrifice of Manoah
(1648) by Frans Post, a biblical landscape that stages the old in the new
with remarkable effect (Fig. 4.1).1 Against a broad and gently mountain-
ous background, an episode of dramatic devotion takes place. A man and
a woman—Manoah and his wife, as described in Judges 13—kneel before
a stone altar on which a kid has just been sacrificed. Suspended within
the pillar of gray smoke billowing up from their offering, an angel
glances knowingly at the performance below while gesturing grandly
toward the heavens above. The angel’s baroque movement is mirrored by
the theatrical reaction of Manoah, who gazes up in stylized awe. His wife,
who wears an antique cloak of blue and a red blouse (costume and colors
otherwise associated with the Virgin Mary) hides her head in her hands,
less from shame than humility. For she, like her husband, has just learned
that she will bear a child, as announced by the miraculously revealed
messenger of God.2
The themes of the painting are spectacular—literally a spectacle of
sacred theater—though Post’s version goes beyond even the usual drama
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Hope of the Netherlands | 87

FIGURE 4.1 Frans Post, Sacrifice of Manoah, 1648. (Courtesy of the Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, Rotterdam)

of Baroque art. The story of the Sacrifice of Manoah—of the annunciation

of a child to a barren woman of Israel and of her husband’s elaborate
thanksgiving—was not in fact a common theme in the visual arts; and,
though a few precedents did exist, none even remotely resembles Post’s
composition. A late sixteenth-century engraved version by Hendrik
Goltzius more typically neglects the actual sacrifice to underscore the
scene of “annunciation” and the typological relevance the story had to
the (New Testament) Annunciation.3 In the middle of the seventeenth
century, the theme received attention from Rembrandt and his circle, who
tended to isolate the dramatis personae in a way that emphasized the
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88 | Benjamin Schmidt

quiet moment of prayer shared by the expectant parents rather than the
sacrifice and its setting. Willem Drost’s circa 1650 rendition presents a
model of Protestant piety.4 The painting that comes closest to the expan-
sive grandeur of Post’s arrangement was executed, about the same time,
by Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert (Fig. 4.2).5 In this case, the central elements
of the compositions do match—the ascending angel, the astonished
Manoah, the sacrificial vessels—but the scenery places the action, liter-
ally, in a different world.6 Moeyaert situates his biblical narrative in an
Italianate landscape, amidst what are meant to pass for Classical ruins.
The dramatic staging of the scene, like the historical context from which
it derives, is meant to look old. Post, by contrast, locates the Old Testa-
ment story in what can clearly be recognized as the New World: the
Israelites sacrifice along the coast of Brazil near Olinda, identified by the
stout watch towers (whose stone form echoes that of the altar) typical of
the region. Other Americana abound. The repoussoir framing the fore-
ground swarms with South American flora, including a giant cactus on
the left, ripe papaya and banana trees, and the thick tropical foliage that
darkens the anterior. An iguana scavenges near a calabash in the center
foreground, facing an armadillo peeking curiously out from the left.
Indigenous birds hover over and perch upon the lush vegetation while
others glide below, where a pair of natives appear busy with their work.7
Why would Manoah have journeyed to America? Partly because
Frans Post did, between 1636 and 1644, as part of the entourage of Johan
Maurits of Nassau, the governor of Dutch Brazil and a generous patron of
the arts. Post (ca. 1612–1680) served as court artist for Johan Maurits,
preparing for the prince both landscape paintings and topographical
drawings of the region. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Post discov-
ered a great interest in—and a strong market for—his tropical vistas and
went into what might be called the Brazilian landscape business. His
Varzea Landscape with Plantation, done eight years after his return, and his
River Landscape, finished two years later, share with the Manoah composi-
tion a meticulous concern for native flora and fauna, which Post arranged
in the Varzea landscape in a manner remarkably similar to that of his bib-
lical painting (Fig. 4.3).8 Both of these later paintings and the scores more
like them that followed, however, came well after Post had established his
workshop and reputation. The Sacrifice of Manoah represents one of the
first canvases produced by the artist since his New World voyage and the
only one, before or after, with an Old Testament subject. Later tastes and
painterly habits explain only partially why Post (or his patrons) decided,
precisely at that moment, to stage the Bible in America.9
Dutch colonial circumstances in 1648 and the political lessons insinu-
ated by Manoah’s sacrifice suggest more particularly why the painting
may have taken the form it did. The child who was born to Manoah and
blessed by the Lord, Samson, grew up to be the champion of the Israelites
and scourge of the Philistines, who had tyrannized God’s Chosen for forty
years. A mere three years had elapsed since the Portuguese planters of
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FIGURE 4.2 Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert, Sacrifice of Manoah, ca. 1649

Hope of the Netherlands | 89
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90 | Benjamin Schmidt

FIGURE 4.3 Frans Post, Varzea Landscape with Plantation, 1652. (Courtesy of the Rijksmu-
seum, Amsterdam)
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Hope of the Netherlands | 91

Dutch Brazil had revolted against their governors, yet the latter-day
Israelites—as the seventeenth-century Dutch liked to fashion themselves—
desperately needed deliverance from the soaring costs, fiscal and political,
of their overseas crisis.10 Salvation, in other words, was projected onto
Post’s Brazilian landscape, in the hope that some new Samson might
deliver the Netherlands from their latest antagonists. The Old Testament in
this instance provided the allegorical as well as historical framework for
Post’s colonial narrative, while the New World provided—or so the Dutch,
like Manoah, prayed—the site and the prospect of redemption.11
The themes of Divine history and heroic salvation shape the argu-
ments of another Dutch work, produced around the same time and
within many of the same contexts as Post’s biblical landscape. Menasseh
ben Israel’s highly influential Hope of Israel—published originally in Ams-
terdam in 1650 and a dozen more times, in half a dozen languages, into
the early eighteenth century—offered a timely reflection on Jews, Amer-
ica, and redemption by the leading Sephardi voice of the Netherlands.12
In confident and learned prose, the author considers the tantalizing
prospect of Old Testament Israelites residing in the New World: a rem-
nant of the Ten Lost Tribes (this time Reubenites, Manoah having
belonged to the tribe of Dan) holding out in the Cordillera mountains of
New Granada, not far from present-day Medellin. Once again, the image
of Jews in the tropics is presented as a propitious sign—the diaspora of
the Jews to all corners of the world implied to Menasseh’s readers the
imminence of messianic redemption—and the work conveyed a heady
message of religious salvation. More prosaically, it focused attention on
the near disastrous state of Dutch Brazil and the plight of the Sephardi
community living there, which faced the calamitous prospect of an ascen-
dant Portuguese (meaning hostile) regime. Like Post’s biblical landscape,
Menasseh’s literary evocation of Jews in America delivered a sermon of
hope and deliverance against the backdrop of Dutch, and in this case
Sephardi, aspirations in the New World.
This distinctive cultural geography shared by both the painter and
the rabbi grew out of a larger context of Dutch politics and culture in the
seventeenth century, and it is the purpose of this essay to explore further
the Dutch background of Menasseh’s American landscape. For a variety
of reasons and purposes, the New World served as a site of salvation for
the Dutch Republic, a place of promise, potential, and, most importantly,
strategic support. This applied for Jews no less than gentiles, and
Menasseh’s case demonstrates nicely how Jews in the early modern
Netherlands could partake equally, if also distinctively, of broader Dutch
strategies of rhetoric and representation. Menasseh, who moved rela-
tively easily between Jewish and Christian circles, constructed the New
World in ways that reflected a traditional geographic discourse in the
Republic that looked to America for redemption. Those Reubenites and
Indians who suggested “the hope of Israel” resembled, in other ways,
representations—or better, projections—of the New World and its natives
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92 | Benjamin Schmidt

as “the hope of the Netherlands.” Menasseh’s world, in this sense, fea-

tured a recognizably Dutch America.
It also featured a good deal more besides exotic Israelites, and this
essay’s focus on Menasseh’s—and by extension Sephardi—geography
represents something of a historiographic departure, both in terms of text
and author. The Hope of Israel has traditionally been studied (and sensibly
so) as a crucial chapter in the religious history of early modern Europe.13
Menasseh’s work ranks among the most influential documents of seven-
teenth-century Jewish history and certainly among the most widely read
pieces of early Jewish Americana. In its day, it ignited a frenzy of mes-
sianic and millenarian speculation across the whole of Europe. This
European, devotional context, however, has distracted attention from the
Hope’s Amsterdam origins and the text’s Dutch, no less than Dutch-Jew-
ish, cultural context. Such a local reading of the text reveals, moreover, a
somewhat more nuanced view of Menasseh himself and, by extension, of
the Sephardi community in Amsterdam. Recent research has succeeded
admirably in identifying, isolating, and analyzing the Sephardim of
northwest Europe and particularly the “Portuguese Nation” of Amster-
dam: the New Jewish immigrants of Iberian and converso origin who set-
tled in Holland from the early seventeenth century.14 To this lately
improved understanding of converso identity, social history, and eco-
nomic activity, this study seeks to add a further dimension to the
Sephardi profile, a Dutch Republican dimension, by exploring the cul-
tural and ideological contexts of Menasseh’s geography. Tracking down
Menasseh’s Old Testament relations in the New World should lead back,
in this way, to New Jewish culture in the Old.

II

The geography of the Netherlands broadened conspicuously beyond

Europe during the late sixteenth century, a direct result of the Dutch
Revolt against Spain (1568–1648) and the ferocious war of words waged
by the rebel party. Already from the earliest years of the revolt, a dis-
tinctly Dutch idea of the New World developed when polemicists work-
ing for the Prince of Orange promoted the theme of “Spanish tyranny in
America” as a means of blackening the reputation of their opponents.
Spain’s tenure in America had proven disastrous, it was argued, and
much the same could now be expected from Philip II’s regime in the Low
Countries. “The Spanish seek nothing but to abuse our Fatherland as they
have done in the New Indies,” asserted a prominent group of nobles in
1568, in defiance of the government in Brussels.15 “America,” within this
context, represented an ominous and foreboding future that awaited the
Netherlands should the tyranny of Spain go unchallenged. The Habsburg
“conquest” of the Low Countries, as the pamphleteers perceived it,
threatened to bring the same miserable consequences to the Netherlands
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Hope of the Netherlands | 93

as the conquistadors had wrought in America. In his widely circulated

Apologie (1581), Willem of Orange codified the image of parallel Spanish
tyrannies when he detailed how the Habsburgs had “adjudged all
[Netherlanders] to death, making no more account of you than of beasts
… as they do in the Indies, where they have miserably put to death more
than twenty millions of people, and have made desolate and waste thirty
times as much land in quantity and greatness as the low country is with
such horrible excesses and riots.”16
From this assumption of mutual suffering evolved a more ambitious
notion of a tactical alliance between those two “nations” that most inti-
mately knew the misrule of Spain. Orange’s assertion of shared anguish
contained in it a considerable degree of sympathy for the Indians, who
had experienced worse abuses, reportedly, than even the Dutch. It also
implied a unique affinity between the rebels and the “Americans”—the
Dutch typically lumped all the natives together—who were linked by
their common hostility toward the Habsburgs. To the polemically agile
mind, this suggested the further possibility of an “alliance”: if the natives
could be construed as cousins-in-suffering, might they not plausibly be
represented as brothers-in-arms as well, or perhaps even partners in
trade? This was the tack taken by Willem Usselincx (1567–1647) and a
group of like-minded colonialists who insisted, by the early seventeenth
century, that the Indians would welcome the Dutch as confederates and
join with them in a campaign against the “universal monarchy” of Spain.
Most of these authors, to be sure, advertised, too, the obvious religious
and economic advantages of their program: God and gold. But they and
Usselincx asserted also the moral duty of their readers to aid those Amer-
ican “allies,” whose experience had bonded them to the Republic. “The
pitiless slaughter of over twenty million innocent Indians who did
[Spain] no harm,” quoted Usselincx directly from the rebel’s propaganda,
“[demanded] God’s righteous judgment.” The creation of a Dutch West
India Company was not just an opportunity, in this view, but an obliga-
tion born of the pledges of fidelity made by the rebels to their American
brethren. “Our friends and allies will lose all faith in us,” wrote Usselincx
in the wake of truce negotiations (1606–09), “if they see that we, but for
the sake of a specious title, abandon our own inhabitants and the allied
Indians who have been so faithful and done us such good service.”17
For a variety of reasons, Usselincx’s vision turned out not to be the
one adopted by the Dutch West Indian Company (WIC), founded upon
the expiration of the Twelve Year Truce in 1621.18 But his rhetoric and the
image of America on which it was predicated did linger nonetheless in
the minds of armchair travelers and colonial schemers, who persevered
in their promotion of a singularly Dutch notion of the New World. Well
into the 1630s and 1640s, America was featured as a site of peculiar
attachment for the Republic. As late as the middle of the seventeenth
century, the Indians continued to constitute the possibility of a special
“alliance” with the Netherlands.
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94 | Benjamin Schmidt

Two Dutch initiatives well illustrate the lasting power of this idea of
America.19 The first involved an official treaty designed to join the States
General of the Republic with the “Serene Lords of Peru” (living, as was
supposed, in Buenos Aires) in a bond of strategic assistance. Joan Avent-
root, author of the document and a zealous warrior for the Reformed
faith, proposed that the “Peruvians” held the key to Dutch salvation and
that a cataclysmic uprising in America, triggered by the Dutch-Indian
confederation, would displace the hegemony of the Habsburgs and the
primacy of the Catholic Church. Aventroot’s apocalyptic musings,
remarkably, received the full backing of the States, which were not only
committed to the treaty but even funded the printing of eight thousand
copies, an unusually large run by early modern standards.20 The second
initiative came in 1643, when the Prince of Orange, in cooperation with
the WIC, backed a plan to unite with the “Chileans” against Spain. Once
again, official documents were drafted and this time delivered, reaching
the western coast of South America with a fleet under the command of
Hendrick Brouwer. In this instance, the Dutch in fact commenced negoti-
ations and laid out to the bemused Araucanians the advantages of the
proposed alliance. Yet, despite getting the natives to kiss the prince’s let-
ters of credentials, the Dutch could not ultimately get them to sign on,
and the expedition ended with the desired alliance still elusive.21
Hope, nonetheless, remained high. Whatever the setbacks in Amer-
ica, the Dutch conceit of the New World remained notably viable back
in the Old, rhetoric triumphing easily over reality. If by the middle of
the seventeenth century the image of the New World had undergone
certain adjustments—appeals to Chile and Peru had pushed the fron-
tiers of the alliance to the farthest shores of the Western Hemisphere—
it still retained considerable currency, especially among the many who
wrote about, but never visited, America. This applied in particular to a
circle of humanists and relatively broad-minded men of letters in or of
Holland. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the noted jurist and diplomat who,
though exiled from the Republic, participated actively in its world of
letters, argued in a pair of Latin treatises published in the early 1640s
that the native Americans had descended from “Norwegian” or Ger-
manic tribes. This made them distant kinsmen to the Dutch, whom
Grotius had elsewhere described as members of another Germanic tribe,
the Batavians.22 This patriotic argument resonated with Caspar Barlaeus
(1584–1648), the humanist poet and author of a massive Rerum per octen-
nium in Brasilia (1647) commemorating the colonial regime of Johan
Maurits. In Barlaeus’s rendition of events, the “progeny of Bato” (as he
referred to the prince of Nassau) had successfully “civilized” and allied
with the natives who, if not kinsmen per se, had shown themselves to
be the stalwart supporters of the Batavians abroad. The prince’s Brazil-
ian triumph, in the context of Barlaeus’s broader celebration of the
Dutch Golden Age, represented yet another sign of the Republic’s prov-
idential ascendance.23
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Hope of the Netherlands | 95

III

By 1650, the year in which the Hope of Israel first appeared, the New World
had become a familiar enough site on the horizons of the Netherlands. It
had become, moreover, a site specific to the Dutch geographic imagina-
tion. “America” represented, firstly, a place of “Spanish tyranny,” a topos
that runs throughout Dutch Americana, from the rebels’ polemics to the
reports of Brouwer’s expedition published in the middle of the seven-
teenth century. Consequently—and secondly—it also represented a place
of anticipated succor. The notion that the Indians, as enemies of the
Republic’s enemy, would therefore be their friends is implicit in the colo-
nialist pitch of Willem Usselincx and explicitly argued by the likes of Joan
Aventroot. Aventroot’s hope for a religious no less than military revolt in
America suggests, thirdly, the theme of religious salvation in, or perhaps
from, the New World. Notwithstanding the Portuguese crisis in Brazil,
Barlaeus’s paean to Johan Maurits fashioned Dutch triumphs in America
as indicative of a redemption already in progress. In all events, Grotius,
in construing the Americans as fellow Germanii, made their fate of direct
concern to latter-day “Batavians.”
Thus Dutch geography. What about Dutch-Jewish geography or at
least “Menassean” geography? Menasseh ben Israel (ca. 1604–57) imag-
ined the New World in a variety of forms. In a certain sense, America was
a very real place for the Amsterdam rabbi, who, like many Dutch
Sephardim, had material and even familial interests in colonization proj-
ects. Using as an intermediary his brother Ephraim, who left for the West
Indies in 1639, Menasseh invested in America in the late 1630s, after a con-
solidation of the Amsterdam synagogues brought a substantial cut in his
pay.24 A few years later, he dedicated the second installment of his four-
part Conciliador (1641) to “the most noble, most prudent and fortunate
señores of the Council of the West Indies”—the directors of the WIC—and
declared his intention to immigrate to Recife in Dutch Brazil.25 Menasseh
only just missed the honor of becoming the “first American rabbi,” as
Cecil Roth once put it, though not without a fair degree of relief. The priv-
ilege, as it turned out, went to his rival, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, whose
vacated position in the Amsterdam congregation Talmud Torah now fell to
Menasseh. This meant a rise in salary, and it obviated the need to look
westward for work. Yet Menasseh, it would seem, had never felt any great
desire to go in the first place. “At present, in complete disregard of my per-
sonal dignity, I am engaged in trade,” he wrote with resignation in 1639.
“What else is there for me to do? I have neither the wealth of Croesus, nor
the nature of a Thersites”—and apparently not the heart to forsake “this
flourishing land of Batavia [Holland] for the distant parts of Brazil.”26
From 1642, Menasseh’s prospects of actually going to Brazil rapidly
diminished. Yet, although America ceased to function for him as a “real”
place to live, it continued to serve as a viable idea—as a geographic topos
or construct—that was nonetheless compelling. This cultural sense of the
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96 | Benjamin Schmidt

New World had, in part, been inherited from decades of Dutch Republican
geography. Menasseh, whose family immigrated from Madeira to Holland
when he was a boy, considered himself “Portuguese by birth but Batavian
in spirit” and would have acquired by this time what might be called a
Batavian world-view.27 In part, too, this sense had further developed over
the years from Menasseh’s own involvement and interaction with the
world of geography, which, apparently, interested him considerably. He
took great pleasure, for example, in hearing of distant lands. Though per-
sonally not much of a traveler, he availed himself, as a rabbi and commu-
nity leader, of the opportunity to interview others passing through
Amsterdam and reportedly delighted in such vicarious voyaging.28
Menasseh also had notable contacts, both collegial and professional,
with some of the leading intellectual figures of the Netherlands, includ-
ing many who had written on matters American. Grotius, if not quite a
friend, corresponded with Menasseh on questions of history and Scrip-
ture, as did the Amsterdam humanist Gerardus Vossius, whose children
the rabbi tutored. When Menasseh contemplated moving to Brazil, these
two humanists exchanged letters on the news, Grotius wishing for
Menasseh good fortune in Brazil “from the bottom of my soul.”29 With
Barlaeus, Menasseh enjoyed an exceptionally warm friendship, each
scholar admiring the other’s work. The esteemed Latinist composed a
sonnet celebrating their extraordinary, interfaith relationship; and, after
Barlaeus’s untimely death in 1648 (just after completing his opus on
Brazil), Menasseh wrote movingly on the bond he had felt with “the Vir-
gil of our time.”30 As a printer, Menasseh came into contact professionally
with those responsible for Amsterdam’s voluminous production of maps,
atlases, and travel narratives describing the New World. Johannes Jansso-
nius, among the leading publishers of Dutch (and indeed European)
Americana, printed an edition of Menasseh’s De Creatione Problemata in
1636 and then engaged the rabbi, around 1650, to prepare a Spanish
translation of the geographer’s massive Atlas Novus. The work ultimately
appeared in 1653, though Menasseh had completed his translation a few
years earlier—more or less at the same time, that is, he was otherwise
contemplating Jews in America.31
Most relevant perhaps were Menasseh’s connections with literary
Americana: with the actual descriptions of the New World, which he
read, studied, and incorporated into his own writing. Evidence of his
geographic expertise comes from the text of the Hope itself, which
includes an impressive list of authors consulted whose work related to
Europe’s westward expansion. This list includes, naturally, a range of
non-Dutch writers—many of whom, however, were popular in the
Republic precisely for their unflattering accounts of the Spanish Con-
quista.32 More to the point, it catalogues Menasseh’s extensive familiarity
with the leading Dutch authorities on America: the geographers Abra-
ham Ortelius, Petrus Plancius, and Willem Blaeu (who was Janssonius’s
chief competitor in the business of cartographic publishing); Menasseh’s
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Hope of the Netherlands | 97

colleague, Hugo Grotius, and the latter’s opponent in the debate on Indian
etiology, Joannes de Laet (who also wrote the standard seventeenth-cen-
tury history of the New World); and, not least, Jan Huygen van Lin-
schoten, whose turn of the century Itinerario provided the literary
foundation for the Dutch overseas enterprise.33 To be sure, dozens of other
authorities—Dutch, Classical, and rabbinical—round off Menasseh’s bib-
liography, and it makes little sense to read the Hope merely as a reflection
of Dutch Americana. On the other hand, though, many more works read
by Menasseh would hardly have merited mention—the polemical litera-
ture and anti-Spanish propaganda so ubiquitous in the Republic—so that
the least that can be said is that Menasseh knew of and appreciated the
Dutch vision of the New World.

IV

What difference would it have made that Menasseh’s geography had a

Dutch imprint? How would a Dutch idea of America have influenced
Menasseh’s hopes for his co-religionists? And why, most importantly,
would America have featured in Menasseh’s messianic musings in the
first place?
The Hope of Israel, if not entirely about the New World, takes as its
point of departure the arrival from America in the Netherlands of the
worldly traveler, Antonio de Montezinos, his tale of New World
encounter providing the basis for Menasseh’s own meditation on mes-
sianic redemption. The work begins, in this sense, with a characteristically
American story. The “Relation of Antonio Montezinos” narrates a mar-
velous adventure of high-altitude exploration, exotic intrigue, and apoca-
lyptic implication. It describes how Montezinos—alias Aharon Levi, a
New Christian merchant from the Portuguese town of Villaflor—experi-
enced in the New World a series of encounters: with the Inquisition, with
a native tribe of Quito, and with a Lost Tribe of Israel. Following these
wondrous episodes, an excited Montezinos returned to Europe, where he
reached Amsterdam in September of 1644 with news of his “extraordi-
nary” journey. He delivered his testimony under oath to Menasseh (in his
capacity as community rabbi); and, by all accounts, Montezinos sought
neither profit nor material advantage for his sensational report. The story
electrified all the same, exciting both the Amsterdam Jewish kehilah and
the Protestant millenarian community. From Amsterdam the news spread
rapidly across the rest of the Netherlands and Europe, so that by 1650,
when Menasseh finally published it as part of his text, Montezinos’s
“Relation” had already achieved far-flung renown.34
It is by all measures an extraordinary narrative, which begins with
a journey across the Cordilleras in Spanish New Granada, not far from
the port of Honda and the present-day capital of Colombia, Bogotá.
There, among his porters and guides, Montezinos meets a native cacique,
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98 | Benjamin Schmidt

Francisco, who makes a seemingly offhand comment about the ill treat-
ment of a “holy people … most innocent,” who would one day rise up
and avenge the cruelty of their tormentors. Though this strange allusion
stirs the marrano’s imagination, he lets the comment pass. Upon his
return to Cartagena on the Caribbean, however, a bout with the Inquisi-
tion and the solitude of his imprisonment jog Montezinos’s memory and
allow him to reflect on the Indian’s curious remark. Released from the
Inquisitor’s jail, he tracks down Francisco in Honda, confesses to him his
secret Jewish identity (and common antipathy toward the Spanish), and
convinces the Indian to reveal the meaning of his earlier allusion.35 This
entails a week’s trek into the mountains that brings the pair to a “broad
river” (the Río Cauca) and face to face with two “brethren,” who greet the
weary travelers with a recitation, in Hebrew, of the Jewish profession of
faith: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4).
These mysterious men, soon joined by others from the opposite bank of
the river, deliver a fantastic oration in the ritualized form of nine propo-
sitions repeated by three hundred “brethren” over the course of three
days. They proclaim themselves to be of the tribe of Reuben, and they
request that Montezinos send twelve bearded emissaries, “skillful in
writing,” to join them for an event (undisclosed) of apocalyptic propor-
tions. Later, Francisco explains that these men, among the earliest settlers
of America, were descendants of the Children of Israel, miraculously
delivered to that land by God. The twelve (Hebrew) scribes whom they
sought were needed to help them and their Indian confederates rise up
against the mutual Spanish enemy.36
Montezinos’s testimony, remarkable in and of itself, seems all the
more so for the way its themes fit so well—are made to fit so well—into the
broader Dutch discourse of America. The geography of the itinerant mar-
rano, as shaped by the Amsterdam rabbi, made perfect sense in the con-
text of the Netherlands. Alliances forged in the New World, once again,
presume to resolve problems emanating from the Old—or so it was
hoped. Indians are enlisted by God’s Chosen to overthrow the tyranny of
Spain. In the case of Montezinos, an alliance between the Reubenites and
the natives of Quito requires the added participation of twelve scribes
(Amsterdam hakhamim?), which makes for a somewhat more triangular
connection between the Old World, the New World, and the Old Testa-
ment wayfarers harbored in America. The effect, though, is much the
same. The Indians will consent to join forces with the Jews/Dutch to wage
war against that which by now rings familiarly as “the notorious cruelty
[of] the Spaniards.”37 The purpose of this alliance also bears a striking
resemblance to the central motif of Dutch Americana: salvation. In the
case of the Israelites, the theme of redemption carries an emphatically
messianic message. The Indians “shall be happy if [they] make league
with [the Israelites],” since the Jews, freed from their bondage, “shall be
lords of the world.” The Dutch alliance with the Indians is similarly
intended to free the Netherlands from its particular “bondage” (a word
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used repeatedly in Dutch literature), though for purposes perhaps more

pragmatic—political and economic—than apocalyptic.38
In a number of ways, of course, the Hope of Israel had some plainly
pragmatic purposes of its own that had nothing to do with the Nether-
lands. The treatise has traditionally been studied in the context of English
religious politics and the author’s subsequent efforts to win readmission
of the Jews into the Commonwealth. In the dedication to the original
Spanish edition, Menasseh refers to inquiries from Protestant divines,
including “a man of letters and of quality in England” (the theologian
John Dury) who had pressed him on the question of American Jews and
thus induced the rabbi to publish. Menasseh dedicated the Latin and
English editions of 1650 to the new English government, appealing to
their “charitable affection,” “that I may gain your favor and good will to
our Nation, now scattered almost all over the earth.”39 The enthusiastic
response of millenarians from the rest of Europe encouraged Menasseh to
respond in print in such a way that cleverly harnessed (Christian) chil-
iastic energies to (Jewish) messianic ends. The Hope of Israel makes the
strenuous argument that the presence of Reubenites in America boded
best for Jews, not Christians; and the work certainly played a significant
part in the expansion of Sephardi spiritualism in the middle of the sev-
enteenth century.40 Finally, and perhaps most practically, the presence of
allies in America would have heartened the embattled Jewish community
of Recife, mired for half a decade in a life and death struggle with the Por-
tuguese. The Hope of Israel may not quite have announced the arrival of a
Jewish-Indian cavalry, but it did offer solace and impart optimism to
Jews, in Europe and America, by suggesting that an age of miracles might
soon be upon them.41
It is the last of these purposes that may have been foremost on
Menasseh’s mind when he went to press in 1650—six full years after
Montezinos’s testimony—and that may suggest why he resorted, in all
cases, to a distinctly Dutch idiom for his text. The directors of the Dutch
West India Company had the capacity to offer Jewish colonists in Brazil
something more concrete than solace and “hope”; and Menasseh, wisely
recognizing this, resorted accordingly to a rhetorical style that made
sense to a Dutch audience. The themes of the Hope of Israel, that is to say,
are enunciated in the vocabulary of Dutch geography—in language,
topoi, and motifs that derive, to a significant degree, from a Dutch
polemical model—and in a manner that effectively linked the “hope of
Israel” with a literary tradition of the Netherlands. Such a rhetorical
strategy allied the Sephardi cause to that of the WIC. More generally, it
affiliated the sacred history of the Jews and their hope for redemption
with the patriotic historiography of the United Provinces and its well-
established tropes of suffering, “alliances,” and redemption. The hope of
Israel, Menasseh asserted, resembled the hope of the Netherlands. And
the New World, in this sense, promised salvation to Sephardi and Bata-
vian alike.
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In the end, what is so striking about the Hope of Israel is the many
types of readers it could accommodate and the multiple layers of rheto-
ric and argument on which it rested. This is testimony to the skill of its
author as a “conciliator”: someone who moved easily between texts and
sacred literatures (as Menasseh famously did) and someone who sought
to reconcile ostensibly different goals and religious traditions (though
with the Sephardi good always in mind). Menasseh’s list of consulted
“authors of other nations” demonstrates a catholicity of learning that
stands out even in the relatively tolerant intellectual environment of the
Dutch Republic.42 It also demonstrates a remarkable rhetorical flexibility
on the part of the author, as a Sephardi rabbi, to participate in and to
exploit what might otherwise be considered alien idioms. Menasseh
knew well how to use the language and topoi of others, and this allowed
him to compose an outstandingly effective treatise—as the public success
of the Hope well attests.
That Menasseh did move so easily within an otherwise distinctively
Dutch discourse suggests, moreover, that the Sephardi “Nation” of Ams-
terdam need not be quite so isolated from its secular surroundings.
Menasseh, it is true, was something of an exception within the Amsterdam
Jewish community precisely for his connections to the Christian world of
scholarship and even politics.43 Yet he was not entirely alone in this
regard. In the case of Uriel da Costa, whose heterodoxies sent convulsions
through the community at about the time Menasseh came of age intellec-
tually, influences came from further afield than simply the Netherlands.44
The Holland-born Baruch Spinoza (who in all likelihood received his ear-
liest schooling from Menasseh), though, participated from a very early age
in the Dutch republic of letters. Like Menasseh, Spinoza showed himself
able to move easily amongst the diverse philosophical and religious circles
of Amsterdam. All of which is not to conflate the ecumenical use of learn-
ing (for orthodox ends) by Menasseh with the intellectual curiosity (for
“impious” goals) of Spinoza. Rather, Menasseh’s case and others show
how the community of Amsterdam Sephardim, if forged by the unique
converso experience, could be shaped all the same by the experiences, cul-
tures, and (in Menasseh’s case) geographies of those around them.45
In the final analysis, the geographic sensibilities expressed by the
Hope of Israel say as much about the author and his world as they do
about that distinctive New World he was describing. America, as imag-
ined by Menasseh and his Dutch contemporaries, represented a hopeful
and optimistic landscape that functioned perhaps better as an idea than
a reality. The Amsterdam Sephardim, in the end, never sent twelve
bearded scribes to the Cordilleras, just as the Dutch, despite their ongo-
ing rhetoric, never finalized an alliance with their American Indian
brethren. But over a period that extended from the late sixteenth
through the mid-seventeenth centuries, the New World continued to
offer the hope of redemption to Jew and Christian alike. Sephardi rabbi
no less than colonial promoter appropriated the geography of America
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Hope of the Netherlands | 101

and the ever plastic image of its natives for their own ideological ends.
The Hope of Israel, like so many other Dutch descriptions of the New
World, provides evidence ultimately of both the rhetorical dexterity of
its author and the singular malleability of his subject, America. By the
remarkable combination of the two, the Old Testament had ended up in
the New World.

Notes

For their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay, I would like to
thank Roger Diederen, David Katz, Hillel Kieval, Louise Townsend, and Ben Westervelt.
Generous financial support came from the Keller Fund of the University of Washington.

1. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (signed and dated, “F. Post 3.27.1648”).
See Joaquim de Sousa-Leão, Frans Post, 1612–1680 (Amsterdam, 1973), 26, 62–63; Erik
Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil (Amsterdam, 1962), cat. no. 12; and Ernst van den
Boogaart, ed., Zo wijd de wereld strekt (The Hague, 1979), 206.
2. Judges 13:20: “And when the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel
of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar while Manoah and his wife looked on;
and they fell on their faces to the ground.” The drama of the story includes both the
annunciation of the child to the couple and the climactic revelation of the angel to
Manoah, who, while never quite doubting his wife, desired nonetheless confirmation
of the Divinity of the message.
3. The image—signed “HGoltzius” and dated ca. 1586—was one in a series of six annunci-
ations, half from the Old Testament and half from the New. See Walter Strauss, ed., Hen-
drik Goltzius 1558–1617: The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts (New York, 1977), esp. 373.
There is an earlier engraving, also in the Mannerist style, by Maarten van Heemskerck
(1498–1574), who worked in Haarlem just before Goltzius’s arrival there ca. 1576–77.
4. F. Saxl, Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Manoah, Studies of the Warburg Institute, vol. 9 (Lon-
don, 1939), reviews many of these paintings, engravings, and drawings, including
images by Govaert Flinck, Barent Fabritius, and Willem Drost. The “Rembrandt”
painting of Saxl’s focus, though, is now attributed to Drost: A Corpus of Rembrandt
Paintings, ed. J. Bruyn et al. (The Hague, 1982– ), 3: 523–32. See also Christian Tümpel
et al., Im Lichte Rembrandts: Das Alte Testament im Goldenen Zeitalter der niederlandischen
Kunst (Munich, 1994), esp. 69–72. The Drost Sacrifice of Manoah is in the Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
5. Sacrifice of Manoah, ca. 1649 (whereabouts unknown; formerly coll. Baron Reedtz-Thott,
Gaunö, Denmark), on which see Astrid Tümpel, “Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert,” Oud
Holland 88 (1974):1–163, esp. 119–22 and Fig. 166.
6. Moeyaert, who had a successful career as an Amsterdam portraitist, has in fact been
credited with the figures in the Boijmans painting. Other candidates include Flinck and
Ferdinand Bol, though their high reputations at this time (especially Flinck’s) may
have precluded their contributing to a relatively minor composition. See Albert
Blankert et al., Gods, Saints, and Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt (Wash-
ington, 1980), 266.
7. The region, more generally, was described as “the Paradise of Brazil” by the leading
chronicler of Dutch America, Johannes de Laet, who happened also to be a bewindhebber
(director) of the Dutch West India Company. See Johannes de Laet, Historie ofte Iaerlijck
verhael van de verrichtinghen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (Leiden, 1644), and
cf. 192 on the captaincy of Pernambuco, in which Olinda was centrally situated.
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102 | Benjamin Schmidt

8. Frans Post, Varzea Landscape with Plantation (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and River
Landscape (Scheepvaart Museum, Amsterdam). Both paintings are signed and dated,
1652 and 1654 respectively. The 1652 landscape was very likely commissioned by Peter
Hagen, a former councilor in Brazil (De Sousa-Leão, Post, 69).
9. This issue has been left largely unexplored in the literature—both on Post and on the
Dutch in Brazil. See, for example, C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–54 (Oxford,
1957); C. M. Schulten, Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika: Brazilië 1624–1654 (Bus-
sum, 1968); and the art historical literature cited above (note 1). Post’s biblical exoti-
cism, as such, has gone unremarked as well, notably in two recent studies of Dutch
biblical painting in the mid-seventeenth century: Christian Tümpel et al., Het Oude
Testament in de schilderkunst van de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1991), and Tümpel, Im
Lichte Rembrandts.
10. This political reading of the painting was first suggested in A. B. de Vries, ed., Maurits
de Braziliaan (The Hague, 1953), 41, no. 17.
11. De Laet seemed also to have recognized some of the spiritual qualities of Post’s Brazil-
ian site by prominently noting, in his description of Olinda, “the beautiful and well-
built Jesuit monastery,” the Capuchin and Dominican monasteries, the Carmelite
nunnery, and diverse other churches—all of which graced the contested settlement (De
Laet, Iaerlijck verhael, 191).
12. The work was published simultaneously in Spanish and Latin as Miqweh Israel. Esto es
Esperança de Israel and Miqweh Israel. Hoc est Spes Israelis (both Amsterdam, 1650), thus
assuring a wide audience both within and without the Sephardi community of Ams-
terdam. All told, at least thirteen editions appeared through 1723 in Latin, Spanish, Eng-
lish, Dutch, Yiddish, and Hebrew. For a complete bibliography, see J. H. Coppenhagen,
Menasseh ben Israel: Manuel Dias Soero, 1604–1657: A Bibliography (Jerusalem, 1990).
13. See, for example, the essays in Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard Popkin,
eds., Menasseh ben Israel and His World (Leiden, 1989); and the superb Introduction by
Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon in Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel, ed.
Méchoulan and Nahon (Oxford, 1987), 1–95. Menasseh’s campaign to win admittance
into England for the Jews (and the millenarian context of these efforts) are examined
in David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655
(Oxford, 1982); idem, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford, 1994), esp. 106–44, with
an updated bibliography; and Lucien Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver
Cromwell (London, 1901). For an excellent study that relates Menasseh’s messianism
specifically to events in Brazil, see Jonathan Israel, “Dutch Sephardi Jewry, Millenarian
Politics, and the Struggle for Brazil,” in Skeptics, Millenarians and Jews, ed. Jonathan
Israel and David Katz (Leiden, 1990), 76–97. Dutch millenarianism is considered in this
context by Ernestine G. E. van der Wall, “The Amsterdam Millenarian Petrus Serrarius
(1600–1669) and the Anglo-Dutch Circle of Philo-Judaists,” in Jewish Christian Relations
in the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. van den Berg and van der Wall (Dordrecht, 1988),
73–94; and idem, “Three Letters by Menasseh Ben Israel to John Drurie,” Nederlands
Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 65 (1985):46–63.
14. The literature is voluminous. For the converso mentalité, see Miriam Bodian, “‘Men of
the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Pre-
sent 143 (May 1994):48–76; and idem, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and
Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1997). Social and religious
issues are addressed in two useful overviews by Yosef Kaplan, “The Portuguese
Community in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century: Tradition and Change,” in
Society and Community, Proceedings of the Second International Congress for
Research into the Sephardi and Oriental Heritage, ed. A Haim (Jerusalem, 1991),
141–71; and “The Intellectual Ferment in the Spanish-Portuguese Community of Sev-
enteenth-Century Amsterdam” [Hebrew], in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy,
ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem, 1992), 600–621. For the economic activities of the
Sephardim, see the essays collected in Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of
Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1985); idem, “The Economic Contribution of Dutch
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Sephardi Jews to Holland’s Golden Age, 1595–1713,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 96

(1983):505–36 (reprinted in the very useful Empires and Entrepots [London, 1990]);
and D. M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-
Century Amsterdam (London, 2000). A fine survey of the state of research (with exten-
sive bibliographies) can be found in J. C. H. Blom, R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Schöffer,
eds., Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland (Amsterdam, 1995), esp. in the essays of
D. M. Swetschinski (“Tussen middeleeuwen en Gouden Eeuw, 1516–1621,” 53–94),
J. I. Israel (“De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden tot omstreeks 1750: Demo-
grafie en economische activiteit,” 97–126), and Y. Kaplan (“De joden in de Repub-
liek tot omstreeks 1750: Religieus, cultureel en sociaal leven,” 129–73). See also the
synthetic overview of R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, De Sephardim in Amsterdam tot 1795 (Hil-
versum, 1989).
15. “Verbintenis van eenige Eedelen,” in J. W. Te Water, Historie van het verbond en de
smeekschriften der Nederlandsche edelen ter verkrijging van vrijheid in den godsdienst en
burgerstaat in de jaren 1565–1567, 4 vols. (Middelburg, 1779–96), 4:61. Further examples
are discussed in Benjamin Schmidt, “Tyranny Abroad: The Dutch Revolt and the
Invention of America,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 11 (1995):161–74.
16. Apologie of Prince William of Orange against the Proclamation of the King of Spaine, ed. H.
Wansink (Leiden, 1969), 53–59 (with slight changes in the punctuation). Like many of
the rebel propagandists, Willem targeted a broadly international audience and had the
Apologie, originally published in French, translated immediately into Dutch, German,
Latin, and English. Willem’s point was reiterated a few months later by the States Gen-
eral in their official abjuration of Philip II, which similarly accused the Spanish
monarch of seeking “to abolish all the privileges of the country and have it tyrannically
governed by Spaniards like the Indies” (emphasis added). See the Plakkaat van Verlatinge
1581, ed. M. E. H. N. Mout (The Hague, 1979), esp. 97, 99, 105, 117.
17. Levendich discours vant ghemeyne Lants welvaert, voor desen de Oost, end nu de West-Indis-
che generale compaignie aenghevanghen (1622), sig. [C4] v; Memorie vande ghewichtighe rede-
nen die de heeren Staten Generael behooren te beweghen, om gheesins te wijcken vande
handelinghe ende vaert van Indien (1608), sig. iij-r; and cf. the Onpartydich discours opte han-
delinghe vande Indien ([1608?]), sig. Aij-r, which speaks of an “alliante” with the Indians.
18. Briefly, a sluggish subscription rate induced the directors to focus more squarely on
economic issues—though political rhetoric did remain part of their pitch. Debates over
the Company’s origins can be found in W. J. van Hoboken, “The Dutch West India
Company: The Political Background of Its Rise and Fall,” in Britain and the Netherlands,
ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (London, 1960); and J. G. van Dillen, “De West-
Indische Compagnie, het calvinisme, en de politiek,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 74
(1961):145–71. Also useful for the early development of the WIC are Simon Hart, The
Prehistory of the New Netherland Company (Amsterdam, 1959); P. J. van Winter, De
Westindische Compagnie ter kamer Stad en Lande (The Hague, 1978); Ernst van den
Boogaart, “De Nederlandse expansie in het Atlantisch gebied, 1590–1674,” Algemene
Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 15 vols. (Haarlem, 1977–83), 7:220–54; and Henk den Hei-
jer, De geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen, 1994). The classic biographies of Usselincx are
J. Franklin Jameson, Willem Usselinx: Founder of the Dutch and Swedish West India Com-
panies, Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 2, no. 3 (New York, 1887);
and C. Ligtenberg, Willem Usselinx (Utrecht, 1914).
19. Both are discussed at greater length in Benjamin Schmidt, “Exotic Allies: The Dutch-
Chilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America,” Renaissance Quarterly 52
(1999):440–73.
20. Joan Aventroot, Sendt-brief aen die van Peru, met een Aliance van de … Heeren Staten, der
Vereenigder Provintien des Nederlands (Amsterdam, 1630). Aventroot had attempted to
forge an American alliance a few years earlier, when he provided the Nassau Fleet (mid-
1620s) with special directives for negotiating a confederation with the natives. See the
“Instructie voor u, Jacques l’Hermite, vanwegen de Ho. Mo. Heeren, de Staten-Gener-
aal” and the “Instructie voor den Generael” in De reis om de wereld van de Nassausche
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104 | Benjamin Schmidt

Vloot 1623–1626, ed. W. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, Werken Uitgegeven door de Lin-

schoten-Vereeniging, vol. 65 (The Hague, 1964).
21. See the published journal of the voyage, Journael ende historis verhael van de reyse gedaen
by oosten de Straet le Maire, naer de custen van Chili, onder het beleyt van den Heer Generael
Hendrick Brouwer, inden jare 1643 voor gevallen (Amsterdam, 1646), as well as the overly
confident Tydingh uyt Brasijl aende Heeren Bewinthebberen van de West-Indische Compag-
nie, van wegen den tocht by den Generael Brouwer nae de Zuyd-Zee gedaen (Amsterdam,
1644), which prematurely announced a Dutch success in the region.
22. Hugo de Groot, De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio (Paris, 1642) and De origine
gentium Americanarum dissertatio altera, adversus obtjectatorem (Paris, 1643), which
responds to Joannes de Laet, Notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii (Amsterdam, 1643).
De Groot laid out his view on the origins of the Dutch Republic in the Liber de antiquitate
reipublicae Batavica (Leiden, 1610), which was published around the same time that Abra-
ham van der Myl (Mylius) was drawing a linguistic link between the “Teutonic” races
(especially the Cimbri, progenitors of the Dutch) and the Indians: Lingua Belgica (Leiden,
1612). G. Gliozzi argues that Grotius, at the time an ambassador for the queen of Swe-
den, meant to bolster his patron’s claims to lands in North America: G. Gliozzi, Adamo e
il nuovo mondo: La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale (Florence 1977). J.-P.
Rubiés sees Grotius’s and de Laet’s debate in the context of a Dutch religious dispute
over Calvinist orthodoxy: “Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of American Peo-
ples and the Use of Comparative Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991):221–44.
In emphasizing economic and religious concerns, Gliozzi and Rubiés both underesti-
mate, and therefore overlook, the intense and intensely nostalgic patriotism nurtured by
de Groot for that which he considered, to the very end, his patria, namely Holland.
23. Caspar Barlaeus, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum, sub praefectura
… J. Mauriti (Amsterdam, 1647). The work contained dozens of engravings based on
drawings made in situ by Frans Post.
24. For biographical details, see Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel, Rabbi, Printer, and
Diplomat (Philadelphia, 1934), esp. 51–53; and Méchoulan and Nahon, “Introduction,”
39–40. Menasseh’s concern for the Dutch colonial enterprise is treated by Jonathan
Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the
Mid-Seventeenth Century (1645–1657),” in Kaplan et al., Menasseh, 139–63. More gen-
erally, see Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960).
25. Menasseh ben Israel, Conciliador o de la convenecia de los Lugares de la S. Escriptura que
repugnantes entre si parecen, Part 2 (Amsterdam, 1641). The dedicatory epistle also con-
tained a glowing account of the Republic’s recent naval triumphs in Spanish Ameri-
can waters.
26. Menasseh ben Israel, De termino vitae: libri tres (Amsterdam, 1639), 236 (cited in Roth,
Menasseh, 53; and cf. ibid., 59–61, for Menasseh’s warm feelings for “Batavia” and for
Aboab’s rabbinical first).
27. Menasseh, Conciliador, Part 2, “Epistola dedicatoria.” There is still some dispute
regarding Menasseh’s birthplace. Roth, who favors Madeira, reviews the source mate-
rial in an extensive note: Roth, Menasseh, 28–30. Méchoulan and Nahon (Introduction,
23) hedge their bets, emphasizing, in all events, the converso background of the Soeiro
family and the youth of Menasseh upon his arrival in the Netherlands. See also H. P.
Salomon, “The Portuguese Background of Menasseh ben Israel’s Parents as Revealed
through the Inquisitorial Archives at Lisbon,” Studia Rosenthaliana 17, no. 2 (1983):
105–46.
28. As noted in his Sefer Nishmat Hayyim [Hebrew] (Amsterdam, 1651) and cited in Roth,
Menasseh, 45.
29. These relationships are well reviewed in Roth, Menasseh, 143–48. See ibid., 59, for the let-
ters exchanged between Grotius and Vossius (January and February 1640); and cf.
Edwin Rabbie, “Hugo Grotius and Judaism,” in Hugo Grotius Theologian: Essays in Honor
of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, ed. Henk J. M. Nellen and Edwin Rabbie (Leiden, 1994),
99–120, for a more skeptical view of Grotius’s relationship with his Jewish colleague.
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30. Barlaeus’s sonnet appears in the prefatory materials to Menasseh’s De Creatione Prob-
lemata XXX (Amsterdam, 1635). More generally, see F. F. Blok, “Caspar Barlaeus en de
Joden: De geschiedenis van een epigram,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 63
(1976–77):85–108 and 179–209; and Roth, Menasseh, 152–54.
31. The Spanish Janssonius—Nuevo Atlas o Theatro de Todo el Mundo de Juan Janssonio (Ams-
terdam, 1653)—is discussed by J. Werner, “Universiteitsbibliotheek van Amsterdam
ontvangt een Spaanse Janssonius,” Caert-Thresoor 4 (1985):10–11; and A. K. Offenberg,
“Some Remarks Regarding Six Autograph Letters by Menasseh ben Israel in the Ams-
terdam University Library,” in Kaplan et al., Menasseh, 191–98. Joan Blaeu, the Nether-
lands’ other leading geographer/publisher, also had dealings with Menasseh, in his
case regarding an edition of the Conciliador (Roth, Menasseh, 171).
It is perhaps worth noting one further cultural contact, who collaborated with
Menasseh on matters related both to scholarship and printing (he produced images for
the Piedra gloriosa [Amsterdam, 1655]), namely, Rembrandt van Rijn. For a recent study
of their personal and professional relationship, see Michael Zell, “Protestant Imagery
and Jewish Apologetics: Rembrandt’s Encounter with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel”
(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1994).
32. Notably “Alonsus de Erzilla [Ercilla y Zúñiga],” whose epic La Araucana describes the
heroic resistance of the native Chileans against the Habsburgs (Spanish ed. pub.
Antwerp, 1586 and 1597; Dutch trans. pub. Rotterdam, 1619) and “Garcilassus [Gar-
cilaso] de la Vega [Inca],” whose highly ambivalent account of the Conquista (the
author was half-native) was widely cited in the United Provinces.
33. Menasseh, Hope, 103–4.
34. Ibid., 105–11. See also Méchoulan and Nahon, Introduction, 68–76 (citing the Gemeen-
tearchief of Amsterdam on Montezinos’s notable absence from the register of alms
recipients); and, for biographical details, the fascinating account of Elizabeth Levi de
Montezinos, “The Narrative of Aharon Levi, alias Antonio de Montezinos,” American
Sephardi, 7-8 (1975):63–83. Antonio, who claimed to be forty years old at the time of
his Amsterdam visit (1644), actually returned the following year to Dutch Brazil,
where he lived for two more years, dying before the Jewish community there began
its own register.
35. In order fully to gain Francisco’s confidence, however, Montezinos must first “go
native”: abandon his Spanish cloak and sword, wear instead the native “alpergatos”
(linen shoes), and swear to eat only roasted maize. See the version of the story (based
on a French ms. copy sent by Menasseh) in Thomas Thorowgood, Iewes in America, or,
Probabilities That the Americans Are of that Race (London, 1650), 129–[138].
36. Records of the Holy Office of Cartagena de las Indias confirm at least part of Montezi-
nos’s tale. See Montezinos, “Narrative,” which traces Inquisition documents concern-
ing “Antonio Montessinos, born at Villaflor” and discusses family traditions related to
the affair.
37. Menasseh, Hope, 105 and passim. Menasseh’s dark vision of “Spanish tyranny” reap-
pears in numerous of his other writings. See, for example, the “Epistola dedicatoria” of
the Conciliador (pt. 2), in which he acknowledges the Dutch role in protecting the Jews
from the Inquisition: “We were protected from Spanish tyranny, and for that neither I
nor my co-religionists will ever be able to thank you [the United Provinces] enough.”
38. Menasseh, Hope, 110. On the metaphor of bondage (or slavery) as used in contempo-
rary narratives of the Dutch Revolt, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An
Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), 81–93.
39. See the “Epistola dedicatoria,” in Menasseh, Esperança de Israel; and the “Epistle Dedica-
tory,” in Menasseh, Hope, 99–100. Important studies that place the work in this English
context include Roth, Menasseh (cf. 181–202); idem, “The Resettlement of the Jews in Eng-
land in 1656,” in Three Centuries of Anglo-Jewish History, ed. V. D. Lipman (London, 1961),
3–25; Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission; and Katz, Philo-Semitism. Menasseh later
attempted to play the Swedish card as well; see David Katz, “Menasseh ben Israel’s Mis-
sion to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1651–1655,” Jewish Social Studies 45 (1983):57–72.
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106 | Benjamin Schmidt

40. This is the central theme of Méchoulan and Nahon (Introduction), who correctly point
out that Menasseh made the case not (as has traditionally been argued) that Indians
were Jews, but rather that Jews lived among the Indians. The Israelite’s miraculous dis-
persal to the farthest corners of the world, New and Old, was a sign of the imminent
messianic redemption.
41. Israel, “Dutch Sephardic Colonization,” and idem, “Dutch Sephardi Jewry,” which
include discussions of the messianic moment of 1645–50.
42. Compare, in this regard, the case of Barlaeus, whose open-minded sonnet dedicated to
Menasseh (which suggested that Jews and Christians might coexist as “friends before
God”) brought in fact a hail of accusations upon the embattled Latin—and, nota bene,
Remonstrant—scholar.
43. It was Menasseh who received the stadholder Frederick Henry (accompanied by
Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I) in the Amsterdam synagogue in 1642. He
communicated also with Christina of Sweden (see note 39 above) and, of course, with
Oliver Cromwell.
44. See the recent edition of Uriel da Costa, Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, trans. H. P.
Salomon and I. S. D. Sasson (Leiden, 1993); as well as Carl Gebhardt, Die Schriften des
Uriel da Costa (Amsterdam, 1922).
45. Bodian (Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation), while making a convincing case for the dis-
tinctiveness of the Amsterdam “Men of the Nation,” also acknowledges a number of
significant points of cultural contact between the “Portuguese” Sephardim and the
Dutch. Among these was a shared idiom of antipathy directed at Iberian Catholicism
and even a certain overlap in the construction of “foundation” histories (see especially
her third chapter, “The Dutch Context,” in ibid., 53–75). Bodian also indicates the pos-
sible channel for this interaction—literature—and notes that Menasseh’s rival, the
rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, likewise read widely in Renaissance literature, both sec-
ular and sacred.
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– Chapter 5 –

ISRAEL IN AMERICA: THE WANDERINGS

OF THE LOST TEN TRIBES FROM
MIKVEIGH YISRAEL TO TIMOTHY MCVEIGH

David S. Katz

R OYAL FAMILY TREES in the early modern period often began with
Adam and Eve, and carried on without shame to the most contem-
porary representatives of that illustrious lineage. In principle, this was
easily accomplished. Everyone knew that Noah had divided the world
among his three sons, each of whom was given divine title either to
Europe (Japheth), Asia (Shem) or Africa (Ham).1 The discovery of the
American Indians, however, demanded a bit of creativity, since there was
no apparent mention of the New World in Genesis, so distant as it was
from the scene of biblical events. Columbus himself had no difficulty
with their discovery. He died in the belief that he had landed on the east
coast of Asia: the Indians were Asiatics, and their presence was interest-
ing but unremarkable. Columbus reported in his journal that when he
sent a reconnaissance party into the interior, he included one Luis de Tor-
res, a converso who “understood Hebrew and Chaldean and even some
Arabic.” Torres was meant to be the interpreter should the expedition
encounter any Hebrew-speaking Indians.2 It was entirely possible,
Columbus reasoned, that these strange people might be the barbarized
descendants of the Ten Tribes of Israel whose fate was described in the
biblical canon itself.
Although some proto-anthropologists, such as Isaac la Peyrère in
seventeenth-century France, suggested that the American Indians might
be entirely outside the Scripture story, virtually all those who wrote about
the origin of the American Indians agreed that they must in some way be
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108 | David S. Katz

descended from Adam and Eve, if not from Noah as well. The chief diffi-
culties were to describe the route of migration and to fit the chronology
within the accepted timetable of Genesis.3 The identification of Indians
with the Lost Ten Tribes was one convenient and popular solution that
found advocates not only in the Spanish-speaking world, but also in Eng-
land and continental Europe.4 But there have been other candidates for the
descendants of the biblical Israelites, most notably the British people and
the white Anglo-Saxon citizens of the United States of America. What
gives this curious and somewhat comical academic dispute historical bal-
last, however, is that the early modern myth of Israel in America would
not only survive the Enlightenment, but would also become the ideologi-
cal underpinning both of a major American religion and of twentieth-cen-
tury racist groups such as the Aryan Nations and the Christian Identity
movement, from whose ranks emerged Timothy McVeigh, who was con-
victed for the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.5

Speculations concerning the possible identification of the Lost Ten Tribes

of Israel with the American Indians may have been in the air since
Columbus, but they took on a renewed urgency in 1644, when a marrano
named Antonio de Montezinos, recently returned from Quito Province in
Ecuador, testified under oath before the Amsterdam Rabbi Menasseh ben
Israel (1604–1657) that he had met Israelites of the tribe of Reuben there,
living secretly, deep in the interior of the territory. Montezinos had made
a good choice in selecting Menasseh as his witness, for in many respects,
the Dutch rabbi had become the Jewish ambassador to the gentile intel-
lectual world.
Montezinos’s testimony before Menasseh ben Israel was both fantas-
tic and exciting. Montezinos recounted his arrival at the secret kingdom
where the inhabitants repeated the Jewish credo, the Shema, along with
nine vague remarks and prophecies, but refused to allow him to cross the
River Sambatyon bordering their country. Montezinos estimated that he
spoke with nearly three hundred Israelite American Indians during his
three days there, but they would see him only in small groups and
declined to elaborate on their nine cryptic statements.6 Menasseh himself
published the full account in his book The Hope of Israel, which appeared
in Amsterdam in Latin and Spanish in 1650, and in London the same year
in an English edition, translated by Milton’s friend Moses Wall; a second
English edition is dated 1652 (see Fig. 5.1).7
Menasseh’s little book reinvigorated the issue of the Lost Ten Tribes
and gave the debate a text over which it could center. Menasseh, in turn,
was instantly famous, especially in the circle of English philosemitic intel-
lectuals who believed that the conversion of the Lost Ten Tribes was a
harbinger of the conversion of the European Jews, which in turn was a
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Israel in America | 109

FIGURE 5.1 Menasseh ben Joseph ben Israel, [Sefer Mikweh Yisrael] (Amsterdam, 1697).
The Hope of Israel was first published in Spanish as Esperança de Israel (Amsterdam, 5410
[i.e., 1650]).
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110 | David S. Katz

prelude to the Second Coming and the millennium, when Christ would
rule on earth for a thousand years with his saints. Menasseh, on the other
hand, had no intention of converting to Christianity, but relied on the
book of Isaiah, which prophesied that the Lord would “assemble the out-
casts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four
corners of the earth” before the coming of the Messiah. Russia and Pales-
tine might be two corners; South America might be a newly discovered
third. England was probably the fourth, in part because its designation in
medieval Hebrew literature was often “the end of the earth,” a Franbreu
translation of “Angleterre.”8
It was the issue of the Lost Ten Tribes, then, that caused the rise of
Menasseh ben Israel, following neatly upon his fall. The discovery of the
Lost Tribes enabled an unemployed and underpaid Dutch rabbi to con-
nect with circles in London who hoped that by readmitting the Jews to
England and converting them to true and pure English Protestant Chris-
tianity, the Second Coming of Christ would be brought closer. There was
an identity of purpose between Christian and Jew in seventeenth-century
England, which was already sensitized to philosemitism on the basis of
the values of the Renaissance and the Reformation common to Northern
European culture.9

II

The chimera of the Lost Ten Tribes stayed fresh and survived as a pow-
erful force, especially among those groups that stressed the inerrancy of
the Bible and refused to accept the new biblical criticism, and even more
so among those denominations that gave the Jews, with or without the
Lost Ten Tribes (and sometimes the Israelite American Indians), a critical
role to play at the End of Days. The first of these religious groups was the
Mormons, whose truths were revealed to Joseph Smith on 21 September
1823 by the angel Moroni, son of Mormon. Written on gold plates in the
Reformed Egyptian language, these truths could be deciphered with the
aid of an accompanying pair of eyeglasses made from two transparent
stones, the Urim and Thummim described in the Old Testament. Only
four years later was Smith allowed to take possession of the plates and to
begin the process of translation.
The result was the Book of Mormon, a 275,000-word chronicle about
the inhabitants of pre-Columbian America. The story begins in 600 B.C. in
Palestine, when a group of Israelites is inspired to leave Jerusalem imme-
diately before the Babylonian invasion. They flee by caravan to the
Indian Ocean and then by boat to the Promised Land on the west coast
of North America. There they split into two contentious groups, the
Nephites and the Lamanites, who spend centuries building a civilization
and fighting with one another. Following His crucifixion and resurrection,
Christ appears to them in America, announcing that He will also visit
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Israel in America | 111

other remnants of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. “I go unto the Father,” He
told them as He prepared to leave, “and also to show myself unto the lost
tribes of Israel, for they are not lost unto the Father, for He knoweth
whither He hath taken them.” The Nephites and the Lamanites live in
harmony after the divine visitation for about two centuries, then begin
warring again; finally, in about 421 A.D., the Nephites are totally van-
quished and destroyed. The victorious Lamanites, however, gradually
sink into barbarism, lose their fair skins, and become the ancestors of the
American Indians. Moroni, the last prophet of the exterminated Nephites,
buries the history of the American Israelites in the Hill Cumorah, where
it remains until revealed to Joseph Smith in 1823. As is fitting for the first
genuine indigenous American variety of Christianity, America is given a
starring role: it had been the scene of Christ’s work on earth as much as
in Palestine, and would be once again as the true American church arises
against the apostate churches of ungodly Europe.10
The Articles of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
made quite clear the role that the Jews and the Lost Ten Tribes were
expected to play. The tenth of thirteen articles affirms: “We believe in the
literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that
Zion will be built upon this [the American] continent; that Christ will
reign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and
receive its paradisiacal glory.”11 This Zion was revealed to be Jackson
County, Missouri, confirmed by revelations received by Joseph Smith.12
The Mormon attitude to the Bible was somewhat less straightfor-
ward. As Joseph Smith explained it in 1842, “We believe the Bible to be
the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.”13 Believing the Bible
to have been incorrectly translated, Smith began the work afresh as early
as 1830, producing a text that is not a genuine translation, but the Autho-
rized Version amended, with certain passages corrected and others
expanded. Since Smith had no knowledge whatsoever of either Hebrew
or Greek, he was forced to rely on inspiration. This claim was problem-
atic, to which one might only reply, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” or
as Smith elegantly put it, “Judge not unrighteously, that ye be not judged;
but judge righteous judgment.”14
For the Mormons, then, the Jews form an essential part of their the-
ology, and the fate of the Lost Ten Tribes is one of the pillars of their ver-
sion of history. The Mormons remain steadfastly philosemitic and
supportive of Jewish temporal interests, especially the welfare of the
modern state of Israel, which most Protestant groups have come to see as
part of the divine plan rather than as a human attempt to jump the gun.
A vast and beautiful Mormon college sits on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem,
built only recently and with full support from one of Israel’s previous
right-wing nationalist governments. As we shall see, however, the Mor-
mons did not have a monopoly on the Lost Ten Tribes. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, the missing Israelites would be enlisted into the
ranks of the Christian Identity movement, whose fruits would include
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112 | David S. Katz

both rabid anti-Semitism and the ideological politics behind many of the
so-called “militias” in the United States.

III

Perhaps the most eccentric messianic theory that emerged during the
nineteenth century was the one usually known as British Israelism. The
concept, in brief, is that the British, or perhaps the Anglo-Saxon races in
general, are the literal descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and
therefore all of God’s biblical promises apply to them and not to the mod-
ern Jews. It is the Anglo-Saxons who are the Chosen People, as demon-
strated not only by evidence in Scripture, but also by anthropological
investigations of the historical migrations of the Lost Ten Tribes since
their Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C. The modern Jews, the
offspring of those who rejected Christ, are therefore excluded from God’s
Grace, while the British, the descendants of those Jews who did not have
the opportunity of hearing the message of Jesus, have the best of both
Jewish and gentile worlds: they are the heirs of promise and saved by
Christ’s blood as well.
The true ideological founding father of British Israelism was John
Wilson (d. 1871), the son of an Irish weaver. Wilson conceived the idea
that the English were the true and literal descendants of the Lost Ten
Tribes of Israel, and promulgated this view in lectures in Dublin and else-
where in Ireland between about 1840 and his death thirty years later. He
seems to have met with great success, peppering his lectures with other
fashionable subjects, especially phrenology.15 Wilson’s ideas were clearly
expressed and his thesis easily explained.

He agrees with those who apply to these Christian nations many of the
prophecies respecting Israel, believing, as he does, that these nations have not
merely come into the place of ancient Israel, but are truly the seed of Abraham
according to the flesh—are of the so-called “lost house of Israel,” the leading
tribe of which was Ephraim. These nations have been brought forth at the
time and in the place predicted; they are the modern nations of Europe, and
especially those of Saxon race.

In the early editions of his lectures, Wilson saw the British as only one of
the Israelitish heirs, along with the Germans and the Scandinavians. By
the fifth edition of 1876, however, England had moved up to a special and
unique position, demonstrated not only by her extraordinary maritime
skills, but also by the rise of America as her brother Menasseh.16
Wilson proved his thesis that the English were the lineal descendents
of the lost tribe of Ephraim in various ways. Like the Spanish theologians
who saw in the American Indians traces of the biblical Jews, Wilson gave
pride of place to cultural comparison and linguistic analysis. The name
“Britain” itself derived from the Hebrew word for covenant, brit. Other
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Israel in America | 113

traces of the Lost Israelites could be found elsewhere in Europe, such as

the remnants of the tribe of Dan, whose legacy survived in places like the
River Don, the city of London, and of course, the River Danube. The word
“cossack” was a corruption of goi-izak. Even the title of the song “Yankee
Doodle” is not originally American: “The name seems to be a Hebraic
nursery epithet of endearment, and it would be interesting to trace the
history of the tune, still more remotely.”17 As if part of a dark prophecy,
Wilson also demonstrated the veracity of British Israelism with a large
dose of racial reasoning, which gave pride of place to “the European
branch of the SEMITIC race” in England and America. As we shall see,
this racist element of British Israelism would become dominant in the
transfiguration of the theory into the Christian Identity movement in the
United States.18
Not content with merely identifying the whereabouts of some of the
Lost Ten Tribes, Wilson also sought to transform his discovery into a
practical program for retaking the land of his fathers, promoting a sort of
British Israelite Zionism. “The land of Israel is a rich epitome of all
lands,” he wrote with the confidence of one who had never been to the
Middle East, “and of all countries it is the most centrally placed in respect
to both land and water. Especially is this the case with regard to the dif-
ferent offshoots of the British Empire; so that in going there, we are, as
already noticed, only removing into the midst of our family, to invite its
several members to draw more closely around us.” He further noted:
“What was regarded a few years ago as a wild dream is now merely a
rational expectation.” All that was required was for the British to conquer
Palestine from the Turks. “There is no time to be lost,” Wilson warned.19
Although Wilson was content to spread his ideas as special (paid) lec-
turer, he made no attempt at first to establish a religious sect or even a
group of fellow believers. It was only in 1871 and 1872 that such a plan
evolved, and the Anglo-Ephraim Association was founded at meetings
presided over by Bishop Gobat of Jerusalem. Wilson, after all, earned his
living by promoting a historical theory, which by itself did little to
threaten the mainly middle-class Victorians who came to see the show.
Even those who were convinced by his exegesis were not really required
to do anything but merely to appreciate the demonstrated fact that they
were the descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes and that God had promised
to them His love and protection. Joining a club would not bring forward
the Second Coming by a single day. Nevertheless, from the early 1870s a
number of small associations of like-minded believers did emerge, and
British Israelism was launched as a movement.
John Wilson’s reluctance to form an organized movement makes
Edward Hine (1825–1891) the first proper Anglo-Israelite. He had left
school at age twelve and worked his way up in the late 1860s to deputy
manager of the “Penny Bank.” But the key event in his life occurred in
1839 when at the age of fourteen he heard Wilson lecture in Aldersgate
Street and became convinced about the truth of British Israelism.20 He
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114 | David S. Katz

gave his first lecture on the subject in 1869 and published it at the same
time, only two years before Wilson’s death, making him in a sense the man
to whom the torch was passed.21 Hine was eventually supplanted by
Edward Wheler Bird, born in India in 1823, the son of a well-known
provincial judge. Bird passed his exams in England at the age of nineteen,
and entered the Indian Civil Service, retiring to Bristol in 1868 from a sen-
ior position. In England he quickly became involved in various evangeli-
cal activities, including the Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the
Jews, the Bible Society, and others. In 1874, he chanced upon one of John
Wilson’s books and became an enthusiastic supporter of British Israelism,
becoming chairman of the Bristol and Clifton Anglo-Israel Association in
April 1875. Edward Hine himself moved to the United States and, as we
shall see, had more success in that particular Anglo-Saxon territory.

IV

While British Israelism would degenerate in England to being yet another

eccentric fringe movement, its transplantation to the United States in the
1880s not only ensured its survival but also enabled it to merge with other
biblical interpretations such as Millerism, dispensationalism, and Christ-
ian Aryanism to produce a potent variety of revolutionary messianism
and virulent racism. If Britain was Ephraim, then the United States was
Menasseh, another Lost Tribe and heir to the promises of Abraham. The
same themes that had been discussed by John Wilson on an exegetical or
intellectual level took on a greater meaning in the New World. After all,
was not the very name of “America” merely a corruption of the Hebrew
words am-erik, “the country of [Leif] Erik[son]”? Looking at all of this
evidence together, who could not but conclude that the British and the
Americans were the true Chosen People of God, and that the biblical
promises applied to them alone?
But most fascinating was the introduction of pyramidology to the
British Israelite scheme. Although this was certainly not a uniquely Amer-
ican phenomenon, it was introduced into the movement at the time of its
transplantation to the United States, and thus became a key issue from its
inception there. Nearly all pyramid enthusiasts are Anglo-Israelites, so
the concepts have remained intertwined. Pyramidology is an old concept,
proclaimed by no less than Isaac Newton and many others. The basic idea
is that the Great Pyramid is God’s original record of biblical revelation,
presented in symbols and terms of modern science and preserved in the
stones of the pyramid itself. Just as God recorded His revelation in the
form of words in the Bible, so too did He give us the same information in
stone, which can be deciphered through mathematics and an under-
standing of the measurements of the Great Pyramid. Since biblical inter-
pretation is never perfectly clear, we are almost compelled to seek further
information in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.22
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Israel in America | 115

In practice, what this means is understanding that there is such a thing

as a “pyramid inch,” 1.00106 British inches, an exact twenty-fifth part of
the Sacred Cubit (25.0265 British inches), which conveniently is precisely
one ten-millionth of the earth’s mean polar radius. The builders of the
Great Pyramid constructed that massive edifice so that each pyramid inch
(especially in the ascending and descending interior chambers) would sig-
nify a single year in the history of humankind. In this way, we can trace the
entire history of the world from the beginning of the “Adamic race” in
about 4000 B.C. to its conclusion in about 2000 A.D., when humankind will
become extinct in the millennial Sabbath. The Great Pyramid documents
the dates of the Flood (2352 B.C.), the Exodus (1513 B.C.), the life of Christ
in great detail, the war between the United States and Mexico (1846), the
repeal of the British Corn Laws (also 1846), World War I, and the abdica-
tion of Edward VIII (1936). The Great Pyramid can also be used efficiently
for the prediction of future events. Adam Rutherford, the great pyrami-
dologist of the 1930s, predicted the creation of the State of Israel “after
1941,” and the establishment of Christ’s millennial reign on earth at 21 Sep-
tember 1994 on the autumnal equinox.23 Peter Lemesurier, Rutherford’s
successor, has since corrected that happy date to 2 July 2989.24
Who built the Great Pyramid? It is named for the Pharaoh Cheops,
but perhaps the builder was Enoch, who led the Shepherd Kings to Egypt
and lived for 365 years, symbolically the same number of days in a single
year. Perhaps the builder was Melchizedek, who was really Job. But two
things are clear, as Adam Rutherford put it: “… that the Great Pyramid in
Egypt is a Divinely designed monument and that it is truth in structural
form.” In other words, he says, “the teaching of the Bible and that of the
Pyramid are identical in every particular, the one in words, the other in
stone.”25 No wonder the British Israelites listened so carefully.

One of the first Americans to promulgate the British Israelite view was Lt.
Charles A. L. Totten (d. 1909), an artillery officer who was in charge of
military instruction at Yale between 1889 and 1892 and who wrote a num-
ber of texts on this important subject. When the British Israelite leader
Edward Hine came to the United States in 1884, he linked up with
Charles Totten and stayed with him in New Haven. Hine enjoyed the
opportunity to re-create himself in this virgin land and made a new
career, lecturing over the next four years up and down the eastern
seaboard and into Canada and the upper Midwest about the true destiny
of the British people and their American brethren, before returning to
England in February 1888. Eventually, groups devoted to this ideology
were also formed in the western United States and Canada, centering
around Vancouver, Portland (Oregon), and Los Angeles, which has
remained its core.26
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116 | David S. Katz

While many of the British Israelites regarded the tribe of Judah, the
modern Jews, as having no part in God’s inheritance, there was no intrin-
sic reason why this particular ideological bent should have become essen-
tially anti-Semitic. The transformation of warmly philosemitic British
Israelism into dangerously anti-Semitic Christian Identity is in itself
almost an accident of history, the result of its adoption by religious and
political activists whose thinking was already moving along racist lines.
Among those earliest writers responsible for this development was
Reuben H. Sawyer (b. 1866), a minister in Portland, Oregon, where he led
an active Anglo-Israel Research Society. Sawyer lectured throughout the
Northwest and helped establish the British Israel World Federation in
London in 1920. At the same time, Sawyer found the leisure to serve as
leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon from 1921 to 1924.27
Many others apart from Sawyer saw the Jews as virulent opponents
who were trying to usurp the role of Chosen People from the rightful rep-
resentatives, the British and Anglo-American white Christians. This was
due in part to the efforts of Gerald L. K. Smith (d. 1976), a former associ-
ate of Huey Long, the populist politician from Louisiana who was assas-
sinated there in 1935. By World War II, Smith was the most notorious
anti-Semite in America, and in the early 1950s, he moved his operation to
Los Angeles, where he pushed Anglo-Israelism into a more overtly anti-
Semitic stance by encouraging its association with the growing Christian
Identity movement.28
In any case, Los Angeles became a center of the British Israel move-
ment in the 1930s and 1940s, with conferences held there annually
between 1945 and 1947. Gradually the California-based movement lost its
links with the organizations in England, and even with followers on the
East Coast of the United States. It fused instead with the very anti-Semitic
Christian Identity movement then underway, a process which Gerald L.
K. Smith actively encouraged.29
In the 1950s, some people with connections to Gerald L. K. Smith and
the racist interpretation of British Israelite views appeared on the scene in
the Los Angeles area, such as William Potter Gale (1917–1988) and Wes-
ley Swift (1913–1970). Swift, the son of a Methodist minister in New Jer-
sey, had begun his career in the (Pentecostalist) International Church of
the Foursquare Gospel of Aimee Semple McPherson. Swift withdrew and
set up his own church on the outskirts of the Los Angeles area, first call-
ing it the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation, and later changing its
name to the Church of Jesus Christ Christian—in this way emphasizing
the Identity position that Jesus was not a Jew.30 William Potter Gale also
had a lasting influence. His own background was in the military, having
been a colonel on General MacArthur’s staff in World War II and later
serving in the Philippines. Gale came across Christian Identity writings
in the early 1950s and helped found the Christian Defense League (CDL)
in the early 1960s. The first president of the CDL was Richard Grint But-
ler, who, after Wesley Swift’s death in 1970, set up a church in Idaho with
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Israel in America | 117

the identical name—the Church of Jesus Christ Christian—and united it

with the movement known as Aryan Nations, one of the most dangerous,
openly racist organizations operating in America today.
Gale was also one of the founders of the Posse Comitatus, which was
established in about 1969 in Portland, Oregon.31 The group remained
obscure until 1975, when the FBI was informed that they intended to assas-
sinate Nelson Rockefeller. An investigation revealed that the group was
active in twenty-three states. One of their leaders, James Wickstrom, had a
Christian Identity ministry in Wisconsin, and by 1984, prominent Aryan
Nation figures were active in the group.32 According to the ideology of the
Posse Comitatus, the Jews are the children of Satan, and the blacks are
“mud people.” They also insist that since the United States was founded
as a Christian commonwealth, it should be run as a Christian country for
Christians alone. Furthermore, they argue, since the largest legitimate gov-
ernmental unit is the county and the highest American official is the sher-
iff, no law enforcement authority above the level of the county sheriff’s
posse has any standing in the United States Constitution.33
Various strands of millenarian theorizing were therefore brought
together in postwar America, fusing with new versions of anti-Semitism,
pre-Adamite racism, British Israelism, neo-Nazi Aryanism, and other
ideologies to form the central tenets of the militant revolutionary mes-
sianists. Those attracted to such ideologies saw the United States change
from a society dominated by white male Christians to one incorporating
blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and women in positions of power and authority.
On the outside, the Communist menace seemed to be looking for any
opportunity to destroy an American society already decimated from
within. These groups created a unique amalgam of various theories and
ideologies, combining existing ideas with conspiracy theories about the
subversive activities of Jews, Freemasons, and Communists. The civil
rights movement and its successes made many people feel even more
dispossessed, since they believed that they would have to fight for the
very survival of the Christian white American world against the govern-
ment of the United States, which was no longer legitimate, having aban-
doned its responsibility to those who should not have been given any
power at all.
It was this sort of world-view that led to the proliferation of military
survivalist groups, the militias, the Posse Comitatus, the Freemen, and
others who began to prepare for the Battle of Armageddon, or something
like it, on American soil.34 Many of the militia groups are primarily sur-
vivalist in nature and are more interested in opposing gun control than in
promulgating a more complicated ideology.35 Their ideology, or theology,
is based in large part on a combination of British Israelism, dispensation-
alism, and other concepts. They find their authoritative literature in the
writings of people like Nesta Webster (1876–1960), the English conspiracy
hunter,36 and Eustace Mullins (b. 1923), the scourge of the Jews and the
Federal Reserve Bank;37 in the apocalyptic, racist novel The Turner Diaries;38
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118 | David S. Katz

or in the works of groups, like the Christian Reconstructionists, that

advocate promulgating God’s law as the law of the land.39
In the writings of these militant groups we hear the echo of the
more benign theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Con-
sider, for example, the statement by Richard Grint Butler, the leader of
the Aryan Nations, based in Hayden Lake, Idaho. “We believe that the
true, literal children of the Bible are the 12 tribes of Israel,” he wrote,
“which are now scattered throughout the world and are known as the
Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Scandinavian and Teutonic people of the earth.”
Furthermore, he tells us, “All races did not descend from Adam. Adam
is the father of the White Race only,” and “the Jew is the adversary of
our race and God.” The children of Satan are alive and are causing a
variety of dangerous troubles. In the end, there will be an accounting by
Yahweh in which those who have followed His Law will be redeemed,
and the rest sent to eternal damnation.40 So too do we find similar sen-
timents expressed in the statement of belief of the Church of Israel at
Schell City, Missouri, which includes the pledge: “We believe that
Adam is the father and beginning of the Caucasian race and of no other
race. We believe that all of the non-white races were on earth before
Adam.” The Chosen People are the Israelites who are “today identified
among the Anglo-Saxon-Germanic-Scandinavian-Slavonic kindred peo-
ples.” The Jews are not Israelites, not Adamites, not of the Tribe of
Judah, but the “Jews of today are the Canaanite, Edemite, Amalekites
and other related peoples identified in the world today as Zionists,
Khazars and other related terms.”41
This view, a school of thought that could be designated “Christian
Aryanism,” is more than the product of contemporary extremism; it is a
fascinating amalgam of much earlier messianic ideologies and theologies.
British Israelism is obviously the key ingredient despite the fact that many
of the Christian Aryans are unaware of their connection with that rather
esoteric English system of belief and most would be appalled to learn
how Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel had contributed to their very existence.

VI

Thomas Fuller, in his massive seventeenth-century illustrated geography

of the Holy Land, could not but reflect on the deep significance of the
Lost Ten Tribes. “Strange!” he exclaimed,

that the posterity of the two tribes (Judah and Benjamin) should be found
(almost) every where, whilest the offspring of the ten Tribes are found no
where!… Not, that he hath utterly extinguished the being (an opinion as
unreasonable, as uncharitable) but hath hitherto concealed the known being of
so numerous a nation, whom we may call the lost-lost sheep of Israel both in
respect of their spirituall condition, and corporall habitation.42
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Israel in America | 119

The wanderings of the Lost Ten Tribes in America, as we have seen,

began with the enchanted gaze of the very first European explorer to
behold the New World. The Israelite sojourn took on messianic signifi-
cance with the congruence of Jewish and Christian interpretation in the
England of Menasseh ben Israel and Oliver Cromwell.
When the Israelites adopted British and then American nationality in
the nineteenth century, they unwittingly set the stage for anti-Jewish sen-
timent and for a racist ideology that would ultimately lead to violence.
The transformation of the British Israelites into the Aryan Nations is only
one of the bizarre developments in the history of messianic revolution
and perhaps the aspect of our story with greatest contemporary rele-
vance. The very notion of an Aryan race grew out of a misunderstanding
of the eighteenth-century discovery by another Englishman named Sir
William Jones (1746–94) that many European languages share a common
origin in Sanskrit. It was a short but crucial step for others to posit the
existence of a superior Aryan race of Indo-Europeans who spoke the
mother tongue of Europe, an idea with dangerous consequences once it
became part of the Nazi theory of race.
Yet it is less recognized that the even older English theory of British
Israelism also underwent a deadly revision, whereby its later adherents
in the United States began to argue that the biblical promises God made
to the Israelites applied literally to their progeny alone, the white Anglo-
Saxon Protestants of America, and that on this basis they might take any
action to protect their “race.” The so-called militia movement in the
United States draws its ideology from British Israelism, and without
understanding this obscure English theory, we can never comprehend the
crimes that were committed at Oklahoma City in 1995. One need not
argue that Columbus was the ideological precursor of Timothy McVeigh
to concede that the transformation of the Israelites from American Indi-
ans to British Imperialists and back again to British Americans makes the
parting of the Red Sea look like a pleasant walk on the beach.

Notes

1. Gen. 9: 18–19.
2. The Journal of Christopher Columbus, ed. C. Jane and L. A. Vigneras (London, 1960), 51,
206. Cf. A. B. Gould y Quincy, “Nueva Lista Documentada de los Tripulantes de Colon
en 1492,” Bol. de la Real Acad. de la Hist. 75 (1924):34–49.
3. See Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Lei-
den, 1987).
4. See generally, David S. Katz, “The Debate over the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel,” in Philo-
Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), chap. 4.
5. For more of these connections, see David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic
Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York, 1999).
05 1/24/01 11:25 AM Page 120

120 | David S. Katz

6. “The Relation of Master Antonie Monterinos,” Ievves in America, ed. T. Thorowgood

(London, 1650). Cf. Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel, ed. Henry Méchoulan and
Gérard Nahon (Oxford, 1987), 105–11.
7. For the publishing history of The Hope of Israel, see the edition of Méchoulan and
Nahon, ix–xi.
8. Isa. 11:12; Deut. 28:64; Cecil Roth, “New Light on the Resettlement,” Trans. Jew. Hist.
Soc. Eng. 11 (1928):113–14.
9. See generally David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994).
10. Most of this narrative comes from the first book of Nephi, in The Book of Mormon
(Palmyra, 1830), and the introductory material therein, which is part of the canon. See
also Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950); Fawn M. Brodie,
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (New York,
1946); Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the
Latter-day Saints (London, 1979); and J. L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mor-
mon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge, 1994).
11. The articles of faith are signed by Joseph Smith, and are often printed in the Book of
Mormon.
12. The Book of Mormon, III Nephi 20:29–33; 21:23–26.
13. Quoted in Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience, 30.
14. Joseph Smith’s new translation is published by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints (Independence, Missouri). See R. J. Matthews, “A Plainer Transla-
tion”: Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible (Provo, Utah, 1975).
15. John Wilson, Lectures on Ancient Israel, and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations
of Europe (Cheltenham, 1840); idem, Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin (5th ed., Lon-
don, 1876); the preface from the first edition is dated Liverpool, August 1840. The
fifth edition included a biographical sketch of Wilson, “The Re-Discovery of Our
Israelitish Origin,” 411–42, in which it is claimed that “Mr Wedgwood’s ‘Book of
Remembrance,’ also, did not come into his hands till long after the publication of the
second edition of ‘Our Israelitish Origin.’” Cf. John Wilson, Sixty Anglo-Israel Diffi-
culties Answered. Chiefly from the correspondence of the Late John Wilson, compiled by his
daughter (London, [1878?]); idem, The Book of Inheritance; and Witness of the Prophets,
respecting Ephraim, and the Raising up of Israel (London, 1846). Wilson also attempted
to start a couple of monthly magazines—The Time of the End and Prophetic Witness
(1844) and The Watchmen of Ephraim (1866–68)—but these failed within a relatively
short time.
16. Other contemporaries who emphasized Britain as the sole heir include R. Govett, Eng-
lish Derived from Hebrew: With glances at Greek and Latin (London, 1869); F. R. A. Glover,
England, the Remnant of Judah and the Israel of Ephraim (London, 1861); the author
describes himself as sometime chaplain to the British consulate at Cologne, and he
would later be active in the British-Israel movement as well.
17. Wilson, Lectures, 192–93, 197, 229–31, 293, 302–99.
18. Ibid., chap. 2: “Relation of Abraham’s Posterity to the Three Grand Races of Mankind.”
For more on Christian Identity, see below.
19. Ibid., 391, 397–98. Cf. John Wilson’s The Millennium, or, World to Come; and its relations
to preceding dispensations (Cheltenham, 1842), with a chart of the Dispensations (76);
idem, The Mission of Elijah to Restore All, previous to our Lord’s Second Advent (London,
[1861]); idem, England’s Duty in Relation to the Christians of Turkey (London, [1876?]);
idem, A Vindication of Christ’s character as the Prophet (London, 1878).
20. See Edward Hine, Memoirs, and a Selection of Letters (London, 1909).
21. Edward Hine, The English Nation Identified with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, a Lecture
(Warrington, 1872). Cf. idem, Seventeen Positive Identifications of the English Nation with
the Lost House of Israel (London, 1870); idem, Twenty-Seven Identifications of the English
Nation with the Lost House of Israel (7th ed., London, 1870); idem, Forty-Seven Identifica-
tions of the British Nation with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel (London, 1874).
22. Generally, see P. Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded (London, 1977).
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Israel in America | 121

23. See the voluminous writings of Adam Rutherford of the Institute of Pyramidology at
Stanmore, London, in the 1930s, especially his monumental Anglo-Saxon Israel or Israel-
Britain (4th ed., Stanmore, 1939; 1st ed., 1934), subtitled “A Call to all the Anglo-Saxon,
Celtic, Dutch and Scandinavian nations with A Special Call to Iceland.” Iceland, indeed,
was one of his favorite subjects, about which he published many books on everything
from that country as the key to biblical prophecy to its transportation system. The pre-
dictions cited above are on pages 556, 569, 579–89, 613, 615, 620, 630, 655, 656, 676.
24. See generally the ultimate pyramid book, P. Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded
(London, 1977), esp. 181.
25. Rutherford, Anglo-Saxon Israel, 329.
26. Generally, see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 20–21.
27. Barkun, Racist Right, 22–23.
28. Generally, see G. Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (New Haven, 1988).
29. Barkun, Racist Right, 54–67, and generally chap. 4, “Creating Christian Identity,
1937–1975.”
30. Cf. Wesley A. Swift, “Was Jesus Christ a Jew?”; Aryan Nations Internet site.
31. For more on Pelley, see E. V. Toy, “Silver Shirts in the Northwest: Politics, Prophecies,
and Personalities in the 1930s,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80 (1989):139–46; and
Barkun, Racist Right, 91–96.
32. Barkun, Racist Right, 217ff. Many of these Posse Comitatus groups have web sites, such
as “The Watchman: The Voice of the Christian Posse Comitatus” in Pennsylvania.
Mark Thomas, its editor, proclaims that “I am a Two-Seedline Identity minister and
was ordained by Pastor Butler at Aryan Nations in 1990.”
33. A full statement of their political, economic, and legal views, taken from a pamphlet
issued in Oregon in the 1980s, appears in Extremism in America: A Reader, ed. L. T. Sar-
gent (New York, 1995), 343–50. Cf. T. Heath, “A Law of Their Own,” Newsweek (25 Sep-
tember 1995):27. See also the web site of “The Fully Informed Jury Association” (FIJA),
which proclaims as its object “to re-establish the trial jury not only as the decider of jus-
tice in the case before it, but as a commentator on the law itself, so that lawmakers
enjoy ongoing access to the will of the people, expressed through the verdicts of citi-
zen juries.” The concept of “leaderless resistance” is one developed recently by Louis
R. Beam, a former Texas Ku Klux Klan member who also lives in Idaho; K. Schneider,
“Bomb Echoes Extremists’ Tactics,” New York Times (26 April 1995), A22; T. Reiss,
“Home on the Range,” New York Times (26 May 1995); G. Niebuhr, “Sandpoint Journal:
Spreading a Message of Love Where Hate Has Found a Home,” New York Times, 29
October 1995, 1.24; and generally on Beam, M. Dees, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia
Threat (New York, 1996).
34. Generally, see the Anti-Defamation League [B’nai Brith] Fact Finding Report, Armed
and Dangerous: Militias Take Aim at the Federal Government (New York, 1994); J. Coates,
Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right (New York, 1987); and Dees, Gath-
ering Storm. See also J. Smolowe, “Enemies of the State,” Time (8 May 1995):58–69; J.
Thomas, “Kansas City Journal; Militias Hold a Congress, and Not a Gun is Seen,” New
York Times, 1 November 1996, A20; A. W. Bock, “Weekend Warriors,” National Review
47 (29 May 1995):39–42; C. J. Farley, “Patriot Games,” Time (19 December 1994):48–49;
G. Wills, “The New Revolutionaries,” NY Rev. Books 42 (10 August 1995):50–52; P.
Doskoch, “The Mind of the Militias,” Psychology Today 28 (July/August 1995):12–14; M.
Barkun, “Militias, Christian Identity and the Radical Right,” Christian Century 112 (2–9
August 1995):738–40; idem, “Millenarian Aspects of ‘White Supremacist’ Movements,”
Terrorism and Political Violence 1 (1989):409–34; J. Kaplan, “A Guide to the Radical
Right,” Christian Century 112 (2–9 August 1995):741–44; M. Janofsky, “Groups Gain
New Members Since Attack,” New York Times, 18 June 1995, 1.19; P. Applebome, “Rad-
ical Right’s Fury Boiling Over,” New York Times, 23 April 1995, 1.33.
35. See, for example, the Militia of Montana (MOM)—“we are everywhere”—especially their
Internet site. Generally, see M. Cooper, “Montana’s Mother of all Militias,” Nation 260 (22
May 1995):714ff.; M. Kelly, “The Road to Paranoia,” New Yorker 71 (19 June 1995):60–64;
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122 | David S. Katz

D. Voll, “At Home with M.O.M.,” Esquire 124 (July 1995):46–49; cf. an account of the
visit of their leader John Trochmann to Yale University in October 1995: Y. Cheong,
“Militia Chief Assails Federal Stewardship,” Yale Daily News, 27 October 1995.
Trochmann was a featured speaker at the Aryan Nations congress in 1990, and has
been to the compound at Hayden Lake four or five times by his own admission: D.
Junas, “The Rise of the Militias,” Covert Action Quarterly [n.d.: Internet repr.]. For infor-
mation on the Michigan Militia Corps, see T. S. Purdum, “Clinton Assails the Preach-
ings of the ‘Militias,’” New York Times, 6 May 1995, 1.1; M. Janofsky, “‘Militia’ Man Tells
of Plot to Attack Military Base,” New York Times, 25 June 1995, 1.14. For “E Pluribus
Unum,” another patriot group, see M. Janofsky, “Demons and Conspiracies Haunt a
‘Patriot’ World,” New York Times, 31 May 1995, A18. Generally, see M. Navarro, “At Fair
for Survivalists, Fallout from Oklahoma,” New York Times, 12 June 1995, A10.
36. Nesta H[elen]. Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London, 1924), repr.
in at least seven editions. Cf. her book, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization
(London, 1921), also in editions at least until 1971; and especially her Surrender of an
Empire (3rd edn, London, 1931), chap. 19: “The Surrender to Zionism.” See also T. P.
Weber, “Finding Someone to Blame: Fundamentalism and Anti-Semitic Conspiracy
Theories in the 1930s,” Fides et Historia 24 (1992):40–55.
37. Eustace Clarence Mullins, A Study of the Federal Reserve (New York, 1952), with further
editions at least in 1954, 1971, and 1983; idem, The New History of the Jews (Staunton,
Va., 1968), published by the International Institute of Jewish Studies. Other works by
him in this vein include: Murder by Injection: The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against
America (Staunton, Va., 1988); The Rape of Justice: America’s Tribunals Exposed (Staunton,
Va., 1989), and A Writ for Martyrs (Staunton, Va., 1985).
38. The Turner Diaries was written by William L. Pierce, a former physics professor from
Oregon State University, and an aide to George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi
Party. Pierce founded a group called the National Alliance in Hillsboro, West Virginia,
and published this work in serial form in its magazine Attack! between 1975 and 1978,
and as a paperback book in 1978. It was republished by Barricade Books in New York
in 1996, ironically by a Jewish publisher named Lyle Stuart who in an introduction to
the paperback edition explains why he thought it important to make the book avail-
able to the general public.
39. On Christian Reconstructionism generally, see Bruce Barron, Heaven on Earth: The Social
and Political Agendas of Dominion Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1992); D. A. Rausch and
D. E. Chismar, “The New Puritans and Their Theonomic Paradise,” Christian Century
100 (3–10 August 1983):712–15; A. Shupe, “The Reconstructionist Movement on the
New Christian Right,” Christian Century 106 (4 October 1989):880–2; R. J. Neuhaus,
“Why Wait for the Kingdom? The Theonomist Temptation,” First Things 3 (1990):13–21;
D. A. Oss, “The Influence of Hermeneutical Frameworks in the Theonomy Debate,”
Westminster Theological Journal 51 (1989):227–58.
40. The full text is given in Extremism in America: A Reader, ed. L. T. Sargent (New York, 1995).
41. Ibid., 334
42. Thomas Fuller, A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (London, 1650), 193.
06 1/24/01 11:27 AM Page 123

PART II

IDENTITY AT STAKE: CONCEALING,

PRESERVING, AND RESHAPING JUDAISM
AMONG THE CONVERSOS AND MARRANOS
OF SPANISH AMERICA
 06
1/24/01

Jewish communities
with date of expulsion
12
Major centers of
11:27 AM

90
90s resettlement
15

90
0 300 km Hamburg Direction of flight

12
ENGLAND Amsterdam
0 300 mi HOLLAND
Antwerp
FLANDERS
Rouen
GERMANY
Page 124

Paris

1290
FRANCE

1182
Nantes

6
94
13

130
La Rochelle

130
6
O
Bordeaux Udine
Venice
T
92 Turin

0
14 T
Peyrehorade PROVENCE 4 Genoa 9 O

142
13
Bayonne Avignon Livorno Nicopolis

After
9 4 (Leghorn) Spalato
M
13
NAVARRE Marseille A

149
1490

7
1492 ITALY Cattaro
N iIstanbul
Adrianople (Constantinople)
PORTUGAL 2 Rome
149
SPAIN Salonica E M
1492 Sardinia

97
Naples P I

14
R E

r
te
Corfu

92

Af
14
GREECE Smyrna
E

92
149 2
2 149

14
To Sicily
AFRICA
I R

Algiers
P

Oran Tunis
Tlemcen
M

Fez Damascus
E

Crete Safed

Jerusalem N
A G H R E B A
M M
Tripoli Alexandria O
T
Cairo O T

MAP 7 Expulsion of the Jews in Europe. Adapted from a map in Martin Gilbert, The Atlas of Jewish History (1992).
06 1/24/01 11:27 AM Page 125

– Chapter 6 –

NEW CHRISTIAN, MARRANO, JEW

Robert Rowland

A DEQUATE DISCUSSION of the role played by Jews in the making of the

New World depends on prior clarification of a difficult question—
that of defining precise and unambiguous criteria for establishing
whether and in what sense a given individual is to be regarded as a Jew.
This question does not arise in relation to Jews from Central and Eastern
Europe; it can be answered in relatively straightforward terms in the case
of Jews of Iberian origin who, before leaving Europe or after arrival in
America, were members of formally recognized or tacitly tolerated Jew-
ish communities. But in the case of Spanish or Portuguese “New Chris-
tians,”1 before the end of the eighteenth century, the question is a decisive
one. In Spain and Portugal, and in their respective empires, there had offi-
cially been no Jews since the end of the fifteenth century, after which only
those Jews who had—voluntarily or otherwise—been converted to Ca-
tholicism (and their Catholic descendants) were allowed to remain. Since
all were nominally Catholics, they were under the jurisdiction of the
Inquisition and liable to prosecution if accused of any act or utterance that
could be interpreted as evidence that their Catholicism was insincere.
Thus, the only observant Jews who remained in the Iberian world
were, of necessity, clandestine Jews, vitally concerned with dissimulating
their religious sentiments and practices. In consequence, little evidence
has survived concerning them that was not produced by the Inquisition
in its attempt to root out and suppress the remnants of Iberian Judaism.
Genealogical inquiries conducted in relation to candidates for admission
to military orders or appointment to certain posts shared the same frame
of reference. Independent evidence on the survival of Judaism in the Iber-
ian Peninsula is for the most part simply not available.
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126 | Robert Rowland

In both Spain and Portugal, it is clear that not all the descendants of
those converted during the fifteenth century remained faithful to
Judaism, and the fact that an individual was entirely or partly of Jewish
descent does not by itself mean that he considered himself, or was con-
sidered by others, to be a Jew.2 The descendants of converted Jews were,
it is true, subject to various forms of discrimination on account of their
“impurity of blood,” and were regarded as inherently suspect in matters
of faith; but this does not justify the presumption on the part of histori-
ans that such prejudices and suspicions had any kind of basis in fact.
Many New Christians whose families had long before lost contact
with the Judaic tradition found themselves falsely accused by enemies or
rivals of secretly practicing Judaic rites and ceremonies. As numerous
contemporaries pointed out, the procedures of the Inquisition were such
that a person falsely accused of reverting to Judaism could only with
great difficulty demonstrate his or her innocence, and so great were the
risks of attempting to do so that many preferred to offer the Inquisitors a
false confession, including an imaginary list of accomplices. In that way,
they could hope to escape with only the loss of their goods and other rel-
atively minor penalties, instead of risking condemnation to death as a
negativo. In such circumstances, neither the accused’s confession to Judaic
beliefs or practices nor the information provided about other individuals
can be regarded as reliable evidence.
The persistence of Judaism among Iberian New Christians, as
recounted in Inquisitorial records, cannot thus be taken at face value.
There can be no doubt that many succeeded in maintaining a form of
clandestine religious practice, but we can be equally sure that not all New
Christians did in fact remain secretly faithful to Judaism, and that the
generalized suspicion directed against them on grounds of their Jewish
descent was often quite unfounded. We can also be sure that not every
confession to having practiced Judaism in secret and not every accusation
made during interrogation had a factual basis. As we shall see later, in
some cases there can be little doubt that Judaic religious observance and
practices did survive in Spain and Portugal well into the eighteenth cen-
tury, but we do not possess unambiguous criteria for deciding which
accusations and confessions were true, and which were, on the contrary,
a by-product of Inquisitorial procedure or generalized anti-Judaic preju-
dice.3 The nature of our sources is such that unless considerable care is
exercised they will only confirm our presuppositions and appear to
demonstrate, as the case may be, either that most of the New Christians
denounced to the Inquisition were crypto-Jews attempting to remain
faithful to ancestral traditions, or that they were the innocent victims of
anti-Judaic prejudice, false accusations, and the perversity of Inquisitor-
ial procedure.
In some ways the situation is analogous to that faced by the historian
who reads some of the strangely repetitive confessions of those accused of
witchcraft in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Some authors
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 127

have accepted the reality of the accusations and confessions, and for
them, as for early modern demonologists, the standardized nature of the
confessions is merely evidence of the strength and influence of the “innu-
merable army of Satan.” Most historians, however, have been convinced
of the unreality of witchcraft and the impossibility of many of the actions
described in the confessions. Their skepticism, or downright disbelief,
leads them to seek an external explanation for the stereotyped character
of the confessions in the very nature of the repression directed against
suspected witches. According to this interpretation, those accused of
witchcraft were responding under torture to the same leading questions
posed by judges who had all read the same treatises on witchcraft. The
standardized representation of witchcraft—and the role in that represen-
tation of the witches’ Sabbath—could thus be attributed to the ways in
which the repression of witchcraft was organized by lay and ecclesiastical
courts. In both cases, the interpretation of the evidence and the overall
conception of what has to be explained are determined by preconceptions
regarding the reality of witchcraft.4
Likewise, in the case of the New Christians the same judicial records
can be read in entirely different ways depending on the preconceptions
of the historian. For some, the schematic list of stereotyped “Jewish prac-
tices” to be found in the majority of confessions is evidence of an attempt
to maintain ancestral traditions under adverse conditions, with few pos-
sibilities of exchanging information with other clandestine Jews, let alone
of contacting Jewish communities abroad. For others, those very same
characteristics are evidence of a process of labeling—in which stereo-
typed attributes projected onto a minority from without are apparently
confirmed in “confessions” extracted by interrogation and torture—and
thus cannot be accepted uncritically as evidence of the persistence of
Judaism in early modern Spain and Portugal.
As in the case of the beliefs and practices attributed to witches in
early modern Europe, it is not possible to verify the factual basis under-
lying the accusations of “Judaism” directed against New Christians. Clar-
ification of the issue (which must in any case be indirect) can only be
provided by closer attention to context: to the changing situation of New
Christians in Iberian society, to the role played by the Inquisition at a
given time and place, and to the circumstances surrounding individual
acts of accusation.

II

The first aspect to be considered in this respect, even though it might

almost appear too obvious to be worth mentioning, is that of the legal sta-
tus of Jews in relation to the Inquisition. The expulsion and forced con-
version of Spanish and Portuguese Jews and the persecution of
“Judaism” by the Iberian Inquisitions have tended to overshadow the
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128 | Robert Rowland

fact that Jews were not, in principle, under Inquisitorial jurisdiction at all.
According to the Bull Antiqua Iudaeorum improbitas of Pope Gregory XIII,
Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians were not ordinarily subject to
the Inquisition. In themselves, the religious beliefs or practices of non-
Christians who had been allowed to reside in a given territory were of no
concern to the Inquisition as long as they remained circumscribed to the
domestic sphere or to their areas of segregated residence.5 In certain
cases, however, particularly when the nature of their relations with the
Christian population was thought to endanger the latter’s faith, the
Inquisition was entitled to intervene. This could occur if, for example,
Jews attempted (or were accused of attempting) to induce converts to
return to the old faith, and in fact it was ostensibly because of the influ-
ence they were thought to be exerting over the large number of Jews who
had converted to Catholicism during the fifteenth century that the
remaining Spanish Jews were expelled in 1492.
The situation of converted Jews and their descendants was quite dif-
ferent. All those who had been baptized as Catholics were under the juris-
diction of the Inquisition. Many New Christians in fifteenth-century
Spain (and to a much lesser extent in Portugal as well) were accused of
having feigned an opportunistic conversion while continuing to practice
Judaism in secret in order to gain access to posts from which Jews were
barred. The same accusations were formulated against the descendants of
such converts, who although baptized as Catholics were suspected of
having been brought up secretly as Jews and were accused of maintain-
ing allegiance to the “law of Moses” and performing Judaic rites and cer-
emonies. Formally, such behavior on the part of a baptized Catholic
would constitute apostasy from the faith, and could be punished as
heresy by the Inquisition. The need to root out such heresy among New
Christians was invoked to justify the introduction of the Inquisition in
Castile at the end of the fifteenth century, and the creation of the Por-
tuguese Inquisition in 1536 was based on similar considerations (Fig 6.1).
What this implies is that all relations between the Inquisition and
Jews—whether those living openly as such (where this was permitted, as
in many parts of Italy), or those maintaining, as in the Iberian Peninsula, a
clandestine Jewish identity and religious practice—reflected and arose out
of the relations that existed between Jews and Catholics: in the first case,
between the Jewish and Christian (or New Christian) communities; in the
second, between each individual’s public identity as a Catholic New Chris-
tian and his or her secret (or familial) identity as a clandestine Jew. The evi-
dence provided by Inquisitorial sources, consequently, refers in the former
case to the relations between Jews and Christians, in the latter, to the rela-
tionship between individuals’ Jewish and Catholic identities. Such sources
do not provide evidence about the identities and beliefs of Jews as such.
Furthermore, that New Christians’ relations with the Inquisition
derived essentially from their (actual or suspected) dual identity as
Catholics and Jews is a fact reflected not only in the nature of Inquisitorial
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 129

FIGURE 6.1 The inquiry. J. Baker, A Complete History of the Inquisition in Portugal, Spain,
Italy, the East and West Indies (London, 1736).

sources. The presence and activity of the Inquisition reinforced that dual-
ity. Sincere converts to Catholicism and their descendants knew that at
any time they could be suspected and accused of clandestinely maintain-
ing a Jewish identity and allegiance, while those New Christians who did
in fact succeed in maintaining some kind of Jewish identity were forced
to engage in constant dissimulation. Thus, in one way or another, all Iber-
ian New Christians were Judeo-Catholics.

III

But the Inquisitions of early modern Spain, Portugal, and Italy were not, of
course, only concerned with the religious beliefs and practices of con-
verted Jews and their descendants. They were concerned—in relation to
the Catholic population under their jurisdiction—with all kinds of beliefs
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130 | Robert Rowland

and practices that could in one way or another be construed as heretical. A

second aspect that has to be considered in discussing the relation between
New Christians of Jewish origin and the Inquisition is the specific impor-
tance of accusations of Judaism among the latter’s repressive activities.
The Inquisition has traditionally been analyzed in terms of its role in
attempting to prevent and repress religious dissent. Such a characteriza-
tion, which reproduced the Inquisition’s own definition of its role in soci-
ety, located the study of the Inquisition firmly within the history of ideas
and concentrated attention on its victims, on a relatively small number of
celebrated trials, and on the struggle for freedom of expression and of
religious belief.
Over the past twenty years a different approach has emerged based
on statistical analyses of the activity of individual tribunals. In 1978 Gus-
tav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras pointed out, in a seminal paper pre-
sented at a conference on the Spanish Inquisition held in Copenhagen,6
that less than half of those tried by the tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition
between 1560 and 1700 had been accused of formal heresy (including
Judaism and Mohammedanism). The majority of trials were for minor
offenses such as bigamy, blasphemy, and various forms of superstition.
Furthermore, there were considerable differences between one tribunal
and another. These results cast some doubt on the assumptions underly-
ing the more traditional approaches and encouraged other scholars to
undertake similar analyses of the Roman and Portuguese Inquisitions.
The results show very clearly that the activity of the Inquisition can-
not be reduced to a single model.7 In Northern Italy, for example, repres-
sion was at first directed primarily against the influence of the
Reformation: those accused of Protestantism represented 68 percent of
those tried in Venice between 1547 and 1585, and 53 percent of those tried
in Friuli between 1557 and 1597. In Naples, on the other hand, the princi-
pal offenses between 1564 and 1590 were witchcraft and illicit magic (24
percent), whereas those accused of “Lutheranism” were no more than 3
percent. By the seventeenth century the magical arts had become a cen-
tral preoccupation of the Inquisition in Northern Italy as well.
In Spain, the pattern was quite different, with significant variations
between individual tribunals. Even though our information regarding
the first wave of terror is far from complete, it is clear that the Inquisi-
tion’s victims were, between 1480 and 1530, nearly all New Christians
accused of having remained secretly faithful to Judaism. According to
one estimate, there were 3,196 trials and 283 executions in Toledo during
this period, with 87 percent originating in accusations of Judaism.
In the following period, when our information is more complete, a dif-
ferent picture emerges. Between 1540 and 1700, in nineteen tribunals of the
Spanish Inquisition, 24 percent of the trials were for Mohammedanism, 10
percent for Judaism, and 8 percent for Protestantism. The remaining trials,
as has been mentioned, were for minor offenses. Mohammedanism
accounted for 29 percent of trials in Aragon and 18 percent in Castile.
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 131

Conversely, accusations of Judaism were responsible for 18 percent of the

trials in Castile, but only 4 percent of those in Aragon.8
As in Italy, the pattern of repression changed over time. During the
initial decades, Judaism was the central preoccupation almost every-
where. The second half of the sixteenth century saw continued repression
against the moriscos (descendants of converted Muslims) of Aragon and
Granada, but the other tribunals began to concern themselves with the
relatively minor offenses of the Catholic (“Old Christian”) population
and with what has been termed the “administration of the Faith.”9 Cases
of suspected Lutheran heresy remained relatively rare. During the seven-
teenth century and until the decline of the Inquisition in the eighteenth
century, accusations of Judaism became once again frequent. This time
the victims were mostly New Christians of Portuguese origin who had
come to Spain or to the Spanish Empire for economic reasons or to escape
the greater severity of the Inquisition in Portugal.
The Portuguese Inquisition was, in fact, something of an exception in
the context of the three early modern Inquisitions. After its comparatively
belated creation in 1536, there was no initial wave of terror, as in Spain,
and the intensity of repression remained relatively stable from the mid-
dle of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries, declining
gradually as the eighteenth century wore on. Even during the years
between 1675 and 1767, before the reforms introduced by the Marquis of
Pombal, the three Portuguese tribunals completed an average of fifty-
nine trials a year. From 1536 to the time of those reforms, which among
other things abolished the legal distinction between Old Christians and
New Christians, the Portuguese Inquisition was overwhelmingly preoc-
cupied with the eradication of Judaic beliefs and practices among mem-
bers of the New Christian population. In the Lisbon tribunal, whose
jurisdiction extended to Brazil and West Africa, accusations of Judaism
constituted 68 percent of all trials between 1540 and 1629. In the Coimbra
tribunal they represented 83 percent of all trials between 1566 and 1762.
In Évora, between 1553 and 1668, the proportion was 84 percent.
The contrast with Italian and Aragonese tribunals, and even with those
of neighboring Castile, is evident. Given the unified doctrinal and institu-
tional framework that regulated the activity of all the early modern Inqui-
sitions, it is clear that such differences need to be explained contextually, in
terms of both time and place, and that the extreme specialization of the Por-
tuguese tribunals in the offense of Judaism can only be understood in the
light of the specific situation of the New Christians in Portuguese society
between the end of the fifteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century.

IV

At the root of that specificity lay the contrasting experiences of Spanish

and Portuguese Jews in the preceding century. In Spain, the massacres of
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132 | Robert Rowland

1391 and the climate of continuing hostility toward Jews that ensued had
provoked a wave of conversions to Christianity. Many conversos subse-
quently came to occupy positions that had been barred to them before
conversion, and they were, as has been mentioned, repeatedly accused of
having feigned conversion precisely in order to gain access to such posi-
tions. Such accusations aggravated tensions that had their origins in the
role played by many conversos in the urban economy and on many occa-
sions degenerated into episodes of violence. At a different level, as in the
case of the anti-converso statutes of Toledo in 1449, there were attempts at
instituting new forms of exclusion against the descendants of converted
Jews. The situation in many regions of Castile at the accession of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella in 1475, just before the establishment of the Inquisition,
has been aptly described as one of latent, or even open, civil war.10
In Portugal the situation was quite different. Portugal, like Spain,
had a proportionately significant Jewish population. Toward the end of
the fifteenth century they may have numbered thirty or forty thousand,
between 3 percent and 4 percent of the population. Most of them were
artisans and tradesmen, and they thus represented a higher proportion
of the population in urban settlements—in many places, probably well
over 10 percent.11 They were under the king’s protection, and in 1392,
just at the time that many Spanish Jews were being murdered or forced
into conversion, the Portuguese legislation designed to protect Jews
was confirmed.12 Only during the second half of the fifteenth century,
with the arrival of increasing numbers of both Jewish and converso
refugees from Spain, were there signs of growing intolerance, but as a
rule, the immigrants were readily integrated into the Jewish or Catholic
population. Unlike Spain, fifteenth-century Portugal did not have a
“converso problem.”
As tension in Spain became more acute, and particularly after the
introduction of the Inquisition, the influx of Spanish Jews and conversos
into Portugal increased dramatically, provoking reactions in Oporto and
Lisbon. In 1488, the king forbade the entry into Portugal of any more
Castilian conversos and simultaneously encouraged the emigration,
mainly to Northern Europe, of those who had sought refuge in Portu-
gal.13 Nevertheless, after their expulsion from Spain, King John II agreed
to allow Spanish Jews to settle in Portugal. The sources and historians
disagree as to the exact number of those who sought refuge in Portugal,
but their arrival probably doubled the overtly Jewish population.14
There is no need to repeat here the well-known story, told in different
but equally dramatic ways by Damião de Góis and Samuel Usque,15 of
how the marriage of the new Portuguese king, Manuel, to Ferdinand and
Isabella’s daughter was made on condition that the Jews be expelled from
Portugal as well, or of how the king, having decreed the expulsion in 1497
of all Portuguese and Spanish Jews who did not accept conversion to
Christianity, did all he could to prevent their departure and subjected
them to forced baptism.
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 133

Whatever the motives–and it is likely that they were at least in part

economic–-there can be no doubt regarding the policy adopted by the
Portuguese crown in relation to the newly “converted” Jews: they were
encouraged to become fully integrated into Portuguese society. Even
before the date fixed for expulsion, and in an attempt to dispel fears that
they might, like the Spanish conversos, become subject to the Inquisition,
the king determined that those who accepted conversion would not be
subject, for twenty years, to any kind of inquiry regarding their religious
beliefs and practices. Furthermore, all forms of socioeconomic discrimi-
nation against New Christians (except, at first, for the prohibition
against leaving the realm) were abolished. It was assumed—or hoped—
that if they were not treated differently, they would, within time, become
good Catholics. The same assumption seems to have underlain the
extraordinary (but now lost) law of 1498 prohibiting marriages between
New Christians: it appears to have been assumed that in a mixed mar-
riage there would be a greater chance of the children being brought up
as Catholics.16
The year 1507 saw the lifting of the prohibition against leaving Portu-
gal and a renewal of the undertaking that New Christians would not be
subject to investigation in matters of faith. Five years later, the undertak-
ing was renewed for a further sixteen years. Some Jewish authors referred
to King Manuel as “the pious King”; according to others, he was referred
to in some New Christian families as “El-rei judeu” (“the Jewish King”).17
In general terms, the policy appears to have been relatively success-
ful, and, with the obvious exception of the Lisbon massacre of 1506,
which was severely punished by the king,18 there was little evidence in
early sixteenth-century Portugal of the kind of open tensions and vio-
lence that had scarred Spanish society during the fifteenth century and
prepared the way for the introduction of the Inquisition.
There can be no doubt, however, that only partial integration was
achieved. Latent tensions, due in part to economic rivalry, persisted
between sectors of the Old Christian population and the converted Jews.
Indicative of this is the way Jews and New Christians are depicted in the
plays of Gil Vicente. In those with a religious theme, we find the usual—
and insulting—medieval stereotypes, but in his profane plays the Jews
are authentic popular characters, very much a part of community life.
Even when depicted in caricature, Gil Vicente’s Jews are real people.19
The persistent tensions and the example offered by neighboring
Spain lent support in some quarters to the idea of introducing the Inqui-
sition, but opinions were divided and policy was contradictory. As early
as 1515, on the grounds that large numbers of conversos were entering
Portugal clandestinely from Spain, King Manuel had approached the
Pope with a view to establishing an Inquisition in Portugal. The proposal
met with considerable opposition in court and was abandoned.
After Manuel’s death, King John III twice renewed the guarantees
given to the New Christians by his predecessor—first in 1522, then again in
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134 | Robert Rowland

1524. At the same time, yielding to increasing pressure and using as a pre-
text the agitation provoked among New Christians by the messianic
preaching of David Reubeni,20 he began to negotiate with Rome. In 1531 he
succeeded in obtaining from the Pope a Bull appointing an Inquisitor in
Portugal and removing questions of faith from episcopal jurisdiction, but
the Bull was revoked a year later without ever having been published in
Portugal. It was only after another five years of negotiations that, in spite
of the diplomatic and financial efforts of the New Christians’ representa-
tives in Rome, he succeeded in obtaining from Pope Paul III a Bull estab-
lishing an Inquisition in Portugal, with three Inquisitors appointed by the
Pope and one by the king. The Bull was published in Évora in 1536, the first
auto-da-fé was held in Lisbon in 1540, and by 1541 tribunals had been
established in Lisbon, Évora, Coimbra, Oporto, Tomar, and Lamego.21
The apparent similarity between developments in Portugal and in
Spain—and in particular the introduction in Portugal of an Inquisition
according to the Spanish model, concerned primarily with the “Judaism”
of New Christians—should not be allowed to obscure the differences
between the two situations. As we have noted, Portugal, unlike Spain, did
not have a “converso problem” during the fifteenth century. Whereas in
Spain mechanisms of exclusion had been instituted in some places as early
as the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese crown chose to encourage and
even to impose integration of the New Christians into Catholic Portuguese
society. The Inquisition in Spain was established at a time when Judaism
was still officially admitted. In Portugal, it was introduced forty years after
the forced conversion of the Jews; during that time New Christians were
officially allowed to maintain Judaic religious practices in the secrecy of
their homes. An entire generation was brought up in a context of religious
and cultural dualism: in public they were required to behave as Catholics;
in private they were allowed to maintain a separate Jewish identity.
By 1530, the differences had become even more marked. In Spain,
those conversos who remained had for the most part become sincere
practicing Catholics; the remainder had either left the country or had
fallen victim to the Inquisition.22 In Portugal, the Inquisition had not yet
been introduced, and an unknown, but clearly very significant, propor-
tion of the New Christians maintained a separate Jewish cultural and
religious identity.
We have no direct evidence regarding the exact proportion of New
Christians in the Portuguese population between the sixteenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, nor do we have any direct indication regarding the pro-
portion of New Christians who maintained allegiance to Judaism. We do
have some indirect evidence regarding the extent of intermarriage
between New Christians and Old Christians during the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, and this evidence, combined with what we
know about the number of New Christians at the end of the fifteenth
century, can provide a relatively secure basis for estimates of the propor-
tion of New Christians in the population at later periods.
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 135

In 1630, a group of fifty-three New Christians presented themselves

before the Lisbon Inquisitors and confessed to remaining faithful to
Judaism.23 On this occasion, perhaps because these confessions were to
constitute the starting point for an investigation, the Inquisitors were
careful to note the precise genealogical status of each individual. Seven
(13.2 percent) were described as being full New Christians; eight (15 per-
cent) were recorded as one-eighth New Christian; and the remaining
thirty-eight (71.7 percent) were variously described as three-fourths, one-
half, three-eighths, one-fourth, or simply “part” New Christian.
A few years later, a total of ninety-six New Christians, convicted of
Judaism, were sentenced at the auto-da-fé celebrated in Lisbon on 3
August 1636. Of these, no more than twenty (20.8 percent) were full New
Christians; one was described as one-eighth New Christian; and the
remaining seventy-five (78.1 percent) were either one-half, one-fourth, or
“part” New Christian.24
If we accept that these two groups were a representative sample of
the entire New Christian population at that time, these figures imply that,
on average, for the first four generations after the forced conversion at
least 20 percent of all marriages involving New Christians (defined as all
descendants of the converted Jews, including those issuing from mixed
marriages) were with Old Christians.25 After four generations, in fact,
that degree of exogamy in each generation would imply that those of
pure Jewish descent represented 19.8 percent of the—now much larger—
New Christian population; 11.2 percent would be, to use the Inquisitors’
categories, one-eighth or one-sixteenth New Christian; and the remaining
69.1 percent would be between one-half and one-fourth New Christian.
These figures are sufficiently close to those observed in the 1630s for us to
be able to accept the figure of at least 20 percent as a realistic estimate of
the degree of exogamy practiced by the New Christians during the six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries.26
Without mixed marriages, the proportion of New Christians in the
population would, other things being equal,27 remain constant. With
intermarriage, however, the proportion of those of pure Jewish descent
would decline from generation to generation, at the same time as the pro-
portion of those who were partly of Jewish descent increased. Since any-
body who was even in part descended from the converted Jews was
formally classified as a New Christian, intermarriage implied an increase,
in each generation, of the proportion of the population who were for-
mally considered to be of “impure blood” and inherently suspect in their
adherence to Catholicism.
At the end of the fifteenth century, as we have seen, the New Chris-
tians represented about 8 percent of the Portuguese population. In
urban settlements, where they were concentrated, the proportion was
certainly higher. If on average and in each generation 20 percent of all
marriages involving New Christians were with Old Christians, then
after four generations, or about 120 years, the proportion of the entire
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136 | Robert Rowland

population classifiable as “New Christian” would have doubled. By

1620, they would have constituted 16.6 percent of the population, al-
though, as we have seen, no more than one-fifth of them would by then
have been of pure Jewish descent.
By 1740, if the same proportion of mixed marriages had been main-
tained over the following four generations, those of pure Jewish descent
would have represented no more than 3.9 percent of the New Christians;
but the latter—still defined as all those descended in some degree, how-
ever remote, from the original Jewish converts—would by then have rep-
resented no less than 34.4 percent of the Portuguese population and well
over half of the urban population. This situation was in no way compa-
rable to that found in either Spain or Italy, and goes some way toward
explaining the peculiarities of the Portuguese Inquisition.

An overwhelming proportion of those sentenced by the Portuguese

Inquisition between 1540 and the middle of the eighteenth century were,
as we have seen, accused of “Judaism.” With few exceptions, the prac-
tices of which they were accused (and to which they almost invariably
confessed) had been described in a document published in 1536 when the
Portuguese Inquisition was initially established. This Monitório do
inquisidor geral, as it was known, purported to describe the external signs
through which a crypto-Jew could be identified. But instead of being a
description of the religious practices of Portuguese New Christians a
generation after their conversion, it is, in fact, a compilation of earlier
Spanish Inquisitorial documents dating back to the late fifteenth cen-
tury.28 As represented in the Monitório, the “Judaism” of Portuguese New
Christians consisted of the following rites and observances: observing the
Sabbath by doing no work and putting on clean clothes or jewels on Sat-
urdays; cleaning the house on Fridays; preparing food on Fridays for the
day after; slaughtering animals in the Jewish manner; not eating bacon or
other forbidden food; practicing the Great Fast of September, that of
Queen Esther and certain other fasts; celebrating the Easter of the Jews;
practicing certain funerary rites; practicing circumcision; blessing their
children without making the sign of the cross. More generally, in a clear
transposition of Catholic religious conceptions, they were accused of
“seeking the salvation of their souls in the Law of Moses.” Although there
are a few cases in which the accused confessed to practices and obser-
vances not described in the Monitório and similar documents, the vast
majority of cases consist of accusations as stereotyped as these: the pris-
oner, a New Christian, would typically be accused by neighbors of being
ill-disposed toward the Catholic faith, of not eating pork, and of putting
on a clean shirt on Saturdays; he would end up by admitting this,
together with some other practices repeatedly mentioned in Inquisitorial
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 137

edicts; and finally he would provide a list of people with whom he had
made mutual declarations of faith in the law of Moses.
In the vast majority of cases, the records of the Inquisition thus pro-
vide very little objective information regarding the Judaism practiced by
Portuguese New Christians. As in the formally similar cases of early
modern witch trials or those of sixteenth-century Italian “Lutherans,”29
the accusations reflect the preconceptions of the Inquisitors as much as
the actual behavior or beliefs of the accused.
It should be remembered that the Inquisition was finally established
in Portugal almost a half-century after the forced conversion of 1497, and
that all but a very few of its victims, even in the initial years, had been for-
mally brought up as Catholics. Relegated to the domestic sphere, their
Judaism—which after 1536 was, in addition, a source of potential dan-
ger—became progressively more simplified, and some practices, like cir-
cumcision, had to be abandoned altogether. As those who remembered
the original traditions and rites became older and died, there inevitably
arose a problem of cultural transmission. In the records of the Coimbra
Inquisition in the second half of the sixteenth century, for example, there
are references to young men who used to attend autos-da-fé so as to learn
the prayers mentioned in the sentences of the condemned, because in
their hometowns there was nobody still alive who knew them.30
This example underlines the fact that the Judaism of Portuguese New
Christians was not simply a tradition transmitted from generation to gen-
eration within the protective walls of their homes. It was also a cultural
representation held up to them, as in a deforming mirror, by the Inquisi-
tion and by the rest of society. Given the difficulties of clandestine cul-
tural transmission, it was inevitable that many New Christians should
come to recognize themselves in the representation of Judaism that was
repeatedly held up to them from outside, whether in the stereotyped for-
mulae of the accusations or in the spectacular rites of the Inquisition.

VI

According to the rules of Inquisitorial procedure, somebody who per-

sisted in denying an accusation of heresy that the Inquisitors considered
to have been proven could be considered a negativo and, even if this were
the first offense, sentenced to be burned. This was because a refusal to con-
fess indicated lack of repentance, and an unrepentant heretic could not be
reconciled with the Church and readmitted into the Christian commun-
ion. Likewise, someone who made an incomplete confession, omitting the
names of accomplices, for example, could be considered diminuto and suf-
fer the same penalty. Under these circumstances, it was in the accused’s
interest to confess and denounce all those whom the Inquisitors regarded
as his or her accomplices, since after a full and satisfactory confession,
with appropriate signs of repentance, the accused would normally be
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138 | Robert Rowland

admitted to reconciliation. After publicly abjuring his or her errors and

being subjected to different forms of penance, the accused would then be
released. Although the goods of those reconciled after confessing to
heresy would be confiscated, this was obviously preferable to the sen-
tence that awaited a negativo or diminuto (Figs. 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4).
In the case of a New Christian who had effectively maintained a dual
religious allegiance—Catholicism in public, Judaism in private—the situ-
ation was clear. If accused and arrested, he could either make a full con-
fession, naming all those who had participated in Judaic rites with him,
or he could deny the accusation and run the risk—should the evidence
against him be considered sufficient—of being considered diminuto or
negativo. But a New Christian who had been unjustly accused of Judaism
faced the same dilemma in a different form: he could either attempt to
refute the accusation and risk being considered negativo, or he could
attempt to make up a false confession and list of accomplices. Since the
prisoner was kept in the dark both in regard to the offenses of which he
was accused and the identity of his alleged accomplices, this was a risky
strategy to adopt; if the prisoner had been accused as an accomplice by
another New Christian but did not include the latter in his own list of
accomplices, or if he failed to include a rite or ceremony in which he had
been accused of participating, he might still be considered diminuto.
The perversity of this procedure gave rise among New Christians to
concerted strategies of mutual self-defense. Those fearing the likelihood
of arrest, usually a group of close kin, would agree among themselves as
to what offenses should be admitted and as to who should be accused as
an accomplice. The latter, knowing in advance that they would be
accused, would attempt to forestall arrest and secure more favorable
treatment by presenting themselves “spontaneously” to the Inquisitors as
soon as a kinsman was arrested and making the prearranged confession
and accusations. As the various confessions corroborated each other,
there was hope that they would be accepted by the Inquisition as sincere
and complete. Once those involved had been released, however, they
would be branded as confessed heretics and marginalized. They might
attempt to salvage what they could of their possessions and seek refuge
abroad; alternatively, they could remain in Portugal and rely on the pro-
tection and solidarity of their kin network and the New Christian com-
munity. But in either case, they would have been definitively excluded
from normal social relations with Old Christians and forced into close
dependence on the New Christian community, even if originally inno-
cent. Under such circumstances, even New Christians who had virtually
lost contact with the original Jewish tradition might rediscover a Judaic
identity, accepting with pride the stereotyped label thrust upon them by
the Inquisition and by Old Christian society, and even, in some cases,
undergoing conversion to Judaism in Amsterdam or London.31 It is in this
sense that the New Christians used to argue that the Inquisition was a
fábrica de judeus.
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 139

FIGURE 6.2 “A man condemned to be burnt but hath escaped by his confession.” J. Baker,
A Complete History of the Inquisition in Portugal, Spain, Italy, the East and West Indies (Lon-
don, 1736).
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140 | Robert Rowland

FIGURE 6.3 The “samarra” worn by those sentenced to the stake. J. Baker, A Complete His-
tory of the Inquisition in Portugal, Spain, Italy, the East and West Indies (London, 1736).
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 141

FIGURE 6.4 An auto-da-fé. J. Baker, A Complete History of the Inquisition in Portugal, Spain,
Italy, the East and West Indies (London, 1736).

VII

As I. S. Révah clearly perceived, there is little point in judging the religion

of the New Christians by reference to Orthodox Judaism. Despised by the
Old Christians, they rejected the Catholicism that excluded them; cut off
from the Judaic tradition and from Jewish communities abroad, they
tried to reconstruct a Jewish identity from the fragmented elements they
had at hand, many of which reached them filtered and distorted by the
Inquisition. Theirs was, he argued, a potential Judaism, defined less in
terms of faith or knowledge than in terms of will. It was this will to be
Jewish that explains, in his view, the return to Judaism of many New
Christians who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left Portugal
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142 | Robert Rowland

and sought refuge in one of the Jewish communities abroad.32 Révah’s

definition of “marrano religion” as a Judaism of the will is undoubtedly
correct, as is his recognition that the marrano will to be Jewish was in
many cases a direct response to the arbitrary injustice of Inquisitorial per-
secution and to what he terms the “racism” of Spanish and Portuguese
society. Despite his perception of the role of the Inquisition in shaping the
representation of Judaism that was common to Old and New Christians
alike, he tended to take that role as given and to define the problem pri-
marily as one of the transmission of a religious and cultural identity
under conditions of persecution.
This “essentialist” perspective does not give due weight to the impli-
cations of the demographic factors mentioned earlier, and in particular to
the consequences of intermarriage between Old and New Christians. As
we have seen, the proportion of “pure” New Christians among those
accused and condemned for Judaism in Lisbon in the first half of the sev-
enteenth century implies that, on average, at least 20 percent of all mar-
riages involving New Christians during the first four generations will have
been mixed marriages. This degree of intermarriage implies, as we have
seen, that the proportion of the Portuguese population who were formally
of “impure blood,” and hence subject to discrimination, will have
increased from 8 percent in 1500 to about 17 percent in 1620 and—assum-
ing the same degree of intermarriage over the following generations—to
over 34 percent in 1740. It was inevitable, under these circumstances, that
the Jewish cultural and religious identity preserved by a very significant
proportion of the first New Christian generation—as Samuel Usque put it,
they did not “change the secret of their souls”33—should have become pro-
gressively more diluted as parents neglected, by choice or by fear, to pass
on the Jewish cultural and religious traditions to their children.
This dilution was not uniform. In some cases, we can be sure that
Jewish religious observance—including the details of the religious calen-
dar—was preserved well into the eighteenth century. The case of António
José da Silva, the playwright known as “o Judeu,” is emblematic. His
family was caught celebrating Yom Kippur on 5 October 1737, but the
Inquisition, which always referred to Yom Kippur as “the Great Fast of
September,” did not realize what was happening; when “o Judeu” was in
fact condemned to death, the charges against him consisted only of the
Jewish fasts he was—perhaps falsely—accused of having observed later
while in prison.34
In other cases we can almost observe the process of dilution and con-
tamination of the original tradition. In several sixteenth-century trials, for
instance, we find references to the Torah. In a trial of 1562, it is described
as a roll of parchment that was shown to those who used to gather in the
accused’s home and was then put away.35 In 1557, we are told of a room
“where they worship the Toura.”36 The use of the vernacular form Toura,
which could also mean “cow,” paved the way for a semantic contamina-
tion. In 1634, in Évora, a twelve-year-old girl confessed that her mother
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 143

had taught her a prayer that was to be recited “to the golden calf.”37 In
1609, in Covilhã, we find a silver statuette of a female calf (bezerrinha de
prata) carefully preserved and transmitted from generation to generation
by a New Christian family.38 In northeastern Brazil at the end of the six-
teenth century, a clay statuette in the form of a cow is described to the
incredulous Inquisitorial Visitor in an accusation as being “the Toura of
the Jews.”39 Some time later, still in Brazil, we find references to a “Con-
fraternity of the Toura,” organized and financed by New Christians.40
It is clear that transmission of the Jewish cultural and religious tradi-
tion was selective. In some family lines it would be kept alive, in others it
would die out. It is likely that, as among the Xuetes of Majorca, marriage
alliances were consciously and selectively used to preserve a hard crypto-
Judaic core: some children would be married within the group, and would
be given religious instruction; others would be allowed to marry outside
the group to non-Judaizing New Christian families or to Old Christians,
and from these such dangerous instruction would be withheld.41
Given such forms of selective transmission, the tradition could at any
time be reactivated even in a family where it had died out. An individual
unjustly accused of Judaism, for example, and forced to make a false con-
fession would be publicly branded as a New Christian and heretic and be
forced to seek support from other New Christians. In due course, he might
reclaim his Judaic identity, seeking out elements of the tradition from a
branch of the family or from other families in which it had been preserved,
or simply adopting the representation of Judaic rites and ceremonies that
had been held up to him by the Inquisition. In such a situation, as Révah
perceived, the tradition could be reactivated by Inquisitorial persecution.
Such mechanisms will have been all the more important and significant as
the Jewish tradition became progressively more diluted with each genera-
tion in a constantly increasing New Christian population, while the Inqui-
sition and Old Christian society continued to discriminate on grounds of
“purity of blood” against all known descendants of converted Jews, how-
ever remote the genealogical link, and however diluted their Jewish iden-
tity. The relative importance of the inherited tradition and of the externally
imposed label will have changed dramatically over time.
Because of this, more attention needs to be given to the factors under-
lying the two elements that Révah and other authors have taken as given:
the social context out of which accusations of Judaism against New Chris-
tians continued to arise and the mechanisms underlying the survival of
the Inquisition itself.

VIII

If the persistence of a Judaic identity among New Christians can be

explained, at least in part, by the fact that it was constantly being held up
to them and imposed by the Inquisition, by Old Christians, and by the
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144 | Robert Rowland

discrimination to which they were subjected, what explains the persist-

ence of the Inquisition itself? Was it simply the case of an institution that,
to guarantee its own survival, needed to maintain its rhythm of activity
and hence to “manufacture” crypto-Jews? Or are there other reasons that
can explain the institution’s longevity?
Between 1570 and 1770, the number of “Familiars” (lay collaborators)
of the Portuguese Inquisition increased uninterruptedly. Between 1621
and 1670, an average of forty-six “Familiars” were appointed every year;
between 1671 and 1720, 110; and between 1721 and 1770, 174 every year.
During the same period, there was an analogous expansion of the
Inquisitorial bureaucracy: from 1621 to 1670 and 1721 to 1770 the number
of comissários (local delegates) increased from 297 to 1,011 and the num-
ber of qualificadores (theological consultants) increased from 110 to 419.
But this expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus did not meet any func-
tional need. During the same period, the number of Deputies and Inquisi-
tors remained stable, increasing from 117 to 119, while the number of
those sentenced actually fell from 11,154 to 3,895.42
It is clear that the Inquisition was being used, on a massive scale, as
a means of social affirmation and mobility. Appointment to any Inquisi-
torial post required a detailed investigation of the genealogies of the can-
didate and his wife to determine whether there was any trace of “infected
blood.” With the passing of time, not having in the family any “Familiar”
or other official of the Inquisition could give rise to suspicion, and as a
result, the social status of individuals and their families depended cru-
cially on the result of these inquiries. The advantages of posts in the
Inquisition, like membership in military orders, did not derive only from
the significant privileges that they conferred, but above all from the fact
that not everybody could have access to them.43
“Familiars” were recruited at almost all levels of society. Although the
proportion of artisans decreased after the end of the sixteenth century and
the proportion of merchants increased significantly during the eighteenth,
the social origins of the Inquisition’s “Familiars” were always varied. And
although the numerical importance of each group—and in particular of
the lavradores (farmers)—was very different from one case to another, in
general the Inquisition recruited its “Familiars” in the same social groups
in which it sought out its victims.44 In each one of these groups the title of
“Familiar” will have accentuated the division between New Christians
and Old Christians, preventing it from disappearing with time.
The persistence of this distinction in a society in which, by 1740, those
who could in principle be branded as New Christians represented one-
third of the population—and over half of the urban population—was struc-
turally related to the persistence of the Inquisition itself and to the functions
it performed in delineating social groups, the criteria for social status, and
strategies of social advancement. As time went on, the “Jewish question” in
Portugal became less and less a religious question and more and more a
question of relations between social groups at all levels of society.
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 145

IX

These issues are obviously crucial for our understanding of early modern
Portuguese society and the role played by the Inquisition. They are also
crucial for our understanding of the meaning to be attached to accusa-
tions of crypto-Judaism directed against New Christians at all levels of
society. Less obvious, perhaps, is their immediate relevance to our under-
standing of the role played by Iberian Jews in the making of the New
World. It should be remembered, however, that Portuguese New Chris-
tians were not only important in colonial Brazil. They also constituted a
large proportion of the converso merchants active in the Spanish posses-
sions in Central and South America. The Jews who moved from Amster-
dam to Pernambuco then to the West Indies and North America were also
to a large extent of Portuguese origin.
As was pointed out earlier, the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution of
native conversos had more or less come to an end by the middle of the six-
teenth century. There followed a period when it was more concerned
with the minor offenses of Old Christians and, in Aragon, with moriscos.
The Spanish tribunals (and in particular those of Castile and Spanish
America) only resumed their persecution of Judaism when, after 1580,
significant numbers of Portuguese New Christians moved into Spain and
the Spanish dependencies. A very large proportion of those tried for
Judaism by Spanish tribunals throughout the Americas in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries were, in fact, Portuguese or of Por-
tuguese origin.
This implies that the experience of Portuguese New Christians—and
in particular the mechanisms underlying the transmission and social con-
struction of their Jewish religious and cultural identity—is directly rele-
vant to our understanding of the role played by New Christians or
marranos throughout the Americas. Unlike the victims of the first phase
of the Spanish Inquisition (1480–1530), whose Jewish identities were sel-
dom in any doubt, the Portuguese New Christians and marranos of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, regardless of whether or not they
attempted to maintain Judaic observance, were the product of a complex
process in which both their Catholic and their Jewish identities were
deeply intertwined. As numerous authors have pointed out,45 the inner
experience of these New Christians and marranos was profoundly
marked by the duality and ambiguity of their Judeo-Catholic cultural and
religious identity. To examine their role in the making of the New World
exclusively in terms of that identity’s Jewish component is to tell only
part of the story.
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146 | Robert Rowland

Notes

1. Converted Jews and their descendants were usually referred to as conversos in Spain
and Cristãos novos in Portugal. Both terms could also be used to refer to converted Mus-
lims, and in Spain the more specific term Cristiano nuevo de judío was sometimes used.
I shall here use the generic term “New Christian” to refer to converted Jews and their
descendants in both countries. Following Israel S. Révah, “Les Marranes,” Revue des
Etudes Juives 118, no. 1 (1959–60):29–77, I shall reserve the term “marrano” for those
New Christians who consciously attempted to maintain, however imperfectly, some
form of Judaic religious observance and identity.
2. Whether he would be so considered by Jewish communities and religious authorities
outside Spain or Portugal is a separate question which cannot be dealt with here. The
best general account in English of the “marrano question” is still Yosef H. Yerushalmi,
From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Mar-
ranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York and London, 1971), chap. 1.
3. Despite the contemporary overtones of terms like “purity of blood,” the notions of anti-
Semitism and racism are out of place in the context of early modern Spain and Portugal.
4. Cf. Robert Rowland, “Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons: European Witch-Beliefs in
Comparative Perspective,” Early Modern European Witchcraft. Centres and Peripheries,
ed. B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen (Oxford, 1990), 161–90.
5. See Nicolaus Eymericus, Directorium Inquisitorum (Rome, 1578), 244ff.; Cesare Carena,
Tractatus de Officio Sanctissimae Inquisitionis et modo procedendi in causis fidei (Cremona,
1655), 251–55; [Eliseo Masini], Sacro Arsenale, ovvero Prattica dell’Officio della S. Inquisi-
tione (Genoa, 1625), 19–20; and, for an overview of the situation in the late medieval
period, Kenneth R. Stow, “Ebrei e inquisitori. 1250–1350,” L’Inquisizione e gli ebrei in
Italia, ed. M. Luzzati (Rome-Bari, 1994), 3–18.
6. Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-four Thousand Cases of the Spanish
Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank,” in The Inquisition in Early
Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. G. Henningsen and J. Tedeschi
(Dekalb, Ill., 1986), 100–130.
7. These results—derived from research by E. W. Monter, J. Tedeschi, J. P. Dedieu, J.
Demonet, G. Henningsen, J. Contreras, J. Veiga Torres, and A. Borges Coelho—are con-
veniently summarized in Francisco Bethencourt’s major comparative study, História
das Inquisições. Portugal, Espanha e Itália (Lisbon, 1994), 268–84 (French trans., L’Inquisi-
tion à l’époque moderne. Espagne, Portugal, Italie, XVe–XIXe siècle [Paris, 1995]).
8. The Aragon Secretariat included the tribunals of Barcelona, Logroño, Majorca, Sar-
dinia, Sicily, Valencia, Saragossa, Cartagena de Indias, Lima, and Mexico; that of
Castile the tribunals of the Canary Islands, Córdoba, Galicia, Granada, Llerena, Mur-
cia, Seville, Toledo, and Valladolid.
9. Jean-Pierre Dedieu, L’Administration de la foi. L’Inquisition de Tolède, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle
(Madrid, 1989).
10. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Los Judeoconversos en España y América (Madrid, 1988), 26.
11. Cf. Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Os Judeus em Portugal no Século XV, vol. 1 (Lis-
bon, 1982), 74. According to the earlier estimates of João Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos
Cristãos Novos Portugueses (Lisbon, 1921), 43, they numbered 75,000, but such an over-
all figure would have implied inordinately high proportions of Jews in urban settle-
ments, and must surely be regarded as excessive.
12. These legal provisions were based on Pope Boniface IX’s Bull of 2 July 1389. Accord-
ing to the Ordenações Afonsinas (II, 120), no Christian was allowed to kill or wound a
Jew, steal his goods, or offend his customs; nor could he violate Jewish cemeteries (on
the pretext of hunting for buried treasure), disturb the feasts of the Jews, or force any
Jew to perform any kind of service or forced labor. See M. Kayserling, História dos
Judeus em Portugal (São Paulo, 1971; orig. ed. Leipzig, 1867), 39.
13. Tavares, Judaísmo e Inquisição (Lisbon, 1987), chap. 1.
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New Christian, Marrano, Jew | 147

14. According to the most recent estimate by Tavares, they numbered no more than twenty
or thirty thousand. Among contemporaries, Abraão Zacuto speaks of 120,000 individ-
uals, Damião de Góis of 20,000 families. The Spanish chronicler Bernáldez claimed that
93,000 crossed the frontier. These high figures have sometimes been uncritically
accepted by modern historians, but they would imply that the number of Jews in Por-
tugal had risen, in the space of a few years, from 3 or 4 percent to about 15 percent of
the total population, and from perhaps 8 percent to about 30 percent of the population
in many urban settlements. This was clearly not the case, and such high figures must
be regarded as an exaggeration. Cf. Tavares, Os Judeus, 252–57, and Azevedo, Cristãos
Novos, 20–22.
15. Damião de Góis, Crónica do Felicíssimo D. Manuel (Coimbra, 1949); Samuel Usque, Con-
solaçam às Tribulaçoens de Israel, 3 vols. (Coimbra, 1908).
16. Tavares, Judaísmo e Inquisição, 41–51; cf. Cod. RES 863, fol. 1, Biblioteca Nacional de Lis-
boa (BNL). The law was still officially in force in the early years of the sixteenth cen-
tury—there are cases on record of New Christians asking for permission to marry
among themselves—but does not appear to have been seriously enforced.
17. Kayserling, História dos Judeus, 154.
18. Contemporary estimates of the number of New Christians who lost their lives range
from 1,900 (Damião de Góis) to 4,000 (Samuel Usque). Fifty of those held responsible
for the massacre were condemned to death. The population of Lisbon lost some of its
privileges, and the city was subjected to a heavy fine.
19. Paul Teyssier, La langue de Gil Vicente (Paris, 1959), chap. 4.
20. See Lea Sestieri, David Rubeni. Un ebreo d’Arabia in missione segreta nell’Europa del ‘500
(Genoa, 1991).
21. The latter three tribunals were in existence for only a short time. In 1558 a fourth tri-
bunal was established in Goa, with jurisdiction over East Africa and the entire Orient.
On the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, see Alexandre Herculano’s classic
História da Origem e Estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (Lisbon, 1854–59).
22. A few isolated communities remained, which the Inquisition would discover and dis-
mantle in the following decades. For an overview, see J. Contreras, “Estructura de la
actividad procesal del Santo Oficio,” in Historia de la Inquisición en España y América, ed.
J. Pérez Villanueva and B. Escandell Bonet, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1993), 621–27.
23. The list is reproduced in Cod. RES 863, fols. 97–98, BNL. As the individual trials have
not been analyzed, we cannot be sure that this group constituted a representative sam-
ple of the New Christian population in Lisbon, but the fact that they confessed “spon-
taneously,” possibly fearing that they might be accused by others (cf. section VI)
suggests that they were at least representative of the kind of New Christian who could
plausibly be accused of Judaism.
24. Cod. RES 863, fols. 119–23, BNL.
25. If those of pure Jewish descent represented no more than one-fifth of those accused
and sentenced for Judaism, it is very unlikely that they could at the same time have
represented a higher proportion of the entire New Christian population. The figure
of 20 percent should thus be regarded as a minimum estimate of the proportion of
mixed marriages.
26. It comes as something of a surprise, after these figures, to discover that by the eigh-
teenth century the vast majority of those accused of Judaism and sentenced by the
Inquisition were described simply as “New Christian”: 93.7 percent of those sentenced
at the auto-da-fé held in Lisbon on 19 October 1704, or 84.9 percent in that held on 25
July 1728 (Cod. RES 863, fols. 353–56, 437–39, BNL). It is possible that, as in Majorca,
selective marriage strategies on the part of some New Christian families could have
led to the constitution of an endogamous Judaizing sub-group within the New Chris-
tian population (cf. Enric Porqueres, Lourde alliance: mariage et identité chez les descen-
dants de juifs convertis à Majorque [1435–1750] [Paris, 1995]), but it is also possible that
by then genealogical subtlety had been abandoned and that the term “New Christian,”
without qualification, was being applied indiscriminately to practically all those of
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148 | Robert Rowland

known Jewish descent. In either case, the Judaic identity of condemned New Christians
cannot simply be taken as given. Cf., however, Révah, “Les Marranes,” 50, who inter-
prets these figures as signifying that even as late as the eighteenth century “Portuguese
crypto-Judaism had preserved a fairly remarkable degree of racial homogeneity.”
27. On the assumption, in particular, that demographic rates were broadly comparable
among the two sub-populations.
28. The contents of this document have been analyzed in detail by H. P. Salomon, “The
‘Monitório do Inquisidor Geral’ of 1536: Background and Sources of Some ‘Judaic’
Customs Listed Therein,” Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português 17 (1982):41–64, which
also reproduces the original text.
29. Cf. Rowland, “Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons,” and Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo
in Italia (Turin, 1987).
30. Elvira Cunha de Azevedo Mea, “Orações judaicas na Inquisição portuguesa—século
XVI,” in Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition, ed. Y. Kaplan
(Jerusalem, 1981), 158.
31. The strategy is described in full in a manuscript written about 1735 by the celebrated
New Christian physician Ribeiro Sanches, who was brought up as a Catholic and
unjustly denounced to the Inquisition by a cousin. He fled to London, where he was
converted to Judaism, but he later returned to Catholicism and became physician to
Catherine of Russia. See A. N. Ribeiro Sanches, Christãos Novos e Christãos Velhos em
Portugal, ed. Raul Rego (Oporto, 1973).
On the extent to which Jewish identities and traditions had in some cases to be
reinvented, see now Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and
Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1997).
32. I. S. Révah, “Les Marranes.”
33. Usque, Consolaçam, 3:32.
34. Révah, discussion in A. J. Saraiva, Inquisição e Cristãos Novos, 2nd ed. (Lisbon, 1985),
284–86; J. Lúcio de Azevedo, Novas Epanáforas (Lisbon, 1932), 143–218.
35. Processo Nº 1266, Inquisição de Lisboa, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT).
36. Processo Nº 236, Inquisição de Lisboa, ANTT.
37. António Borges Coelho, A Inquisição de Évora, vol. 1 (Lisbon, 1987):363.
38. Denúncias em Nome da Fé. Perseguição aos Judeus no Distrito da Guarda de 1607 a 1625, ed.
Maria Antonieta Garcia (Lisbon, 1996), 70–71.
39. Primeira Visitação do Santo Ofício às Partes do Brasil pelo Licenciado Heitor Furtado de Men-
donça. Denunciações de Pernambuco, 1593–1595, ed. R. Garcia (São Paulo, 1929), 38.
40. Anita Novinsky, Cristãos-Novos da Bahia (São Paulo, 1972), 159.
41. Porqueres, Lourde alliance.
42. José Veiga Torres, “Da Repressão Religiosa para a Promoção Social. A Inquisição como
instância legitimadora da promoção social da burguesia mercantil,” Revista Crítica de
Ciências Sociais 40 (1994):109–35.
43. See the excellent study by Fernanda Olival “O acesso de uma família de cristãos novos
portugueses à Ordem de Cristo,” Ler História 33 (1997):67–82.
44. We do not, at present, have sufficient information for a rigorous statistical comparison.
Cf., however, the figures given by Borges Coelho (Inquisição de Évora, 1:383) and by
Veiga Torres (“Repressão Religiosa,” 133). Of 5,382 individuals tried by the Évora
Inquisition between 1537 and 1668, 22 percent were merchants or tradesmen, 42 per-
cent artisans, 9 percent farmers, and 4 percent laborers. During the same period farm-
ers made up almost half the number of “Familiars,” whereas artisans, merchants and
fidalgos made up, respectively, 15 percent, 13 percent, and 6 percent. Between 1721 and
1770 the proportion of farmers had fallen to 28 percent, while the remaining three
groups now made up, respectively, 6 percent, 37 percent, and 5 percent.
45. See, for example, Novinsky, Cristãos Novos, and Nathan Wachtel’s contribution to
this volume.
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– Chapter 7 –

MARRANO RELIGIOSITY
IN HISPANIC AMERICA IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Nathan Wachtel

W HAT IS MARRANO RELIGIOSITY? We can legitimately discern among

New Christians throughout the Iberian world beliefs and practices
that indicate the persistence of a possible crypto-Judaism. But does it suf-
fice merely to make an unquestioning inventory of such elements? For
indeed, the range of beliefs held by New Christians was not limited to the
clandestine pursuit of more or less impoverished Judaizing practices.
Hence, we must avoid using the reductive schemas of an apologetic his-
tory and instead restore to marrano religiosity its full measure of com-
plexity and diversity. We must cover a broad spectrum between two
poles—that of actual fervent Judaists and that of sincere Christians—with
a whole series of intermediate cases and syncretic combinations.
Conversos can be distinguished from Old Christians both negatively
and positively: legally, the “pure blood” statutes left them (in principle)
relatively marginalized; but we know that in social terms the New Chris-
tians were united in vast networks reinforced by kinship and marriage,
and that this solidarity was reinforced to varying degrees by the shared
feelings of a community of memory. But what about their religious beliefs?
In seeking to answer this question, we are confronted with a paradox, aris-
ing from the complex and manifold forms of religious life. On the one
hand, there is a (potentially) common body of Judaizing practices, and on
the other, extreme diversity among various individuals, groups, places,
and periods under consideration. It is as if the very object of our study dis-
sipates before our eyes. The essential point is in the paradox itself: what is
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150 | Nathan Wachtel

specific about the religious domain of New Christians is precisely the ten-
sion they experienced between two religions—Judaism and Christian-
ity—with all the resultant doubts, hesitations, vacillations, and at times
skeptical detachment, as well as the “interferences,” cross-fertilization,
and dual sincerity.
Here a brief consideration of terminology is in order. It is no accident
that the terms “marrano” and “marranism,” despite their once pejorative
connotations, have come to be accepted for the sake of convenience: they
correspond to an objective reality, that of a certain religiosity. By religiosity,
I mean not a religion as clearly defined by theological doctrine, but rather
a set of concerns, practices, and beliefs grouped together in a configuration
made up of various, even contradictory, elements whose diversity does not
preclude a kind of unity—a generic style that makes it possible for us to
identify and label it with a specific term, in this case “marrano.”1
Marrano religiosity as it pertains to the New Christians in Hispanic
America, and more particularly in New Spain, during the first half of the
seventeenth century is the focus of this essay.2 The overwhelming major-
ity of the New Christians—Judaizing or otherwise—who came to the
American continent in large numbers, particularly starting in 1580 with
the Union of the Two Kingdoms, were of Portuguese origin. Many of
them were the descendants of Spanish Jews who had originally fled to
Portugal in 1492, sometimes making a detour through Spain again for
one or two generations before ultimately pursuing their migration as far
as the New World. In the American context, these conversos exhibited very
particular characteristics: like the Amerindian societies, but in a very dif-
ferent milieu, they constitute a virtual laboratory for the study of prob-
lems related to acculturation processes, syncretic phenomena, and
cultural métissage.
In the Americas—which were open to new arrivals but which retained
a population that, despite the demographic catastrophe, remained pre-
dominantly indigenous—heterodox beliefs and practices could indeed
escape detection and denunciation more easily than in the metropolis (all
the more so because the jurisdiction of the Inquisition tribunals extended
here over vast areas). Conversely, in those faraway lands to which Hebrew
literature made its way only surreptitiously, and exceptionally at that, it
was difficult to sustain a Jewish Orthodox tradition. Thus the New Chris-
tians who immigrated to Hispanic America had recourse to a whole range
of multiple syncretic combinations, which we shall examine more closely
in order to discover the specific characteristics of marrano religiosity.

The Range of Beliefs: Christian Influences

By definition, the conversos had received some Christian education that

had inevitably left traces, even to the point of stamping their personalities
with indelible mental reflexes. There are many accounts describing the
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shock experienced by an adolescent to whom a parent had suddenly

revealed that everything the child had previously learned, and in which
he ardently believed—Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Trinity, the
saints, and so forth—was false and that salvation was to be found not in
the “law of Jesus” but in the “law of Moses.” Such expressions were not
confined only to the vocabulary of the Inquisitors; they were totally
assimilated by the New Christians as well, whatever the nature of their
faith. What was at stake was still the salvation of the soul: this peculiarly
Christian concern formed the basis for a range of beliefs within which the
alternatives were arrayed, along with the doubts and hesitations of those
who, from the moment of revelation on, found themselves faced with a
dramatic choice.3 Often a single family would be split into sincere
Catholics and fervent Judaists, the relations between them oscillating
between mutual distrust and compromising solidarity. Sometimes par-
ents would argue over their children’s education, as in the example of
Antonio Diaz de Caceres and his wife Catalina de León de la Cueva (the
sister of the famous Luis de Carvajal El Mozo). Their fourteen-year-old
daughter, Leonor de Caceres, reported a remarkable episode:

One day, in the presence of the said Doña Mariana (who was quite crazy) and
the said Doña Anna, Antonio Diaz fought at length with Doña Catalina
because she made her [Leonor] fast during the holy days of the Lord and he
ordered her [Leonor] to get dressed, saying, “Stand up, you bad woman of
poor breeding, and do not ever return to this house” and so Ysabelica china,
who is now dead, dressed her and she went with her father down to the street
corner where she said to the said Antonio Diaz, “My Lord and father, where
are you taking me so that I might cry in someone else’s home?” and the said
Antonio Diaz responded, “Be quiet, you sly vixen of poor breeding. I am tak-
ing you to Machado’s house.” And as she knew not who he [Machado] was,
she cried, and the said Antonio Diaz shed tears when he heard her ask where
he was taking her so that she might cry in someone else’s home, and he took
her back to her mother’s house, saying, “Go on, you poorly bred woman and
thank God for what you said to me, for it is because of this that I am taking
you to this bad woman,” and her father, the said Antonio Diaz, left her at the
door and went about his business.4

Let us take another example that illustrates the persistence of Christ-

ian practices in the midst of Judaizing observances, or rather, in this case,
a Judaizing reinterpretation of Christian practices and beliefs. This is the
case of Antonio Fernandez Cardado, born in Moral in La Mancha (of par-
ents native to Portugal). After a complicated itinerary that took him
through Bordeaux and Saint Jean de Luz, he arrived in Spain in 1613. He
amassed some capital by working as a peddler between Vera Cruz and
Puebla, and then opened a wholesale supply company in Mexico, extend-
ing his business to Tlaxcala and the mining town of Pachuca. When he
ended up in front of the Inquisition tribunal in 1634, this is how Cardado
described his conversion to Judaism:
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152 | Nathan Wachtel

The said Talaveras, his cousins, told this confessant that the law of Jesus
Christ was not the good one and that there was only one God who was to be
adored, and that the Messiah had not come, nor was Jesus Christ the Messiah,
although they said that there was a Holy Ghost who had spoken through the
prophets and patriarchs of the old law.5

Thus, at the very moment when the reconversion took place, as Jesus
Christ was rejected, there remained a trace of Christian doctrine in the
presence of the Holy Ghost transposed onto the Old Testament. Antonio
Fernandez Cardado went on to say that, as a child, in the school where
he was taught by priests to read and write, he had learned a prayer that
the children had recited every afternoon, and he repeated it to the
Inquisitors: “We pray to you that you have mercy on us and the souls of
our deceased relatives and friends, and please Lord, save them from the
pain they suffer and take them to your Holy Kingdom. Amen Jesus.”6
Antonio Fernandez Cardado added that he remained quite attached to
this prayer and that he continued to recite it even after his conversion to
the “law of Moses,” although he took care to stop before he got to the
“Amen Jesus” with which it ended. However, sometimes he would slip
and unintentionally utter the final “Amen Jesus” without meaning to; the
mechanism of a prayer learned by heart, inculcated at an early age,
reproduced itself like a reflex.
Let us note further how Antonio Fernandez Cardado excused himself
for making these slips: his real intention, he insisted, was truly to pray as
one who observes the “law of Moses” and to address the God of Israel
exclusively.7 So even in private prayer he maintained a mental reserva-
tion and drew a distinction between the words he actually uttered and
the faith within his heart of hearts; in other words, there was a discrep-
ancy or gap between the prayer as literally expressed and his inner feel-
ings, the authentic faith that alone guaranteed salvation. Antonio
Fernandez Cardado’s observation is similar to certain admissions con-
cerning the Christian confession: those conversos on trial often related
how, when they went to church for the purpose of confessing, it was
because they were obliged to keep up appearances. Although they con-
fessed to the priest, they too had mental reservations, taking care to think
of the God of Israel to whom their prayers were really addressed (and to
whom they had prayed beforehand in order to ask for forgiveness).
Another type of ambiguity is illustrated by a scene that was played
out in the house of Simon Vaez Sevilla, one of the richest business men in
New Spain during the 1630s. The occasion was a Passover celebration, in
a ceremony at which Blanca Enriquez was officiating. Considered a “dog-
matist” and rabbinist, she was the mother-in-law of Simon Vaez Sevilla
and had been imprisoned and tortured in the dungeons of the Inquisition
in Sevilla. The faithful gathered together in the back room of the house
where Blanca Enriquez proceeded to distribute the unleavened bread
that had been secretly prepared. They lined up before her, one behind the
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other; for each of them, she broke off a small piece of unleavened bread
and placed it in the worshipper’s mouth, according to, and as if in atone-
ment for, the Christian model.8

* * * *

IN ORDER TO BROADEN the scope of our study, let us consider the

extremely complex case of Manuel Bautista Perez, a powerful merchant
in Lima (and the Peruvian counterpart, in the 1620s and 1630s, of Simon
Vaez Sevilla).9 An examination of his commercial practices is not the
focus here, but it is known that he made his fortune through the African
slave trade and through smuggling.10 Now this slave trader was also a
well-read man: along with his collection of 125 paintings, Manuel
Bautista Perez possessed a library of 155 volumes;11 the inventory of these
works shows that 19 percent consisted of belles lettres, 62 percent were sec-
ular works (including history, law, philosophy, and so forth), and only 18
percent belonged to the religious domain. Compared to other personal
libraries of the same period, religious works represented a relatively
minor part of Perez’s collection.
Among the secular works, which made up the majority of the books,
one genre predominated—history, with forty-seven titles, or about one-
third of the total collection. This interest in the things of the past indicated
on Manuel Bautista’s part certain preoccupations that are probably con-
nected somehow to his status as both converso and Portuguese. Indeed, a
significant proportion of these history books deal with the expeditions of
discovery and conquest undertaken by the Portuguese in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, for example, Diogo de Couto’s Decades, pub-
lished in Lisbon between 1602 and 1614; the History of the Moluccas, by
Bartolome Leonardo Argensola (Madrid, 1609); or again the famous Trav-
els in China by Fernâo Mendes Pinto (Lisbon, 1628). Manuel Bautista
Perez directed his curiosity toward the knowledge of distant lands, the
latest discoveries, and the learned publications of his time.
While the religious part of his library was not abundant, its contents
were no less telling. Apart from works of hagiography, there were trea-
tises on Christology and Marian cults, a set of themes and beliefs specifi-
cally rejected by Judaists. Thus we note two books on the life of Christ,
one by Cristobal de Fonseca (the first part published in Toledo in 1596 and
the second in Lisbon in 1602), the other by Juan Arze de Solorzano
(Madrid, 1605). Other works take up the debate over the conception of the
Virgin, for example, the Concepción de Maria Purisima, by Hipolito de Oli-
vares y Butron (Lima, 1631), and Nombres y atributos de la Virgen, by
Alonso de Bonilla (Baeza, 1624). We also note the presence of a Treatise on
the Communion by Fernando Quirino de Salazar (Madrid, 1622).12 In other
words, Manuel Bautista Perez’s interests as far as theology is concerned
seem to be concentrated around issues that differentiate the “law of Jesus”
from the “law of Moses.” Several accounts also relate his conversations
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154 | Nathan Wachtel

with the Dominican Fray Blas de Acosta, who responded to his questions
(dudas) relating to the Trinity, the Virgin, and the incarnation of Christ.13
This set of preoccupations suggests a religious anxiety that appears quite
different from the attitudes of the most radical Judaists (for example, that
of Francisco Maldonado de Silva, condemned to the same auto-da-fé in
1639), who categorically denied the founding mysteries of Christianity.
We may well wonder whether these theological interests and the
manifestations of Christian faith evinced rather ostentatiously by Manuel
Bautista Perez were not intended to mask his crypto-Judaism. We do
know, however, that—again, unlike Francisco Maldonado de Silva—
Perez always, even under torture, denied having observed the “law of
Moses”: in fact, he was condemned as a negativo. It is true that many other
accounts adduced at his trial report scenes and conversations that ren-
dered him highly suspect.14 But suspect of what, precisely? Some of his
own notations attest to his being clearly aware that the Judaizing prac-
tices of his friends in Lima were extremely impoverished, being reduced
to banal stereotypical formulas: “All that they know of the Law of Moses
is very limited because Jewish practices here are not known because they
have never seen anyone who knows more than to fast on Tuesdays and
Fridays.”15 The numerous meetings held in his house were devoted
essentially to recollections of these ceremonies, as if the rite were, under
the circumstances, reduced to speech and to memory. In this sense, the
crypto-Judaism of Manuel Bautista Perez, if crypto-Judaism it was,
would seem to have been based more on the cult of memory than on an
authentically religious faith, thus prefiguring, in its way, a quasi-secular
Jewish consciousness.
The complex personality of Manuel Bautista Perez leads us to ask,
with respect to him and to many others condemned by the Inquisition,
whether he was a Jewish martyr or a Christian martyr. The answer, in his
case, is not obvious, but it is not implausible to suppose that he was the
victim of a dual sincerity—straddling two different standards while
experiencing doubts and uncertainty about both of them.

Diverging Representations of the Afterlife

Let us return to Mexico and to the statements made by Antonio Fernandez

Cardado. The anecdote concerning his slip in uttering “Amen Jesus” at the
end of a prayer reaches much deeper than its superficially amusing aspect.
If Cardado remains attached to the prayer he learned in childhood, this is
clearly because of its content, the object of the prayer, which is a plea for
mercy for the souls in Purgatory. The notion of Purgatory, of course, is a
relatively late development and a distinctively Christian one.16 If a kind of
equivalent is sometimes found in Jewish conceptions at that time (partic-
ularly in the cabalistic tradition), these concepts nevertheless take quite
different forms. As for the representations of the afterlife as understood by
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the New Christians of New Spain during the same period, they appear to
be extremely varied, running the gamut from belief in the immortality of
the soul to the more or less radical negation of such immortality.
We will consider only a few examples here. While Antonio Fernandez
Cardado continues to believe in Purgatory, the same is not true of his
nephew Francisco Botello, who explicitly denies its existence. In fact,
properly speaking, Botello’s beliefs concerning the destiny of souls
appear to be more consistent with the Jewish idea of the necessity of the
Messiah’s coming before the “gates of heaven are opened,” although
there are also references to the “Elysian Fields” with connotations evok-
ing the ancient world. As for hell, it most certainly exists, but it is
reserved for Christians who are condemned to it for their idolatry:

And the said Francisco Botello affirmed that there was no purgatory because
those who died went to a place, which he understood was called the Elysian
Fields, and they would remain there until the Messiah came to take them to
heaven, and when he heard of one who had died and it was believed that God
has received him in heaven, Francisco Botello laughed because he said the time
had not come to open the gates of heaven. Even though they were not Christians
they could not go to heaven because all Christians were going to hell for being
idolatrous and worshipping wooden images of Jesus Christ and the saints.17

The equivalent of Purgatory that is found in the case of Margarita de

Rivera bears more resemblance to the Cheol of some Jewish traditions:
after death, the soul remains there for a period limited to one year; this is
also a period of mourning with its attendant fasts, intended to ensure the
salvation of the soul of the deceased.

It is a constant among observants that the souls of the deceased, who are also
observants, remain a year and a day suffering the punishments which God
our Lord sees fit to give them … and in this way the fasts that are assigned are
performed specially for the benefit of the souls before the year and a day, so
they might escape those punishments, since after the year and a day are up,
the fasts are useless.18

Yet another version is put forth by Antonio Vaez Casteloblanco. The

elder brother of Simon Vaez Sevilla, he was considered by the Inquisi-
tors to be one of the principal “dogmatists” of the marrano community
in Mexico. In his representation of the hereafter, not only is Purgatory
absent, but hell also is nonexistent: “And he said to this confessant con-
cerning the Law of Moses … that no one who observes it will be con-
demned [to hell] nor either are Christians because there is no hell, and
the Christians [who believe in it] are like beasts lacking understand-
ing.”19 Unfortunately, Antonio Vaez Casteloblanco does not expand
upon this conception, but his derogatory remark about Christians leads
one to suppose that, at least so far as they were concerned, he believed
their souls to be mortal and their situation to be accurately described by
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156 | Nathan Wachtel

the famous saying, no hay mas que nacer y morir (“there is no more than
living and dying”)—a watchword, in the eyes of the Inquisitors, for
Judaizing heresy. In other words, the problem here of the immortality of
the soul gives rise to a sort of compromise through juxtaposition, since
two different destinies were possible after death: the first, reserved for
one part of humanity—namely Christians—was the void; the second,
for another part—those who observe the “law of Moses”—was guaran-
teed salvation.
An example that takes us to the end of the seventeenth century
completes this picture of the diversity of representations of the afterlife:
this is the case of Fernando de Medina, a recent arrival in Mexico who
had lived there for only four years before being imprisoned by the Holy
Office in 1691. He had actually been born in the marrano community of
Peyrehorade in southwestern France (where he had been both baptized
and circumcised); at the age of twelve, he left for Spain, where he
resided for about twenty years before emigrating to Mexico to escape
his debt collectors. The numerous contradictory statements made by
Fernando de Medina in the course of his trial are difficult to interpret.
While the Inquisitors did not hesitate to attribute his frequent sarcasm
and blasphemy to intentionally feigned madness, it nevertheless seems
likely that he was indeed suffering, at least temporarily, from some
mental disturbance. Still, on the question of the destiny of the soul, he
clearly and coherently put forth a world-view that excluded any belief
in an afterlife:

He did not know whether there was a God or not.20

What salvation of the soul, because the soul was the spirit and when the
body died, the spirit also died, [and the spirit] was what he understood to
be the soul.21

And he believed that there was nothing more than the present and no sin
greater than doing harm to another, and such a sin called for punishment in
this life as there was no other and that the judges and superiors there are in
the world who govern the republic must reward the good in this life.22

Fernando de Medina’s denial of the immortality of the soul is far

more radical than the partial denial made by Antonio Vaez Castelo-
blanco, since the former encompasses all of humanity, including those
who observe the “law of Moses” as well as those who follow the “law
of Jesus”; but Medina’s denial also fit within a context of unbelief in the
vulgar sense (no hay mas que nacer y morir) rather than within the frame-
work of a more learned tradition of skepticism, to which Fernando de
Medina’s scanty education would scarcely have allowed him access.
Other statements of his suggest a certain relativism in the matter of reli-
gious loyalty,23 which is in keeping with his thinking based on atheistic
materialism.
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The Rejection of Image Worship

Let us return to the first half of the seventeenth century in Mexico. We

have seen that Francisco Botello condemned Christians to hell for their
idolatry. This leads us to another major theme, one of the most funda-
mental elements of marrano religiosity: the rejection of image worship.
This refusal found expression in scorn and mockery, such as we know
Blanca de Rivera and her daughter indulged in while watching Holy
Week processions with statues of the saints, the Virgin, and Christ pass by
their windows.24 Did their aversion go as far as sacrilege, provoking
insulting or violent gestures such as spitting upon images or subjecting
them to flagellation? Such accusations frequently appear in the docu-
ments of the Inquisition, and we must consider whether they are slan-
derous or not. While the sincerity of certain witnesses (often household
servants) is dubious in some cases where such practices are described,
many indications seem to confirm that they did indeed occur (even if
they were perhaps not as widespread as claimed by the denunciations).
Let us look at a few more examples. This type of insulting gesture is
mentioned at the end of the preceding century, even in the entourage of
Luis de Carvajal El Mozo, whose piety bordered on mystical illuminism,
but who turned his back on images of the Virgin and the saints when
praying in his own home:

And so they had images of Our Lady of the Conception and of Pity and other
saints in Santiago’s chapel in order to keep up appearances because they
revered them as idols and when they prayed, they turned their backs to them,
and she saw the said Luis de Carvajal, Doña Catalina her mother, Doña Fran-
cisca her grandmother, and Doña Ysabel her aunt, spit on the images, saying,
“I do not know for what reason we have these idols.”25

In the 1630s and 1640s, Blanca de Rivera and her daughters, once
again, were accused of striking a crucifix with a whip.26 Likewise, Duarte
de Leon Jaramillo and his wife Isabel Nuñez “flagellated an image of Christ
and dragged it across the room.”27 Regarding this last case, one account
deserves to be quoted at length: firstly, because it is an extraordinarily vivid
recreation of a scene from daily life portraying children in a Mexican street;
and secondly, because the plethora of lifelike details suggests that the nar-
rative could not have been purely and simply invented by Inquisitors run-
ning short of accusations. Here, then, is the record of the account by Maria
de Luna y Vilchas, who was eighteen years old in 1648. She was about
eight years old when the incident, ostensibly about sweets, took place:

She said that she knows very well that a little more than ten years ago, the said
Duarte de León and his wife, Ysabel Nuñez, and their daughters, Clara Anto-
nia and Ana, and their sons, Francisco, Simon and Jorge, the smallest, had all
been condemned by the Inquisition with San benitos … because they lived as
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158 | Nathan Wachtel

neighbours for years on Azequia Real Street, and it was common for this wit-
ness and her sisters, Francisca and Petronila, to be friendly with all of the
sons and daughters of the said Duarte de León because as children they had
all been raised together and she remembers that about ten or more years ago,
Jorge came across this witness in the doorway of the store where her father,
Juan de Vilches, held the right to sell ice, and he said to the witness, “Give
me a piece of ice and I will tell you something,” and the witness, standing in
the doorway, said to him, “I won’t give you any ice unless you tell me.” So
the said Jorge said that his father, Duarte de León, flagellated a Holy Christ
with a barbed wire whip at night in the chamber where he slept … and with-
out asking any more questions, nor saying another thing to him, the witness
gave Jorge the piece of ice that he had asked for.28

If we admit that such sacrilegious practices did take place, how are
we to understand them? Why insult images, if one considers them to be
no more than lifeless paintings on pieces of wood? The aggressive ges-
ture, in the circumstances described, takes on a ritualistic quality that
implies, paradoxically, that the images are thought to possess a certain
power or at least that this black magic is expected to have some effect. In
other words, the aggression is also a transgression, insofar as it betrays a
form of adherence to the dominant beliefs, that is, Christian beliefs; but
the adherence is inverted.29 Confirming this is an observation that Juan
Pacheco de León (a native of Livorno, where he was educated in the Jew-
ish community) made when he was accused of participating in such sac-
rilegious rites at the home of Simon Vaez Sevilla. Although in his
refutation he admits that he does not believe in Jesus Christ, he denies
ever having committed blasphemy; his argument is based on a telling
comparison between the Jews of his native land, Italy, and those of the
Iberian territories where they were obliged to convert to Catholicism:

And although it is true that he did not believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ and
believed the images to be merely sticks and paintings, he has never blas-
phemed Jesus Christ Our Lord, nor the Holy Virgin, nor any of the saints in
heaven, because there in his native land they only cared about teaching the
old law and observing its commandments, performing the rites and cere-
monies while awaiting the Messiah, but they have nothing to do with Jesus
Christ Our Lord, seeing as the Jews who whip Christs and perform other
crimes of that sort are those who live here as Catholics, because they are the
worst, and those who go to live in those lands are the most unlawful, they are
held in low esteem by other Jews.30

Juan Pacheco de León’s remarks are of a general nature (he avoids

commenting on the specific point of subjecting the image of Christ to
flagellation in the home of Simon Vaez Sevilla), but his distinction
between Jews who could freely profess their faith in certain European
countries (allá, there) and those in Mexico or Spain (acá, here) who were
obliged to conceal it, in fact corroborates the accusation: the latter Jews
were the ones guilty of sacrilegious offences, and if they behaved thus, he
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says explicitly, it was because “they live like Catholics.” Marked by their
Christian education, imbued with the beliefs that surrounded them, and
suffering from persecution at the hands of the Inquisition, they expressed
their hatred and resentment through such gestures. Secrecy and repres-
sion led them to assert their true faith in this perverted manner, and when
they were back in Jewish communities in Europe (or Muslim lands), they
were treated with scorn.
Transgressive behavior directed at images can therefore be consid-
ered as one form—here superstitious or magical—among many syncretic
combinations that are found in such wide variety among the New Chris-
tians. Marrano religiosity, however, is so diverse, complex, and contra-
dictory that other forms of syncretism concerning their attitudes toward
images call for some nuances and corrections. Let us once again return to
Francisco Botello, who condemned all Christians to hell for their idolatry.
What do we find in his home, or more precisely, in the bedroom of a
member of his household, his nephew Baltazar de Burgos? Two tapestries
whose images, while they do not represent Christian saints, portray none
other than King David and Saint Moses. By custom, the members of Fran-
cisco Botello’s family would light a candle in honor of these figures.31
Another image of Moses, described in a passage that includes a striking
detail, was recorded as being in the house of Isabel de Medina: “She had
a tapestry painted with Saint Moses … with Jewish garments and some
rays on his head in the form of horns, with the tablets of the law in his
hands.”32 Is it surprising that among these Judaists in Mexico the repre-
sentation of Saint Moses, with horns on his forehead, is none other than
a traditional image of Christian iconography?
This image of Saint Moses preserved by Isabel de Medina was sup-
posed to assist childbirth, and it was to this image that Juana Enriquez, the
wife of Simon Vaez Sevilla, addressed her prayers before the birth of her
son. Let us trace her comings and goings and examine more closely the
details of the rituals she engaged in at that time. Juana Enriquez did not
limit herself to praying to Saint Moses in her prayers; nor is it surprising
that she associated a Christian saint with a Jewish “saint.” One account
tells us explicitly that she also went to church—the church of San Francisco;
that there she prayed to San Antonio (Saint Anthony); and that afterward,
as was the custom among pregnant women in the marrano community,
she performed a novena to Saint Moses.33 This association of two “saints,”
one from the Old Testament and another from the New Testament—the
first worshipped in secret and the second in public—represents another
remarkable case of syncretic combination.

The Special Characteristics of Marrano Fasting

The theme of marrano fasting, which is among the most frequently recur-
ring charges in the Inquisition trials, is no less complex. It is well known
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160 | Nathan Wachtel

that fasting was one of the principal rites practiced by Judaists, who
undertook it not only on the occasions of the yearly holidays of obliga-
tion, such as Yom Kippur or the commemoration of Queen Esther (to
whom the marranos evinced a particularly fervent devotion), but also
quite frequently in the course of ordinary weeks, up to two or three times
a week, preferably on Mondays and Thursdays. (In keeping with the
“Jewish custom,” this involved a full twenty-four-hour fast lasting from
dusk to the following dusk.) The worshipper who manifested his piety in
this way might be motivated by a variety of goals: to implore forgiveness
for his transgressions, to pray for the salvation of souls or the coming of
the Messiah, or simply to manifest his faith in the “law of Moses.” More
prosaically, a fast might serve to request that a disease be cured, or that a
journey or business deal meet with success. The frequency of this fasting
can be explained first of all in practical terms: it was a rite that could be
observed quite discreetly and was thus in keeping with the marrano
style. It was easily kept secret because it could not be detected externally.
Of course, those who fasted ran the risk of arousing the suspicions of the
domestic servants, which is why Simon Vaez Sevilla, for example, made
a show of quarrelling with his wife before fasting so it would appear to
the servants that he was too angry to eat; alternatively, he would pretend
to be ill.34
Fasting as practiced by these Judaizers was distinguished by special
traits that suggest a specifically marrano religiosity. The first such trait
was the state of spiritual exaltation it brought about, enabling the wor-
shipper to leave behind the limits of the human condition and ascend to
a state of quasi-mystical communication with the Divine. Thus, accounts
concerning Leonor Nunez, one of the “rabbinists and dogmatists” in
Mexico, the mother-in-law of Tomas Treviño de Sobremonte (himself the
leader of another marrano group), described her as a “saint” whose fasts
transformed her into a virtual “angel” on earth, allowing her to attain a
state of “grace”:

On that day and on many other occasions when we performed the Cro,
Tremiño said to my mother that she seemed to him like a beautiful and
transparent image and his mother-in-law replied, “Son, if I were to die now,
I would go straight to heaven because when I do this, it seems that I am in a
state of grace.”35

Fasting among marranos in New Spain is distinguished by yet

another trait that is more paradoxical: it was devoid of any of the forms
of asceticism, mortification, or vilification of the body that accompanied
certain Christian practices. Quite the contrary, among marranos the
experience of fasting could include a certain sensual, even erotic, exalta-
tion. Indeed, fasting together was considered as a mark of trust or affec-
tion: the secret was shared with the family, friends, or even more
significantly, with lovers. For a suitor, inviting a young woman to fast
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Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America | 161

with him was a way of declaring his feelings. This was true to such an
extent that, in communications among prisoners held by the Inquisition,
code words for fasting (such as cro, or suchil) were used ambiguously to
signify not only “fasting” but also “making love.”36 Was this fleshly
dimension of the rite inspired by certain illuminist tendencies? The prac-
tice of fasting presents another of the many forms of syncretism devel-
oped by the Judaists of Mexico.

Messianisms

Frequent fasting was also viewed as a means of promoting the coming of

the Messiah. This aspiration was by definition an essential component of
marrano religiosity since it formed the basis for rejecting Jesus Christ and
for believing that salvation was ensured only by following the “law of
Moses.” Yet, as paradoxical as it may seem, the messianism found among
the Judaists of Mexico also embraced certain hybrid forms, to the point of
being permeated at times with Christian representations or conceptions.
This phenomenon is aptly illustrated by the case of Juana Enriquez, whom
we have already seen praying to Saint Moses and Saint Anthony for the
successful outcome of her pregnancy. It should be recalled that Doña
Juana was not just any pregnant woman. She belonged to a well-known
and respected family (several members of whom were condemned by the
tribunals of the Inquisition in Lisbon, Seville, Cartagena, and Lima), and
in the marrano communities of Mexico, there was talk of the long-awaited
Messiah being born in the Americas to the Enriquez family.37 Impelled by
this fervent hope, Doña Juana directed her prayers toward the “saint” of
the Old Testament and the “saint” of the church. A further detail is to be
noted in the exceptional case of Doña Juana: the account specifies that spe-
cial respect was due to her as the Mother of the Messiah (Matriz). The syn-
cretic process is therefore not limited here to the sanctification of Moses,
nor to the association of Saint Moses and Saint Anthony; it leads to a sort
of analogy between Doña Juana and the Virgin Mary:

The aforementioned Doña Juana had gone to San Francisco to pray to San
Antonio, and had returned, to come and pray to Moses so that he would
grant her a good childbirth and, before giving birth, she had to go nine days
and pray to him, as the pregnant women usually went to visit that Moses, and
she was given to sewing small shirts for the heir which was to be born and
which was to be the Messiah, and they were to raise him according to their
customs, and they were to respect her as the Mother of the Messiah.38

A similar phenomenon can be observed in a striking scene described

by several witnesses. The protagonist in this scene is none other than
Blanca Juarez (Blanquita), the niece of Juana Enriquez. The latter did
indeed give birth to a son, Gaspar, who ultimately failed to live up to the
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162 | Nathan Wachtel

rather unreasonable hopes that had been placed on him. According to a

revelation made by an angel to the “dogmatist” grandmother Blanca
Enriquez, the Messianic aspiration was transferred to one of her grand-
children, the pious Blanquita, herself the daughter of Dona Juana’s sister
Rafaela Enriquez. A ritual consisting of prayers and fasting was prac-
ticed, once again, in order to bring about the desired event. In Doña
Rafaela’s house, this time, but still under the guidance of the grand-
mother Doña Blanca (as with the distribution of the unleavened bread), a
dozen women gathered one afternoon after having performed the ritual
ablutions. They stripped the young Blanquita, purified her, clothed her in
a white tunic, adorned her, and finally, by candlelight, formed a circle
around her, praying and fasting until the evening that she would give
birth to the Messiah. The entire ritual had an aspect of “adoration” of the
young woman who was to be the Messiah’s Mother:

That when Doña Rafaela Enriquez lived opposite San Lorenzo, one afternoon
she had a light lunch and party at which all of her female relatives were pres-
ent but no men, and in order to celebrate, first they all bathed and cleaned
themselves very well, and then they fasted at their own leisure without any-
one outside knowing, and they undressed Blanca Xuarez, and cleaned and
washed her well, dressing her in a very pretty white garment, and they sat her
in the middle of the drawing room, all adorned, and they all prayed to ensure
that the Messiah be born to this Jewess, and her grandmother, the dogmatist,
said that an angel had revealed this to her.39

She completely undressed her daughter Blanca and having put a white tunic
on her, they placed her on an altar and worshipped her.40

Dona Juana Enriquez’s prayers, along with the ceremony in honor of

Blanquita Juarez, indicate that the coming of the Messiah was conceived
as imminent. Other accounts confirm this belief: there were rumors that
an astrologer had forbidden his son to become a priest, for “the law of
Jesus was to last only a little while longer,” and that, according to another
astrologer, “a change in the law [mudança de leyes] was to take place
before long.”41
Likewise, among the entourage of Simon Vaez Sevilla in particular, it
was announced that the observance of the “law of Jesus” was coming to
an end, and that all men would henceforth obey one law only—”the
ancient written law.” The date of the event was even specified: it was to
take place “in 1642 or 1643.”42 Why this date rather than 1648, the year
that certain Jewish cabalistic traditions in Europe considered to be auspi-
cious for the Judgment and resurrection of the dead?43 Was the Mexican
prediction linked locally to the beginning of the first wave of arrests of
Judaists in New Spain? This was perhaps suggested by the idea, voiced
by Antonio Vaez Casteloblanco (the brother of Simon Vaez Sevilla), that
the Messianic era would be preceded by great misfortunes and that these
tribulations were none other than the Holy Office’s “filling the prisons”
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Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America | 163

with the Judaists of Mexico: “The aforementioned Antonio Vaez Castelo-

blanco said to them that the people of this land had to become like us and
of one single law … and also that before this happened, the prisons of the
Holy Office would be filled with people imprisoned for being observants
of Moses’ law.”44
As a corollary, we note the diffusion of apocalyptic themes, in expec-
tation of the return of Elias and Enoch, and even the knowledge of a
cabalistic symbol (which recurs twenty years later in the movement of
Sabbataï Tsevi):45 when the new era begins, the witness specifies, those
following the “law of Moses” will have to dress in red, the color of Judg-
ment. These indications are supplied by Margarita de Rivera, a believer
who was herself uneducated; it is noteworthy that she in turn drew her
information from what she had heard in the house of the same Simon
Vaez Sevilla, whose circle was by all evidence particularly active with re-
spect to Messianic speculation:

That this confessant had said that the law had to be one and that Elias and
Enoch would come and other things of the sort, the truth of the matter is that
six months before this prisoner was arrested, while she was in the drawing
room of Simon Vaez Sevilla’s house one night with Doña Juana Enriquez and
Simon Vaez Sevilla, her husband, and Gaspar Vaez, their son, Juan Mendes
Villaviciossa entered … and Juan Mendes responded that he was glad … that
there should be rejoicing, the law which was observed had to become one sin-
gle law and be the law of Moses, which was the good one, and that those who
observed it then had to dress in red, which pleased all of them very much.46

The problems of Messianic chronology lead us to wonder, in paral-

lel, about a possible connection with the great political event of 1640: the
restoration of Portuguese independence. Such a line was present in the
minds of the Inquisitors, since their aim was to repress the “Great Con-
spiracy.” It seems unlikely that the New Christians of Mexico would
have been involved in any conspiracy against the Spanish crown, but it
is true that they were connected with a vast international network and
that they maintained business relations with the enemies of Spain. Fur-
ther still, numerous accounts attest to their loyalty toward the Lusitanian
crown, and it is therefore not surprising that they also participated in
another major Messianic movement, a specifically Portuguese one
known as Sebastianism. This involvement is confirmed by certain com-
mentaries on the political events of their home country in which one
encounters not only the old medieval idea of the decline and fall of
Spain, but also the notion (proper to Sebastianism) of the glorious des-
tiny of the king of Portugal who was to be called upon to reign over the
whole world until the end of time. It is advisable to distinguish between
Portuguese and Jewish messianism, but a certain interconnection or
“interference” between the two perspectives can be clearly discerned
among the Judaists in Mexico. Such interferences can be found, for exam-
ple, in the conversations between Maria de Campos and Francisco de
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164 | Nathan Wachtel

Léon, which clearly associate the restoration of the Lusitanian kingdom

with the redemption of the Jewish people, or at least the beginning of
their redemption, since the king of Portugal would then, they hoped,
protect them from persecution by the Inquisition, deliver them from their
present captivity, and even avenge them.

And that Spain was coming to an end, and was very wretched and that it
would never hold up its head again, and Maria said to him, “This news
makes me very happy, and tell me, how are Portugal and our kind faring?”
And the man replied, “Very vigorous and much fortified, with many people
and he will be the one who will rule until the end of time,” and Maria said to
him, “God save our King and Lord and keep him many years in his king-
dom, and not that King of Spain who is without a rightful title, possessing
that which was not his, each should enjoy that which corresponds to him,
and be it that Ours is forever and becomes the ruler of all, and wins this and
destroys this house, and that we all see ourselves freed from the power of
these wicked people, and that our injuries be avenged, and that we be taken
out of this captivity.47

Other commentaries, in analogous fashion, explicitly connect the “change

of law,” the Lusitanian restoration, and the suppression of the Inquisition,
which had supposedly come to an end in Portugal (as in Granada as
well).48 It is probably not a question of syncretism strictly speaking, but if
Jewish messianism and Portuguese messianism did not fully merge, they
did give rise to hybrid forms by mixing at least partially, overlapping and
intertwining in such a way as to give marrano religiosity some of its spe-
cific traits.

* * * *

I HAVE PLACED PARTICULAR EMPHASIS on the syncretic aspects of mar-

ranism in order to show one of its essential characteristics, which distin-
guishes it from crypto-Judaism per se. Of course, marrano religiosity, in
its diversity and complexity, cannot simply be reduced to these intersec-
tions or interpretations: it encompasses all the possible cases, including
that of authentic Judaism, but also attitudes of doubt and hesitation, and
finally the processes of separation from both the “law of Moses” and the
“law of Jesus.” This last aspect, which is also specific to marranism, is
what I would like to emphasize in my conclusion, for it too results from
the tension between two religions: the vacillations and variations, the
dual sincerities, are a way of reckoning with polemical arguments that
stand in opposition to each other, such that their reciprocal neutralization
may lead, if not necessarily to disbelief and to skepticism, at least to a cer-
tain religious relativism. Along these lines, it can be argued that the New
Christians contributed considerably to the emergence of modernity in the
Western Hemisphere, not only in the economic arena, but also in that of
religious and intellectual history.
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Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America | 165

Let us consider once again the case of Francisco Botello, who died at
the stake in 1659 and whom the chronicler of the auto-da-fé described as
“the most hardened Jew of all those who were punished by the Holy
Office over the centuries.”49 When he wished to affirm his adherence to
the “law of Moses,” he did so using aphorisms that do not refer exclu-
sively to belief in the God of Israel: “let each man be what he is;
whomever I follow, I follow; whomever I belong to, I belong to”;50 or
again: “let each man keep what comes to him”;51 “whatever one is, one
must die as one is.”52 The identity thus claimed is received by birth, and
it includes a collective dimension: the individual is defined in relation to
the group into which he is born, to which he is bound in solidarity, and
from which he receives a heritage that must be “preserved and hon-
ored.”53 Now this conception of identity applies to all human groups:
taken generally, it legitimates all faiths (Jewish faith for Jews, Christian-
ity for Christians) so that ultimately all religions are equal. In fact, at the
very moment when Francisco Botello was expressing regret that his Old
Christian wife, Maria de Zarate, observed another law, he praised her
with this surprising statement: “and if everything that she did in her law,
she did in our own, she would be a saint and would be canonized.”54 This
husband and wife most likely had occasion to discuss their respective
beliefs, and they seem to have agreed upon a sort of parallelism: let each
one follow the law of the community to which he or she belonged.
Indeed, Maria de Zarate (not only an Old Christian, but born to a family
that took pride in being related to Juan Martinez Siliceo, the famous
Archbishop of Toledo) gave voice to a sentiment in tune with the one her
husband had expressed: “Let each one follow the law he chooses … God
the Father is not angry with those who serve God the Son, nor is God the
Son angry with those who serve God the Father.”55 In the case of Maria
de Zarate, the idea of reciprocal tolerance goes so far as to include a
defense of “free choice” in religious matters.56
This relativism took a more radical form forty years later when Fer-
nando de Medina voiced his belief that “men can find their salvation in all
laws and all sects,”57 even as he drifted into a materialism that was at least
agnostic. The term “salvation” is not to be understood here in its religious
meaning, since, as we have seen, the author of these universalist views
does not believe in the immortality of the soul: it is the futility of being
concerned with one’s destiny in an afterlife that makes all religions equal
in his view, and that means justice can only be immanent, thanks to insti-
tuted laws. But while ritual practices and the properly religious content of
Judaism were blurred, Fernando de Medina’s sense of identity was
accompanied by an even more vital idea of “nation,” which was thereby
secularized, rooted in collective memory, implying only moral obligations:
loyalty to ancestors, solidarity with members of the marrano diaspora,
and reverence for the “natural name that was given us at birth,”58 that is,
the Jewish name conferred by a history conceived as nature. When belief
in God disappears, religious faith becomes faith in memory.
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Notes

Translated from the French by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Spanish quotations translated by
Carrie Chorba.

1. The term “marrano” has therefore a much wider connotation than crypto-Judaism in
the strict sense of the word.
2. I focus my attention on the New Christians of New Spain in the first half of the seven-
teenth century mainly because the series of Inquisition trials in the Mexican archives
(especially those produced by the repression of the “Great Conspiracy”) are extraordi-
narily rich in evidence. From time to time, however, to supplement the picture, I shall
stray outside this main period and geographic area (cf. below, the example of Manuel
Bautista Perez in Peru).
3. It is true that when the accused alluded to their hesitation regarding the two “laws,”
this was on many occasions part of their defense strategy. Nevertheless, the terms they
use and the context entitle us to give credence to their statements. For example, in the
Archivo General de la Nación de México (hereafter AGN), Inquisición, Trial of Antonio
de Caravallo, vol. 406, fol. 272r: “aunque conocía que la ley de Moysen era contraria a
la de nuestro Señor Jesu Christo nunca la ha dejado sino que sin distincion las guard-
aba entrambos.” Similarly, further on, fol. 276r: “a seguido la ley de Moysen y la de nro
Señor Jesu Christo teniendolas emtrambas por buenas para la saluación de su alma.”
And again, the statement of Isabel Tinoco (aged 16), vol. 395, fol. 237r: “pero que ni en
ella [la ley de Moysen] ni en la de nro Señor Jesu Christo hauía estado firmamente
asentada, porque le faltaba la razon y el discurso, viviendo entre dos aguas.”
4. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Ruy Diaz Nieto, vol. 157, exp. 1 (unpaginated): “y un dia en
presencia de las dhas doña Mariana y doña Anna estando la dha doña Mariana loca
riño mucho el dho Antonio Diaz a la dha doña Catalina porque hacia ayunar a esta los
dias grandes del Señor y mando a esta que se vistiesse diziendole levantate mala hem-
bra de mala casta que no volveras más a esta cassa y a esta la vistió Ysabelica china ya
difunta y se fue con el dho su padre ya a la esquina de la calle dixo esta al dho Anto-
nio Diaz Señor padre a donde me lleva V. Md para que yo ande llorando en cassas aje-
nas y el dho Antonio Diaz le respondió calla buena pieça de mala casta que a cassa de
Machado te llevo sin sauer esta quien fuesse el dho y esta lloró y al dho Antonio Diaz
se le saltaron las lagrimas quando oyó a esta que dixo que para que la llevaba para que
anduuiesse, llorando en cassas ajenas y la volvió a cassa de la dha su madre diciendole
anda mala casta agradesçe a Dios lo que me aveis dho que por eso os lleuo con aque-
lla mala hembra y dexando a esta en la puerta se fue a sus negoçios el dho Antonio
Diaz su padre de esta.”
5. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Antonio Fernandez Cardado, vol. 378, exp. 1, fol. 176r: “Los
dhos Talaveras sus primos comunicaron a este confesante de que la ley de Jesu Christo
no era la buena y que no avía más que un dios a quien se avía de adorar, y que el
mesias no avía venido, ni Jesus Cristo lo era, aunque dixeron que auía espiritu santo,
el qual hablabla por boca de los profetas y patriarchas de la ley antigua.”
6. Ibid., fol. 305v: “Rogamos a ti mismo que ayas misericordia de nos y de las animas de
nuestros difuntos parientes y amigos, y plegate Señor de las sacar de las penas en que
estan y llevarlas a tu Santo Reyno Amen Jesus.”
7. Ibid., fol. 180v: “y que esta oración como la a referido la decía los más dias asta que tuuo
noticia y le enseñaron la ley de Moysen y la creyó que despues aunque la dezía quitaba
la palabra (Amen Jesus) porque le parescía que en toto lo demas hablaba con el Señor y
su yntención era de hablar con el como observante de la ley de Moysen y aunque algu-
nas vezes pronunciaua el Amen Jesus como la auía aprendido su yntención no era sino
dezirlo como los observantes de la dicha ley de Moysen.” Similarly, fols. 305r–305v.
8. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Micaela Enriquez, vol. 397, fol. 266v: “y hiço el pan cenceno
que era unas torticas de arina … Dandole un pedaçito de una de ellas no consintiendo
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Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America | 167

que la dha Micaela Enriquez la tomase en la mano sino que la misma dha su madre se
la daba en la boca como cuando comulgan los cristianos diciendole çiertas palabras en
remedio de la comunión de la santa iglesia catolica, que dan los sacerdotes de ella.” Cf.
also the trial of Rafaela Enriquez, vol. 402, fol. 128v (testimony of Pedro Tinoco): “un
bocado de aquel pan … y la dha su abuela se lo dió a este confesante con su propia
mano poniendoselo en la boca como quando se da la comunion a los cristianos.”
9. The bulk of the Inquisitorial archives of the Lima tribunal have unfortunately disap-
peared, but by good luck the proceedings of the trial of Manuel Bautista Perez were
sent to the Supreme Council in Madrid. They are catalogued in the Archivo Histórico
Nacional (hereafter AHN) in bundle 1647, n°13. The document, 457 folios in length, is
almost complete.
10. Cf. Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, 1974),
61ff, and tables and graphs in Appendix B, 342–45.
11. Cf. Gonçalo de Reparaz, Os Portugueses no Vice-Reinado do Peru (Seculos XVI y XVII)
(Lisbon, 1976), 105–9. Pedro Guibovich Perez has analyzed the library of Manuel
Bautista Perez in “La cultura libresca de un converso procesado por la Inquisición de
Lima,” Historia y Cultura. Revista del Museo Nacional de Historia (Lima, 1990), 133–60.
12. Ibid.
13. AHN, Inquisición, leg. 1647, n°13, fol. 104.
14. Ibid., n°16, for instance, fol. 60v: “que nunca comían el quarto trasero de ningun gen-
ero de carne … la carne que comian la echavan a desangrar el día antes.”
15. Ibid., n°13, fols. 197r–197v, testimony of Amaro Dionis: “todo quanto savían de la ley
de Moysen era por mayor porque las ceremonias de los judíos aca no se sauían porque
nuna avía visto persona que supiere más que ayunar martes y viernes.”
16. Cf. Jacques Le Goff, La Naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981).
17. AGN, Inquisión, Trial of Francisco Botello, vol. 457, fols. 525r-–526v: “y afirmaba el dho
francisco botello que no avía purgatorio porque los que morían iban a un campo que
entiende se llama campo eliseo y que alli estaban hasta que viniese el mesias para ir al
cielo; y quando oía decir de alguno que avía muerto y que confiaba en dios que estava
en el çielo se reía el dho francisco botello porque decía que no avía llegado el tiempo
de abrirse las puertas del çielo; y que asi no podían yr al çielo aunque no fuesen chris-
tianos porque todos los christianos se yban al infierno por ser ydolattras en adorar las
imagenes de Jesu Christo y de los sanctos echas de palo.”
18. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Margarita de Rivera, vol. 408, exp. 1, fol. 342v: “es cosa con-
stante entre los observantes que las almas de los difuntos que lo son estan año y día
padeciendo penas que Dios nuestro Señor se sirbe de darlas … y que assi los ayunos que
dejan mandados se hagan por sus almas precisamente se an de hacer antes del año y día
porque aprovechen a salir de aquellas penas, y que despues del año y día no sirben.”
19. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Antonio Vaez Casteloblanco, vol. 413, fols. 131v–132r: “y que
dixo a este confesante tratando de las cosas de la ley de Moysen … que ninguno de los
que guardavan se condenaba ni tampoco los christianos porque no havía ynfierno y
que los christianos eran como las bestias sin entendimiento.”
20. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Fernando de Medina, vol. 681, fol. 106r: “no savía si havía
Dios o no.”
21. Ibid., fol. 106v: “que saluación de anima, porque la alma era espiritu y muriendo el
cuerpo se acauaua y moría el espiritu que era lo que el entendía por alma.”
22. Ibid., fol. 106bis r: “y que entendía que no hauía más que el presente ni mas pecado
que hazer daño al proximo el cual pecado se hauía de castigar en esta vida pues no
auía otra y premiar en ella al bueno los jueces y superiores que ay en el mundo y gob-
iernan la republica.”
23. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Fernando de Medina, vol. 704, fol. 336r, fol. 367v.
24. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Margarita de Rivera, vol. 394, exp. 2, fols. 370r–370v.
25. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Ruy Diaz Nieto, vol. 157, exp. 1 (unpaginated): “y si tenían
ymagenes de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción y de la Piedad y de otros santos en la
sala de Santiago por cumplimiento porque los tenían por idolos y quando rezaban los
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168 | Nathan Wachtel

bolvían las espaldas y vío esta a los dhos Luis de Carvajal doña Catalina su madre de
esta doña francisca su abuela doña ysabel su tía escupir a la dhas ymagenes diziendo
no se para que tenemos estos idolos.”
26. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Margarita de Rivera, vol. 394, exp. 2, fols. 285r–286v, 451r–452v.
27. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Isabel Nuñez, vol. 401, exp. 1, fol. 17v.
28. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Jorge Duarte, vol. 431, exp. 4, fols. 106r–106v: “dixo que
conoce muy bien abra mas de diez años a los dhos Duarte de León e Ysabel Nuñez su
mujer y a sus hijas Clara Antonia y Ana y a sus hijos Francisco y Simon que todos han
salido penitenciados con san benito y a Jorge que es el más pequeño … porque vivían
pared años en la calle de la Azequia Real y de ordinario esta declarante y sus her-
manas Francisca y Patronila tenían amistad con todos los dhos hijos y hijas del dho
Duarte de León como muchachos que e criaban juntos y se acuerda que abra diez años
dhos poco más o menos que el dho Jorge alló a esta declarante en la puerta de la calle
de la tienda donde su padre Juan de Vilches vende la nieve por tener el estanco della
y la dixo estando parada a la puerta y solos dame un pedacito de nieve y te diré una
cossa y esta declarante le dixo no te e de dar la nieve hasta que me lo digas y entonces
le dixo el dho Jorge que el dho su padre Duarte de León açotaba a un Santo Christo
de noche en el aposento donde dormía con una disciplina de alambres … y sin pre-
guntarle más esta declarante ni decirle otra cossa el dho Jorge le dio el pedaçito de
nieve que le havía pedido.”
29. Cf. Solange Alberro, Inquisition et société au Mexique (1571–1700) (Mexico, 1988), 213.
30. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Juan Pacheco de León, vol. 400, exp. 2, fols. 705r–705v: “y
aunque es verdad que no creía en nuestro Señor Jesu Christo y tenía a las imagenes por
palos y pinturas, nunca ha blasfemado de Jesu Christo nuestro Señor, ni de la Virgen
Santíssima, ni de los santos del cielo, porque alla en su tierra solo cuidan de enseñar la
ley vieja y en guardar sus preceptos haciendo sus ritos y ceremonias esperando el
Mesias, pero no se meten con Jesu Christo nuestro Señor, que los judíos que azotan
Cristos y hazen otros delitos de esta calidad serían aca y viven como catolicos, porque
son los peores, y en yendo a vivir en esas tierras son los mas desaforados y los tienen
los otros judíos por gente de poca importancia.” This trial has been published by
Boleslao Lewin as Singular Proceso de Salomon Machorro (Juan de León), Israelita Liornes
condenado por la Inquisición (México, 1650) (Buenos Aires, 1977). For the passage quoted,
cf. also, Solange Alberro, Inquisition, 213.
31. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Francisco Botello, vol. 403, exp. 1, fols. 262r–263r.
32. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Pedro de Espinoza, vol. 403, exp. 1, fols. 159v–160r: “tenía en
un guardamesi pintado al Sancto Moysen … con vestiduras judaïcas y unos rayos a
manera de cuernos en la cabeça con las tablas de la ley en las manos.”
33. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Juana Enriquez, vol. 400, exp. 1, fols. 88r–88v.
34. AGN, Inquisición, vol. 398, exp; 1, Trial of Simon Vaez Sevilla: “y que el dho Simon Vaez
era judío tan cauteloso y recatado que cuando en compania de su mujer Juana
Enriquez había de hacer los ayunos de la ley de Moysen … fingían alguna riña, o enojo,
con que se retiraba a su escritorio el dho Simon Vaez para que los criados atribuyesen
el no comer a los enojos fingidos siendo verdaderos ayunos.”
35. AGN, Inquisición, “Diez cuardernos de comunicaciones de carceles,” vol. 423, exp. 3,
fol. 130r: “aquel día y en otras muchas ocaciones quando hacíamos el Cro le decía
Tremiño a mi madre que le parecía una imagen linda y trasparente y lo que su suegra
le respondió fue hijo si agora me muriera me iba derecho al Cielo porque quando hago
esto me parece que estoy en la gloria.”
36. The ambiguity of the term Cro is suggested in numerous instances. Here are a few
examples taken from the accounts of Leonor Vaez in AGN, Inquisición, “Diez cuader-
nos de comunicaciones de carceles,” vol. 423, exp. 3. Regarding the love affair between
her sister Maria Gomez and Melchor Rodriquez Lopez: “tambien en mi cassa se vieron
muchas veçes y se goçaron Melchor Rodriguez y mi hermana Maria y alli hiçimos el
Cro dos o tres veçes y todos los días me vía y me socorría con lo que podía y yo le decía
oy es buen día,” fol. 187r. And again, on the same subject: “que Melchor Rodriguez una
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Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America | 169

vez que el supo que tremiño auía ydo a la tierra adentro fue a mi cassa y me dixo por
vida tuia que me has de hacer un favor … y que el dho Melchor Rodriguez le dixo que
le ruegues a tu hermana Maria supuesto que no esta aqui su marido que se vaya a mi
cassa y tu con ella por ocho o quince dias … y que fueron en casa de Melchor
Rodriguez y que estuvieron alla muchos días y que las regaló mucho y que hicieron el
Cro más de doçe veces y que todas la veces que hacían el Cro se bañauan y limpiauan
y ponían ropa limpia de Melchor Rodriguez porque no inbiaramos por ropa y lo hiçi-
mos como se debe haçer y mi madre y yo y Maria y Melchor Rodriguez y un amigo
suyo de España llamado Sebastian Riveros muy a puerta cerrada y nos regaló mucho
y nos holgamos de todas maneras porque de día hacíamos el Cro y de noche dormía
Maria con Melchor Rodriguez y yo con el Sebastian Riveros que era muy lindo moço
y no emos tenido mejores dias,” fols. 244r–244v. The term Cro can be said to have a nar-
row sense (fasting exclusively) and a broader sense, as another episode involving
Isabel de Caravallo and Pedro de Guevara shows: “y que guebara enamoró a la coxa
mujer de caravallo y que ella le dixo a guevara que se dexase deso que estaba muy bien
ocupada con amigo suyo ero si quería amistad con ella y con su marido o padre y
madre para declararse con ellos par hacer el Cro que eso si, que tendría entrada en su
cassa el y su compañero Amesquita y todo regalo para el Cro y no para otra cosa,” fol.
192r. Pedro de Guevara appears to be just as unsuccessful with the narrator Leonor: “y
luego gueuara enamoró a mi y le dixe que no se cansase que yo era muger honrrada
que en cuanto el Cro cuanto el quisiera y lo hiçe muchas veçes con el,” fol. 192r.
37. This belief peculiar to Judaizers in New Spain was not confined to the Enriquez fam-
ily alone (i.e., the entourage of Simon Vaez Sevilla); it was also widespread in many
other circles. It has, for instance, been detected in the “dogmatist” Leonor Nuñez
(mother-in-law to the famous Tomas Treviño de Sobremonte); cf. AGN, Inquisición,
Trial of Leonor Nuñez, vol. 379, fol. 233r: “que Duarte de León, Isabel la de Luis Perez
y Leonor su madre se enserraban en el almaçen del dho Duarte de León. Y que la dha
Leonor Nuñez dixo a uno de los hijos, que nombró, del dho Duarte de León, que esta-
ban esperando su Messias que hauía de nacer de uno de ellos.”
38. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Juana Enriquez, vol. 400, exp. 1, fols. 88r–88v: “la dicha dona
Juana, que avía ido a San Francisco a reçar a San Antonio, y que de vuelta avía de venir
a reçar a Moysen para que la diese buen parto, y que antes de parir avía de yr nueve
dias, que suelen andar las preñadas a visitar al dicho Moysen, y reçarle, y que le avía
dado a coser unas camisitas para el heredero que avía de nacer que era el Mesias, y lo
avían de criar a su usança, y que a la dha persona la avían de respetar como a Matriz.”
39. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Blanca Juarez, vol. 487, fol. 437r: “que quando doña Rafaela
Enriquez vivía frontero de San Lorenzo hauía hecho una tarde una merienda y fiesta
en que se hauían hallado todas la mugeres de su parentela sin níngun hombre y que
para celebrar la dha fiesta se hauían bañado primero todas y se hauían limpiado muy
bien, y luego ayunaron muy a su gusto sin que lo supiera nadie de fuera, y que a la
dha Blanca Xuarez la desnudaron, y pusieron muy limpia y muy aseada y la
vistieron una bestimenta blanca muy linda, y la sentaron en medio del estrado muy
adereçada y se pusieron todas en oración asegurando que desta judía havia de nacer
el Mesias, y en especial la dogmatisadora de su abuela que decía que se lo avía rev-
elado el angel.”
40. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Rafaela Enriquez, vol. 402, fol. 270r: “que ella desnudada en
carnes a su hija Blanca y poniendola una tunica blanca puesta en un altar la adoraban.”
41. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Pedro de Espinoza, vol. 403, fol. 73r (statement of Violante
Juarez dated 27 November 1642: “Y que un mes antes que la prendieron oío decir a
Manuel de Mella su marido que hablando con Pedro de Espinoza que hauía llegado a
aquella ciudad … que un astrologo desta çiudad no hauía querido que un hijo suyo se
ordenase porque hauía de durar poco la ley de Jesu Christo y que un veçino desta çiu-
dad llamado fulano de la Calua … le hauía dicho al dho Manuel de Mella que otro
astrologo tenía un repertorio … en el qual preuiene que muy en breue a de tener
mudança de leyes.”
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42. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Margarita de Rivera, vol. 394, fol. 373r: “y que se esperaua el
Messias prometido en la ley, y que su venida auía de ser por el año passado de mil sei-
scientos y quarenta y dos, o quarenta y tres, con que se acabaría la ley de nro Señor Jesu
Christo y sería una sola ley antigua escrita.”
43. Cf. Gershom Sholem, Sabbataï Tsevi. Le Messie mystique, 1626–1676 (Paris, 1983), 99ff.
44. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Antonio Vaez Casteloblanco, vol. 489, fol. 314r: “el dicho Anto-
nio Vaez Casteloblanco les dezía que toda la gente de esta tierra había de venir a ser
como nosotros y de una ley … y que asimismo dixo que primero que esto se cumpliese
se hauían de llenar las carceles deste Santo Oficio de gente pressa por observantes de la
dha ley de Moysen.” Cf. also the Trial of Margarita de Rivera, vol. 394, fol. 415r.
45. Cf. Sholem, Sabbataï Tsevi, 599–600.
46. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Margarita de Rivera, vol. 408, fols. 316r–316v: “que esta con-
fesante auía dicho que la ley auía de ser una y que auía de venir elias y enoch y otras
cossas de esta traza, y la verdad de esto es que seis messes antes que esta rea fuese
pressa, estando en casa de Simon Vaez Sevilla una noche en la sala del estrado junta-
mente con doña Juana Enriquez y el dho Simon Vaez Sevilla su marido y Gaspar Vaez
si hijo, aserttó a entrar Juan Mendes Villaviciossa … y el dho Juan Mendes respondió
que se holgaba … para el rregusijo que havían de tener pues la ley que se guardaba
havía de ser presto toda una y la de moysen que era la buena y se havían de vestir
entonces todos de colorado los que la guardauan de lo qual se alegraron todos mucho.”
47. AGN, Inquisición (Riva Palacio), Trial of Maria de Campos, vol. 23, exp. 2, fols. 2r–2v:
“que España se iba acabando y estaba muy desdichada y que no alzaría cabesa en su
vida, y Maria le dijo mucho me huelgo con esa buena nueba y dime Portugal y nuestro
Rey en que alturas se hallan? Y el hombre le respondió, muy pujante, y muy fortaleçido
y con mucha gente y sera Rey de acqui a que se acabe el mundo y Maria le dixo Dios
aiude a nro Rey y Señor, y lo conserve muchos años en su Reino, y no que estaba el de
España con mal titulo poseiendo lo que no era suyo, cada uno goze lo que le toque, y
el Nuestro sera para siempre y venga a ser Rey de todo, y gane esto y asuele esta cassa,
y nos veamos todos libres y fuera del poder de esta mal gente, y vengue nuestros
agravios y nos saque de este captiverio.”
48. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Pedro de Espinoza, vol. 403, fol. 73r (testimony of Violante
Juarez): “y de lo demas que les oió en aquella ocasion çerca de que ya no hauía Inquisi-
ción en Portugal y Granada.”
49. Cf. Jose Toribio Medina, Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en México
[1905] (Mexico, 1987), 309: “Francisco Botello el más endurecido judío de cuantos en
muchos siglos se habran visto castigados por el Santo Oficio, sin ser posible con el que
nombrase a Jesus ni a la Virgen Santíssima su madre, se dejo abrasar vivo.”
50. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Francisco Botello, vol. 457. These statements are taken from
the “confidences” exchanged between Francisco Botello and Juan Pacheco de Léon
while in prison. These “confidences” have been published by Boleslao Lewin, Confi-
dencias de dos cripto-judios en las carceles del Santo Oficio (México, 1645–1646) (Buenos
Aires, 1975). Cf. here, page 65: “eso si, estar cada uno lo que es y con quien vengo,
vengo; y cuyo soy, soy”; similarly, page 121: “eso si es lo que importa, y con quien
vengo, vengo, y cuyo soy, soy.”
51. Ibid., 139: “hacía muy bien como bueno y como quien es, guarde cada uno aquello que
le toca me parece muy bien.”
52. Ibid., 150: “ya que lo son mueren como son.”
53. Ibid.: “cada uno se precie de quien es y de lo que guarda.”
54. Ibid., 174: “que estaba con una mujer muy caritavia y limosnera, que hacía todo el bien
que podía, y muy observante de su ley de ella (que es la de los cristianos) … y si lo que
ella hace de su ley lo hiciera de la nuestra fuera una santa y estuviera canonizada.”
55. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Maria de Zarate, vol. 1500. The trial has been published by
Boleslao Lewin as La Inquisición en México. Racismo inquisitorial (El singular caso de Maria
de Zarate) (Puebla, 1971). Cf. page 61: “y que no se enojaba Dios padre que sirviesen los
hombres a Dios hijo, ni tampoco se enojaba Dios hijo de que sirviesen al Padre.”
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Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America | 171

56. Ibid., 61: “que Dios no quería que se forzase el libre albedrio del hombre sino que sigu-
iese la ley que quisiese.” To Francisco Botello’s aphorism cited earlier, we can add the
following remark: “[los cristianos] adoran sus cosas como nosotros las nuestras”
(Lewin, Confidencias de dos criptojudios, 95).
57. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Fernando de Medina, vol. 704, fol. 367v: “dijo que en todas
leyes y sectas se podían salvar los hombres.”
58. AGN, Inquisición, Trial of Fernando de Medina, vol. 681, fol. 108v: “que es ley que entre
nos esta que la llamamos de unome [sic], el señalado de nuestras antiguedades y del
tiempo presente por mantenedor de la casa con nombre natural de nacimiento, el qual
se hace mención diaramente y se venera sobre todos los demas.”
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– Chapter 8 –

CRYPTO-JEWS AND THE

MEXICAN HOLY OFFICE IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Solange Alberro

Antecedents and the Original Alternative

A LTHOUGH CONVERSOS secretly practicing Judaism began arriving at

the very beginning of the conquest and colonization of what would
soon be called New Spain, their presence—if not massive, at least estab-
lished—was not registered until the 1580s. The union of the Castilian and
Portuguese crowns between 1580 and 1640 made the passage to America
possible for families that, after the expulsion from Spain decreed by the
Catholic monarchs in January 1492, had taken refuge in Portugal, a king-
dom initially more tolerant toward Jews. From 1496 onward, however, a
repression even more severe than that which had preceded and accompa-
nied their expulsion from Spain was unleashed upon the conversos of Por-
tugal. Families that were able to fled once again. They sought refuge in
some of the cities of southwestern France, in England, in the Low Coun-
tries, in some German ports, and, not long after, in the cities of northern
Italy, not to mention in countries of the Middle East and of the Maghreb.
Nonetheless, many stayed in Portugal, learning to live through and sur-
vive clandestine situations made extremely difficult by the Portuguese
Holy Office, which acted against them with relentless harshness. These
were the families and individuals who took advantage of the politically
favorable conditions afforded by the union of the two crowns in 1580 to
return to Castile, from where their ancestors had fled a century before.
Many headed for Seville, where they frequently re-encountered close
and distant relatives and acquaintances, and where some had also lived for
varying amounts of time. Although some chose to settle in the great
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 173

Andalusian port (which, because of its intense and monopolistic trans-

oceanic relations, afforded many commercial and artisanal opportunities
to the newly arrived), others awaited the possibility of emigrating to
America. Despite their generally Castilian origins, in Seville they were
considered “Portuguese” for having lived for a century in the Lusitanian
kingdom, whose language they had adopted. For these conversos, New
Spain, with its economic boom, was one of the most attractive destinations.
It is well known that in the fateful winter of 1492, a pressing dilemma
was imposed upon the Jews of Castile: receive baptism or go into perma-
nent exile from the land where, for centuries, they had lived and often
prospered. Tens of thousands, placing loyalty to their religion above all
other considerations, accepted the second alternative. But why did oth-
ers, perhaps in as great a number as the first, decide to stay in Spain? Of
those who stayed, an undetermined number—perhaps in despair from
the persecutions suffered because of their Jewish faith in the previous
century—accepted baptism and became New Christians, hoping to
escape persecution and discrimination forever by assimilating defini-
tively into the Christian majority. This assimilation would never be com-
plete, since for generations thereafter the stigma, the suspicions, and the
restrictions on holding office or receiving distinctions would weigh on
converso descendants. Alternatively, others, in numbers also impossible to
estimate, received baptism simply as a strategy for continuing to practice
Judaism clandestinely. These individuals—since we cannot speak here of
whole families—are the ones that make us ask: How could they believe
that they could escape popular and inquisitorial vigilance—which we
will soon see was one and the same—so as to continue practicing with
impunity the necessary Jewish rites? How could they hope to preserve
their ancestral religion without the help of rabbinical authorities and the
traditional formative experiences?
Such crypto-Judaism and the questions it raises appeared in Portugal
a few years later when relentless repression was waged on overt Judaism,
and again in the last decades of the sixteenth century when whole families
and isolated individuals opted to cross the ocean and try their luck in Peru
or New Spain. In effect, the Jews who remained practicing Jews despite
their baptism—first in Castile, then in Portugal, and finally in New Spain
and all of the Spanish Empire—knew well that they would always be sub-
ject to Inquisitorial persecution. This persecution was especially fearsome
because they would then be dealt with as relapsos. Why not choose, in
1492, in 1496, or at the end of the seventeenth century, to relocate to a
country or city where the possibility existed of openly being Jewish?

America: Reasons for the Choice

To answer this question, it is necessary first to look at a cultural consid-

eration never explicitly mentioned by the people concerned—since they
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174 | Solange Alberro

would not have been conscious of it—but that permeated their way of liv-
ing and being. Our conversos were Mediterranean; more specifically, they
were Iberian, since the adjective “Spanish” still lacked meaning at that
time. They were accustomed to a way of life and of conviviality that
included habits of all kinds: social, familial, and personal, including such
matters as love relations, taste in clothing and jewelry, celebrations, types
of cooking, values such as “honor,” and more generally, we may surmise,
extroverted behavior characterized by informality and warmth. Al-
though they never specifically mentioned this, it is probable that these
crypto-Jews preferred to preserve what we today call their culture—their
Spanish and/or Portuguese culture, the drinking of wine and the singing
of verses of Lope de Vega accompanied by a guitar—to greater security
in a different environment. It was always the case that one of the twenty-
some tribunals of the Holy Office was stalking the crypto-Jews of the
kingdoms that depended upon the Castilian and Portuguese crowns.1
These Jews were, nonetheless, in their natural and traditional medium
where they were more likely to recognize the threats, delude the author-
ities, and even beat the dangers that they had learned to evade since at
least the fourteenth century.
At the end of the sixteenth century, there were compelling incentives
for those who embarked in greater numbers in Seville for the remote
American possessions. A major inducement for any Iberian was the pos-
sibility of becoming rich. The entire American continent has always
inspired—up to the present—great dreams among immigrants of all
classes and origins, who hope to try their luck and remake their lives.
New Spain at the end of the sixteenth century, with its Asian dependency
of the Philippine Islands, and Peru in the mid-seventeenth century, with
its silver mines, captured the expectations and imaginations of thousands
of Iberian migrants—among whom were more than a few secret Jews—
who, one way or another, set out toward the sea.
New Spain, with its booming mining industry and noteworthy
expansion toward the north and to the Philippines, was especially attrac-
tive. First, it offered many readily available commercial opportunities.
The capital of the viceroyalty, the big cities like Puebla, and the mining
camps (especially the ones in the north) held a population that was
thirsty for luxury goods and possessed the means to acquire them. Also,
it was tempting, though risky, to look for pearls in the Rio de la Hacha—
on the north coast of present-day Colombia—and for the emeralds of
New Granada, or to acquire the most precious stones, cloths, and com-
modities from Europe and Asia to sell for great profit in New Spain.
The inventories of the great converso merchants who lived in New
Spain in the mid-seventeenth century reveal the extensive commercial
activities they were engaged in. To this mercantile business must be
added the flourishing but horrible trade in Africans—a commerce to
which some of the most prominent members of the Portuguese-Castilian
converso population established in the viceroyalty were dedicated. Those
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 175

who looked for a fortune on American soil that was as quickly made as
it was great pretended, or perhaps actually believed, that after achieving
it, they would live in countries where they could openly practice the reli-
gion of their ancestors. This dream was seldom realized, for as these con-
versos became wealthy, either they continued increasing their estates,
following human nature, or they felt so rooted in New Spain that they no
longer desired to leave. When the persecutions associated with the so-
called “Great Complicity” or “Great Plot” were unleashed in the years
from 1642 to 1649, there were at least a dozen prosperous Jewish mer-
chants and traders who could easily have left the viceroyalty and their
Iberian possessions to live comfortably in countries where they would
not have been disturbed for being Jews.2
On the other hand, American kingdoms like Peru, New Granada, and
New Spain, although subject to tribunals of the Holy Office, offered sin-
gularly more favorable environments than the metropolis for the clan-
destine practice of Judaism. In America, Inquisitorial districts were thinly
administered because of their size, their geographic diversity, and the
weakness of institutional networks in general. The Mexican Holy Office’s
district stretched from New Mexico to Nicaragua, and included even the
remote Philippine Islands. The tribunal itself was composed of three
Inquisitors who never left the capital, unlike their metropolitan counter-
parts who were obligated to periodically visit their districts. Thus, Jews
established in a mining camp or hacienda, or better, those who traveled
from place to place as their commerce dictated, could easily escape any
vigilance. It can even be asserted that only bad luck could reveal their
practices in regard to foods, fasts, prayers, and other observances of their
faith. This was particularly the case in New Spain where the population,
in comparison with that of Spain, generally lacked the religious sophisti-
cation to detect such clandestine activities.
In effect, Spaniards who theoretically had the religious training nec-
essary to notice heterodox religious behavior or statements were always
a minority in New Spain. What is more, these Spaniards were often iso-
lated, especially in the mining camps and outlying regions. They did not
necessarily always collaborate wholeheartedly with civil and religious
authorities, who were not always present. Hence, it was ordinarily only
in the cities that conditions existed to sustain and carry out the vigilance
and denunciations of the Inquisition.
Aside from these few peninsular Spaniards, much of the population
consisted of the castas3 and the indigenous masses whose Christianiza-
tion and consequent Westernization were as recent as they were superfi-
cial. These majority sectors of the population were largely incapable of
discerning heterodox behavior. When they denounced what looked to
them like heresy, it was done with an ulterior motive—as was the case
with slaves, who turned in their masters for reasons as varied as they
were obvious—or the denunciation was without foundation. In effect, the
general population of New Spain could not collaborate effectively with
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176 | Solange Alberro

the Inquisitorial apparatus, in contrast to the Old Christians of the Iber-

ian Peninsula—a circumstance obviously very favorable to crypto-Jews.
The immensity of the territory, the weakness of institutional networks,
especially of the Inquisition, and the consequent lack of effective control
have been noted. Moreover, it was always feasible, when imminent dan-
ger was suspected, to make oneself “absent” (ausentarse was the term pre-
ferred at the time), that is, to hide in a remote region, or even another
American or Asian country, and take refuge in a new identity. The many
proceedings “in absentia” conducted by the Mexican Holy Office against
Jews testify plainly to this device. Although some of these proceedings
refer to individuals who had died before the time of the trial, others con-
cerned people who were quite healthy but had left the viceroyalty, either
for business reasons or because they fled when they sensed danger.

The Coexistence of Jews and the Inquisition in New Spain

Surviving under the Inquisitorial gaze meant above all else escaping the
curiosity and vigilance of the others: the Old Christians, the mass of cas-
tas, and the indigenous population. Like its Iberian counterparts, the
sleepy and simple colonial tribunal could not function without denunci-
ations by good Christians; denunciations were the raw material indis-
pensable to any further proceedings capable of resulting in a trial.
Meanwhile, backed by their lengthy experience in Spain and Portugal,
the crypto-Jews who had settled in the viceroyalty practiced all manner
of precautions and deployed a vast quantity of subterfuges to parallel the
behavior of others—to appear to be obedient and even conformist Chris-
tians. In an ancien régime society, and moreover one with a Mediter-
ranean culture, appearances were fundamental, prevailing over any
other distinctions.
It is difficult to create even a preliminary list of the various wiles by
which the conversos of New Spain managed to deflect the outsider’s
scrutiny. The very diversity of the situations and of the psychological
mechanisms employed contributes to this difficulty. Nonetheless, we can
establish a clear distinction first between men and women, and second
between rich and poor. Men, for example, especially if they were wealthy,
participated in the full socioeconomic life of the viceroyalty. Often
engaged in business away from home, they had constantly to deal with
Christians and found themselves frequently obligated to share their
habits—foods, religious practices, social customs—and perhaps develop
personal friendships with them that would be impossible to avoid in His-
panic culture. Thus, a renowned merchant might drink chocolate with a
religious dignitary even while he should be fasting according to the Jew-
ish calendar. He could be a member of an exclusive Catholic brotherhood
with the aim of maintaining necessary social relations, and would not
avoid inviting Christians to a wedding celebrated within the family.4
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 177

Conversely, women, especially poor women, enjoyed wide freedom

of action by remaining at home. Even though the stereotype of the Span-
ish woman rigorously cloistered in her home was far from the reality in
the American viceroyalties, it is a fact that Jewish women essentially
functioned in the family and domestic sphere, unlike their husbands,
brothers, and sons. This was the case even among those who saw them-
selves obligated to undertake some kind of remunerative activity because
they had been abandoned or left destitute. The Rivera family, for exam-
ple, composed of a mother and four daughters, supported themselves at
home through small-scale artisanal work. Women in general—and the
poor in particular—tended to be less restrained and cautious in Jewish
religious practices than men because their actions were not as exposed to
the outsider’s gaze.5
To appear to be good Christians, it was essential to comply with the
strictest and most public Catholic obligations: baptism, mass, confession,
taking communion on Easter, and extreme unction. Moreover, it was
helpful for one’s image to participate in Holy Week processions, to carry
a rosary, to have one or another religious paintings and a crucifix in the
home, and to remember to utter the appropriate sacred formulas at the
ends of certain sentences, for example when someone sneezed. The vast
majority of Portuguese Jews sought to fulfill these norms meticulously,
all the while inventing thousands of ways to evade, counteract, or inval-
idate their form and meaning. While listing and describing these numer-
ous strategies is outside the scope of this essay, we can simply say that the
inventiveness crypto-Jews mustered in order to seem Christian can only
be compared with the capacity they showed to conceal their Judaism.
There were some religious commandments that were difficult to
adhere to while being concealed. These had to do with codes guiding
food and ritual cleanliness. The thorniest had to do with the Jewish pro-
hibition against consumption of pork in all its forms, a practice that rea-
sonably aware Christians noticed first because it was the most plainly
identifiable. Jews tried to eat only in their own home or in the home of
another Jew. The presence of slaves constituted a constant danger, since
they could turn in their masters. In this case, one took refuge in the excuse
of endemic stomach problems, one discreetly fed the forbidden meat to
domestic animals, or one simply pretended not to like the food. With
regard to the ritual sacrifice of fowl, bleeding of meat, eating only fish
with scales, or cleaning a leg of lamb, Jewish women shielded themselves
behind practical explanations to allay suspicions: as they explained it,
meat prepared this way or that way tasted or cooked better.
Being unable to carry out properly the various Jewish celebrations in
a society with a Christian majority, Jews compensated for the absence of
these observances by undertaking a great number of fasts. Fasts had the
significant advantage of being very difficult to identify as heterodox
behavior, and, as a form of penance, they may have helped Jews to cope
with the guilt of the necessary deviations from Jewish law and practice.
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178 | Solange Alberro

It was easy for a merchant invited by a Christian colleague to sit at his

table to avoid eating by saying that he had already eaten at home or was
indisposed. If it was impossible to observe the fast that corresponded
with a certain Jewish holiday, the merchant could pay some poor woman
from the community to fast on his behalf.6 Through this transaction, he
met his religious obligation, the woman received some charity, and
appearances, always vital, were maintained: no one would suspect that
the merchant in question had contrived to reconcile the unreconcilable.
Although it was feasible to comply with attendance at masses and
with the celebrations of the majority of Catholic practices in such a way
that others would suspect nothing, and though there were mechanisms
for satisfactorily negotiating the proscriptions of Jewish law, celebrating
the Shabbat (the Sabbath) entailed serious dangers. Some of the major
holidays, like Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashannah, Hanukkah, and Passover,
coincided in large part with Christian holidays, and, as a result, their dis-
creet observance easily passed unnoticed. But this was not the case with
the Shabbat: the Jewish Saturday of rest could not but contrast with the
Christian Sunday. There was little that could be done to hide the Friday
ablutions, the changing of underwear and bedsheets, and the candlelight
dinner at dusk with the whole family in attendance and perhaps some
relatives and friends. All that could be done was to remove the slaves,
some matron dismissing them from the house so the family could be free
of their gaze.7 The weekly celebration of the Shabbat was the most dan-
gerous of observances because there was no way to disguise it as a
Catholic practice; the only recourse was to carry it out with extreme cau-
tion and to reduce it to a few discreet practices.
In very broad terms, these were the main contrivances that the con-
versos resorted to so that they would appear to be like the rest of the
European inhabitants of New Spain. With these precautions, they hand-
ily achieved their ends, and, though they were generally recognized as
“Portuguese” because they frequently spoke the language and pre-
served certain Portuguese customs, rarely were they discovered to be
practicing Jews.
Aside from subterfuges designed to deceive the bulk of the Christian
population, there were other contrivances, less frequent and more exclu-
sive, that were used to establish privileged relationships with the Church
in general and with the members of the Holy Office’s tribunal. These
privileged relationships were intended to protect against any sort of sus-
picion in matters of faith. At least some converso families went beyond
participation in the Catholic ceremonies and customs we have just men-
tioned or membership in some particularly exclusive religious brother-
hood. From the Carvajal family of the sixteenth century and the Campos
of the seventeenth century, one member actually became a priest or friar
in a religious order. Such a step doubtlessly resulted from complex
motives, among which we must stress the following. First, it is clear that
after 1492 and the consequent acceptance of baptism by those who chose
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 179

to stay in the Spanish Empire, some individuals genuinely embraced

Catholicism, as attested by the high proportion of clergymen, including
mystics, whose families were of known Jewish origin. We must recognize
that an unspecified number of New Christians not only developed into
true Christians but also into figures distinguished among their counter-
parts for the intensity and quality of their religious fervor. Without a
doubt, however, there also existed an actual strategy that consisted of
“sacrificing” a member of the family by handing them over to the
Church, so that the whole group would be symbolically exempted from
suspicion on questions of faith. The cases of Iberian clergymen who were
punished for continuing to practice Judaism despite their robes allows us
to believe that this was one of the mechanisms that some families
resorted to in order to secure their survival and social status.
What is more, in American viceroyalties such as New Spain, the colo-
nial reality provided other opportunities to establish acceptable, if not
cordial, relations within ecclesiastical and Inquisitorial spheres. In the
midst of the indigenous peoples and the ever growing number of castas,
the Spaniards, Portuguese, and the handful of other Europeans who set-
tled there—when they belonged to social sectors of a certain status—
tended to merge into a single category: that of rulers, automatically
identified as Old Christians and frequently adorned with a fictitious her-
aldry. In America, as we know well, traditional social barriers were
largely erased by the amassing of money. The low-born wealthy mer-
chant or slave dealer could, with impunity, adopt the lifestyle of the Iber-
ian nobility with whom he had struck up social relations, and he might
even marry into this group. There is nothing strange, therefore, in the fact
that people like Simón Váez Sevilla or Sebastián Váez de Acevedo would
deal with Inquisitors, give them expensive gifts, or even ask them for
favors. Acevedo, for instance, did not hesitate to ask the Mexican Holy
Office tribunal to warehouse goods he had brought from the Philippines
in order to hide them from the royal tax auditor.8
Such relationships could eventually carry over into participation in
family life, as evidenced by the presence of several Inquisition officials at
the funeral rites of the famous dogmatist Blanca Enríquez. The Enríquez
family must have realized the danger posed by the presence of these offi-
cials at an event in which several rituals that were carried out stood to
raise reasonable suspicions. Indeed, the good relations with Inquisition
officials seems outright bizarre when we look at the relationships of the
daughters of Blanca Enríquez. Micaela and the charming Rafaela, though
devout Jews, became close friends of the Inquisitorial notary Don Euge-
nio de Saravia and of the Inquisitor Don Francisco de Estrada.9 Again,
supposing that the officials did not harbor the slightest doubt about the
orthodoxy of the sisters—which seems unlikely, as we shall see—how can
we explain this dangerous familiarity on the part of practicing Jews with
men known to be potential persecutors? Aside from the reasons already
discussed, such as families placing some of their members among the
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180 | Solange Alberro

ranks of the church, and aside from quite individual motives, such as the
flirtatiousness of confident women accustomed to breaking hearts, we
glimpse here a class complicity among the ruling elite of colonial society
and, in the end, a process of assimilation of some crypto-Jews into a
majority-Christian society.

The Holy Office and the Jews: “All was quiet”

For their part, it seems that the Inquisitors had established a modus
vivendi with those who should normally have inspired the Inquisition’s
concern, if not outright suspicion. The Holy Office had not ignored the
fact that Jews were present in the viceroyalty from the beginning, and the
persecutions at the end of the sixteenth century—in particular, the spec-
tacular case of the Carvajal family in 1596—demonstrated that groups of
crypto-Jews had settled in different parts of the country. But aside from a
small upswell of Inquisitorial activity in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, which was really the tail end of earlier persecutions, in the suc-
ceeding decades there were no alarming measures taken against the “Por-
tuguese,” who continued arriving in ever greater numbers to the
American kingdoms.
There were denunciations that revealed situations that should have
inspired at least the curiosity of the Inquisition. In 1622, for example, an
anonymous tip sent to the tribunal revealed the existence of a synagogue
on Calle de Santo Domingo, just two doors down from the Inquisition’s
offices. Any passerby could hear the prayers of the devout congregated
there for the Shabbat, and by then there were maybe between fifty and
one hundred “Portuguese” living in the capital. This information was
filed away, without so much as an investigation.10
Three years later, an informer appeared before the tribunal who was
a person of responsibility, this time providing his name: he was the head
administrator of the Mexico City Treasury. He had worked for some
months as a cashier in the household of the wealthy merchant Simón
Váez Sevilla, which allowed him to observe actions and situations that
left no room for doubt. The family never ate pork in any form, they used
oil instead of lard for cooking, Simón Váez ate meat on Fridays, his wife
did not regularly attend church nor pray with the rosary, the couple lived
in isolation and associated with people already punished for being Jew-
ish. This accusation was not successful either.11
Ten years later in 1635, in the same month of August when the crack-
down against the “Great Complicity” was taking place in Peru, the Mexi-
can Inquisition received new accusations against Simón Váez Sevilla, his
wife, and his sister, Elena Váez. The sister was accused of not eating bacon,
bleeding meat before cooking it, using beef marrow or oil instead of lard,
not attending mass, and ridiculing an image of Christ. Váez’s wife, Juana
Enríquez, was accused of performing Jewish funeral rites—washing the
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 181

body and dressing it in a shroud of new cloth—upon a deceased nephew,

the son of her sister-in-law. One of the witnesses called by the tribunal in
reaction to these weighty allegations informed the Inquisitors that on
Good Friday and the Thursday before it was customary at the Váez
household to whip the slaves and that Simón Váez did not stop washing
himself, in contrast to what Christians did during those days of mourn-
ing. Despite what was going on in Peru at the same time, these accusa-
tions were filed away without further repercussion.12 What is more, they
were filed away even though twelve other Jews had been reconciled and
another five relaxed in effigy in the auto-da-fé on 2 April 1635. It is clear
that the persecution waged in New Spain was insufficient to destroy the
flourishing crypto-Judaic community and that the Inquisitors were not
disposed to act vigorously against it. Nonetheless, the accusations that
kept arriving were filed away with the rest, awaiting the fateful day when
they would be dug up.
Without saying that relations between the Portuguese Jewish com-
munity and the Inquisitors were actually “tight” or even cordial, it can be
asserted that during the decades between 1620 and 1640 some Inquisitors
and Jews knew each other well and tried to get along through a modus
vivendi that excluded neither judicial hearings like those in 1635 nor pri-
vate understandings that ranged from criminal conspiracies to personal
relationships. This was the case because, despite the existence of clandes-
tine religious heterodoxy no doubt less important in the New World than
in the Old, Inquisitors and crypto-Jews belonged to the same ruling elite.
We will not reiterate here the many complex reasons why this pre-
carious equilibrium broke down after having endured throughout almost
the entire first half of the seventeenth century. It suffices to remember that
the change occurred because of political events in the mother country and
the role played by certain key individuals such as Count-Duke Olivares,
Bishop Juan de Palafox, Viceroy Marquis de Villena, and the Inquisitors
Arce Reinoso at the Suprema (the Supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition in
Spain), and Juan Sáez de Mañozca in New Spain. It was also caused, in a
fundamental sense, by the deep schism within New Spain’s crypto-Jew-
ish community along the lines of rich and poor and, within these groups,
by the dilemma of remaining true to their faith while continuing to be the
Iberians that they also were. In the unique political circumstances of 1640,
these factors combined to destroy forever the already strained dynamics
of the converso community in New Spain.13
Although the community as such was irreversibly destroyed, the indi-
viduals that it comprised for the most part survived. In the mid-seven-
teenth century the Jewish population of New Spain probably numbered
between 150 and 250 people—a loose approximation given the semi-clan-
destinity they maintained. Of these, only a portion was arrested, and out-
side of those who were burned at the stake—some twenty or twenty-five
at the most—the great majority were reconciled and theoretically con-
demned to exile from the viceroyalty in Seville and in Madrid.14
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182 | Solange Alberro

Nonetheless, few ever embarked for Spain to fulfill their sentences. Most
opted to stay in New Spain. While we cannot speak of a Jewish commu-
nity after 1650, the individuals remained under different identities and
far from the capital, and continued to observe their religion to the extent
that they could or that they chose to.

Final Considerations

Like their equals in Iberia, the crypto-Jews who settled in New Spain
tried to immerse themselves in the society of the Christian majority, and,
by and large, they succeeded. Their long experience at evading the
curiosity and vigilance of the Christian population in general, the relative
inability of the bulk of the population to recognize their heterodox prac-
tices, the weakness of institutional networks—especially the Inquisi-
tion’s—and finally, the elite status that they shared with other Europeans
gave them a good chance of surviving, as had been their hope when they
embarked for America. Had it not been for the great persecution that was
unleashed in the mid-seventeenth century, which ended their existence as
a group, it is likely that they would have continued living in the tolerable
environment that had existed until then.
Today, the only officially recognized Jewish communities in Mexico
are those of the Sephardic descendants of immigrants from the old
Ottoman Empire and the more recent Ashkenazim, who settled after the
advent of Nazism in Europe. It might be asked: What would have
become of the “Portuguese” from the years between 1580 and 1640 had
they not been persecuted and dispersed in the mid-seventeenth century?
Two answers seem possible. First, according to the historical record, iso-
lated individuals secretly continued the practices they considered funda-
mental to Judaism and tried to pass on some rites. These now survive
merely as cultural fragments within families that have otherwise lost
their historic memory of their remote identity.
On the other hand, it is doubtful that the converso community as it
stood at mid-century could have sustained itself indefinitely. The differ-
ences and latent antagonisms between rich and poor coincided in large
part with the differences between men and women, and in the end made
for a religious practice that was locked into the home and managed by
women. The lack of sacred texts, rabbis, and formal teaching condemned
Jewish religion to the status of being little more than a series of domestic
rituals; for some, it became a faith whose characteristics and require-
ments were strictly personal. A merchant like Tomás Nuñez de Peralta
exemplified this outcome. Scolding his wife for frequent and dangerous
indiscretions, he told her one night: “For fifteen years, I have done noth-
ing more than commend myself to God while I go about my business,
and having Him in my heart is enough.”15 Obviously, this type of reli-
giosity held more in common with the beliefs of enlightened elites of the
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 183

eighteenth century than it did with commonly accepted practice among

both Christians and Jews in the seventeenth century. In sum, there were
factors at the heart of the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain that
augured its probable disintegration over time, under the inevitable
impact of deliberate, although unintended, assimilation.
Finally, and paradoxically, the only way for the community to sur-
vive was specifically under the pressure and vigilance of the Inquisition.
After the original alternative—baptism or exile—Iberian crypto-Jews had
implicitly accepted living in isolation, out of touch with broader Jewish
religious currents and deprived of their theological and cultural infra-
structure. They accepted the task of seeming to be what they were not
and hiding what they really were, in effect being both Christian and Jew
at the same time. In this sense, they were true cultural mestizos, rejected
by both religions, each equally driven by purity and orthodoxy. These
conversos established a modus vivendi that we could well call a marrano
(or converso) culture, the focal point and defining element of which seems
to have been … the Holy Office.
In the converso world of both vital and deadly appearances, of con-
tradictions and of existential schisms, only the tribunal was an absolute
and constant point of reference. What it represented became the only fac-
tor drawing together sectors, families, and individuals unavoidably torn
by contradictory and opposing forces. As Jean Paul Sartre showed in his
classic Anti-Semite and Jew, it is the anti-Semitic assault that, in situations
that favor the assimilation of Jews, reminds them of who they are. In this
sense, the Holy Office of the Inquisition was the main force that reminded
the conversos that they were Jews and obligated those who were on the
verge of forgetting to remember.
This marrano culture—or marranismo, if you will—was characterized
by secrecy, clandestine activities, and constant fear in the face of danger.
To live and to endure demanded rejecting and even mocking the Chris-
tianity imposed upon them. Only in this way could the crypto-Jews pre-
serve their specificity, and it is interesting to note that the Holy Office’s
tribunal and its inherent anti-Semitism played exactly the same role for
the nascent Creole identity.16
As the great persecution of the Portuguese in the capital of New
Spain wound down, the first herald of militant creolism, Miguel Sánchez,
brought to light his Imagen de la Virgen María …, in which he proclaimed
the Virgin of Guadalupe’s meaning and mission for the Mexican nation.
The clergyman could not help drawing a relationship between the
Guadalupean miracle and the autos-da-fé conducted at the time. Under
his pen, the penitent crypto-Jews that were the “enemies of our holy
faith” were also “strangers and foreigners … without original roots in
this land.”17 In this way, the Catholic faith became a characteristic of “this
land” and therefore of its sons, who opposed themselves to the “enemies
of our holy faith.” If the crypto-Jews on their part needed the Christians,
headed by the fearsome Inquisition, to preserve themselves as such, the
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184 | Solange Alberro

New Spain Creoles also needed the crypto-Jews in order to vivify their
nascent identity.
These considerations lead us to believe that as long as the Holy Office
maintained some sort of pressure over them, real or imagined, the Por-
tuguese of New Spain would retain their cohesion; inevitably, they
drifted toward a syncretism and assimilation, but their Jewishness should
not be questioned. The persecutions of the 1640s probably accelerated the
process of assimilation, annihilating the community and dispersing its
individuals. But in so doing, the Holy Office, whose purpose was the
eradication of that community, signed its own death sentence. The Jew
and the Inquisitor did not exist except in relation to each other; after the
disappearance of the first, the second became superfluous.
The reciprocity of this relationship between Jew and Inquisitor was
perceived by those Jews who were living in communities in which they
could openly practice their faith. According to Juan Pacheco de León, the
Jews of Livorna, Italy, for example, looked down upon the marranos that
had remained in the Spanish Empire to such a degree that when they
encountered one, they hurriedly denounced him before the bishop,
accusing him of being a bad Catholic.18 The sharpest Inquisitors also per-
ceived this, and Juan Sáenz de Mañozca, the main figure behind the per-
secution of New Spain’s marranos in the mid-seventeenth century, wrote
the following to the Suprema, at the end of the intense years from 1642 to
1649: “With the complicities of 1649 concluded, this Inquisition returned
little by little to that earlier slackness.”19
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Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office | 185

Notes

1. Theoretically, the Spanish Empire was formed by several kingdoms that were ruled by
their own laws, usages, and authorities. The term “colony” from the English language
appears only with the Bourbon dynasty in the late eighteenth century, when the Span-
ish crown aimed to administer its possessions in a systematic and rational way.
2. For the socioeconomic situation of the marrano community of seventeenth-century
Mexico. Stanley Hordes, “The Crypto-Jewish Community of New Spain, 1620–1649: A
Collective Biography” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1980); Seymour Liebmann, The
Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame and the Inquisition (Coral Gables, 1967), passim; and for
most of these items, Solange Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México 1571–1700 (Mex-
ico, 1988). There is a French version, Inquisition et Société au Mexique, 1571–1700 (Mex-
ico, 1988). In this paper, the citations are from the Spanish version.
3. The castas are the different groups of mestizos who were the issue of relations between
Indians, Europeans, and Africans in Spanish America. It is not a formal system but a
common way to name the different offspring, from their somatic characteristics.
4. Cases of Thomas Núñez de Peralta, Mathias Rodríguez de Olivera, and the Enríquez
family of Mexico. See Alberro, Inquisición, 425.
5. Ibid., 444–45.
6. Ibid., 443.
7. Cf. the case of Blanca Enríquez. Alberro, Inquisición, 420.
8. Ibid., 46–47.
9. Ibid., 47–48, 426. Rafaela Enríquez had an affair with the Inquisitorial notary, Euge-
nio de Saravia.
10. Alberro, Inquisición, 536.
11. Ibid., 536–37.
12. Ibid., 539–40.
13. Ibid., 533–94.
14. In such cases, they were forbidden to stay in the viceroyalty itself, the whole Indies,
the court of Madrid and the city of Seville, the main departure port for America, but
they were allowed to live in any other place in Spain.
15. Alberro, Inquisición, 425.
16. The term “Creole” (“criollos”) refers to descendants of Spanish or French parents, born
in Spanish or French American territories and the Philippines Islands. The “criollos”
were also called “American Spanish,” in opposition to the “peninsular Spanish.”
17. Miguel Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe … México,
Imprenta de la viuda de Bernardo Calderón, 1648, in Ernesto de la Torre Villar and
Ramíro Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos guadalupanos (Mexico, 1982), 173.
“Enemigos de nuestra santa fé, sin raíces originarias desta tierra … extraños pere-
grinos y advenedisos.”
18. Alberro, Inquisición, 438.
19. Ibid., 584. “Conclusa la complicidad por abril 649 se fue volviendo poco a poco esta
Inquisición a aquella flogedad antigua.”
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– Chapter 9 –

THE PARTICIPATION OF NEW CHRISTIANS

AND CRYPTO-JEWS IN THE CONQUEST,
COLONIZATION, AND TRADE OF
SPANISH AMERICA, 1521–1660

Eva Alexandra Uchmany

Introduction

M ODERNITY EXCLUDED THE JEWS from one of its biggest enterprises:

the discovery, conquest, and colonization of America. Notwith-
standing, the Jews found ways to participate in this adventure, although
in Christian garb. The persecutions and social pressures lived through by
the Jews from Castile, and in minor form by Aragonese Jewry, during their
last hundred years in the Iberian Peninsula forged a tendency in the bap-
tized and their successors, the New Christians, to assimilate into the reli-
gion of the majority. It was a span of time in which almost two-thirds of
the Hebrew nation converted to Christianity, by coercion or voluntarily.
The case of Portuguese Jewry, as is well known, was very different.
The whole Hebrew nation of Portugal was forced, in a very short span of
time—almost in one day—to accept a religion in whose authenticity they
did not believe and to the popular culture and liturgical forms of which
they had had no time to assimilate. Because of this violation of their con-
sciences, the immense majority of the Portuguese Jews never abandoned
their ancestral religion, but rather only changed their external identity.
Although they tried to appear to be good and devout Christians in the
eyes of their neighbors and of spies, in the intimacy of their homes they
remained Jews and continued to educate their children in Jewish customs
and religion. Due to the different circumstances in which the conversion
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 187

of the two groups took place, and also because the Portuguese New
Christians, who were in the majority crypto-Jews, arrived in New Spain
and Spanish America mostly in the second half of the sixteenth century,
this essay will be divided into two corresponding sections.

The New Christians of Spanish Origin

Imitating the Portuguese venture into the Atlantic Ocean, the Spanish
discover and colonization of the New World was undertaken as a capi-
talist enterprise. So it is not strange that the New Christian Luis de San-
tángel,1 a major entrepreneur and financier of the Spanish crown,
invested in the first voyage of Columbus, who intended to arrive in the
East by sailing west. Certainly, Santángel and his associates had also
endeavored to share in the rich Portuguese Atlantic trade.
In the four voyages of Columbus, several New Christians were pres-
ent and also one converso. The latter was Luis de Torres from Murcia,
who knew Hebrew and Aramaic, languages that might have been
understood in the Indian Ocean and were the first spoken in the New
World by a European: Columbus, who thought he was near the territo-
ries of the Grand Khan, had sent de Torres to explore the first major
island of the West Indies that they discovered and named Hispaniola.2
Before returning to Spain, Columbus left behind thirty-nine men,
among them Luis de Torres, to colonize the island. All were killed by the
indigenous people.3 In the first and last voyage a crypto-Jew was also
present—the apothecary Maese Bernal, who was later tried by the
Inquisition for Judaizing.4

The Favorites and the Prohibited

In 1501 the Catholic king excluded from the West Indies adventure all the
converted Jews and New Christians who had been punished for Judaiz-
ing during the preceding ten years. In the Archive of the Indies there is a
list (Padrón de Conversos) with more than five hundred names from the
province of Seville alone.5 In this Padrón are listed many families whose
members later played a major role in the conquest, colonization, and
Christianization of the New World. Such was the case of the family of
Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the great protector of the American Indians,
who arrived in America in the company of his father Pedro de las Casas
in the second voyage of Columbus.
The king rigorously punished transgressors against the faith. He con-
fiscated their property, excluded them from any honorable office, and
prohibited them from trading with the Indies. But the decree did not
include the favorites: the relatives and friends of the New Christian Lope
de Conchillos, secretary of the council of Castile, and those of the queen’s
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188 | Eva Alexandra Uchmany

secretary Miguel Pérez de Almazán. The family of Alonso de Ávila, who

had been one of the converso secretaries of Queen Isabel, was also not dis-
criminated against, although his cousin and namesake had been penal-
ized by the Inquisition and appears in the Padrón de Conversos as number
70. Indeed, this former secretary of the Queen was able to get a good
post for his cousin Gil González de Ávila, who in 1509 was appointed
royal accountant in Hispaniola.6 In 1511 Gil González transferred this
post to his nephew Alonso de Ávila and left for Cuba. In 1514 King Fer-
dinand dubbed him Knight of Santiago and sent him to outfit an expe-
dition to locate a strait between the two oceans. While searching for the
strait, Gil González conquered Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and part of Hon-
duras, where he clashed with the captains of Cortés, who claimed the
territory for themselves.
A few years later, the royal accountant Alonso de Ávila enlisted in the
army of Hernán Cortés as captain. The conquistador appointed him the
first bookkeeper of the recently founded city of Veracruz and of the whole
army during the conquest of Mexico, and later sent him, with the treas-
ury of Motecuhzoma, as his procurator to Spain. In 1528 Alonso de Ávila
enrolled with Francisco de Montejo for the conquest of Yucatán. His
brother, Gil González de Benavides de Ávila, also played an important
role in the conquest of Mexico. Both of them were harassed by the prim-
itive Inquisition in New Spain, headed by Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the
first bishop of New Spain: Gil González de Benavides in 1527 and his
brother Alonso ten years later.
Like many New Christians, they had an eclectic approach toward
matters of faith. In 1537 Alonso de Ávila was accused by Bishop Zumár-
raga of keeping a crucifix under his writing desk and stepping on it.7
Indeed, this was a classical accusation against many Jews and New Chris-
tians, and served the Inquisitor as a defamatory libel against the former
royal accountant and conqueror of Mexico and Yucatán.8 Zumárraga
hated Ávila because he dared to warn his good friend, the New Christian
Gonzalo Gómez (founder of the town Guayanguareo, now the city of
Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacán), that the apostolic Inquisi-
tor was going to arrest him.9 Definitely, no true Old Christian would do
such a favor for a New one.
Some time later, after degrading and shaming the New Christians, the
Catholic king secularized the sanctions of the 1501 decree and offered to
rehabilitate lost civil rights for a large sum of money. Indeed, the king sold
to the enabled (inhábiles) papers that restored to them their lost honors. In
1508, those reconciled by the Inquisition from the province of Seville alone
paid 20,000 golden ducats to Ferdinand for the return of their confiscated
property. A year later, in 1509, the Catholic king collected 80,000 ducats
selling them the rights to hold public office and to trade with the Indies.
The New Christians seized these opportunities with both hands.
Many names that appear in the Padrón de Conversos are found in the
“Catalogue of Passengers to the West Indies,”10 and similar lists. A large
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 189

number of them arrived in 1514 with the expedition of the New Christian
Pedro Arias de Ávila, or Pedrarias Dávila, appointed by the king as gov-
ernor of Castilla de Oro. He was the grandson of Diego Arias, who had
embraced Christianity in the first decades of the fifteenth century and
became the Chancellor of the Exchequer of Castile; all of his family
became ennobled and related to the crown.11 A significant number of
New Christians who came with Pedrarias took part in different expedi-
tions and were involved also in the conquest of Mexico and Peru, as was
the case of the brothers Juan de Orgoñoz and Diego Méndez, who were
present at the conquest of Cuzco. Others were appointed as royal
accountants and public and royal notaries.
Some were engaged in finance or trade with the West Indies. From
this group I will mention only Juan de Córdoba, registered in the Padrón
de Conversos as number 286, one of the most prominent New Christians
in Seville, who later managed to be one of the twenty-four city magis-
trates, or councils of the city. In 1519, Juan de Córdoba lent to Hernán
Cortés a large sum of money to carry out the conquest of Mexico.12 The
loan was given to Cortés thanks to his relative, licentiate Francisco
Núñez de Valera, a prominent New Christian from Salamanca, who was
married to Cortés’s father’s sister Inés Gómez de Paz.13 Núñez, in whose
house Cortés lived during his student years at the University of Sala-
manca, was the conquistador’s private procurator in Seville and in the
royal court.14 In 1522, licentiate Núñez sent Rodrigo de Paz, his oldest
son, to Mexico, carrying the royal appointment for Cortés as captain
general and governor of New Spain. At the same time, the New Christ-
ian Rodrigo de Paz was also the courier of the royal decree that ordered
Cortés to expel from his recently acquired overseas domains all settlers
with Jewish and Moorish origins.15 Such contradictions amplified the
already bizarre reality lived by many in Spain, which after 1522 was
exported to New Spain.
Cortés favored Rodrigo as well as his brothers Alonso de Paz and
Adrián and Juan Núñez, his sister Ana Núñez, and her husband
Christóbal de Salamanca, who traveled together to Mexico. To all of them
he conceded various Indian villages. Indeed, Rodrigo de Paz owned,
three years later, several houses and sixteen shops in Tenochtitlán (as
Mexico City was still called in the documents of those years),16 and slaves
that he exploited in his mines.
When he began the conquest of the Hibueras,17 Cortés made Paz the
administrator and keeper of his estates and fortune. After the conqueror
left the city with his expedition, the political situation changed in Mexico.
The royal officials, mortal enemies of the conquistadors, took the govern-
ment into their own hands, confiscated the property of Cortés, and tor-
tured his loyal cousin Rodrigo de Paz, burning his feet and legs. On 16
October 1525, Rodrigo was executed on the gallows,18 accused of hiding
the conquistador’s treasury.
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The Prohibited

The royal decree that Rodrigo handed to Cortés in late 1522 was issued
on 25 September of the same year by Charles I, who had recently become
the king of Spain. Charles of Flanders, educated to distrust the converted
Jews, changed the crown’s policy toward the New Christians. In 1518 he
prohibited any person, once punished by the Inquisition, from embark-
ing for the West Indies. The New Christians protested, alleging that free
traffic to the Caribbean Islands was a privilege they had paid for. The
king ordered an investigation into the matter, wishing to know more than
anything else if all of them had paid their debt to the crown. While the
inquiry lasted, the way to the Indies remained open. But after 25 Sep-
tember 1522, all people of Hebrew origin were forbidden to cross the
Atlantic Ocean. Subsequent laws ratified this sanction and extended the
prohibition to grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of any Jew.
Most of the conquistadors and royal officials disobeyed these prohibi-
tions and did not publish the royal bans. They feared provocation, quarrels,
and discord in their armies; moreover, some of them had Jewish ancestors.
Many New Christians who had gained access to the West Indies before
1518 managed to conceal their origins by changing their identity and pro-
fession. They made every effort to appear to their neighbors as Old Chris-
tians. A good number of them succeeded, but some did not. These
unfortunates were harassed and paid for their ascendancy with their lives.
Such was the case of the Alonsos, Hernando and Martín, natives of the
province of Huelvas, from the villages Niebla and Palos. Both embarked in
1518 for Cuba. Hernando, a blacksmith by trade, worked under the orders
of Martín López in building the brigantines that played such an important
role in the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlán, and took part also in the paci-
fication of Pánuco. For all these services he was granted the signory of
Actopan as an encomienda.19 From 1524 to 1528 he devoted himself to min-
ing and cattle-raising, which enabled him to obtain a monopoly on the meat
supply for Mexico City. In the early autumn of 1528 he was accused of Ju-
daizing in Cuba. Supposedly, he assisted in a Passover ceremony, sang
“Bzet Israel,” and did not permit his wife to go to church during her period.
In this case he confused the synagogue with the church, to which he might
have attributed a biblical ordinance. Some witnesses said, however, that he
was simply very jealous of Isabel de Aguilar, his young and beautiful wife.20
In any case, in 1528 the Dominican Santa María burned him, almost with-
out a trial,21 in the first public auto-da-fé celebrated in New Spain, together
with Gonzalo Morales, a shopkeeper. Gonzalo’s brother, Diego, condemned
for blasphemy and for suspicion of being a Judaizer, was present with tied
hands fastened to pincers clipped to his tongue and connected with a rope
to a tree. This situation barely permitted him to put his feet on the ground
and left him hanging in the air during the four long hours that the ceremony
took place. He survived six other autos-da-fé in the following twenty years
in which he was accused time and again for the same sins.22
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 191

One of the notable figures in the auto-da-fé was Diego de Ocaña,

public notary, who served as secretary to the governor of New Spain,
Alonso de Estrada, and who belonged to the group of royal officials
opposed to Cortés. Alonso de Estrada, born in Ciudad Real, a natural son
of King Ferdinand and a Jewish lady,23 was married to Marina de la
Caballería, daughter of a famous New Christian family that embraced
Christianity sometime at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The gov-
ernor sent his cousin, Diego de Mazariegos, to subdue and settle the
province of Chiapas. The names of the conquerors and colonizers of Chi-
apas coincide, in their totality, with the names of those sentenced by the
Inquisition in Ciudad Real, including the name of Diego de Mazariegos.24
The children of those condemned and defamed by the Inquisition were
determined to make a new life, far from the metropolis, in the most
remote corners of the Spanish Empire.
From the accusations against Diego de Ocaña, it can be understood
that he was still bound to Jewish dietary laws, avoiding non-kasher25
fish and sacrificing chickens according to the “law of Moses.” He used
to shout in the jail: “I am telling you, wall, not to confess because the
witnesses are dead.”26 Nevertheless, thanks to his friendship with the
governor and other important people of that time, he was reconciled
and condemned only to spiritual penitence and to wearing a sambenito
all of his life. But the public humiliation to which this intelligent man
was exposed, and the shameful garment that he was obliged to wear,
which exhibited him to all the people as an infamous heretic, destroyed
him morally.27
In those same years, Martín Alonso Alemán (the relative of the above
mentioned Hernando Alonso), who appears in the Padrón de Conversos as
number 172, was engaged in pearl fishing and trade in the Caribbean. In
1527, he was elected mayor of Cubagua, an honor that provoked the envy
of some Old Christians. In December 1528 he was assassinated by Pedro
de Barrionuevo, a native of Soria, who was convinced that stabbing to
death a descendant of a Jew was not a sin.28
The royal prohibitions and the changing mood in the colonies have
been closely linked to the battles between Old Christians and New Chris-
tians over positions of honor and wealth in the Church and the realm. By
means of the “Statutes of Purity of Blood,” the middle-class Old Chris-
tians tried to oust the New Christians from all the opportunities that their
time offered to entrepreneurs. The “Statutes” were adopted by the men-
dicant orders, who themselves were sons of the middle-class bourgeoisie,
by the city councils almost everywhere, by the Council or Cabildo of the
Toledo Cathedral, and so forth. Through the “Statutes,” the descendants
of Jews were absolutely excluded from the Colegios Mayores, whose
graduates were accepted automatically to all the important bureaucratic
posts in Spain and in the colonies, including the tribunal of the Inquisi-
tion. On the basis of the “Statutes,” even those New Christians who had
only a few drops of Jewish blood in their veins could not be trusted and
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192 | Eva Alexandra Uchmany

were condemned to live on the margins of society, despite their sincerity

as Christians.
For example, Dr. Antonio Robles, who was born in 1544 in San Lúcar
de Barrameda and had been brought by an uncle to New Spain as an
infant, graduated in canon law and theology at the University of Mexico
and was honored with the chair of theology at the same institution. In
1592 he was appointed attorney of the tribunal of the Holy Office. An
extensive inquiry into his origins started instantly. A year later, testimonies
showing he was “unclean” reached the Inquisition of New Spain. Indeed,
it was public and notorious knowledge to everyone in San Lúcar de Bar-
rameda that Robles’s grandparents from his father’s side, Hernando Ortiz
and his wife Violante Hernández, were descendants of converted Jews.
Hernando Ortiz was even nicknamed in the town as “the king of the
Jews.” On 1 December 1592, the day that this information arrived, Dr.
Antonio Robles was suspended from all his positions, and his sisters and
cousins, married to the best of New Spain’s families, became defamed.29
In the hostile environment that reigned in the Spanish Empire dur-
ing and after the Council of Trent (1545–63), the New Christians of Span-
ish origin had only one desire: to acquire by any means the documents
that would demonstrate their “purity of blood.” Sometimes they were
lucky and succeeded in acquiring the desired paper, but even this was
not a guarantee for a peaceful life. Dr. Christóbal de Miranda, posted as
the dean of the cathedral of Yucatán, arrived in the company of his father
in Veracruz in the early 1570s. Some time later he was also appointed
commissary of the Inquisition in Yucatán. Due to his new position,
according to the practices of the Holy Office, a second exhaustive
inquiry was made about his ancestry. As a result, it came out that both
the paternal and maternal grandparents of this theologian had been
punished and burned at the stake in the port of Santa María, near Seville,
as “dogmatic Judaizers.”30

The Portuguese Presence: The Doubly Prohibited

From the year 1560 small Portuguese communities spread all over Span-
ish America. Most of these colonizers were New Christians who hoped to
evade the tribunals of the Inquisition in Portugal and, at the same time,
were attracted by the discovery of the rich silver deposits in New Spain
and the region of Potosí. Furthermore, the conquest of the Philippines
opened a new route to the east and that meant a wide sphere of action for
many entrepreneurs. Also, some New Christians had relatives and
friends who were in the service of the Portuguese crown or went as mer-
chants to the Lusitanian outposts in Southeast Asia. The immense major-
ity of them rejected assimilation and tried to survive, given the
circumstances, as Jews in Christian garb. Due to the necessarily secret
aspects of their lives, they are properly called crypto-Jews.
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 193

At the same time they were the “doubly prohibited,” since the prohibi-
tion against settling in Spanish America not only included the descendants
of Jews but also was extended to foreigners. Their presence was ultimately
detected by the tribunal of the Inquisition established in Lima, Peru, in 1570.
A group of persons was denounced “for taking out the sinew from the
lamb’s thigh,”31 a Jewish custom well known to the Spanish Inquisitors. The
rite was practiced in remembrance of Jacob’s fight with the Angel. Unable
to defeat Jacob, though he hit his thigh, the Angel, after blessing him,
changed Jacob’s name to Israel, meaning literally the undefeated, the victo-
rious one. This story, relating to the origins of the Hebrew nation and to the
promise given by God to Abraham, evolved during the following centuries
into the belief in messianic redemption in history.32 Taking out the sinew
from the lamb’s thigh was the first and last Jewish rite detected by the Inqui-
sition in Spanish America. Due to its antiquity and meaning, even New
Christians who were assimilated to the religion of the majority, as was the
physician Alfonso de Rojas, the grandson of Fernando de Rojas, the famous
converso author of the fifteenth-century novel La Celestina (1499), still felt
bound to this Hebrew rite in the last decade of the sixteenth century.33
In 1580 Philip II of Spain seized the Portuguese crown and became
Philip I of Portugal. It was sixty years before the Lusitanians regained their
autonomy. During this period of the United Crown, that is, between 1580
and 1640, Portuguese settlers abounded in Spain and its overseas colonies.
Many of them migrated to Spain from Portugal and from there ventured to
Spanish America. Others, who had fled Portugal in previous years and set-
tled temporarily in Jewish quarters and ghettos in Italy and other places,
also found their way to the Spanish overseas domains. The anti-Jewish
rules imposed by several popes of the Counter-Reformation made their
lives so miserable in the overcrowded ghettos that many left the intolerant
European Christian kingdoms and settled in the territories of the Ottoman
Empire; others returned to the Iberian Peninsula and embarked to the East
or West Indies, as was the case of Ruy and Diego Díaz Nieto.34
Juan Rodríguez de Silva had lived in France, Italy, and in the Ottoman
Empire. He married in Salonica, where he left his wife and traveled once
again to Italy, and from there to Spain, from which he embarked for the West
Indies. He set up shop as a soap manufacturer in New Spain, fleeing when
the officers of the Inquisition began looking for him. He was burned in
effigy, as all absent persons were, in the auto-da-fé celebrated in Mexico City
in 1596 and thus became in life a dead man in the Iberian empires.
His friend Jorge de Almeyda lived in Ferrara until 1570. When life
became difficult for the Jews in the duchy of D’Este, due to one of the eco-
nomic crises caused by the wars with the Turks, he left with his family for
New Spain, where he dedicated himself to mining. His cousin, Blanca
Rodríguez, settled in Seville where she opened an inn at which many
crypto-Jews stopped on their way to and from America. For them kasher
food was served. Almeyda fled from Mexico in 1590 after the Holy Office
apprehended his wife Doña Leonor, one of the daughters of the Carvajal
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194 | Eva Alexandra Uchmany

family, whose members were burned at the stake in the terrible autos-da-
fé celebrated in Mexico City in 1596, 1601, and 1649. Doña Leonor was
sacrificed together with her mother, Doña Francisca, and her sisters,
Doña Catalina and Doña Isabel, and brother Luis.35 In 1594 Almeyda was
still in Madrid, and thanks to his good connections with some people in
the royal court, he got a contract to carry merchandise from Angola to
Cartagena. After the sacrifice of the Carvajal family he went back to Italy
and years later embarked for the East Indies.
New Christians often developed the ability to slip in and out between
Christian and Jewish societies. They knew how to behave properly in
both the synagogue and the church, and they also had mastered several
languages. This ability—born in them as a consequence of religious coer-
cion—permitted some of them to leave behind for a while the miserable
social and economic situation of the ghettos and to search for better
opportunities in the Iberian empires. For example, Diego Pérez de Albu-
querque, born in Bordeaux and raised in Rouen, France, arrived in New
Spain in 1618. He lived in Puebla and Mexico City, and finally settled in
the mining center of Zacatecas, where he opened a shop. Soon after, how-
ever, he found himself in 1624 in the secret jails of the Holy Office. Alvaro
Méndez, arrested in Lima, Peru, in 1631, had formerly lived in France and
had sent money to relatives in Amsterdam. Julián Alvarez came to Mex-
ico from Holland. Luis Franco Rodríguez, a resident in Cartagena de
Indias who had brothers in Holland, yearned throughout his whole life
for a comfortable economic situation that would permit him and his fam-
ily to live freely as Jews.36
Many crypto-Jews had seemingly lost the ability to put down roots
anywhere and wandered from one place to another. This was the case of
Balthazar de Araujo, descendant of Abraham Senior, chief rabbi of
Castile, supplier of the armies that conquered Granada, and one of Queen
Isabel’s loyal advisors. To keep this ancient servant with her, the Catholic
queen did the impossible and compelled him, together with his son-in-
law Meir Melamed, to a baptismal font. They took the name of Núñez
Coronel and Pérez Coronel, respectively. A branch of this family, trying to
live in accord with the “law of Moses,” moved to Portugal, from there to
Bayonne, and later to Galicia. In this kingdom, the tribunal of the Inqui-
sition was formally introduced in 1562 and began its functions only in
1574.37 When life for the crypto-Jews became dangerous there, the mother
of Pérez Coronel, alias Araujo, moved to Flanders and from there to
Venice, where she had her sons circumcised and gave them Jewish
names. Balthazar was called Abraham Senior after his illustrious ances-
tor. In Venice and later in Salonica, and then in Constantinople, he stud-
ied in a yeshiva,38 together with his brethren. After that he moved to
Cairo; later he settled in Alexandria, and from there he returned to Bay-
onne, but out of fear of the Holy Office he went back to Constantinople.
Nevertheless, he “felt a desire to see the world” and once again crossed
the Balkans, traveling through Italy and Spain, and finally embarked for
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 195

the West Indies. In 1634 he was apprehended by the Holy Office in Carta-
gena de Indias.39
Travelers like Coronel Senior and others, such as those mentioned
above, infused new life into the small crypto-Jewish communities spread
over the Spanish overseas domains in the main cities and mining centers,
and kept them in constant communication with the intellectual centers of
Judaism. Occasionally, these men, such as Juan Pacheco de León, who
came to Mexico in 1639 from Livorno, Italy, became the spiritual guides
for some groups of their co-religionists.
Moreover, all these Jews carried books printed in Ferrara, Venice, or
some other cultural metropolis, which found their way to the most re-
mote corners of the Spanish Empire. Manuel de Paz, imprisoned in Lima
in 1634, had one of these Hebrew-Spanish bibles.40 The physician Blas de
Paz Pinto, who converted his house in Cartagena de Indias into a syna-
gogue, owned not only a Hebrew bible but a prayer book from which a
member of the community was reading the appropriate portion every
afternoon to an audience of ten or more men gathered for Maariv.41 They
were observed, from a small window on the roof of the house, by two
black slaves: Rufina and her lover, the sorcerer Diego López. That the
slaves were unable to understand the language of the prayers42 suggests
that they were read in Hebrew. In 1637, Simon Váez Sevilla was de-
nounced by his “godfather” Pedro de Navia for displaying a Hebrew-
Spanish bible on his desk.43 These types of books circulated also in the
Philippines, Macao, Malacca, Cochin, and Goa.
One of the main characteristics of the period of the United Crown
was that the majority of the crypto-Jews actually tried to fulfill the com-
mandments of the Torah, or the “law of Moses.” All of them observed
Shabbat (the Sabbath), though the men made a pretense of going to their
business places so that they would not be noticed. For the women it was
easier to pretend that they were sewing or embroidering without doing
anything. A substantial number of them abstained from eating prohibited
food, although they served bacon when they had visitors, calling pork,
ironically, ejecutoria, a nobility coat. In his great novel, Miguel Cervantes
de Saavedra, who was a New Christian and because of it banned from
migrating to New Spain, makes Sancho Panza, the armor-bearer of the
errant knight Don Quixote, who was aspiring to the governorship of an
island, say that he deserves the honor because he is full of ham and bacon
from the four sides of his ancestors. “I am an Old Christian and to be a
Count it is enough,” Sancho asserts. Cervantes-Quixote answers him:
“Look, Sancho, it is not the blood you inherit, but the virtue you acquire
that matters. Virtue has inherent worth; blood does not.”44 Notwith-
standing, it was Sancho’s statement that became the opinion of the major-
ity in sixteenth-century Spain and its dominions.
To the extent that circumstances permitted, crypto-Jews of Por-
tuguese origin celebrated the three major annual holidays, namely Pesah,
Shavuot, and Sukkot. They strictly fasted on the “Great Day of the Lord,”
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196 | Eva Alexandra Uchmany

as they called Yom Hakkipurim, and at the “Fast of Esther.” Due to the reli-
gious oppression in which crypto-Jews lived, Queen Esther was consid-
ered by them one of the greatest Hebrew heroines because she had saved
her nation from destruction. Many of them fasted Mondays and Thurs-
days, the days when the reading of the Torah is performed in the syna-
gogues. By means of fasting they asked God to forgive them their
transgressions, that is, their living in Christian garb. On the eves and ends
of the fasts, they dined only on Lenten dishes, such as vegetables, fruit,
fish, eggs, and cheese, as many Sephardi families still do to this day. On
the occasion of these banquets, the family and a small group of friends
would gather to discuss the “law of Moses,” reiterating that “this law is
the right one and the only one by which man could be saved.”
The subject of the Messiah came up in all meetings, since everyone
yearned for a quick redemption of Israel. Some even predicted the date of
his arrival. Manuel Díaz, sacrificed at the auto-da-fé celebrated in 1596,
calculated that the Messiah would appear by the year 1600. During his
imprisonment, Manuel dreamed that the Anointed One of the House of
David had opened the doors of the Inquisition’s secret jails. Seeing him-
self outside and free, he said to some acquaintances: “Look, God took up
his cause.”45 With this belief in his heart, Luis de Carvajal, during his sec-
ond imprisonment, confronted the Inquisitors and tried to convert them
to Judaism.
Others believed that the Savior would be born into a crypto-Jewish
family. In 1620, when Juana Enríquez was pregnant with her son Gaspar,
it was believed that she would give birth to the Redeemer because she
strictly observed the Mitzvoth and because her husband, Simon Váez, was
descended from the tribe of Levi. When Gaspar did not turn out to be the
Messiah, other virtuous women were considered as possible mothers of
the Savior. Certainly, every irregular and strange happening was seen as a
sign of His impending arrival. Simple as well as educated men believed
with all their hearts that God had not forgotten His people. Thanks to this
deep and genuine faith, which was at the same time the kind of futuristic
ideology that helps people to cope with tragedies, the survivors of the
autos-da-fé—in which their family and friends had been devoured by
flames—had the strength and energy to educate their children in their
ancestral creed. For fear of being discovered, the crypto-Jews educated
their small children as Christians. They revealed their children’s true iden-
tity and initiated them into Judaism when they reached the ages of twelve
and thirteen. The teaching generally began a few weeks before the fast of
Yom Hakkipurim. In this way the bath mitzvahs or the bar mitzvahs, after
fasting for the first time, became members of their small communities.
Though I have treated the period of the United Crown as one epoch,
this span of time should be divided in two stages. The first one extends
from 1580 until 1606, when the survivors of the three big autos-da-fé cele-
brated in New Spain (in 1590, 1596, and 1601) and those punished in that
decade in Peru and Goa benefited from the general pardon extended to
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 197

them by Pope Clement VIII. Thanks to the 1,800,000 golden ducats that
they paid to Philip III, of which the Holy See got a part, the New Christians
had been absolved from their sins and were reintegrated into civil society.46
The second stage extends from about 1610 until 1635 in Peru and
Cartagena de Indias,47 and from the same time more or less in New Spain
until 1642, with small autos-da-fé in between. In this span of time, many
New Christians and crypto-Jews settled once again in the Spanish over-
seas dominions. Some of them amassed great fortunes, especially those
who were engaged in the Atlantic trade. Some very few also ventured
into the Pacific trade. Their Lusitanian origin as well as their fortunes
provoked envy and jealousy among royal officials. The governor of
Panama, Francisco Valverde Mercado, expressed the feelings of many
when he wrote to Philip III in the first half of the seventeenth century that
“today the traders of the Indies are the Portuguese because they have the
asientos [contracts] for supplying slaves and the dispatch of the fleets and
squadrons on the good journey, of which all trade depends, and of this
nation there have been many Jewish merchants around here who live
within their Law and they, upon getting rich, go to other kingdoms before
they fall into the hands of the Inquisition.”48 Nevertheless, the sad truth
is that most of them, together with their fortunes, did fall into the hands
of the Inquisition.
The most important distinction between the crypto-Jews of the six-
teenth and the seventeenth centuries was the difference in their intellec-
tual level. The first wave of crypto-Jews had access to the Jesuit colleges
because the Societatis Jesus did not introduce to their order the “Statutes
of Purity of Blood” until 1570. Therefore, a good number of New Chris-
tians studied in their colleges and also in the Spanish universities, which
never introduced the “Statutes” and remained universal—especially the
University of Salamanca, at which several crypto-Jews got their degrees
in medicine and law. Due to this policy, a notable number of them mas-
tered Latin.
The second wave of New Christians and crypto-Jews had less oppor-
tunity to be educated in similar institutions, though a small number of
them studied law in Salamanca, as was the case of Tomás Treviño Martínez
de Sobremonte, who must have been a good Latinist, since he studied
Utroque Jure (Roman and canon law) in the above mentioned university. It
must be also said that Treviño was one of the most learned and devoted
Jews of his time in New Spain. During his last seven years, spent in the
secret jails of the Holy Office (1642–49), he refused to eat food prohibited
for a Jew; and when he was asked, in the last minutes of his life, to take a
cross in his hands as a sign that he was repentant for his sinful and
wicked Jewish life, he refused to do so. Due to this refusal, he was burned
alive.49 The Inquisition extended its merciful hand only to those who in
their last seconds appeared to be repenting for their sins and asked for
clemency. As an act of Christian-Inquisitorial charity, the penitents were
strangled before the wood on which they were standing was set ablaze.
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The Collapse of the Crypto-Jewish Communities

in Spanish America
In 1634 a young man who had recently arrived in Peru from Portugal was
arrested in Lima. He was brutally tortured and, when lying on the rack,
confessed his Jewishness, concurrently becoming a witness against other
co-religionists. In this way he initiated a series of persecutions that cul-
minated in the auto-da-fé celebrated in Lima in 1639 in which most of
Peruvian Jewry was exterminated. During that same span of time, the
community of Jewish merchants at Cartagena de Indias almost vanished.
The destruction of the crypto-Jewish community in New Spain began
in 1641 when Gaspar de Robles, a member of the large López-Méndez-
Enríquez family, who had been introduced by his uncles to Judaism in
Angola, as other young people were, changed his creed and, as a sincere
Catholic, denounced them as Judaizers.50 During the course of the year
1642, the secret jails of New Spain’s Inquisition swelled with crypto-Jews.
During the four autos-da-fé celebrated between 1646 and 1649, more than
188 Judaizers were displayed and punished in these processions. This
includes the living and the dead, since those who expired in jail or else-
where were ignited in effigy along with the boxes that contained their
exhumed bones from the different churches and graveyards of the city.
It should be underscored that 90 percent of the men condemned in
the several autos-da-fé that were celebrated in Peru, Cartagena de Indias,
and New Spain had been circumcised. A notable number of them went
through this rite in Amsterdam, and others had their circumcisions per-
formed in New Spain and Peru.51
The autos-da-fé had disastrous economic consequences in Spain as
well as in the viceroyalties. The seizure and confiscation of property car-
ried out in Peru between 1637 and 1639 caused the bankruptcy of the only
bank that existed in those times in Lima.52 The confiscated property in
Cartagena de Indias and New Spain, which included a great amount of
merchandise belonging to important brokers in Seville, was never paid
back to them, and therefore caused their ruin. The seized property was
partially sold at public auctions, and the money was used for current
necessities of the Holy Office, such as ornaments for chapels and
churches. The rest was invested in state bonds on the public debt, called
juros, which paid their holders an annual revenue of 7 percent. In sum,
the confiscations not only ruined big commercial houses in Seville and
some great merchants in the colonies, but it changed active capital into
passive in Spain and her overseas domains. Finally, the confiscations
caused mistrust among the big financiers and entrepreneurs, mostly New
Christians, some of whom were fortunate and fled with their capital to
the Low Countries and England, kingdoms that were enemies of Spain.
The survivors of the last autos-da-fé celebrated in the Spanish Amer-
ican tribunals, who were considered potential heretics, were expelled
from that part of the world. For both those who were honorable and
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 199

prosperous subjects of the crown and others who were poor and
degraded pariahs, it was not easy to abandon the land in which they had
lived for decades. Most of them, though they wanted to leave the place of
their sufferings, lacked the means to do so. They left the secret jails of the
Inquisition with only the ragged clothes on their backs, which occasion-
ally were covered with the sambenito. Many of them, including Juana
Enríquez, the wife of Simon Váez Sevilla, had started their new life with
only a sambenito, since their rags were destroyed the day following the
auto-da-fé. Indeed, Juana, like most of those reconciled into the bosom of
the Catholic Church, was condemned to get two hundred lashes for hav-
ing communicated with her fellow prisoners during her years of confine-
ment in jail. This punishment was applied by mounting the victim on a
donkey in the public streets of the city. The executioner was rewarded by
the spectators of this show with generous tips for every good flog.
All of the survivors had to beg in the street or seek loans to pay their
passage to Spain. At the same time, the captains and sailors rejected them
and refused to allow them on their ships, believing that having heretics
on board could cause some misfortune to befall them on the high seas.
But the Holy Office was implacable. It forced the owners of the vessels to
obey their orders under penalty of a fine of two hundred ducats and the
threat of excommunication.53
Nevertheless, small groups of crypto-Jews found ways of remaining
in America. Terrible was their fate if, through misfortune, they were to
fall once again into the grasp of the Holy Office. This happened to some
of them, and their destiny was the flames. In 1659, in the auto-da-fé cele-
brated in Mexico City, two old men, Diego Díaz and Francisco Botello,
who had nowhere to go, were reduced to ashes together with other
heretics. Diego Muñoz de Alvarado, who was once mayor of the city of
Puebla, was condemned as a Judaizer in June 1684 more because of his
multiple holdings and possession of 100,000 pesos in cash than because
of heresy. One of the last Jews sent to a pyre in Spanish America was Fer-
nando de Medina, alias Moisés Gómez, a native of Bordeaux, France. He
was linked to the tobacco monopoly, the administration of which was still
in the hands of Portuguese financiers who, as has been noted, were in the
majority New Christians. He was burned alive in a private auto-da-fé cel-
ebrated on 14 June 1699 in Mexico City.
By the eighteenth century, Spanish America was almost clean of Jews.
The New Christians that had not abandoned this part of the world were,
in general, already assimilated into the society of the Old Christians.
Even the term “New Christian” fell into disuse in the Spanish colonies.
The inhabitants, who had never seen a living example of a Jew, but who
attended the religious theater and walked in the solemn processions dur-
ing Holy Week, considered the Jew to be a mythical being who personi-
fied the concept of evil in history. Indeed, the Jew was identified with the
devil and was believed to have a tail and horns. Concepts like these also
prevailed in the first decades after the independence of Mexico—and of
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200 | Eva Alexandra Uchmany

Spanish America as a whole—until liberal ideas gained ground and dif-

ferent states issued laws establishing religious tolerance.
The Inquisition, from its establishment in New Spain and the viceroy-
alty in Peru, formed and manipulated public opinion through the peri-
odic publication of the Edicts of Faith, which were read in all the
churches, including the smallest ones in the vast Spanish domains, and
by this means transformed not only the Jews but also the English, Dutch,
and other non-Catholics into demons and villains. When some French
and even English came to New Spain with the Bourbon regiments in the
second half of the eighteenth century, the Mexican Inquisitors wrote to
the king in 1770, asking him to prohibit foreigners from passing to the
Indies. The Holy tribunal feared that the foreigners’ presence would
“undetectably dispel among the majority of the inhabitants of this King-
dom the horror and abomination that they have against this nation [the
English] only because of the idea that they are heretics and enemies of the
religion and the Church.”54

Notes

1. “Lineage of Santángel” in Libro Verde de Aragón, reproduced partially by Manuel Ser-

rano y Sanz, Orígenes de la Dominación española en América (Madrid, 1918), 494–501;
“Summary and Memory of the Converted Jews, Neighbors of the City of Zaragoza,
Which Were Burnt in Person or in Statue, or Punished by the Inquisition between 1483–
1504,” in José Amador de los Ríos, Historia Social, Política y Religiosa de los Judíos en
España y Portugal (Madrid, 1960), 756, 1010–22.
2. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (Mexico, 1996), vol. 1, 226–27.
3. Alice B. Gould, Nueva Lista documentada de los tripulantes de Colón en 1492 (Madrid, 1984),
53–54. De Torres converted sometime in 1492, before the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain, and enlisted himself with the Adelantado of Murcia, Don Juan Chacón. He was
asked to cross the Atlantic Ocean with Columbus because of his knowledge of Hebrew
and Aramaic. He traveled on the boat Santa María and was left in the first colony
founded by Columbus in the New World, named Navidad, where he was killed by the
Indians together with his companions. Bartomomé de las Casas, Historia, vol. 1, 239.
4. Antonio Domíguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en España y en América (Madrid, 1971), 49–50.
5. Claudio Guillén, “Un padrón de conversos sevillanos,” in Bulletin Hispanique (Bor-
deaux, 1963), T. 65, 40–85.
6. The names Alonso de Ávila and Gil González de Benavides de Ávila were used very
frequently in the same family, the name passing mostly from an uncle to his cousin.
The same was the case in the family of the Santángels, mentioned above.
7. “Inquiry of the Holy Office against Alonso de Ávila … Mexico, 1537,” Archivo General
de la Nación de México, further AGNM, Inquisition, further Inq., Index of the first vol-
ume of the Inquisition files.
8. Returning from Spain, Alonso de Ávila enlisted under Francisco Montejo and in 1528
took part in the conquest of Yucatán.
9. Eva A. Uchmany, “De algunos cristianos nuevos en la conquista y colonización de la
Nueva España,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana (1985):265–318; and “Proceso de Gon-
zalo Gómez por palabras malsonantes, México 1536,” AGNM, Inq., vol. 2, exp. 2.
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New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America | 201

10. Cristóbal Bermúdez Plata, Catálogo de pasajeros a Indias durante los siglos XVI, XVII y
XVIII (Seville, 1964), 2 vols.
11. Amador de los Ríos, “Historia,” 623–27.
12. Ruth Pike, Aristócratas y comerciantes, la sociedad sevillana en el siglo XVI (Barcelona,
1978), 105.
13. Francisco López de Gómara, Historia General de las Indias (Barcelona, 1954), vol. 2, 4, 299.
14. “Testamento de Hernando Cortés,” in Cartas y Documentos de Cortés (Mexico, 1963),
499, 508, 514, 570, 589.
15. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de México (Mexico, 1960), vol.
2, 161–63.
16. “The Will of Rodrigo de Paz, Native of Salamanca, September 23, 1525” and “Nuevo
Codicilo de R. de Paz, September 30, 1525,” in A. Millares Carlo and J. I. Mantecón,
Indice y extractos de los Protocolos del Archivo de Notarías de México, 1524–1528 (Mexico,
1945), vol. 1, 42–44, doc. numb. 74. and doc. numb.96.
17. Hibueras is today’s Honduras and part of Nicaragua. In this unfortunate expedition
Cortés lost his governorship in New Spain.
18. Millares Carlo and Mantecón, Indice y extractos, note at 57.
19. An encomienda included land, water, and Indians, whose labor was the main capital of
the conquistador (encomendero). The granting of an encomienda was limited in time: a
span of years or one or more lifetimes.
20. “‘Statements of Bartolomé González and Pedro Vázquez de Vergara,’ Companions of
Hernando Alonso in the Conquest of Mexico,” in “Diligencias sobre los Sambenitos
antiguos y renovación de ellos y postura de los que se han relaxado y requeridos por
este Santo Oficio, Mexico, 1574,” AGNM, Inq., vol. 77, exp. 35. (This was an Inquisitor-
ial list of all those punished by the Inquisition in Mexico, including those condemned
to death. They were given over to secular justice to execute the terrible order to burn
them at the stake. This was done in the late afternoon, after the reading of their sen-
tences came to an end. The formal tribunal was establish in Mexico in 1571. After an
exhaustive investigation into all those convicted, the penitential garment (sambenito) of
the convicted was displayed in the cathedral of the city, so that they and their families
would live in shame for generations. The sambenito in itself was an overgarment marked
with a cross of Saint Andrew, on which the sentence of the convicted was painted.)
21. According to Don Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, archbishop and Inquisitor of Santo
Domingo, who became in 1530 the president of the Royal Audience of New Spain, in
“Statements” of the above mentioned witnesses.
22. Uchmany, “De algunos,” 301–2.
23. Francisco Fernández del Castillo, “Alonso de Estrada, su familia,” in Memorias de la
Academia Mexicana de la Historia (Mexico, 1942), T. I., 398–431; Norberto Castro y Tosi,
“Verdadera paternidad de Alonso de Estrada,” in Revista de Indias (Madrid, 1948), vol.
9, 1011–26.
24. Gudrun Lohmeyer, personal communication, and Master’s Degree thesis on the con-
quest of Chiapas. Haim Beinart, Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad
Real, 1483–1525 (Jerusalem, 1974–85), 4 vols.
25. Kasher is the Hebrew word meaning “pure, not contaminated” according to Jewish
dietary ordinances. Deformation of the word “Kosher,” as used in Yiddish.
26. Uchmany, “De algunos,” 301–2.
27. “Testamento de Diego de Ocaña, México 1533,” in Vida Colonial, publication of the
AGNM, 1933, numb. VIII, 3–15.
28. Enrique Otte, Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua (Caracas, 1977), 198–99.
29. Javier E. Sánchiz Ruiz, “La limpieza de sangre en la Nueva España, El funcionariado
del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, siglo XVI,” Master’s Degree thesis, 1990, UNAM,
unpublished, 109–12.
30. “Letters, Testimonies and Information” on Doctor Christóbal de Miranda, from the
year 1577, in AGNM, Inq., vol. 79, exp. 10; vol. 80, exps. 8,9,10, 11 and 21; vol. 82, exp.
34; and from the year 1579, vol. 82, exp. 14.
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202 | Eva Alexandra Uchmany

31. José Toribio Medina, Historia del tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, 1596–1820, ed. Marcel
Bataillon (Santiago de Chile, 1956), 175–76.
32. This concept is discussed in Eva A. Uchmany, La vida entre el Judaísmo y el Cristianismo
en la Nueva España, 1580–1606 (Mexico, 1992, 1994), 158–59.
33. Uchmany, La vida, 158–59.
34. Uchmany, La vida.
35. Ibid.
36. Eva A. Uchmany, “The Periodization of the History of the New Christians and Crypto-
Jews in New Spain” in New Horizons in Sephardic Studies, ed. Yedida K. Stillman and
Georges K. Zucker (Albany, 1993), 113.
37. Jaime Contreras, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisici¢n de Galicia, Madrid, 1982, 39–65.
38. “Yeshiva” is a rabbinical school.
39. “Testification of Balthazar de Araujo against Luis Franco Rodríguez, 1634,” in Manuel
Tejado Fernández, Aspectos de la vida social en Cartagena de Indias durante el seiscientos
(Sevilla, 1954), 322–24.
40. Medina, Historia, vol. 2, 93.
41. Maariv is an evening prayer.
42. “According to the testimony of the sorcerer Diego López, the man who was reading
from the book was young, about 23 years old, of dark complexion and a newcomer in
Cartagena,” in Manuel Tejado Fernández, Aspectos, 200.
43. Eva A. Uchmany, “Simón Váez Sevilla,” in Estudios de Historia Novohispana (Mexico,
1987), vol. 4, 307–22.
44. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha, chap. 42.
45. Uchmany, La vida, 87–88.
46. Ibid., last chapter and enclosed documents.
47. In 1610 a third tribunal of the Holy Office was establish in Spanish America.
48. “Letters of don Francisco de Valverde Mercado, Puertobelo, 1 and 30 of July, 1606,”
Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Audiencia de Panamá, exps. 718 and 725.
49. “Causa Criminal contra Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, por judaizante, Oaxaca, 1625”;
and “Segundo Proceso Criminal …, México 1642,” in Boletín del Archivo General de la
Nación (Mexico, 1935), T. VI, no, 1, 2, 3 and 1936, T. VII, 1, 2, 3.
50. “Testification of Gaspar de Robles, México 1641,” AGNM, Inq., vol. 390, exp. 11, and
“Proceso criminal contra Francisco Home alias Vicente Enríquez por judaizante,”
vol. 391.
51. Description or Relación Sumaria of the autos-da-fé celebrated in Mexico City in the
years 1646, 1647, 1648, and 1649. These books, best-sellers in their time, were written
by Don Pedro de Estrada y Escobedo, member of the administration of the cathedral
of Mexico City, and brother of Francisco de Estrada y Escobedo, one of New Spain’s
Inquisitors at the time. The auto-da-fé celebrated in Lima, Peru, was described by the
Presbyter Fernando de Montesinos, a “Familiar” (lay collaborator), of the tribunal of
Lima. The books were published in the printing houses of the Holy Office, and most
of them include the sermon that was preached during the autos-da-fé. Some of these
Relaciones survived, and a copy can be found in The John Carter Brown Library.
52. “Letter from the Inquisitors of Peru to the Supreme Council of the tribunal … giving
statement of the bankruptcy of the Bank of Juan de la Cueva,” in Archivo Histórico
Nacional, Madrid, Inq., libro 1040, fs. 423–25.
53. “Letters and orders, Mexico 1649,” annexed to the “Proceso criminal contra Simín Váez
Sevilla por judaizante, Mexico 1642,” AGNM, Inq., vol. 398, exp. 1.
54. José Toribio Medina, Historia del tribunal del Santo Oficio en México (Mexico, 1952), 293.
10 1/24/01 11:38 AM Page 203

– Chapter 10 –

CRYPTO-JEWS AND NEW CHRISTIANS IN

COLONIAL PERU AND CHILE

Günter Böhm

I N1947 WHEN I SUBMITTED to the Chilean Historical Society the manu-

script for my book Los Judíos en Chile durante la Colonia,1 I thought that
I had exhausted all available documentation on the subject in Chile—
going beyond even José Toribio Medina’s legacy of work on the Inquisi-
tion, which forms part of the treasures in the National Library in
Santiago. The response I received from Chilean historians such as Carlos
Larraín de Castro seemed to confirm my belief.2
Now, fifty years after beginning my research on the presence of Jews
in colonial Peru and Chile, I must admit that many related questions have
yet to be resolved. Because we have no knowledge of any testimony from
the accused or their contemporaries, the history of the Jews must be
found almost exclusively in the acts and proceedings of the Holy Office
of the Inquisition’s tribunal. The information in the acts of the tribunal in
Lima leads us to believe that no more than 250 people were accused of
having Jewish origins between 1569—the year that this tribunal was
established in Lima (Fig. 10.1)—and 1690. Of this sum, scarcely a dozen
cases occurred in the territory of present-day Chile. We may never know
with certainty the exact number—or even an approximation thereof—of
Judaists who settled temporarily or permanently in these territories.
Here, I will put forth a few of the reasons for which we do not have more
records concerning the real number of Jewish converts (conversos) or clan-
destine Jews in colonial Chile and Peru at our disposal.
To begin, I must mention that several decades passed after the con-
quest of these two countries and after the constitution of the tribunal of
the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Lima before any denouncements
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204 | Günter Böhm

FIGURE 10.1 Royal letters patent establishing the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Chile.
Madrid, 25 January 1569.
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Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile | 205

against Judaizers were received. The tribunal’s early activities were pri-
marily concerned with combating heresy and sins against the holy
Catholic faith, as well as staving off Protestantism’s possible infiltration
into the region—which, it was thought, might be brought in by crew
members of foreign vessels.
During the sixteenth century, numerous conversos were able to proceed
into the territory of Chile, owing to the lack of European inhabitants and
the absence of a local tribunal, for here there were only commissioners who
had been named by the headquarters. Years later, often after their deaths,
the true origins of many of these crypto-Jews were revealed only because
their names appeared in generally anonymous, libelous pamphlets.
An example of this is provided by the case of Rodrigo de Orgoños,3 a
member of the small army that accompanied Diego de Almagro on his
1535 exploratory expedition to Chile. Born in Oropresa in the diocese of
Toledo, Spain, he was the legitimate son of Alfonso Jiménez, a Jewish cob-
bler, and Beatríz Dueñas. While serving in Italy, this Spanish soldier
adopted the surname of a modest hidalgo from Oropresa, claiming to be
his illegitimate son and demanding legal recognition as such in return for
a large sum of money and a yearly allowance. Whatever the truth, Juan
de Orgoños denied any relation to Rodrigo and publicly declared, “What
an annoying Jew; he is not my son, and I thank God for that fact.”4 Nat-
urally, the records that contain this information were unknown in Chile
and Peru during Orgoños’s stays in both countries.
Years later, another Spanish soldier, Diego García de Cáceres, served
with the conqueror of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia, and soon after, in 1583,
became acting governor. Two of Chile’s founding fathers, José Miguel
Carrera and Diego Portales, number among García de Cáceres’s descen-
dants.5 A full four centuries after García de Cáceres arrived in Chile, his
Jewish origins were revealed with the discovery and publication of a text
in Lima. The work had been written in 1621—many years after the death
of García de Cáceres—by Pedro Mejía de Ovando, and was therefore
known as “La Ovandina.” In this work, Ovando claimed to know of a list
of families who had assumed noble titles through payment of huge sums
of money. Among them was the García de Cáceres family, as this passage
from the proceedings shows: “Ramiro Yañez de Saravía, married in the
kingdom of Chile to Doña Isabel de Cáceres y Osorio, daughter of Diego
García de Cáceres of Plascencia where he and his descendants are pub-
licly deemed new Christians, descendants of Jews.”6 Thanks to docu-
ments that still exist in Spain, it has been proven that Diego García was
neither a hidalgo nor from Cáceres, as Ovando had claimed.
A 1570 letter to the General Inquisitor referring to both Chile and
Peru confirms the ease with which Spanish conversos arrived and resided
in colonial Chile, saying, “with respect to the few Spaniards in these
parts, there are two times as many converts as in Spain.”
Of equal importance is the case of the soldier Luis Duarte, son of a
Portuguese Jewish converso, who changed his surname to Noble and was
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206 | Günter Böhm

baptized by a clergyman who had been “degraded for being a Judaizer.”

Despite the fact that he had been denounced as a Jew in the port of
Buenos Aires, Luis Noble was able to travel to Peru where, in 1608, he
had no problem enlisting in a troop that was then sent from the port of
Callao to Chile. In the middle of 1614 he returned to Peru. His Jewish ori-
gins would never have been known had it not been for the fact that, in
dire need of sustenance, he robbed a church. As a result, he was captured
and tried in the tribunal of the Holy Office in Lima, wherein he was
forced to acknowledge his true origins.7
As a result of the temporary unification of the two Iberian crowns
between 1580 and 1640, a significant number of Portuguese New Chris-
tians began to flock to Spain’s New World dominions. They were assured
residency within Hispanic territories through legally obtained authoriza-
tions despite the fact that they were considered foreigners. These Por-
tuguese first headed to Brazil and, by way of the port of Buenos Aires,
moved on to Córdoba, Tucumán, and the silver mines in Potosí. Often
they continued on to Peru and Chile. Documents received by the Inquisi-
tion’s tribunal in Lima constantly complain of their presence. For exam-
ple, one written document affirms “that through the port of Buenos Aires
in the province of Río de la Plata enter many Portuguese from the
Hebrew nation” and earnestly demands that they be stopped from enter-
ing the region.
The surgeon Diego Núñez de Silva (father of the martyr, Bachelor
Francisco Maldonado de Silva, whom I discuss below) must have traveled
this very same route. Around 1580 in San Miguel de Tucumán, he married
an Old Christian, the daughter of one of the conquerors.8 Many other Por-
tuguese followed the same path as a means of safeguarding against the
possibility of seizure orders given by civil or ecclesiastic authorities.
Because of Chile’s known poverty, due in part to the lack of impor-
tant silver or gold mines and due also to the constant attacks on Spanish
villages by Indians, few Portuguese dared travel to the region. For this
reason, even in Santiago, the Chilean territory’s principal city, there were
only about three thousand settlers of Spanish origin around the year
1630. This number had risen to nearly six thousand by 1642 when a full
sixth of the population was lost in a great earthquake that completely
devastated the city. For the next few decades, the residents of Santiago
lived in the most alarming misery, which prompted Bishop Gaspar de
Villaroel’s urgent request for aid from Lima. It is therefore understand-
able that very few Judaizers risked settling in Chile, and when they did,
it was due to the immediate need to escape orders for their capture given
by the tribunal of the Holy Office in Spain or to escape the denounce-
ments of its commissioners in Buenos Aires.
This was apparently the case of Doctor Rodrigo Henríquez de Fon-
seca (whose parents were imprisoned in Spain for being Judaizers), his
wife, and Luis Rivero, his brother-in-law.9 These three had fled to Santi-
ago, changing their surnames to Sotelo before setting sail for the New
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Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile | 207

World. The arrival of Doctor Henríquez de Fonseca and his wife, Leonor
de Andrade, is of special interest in the history of Jews in Chile because
they were the first Jewish couple to settle there. In addition, their daugh-
ter, who was born in Santiago in late 1665, was the first known child of
both a Jewish father and mother in Chile. When Doctor Henríquez de
Fonseca committed the indiscretion of signing a document with his real
name, the Holy Office’s commissioner identified him, having already
received the orders for his arrest from Lima. Their trial lasted a number
of years, and after being tortured, the doctor and his wife admitted to
having practiced various Jewish customs in both Spain and the New
World. Once the brother-in-law, Luis Rivero, had confessed to being “a
follower of Moses’ Law, he killed himself by bloodletting,” as the Inquisi-
tors of Lima so concisely state in a letter.
Of special importance here is the last known Inquisition trial in Chile,
that of Leonel Gómez Pereyra, who was born to Jewish parents in Viana,
Portugal, around 1636.10 To avoid being identified, he adopted the name
León Gómez de Oliva. Owing to the length of his trial, which began in
July 1679 and continued until May 1683, and the extensive personal data
that he himself provided, we are able to reconstruct the biography of one
of the many Portuguese who settled in Chile during the seventeenth cen-
tury. Within many important social circles in the country it was common
knowledge that he was a New Christian, but this did not prevent León
Gómez from marrying an Old Christian gentlewoman and attaining
important positions, such as that of councilman. Although he was sen-
tenced by the tribunal of the Holy Office to suffer “the confiscation of his
goods … for formal guilt of Judaism,” he became “an Established brother
of Saint Peter’s guild in the cathedral of this city [Santiago]”; received the
“Letter of benefactor in the Society of JHS [Jesus]”; and obtained the “Let-
ter of brotherhood in the Religion of my father, Saint Augustine.” León
Gómez de Oliva must have had many powerful friends. Because this
“penitent” had made important donations to the “Main Church” and the
Monastery of Santa Clara, I suspect that he had befriended a number of
influential members of the clergy. This being so, we can understand that,
in 1708, upon signing his last will and testament, he dared request a “bur-
ial in the Church of our Lady of Mercy in this city,” and that his body be
accompanied to the sepulcher “by the priest and sacristan of my parish
with the cross held high.”
Peru’s highlands, with their important silver mines, indisputably
attracted more Portuguese in the sixteenth century than did any other
region. The Inquisitors Verdugo and Gaytan, from the tribunal in Lima,
call our attention to this fact in a report sent to Madrid in May 1622:
“The village of Potosí is full of Portuguese … and generally speaking
they are all from the Hebrew nation, and our experience shows that
those who have been imprisoned by the Inquisition all Judaize” and that
“they now live very cautiously and they are no longer as easily identifi-
able as before.”11
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208 | Günter Böhm

Portuguese miners and merchants were not the only settlers of Potosí
and the Peruvian highlands, however. Many clergymen and men of let-
ters also took up residence there as well. In 1629, the chronicler Vázquez
de Espinosa estimated this region’s Spanish population to be about four
thousand, whereas Lima’s Spanish inhabitants numbered only ten thou-
sand. In a Royal Bull from the end of October 1603, specific reference was
made to the potential harm done by Portuguese clergy with Hebrew ori-
gins. One such clergyman was the bishop of Tucumán, Friar Francisco de
Vitoria, who “is kin to the Piedras Santas family from Granada, known
Jews, and whose brother, Diego Pérez de Acosta … of Jewish class and
lineage” was found guilty of adhering to “Moses’ Law” in 1602.12
Just as illuminating is the case of the Portuguese clergyman, Diego
López de Lisboa, who was burned to death for being a Judaizer.
Although they were known to be Jewish in Spain as well as in Lima, both
he and his wife falsely claimed to be Old Christians. In Lima, Diego
López de Lisboa came to be the chaplain to Archbishop Fernando Arias
de Ugarte. In 1635, documents from the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition
in Lima name him as they tell how “many people came to this arch-
bishop’s windows, saying, ‘Cast that Jew from Your Majesty’s house.’”13
Two of López de Lisboa’s four children occupied important posts in
Peru. The first, Diego, changed his surname to León Pinelo and in 1647
was awarded the cathedra of Prima Cánones (ecclesiastic theology) in the
University of San Marcos. Yet a number of Inquisitors believed that it was
“very dangerous to entrust the interpretation of the sacred Canons, the
ecclesiastic material, and the sacraments to a person so foul and suspect
as he.” Despite these doubts, Diego León Pinelo was later appointed rec-
tor of the University of San Marcos and General Protector of the Indians
of Peru.14
Even more famous than Diego de León Pinelo was his brother, Anto-
nio, who had used the same surname as Diego since 1636 and who was
considered an illustrious writer and bibliographer and a legal expert.
After moving to Madrid, Antonio published a number of works, among
them the Sumarios de la recopilación general de las leyes on the laws of the
Indies. As a result of his important publications, he is rightly known as
the father of American bibliography.
If Potosí became the third most populous city in Hispanic America,
relying on Vásquez de Espinosa’s Compendio y descripción de las Indias
Occidentales, we see that Lima was the second most important city in the
New World (after Mexico City) in 1630. During the second half of the sev-
enteenth century, Lima was also the favorite South American city of New
Christians and crypto-Jews. In fact, we have a picturesque description of
Peru and Chile provided by an anonymous Portuguese Jew in the first
decade of the seventeenth century. This author also spoke favorably of
neighboring regions as he considered the possibilities for commercial
exchange with the Netherlands. His General Description gives many
details, among them important data concerning Spanish fortifications in
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Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile | 209

the different ports and cities of the region. This information was of spe-
cial use to the Dutch West India Company, which would soon begin its
colonizing expeditions into new American territories.
It is important to note that the author of the Description was a Jew and
that, after his formal baptism, he was able to live in the viceroyalty of
Peru without complications and without being bothered by the tribunal
of the Inquisition. After having lived, for the most part, in Lima for some
ten years, this Jew left Peru around the year 1615. Sadly, his General
Description is the only source of information that issues directly from a
Jewish resident of those territories.15
The number of Portuguese Judaizers must have risen considerably in
the 1630s, judging by the increasing number of public trials occurring in
Lima, as well as the large quantity of Portuguese accused in the “Great
Complicity” or “Conspiracy” proceedings that ended in the trials of 1639.16
In this process, no fewer than fifty-seven of the total sixty-three accused
were Portuguese or sons of Portuguese.17 Of the six remaining, four were
from Seville, a city with a high concentration of conversos, many of whom
set sail for the New World during the unification of Iberian kingdoms.
The most important of the massive detentions of Portuguese oc-
curred in Lima in 1635, when a third of the city’s Judaizing population
was captured. According to a document sent to Madrid by the Inquisitors
on 18 May 1635, this event plunged the city into bankruptcy and brought
about the ruin of the major part of its commerce.18 What is more, it
alarmed the commissioner in Chile, who then ordered a census of the
Portuguese living in that territory. A total of twenty-eight people were
counted, but this prompted no Inquisitorial proceedings since there were
no denunciations of them as being Judaizers.
The aforementioned Inquisitorial report of May 1635 also provides us
with other details concerning the Portuguese presence in Lima. For exam-
ple, the majority were single and had arrived in Lima between 1628 and
1630. An important sector of commerce rested in their hands, and the
Inquisitors wrote, “the Spaniard who does not have a Portuguese for a
business partner fears he will not be successful.” What is more, “all mer-
chandise, from brocade to sackcloth, from diamonds to trinkets, all
passed through their hands.” The Inquisitors knew full well that these
Portuguese developed both business and family ties with other New
Christian countrymen throughout the countries of the Old World and the
New. The Inquisitors also knew of the double religious lives led by many
of these Portuguese, as demonstrated in a document that attests, “gener-
ally none is caught without their rosary, reliquary, icons … and other
devotions.… They know the catechism, pray the rosary and, when asked
… why they pray, they reply that they never forget their prayers in times
of need, as in prison, and they appear devout in order to deceive, so that
they will be taken for good Christians.”
The arrests that took place during the “Great Complicity” proceed-
ings came about because of the indiscretion of a single converso, Antonio
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210 | Günter Böhm

Cordero, who in August 1634 was accused by the Holy Office of practic-
ing Jewish customs.19 He and the others who were detained were tor-
tured and forced to reveal the names of still others who were involved.
These prisoners also provided details concerning Jewish practices, rites,
and customs as well as the places where Judaizers met to pray. As a
result, Manuel Bautista Perez’s name appeared as the spiritual leader or
“Great Captain.”20 He was

A man of good reputation and was deemed the oracle of the Hebrew nation,
always considered to be the principal observer of Moses’ Law. He presided
over the meetings concerning this law, which were held in his house. He had
many spiritual books and dealt with Theologians of Portuguese descent.…
On the outside, he seemed a good Christian, celebrating the Holy Sacrament,
hearing especially those masses and sermons which told the stories of the
Old Testament.… Although he tried, he could not foil the astute members of
the Holy Office of the Inquisition who eagerly collected proof of his deceit in
performing these acts. He was captured for being a Judaist … and listened to
his sentence with grave dignity. He died unrepentant, telling the executioner
to do his job.

Although the Inquisitors do not give a reason, the bachelor Francisco

Maldonado de Silva was implicated in the trials of 1639 and taken pris-
oner by the tribunal of the Holy Office in Chile. Along with ten other
accused, he was sentenced to “relajado en persona,” whereas Manuel de
Paz, who killed himself in prison, was condemned to “relajado en estatua.”
In my 1984 book, Historia de los Judíos en Chile, I make known all of the
existing biographical information and documentation concerning Mal-
donado de Silva. It is notable that this distinguished figure, martyred for
his faith, had no problem traveling to, and establishing himself in, Chile,
although both his father and older brother had been brought before the tri-
bunal of the Holy Office in Lima in March 1605. Nor was this background
a professional obstacle, since he was given work as a doctor in Santiago’s
Hospital of San Juan de Dios in 1619. Yet because he had openly confessed
his Judaism to his younger sister Isabel in 1625, he was arrested, taken to
the secret prisons of the tribunal of the Holy Office in Lima, and burned at
the stake at an auto-da-fé on 23 January 1639 (Fig 10.2).
After the massive trials of 1639, the activities of the tribunal of the
Holy Office in Lima abated. A significant number of Judaists left the city,
surely, or ceased their practice of Jewish rites. After 1666, no one is men-
tioned as having been accused of Judaizing in the Acts of the Holy Office.
In 1736, María Ana de Castro, an almost legendary figure who had love
affairs with many of Lima’s aristocrats, was the last person to be sen-
tenced and burned alive at the stake.21
Although no more cases of “Judaizers” are known to exist in the avail-
able documents of the tribunal of the Holy Office in Lima during the colo-
nial period, the interpretation of the information we do have continues.
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Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile | 211

FIGURE 10.2 Title page of a pamphlet relating to the auto-da-fé in Lima, 23 January 1639.
10 1/24/01 11:39 AM Page 212

212 | Günter Böhm

Notes

Translated from the Spanish by Carrie C. Chorba.

1. Günter Böhm, Los Judíos en Chile durante la Colonia (Santiago, 1948).

2. Ibid., 5–9.
3. Carlos Larrain de Castro, “Los Judíos en Chile Colonial,” Judaica 133–134 (July–August
1944):27–28.
4. José Armando de Ramón Folch, Descrubrimiento de Chile y compañeros de Almagro (San-
tiago, 1953), 167–68.
5. Larrain de Castro, “Los Judíos,” 34.
6. Antonio R. Rodriguez Moñino, “Pedro Mexia de Ovando, cronista de linajes colo-
niales. Andanzas Inquisitoriales de ‘La Ovandina,’” Tierra Firme, no. 3–4 (1936):413.
7. Günter Böhm, “Luis Noble: La Historia de un soldado judío en Chile,” Sefardica 7
(1989):50.
8. Günter Böhm, Historia de los Judíos en Chile, vol. 1 (Santiago, 1984), 21–23.
9. Günter Böhm, “Criptojudaismo en América Latina,” Sefardica 10 (1993):52–53.
10. Ibid., 53–57.
11. Letter written by the Inquisitors Francisco Verdugo and Andrés Juan Gaytan, 4 May
1622. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (Inquisición Libro 1038, fls. 417v–418v).
12. Günter Böhm, “Algunos Clérigos ‘portugueses’ en América del sur colonial,” Sefardica,
no. 3 (1985):33.
13. Ibid., 36–37.
14. Ibid., 39.
15. Günter Böhm, “Una descripción del reino de Chile por un judio ‘portugués,’ a comien-
zos del siglo XVIII,” Maguen-Escudo 100 (1966):20–24.
16. Mentioned by the Inquisitors as “complicidad granda.”
17. Böhm, Historia de los Judios en Chile, vol. 1, 141, 399–426.
18. Ibid., 345–67.
19. Ibid., 329, 345–49.
20. Ibid., 420–21.
21. José Toribio Medina, Historia del tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Lima, vol. 2
(Santiago, 1956), 273–74.
11 1/24/01 4:11 PM Page 213

PART III

THE LUSO-BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE:

JEWS IN PORTUGUESE LATIN AMERICA
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– Chapter 11 –

MARRANOS AND THE INQUISITION:

ON THE GOLD ROUTE IN
MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL

Anita Novinsky

O NE OF THE LEAST KNOWN FACTS in the history of Jewish involvement

in the expansion of Europe is the role of marranos in Brazil at the
beginning of the modern era. New Christians, descendants of Jews who
converted to Catholicism, tried to take advantage of the opportunities
opened up by the Atlantic sea routes to the west to begin new lives—lives
that in many cases had been suspended by the persecutions of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition.
This essay will focus on the region of Minas Gerais during the first
half of the eighteenth century, a period in which the Portuguese Inquisi-
tion waged its most rigorous attacks against descendants of Jews. My
research is based entirely upon as yet unpublished documents, prima-
rily fifty-seven transcripts of trials concerning prisoners from Minas
Gerais, all of whom were incarcerated in Portugal. These documents
reveal the involvement of New Christians in expeditions in search of
gold, in the construction of early settlements and villages, in mineral
extraction, and in commercial, political, administrative, and cultural
spheres, along with the persecutions they suffered in a new world
molded upon old prejudices.
The discovery of gold deposits at the turn of the century produced a
veritable rush toward the mines, both from Portugal, where entire vil-
lages were emptied, and from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Per-
nambuco. Approximately 300,000 Portuguese set off in search of the
mining regions of Brazil in the eighteenth century, a considerable number
of whom were New Christians.
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216 | Anita Novinsky

Before discussing the history of New Christians in the gold region,

however, I want to turn to some more general considerations concerning
the Jewish role in European expansion. Alfredo Margarido, an eminent
professor from the University of Paris, has written that had the Jewish
community not existed, European expansion would have been slower
and the Portuguese would not have achieved their worldwide presence.1
A well-known essayist on Portuguese culture, Margarido credits the
techniques, experiences, and wealth of the Jews (or New Christians) with
imposing a well-defined path for European expansion, which led to the
enlargement of the known world. The dissemination of Portuguese and
Spanish Jews created a network of relations between far-flung outposts
of the empire, which in turn stimulated commerce during an age when
communications were extremely difficult.2
The introduction of the Inquisition tribunal in Portugal was a reac-
tion to the development of a competitive and upwardly mobile mercan-
tile middle class that inserted itself into the spheres of power, thereby
threatening the aristocracy’s political and financial hegemony. The tribu-
nal covered itself in a mantle of “holiness” and extended its control over
the entire empire. Religion and all of its symbolic trappings served a
practical end: to prevent the ascension of a new class with new demands
and new values that directly contradicted the beliefs held by leading con-
servative groups in Portugal. A desire to appropriate the material goods
accumulated by the New Christian mercantile bourgeoisie was also a fac-
tor in bringing the Inquisition to the recently discovered, gold-producing
regions of Brazil.3
Professor Jonathan I. Israel, like Professor Margarido, has also called
attention to the Jewish contribution to economic life in the early modern
period. He states that the preeminence of Sephardic Jews in the world
economy has been one of the most remarkable phenomenons in history.4
Scattered to the four corners of the earth, the Sephardic Jews maintained
a central role in the Western European market over the course of three
centuries, as well as in the economic interactions between the Middle
East, West Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
According to Professor Israel, the reasons for this success lie in the
social, religious, cultural, and economic ties that these Sephardic Jews
established between commercial communities that were enormously dis-
tant from each other. At a time when communications in Europe were
slow and difficult, the Sephardic Jews were able to maintain contact with
their brethren in the most distant regions in the world.5 Although he
includes Brazil in this economic web, Professor Israel does not investigate
closely the extensive commercial network created by Brazilian New
Christians, nor its relevance within a global economic context.
A third, rather bold thesis, which has been widely contested by tradi-
tional historians, is that of Ellis Rivkin. Rivkin’s argument seems to me to
be extremely pertinent to the Brazilian phenomenon.6 He stresses the
importance of Portuguese Jews in unleashing a “process of modernization
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 217

and westernization that transformed Europe’s destiny.” Whereas Spanish

Jews were mired in the diaspora, Portuguese crypto-Jews were involved
in large-scale enterprises overseas. Rivkin also calls attention to an
important and original fact in Jewish history that has given rise to polem-
ical debate: the Portuguese New Christians’ “option” to remain New
Christians. Even when these New Christians found themselves living in
regions of Europe that afforded them relative tolerance, they would often
choose to return to Portugal or to live in lands belonging to the Por-
tuguese crown, where they would suffer from legal discrimination yet
also benefit from great opportunities for social and economic advance-
ment. In Rivkin’s opinion, the religious identity of the New Christians
was “negotiable,” and they chose their unique role as entrepreneurs over
their Jewish religious identity. Portuguese New Christians were neither
sincere New Christians nor crypto-Jews, but rather “crypto-individual-
ists.”7 In large part, this description corresponds to the situation in Brazil,
especially with regard to wealthy businessmen and contractors, although
one must be careful not to generalize, since Rivkin’s argument does not
apply well to the complexity and dynamics of the Brazilian marrano phe-
nomenon in its entirety.

* * * *

A NEW ERA IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY of Portuguese New Christians

began in the eighteenth century with the discovery of gold deposits in
Brazil. Accounts of the economic activities and daily social life of New
Christians in Minas Gerais are essentially absent from Brazilian histori-
ography, with the exception of the work of J. Gonçalves Salvador.
Prominent Brazilian historians have minimized or ignored the role of
Jewish descendants in the colonization of Brazil, from an economic as
well as a social and cultural standpoint. In his classic work on Minas
Gerais, Augusto Lima Júnior calls attention to the large New Christian
population, yet states that “rarely one finds in Minas Gerais proceedings
against New Christians for practicing Judaism.”8 Caio Boschi, a special-
ist in colonial Minas history, wrote in one of his articles that “there are
no decidedly pronounced traces of Jewish religious life in colonial
Minas.”9 The abundant documentation I examined in the archives of the
extinct Inquisition tribunal, referring to Minas Gerais and the New
Christians, reveals a quite different scenario, however. Professor José
Gonçalves Salvador, using genealogical research, has reconstructed the
Jewish origins of a large portion of the mineiro population (i.e., those liv-
ing in Minas Gerais), and furnished us with important data for under-
standing the “quality” of the people who made up Minas society.10 Yet
it is the detailed study of the trials of those New Christians who were
condemned that offers us a fuller picture of the daily life and the man-
ner of thinking of the first mineiros; this type of analysis has not been
attempted until now.
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218 | Anita Novinsky

The New Christians who migrated to Brazil—who forged through

virgin territory, captured Indians, and came into conflict with the
Jesuits—were men of a radically different mindset from the Ashkenazim
Jews or the Sephardic Christian converts who spread across the Nether-
lands, France, and Italy. Highly assimilated and distanced for over a cen-
tury from Jewish culture, their adventurous and violent lifestyle was
markedly different from that of Jews in other parts of the world. The
degree of assimilation and integration of New Christians in the social and
political context of colonial Brazil may be understood by looking at three
men of Jewish origin who distinguished themselves in the political and
administrative life of Minas Gerais: Garcia Rodrigues Pais, Miguel Teles
da Costa, and Manuel Nunes Viana.
Garcia Rodrigues Pais, the son of Fernão Dias Pais, a well-known
“emerald hunter,” organized the first pioneering and founding expedition
in Minas Gerais, building a route to Minas called Caminho Novo (the New
Road), which also became known as Caminho do Comércio (the Commercial
Road). This road considerably shortened the journey from Rio de Janeiro,
the port from which basic goods flowed between Portugal and Ouro
Preto. In 1702, in recompense for his services to the crown, Garcia
Rodrigues Pais was appointed Inspector General of the Mines, a position
of such prestige that it encouraged him to request entry into the renowned
Order of Christ. Entry was refused because he was “dishonored as a New
Christian by the part of his maternal grandmother.”11 Legislative action
and prejudice against Jewish descendants managed to affect New Chris-
tians up to the fifth or sixth generation. While the struggle for survival in
America eased the barriers between Old Christians and New Christians,
the latter, primarily merchants, were still regarded with suspicion by the
Portuguese government. Yet the decisive factor in the inclusion of New
Christians in the local elite was their level of wealth, which in Brazil could
both “whiten the skin” and “erase the stain” of Jewish blood.
Nothing is known of Garcia Rodrigues Pais’s Jewish practices or feel-
ings, if any, since the chief sources we have for uncovering the daily lives
of Portuguese people of Jewish origin in America are the records of the
Inquisition, by which Garcia was never condemned.
Another figure featured in the early history of Minas Gerais, and one
who assumed an important administrative post, is Head-Captain Miguel
Teles da Costa, of whom there are several reports because he was arrested
by the Inquisition and accused of Judaism in 1713.12 Miguel Teles da
Costa was named Head-Captain of the villages of Itanhaen, Ilha Grande,
and Parati by the Portuguese king. A landowner in Nossa Senhora do
Carmo, he was one of the first settlers of the region and belonged to a
secret society of New Christians formed by a group of merchants and
mining businessmen residing in Rio das Mortes.
Miguel Teles da Costa was arrested in Rio de Janeiro along with other
New Christians accused of following the “law of Moses.” As a merchant,
he would send colonial products to his associates in Lisbon, one of whom
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 219

was his brother Francisco Mendes de Castro. From Rio de Janeiro he

would also order shipments of goods for Minas Gerais, aided by his
nephew Diogo Lopes Flores. In 1704 he forwarded more than twenty
shipments of goods to Rio das Mortes, an abundant gold-producing
region. He grew corn and beans, and owned slaves, horses, weapons,
and various other worldly possessions, as listed in his personal inven-
tory.13 He built a permanent residence in Rio das Mortes, which he later
converted into lodgings to house friends who would travel to Minas
Gerais on business.14 Miguel Teles da Costa was the chief authority in the
region, responsible for the defense and supervision of the border around
Minas Gerais, to which entry was granted only with “special permis-
sion.” The charge leveled against him was that he allowed entry to cer-
tain people, probably New Christians, “without permission.” In spite of
his prestige and jurisdiction over considerable territories in Minas
Gerais, he was unable to escape the deputies of the Inquisition who
roamed the region. He was arrested, taken to the dungeons of the Inqui-
sition, and tortured, and all of his possessions were confiscated. He died
destitute and insane.15
A third figure, also a New Christian and one of the most interesting
personalities in colonial history, was Manuel Nunes Viana.16 There is
detailed information concerning his violent, unusual, and contradictory
personality, as well as his involvement in a civil war with the paulistas
(i.e., those from São Paulo) for the possession of mineiro land (land rich in
gold). We know little about his Judaism. Of Jewish origin, he was a close
friend of Miguel Mendonça Valladolid, a businessman who traveled the
commercial routes between São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais,
Bahia, and Colônia do Sacramento, and with whom he learned Jewish
prayers.17 Manuel Nunes Viana was born in Viana do Castelo, Portugal,
and made his fortune in Bahia and Minas Gerais dealing in slaves and
gold. In 1710, he owned several profitable gold mines in Caeté and other
regions, and maintained a monopoly on the supply of meat to Minas
Gerais. He was a leader in the mineiro division of the bloody “War of the
Emboabas” in 1708, participating in a veritable massacre in Capão da
Traição, in which numerous paulistas, both New and Old Christians, were
killed. He became known in Brazilian history as the “King of the
Emboabas,” and was proclaimed provisional governor of the entire
Minas region. Despite his disagreements with the viceroy, he received a
letter of commendation from the king of Portugal for “services rendered.”
Remarkably, he was accepted into the elite and prestigious Order of
Christ despite his Jewish origin, which demonstrates the arbitrariness of
those who exercised the “purity of blood” laws.
Although Manuel Nunes Viana was barely literate, he harbored cul-
tural ambitions. In 1728, he financed the publication of a book by Nuno
Marques Pereira, Compêndio do peregrino da América (Compendium by a
Traveler from America), a work that achieved enormous success. It is
reported that he owned a library and that he also financed the printing of
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220 | Anita Novinsky

the third volume of Décadas (Decades) by Diogo do Couto.18 Manuel

Nunes Viana lived as many other New Christians—divided between two
worlds. In one he uttered Jewish prayers, in the other he delivered his two
daughters to a Lisbon convent.
Occupation of land in Minas Gerais took a different form than in
other parts of America. Opportunities for quick wealth and rapid upward
social mobility were more abundant than in regions dominated by the
sugar economy. Scattered throughout Brazil, New Christians maintained
a vast network of communications amongst themselves, and the fact that
they were dispersed throughout America, and the world as well, made
possible a network of economic transactions with which Old Christians
could scarcely compete. While Portugal attempted to maintain strict con-
trol over the region, especially because of frequent smuggling at Brazilian
ports and the mass of foreign adventurers who attempted to gain entry
without permission, it appears that New Christians received secret infor-
mation that made it easier for their fellows to arrive in Minas Gerais.19
New Christians in the Minas region were involved in a variety of
activities: they bought and sold slaves and necessary items for residents,
and as cattle-breeders supplied meat to the entire region. They partici-
pated in the extraction of gold and were artisans, doctors, and lawyers.
They acquired books and wrote poetry.20
According to a study by Ida Levkovitch, based on a tabulation of
goods confiscated by the Inquisition from New Christians of Minas
Gerais, only 23 percent of those sentenced were involved in mining; 64
percent were merchants, and 6 percent were agriculturists.21 New Chris-
tians who combined mining with farming and the trading of slaves with
other merchandise achieved the highest economic gains. In Ouro Preto
in 1740, for example, the greatest fortunes were in the hands of those
New or Old Christians who combined several occupations at once.
Thus, Ignacio Dias Cardoso appears as a farmer, merchant, miner, corn
and bean plantation owner, and master of two sugar mills, as well as the
owner of lands devoted to mineral extraction. His fortune totaled
26,295,311 reis. Yet very few New Christians can be compared to power-
ful tycoons such as the New Christian Manuel de Albuquerque e
Aguilar, who was perhaps the wealthiest of all, with 57,330,000 reis, and
not even to Francisco Ferreira Izidro (or Isidoro), whose fortune reached
10,709,000 reis.22
Flavio Mendes de Carvalho, who tragically disappeared, was a dili-
gent researcher on the Inquisition and New Christians23 and was respon-
sible for a pioneering survey based on 129 inventories regarding the
approximate value of goods confiscated from convicted New Christians
in various regions of Brazil.24 His results shed some light on the financial
status of the marranos: 78 percent of the 129 sentenced belonged to the
middle class, and only 5.4 percent were powerful magnates who alone
contributed 52 percent of all confiscated goods, with almost half the total
derived from sugar mill owners.
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 221

Based on the 129 cases studied by Carvalho, the following list pro-
vides the distribution of the patrimony confiscated by each captaincy
between 1704 and 1761, measured in gold (in terms of present-day values
in grams):25

Rio de Janeiro 3,144,917 gr.

Bahia 976,915 gr.
Minas Gerais 752,846 gr.
Goiás 68,476 gr.
Parahiba 23,811 gr.
Pernambuco 16,452 gr.
São Paulo 2,106 gr.
Sergripe 1,044 gr.
Total 4,986,567 gr.26

During his reign, King João V received in revenue from Brazil 107 million
cruzados (379 tons) of gold.27

* * * *

THE SLAVE TRADE WAS THE DRIVING FORCE in the economy of the Atlantic,
and slave trafficking became one of the most profitable commercial
enterprises in Brazil. Slave trade contractors authorized by the Por-
tuguese crown brought Africans to waiting New Christian merchants at
the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, who transported the slaves to
Minas Gerais where they were resold, usually on credit. José Gonçalves
Salvador asserted that the “slave-trafficking lords” were primarily New
Christians. Yet when he listed the names of the traffickers, he did not pro-
vide any empirical proof; his conclusions are thus based merely on names
that were most common among New Christians.28
Taking as a source the property inventories of 130 New Christians
who were arrested in Brazil in the first half of the eighteenth century, I
found twenty-five who were residents of, or at least regularly present in,
Minas Gerais.29 None of these twenty-five New Christians identified him-
self as a slave trader; rather, they described themselves as buyers, sellers,
and transporters of merchandise from one region to another in Brazil.
These merchants were entirely distinct from international slave trade
contractors who journeyed to Africa in search of slaves, often using their
own ships.
I also did not find among the seventy-one New Christians from Rio de
Janeiro mentioned in the inventories any who claimed to have received
slave shipments from overseas. It is a slightly different story in Bahia,
where three out of twenty-one registered prisoners were slave traders to
Africa: José da Costa, who went to Angola and Sudan in search of slaves;
Antônio Cardoso Porto, also called Belchior Mendes Correa, who brought
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222 | Anita Novinsky

slaves from Sudan; and Tomás Pinto Corrêa, who brought shipments of
slaves from Angola that had been ordered by several individuals.30
Family ties were of fundamental importance in commercial transac-
tions enacted by New Christians in Minas. Davi de Miranda, Damião
Rodrigues Moeda, Francisco Nunes de Miranda, and João de Moraes Mon-
tesinhos, among many others, worked in connection with their relatives.
There was tremendous mobility among New Christians in the
colony. Francisco Nunes de Miranda, for example, had residences in
Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Rio das Mortes. He did business with the
tycoon Francisco Pinheiro and with his relative José da Costa, who trans-
ported slaves from the Ivory Coast and Angola to Brazil.
Smuggling, fraud, and theft were daily occurrences in Minas Gerais.
By 1725 smuggling was occurring at an alarming rate. The governor him-
self, D. Lourenço de Almeida, participated actively in diamond smug-
gling. Old Christians and New Christians both participated in illegal
trade, which at the time was not viewed as an ethical or moral violation
of legal commercial practices; rather, it was regarded as an essential part
of trade under an imperial and colonial regime.31 Contraband goods were
a part of daily life in the eighteenth-century colony, as well as in the court,
on the seas, and in the markets. Church and state officials, merchants,
mine owners, masters of sugar mills, professionals, and artisans observed
that being exposed to the realities and ramifications of contraband activ-
ities was inevitable.32 Yet the controlling influence of the Portuguese
crown was intensely felt. In connection with an accusation involving ille-
gal minting, the name of the New Christian Manuel de Albuquerque e
Aguilar appears.
On the basis of current findings in studies that focus on New Chris-
tians in Minas Gerais, we can affirm that a relatively high percentage of
the population was of Jewish origin—if one includes also those who
resided in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia but regularly spent long periods of
time in Minas Gerais. One hundred fifty New Christians who were either
permanent or part-time residents in Minas Gerais appear on the “Guilty
List,” an inventory compiled by the Inquisition containing names of New
Christians from all over the world who were either under suspicion,
accused, or imprisoned.33 It is a striking fact that the number of New
Christians residing in several Brazilian cities exceeded the total number
of Jews living in Amsterdam when the Sephardic community there
reached its height. The total number will always remain unknown, given
that we can obtain demographic data only about New Christians who
were arrested or accused as Judaizers before the Inquisition. Most New
Christians who went to Brazil were not arrested and were widely dis-
persed within the Brazilian population. Currently, we can list approxi-
mately five hundred New Christians in Minas Gerais who were either
accused or imprisoned.
The following information is based on an analysis of the fifty-seven
New Christians who were convicted in Minas Gerais (see the Appendix
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 223

at the end of this chapter). The greatest number of New Christians were
arrested during the period of highest gold production in 1728, 1729, 1730,
1732, and 1734, with the highest numbers recorded in 1728 and 1729,
when eight people were imprisoned each year. Twenty-one New Chris-
tians were burned at the stake in Brazil (two “in effigy” and nineteen “in
person”). Among those consigned to the flames “in person,” eight
resided in Minas Gerais (permanently or part-time), that is, approxi-
mately 42.11 percent. (Among prisoners in Brazil, only those accused of
Judaism received the death sentence).
These individuals were burned “in person” in Minas Gerais in the
years indicated: Miguel de Mendonça Valladolid, 1731; Diogo Correa do
Valle, 1732; Luis Miguel Correa, 1732; Domingos Nunes, 1732; Manoel da
Costa Ribeiro, 1737; Luis Mendes de Sá, 1739; Martinho da Cunha
Oliveira, 1747; João Henriques, 1748. Not included in this list, nor among
the fifty-seven New Christian prisoners previously mentioned, is the
alleged Judaizer and cabalist Pedro Rates Henequim—who was burned
at the stake in 1748 after having lived twenty years in Minas Gerais—
because investigations about his origin, based on insufficient evidence,
mistook him initially for an Old Christian.34
The Portuguese authoritarian regime was extended to the Brazilian
colony, where control of the behavior, beliefs, and ideas of the population
was implemented by means of two systems: investigations (so-called
“visits”) within a diocese, conducted by bishops with the assistance of
local clergy; and Inquisitorial investigations (also “visits”) ordered by
Portugal and conducted by visiting officials or commissioners, who acted
as religious agents working on behalf of the Inquisition, or even by lay-
men, the so-called “Familiars” of the Holy Office, assigned to spy on and
apprehend suspects. The hearings organized for the diocesan investiga-
tions have been widely researched and analyzed in recent years,34a result-
ing in the discovery of a clear distinction between the social classes of
those accused. It becomes apparent from this research that the poorer,
more destitute portion of the population, consisting primarily of Old
Christians, blacks, slaves, and pardos (like mulattos, pardos are racially
mixed) came under the jurisdiction of the bishop, while the New Chris-
tians, the middle-class, businessmen, influential merchants, liberal pro-
fessionals, and even self-employed artisans fell under the responsibility
of Inquisitorial agents.
In the episcopal inquiries, the crimes—particularly those committed
by Old Christians—consisted of witchcraft, blasphemy, usury, apostasy,
bigamy, slander, soliciting, and offenses against customs. The infractions
were tried in the locale, and the punishments were minor, consisting of a
few admonitions by the bishop and donations to be made to the Church.
In the inquiries performed by Inquisitorial officials, however, Judaism
was the most frequent crime. The accused were New Christians who
were brought to trial in Portugal and whose possessions were confiscated
when they were sent to prison. These two systems of control did not have
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224 | Anita Novinsky

definite boundaries, but they may be distinguished by the social class at

which each system was aimed.
Although Judaizing New Christians were the prime target of the
Inquisition in Minas Gerais, others suspected of practicing witchcraft,35 of
soliciting (the seduction of women by priests in the confessional),36 of
sodomy,37 and of sexual crimes38 were also included and arrested.
According to Caio Boschi, the diocesan investigations complemented the
Inquisitorial institution and could be thought of as veritable itinerant tri-
bunals.39 The “visitor” would go from village to village questioning the
population. When the crimes were considered “minor,” the sentence was
given in loco; when a crime was considered “major,” the case was trans-
ferred to the ecclesiastical tribunal established in the town of Mariana. In
very rare cases, the question was sent to the Inquisition in Lisbon. My
research, however, did not unearth any evidence to support the claim that
there was direct participation by the agents of the Holy Office in these
diocesan “visits.” The greatest number of episcopal investigations
occurred during the decade of the 1730s, the period in which the Inquisi-
tion maintained the largest number of prisons in the colony.
The majority of New Christians brought before the Inquisition in
Minas Gerais were accused of the same crime: Judaizing. The actual guilt
or innocence of the accused continues to be an essential question among
scholars of the Inquisition. To what extent were the prisoners practicing
Judaism, if at all, and to what degree did the system rely on the blame-
worthy for the preservation and legitimization of the Inquisitorial insti-
tution, thus virtually manufacturing Judaizers through the use of tricks
and strategies? Faced with differences of opinion among historians, it
seems of the utmost importance to consider the views of contemporaries
of the period who had the courage to express their criticisms of the
Inquisitorial system, and, whenever possible, to listen to the voices of the
accused. There is a considerable amount of information on this subject
that has surfaced from intersecting sources and serves to illuminate the
issues raised by historians, such as José Antônio Saraiva and Israel
Révah, among others.40
The marranos themselves knew how the tribunal “operated” and
what methods were used to incriminate New Christians. The Jesuit
Father Antônio Vieira left one of the most powerful testimonies of unjust
persecutions against the New Christians, and his affidavit is cogent,
given that it was spoken from “inside” the Church. In a famous letter
addressed to Pope Innocent XI, Father Antônio Vieira exposed the mate-
rial interests and the unjust rulings of the Portuguese tribunal.41 Ironic
references by the condemned themselves, regarding the reasons for the
persecutions they endured, also reveal the fact that at the time there was
widespread consciousness of the Church’s material interests.
To be spared from death, the New Christians had to confess to prac-
ticing Judaism. The tribunal needed criminals in order to survive as an
institution that derived its main financial support from confiscations. If the
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 225

accused insisted upon their innocence, they were deemed contrary and
obstinate, suspected of hiding accomplices, and subjected to capital pun-
ishment. The following anecdote illustrates that New Christians under-
stood how to escape the death penalty. Upon leaving prison, one New
Christian encounters a friend who asks him, “So, how did you escape
death?” And he responds, “As all others do, by telling them I was a Jew.”42
From the fifty-seven Inquisition cases in Minas Gerais, I have chosen
a few examples that demonstrate the marranos’ conflicted behavior, their
double identity, their freethinking, their “Judaism.” The case of Diogo
Corrêa do Vale and his son Luiz Corrêa confirms Father Antônio Vieira’s
observations about the tribunal’s methods. Born in Seville, Diogo Corrêa
do Vale was a widower who lived in Oporto. He was a graduate of the
school of medicine at the University of Coimbra. After several members
of his family were arrested by the Inquisition in Portugal, he escaped to
Brazil with his son, settling in Vila Rica de Ouro Preto. On 12 September
1730, he was arrested along with his son, Luiz Miguel Corrêa.43 In a let-
ter to the Inquisition tribunal by Dr. Lourenço de Valadares Freire, an
agent of the Holy Office, sent from Vila Rica in 1730, we are privy to the
words Luiz Miguel Corrêa spoke to Lieutenant Martinho Alvarez, the
officer who arrested him: “They say that the Holy Office is just, yet I see
now that it is not, for it indicts innocent men.”44
Accusations of Judaizing aimed at both Diogo Corrêa do Vale and his
son were derived entirely from their lives spent in Oporto twenty years
before, when Luiz was a child. The Inquisitors were not able to compile
evidence from their time in Minas Gerais. Diogo’s imprisonment was
apparently founded upon old professional rivalries among Oporto’s
physicians based on the different treatments given their patients. His
friends in Oporto tried to intervene on his behalf, attesting to his honor-
able conduct and to his sense of charity both as a Christian and a doctor
in that he “cared for the ailing poor free of charge.” Despite Diogo’s
efforts to defend himself, asserting to the end that all the accusations
against him were false, the Inquisitors did not alter his death sentence.
Diogo insisted that he had always lived under Christ’s law and that he
wanted to die under it, but his Jewish origins sealed his fate.45
The case of his son, Luiz Miguel Corrêa, is even more tragic because
the latter’s adherence to the Christian faith is evident throughout his trial.
Having experienced a strong penchant for the religious life and wishing
to become a clergyman, he sought the help of the bishop of Rio de Janeiro.
The bishop immediately dissuaded him by citing the improbability of his
ambitions, given that he was a New Christian and that many members of
his family had been condemned by the Holy Office. In a last, desperate
attempt, Luiz informed the bishop of his willingness to sell off all his
slaves and worldly goods in order to buy the “proof of the purity of his
blood, as many others were doing.” It was hopeless. On the last day of his
trial before the Inquisitors he pleaded that even if they declared him inno-
cent, they should sentence him to life imprisonment so that he could deal
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226 | Anita Novinsky

with his salvation, “since he could not become a priest because of the
impurity of his blood.” He also claimed that the fear of death had placed
him in a state of “desperation,” and thus he had falsely denounced him-
self and had wrongly accused others of practicing the “law of Moses.” He
stood steadfast in his innocence of the crime of Judaizing until the end.
He was burned to death at the stake on the same afternoon as his father.46
“Purity of blood” statutes were applied less rigorously in Brazil than
in Portugal. A great number of New Christians who had “infected blood”
were received into the bosom of the Church when it was to the Church’s
advantage, or when New Christians offered money in exchange. In Portu-
gal, the Inquisitor Martins Mascarenhas had sold “Certificates of Purity”
at a fixed price.
Marranism was a multifaceted phenomenon. As I have suggested
several times, there was not one but many marranisms in Minas Gerais,
as in the rest of Brazil. The phenomenon includes various types of
behavior and should not be understood only in the narrow sense of
crypto-Judaism. Marranism must be considered in a broad context, as
in the manner suggested by the French philosopher Edgard Morin.47
The marrano represents the universal, often unconscious, condition of
men who are removed from the societies in which they live. The mar-
rano is a man who lives in a world without belonging to it. In this
sense, we find in Minas Gerais, as in the rest of Brazil, behavior that
cannot be defined as merely actions in compliance with specific Jewish
dietary laws, fastings, or abstention from working on Saturdays, among
other principles. Marranism among the Portuguese in Brazil was pri-
marily a mental attitude, a sentiment, an outlook on life, rather than a
religious observance.48 If a substantial portion of New Christians man-
aged to overcome ethnic, social, and religious barriers to become part
of a larger community, another portion remained loyal to the traditions
inherited from their ancestors. Paradoxically, historical memories of
centuries of suffering, in addition to the direct experience of social and
legal exclusion, increasingly reinforced resistance to adopting official
religious ideas. The New Christians’ greatest contribution to eigh-
teenth-century enlightened thinking in Brazil was a critical approach
to religion.49
Diogo Nunes Henriques, a wealthy businessman who was arrested in
Minas Gerais in 1728 for having declared that “each person should live and
die according to the Law which best suits him,”50 had a different experience
from that of Luiz Miguel Corrêa. The crime that led him to Lisbon’s prisons
was his support of freethinking, a position inconceivable to the majority of
his Portuguese contemporaries. As soon as they received the accusation
against him, the Inquisitors set out to investigate his life in minute detail:
“from which country he originated,” his “way” of life, “in which part” of
Minas Gerais he lived, and his “ethnic background.” New information was
collected, including the fact that his house in Ouro Preto was the head-
quarters of a secret society of New Christians at which congregated the
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 227

Minas elite: David Mendes, Domingos Nunes (Diogo Nunes Hen-

riques’s nephew), the sugar mill owner Domingos Rodrigues Ramires
who had lived in Rio de Janeiro, João da Cruz, the fabrics merchant
David de Miranda, Francisco Nunes, Duarte Rodrigues, Manuel Nunes
de Paz (Diogo Henriques’s son), Manuel Nunes Sanches, among many
others, all of whom were neighbors.51
Diogo Nunes Henriques is portrayed as a learned man, given that
one of the accusations against him was that he “was inclined to read
numerous books.” Old Christians who testified against him claimed that
they had never seen him pray or teach his slaves the doctrines of the
Christian faith, as was the custom in rural areas. A tailor declared to the
investigative agents that he had never seen Diogo with rosary beads and
that he disregarded the rules of Lent, teaching heresies to his slaves.
According to his Old Christian neighbors, Diogo also called attention to
himself whenever he was tired, by sighing “Oh God!” without ever utter-
ing the name of Jesus. And he committed what was considered a serious
crime: he would gather various members of the Miranda family and
friends “in order to read books.”52
One of Diogo Nunes Henriques’s nephews, Domingos Nunes, also
provides interesting information concerning the daily affairs of this secret
society in Minas Gerais. The Inquisition had been pursuing him since
1726. An order for his arrest had been issued in 1728, though he was not
captured until two years and seven months later, after which he was
turned over to the Lisbon Inquisition on 12 October 1730.53 Seventeen
business associates, with whom he had traded in Brazil and who were
subsequently imprisoned, denounced him: Gaspar Fernandez Ferreira
(or Pereira), a businessman in Ouro Preto; Miguel da Cruz, a business-
man who also resided in Rio de Janeiro; Manuel Nunes da Pax, a busi-
nessman and resident of Minas Gerais; Gaspar Henriques, a mineiro
resident in Bahia; Manoel Nunes Bernal, a ship’s captain and resident of
Rio de Janeiro; Jeronimo Rodrigues, a dealer and resident of Bahia;
Joseph da Cruz Henriques, head tithe-collector and resident of Ribeirão
do Carmo; Joseph Rodrigues Cardoso, no occupation listed, who was
originally from Bahia and a resident of Ribeirão do Carmo; Domingos’s
uncle, Diogo Nunes Henriques, a businessman and resident of Ouro
Preto; Antônio da Fonseca Rego, a sugar cane worker originally from Per-
nambuco, and a resident of Paracatú; Antônio Rodrigues Campos, a man-
ioc worker and resident of Bahia; Diogo Dias Corrêa, no occupation
listed, who was a resident of Santos; Luiz Vaz de Oliveira, originally from
Spain and a resident of Ribeirão do Carmo; David Mendes da Silva, a res-
ident of Ouro Preto; and Miguel Henriques, a dealer and merchant in
Ribeirão do Carmo.54 New Christians’ domestic transactions required
that they travel to far-flung regions and that they establish true commer-
cial networks for their trade. These secret New Christian associates
offered support, security, and credit to each other despite the knowledge
that, if arrested, all members would denounce one another.
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228 | Anita Novinsky

Several doubts and questions emerge concerning the nature of

Domingos Nunes’s Judaism. It seems that since childhood he had been
instructed in the Jewish faith. He set up house in Minas Gerais and
brought in shipments of assorted merchandise. Traveling throughout the
colony, he came into contact with all of the major merchants. When sub-
mitted to torture, he denounced all of his associates who lived in the
regions of Caeté, Cachoeira, Paraopeba, Congonhas, Vila Pitangui, village
of Antônio Pereira, Fanado Mines, Serro Frio, and Rio das Mortes, in
addition to many others from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Santos. Domin-
gos tried to save his life in any way possible. The “watchmen” who
guarded his cell twenty-four hours a day accused him of “fasting in a
Judaizing way,” of having “looked up at the sky,” of having made “Jew-
ish gestures,” of having written something “secretive” on the headboard
of his bed, and then immediately erasing what he had written so no one
could read it. After having used all possible arguments, including that he
had fasted in his cell because he had wanted to kill himself, Domingos
Nunes wound up like all the other accused—confessing his complicity in
Judaism. Moreover, he repeated a prayer praising a single God, creator of
the universe, soliciting His forgiveness and help:55

You are the ruler of this damned world

Hear Lord our Prayer
Receive our Adoration
Do not make us walk in sadness
For the Soul you have given us
Infinite you Holy Father
Who has created light and day
With great wisdom you have made it grow night
Great are our sins
Greater is your Holy Power
We have already
Confessed Lord
From All the truth
Deliver us from all the darkness
May our souls be saved
Before Your Holy Power
Lord
Amen.

Great Lord Creator of the Universe

As a Great Sinner
I confess to you O Lord
As such I recognize myself
And ask you for forgiveness
I am not worthy of such lofty pardon
Witness Lord my anguish
That which I deserve
Witness what I endure
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Marranos and the Inquisition | 229

Give me strength
Almighty Powerful
Great Lord
Amen.56

Domingos was burned at the stake in 1732.

* * * *

THE SECRET SOCIETIES THAT WERE CREATED in Minas Gerais followed the
gold route. Secret meetings were immediately organized in each town or
village founded in gold-producing regions, for instance, in some of the
houses in Ouro Preto, Tijuco (a diamond-mining region), Rio das Mortes,
and Ribeirão do Carmo. During the course of these meetings, business
transactions occurred, trust was established, and at the same time resistance
was formed, as well as a particular “feeling” for the world: marranism.57
Among the participants in these groups were crypto-Jews, nonbelievers,
agnostics, and others identified as Jews not only because of their conduct
or beliefs but also because of their origin. The secret societies of Minas
Gerais formed by crypto-Jews and heretics were not a new phenomenon;
rather, they were the product of a long process that had matured over the
course of two centuries as an inheritance from their forebears. In Brazil,
this process began during the formation of the first settlements in São
Vicente, São Paulo, Bahia, and Pernambuco soon after the discovery of
Brazil. The New Christians spread throughout the colony as the land was
explored and as new settlers, adventurers, and fugitives escaping Inquisi-
torial persecutions arrived.
Once the gold route was established, Inquisitors ordered that control
over the population of Jewish origin be intensified. The main areas tar-
geted were also the wealthiest: Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The New
Christians of Paraíba, who were also intensely pursued during this period
(approximately forty-nine sentenced), consisted of a community of labor-
ers with little property but who possessed some goods including slaves.
The persecution of New Christians in Minas Gerais followed the
same pattern of the two previous centuries. It affected those New Chris-
tians whose parents, grandparents, and siblings had already experienced
the prisons of Lisbon, including those belonging to the oldest families in
the colony.
We can divide the behavior of the marrano in Brazil in general and in
Minas Gerais into two major groups: crypto-Jews, who actively per-
formed some Judaic ceremonies, and skeptics, for whom religion was a
problem rather than a source of comfort. Secrecy was also part of the
world of marrano skeptics and nonbelievers, for they shared a common
ancestral identity with the crypto-Jews.
Jewish practices in Minas Gerais were cloaked in symbolism; secret
communications were often made in code. In general, these crypto-Jewish
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230 | Anita Novinsky

customs and ceremonies were similar to those practiced by New Chris-

tians or conversos in Portugal and Spanish America, as well as in other
regions of Brazil. A few omissions from orthodox practices and some syn-
cretisms exist, with observances primarily concentrated on the fastings of
Yom Kippur, the observance of the Sabbath, the celebration of Passover,
and the holiday in honor of Queen Esther, as well as some dietary restric-
tions. To complete the picture of marrano religion, there was belief in a
single God, the creator of the universe; the rejection of salvation through
Christ; and an aversion to religious imagery and confession. Yet the prin-
cipal dividing factor between crypto-Jewish New Christians and Old
Christians was the issue of the Messiah.
The overall content of crypto-Jewish prayers associated with the mar-
ranos of Minas Gerais expressed characteristic concerns of “guilt and
redemption.” Life’s vicissitudes were regarded as stages in the process of
redemption. Marrano religion thus fulfilled a social function: deliverance
from economic and social oppression. It was inexorably linked to the idea
of salvation through the “law of Moses,” which compensated for the mar-
ranos’ condition as “other” or “outsider.” A message was thus clandes-
tinely passed on from one generation to the next that encouraged
persecuted New Christians who could not find a “response” in the offi-
cial religion to make sense of their lives. “Daily” and “covert” activities
supplied the marranos in the gold region with comfort and meaning. In
the words of Max Weber, we can say that the religious demands of the
marranos were demands for compensation, typical of those who are dis-
advantaged. Memory of the historic origins of the Jews had a primarily
symbolic effect upon the New Christians, in that it offered them a system
for justifying their existence. Their beliefs represented hope, while the ties
bonding marrano nonbelievers and agnostics with crypto-Jews granted
all a sense of “belonging.” With its various regional subtleties, marranism
in Brazil was a long-standing phenomenon featuring traits that defy gen-
eralization. Brazilian marranism must be understood in the context of the
formation of Brazilian culture, a culture that the marranos unwittingly
helped to create.
 11
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APPENDIX
New Christians—Minas Gerais—Prisoners*
4:11 PM

Name
Inquisition Marital Age Prison Name of Father
Process No. Born In Residence Profession Status Approx. Year Birth, Profession Notes

Ana do Vale Rio de Janeiro Minas de Single 25 1734 Domingos Rodrigues Ramires Family imprisoned
6989 Cachoeira Sugar Mill Landlord
Page 231

Antonio Carvalho Santalhão Minas Businessman Single 37 1731 Francisco de Gamboa Family imprisoned
de Oliveira (Miranda Gerais Businessman
10474 Bishopric)
Antonio de Sá Vila de Almeida Minas do Miner Single 28 1734 Manuel Henriques de Leão Family imprisoned
de Almeida (Lamego Serro Frio Merchant
8025 Bishopric) Residence: Almeida
Antonio Fernandes Mogadouro Minas Miner Single 30 1730 Manoel Francisco Fernandes Family imprisoned
Pereira (Braga Arch- Novas de Shopkeeper
10481 diocese) Arasauay
Antonio José Évora Minas and Inspector Married 1743
Cogominho Portugal (Minas de
Sabará)
Antonio Ribeiro Bragança Minas do Businessman Single 32 1751 José Ribeiro Family imprisoned
Furtado Serro Frio Weaver Weaver
2801 Born in: Bragança
Antonio Ribeiro Monforte Minas do Doctor Single 37 1747 Manuel Nunes Ribeiro Family imprisoned
Sanches (Guarda Bishopric) Paracatú Farmer
11603 Born in/Residence: Monforte
David de Miranda Almeida Carmo Businessman Single 43 1714 and Francisco Rodrigues Family imprisoned
7489 (Lamego Minas 1728 Businessman
Bishopric)

*This list is not a definitive one. Other prisoners lived simultaneously in other regions of Brazil.
(Continued)
Marranos and the Inquisition | 231
 11

Name
1/24/01

Inquisition Marital Age Prison Name of Father

Process No. Born In Residence Profession Status Approx. Year Birth, Profession Notes

David Mendes Vila Nova de Minas do Businessman Single 40 1730 Gregório da Silva Family imprisoned
da Silva Foscoa Serro Frio Residence: Bahia
4:11 PM

2134 (Lamego Bishopric) Businessman

Diogo Correa Sevilha Minas de Doctor Widower 58 1730 Luis Correa Family imprisoned
do Vale Castela Kingdom Ouro Preto 1732— Businessman
232 | Anita Novinsky

821 Burned at Residence: Vila Real

the stake
Page 232

Diogo Dias Correa Freixo de Nemão Minas and No profession Single 18 1728 Antonio Dias Fernandes Family imprisoned
2646 (Lamego Bishopric) Madeira Merchant
Islands Born in: Castela
Residence: Lisboa
Diogo Nunes São Vicente Curralinho Businessman Widower 53 1729 Diogo Henriques
7488 da Beira Minas de Residence: Proença
(Lamego Bishopric) Ouro Preto Merchant
Diogo Nunes São Vicente Minas de Tax collector Married 53 1718 Family imprisoned
Henriques da Beira Ouro Preto
4895 (Guarda Bishopric)
Diogo Nunes Freixadas Minas de Businessman Married 62 1728 Manuel Fernandes Family imprisoned
Henriques or (Vizeu Bishopric) Ouro Preto Residence: Freixadas
Francisco Rodrigues Tanner (silk)
Pereira
7487
Domingos Nunes Freixadas Minas Businessman Single 38 1730 Antonio Rodrigues Family imprisoned
1779 (Vizeu Bishopric) Gerais 1732— Born in: Freixadas
Burned at Businessman
the stake
Domingos Rio de Janeiro Rio de Sugar mill Married 30 1710 Duarte Róis de Andrade Family imprisoned
Rodrigues Ramires Janeiro landlord Residence: Rio de Janeiro
6517 and Sugar mill landlord
Minas
 11
1/24/01

Duarte da Costa Chaves Serro Frio Miner Married 35 1735 Agostinho de Fonseca
Fonseca (Braga Arch- Minas Businessman Chaves
6759 diocese) Novas Lives from his income
Elena do Vale Rio de Janeiro Vila Rica Single 26 1734 Domingos Rodrigues Ramires Family imprisoned
4:11 PM

4220 de Ouro Sugar mill landlord Sister of Ana

Preto do Vale
Fernando Gomes Manteigas Vila Rica Businessman Single 44 1739 Francisco Gomes Family imprisoned
Nunes (Guarda Bishopric) de Ouro Born in: Cáceres (Castela)
4058 Preto or Belmonte
Page 233

Residence: Almeida
Merchant
Francisco Correa Rio de Tenant 1728 Diogo Correa do Vale Family imprisoned
Denounced Janeiro Doctor
and Minas Burned at the stake
Gerais
Francisco de Rio de Janeiro Rio de Miner Married 26 1712 Diogo de Montarroyo de Family imprisoned
Lucena Janeiro Lucena
Montarroyo and Born in/Residence: Rio de
1340 Minas Janeiro
Gerais
Francisco de Rio de Janeiro Rio de Doctor Married 42 1708 José Fernandes de Miranda Family imprisoned
Siqueira Machado Janeiro Born in: Mirandinha
1892 Minas Residence: Rio de Janeiro
Gerais Merchant
Francisco Ferreira Freixo do Nemão Vila do Miner Single 41 1726 Luiz Vaz de Oliveira Family imprisoned
Izidro or Izidoro (Lamego Carmo Born in: Torre do Moncorvo
11965 Bishopric) (Minas Residence: Rio de Janeiro
Gerais) Merchant
Francisco Nunes Beja-Portugal Guara- Married 1732 Family imprisoned
de Miranda pirang order
in 1723 of prison
and
Ribeirão
do Carmo
Marranos and the Inquisition | 233

(Continued)
 11

Name
1/24/01

Inquisition Marital Age Prison Name of Father

Process No. Born In Residence Profession Status Approx. Year Birth, Profession Notes

Henrique Froes Covilhã Ouro Miner Single 37 1734 Manuel Frois Family imprisoned
or Muniz (Lamego Preto Businessman Residence: Covilhã
4:11 PM

426 Bishopric) Sumidouro Farmer

Ignácio Cardoso Rio de Janeiro Vila Rica Lawyer Married 35 1712 Agostinho de Paredes Family imprisoned
234 | Anita Novinsky

de Azevedo de Ouro Born in/Residence: Rio de

5447 Preto and Janeiro
Rio de Sugar mill landlord
Page 234

Janeiro
Isabel Palhana Rio de Janeiro Minas — Married 27 1715 Antonio Farto Divino Auto-da-fé in 1716
4953 Family imprisoned
Jerônimo Escalião Bahia Businessman Married 50 1729 José Cardoso Family imprisoned
Rodrigues (Lamego and Born in/Residence: Escalião
10003 Bishopric) (Minas) Merchant
João da Cruz Almeida Bahia and Tanner Single 24 1710 Francisco Rodrigues de Almeida Family imprisoned
9089 Minas Residence: Bahia
Tanner
João da Cruz Almeida Ribeirão Bill collector Single 26 1728 Antonio Rodrigues Nickname:
Henriques or Pinhel do Carmo Born in: Almeida “o carregado”
10004 Merchant
João de Matos Maçal do Chão Guara- Merchant Single 30 1729 Francisco da Cruz Henriques
Henriques piranga New Christian
3752 Born in: Almeida
Residence: Maçal do Chão
Lived from his income
João Henriques São Vicente Minas de Pharmacist Single 27 1747 João Henriques
8378 da Beira Paracatu 1748— Born in: São Vicente da Beira=
Burned at Residence: Castelo Branco
the stake Pharmacist
 11
1/24/01

João Morais Bahia Minas de Businessman Single 27 1729 Luiz Mendes de Morais Family imprisoned
Montesinhos Ouro Preto Born in: Almeida
11769 Residence: Bahia
João Nunes Vizeu Idanha, a Nova Rio das Doctor Married 40 1710 Manuel Nunes Vizeu Family imprisoned
4:11 PM

1195 Mortes and Born in: Castelo Branco

Rio de Residence: Rio de Janeiro
Janeiro Farmer
João Róis de Vinhaes Ribeirão Bill collector Single 26 1733 Manuel Róis de Mesquita
Mesquita do Carmo Grocer
Page 235

8018
José Nunes Freixo de Espada Serro Frio Grocer Single 38 1734 Francisco Nunes
430 a Cinta Born in: Freixo de Espada a Cinta
Twister (silk)
Joseph Rodrigues Bahia Curralinho Single 21 1729 Jerônimo Rodrigues Cardoso Family imprisoned
Cardoso Residence: Bahia
19 Businessman
Luis Alves or Rio de Janeiro Minas Farmer Single 32 1712 Diogo de Montarroyo Family imprisoned
Álvares Montarroyo Lived from Born in/Residence: Rio de
695 his income Janeiro
Sugar mill landlord
Luis Mendes de Sá Coimbra Rio das Camboeiro Single 37 1738 Salvador Mendes de Sá Family imprisoned
8015 Contas 1739— Born in: Bragança Luis Mendes de Sá
Burned at Residence: Lisboa and Holland born in the prison
the stake Merchant of Coimbra
Luis Miguel Correa Pinhel Vila Rica Farmer Single 26 1730 Diogo Correa do Vale Family imprisoned
9249 (Vizeu Bishopric) de Ouro 1732— Born in: Pinhel
Preto Burned at Residence: Vila Rica
the stake Doctor
together Burned at the stake
with his
father

(Continued)
Marranos and the Inquisition | 235
 11

Name
1/24/01

Inquisition Marital Age Prison Name of Father

Process No. Born In Residence Profession Status Approx. Year Birth, Profession Notes

Luiz Vaz de Oliveira Castela Kingdom Minas do Businessman Single 23 1730 João Sanchez Maioral His mother was
9969 Ribeirão Born in: Castela burned at the stake.
4:11 PM

do Carmo Residence: Freixo da Espada Family imprisoned

a Cinta
Pharmacist
236 | Anita Novinsky

Manoel Nunes Castela Kingdom Curralinho Businessman Married 35 1727 Diogo Nunes Henriques Family imprisoned
da Paz Ranch Born: Pinhel
9542 (Minas) Residence: Minas
Page 236

Farmer
Manoel Nunes Idanha Nova Minas dos Businessman Single 30 1730 Manuel Nunes Sanches Family imprisoned
Sanchez or Mendes (Guarda Bishopric) Fanados Miner Born in/Residence: Idanha Nova
11824 Doctor
Manuel da Costa Panamacor Guara- Shopkeeper Married 40 1729 Antonio Gomes Nunes Family imprisoned
Espadilha (Guarda Bishopric) piranga Born in/Residence: Panamacor
1831 Minas de Merchant
Ouro Preto
Manuel da Costa Celorico Vila Rica Farmer Single 24 1734 José Carvalho Almeida Family imprisoned
Ribeiro (Guarda Bishopric) de Ouro Businessman 1737— Born in/Residence: Celorico
1361 Preto Burned at Merchant (silk)
the stake
Manuel de Castelo Rodrigo Vila Rica Businessman Single 38 1732 Antonio Siqueira Cabral He doesn’t know
Albuquerque e (Lamego Bishopric) de Ouro Residence: Castelo Rodrigo if his family was
Aguilar Preto Lived from his income imprisoned.
4407
Manuel de Meza Portugal Assistant Lawyer Single 1732 José Pesso
in Minas Businessman
Manuel Gomes de Celorico Vila Rica Miner Single 45 1734 Gaspar Carvalho
Carvalho de Ouro
Preto
 11
1/24/01

Martinho Cunha Idanha Nova Minas de Businessman Single 20 (1st 1712—1st Manuel da Cunha Family imprisoned
de Oliveira (Guarda Bishopric) Ouro Preto impris- 1746—2nd Born in: Montemor
8106 and Vila onment) 1746— Residence: Fundão
Fundão 52 (2nd Burned
4:11 PM

(Guarda impris- at the

Bishopric) onment) stake
Marcos Mendes Idanha Nova Rio das Miner Single 1730 Manuel Nunes Sanches Family imprisoned
Sanches (Guarda Bishopric) Mortes Doctor
2141 (Minas)
Page 237

Miguel da Cruz Maçal do Chão Ribeirão Businessman Single 27 1727 Francisco da Cruz Henriques Family imprisoned
11330 (Portugal) do Carmo Born in: Almeida
and Rio de Residence: Marçal do Chão
Janeiro Farmer
Miguel Mendonça Valladolid Assistant Businessman Married 33 1729 João Castro Mendonça Family imprisoned
Valladolid (Castela in Minas 1731— Born in/Residence: Valladolid
9973 Kingdom) Burned at Merchant
the stake
Miguel Nunes de Bahia Curralinho Merchant Single 24 1729 Félix Nunes de Miranda Family imprisoned
Almeida (Minas) Born in : Almeida
9248 and Bahia Businessman
Burned at the stake
Miguel Nunes Idanha Nova Paracatu Businessman Married 39 1747 Manuel Nunes Sanches Family imprisoned
Sanches (Guarda Bishopric) Born in/Residence: Idanha Nova
8112 Doctor
Miguel Teles da Trancoso Rio das Capitão—Mor Single 55 1710 Diogo Mendes de Castro Family imprisoned
Costa (Vizeu Bishopric) Mortes Born in: Trancoso
6515 Residence: Lisboa
Lived from his income
Pedro Nunes de Castelo Rodrigo Bahia Farmer Single 30 (1st im- 1714—1st Francisco Nunes de Miranda Family imprisoned
Miranda (Castela Kingdom) and prisonment) 1731—2nd Born in: Almeida
9001 Rio das 50 (2nd im- Residence: Bahia and Minas
Mortes prisonment) Doctor

(Continued)
Marranos and the Inquisition | 237
 11

Name
1/24/01

Inquisition Marital Age Prison Name of Father

Process No. Born In Residence Profession Status Approx. Year Birth, Profession Notes

Salvador Rodrigues Rio de Janeiro Rio das Miner Single 37 1734 Simão Farto Deniz Family imprisoned
de Faria Mortes Born in/Residence: Rio de
4:11 PM

9395 (Minas Janeiro

Gerais) Merchant
238 | Anita Novinsky

Source: Lisbon Inquisition. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo. Portugal. Manuscripts.

Page 238
11 1/24/01 4:11 PM Page 239

Marranos and the Inquisition | 239

Notes
Translated from the Portuguese by Marguerite I. Harrison

1. Alfredo Margarido, “Le Rôle des Juifs dans l’Expansion Europeéne,” Andorra (1984):
218–29.
2. Ibid.
3. About the goods confiscated from the New Christians arrested in Brazil in the eigh-
teenth century, see Anita Novinsky, Inquisição, Inventários de Bens Confiscados a Cristãos-
Novos, Brasil, Século XVIII, Fontes para a História de Portugal e do Brasil (Lisbon, 1978).
4. Jonathan I. Israel, “The Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life and Colonization in
Europe and the New World (16th–18th centuries),” in Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim
Beinart, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1992), 365–98.
5. Ibid.
6. Ellis Rivkin, “How Jewish Were the New Christians?” in Hispania Judaica, vol. 1: His-
tory (Barcelona, 1980), 105–15, and idem “Uma História de Duas Diasporas,” in Iberia
Judaica, ed. Anita Novinsky and Diana Kuperman (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1992),
267–75.
7. Rivkin, “Uma História,” 274.
8. Augusto Lima Junior, A capitania das Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, 1978).
9. Caio Boschi, “As Visitas Diocesanas e a Inquisição na Colônia,” in Inquisição, Anais do
Primeiro Congresso Luso Brasileiro sobre a Inquisição, vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1989), 965–96, esp. 968.
10. José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Cristãos Novos em Minas Gerais durante o Ciclo do Ouro (São
Paulo, 1992).
11. For information on Garcia Rodrigues Pais, see ibid., 117.
12. Trial against Miguel Teles da Costa, Iniquisition of Lisbon, #6515, Arquivo Nacional da
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. See also Rachel Mizrahi Bromberg, A Inquisição no Brasil: Um
Capitão-Mór Judaisante (São Paulo, 1984).
13. About the goods confiscated from Miguel Teles da Costa, see Anita Novinsky,
Inquisição, Inventários de Bens Confiscados, 223–24.
14. Trial against Miguel Teles da Costa, #6515, op. cit.
15. Ibid.
16. In reference to Manuel Nunes Viana, see Salvador, Os Cristãos-Novos, 11.
17. Trial against Miguel de Mendonça Valladolid, Inquisition of Lisbon, #9972, Arquivo
Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.
18. Charles R. Boxer, A Idade do Ouro no Brasil (São Paulo, 1963), 320.
19. A book entitled Itinerário Geográfico, written by Francisco Tavares de Brito and printed
in 1732 by the press belonging to Antonio da Silva, was distributed in secret; it gave
directions for traveling to Minas Gerais. The John Carter Brown Library owns a copy
of this document.
20. The first poet to surface in the eighteenth century in the mine region of Goias was
Antonio Ferreira Dourado, also a businessman, arrested by the Inquisition in Vila Boa
de Goiás in 1760 and sentenced to life imprisonment (Trial against Antonio Ferreira
Dourado, Inquisition of Lisbon, #6268). The Inquisition confiscated 23.469 kg. of gold
from him, according to Flavio Mendes de Carvalho’s evaluation in his work Inquisição:
Uma avaliação de Bens Confiscados a Judeus Brasileiros. Século XVIII (manuscript belong-
ing to Anita Novinsky). Three more New Christians accused of Judaism were arrested
in Goias: Thomas Pinto Ferreira, a farmer, in the year 1760 (Inquisition of Lisbon,
#8659), and his brother Dr. Jose Pinto Ferreira, a graduate in law at the University of
Coimbra, also in 1760 (Inquisition of Lisbon, #8912); and Fernando Gomes Nunes (or
Belmonte), a merchant, in 1739 (Inquisition of Lisbon, #4058). In the mine region of
Paracatu, near Minas Gerais, we found three other New Christians condemned for
Judaism: Miguel Nunes Sanches, businessman (Inquisition of Lisbon, #8112); Dr. Anto-
nio Ribeiro Sanches, graduated in medicine at the University of Coimbra (Inquisition
11 1/24/01 4:11 PM Page 240

240 | Anita Novinsky

of Lisbon, #11603); and João Henriques, pharmacist (Inquisition of Lisbon, #8378). All
trial proceedings can be found in the Archivo Nacional Torre do Tombo.
21. Ida Lewkowicz, “Confiscos do Santo Ofício e formas de riquezas nas Minas Gerais no
século XVIII,” in Inquisição, Ensaios sobre Mentalidade, Heresias e Arte, ed. Anita Novin-
sky and Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro (São Paulo, 1992), 208–24.
22. Ibid.
23. Carvalho, Inquisição: Uma avaliação de Bens Confiscados.
24. Novinsky, Inquisição, Inventário de Bens Confiscados.
25. Carvalho, Inquisicão: Uma avaliação de Bens Confiscados.
26. Ibid.
27. The evaluation of the equivalent of 379 tons of gold was made by Carvalho, Inquisição:
Uma avaliação de Bens Confiscados, 15.
28. J. Gonçalves Salvador, Os Magnatas do Tráfico Negreiro (São Paulo, 1981).
29. Novinsky, Inquisição, Inventário de Bens Confiscados. With reference to New Christians,
the issue of residency is a complicated one, given that they frequently lived in one
region but were also regularly present in another; they were also not very precise when
submitting statements to this effect. Among those mentioned I included Miguel de
Mendonça Valladolid, who lived in both São Paulo and Minas Gerais.
30. Ibid., 157, 168, 247.
31. Ernest Pijning, “Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy and Society in Eigh-
teenth Century Rio de Janeiro” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1997).
32. Ibid.
33. Anita Novinsky, Rol dos Culpados (São Paulo, 1992).
34. About Pedro Rates Henequim, see Anita Novinsky, “The Inquisition and the Mythic
World of a Portuguese Cabalist in the 18th Century,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh World
Congress of Jewish Studies (1994), 115–22.
34a. For studies about Minas Gerais based on the diocesan investigations, see Laura de
Mello e Souza, Os Desclassificados do Ouro. A Pobresa mineira no século XVIII (Rio de
Janeiro, 1982); Luciano Raposo de Figueiredo, Barrocas Famílias (São Paulo, 1997), and
idem, O Avesso da Memória (Rio de Janeiro, 1993); Francisco Vidal Luna and Iraci del
Nero, “Devassa nas Minas Gerais; observações sobre casos de concubinato,” Anais do
Museu Paulista, vol. 31 (São Paulo, 1982); Caio Boschi, “As Visitas Diocesanas e a
Inquisição na Colônia,” in Inquisição, Anais do Primeiro Congresso Luso Brasileiro sobre a
Inquisição, vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1989), 965–96.
35. Laura de Mello Souza, O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz (São Paulo, 1986).
36. Lana Lage da Gama Lima, “Guardiães da Penitência: O Santo Ofício português e a
punição dos Solicitantes,” in Inquisição, Ensaios sobre Mentalidade, Heresias e Arte, ed.
Anita Novinsky and Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro (São Paulo, 1992), 703–38.
37. Luiz Mott, “Justícia e Misericórdia: a Inquisição portuguesa e a repressão ao nefando
pecado da sodomia,” in Inquisição, Ensaios, ed. Novinsky and Carneiro, 703, 738.
38. Ronaldo Vainfas, Trópico dos Pecados (Rio de Janeiro, 1989).
39. Caio Boschi, “As visitas Diocesanas,” 991.
40. With reference to the debate concerning the interpretation of sources, see the discus-
sion between I. S. Révah and António José Saraiva, “Polêmica acerca da Inquisição e
Cristãos-Novos,” in António José Saraiva, Inquisição e Cristãos-Novos (Lisbon, 1985),
211–91.
41. Carta do Padre António Vieira sobre a causa do Santo Ofício escrita ão Santíssimo Pde. Inocên-
cio XI, manuscript #49/IV/23, Biblioteca da Ajuda Lisbon. See also Anita Novinsky,
“Padre António Vieira, a Inquisição e os Judeus,” Novos Estudos, CEBRAP 29 (March
1991):172–81; published in English in The Frank Talmage Memorial, vol. 2, Jewish History,
vol. 6, no. 1–2 (Haifa, 1992), 151–62. See also Novinsky, “Sebastianismo Vieira e o Mes-
sianismo Judaico,” in Sobre as naus da Iniciação, Estudas Portugueses de Literatura e Histo-
ria, ed. Carlos A. Iannone and Renata S. Junqueira (São Paulo-Araraquara, 1998), 65–79.
42. Cadernos do Promotor de Lisboa no. 23, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon;
Anita Novinsky, Cristãos-Novos na Bahia, 2nd ed. (São Paulo, 1992), 142.
11 1/24/01 4:11 PM Page 241

Marranos and the Inquisition | 241

43. Anita Novinsky, “A Inquisição no Brasil. Judaisantes ex-alunos da Universidade de

Coimbra,” in Universidade, História, Memória, Perspectivas, Actas do Quarto Congresso
História da Universidade, 7th Centenary (Coimbra, 1991), 315–27.
44. Trial against Luís Miguel Corrêa, Inquisition of Lisbon, #9249, Arquivo Nacional da
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.
45. Trial against Diogo Corrêa do Valle, Inquisition of Lisbon, #821, Arquivo Nacional da
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.
46. Trial against Luís Miguel Corrêa, op. cit.
47. Edgar Morin, Mes Démons (Paris, 1994), 138–84.
48. See Anita Novinsky, “Cristãos-Novos no Brasil, Uma Nova Visão do Mundo,” in
Arquivos do Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, Mélanges offerts a Fréderic Mauro, ed.
Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, vol. 34 (Lisbon and Paris, 1995), 387–97.
49. With reference to the Brazilian experience in terms of a critical approach to religion, see
Anita Novinsky, “Estudantes brasileiros afrancesados da Universidade de Coimbra. A
Perseguição de Antonio Morais Silva,” in A Revolução Francesa e seu impacto na América
Latina, ed. Osvaldo Coggiola (São Paulo, 1990), 337–71.
50. Trial against Diogo Nunes Henriques, Inquisition of Lisbon, #7487, Arquivo Nacional
da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Trial against Domingos Nunes, Inquisition of Lisbon, #1779, Arquivo Nacional da
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Prayers uttered during the session of 12 October 1730, Trial #1779, op. cit.
57. With reference to marranism in Brazil, see Anita Novinsky, “Jewish Heresy in Colo-
nial Brazil,” Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. 2 (Jerusalem,
1975), 111–21, and Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to the Historiography of Marranos
in the Light of New Documents,” in Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from Their
Expulsion in 1497 through Their Dispersion, ed. Israel Katz and M. Mitchell Serels (New
York, 2000).
12 1/24/01 11:43 AM Page 242

– Chapter 12 –

OUTCASTS FROM THE KINGDOM:

THE INQUISITION AND THE BANISHMENT
OF NEW CHRISTIANS TO BRAZIL

Geraldo Pieroni

Lisbon, 1581. It’s the beginning of the united period of the two Iber-
ian crowns. At a reception given in honor of the new King of Portu-
gal, Phillip II, the colony of Brazil was symbolically represented by a
feminine figure holding a sprig of sugar cane in her hand with a cap-
tion that read: “I have been the place of banishment for the condemned.”1

O NE OF THE MAJOR PREOCCUPATIONS of the judges of the “Tribunals of

Faith” was the preservation of religious order through the quelling
of heterodoxies. The Inquisition was granted authorization to function in
Portugal on 23 May 1536, and the first auto-da-fé2 ceremony occurred in
Lisbon in 1540. Because of diplomatic disagreements between the Por-
tuguese monarchy and the papal court, however, the tribunal was only
definitively established on 16 June 1547, by order of an edict of Pope Paul
III, the “Meditatio Cordis.” The hunt for Judaizers had officially begun.
What was the motive behind this repressive legal action?
At that time, the main justification for the punishment of those who
violated Divine law was the salvation of their souls, even if accomplish-
ing this goal made it necessary to exclude them from society, much as
weeds are separated from healthy stalks of wheat. In order to reunite a
dissident minority to Christian society, the Inquisition, in an extremely
vigilant way, resorted to punishment and to catechization (pedagogical
means of social and religious reintegration). The primary reason for legal-
izing a “Tribunal of Faith” on Portuguese soil was the battle against the
lapsing or backsliding of New Christians who, according to the crown
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Outcasts from the Kingdom | 243

and the Church, continued to practice Hebrew beliefs after their “conver-
sions”—the mandatory baptisms that began to be enforced late in 1496.
From that moment on, Jews were no longer “Jews of the synagogues”
who lived in their districts or ghettos, private communities in which they
freely practiced their religion. Prior to the 1496 edict, these communities
had existed all over Portugal: in Lisbon, Santarém, Évora, Porto, Faro,
Setúbal, and Portalegre. With the establishment of mandatory baptism
and the institution of the Holy Office, the new minority no longer enjoyed
the juridical, ethnic, or religious legitimacy that had previously been
granted by the Afonsin Ordinances. Henceforth this minority became
“Christian”—or rather, “New Christian”—and was stigmatized and
viciously persecuted.
As its title reflects, this chapter focuses on social exclusion, the Inqui-
sition in Portugal, and the exile of New Christians to Brazil. The core of my
discussion concerns the seventeenth century, although a seventeenth cen-
tury deliberately extended so that we can better confirm transformations
evident only in the long run. My purpose is to analyze the apparatus that
promoted the establishment and practice of deportation to Brazil as a pun-
ishment meted out by the Portuguese Inquisition’s judicial system.

Banishment

The cross, the olive branch, and the sword—the symbols of the Inquisi-
tion—represent the weapons that the institution used in order to integrate
a dissident minority into a Catholic majority. Severity and forgiveness,
vigilance, castigation, and catechizing—these were the Inquisitorial com-
pellere intrare3 during an era when fear was institutionalized. Everyone
feared the king and the Inquisitors. Sons feared fathers, women feared
husbands, everyone feared God—His chastisements during life on earth
and His eternal punishments thereafter.4
Banishment was one of the Holy Office’s preferred punishments.
This type of disciplinary action, implemented within a broad penal sys-
tem, had been widely practiced in Portugal since the early Middle Ages.
By examining the Portuguese legal system, we can confirm that the prac-
tice of exile was a convention employed by both ecclesiastical and secu-
lar judges. Secular tribunals and the tribunals of the Inquisition therefore
operated similar types of correctional systems that functioned in parallel
ways. Although jurisdictions, prisons, and judges were naturally differ-
ent once a sentence of exile overseas had been levied, all those con-
demned by secular or Inquisitorial tribunals were united in a common
location in Lisbon, the Limoeiro prison, where criminals and sinners
would fearfully await their embarkation date.
As a result of the maritime expansion that occurred during the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, the kingdom’s undesirables could, for the
first time, be deported to territories overseas. In the case of Brazil, as it
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244 | Geraldo Pieroni

happens, the first Portuguese inhabitants were two convicts abandoned

on the beach by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500. These deportees became
future symbols strongly rooted in the ideals of the Brazilian people.
Would Brazil be, therefore, a land of exile?
The king was the representative of the Portuguese judiciary, and the
Inquisition tribunals were extensions of royal power. In theory, at least,
intervention in and discipline of Catholic heterodoxies was a means of
reinforcing the notion that the king, as God’s representative, had power
over the territories he controlled. The Church was united with the crown
against social, religious, and moral threats. In the mind of the king, the
supreme judge, as well as in those of the legislators, the existence of evil
necessitated a judicial system with laws and principles aimed at protect-
ing society. The twin notions of sin/reform and of crime/punishment are
manifested in its ordinances. Reform through penitence and punishment
through legal sentencing allowed order to be restored to a world knocked
off balance by sin and crime. Royal and ecclesiastical authorities per-
ceived their “holy mission” to be the administering of justice, given that
sin and crime injured God in heaven and His representatives on earth.
Within this judicial system, secular, Inquisitorial, and ecclesiastical tri-
bunals were able to work unanimously.
For the Inquisition, exile provided a double function: on one hand, it
operated as a defense of social and religious order, and on the other, as a
purification process for sins committed. One cannot, therefore, examine
exile imposed by the Inquisition in Portugal without taking into account
the penitential dimension embedded in each sentence.

New Christians and the Inquisition

New Christians accused of crypto-Judaism were those who appeared

most frequently on the lists of autos-da-fé. Appearing far less often
were those who had violated Catholic morals and were also sentenced
to exile: bigamists, sodomites, and seductive priests, along with other
sources of disorder, including sorcerers, visionaries, and blasphemers.
All were perceived to represent a threat to the consolidation of the
kingdom’s social, political, and religious unity and to its support of
Roman Catholicism.
The daily lives of New Christians were strictly scrutinized. All were
suspected of Judaism. “In small countries, where not one door is opened,
nor one word uttered, that the rest of the world does not learn of it,”5
nothing escaped the eyes of the informers. From the cradle to the coffin,
everything pertaining to private, domestic life or to social life could be
denounced. All those who did not participate in confession during
Christmas, Easter, and Pentacost fell under suspicion of heresy. Catholic
laymen could only possess in their homes the Bible, the Psalms with the
Breviary, and Our Lady’s Book of Hours, though never the vernacular
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Outcasts from the Kingdom | 245

version.6 New Christians were accused of behaving in public as “good

Mass-going Catholics” while secretly, in the privacy of their homes, con-
tinuing to observe the “Sabbath and fastings prescribed by Judaism.” A
large number of New Christians, particularly those of generations who
had converted prior to mandatory baptisms, had thoroughly absorbed
Catholicism, assimilating the principle and the practices of the Catholic
Church; but they also may have bequeathed to their descendants a
diluted version of the “law of Moses.” Both crypto-Judaizing New Chris-
tians and New Christians fully loyal to Catholicism were seized by the
Holy Office, and many were condemned to exile on Brazilian soil. Any
minor gesture that could be construed as suspicious was reason enough
to be thrown into the Inquisition prisons of Lisbon, Coimbra, and Évora.
Francisco Bethencourt affirms that extensive and intensive searches for
Judaizing New Christians were typical of the “style” of the Portuguese
Holy Office, which had no equivalent either in relation to the Roman
Inquisition, which considered Judaism a residual fault, or to the Spanish
tribunals, which had ended massive persecution of Judaizers at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century and from then on had treated Judaism as a
minor crime.7
In order to eradicate Judaizers from Portuguese soil, the Inquisitors
established a general practice of denunciation. The condemning doctrine
was based on the amount of Jewish blood that each person had in his
veins. There frequently appear in the Inquisition records meticulous cate-
gorizations based on the purity of one’s blood, as the following examples
demonstrate: Brites Maria, “completely XN”; Maria Gomes, “part XN”;
Diogo Dias, “three-fourths XN”; Alexandre Tavares, “one-half XN”;
Simão Roiz, “one-third XN”; Margarida de Souza, “one-fourth XN”; João
Fernandes, “one-eighth XN.”8
The Jesuit António Vieira severely criticized the Portuguese Inquisi-
tion’s actions, testifying to the great difficulty he had in comprehending
the abuses it committed in the mass persecution of New Christians. He
accused the Holy Office of apprehending “many people who did not have
much of what one might there call the Jewish Nation, more than an
eighth, or a sixteenth.… Such subtleties have never been seen in the
world, to divide into eight parts, to find in them their sixteenths, their
thirtieth parts and their thirty-second parts.” Father Vieira would ask the
Inquisitors: “Does Portugal’s air create Jews?”9
Thousands of men and women accused of Judaism passed through
hundreds of auto-da-fé ceremonies of the Holy Office. As we have
already mentioned, many New Christians were exiled to Brazil. Those
charged with Judaizing represented more than half of all the criminals
banished to the Brazilian colony, that is, 52.7 percent; of these, women
constituted the majority (65 percent). Male New Christians exiled to
Brazil represented a smaller percentage because many of them were
sentenced to forced labor in the galleys, a punishment reserved exclu-
sively for men.
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246 | Geraldo Pieroni

TABLE 12.1 Banishment to Brazil

Numbers Percentage
Judaism 311 52.7
Bigamy 88 14.9
Deceit 55 9.3
Witchcraft 43 7.3
Sodomy 25 4.2
Revelation of secrets 18 3.1
Visions 14 2.4
Blasphemy 10 1.7
Solicitation 7 1.2
Other 19 3.2

Note: Number of cases analyzed: 590

Source: ANTT, General Council of the Holy Office, Books 433 (Coimbra), 434 (Évora), 435
(Lisbon).

TABLE 12.2 Exile to Brazil by Century (sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth)

16th 17th 18th Total

W M T W M T W M T W M T
Judaism 1 3 4 180 88 268 20 19 39 201 110 311
Bigamy 7 7 14 43 16 59 10 5 15 60 28 88
Deceit 16 4 20 9 22 31 3 1 4 28 27 55
Witchcraft 1 1 2 21 12 33 4 4 8 26 17 43
Sodomy 0 1 1 1 23 24 0 0 0 1 24 25
Revelation of secrets 0 7 7 3 7 10 1 0 1 4 14 18
Visions 1 0 1 10 1 11 2 0 2 13 1 14
Blasphemy 0 0 0 1 8 9 0 1 1 1 9 10
Solicitation 0 0 0 0 5 5 0 2 2 0 7 7
Other 0 1 1 3 12 15 0 3 3 3 16 19
Total 26 24 50 271 194 465 40 35 75 337 253 590

Notes: Number of cases analyzed: 590; W=Women, M=Men, T=Total

Source: ANTT, General Council of the Holy Office, Books 433 (Coimbra), 434 (Évora), 435
(Lisbon).

To be exiled overseas, especially to Brazil, meant crossing the ocean

and living for three, five, or ten years in a different and peripheral world.
The Inquisitors seemed to have assumed that for Europeans life in Brazil
was a veritable purgatory, since the Inquisition considered exile to a
colony as a sentence justified only for the most serious offenders. As
viewed by the Inquisition, banishment, like purgatory, was a strict but
transitory sentence. It remains to be seen if the deportees were able to
make use of the imposed purgatorial exile.
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Outcasts from the Kingdom | 247

New Christians Banished to Brazil

Each New Christian has his or her own story, and it is by way of these
personal histories that we can understand how the Inquisition con-
demned the accused to prison sentences, confiscation of goods, forced
labor in galleys, banishment, and death by fire. The following examples
refer exclusively to New Christians exiled to Brazil.
“O, Almighty God of Israel, Lord of Abraham, having heard Daniel,
hear, Lord, my prayer.” This was the prayer uttered in an Inquisition’s
prison by Baltazar Soares, a thirty-year-old medical doctor. Son of Diogo
Dias Caldeirão, also a doctor, and Inês Soares, he was accused of praying
the Psalms of David without the Gloria Patris. Baltazar, married to
Andresa Gomes, was in a prison of the Holy Office for five years before
being condemned to an additional five-year exile to Brazil in an auto-da-
fé on 9 September 1708.10
Whereas New Christians were not necessarily Judaizers, the special
logic of the Portuguese Inquisition resulted in Baltazar Soares’s condem-
nation for crypto-Judaism. The Inquisition saw a potential heretic in
every New Christian, and the Holy Office’s methods did not allow any
New Christian to escape the tribunal unscathed. Denunciations, often
without substantiation, were enough to convict an accused.
The Évora Inquisition imprisoned several members of the Almeida
family, all New Christians. Among them was Maria, who had been
denounced by her father Pedro, her brother António, and her sisters
Helena and Inês, all themselves incarcerated by the Holy Office. Twenty-
seven-year-old Maria de Almeida was married to a shoemaker, Luís
Vieira, and on 7 July 1644 was relaxada11 for not declaring all her offenses
and for not supplying the Inquisitors with the names of those people with
whom she was acquainted. Aware of the fact that she would die on a
pyre, Maria de Almeida requested another hearing in which she “con-
fessed all her sins.” In the auto-da-fé of 21 October 1644, she was con-
demned to life in prison and to the penitential garment, a sambenito with
“emblems of fire.” The Inquisitors further sentenced her to six years of
exile in Brazil. Before departing, she signed the term of secrecy and went
to the outcasts’ prison to await a ship that would transport her overseas.12
In Portugal, the number of individuals suspected of Judaism kept ris-
ing steadily. It was not enough to punish New Christians once; as time
went on, the Inquisition continued to search for renegades who had been
condemned before. Once the first generation had been punished, then it
was the second and the third. The source continued its fervent flow. As
António Vieira asserted in a letter written during the first years of the
Restoration, the methods of the Inquisition actually perpetuated the exis-
tence of Judaism in Portugal.13 Backsliding charges against those suppos-
edly reconciled with and accepted back into the bosom of the Church
increased the ranks of prisoners accused of Judaism. Accused and accus-
ers alike were now children, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren who, as
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248 | Geraldo Pieroni

prisoners, when reprehended, tortured, and threatened with death,

would accuse their parents, uncles, and grandparents who were well
familiar with the prisons and techniques of the Inquisition, for they had
previously experienced these same forms of torture.
New Christian Maria Gomes was seventeen when she was sentenced
by the Holy Office on 1 April 1629. She received the well-known samben-
ito as punishment and departed for Monte-mor-o-Novo, her hometown,
to fulfill her spiritual penance. She was again imprisoned on 21 April
1630 for refusing to wear the penitential garment in her local church.
After being reprimanded, she promised to obey the Inquisitors. Forty-
four years later, precisely on 6 September 1674, Maria Gomes, now a
widow, was again imprisoned. Among her many accusers was her
nephew José Mendes, a soldier in the town of Estremoz, who was also
confined by the same Inquisition. In the auto-da-fé that took place on 28
March 1683, Maria Gomes was sentenced to two years of banishment in
Brazil for “reverting to Judaism.” In addition to exile, this transgressor
received “spiritual penances and teachings on matters of the faith.”14
In the minds of the Inquisitors, the fact that New Christians behaved
outwardly as “good Catholics” was merely proof of their cunning in
masking their true identities. Without question, crypto-Judaizers existed
in Portuguese society during the Inquisitorial repression and were pun-
ished for practicing the “law of Moses” and for preserving the customs
and traditions of their ancestors. The fact that they were sentenced a sec-
ond time for “reverting to Judaism” would seem to indicate that many
New Christians continued to practice principles found in the “ancient
law.” Nevertheless, the majority of Inquisitorial cases involving New
Christians exiled to Brazil clearly reveals that the practice of Catholicism
was soundly present in their prayers, confessions of faith, and daily ritu-
als. Following are two such instances.
Ana Rodrigues was accused of Judaism; according to the Inquisitors’
calculations, she was “three-fourths New Christian.” She was married to
a soldier named António Coelho and was twenty-three years old when
the authorities of the Lisbon Inquisition sentenced her to three years of
exile in Brazil. After the auto-da-fé, she was sent to Limoeiro prison
where she endured many hardships, “suffering great affliction in her soul
for not being able to receive the communion sacrament.” She begged per-
mission to receive the “most holy sacraments” by invoking the “five
tribulations of Christ Our Lord.” During Lent, in 1655, the Inquisitors
allowed her to go to confession and to partake of the Holy Communion.
Ana Rodrigues was accused of “observing the Sabbath and of not eating
pork,” even though she continued to uphold her Catholic faith by pro-
fessing with great devotion that she believed in everything that the
Catholic Church teaches its followers.15
Fernando de Morales Penso, a twenty-five-year-old New Christian,
single, born in Lisbon, was imprisoned by the Holy Office and sentenced
to five years of exile in Brazil. The Inquisitors demanded that as soon as
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Outcasts from the Kingdom | 249

he touched Brazilian soil he would send a certificate to the Holy Office

Board in Lisbon confirming his arrival and his pledge that “he would not
leave Brazil before the end of his sentence.” Fernando left Portugal on
board the ship Diligente and while on the high seas sent a letter to the Lis-
bon Inquisitors, dated 29 October 1683, stating: “It is absolutely necessary
to relieve my conscience by telling Your Excellencies that since the day I
was baptized until today I have never ceased being a true Catholic, never
did a single thought allow me to stray from the Laws of Our Lord Jesus
Christ under which I was well instructed, and therefore I declare to Your
Excellencies that everything that I claimed in my confessions to the Holy
Office, concerning me, and against those close to me, was false, and I con-
fessed what I did not do for fear of death and to save my life.”16
If we determine the traits of those New Christians who were ban-
ished to Brazil by analyzing Inquisitorial cases, then at first glance we can
assert that they were predominantly Catholic, both in practice and in
belief. It is very difficult to ascertain, however, to what extent the confes-
sions made to the tribunal were sincere. It is evident that during brutal
interrogations the prisoners’ judgments were completely impaired by the
Inquisitors’ methods: after numerous sessions of inquests and torture,
their ability to think or speak critically would have been diminished. The
belief that they had betrayed their religion, the desire to save themselves
and the lives of family members, the remorse over having accused rela-
tives and friends, the discomfort of the prisons, the exhaustion—every-
thing closed their minds. Anita Novinsky states that “If many generations
of Catholicism had not turned New Christians into good Catholics, it nei-
ther, for the most part, turned them into Jews.… He is considered a Jew
by Christians and a Christian by the Jews.… The New Christian creates
his own defenses against a world in which he does not belong. He is,
above all, a New Christian.”17
Our last case is an example of how New Christians were put aboard
ships and delivered to the authorities in Brazil. Escolástica de São Bento
and her mother Maria Cordeira were imprisoned and sentenced by the
Coimbra Inquisition. Taken to the Holy Office by Manuel de Abreu Bace-
lar, Escolástica arrived in jail elegantly dressed. She had brought with her
“a gold trinket, silver buckles, black lace gloves with silver fringe, cul-
tured pearls around her neck, and two silver pins.” After several warn-
ings in prison, she admitted she was a follower of the “law of Moses,”
along with several other people whom she named one by one. The
Inquisitors decided that Escolástica de São Bento was a Judaizer and,
thus, a “heretic and an enemy of the holy Catholic faith,” deserving of the
highest sentence of excommunication, in addition, significantly, to the
confiscation of all her possessions by the treasury office. Following advice
to confess all her sins with signs of remorse and begging forgiveness of
the Inquisitorial judges, the defendant was received in the “Sanctity and
Union of the Holy Mother Church.” She declared herself guilty, renounc-
ing her “heretical faults.”18
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250 | Geraldo Pieroni

Maria Cordeira, Escolástica’s fifty-three-year-old mother, was given

the same sentence, and both departed for Brazil to carry out their exile.
Mother and daughter had been accused by their nephew and cousin
António da Gama, a tailor residing in Aviz. António was thirty when the
Holy Office imprisoned him on 2 September 1714. Accused of Judaism,
he accepted the offenses with which the Inquisitors charged him, but
soon thereafter went completely mad, and it became impossible to force
him to repeat his confessions.
Upon embarking and after having crossed “the great ocean waters,”
mother and daughter arrived in São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os San-
tos and were handed over to João Calmon, commissioner of the Holy
Office. On 3 July 1719, he wrote to the Portuguese Inquisitors confirming
the arrival of the Judaizing offenders: “From the Holy Office Tribunal of
the Coimbra Inquisition were sent by way of the Porto ships that docked
here, to this city in Bahia, Escolástica de São Bento, daughter of Francisco
Rodrigues, weaver, native of Aviz and resident of the city of Coimbra,
with three years of banishment in Brazil.… Maria Cordeira also arrived,
widow of Francisco Rodrigues, nicknamed the Sapé, weaver, native of
Aviz and resident of Coimbra.” Maria Cordeira was also sentenced to
“another three years of banishment in Brazil.” The two women had
embarked on the ship Nossa Senhora do Vale e São Lourenço, whose captain
was Manuel Cardoso Meirelles.19
To have access to and to analyze an Inquisitorial trial account is to
have the opportunity to bring the domestic and social life of a person of
the seventeenth century into the present day. It is like being presented
with an open safe that reveals the secrets and afflictions of Holy Office
offenders. If a first reading of these documents unearths statements obvi-
ously inspired by the Inquisitorial authorities that provoked them, a
more careful reading exposes the hidden feelings of those condemned.
All of this documentation allows us to understand the lives of the men
and women of this period; it permits us to penetrate the daily routines
and the fragmented families of these New Christians. Dominated by fear,
they were subjected to severe degradation in their personal lives, which
for many ended in exile to a distant land, a punishment aimed at both
social exclusion and purification of souls. The exclusion of undesirable
elements from the community was used by the ancien régime as a means
of achieving social normalization. The practice of banishment was an
obvious form of social vengeance against transgressors of royal laws. For
the Inquisition, banishment functioned as what was believed to be a nec-
essary religious and social defense against heterodox infection, while at
the same time, serving as a mystical procedure for the purification of sins.
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Outcasts from the Kingdom | 251

Notes
1. Gil de Methodio Maranhão (explicação de), Documentos para a História do Açucar, vol. 1
(Rio de Janeiro, 1954), xv.
2. Public penitential ceremony used by the Holy Office.
3. Means of forced entrance.
4. Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Judaísmo e Inquisição (Lisbon, 1987), 186.
5. ANTT (Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo), Inquisition, General Council, Loose
Documents, Group 2645, 114.
6. BNL (Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa), Periodicals Room, reference J. 5543B: “Monitório
de D. Diogo da Silva,” in Mendes dos Remédios, “Os Judeus portugueses perante a
legislação inquisitorial,” BIBLOS – Boletim da Biblioteca da Faculdade de Letras da Univer-
sidade de Coimbra, vol. 1, nos. 10 and 11 (October/November 1925).
7. Francisco Bethencourt, “A Inquisição,” in Yvette Kace Centeno, comp., Portugal: Mitos
Revisitados (Lisbon, 1993), 104.
8. “XN” is the abbreviation for New Christian, notation used by the Holy Office notaries.
9. ANTT, Inquisition, General Council, Loose Documents, Group 2645, 114.
10. ANTT, Évora Inquisition, trial account 4002: Baltazar Soares. All prayers that did not
include “glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”—the well-known Gloria
Patris—were proof of heterodoxy: the rejection of the second person in the Trinity,
Christ, God and Messiah.
11. Relaxada: a term used by the Inquisition, meaning the accused was to be relinquished
to a civil court to be executed under the death penalty.
12. ANTT, Évora Inquisition, trial account 9172: Maria de Almeida.
13. ANTT, Inquisition, Council General, Loose Documents, Group 7, no. 2645, 145.
14. ANTT, Évora Inquisition, trial account 4586: Maria Gomes.
15. ANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, trial account 11019: Ana Rodrigues.
16. Ibid., trial account 6307: Fernando de Morales Penso.
17. Anita Novinsky, Cristãos-Novos na Bahia (São Paulo, 1972), 160–61.
18. ANTT, Coimbra Inquisition, trial account 1725: Escolástica de São Bento.
19. Ibid.
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13 1/24/01 11:45 AM Page 253

PART IV

FROM TOLERATION TO EXPULSION:

IDENTITY, TRADE, AND STRUGGLE FOR
SURVIVAL IN FRANCE AND
CARIBBEAN FRENCH AMERICA
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13 1/24/01 11:45 AM Page 255

– Chapter 13 –

THE PORTUGUESE JEWISH NATION

OF SAINT-ESPRIT-LÈS-BAYONNE:
THE AMERICAN DIMENSION

Gérard Nahon

T HE JEWISH NATION OF SAINT-ESPRIT-LÈS-BAYONNE was established on

the Atlantic coast of France, at the westernmost point of the diaspora,
by Portuguese New Christians originating from the forced conversions of
1497. Like the Jewish Nation of Bordeaux, it owed its existence to the Let-
tres patentes granted in 1550 by Henri II to the New Christians or Por-
tuguese merchants. Consequently, the status of these groups, who were
not recognized as Jews, was an ambiguous one up until the French Revo-
lution. Bayonne was the Jewish community that was closest to the Iberian
Peninsula. Along with its sister communities of Bidache, Peyrehorade,
and Labastide-Clairence, it received emigrants from the Peninsula begin-
ning in the sixteenth century. Some of these emigrants went on to the
New World.1
In the seventeenth century, Jews who had left Bidache for Brazil and
others from Peyrehorade living in Mexico were put on trial by the Inquisi-
tion. It is thanks, in part, to these trials that we have records of the private
lives and regular religious practices of Jews from Peyrehorade.2 The pri-
mary wave of migration, however, was toward the French Antilles, Mar-
tinique, and Guadeloupe, which opened a Portuguese connection with
the Americas. The conquest of Cayenne—previously a Dutch territory—
by the French on 15 May 1664 caused Portuguese Jews to move from
French Guyana to Suriname, and established lasting ties between the Por-
tuguese in France and those in Suriname. Curiously, this exodus of Jews
toward Dutch-held Guyana, or Suriname, was in a sense counterbalanced
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256 | Gérard Nahon

by fresh arrivals of Christian and Jewish immigrants from La Rochelle. In

1725, King Louis XV refused to allow the Suriname Jews to return to
Cayenne. Under pressure from the Jesuits, Louis XIV had on 28 April
1684 issued a decree expelling the Jews everywhere from Martinique to
Bayonne. Subsequently, the Black Code (Versailles, March 1724) prohib-
ited the establishment of any Jewish settlement in the French colonies,
especially Louisiana, from which Louis XV expelled “all the Jews who
may have settled there … as avowed enemies of the Christian name.”3
Though only partially enforced, this expulsion jeopardized the continued
presence of Jews in the French colonies. In fact, it scattered Jewish fami-
lies native to the Bayonne region throughout the Dutch, English, and
Danish colonies, where they enjoyed a higher status.4 The American lands
touched by the Jews of Bayonne thus extended from Suriname to New-
foundland and Labrador, along with Curaçao, Martinique, Jamaica, Bar-
bados, Saint Eustatius, Saint-Domingue, Saint Thomas, Louisiana, and
L’Isle Royale, previously known as Cape Breton and now as Nova Scotia.5
This chapter aims to define a French model—exemplified in the case
of Bayonne—of relations between a Portuguese Jewish Nation and colo-
nial America. Certainly the Portuguese Jews from Bordeaux played a far
greater role in Atlantic trade than did those from Bayonne. But the bulk
of research has concentrated on the Bordelais model, leaving Bayonne
virtually unexplored. For this reason I will concern myself almost exclu-
sively with the Portuguese Jewish Nation of Bayonne. For my sources I
have relied primarily upon notarial deeds from Bayonne in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries preserved in the Archives des Pyrénées
Atlantiques in Pau.

Economic, Familial, and National Connections

One of the seven principal ports of the French kingdom, Bayonne was
oriented mainly toward the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas for its com-
mercial activities. The Jews of Bayonne participated in the maritime
enterprise as well as in the colonization and exploitation of the French
Antilles, where some of them settled with their families.
On 11 March 1715, Jacob Henriques de Castro and Samuel Teilles fit-
ted out the fishing ship Le Prude, which caught and dried cod in Labrador.
According to Anne Zink, at the end of the eighteenth century “nearly all
the Jews, like the true Bayonnais they were, chose to invest in cod fish-
ing.” The following day, Moïze Pereira-Mendes equipped another ship,
the Marianne, for the same purpose. Others fitted out vessels to hunt and
render whales in Newfoundland. The Jewish merchants of Bayonne
invested in maritime ventures lasting several months, and thus became
acquainted with the hazards of long-distance navigation on the Atlantic.6
They imported colonial products such as cacao and animal pelts, and
were in a position to appreciate the difference in quality between cacao
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Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne | 257

from Caracas and cacao from the Antilles. They exported manufactured
products including cloth, various trades goods, and notions. Some of
their ships bore Jewish names, perhaps following the example of the Jew-
ish “fleets” of Curaçao. Thus on 25 May 1695 Georges Mendes and Jean
Gomes Sampayo planned to send the ship Le Roy David to Newfoundland
under the Spanish flag, and on 27 February 1720 Gabriel Rodriguez Silva
fitted out and provisioned the Sara for fishing off Ile Royale. On 5 June
1706, Antoine Alvares engaged the frigate the Sainte Anne to transport
cloth from Brittany for sale in the islands. A meeting of the Commerce
Bureau on 17 November 1729 examined a request by Jacob Silva, a Bay-
onne apothecary, who was seeking to ship “chests filled with drugs and
medicines … on vessels bound for the French islands in America.” The
Jewish merchants of Bayonne also insured ships, as Isaac Léon did on 15
January 1726 for the Saint Jean de Bayonne, sailing for Martinique. On 17
September 1750, Izaac Delcampo sold manufactured goods bound for
Louisiana on La Gracieuse.7
A number of Jews from Bayonne, and even more from Bordeaux,
acquired land and slaves in Martinique, where they settled in the seven-
teenth century and planted new crops, particularly cacao. In a petition to
Louis XIV on 17 July 1689, Benjamin da Costa d’Andrade, a “Portuguese
of the Hebrew Nation,” explained “that he went to live on the island of
Martinique and transported a large quantity of merchandise to trade
there and to attract commerce from several places in order to profit and
please Your Majesty, and built several houses there as well as a brewery
on which he spent a large sum of money.” Some of these Jews were to
establish themselves in North America. Isaac Monsanto of New Orleans
conducted business with Bayonne firms between 1758 and 1769.8
In the eighteenth century, Jews from Bayonne also lived in Jamaica,
Curaçao, and Suriname. Aron de Castro Solar, whose father lived in Bay-
onne, settled in Port-au-Prince in Saint-Domingue. Léogane was where
Michel Lopez de Paz, physician to the king, had his practice. Despite the
changing politics of the French government, a Jewish community took
root in Martinique. On 4 July 1764, it presented the Comte d’Estaing,
“representing the person of His Majesty in the Leeward Islands of Amer-
ica,” with a request on behalf of the “Community of merchants of the
Hebrew Nation living both in this Island and in its dependent islands and
being subject to the domination of His most Christian Majesty.”9
The intellectual contribution of the Jews in colonial America was
admittedly very modest. Still, an author born in the southwest of France
was the first to introduce biblical poetry to the New World. Daniel-Israël
Lopez-Laguna spent his youth in Peyrehorade. In 1691, he offered a son-
net to his rabbi Yshak de Acosta, the author of Historia Sacra Real, on the
book of Esther. He then moved to Spain and went on to settle in Jamaica,
where he wrote his masterpiece, Espejo fiel de Vidas que contiene los Psalmos
de David in verso, published in London in 1720. He returned to Jamaica,
and on 11 August 1721, in the presence of two witnesses, Moses Gutierez
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258 | Gérard Nahon

and Isaac Rodrigues de Leon, he made out his will, requesting that his
body be buried in the Kingston cemetery beneath a gravestone worth 10
pounds that was imported from London. The exact year of his death
(Marcus puts it at 1722) and his tomb—although marked in the Kingston
cemetery—do not figure in the recent publication of Jewish inscriptions in
Jamaica. He was survived by three sons named David, Jacob, and Isaac.10

Temporary Residence versus Permanent Settlement:

Familial and National Strategies

The eighteenth century was for the Jews the century of the emigrant. At
the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, did Bayonne, like Amsterdam,
export its poor to the colonies? In the summer of 1746, Ishac de Selomoh
Abarbanel Souza wrote to the Portuguese Jewish Nation of Amsterdam
to request financing for the voyage to Suriname of a vagabond, Abraham
Lopes Rephael, and his family.11
Wealthy merchants also set up trading posts in the colonies and
acquired properties there, a practice exemplified by Josias Gabay Ferro.
Born in Spain in 1653, he passed through Bayonnne only briefly on his
way to Amsterdam, finally settling in Curaçao where he was among the
island’s richest Jews. In 1709, he made a will mentioning a brother in
Amsterdam, Abraham Gavay, and another brother in Bordeaux, Isaac
Gavay. He also had five sisters, one of whom was still living in Spain with
her son, Manuel Ferro. The four other sisters lived in Bayonne. Josias
Gabay Ferro died on 14 August 1723 in Curaçao.12 On 23 March 1720,
Jacob Henriques de Soza, living in Jamaica, received power of attorney by
associates in Bayonne following the death of Isacq Rodriguez Soza in
Jamaica. At Le Cap, on 18 February 1785, Faxardo granted power of attor-
ney to the older son of Brandam in Bayonne. David Nones-Lopes, resid-
ing in Saint-Domingue, on 2 February 1790 loaded the vessel La
Bayonnaise with 315 pelts. On 12 March 1775, Aron Robles the younger, a
merchant in Port-au-Prince, received a transfer of 150 livres from a bailiff
at the headquarters of the Bayonne admiralty. One Izaac Victoire, a trader
at Cap-Français, was granted power of attorney on 6 December 1785 by
Salomon Levy in Bayonne. Rachel Carvaillo Frois was most unhappy on
20 February 1705, because she had long since received no support from
her absent husband, Isaac Nunes Carvallo, who had gone to Jamaica
about six years earlier. On 21 July 1789, Abraham Suarès conferred power
of attorney upon his uncle, who was “about to return home to the Eng-
lish island of Jamaica.” There were also Jewish companies in the colonies,
such as Pereira-Souares Frères et Compagnie, mentioned at Le Cap on 20
October 1785, which sent trade goods on the ship Les Quatre amis to a Bay-
onnais by the name of Destandeau.13
Lasting settlement was also concretized by marriages contracted in
the colonies. “Jewish Atlantic endogamy,” to use Anne Zink’s expression,
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Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne | 259

was embodied in numerous marriages between young people from Bay-

onne living in Curaçao in the eighteenth century. Isaac Mendès de Sola,
born in Bayonne, married Esther de Mezas, born in London, in Curaçao
on 2 June 1734. Abraham Flores, another native of Bayonne, married
Esther de Jacob Athias de Neyra y Chaves in Curaçao on 12 August 1742.
In 5504 (1743–1744), the synagogue Mikveh Israel honored Abraham Flo-
res by naming him Hatan Tora, or “Bridegroom of the Torah,” that is, the
first reader of the law. He died before 1764, followed by his widow in
1770. He must have had a tidy fortune since, according to a list made up
between 1 July 1764 and 1 July 1765, his widow owned three slaves. Moy-
ses Oliveyra Isidro from Bayonne married Rachel, daughter of Jacob
Campos de Leon, in Curaçao on 10 September 1771. Moïse Prois d’An-
drade, born in Bayonne, married Rachel, daughter of Isaac de Sola and
his wife, a Nuñes da Costa, in Curaçao on 8 August 1781. David de Jacob
Nunes-Tavarez, from Bayonne, married Zipporah de Leon in Curaçao on
21 January 1787. Mozes Gomes de Fonseca from Bayonne married Sara
de David Rodriguez da Costa on 28 January 1787 in Saint Eustatius. Jacob
de Abraham Rodriguez, born in Bayonne, married Ribca, daughter of
Abraham Flores and Athias de Neyra, in Curaçao on 17 April 1791.14
Jacob Baiz, born in Bayonne in 1779, married Lea Oliveira Isidro in
Curaçao in approximately 1806. He was to die in the Danish island of
Saint Thomas in 1857.15
At the end of a life rich in travel and adventure, those who succeeded
in America made wills. As their final resting place they chose the ceme-
teries of the English or Dutch Antilles, since Jews were rarely allowed
Jewish burial in French territory. I am indebted to my friend Mordechai
Arbell for an epitaph in French that he found in the Charlotte Amalie
cemetery in Saint Thomas: “Here lies the body of Abraham Gomez Vaez
born in Bourg Saint-Esprit in the city of Bayonne on 24 March in the year
1759 and deceased in Saint-Thomas on 17 March in the year 1810 at the
age of 51 years minus seven days.” David Cardozo Pereira, born in Peyre-
horade, was buried in Curaçao on 22 October 1786. In his will he
bequeathed one hundred florins of his property to his sister Sara Cardoze
living in Bayonne, and he also prohibited the sale of his house on
Breedestraat. Moses Jussurun Cardosso made his will on 9 December
1725 at Port Royal in Jamaica. Though we have no proof that he was from
Bayonne, there is no doubt that he maintained relations with the French
community; indeed, he bequeathed ten pounds to the poor of Bayonne.16
The Jews of Bayonne who settled in America took part in familial
strategies. On 19 September 1776, Jacob d’Isaac Delvaille registered a
notarial deed to arrange his sister Debora’s marriage in Bayonne to Jacob
de Joseph Valery on 23 December 1776. His brother Moïse had stipulated
in his will, dated 2 November 1773, that the marriage of his sister Lea
“can be accomplished only with the approval of my brother Jacob d’Isaac
Delvaille, now in Cap Saint-Domingue,” and had appointed Jacob his
general and universal heir. On 17 June 1785, Abraham Pessoa, living in
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260 | Gérard Nahon

Curaçao, was named the universal heir of his brother Moïse, a Hebrew
teacher in Bayonne.17
Some expatriated natives of Bayonne, however, planned to return to
their country of origin after making a fortune. Abraham Péreira Mesquita
of Jamaica instructed his father, living in Bayonne, to purchase for him a
country property “in that land where he wished to return to make his
home.” He therefore bought “the house and possessions of Sanguina” for
the sum of twenty-five thousand livres. In this paradigmatic case, the
period spent in America enabled him to build up wealth in the form of
real estate in France, where Portuguese Jews had the right to own land.
Abraham Péreira Mesquita died before entering into possession of his
property, as attested by a deed dated 5 February 1755. Since he still
owned property in Suriname, his father and heir chose Abraham Pardo,
“a merchant in the colony of Suriname in Holland,” to manage it. Mar-
dochée Mendès-France, who paid three thousand livres’ worth of taxes in
Port-au-Prince on 22 October 1764, returned to Bayonne with all of his
overseas properties intact. In 1794, his fortune was estimated at 150 thou-
sand francs, “not counting his property in America.”18

American Spaces Internalized

The Jews of Bayonne thus had property, commodities, ships, and families
in America. What place did America hold in their conversations, their
thoughts, their plans and dreams? In his library, Aron Colaso had copies
of Cesar de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de
l’Amérique … avec un vocabulaire caraïbe (Rotterdam, 1658) and Richard
Blome’s L’Amérique angloise ou Description des isles et terres du roi d’An-
gleterre dans l’Amérique avec de nouvelles cartes de chaque isle et terres (Ams-
terdam, 1688). This last title was “written in English by Richard Blome,
primarily to encourage those who wish to settle in America under the
dominion of the King of England, to make their way there.” These books
include discussions of the Jewish settlements, even on the Jewish origins
of the indigenous inhabitants, and contain some quite striking passages,
such as the following:

As for their [the indigenous inhabitants’] origins, I am not disinclined to

believe that they are of the Jewish race, and I think for the following reasons
that they are descended from the ten tribes: Because they had to go to a land
that was neither cultivated nor known, which must certainly be Asia or
Africa, for it was not Europe. And the one who imposed this severe law upon
them could easily have smoothed the way for them; and it is not impossible
to go from the easternmost points of Asia to the westernmost points of Amer-
ica. To me their faces resemble Jewish faces, and their children especially, and
so closely that when you see their children you would almost think you were
in London in the Duckeplat or Berrystraet where most of the Jews live, and
not only that, but their ceremonies are similar, they count by moons, they
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Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne | 261

offer up first-fruits, they have a sort of festival of the Tabernacle; it is said that
their altar is placed on twelve stones; mourning lasts a year for them; the cus-
toms of their women, along with several other things, which do not come to
mind right now, coincide with Jewish customs.19

Jacob Rodriguez Péreire, the Portuguese Jewish Nation’s agent in

Paris, defended the rights of Jews in the French colonies and demon-
strated a perfect understanding of their situation. In 1779, he presented a
long treatise on the subject to the minister of the navy. For their part, in
Le Cap on 22 June 1782, the Jews of the French Antilles registered the Let-
tres patentes obtained in 1776. Curiously enough, the same agent of the
Jewish Nation in Paris wrote a treatise on improving navigation at sea.
He thus carried over to the scientific realm the maritime experience of the
Portuguese outfitters of Bordeaux and Bayonne.20
America, land of settlement and commerce, was part of the political
activity of the Jewish Nation, which claimed the rights enjoyed by the
Jewish Nation in Suriname. Were its members also inspired by the exam-
ple of the Jewish plantations of Suriname, bearing names of places in the
Holy Land—Carmel, Hebron, Succoth, Beersheva? Albert Bernal gave the
names Jerusalem, Hebron, and Moriah to properties acquired in the
vicinity of Bayonne.21 The American dream certainly pervaded conversa-
tions and thoughts. In 1738, a Jewish girl named Esther Brandeau donned
a disguise and, under the name of Jacques Lafarge, embarked as a cabin
boy on a vessel bound for Canada.22 After lengthy consultations, the
administration decided to send her back to France; the sequel to her
adventure is not known.
On a graver note, a Jew leaving Bayonne would make his will upon
sailing overseas: every departure was an act of daring, and those who set
off were conscious that one phase of life was coming to an end. Jacob
d’Isaac Delvaille, a merchant of the Jewish Nation, wrote on 29 October
1769, before embarking on the Neptune de Bayonne bound for Cap-
Français: “[B]eing on the verge of leaving for America and fearing death
and the uncertainty of its time, in order to forestall untoward conse-
quences, I declare this to be my last will and testament.”23
Was there still nostalgia for the lost America, that is, Brazil, where the
first official Jewish community of the New World had known a brief exis-
tence during the period of Dutch occupation? As of 23 April 1725, Isaac
Henriques Julian from Bayonne still owned a house in Amsterdam
named “Le Recife en Brésil.” Located on the Lange Houtgracht, the house
with its warehouses and dependencies had been bequeathed to him by
his father.24 In a letter written in Bayonne on 24 March 1789 to Joseph
Brandon, who lived in Paris, Abraham Silveyra describes a share in a
house that was to go “to your American uncle Joseph.” This was Jacob
Rodrigues Bernal, who was nicknamed “the American.” Had he made a
fortune in the New World? It is difficult to know, for many young men
had set off for the colonies in order to make a life for themselves. In April
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262 | Gérard Nahon

1772, one Isaac Sossa, twenty years old, embarked on the ship La Mindroc
and sailed for Le Cap and afterward Jamaica, “where he had personal
business.” By 9 September 1772, the same Isaac Souza had already
returned to Bayonne on the ship Les deux Joseph. Izaac Goutiérez, aged
thirty, and Abraham Delvalles, aged twenty, both of the Jewish Nation,
boarded the brigantine La Fillou, bound for Port-au-Prince; on 1 June 1772,
they arrived in Curaçao. On 15 March 1777, Jacob Gomes the younger, of
the Jewish faith, thirty-one years old, embarked on the vessel L’Actif to sail
to Saint Eustatius, “where he has settled.” If nothing else, Jacob Rodrigues
Bernal acquired revolutionary tendencies in America: he was to become
the secretary of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Revolutionary Committee,
which governed the region of Bayonne during the Reign of Terror. Moïse
Suarez invested the fortune he had amassed overseas in a chateau and
was dubbed “le Milord.” Jacob Mendes Capotte, écrivain public, was “about
to sail on the ship named La Société, bound for Port-au-Prince” “where he
must remain to carry on trade” on 12 and 14 March 1775.25
After her husband’s death, Sara Oxeda, whose husband Abraham
Gabay Isidro had been a rabbi in Barbados, returned to her family in Bay-
onne—perhaps somewhat the richer. She brought to fruition her ambi-
tious plan to publish her husband’s Hebrew work entitled Yad Abraham.
She wrote a foreword in Portuguese and had this book printed in Ams-
terdam in 1758.26

Conclusion

The American dimension of the Jewish community in Bayonne was man-

ifested in the commercial, maritime, and colonial enterprises carried out
during the eighteenth century in the New World territories of the Euro-
pean powers. This dimension strengthened the political and economic
roots of Portuguese Jews in France itself, as they acquired real estate and
launched major industrial enterprises in the nineteenth century, such as
the construction of railroads and the development of navigation by
steam. Was the impact of the Bayonne Jews on America in general as neg-
ligible as Marcus has claimed it to be in his discussion of English
colonies? Indeed, Marcus wrote, “Though the Jews of the French Islands
had traded intensively with their coreligionists in England’s North Amer-
ican colonies, their influence on the emergent Anglo-Jewish communities
in the North Atlantic appears religiously and culturally to have been
nil.”27 It should be pointed out that the only self-study produced by a
Jewish Nation in colonial America was a French work published in 1788
in Paramaribo under the title Essai historique sur la colonie de Suriname …
avec l’histoire de la Nation Juive Portugaise & Allemande y etablie, leurs privi-
lèges immunités & franchises…. The connection between Bayonne and Suri-
name explains in part such a surprising linguistic choice, whereby French
supplanted the Spanish of the Nacion as the language of culture.28
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Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne | 263

The influence of the French connection was to make itself felt in

North America as well. Benjamin Nones, born in Bordeaux, became pres-
ident of the Jewish Community of Philadelphia in the nineteenth century.
Henri de Castro, alias Moïse Henriquez Castro, born in Bayonne on 17
July 1786, transported five thousand Alsatians on twenty-seven ships and
invested $150,000 in order to colonize the western part of Medina. He
gave his name to a county south of Amarillo and to the town Castroville,
Texas.29 Alongside the American dimension of Bayonne we must not for-
get the Bayonnaise dimension of American Judaism.

Notes

Translated from the French by Jennifer Curtiss Gage.

1. On Bayonne, see Pierre Hourmat, Histoire de Bayonne des origines à la Révolution française
(Bayonne, 1986). The Lettres patentes of 1550 and those that followed through the end
of the eighteenth century are published in Gérard Nahon, Les “Nations” juives portu-
gaises du Sud-Ouest de la France (1684–1791) (Paris, 1981), 21–46. On the subject of these
“Nations,” the reader is referred to the classic work by Louis Francia de Beaufleury,
Histoire de l’établissement des Juifs à Bordeaux et à Bayonne depuis 1550 (Paris and Bor-
deaux, year VIII [1800]); new ed. with a preface by Jean Cavignac, L’établissement des
Juifs à Bordeaux et à Bayonne (Bayonne, 1985); A. Detcheverry, Histoire des Israélites de
Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1850); T. Malvezin, Histoire des juifs à Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1875;
repr. Marseille, 1976); H. Léon, Histoire des Juifs de Bayonne (Paris, 1893; repr. Marseille,
1976); G. Cirot, Recherches sur les Juifs espagnols et portugais à Bordeaux, part 1 (Bordeaux,
1908); G. Cirot, Les Juifs de Bordeaux, leur situation morale et sociale de 1550 à la Révolution
(Bordeaux, 1920), of which only the first volume was published; and especially Frances
Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary
and Napoleonic France (Alabama, 1978). To these works may be added my own synthetic
research: “Les sefarades dans la France moderne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Les Nouveaux
Cahiers, no. 62 (1980):16–25; idem, “The Conversos in France in the 16th to the 18th Cen-
turies,” in Culture and History, Ino Sciaky Memorial Volume, ed. Joseph Dan (Jerusalem,
1987), 185–203 [in Hebrew; summary in English, xvii]; idem, “The Sephardim of
France,” in The Western Sephardim: The History of Some of the Communities Formed in
Europe, the Mediterranean and the New World after the Expulsion of 1492, ed. R. D. Barnett
and W. M. Schwab (Grendon, Northants, 1989), 2:46–74; idem, with Jean Cavignac,
“Les communautés israélites du Sud-Ouest,” in Gildas Bernard, Les familles juives en
France XVIème siècle–1815. Guide des recherches biographiques et généalogiques (Paris, 1990),
39–49; idem, “Communautés espagnoles et portugaises de France (1492–1992),” in Les
Juifs d’Espagne, histoire d’une diaspora 1492–1992, ed. Henry Méchoulan (Paris, 1992),
111–44; idem, “Le modèle français du marranisme: perspectives nouvelles,” in
Inquisição. Ensaios sobre Mentalidade, Heresias e Arte, ed. Anita Novinsky and Maria Luiza
Tucci Carneiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), 227–65; idem, “Des Nouveaux Chrétiens à la
Nation juive portugaise,” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart
(Jerusalem,1992), 640–63 (in Hebrew), English translation, “From New Christians to the
Portuguese Jewish Nation in France,” Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim
Beinart (Jerusalem, 1992), 2:336–64; idem, “La ‘Nation juive’ de Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne
du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle: escale ou havre de grâce?,” in 1492/1992. L’Exode des juifs d’Es-
pagne vers Bayonne: Des rives de l’Ebre et du Tage à celles de l’Adour. Colloque international,
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264 | Gérard Nahon

Faculté pluridisciplinaire de Bayonne–Anglet-Biarritz, 7, 8, 9 avril 1992, ed. Maïté Lafour-

cade (Bayonne, 1993), 1–30; idem, “Yshak de Acosta et David Silveyra: mémoire rab-
binique, mémoire politique de l’Espagne, Bayonne 1722–1790,” in Mémoires juives
d’Espagne et du Portugal, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris, 1996), 145–69. Also useful is the
catalogue of the Musée Basque, Les Juifs de Bayonne 1492–1992: Exposition présentée à la
Salle Ducéré de la Bibliothèque Municipale de Bayonne (Scénographie: Dominique
Berthomé, curator: Olivier Ribeton) (Ville de Bayonne, 1992); as well as G. Nahon, “La
Nation juive portugaise en France XVIeme–XVIIIème siecle: Espaces et pouvoirs,”
Revue des études juives 153 (1994):353–82. An additional source is Antonio-João Simoes
Serra, Subsidios para a Historia dos Judeus Portugueses em França, I. A Comunidade de
Baiona (Lisbon, 1963), which I was unable to consult for the present work.
2. Claudine Laborde-Sabarots, “Fernando de Médina, Juif de Peyrehorade face à l’In-
quisition de Mexico au XVIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société de Borda, Dax, 116th year,
no. 422 (1991):207–41; Haïm Beinart, “The Trial of Moshe and Ya’acov Gomez, Jew-
ish Inhabitants of Peñaorada (Near Bordeaux),” Jewish History 6, no. 1–2 (1992):xi–
xxii (in Hebrew).
3. The first version of the Black Code issued in Versailles in March 1685 applied to the
islands in general. The first article stipulated: “We wish and intend for the Edict issued
by the late King of glorious memory, our Lord and Father, on 23 April 1615, to be exe-
cuted in our Islands; in so doing, we enjoin all of our officers to expel from our islands
all the Jews who have established residence there, who, as the declared enemies of the
Christian name, are ordered to leave within three months from the day of publication
of the present notice, on pain of confiscation of body and property,” Jean-Baptiste
Labat, Voyage du chevalier des Marchais en Guinée isles voisines et à Cayenne fait en 1725,
1726, 1727 contenant une description très exacte & très étendue de ces païs et du commerce qui
s’y fait (Amsterdam, 1731), 3:155, according to records dated 6 May 1687, Saint-
Domingue. The tenor of the 1724 text is quite similar: “The Edict issued on 23 April
1615 by the late Louis XIII of glorious memory will be executed in our province and
colony of Louisiana, in so doing, we enjoin the Directors General of the said company
and all of our officers to expel from the said country all the Jews who may have estab-
lished residence there, who, as the declared enemies of the Christian name, are ordered
to leave within three months from the day of publication of the present notice, on pain
of confiscation of body and property,” ibid., 177–78; separately printed copy, Le Code
Noir ou Edit du Roy, servant de règlement pour le gouvernement & l’administration de la jus-
tice, police, discipline & le commerce des esclaves nègres, dans la province & colonie de la
Louisiane, donné à Versailles au mois de mars 1724(Paris, 1727).
4. On the Danish possessions, see Jens Larsen, Virgin Island Story: A History of The
Lutheran State Church, Other Churches, Slavery, Education, and Culture in the Danish West
Indies, now the Virgin Islands (Philadelphia, 1950), 96–97; list of religious buildings in
Sainte-Croix in 1784: 1 Jewish, 152: “In 1685 Denmark had Proclaimed religious toler-
ance to the Jews on St. Thomas, allowing them, as well as the Roman Catholics, to hold
private religious services. There is no information of such religious services being held
by the Jews until after 1781, when, after the sacking of St Eustatius, the greater part of
the Jews there came to St. Thomas. In 1796 the Jews formed a congregation and built a
synagogue under the appellation of Blessing of Peace.”
5. On the Jews in the French colonies, see the series of articles by Abraham Cahen, “Les
Juifs de La Martinique au XVIIe siècle,” Revue des Etudes Juives 2 (1881):93–122; also
indispensable is “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises au XVIIIe siècle,” REJ 4 (1882):
127–45 and 236–48; REJ 5 (1882):68–92 and 258–72. The question is raised again by J.
Petitjean-Roget in “Les juifs à La Martinique sous l’Ancien Régime,” Revue d’histoire
coloniale 43 (1956):138–58. On Jamaica, see Jacob A. P. M. Andrade, A Record of the Jews
in Jamaica from the English Conquest to the Present Time (Kingston, 1941). I am indebted
to M. Mordechai Arbell for providing me with a photocopy of this extremely rare
work. Some information on the Jews in Barbados are to be found in Robert H. Schom-
burck, The History of Barbados comprising a geographical and statistical description of the
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Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne | 265

Island, a sketch of the Historical events since the settlement and an account of its geology and
natural productions (London, 1848), 97–98, 107, and 432. Their first settlement dates
from 1628, and the first Jewish grave from 1658. The community opened five cemeter-
ies, and its synagogue, whose denomination was Kaal Kadosh Nidhe Israel, was
destroyed by a hurricane in 1831. On Saint Eustatius, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial
American Jew 1492–1776 (Detroit, 1970), 1:141–43.
6. See Anne Zink, “L’activité des juifs de Bayonne dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siè-
cle,” in Lafourcade, 1492/1992, 85–107, 97. The following deeds are cited: 11 March
1715, Archives des Pyrénées Atlantiques III E 4439, Grosse: Jacob Henriques de Castro
and Samuel Teilles for five thousand pounds at 25 percent on La Prude fishing and dry-
ing cod in Labrador. Cod fishing and drying on Ile Royale or Cape Breton—today the
part of Canada known as Nova Scotia—benefited from various tax exemptions. See,
for example, l’Arrest du Conseil d’Estat du Roy concernant le commerce qui se fait aux Isles
Françaises de l’Amérique, des morues séches et des huiles provenant de la pesche des sujets de
Sa Majesté à l’Isle Royale du 20 may 1718.
7. Deed of 23 May 1695, Leonor Gomes de Sampayo and Catherine Mendes de Medine:
agreement with Jean Drouillet on the ship Le Roy David, III 3175; 27 February 1720, con-
tract of grosse: Samuel Gradis and Samuel Alexandre the younger to Gabriel
Rodriguez-Silva, La Sara, fishing at L’Isle Royale, III E 4630; deed of 5 June 1705 certi-
fying the quality of cacao transported on the Saint Jean Baptiste, III E 4428; deed of 5
June 1706, contract on the sale of cloth shipped from Bretagne to the islands on the
Sainte Anne, III E 4428. On Jacob Silva, see Séances du Bureau du Commerce, année 1729,
Paris, Archives Nationales F 12 * 76, 649. On Isaac Leon, see III E 4156; on Izaac Del-
campo, III E 4655. On Jewish maritime credit at Bayonne, see the important article by
Anne Zink, “Les Juifs de Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne et le prêt à la grosse aventure,” in
Archives juives 29(2) (1996):20–35.
8. Benjamin da Costa d’Andrade’s petition is in the Archives du Ministère des Affaires
Etrangères. I am especially grateful to Hugues de Dianoux de la Perrotine for a photo-
copy of this document. On Isaac Monsanto, see Bertram-Wallace Korn, The Early Jews
of New Orleans (Waltham, 1969), 161–62.
9. On Aron de Castro Solar, see G. Nahon, Les Nations juives portugaises, doc. 8, 18–20. On
Lopez de Paz, a relative of David Gradis of Bordeaux, see Abraham Cahen, “Les juifs
dans les colonies françaises au XVIIIe siècle,” REJ 4 (1882):132–33. For the 1764 peti-
tion, see Archives de la Marine, Collection Moreau de Saint-Méry, Colonies, vol. 15, art.
juif, Cahen, “Les juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 237–38.
10. See Cecil Roth, Laguna, Daniel Lopez (c. 1653–c. 1730), Enc. Jud. 10, col. 1361–62; Mar-
cus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. 1, 127–28; C. Cabezas-Alguacil, “Un acercamento a
la obra de Daniel López Laguna Espejo fiel de Vidas,” Miscelanea de Estudos arabes y
hebraicas (1988–89):37–38 and 151–62. For the sonnet, see G. Nahon, Les Nations, doc.
110, 357–58. Regarding the year of his death, see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol.
1, 128. Testament Island Record Office, Spanish Town, Jamaica, Liber XVI f° 32,
excerpts; the grave is mentioned in Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 130 and
225. On the subject of funerary inscriptions in Jamaica, see Richard D. Barnett and
Philip Wright, The Jews of Jamaica: Tombstone Inscriptions 1663–1880, ed. Oron Yoffe
(Jerusalem, 1997).
11. For the expression “the century of the immigrant,” see Marcus, The Colonial American
Jew, vol. 1, 255. Letter of 15 menahem 5506, 1 August 1746, Amsterdam, Gemeente
Archief PA 334 92, published in G. Nahon, Les nations juives, doc. 86, 289.
12. The Hague, Rijksarchief, Oud Archief van Curaçao [1708–1845] 1545 no. 221; see Isaac
S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles
(Cincinnati, 1970), vol. 2, 750–51; epitaph in I. S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews
of Curaçao (Assen, 1957), 250.
13. Deeds of 23 March 1720, III E 4630; 18 February 1785, III E 4234; 2 February 1790, III E
4239; 12 March 1775, III E 4576; 6 December 1785, III E 3958; 20 February 1705, III E
4206; 21 June 1789, III E 4516; 20 October 1785, III E 3958.
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266 | Gérard Nahon

14. For the expression “l’endogamie juive atlantique,” see Zink, “L’activité des juifs des
Bayonne,” 101. On marriages, see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History, 1001 (Isaac
Mendès Sola). Regarding Abraham Flores: marriage, see Emmanuel and Emmanuel,
History, 690; mention of the title Hatan Tora, 788. In the inventory after the death of
Esther Flores were gold amulets, Inv. OAC 983 n° 112, Emmanuel and Emmanuel,
History, 1046. A complete list of slave owners on the island appears in OAC 907, no.
66, littera a, Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History, 1036–45; Abraham Flores’s widow is
mentioned on page 1043. For the other marriages, see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, His-
tory, 914 (Moyse Oliveira Isidro); 893 (Moïse Frois d’Andrade); 1050 (David de Jacob
Nunes-Tavarez and Moyse Gomez de Fonseca); 985 (Jacob de Abraham Rodrigues;
849 (Jacob Baiz).
15. See Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History, 849.
16. List of four Jewish houses on Breedstraat in Willemstead or Punda in 1715, The Hague,
Rijksarchief, West India Company 206, 35–41; see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History,
770. Jews from Bayonne made wills that are preserved in the Island Record Office,
Spanish Town, Jamaica, filed under the following code: liber XXI 76 (1737), XXXVII,
367 (1768); cf. Marcus, The American Colonial Jew, vol. 3, 1403n. 6. Excerpt from the will
of Moses Jussurun Cardosso from the Island Record Office, Jamaica, liber XVII, fol.
104, in Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 180.
17. Deeds of 19 September and 23 December 1776, Archives des Pyrénées Atlantiques, III
E 4577. Will of 2 November 1773, III E 4574, no. 206. List of ship-owners, The Hague,
Rijksarchief, Oud Archief van Curaçao [1708–1845] 837, see Emmanuel and Emmanuel,
History, 699; list of brokers in Curaçao, The Hague, Rijksarchief, Oud Archief van
Curaçao [1708–1845] 911 no. 169, Naamlijst van … der Regeeringe en Gequalificeerde Per-
soonen … op ‘t Eyland Curaçao (Amsterdam, n.d); see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, His-
tory, 759. Abraham Pessoa appears among the members of the community in Curaçao
beginning in 1769; see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History, 1030. Will of 17 June 1785
and inventory after the death of Moïse Pessoa on 22 June 1785, Archives des Pyrénées
Atlantiques in Pau, III E 4586.
18. Declaration by Jacob Péreira-Mesquita of 5 February 1755, III E 4181, on the purchase of
this property. Jacob-Péreira-Mesquitta’s power of attorney to Abraham Pardo, 11 April
1752, III E 4656. I have not identified Abraham Péreira Mesquita’s property on the list
of “Names of plantations on the Surinam river, from its source to the fortress of Ams-
terdam,” which contains the names of Jewish plots but not—with a few exceptions—
those of their owners, in Philippe Fermin, Description générale, historique, géographique et
physique de la colonie de Surinam (Amsterdam, 1769), vol. 1, xv–xvi. Concerning the river,
see also page 10: “But going further up, one comes upon a little village, named Torrar-
ica, located on the left bank, which is inhabited only by a few Jewish planters. Eight
leagues from here is another Jewish village, in which there is a very large and lovely
synagogue”; on the Jewish synagogues, see page 28: “the Jews, of whom there were a
considerable number, both Portuguese and German, also have two synagogues. That of
the former is quite beautiful; but that of the Germans is far less attractive.” On the map
in volume 1 can be read: Village de Juifs and Savane des juifs. On Alexander Lavaux’s
color map figures a 288-acre plot numbered 82 in the name of Adam Pardo; is this an
erroneous transcription of the name of Ab[raha]m Pardo, Abraham Péreira Mesquita’s
proxy? For the tax paid by Mendès-France’s in Port-au-Prince, see Abraham Cahen, REJ
4 (1882): 245; for his fortune in Bayonn, see “Tableau des citoyens dont la fortune s’élève
au-delà de 40.000 francs,” Léon, Histoire, 167; Ernest Ginsburger, Le Comité de surveillance
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne, Procès-verbaux et correspondance 11 octobre
1793–30 fructidor an II (Bayonne, 1989, 2nd ed.), 165.
19. List of Aron Colace’s books, Amsterdam, Gemeente Archief, Archief Weeskamer, K
18, published in G. Nahon, Les Nations, doc. CLI, 442–49, nos. 16 and 154. For the ref-
erence, see Richard Blome, L’Amérique angloise ou Description des isles et terres du roi
d’Angleterre dans l’Amérique avec de nouvelles cartes de chaque isle et terres (Amsterdam,
1688), 156–57.
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Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne | 267

20. The treatise by Jacob Rodrigue Péreyre is published in Abraham Cahen, “Les juifs dans
les colonies françaises,” REJ 5 (1882):81–85. On Péreyre, see Renée Neher-Bernheim,
“Un savant juif engagé: Jacob Rodrigue Péreire (1715–1780),” REJ 142 (1983):313–451.
21. Henry Léon also lists “Jérusalem, Hébron et Moriah, isolate houses, surrounded by
land, occupied by small farmers and built by M. Albert Bernal, who gave them these
names in memory of the history of the Hebrew People”; in Léon, Histoire, 413.
22. On Esther Brandeau, see Archives Nationales (Paris), Colonies B 68 f° 29 v° (290 v°), B
71 f° 8, 1739–40; Joseph R. Rosenbloom, A Biographical Dictionary of Early American Jews:
Colonial Times through 1800 (Lexington, 1960), 13; and Benjamin G. Sack, History of the
Jews in Canada (Montreal, 1965), 6–9. See also my review in REJ 125 (1966):458; Gaston
Tisdel, article on “Brandeau, Esther,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1966);
and Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. 1, 377–78. I have been able to locate only a
few of the documents relating to this affair that are cited by the late Benjamin Sack, and
unable to trace the young girl’s subsequent adventures. On the place of this episode in
Canadian historiography, see Richard Menkis, “Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism in
Pre-Confederation Canada,” in Antisemitism in Canada: History and Interpretation, ed.
Alan T. Davies (Waterloo, Ontario, 1992). See also Laurence F. Tapper, Sources
d’Archives sur les juifs canadiens, 2nd ed., revised and augmented (Ottawa, 1987).
23. Departure of the Neptune, Arch. Nat. Colonies F 5 B 30; testament, Arch. Pyr. Atlant. III
E 4570 n° 151.
24. Arch. Pyr. Atlant. III E 3726.
25. On Jacob Rodrigues Bernal, see Léon, Histoire, 162 and 385; the letter is published in G.
Nahon, Les Nations juives portugaises, doc. 158, 436–37. Passengers on board Arch. Nat.
Colonies F 5 B 38: Isaac Sossa (162 and 167), Izaac Goutiérez (162), Abraham Delvaille
(id.); F 5 B 30: Jacob Gomes (193). For Moïse Suarez, see Léon, History, 161 and 467. On
Jacob Mendes Capotte, Arch. Pyr. Atlant. III E 4576.
26. Cf. Cecil Roth, “The Remarkable Career of Haham Abraham Gabay Izidro,” Transac-
tions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 24 (1974):211–13, of which the late R. D.
Barnett provided me with proofs prior to publication. Notary Bertrand Forgues, Arch.
Pyr. Atlant. III E 4566, n° 38. Reg. des Décès, Registre des naissances, Arch. Bayonne,
GG Suppl. Israélites 15 (3) 292. On the sometimes stormy career of this rabbi in Suri-
name, see G. Nahon, “Recherches sur les relations intercommunautaires: Amsterdam
et la diaspora sefarade,” Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Ve section: Sciences religieuses.
Annuaire, vol. 87 (1981–82/1978–79):247–50.
27. Jacob R. Marcus, “Jews in the French Indies 1654–1800,” in Marcus, The Colonial Amer-
ican Jew, vol. 1, 85–94 and 95.
28. In their preface, on page vii, the regents of the offer the following explanation: “Privés
des connoissances nécessaires, forcés en quelque façon d’écrire dans une langue qui
n’étant point la nôtre [en note: elle est la Portuguaise & l’Espagnole] nous fut apprise
moins par des principes que par une routine, peut-être même vicieuse.”
29. On Henry Castro, see Henry Cohen, “Henry Castro, Pioneer and Colonist,” Publica-
tions of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1896):1–5; Audrey Goldthorp, “Castro’s
Colony” (Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1928); Bernard Postal, art titled Texas, in
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 15 col. 1035; Julia Nott Waugh, Castroville and Henry Castro,
Empresario (San Antonio, 1934); Bobby Weaver, Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development
in Texas 1842–1856 (Texas University Press, c. 1985). For Castro’s état civil—his biogra-
phy prior to his voyage to America has been very little studied—see Registre des nais-
sances de la Nation juive, Arch. Bayonne, GG Suppl. Israélites 15(3) 104.
14 1/24/01 11:47 AM Page 268

– Chapter 14 –

ATLANTIC TRADE AND SEPHARDIM

MERCHANTS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
FRANCE: THE CASE OF BORDEAUX

Silvia Marzagalli

D URING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, French foreign commerce grew

remarkably. Since exports and imports essentially took maritime
routes, the Atlantic port cities—Bordeaux in particular—played a major
role in French economic expansion to the New World. By the middle of
the eighteenth century, Bordeaux was the major French port. The city’s
success was mainly due to a boom in the Atlantic and colonial trade,
although its Asian trade also increased in the decade prior to the French
Revolution. Until the loss of Canada in 1763, Bordeaux also traded with
New France, but the core of the city’s commercial expansion was in the
Caribbean. From the early 1720s up until the Revolution in 1789, Bor-
deaux merchants imported increasing quantities of sugar, coffee, and
indigo from the three French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and, in
particular, Saint-Domingue. The value of Bordeaux’s colonial trade in
1789 was more than ten times higher than it had been in the 1720s. Since
the domestic French market could absorb only a limited portion of these
huge amounts of colonial goods, merchants re-exported the vast majority
of them to Northern Europe, together with more traditional regional
products, such as French wine, brandy, and dried fruits.1
Colonial trade was strictly governed by France through an array of
legislation known as the Exclusif, or the “exclusive system.” According to
this mercantilist rule, only French merchants could trade with the French
colonies. Although colonial planters repeatedly ignored this legislation
and sold a great deal of their produce to foreigners, the exclusive system
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 269

nevertheless had a major effect upon the Bordeaux merchant community.

Whereas French merchants concentrated on colonial trade, their foreign
colleagues living in the city specialized in European trade. French author-
ities deplored the fact that French merchants left most of the freights and
profits from the re-export trade to German, Dutch, and British ship-own-
ers, but this division of labor proved highly functional. Foreign mer-
chants in Bordeaux were therefore numerous.
Scholars have done a considerable amount of research on the cos-
mopolitan Bordeaux merchant community of the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.2 Existing studies generally tend to classify the mer-
chants according to their religious belief. Historians have highlighted
that, although the city’s population was almost entirely Catholic, Protes-
tants and Jews were remarkably numerous within the merchant elite.3 In
the international trade of late eighteenth-century Bordeaux, for example,
one merchant out of every four or five was a Jew.4
Despite the considerable interest that historians have taken in the Bor-
deaux merchant community, the importance of the Jews in the city’s eco-
nomic expansion still needs investigation. It is not that scholars have
neglected Bordeaux’s Jews; the first history of this community was pub-
lished at the end of the eighteenth century, and other works were pub-
lished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 More recently,
France Malino has brilliantly dealt with the question of their political and
institutional status in Bordeaux, and Jean Cavignac has studied the
demographic and social structure of the Bordeaux Jewish community.6
However, all of these scholars were concerned mainly with the prob-
lems of Jewish integration and assimilation within French society. The
specifically economic role of the Bordeaux Jewish community is therefore
largely marginal in existing literature. Apart from case studies of single
Jewish merchant houses,7 some evidence of the importance of the Jewish
merchants for French expansion to the west can also be found in works
on religious minorities in the French colonies.8 These studies tend to con-
centrate upon the legislation, which first authorized, then forbade, Jew-
ish settlement in the French colonies, but they also underline that, despite
all the difficulties, Jewish planters and merchants were in fact tacitly
admitted into most of the French Caribbean islands. Many questions,
however, still remain unanswered. Jews certainly contributed to the pros-
perity of French colonial trade, but was their role of decisive importance?
And did their commercial organization have any special characteristics?
Despite the substantial bibliography concerning both Bordeaux and its
colonial trade, we know remarkably little about the importance of Bor-
deaux Jews in French commercial expansion in the New World. The ques-
tion as such has not been raised before. Even if they provide a valuable
framework within which to analyze this specific problem, French histori-
ans on Bordeaux are above all interested in the commercial successes of
the city. They might study Jewish merchants, but their primary aim is to
explain the life of Bordeaux, not the Jewish role in transatlantic expansion.
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270 | Silvia Marzagalli

One might expect to find something with regard to this problem in

debates for or against Jewish integration that occurred in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century France, since the economic utility of the Jews was one
of the main arguments used in favor of their emancipation.9 However, the
analyses were mainly confined to France, rather than to her colonies. If
French colonial governors and intendants10 occasionally underlined the
utility of Jewish settlers in the Caribbean, their remarks were solely con-
fined to administrative correspondence and found no echo in public
debate. Also, the arguments were highly ideological—a defense of Jews
might, for example, be used as a pretext to attack the Jesuits—so that it
becomes difficult to use these sources to assess the real economic impor-
tance of the Jews in the French colonies.
In order to put forward a tentative evaluation of this subject, it is first
necessary to assemble the evidence, which is quite scant and dispersed
throughout the extensive literature on eighteenth-century Bordeaux. The
aim of this essay is to demonstrate the possible value of such research.
What was the place and importance of Jewish merchants in eighteenth-
century Bordeaux, and how exactly did they participate in the Atlantic
trade? What legal opportunities were available to them to live in and to
trade with the French colonies? We will concentrate here on Bordeaux
colonial trade, rather than on the intercolonial trade in which Jews were
also active, but which did not directly benefit the city’s economy. Did
Jewish commercial strategies in the Atlantic trade differ from those of
non-Jewish Bordeaux merchants? This question raises the more general
question of the comparative advantage that Jews might still have had in
the later phase of European expansion to the west.
I want first to review the legal situation of Jewish merchants both in
Bordeaux and in the colonies, and then to concentrate on the activities of
some of those Jewish merchants of Bordeaux who participated in French
colonial trade. Finally, I want to assess the Jewish merchants’ indirect
contribution to this trade through their involvement in the finance and
insurance businesses.

The Jews in Bordeaux: Origins, Evolution, Occupations

The literature on the Bordeaux Jewish community is, as has been men-
tioned, abundant. The demographic evolution and the geographical ori-
gins of these immigrants are relatively well known. Jews had been
expelled from France at the end of the fourteenth century. The Jewish
community of eighteenth-century Bordeaux was, therefore, the result of
Jewish emigration in modern times, mainly from the Iberian Peninsula.
The first New Christians arrived in southwest France at the end of the
fifteenth century, both from Spain and from Portugal. This emigration
continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially
from Portugal. By then, Jews were officially tolerated in Bordeaux and
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 271

had formed their own community. Sources are therefore more abundant.
During the eighteenth century, the Jewish population of the city increased
from five hundred to fifteen hundred inhabitants, that is, from 1 to 1.5
percent of the city’s total population. Whereas earlier immigration was
due to religious intolerance in the Iberian Peninsula, Jean Cavignac
explains the large number of arrivals in the eighteenth century by refer-
ence to Bordeaux’s economic prosperity and to the existence of an already
well-established Jewish community in this town.11 According to the 1808
Napoleonic census, there were 2,063 Jews in Bordeaux, over three-fourths
of whom were designated as “Portuguese.”12
The Jewish community of Bordeaux was one of the most important,
both demographically and economically speaking, in eighteenth-century
France. The southwest region of France was one of the few major areas of
Jewish settlements in France.13 There were also important Jewish com-
munities in both Lorraine and Alsace, where twenty thousand Jews lived
in 1784, and in the territories of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin,
belonging to the Pope. The Jewish community in Paris was formed by
immigrants from all of these areas.
The political situation of these communities varied greatly, since
France was far from being, at that time, a centralized or homogeneous
nation. A great ambiguity characterizes the political status of these Por-
tuguese immigrants in Bordeaux during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In 1550, the French king had granted large privileges to the
“merchants and other Portuguese, called the New Christians” who had
settled in southwest France. In fact, they essentially enjoyed the same
rights as native Frenchmen. They could also obtain French naturalization,
as well as the title of bourgeois de Bordeaux,14 which implied several further
commercial privileges.
These measures pertained, however, only to those Portuguese immi-
grants considered New Christians, that is to say, Catholics. This distinc-
tion explains why, until the eighteenth century, there was apparently no
contradiction between, on the one hand, the various orders expelling
Jews from Bordeaux, and on the other, the ordinances protecting Por-
tuguese merchants: French authorities pretended or assumed that the lat-
ter were in fact Christians.
Most of these New Christians had escaped from religious persecution
carried out against the Jews. If some of them had converted to Christian-
ity, the majority remained secretly attached to their religion. It is, of
course, truly difficult to apprehend the actual religious practice and
beliefs of these early immigrants, since they publicly conformed to the
Catholic religion: they let their children be baptized, they married in front
of a Catholic priest, and they were buried in Christian cemeteries.
The fundamental ambiguity in the French legislation affecting Por-
tuguese immigrants disappeared in 1723, when a royal act confirmed
once again the privileges that had been accorded to the Portuguese New
Christians of Bordeaux in 1550. Now for the first time, the Portuguese
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272 | Silvia Marzagalli

were officially recognized as Jews. This might seem surprising, especially

if one considers that from the 1680s Louis XIV had adopted a severe pol-
icy against religious minorities, both Protestant and Jewish. Certainly, as
Frances Malino points out, the conjunction of economic and financial
crises at the beginning of the eighteenth century had proved the eco-
nomic utility of Jewish capital and had led to the official recognition of
this religious minority in 1723. However, a change had also taken place
within the Portuguese community of Bordeaux itself, which had begun to
emerge as a well-organized “nation.”15
After the turn of the century, Jewish families abandoned the fiction of
Catholicism and no longer let their children be baptized. A few years
later, they acquired land in order to provide for their own cemetery, and,
in addition, although they still married in front of a Catholic priest—this
was the only legal way of getting married in modern France—the cere-
mony took place outside of the church. From 1699, there was also a sedaca
in Bordeaux—a charitable organization that later became synonymous
with the Portuguese Jewish nation. The decisive impulse toward these
changes had come from the new wave of immigrants who had arrived in
Bordeaux after 1683 as a result of the persecutions of Don Pedro in Por-
tugal. These families were possibly more attached to their Judaism than
those who had previously settled in Bordeaux, and were definitely less
disposed to live there as Christians. They sought recognition by the king
as one of the organized communities (corps) that traditionally provided
the structure of French society. As such, they would have the right to rule
their own community and to levy money for its functioning. This
approach proved successful, and some well-known Portuguese mer-
chants of eighteenth-century Bordeaux were able to benefit from the com-
mercial expansion of the city, not as New Christians—now an uncertain
condition—but as members of a recognized Jewish community, which
afforded more protection.
Historians have often underlined the contribution made by the Jews
to the economy of modern Europe. In France, scholars have repeatedly
stressed the strong presence of Jews, as well as of Protestants, in finance
and trade.16 These studies, however, have tended to concentrate upon a
number of prominent bankers or merchants, neglecting to point out that
in early modern Europe the vast majority of the Jewish population, along
with the Christian inhabitants of the city, lived in a very precarious eco-
nomic situation. Most of the Jews in eighteenth-century Bordeaux were in
fact shopkeepers and retail dealers, and they hardly contributed, even
indirectly, to the city’s Atlantic trade.
However, within the Jewish community, a few individuals came to
prominence because of their fortune and prestige. According to a 1734
report by the intendant of Bordeaux, there were at that time five or six
Jewish ship-owners trading with the American colonies and, in addition,
a few others who were involved in banking. Each of these Jews was
responsible for a “very considerable business.”17 In 1747, David Gradis,
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 273

Jacob Peixotto, Jacob Raphaël, Gabriel Da Silva, and Salomon Francia

were the five most taxed Jewish merchants in Bordeaux,18 and their
names were well known in international trade. In the second half of the
century, other Jews, such as the Rabas or the Lopès-Dubecs, contributed
through trade and banking to Bordeaux’s commercial success.
The Bordeaux Jewish merchants concentrated mainly on three sec-
tors: trade to Spain, colonial trade, and banking. As we will see, all of
these activities contributed directly or indirectly to Bordeaux’s expansion
to the New World.

The Jews in the French Colonies: A Precarious Status

Most Bordeaux merchants involved in colonial trade had a family mem-

ber in the Caribbean who kept them informed about prices and produc-
tion, who sold their cargo, who organized the return voyage of the ship
with the shortest possible delay, and who made sure that the colonial
planters paid off their debts. The correspondence of Jacob Azavedo in the
early 1770s shows that the Bordeaux Jewish merchants were perfectly
conscious of the importance of relying upon a commercial partner in the
colonies.19 However, were these Jewish merchants allowed to operate
with the same freedom as their Catholic colleagues?
Whereas the Jewish merchants’ situation in Bordeaux was relatively
safe, thanks to the protection granted them in the sixteenth century, this
was not the case in the French colonies, where Jews did not enjoy the
same degree of security and where their position was, in fact, most pre-
carious. An analysis of the evolution of the legal status of Jews in the
French colonies is therefore necessary in order to better understand the
delicate situation in which the Bordeaux Jewish merchants found them-
selves and to better appreciate their initiative under such difficult cir-
cumstances.
Compared to other European countries, France was relatively late in
undertaking occupation of territories in the New World. The expulsion
order issued against Jews on 23 April 1615 was to be applied both in
France and in the French colonies.20 At that time, however, the colonial
expansion of France was still extremely limited, and the effects of this
decision were largely insignificant.
It is uncertain whether the French would have found Jews in Mar-
tinique when they took possession of this island from the Dutch in 1635.
The Dutch, unlike the French, had largely protected Jews,21 and when
France later acquired Remire (Cayenne) in 1664, two paragraphs of the
treaty explicitly granted protection and religious freedom to Jewish
colonists, who had settled there under Holland’s favorable legislation.
In the seventeenth century, Jewish capital proved in fact to be useful
to the French colonial administrators, who were consequently to under-
line, in their reports to Paris, the economic value of these settlers and
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274 | Silvia Marzagalli

were to defend them from the attacks of the missionaries, in particular,

those of the Jesuits. Besides providing capital and banking services, Jews
may also have transferred technology to the French colonies. The intro-
duction of the new techniques used in sugar cane and cacao production
is commonly attributed to Benjamin Dacosta, a Jew who had settled in the
French Fort St. Pierre after the Portuguese conquest of Recife (1654).22
At the beginning of French colonization of the Caribbean, Jewish
colonists were mainly engaged in trade and offered useful credit to other
settlers, as well as to the authorities. Thanks to the Sephardim diaspora,
they had contacts with Amsterdam and were thus able to provide infor-
mation on world markets directly from the most important European
port. Isaac Pereira possibly obtained his naturalization in 1676 as a
reward for the information from Curaçao that he gave to the French
authorities during the war against Holland.23
In the second half of the seventeenth century, some Jews started to
acquire land in the French colonies and became planters. By 1680, there
were sixteen Jewish proprietors in Martinique, and at least four of them
owned slave-run sugar plantations. This was also the case for a Jew in
Granada.24 New problems then arose for the French authorities. One of the
main arguments used to legitimize slavery had been religious: slaves were
offered the opportunity of getting to know the Christian gospel and thus
to save their souls. Missionaries regularly visited and catechized slaves in
the plantations of the French Caribbean. How could they possibly tolerate
that nominally Catholic slaves lived under the rule of a Jewish master in a
colony that belonged to the “very Christian” king of France?
By 1680, Jesuit protests on this problem found an attentive listener in
Louis XIV, who sought religious unity in his kingdom. In 1685, the Edict
of Nantes of 1598, which had conferred religious rights to Protestants,
was revoked. In that same year, the Code Noir, or “Black Code,” stan-
dardized the legislation for French colonies. The first article of the code
banned non-Catholics from living in the territories belonging to the king
of France, thus condemning both Jews and Protestants to expulsion
within three months. This code was henceforth used to govern all French
colonies and was systematically applied to new conquests, for example to
Saint-Domingue—present-day Haiti—which was officially acquired by
France in 1697. It was on the basis of the Code Noir that Jews were
expelled from Louisiana in the 1720s and were never really able to settle
in New France.25
A change in government attitude toward the Jews was already percep-
tible in 1683, when an order was issued that proscribed Jews from settling
in French colonies. The fact that the Code Noir had to repeat this expulsion
order two years later proves that the earlier edict had not been rapidly exe-
cuted; nevertheless, the change in policy was clear. France was closing her
colonies to religious minorities in the 1680s, whereas other European pow-
ers were explicitly granting protection to Jews in order to promote the eco-
nomic development of their own possessions in the New World. Britain
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 275

had in fact authorized Jewish settlement in Barbados in 1661, and Holland

had granted equality of rights to Jews in Guyana in 1667.26
After their expulsion, Martinique Jews left for Curaçao, St. Eustatius,
and Barbados before eventually trying to come back to this French colony
with the complicity of the French colonial authorities, who found their
presence and their credit facilities extremely useful.27 The same happened
in Saint-Domingue. Even if the Code Noir officially forbade Jewish settle-
ment, the local governor and intendant generally sought to protect those
Jewish colonists already on this island or who wished to settle there.28
The Jews, however, had no legally recognized status in the French
colonies. Being considered foreigners (Portuguese), the king of France
could, for instance, confiscate their property at their death (droit
d’aubaine). Their security depended entirely upon the benevolent protec-
tion of the local authorities, and thus in 1765, when the new governor of
Saint-Domingue arrived with a negative attitude, the Jews were first
heavily taxed and then threatened with expulsion.29 This did not, how-
ever, prevent Abraham Gradis from acquiring a sugar mill on the island
in the following year.
In the late 1770s, the crown once again changed its policy. In 1776,
Jews were unofficially granted the right to live in Martinique provided
that they did not profess their religion publicly. It was the same year in
which the French king confirmed the privileges of the Portuguese Jews of
Bordeaux. This act was officially registered in Cap-Français in 1782, thus
definitively solving the problems of inheritance for those Bordeaux Jews
dying in the colonies.30 In the 1780s, Jews must in fact have been quite
numerous in Saint-Domingue: twenty-two Bordeaux Jews were to ask for
indemnities after the slave revolt and the independence of Haiti.31
All in all, French legislation concerning Jews in the colonies remained
restrictive throughout most of the eighteenth century. The actuality, how-
ever, was quite different from the laws, and Jews could in fact live in the
islands, as long as they acted as Christians. Despite all the difficulties,
some Jewish colonists were thus able to make their fortune in the French
islands. A study of Bordeaux’s Jewish merchants may clarify how.

The Activities of Some of Bordeaux’s Jewish Merchants

Participating in French Colonial Trade

Compared to other French ports, such as Rouen for instance, Bordeaux

entered into colonial trade relatively late. The Rouen Sephardim mer-
chants were already participating in overseas colonial trade during the
first half of the seventeenth century. This was not the case in Bordeaux,
where in the same period the merchants essentially confined their trade
to Europe.32
Bordeaux New Christians were not pioneers in the American trade
venture. In fact, in the 1670s and 1680s, they were mainly shopkeepers.
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276 | Silvia Marzagalli

The few wealthy Portuguese merchants at Bordeaux were involved in

local and regional trade rather than in international commerce.33 As the
city turned toward colonial trade, however, especially once the Lettres
patentes of 1717 had granted to Bordeaux’s merchants the right to trade
with the colonies, its Sephardim merchants immediately recognized the
commercial opportunities of this branch of trade. In fact, as we have seen,
the expansion of Bordeaux into the colonial market attracted an increas-
ing number of Jewish merchants, who settled in this French town
throughout the eighteenth century.
Zvi Loker underlines three factors that might have favored Jewish
success in the French Atlantic trade: their family networks, the geo-
graphic mobility necessitated by their persecution, and their knowledge
of foreign languages, such as Spanish or Portuguese, which proved use-
ful in trade.34 In order to judge whether these factors still gave any com-
parative advantage to Jewish merchants over non-Jewish merchants in
Bordeaux’s eighteenth-century colonial trade, it might be useful to have
a glance at the trade patterns that they used.
Bordeaux Jews, throughout the eighteenth century, seem to have been
able to settle their relatives in the French Caribbean without any major
problems. As we have seen, Jews were tolerated in French colonies, pro-
vided that they did not publicly exercise their religious beliefs. In fact,
many of them lived in the colonies under the pretense of being Christian.
The Raba brothers, for instance, wealthy merchants of late eighteenth-
century Bordeaux, settled in the city in 1763 from their native Bragança in
Portugal. Shortly after their arrival in France, they were circumcised.
However, when François (Benjamin) and Antoine (Moise) Raba went to
Saint-Domingue in 1779, they managed to obtain a certificate from a
Capuchin affirming that they were Catholics before obtaining a letter of
naturalization and thus becoming French subjects.35
The Rabas are probably the best example of the fortune that Jewish
merchants of Bordeaux could make in the French colonies. At their
deaths, all of the brothers were able to leave substantial fortunes to their
heirs: Moise left 300,000 francs in 1806, Aaron 270,000 francs (1810), Abra-
ham 369,000 francs (1810), Jacob 316,000 francs (1817). Finally, Salomon
“the American,” the Portuguese consul at Bordeaux, left 580,000 francs
(1820). Although Jacob was associated with his brothers’ firm, he was in
fact a doctor. His brothers, however, were all merchants. With the excep-
tion of Aaron, who directed the business in Bordeaux, all of the others
had spent at least a part of their lives in Saint-Domingue.
Like the Rabas, many other Jewish immigrants of eighteenth-century
Bordeaux sent a member of their family to the Caribbean shortly after
their arrival in this French town. Jean Cavignac lists some fourteen Jew-
ish families who had arrived in Bordeaux after 1748 and who later set-
tled a son or a brother in Saint-Domingue.36 As Bordeaux’s colonial trade
rapidly expanded during the second half of the eighteenth century, Bor-
deaux’s Jews increased their activities in the Caribbean.37 However,
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 277

some Bordeaux Jews had already adopted the strategy of sending a rel-
ative to the colonies in the early eighteenth century. David Gradis, for
instance, had established his nephews in both Saint-Domingue and Mar-
tinique in the 1720s.
The Rabas were not the only successful Jewish merchants from Bor-
deaux involved in colonial trade. There were also others, for example
Gradis, Dias-Pereyra, Lopès-Dubec, Pimentel, Sasportas, Sequeyra, and
Totta, who made their fortunes in this trade. Most of them had arrived
in Bordeaux during the second half of the eighteenth century,38 but
some, like David Gradis, had already traded with the colonies during
the early 1720s.
The Gradises, the Lopès-Dubecs, and the Rabas created a solid family
tradition in trade, and they stand out among the twenty-five most promi-
nent Bordeaux families who dominated Bordeaux’s political and social
life in the 1830s.39 Salomon Lopès-Dubec made his fortune through colo-
nial trade with Saint-Domingue. In 1783, he sent his fourteen-year-old
son to Cap-Français, and in the same year he entered into partnership
with his cousins, who had settled in the island a number of years before.40
This pattern seems to have been common for all the major colonial mer-
chants, both Jewish and Christian.
Not every Bordeaux Jew who left for the colonies became a successful
sugar planter or a rich merchant, however. Isaac-Henry Mendès-Furtado,
for example, arrived with his father at Bordeaux in 1748, at the age of
eighteen. He left this city for Saint-Domingue, where he was to become a
retail dealer before returning to Bordeaux and dying there in 1791.41 Like
many of the young Catholics leaving Bordeaux for the colonies, Mendès-
Furtado did not succeed in making a considerable fortune. Possibly he
lacked experience, or perhaps he lacked relatives and partners upon
whom he could rely.
The example of Isaac Mendès-France proves that success could be rel-
atively easily obtained, provided that one belonged to the right network.
Isaac Mendès-France was born in 1720 in Bordeaux, where his father was
a merchant. At the age of twelve, Isaac was sent to Amsterdam for his
commercial education. In 1743, he married Judith Da Costa, the daughter
of a rich Jewish merchant of Bordeaux. This enabled him to become a
colonial merchant and a ship-owner. Having sustained heavy losses in
the early 1750s, he left for Saint-Domingue at the end of the Seven Years’
War. He settled in Petit Goave where he cultivated and traded in coffee
and cotton, and he succeeded in making a fortune within a few years. In
fact, he possessed all that was required to become successful: both capi-
tal and a trade network, in Bordeaux as well as in the French colonies. In
1775, he came back to France, leaving his two sons in the colony. He
acquired several houses and landed properties in Bordeaux, and he
became a bourgeois in 1779. The same Isaac Mendès-France was involved
in a famous lawsuit as a result of having brought two slaves back with
him from Saint-Domingue. Under French legislation, a slave became free
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278 | Silvia Marzagalli

as soon as he or she arrived in France. The trial brought by these two

slaves against their master was to become the pretext for violent anti-
Semitic attacks during the 1770s.42 But Mendès-France’s behavior did not
differ from that of many Catholic planters coming back to France from
the West Indies.
Slavery in the French colonies, as well as the slave trade itself, was not
the prerogative of a specific religious group: Catholic, Protestant, and
Jewish merchants of Bordeaux were all involved in this trade. With ten
slave ship voyages, the Gradises were among the seven largest Bordeaux
slave traders in the eighteenth century. If one considers, however, that
Jews made up 20 to 25 percent of local merchants, the direct participation
of Bordeaux Jewish shippers in the slave trade from 1685 to 1826 was
quite limited: four Jewish houses out of a total of 186 (2.2 percent), and
twenty expeditions out of 460 (4.3 percent). Even for David Gradis &
Sons—the most important Jewish firm at Bordeaux that was involved in
the slave trade—this form of trade played only a minor part in its activi-
ties: from 1718 to 1789 the firm sent 221 ships to the colonies, only ten of
which (4.5 percent) carried slaves.43
It is possible that the modest participation of Bordeaux Jews in the
slave trade was due to their lack of connections or relatives in Africa. In
African trade, French ship-owners had to rely entirely upon their captain,
and French captains were all Catholic. For direct colonial trade, on the
other hand, Jewish merchants had a relative in Saint-Domingue or Mar-
tinique to whom they could consign the cargo. This could not have been
the case for the slave trade. David Gradis & Sons was an exception in that
the firm had close links to government circles. Immediately after the
Seven Years’ War, Abraham Gradis was able to enter into a partnership
with the French governor of Gorée and rely on him for the purchase of
slaves on site.44
The Gradises, together with the Rabas, were probably the most
famous Jewish merchants of eighteenth-century Bordeaux. The Rabas
had settled in Bordeaux after the Seven Years’ War, and their success coin-
cides with the most glorious phase of eighteenth-century Bordeaux trade.
The Gradises illustrate, on the other hand, the ascension of a Jewish fam-
ily in the first half of the century. They were also to make a fortune in the
colonial trade, but they were involved with royal officials and with the
slave trade as well.
The Gradises had begun to outfit ships for the Caribbean in 1717,
when the king’s Lettres patentes had authorized Bordeaux merchants to
equip ships for the colonies and had granted them exemption from fees.
At that time, David Gradis was already a well-known merchant who had
specialized in the textile trade. Through the marriages of his daughters, he
became linked to a number of important Jewish merchants and bankers:
his sons-in-law were Louis Lopès-Depas, whose brother had good con-
nections in Saint-Domingue; Jacob Peixotto, the son of a Bordeaux Jewish
banker with relatives in Amsterdam; and Samuel Alexandre, whose father
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 279

was a wealthy shipper and banker in Bayonne.45 Like Mendès-France,

David Gradis belonged to a Jewish network that could support him and
ensure his commercial success. In 1724, he sent two of his nephews, Jacob
Mendès and Miranda, to Saint-Domingue. From then on, David Gradis
was to consign at least four ships to them every year. In 1726, he placed
another nephew, Abraham Gradis, in Martinique;46 Abraham Gradis
eventually entered into partnership with David Mendès, the younger
brother of Jacob. David Gradis could therefore rely on relatives in both
Martinique and Saint-Domingue to sell his cargoes and to assume respon-
sibility for the return cargo for Bordeaux.
One peculiarity of the Gradises in eighteenth-century Bordeaux was
their important connection to the crown. When war broke out in 1744,
the Gradises diversified their investments and chartered some of their
ships to the king.47 This experience gained them contacts among the
Canadian authorities, and as the peace returned in 1748, the Gradis firm
developed its associations with François Bigot, intendant of New France,
and Jacques-Michel Bréard, controller of the marine in Quebec City.
From 1749 to 1755, Gradis sent annually, on behalf of the Société du
Canada, a ship to Bigot and Bréard. These two officials systematically
conflated private and public interest and used their influence to favor
Gradis’s ships and cargoes. When the partnership was finally dissolved,
the firm David Gradis & Sons had made 451,152 livres profit.48 In the
same period, Gradis also chartered some of his ships to the crown for the
French Caribbean. This paid well, provided that one could wait for the
notoriously protracted repayment of state debts. Only a solid firm with
the requisite contacts with members of the government could invest in
such expeditions. During the Seven Years’ War, Gradis was again
involved in the chartering of ships for the king, and he profited from the
increasing royal expenditures in New France.49 His familiarity with gov-
ernmental circles permitted Gradis to obtain, in 1779, an exemption from
the droit d’aubaine in the colonies. Because of his link to the French court,
Bordeaux’s Jewish community also called upon him to occasionally
defend the interest of the Portuguese merchants of Bordeaux in Paris.50
Gradis’s business was highly diversified. From 1753, he had financed
the activities of Lavalette, the superior of the Jesuits in Martinique, whose
bankruptcy during the Seven Years’ War was made the pretext for the
suppression of the Company of Jesus in France in 1764. Gradis had also
lent money to Prunes, a magistrate of the Parliament of Bordeaux, and
from whom he was eventually to acquire a sugar plantation in Martinique
when Prunes was no longer able to pay off his debts. Finally, the Gradises
owned vineyards around Bordeaux.
Richard Menkis has underlined that, although the ties with their co-
religionists were necessary and largely used, the Gradises’ success
depended also upon their ability to enter into good relationships with non-
Jews: the government, ship captains, and a number of Catholic merchants,
magistrates, and even clergymen looking for their financial support.51
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280 | Silvia Marzagalli

Bordeaux Jews certainly had extensive connections. However, noth-

ing in these brief profiles of prominent Jewish merchants from eigh-
teenth-century Bordeaux seems to give to them a comparative advantage
over their Christian colleagues. The precarious situation in which they
were placed as Jews in the French Caribbean would suggest that they
were in fact rather disadvantaged.
The activities of the Gradis family, and particularly its link to the
crown, were possible because of the financial solidity of this firm, and
one could argue that it was precisely their strength in finance and bank-
ing that permitted Bordeaux Jews to acquire some relevance in the
Atlantic trade. Since finance could also contribute indirectly to Bor-
deaux’s expansion to the New World, it is necessary to examine briefly
these activities, before summing up the role of the Jews in the colonial
trade of this city.

The Indirect Participation of Bordeaux’s Jewish Merchants

in the Atlantic Trade: Investment, Finance, and
Insurance Businesses

Even if they did not send a ship on their own account to the colonies,
Bordeaux’s Jews could contribute to the city’s commercial expansion by
financial participation in these maritime ventures. The brothers Louis
and François Lopès-Depas, for example, together lent 5,000 livres to
Jacques Perreire in 1727, who sent his ship Jacob to Martinique.52 In this
case, they financed a Jewish ship-owner, but Jews were also, in some
cases, shareholders in ships belonging to Catholic merchants. Lopès-
Dubec, for instance, while sending his own ships to the islands, also
acquired shares in a great number of colonial expeditions organized by
other Bordeaux merchants.53 The diversification of investments in several
shipping ventures was a common way of reducing risk and was a strat-
egy used both by Jewish and Christian merchants.
Beside this participation in the financing of ships to the colonies, Bor-
deaux Jews also indirectly assisted the commercial expansion of eigh-
teenth-century Bordeaux through their prominent position in the sectors
of banking, finance, and insurance. Planters in the colonies could, for
instance, draw on a Bordeaux Jewish banker in order to make their pay-
ments,54 thus facilitating financial exchanges between the colonies and
France. There were only a few prominent bankers in eighteenth-century
Bordeaux, and most of them were Jews. Bordeaux Jews did have a com-
parative advantage in the city’s banking, since they could benefit from
the Sephardim diaspora: they often had relatives in London and Amster-
dam, the two major financial centers of the time.55
Bordeaux’s merchants certainly received precious financial assistance
from Jews living in other cities. Jacob Azavedo was just a modest com-
missioner and insurance merchant when he arrived in Bordeaux in 1746.
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Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants | 281

He had a close relative in Bayonne, however, and was therefore able to

provide Bordeaux merchants with Spanish and Portuguese specie, which
they used for their colonial trade.56 The Bayonne connection was particu-
larly valuable for getting specie to Bordeaux because of its proximity to
Spain and therefore to the silver coming from its American colonies.
French merchants could buy colonial produce at lower prices in the
French Caribbean if they paid cash. There was consequently a constant
demand for specie in French ports. Thanks to their relations with Spain,
Portugal, and Bayonne, Bordeaux’s Jews enjoyed an enviable situation in
this particular branch of trade.57
Bordeaux’s Jewish merchants were also able to benefit French trade to
the New World by their insurance services. The proceedings of a trial
against Joseph David Gabriel Da Silva,58 a Jewish merchant based in Bor-
deaux who went bankrupt, reveal that he had insured a ship owned by
Journu frères of Marseilles for 32 thousand livres, a considerable amount,
as merchants rarely risked more that two thousand or three thousand
livres on a single ship. This was the practice, for instance, of Jacob
Azavedo, who carefully collected information on the captain, the vessel,
and the ship-owners before insuring part of a ship’s value for her voyage
to the colonies.59
In general, however, it is extremely difficult to quantify the indirect
contribution made by the Jews to Bordeaux’s expansion to the New
World, since we have no means of reconstructing a complete picture of
the complex network of finance, insurance, and banking services. The
few examples above serve to show simply that Jews were involved at all
levels of colonial trade, and it is possible that through their involvement
in banking and insurance they provided the most useful services of all
for the colonial trade of Bordeaux. This point certainly needs to be fur-
ther investigated.

Conclusion

Bordeaux’s Jews contributed, both directly and indirectly, to the eco-

nomic expansion of France into the New World in the eighteenth century.
According to Jean Cavignac, eighteenth-century Bordeaux was a havre de
tolérance, a “harbor of tolerance” that offered Jews and Protestants the
opportunity to trade and to make their fortune.60 The condition of Jews in
southwest France was in fact more favorable than anywhere else in the
kingdom; this situation certainly explains the importance of Bordeaux’s
Jewish community. Some of its prominent members participated, as we
have seen, in the colonial venture. Far from being representative of the
role played by the Jews in eighteenth-century French maritime trade, the
case of Bordeaux is therefore unique, both because of its specific legisla-
tion concerning the Jews and because of the importance of this maritime
city in French trade.
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282 | Silvia Marzagalli

If a comparison has to be made, Bordeaux’s Jewish merchants should

be compared to their colleagues in England or in Holland, as they were
all to engage in colonial and Iberian trade, as well as in banking and
insurance.61 However, the position of the Bordeaux Jews in the French
colonies was much more precarious than that of the English and Dutch
Jews. On ideological and religious grounds, the king of France was to
refuse throughout the eighteenth century to grant to all Jews the right to
settle in the colonies, whereas the English and the Dutch colonies were
much more open to Jewish participation.62
If Bordeaux Jews engaged, despite all the difficulties, in American
trade, it was because they understood that the economic context was
extremely favorable and because their expectation of profits was not
deceived. It cannot be claimed, however, that they had a comparative
advantage over their Christian colleagues in the Caribbean colonial trade.
Christians and Jews adopted the same strategies of establishing a rel-
ative in the colonies, and often of acquiring plantations. It has been diffi-
cult to identify any facet of the Jewish trade in the French colonies that
was specific to it. In addition, if the Gradises or the Rabas were among the
richest merchants of Bordeaux, they were far from being the only ones,
and many Christian merchants also had a great deal of success in colonial
commerce, such as Bonnaffé and Nairac, both of whom were Protestant.
If family links resulting from the Sephardim diaspora gave any
advantage to Bordeaux’s Jews, this would have been in the banking and
insurance sectors. The connection with Spain and Portugal was particu-
larly valuable for the trade in specie. Bordeaux colonial merchants
needed silver and gold for its extra European trade, and the Jews pro-
vided an essential service in this regard. The diaspora to London and
Amsterdam, and to Hamburg and other city ports, provided Bordeaux’s
Jews with a solid network for conducting financial operations.
Family and co-religionist networks were certainly fundamental fac-
tors in explaining the Jewish success in eighteenth-century Bordeaux, but
they do not explain everything. Gradis’s success in New France was due,
as we have seen, to his links with the crown and to his dealings with
Catholic ministers and colonial officials. It was thanks to their family rela-
tions in London and Amsterdam, where Jewish capital was largely avail-
able, that Bordeaux’s Jews could certainly find underwriters in these two
major insurance centers. However, Gradis was also to rely on Nairac, a
Bordeaux Protestant based in Amsterdam (which invites a consideration
of another diaspora—that of the Huguenots).63 The Jewish contribution
to Bordeaux’s expansion to the west is incontestable, but it was not con-
fined to a circle of co-religionists.
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Notes
1. For an analysis of Bordeaux trade and merchants in the eighteenth century, see
François Crouzet, “La croissance économique; le commerce de Bordeaux; la conjonc-
ture bordelaise,” in Bordeaux au 18e siècle, ed. François-Georges Pariset, vol. 5 of the
Historie de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1968), 191–323; Paul Butel, Les négociants bordelais, l’Eu-
rope et les Iles au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1974). This is a shorter version of Paul Butel, “La
croissance commerciale bordelaise dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle” (Ph.D.
diss., Université de Paris I, 1973).
2. Among others, Perry Viles, “The Shipping Interests of Bordeaux, 1774–1793” (Ph.D.
diss., Harvard University, 1965); Butel, Les négociants bordelais; Peter Voss, “Bordeaux et
les villes hanséatiques, 1672–1715. Contribution à l’histoire maritime de l’Europe du
Nord-Ouest” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Bordeaux III, 1995).
3. In underlining the importance of non-Catholic houses in Bordeaux, these studies are
probably influenced by the echoes of Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and other scholars
of early capitalism. The quantitative relevance of Jews and Protestants possibly justi-
fies a classification based on ethnic and religious factors; however, Bordeaux’s scholars
have rarely tried to analyze the nature of the relation between religious belief and eco-
nomic success.
4. Jean Cavignac, Les Israélites bordelais de 1780 à 1850. Autour de l’émancipation (Paris,
1991), 101–4. As we will see, the presence of Jews in Bordeaux was officially admitted
in 1723. In the seventeenth century, authorities referred to them as New Christians or
Portuguese merchants. They lived within the frame of Catholicism, but they aban-
doned this façade and emerged as an organized Jewish community at the turn of the
century. In this essay we will eventually refer to Portuguese New Christian merchants
of Bordeaux as “Jews,” even before 1723, like the historians of Bordeaux used to do.
5. Salomon Francia De Beaufleury, L’établissement des juifs à Bordeaux et à Bayonne (Paris,
an VIII [1799]; reprint Bayonne, 1985, with intro. by J. Cavignac); Armand Detcheverry,
Histoire des Israélites de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1850); Théophile Malvezin, Histoire des Juifs
de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1875); Georges Cirot, Les Juifs de Bordeaux, leur situation morale
et sociale de 1550 à la Révolution (Bordeaux, 1920).
6. Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolu-
tionary and Napoleonic France (University, Ala., 1978); Cavignac, Les Israélites bordelais.
See also Jean Cavignac, Dictionnaire du Judaisme bordelais aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles:
biographies, généalogies, professions, institutions (Bordeaux, 1987). For a detailed bibliog-
raphy on Bordeaux’s Jews, see Gérard Nahon, “Théophile Malvezin et l’histoire des
Juifs à Bordeaux; biographie et mise à jour bibliographique,” Bulletin de l’Institut
aquitain d’études sociales (I.A.E.S.) 30 (1977):7–26, and the introduction of the 1985
reprint of Francia De Beaufleury, L’établissement des juifs.
7. Richard Menkis, “The Gradis Family of Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux: A Social and
Economic Study” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1988). The author analyzes the var-
ious activities of this Jewish merchant family in eighteenth-century Bordeaux in order
to assess the importance of the Jewish network for the success of this firm. See also
Jose do Nascimento Raposo, “Don Gabriel de Silva, a Portuguese-Jewish Banker in
Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux” (Ph. D. diss., York University, Toronto, 1989). Gabriel
da (or de) Silva (1683?–1763) was a private banker and was not directly involved with
colonial trade.
8. On religious minorities in the French colonies, see Abraham Cahen, “Les Juifs de la
Martinique au 17e siècle,” Revue des Etudes Juives 2 (1881):93–122, and idem, “Les
Juifs dans les colonies françaises au 18e siècle,” Revue des Etudes Juives 4 (1882):
127–45, 236–48; 5 (1882):68–92, 258–72; I. S. Emmanuel, “Les Juifs de la Martinique et
leurs coreligionnaires d’Amsterdam,” Revue des Etudes Juives 123 (1964):511–16; Zvi
Loker, “Une famille juive au Cap: membres de la famille Depas (ou De Paz) à
Saint-Domingue,” Conjonction. Revue franco-haïtienne 133 (March–April 1977):126–31,
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284 | Silvia Marzagalli

and Zvi Loker, “Colonies juives aux Antilles,” Les nouveaux Cahiers 86 (1986):57–61; G.
Lafleur, “Minorités religieuses aux Antilles françaises du Vent sous l’ancien régime”
(Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris IV, 1984).
9. This argument is in fact common throughout most of Europe: see Todd Endelman,
“L’activité économique des Juifs anglais,” Dix-huitième siècle 13 (1981), special issue
Juifs et Judaisme:113–26; Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 58–87.
10. The intendant was a revocable representative of the king sent to the provinces to
supervise the local administration.
11. Jean Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs portugais à Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle,” Actes
du 38e Congrès de la Fédération Historique du Sud-Ouest (Pau, 1985), 125–38, esp. 127–28.
12. The other Jews in Bordeaux were from Avignon (7.5 percent) and from Alsace (14.5
percent). The Jews from Avignon did not enjoy the privileges of the Portuguese Jews
until the second half of the eighteenth century.
13. Beside Bordeaux, there was an important Jewish settlement in Saint-Esprit, in the out-
skirts of Bayonne. The Saint-Esprit community was in fact demographically more
important than that of Bordeaux. On Bayonne Jews, see Gérard Nahon, “Les commu-
nautés judéo-portugaises du Sud-Ouest de la France (Bayonne et sa région),
1684–1791” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris, 1969); see also Nahon’s contribution to
this volume.
14. This title was hereditary and was granted to propertied citizens already resident in
Bordeaux for a number of years. Only a small minority of Bordeaux’s inhabitants
enjoyed this status. In order to become a bourgeois, one had to be Catholic. Many New
Christians acquired this title before 1679, after which date hardly any Sephardim
became a bourgeois de Bordeaux. Between 1722 and 1752, out of a total of 350 new bour-
geois, there were only three Jews, all of them merchants. Many prominent Jewish mer-
chants were, however, already bourgeois, having inherited this title from their New
Christian fathers. See Cirot, Les Juifs de Bordeaux, 16–37.
15. Malino, The Sephardic Jews.
16. Endelman, “L’activité économique,” has analyzed the ideological framework of these
early analyses as far as England is concerned.
17. Reported by Malvezin, Histoire des Juifs, 179.
18. Unpaged preface by Jean Cavignac to Francia De Beaufleury, L’établissement des juifs.
19. Cited in Paul Butel, “Contribution à l’étude des négociants juifs portugais de Bordeaux
et de Bayonne: le cas de la maison Azavedo,” in Actes du 35e Congrès de la Fédération his-
torique du Sud-Ouest (Bayonne, 1981), 219–41.
20. Zosa Szajkowski, “Jewish Emigration from Bordeaux in the 18th and 19th Centuries,”
Jewish Social Studies 18 (1956):118–24.
21. Whereas Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies,” states that there were some Jews in Mar-
tinique in 1635, Lafleur, “Minorités religieuses,” has found no positive evidence. By
1654, however, there was a significant Jewish settlement in Martinique, which in his
view should be attributed to immigration from Brazil.
22. Jean Petitjean-Roget, “Les Juifs à la Maritinique sous l’ancien régime,” Revue d’his-
toire des colonies 43:2, no. 151 (1956):138–58, sees this as a legend, but other scholars
still credit this event. See, for instance, Loker, “Colonies juives,” 58. If the evidence
is scarce, it is, however, likely that the Jewish diaspora from Brazil greatly facilitated
a technological transfer from the more developed Dutch colonies to the French
islands. Portuguese Jews had also introduced techniques of chocolate production in
Bayonne: Henry Léon, Histoire des Juifs de Bayonne (Paris, 1893; rep., 1976), 69. On the
role of the Dutch Jewry in Brazil in the seventeenth-century Atlantic trade, see
Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (2nd ed.,
Oxford, 1989), 106–7.
23. Lafleur, “Minorités religieuses,” 328–29.
24. Cahen, “Les Juifs de la Martinique”; Loker, “Colonies juives”; Lafleur, “Minorités
religieuses,” 322–36. According to Lafleur, Guadeloupe seems to have had fewer Jew-
ish settlers.
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25. See Bernhard Blumenkranz, ed., Histoire des Juifs de France (Toulouse, 1982), chap. 4;
Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 34–37. Compared to Huguenots, Jews seem to have
played a minor role in the French trade to New France: see John Bosher, The Canada
Merchants, 1713–1763 (Oxford, 1987).
26. England had granted equal rights in Barbados and Jamaica in 1740; Elie Barnavi, His-
toire universelle des Juifs: de la genèse à la fin du XXe siècle (Paris, 1992).
27. On these aspects, see Lafleur, “Minorités religieuses,” 435–39.
28. They also tried to influence a change in Paris by stressing the losses the colonies had
incurred on account of the departure of the Jews, and by underlining the positive role
that the Jews played in non-French colonies. For some excerpts of this correspondence,
see Petitjean-Roget, “Les Juifs à la Maritinique.” See also Cahen, “Les Juifs de la Mar-
tinique” and Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies.”
29. On the situation of the Jews in Saint-Domingue, see Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et Juifs au
XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1984), 91–115. See also Yvan Debbash, “Privilège réél ou privilège
personnel? Le statut des Juifs portugais aux Iles,” in Religion, société et politique.
Melanges en hommage à Jacques Ellul (Paris, 1983), 213–29.
30. Malvezin, Histoire des Juifs, 225–28.
31. See Cavignac, Les Israélites bordelais, sources: I.
32. Prominent Bordeaux merchants in the seventeenth century were mainly the Dutch and
the Germans. See Bertrand Gautier, “Les marchands étrangers à Bordeaux et à Rouen
dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle,” Bulletin du Centre d’histoire des Espaces Atlan-
tiques 7 (1995):9–32; Voss, “Bordeaux et les villes hanséatiques.”
33. Malino, The Sephardic Jews, 8.
34. Loker, “Colonies juives.”
35. Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs,” 137.
36. Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs.”
37. Jean Cavignac has found more than thirty different Bordeaux Jews subscribing to a
notary act in Cap in the years preceding the French Revolution: Jean Cavignac, “Un
exemplaire ‘marchand portugais,’ Salomon Lopès-Dubec (1743–1835),” Archives juives
18:4 (1982):67–72. A short biographical sketch of those Bordeaux Jewish merchants
(négociants) listed in the 1808 census shows that many of them still had a relative in the
French colonies (Cavignac, Les Israélites bordelais, 119–32).
38. Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs.”
39. Jean Cavignac, Les vingt-cinq familles. Les négociants bordelais sous Louis-Philippe (Bor-
deaux, 1985), 151–69.
40. The autobiography of Salomon Lopès-Dubec, containing many details on his trade
activities, has been published by Zosa Szajkowski, “Notes autobiographiques d’un
armateur bordelais, Salomon Lopès-Dubec,” Revue historique de Bordeaux n.s. 19 (1970):
93–110, and by Jean Cavignac, “L’autobiographie de Salomon Lopès-Dubec (1743–
1835),” Archives juives 19:1–2 (1983):11–28.
41. Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs,” 131, and Cavignac, Les Israélites bordelais, 339.
Like the Rabas, he left in his will some of his money to the Jewish as well as to the
Catholic poor people of Bordeaux.
42. Pluchon, Nègres et Juifs.
43. Eric Saugera, Bordeaux, port négrier, XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris and Biarritz, 1995), 229–34.
44. Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 157, 166–67.
45. Ibid., 104–5.
46. Abraham Gradis died in Martinique in 1738. On Gradis, see Jean de Maupassant, Un
grand armateur de Bordeaux, Abraham Gradis, 1699?–1780 (Bordeaux, 1931); Jean
Schwob d’Hericourt, La maison Gradis et ses chefs (Argenteuil, 1975); and Menkis, “The
Gradis Family.”
47. David Gradis died in 1751, at the age of 86. For a number of years prior to his death,
his son Abraham had directed the family firm. Abraham had gained his commercial
education in Holland and in London.
48. See Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 178–245.
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286 | Silvia Marzagalli

49. On the modifications in the trading patterns to New France in the last twenty years of
French rule, see J. S. Pritchard, “The Pattern of French Colonial Shipping to Canada
before 1760,” Revue française d’histoire d’Outre-mer 64, no. 231 (1976):189–210.
50. Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 143–45.
51. Menkis, “The Gradis Family.”
52. Petitjean-Roget, “Les Juifs à la Maritinique.”
53. A list of his participation in the expeditions of other Bordeaux merchants appears in
Jean Cavignac, “L’autobiographie de Salomon Lopès-Dubec.”
54. Lafleur, “Minorités religieuses.”
55. G. Nahon has underlined the strong dependence of the Bordeaux Jewish community
upon the Sephardim community of Amsterdam: Gérard Nahon, Métropoles et péri-
phéries sefarades d’Occident. Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jérusalem (Paris,
1993), 95–183.
56. On Azavedo, see Butel, “Contribution à l’étude des négociants juifs.”
57. On this particular matter, see Paul Butel, “Contribution à l’étude de la circulation de l’ar-
gent en Aquitaine au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 52 (1974):83–109.
58. Zosa Szajkowski, Franco-Juidaica, an Analytical Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, Decrees,
Briefs and Other Printed Documents, Pertaining to the Jews in France, 1500–1788 (New
York, 1962), 99.
59. Butel, “Contribution à l’étude des négociants juifs.”
60. Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs.”
61. Endelman, “L’activité économique.”
62. A. N. Newman, “The Sephardim of the Caribbean,” in The Western Sephardim: The His-
tory of Some of the Communities Formed in Europe, the Mediterranean and the New World
After the Expulsions of 1492, ed. R. D. Barnett and W.M. Schwab (Grendon, 1989),
445–73.
63. Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 168.
15 1/24/01 11:49 AM Page 287

– Chapter 15 –

JEWISH SETTLEMENTS IN THE FRENCH

COLONIES IN THE CARIBBEAN (MARTINIQUE,
GUADELOUPE, HAITI, CAYENNE)
AND THE “BLACK CODE”

Mordechai Arbell

T HE DUTCH AND THE ENGLISH competed in attracting Spanish-Por-

tuguese Jewish settlers to their colonies at the end of the seventeenth
century, especially those Jews who were forced to leave Dutch Brazil in
1654 and had experience with tropical agriculture. Such people were con-
sidered an excellent colonizing element for the Wild Coast of the
Guianas—British Suriname and Dutch Berbice, Demerara, Essequibo,
Pomeroon, and Cayenne. The colonial authorities offered the Jewish set-
tlers what they needed most: rights and privileges that they could not
obtain in other parts of the world. The settlers’ knowledge of Spanish and
Portuguese also made the Jews attractive in the Caribbean area, for they
could facilitate illicit trade with the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in
South America.
In French America the case was different. The French, being Catholic,
saw the Iberian New Christians’ reversion to Judaism as a sin. The
Catholic orders, especially the Jesuits, were opposed to any Jewish settle-
ment, and they were particularly in opposition to the semi-private
landowners who for a time ruled the colonies in the name of France.
These landowners felt that a Jewish presence would be helpful in the
development of the French colonies and also hoped that it would boost
their personal wealth.
Such conflicting positions made Jewish life in French America quite
insecure; Jewish well-being depended upon the arbitrary stances of the
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288 | Mordechai Arbell

different administrators of those territories. Each side tried to exert influ-

ence in Paris and in the royal court. The chief ministers tended to side
with the colonial governors, whereas the Catholic orders acted through
their colleagues in the royal court in their quest to bring about the expul-
sion of the Jews from the French colonies.
Strong Jesuit pressure resulted in the signing of the Code Noir (“Black
Code”) in 1683 by Louis XIV (put into effect in 1685), which led to the
exile of most of the Jews from the French possessions in the Caribbean
and the Guianas.

The Jews of Martinique and Guadeloupe

The Jewish history of Martinique and Guadeloupe is relatively short,

spanning only about sixty years. It opened with the arrival of the first
Jews from Amsterdam—who came in the 1620s to manage Dutch inter-
ests in the commercial outposts established on the islands—and closed
with the expulsion of the Jews in 1685. Although short lived, the Jewish
presence had significant impact on life in Martinique and Guadeloupe. It
brought important changes in their economic structures while at the
same time creating strains in the relations between the islands’ lay rulers
and the Catholic establishment.
In 1635, Armand Jean du Plessis Cardinal Richelieu founded the
Compagnie des Isles d’Amerique (The Company of the Islands of Amer-
ica) with the intention of developing the production of and commerce in
tropical plants. He saw in the West Indies a source of income for the
French crown and state. The establishment of the Company encountered
fierce opposition from the settlers and planters already there, however.
Company regulations dictated the collection of commissions and taxes
at the rate of 20 percent of sales and the levying of an import tax on
goods entering France, with general preference being given to trade with
France exclusively.
The Company’s establishment coincided with the 1635 occupation of
Martinique on behalf of France by Pierre Belain d’Esmanbuc. D’Esman-
buc had invaded and occupied St. Christopher (St. Kitts) ten years earlier
in 1625 and had agreed to divide possession of the island in half with the
British. At St. Kitts, he initiated the development of tobacco growing and
indigo production. The subsequent capture of Guadeloupe by Jean du
Plessis, Sieur d’Ossenville, in 1635 raised hopes in France that large-scale
development and steady income from its American island possessions
were possible.
Those hopes did not materialize. The principal product, tobacco, was
usually sold in non-French markets, thus depriving France of taxes. When
tobacco prices in the world markets dropped lower and lower, the Com-
pany of the Islands of America in 1649 was forced to sell its rights to pri-
vate owners—seigneurs—who would rule the islands in a French version
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 289

of Dutch patroonships and English royal patents. In 1649, the islands of

Guadeloupe and Marie Galante were purchased by the Houel family, and
Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, and the Grenadines by Monsieur Dyel du
Parquet, a nephew of d’Esmanbuc.
When the French first occupied Martinique in 1635, they found there
a number of Jews who had arrived earlier from Amsterdam to serve as
agents and managers for Dutch enterprises in the islands. The Dominican
monk Jean Baptiste du Tertre, who arrived in Martinique in 1640 and
remained there for sixteen years, described a fire in which sixty Dutch
warehouses were consumed,1 a fact affirming that the Dutch presence on
the island had been considerable.
The French did not at this time disturb the resident Dutch Jews,
whose numbers were not significant. Moreover, the Jews were dispersed
among warehouses, plantations, and stores all over the island and, so far
as is known, did not form a community. The Jews were able to work and
prosper under twenty years of French rule, tolerated and protected by the
French governors who needed their commercial and financial acumen
and whose services they made use of. Gradually, however, the success of
the Jews aroused the jealousy of the French settlers and merchants. At the
same time, the growing number of Catholic monks and priests arriving in
the colony could not bear to see Jews residing in French-ruled territory.
The situation of the Jews in Martinique changed dramatically with
the Portuguese reoccupation of Dutch Brazil in 1654. Ships loaded with
Jews, Dutch refugees from Brazil, and other Protestants roamed the
Caribbean Sea seeking possibilities for settlement. The monk du Tertre
described the arrival of refugees from Brazil as follows:

A ship of 1400 tons sailed toward our islands and reached Martinique at the
beginning of 1654. Its leaders disembarked and came to present their homage
to M. du Parquet, and to ask him to agree to their settling in his island, on the
same terms and conditions as the French settlers. M. du Parquet was well dis-
posed and made some promises, but the reverend Jesuit fathers declared to
him that this was against the intention of the King, and that the introduction
of these people into the island, the majority of whom were Jews and the oth-
ers heretics, would introduce heresy and Judaism, and they managed to con-
vince him. He decided with regret to reject them, in the politest way possible.2

When the governor of Guadeloupe, M. Houel, learned of the refugees

being refused entry into Martinique, he hoped they would come to
Guadeloupe—as they did. Tertre details for us the refugees’ arrival:

A big ship full of inhabitants of the island of Tamarica (Brazil), and their
slaves, anchored at the island, and four leaders from the vessel came to ask his
permission to reside in his island with their families, [and] their slaves, on the
same conditions as the other inhabitants. M. Houel received them well, and
accepted their request with great joy.
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290 | Mordechai Arbell

Other ships came the next night. One Dutch frigate, the same day, two
other big ships arrived with inhabitants of Paraiba (Brazil), and the next
Wednesday, a big ship with the garrison of Tamarica and Paraiba.3

In his description, du Tertre informs us that the refugees from Brazil—

whose number he set at about 900, including slaves—came with a great
deal of property. The expectation in Guadeloupe was that once they had
landed, these refugees from Brazil would spend great sums of gold and
silver locally in order to establish themselves.
The governor of Martinique, du Parquet, observing that he was los-
ing a rare opportunity to make profits and that all the settlers from Brazil
were landing in Guadeloupe, expressed his anger to the Jesuit fathers.
This prompted the Jesuit Supérieur to travel to Guadeloupe to convince
Houel to expel the new arrivals, but without success. Du Tertre says that
Houel told the Supérieur to mind his own business. Thus, the Jews and
the Dutch settled in Guadeloupe. Shortly thereafter, another ship of
refugees arrived in Martinique with three hundred Dutchmen and Jews.
This time M. du Parquet received them with open arms.4 From various
sources and documents, it is quite clear that according to the terms of sur-
render between the Dutch and the Portuguese in Brazil, the Dutch and
the Jews could leave Brazil with their movable property, their money, and
their slaves. This meant that the Jews arriving in Martinique and Guade-
loupe did in fact have property with them.
As for the slaves, du Tertre5 comments that the Dutch and the Jews
brought with them two kinds of “Brazilian savages”—one group con-
sisted of Christians, and they were slaves; the other group consisted of
pagans, and they were freemen. The term “savages” was generally used
in those times to refer to Indians. As far as we can unravel the history of
the Jewish settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas, it seems that in
many places the authorities—British, Dutch, or French—would generally
not permit Jews to have servants or slaves who were Christians. In some
instances, the Jews were accused of opposing the baptism of those in their
service. Therefore, it can be deduced that the pagans were Indian ser-
vants of the Jews, not Africans, and were treated as freemen, but were
undoubtedly in bondage. They were free to work on the Sabbath, Satur-
days, for their own income and received plots of land from their masters
on which they cultivated potatoes and manioc. They then sold their pro-
duce on the free market, thus generating personal income.6
The permission given to Jews to settle in Martinique and Guadeloupe
also attracted some French Jews of Spanish-Portuguese origin who were
living in Bayonne and Bordeaux. These people were often relatives of
those who had come from Brazil, a development that increased the num-
ber of Jews in the French islands. It is difficult to evaluate the exact num-
ber of Jews on Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1658. A conservative
estimate might be about three hundred out of a population of about five
thousand whites.
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 291

The Jesuit fathers, who saw the settlement of Jews as a battle they had
lost, did not rest, making incessant efforts to rid the islands of Jews. On 2
April 1658, the Sovereign Council of Martinique issued a decree “pro-
hibiting the Jews from dealing with commerce on the islands,” but due to
the intervention of the governor—Seigneur du Parquet—a new decree
several months later “reestablished the privileges given to the Jews to
engage in commerce,” canceling the previous decree.7 The Jesuit fathers
based their fight for expulsion of the Jews on Article 4 of the charter of the
Company of the Islands of America, approved by the French king, which
stated “No one who is not a citizen and does not follow the Roman, Apos-
tolic Catholic religion will be permitted to settle in the islands, colonies or
settlements.” Furthermore, Article 6 of the Company’s contract with d’O-
live and du Plessis, who captured Guadeloupe, stated, “only French and
Catholics can settle.”8
The Portuguese, Dutch, and Brazilian Jews, immediately after set-
tling, began to establish commercial houses, sugar cane fields, and sugar
mills on a large scale. This brought a period of prosperity to the impov-
erished islands and profits to their owners, Houel and du Parquet.
Antoine Biet, a Catholic priest stationed in Cayenne, in French Guyana,
described his dismay upon his visit to Martinique in 1662:

Since the Jews owned the main stores and the best choice of merchandise, but
were not allowed to observe their Sabbath which fell on the market day, they
managed to transfer the market day to Friday. This was agreed to by the gov-
ernor.… So the Jews who are not tolerated in France, have been able on a
French island to practice Judaism, and from Friday sunset until Saturday at the
same hour they rest and do not sell any merchandise to anyone. On the other
hand, they easily profane holy Sunday and church holidays, selling to many
people what they need, and Catholics assemble in their stores.… The Jews, the
biggest and most cruel enemies of Jesus Christ, whom they crucified, publicly
exercise their religion and keep their Sabbath. The Jews have storehouses in
Fort St. Pierre, and in the city where vessels anchor. They are the main mer-
chants and have the good graces of M. du Parquet (the governor-owner) and
his wife. Therefore, all the inhabitants who have prepared sugar, tobacco, gin-
ger, and indigo and others do not use Saturday for public weighing.9

The main Jewish contribution to Martinique and Guadeloupe was

what we today call agro-industry. The French islands were relatively late
in developing sugar production. It was only after the settlement of the
Jews from Brazil, who were experienced sugar refiners and merchants,
that the sugar industry picked up. In 1661, there were seventy-one sugar
mills in Guadeloupe, with Martinique lagging behind. Ten years later,
however, in 1671, Martinique had 111 sugar mills with 6,582 workers and
slaves laboring in them. By 1685, the number had reached 172 mills. This
success led many planters to switch from tobacco culture to sugar cane.10
One of the most prominent sugar producers was Benjamin d’Acosta de
Andrade, a Jew born as a converso in Portugal, who had settled in Dutch
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292 | Mordechai Arbell

Brazil and came to Martinique in 1654. He was the owner of two of the
largest sugar mills in Martinique (the site is still shown to tourists visit-
ing the island). D’Acosta de Andrade is also known and remembered for
establishing the first cacao processing plant in French territory.
Cacao processing for chocolate began in the Spanish colonies in Amer-
ica, but processing in Martinique advanced quickly. At first, chocolate was
not well received by the French public, and the custom duties on it were
high. Its popularity grew over the years, however, and by 1684 more and
more cacao processing plants were built in Martinique. Sugar and choco-
late being highly complementary foods, chocolate became Martinique’s
most important export. D’Acosta de Andrade, however, could not benefit
from its development. In 1664, in response to the growing profits of the
Caribbean colonies, Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), the chief minister of
Louis XIV, formed the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (The Company
of the West Indies), which was intended to centralize authority over the
colonies, transferring their administration from the seigneur-owners to
the direct control of the French crown. According to the new company’s
rules, all commerce had to go through French hands and had to be con-
ducted only with France. Thus d’Acosta de Andrade had to abandon his
enterprises,11 which passed into the hands of his French partners.
These restrictions hampered the flourishing trade between Mar-
tinique and Amsterdam, carried out mainly by Jews on both sides of the
ocean. The new rules stemmed mainly from the fact that the Company of
the West Indies regarded the Jews as competitors. The Jews’ close con-
tacts with Amsterdam and the Dutch island of Curaçao had led to the
diversion of a large part of Martinique’s produce to non-French ports,
causing a loss to the French treasury. At the same time, Jewish prosperity
was the object of envy by a large section of the French planters in Mar-
tinique and Guadeloupe. The Brazilian Jews had not only the expertise
but also the financing for their sugar mills, which required a considerable
initial investment. The majority of the French planters continued planting
tobacco and gradually became more and more impoverished. Their need
for cash indebted them to Jewish moneylenders. The Jews were also
accused of investing their profits outside of Martinique, therefore depriv-
ing the islands of cash liquidity. Thus, a coalition formed by the Jesuit
fathers and French planters and merchants went into action to put con-
straints on Jewish life and to bring about the expulsion of the Jews.
The coalition managed to force Governor Prouville de Tracy to issue,
in 1664, an act in which a paragraph is included saying that “those of the
Jewish Nation must purchase and sell on the day of Sabbath, unless oth-
erwise ordered by his Majesty.”12 The unhappy de Tracy sought help by
asking for clearer instructions from France. He received ambiguous ones,
namely “The King does not want to alter what has been practiced till now
towards the Huguenots and the Jews.”13 De Tracy’s only recourse was to
close his eyes to transgressions against his own act. The Jews continued
keeping the Sabbath.
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 293

The appointment, in 1667, of De Baas as governor led to a positive

attitude toward the Jews. In a short time, De Baas, a person of culture, tol-
erance, and liberal ideas, became convinced that the Jewish presence was
necessary for the welfare of the islands, especially their plantations and
industries. His naming as governor encouraged the Jews to make a direct
appeal to Louis XIV—conducted by three relatives of Martinique Jews in
Amsterdam14—for the right to engage in commerce equal to those of the
other inhabitants of the islands.15 Undoubtedly the petitioners16 had coor-
dinated the petition with Governor de Baas, who gave it a positive rec-
ommendation. This resulted in the letter of 23 May 1671 to de Baas signed
by Louis XIV and co-signed by the chief minister, Colbert, as follows:

M. de Baas has informed us that the Jews established in Martinique and other
islands have invested considerably in the tilling of the land and in fortifying
their establishments, for the public utility. By this letter I inform you that my
intention is that you take care, that they have the same privileges as the other
inhabitants of the said islands, and you allow them complete liberty of con-
science, but taking the necessary precautions, so that the exercise of their reli-
gion will not scandalize the Catholics.17

From this letter the Jews deduced that they could continue to practice their
religion, on the condition that they not do so openly. This encouraged them
to ask the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community for a Bible scroll
(Torah), which was received in 1676 by Benjamin d’Acosta de Andrade.
The Jews of Martinique read the king’s letter well. Further proof of its
meaning appears in the diary for 1671 of the French king’s emissary to the
French colony of Cayenne, Le Febvre de la Barre, in which he writes:

The sole religion permitted to be practiced in the islands is the Catholic one.
Although there are some inhabitants of the region claiming to be Reformist
and also some declared Jews in Martinique, they are not permitted to make
any public manifestation of their religion.18

It has been theorized that a synagogue was built in Martinique, and sev-
eral possible sites have been suggested. However, services were suppos-
edly conducted in a private house, transformed for the occasion into a
prayer house, which gradually became an improvised synagogue.
The happy and quiet Jewish existence of the Martinique Jews contin-
ued until the death of Governor de Baas in 1677. His replacement,
Charles de Courbon, Count de Blenac, a devotee of the Jesuits, had
served as confessor of Louis XIV. His main aim was the expulsion of the
Jews from Martinique, and he constantly appealed to the court to take
measures against the Jews. His efforts had varying results. His own inten-
dant on the island, Sieur Begon, and some of his functionaries opposed
him. Contradictory reports about the Jews reached Versailles, and Colbert
himself did not want to change the status quo.
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294 | Mordechai Arbell

A petition instigated by de Blenac was presented to Colbert by the

Jesuit fathers of the island in 1681. In the petition, the Jews were accused
of having Christian slaves, of blaspheming the name of Jesus, of killing
the babies born to their Christian slaves so they could not be baptized, of
openly observing the Sabbath, Passover, and other Jewish holidays, of
circumcising their newborn males, of preparing their meat according to
Jewish laws, and so on. The petition recommended that Jews be tolerated
only for commercial purposes, that they be distinguished from others by
a special outward sign, that no Jew be permitted to arrive in Martinique
with the intention of settling, that no permission be given to Jews to own
slaves, and that no Jews who had once been baptized and since returned
to Judaism be permitted to stay on the island.19 In light of the mounting
campaign against them, the Jews of Martinique began gradually to aban-
don the island. Guadeloupe, its history replete with upheavals, also saw
its Jewish population sharply diminishing.
When Count de Blenac was on leave in France in 1683, he found Col-
bert in bad health, and using his personal contacts in the French court he
managed to obtain the king’s signature on an order for the Jews’ expul-
sion from the islands, with a letter confirming the receipt of the Jesuits’
petition. To be certain that the order would be executed without delay,
the king included this decree in the first article of the “Black Code” (Code
Noir) in 1685, which reads:

We wish and intend that the edict of the late king, of glorious memory … of
April 23, 1615, be implemented in our Islands, which enjoins our officers to
expel from the Islands all of the Jews who have established residence there,
who as declared enemies of Christianity, we order them to depart within three
months from the day of publication of the present decree, on pain of confis-
cation of their person and goods.20

There are differing estimates of how many Jews were in Martinique

at the time of the Code Noir and the expulsion. They probably numbered
less than one hundred, including the families Pereira, Franco Athias,
Molina, Letov, Barjuda, Pinheiro, d’Andrade, Louis, da Gama, Bueno,
Cohen, Lopez, Gabay, Israel, d’Acosta de Andrade, Vaz, and Nunez.21
Most of the Jews left Martinique for Curaçao. The historian of Curaçao
and its chief Haham (rabbi), Isaac Emmanuel, has identified the families
Vaz, Andrade, de Molina, da Gama, Franco Athias, Pinheiro, Pereira, da
Acosta, de Andrade as residing in Curaçao.22 The Torah scroll, together
with the ornaments of the improvised synagogue, were carried from the
island by those expelled.23
There remain today some sites related to the Jewish presence in sev-
enteenth-century Martinique—ruins of sugar mills, mansions, and so on,
particularly in the so-called Old Brazilian quarter. A Guadeloupe legend
still tells of a Jewish fisherman named Pietrz who, after arriving from
Brazil, started a fishing business on a point on the coast. Under the British
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 295

occupation in 1759, a city was founded named Point-au-Pitre, on the

same spot, the point of Pietrz, where the fisherman had settled.24
The “Black Code” was subject to various interpretations. Some
maintained that it concerned not all the Jews—only those who were not
French citizens,. In other instances it was inferred that Jews could travel
to the islands but not reside in them. Based on the Lettres patentes signed
by the French kings, the question arose whether the Portuguese Jews
already residing in France could be denied residence in the French
colonies. Most of these questions remained subject to the different inter-
pretations and decisions of local magistrates. We can cite two cases con-
cerning Martinique.
The Dominican father Jean Baptiste Labat describes the arrival in Mar-
tinique in 1699 of a member of the Benjamin d’Acosta de Andrade family
who had come from Curaçao to arrange for the collection of debts owed
to a relative who had died. The family’s industries there had been taken
over by d’Acosta de Andrade’s Christian partners. The visit yielded no
results; payment was refused.25 But from this visit itself, as well as from
others we are aware of, we may conclude that visits were possible.
As for residence, it depended on one’s connections to the authorities.
David Gradis, a Portuguese Jew living in Bordeaux, founded one of the
big companies trading with the French colonies, and had obtained per-
mission to have his two nephews, Mendes and Miranda, reside in Mar-
tinique as trading partners. The company was an important one, with
about six of the company’s ships arriving in Martinique every year. In
one of those ships came the son of David Gradis, Samuel, who died in
Martinique in January 1732. He was buried in a monastery, Frères de la
Charité, with all the appropriate Jewish prayers, but without a tombstone
marking his grave. From this event we can deduce that in 1732 there were
at least ten Jews residing in Martinique, enough to form a minyan (the
prayer quorum of ten Jewish males) for a Jewish burial.26 By the time of
the French Revolution, however, there was, for all practical purposes, no
significant Jewish presence in Martinique or Guadeloupe.

Cayenne (Today French Guiana)

Of the various European nations with colonial ambitions, the French

made the greatest effort to settle the island of Cayenne. In 1631, an early
group of French settlers made the mistake of getting involved in the
internal quarrels of the local Indians, which led to the dissolution of the
settlement. In 1643, a French company was established in Rouen under
the name Cape North Company, and Charles Ponces, Sieur de Bretigny,
sailed to Cayenne with about three hundred persons. As was the case in
the first attempt, the French colonists quarreled with the Indians and
among themselves (Bretigny being very dictatorial, cruel, and con-
tentious). In 1645, Bretigny was killed by the Indians, and the colony
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296 | Mordechai Arbell

dispersed. Still another French effort met with a similar fate, and the
French were driven out of Cayenne.27
The Dutch commander Guerin Spranger, finding Cayenne aban-
doned by the French, received a grant from the Dutch States General and
formed a Dutch colony in Cayenne in 1656. This colony passed over to
the control of the Dutch West India Company, whose aim was to attract
suitable colonists to settle in Cayenne. One of their more specific objec-
tives was to draw Jewish settlers experienced in dealing with tropical
products. One of the refugees from Dutch Brazil, David Nassy, negotiated
with the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company a grant of lib-
erties and exemptions, dated 12 September 1659, for a Jewish colony on
the island of Cayenne.28 The grant states (in Paragraph I) that David
Nassy and his partners are to be patroon and patroons of a “Colony in the
island of Cayenne … provided they do not extend so far from the Colony
of Cayenne as to interfere with other settlers.” We understand from this
section of the text that the company’s intention was to have an exclu-
sively Jewish settlement that was to be distant from the lands tilled by
non-Jewish settlers around the city of Cayenne. The grant given to David
Nassy provided for freedom of conscience, the building of a synagogue,
and the opening of a school—on condition that these same rights also be
given to non-Jews wishing to reside in the colony.
Notwithstanding this, when the group of Jewish colonists, com-
posed mainly of Jewish refugees from Brazil and a number of Jews
from Amsterdam, arrived in September 1660, the Dutch governor, Jan
Classen Langendijk, prevented them from disembarking. The only
alternative he offered the Jews was the privilege of establishing a
colony not on the island of Cayenne but on the mainland. The gover-
nor, however, came under political pressure: his own people, about
thirty-five in number, believing the Jews would bring prosperity to the
island, declared that they would not remain beyond their term of serv-
ice if the governor refused land to the Portuguese Jews. The peaceful
Indians, too, welcomed the Jews.29 Apparently, the governor finally
gave in and permitted the Jews to land and settle on the island of
Cayenne in accordance with the grant of privileges they had in hand.
The Jews situated themselves on the western side of the island of
Cayenne in a place called Remire or Irmire. Remire was described by
Jacques Bellin as “the most smiling and the most fertile region of the
island from which the French, in 1634, chased away the Arikorets and
other Indian nations.”30
The Jews planted sugar cane, erected a sugar mill, produced dyes
from indigo and roucou, and experimented with various undeveloped
tropical products. The township was protected by a fort, and presumably
there was also a synagogue, since we know that the community had an
orderly life with its own rules and regulations. There exists an acknowl-
edgment for a gift of a Torah scroll donated in 1659 by the Amsterdam
community for use in Cayenne; it was signed by David Diaz Antunes and
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 297

Abraham Enriquez Flores. Normally, a Torah scroll was used and kept
only in a prayer house.31 In contrast to the French who had preceded
them, the Jews remained on good terms with the local Indians.32
Not everybody looked upon the success of the Jewish settlement with
admiration, however. The French priest and historian du Tertre, after
describing Remire, explains that “since the island of Cayenne was aban-
doned by the French, some Dutch people and Jews expelled from Brazil
by the Portuguese arrived and found there well-planned gardens and a
good fort with its cannons, so that it was not difficult to settle there.”33
The French priest Father Labat, a colleague of du Tertre and his suc-
cessor in several duties, mocks the foregoing account and its assump-
tions. He presents a contrary view, adding that the reason for the success
of the Remire Jewish settlement was the gradually improving relations
with the Indians, as opposed to the actions of the French. He also
describes the thriving sugar plantations and the cultivation of cotton,
indigo and roucou, and states that “a successful commerce … was carried
on with those of their nation and others. They lived there in peace till the
subsequent French occupation.”34
One of the specialties of the Jews who settled on the Wild Coast was
the preparation of vanilla extract. In the narrative of Labat,35 who resided
in Martinique, there is a description of the arrival on the island of one of
the heirs of Benjamin d’Acosta de Andrade, who had been in Cayenne,
and of the effort Labat made to induce him to reveal the method for the
preparation of vanilla. The importance of vanilla and the Jewish control
of its preparation can also be seen in the reports of the Dutch governor of
Pomeroon (today the Republic of Guyana), where another group of Jews
had settled on the Wild Coast. The historian Ternaux-Compans’s descrip-
tion of Remire tells us that

David Nassy … obtained the title of Patroon-Master and in 1659 went with a
large number of his compatriots to Cayenne. In the following year, these were
joined by the persons of the same religion who had quit Leghorn, and these
likewise devoted [themselves] to the cultivation of the earth. The prosperity
which this colony enjoyed during its short existence is proof that the Jews are
not so unfit, as has been believed, for agricultural enterprises.36

It is quite clear that the leaders of the Jewish settlers in Cayenne were
David Nassy and his group, exiles from Dutch Brazil. They were joined,
however, by Jews from Leghorn (Livorno), mostly of North African ori-
gin, who had lived as marranos in Spanish-held parts of Algiers (Oran,
Mers el Kebir). After emigrating to Leghorn, these marranos reverted to
Judaism.37 They remained among the poorest people in overcrowded
Leghorn, and hence were good prospects for the Dutch West India Com-
pany to resettle on the Wild Coast. It is difficult to estimate how many
boatloads of Leghorn Jews reached Remire. Documents mention at least
two: one went directly to Cayenne, and one, on board the Monte de Cisne,
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298 | Mordechai Arbell

reached the island of Tobago, from where, after a disastrous period, a

group finally made their way to Cayenne.
Details on the everyday life of the Jews in Remire are also very scarce.
It is not easy even to estimate their number. The best documents are those
describing the exodus of the Jews from Cayenne after the French occupa-
tion, at which time there were between three hundred and four hundred
Jews. From different sources chronicling the history of what is now
French Guiana, it is clear that the settlement of the Jews in Remire was far
more successful economically and agriculturally than the larger settle-
ment of the capital—the city of Cayenne.
In Cayenne, as in Martinique and Guadeloupe, we find differences in
the colonization methods of the French and the Jews. Success in tropical
agriculture required very thorough preparation of the land, adaptation to
the climate, experience, and perseverance—all of which together necessi-
tated a substantial initial investment. The Jewish exiles from Brazil had
the experience, could easily adapt to similar tropical conditions, and were
ready to invest. The French colonizing companies were quite reluctant to
make even the initial outlays required, which was one of the causes of
their failure.
In October 1663, M. Le Febvre de la Barre and Sieur Bouchardeau
persuaded Colbert to form the French Equinoctial Company for the set-
tling of the Wild Coast. De la Barre was appointed governor of the island
of Cayenne, and Alexandre Prouville de Tracy was charged with the duty
of driving out “by force of arms any person established there, which the
French considered their territory.”38 The Dutch commander of the
colonies in Cayenne—Querin Spranger (himself a refugee from Dutch
Brazil)—was surprised to see on 26 February 1664, a fleet of five vessels,
with twelve hundred French colonists accompanied by two warships,
arriving in Cayenne during a period of peace between France and Hol-
land. He felt compelled to give in without a fight, so as to obtain more
advantageous terms in the surrender agreement.
We find in the agreement, annotated and signed by de Tracy as the
representative of the king of France and by de la Barre acting for the
Equinoctial Company and as its new director, the following concessions
made to the Dutch:

Paragraph 4— … be it enacted that there shall be given us the free and most
public exercise of religion; and the undersigned lords shall protect us in it
[referring to de la Barre; signed by de Tracy]

Paragraph 5—The Jews demand also the free exercise of their religion as in
the preceding article. [referring to de la Barre; signed by de Tracy]

Paragraph 9—That the expenses incurred by the Patroon and individuals of

the Hebrew colony shall be repaid. [It was de la Barre who had to decide on
this article]39
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 299

The acceptance of Paragraphs 4 and 5 are quite exceptional in the rela-

tions of French colonies with the Jews.
Du Tertre’s description of the ceremony celebrating the French vic-
tory shows that colonial wars in that period still had strong religious
overtones:

De Tracy, seeing de la Barre well established in the island of Cayenne, sent

Father Beaumont of the Dominican Order to erect the Cross in his name as a
sign of his piety. The priests and lay[men] were joyous when they saw the
sign of our Redemption, erected again in the place from where it was torn out
by the Jews and the heretics.”40

As for the rights of the Jews under the French, the situation remained
ambiguous. The Dutch historian Hartsinck asserts that after the agree-
ment was made, the French captured six Dutch vessels that had come to
trade, plundered the inhabitants, “and finally shipped both Christian
and Jews to Rochelle leaving them to find their way to their fatherland as
best they could.”41 Hartsinck’s account was widely criticized by a series
of historians42 who saw it as far-fetched to think that Christians and Jews
were transported to La Rochelle in France and then sent off to trek all the
way to Holland. For persons well acquainted with the geography of Suri-
name, it is clear that the people were transported to the outpost La
Rochelle on the border of French Guiana and Suriname. (See the map
prepared by the Dutch army officer in Suriname, John Gabriel Stedman,
who fought there from 1772 to 1777. Stedman mentions La Rochelle of
Suriname several times in his narrative.)43 France was not mentioned in
the original.
From the above, it is clear that some of the Cayenne Jews and Protes-
tants had been taken to La Rochelle in Suriname and that the Jews found
their way to Suriname’s Jewish Savanna, with its recently founded settle-
ment. In Jewish Savanna there is a region called Cajane (Cayenne in
Dutch). The old cemetery of the Jewish Savanna contains graves of Jews
born in Leghorn, who undoubtedly had been among those who had set-
tled in Remire44 and were then evacuated to Suriname. Not all Jews left
Remire. It was in the interest of the French company to keep the prom-
ised liberty of conscience. The Jesuit fathers had not yet reached Cayenne,
so the economic motivation to keep the Jews prevailed. It is Le Febvre de
la Barre himself who gives a description of the situation in Remire after
the French occupation: “There is another town, Armire, occupied by
Jews, who number sixty whites and eighty-five blacks. Further up, there
is a chapel and a water-powered mill, and about sixty French and twenty-
five blacks.”45 This description helps us understand that a portion of the
Jews of Remire had left, that the water-powered sugar mill, in which Jews
specialized, was no longer in their hands, and from a minimum of three
hundred to four hundred Jews, only sixty remained. The abandoned
houses were occupied by French newcomers.
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300 | Mordechai Arbell

In 1667, following the orders of British General Henry Willoughby,

whose base was Barbados, Captain Sir John Harman invaded Cayenne.
The only strong resistance to the British was in Remire. The British orders
were to burn the town and destroy it. The French commander de Lezy
fled with two hundred of his soldiers to Suriname. Taking as much plun-
der as the vessels could carry, Harman proceeded to demolish the sugar
works and the plantations and to set fire to the houses.
The British ships being quite full, it was impossible to carry off all of
the French prisoners, many of them sick and diseased. Willoughby’s
orders were to take on board only the Jews. These orders caused resent-
ment among the British officers, who were “aggrieved that any of the
French should be left behind, being Christian, and the Jews numbering
fifty to sixty should be carried off.” In a most unusual act, they dared to
ask for clearer instructions from Lt. General Willoughby and Captain
Harman. An officer boarded the commander’s ship, The Swan, and sub-
mitted a document with the officers’ questions, which was returned to
the officers with remarks46 as follows:

Queries Remarks

Whether all the French Prisoners, men, To take as many as fit

women, and children can with conven- for exchange.
ience be transported to the Barbados or
not; if not the whole number, whether
such thought fit to exchange?

May the remaining part be provided Willoughby agreed to

for with homes, baking stones, iron this.
pots, and working tools?

That the fort be, as far as possible, Agreed to.

demolished along with all the strong
buildings on the island, only some cot-
tages preserved to provide shelter for
women and children.

Whether any or all of the Jews do con- It is necessary for the

cern his Majesty’s interest, or the par- Jews to be transported
ties designated for transport, or hence for the several reasons
be left behind. fit to be given to his
Majesty.

There was obviously a clear interest in having the Jews in British territory.
The French prisoners were exchanged in Martinique. As for the Jews, they
sailed with the fleet proceeding to Suriname and may have landed there.
The fleet’s next station was the home base of Barbados. Jews were needed
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 301

there, too. For the British, the development of the sugar industry was a
national objective, and they felt they could achieve it through the Jews.
Sometime later, the Suriname Jews petitioned to return to Cayenne.
Abraham Cahen found in the archives of the French Ministry of the
Marine a letter by Secretary of State M. de Phélipeaux responding to a
petition dated 1725:47 “I have reported to the King the request of the Jews
of Suriname for permission to settle in Cayenne. His Majesty does not see
it convenient to support it.” This sealed the short episode of Cayenne in
Jewish history until 1994, when in January of that year I received an offi-
cial fax from Mrs. Abchee of Cayenne announcing the establishment of a
Jewish community there after a hiatus of almost 330 years.

Haiti

In the second half of the seventeenth century, the French gained control
of the western part of the island of Hispaniola (or Saint-Domingue, or
Haiti). By the treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain officially ceded western
Hispaniola to France. French buccaneers already had a foothold there,
and French planters had begun to settle there before the signing of the
treaty. Individual Jews who left Brazil in 1654 had reached Haiti and,
using their expertise in sugar growing, either worked on French planta-
tions as specialists or had small plantations of their own. Their small
number, scattered in all parts of the relatively large “half island,” was
never sufficient for the formation of a congregation. The “Black Code” of
1685 ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the French islands caused
most of that meager number of Jews to leave the island.
In spite of the “Black Code,” a few Jews remained on French islands;
some were “tolerated” by the local authorities either as a special favor
or owing to an interest on the part of the French government. Por-
tuguese Jews from Bordeaux and Bayonne could in some cases arrange
with the local authorities for special permission to reside in the French
islands, and lettres de naturalité were obtained. With more liberal inter-
pretations of the “Black Code,” more explicit permissions—Lettres
patentes—were given to Jews, particularly those representing big com-
panies that the government wished to see prosper. As noted earlier, one
of the most prominent examples was the Gradis family of Bordeaux,
which had commercial interests in the French colonies. Jews such as
these had the influence and ability to obtain permission for relatives and
friends to reside in the French colonies. In 1717, David Gradis, founder
of the company David Gradis & Sons, began producing arms, which
required him to have strong commercial and maritime relations with the
colonies. By 1722, he had opened offices in Martinique and in different
locations in Haiti—Cap-Français (Cap-Haitien of today), Saint Louis,
Fonds-de-l’Isle à Vaches, and Leogan. He placed in those offices his Jew-
ish friends and relatives.
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302 | Mordechai Arbell

Certainly by 1739 there was a tendency to interpret the “Black Code”

in such a way as to permit some Jews to reside in the islands without
voiding the force of the code. In a letter of 12 August 1739, the Messrs
Champigny and de La Croix, administrators of the French Windward
Islands, offered the following interpretation to the minister of state, M.
Phélipaux, Comte de Maurepas:

not as in the case of France, in the Islands and in the French colonies, accord-
ing to the first article of the Black code, His Majesty orders all his officers to
expel all the Jews from those islands, where they reside, as enemies of the
Christian Name …
This law is very strict. But it seems that it should be applied only to Jews
coming here on their own and without permission. All those who obtain
such permission must not be identified with those whom His Majesty
declared enemies of the Christian Name.48

Such interpretations were common at several levels of authority, thus

permitting the issuance of Lettres patentes. The privileges of Portuguese
Jews were based on the rulings of the French kings, starting in 1550 when
Henry II made an exception of “Marchands et autres Portugais, appelés
Nouveaux Chrétiens” (merchants and other Portuguese, called New
Christians), and these privileges were reconfirmed by the French kings
who reigned after him. In the following example, the merchant house
David Gradis & Sons requests Lettres patentes to reside in Haiti.

The Messrs David Gradis & Sons, Portuguese Jews, ask His Majesty for “Let-
tres Patentes” on the basis of which they could use their residences for their
business, which they will need to acquire in the colonies.…
For more than forty years the House of Gradis has been in charge of sup-
plying goods to the colonies in America and Africa, and of other important
operations in the service of His Majesty. It has always, in peace or war, exe-
cuted the multiple functions given to them with exactitude and energy. The
House has been very useful also to the city of Bordeaux and its citizens with
the income generated.
In the colonies in America they have lent funds to important colonists
that were paid for by acquiring several residences in St.-Domingue [Haiti]
and in Martinique.
According to the State laws, Portuguese Jews have in all the territory of
the Kingdom, Country, Lands under His Majesty, the same rights and privi-
leges as the other subjects, for commerce, possession of houses, and testa-
ments. Those rights and privileges were given to Portuguese Jews by Henry
II, and reconfirmed by the subsequent kings.
As these reconfirmations were not registered by the tribunals of the
Colonies, Messrs Gradis ask His Majesty to show his satisfaction with the
large number of expeditions carried out in the service of the State, by approv-
ing the “Lettres Patentes”…
The privileges that the constitution of the Colonies permit to be given
to Portuguese Jews, are not yet legally determined, but it is to be thought
that Messrs Gradis, naturalized from father to son, for two centuries, in the
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 303

kingdom, and their armaments and their commerce, often very useful to the
service of His Majesty, make them especially worthy of the “Lettres Patentes”
they ask for.49

The Lettres patentes requested were approved. In them, however, it was

made clear that the “Black Code” was still in force.

In a report made by the Minister of State, having the Department of the

Marine, the Conseil des Dépêches [Cabinet], on which basis the Lettres Patentes
have been awarded to Messrs Gradis, Portuguese Jews, French-born, resi-
dents of Bordeaux, and given the rights of French citizens on the Island of St.-
Dominigue [Haiti] and all other French colonies, taking into account that
Royal Edict of 15 April 1615 [Edict signed by Louis XIII but never enforced],
and article 1 of the Edict of March 1685 [the “Black Code”], where the King’s
officials are expressly ordered to expel all the Jews from the colonies.”50

Among the other benefits of this confirmation of rights was that it

helped to overcome one of the disabilities of the Jews in the French
colonies: in case of death, their wills were not respected by the courts of
law and were declared null and void. Therefore, property in the estate
was declared vacant and reverted to the authorities (droit d’aubaine). In
such decisions, the courts based their reasoning on the Code Noir, Article
1. In one case in which the deceased was born Christian but was of Jew-
ish origin, the disability was ruled still to exist, since “the mere fact of
changing the Jewish religion by conversion to Christianity does not
remove the Jewishness of the converso, not even in the second generation,
nor does it curtail the disabilities.”51
When the minister of state Phélipaux expressed his worry over Jews
from Bordeaux asking daily for permission to settle in the islands, a query
was sent to the administrators of Haiti about the number of Jews residing
there. In a letter dated 4 July 1743 by Larnager, governor, and Maillart,
intendant, it was reported:
The businessmen Miranda and Mendes, residents of Fonds de l’Isle à Vaches
for fifteen to twenty years, have large-scale commerce and are very honest;
bachelors.
In Cap Français, Jacob Suares, a businessman of very good reputation, has
been resident for many years; bachelor.
In St. Louis, M. de Paz has had several male and female children from a black
woman to whom he is very loving. She was liberated from slavery years ago,
but he has not married her. To the children he is very tender and has sent
them to his parents in Bordeaux to be educated.52

To which the Minister answered on 3 September 1743,

Since there are only three, forming two houses, not married, and they are
engaged in commerce, you can tell them that there is no inconvenience in
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304 | Mordechai Arbell

tolerating them in the colony. As the King sees it, they can remain as long as
their conduct remains as it is till now. His Majesty, however, does not wish to
see this nation multiply in St.-Domingue.53

Because the report was not decisive about the Jewishness of M. de Paz,
only three Jews were counted.
Notwithstanding the restrictions, the number of Jews increased,
attracted by the now flourishing Haiti, often called La perle des Antilles (The
Pearl of the Antilles). The growing number of Jews can be deduced from
several documents in different French archives under the names de Pas,54
Lopes,55 Mendes France,56 Sordis, Cordova,57 Ravel, Nathan, Pereyra.58
Usually, non-Catholics were buried in plots reserved for Protestants,
Jews, Muslims, and non-baptized slaves, or in private graves on the
ground of their property. In November 1984, Dr. William Hodges and
Miss Jennifer Hamilton discovered a Jewish cemetery in Cap-Haitien, in
which three gravestones were found intact.59 The inscriptions were solely
in French, but their content makes clear that the deceased were Jewish. On
the gravestone of Abraham Molina it is written, “Le bien heureux,” which
is a translation of the Portuguese benaventurado found on most Jewish
gravestones in the Caribbean. On the same gravestone and on that of Sara
Fasto we see the letters S.A.G.D.E.G., which stands for the words su alma
goza de eterna gloria, written on most Portuguese Jewish graves. This is the
only Jewish cemetery that has been found in Haiti. The years written on
the gravestones, 1789, 1790, and 1791, show that the burials took place
during the period of the French Revolution and at the start of the Haitian
revolution. Hodges, versed in Haitian history and founder of the histori-
cal museum De Guahaba in Limbé, explains that the preservation of the
tombstones was “due to the special admiration the Haitian revolutionary
slaves had for the Jews, also victims of blind discrimination.”60
It is impossible to learn the exact number of Jews residing legally or
illegally in Haiti during the eighteenth century. At best, a general idea can
be reached through estimates based on different kinds of data. A thor-
ough study has been made by the Archives of the Gironde on the Jewish
families in Bordeaux, France, in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies.61 It shows that of the 118 Jewish families listed, forty-one of them
had members who had lived in Haiti and returned to Bordeaux. The
breakdown was: nineteen had lived in Cap-Haitien, sixteen in Port-au-
Prince, two in Petit Goave, one in St. Louis, one in Jacmel, one in Cap
Tibouron, one in Leogan, and for the others there are no precise details as
to place of residence.
We must also remember that families who remained in Haiti after the
Haitian revolution, or who emigrated elsewhere, were not taken into
account. If we add to them the Jews from Bayonne who had settled in
Haiti, and Ashkenazi Jews from Nantes and Nancy, the number is much
larger. Bertram Korn mentions at least two families in New Orleans who
had arrived there from Haiti (Lopes Pardo and Lopes Dias) and supposes
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 305

that there were more.62 The contacts between Jews living in Haiti, New
Orleans, and Charleston were quite frequent, and refugee Jews may have
settled in those mainland cities.
The other source of Jews in Haiti was Curaçao. Trade between
Curaçao and Haiti was very brisk between 1789 and 1795. Curaçao Jews
settled mainly in Cap-Français (Cap-Haitien) where, as we noted, the only
Jewish cemetery in Haiti was found. Curaçao community archives show
that circumcisions were performed there until at least 1783. The number
of Jews in Cap-Haitien was such that in 1790 they engaged the services of
Dr. Isaac Cardozo as a religious leader. Curaçao Jews also settled in
Jacmel, Jeremie, Les Cayes, and in smaller numbers in St. Louis and Port-
au-Prince. Small numbers of Jews from Jamaica and St. Thomas also set-
tled in Haiti.
The second largest Jewish concentration after Cap-Français was in
Jeremie. Situated on the southern peninsula of Haiti, it was a lively port
surrounded by plantations and quite isolated from the main parts of Haiti.
When the series of uprisings of mulattos and black slaves started in 1792,
it became a convenient refuge for white settlers. On 19 September 1793,
these settlers called for English assistance, and the area was occupied by
the English for the next five years. In Jeremie, the Jewish presence was eco-
nomically dynamic, and the Jews attained a stable financial position and
relatively high social position. In notarial records studied by Loker for the
period 1786 to 1800, at least nineteen Spanish-Portuguese Jewish families
resided in Jeremie. Except for one from Curaçao, most of this group came
from France—Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Avignon. They earned a living
mainly from managing plantations (sugar, coffee, cacao, and indigo) and
from retail trade.63 The number of Jews may have been larger, since there
were non-registered, non-practicing ones, and also racially mixed ones—
mulattos of Jewish origin having Portuguese Jewish names.
In contrast to Cap-Français, where institutional Jewish life was influ-
enced by Curaçao, in Jeremie there are no indications of organized Jewish
life or cemeteries. Most of the Jeremie Jews left with the advent of the first
Afro-American state. Many Jewish enterprises were ruined by the Haitian
revolution, and commerce came to a standstill. The majority of the Jews
left, but not all did so. We still find births and deaths of Jews registered in
Haiti until 1850. The majority of members of the Masonic Lodge in Port-
au-Prince in 1847 were Jewish,64 but by the second half of the nineteenth
century almost no Jews remained in Haiti.
A particular Haitian phenomenon was the sizable community of offi-
cially freed slaves (affranchis) who became city dwellers. Some of them
were well educated and gradually became the Haitian middle class. They
also became the ruling class after the liberation of Haiti. As has been men-
tioned, Jews occasionally intermarried with them. When I met some of
those families, while serving as non-resident ambassador of Israel to Haiti,
they knew of their Jewish past and had documents to prove it. An exam-
ple is the Decastro family, who are descendants of Joseph Henriquez De
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306 | Mordechai Arbell

Castro and Rachel Felicite Mendes France, who married at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. Joseph’s sister Abigail Henriquez de Castro
married Mardochee Mendes France.65

Count d’Estaing and the Jews

In 1764, Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector Comte d’Estaing was named
governor general of the “French Windward Islands of America.” He
came to Haiti after serving in India and was known as an energetic
reformer. Following his stint in Haiti, he captured the islands of Grenada
and St. Vincent for France, served in the French Revolution, and was a
rear admiral in the French forces during the American Revolution. In
1792, he was promoted to admiral, commanding the entire French navy,
but ultimately he was beheaded by the guillotine for “being sympathetic
to the Royal house.”66
Until d’Estaing’s arrival in America, Jewish existence was tolerated,
and a semi-legal way was found to permit the residency of Jews, despite
the “Black Code.” D’Estaing started energetically to better the infrastruc-
ture of the colony. He offered the Jews of Saint Louis and Les Cayes his pro-
tection and intervened on their behalf, on condition that they contribute
money to public projects: fountains, batteries, ships, roads, inns. Knowing
that their precarious semi-legal status might worsen if they refused, the
Jews stalled. D’Estaing took their silence to mean acceptance.67
Receiving information that the Jews were preparing to complain to
David Gradis in Bordeaux, who was at that time responsible for the pro-
visioning of the French garrisons in Cayenne, Haiti, Martinique, and
Guadeloupe, d’Estaing wrote to the minister of the marine, foreign
affairs, and war, the duc de Choiseul, on 8 September 1764:

I want to report to you that I want to contribute to the public welfare and not
to the synagogues of St. Louis and Les Cayes. The Jews, owners of slaves who
become Jewish like them, who purchase and own land in a Christian country,
must, if they want to be tolerated, bring water to the towns, supply ships to
the King, and perform other useful deeds which will give them honor in
future centuries. What I asked of them is not much. Mister Gradis may dis-
approve and shout. I will take into account these small donations when I
measure the good or bad conduct of these sons of Moses.68

He also enumerated the projects: a water conduit to the city of St. Louis,
with a fountain; a battery for four cannons; an inn with space for horses;
seven thousand pounds yearly in cash for the supply of five companies
of soldiers: fifty thousand pounds in two payments for the purchase of
ships, and ten thousand pounds in cash for another big ship.69 After
assessing the financial worth of each Jew and deciding the sum he must
pay, d’Estaing nominated the Jew Daguilard (d’Aguilar) to be the leader
of the Jews in the colony and responsible for collecting the money.
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 307

In the meantime, on the basis of information about d’Estaing’s

excesses in Haiti, the duc de Choiseul began to lose confidence in him.
The duke wrote to the king explaining that some of the governors in the
American colonies were “despotic, ignorant and unreasonable,” and he
added that “one like that is M. d’Estaing, whom I consider to be a man of
superior talent, but he is crazy and dangerously insane and his intendant
dishonest.”70 Already in the final days of 1764, an act of accusation was
issued in Paris against d’Estaing. One paragraph states that:

Jews of the colony were taxed considerable sums, including the Portuguese
Jews who have the privilege of establishing themselves in all the lands under
French domination, and in France. The English have one principle, they
attract them, this industrious people, giving them sizable privileges, and it
can be said that it was the Jews who made Jamaica flourish.71

Either because he learned of these accusations or was satisfied that

the money for his projects had been collected, d’Estaing had a change of
attitude, and in a decree issued on 16 January 1765, Article 5, he says,

In all cases it was always taken into account that the money given by the Jews
will pay an interest of 5 percent.… A plan has been introduced for the return
of the above sums in order to have the confidence of the Jews for future loans.

And in Article 9 he states,

The Jews of the North demand to pay free of charge and not as a loan the
sums mentioned, taking into account that the “Lettres Patentes” given to the
Jews by his Majesty to the Portuguese Jews insure them in this colony, and it
seems these “Lettres Patentes” attract them to this colony.72

These paragraphs coincide with the letter from the minister of the
marine to d’Estaing on 18 January 1765:

I have received your letter of Sept. 8, relative to the contributions which have
been imposed on Jews of St.-Domingue, in order to finance some projects of
public utility in the colony. The King to whom I reported, approved everything
you have done on this subject. I believe my duty is to observe that you must
use the contributions with the greatest moderation. The Jews, although from a
different religion, are free men, very useful to the state and to the colony, for
their attachment to culture and their proficiency in commerce, and if they are
treated with rigor, they can take elsewhere their fortunes and their capacity.73

To this d’Estaing and the intendant Magon wrote on 8 January 1766 to

the minister,

There are two kinds [of Jews], the agriculturist and the tradesmen. They have
contributed to the gift for d’Estaing, have given charity to the hospital, to the
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308 | Mordechai Arbell

people, and to the colony. These industrious people contribute to the growth
and wealth of the colony. Religion does not seem to be a sufficient obstacle to
deprive the colony of these people.74

The Intended Expulsion of the Jews from Cap-Français

On 2 April 1765, a petition was submitted to d’Estaing signed by 152 mer-

chants, captains of ships, and other businessman of Cap-Français that
accused the Jews of residing in Cap-Français and in Saint-Domingue,
contrary to the “Black Code”; sending sums of money to synagogues
elsewhere; damaging the national commerce by maintaining connections
in foreign colonies; traveling from country to country and creating fraud-
ulent bankruptcies, causing the state to lose the taxes that would ordi-
narily be obtained from them; clipping; taking over the interior
commerce of the colony; and ruining the French merchants. D’Estaing
referred the petition to the judge of Cap-Français, who then issued the
following order on 10 April 1765:
The petition submitted to the Governor-General by 152 merchants, captains
of ships and businessman.… We are taking into account [the] above act, [and]
order that article 1 of the edict of March 1685 [the Code Noir] will be put into
force according to its letter and spirit.
Therefore we order all and every one of the Jews which are in our juris-
diction or can establish residence in it, to leave in three months from the day of
publication of this order; and if the Jews mentioned fail to leave in three
months, we order that they will be persecuted in their bodies, and their hold-
ings confiscated for the King’s profit. We also authorize, in accordance with
their demand, the merchants, captains, businessmen and others, to make after
the above three months, denunciations to the King’s prosecutor, of every Jew
who remains in our jurisdiction; without prejudicing the privileges, if some
were accorded to certain Jews, and those registered by law in this colony.75

The group of petitioners expected to receive the approval of the gov-

ernor general on the basis of his previous attitude toward the Jews, but
the petition found a different d’Estaing. Subdued by the letters he had
received from the minister of the marine and by the investigation against
him, d’Estaing did not enforce the order of the judge of Cap-Français. On
21 June 1765, he gave the Jews “letters of relief of appeal of the sentence
of the Judge,” and the case was abandoned.76 Thus, the Jews returned to
their semi-protected situation. Daguilard, exhausted by his function of
being responsible for the Jews, hated by the Catholic merchants, and
ruined financially, embraced the Catholic faith.
In 1779, in a note by the king to the governor and the intendant, we
find “His Majesty is willing to allow those [Jews] who are established in
[Saint-Domingue] not to be troubled for their creed so long as they
abstain from all public exercise of their religion.”77 Until the French Rev-
olution, nothing more changed. The Jews were “tolerated.”
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 309

Jewish Life in Haiti

Being spread out all over the country, the Jews could not form a real
congregation. Jewish marriages, however, were performed, and Jewish
holidays observed—especially in Cap-Français. There was no real dis-
crimination in day-to-day life. Dr. Michel Lopes de Pas, resident of
Leogane, recommended by the intendant Wilton on 24 December 1714,
was appointed medecin du roy (king’s physician) and, in 1723, a member
of the superior council of the colony.78 Other Jews were named as judges
in tribunals and for other public functions.

The Town of Moron Founded by a Jew

Moron is a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, forty kilometers from

Jeremie. A Portuguese Jew from Curaçao settled in Jeremie and became a
businessman and planter. In 1787, he purchased land in what is today
Moron. Undoubtedly, he was the founder of this locality. Moreover, local
legends say that the town of Moron was founded by a Jewish rabbi.79 It
may be that in a small house on his property, the Jews would meet to pray.

The Mendes France Family

The late premier of France, Pierre Mendes France, did thorough research
on his family roots, and among his ancestors he found Isaac Mendes
France. Isaac settled in Haiti in 1763 where his brother David was already
established in Port-au-Prince. Together with his son Mardochee (see
above), they settled in Petit Goave. In 1779, Isaac returned to Bordeaux.80
We can get an idea of the property of a typical Jewish family in Haiti from
a document in the American Jewish Archives that lists the possessions of
the Mendes France family (several houses, stores, plantations, and coffee
and cotton mills).81
Jews left Haiti gradually. The slave rebellion did not cause a panicky
evacuation, but resulted in a gradually diminishing Jewish population. In
the next century, in the 1920s, Jews from Syria, joined later by Jews from
Germany and Eastern Europe, settled in Haiti. In time, they reached
thirty to forty families, but a congregation was not formed. With the
unstable political and economic situation in Haiti in the 1990s, only five
or six Jewish families remain there. Haiti is an example of non-centralized
Jewish life in the Caribbean. Jews were a minority in a rather large white
population of some twenty thousand to thirty thousand. With the French
authorities usually hostile to the Jews, Haiti is not typical of the Jewish
life in the Caribbean, but it is part of it anyway.
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310 | Mordechai Arbell

Notes

1. Jean Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les Francais (Paris, 1667),
1123.
2. du Tertre, Histoire, 460–61. Translated by the author.
3. Ibid., 463–64.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 492.
6. Ibid., 515.
7. Abraham Cahen, “Les Juifs de la Martinique au XVIIe siècle,” Revue des Etudes Juives
31 (1895):95–96.
8. du Tertre, Histoire, 49 and 68.
9. Antoine Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxical en l’isle de Cayenne (Paris, 1664), 303–4.
Translated by the author.
10. Pierre Pinchon, ed., Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyanne (Toulouse, 1982), 93–94.
11. Jean Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique, vol. 6 (Paris, 1722), 3.
12. Cahen, “Les Juifs de la Martinique,” 96.
13. Ibid.
14. Jacob Pereira da Silva, David da Acosta d’Andrade, and David Lopez Henriques.
15. Isaac Emmanuel, “Les Juifs de la Martinique et leurs coreligionaires d’Amsterdam au
XVIIe siècle,” Revue des Etudes Juives 123 (1964):511–16.
16. Cahen, “Les Juifs de la Martinique,” 98.
17. Ibid., 99. Translated by the author.
18. Antoine Joseph Le Febvre de la Barre, Relation de ce qui s’est passé dans les isles de Terre
ferme de l’Amérique, pendent la derniere guerre avec l’Angleterre et depuis en execution du
traitté de Breda, vol. 1 (Paris, 1671), 36. Translated by the author.
19. Cahen, “Les Juifs de la Martinique,” 116–21.
20. Louis XIV, Code Noir, Edit du Roy servent de reglement touchant la police des Isles de
l’Amérique Françoise. Signed Louis Roy de France et de Navarre, Colbert, Le Tellier,
Versailles, 1685.
21. Archives of Ministère de la Marine (Colonies—Martinique), 1683, Paris.
22. Emmanuel, “Les Juifs,” 516.
23. Ibid., 515.
24. Albert Gassman, Dictionary of the French and Netherlands Antilles (Metuchen, NJ, 1978).
Pieter is hardly a Jewish name. However, we find Salomon Pietrz in New Amsterdam,
and a study by Dr. Isaac Prins of Jerusalem showed that his original name was Car-
doso (Old Archief of Amsterdam, doc. No. 3583) and that he was Jewish.
25. Labat, Nouveau Voyage, vol. 4, 106.
26. Abraham Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des
Etudes Juives 4 (1882):132.
27. James Rodway, Chronological History of the Discovery and Settlement of Guyana 1493–1668
(Georgetown, 1888), 104, 112, 129, 130.
28. Jan Jakob Hartsinck, Beschryving van Guiana, of de Wildekust (Amsterdam, 1770), 940;
English trans. in J. Rodway, Chronological History, 145.
29. Jac Zwarts, “Een Episode mit de Joodsche kolonisatie an Guyana (1660),” in West Indis-
che Gids (WIG) 9 (1928):519–30; Herbert Bloom, “The Dutch Archives with Special Ref-
erence to American Jewish History,” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society
(1931), refers to the document, Notarial Archives, Pieter Padthuysen (1659), vol. 2888,
on the deposition of the captain who brought the Jews to Cayenne—”The Commander
[Langedijk] did not wish to permit the settlement … and did not wish that the colonists
15 1/24/01 11:49 AM Page 311

Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 311

remain on the island either as colonists of the company or under him”; see also vol.
2899, fols. 344–55, 10/5/1660.
30. Jacques Bellin, Description Geographique de la Guyane. Ccontenant les possessions et les
establissemens des François, les Espagnols, les Portugais, les Hollandois dans ces vastes pays
(Paris, 1763), 16. Translated by the author.
31. Zvi Loker, “Les Juifs a Cayenne 1660–1667,” in La Grande Encyclopédie de la Caraïbe, vol.
7 (Samoli, 1990), 22–27; Isaac Emmanuel, “Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Jews in
Brazil (1630–1654),” in American Jewish Archives (January 1955):21–23.
32. James Rodway, Guiana, British, Dutch and French (New York, 1912), 57.
33. R. P. Jean Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitees par les Francais vol. 3
(Paris, 1667), 12. Translated by the author.
34. Jean Baptiste Labat, Voyage du Chevalier de Marchais en Guinée … et a Cayenne (Amster-
dam, 1731), 99.
35. Jean Baptiste Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, vol. 3 (Paris, 1772), 106.
36. H. Ternaux-Compans, Notice Historique sur la Guyane francaise (Paris, 1843), 66; Samuel
Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana and Its Relation to the Jews
in Suriname, Cayenne, and Tobago,” in PAJHS 16 (1908):123.
37. Daniel Levi de Barrios, “Triumphal carro de la perfecion por el camino de la salvacion,”
in El Triumpho del Gobierno Popular (Amsterdam, 1701), 631–635.
38. Rodway, Chronological History, 164–65.
39. du Tertre, Histoire, vol. 3, 34.
40. Ibid. Translated by the author.
41. Hartsinck, Beschryving, citing “Hollandize Mercurius,” of July 1664, page 127: “Zu
voeren de Joden en Christen van hun welvaren berooft en ser pover stelt na Rochel on
van der tu mosen veotern hun vaderland.”
42. Oppenheim, “Early Jewish Colony,” 135; Loker, “Les Juifs,” 24; Zvi Loker, “Cayenne—
a Chapter of Jewish Settlement in the New World in the 18th Century,” in Zion
(Jerusalem), 112n.; Dr. L. L. E. Rens “Analysis of Annals relating to Early Jewish Settle-
ment in Surinam,” in Vox Guyanne (Paramaribo, 1954), 25, in which Rens further states
that about one hundred Jews were shipped to La Rochelle.
43. John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of
Surinam in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America from 1772 to 1777, Elucidating the
History of That country, London, 1796, 87: “A Jew soldier of the society past La Rochelle
accompanied him”; and 241, “During all this time strong patrols cruised between
Magdeburg, La Rochelle, and the Jew Savannah.…”
44. Fred Oudschans Dentz, “Wat er Overbleef van het Kerkhoff en de Synagoge var der
Joden Savanne in Suriname,” in WIG 29 (1948):210–34. “The Grave of Abraham Mendes
Vaez born in Livorno died in 1697 at the age of 64.”
45. Le Febvre de la Barre, Description de la France Equinoctiale cy devant appellée Guyanne et
par les Espagnols “El Dorado” (Paris, 1688), 52.
46. V. T. Harlow, ed., Colonizing Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana (London, 1924), 241.
47. Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 130.
48. Archives du Ministère de la Marine—Correspondence générale—Colonies—1739, cited
in Cahen, “ Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 136.
49. Archives Nationales de France (Colonies), Paris, E210 folio 13, published in Zvi Loker,
Jews in the Caribbean (Jerusalem, 1991), 242–43.
50. Archives Nationales de France (Colonies), E210, folio 106, published in Loker, Jews in
the Caribbean, 248.
51. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 268.
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312 | Mordechai Arbell

52. Archives du Ministère de la Marine—Collection Moreau St. Mery (Colonies) + XV art.;

Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 141.
53. Ibid., 142. Translated by the author.
54. Archives Nationales de France (Colonies), F5 B39.
55. Ibid., F5 B42
56. Ibid.
57. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 222.
58. Archives Nationales de France (Colonies), F5 B53 and Loker, Jews in the Caribbean,
222–26.
59. William H. Hodges, Les Juifs au Cap—evidence d’une communauté Juive au Cap Français
(Limbe, Haiti, 1983), 3.
60. Hodges, Les Juifs au Cap, 4.
61. Jean Cavignac, Dictionaire du Judaisme Bordelais aux XVIIe et XX e Siècles (Bordeaux
1987), 9–125.
62. Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (Waltham, 1969), 72.
63. Zvi Loker, “Jews in the Grand’Anse Colony of Saint-Dominigue,” in American Jewish
Archives 34:1 (1982). Families mentioned are: Alvares, Cardoze, D’Almeyda, Da Sylva,
Lange, Lopez de Paz, de Lima, Maduro, Montes, Moron, Penha, Petit, Rodrigue,
Seixas, Vidal.
64. Archives Israélites (Paris, 1847), 861–63.
65. Laurore St. Juste, “Ancêtres de Pierre Mendes-France originaire d’Haiti,” in Créations
Haitiano-Françaises, 12–13 July 1971. On the Mendes France family, see notes 80 and 81
below.
66. Albert Gastman, Historical Dictionary of the French and Netherlands Antilles (Metuchen,
N.J., 1978), item 22.
67. Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 239.
68. There is no mention anywhere else of the existence of such synagogues. It was sup-
posed that a ruin in Jeremie might have been a synagogue, but there is no proof.
69. Archives Nationales—Ministère de la Marine (Colonies), Saint-Domingue—Corre-
spondance Générale (1764).
70. Giraud, “Memoire de M. Choisel remis au Roi en 1765,” in Journal de Savants (April
1881):255, cited in Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 237n.
71. Archives Nationales de France, Ministère de la Marine—Correspondance Générale,
Colonies, Saint-Domingue, 1764, cited in Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies
françaises,” 248.
72. Collection Moreau St. Mery—Ministère de la Marine—Archives Générales de France,
Colonies t. XV Juifs, cited in Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 244.
73. Archives Nationales de France (Colonies)—Ministère de la Marine—Correspondance
Générale—Saint-Domingue, 1765, in Cahen, “Les Juifs dans les colonies françaises,” 78.
74. Archives Nationales de France C9 A127 Of 1 vol. 5, copy in American Jewish Archives,
Cincinnati, SC 8047.
75. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Lois et constitutions des colonies françaises d’Amérique sous le Vent,
vol. 4 (Paris 1787):850.
76. Ibid., 853.
77. Archives Nationales de France C9 B21 file 1479, copy in the American Jewish Archives
SC. 8047.
78. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 218. See also Zvi Loker “Dr. Michel Lopes de Pas—Médecin
et Savant de Saint-Domingue,” Revue d’Histoire de la Médécine Hebraique 37 (1980):55–57.
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Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies | 313

79. Zvi Loker, “Simon Isaac Henriquez Moron—Homme d’Affaires de la Grand Anse,”
Revue de la Société Haitienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie 125 (1979):56–59; and
Zvi Loker, “Un Juif Portugais Fondateur de Moron,” Conjonction, revue Franco Haitienne
139 (1978):87–88.
80. Jean Lacouture, Pierre Mendes France (New York, 1984), 18.
81. List of properties situated in Saint-Domingue, having belonged to the Mendes France
family, Manuscript, in American Jewish Archives SC 8042, based on file A 114 II Cote
30 in Archives Nationales de France.
16 1/24/01 11:58 AM Page 314

– Chapter 16 –

NEW CHRISTIANS/“NEW WHITES”:

SEPHARDIC JEWS, FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR,
AND CITIZENSHIP IN FRENCH
SAINT-DOMINGUE, 1760–1789

John D. Garrigus

T HE CASE OF SAINT-DOMINGUE’S SEPHARDIM illustrates that the story of

Jews in Europe’s expansion westward is about more than the sur-
vival or mutation of deeply rooted family traditions. Old World questions
about Jewish political identity did not disappear in the Americas. Rather,
these persistent issues forced colonists and their children born in the New
World to reconcile European philosophies with American conditions. In
the case of the largest slave colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue’s
Jews helped translate emerging French nationalism into an attack on
racial prejudice that eventually produced the Haitian revolution. By rais-
ing complex issues of national identity and citizenship in French Amer-
ica after 1763, Sephardic merchants and planters provided a model for
another group whose place in colonial society was equally ambiguous:
Saint-Domingue’s free people of color.
In the mid-1780s, the self-proclaimed leaders of the colony’s “mulat-
tos”1 adopted many of the techniques that colonial Jews used to fight for
legal rights. Their challenge to a racial hierarchy that had only recently
acquired full legitimacy threatened the ideological basis of plantation soci-
ety. By 1791 political and military struggles between colonial “whites” and
“mulattos” had become so vicious that a great slave rebellion was possible.
The civil positions of colonial Jews and free people of mixed Euro-
pean and African parentage were parallel because elites in France began
to construct new definitions of French citizenship in the mid-eighteenth
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Base Map: David Geggus, Slavery,

War, and Revolution

Les Cayemittes
(Jerémie)
(Port au Prince)
(Petit Trou) Léogane
Fond des
(Cap Tiburon)
Nègres Petit
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316 | John D. Garrigus

century. In Paris and elsewhere, Jansenist judges and Protestant leaders

pushed royal administrators to recognize that property, loyalty, and civic
utility, not orthodox Catholicism, defined French identity.2 At the same
time, royal bureaucrats eager to open France to wealthy families born
outside its borders began to free these influential immigrants from tradi-
tional legal disabilities. By 1789, therefore, the continuum of rights and
disabilities separating non-French residents and native-born subjects of
the French monarchy was increasingly simplified into two mutually
exclusive categories: citizen and foreigner.3
These gradual but important changes in the way France defined civil
and national identity had a profound impact on the kingdom’s most
dynamic overseas possession. Dominguan elites were quick to adopt new
French ideas, including a greater sympathy for the loyalty of resident
Jews. At the same time, however, social and political tensions in this slave
society after the Seven Years’ War produced newly scientific definitions
of racial identity that colonists applied to free people with unprecedented
rigor.4 Equipped with a more “objective” racial ideology, colonial author-
ities labeled a few old colonial families as gens de couleur and insisted such
“quadroons” and “mulattos” were not authentically French. At the very
same time, however, Saint-Domingue’s Jews were successfully fighting
much older prejudices, to the point that administrators were freeing some
Sephardic families from the old discriminatory laws. I hypothesize that
colonial Sephardim provided free people of color with an important
example of how to reclaim their French identity. It was no accident that
Julien Raimond, the “quadroon” planter and free colored spokesman in
the 1780s and 1790s, traded with and lived next to some of the colony’s
most important Jewish families.
The civil struggles of colonial Sephardim and gens de couleur after
1763 were important steps in the development of French and Haitian
national identities. Out of a shared marginality and a common footing in
Caribbean contraband, Sephardim and free people of color challenged
the laws and stereotypes defining them as non-French.

* * * *

THE FRENCH CROWN had allowed Sephardic Jews fleeing Portugal to set-
tle in southwestern France from the 1550s. Known as New Christians
until 1723, after which they could acknowledge their Judaism openly, this
small population was an example of the ways in which the emerging
Atlantic economy challenged traditional ideas about French identity.
Through their connections to the Sephardic diaspora, Bordeaux’s Jews
helped the city grow into France’s most important Atlantic port. This net-
work was also invaluable to France’s Caribbean possessions, though
questions about Jewish loyalty and identity were harder to resolve in the
islands. In the 1650s, Sephardim fleeing the collapse of Dutch Brazil intro-
duced cacao and sugar processing to Martinique, but colonial authorities
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 317

forced the Jews out in 1683. The crown wanted to protect French mer-
chants and planters from the Dutch competition and the religious diver-
sity associated with these enterprising colonists. Two years later, the first
article of France’s new collection of slave laws, the Code Noir, ordered
governors to expel all Jews from the French Caribbean.
Saint-Domingue was still a frontier society in 1685. Ten times larger
in area than Martinique and Guadeloupe put together, it had no strong
religious institutions and was still dependent on illegal foreign trade.
Despite regulations, Dominguan authorities did not closely monitor the
Jewish population, let alone expel it. Sometime before 1710, Michel Lopez
Depas, a thirty-year-old doctor from an important Bordeaux Sephardic
family, arrived in the colony. Energetic and respected, he was appointed
royal physician in Petit Goâve, at that time the colonial capital. Lopez
Depas apparently converted to Christianity, and went on to serve as a
judge on the colony’s Superior Council in 1723. In the 1730s he presented
a large and inexpert painting of the archangel Michael to the nearby
parish of Fond des Nègres, where he owned property. The parish
promptly named Saint Michael as its patron saint.5
Whether or not such conversions were sincere, royal officials in Saint-
Domingue may have considered Jewish commercial contacts too valuable
to lose.6 Sixty years earlier, Sephardic expertise, capital, and connections
had helped to establish valuable cacao and sugar plantations in Mar-
tinique, and Versailles wanted a similar transformation in Saint-
Domingue. When Michel Lopez Depas first arrived in Saint-Domingue,
much of the colony’s southern peninsula was under the control of a royal
monopoly company. Versailles hoped this unsettled coast would serve as
an entrepôt for smuggling goods into Spanish America, but its monopoly
company collapsed in 1720.7 English and Dutch merchants outmaneu-
vered the French in Spanish colonial markets, and even bought the
tobacco, cacao, and indigo produced in this frontier region of Saint-
Domingue. Indeed, by 1713 a thriving community of free black farmers
had taken root in the fertile hollow thereafter known as Fond des Nègres,
growing cacao and presumably trading it to the merchants of Jamaica and
Curaçao.8 A substantial portion of this contraband cacao was carried by
Sephardic merchants.9 The Spanish traveler Gregorio de Robles visited
Jews in Jamaica at the end of the seventeenth century, who told him they
used the smaller Spanish coins they earned in contraband to “trade with
the Indians, mulattos and mestizos, carrying off their goods at the same
time, a commerce that yielded them much profit.” The free black cacao
growers of Fond des Nègres probably sold their crops to traders like these
or to other Jamaican or Curaçaoan merchants, at least until 1715 and 1716,
when a blight eliminated Saint-Domingue’s cacao groves forever.10
It is likely that Michel Lopez Depas was aware of this commerce,
though there is no direct evidence that contraband cacao drew him to
Fond des Nègres.11 His brother Louis had married into the Gradis family
of Bordeaux, modest textile merchants until 1718. The Gradises switched
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“Town of
Area
Petit Rivière”
Enlarged
Page 318

Parish of
Fond des
“Depas” Translated label from 18th-century military map
Approximate route of colonial road
Nègres
Rivers
Base Map: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia; Archives
Nationales Col. 135 AP4 (1) feuille 2. “Michel
Depas”
“Depas”
“Raimond” “Dasmard
and Depas”
“Saint-Louis” Parish
“Depas” of
Aquin
“Depas “English Bay”
“Michel
Point” Depas”
“Flemish Harbor
of Aquin”
0 6 km

0 6 mi
Caribbean Sea

MAP 9 Depas Family Properties, Saint-Domingue

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New Christians/“New Whites” | 319

to colonial commerce about the time Michel arrived in Saint-Domingue.

By 1728 they had increased their trading capital from roughly 5,000 livres
tournois to 162,000 and were sending three ships a year to Saint-
Domingue’s southern peninsula.12 Twenty years later they had become
such important shippers that in 1751 they received letters of nobility for
their role in supplying Quebec in wartime.13 This service to Versailles
continued through the Seven Years’ War and the War of American Inde-
pendence, during which they furnished at least two million livres
tournois in specie to pay colonial troops.14
Along with these official contacts, the Gradises in Bordeaux and
Michel Lopez Depas’s family in southern Saint-Domingue were heavily
involved in smuggling. From before 1720 until the end of the century, con-
traband dominated the economy of this peninsula. French commercial
restrictions were greatly resented throughout the colony, and contempo-
raries reported that the indigo and sugar plantations of the southern
peninsula were almost entirely dependent on merchants from Jamaica and
Curaçao. Trade with France was especially limited during periods of war,
when famine forced royal officials to legalize foreign shipping.
This situation further explains why colonial officials did not expel, or
even identify, Jewish families. In 1741, Saint-Domingue’s administrators
told Versailles that there were only three Jews in the colony. They men-
tioned Michel Lopez Depas, but did not count him as Jewish because of
his conversion.15 Christian or not, the doctor sent to France for his broth-
ers, who became wealthy planters and merchants in this part of the
colony, maintaining close relations with the Gradis house of Bordeaux
through intermarriage.16 The growing colonial branch of the Lopez Depas
family also participated in contraband trade with Curaçao, where Lopez
Depas was a common name in the Jewish community.17 These profitable
connections allowed Michel’s brother François, a merchant, to raise nine
legitimate children in Aquin parish, just south of Fond des Nègres. In
1763 Philippe Lopez Depas, another brother, owned an Aquin estate with
sixty-three slaves valued at 200,000 livres.18
Trade with Curaçao and Jamaica was an important resource for
another group that had no openly acknowledged place in French colonial
society before 1763: free people of color. By mid-century, the slaves and
free black farmers of Fond des Nègres and elsewhere had intermarried
with European immigrants, producing a second and third generation of
free and independent families, many of them of mixed European-African
descent.19 In fact, one of the southern peninsula’s wealthiest men of color
was Michel Depas, a free “mulatto” who lived in Aquin parish and was
probably the illegitimate son of Michel Lopez Depas.20 In 1743 royal
administrators described “M. de Paz” as having several children with a
former slave woman to whom he was very devoted. “To the children he
is very tender and has sent them to his parents in Bordeaux to be edu-
cated.”21 Indeed, a Michel Depas worked in the Gradis merchant house
in Bordeaux in the late 1730s and early 1740s.22 In the 1760s, a hostile
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320 | John D. Garrigus

colonial governor described the free “mulatto” Michel Depas as “a

courtier of Mr. Gradis.”23 This second Michel Depas did considerable
business with his father and, at the son’s death in 1783, left an estate with
sixty-seven slaves, twenty-seven slave huts, an animal pen, and seven
different outbuildings. In his dining room the notaries found fourteen sil-
ver place settings and other silver tableware, while in his study they dis-
covered an “optical box” and prints for viewing with this device.24 In the
late 1780s, Michel’s sons married, forming households as wealthy as
those of many members of the white colonial elite.25
A number of prominent families of mixed European-African descent
in this region had contraband connections to Curaçao, even if they were
not related to Sephardim.26 Julien Raimond, an indigo planter of one-quar-
ter African ancestry who led free colored political efforts after 1782, owned
land next to the white and mulatto members of the Depas family and
traded with both Bordeaux and Curaçao, as they did. When Raimond
deposited an inventory of his commercial papers with a notary in 1785, 40
percent of these documents (60 of 159) included overseas transactions.27
Forty-four of his receipts were with Bordeaux merchants or captains, but
he had six from Curaçao and four from Bruges and Ostend, compared to
only two from the important French port of Nantes. Furthermore, Rai-
mond traded with Sephardic merchants in Saint-Domingue. He sold dye
to David Henriques and Captain Jacob Mendes Henriques of Curaçao in
1780 and 1781, and later dealt with the Henriques firm when it opened a
trading counter in Aquin. He paid a bill to “Levé,” a merchant-goldsmith
in Jacmel and owed money to one “Paraire,” a merchant in Petit Trou. Rai-
mond also dealt with Salomon d’Aguilar, a Jew living in Curaçao who had
roots in Port-au-Prince and family in Aquin.28
These Jewish families and their neighbors of mixed African-European
descent experienced a major social change after the end of the Seven Years’
War in 1763. For the first time in the colony’s history, planter elites and
royal administrators examined the civil status of Jews and free people of
color in an attempt to create a new kind of “patriotic” colonial public.
This new attitude was partly inspired by changes in France. The influ-
ence of the Enlightenment and a long struggle between the crown and its
highest judges were producing greater sympathy for the civil rights of
Protestants and of those who held Jansenist views about communion and
sin. As Peter Sahlins has pointed out, after 1685 “royal officials and peti-
tioners worked out a set of legal and administrative fictions to mask reli-
gious difference.”29 By the end of the eighteenth century, jurists and
writers were increasingly collapsing the many corporate identities that
had defined the subjects of the king of France into the term “citizen.” In
1787, as part of this process, Protestants were granted full civil status.30
Sahlins’s study of the more than seven thousand letters of naturalization
issued in France between 1660 and 1789 reveals that the crown readily
made wealthy non-Catholic foreigners into French subjects, giving them
the right to bequeath French property to their heirs. By the Revolution,
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 321

says Sahlins, the ease with which a person could be naturalized had effec-
tively simplified the many social identities and corporate statuses sepa-
rating aubaines (foreign-born residents of the kingdom) from régnicoles
(native-born subjects of the crown). Those living under the French
monarchy were increasingly regarded as either “citizen” or “foreigner.”31
France’s desire to participate in the expansion of the Atlantic economy
accelerated this expanding definition of who was French. Although
Ashkenazic Jews in eastern France bore heavy legal disabilities until the
Revolution, Sephardic Jews in the southwest were given nearly complete
civil and religious rights in 1723, a date that coincides closely with Bor-
deaux’s expansion into the Atlantic trade.32
These new ideas about French citizenship arrived in Saint-Domingue
in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War. The Treaty of Paris brought
unprecedented prosperity to planters and merchants. With Quebec under
British control and a long wartime blockade over, Saint-Domingue more
than ever became the focus of French overseas attention. European emi-
gration boomed, and coffee joined sugar as an important colonial export.
The annual volume of the African slave trade tripled from 1763 to 1788,
but the war left troubling questions about colonial allegiance to France.
During the hostilities, colonists in the supposedly more loyal French
islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique had surrendered to the British
quickly, even eagerly. Saint-Domingue’s inhabitants had long com-
plained about French trade rules and the rigors of militia duty, and the
war had expanded both burdens. Before the peace, Versailles, hoping to
cement Dominguan loyalty, had offered to abolish the colonial militia
when the conflict was over. This was done in 1763, but the following year
Versailles sent a new governor to reestablish the militia.
This official, Charles d’Estaing, was deeply smitten with the neoclas-
sical notions of patriotism that many French military reformers adopted
after the war.33 Saint-Domingue was notorious for its planters’ individu-
alism and for their complete lack of social attachment to each other. Nev-
ertheless, d’Estaing believed that by artfully reforming the militia,
renaming it the National Legion, and creating ranks and medals, he could
instill a civic spirit in the colony. As part of achieving this new public-
spiritedness, the governor proposed fundamental changes in the civil sta-
tus of colonial Jews and free people of color. He was shocked to find that
Saint-Domingue had nearly fifty Jewish families, instead of three as his
predecessors had reported. Describing these individuals as foreigners
who needed to earn their toleration, the governor instituted a tax “for the
public good.” He ordered the Sephardic families of the southern penin-
sula to pay for bridges, defense batteries, and aqueducts.34 D’Estaing was
particularly troubled by the wealth of Michel Depas, the free “mulatto,”
whom he described as a “courtier of Gradis” and a

trouble maker [mauvais sujet], against whom there are a multitude of com-
plaints by the planters; free mulatto and bastard [Batard]. He owns a very
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322 | John D. Garrigus

sizable plantation at the Grande Colline with 120 slaves; moreover he has
another plantation at the Colline à Mangon with 30 slaves. He has rebelled
several times against commands which have been given to him in the inter-
est of good public order.35

He ordered Depas to pay a 50,000 livres tax, equal to the value of a siz-
able plantation. Lesser amounts were levied against other families and
individuals.
The governor predicted that his anti-Semitic measures would be chal-
lenged at court by the powerful Gradis family, and he was right. Versailles
was horrified at his orders and reversed them. The minister, Choiseul,
called d’Estaing “a fool, a dangerous one.”36
D’Estaing wanted to define these successful Sephardic colonists as
foreigners, but he took the opposite approach with the colony’s free peo-
ple of color. Because he hoped to build the martial, not commercial, spirit
of the colony, d’Estaing planned to recognize families of mixed Euro-
pean-African ancestry as “white,” to reward them for military service.
The governor was impressed with free colored enthusiasm and ability in
the ranks, but he also wanted to increase the number of officers’ commis-
sions available for French immigrants. He therefore proposed to exclude
men of color from leadership positions in their own units. Reasoning that
appropriate rewards would sweeten the sting of this reform, he envi-
sioned special medals and pensions for deserving men of color. These
awards would culminate in an official recognition of “whiteness” for the
greatest heroes of this class.
Although d’Estaing hoped to expand the hitherto informal definition
of “white” to include some families of acknowledged mixed ancestry, his
efforts inspired a new era of racism in Saint-Domingue. Colonists drew on
new biological theories published in Europe for their new, more rigidly
genealogical and “scientific” definition of racial difference, but at root
their efforts were prompted by anxiety about white society in Saint-
Domingue. The colonial elite hoped that the end of the war in 1763 would
begin the “rule of law,” and eliminate the private “arbitrary” power of
military officials like d’Estaing. These planters and merchants wanted
more commercial freedom and fewer wars in the Caribbean. They wel-
comed the new public buildings, promenades, fountains, and theaters the
government was planning for Saint-Domingue. The colony’s first perma-
nent printing press arrived from France in 1763, and officials began to
build new colonial roads and reform the postal service.37 According to
Moreau de Saint-Méry, “finally the light of civilization and politeness
appeared after the peace of 1763.”38 A planter wrote in the new colonial
newspaper in 1769: “… this colony now has something for every taste:
plays, concerts, libraries, sumptuous parties, where gaiety and wit wipe
away tiresome boredom. Buccaneers have given way to ballet-masters.”39
Yet this elite was keenly aware that Saint-Domingue was not France.
Commentators worried that the selfishness and hedonism of their fellow
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 323

colonists—fed by the sexual power masters had over slaves and encour-
aged by self-interested royal officials—would prevent the flowering of
this new French civilization. The many elite colonists who had read
Montesquieu’s chapters on tropical societies in Spirit of the Laws were
well aware of the connections he drew between climate, marriage cus-
toms, and political forms. For Montesquieu, despotism was a central fea-
ture of societies where the seraglio had replaced marriage. Spirit of the
Laws also warned that tyranny threatened when women ran free, unre-
stricted by male heads of household.40 Advocates of a new, virtuous
“civilized” community in Saint-Domingue saw both harems and harlots
when they described the sexual power that some women of color had
over white colonists, and the affection many fathers had for their illegit-
imate colonial children.41
By attempting to increase the power of the military and revise infor-
mal racial categories, d’Estaing inadvertently prompted the formation of
a new, self-consciously “white” patriotic identity in Saint-Domingue. His
attempts to make Saint-Domingue into a tropical Sparta were rejected by
the colony’s high councils, whose judges were born in the islands but
were keenly aware of how metropolitan judges were fighting the crown.
Versailles assigned a new governor to reestablish the militia, but this
man, the Prince de Rohan-Montbazon, called public assemblies that only
inflamed anti-militia sentiment. In 1769 royal troops and pro-militia
colonists had to suppress an anti-militia revolt in the southern peninsula
and in the hinterland of Port-au-Prince.42
This failed uprising only confirmed white elite suspicions about
“tyrannical” royal appointees. They proclaimed that true colonial patri-
otism was seen in commercial success, not martial virtue. In March 1779,
as five hundred men of color were enlisting to fight the British in North
America, the colonial newspaper ridiculed d’Estaing’s outmoded ideals:

To the honor of humanity, surely one will never again see a ferocious and bar-
barian mother send her son to his death with a dry eye, without emotion see
him again pale and bleeding and believe she owes this horrible sacrifice to the
fatherland.… These awful traits, so long admired by our fathers, are unnatu-
ral and make any respectable and sensitive soul tremble.43

These words were a message to d’Estaing, who was in the colony when
they were published, as commander of the North American expedition.
The paper urged “humane” colonists to donate their profits, not their
blood, to the French cause. It launched a subscription drive to purchase a
naval vessel as a gift for Louis XVI.44
In constructing a new white identity based not on culture, religion, or
class, but on the complete absence of African ancestry, Dominguan elites
combined misogynist anti-court rhetoric, partially inspired by Mon-
tesquieu, with the new racial science of Buffon and others to cut all per-
sons of any African descent out of respectable colonial society.45 In 1685
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324 | John D. Garrigus

the Code Noir had given ex-slaves and their offspring all the privileges of
French subjects. Though social and legal distinctions between whites and
gens de couleur had existed in the colony since the 1720s, a number of
established families of mixed descent were legally regarded as “white” up
to the middle of the century. Julien Raimond and other neighbors of the
Lopez Depas in Fond des Nègres and Aquin parishes were among this
number. After 1769, however, officials began to record African descent far
more carefully, separating “white” from “colored” families. The colonial
councils passed new laws restricting the public activities of these families
and other “ex-slaves.” Now all persons of any African descent—no mat-
ter how remote the ancestor, how wealthy the family, or how European
the lifestyle—were to be classed as freedmen or affranchis.
To further separate proper French families from these foreigners, in
1773 a new law directed free people of color to take an “African” name so
they would not be confused with “respectable” families. Michel Depas,
the free mulatto planter, formally asked the governor and intendant to be
exempted from this requirement, but on 5 June 1777 he officially became
Michel Medina, adopting another name prominent in the Sephardic net-
works to which his Lopez Depas brothers and cousins belonged.46
If the negative reaction to d’Estaing’s plan for racial integration
helped produce a more far-reaching racism toward people of color, the
governor’s anti-Semitic measures were followed by colonists’ greater
acceptance of Sephardim as French. This was in part because colonists
now looked to skin color rather than religious belief as the primary deter-
minant of social status, and also because these Jewish families seemed to
represent commercial rather than military virtues. Although Versailles
had granted Jews full citizenship in Bordeaux in 1723, members of this
group officially had no such rights in Saint-Domingue. As aubaines or for-
eign-born residents, Jews outside Bordeaux could not draft a valid testa-
ment.47 Even before the Seven Years’ War, however, Dominguan high
courts upheld Jewish wills.48 The failure of d’Estaing’s anti-Jewish tax of
1764 seemed to confirm colonial acceptance of Jewish citizenship. Into the
1770s, although Versailles warned against giving colonial Jews full legal
rights as a class, colonial judges repeatedly upheld Jewish testaments,
negating the most severe disability of aubaine status. In 1783 a new colo-
nial minister, the Maréchal de Castries, extended full civil rights to
Sephardim in Saint-Domingue’s rich north province. Here, where most
Jewish commerce fell within the bounds of legal trade and where the Jew-
ish population was the largest, Jews would have the same rights that they
enjoyed in Bordeaux.49 Though Suarez d’Almeyda was a name associated
with Jewish contraband traders along the southern coast, in Cap Français
Jean-Baptiste Suarez Dalmeïda served as royal attorney in the local court,
and then for the Cap Français council.50
Despite Castries’s reforms, the extent of Jewish rights remained unclear
outside the north province. In 1782, the death of the planter Philippe Depas
in Aquin parish raised the question of whether his daughter, who had
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 325

followed a family tradition by marrying one of her Gradis cousins in Bor-

deaux, could inherit colonial property.51 Courts validated the Depas tes-
tament, partly because of “the services this [Gradis] family has rendered
to the state.”52
Castries himself was probably behind this decision. Though he op-
posed contraband, the minister recognized its utility. During the War of
American Independence, he had opened all Dominguan ports to interna-
tional shipping, allowing merchants from Curaçao, especially, to supply
food during the British blockade.53 After the war, he permitted limited
international commerce along the entire southern coast of Saint-
Domingue and in six other French Caribbean ports.54 In 1781 Castries
even suggested that he might be open to redefining the racial, as well as
religious, restrictions on citizenship in Saint-Domingue.55
Wealthy colonial families of color responded enthusiastically to the
possibility of repealing the strict racial laws laid down after d’Estaing’s
governship. In 1782, elite members of the free population of color, from
families that had been mostly considered “white” before 1764, ap-
proached colonial administrators with a patriotic proposal that owed far
more to the example of their Jewish neighbors than to the martial admo-
nitions of d’Estaing. Julien Raimond asked to be allowed to solicit contri-
butions from free people of color for the colonial gift of a ship for Louis
XVI. Apparently following the recommendation of the colonial newspa-
per that “respectable and sensitive” souls sacrifice their fortunes, not their
lives, for France, Raimond collected over 900 livres for the monarch’s trib-
ute. The following year Raimond penned the first of four letters to the
ministry arguing that light-skinned men like him should be officially
reclassified as “new whites.”56 Though he did not explicitly refer to his
Dutch commercial contacts or Sephardic neighbors, Raimond made a case
for free colored citizenship that was strikingly similar to the situation in
Curaçao and among Jews in Saint-Domingue. In the Dutch entrepôt, with
its large Jewish and free colored populations and relatively open concep-
tion of citizenship, after 1769 prosperous light-skinned mixed families
had been allowed to serve with white militia units.57 In a similar way,
admiration for the utility of Jewish commerce in Saint-Domingue had
prompted elites to disregard metropolitan laws and recognize important
families like the Depas as de facto citizens, on a case-by-case basis.
In essence, Raimond was arguing that the same kinds of administra-
tive euphemisms that had been developed for wealthy foreigners in
France be applied to wealthy free men of color like himself. Colonial con-
demnations of mulatto immorality derided the “vice of their birth.” Rai-
mond did not mention it, but the same phrase was used to describe
foreigners in France, and royal letters of naturalization could easily erase
this obstacle.58 In the same way, Raimond did not remind the minister that
the ancestors of his neighbors the Lopez Depas had been Nouveaux Chre-
tiens in France before 1723, and Cristãos-novos in Portugal even earlier, but
he did ask that wealthy people of color be renamed nouveaux blancs.
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326 | John D. Garrigus

In 1784 the indigo planter and his wife moved to France. Raimond
met with Castries, who had been replaced as colonial minister, and peti-
tioned his successor to adopt the very limited reforms described above,
but little happened in this arena before 1789. Instead, full citizenship for
men like Raimond came in the early years of the French Revolution, at
about the same time as it did for the Gradises and other Bordeaux
Sephardim. Both groups used the debates about representation and
active versus passive citizenship in 1789 and 1790 to advance their cases.
An anonymous pamphleteer in Paris borrowed the language of Jewish
petitioners for civil rights when he argued that free men of color were rég-
nicoles, free-born Frenchmen.59 The colonists’ club of Bordeaux, whose
president was David Gradis, supported free colored demands for repre-
sentation in the National Assembly at the end of the summer of 1789,
even though the delegates would not recognize the active citizenship of
Bordeaux Jews until January 1790.60
The movement for Jewish citizenship provided even greater support
for free colored recognition in the person of Abbé Grégoire. Known in the
Assembly as “the protector of the Jews,” Grégoire knew little about
France’s colonies until he met Raimond in Paris in 1789. By early 1790 he
had become a noted voice in debates on this issue, and had adapted his
pro-Jewish arguments for the free colored cause as well.61 Though Rai-
mond himself never published any explicit comparisons between free
people of color and Jews, in his first pre-Revolutionary manuscript he
pointed out that prejudice kept wealthy men of color from even so minor
a post as parish sexton.62 Grégoire, who drew heavily on Raimond’s
papers for his own publications, noted in an 1789 manuscript in favor of
free colored citizenship that the wealthy Jewish doctor Depas had been a
member of the colony’s highest court and that his grandnephew had
served as sexton of the Aquin parish church.63 If the crown allowed Jews
such honors, why were mulatto planters excluded? The Abbé de Cour-
nand, another Parisian supporter of free colored citizenship, compared
the situation of free colonial people of color to that of Jews in Europe in a
1790 pamphlet deeply informed by Raimond.64
In May 1791, the National Assembly, spurred by the power of these
arguments, did extend civil rights to the wealthiest and oldest free fami-
lies of color in the French Caribbean. It was white colonial resistance to
even this limited reform that plunged Saint-Domingue into civil war,
which in turn helped produce the great slave uprising of August 1791.

* * * *

THE MANY SIMILARITIES between the pre-Revolutionary situation of Saint-

Domingue’s Sephardim and prominent free families of color are more
than coincidental. Simultaneously enriching France and themselves, Jew-
ish merchants and planters offered Versailles the best reason to replace
old corporate labels with new secular, individualistic categories in the
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 327

colonies. If French-born colonists like Michel Lopez Depas or his brother

Philippe were useful and loyal to France; why couldn’t they be French?
But this enlightened vision of civic community, while discounting old
religious classifications, installed new corporate groupings in their place.
Scientific theories about the superiority of European over African blood
reinforced a profitable system of plantation slave labor and required
increasing vigilance in free colonial society against persons of mixed
ancestry. After 1763 these “mulattos” could not be fully French, no mat-
ter their birthplace, religion, wealth, education, or civic service.
Contact between Sephardim and free families of color prospering
along a forgotten coast near the edges of the French, English, Dutch, and
Spanish empires revealed the contradiction between these two trends.
The money Julien Raimond earned selling indigo to merchants from
Curaçao helped him finance five years in Revolutionary Paris, disman-
tling colonial racism, but contact with Jewish colonists also helped Rai-
mond see how to argue for French citizenship. The support of the
Gradises and other Bordeaux Sephardim for free colored citizenship in
1789 and the conversion of Grégoire from advocate of Jewish integration
to supporter of French citizenship for free and enslaved people of color
further illustrate the connections between these political struggles.65
In the colonies, on the very edge of what was considered “France,”
Jews and people of mixed African and European descent tested and
helped explode the narrow definition of who might be a French citizen.
The heirs of their struggle discovered that the new ideas of race and iden-
tity were too difficult to reverse, especially when fused with the profits
generated by slavery. Rather than fight Europe endlessly over who could
be French, in 1804 these revolutionaries created Haiti, a new American
nation with a racial identity all its own.

Notes

1. I use quotation marks around “mulatto” and other racial terms for two reasons. First,
contemporaries applied the term to the entire free population of color, though some of
these people were of full African descent and many others were, technically, some mix-
ture of African and European other than “mulatto.” Secondly, I use quotation marks
because this chapter is about the social construction of these racial terms. Until recently,
historians of Saint-Domingue have treated racial categories as objective descriptors,
ascribing the dramatic increase in the colony’s free colored population on the eve of the
French Revolution to demographic factors or to increasing manumissions, rather than
to new definitions of the line between “white” and “colored.” See, for example, Jean
Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale des origines à 1914 (Paris, 1991), 165.
2. Jeffrey Merrick, “Conscience and Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eigh-
teenth-Century Studies 21 (1987):48–70; Gary Kates, “Jews into Frenchmen: Nationality
and Representation in Revolutionary France,” Social Research 56 (spring 1989):223, 232.
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328 | John D. Garrigus

3. Peter Sahlins, “Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners,

1685–1787,” Representations 47 (summer 1994):85–110.
4. John D. Garrigus, “‘Sons of the Same Father’: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in Saint-
Domingue, 1760–1792,” Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Christine
Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham (University Park, 1997), 137–53. The rise
of racism in 1760s France is treated in Pierre Boulle, “In Defense of Slavery: Eigh-
teenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of Racist Ideology in France,”
History from Below, ed. Frederick Krantz (Oxford, 1988), 219–46, and, most notably, in
Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in
the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 1997), which are important additions to the earlier survey
of the topic by William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans 1530–1880 (Bloom-
ington, 1980).
5. Méderic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile,
politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint Domingue (Paris, 1984), 1196.
Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolu-
tionary and Napoleonic France (University, Ala., 1978), 10, reports that in Bordeaux a
number of Jews converted to Catholicism in order to practice medicine.
6. Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et juifs aux XVIIIe siècle: Le racisme au siècle des lumières (Paris,
1984), 102, 109.
7. Charles Frostin, “Les Pontchartrain et la pénétration commercial française en
Amérique espagnole,” Revue historique (April–June 1971):307–36.
8. Pierre de Vassière, Saint Domingue (1629–1789): La société et la vie créole sous l’ancien
régime (Paris, 1909), 40–41, notes 2 and 4, 43–44, note 2; Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau
voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (Fort-de-France, 1972), 114–15.
9. On Jews in the Caracas cacao trade, see Celestino Andres Arauz Monfante, El contra-
bando holandes en el Caribe durante la primera mitad del siglo XVIII , vol. 1 (1984), 47–59.
Curaçaoan smuggling of cacao and other commodities from French and Spanish terri-
tories began in earnest during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–13), according to
Cornelis Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Assen,
1985), 190, 196, 225. Goslinga, 106, 196, 202, reports that the increase in Curaçao’s eigh-
teenth-century smuggling trade coincided with the growth of the Sephardic Jewish
population at Willemstad.
10. Gregorio de Robles, America a fines del siglo xvii: Noticia de los lugares de contrabando (Val-
ladolid, 1980), 32–36. On the disastrous cacao fungus and the series of insect plagues
that blighted the early agricultural promise of Fond des Nègres, see Pierre François
Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l’isle espagnole ou de S. Domingue; écrite particulièrement
sur les mémoires manuscrits de P. Jean-Baptiste le Pers, vol. 2 (Paris, 1730–1731), 360, 390
and Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1197–99.
11. Chocolate-making was a specialty trade of Sephardic Jews in Bordeaux and Bayonne;
Jean Cavignac, Les israélites bordelais de 1780 à 1850: Autour de l’émancipation (Paris,
1991), 154.
12. Paul Butel, Les négociants bordelais: l’Europe et les îles au xviii siècle (Paris, 1974), 317;
Richard Menkis, “The Gradis Family of Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux: A Social and
Economic Study,” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1988), 104–5.
13. Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 58.
14. Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, 14; Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 156; Jean Tarrade,
Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’ancien régime: L’évolution du régime de ‘l’Ex-
clusif’ de 1763–1789 (Paris, 1972), 309, 475; Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on
the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times (Jerusalem, 1991), 255.
15. Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 93–94, 102; Zvi Loker, “Were There Jewish Communities in
Saint Domingue (Haiti)?” Jewish Social Studies 45 (1983); Zvi Loker, “Docteur Michel
Lopez de Paz: médecin et savant de Saint-Domingue,” Revue d’histoire de la médecine
hébraïque 33, no. 134 (1980):55–57.
16. These close connections with the family in Bordeaux do not provide strong evidence
about Michel Lopez Depas’s religion. In 1763 one of his nieces in Bordeaux was a nun
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 329

in a convent where another family member was a pensioner. Nevertheless, they still
received property in testaments of Jewish family members; Butel, Négociants bordelais,
337; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1196, 1236, 1251, 1518, 1519; Pierre Pluchon,
Nègres et juifs, 59; one of Michel Lopez Depas’s nieces married into the Gradis family
and another into the Mendès family at Bordeaux. Register 430 of the notary Daudin de
Belair, 3 June 1762, vente, French National Archives, Overseas Section (henceforth
ANSOM); register 431 of the notary Daudin de Belair, 16 January 1764, affranchisse-
ment, ANSOM. In Bordeaux in 1753 Henriette Lopès Depas married David Da Silva of
Amsterdam; Louis Lopès Depas was married to Ricka Gradis. Butel, Négociants borde-
lais, 336–37.
17. Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles
(Cincinnati, 1970), 828–30, 964–66; register 102 of the notary Belin Duressort, 15
November 1768, procuration, ANSOM; Zvi Locker [sic], “Une famille juive au Cap:
Membres de la famille Depas (ou de Paz) à St-Domingue,” Conjonction: Revue franco-
haïtienne, no. 133 (1977), 130, note 4, found a “Depas” and several “Lopez Depaz” in
Martinique. He describes a “de Pas” tombstone in a cemetery in Spanish Town,
Jamaica, citing Caribbean Quarterly 3 (1967):56.
18. Loker, “Were There Jewish Communities?” 138; register 360 of the notary Casamajor,
3 December 1754, vente, ANSOM; register 430 of the notary Daudin de Belair, [il-
legible] February 1763, vente, ANSOM; the median price for the sale of rural land in
the Saint Louis quartier of which Aquin formed a part was 6,750 livres in the period
1760–69. The average price was 23,846 livres. There were a number of other Jewish
families in the southern peninsula, especially by the 1780s. In 1787 in Aquin, for
example, the trader David Daguilar of Bayonne married Rachel “Pinet” of Amster-
dam, whose father Raphael “Pina” was also a merchant at Aquin. Their guests
included Antoine Robert Suarès Dalmeida, Jacob Castro, Fernandes ainé, Elias and
Fonseco; register 1594 of the notary Scovaud, 25 September 1787, marriage, ANSOM;
Jean Cavignac, Les israélites bordelais, 123, shows a Jacob Dalmeyda in Bordeaux iden-
tifying himself as a “merchant in Tiburon,” in Torbec parish, farther down the coast.
In Anse à Veau on the northern coast of the peninsula, a member of the Astruc fam-
ily, of Avignon and Bordeaux, was militia commander in 1785. Register 745 of the
notary Gaudin, 24 November 1787, marriage, ANSOM; register 743 of the notary
Gaudin, 5 September 1785, marriage, ANSOM; Cavignac, Les israélites bordelais,
170–71, 271.
19. Though many free people of color were illegitimate, “intermarriage” is not just a
euphemism. Jacques Houdaille, “Trois paroisses de Saint-Domingue au 18Ie siècle,”
Population 18 (1963):93–110, uses church registers from the neighboring parishes of
Jacmel, Cayes de Jacmel, and Fond des Nègres. He finds that 17 percent of all recorded
church marriages there before 1730 were between whites and people of color. Further-
more, these numbers remained fairly consistent after this date: 8 percent in the 1730s,
17 percent in the 1740s, 17 percent again in the 1750s, 20 percent in the 1760s, 13 per-
cent in the 1770s and 17 percent again in the 1780s.
20. In Garrigus, “Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored
Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue,” Americas 50 (1993):251, I mistakenly
described Michel Depas as the nephew of Michel Lopez Depas and the son of Philippe
Lopez Depas. Although Philippe did have several free children of color, the papers left
by the younger Michel Depas at his death indicate that this man of color had done much
business with “M. Michel Depas his father” and owed his estate nearly 3,000 livres in
1760. Register 1451 of the notary Paillou, 15 October 1783, inventaire, ANSOM.
21. Mordechai Arbell, “Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean,” in
this volume, above, cites Abraham Cahen, “Les juifs dans les colonies françaises au 18I
siècle” Revue des études juives 4 (1882):141.
22. Menkis, “The Gradis Family,” 110, 174.
23. This was Governor Charles d’Estaing, whose contempt for Depas and Jews in general
is noted below.
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330 | John D. Garrigus

24. Register 1451 of the notary Paillou, 15 October 1783, inventaire, ANSOM.
25. Their three marriage contracts assembled property worth 143,200, 61,372 and 60,838
livres, while the white daughter of an indigo planter had a dowry of 93,700 livres and
a royal attorney in the same region had 70,000 livres in property at marriage. Regis-
ter 1415 of the notary Monneront, 14 January 1789, marriage, ANSOM; register 1452
of the notary Paillou, 10 January 1785, marriage, ANSOM; register 1452 of the notary
Paillou, 11 April 1785, marriage, ANSOM; register 739 of the notary Gaudin, 15 Octo-
ber 1782, marriage, ANSOM; register 1588 of the notary Scovaud, 16 January 1781,
marriage, ANSOM.
The wealth of this strata of the free colored elite was comparable to that of Bor-
deaux’s wholesale merchants (négociants). Paul Butel found that nearly half the mar-
riage contracts in this French commercial milieu in the years 1787–89 listed property
that would have been worth between 17,600 and 68,267 livres in the colonies. Butel,
Négociants bordelais, 294.
26. Nevertheless, at least a few other families were. Like the Lopez Depas of Aquin, the
Pinet and Dulièpvre of Torbec parish had both “white” and “colored” branches and
close relations with other prominent free colored families at Torbec. See register 1587
of the notary Scovaud, 30 October 1780, marriage, ANSOM; register 1588 of the notary
Scovaud, 7 May 1781, marriage, ANSOM.
27. Register 1452 of the notary Paillou, 5 April 1785, dépôt des papiers, ANSOM.
28. In 1780 one Louis Daguilard was collecting bills for a French ship in Aquin; register
1587 of the notary Scovaud, 19 November 1780, ANSOM. That same year, however, he
bought a schooner (goelette) from a Curaçao captain in the harbor at Les Cayes and
resold it to wholesale merchants in the same town. Daguilard was the attorney for the
widow of Philippe Lopez Depas and her son-in-law Jacob Gradis in Aquin. Register
1403 of the notary Monneront, 10 October 1781, procuration, ANSOM.
29. Sahlins, “Fictions,” 102.
30. Merrick, “Conscience and Citizenship,” 69–70.
31. Sahlins, “Fictions,” 86–95.
32. Silvia Marzagalli, “Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants in Eighteenth-Century
France: The Case of Bordeaux,” in this volume, above. The treatment of Bordeaux’s
Jews was not a simple question of “progress” toward citizenship, however. Louis XVI
refused to expand the territory in France in which Bordeaux Jews could enjoy full
rights, and in the 1780s there was new intolerance and expropriations against Jews.
Sahlins, “Fictions,” 99.
33. André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789 (Bloomington, 1979), 103. In
1791 d’Estaing published a neoclassical tragedy in verse entitled Les thermopyles,
according to Alexander Lawrence, Storm over Savannah: The Story of Count d’Estaing and
the Siege of the Town in 1779 (Athens, Ga., 1951), 13.
34. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 227, cites Col. C9A120, Archives Nationales, d’Estaing’s
“Nottes sur les Juifs de St. Louis, et des Cayes qui ont offert par requêtes et pour être
tolérés de contribuer au bien publique”; Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 91, 105–6.
35. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 230, cites Col. C9A 120, Archives Nationales.
36. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 227; Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 96.
37. See James E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Bal-
timore, 1992), 44, 80, 82, 94, 99.
38. Col. F376, 151, Archives Nationales.
39. Jean Fouchard, Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue: Notes sur sa vie sociale, littéraire et artistique
(Port-au-Prince, 1955), 53.
40. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, New
York, 1988), 36: cites Spirit of the Laws, Book 7, Chapter 9. On the degree to which Mon-
tesquieu’s writings were invoked by d’Estaing’s opponents, see the unsigned, “Reflex-
ions sur la position actuelle de Saint-Domingue,” in Col. F3192, Archives Nationales.
In 1776 Hilliard d’Auberteuil attempted to supply “what is lacking from the perfection
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New Christians/“New Whites” | 331

of Montesquieu’s immortal book” in his controversial Considérations sur l’état présent de

la colonie française de Saint Domingue, vol. 1 (Paris, 1776), 18–19.
41. On the combination of sexual and political imagery in colonial writings about race, see
Garrigus, “Sons of the Same Father,” 137–53.
42. See Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVII et XVIIIe siècles
(Paris, 1975).
43. Affiches Américaines, Tuesday, 30 March 1779 no 13; Bibliothèque Nationale 4, lc 12
20/22.
44. Garrigus, “Catalyst or Catastrophe? Saint-Domingue’s Free Men of Color and the Bat-
tle of Savannah, 1779–1782,” Revista/Review Interamericana 22 (1/2) (1992):116.
45. See Garrigus, “Sons of the Same Father,” for more on this theme.
46. Register 1451 of the notary Paillou, 15 October 1783, inventaire, ANSOM. The Medinas
were prominent in Bordeaux and in Curaçao. Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 59; Isaac S. and
Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati, 1970),
691, 695, 697, 700, 1034. Some of the new laws against people of color can be found in
Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françaises de l’Amérique sous le
vent (Paris, 1785–1790):4:225, 229, 342, 412, 466, 495; 5:384–85, 823; Col. F3243, p341,
Archives Nationales; Col. F3273, 119, Archives Nationales; Col. F391, 115, Archives
Nationales; Col. F3189, decree of 2 June 1780, Archives Nationales.
47. Pierre Pluchon, Histoire de la colonisation française: Le premier empire colonial (Paris,
1991), 106.
48. In 1751, the Léogane council, the colonial equivalent of a French parlement, ordered that
the property of David Cardoze be returned to his brother and heir, Emmanuel Cardoze
of Bordeaux. In 1759 the council of Port-au-Prince quashed a judicial order against the
estate of Moïse Aguilard, and its decision was upheld by the council of Cap Français.
Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 110–11.
49. Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 113–15.
50. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 373, notes that Jean-Baptiste Suarez d’Almeïda
gave a six foot by four foot portrait of Louis XVI to hang in the hall of the local court.
Antoine Robert Suarés Dalmeida was at the marriage of David Daguilar and Rachel
Pina in Aquin in 1787. Register 1594 of the notary Scovaud, 25 September 1787, mar-
riage, ANSOM.
51. In addition to their political, kin, and commercial connections in Saint-Domingue, the
Gradises had already acquired considerable colonial property by collecting on
planters’ bad debts. This meant that the inheritance problem had already risen once.
In 1752 Esther Gradis, married to a Bordeaux gentile, had contested the will of her
brother Abraham. She argued that since Jews had no legal status in the French Antilles
they could not transfer colonial property in such a document. A colonial court upheld
Abraham’s Gradis’s testament, nevertheless. Pluchon, Nègres et juifs, 111; Menkis, “The
Gradis Family,” 157; Debbasch, “Privilège réal ou privilège personnel? Le statut des
‘Juifs portugais’ aux îles” in Religion, société et politique: Mélanges en hommage à Jacques
Ellul (Paris, 1983), 217.
52. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 238–39.
53. Charles Frostin, “Saint-Domingue et la révolution américaine,” Bulletin de la société
d’histoire de la Guadeloupe 22 (1974):101–2.
54. Pluchon, Histoire, 754; Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’ancien
régime: L’évolution du régime de ‘l’Exclusif’ de 1763–1789, vol. 2 (Paris, 1972):629.
55. Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre esclavagiste
(Paris, 1967), 126; Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical
Interpretation (Cambridge, 1994), 125–27.
56. Col. F391, 177–95, Archives Nationales.
57. Wim Klooster, “Subordinate but Proud: Curaçao’s Free Blacks and Mulattos in the Eigh-
teenth Century,” New West Indian Guide/Niewe West-Indische Gids 68 (3/4) (1994):294.
58. Sahlins, “Fictions,” 86–87.
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332 | John D. Garrigus

59. “Précis des gémissemens des sang-mêlés dans les colonies françaises. Par J.M.C.
Américain, Sang-mêlé” (Paris, 1789).
60. Gabriel Debien, “Gens de couleur libres et colons de Saint-Domingue devant la con-
stituante, 1789–Mars 1790,” Notes d’histoire coloniale 18 (Montréal, 1951):26.
61. David Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the Con-
stituent Assembly,” American Historical Review 94 (1989):1290–308. A comparison of
Grégoire’s arguments for Jewish and free colored citizenship is not possible here, but
his similar use of gender imagery and other tropes in both causes is striking. See Jean
Tild, L’Abbé Grégoire, d’après ses mémoires (Paris, 1946), 21; Pluchon, Nègres et juifs,
82–87; and Grégoire’s free colored writings, for example: Henri Grégoire, “Mémoire en
faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mêlés de St.-Domingue, et des autres Isles
françoises de l’Amérique, adressé à l’Assemblée Nationale. Par M. Grégoire, curé
d’Embermenil, Député de Lorraine” (Paris, 1789).
62. Col. F391, 183, Archives Nationales.
63. Loker, “Dr. Michel Lopez Depas,” cites Séries AD VII “Inventaire des pièces
non-imprimées déposées au Comité Colonial de l’Assemblée Générale, liasse A, dossier
2, page 49, note 6, Archives Nationales.
64. Abbé de Cournand, “Requête présentée à nosseigneurs de l’assemblée nationale en
faveur des gens de couleur de l’île de Saint Domingue” (Paris, 1790).
65. These connections continued in the Haitian revolution. Free people of color in the
southern peninsula were sustained in their struggle against whites in 1792, as in ear-
lier wars, by smugglers from Curaçao. In 1797, Julien Raimond, by then a prominent
figure in the government of Toussaint Louverture, chose Philippe Depas the younger,
presumably the son of his neighbor, as one of four men “worthy of confidence” in the
southern peninsula, including him on a list with his own brother, another close free
mulatto friend, and a respected white moderate. He described Depas as a “white
colonist, respected for his knowledge and his character.” Julien Raimond, Rapport de
Julien Raimond, commissaire délégué par le gouvernement français aux Isles-sous-le-vent, au
Ministre de la Marine (Cap Français, an V), 6. In 1799 the failed attempt of the Sephardic
merchant Isaac Sasportas to raise black and free colored rebels in Curaçao and then
Jamaica for Toussaint Louverture again shows the use of Jewish commercial connec-
tions during the revolution. Zvi Loker, “An Eighteenth-Century Plan to Invade
Jamaica: Isaac Yeshuron Sasportas, French Patriot or Jewish Radical Idealist?” Transac-
tions, Jewish Historical Society of England 28 (1984):132–44.
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PART V

BLOSSOMING IN ANOTHER WORLD:

THE JEWS AND THE JEWISH
COMMUNITIES IN DUTCH AMERICA
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– Chapter 17 –

THE JEWS OF DUTCH AMERICA

Jonathan I. Israel

T HE FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY undoubtedly represents

the most flourishing period of Dutch America in practically every
respect and also the most flourishing phase by far of the Jewish commu-
nities in Dutch America. At that time, the Sephardic congregations of
Curaçao and Suriname were the largest and commercially most impor-
tant Jewish communities to be found anywhere in the Western Hemi-
sphere, and it was during the eighteenth century that the Jews of the
Dutch American colonies exerted their greatest impact on the economic,
political, and cultural life of the New World as a whole.
The two principal Jewish communities in the Dutch American
colonies were, as has often been remarked, very different in character.
Curaçao, the larger and more prosperous of the two, was essentially a
maritime commercial and financial center with links all over the
Caribbean and South and North America, as well as with Amsterdam
and the rest of the United Provinces. It could, with some justification, be
called the “Amsterdam of the Caribbean.” As a consequence of its geo-
graphical position and economic role, Curaçao Jewry always main-
tained close religious, social, and cultural ties—to an extent and in ways
that the Jews of Suriname and the small communities of western
Guyana could not—with all the other Jewish communities of the
Caribbean and North America, in the latter case principally New York
and Rhode Island. Whereas Suriname had little direct contact with the
Jewish communities in the Americas outside the Guyanas, except for
Curaçao, Curaçao was the hub around which the communities on St.
Eustatius, St. Maarten, and, to an extent, all the other Jewish communi-
ties in the New World revolved.
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336 | Jonathan I. Israel

Suriname Jewry, by contrast, together with the small communities in

western Guyana, was in the main, until the 1760s, a plantation society.
The bulk of its members were planters (or belonged to the families of
planters, or those who worked for, or with, the planters) engaged in trop-
ical agriculture. From the origins of Suriname Jewry in the middle of the
seventeenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century, the
Suriname plantations were overwhelmingly geared toward production
of sugar cane. Later, coffee also developed into a major cash crop. During
the second half of the eighteenth century, however, Suriname’s plantation
economy—most of all, the Jewish sector of it—rapidly declined. Whereas
in 1730 Jews still owned 115 out of 440 sugar and coffee plantations in
Suriname, by 1788 this figure had dropped to only forty-six.1 Two sub-
stantial synagogues were to be seen in Suriname: one, built in 1685, was
inland, among the plantations, situated on the Suriname River; the other,
of considerably later construction (1735), was on the coast, in the port of
Paramaribo.2 An exceptionally grand occasion in the history of Suriname
Jewry occurred in 1785 at the time of the celebrations to mark the cente-
nary of the inauguration of the synagogue of Jodensavanne, as the inland
synagogue and the Jewish village around it were called. The governor of
the colony and other colonial dignitaries attended, as did all the leading
figures of the Jewish community of Paramaribo. It was a glittering event:
the magnificent banquet offered to the guests was illuminated by over a
thousand Chinese lanterns. But it was also a deeply melancholy event, for
by that time only a handful of Jews, some twenty impoverished families,
still resided at Jodensavanne.3 The Jewish planter elite and their society
had virtually disintegrated. The great bulk of Suriname Jewry had drifted
to Paramaribo and had been transformed into a maritime trading com-
munity. If, by 1791, the total population of Paramaribo was estimated at
nearly 13,000, no fewer than 1,050 of these were Jews (620 Sephardim and
430 Ashkenazim).4 Besides these, there were only another 200 or so Jews,
mostly Sephardim, scattered among the plantations and at Jodensavanne.
Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, Curaçao and Suriname Jewry,
formerly each so different from the other, had come to resemble each
other: both dwelt in sizable harbor towns economically and culturally
tied to commerce, shipping, and the sea.
Meanwhile, at Curaçao, the synagogue Mikveh Israel, which had
been constructed in the years 1730–32 to replace an earlier, smaller struc-
ture, was both the largest synagogue in the Dutch American colonies and
the largest to be found in the Western Hemisphere. It remains today one
of the prime tourist sites of the Caribbean in the midst of a well-preserved
Dutch colonial town, which retains much of its eighteenth-century char-
acter and profile. Curaçao can indeed be said to have been the “mother”
community of the Jewish Caribbean ever since the 1660s.5
In 1702, there were 126 Jewish families (the great majority Sephardic)
living on Curaçao, totaling together with a number of widows and other
single people over 600 souls, a figure that, by 1789, had risen to over
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Jews of Dutch America | 337

1,500.6 Of these, 1,495 were reported as living in the island’s main town,
Willemstad, with just two or three dozen living on the island’s estates and
on the neighboring island of Aruba. Meanwhile, what was originally a
small Sephardi community—in 1722 there were only 21 Jews out of a total
population of 204—on the island of St. Eustatius, little more than a large
rock in the sea near Puerto Rico, grew into an extremely vigorous trading
community of middling size by the third quarter of the century.7 The orig-
inal synagogue of St. Eustatius was built in the years 1737–38. After this
structure was demolished by a hurricane, a second and larger synagogue
was constructed in 1772.
Compared with all the other Jewish communities in the New World,
the commercial and cultural connections of the Jews of Curaçao and St.
Eustatius were exceptionally extensive and widespread. While commerce
and the sea were fundamental to all the Jewish and Portuguese New
Christian congregations in the New World, Edmund Burke’s remark in
reference to the Jews of St. Eustatius, which describes them as the “links
of communication in the mercantile chain,” applies more comprehen-
sively and impressively to these two communities than to any others.8 It
is true that the Jewish communities of Barbados and Jamaica in the eigh-
teenth century were relatively large: that of Barbados has been estimated
at over four hundred by 1750,9 and that of Jamaica at around nine hun-
dred by 1770. But, in large part, this was due to both islands being major
plantation economies with much larger total populations than Curaçao or
St. Eustatius and to the fact that Jews played a significant role in retailing.
With regard to Jewish involvement in inter-American trade, however, nei-
ther of their Jewish communities can be said to have rivaled Curaçao or
St. Eustatius in the mid-eighteenth century.
There were continual shifts in the pattern of Curaçao’s inter-Ameri-
can commerce, and the table, which appears at the end of this chapter, list-
ing fifty-nine ships arriving at Curaçao during the six-month period from
July to December 1714 probably overstates the intensity for the eighteenth
century as a whole of the island’s links with the North American colonies,
and certainly underestimates the intensity of Curaçao’s links with La
Guaira and other ports of central Venezuela, near Caracas. What is
entirely typical is Curaçao’s unique role as a bridge between Spanish
America, English America, and French America, as well as with the Dan-
ish island of St. Thomas, and its function as a conduit linking all these
with the Dutch global maritime trading system centered in Amsterdam.10
The largest category of vessels arriving in the port of Willemstad in the
second half of 1714 had sailed via St. Thomas, an island in the northern
Caribbean near Puerto Rico which though officially Danish had a commu-
nity of planters and merchants most of whom were Dutch and which, with
the liberal trading policy upheld by the Danish crown, functioned, for all
practical purposes, as part of the Dutch New World maritime trading sys-
tem.11 As always in Curaçao’s maritime history, numerous vessels arrived
from Venezuela and other parts of Spanish America, particularly Hispaniola
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338 | Jonathan I. Israel

and Puerto Rico. At the same time, many ships arrived from the English
colonies. Curaçao’s thriving commerce with North America, illegal in the
eyes of the British crown and Parliament, was in no small measure an
extension of the trade with Spanish America, which, since being opened
up in the 1660s, was the foundation of the island’s prosperity. The traffic
to the Venezuela coast and Spanish islands was conducted in small ves-
sels—sloops and barques—since the northern coast of Spanish South
America had very few harbors that were safe for larger vessels and, from
these, foreign vessels were largely excluded by the Spanish crown. At the
height of its prosperity, Curaçao had a fleet of some eighty barques and
sloops, a considerable proportion owned by Jews.12 On the outward voy-
age to Venezuelan ports, these barques carried textiles and other manu-
factured goods shipped out from Amsterdam, as well as slaves. On their
return to Willemstad they brought a constant stream of silver, dyewoods,
cacao, and high-quality tobaccos. But to service Curaçao’s large traffic, fit
out the ships, and feed the island’s population, garrison and seamen—the
island then as now was rather barren, had few trees and low rainfall—large
quantities of provisions and ships’ stores were needed. These supplies
were often obtained from New York, which retained its predominantly
Dutch character at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, and
also from Boston, Rhode Island, and Virginia. In exchange for these sup-
plies, the North American colonists—illegally in British eyes—imported
Dutch manufactures and East India commodities.
The importance of Venezuela in the Dutch Atlantic trading system as
a whole derived partly from its large output of cacao and the good qual-
ity of its tobaccos, and partly also from its trade with other parts of Span-
ish South America, which generated a constant flow of silver along the
Andean passes to Caracas. A valuable part of Curaçao’s traffic with the
mainland involved the western Venezuelan ports of Coro, Rio de la
Hacha, and Maracaibo which stood opposite the entrance to the main
passes running southwest between the two principal spines of the
Andean sierra all the way to Popayán, Quito, and the viceroyalty of
Peru.13 In this way, Curaçao also formed a commercial link between the
Spanish American Pacific and the Atlantic.
It was in order to tap into this thriving transit traffic along the north
coast of South America and to purchase cacao that Dutch and Dutch Jew-
ish colonists established the settlement at Tucacas, facing Aruba, on the
northwest coast of the peninsula of Paraguana, in western Venezuela, in
or around 1693.14 Despite several attacks by Spanish troops and Indians
sent from Coro, the Jewish community at Tucacas maintained its exis-
tence and a substantial trade at least until well into the 1720s. The local-
ity was inaccessible yet close to major trade routes. The merchandise was
mostly stored in warehouses on a small offshore island, which on at least
one occasion was successfully defended by fire from four armed Dutch
vessels. Reportedly, most of the Jews’ houses and a small synagogue were
located on the mainland.
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Jews of Dutch America | 339

Of course, the merchants on Curaçao and St. Eustatius, or at Para-

maribo, St. Thomas, or for that matter, Tucacas, were by no means all Jew-
ish—far from it. On Curaçao, as in Jamaica and Barbados, there were
groups of wealthy and influential Protestant merchants who had no par-
ticular liking for the Jews and, on occasion, sought to use political and
legal means to prejudice or obstruct Jewish involvement in trade. Analy-
sis of Curaçao’s trade with Amsterdam in the early eighteenth century
shows that a majority of the merchants participating in importing and
exporting from, and to, the United Provinces—booking space on the large
West India Company vessels used to carry much of the traffic—were in
fact Sephardic Jews. Nevertheless, the largest and wealthiest participants
in the commerce were Dutch Protestants and several German Luther-
ans.15 Overall, it would seem that the Jews accounted for considerably
less than half of the total traffic between Amsterdam and the Caribbean,
but their role was, even so, very substantial. When the marine insurance
consortium, or society of underwriters, maintained by the Curaçao mer-
chants was reorganized in 1759, Jews owned 123—slightly under one-
third—of the total of four hundred shares.16 It is probable that this sort of
proportion, roughly one-third, characterizes the Jewish role in Curaçao’s
trade as a whole.
The fact that the largest and most flourishing Jewish communities in
the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were those in the
Dutch colonies might well appear, at first glance, to be a direct result of the
fact that in the seventeenth century the Dutch Republic was—and enjoyed
the reputation of being—the most tolerant of European societies. If the
Jews in Curaçao, Suriname, western Guyana, St. Eustatius, and New York
possessed a greater degree of economic, legal, and religious freedom than
Jews did in other parts of the Americas, one might well suppose that it is
the Dutch context in Europe that explains this. And yet it is arguable that
the relative tolerance of the United Provinces compared to other European
societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not a sufficient
explanation of why the Jewish communities in Dutch America presided
over Jewish life in the New World until the end of the eighteenth century
to the extent that they did. In the first place, the Dutch colonial context was
often noticeably less tolerant in religious matters than was society in the
Dutch homeland itself, especially as compared to the province of Holland.
This is evident not only in the example of the territories under the rule of
the Dutch East India Company (VOC), including Dutch South Africa,
which was notoriously intolerant until the beginning of the nineteenth
century,17 but also in the social context established in New Netherland,
which until the late 1650s was likewise characterized more by Calvinist
intolerance than by any tendency to promote religious and social free-
dom.18 In the second place, it is undeniable that after the Glorious Revolu-
tion of 1688–91, society in Britain and the British colonies in the Americas
was at least as flexible and accommodating toward religious dissenters
and minorities as the Dutch Republic, and arguably more so.
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340 | Jonathan I. Israel

Nevertheless, it is as true of the eighteenth century as it is of the sev-

enteenth that Jews in the English colonies in the New World did not play
as large a part in inter-American commerce and navigation, and were not
as prominent in the trade between the motherland and the Western
Hemisphere, as were the Jews of the Dutch American colonies. The most
important reason for this striking difference, in my view, lies not in any
European factor but rather in the psychological, cultural, and economic
consequences of the relatively brief, but profound, Jewish experience in
Brazil.19 The crucial difference between the Jewish trading communities
in the English and Dutch colonies is that the latter were much more suc-
cessful in establishing enduring links with the markets of Ibero-America.
This success seemingly had its origins in the strategy adopted by the
Dutch early in the seventeenth century in Brazil. After its formation in the
years 1621–22, the Dutch West India Company selected as its chief objec-
tive in the Americas, and concentrated most of its resources on, the
attempt to wrest control of Brazil’s sugar production—and with it the
entire European market for sugar—from the Portuguese. This strategy,
rather than that of capturing islands in the Caribbean to use as trading
bases or of colonizing tracts of land in North America, required the West
India Company to rely to a quite unprecedented extent on Sephardic
Jews as intermediaries and adjuncts to support its trade.
As a newly created organization, the West India Company could not
embark on a vast and complex enterprise in Brazil without drawing on
skills, expertise, information, and resources acquired previously by oth-
ers. Ever since the 1590s, Amsterdam and its sugar refineries had been
importing growing quantities of Brazilian sugar indirectly, via Lisbon
and Oporto, by means of a commercial network largely dominated by
Portuguese New Christians collaborating with relatives who had
returned to normative Judaism in Amsterdam and Hamburg.20 A set of
links had been created connecting the Jewish community in Amster-
dam—whose business life in the early decades of its existence was chiefly
geared to the importing of Brazilian produce—with closely related New
Christian merchant communities in metropolitan Portugal and in Brazil,
as well as other parts of the Portuguese empire, including the Azores and
Madeira, which frequently figured in the maritime interactions between
Portugal and Brazil. Moreover, though most cargoes of Brazilian produce
reaching the Jews of Amsterdam before 1621 came indirectly, via Lisbon
and Oporto, having crossed the Atlantic in Portuguese ships, there is no
doubt that a certain proportion of consignments were shipped directly
from Brazil to Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam and also Hamburg.
Significantly, one of the earliest documents that has survived con-
cerning the direct passage of ships returning from the New World to the
Netherlands expressly states that it is “true that on a number of occa-
sions various ships sailing from Brazil and thereabouts, and having
loaded there with sugar and brazilwood, have arrived here by-passing
Portugal.”21 In July 1603, one of the leading Portuguese merchants in
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Jews of Dutch America | 341

Amsterdam at that time, Manoel Rodrigues Vega, indicated the name of

his factor residing at Bahia in Brazil, Dias Querido, mentioning that he
had sent him cargoes of knives and haberdashery. Several of the Jews
who settled in Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century had in fact
lived in Brazil, under Portuguese rule. One of these men, Diogo Dias
Querido, whose name in the synagogue was David Querido—probably
the same person who had been Rodrigues Vega’s correspondent in Bahia,
Dias Querido, who is known to have lived for several years in Brazil and
who was a native of Oporto—became a substantial merchant in Amster-
dam. In 1604 this Diogo Dias Querido had 1,900 guilders invested in the
Dutch East India Company, and in 1611 he was named in a debate in the
Consejo de estado, the highest-ranking council of the Spanish monarchy,
as one of the principal Dutch interlopers in the Guinea trade. Dias
Querido imported sugar to Holland from both Brazil and the West
African colony of São Tomé, usually via Lisbon from where he also
shipped sugar to Livorno and Venice.22
During the early 1630s, the West India Company captured sizable
portions of northern Brazil, invested heavily in forts and garrisons to
defend its Brazilian conquests, and found itself under intense pressure
from investors to develop its newly acquired but half-ruined colony as
rapidly as possible. Many of the sugar plantations had been destroyed in
the fighting, and it was probably impossible to restore the colony’s earlier
profitability and prosperity without encouraging the existing Portuguese
planters to reinvest in their plantations and sugar mills and to buy fresh
slaves and equipment. Such a strategy would have required the West
India Company to advance supplies, equipment, slaves, and money on
credit, which the Company, with its huge expenditures on military and
naval armaments, its ten thousand employees, and its rapidly mounting
debts, was in no position to do.23 There was in fact no alternative but to
permit and encourage Portuguese Jewish emigrants from Amsterdam—
drawing on the capital of the Amsterdam Sephardic community—to set-
tle in sizable numbers in Dutch Brazil and become the brokers and
intermediaries, the links in the chain, that got the Dutch Brazilian econ-
omy working again. While the Company retained its monopoly over the
importing of slaves, which it shipped in from West Africa, and over the
export of brazilwood, a red dyewood important in the European textile
industry, it was forced by circumstances to turn over to the Jews most of
the business of advancing money, goods, and slaves to the planters, and,
in exchange, the business of buying up the raw sugar. From the outset,
the Jews were the principal intermediaries between the Dutch West India
Company and the Portuguese Catholic planters.24 A few of the Jews who
settled in Dutch Brazil themselves acquired plantations and sugar mills,
but the great majority resided in Recife or other fortified places and
engaged in trade.
In this way, Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin, who already knew
the language of the country and had a long experience of the trade in
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342 | Jonathan I. Israel

Brazil sugar, became the largest group of white civilians living under
Dutch rule in northern Brazil, evidently outnumbering both the Dutch
Protestants (other than soldiers), on the one hand, and Portuguese Cath-
olics, on the other. By 1644, at which point the Jewish community of Dutch
Brazil was at its zenith, Jews numbered approximately 1,450 out of a total
white civilian population in the colony of some three thousand.25 For a
time, the revived sugar economy of New Holland, as the Dutch called
northern Brazil, flourished, enabling the West India Company to domi-
nate the European sugar market for some ten to twelve years.26 The
colony’s resurgent economy was completely ruined, however, by the
uprising of the Portuguese Catholic planters, backed by forces sent from
Bahia, against the Dutch and Dutch Jews—the latter being hated both as
religious enemies and as creditors—which erupted in 1645. Almost the
entire colony outside the walls of Recife was engulfed in fighting. Within
months, most of the sugar plantations had been burned and the colony’s
agriculture, commerce, and financial systems paralyzed. Although the
Dutch retained control of Recife and its immediate vicinity and some other
localities until 1654, when all the remaining Dutch fortresses in Brazil
were surrendered to the Portuguese, and although a substantial core of the
Jewish community remained in Recife until the end, half or more of the
Jews who had settled there left in the intervening period, as confidence
that the Dutch would be able to restore their military control and their rule
gradually evaporated. Most of these Jews returned across the Atlantic to
the United Provinces but a substantial number remained in the New
World or eventually returned there after a period in the Dutch Republic.
The success and vigor of Jewish society in Dutch Brazil had been
short-lived, lasting only from around 1633 to 1645, by which date it was
effectively undermined. But it was also unprecedented and unique as
regards the considerable degree of economic and religious freedom, as
well as the secure legal status, that the Jews who emigrated to Dutch
Brazil had been able to secure from the West India Company. A new kind
of Jewish society had been created, quite different from any previous Jew-
ish society in the Old World, geared to tropical agriculture and based on
skills and expertise that the Jews were in an exceptionally strong position
to exercise. This created the possibility that the Jews would function as
intermediaries between the Dutch and any Ibero-American markets that
the Netherlanders might prise open in the future and would powerfully
contribute to the development of plantation agriculture.
Why intermediaries between the Dutch and Ibero-America, and not
between the English and Ibero-America? It would be wrong to argue that
in the middle years of the seventeenth century the Dutch colonies in the
New World were in need of the skills, expertise, and resources of Jews
forced out of Brazil while the English colonies were not. By the time the
last batch of more than six hundred Jews departed from Recife in Dutch
ships following the surrender of the colony in 1654, the island of Barba-
dos was already developing under English rule into the most thriving
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Jews of Dutch America | 343

sugar economy in the Caribbean, with the assistance of a number of

Dutch and Dutch Jewish entrepreneurs, while it was only one year later,
in 1655, that English forces wrested Jamaica from the Spaniards.27 Fur-
thermore, the new English Parliamentary regime, headed by Oliver
Cromwell, showed much more interest in accommodating the Jews
within England’s expanding mercantile system than the Stuart kings had
previously. Consequently, it hardly seems possible to argue that Se-
phardic Jewish skills and enterprise in the Americas in subsequent
decades came to be concentrated in the Dutch rather than the English
colonies because the former were more tolerant or accommodating dur-
ing the crucially formative decades following the collapse of Dutch Brazil.
The true explanation in my view is not that the Dutch were more tol-
erant than the English in the period from the 1650s onwards, but rather
that the wider geo-political context of the New World during the second
half of the seventeenth century did not favor an English breakthrough in
terms of trade, investment, and maritime contacts into the markets of
Spanish America. The chief reason for this, I would argue, is that the
Spanish, who were aggressively attacked by Cromwell’s England in 1655
and remained at war with England until 1660, were now (in contrast to
the first half of the seventeenth century) a good deal more afraid of Eng-
land’s rapidly growing military, naval, and commercial might in the
Western Hemisphere than they were of the no longer rapidly expanding
Dutch trading system. In fact, it was clear by the 1650s that England had
more potential for attacking and dismembering Spain’s American
empire—and a far more active interest in doing so—than any other Euro-
pean power. After the final peace between Spain and the Dutch was
signed at Münster in 1648, the Dutch Republic continued to be considered
a commercial threat to Spain’s interests in America, but no longer the kind
of political and strategic threat that both England and France increasingly
showed themselves to be.
During the second half of the 1650s, Spain was at war with both
France and England, and its normal transatlantic maritime system was
heavily disrupted, causing severe shortages of imports of every kind,
including slaves, throughout Spanish America. The result was a sensa-
tional upsurge in smuggling in open violation of the Spanish crown’s
highly restrictive mercantile regulations, with illegal cargoes being
shipped to Buenos Aires as well as to numerous ports in the Spanish
Caribbean, a traffic heavily dominated by the Dutch.28 This activity was
extensively connived at not only by Spanish officials in the colonies but
now also by ministers in Madrid. The feeling was that if Spain’s Ameri-
can colonies had to obtain supplies and slaves from somewhere, it was
better to obtain them from the Dutch, who were no longer a threat to the
physical existence of the Spanish American empire, than from the English
and French, who were. In the early 1660s, this new and close interaction
between the Dutch colonies and Spanish America was made semi-legal by
the decision of the Spanish crown to sign contracts for slave imports to
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344 | Jonathan I. Israel

Spanish America with a group of Genoese factors in Madrid, who were

authorized to obtain their slaves from Curaçao.29 This proved to be the
decisive step in making Curaçao the principal link in the direct traffic
between the Dutch colonies and Spanish America and in inducing the
West India Company to tolerate what soon became a thriving private
trade in small barques and sloops between Curaçao and the Spanish
American mainland.30
The crucial importance of Spanish policy during the second half of
the seventeenth century in determining the shape and distribution of
Jewish settlement and activity in the New World is, in my view, demon-
strated by the reluctance until the late 1650s of the Dutch West India
Company to tolerate Jewish private trade outside of Brazil. Even in Dutch
Brazil there had been a certain amount of opposition from the predomi-
nantly Protestant investors in the West India Company, and from the Zee-
land and some other regional chambers of the Company in the
Netherlands, to the large measure of private (and especially Jewish) trade
that the Company’s chief directors had been persuaded to permit. There
was a strong feeling among the investors that the Company in which they
had invested their money, and which had to shoulder the huge costs of
conquering and garrisoning Brazil, ought to reap all the profits.
With the collapse of the economy of Dutch Brazil in 1645–46, both the
Company and the Jews began to think seriously about transferring both
sugar production and the sugar trade elsewhere. For more than a decade,
until the late 1650s, the Company’s directors pursued a policy of willing-
ness to put Jewish skills and enterprise to work in developing the agri-
cultural potential of their American colonies (other than Brazil), while at
the same time attempting to block Jewish participation in the commerce
of these same colonies.
This phenomenon is evident in the case of New Netherland, where
the Calvinist town council of New Amsterdam responded to the arrival
of several groups of Sephardic Jews, who had left Brazil in 1654, by
endeavoring to obstruct their entry into shopkeeping as well as general
commerce. In their letter of 26 April 1655 to Peter Stuyvesant, the gover-
nor of New Netherland, the West India Company directors remarked that
they would have liked to accede to the pressure from the Protestant pop-
ulation to exclude the Jews from the colony entirely, but had decided that
this would have been unjust, since the Jews had sustained very heavy
losses at the hands of the Portuguese in Brazil, and inadvisable “because
of the large amount of capital which they have invested in the shares of
this Company.”31 Consequently, the Jews were permitted to settle in New
Netherland, but under greater restrictions than they had been subjected
to in Brazil as regards both their trade and their religious activity. Later
that year, Stuyvesant expressly forbade the Jews to trade up the Hudson
River to Fort Orange (i.e., Albany) or on the Delaware River.32 The Jews
complained to the Company directors, and in June 1656, the company
wrote instructing the governor that the Jews were to be allowed to trade
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Jews of Dutch America | 345

to Fort Orange and on the Delaware, but, in contrast to Brazil, were to

remain excluded from shopkeeping, as they were in Amsterdam itself.33
In January of 1657, Stuyvesant and the New Netherland colonial council
issued measures to ensure Jewish exclusion from all retailing except for
religious articles and ritually slaughtered meat for their own community.
Another illustration of the tendency in the aftermath of the Brazilian
revolt to try to obstruct Jewish entry into commerce in the other Dutch
American colonies is the Company’s policy for the three “Curaçao
islands”—Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba. It is remarkable that in the long
period between the Dutch occupation of these islands in 1634 and the late
1650s, the Curaçao islands totally failed to develop into any sort of
Caribbean trading entrepôt under Dutch control. Despite the fact that
Willemstad was one of the best harbors in the Caribbean, and despite
Curaçao’s proximity to the Spanish American mainland, the islands
attracted practically no trade—to such an extent that on several occa-
sions, including in 1651, the West India Company directors seriously con-
sidered abandoning the islands altogether so as to save the expense of
garrisoning them.34 Yet even in these unpromising circumstances, several
years after the disruption of the economy of Dutch Brazil, the Company
still showed itself unwilling to countenance the establishment of a Jewish
trading network based on Curaçao.
The first contract for Jewish settlement on Curaçao, drawn up
between the Company and João de Yllão in March 1651, provided for the
shipping of fifty Jewish colonists to the island for the purpose of culti-
vating the land and establishing plantations, but not for Jewish partici-
pation in trade. Indeed, the Company directors were suspicious—as they
confided to Stuyvesant, at the time governor of Curaçao—that the offer
on the part of the Jews to establish plantations was just a pretext to get
the Company to agree to Jews being admitted to the islands, and that in
reality de Yllão “and his associates have quite another objective in view,
namely to trade from there to the West Indies and the Spanish Main.”35
When in the following year the Company directors signed a second con-
tract for Jewish settlement on Curaçao, this time with David Nassi (alias
Joseph Nunes da Fonseca), the latter undertook to bring “a large number
of people,” many of whom were doubtless refugees from Brazil, to culti-
vate the land, but again there was no permission to trade. “Time will tell
whether we shall succeed well with his nation,” the directors wrote to
Stuyvesant. “They are a crafty and generally treacherous people in whom
therefore not too much confidence should be placed.”36 The contract
expressly reserved the logwood and salt assets on the three islands—their
only valuable resources—for the Company’s own use, and also failed to
grant Nassi and his associates full freedom of religion, such as they had
enjoyed in Brazil. By late 1652 the Company directors had concluded that
João de Yllão and the twelve other Jews who had settled on Curaçao with
him—there is no evidence that Nassi ever went—were neglecting to
“plant tobacco, indigo, cotton and other staples,” which is what they had
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346 | Jonathan I. Israel

been given permission to do, and were in fact busy cutting logwood and
trying to use it to trade with other Caribbean islands, and were also
exporting the islands’ horses. The directors wrote to Curaçao insisting
that “no more horses shall be exported from Buenairo, Curaçao and
Aruba but they shall remain there to be used in time in our province of
New Netherland.”37 In June 1653 it was again reported that the Jews on
Curaçao were not cultivating the land but cutting dyewood and “export-
ing horses from the islands of Aruba and Bonaires to the Caribbean and
other neighbouring isles.”38
Nor was this restrictive policy applied at this stage only in New
Netherland and the Curaçao islands. During the 1650s, the West India
Company was interested in developing the island of Tobago—which the
Dutch called New Walcheren—as a commercial depot close to the
Guyanas, but were reluctant to permit the Jews to engage in Caribbean
commerce from there.39 Even in the case of the (in most respects) extremely
liberal privileges conceded in 1657 by the Zeeland towns for Jewish settle-
ment in western Guyana, or Nova Zeelandia as it was then called, the
stress was on religious freedom and on encouraging the Jews to acquire
land and establish plantations as well as to engage in “hunting and fish-
ing” rather than on the establishment of commerce, though the document
does concede that “it shall be lawful to trade with the Indians.”40 Only in
1659 were the Jews on Curaçao granted full freedom to trade.
In conclusion, in the 1640s and during most of the 1650s there was lit-
tle or no disposition on the part of the Dutch West India Company to
encourage the Jews to rebuild in other parts of Dutch America the kind of
large-scale transatlantic commerce that they had been able to develop in
Brazil in the 1630s and early 1640s. There was, in fact, absolutely no
intrinsic reason why the principal Jewish trading and maritime network
in the New World of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should
have been based in Dutch America rather than in the English Caribbean
colonies. That Curaçao became the principal hub of Jewish inter-Ameri-
can trade—along with St. Eustatius, St. Thomas, and several other depots
after 1660—seems to be due chiefly to geo-political factors and, in partic-
ular, to the marriage of convenience that developed in the New World
maritime trade between the Spanish empire and the Dutch Republic from
the late 1650s until the end of the Habsburg era in Spain in 1700. It was
during those decades that the Jews of Dutch America became what might
fairly be described as the preeminent intermediaries and specialists in
inter-American trade.
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Jews of Dutch America | 347

TABLE 17.1 The Inter-American Trade of Curaçao and St. Eustatius

Curaçao (July–Dec. 1714) St. Eustatius (1773)

arriving leaving arriving
from for from

St. Thomas
(Danish) 14 1 0
New York (New
Amsterdam) 9 5 3
Venezuela 7 3 0
Hispañola 7 3 0
Jamaica 3 1 1
Antigua 2 2 4
Nevis 2 0 1
Virginia-Maryland,
N. Carolina 2 0 3
Rhode Island
(Root Eiland) 1 1 13
Barbados 6 2 8
Boston 1 0 5
Bermuda 0 1 3
Guadeloupe 0 0 24
Martinique 0 0 23
Saint Christopher 0 0 9
Saint Maarten 0 0 5
Puerto Rico 1 0 1
Tobago 1 0 0
Monserrat 0 0 2
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348 | Jonathan I. Israel

Notes

1. Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth
Century (Leiden, 1991), 61–75; see also Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean
and in the Guianas 1680–1791 (Assen, 1985), 353, 362.
2. On the synagogues of Suriname, see Günter Böhm, “The Synagogues of Suriname,”
Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1978):98–104; and the essay by Rachel Frankel in this volume.
3. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, 363.
4. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 63–65; Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, 519.
5. Yosef Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th
Centuries,” American Jewish History 72 (1982):197–202; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
“Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam: The Place of Curaçao and the Caribbean
in Early Modern Jewish History,” American Jewish History 72 (1982):191–92.
6. I. S. and S. A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols. (Cincin-
nati, 1970), vol. 1, 277, and vol. 2, 763; Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, 263 and 239;
J. I. Israel, “The Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life and Colonization in Europe
and the New World (16th–18th Centuries),” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy,
ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem, 1992), 389–90.
7. Emmanuel, History, vol. 1, 519, 522, and 524; see also Günter Böhm, Los sefardíes en los
dominios holandeses de América del sur y del Caribe 1630–1750 (Frankfurt, 1992), 219–22.
8. Emmanuel, History, vol. 1, 525.
9. See S. A. Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce,
1650–1750 (Gainesville, Fla., 1984), 48.
10. J. I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989), 396.
11. On the links between St. Thomas and Curaçao, see Israel, Dutch Primacy, 326, 368–69,
374; and W. Westergaard, The Danish West Indies under Company Rule (1671–1764) (New
York, 1917), 121, 209, 332.
12. Georges Scelle, La traite négrière aux Indes de Castille: contrats et traites d’Assiento, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1906), vol. 2, 160, 309–10; Israel, Dutch Primacy, 369.
13. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 323–24, 369.
14. I am greatly indebted to Mordechai Arbell for allowing me to see the typescript of his
article on Jewish settlement in Tucacas, forthcoming in American Jewish Archives.
15. See the lists of commodity and bullion consignments from Curaçao to Amsterdam in
Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague, West India Company Archives, vols. 568 and 569.
However, the Jewish share of Curaçao’s trade with the Spanish American mainland
was probably larger than this; see Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, 240.
16. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, 201.
17. J. I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995),
951–56.
18. G. L. Smith, Religion and Trade in New Netherland (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 190–94, 215–16.
19. Israel, “Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life,” 380–84; see also J. I. Israel, “Dutch
Sephardi Jewry, Millenarian Politics, and the Struggle for Brazil (1640–1654),” in Scep-
tics, Millenarians and Jews, ed. D. S. Katz and J. I. Israel (Leiden, 1990), 76–97.
20. J. I. Israel, “The Changing Role of the Dutch Sephardim in International Trade,
1595–1715,” Dutch Jewish History 1 (1984):33–42.
21. See E. M. Koen, ed., “Amsterdam Notarial Deeds Pertaining to the Portuguese Jews in
Amsterdam up to 1639,” no. 87, in Studia Rosenthaliana 2 (1968):257: “verclaert ende
geaffirmeert hoe waerachtig is dat tot meermalen diversche scheepen uit Bresilien
ende die quartieren commende (ende alder suyckeren ende bresilienhout geladen
hebbende) alhier te lande sijn gearriveert ende Portugael verbijgeloopen, alwaer die
selve schepen gedestineert waren …”
22. J. I. Israel, “The Jews of Venice and Their Links with Holland and with Dutch Jewry
(1600–1710),” in Gli ebrei e Venezia secoli XIV–XVIII, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan, 1987),
101–2.
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Jews of Dutch America | 349

23. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654 (Hamden, Conn., 1973), 64–66, 75–80.
24. Ibid., 133–44; Arnold Wiznitzer, The Jews of Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960), 120–38;
Israel, “Dutch Sephardi Jewry, Millenarian Politics, and the Struggle for Brazil,” 76–88.
25. Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Number of Jews in Dutch Brazil, 1603–1654,” Jewish Social
Studies 16 (1954):107–14; I. S. Emmanuel, “Seventeenth-Century Brazilian Jewry: A
Critical Review,” American Jewish Archives 14 (1962):32–68; see, however, the dissenting
view in Böhm, Los sefardies, 67–69.
26. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 167–70; Israel, “Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life,” 382–83.
27. V. T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford, 1926), 44, 93–94; J. I. Israel,
“Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-
Seventeenth Century (1645–1657),” in Menasseh ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef
Kaplan, Henri Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden, 1989), 144, 148–50.
28. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 240–42.
29. Scelle, Traite négrière, vol. 1, 484–85; S. van Brakel, “Bescheiden over den slavenhandel
der West-Indische Compagnie,” Economisch-Historisch Jaarboek 4 (1918):61–66; J. M.
Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (Cambridge, 1990), 33–36.
30. In March 1661, the Spanish ambassador at The Hague reported to Madrid that the
Dutch on Curaçao had now “established large stores with every kind of merchandise
there which they deliver during the night, using long boats, taking back silver bars and
other goods,” Archivo General de Simancas, Libros de la Haya, vol. 43, fo. 94.
31. Smith, Religion and Trade in New Netherland, 214.
32. Ibid., 215.
33. Ibid., 216.
34. Van Brakel, “Bescheiden,” 49–50; W. R. Menkman, De Nederlanders in het Caraibische
zeegebied (Amsterdam, 1942), 44–45.
35. G. H. Cone, “The Jews of Curaçao According to Documents from the Archives of the
State of New York,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 10 (1902):143.
36. G. H. Cone, “The Jews of Curaçao,” 147–49; Emmanuel, History, vol. 1, 43.
37. Cone, “The Jews of Curaçao,” 150.
38. Ibid., 150–51.
39. It is not known exactly why there was no response to the Jewish request of July 1654
to settle Tobago; see Mordechai Arbell, “The Failure of the Jewish Settlement on the
Island of Tobago,” Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies (1994), vol.
3, 304–5.
40. Robert Cohen, “The Edgerton Manuscript,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62
(1973):333–47.
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– Chapter 18 –

THE JEWS IN SURINAME AND CURAÇAO

Wim Klooster

I N HIS FAMOUS BOOK OF 1788 on the Jews of Suriname, David de Isaac

Cohen Nassy argued that “the Portuguese Jews have settled in Suri-
name on much happier and more favorable terms than anywhere in the
universe: all and sundry were put on a par with the colonists of the
Protestant faith: all offices and functions were open to them uncondition-
ally.”1 Both Suriname and the insular Dutch colony of Curaçao were, rel-
atively speaking, models of tolerance in the days of the ancien régime,
offering attractive opportunities to Jewish settlers. The Jews, in their turn,
made significant contributions to the economic growth of these colonies.
In this essay, I will analyze the nature of these contributions.

Suriname: The Vicissitudes of Plantation Agriculture

An English colony since 1651, Suriname numbered no more than a few

dozen Jews2 until a group of about one hundred arrived from Cayenne in
1665 or 1666, after the loss to France of the neighboring Dutch settlement.
They were joined by Jews who had originally left the Netherlands and
Leghorn for Dutch colonies in Pomeroon, Essequibo, and Tobago. The Eng-
lish authorities granted several privileges to the Jewish population, includ-
ing freedom of worship, the free exercise of their customs, and exemption
from work on Sabbaths and holidays. Likewise, on Sundays they were
allowed to work, to have their slaves work, and to visit relatives.3
The Dutch government affirmed these rights after a naval squadron
from the province of Zeeland had conquered the colony in the last year
of the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–67). Occasionally, Jews had to
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 351

defend their privileges vis-à-vis the colonial authorities, as for instance

when their dispensation from work on the Sabbath and their right to
labor on Sundays came under attack. When in 1675 a law was passed for-
bidding all inhabitants to work on Sundays, the Jews rose in protest, fear-
ful that their slaves would spend the entire weekend in idleness.
However, the Society of Suriname, which administered the colony,
decided that the regulation did not extend to the Jews or their slaves.4
While dozens of Jews took refuge in Jamaica after the Dutch capture
of Suriname, those who stayed behind traveled up the Suriname River
and settled in an area that came to be called the Jodensavanne (“Jewish
Savannah”). The reason for this move seems to have been that all of the
high ground in Thorarica, the main settlement in the English period, had
already been occupied. Overlooking two deep valleys and rising thirty
feet above sea level, the Jodensavanne, which soon boasted eighty houses,
developed into the world’s largest Jewish agricultural community.5
Surinamese agriculture invariably impressed foreign travelers. The
low situation of the marshy coastal plain and the large amount of precip-
itation required massive drainage, irrigation, and architectural ingenuity
to sustain the production of sugar, coffee, cotton, and cacao.6 A French
visitor, V. P. Malouet, observed: “When a settler of St. Domingue or Nor-
mandy wants to get rich, he just has to work the fertile soil in the usual
way; the colonists of Suriname almost have to bring about the miracle of
a second creation; they have to put in order the muddled elements, sepa-
rate the slimy soil from the water, and erect immense buildings on firm
ground in the middle of swamps.”7
Most Jewish plantations were concentrated inland, where the land
was less swampy and therefore easier to bring into cultivation. Even so,
planting was a tall order. The sugar plantation “De Drie Gebroeders” on
the Suriname River was a case in point. The owner, Samuel d’Avilar, suc-
cessfully added to his estate for over twenty-five years, leaving it in excel-
lent condition at his death in 1769. His heirs, however, could not manage
the plantation, and it deteriorated rapidly in the next decades.8
The successful operation of Suriname’s plantations required a large
labor supply that was met by the importation of African slaves. Initially,
demand far exceeded supplies. David Nassy’s assertion that by 1690
some nine thousand enslaved Africans, spread among forty sugar mills,
were already in the service of Jews, therefore seems exaggerated.9 In 1684,
the entire Afro-Surinamese population stood around four thousand, and
few ships arrived from Angola or West Africa in the next few years.10 It
was only after the 1730s that large numbers of Africans were disem-
barked in the colony, resulting in a slave population of almost sixty thou-
sand in 1774.11 The continuous importation of slaves cannot be explained
simply by the expansion of land under cultivation. Other significant fac-
tors were the high mortality of the slave population and the ever swelling
number of runaways. One planter complained in 1706 that an average
plantation lost six slaves a year.12
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352 | Wim Klooster

In the second half of the eighteenth century, both Jewish and gentile
planters were tied increasingly to mortgage-granting merchant-bankers
in the Netherlands. The lack of investment opportunities in the mother
country had created a surplus of capital for which Suriname provided
an outlet, all the more since coffee prices were constantly rising on the
world market. The floating of bonds by metropolitan investors ren-
dered money available for loans to planters. Plantation real estate valu-
ations, however, were often groundless, so that the loans bore no
relation to the actual value of the assets. The illusion of a flourishing
plantation economy was enhanced by the almost unlimited availability
of credit. When the moment came to settle their debts, however, many
planters were unable to pay, and their plantations were sold to metro-
politan creditors.13
Tax lists suggest that the Jews sustained heavier financial losses than
did gentiles. While in 1772 the Jews paid more than one-fourth of the
property tax (26.1 percent), eight years later their share had fallen to 22.7
percent. The Jews lost more in all quarters than their non-Jewish neigh-
bors, and as a result, two-thirds of the Jews in Suriname were reduced to
poverty.14 Most Jewish estates had to be relinquished, with their owners
and families moving en masse from the Jodensavanne to the city of Para-
maribo.15 While 115 out of 401 plantations (28.7 percent) had been in Jew-
ish hands around 1730,16 in 1788 only forty-six out of 591 remained (7.8
percent). Of these forty-six, thirty produced timber and provisions, and
only sixteen were export-oriented coffee and cotton estates. Sugar culti-
vation had in large part been abandoned during the investment boom. By
contrast, only 109 of 545 gentile plantations had abandoned the produc-
tion of cash crops by 1788.17
The debt crisis only partly explains this divergent development. The
fortunes of Jewish planters had begun to decline prior to the crisis
because of the changing condition of their plantations. Jews had taken up
agriculture along the upper reaches of the Suriname and Commewijne
rivers at an early stage, and were faced with the depletion of their soils
long before their gentile colleagues on the lower reaches of the rivers.18
Already by mid-century, therefore, the main activity in the Jodensavanne
was the cutting of wood for boards and shingles.19
The Jewish role in plantation agriculture further declined in the fol-
lowing decades. By the early nineteenth century, no more than twenty-
three Jewish plantations were producing export crops; all other so-called
“plantations” were in actual fact timber grounds that hardly turned a
profit. The Jodensavanne, by then, was all but deserted; the few remain-
ing villagers were septuagenarians. In 1832, shortly after the Dutch
agronomist Teenstra had met “oppressive poverty on the ruins of former
greatness,”20 a fire destroyed the place for good.
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 353

Curaçao: Smuggling for a Living

At about the same time the first Jews settled in Suriname, another group
of Jews took up residence on Curaçao. The West India Company had cap-
tured the Caribbean island in 1634 from thirty-two Spaniards, and ini-
tially used it as a military base. Invasions of the Spanish Main from
Curaçao were carried out almost every year, and death and destruction
were spread to Maracaibo, Santa Marta, and Cartagena. With the peace in
1648, Curaçao lost its military function and languished for several years.
The Company board even toyed with the idea of giving up the island,
together with the neighboring islands of Aruba and Bonaire, but aban-
doned the thought after careful consideration.
It was unclear at the outset what Curaçao’s new destiny was to be,
but it soon emerged that cash crop production was not a viable alterna-
tive. The poor soil and lack of rainfall wrecked all attempts to grow
tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar. The island’s estates eventually special-
ized in the production of maize, the staple food of the slaves and, during
droughts, of the cattle as well. Since cattle-breeding was more valuable
than agriculture, all “plantations” were eventually transformed into
dairy-producing mixed farms with oxen, calves, sheep, and poultry.21 But
even then, Curaçao’s produce did not meet the needs of its population.
What saved the island, eventually, was the business instinct of its cit-
izens, who soon transformed Curaçao into an American counterpart of
Amsterdam—a staple market where numerous European commodities
were piled up, awaiting sale to customers in the French, English, and
Spanish colonies. Curaçao’s remarkable commercial development, which
began in the 1660s, was matched by a population increase. The number
of free residents of Willemstad rose from 300 in 1675 to 850 in 1715, and
by 1789 was up to 6,000; the latter group included 2,469 Protestants and
1,095 Jews. Having first arrived in the 1650s, the Jewish community grew
rapidly, through both natural increase and the immigration of new fami-
lies from the Netherlands and refugees from the French island of Mar-
tinique in 1685.22 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of
Jewish families was up to about half that of the gentiles,23 and this ratio
remained the same until at least 1789 (Table 18.1).
As in Suriname, the Jews of Curaçao could count on protection by
Dutch officials. The West India Company guaranteed them freedom of
religion and safeguarded their property rights. Although conflicts
between Jews and Christians were even more rare than in Suriname, they
did occur. Jewish schooling on Sundays, for instance, irritated Governor
Faesch in 1740 so much that he ordered the schools to close on that day
of the week. It is likely that this measure did not remain operational for
long and soon afterward a compromise was reached, allowing Jewish
schools to hold Sunday classes, albeit without choral singing.24 A more
serious conflict erupted in 1682. Spanish sailors, reportedly in accordance
with an old custom, hoisted a dummy to the masthead of their vessel on
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354 | Wim Klooster

Maundy Thursday, and put it on fire. The dummy not only represented
Judas Iscariot, it was also an effigy of Curaçao’s rabbi.25 The Dutch factor
of the slave trade, Balthasar Beck, who apparently greeted the spectacle
with approval, was dismissed from the post of captain of the civil guard.26
The arrival of the Jews may have been the single most important
impetus to Curaçao’s rise as a regional entrepôt. Although they did not
shun agriculture, the Jews soon found out that it paid to go into com-
merce. Before long, many merchants and ship-owners were Jews who
made full use of their particular advantages: mastery of the Spanish lan-
guage and family networks across the Atlantic with various relatives act-
ing as business associates.
Since their trades forced the Jews to live close to the commercial cen-
ter, most settled down in Punda, the old part of Willemstad, staying there
even as a growing number of Protestants moved to the new residential
areas of Otrabanda, Pietermaai, and Scharloo. In the process, the Old
Town underwent a remarkable change. While in 1707, the Protestants had
outnumbered the Jews in seven of the eight main streets, even in the
Joodestraat,27 by 1789, 860 Jews and 658 Protestants were living in the old
part of Willemstad. Almost seven of every eight urban Jews (84.1 percent)
then resided in Punda, compared to only one-third of the urban Protes-
tants (Tables 18.1 and 18.2).

Jewish Trade Networks

The vast majority of the cacao, tobacco, hides, and other shipments sent
by Curaçaoan Jews to Amsterdam were consigned to other Jews, quite
often a member of the same family who served as the consignor, as is
shown in the Appendix at the end of this chapter. When possible, trade
between Curaçao and other parts of the New World was also conducted
with fellow Jews. Commercial ties between the Sephardim of Curaçao
and the Jews of New York were sustained by the bonds of matrimony,
which joined the Dovales, Pardos, Naftalis, and Pinheiros of New York to
the De Casseres, Idanha de Casseres, Lopez da Fonseca, and Mendes da
Gama of Curaçao.28 Esther Levy from Curaçao was married to Daniel
Gomez (1695–1780), a merchant who sent 133 ships to the Dutch island
between 1739 and 1772. His thirty-five correspondents on the island were
all Sephardic Jews.29
While the importation of flour, bread, butter, meat, and other provi-
sions from Manhattan was indispensable to Curaçao, Spanish American
produce formed the backbone of Curaçao’s trade. For every ship arriving
from New York between 1751 and 1752, there were eight coming in from
the Spanish colonies, and the average value of their cargoes was many
times greater.30 This trade was certainly not dominated by Jewish net-
works; the Spanish mainland and the Spanish Caribbean lacked sizable
Jewish communities at this juncture. Seymour Liebman’s assertion that
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 355

TABLE 18.1 Urban Settlement Patterns, Curaçao, 1789

Protestants Jews Servants F.N.W. Slaves

Old Town Families 194 219 132

Old Town Persons 658 860 223 401 2,773
Otrabanda Families 192 14 423
Otrabanda Persons 593 80 134 1,497 1,598
P & S Families 204 26 250
P & S Persons 750 83 126 719 1,048
Total Persons 2,001 1,023 483 2,617 5,419

Adapted from: General survey of Curaçao and dependent islands, Appendix no. 16: Report
of private houses. Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA), The Hague, Raad van Coloniën 120. P & S
stands for the quarters of Pietermaai and Scharloo. F.N.W. means free non-whites.

TABLE 18.2 Urban Distribution of Social Groups, Curaçao, 1789

Protestants Jews Servants F.N.W. Slaves

Old Town 32.9 84.1 46.2 15.3 51.2

Otrabanda 29.6 7.8 27.8 51.2 29.5
P&S 37.5 8.1 26.1 27.5 19.3
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Adapted from: General survey of Curaçao and dependent islands, Appendix no. 16: Report
of private houses. ARA Raad van Coloniën 120. P & S stands for the quarters of Pietermaai
and Scharloo. F.N.W. means free non-whites.

branches of the “Mikveh Israel” community were established in Caracas

and Coro, thereby laying the foundation of a ramified trade network, is
simply not true for the eighteenth century.31
Still, the commodity trade with such places was important enough
for Mikveh Israel, the Jewish community of Curaçao, to ignore one of the
ordinances of its parent community in Amsterdam, the Talmud Torah
congregation. Whereas all other ordinances were adopted, members of
Mikveh Israel were not banned from staying in “countries of idolatry,” a
reference to the lands ruled by the Catholic kings of Spain and Portugal.
Obeying this ordinance would have left many Jews penniless.32 Jewish
activities were not confined to ship-owning and maritime trade; many
chose related professions. By the eighteenth century, there were twice as
many Jewish dealers in houses and plantations as Protestant brokers,
while the insurance business was practically a Jewish monopoly.33
The commodities that the Curaçaoans sold to these “countries of
idolatry” had all been shipped in from Dutch ports, which is not to say
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356 | Wim Klooster

that all the goods were produced in the Netherlands; most, in fact, were
not. Linen, the main item, was mainly from Silesia, Saxony, and West-
phalia, with the finer sorts coming from France. Other cloth included
woolens, and lace and silk fabrics trimmed with gold and silver.34 Provi-
sions tended also to be non-Dutch in origin, such as Madeira or Bordeaux
wines and Marseilles ham. Cinnamon, pepper, and other Asian spices
also found a ready market.
Although Curaçao was a major transit port for African slaves from
around 1660 until 1716, allegations about a heavy involvement of the
island’s Jews in the Atlantic slave trade are generally not true.35 A few
Jews were involved at one time or another,36 but the local representatives
of the West India Company were invariably Protestants. On the other
hand, Jewish settlers, like the Protestants, bought slaves from the Com-
pany for their personal use.37 It is telling that the collapse of the island’s
slave market after the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) did not
lead to considerable financial loss for the Sephardim of Curaçao.
From the neighboring Spanish provinces, Jews and other Curaçaoans
imported a wide array of locally cultivated crops and products. Since the
bulk of Curaçao’s trade was with Venezuela, the world’s leading cacao
producer from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, cacao
became the main import item of the Dutch island. Its exports to the United
Provinces came to almost one and a half million guilders in the first half of
the eighteenth century, with an estimated value of over 800,000 guilders.38
Whereas there was only one kind of cacao, tobacco purchased by the
Curaçaoans came in all shapes, sizes, and grades. Tobacco from Puerto
Rico, Santo Domingo, Martinique, and New Granada was shipped to the
Netherlands in the form of leaves, but Venezuelan tobacco was typically
processed first and then sent in so-called canisters, that is, baskets contain-
ing rolls of spun tobacco. One canister variety, Barinas tobacco, was aimed
at connoisseurs. The Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco Miranda found it
advertised on signboards in Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat.39
Other than these luxury goods, Curaçaoan imports from Spanish
America included hides from Venezuela, Santo Domingo, and Cuba, and
logwood and dyewood from Río de la Hacha, Santa Marta, and
Campeche.40 The French Caribbean colonies of Saint-Domingue, Mar-
tinique, and Guadeloupe, supplied sugar, coffee, and indigo, all crops of
secondary importance to Curaçao’s trade. Finally, consignments of flour,
bread, and butter reached Curaçao from British North America.
The vessels used for this regional commerce were sloops and, as the
eighteenth century advanced, increasing numbers of schooners. Equipped
with oars, the fast schooners were well suited to both the coastal and the
long-haul trade. The names of some of the vessels leave little doubt about
their owners. The archives are full of names such as the Masaltob, the
Abraham en Isaac, the Bathseba, and the Bekeerde Jood (Converted Jew).41 A
trading voyage normally included several stations. It was generally not
remunerative to sail straight back and forth between Curaçao and a
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 357

Spanish American port, because the value of the products that were pro-
cured was outweighed by the expense of equipping vessels. Added to
this financial consideration were the difficulties ship-owners experienced
in their efforts to recruit enough crewmen. It was therefore advisable to
have the same crew make as many short voyages as possible before drop-
ping anchor again in Curaçao.42
An exchange of letters sometimes preceded Curaçaoan deals with
Spaniards, and the costs of voyage between Willemstad and the Spanish
Main were quite often partially met by Venezuelan merchants. Smugglers
also made use of Spanish messengers to arrange transactions, or invited
Spanish merchants on board to discuss the kinds of goods that were to be
traded. The Dutch side usually made a payment and the Spanish prom-
ised to land their merchandise on the beach the next day.43 Curaçaoans
also dealt directly with Spanish or Creole planters inland.
Not much business was conducted in Willemstad, since Spanish mer-
chants and ship-owners tried to avoid seizure by Venezuelan coast
guards, fitted out by the Compañía Guipuzcoana, a Basque company
founded to combat contraband trade. The ships that did put into the
Dutch island were often bound for Veracruz, Santo Domingo, or Puerto
Rico with more cocoa on board than had been registered. This surplus
cocoa was exchanged at Curaçao for linen goods and other European arti-
cles, which were afterward sold at the official destination. The Venezuelan
sloops that regularly sailed to the island of Margarita carrying dried and
salted goat meat also stopped at Curaçao. The sloops were indeed loaded
with meat, but stowed underneath this were large amounts of cocoa and
hides, which were to be sold in Curaçao in exchange for textiles.44
Such roundabout methods were necessary because of the risks
involved in the trade between Spanish subjects and foreigners. The Span-
ish monarchy considered any such commercial contacts as illegal, a view
shared by the Dutch Republic in the bilateral treaties of 1648 and 1650, and
once again at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713–14. In reality, however, the West
India Company did not thwart the traders in any way. Spanish authorities,
on the other hand, were instructed to put up a vigorous fight against
smuggling. To deter and curtail this many-headed monster, coast guard
vessels patrolled the littoral of various Spanish colonies. Shunning the
official ports,45 Curaçao’s vessels mostly sailed to bays, coves, and inlets
along the coast, where the large coast guard ships could not navigate.
Even in those places, it was advisable to proceed with caution. Con-
ducting business was particularly risky for some of the less affluent
Curaçaoans, among whom there were several Jews, who tried to supple-
ment their slender incomes with retail trade.46 In the event of capture by
a coast guard vessel, all commodities carried on board were lost. Still
worse, quite a number of common sailors, including some Jews, were
clapped in irons and condemned to serve on the galleys of North Africa,
while others ended up in “la Carraca,” a prison in Cádiz, Spain, which
bore a sinister reputation on Curaçao.47
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358 | Wim Klooster

It is no surprise, therefore, that the Jews of Curaçao were resentful of

the Compañía Guipuzcoana. A diary kept by a Spaniard who stayed on
the Dutch island at the time of an English assault on Venezuela in 1743,
reveals the ill will that the company had aroused. One entry describes the
reaction to the news that an English squadron of twenty-three ships,
known to be preparing an assault on Venezuela, had dropped anchor in
the main port of La Guaira.

This news caused such delight and satisfaction among the inhabitants of this
city that they were exalting the English all day long until night fell and the
god Bacchus settled them down.… The ones who went most out of their way
to celebrate the news were the Jews, who proclaimed in loud voices in the
Spanish tongue: citizens and residents, victory is ours, because … the Great
God of Israel has drawn the sword of His justice against these Basque dogs
who have inflicted so much damage on us.48

It should be emphasized, however, that it was not difficult to bribe

land guards with a hunk of cheese or a bottle of brandy. Moreover, chance
encounters with guardacostas were the hazards of a profitable job. Once
the Venezuelan shore was reached, the Curaçaoans were usually received
with open arms by local settlers, who appreciated the regular availability,
low prices, and assortment of Dutch supplies. The reliability of Dutch
merchants contrasted sharply with that of their Spanish colleagues. From
Cádiz, the only port in Spain authorized to trade with the Indies, only
three ships with goods were sent to Caracas, and three more to Maracaibo
during the War of the Spanish Succession. The province of Río de la
Hacha, another hotbed of Curaçaoan smuggling, received not a single
ship from Cádiz between 1713 and 1763.49
If most business between ill-supplied Venezuelans and eager Cura-
çaoans was originally organized in the central parts of Venezuela’s lit-
toral, one place was an exception to this rule: Tucacas, a small village near
Coro, located within easy reach of Curaçao via the Yaracuy River, in a
sparsely populated area with only a few Indian villages. It did not pay for
the authorities in Caracas to have it patrolled continuously, and the Cura-
çaoans seized the opportunity to establish a settlement of their own there
in the late seventeenth century. In fact, a group of Jews seems to have
pitched camp in Tucacas after an epidemic had swept through Curaçao.
Tucacas soon became a major Curaçaoan trading place. In 1720 the
Spanish examining magistrate Olavarriaga concluded that Tucacas was
the place where most deals between the Dutch and the Spanish were car-
ried out. Over a million pounds of cacao were traded there annually, and
in addition, tobacco, cows, and mules were sold to Curaçao. The leader-
ship of this thriving colony was first in the hands of Jurriaan Exteen, also
known as “Jorge Cristian,” a ship’s captain in the service of the Jewish
merchant Phelipe Henriquez. Exteen styled himself the “Marquis of
Tucacas” and, according to some witnesses, lived in splendor.50 He was
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 359

later succeeded by Samuel Hebreo, who appropriated the title “Lord of

Tucacas” for himself. During his rule, the colony consisted of seventeen
houses and a synagogue51
The importance of Tucacas in the contraband trade did not go unno-
ticed, and the Spanish government decided to stamp out the Dutch set-
tlement completely. In 1710, the chief ensign of the town of Coro was sent
to Tucacas with 150 Indian archers, who destroyed several houses and
killed the cattle the Dutch had left behind.52 Only a few years went by,
however, before another Spanish expedition could report the presence of
two hundred armed Dutch males in Tucacas. Time and again, Spanish
authorities tried to chase away the intruders. In 1721, they tore down the
synagogue,53 and in 1734, Governor Martín de Lardizábal erected a fort
with four cannon at Tucacas. But the soldiers who were assigned to man
the fort deserted in protest against their low wages, and in 1740 a joint
effort by Curaçaoans and Englishmen from St. Christopher led to the
fort’s destruction.54 By then, Tucacas had lost much of its commercial
strength. Most of the production and trade of cacao had shifted from
coastal Venezuela, which was beginning to show signs of overcultivation,
to the banks of the Tuy River.55

The Adventures of Phelipe Henriquez

One of Curaçao’s Jewish merchants involved in the Tucacas trade was

Jacob Senior (ca. 1660–1718), who adopted his grandfather’s name Phe-
lipe Henriquez when he took up trade. He came from a family of New
Christians that had fled Portugal in the 1590s. Felipe Henriques
(1589–1656), alias Juda Senior, became a merchant in Amsterdam, and
traded with several places in the Mediterranean.56 He left a son
Mordechay who served Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, the governor
of Dutch Brazil. Johan Maurits created a favorable social climate that
attracted numerous Amsterdam Sephardim. Mordechay’s son Phelipe
was born around 1660 in Amsterdam. At the age of twenty-five, he
arrived in Curaçao with three of his brothers and built up a merchant
fleet. Another brother stayed behind in Amsterdam to secure freight for
the outgoing ships. At Curaçao, Henriquez established relationships with
traders in numerous Spanish colonies and went on to become a success-
ful merchant and ship’s captain.
In general, it was difficult for Jews to profess their faith on board the
trading vessels among a majority of gentiles: Protestant Dutchmen, Ger-
mans, and Scandinavians, as well as Roman Catholic slaves and free
blacks. There are, however, some references in the archives to Jews who
made no secret of their conviction. Amanuel Alvares Correa, for instance,
was a merchant on a sloop that was seized in 1746 near Caracas by an
English ship. At the subsequent trial in Newport, Rhode Island, he swore
an oath on the Pentateuch.57 Phelipe Henriquez was also open about his
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360 | Wim Klooster

Judaism. He claimed he led his crew in Christian prayer in the morning

and in the evening, and thereafter had a quiet read in a Hebrew prayer
book. When his business took him to Río de la Hacha, he observed the
“law of Moses” so unabashedly that the local pastor was scandalized and
lodged a complaint in Cartagena de Indias.
Before long, Henriquez landed in the dungeons of the Inquisition in
Cartagena. The official reason given was his trade in arms and ammuni-
tion. However, in a report he wrote after his release, Henriquez relates
that he was accused of slaughtering chickens in a ritual Jewish manner in
Santa Marta on the coast of present-day Colombia. During an interroga-
tion, he denied this allegation by saying that he was not qualified to per-
form that function, and that local Jews had done it in his stead.58
His captivity ended after only ten weeks when his freedom was
bought by the director of the Portuguese Cacheu Company, which pos-
sessed the asiento, the monopoly to supply Spanish America with slaves;
Henriquez had served this company as the Curaçao factor. A few years
later, he was appointed the agent of a French company that had acquired
the asiento.59 Such international contacts led to his involvement in diplo-
macy. During the War of the Spanish Succession, he was in the service of
the camp of Archduke Charles, the candidate for the vacant Spanish
crown who was supported by an alliance of Great Britain, the Dutch
Republic, Austria, and Brandenburg-Prussia. The candidate favored by
Spain and France, on the other hand, was the grandson of Louis XIV, later
Philip V. The Jews of Amsterdam and Curaçao backed the archduke, fear-
ing that Philip’s victory would lead to a pronounced French predomi-
nance in the trade with Spanish America.60
Charles deployed ambassadors in all quarters of the world to plead
his case. One of them was the Italian count de Antería, Charles’s ambas-
sador to northern Spanish America, who used Curaçao as an operational
base in his attempts to win the people of Venezuela over to the archduke.
Antería availed himself of the vessels of Phelipe Henriquez and his excel-
lent contacts with the Venezuelans. As a reward for this help, Phelipe was
promised the governorship of Venezuela.61 Shortly after the outbreak of
the war, Phelipe made his way to The Hague, presumably for high-level
deliberations that must have also involved Phelipe’s brother-in-law, who
acted as Charles’s consul in Amsterdam. Unfortunately for them, the
archduke lost the war.
Phelipe was among Curaçao’s men of property. Other Jews in
Curaçao could hardly get by on their monthly wages. Yet to all, Curaçao
was a safe haven, a place to live their lives in freedom. The departure of
many Jews in the early nineteenth century was not the result of any
change in the Dutch policy. The commercial prosperity of Curaçao,
rather, had come to an end after the French invasion of the Dutch Repub-
lic in 1795. Shipping traffic with Amsterdam and Zeeland was frequently
interrupted, and the British occupations of 1800–03 and 1807–16 were
very prejudicial. The high taxes that were levied prompted the Jews to
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 361

leave the island. Some came back in later years, but they would never see
the return of the golden age of Curaçao.

Conclusion

Their conquests of Curaçao and Suriname left the Dutch in the seven-
teenth century with dissimilar Caribbean endowments. While Suriname’s
climate lent itself to the production of tropical crops, Curaçao’s excellent
natural port was conveniently located to conduct trade with the Spanish
Main. Neither place, however, was a land of plenty, and only through
perseverance could the potential of each be realized. In this respect, the
agricultural and commercial activities of Jewish colonists proved to be
indispensable. The Jews prospered in the tolerant social climate that pre-
vailed under the umbrella of the Dutch colonial governments. Despite
occasional tensions with the gentiles, they came to form one-third of the
white population in both Suriname and Curaçao. This strong presence
was truly unique in the history of the European expansion.62
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362 | Wim Klooster

APPENDIX
Curaçao’s Jewish Merchants and Their Amsterdam Consignees:
The Ship de Juffrouw Gesina, 174463

Curaçao Jews Amsterdam Jews and Gentiles

Aron de Chaves Jr. Aron de Chaves

Jacob Suares Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Abraham Suares Jr. Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Abraham de Isaac Senior David Semah Aboab Jr.
Isaac Henriques Cotinho Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Ester de Aron Motta Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Abraham Jesurun Sasportas Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Abraham & Isaac de Marchena Christiaan van Eghen*
Abraham Floris & Moses de Castro Moses de Crasto
Isaac Cardoze Elias Gomes Suares
Joseph Jesurun Henriques Salomon Gutierres
Joseph da Costa Gomez Jacob Temmink Adriaansz*
Joseph da Costa Gomez Widow of Pieter Root* &
Joan Willem Bongaard*
Joseph da Costa Gomez Cornelis de Meij*
Joseph da Costa Gomez Christiaan G. Frederiks*
Joseph da Costa Gomez Aron Jesurun
Joseph da Costa Gomez Dirk Entvogel*
Joseph & Isaac da Costa Gomez Abraham & Moses de Raphael
Mendes da Costa
David Lopez Lagunes Abraham de Moses da Costa Gomez
Abraham Flores & Moses de Castro Moses & David Mendes da Costa
Moses de Castro Moses de Crasto
Moses de Abraham de Chaves Moses de Chaves
Aron de Chaves Jr. Aron de Chaves
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Moses & David Mendes da Costa
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto David Henriques de Castro
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Moses Capadoso
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Jacob Machoro
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Abraham & Moses de Raphael
Mendes da Costa
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Salomon Gomes
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Jacob de Prado & son
David Jesurun & Mordechay de Crasto Jacob van Ghesel*
David Jesurun Isaac de Salomon Jesurun
Mordechay de Crasto Isaac de Salomon Jesurun
Jacob de Mordechay de Crasto Jacob Jr. & Abraham Semah Ferro Jr.
Abraham Flores & Moses de Castro Abraham & Moses de Raphael
Mendes da Costa
Joseph da Costa Gomez Abraham & Moses de Raphael
Mendes da Costa
Jacob Fidanque Herman Beerens & son*
Jacob Fidanque Adam Bartelsman*
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 363

Curaçao Jews Amsterdam Jews and Gentiles

Widow Ribca Alva Isaac Dias

Isaac de Jacob Henriques Fereyra Abraham Henriques Fereyra
Isaac de Jacob Henriques Fereyra Henrique Vaes de Oliveira & sons
Abraham Bueno Vivas Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Moses de Benjamin Jesurun Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Rachel Henriques Moron Aron Jesurun
Cohen Henriques Jr. Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Cohen Henriques Jr. & Isaac Juliao Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Sara de Mordechay Alvares Correa Aron Jesurun
Manuel & Daniel da Costa Gomez Abraham Lopes Lagunes
Abraham Jesurun Sasportas Aron Jesurun
Aron Henriques Moron Hobbe Strandwijk*
Isaac Belmonte Christiaan van Eghen*
Neyra & Widow of Anthony de Neijra Moses David Mendes da Costa
& sons
Moses Penso Henrique Vaes de Oliveira & sons
Moses Penso & Jacob Lopez Dias Joseph Rodrigues da Costa
Moses Henriques Cotinho Christiaan G. Frederiks*
Isaac Juliao Joseph da Fonseca Chaves
Abraham & Isaac de Marchena Aron Jesurun
Abraham & Isaac de Marchena Abraham & Moses de Raphael
Mendes da Costa
Joseph & Jacob da Costa Gomez Isaac Orobio de Castro
David de Mordechay Senior David Semah Aboab Jr.
Isaac de Abraham Baruch Louzada Isaac Orobio de Castro
Abraham Baruch Louzada Isaac Orobio de Castro

*The names of the gentiles are indicated with an asterisk.

Source: ARA, Nieuwe West-Indische Compagnie (NWIC) 591, fols. 231–33.
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364 | Wim Klooster

Notes

1. [David de Isaac Cohen Nassy,] Geschiedenis der Kolonie van Suriname: Behelzende derzelver
opkomst, voortgang, burgerlyke en staatkundige gesteldheid, tegenwoordigen staat van koo-
phandel, en eene volledige en naauwkeurige beschryving van het land, de zeden en gebruiken
der ingezetenen. Geheel op nieuw samengesteld door een gezelschap van geleerde joodsche man-
nen aldaar (Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1791), 101–2.
2. There is evidence that Jews were living in Suriname as early as 1643: Samuel Oppen-
heim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana, 1658–1666, and Its Relation to the
Jews in Surinam, Cayenne and Tobago,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical
Society 16 (1907):97.
3. Günter Böhm, “The Synagogues of Surinam,” Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1978):99. L. L. E.
Rens, “Analysis of Annals Relating to Early Jewish Settlement in Surinam,” in The Jew-
ish Nation in Surinam: Historical Essays, ed. Robert Cohen (Amsterdam, 1982), 36.
4. Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth
Century (Leiden, 1991), 125–26. Jewish labor on Sundays was also disputed in Para-
maribo. The opening of Jewish shops on that day was bound to invite a negative
response from the consistories of the Dutch and French communities. They complained
that shopkeepers were putting their wares on the windowsill and selling them on the
streets. The government thereupon forbade the Jews to open their shops on Sundays.
What also worried the consistories was Jewish women sewing and practicing other
handicrafts in their doorways at the Christian church-time. See Placard of 21 Novem-
ber 1718 [no. 279] in Plakaten, ordonnantien en andere wetten, uitgevaardigd in Suriname,
1667–1816, ed. J. Th. de Smidt (Amsterdam, 1973), 323–24.
5. F. C. Bubberman et al., Links with the Past: The History of the Cartography of Suriname
1500–1971 (Amsterdam, 1973), 53. Cf. for the history of the Jews of early Dutch Suri-
name, Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten. Engländer und Niederländer im
amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum 1648–1713 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1998), 218–
20, 229–52.
6. Alex van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast. Roofbouw en overleven in een Caraïbische plan-
tagekolonie 1750–1863 (Leiden, 1993), 79.
7. V. P. Malouet, V.P. Malouet’s franz. Seewesens-Administrators’s Reisen nach dem Französis-
chen Guiana und nach Surinam (Weimar, 1805), 150.
8. Van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast, 93–94.
9. The slaves were owned by one hundred families and some fifty bachelors. In all, Nassy
lists 92 Sephardic and ten to twelve Ashkenazi families for the year 1690: [Nassy,]
Geschiedenis der Kolonie van Suriname, 74–75.
10. We have two data for 1684: a poll and land tax list recording 3,226 black slaves (972 of
whom employed by 163 Jewish men and women), and a probably more reliable book-
keeper count of 4,237: Victor Enthoven, “Suriname and Zeeland: Fifteen Years of Dutch
Misery on the Wild Coast, 1667–1682,” in Shipping, Factories and Colonization, ed. J. Ever-
aert and J. Parmentier (Brussels, 1997), 255; J. M. van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren
en hun kerk. Plantagekolonie en handelskerk ten tijde van Johannes Basseliers, predikant en
planter in Suriname, 1667–1689 (Wageningen, 1966), 50. For the slave trade in this period,
see Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas 1680–1791
(Assen, Maastricht, and Dover, N.H., 1985), 418–20; Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch
in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 356–57.
11. Van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast, 311 (table 44); Henk den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven.
Scheepvaart en handel van de Tweede West-Indische Compagnie op Afrika, 1674–1740 (Zut-
phen, 1997), 366.
12. Postma, Dutch in Atlantic Slave Trade, 184. Annually in the eighteenth century, three
hundred slaves ran away, and one hundred of them were never recovered. Van Stipri-
aan, Surinaams contrast, 386, citing Wim S. M. Hoogbergen, De Boni-oorlogen, 1757–1860;
Marronage en guerrilla in Oost-Suriname (Utrecht, 1985), 54.
13. Van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast, 207–25.
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 365

14. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 85.

15. As many as 150 families set up retail businesses in Paramaribo, even though there was
room for only a few such traders.
16. At least seventy plantations on the Suriname River are indicated as having Jewish
owners on the 1737 map of A. de Lavaux, Algemeene Kaart van de Colonie of Provintie van
Suriname.
17. [Nassy,] Geschiedenis der Kolonie van Suriname, second pagination, 5–6.
18. Alex van Stipriaan, “An Unusual Parallel: Jews and Africans in Suriname in the 18th
and 19th Centuries,” Studia Rosenthaliana 31, no. 1/2 (1997):78.
19. Two Diaries or Notebooks of the Artist John Greenwood, fols. 101–2, New York His-
torical Society.
20. M. D. Teenstra, De landbouw in de kolonie Suriname voorafgegaan door eene geschied- en
natuurkundige beschouwing der kolonie, vol. 1 (Groningen, 1835), 135.
21. ”Consideratien over den toestand van t’eijlant van Curacao,” 1695, Algemeen Rijk-
sarchief [The Hague] (ARA) Verspreide West-Indische Stukken 394; Report by W. A. I.
van Grovenstein and W. C. Boeij, The Hague, 11 February 1791; ARA Verspreide West-
Indische Stukken 972; Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyage d’un suisse dans différentes
colonies d’Amérique pendant la dernière guerre (Neuchatel, 1785), 99; Joh. Hartog, Curaçao.
Van kolonie tot autonomie, vol. 1 (Aruba, 1961):368–69. J. A. Schiltkamp, Bestuur en recht-
spraak in de Nederlandse Antillen ten tijde van de West-Indische Compagnie (Willemstad,
1972), 30–31; W. E. Renkema, Het Curaçaose plantagebedrijf in de 19e eeuw (Zutphen,
1981), 15–16, 252–54.
22. One of them was Benjamin de Casseres, the nephew of Spinoza. I. S. Emmanuel, “Les
juifs de la Martinique et leurs coreligionnairs d’Amsterdam au XVIIe siècle,” Revue des
Etudes Juives 123 (1964):516.
23. Goslinga’s claim that the Jewish population swelled again at mid-century as a result of
migration from St. Thomas and the United Provinces cannot be substantiated. Family
tax lists, published by the West India Company in 1746, 1750, and 1755, reveal that the
number of Jewish families remained roughly the same in these years, declining even
slightly from 156 to 153 to 151. However, the Jewish group gained demographic weight
because the gentile population decreased in this period from 349 to 312 families and
then dropped to 270. Goslinga, Dutch in Caribbean, 114–15. Family tax lists, Curaçao,
1746, 1749, 1755. ARA Nieuwe West-Indische Compagnie (NWIC) 594, fols. 132–39,
NWIC 597, fols. 903–20, NWIC 600, fols. 1010–25.
24. Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands
Antilles, vol. 1 (Cincinnati, 1970), 152.
25. The spectacle had roots in medieval Europe, where Judas was hanged with a money-
bag suspended from his neck to personify avarice. All of the standard forms of Jewish
dress were applied to Judas. Lester K. Little, “The Jews in Christian Europe,” in Essen-
tial Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation,
ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York and London, 1991), 289, 296n.
26. Governor Nicolaas van Liebergen to the WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, Curaçao, 25
April 1682; Meeting of the Council of Curaçao, 28 March 1682; Memorandum of “Jan
Ignacius” Echeverria, Curaçao, 14 April 1682, ARA NWIC 617, fols. 149–52, 178, 193–94.
27. Bernard R. Buddingh’, Van Punt en Snoa. Ontstaan en groei van Willemstad, Curaçao vanaf
1634, De Willemstad tussen 1700 en 1732 en de bouwgeschiedenis van de synagoge Mikvé
Israël-Emanuel 1730–1732 (‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1994), 78.
28. Also, the New York merchant Mosseh Hizquiau Lopes da Fonseca, a former
Curaçaoan, married Rachel Israel of Curaçao in 1736. Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious
Stones of the Jews of Curaçao: Curaçao Jewry 1656–1957 (New York, 1957), 261, 316.
29. Daniel Snydacker, “Traders in Exile: Quakers and Jews of New York and Newport in
the New World Economy, 1650–1776” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University,
1982), 268–71, 278–79; Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew 1492–1776, vol. 2
(Detroit, 1970), 596–97, 602, 607, 618; David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early
Jewish Settlers 1682–1831 (New York, 1952), 237–38.
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366 | Wim Klooster

30. From 16 October 1751, through 15 October 1752, 149 vessels from Spanish American
colonies dropped anchor in Willemstad compared to eighteen from New York. In 1785
and 1786, seventeen ships came into Willemstad from New York. ARA NWIC 598, fols.
947–65, 1210–21, NWIC 599 fols. 22–28, 94–97, 136–39, 258ff, 409ff.
31. This assertion by Liebman is based on a quotation from Melvin H. Jackson. Liebman’s
discussion of Curaçao’s Jews is full of errors. He wrongly argues, for instance, that Jew-
ish enclaves existed in Venezuela before 1693, and identifies Tucacas with Puerto
Lopez, Colombia. Seymour B. Liebman, New World Jewry, 1493–1825: Requiem for the
Forgotten (New York, 1982), 183ff.
32. Yosef Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th
Centuries,” American Jewish History 72 (1982):200–202.
33. In 1734, thirty-nine out of forty-four insurers were Jews, while sixty years later, there
were seventeen Jews among twenty-five sworn brokers.
34. Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden, 1998), 178–79.
35. The Nation of Islam, the radical movement of black Muslims headed by the well-
known activist Louis Farrakhan, has tried to show that the Atlantic slave trade was a
kind of Jewish specialty. Its allegations, gathered in Nation of Islam, The Secret Rela-
tionship Between Blacks and Jews (Chicago, 1991), were answered by Seymour Drescher,
“The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Immigrants and Minorities 12 (July
1993):113–25; David Brion Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” The New York Review
of Books 41 no. 21 (22 December 1994):14–16; and Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave
Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York and London, 1998). See also essays by
Drescher and Pieter Emmer in this volume.
36. Other Jews actively involved were Moshe Lopez, a.k.a. Francisco Lopez Henriquez,
Manuel de Pina, and Manuel Alvares Correa: Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the
Jews, vol. 1, 76.
37. Ibid., 77–80. For the development of Curaçao’s slave trade, see Wim Klooster, “Slaven-
vaart op Spaanse kusten. De Nederlandse slavenhandel met Spaans Amerika,
1648–1701,” Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis 16, no. 2 (1997):121–40.
38. Klooster, Illicit Riches, 185.
39. H. K. Roessingh, Inlandse tabak. Expansie en contractie van een handelsgewas in de 17e en
18e eeuw in Nederland (Zutphen, 1976), 238–39; Wim Klooster, “De reis van Francisco
Miranda door de Republiek in 1788,” De achttiende eeuw. Documentatieblad van de Werk-
groep Achttiende Eeuw 25, no. 1 (1993):79.
40. Agustín Moreno Henríquez to José de Galvez, Amsterdam, 11 February 1778, Archivo
General de Indias [Seville] (AGI), Indiferente General 2412.
41. Governor Isaac Faesch to the WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, Curaçao, 16 May 1753,
ARA NWIC 599, fol. 679.
42. Citizens of Curaçao to the West India Company, Chamber of Amsterdam, 1761 or 1762,
ARA NWIC 603, fols. 1446–47; Willem Kock, boatswain, to the WIC, Curaçao, 13 July
1753, ARA NWIC 1161 fol. 6; Vicente de Amézaga Aresti, Vicente Antonio de Icuza.
Comandante de corsarios (Caracas, 1966), 49–50.
43. Interrogation of Pieter Taeijste, Curaçao, 6 February 1766, ARA NWIC 605, fols. 210–11.
Testimonies of Joseph Gatardo and Ignacio de la Raza, Curaçao, 7 August 1731, ARA
NWIC 580, fol. 483.
44. Agustín Moreno Henríquez to José de Galvez, Amsterdam, 11 February 1778, AGI
Indiferente General 2412.
45. Only rarely, Curaçaoans would conduct business in La Guaira or Puerto Cabello,
Venezuela’s official ports. Around 1720, the Curaçaoan Jew “Coche” Pereira traded for
more than eight months in Puerto Cabello, purchasing cacao and tobacco from one
estate. He was protected by Captain Diego de Matos Montañés, who, ironically, had
plenary power to combat contraband trade. Mario Briceño Perozo, “Estudio Prelimi-
nar,” in Pedro José de Olavarriaga, Instrucción general y particular del estado presente de la
Provincia de Venezuela en los años de 1720 y 1721 (Caracas, 1965), 11, 30.
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Jews in Suriname and Curaçao | 367

46. J. G. Pax and Nathaniel Ellis, delegates of the Council of Curaçao, to Governor Faesch
and Council, Curaçao, 24 September 1753, ARA NWIC 599, fols. 912–13. Monthly
wages of the sailors are mentioned in ARA Oud Archief Curaçao [OAC] 814, fol. 482.
47. This happened to Jacob and Abraham Henriquez Moron, Ishac de Medina, Jacob
Moreno Henriquez, and Abraham de Belmonte (1733), Mosseh de Selomoh Levy
Maduro (1734), Jeudah Alva (1748), Abraham Pinedo and Manuel Tabuada (1764),
Daniel Martines and Salomon Calvo (late 1760s), and Aron de David Uziel Cardozo
(1773). Testimony of Abraham Dias and David Jesurun Henriquez, Curaçao, 6 January
1749, ARA OAC 820, fol. 11; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews, vol. 1,
222–26; Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the
Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times (Jerusalem, 1991), 72–73.
48. Diary of Juan Francisco Navarro, Curaçao, 3 March–3 April 1743, Annex to San Gil to
Marqués de Villarias, The Hague, 4 July 1743, Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 6275.
49. Analola Borges, “El inicio del comercio internacional venezolano (siglo XVIII),” Boletín
de la Academia Nacional de Historia [Caracas] 46, no. 189 (1965):28–29; Geoffrey J. Walker,
Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington, 1979), 63; Lance R. Grahn,
“An Irresoluble Dilemma: Smuggling in New Granada, 1713–1763,” in Reform and
Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru, ed. John R. Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe, and
Anthony McFarlane (Baton Rouge and London, 1990), 131.
50. Clara Catharina Kerckrinck and David Senior to Interim-Governor Jonathan van
Beuningen, Curaçao, 13 October 1716, ARA Staten-Generaal 9489.
51. Borges, “Inicio del comercio internacional,” 33. Governor Juan Pedro van Collen later
claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the erection of a synagogue had been one of
the reasons for the foundation of the Compañía Guipuzcoana. Juan Pedro van Collen
to the WIC, Curaçao, 7 June 1737, ARA NWIC 583, fol. 301.
52. Juan Jacobo Montero de Espinosa to King Philip V, Caracas, 9 April 1711, AGI Santo
Domingo 697. Statement by Domingo de Arostegui, San Juan de Guaiguaza, 3 Febru-
ary 1718, AGI Santo Domingo 697; Olavarriaga, Instrucción general y particular, 247.
53. Four years later, however, a Spanish report again mentioned the existence of a Dutch
“church” in Tucacas. Briceño Perozo, “Estudio Preliminar,” 149n. “Relacion que el
Conde Clavijo hase de lo succedido con los Navios que apreso olandeses,” Cartagena,
17 March 1725, ARA Staten-Generaal 7128.
54. Statement by Martín de Lardizábal, governor of Caracas, Caracas, 15 October 1734,
AGI Santo Domingo 710. Marquis de San Gil to the States General, The Hague, 28
December 1741, ARA Staten-Generaal 7138; “Information Collected by Delegates of the
Council of Curaçao,” 6 September 1743. ARA NWIC 590, fols. 547–52.
55. Robert James Ferry, “Cacao and Kindred: Transformations of Economy and Society in
Colonial Caracas,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1980), 189. Dorothy Cairns
Tamaro, “A New World Plantation Region in Colonial Venezuela: Eighteenth-Century
Cacao Cultivation in the Tuy Valley and Barlovento,” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University,
1988), 68.
56. Notice of intended marriage, 13 December 1617, DTB 668/130, Gemeentearchief Ams-
terdam (GAA). Act of 14 January 1620, GAA Notarieel Archief (NA) 625, fols. 439–41.
Acts of 28 August and 12 December 1622, NA 646, fols. 224, 341. I would like to thank
Odette Vlessing of the Amsterdam Gemeentearchief for providing reproductions of
the index cards.
57. Dorothy S. Towle, Records of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Rhode Island 1716–1752 (Wash-
ington, D.C., 1936), 348.
58. In 1636, the Inquisition arrested twenty “judaizing Portuguese.” There are actually
indications that a small group of Portuguese Jews in Cartagena was in touch with the
Dutch West India Company as early as the 1630s: Nikolaus Böttcher, Aufstieg und Fall
eines atlantischen Handelsimperiums. Portugiesische Kaufleute und Sklavenhändler in Carta-
gena de Indias von 1580 bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 90,
106, 116–18.
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368 | Wim Klooster

59. At Utrecht in 1713, following the War of the Spanish Succession, the asiento was granted
to Britain. The British asentistas subsequently very rarely called on the Dutch entrepôt.
60. Jonathan I. Israel, “The Dutch Republic and Its Jews During the Conflict over the Span-
ish Succession (1699–1715),” in Dutch Jewish History: Proceedings of the Fourth Sympo-
sium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands 7–10 December, Tel Aviv-Jerusalem, 1986,
ed. Jozeph Michman (Assen and Maastricht, 1989), 118–19.
61. Patent, issued by Governor Jeremias van Collen, Curaçao, 2 June 1702, AGI Santo
Domingo 696; J. de Wildt, secretary of the Amsterdam Admiralty, to Pensionary
Anthonie Heinsius, Amsterdam, 9 November 1703, in De briefwisseling van Anthonie
Heinsius 1702–1720, ed. A. J. Veenendaal, Jr., various vols. (The Hague, 1976–), vol. 3,
532; “Concept tot veroveringe en verdelinge van de Spaense Westindien tussen Hol-
lant en Engelant,” The Hague, December 1707, ARA Aanwinsten 1906 XLIII 23.
62. In 1787, the number of Surinamese whites was estimated at 3,356, including 1,311 (39.1
percent) Jews, but not counting around one hundred free mulatto Jews. This percent-
age was higher than that in Dutch Brazil, whose Jewish population has often been
overstated. Jews accounted for only one thousand at most, and probably even less
than five hundred, out of a total population of 3,400 in 1645. Gonsalves de Mello
claims that approximately 350 of Recife’s 1,704 inhabitants were Jews: José Antonio
Gonsalves de Mello, Gente de Nação. Cristãos-novos e judeus em Pernambuco 1542–1654
(Recife, 1989), 282.
63. This ship of ca. 90 tons left Curaçao for Amsterdam on 30 April 1744.
19 1/24/01 12:08 PM Page 369

– Chapter 19 –

AN ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE JEWISH

STRUGGLE FOR RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN
BRAZIL, NEW NETHERLAND, AND NEW YORK

James Homer Williams

I N THE MIDDLE THIRD OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, Jews experienced

a range of treatment within the Dutch Atlantic world. Amsterdam tol-
erated a sizable Jewish community and became the center of Jewish life
in western Europe. Dutch Brazil encouraged Jewish settlement in an ecu-
menical effort to wrest Brazil from Portuguese control. There, hundreds
of Jews flourished, as they did later in other Dutch colonies of South
America and the Caribbean. Yet in New Amsterdam, geographical pre-
cursor to the center of North American Jewry—New York City—Dutch
leaders persecuted a few dozen Jews and succeeded in preventing the
creation of a prosperous Jewish community.
The central question to which this essay offers an answer, therefore, is
why similar Jews within a seemingly uniform Dutch Atlantic world faced
a range of challenges and were welcomed in some places and not in oth-
ers. An examination of Jewish experiences in Amsterdam, Recife, and New
Amsterdam suggests that a complex set of variables were at work in deter-
mining the particular situation in which the Jews found themselves. These
variables included Dutch leaders’ valuation of the Jews’ usefulness to the
larger community and empire, the number of Jews compared to Christians,
the perceived threat that Jewish merchants posed to Christian merchants,
and the background and temperament of Dutch officials in each locale.
In recreating an Atlantic context for the Jewish quest for a significant
place in the Dutch world of Europe and the Americas, this essay hopes
not only to solve the puzzle mentioned above but also to transcend some
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370 | James Homer Williams

of the limitations in previous accounts of the Jews in early America.

Though it has received a great deal of attention—far beyond the actual
number of people involved probably warrants1—the history of the Jews
of New Amsterdam suffers from narrow interpretations by historians
interested in the Jewish experience in relatively small geographic areas,
such as a city, colony, or region. From this perspective, the two dozen
Jews in New Amsterdam are “pilgrim fathers,” the first wave of religious
troops who established a “precarious North American beachhead” for
Judaism, or they are the first indication of “the reversal of the pendulum
of Jewish migration” toward the west.2
On the other hand, scholars of Dutch colonization prefer to place the
Jews within a broader type of intolerance with New Netherland’s direc-
tor-general Peter Stuyvesant as the exemplar. One could accept Frederick
Zwierlein’s insistence that Stuyvesant’s “persecution of the Jews” was
simply a part of the general unadulterated religious bigotry of orthodox
Calvinists toward Lutherans, Quakers, Catholics, and other non-Calvin-
ists who attempted to settle and worship in New Netherland3—if not for
the fact that accepting this simplistic view ignores the strikingly different
reception Jews received in Dutch Brazil and in Holland itself.
Early modern historians increasingly speak of an Atlantic world, a
concept that tries to transcend political boundaries and reconnect mobile
people, goods, and ideas as they moved within and between North and
South America, Africa, and Europe.4 This essay proceeds in sections that
follow Jews chronologically through three areas of the early Dutch
Atlantic world: Holland, Brazil, and New Netherland. It soon becomes
apparent that nowhere in the Dutch world of the early to mid-1600s did
Jews achieve perfect equality, but they did not expect to, either. What did
Jews demand and reasonably expect to achieve? The rights and privileges
granted to them in Amsterdam served always as the model when Jews
ventured to the western reaches of the Dutch empire. These rights
included the exercise of their religion—officially, only in private house-
holds so as not to challenge the public monopoly of the Dutch Reformed
Church, but in practice, fairly openly in synagogues. They also expected
the opportunity to engage in trade, though they accepted other economic
restrictions. In return, Jews invested in the Dutch India companies and
contributed in myriad ways to the propulsion of the United Provinces
into a golden age in the seventeenth century.
A final, shorter section continues the story into the English period
after the Dutch lost New Netherland in 1664. This section contrasts the
Jewish experience in Manhattan under Dutch and English rule but also
places English policies toward Jews in New York in the larger context of
the English imperial world in the late seventeenth century. Ironically, the
permanent foothold for Jews in mainland North America came not under
the auspices of the Dutch, whom scholars and the public perceive as cos-
mopolitan and tolerant, but under the English, who are seldom noted for
a willing acceptance of cultural differences in the early modern world.
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An Atlantic Perspective | 371

* * * *

MOST JEWS IN HOLLAND, BRAZIL, AND NEW NETHERLAND could trace their
lineage to Portugal, even though by the time of Dutch colonization in the
Americas in 1624 some of them were Dutch-born. Jews in Portugal, who
accounted for 20 percent of the population in 1496, had fared better than
those in Spain, at least until 1536 when João III, the Portuguese monarch,
received permission from Rome to create a Portuguese Inquisition. Those
Jews forcibly converted to Christianity were known as New Christians—
Cristãos novos in Portuguese, conversos in Spanish. Early in the 1500s, New
Christians established themselves as the leaders of finance and interna-
tional trade in Portugal, where they enjoyed a monopoly, and in Portuguese
colonies such as Brazil. When the crowns of Spain and Portugal united in
1580, the Portuguese New Christians also assumed major roles in the mer-
chant communities of Spain and its overseas empire. For generations after
the original forced conversions, descendants of the original New Christians
were still known by that term, even if for scores of years their religious
devotion had been orthodox Christian. Within a largely anti-Semitic
Europe, they could never escape their ancestry as Jews. Across the globe,
“Portuguese,” “New Christian,” and “crypto-Jew” were often used as syn-
onymous religious terms, though with questionable validity. The Por-
tuguese Jesuit theologian António Vieira noted that “in popular parlance,
among most of the European nations, ‘Portuguese’ is confused with ‘Jew.’”5
In the Low Countries, Christians had essentially driven Jews out by
1550. When the seven northern provinces rebelled in the 1570s, the polit-
ical chaos and politique philosophy of William of Orange combined to
open the door to Portuguese New Christians to settle again in the United
Provinces. Many New Christians reverted to Judaism when they arrived
in Amsterdam. After the Dutch extended their blockade of Antwerp in
1595, New Christian merchants in Portugal shifted their trade to other
ports, most notably Amsterdam. From 1595 to 1620, the eve of Dutch col-
onization in North America, the Portuguese Jewish community in Ams-
terdam grew rapidly and with little resistance from the burgomasters of
the city, who recognized that the Jews, whether New Christian or obser-
vant, opened new trade relationships with Portugal and the Portuguese
colonies. The prosperity of the Dutch Sephardim in the first six decades
of the seventeenth century rose and fell with the vicissitudes of Spanish-
Dutch relations. As the historian Jonathan Israel indicates, progress was
“extremely sporadic.” Dramatic gains were made only during times of
peace between the United Provinces and Spain, that is, during the truce
from 1609 to 1621 and the decade after the second Spanish-Dutch war,
from 1646 to 1655. “By the mid-seventeenth century,” historian Miriam
Bodian concludes, the Amsterdam Jewish community “had risen to a
position of international importance in the Jewish and commercial
spheres,” making it “a nerve center for a commercial, ethnic, and reli-
gious network of considerable complexity.”6
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372 | James Homer Williams

Two diasporic Jewish movements created this complex network cen-

tered in Amsterdam. The Jewish community there—and it was a commu-
nity, Bodian insists—was part of “two far-flung diasporas”: the Jewish
people in general who spread across Europe and eventually the globe,
and the conversos and ex-conversos who traced their heritage to Spain and
Portugal. In Amsterdam, the Sephardic community constructed a collec-
tive identity around the Portuguese phrase os da nação (those of the
Nation). “It was the term ‘nation’ that carried the effect,” Bodian states,
for it “evoked an aura, drama, and historical experience which outsiders
could not grasp,” and which linked the Amsterdam community to other
elements of the “Portuguese” diaspora: in Hamburg, Salonica, Rouen,
Livorno, Pisa, Jerusalem, Tunis, Brazil, Suriname, and Curaçao. To the
Dutch, however, the Portuguese Jews became known as the Portugeesche
Natie (Portuguese Nation), a use of the word “nation” that stretched from
Roman antiquity through the medieval period to mean “a local commu-
nity of foreigners (never one’s own community).”7
Commerce, not religion, largely determined the relationship be-
tween the Dutch and the Portuguese communities in Amsterdam, a city
that had become in the early and mid-seventeenth century the center of
colonial trade in northern Europe. The Jews specialized in the so-called
“rich trade” of colonial products such as sugar, tobacco, spices, and dia-
monds, which they traded almost exclusively with Portugal, Madeira,
and the Azores. Their age-old expertise benefited the Dutch as well, as
they expanded into Brazil, which will be discussed below. Lest we fall
into the stereotype of the rich Jewish merchant, however, it is helpful to
point out that the Amsterdam community included not only dominant
merchants engaged in international trade but also a large number of
“middling” and poor folks. Cultural fissures also developed, for by the
late 1630s, the community included some five hundred Ashkenazi
refugees from Eastern Europe. These Yiddish speakers were culturally
distinct from the Portuguese and were usually poor, and therefore
resented. The Portuguese community’s population stagnated around
one thousand members, with many families recently gone to Brazil or
other European cities.8
If commerce smoothed the relationship between Portuguese Jews
and the Christian merchant elite of Amsterdam (the “regents”), then the
Dutch Reformed clergy (predikants) threatened that relationship with
demands for discriminating regulations against the Jews. The clergy were
not of one mind, however, with a conservative majority demanding rig-
orous bans against any non-conformist worship while a clerical minority
sought toleration. By necessity, the secular magistrates, drawn mostly
from the Calvinist merchant elite, played referee in the push-and-pull
struggles over how Calvinist Holland (and the other six provinces)
would be. Bodian asserts that the Portuguese Jews sought “maximum
opportunity and well-being (including religious freedom)” for their com-
munity. The regents’ focus was on maintaining civil peace.9
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An Atlantic Perspective | 373

The conflict at the core of Dutch society and identity formation, how-
ever, was not Christian-Jewish but Protestant-Catholic. During the
decades-long struggle against Spain, Dutch Protestants adopted the atti-
tude liever Turcx dan Paus, “better Turkish than papist.” This focus on
Catholics explains why Amsterdam Jews were allowed to build a syna-
gogue in 1612, a full two centuries before Amsterdam Catholics could wor-
ship publicly. During crises such as flooding, pestilence, and war, the
predikants blamed backsliding Christians, not Jews. “It was Catholic
churches, not synagogues, that suffered damage at the hands of angry
mobs,” Bodian concludes, “and it was a demonized ‘popery’ against
which Protestant preachers fulminated.”10
Since the Jews were not those demonized, it was easy and expedient
for the magistrates of Amsterdam (particularly the burgomasters) to
evade the complaints of the clergy by ignoring them. The result was a gap
between official policy and actual practice when it came to the rights and
privileges that Jews would enjoy. The burgomasters allowed a Por-
tuguese merchant to buy burghers’ rights (poortersrecht) in 1597. A reso-
lution passed the next year extended the right to other Portuguese, with
two stipulations. First, the purchasers must be Christians and “that
before taking the [burgher’s] oath they be warned that in this city no reli-
gion can or may be practiced other than that practiced publicly in the
churches,” in other words, Calvinism. While seeming to prohibit Jews
and Catholics from purchasing the burghers’ rights, in fact the resolution
served merely to warn non-Calvinists that their religious rights were
restricted. The magistrates tolerated Catholic worship if conducted pri-
vately, and they allowed Catholics and Jews to purchase the burghers’
rights, although certain restrictions did apply. An ordinance in 1632, for
instance, “specifically prohibited Jewish poorters from carrying on retail
trade or guild trades—that of the brokers’ guild excepted.” Furthermore,
they could not hold public office, nor could their children inherit the
burghers’ rights as Christian children did from their parents.11
So within twenty years of their arrival in Amsterdam, Portuguese
Jews had worked under the umbrella of legal disability in terms of eco-
nomic and religious activity to create in reality a situation of remarkable
privileges enjoyed by few Jews elsewhere in Europe. Their skills in adapt-
ing to circumstances—and the magistrates’ willingness to connive with
them against the orthodox Reformed ministers—is illustrated in the build-
ing of the first synagogue in 1612. After construction of the building had
begun, the city council passed a resolution prohibiting anyone from the
Portuguese Nation from living or worshiping in the building, “on penalty
of having the said house or building razed.” While some Reformed min-
isters spit vitriol at the Jews and the magistrates followed with a resolu-
tion against the synagogue, construction continued. The compromise was
to transfer ownership to a Christian (the Catholic Nicolaes van Campen,
himself a member of the council in spite of regulations against Catholics
holding office), who then rented the building to the Jews. Catholics
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374 | James Homer Williams

sometimes followed the same tactic to maintain their secluded houses of

worship (schuilkerken), but they rented from Protestants.12
As long as the Jews of Amsterdam kept a low religious profile in pub-
lic, they could function normally in Dutch society, suffering only some
restrictions on their economic activities (not enough to prevent many
from becoming wealthy) and their political rights (though it is not certain
that Jews even wanted to hold political office). In Amsterdam, Jews and
Christians largely lived in separate spheres that intersected only in the
economic realm. Neither side wished for social and religious interaction.
What happened in Amsterdam, however, did not necessarily dictate
Dutch policies toward Jews in other cities, some of which were less wel-
coming than Amsterdam, or in the colonies, where the West India Com-
pany (WIC) operated autonomously. Neither the province of Holland nor
the States General of the United Provinces ever promulgated a uniform
Jewish policy. When presented with just such a statute in 1619, the States
General declined to take action, thereby leaving regulation of the
“Hebrew Nation” (Hebreeusche Natie) in the hands of local authorities and
leaving intact the ordinances directed at the Jews of Amsterdam passed
by the burgomasters in 1616. These ordinances warned the Jews “not to
speak or write anything (and to ensure that nothing be spoken or written)
that may, in any way, tend to the disparagement of our Christian religion;
not to attempt to seduce any Christian person away from our Christian
religion or to circumcise one; and not to have any carnal relations,
whether in or out of wedlock, with Christian women or girls, not even
those of ill repute.” Thus, “in characteristically evasive fashion,” Bodian
remarks, the burgomasters “neither granted nor denied Jews the right to
public worship.”13
Since the magistrates of Amsterdam had created a place for the Por-
tuguese Jews, it should come as no surprise that when plans arose for
Dutch activity in Brazil, they included the Jews. By 1621, when the WIC
formed and began its plans for colonization of North America, there was
already a substantial population of New Christians in Portuguese Brazil
and a Portuguese Jewish community of approximately eight hundred in
Amsterdam (less than 1 percent of the city’s population). From the early
1600s, Amsterdam Jews had been the intermediaries in trade between
Holland and Brazil. The historian Daniel M. Swetschinski has suggested
that this trade “should really be seen as a triangular Holland-Portugal-
Brazil route with as yet no direct traffic between Holland and Brazil.”
Portuguese Jewish merchants in Amsterdam could not operate inde-
pendently but rather were partners with kin situated in merchant com-
munities across the Atlantic world. “Considerations of kinship,”
Swetschinski concludes, “were uppermost in the minds of Amsterdam’s
Portuguese Jews.”14
These Portuguese Jews also actively supported Dutch Christians in
their struggle against Spain for independence. It was natural in 1623 for
Dutch officials to suggest that Jews would help them conquer Brazil,
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An Atlantic Perspective | 375

which was still under the united crowns of Spain and Portugal. In his con-
quest proposal, Jan Andries Moerbeeck surmised that because most of the
Portuguese residents of Brazil were Jews, they were inevitably enemies of
Spain, and the Dutch could expect no resistance from them. In the con-
quest of Bahia in 1624, several dozen Jews did join the expedition from
Holland, and some New Christians in Brazil collaborated with the Dutch,
who immediately proclaimed a policy of religious toleration. Such collab-
oration was always dangerous, however. When the Portuguese recap-
tured Bahia a year later, they executed four “men of the Hebrew Nation.”15
The Dutch returned in 1630 to conquer Pernambuco in northeastern
Brazil. In the plans for conquest approved by the States General, the WIC
promised that “The liberty of Spaniards, Portuguese, and natives,
whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews, will be respected.” As at home
and in its other colonies, the WIC established the Dutch Reformed
Church for public worship, but it left everyone free of molestation “or
inquiries in matters of conscience or in their private homes.” In Brazil,
“no one should dare to disquiet or disturb them [Catholics and Jews] or
cause them any hardship—under the penalty of arbitrary punishments or
… severe or exemplary reproof.” With the Dutch seen as tolerant Protes-
tant liberators from Spanish Inquisitorial oppression, the New Christians
of Recife, a historian of Brazilian Jews commented, “rejoiced at the arrival
of the Dutch expedition.”16
A variety of Jews in the Dutch expedition made their way into
Brazilian society: soldiers, company interpreters, citizens joining rela-
tives, and perhaps a few German and Polish Jews. There were immedi-
ate success stories. The mercenary soldier Moses Navarro, for instance,
petitioned to stay on as a free citizen (vrijluiden) after his three-year con-
tract, and in 1635 received a broker’s license for trading in sugar and
tobacco. So many Jews emigrated from Amsterdam in search of the
newly opened economic opportunities in Brazil that the three Sephardic
congregations in Amsterdam combined into one in 1639. Meanwhile,
some New Christians of Pernambuco reverted to Judaism and were cir-
cumcised, provoking “a great scandal for the Christian people,” accord-
ing to a contemporary Catholic historian.17
The golden age of Dutch Brazil—and the peak of Jewish prosperity
there—came under the relatively enlightened governor-generalship of
Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1637–1644). This nobleman, great
grandson of King Christian III of Denmark (1503–1559) and great
nephew of William I, Prince of Orange and stadholder of Holland
(1533–1584), towers over the history of Dutch Brazil and proved a bless-
ing to Jews. The WIC encouraged Jews to emigrate to Brazil, where they
proved useful as cultural brokers with the Portuguese. Jews dominated
tax farming and the domestic slave trade in Brazil, but they were
excluded from public office. They served in the militia with other free cit-
izens, but Johan Maurits exempted them from guard duty on Saturdays
in exchange for a fee.18
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376 | James Homer Williams

Johan Maurits’s Calvinist heritage19 and his early statements about

Jews did not foretell his eventual promotion of religious toleration. Soon
after his arrival in Brazil, he encouraged Reformed ministers to turn
their conversion efforts to Indians, Catholics, and Jews alike. “It is nec-
essary to destroy the deep-rooted pretension of the Jews to observe the
Mosaic Law and to wait for the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel,”
Johan Maurits said. “They must be persuaded that Jesus Christ, the son
of Mary, was the promised Messiah, who has already arrived, and to
revere and believe in him.” Evidently, this puff of Christian bravado was
meant for the consumption of the Reformed clergy, for a minister to the
French Protestant community in Brazil confirmed that Johan Maurits
privately detested the Jews. Yet he succeeded in separating his own feel-
ings from company policy and soon became known as a man of “benev-
olence, forgiveness, affability and fairness” to Reformed, Catholics, and
Jews alike. In the end, no Jews converted, nor were they really expected
to. Instead, within months of Johan Maurits’s arrival the Jews had estab-
lished two synagogues in Recife, in violation of the Reformed monopoly
on public worship.20
Jewish success, in turn, provoked resentment from Portuguese
Catholics—the Old Christians. Catholics had fallen from the status of the
oppressor to the position of the conquered, and suffered the further
humiliation of being mocked by Jews. Even though the Brazilians shared
Christianity with the Dutch, theirs was the evil papism so despised by
Calvinists in the 1600s.21
The economic usefulness of the Jews in the conquest and thereafter
tempered Johan Maurits’s private bigotry toward Jews. As long as this
usefulness lasted, WIC officers allowed the Jews to bend the rules, just as
they were accustomed to doing in Amsterdam. In 1638, however, the
Reformed clergy asked Johan Maurits to disallow public worship by the
Jews, and the synagogues were closed. The government prohibited street
processions by Catholics or Jews and warned the Jews to worship “so
secretly that they should not be heard.” Yet the issue was by no means set-
tled and was not simply a matter of religious policy, for the Dutch also
had to consider the colony’s future and the place of Catholics and Jews in
its success. As more Dutch people acculturated to Brazil, the usefulness of
the Jews diminished, while increasing numbers of Dutch colonists inter-
preted the Jews’ success as coming at the expense of Christians.22
Johan Maurits’s mediation of competing ethnic and religious interests
in Brazil produced what historian C. R. Boxer has called a “policy of mas-
terly inactivity,” which tried to blunt the complaints of Reformed clergy
while balancing the views of the Jews and the Catholics. Jews believed
that their unquestioned loyalty to the Dutch Republic and their contribu-
tions to the success of the WIC should translate into greater liberties for
themselves. Johan Maurits wrote to the Company and concurred that the
Jews were loyal, but the Portuguese Catholics, he knew, could not be
trusted for a moment.23
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An Atlantic Perspective | 377

All in all, however, Portuguese Christians enjoyed greater political

rights, in spite of their disloyalty, than Dutch Jews enjoyed. The reality of
population proportions undoubtedly shaped Johan Maurits’s policies as
much as his religious sympathies did, for New Holland, as the Dutch
called their part of Brazil, was never a colony where the Dutch them-
selves settled in great numbers. The twenty thousand Portuguese
colonists and six thousand African slaves, not to speak of the local native
groups, vastly outnumbered the Dutch civilian population, Christian and
Jew, which reached only three thousand in number.24 Jews, a double
minority, were granted political rights equivalent to those given Indians
and Africans in Brazil. Many of them succeeded economically, it is true,
and they must have found Brazil an attractive opportunity since in 1645
Jews accounted for up to one-half the civilian white population in Dutch
Brazil. They also remained steadfastly loyal to the Dutch during the years
of rebellion from 1645 to the fall of Recife in 1654.25
Their loyalty, however, was never rewarded with religious or political
equality in Dutch Brazil. Were the Dutch simply exploiting the Jews, or
more charitably, were they unusually tolerant in an intolerant age? Either
way, the precise experience of the Jews in Dutch Brazil helps to explain
what to modern eyes may seem to be an inconsistent policy toward ethnic
and religious groups. At an official level, religious difference mattered, but
at the practical level, economic, military, or political utility counted for
more. In short, politique clashed with religious zeal and bigotry.
When they reconquered Dutch Brazil, the Portuguese offered gener-
ous terms, including a pardon in article one for “all nations of whatever
quality or religion they may be … although they may have been rebel-
lious against the Crown of Portugal—the same also granted to all
Jews.…” Other articles allowed all Dutch subjects retention of their prop-
erty and future treatment as if they were Portuguese. Regarding religion,
the Dutch would be treated like foreign residents of Portugal. Those who
did not wish to remain were given three months to arrange a departure.26
Nearly all the Dutch chose to leave, but a shortage of ships prevented
their departure within three months. As the 26 April deadline approached,
Dutch leaders requested an extension from the Portuguese government.
General Francisco Barreto de Menezes replied that all Christians and Jews
who missed the deadline would continue to receive mild treatment,
“except the Jews who had been Christians, these being subject to the Holy
Inquisition, wherein I cannot interfere.”27 Given this prospect, it is hardly
surprising that all professing Jews, six hundred in all, emigrated to Ams-
terdam, to other European cities, or to Caribbean colonies. A small group
of Jews sailed from Recife in February 1654 on the same ship with a
Reformed minister. Outcasts, all were bound for New Netherland. After
being blown off course and waiting for several months in the Caribbean for
other transportation, the group resumed its journey to New Amsterdam.28
The Portuguese Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil did not start well
in New Netherland. The arrival of “23 souls, big as well as little,” stirred
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378 | James Homer Williams

up the Dutch community of New Amsterdam, particularly because the

Jews owed more than 1,500 guilders to the captain and crew for their pas-
sage. The local court ordered their furniture and other property sold to
satisfy the debt, thus leaving the refugees not only religious outcasts, but
poor ones at that. These mostly Sephardic refugees joined Jacob Barsim-
son, an Ashkenazi who had arrived a month before as just another immi-
grant sent with the blessings of the WIC to build the population of the
struggling colony. Only with the arrival of the Brazilian refugees in Sep-
tember did the presence of Jews create a stir.29
In a settlement of several thousand, these two dozen Jews faced dif-
ferent circumstances than in Brazil. In New Netherland, they were vastly
outnumbered and of no immediate use to Peter Stuyvesant and his
colony. Moreover, Stuyvesant was no Johan Maurits. The two men shared
a commitment to the WIC, a military career, and a Calvinist zeal from
their upbringing. In the last year of Johan Maurits’s rule in Brazil,
Stuyvesant in his capacity as governor of the Caribbean islands of Aruba,
Bonaire, and Curaçao led an expedition to capture St. Martin from the
Spanish. In 1644 with ships borrowed from Dutch Brazil, Stuyvesant laid
siege, endured a shattered right leg, but after a month returned to
Curaçao without victory. His eighteen-month tenure at an end, and his
life miraculously intact, Stuyvesant repaired to the Netherlands.30
Two years later in 1647, he arrived in New Netherland with an artifi-
cial leg and an appointment to serve as director-general. He immediately
set about shaping up the colony to match his character: “God-fearing,
honest, hard-working, abstemious,” according to one biography. As the
son of a Calvinist minister and as a career official in the WIC since 1632,
Stuyvesant could be expected to serve the company and the Dutch
Reformed Church loyally.31
And so he did, but as episodes in New Netherland would show, his
actions were motivated more by religious zeal than by a pragmatic policy
aimed at Company prosperity, such as Johan Maurits’s. To be sure, both
Dutch governors strove for peace and prosperity in their respective
domains, but the fundamental difference between Stuyvesant and Johan
Maurits was the path they chose in hopes of achieving their goal. Their
choices mirrored the dichotomy in the debate about religious diversity
and tolerance that had been raging in the Netherlands since the 1570s.
Johan Maurits reflected the pragmatically tolerant end of the spectrum in
the vein of the Amsterdam regents and the Arminian writer Simon Epis-
copius, who believed that the security and happiness of states was best
achieved where citizens enjoyed intellectual and religious freedom.
Stuyvesant sided with the strict Calvinists who continued to insist that
diversity and toleration would undermine social harmony and endanger
the peace and prosperity of the provinces, a belief that impelled them to
suppress public deviation from the Reformed norm.32
In spite of these differences in circumstances and leadership, relations
between the Jews and Reformed citizens of New Netherland resembled
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An Atlantic Perspective | 379

those in Amsterdam and Recife. Wherever they went in the Dutch Atlantic
world, in fact, Jews found themselves in similar struggles for the eco-
nomic rights and religious toleration they enjoyed in Amsterdam. Wher-
ever they went, Jews sparked intense reactions and lengthy transatlantic
conversations between Reformed clergy, colonial officials, company direc-
tors, and Netherland politicians about the place of Jews in an increasingly
global Dutch world and an increasingly diverse Dutch culture.33
Stuyvesant wished for Jews to have no place in his colony. Within
three weeks of the Jews’ arrival, he reported to the company directors in
Amsterdam that, “for the benefit of this weak and newly developing
place,” he had “require[d] them in a friendly way to depart.” In language
reminiscent of Johan Maurits in the 1630s, Stuyvesant called the Jews a
“deceitful race” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of
Christ” who should not be allowed “further to infect and trouble this new
colony.”34 Immediately, then, it is clear, the magistrates and clergy of New
Netherland interpreted Jews not as useful allies in the development of a
colony (as in Brazil) but as godless competitors and troublemakers who
must be purged. Peace and prosperity demanded it.
When word reached Holland of the Jews’ reception in New Amster-
dam, the Amsterdam Jewish community mobilized in defense of the
rights of Jews to remain in New Amsterdam with the same privileges that
Jews enjoyed in Amsterdam. In January 1655, “the merchants of the Por-
tuguese Nation,” as they called themselves, petitioned the Amsterdam
chamber of the WIC, which administered affairs in New Netherland. The
petition reminded the directors of the great influx of Jews from Brazil, all
of whom could not stay in Amsterdam. To prevent immigration to New
Netherland would damage the Jewish community and hinder the Com-
pany, and it was unfair to those Jews who had “at all times been faithful”
to the Company in Brazil and had risked their “possessions and their
blood.” The Jews demonstrated a keen understanding of imperial rival-
ries in the mid-seventeenth century by suggesting that the Dutch would
fall behind the French and the English, who allowed Jews to travel to
their Caribbean colonies. Besides, how could the Company restrict the
Jews “who reside here [in Amsterdam] and have been settled here well
on to about sixty years, many also being born here and confirmed
burghers, and this to a land [New Netherland] that needs people for its
increase?” Calling upon sentiments of past loyalty and prospects of con-
tinued utility to the Company, the Jews asked to “enjoy liberty on condi-
tion of contributing like others” to the prosperity of New Netherland.35
The lines of debate had been drawn. Stuyvesant and the colonial and
Amsterdam clergy would insist on religious purity as a keystone to suc-
cess for New Netherland. Jews relied on their experience in Holland and
Brazil to argue for a uniform application throughout the Dutch Atlantic
world of the limited privileges that they had in Amsterdam. Moderating
the extremes were the Company directors and occasionally their High
Mightinesses in the States General of the United Provinces. Who could
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380 | James Homer Williams

disagree with the Amsterdam Jews’ assessment that in the colonies land
was “extensive and spacious”? With the exception of the Reformed
Church, with its focus on God before mammon, everyone could also
agree that “the more of loyal people that go to live” in the colonies, “the
better it is in regard to the population of the country” and the income to
be derived therefrom.36 This is precisely the bind in which the orthodox
Calvinist Stuyvesant found himself: he needed to populate New Nether-
land with loyal citizens, but he could not stomach tolerating Jews as a
means to do so.
The directors sympathized initially with the troubles that Stuyvesant
foresaw with the Jews, but they nonetheless agreed with the petition from
the Amsterdam Jews and ordered Stuyvesant to be tolerant. Because of
the losses Jews suffered in Brazil, and “also because of the large amount
of capital which they still have invested in the shares of the company,”
the directors concluded that it would be “somewhat unreasonable and
unfair” to prevent their access to New Netherland. “You will now govern
yourself accordingly,” they wrote.37
Stuyvesant continued to resist. “To give liberty to the Jews will be
very detrimental,” he warned again. First, they would inevitably snatch
business from Christians, a prospect that most Europeans at the time
regarded as fact. More to the point for Stuyvesant was the door that tol-
eration would open to other heretics. Once Jews had liberty, “we cannot
refuse the Lutherans and Papists.”38
Meanwhile, the New Amsterdam clergy seconded Stuyvesant’s pre-
dictions of religious chaos and urged the classis of Amsterdam to pres-
sure the WIC to preserve the Reformed monopoly. In March 1655 the
Reverend Johannes Megapolensis wrote his impression of the Jewish
refugees. On the one hand, they had been nothing but “godless rascals”
and a drain on the Christian poor relief system. On the other, contradic-
torily, he feared they would soon overwhelm the Christians, take all the
trade, and “then build here their synagogue.” To him a religious domino
effect was a real possibility. New Netherland suffered already from diver-
sity—“Papists, Mennonites and Lutherans among the Dutch,” “Puritans
or Independents, and many Atheists and various other servants of Baal
among the English under this Government, who conceal themselves
under the name of Christians.” A flood of “obstinate and immovable
Jews” from Holland would certainly “create a still greater confusion.”39
Ordered to let the Jews remain, Stuyvesant and his council did their
best to make life for Jews in New Amsterdam more restrictive than for
Jews in Amsterdam. In 1655 the council considered three areas of com-
munity and economic activity: military service, trade rights, and the own-
ership of real estate. In each area, Jewish activity was limited. Supposedly
at the request of the captains and officers of the militia, who felt an “aver-
sion and disaffection … to be fellow soldiers … and to mount guard in the
same guardhouse” with Jews, and also because Jews in Netherlands’
cities did not serve in the militia, the council exempted Jews from military
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An Atlantic Perspective | 381

service in exchange for a monthly fee, as was done in Amsterdam. Jacob

Barsimson and Asser Levy, however, petitioned to serve in the militia,
since as manual laborers they could not afford the exemption fee. The
council denied their request and told them they were free “to depart [the
colony] whenever and wherever it may please them.”40
In November, several Jews petitioned to conduct trade in all parts of
New Netherland, as they thought was provided in the company’s order
early in the year. The council, “for important reasons” that it never spec-
ified, denied the request and restricted Jews to trade in the city of New
Amsterdam alone. Just before Christmas, Salvador Dandradj, a Jewish
merchant, petitioned the council to approve his purchase of a house in
New Amsterdam. Again, the council refused “for important reasons” his
right to own real estate. When the seller objected, the council ordered
him to auction the house again. When the price was nearly 300 guilders
(a laborer’s annual income) less than Dandradj had bid, Stuyvesant and
his council agreed to contribute half the difference, or 148 guilders, to the
seller, “a man needed by his family, having a house full of children.”41 In
this last instance, the leaders of the colony literally paid for their reli-
gious bigotry.
With the Amsterdam Jewish community on the backs of the WIC
directors, it proved futile for Stuyvesant to hedge on Jewish rights for-
ever. In March 1656, the directors reminded him that they had granted
the Jews “the same liberty that is granted them in this country … with
respect to civil and political liberties,” meaning limited but significant
privileges. As stated above, Amsterdam Jews by this time had a syna-
gogue, but the directors continued to refuse New Amsterdam Jews
“license to exercise and carry on their religion in synagogues or gather-
ings,” a policy that applied to every non-Reformed group, not just Jews.
Stuyvesant replied that the Jews had every privilege and freedom to
trade as the other inhabitants of New Netherland, but they were still pro-
hibited from “the free and public exercise of their abominable religion.”
He noted sarcastically that “what they may be able to obtain from your
Honors time will tell.”42
This letter crossed the Atlantic simultaneously with a stern rebuke
from the directors that seemed to settle the Jewish matter once and for all.
The directors had “learned with displeasure” that the director and coun-
cil had prohibited Jews in New Netherland from trading outside New
Amsterdam, in contradiction to the directors’ orders, and from owning
real estate, in contradiction to the practice in Holland. “We wish that this
had not occurred,” wrote the directors, “but that your Honors had
obeyed our orders which you must hereafter execute punctually and with
more respect.” Some restrictions were acceptable, however. “Jews or Por-
tuguese people” should not be allowed to become mechanics (i.e., crafts-
men) or to have open retail shops, occupations still closed to Jews in
Amsterdam. In every respect, the directors expected the Jews to model
themselves after those in Amsterdam, and for Stuyvesant to let them.
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382 | James Homer Williams

Jews should “quietly and peacefully carry on their business” and “exer-
cise in all quietness their religion within their houses.” It only seemed nat-
ural that they would “build their houses close together in a convenient
place on one or the other side of New Amsterdam—at their choice—as
they have done here” in Amsterdam.43
Did Stuyvesant take this rebuke to heart in 1656? A court case that
summer suggests so, and it reveals more about the Jewish refugees’ strug-
gle to find a place within the majority culture. In early June, Nicasius de
Sille, a law enforcement officer in New Amsterdam, charged David Ferera
with removing a chest of goods from the house of the bailiff, contrary to
the bailiff’s orders. That Ferera used “many hasty words uttered in his
language”44 compounded the offense, for the court felt him “in serious
contempt and disregard of justice.” New Netherland court records reveal
no shortage of similar cases wherein the court zealously punished disre-
spectful citizens. In this case, however, there were the added elements of
Ferera’s religion, his inability to speak Dutch, and the court’s bigotry
toward Jews. Jews were almost always clearly labeled in the records, even
when their Judaism had nothing to do with the case. Sille demanded “that
the said Jew shall be publicly whipped at a stake” and banished, but the
court decided for the moment only to imprison him.45
The case dragged into July as Ferera appeared with a translator to
answer the charges. The city court fined him 800 guilders. In late July Fer-
era appealed “with humble reverence” for a reduced penalty to Stuyvesant
and his council. From jail Ferera confessed “his ignorance of Dutch laws
and customs and lack of knowledge of the language,” both of which pre-
vented him from understanding the gravity of his offense. “To prevent
costs and so dispatch the suit quickly,” the director and council on 26 July
appointed arbitrators, including Ferera’s interpreter Joseph da Costa,
another Jew. Their decision was recorded the same day: a fine of 120
guilders plus 50 guilders in costs. A far cry from whipping and banishment
(or an 800-guilder fine), the final arbitrated sentence suggests that not all
Dutch officials were out to ruin the Jews and perhaps that the Amsterdam
directors’ letter of 14 June had arrived in New Amsterdam and encouraged
Stuyvesant to blunt the city court’s original blow at Ferera.46
Lest we conclude that all the Christian residents of New Netherland
were unadulterated anti-Semites, it is worth remembering that the Dutch
leaders of New Amsterdam and New Netherland always debated the
cases before them and usually recorded the range of verdicts and punish-
ments voted by each member of the council and the court. So there was
always a range of attitudes within the larger consensus that Jews were
unwelcome competitors in the colony. Occasionally, one can even detect a
bit of toleration, by any standard, as on 3 June 1658. On that Monday
court day, Adriaen Keyser brought a suit against Jacob Barsimson, who
failed to appear. Instead of holding Barsimson in contempt, however, and
assessing court costs, as was frequently the case when a party to a suit
failed to appear, the court was more lenient. “Though deft. is absent,” the
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An Atlantic Perspective | 383

record states, “yet no default is entered against him, as he was sum-

moned on his Sabbath.”47
Within another year most Jews would depart for greater opportuni-
ties in other colonies. Stuyvesant, in effect, succeeded in making New
Netherland unattractive to prospective Jewish immigrants. For those few
that stayed, the years of Dutch rule that remained would be more tran-
quil. An episode in 1657 suggests that Stuyvesant would fight no more, at
least about economic privileges. In April, Asser Levy petitioned for the
burghers’ rights, and Jacob Cohen Hendricus requested permission to
bake bread in the city of New Amsterdam. Levy claimed “that such ought
not be refused him as he keeps watch and ward like other Burghers,” and
he showed “a Burgher certificate from the City of Amsterdam that the
Jew is Burgher there.” The burgomasters refused Levy and referred him
to the director and council. As for Hendricus, he also knew his rights
should compare to Amsterdam Jews, so he asked for the limited right to
sell bread “with closed door.” Again, the burgomasters refused, citing
orders from the director and council and the “Honorable Lords Majores,”
perhaps meaning the Amsterdam directors. They erred, of course, since
Amsterdam authorities prohibited Jews only from open retailing.48
Not to be outdone, the “Jewish Nation” of New Amsterdam
reminded Stuyvesant that by denying Jews the burghers’ rights the bur-
gomasters had ignored the directors’ order of 1655, the one that must be
obeyed. With no commentary, the director and council charged the bur-
gomasters to admit Levy, and Jews in general, to the burghers’ rights.49
If these Jews were not “pilgrim fathers” and their Dutch tormentors
were not simply unthinking bigots, then what were they? In addition to
migrating within the Dutch Atlantic world, the refugees from Brazil acted
out another episode in a drama that had begun thirty years before when
the WIC planned New Netherland as an outpost of Dutch culture, includ-
ing Reformed religion. This colony, at least, would be more narrowly
Dutch than Holland, not to mention Amsterdam with its growing diver-
sity. The definition of “Dutchness” created in 1624 and guarded thereafter
began with the monopoly on the Reformed religion in terms of public
worship, with the guarantee of freedom of conscience otherwise. Com-
pany officials in the colony must be Reformed, which created a two-tiered
system of political rights. To this core, the directors added layers of mean-
ing, including an insistence that all civil, military, and judicial business be
conducted solely in the Dutch language. Colonists were also required to
take an oath of allegiance to the States General and to the Company. Legal
matters must be conducted according to Dutch practices, and commerce
should follow Dutch forms.50 In short, these regulations, along with the
Atlantic itself, screened out those who did not already fit the definition of
Dutchness or who were unwilling to conform to it, and they meant that
Jews would not enjoy all the privileges they had known in Amsterdam.
By the 1650s, however, it was becoming clear that this zeal for a pure
Dutch colony was in effect driving current residents away or potential
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384 | James Homer Williams

immigrants toward other colonies that were more hospitable, especially

in religious matters. The concerns in Amsterdam of the directors and the
Jewish community were realistic: both agreed that loyal Dutch residents
were desirable immigrants to New Netherland, which needed more peo-
ple if it hoped to survive, surrounded as it was by growing English
colonies. Rather than open the doors to Dutch Jews, who had proven
their loyalty in Brazil, Stuyvesant, backed by the Reformed clergy, clung
to the ideal of New Netherland as a Christian colony, even if that meant
welcoming foreigners of questionable loyalty. Just as the Dutch fled
Brazil and some Jews arrived in New Netherland, England and the
United Provinces were completing the first Anglo-Dutch war. Tensions
were high in New Amsterdam for fear that the English would pounce on
the Dutch colony. Nevertheless, at the same time that Dutch leaders
asked two dozen Jewish refugees with a Dutch identity to leave Manhat-
tan, English refugees from New England were forming towns a few miles
away on western Long Island. For a decade, the Dutch rightly questioned
their loyalty, yet Stuyvesant assumed the best from the English because
they were “brothers” in Calvinist religion.51
Centuries later, all this may seem foolhardy, nonsensical, or ironic. The
question remains as to how two similar colonies, New Holland and New
Netherland, starting with essentially the same policies could result in
strikingly different characters, in particular for the Jews who tried to set-
tle there. The first variable was the number and time of arrival of the Jews.
In Brazil, they arrived with the first Dutch expeditions and in large num-
bers that continued to grow. In New Netherland, they arrived thirty years
after the colony was founded. Another factor was the Jews’ usefulness. In
Brazil, they were valued initially as vital allies and cultural brokers for the
Dutch. In New Netherland, a trade network was already in place when
the Jews arrived, so they were seen immediately as dangerous competi-
tors. In Brazil, unlike North America, the Dutch conquered another group
of Europeans. This large community of Portuguese Catholic Christians,
New and Old, necessitated a more flexible application of the Reformed
monopoly that was the official policy in all Dutch colonies.
Finally, we should not overlook the force of personality, for the fate of
the Jews in Brazil depended in large measure on Johan Maurits and in
New Netherland to the same degree on Peter Stuyvesant. Both began
their colonial service as zealous defenders of the Reformed Church, but
one became a governor willing to look the other way while the other
remained steadfastly opposed to toleration, despite the economic gains
that it might bring. The man who left Brazil in 1644 did not share the same
temperament with the man who saw New Netherland fall in 1664. In his
advice to his successors, Maurits recommended religious toleration. “In
ecclesiastical matters or affairs of the Church, toleration or compliance is
more necessary in Brazil than with any other people which has been
granted religious freedom,” Johan Maurits wrote. “If fervour and Christ-
ian zeal for the true worship urges you to think otherwise, it is better if
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An Atlantic Perspective | 385

you do not manifest it. Every one of you should suppress personal feel-
ings in this matter in order to avoid great inconvenience.”52 It is impossi-
ble to imagine Stuyvesant saying these words. He never changed his
view of Jews as a “deceitful race.” The Jews who sought refuge in New
Netherland learned this lesson: Jews within the confines of the Dutch
Atlantic world in the mid-seventeenth century, though dealing with sim-
ilar Dutch leaders, through the peculiarities of time, place, and personal-
ity could expect uneven treatment in their struggle for rights, ranging
from conditions in Amsterdam, arguably the best place in Europe for
Jews, to conditions in New Netherland, certainly the worst.

* * * *

IN THE DECADE BETWEEN 1654, when the Jews arrived in New Netherland,
and 1664, when the English conquered the colony, Dutch Jews found
more economic, political, and religious hospitality in other colonies.
Attention shifted to the Caribbean in the WIC’s struggle to compete with
English imperialists. In 1657 the Zeeland chamber of the WIC issued a
charter for Nova Zeelandia, a new Dutch colony in the Essequibo and
Pomeroon river regions of western Guiana. The charter granted Jews
“very unusual” privileges, in historian Jacob Marcus’s estimation, for it
included the free and open exercise of religion, freedom to engage in any
occupation, full burghers’ rights to trade, and the right to exercise minor
judicial functions within their community. Lest the Zeeland chamber look
unusually tolerant, it should be noted that the initiative for the colony
came from the Jewish community and succeeded in spite of Christian
prejudice.53 It represents a classic case of the Dutch dilemma in the sev-
enteenth century: how to reconcile economic desires, nationalism, and
Calvinist zeal.
While several hundred Jews of various stripes—mostly Sephardim
from the United Provinces, Brazil, Morocco, and Livorno—ventured to
Nova Zeelandia, other Jewish communities soon formed in Suriname54
and on Curaçao. The latter became the largest Dutch American Jewish
community and faced few, if any, disabilities from the Dutch authorities.
Historian Wim Klooster argues: “They could practice their religion
unhindered and were protected in all possible ways by the West India
Company.” Unlike Brazil and New Netherland, with its anti-Semitism
thinly disguised, if disguised at all, in Curaçao “even unofficial anti-
semitism seems to have been a rare phenomenon.” Calling upon their
expertise in the network of Portuguese Jews, Jews in Curaçao dominated
some professions, such as trade, brokerage, and insurance.55
Comparisons between Brazil, Curaçao, and New Netherland, though
beyond the scope of this essay, would be useful for understanding the
Atlantic world, particularly because Jews traded between New Nether-
land and Curaçao, and Stuyvesant was the director-general of both
colonies. The Jewish community of Curaçao emulated the Amsterdam
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386 | James Homer Williams

Jewish community, which was entrusted with the same role as mediator
and advocate that it had played for the benefit of the Jews in New Ams-
terdam. A web of transatlantic conversations occurred among Dutch
people in Curaçao and Amsterdam, similar to the conversations about
Dutch identity discussed above in reference to New Netherland.56
With English rule, the political metropolis for the region shifted from
Amsterdam to London. The Atlantic world of English Jewry was limited
in comparison to Jews in the Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese worlds.
There were far fewer Jews in England and its colonies. Nevertheless, a
Jewish community redeveloped in New York City after 1664, and in all
English colonies similar issues of toleration and equality arose in the
treatment of the Jewish minority.
There were no Jews in England from 1290 to 1656. When they
allowed Jews re-entry in 1656, the English treated them differently than
the Inquisitorial Catholic European states. On paper, at least, English
Calvinist policies closely resembled the practices of the Dutch Reformed
in Holland and in the WIC colonies. In short, nearly everyone was anti-
Semitic. Yet the English passed no laws in the seventeenth century that
targeted Jews. Rather, Jews suffered the same disabilities in law that
affected other non-Anglicans. The English limited the privileges of dis-
senting Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in a variety of ways: municipal
and guild restrictions, the establishment of the Church of England, alien
status that limited citizenship rights, the prescription of Anglican sacra-
ments, and the requirement to subscribe to state oaths.57
In practice, Jews found life tolerable enough that hundreds soon set-
tled in the English world. By 1689, sixty to eighty Jewish families lived
in England. Although the Toleration Act of 1689 did not extend to them,
Jews in London continued to worship publicly in a synagogue, as they
had done as a privilege (not a right) extended by the king-in-council
since 1673. Much like the Dutch had done earlier in the century, the Eng-
lish encouraged Jews to settle in English colonies as a strategy to
increase population and develop healthy trade. Legal disabilities still
applied, with the exception of religious laws, which did not automati-
cally extend to the colonies. In the West Indian sugar islands, colonial
legislatures restricted Jewish rights and privileges the most. Jamaica in
the late seventeenth century resembled New Netherland insofar as its
residents complained about the competition from Jews and tried to limit
the economic and political freedoms of Jews more than the crown char-
ter allowed.58
In the mainland colonies, discrimination was less direct. In New
York, the Jewish struggle for economic and religious rights was largely
anticlimactic. After the nadir of 1664, when only four Jews were known
to live in the colony, the Jewish population did not flourish dramatically
in the light of English toleration, nor was there much of a struggle for eco-
nomic opportunities. Instead, Jews gradually spread up the Hudson Val-
ley and made gains in population and wealth in Manhattan. In 1674,
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An Atlantic Perspective | 387

James, duke of York, instructed Governor Edmund Andros to tolerate all

dissenters. Four years later, Andros reported “Religions of all sorts” in the
colony, including “Quakers and Anabaptists, of severall sects, some Jews,
but presbiterians and Independents most numerous and substantiall.”
Four Jews were listed on a November 1676 tax list. In 1682, Asser Levy, a
carryover from Dutch times, died, leaving an estate that symbolized his
achievement of “considerable status” as a butcher in Manhattan. Accord-
ing to Leo Hershkowitz, the expert on Levy, he was “a real ‘Pilgrim,’” for
“he remained while others left”; he was a success, and “he more clearly
integrated himself within the host society.”59
The turn of the century brought growth and stability. An influx of
substantial families and individuals led to the creation of a group of
wealthy merchant shippers among New York’s Jews. In 1730 the commu-
nity dedicated the first synagogue built specifically for that purpose in
British North America. The synagogue of Mikveh Israel, in Willemstad,
Curaçao, donated 272 ounces of silver to the New York synagogue,
Shearith Israel, to help pay for construction. The receipt recording the
donation indicates the continuing presence of the Portuguese Jewish net-
work in the Atlantic world. Written in both English and Portuguese, it
was signed by Moses Gomez and Rodrigo Pacheco of Curaçao and by
Jacob Franks of New York. By then about 225 Jews coexisted with the
city’s eight thousand residents.60
Like the Dutch in Brazil, the English inherited a community of Jews
in New York. Their treatment of the Jews subsequently was a product of
the same variables that explain the differences between the Jewish expe-
rience in Brazil and in New Netherland. First, the community of Jews in
Manhattan was tiny and remained unthreateningly small into the mid-
1700s. Second, the political leader of the colony, later to become James II,
was himself a Catholic and therefore tended to favor toleration of non-
Anglicans in his colony. Finally, the English grew to see the Jews as a valu-
able resource in the building of an Atlantic empire.
In spite of occasional disputes between Christians and Jews in New
York, the Jews experienced a gradual expansion of rights and privileges
from 1664 to 1740. The Dutch surrender agreement included a pledge
from the English that all residents of New Netherland would be treated as
free denizens of New York with full property rights and “the liberty of
their consciences in divine worship.” The English agreed, therefore, to
treat the Jews as they were already inclined to do, that is, with toleration
but at the same time enforcing certain disabilities. Over time, the Jews
managed to eliminate most of the disabilities in practice, if not officially.
One of their momentary defeats came in 1685 when Governor James Don-
gan, a Catholic, endorsed the Jews’ petition to worship publicly. The
mayor and aldermen denied the request, however, citing the charter of
1683, which declared that “noe publique worship is tolerated … but to
those that professe faith in Christ.”61 The Dutch policy continued, there-
fore, well into the English period.
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388 | James Homer Williams

In terms of political rights, Jews remained second-class citizens, like

all non-Anglicans, and could not hold high office. They worked toward
more liberal naturalization laws after 1700 and succeeded by 1718 in being
elected as constables in New York City and in avoiding disqualifying tests
and oaths. They apparently voted successfully, too, at least in local elec-
tions as long as they met freehold qualifications. The political struggle
reached across the colony in an election in 1737. In that year, the legisla-
ture voided Jewish votes for a candidate after his opponent argued that
English law disqualified Jews from voting. That the challenger clinched
his argument against the Jews by resurrecting their alleged guilt for the
Crucifixion should lend caution to an overly sanguine picture of the Jew-
ish experience in colonial New York. There was still anti-Semitism aplenty.
The greatest shift in English policy toward Jews in the colonies came in
1740 with passage of the Plantation Act. Primarily meant to encourage
Jewish traders to populate British America, the act shifted control of natu-
ralization to imperial authorities. In making it easier for Jews and foreign
Protestants to become naturalized British citizens, the government hoped
to create another competitive edge against its European rivals.62
Ironically, if one looked only at the Jewish struggle for rights and
opportunities in Manhattan, one would be forced to conclude precisely
the opposite of the traditional view of the colonial Dutch as clones of cos-
mopolitan, tolerant Amsterdam, and of the English as perhaps the most
insular and prejudiced toward strangers of any early modern Europeans.
This distorted view, based on one local situation in North America,
should caution us again to view cultural issues cross-culturally and in the
comparative setting of the Atlantic world. Only then can one place the
struggle between Stuyvesant and the Jews in its proper context, as part of
an ongoing battle to preserve an orthodox Dutch identity in one of the
least significant outposts of the Dutch world, New Netherland. And only
then can one begin to identify the factors that shaped the reaction of
Christian Europeans when Jews wished to settle and trade in their midst.
As Amsterdam, Brazil, New Amsterdam, and New York illustrate, the
power of personality, the vagaries of time, the sometimes overwhelming
desire for profit, the size of the Jewish community in relation to the Chris-
tian majority, the perceived usefulness of the Jews in the construction of
colonies and empires, the strength or weakness of anti-Semitism among
local residents and clergy, and the availability of greater opportunities
elsewhere all determined the contours of the Jewish struggle for rights
and opportunities at any particular place and time in the Atlantic world.
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An Atlantic Perspective | 389

Notes
An earlier, shorter version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the Ameri-
can Historical Association, New York, 5 January 1997. A grant from the Middle Tennessee
State University Faculty Summer Research Program assisted the completion of early revi-
sions. Final revisions were made while the author was a National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library, Chicago, 1998–99. The author thanks Jane Ger-
ber, Leo Hershkowitz, Milton Klein, Dennis Maika, John Murrin, Ernst Pijning, Susan
Pyzynski, Ben Schmidt, David Sheinin, Beth Slinkard, and Walter Renn for their assistance
and encouragement.

1. See the bibliography of Chapter 1 in Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in Amer-
ica (New York, 1994), 937–40, and the notes and bibliographic essay in Eli Faber, A Time
for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820, The Jewish People in America, vol. 1 (Bal-
timore, 1992).
2. Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Exodus from Brazil and Arrival in New Amsterdam of the
Jewish Pilgrim Fathers, 1654,” American Jewish Historical Society Publications (hereafter
AJHS Publs.) 44 (1954):80–97; Sachar, History of the Jews in America, 13; Jacob R. Marcus,
The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970), 215.
3. Frederick Zwierlein, Religion in New Netherland: A History of the Development of the Reli-
gious Conditions in the Province of New Netherland, 1623–1664 (New York, 1910). One
recent account ignores the persecution of Jews altogether: “In their colonies in both
South America and North America (New Amsterdam), the Dutch offered all immi-
grants the same religious freedom as was offered in Holland itself.” A Historical Atlas
of the Jewish People: From the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present, ed. Eli Barnavi (New
York, 1992), 152.
4. Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996):19–44. Bailyn is the
leading proponent of Atlantic history in the United States in his role as the director of
Harvard University’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World,
1500–1800, which has gathered young scholars annually since 1996. The concept has
spread recently to historians of the Jewish experience, most notably Eli Faber, whose A
Time for Planting includes Chapter 2, “The Atlantic World of Colonial Jewry.” Since he
concentrates on the area that eventually became the United States, his Atlantic world
refers mostly to the eighteenth century, when several Jewish communities were well
established along the eastern coast of North America.
5. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1985),
104–5; Frédéric Mauro, “Merchant Communities, 1350–1750,” in The Rise of the Mer-
chant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D.
Tracy (New York, 1990), 267–68; Robert L. Carothers, “Marking Another Anniversary:
The Diaspora of the Sephardic Jews,” Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes 11 (1992):113;
Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (Morningside Heights, N.Y., 1960), 1; C. R.
Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York, 1969), 11–12, 266–70;
Vieira quoted in Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Com-
munity in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1997), 13. Bodian’s is the most thor-
ough examination of the Amsterdam Jewish community in the seventeenth century.
See also Bodian, “‘Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Mod-
ern Europe,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994):48–76.
6. Israel, European Jewry, 38, 50–51, and “Spain and the Dutch Sephardim, 1609–1660,”
Studia Rosenthaliana (hereafter SR) 12 (1978):1–61, quot. on 1; A. T. van Deursen, Plain
Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Hol-
land, trans. Maarten Ultee (New York, 1991), 32–33; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese
Nation, ix.
7. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, ix, 6.
8. Ibid., 4, 50.
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390 | James Homer Williams

9. Ibid., 53, 57.

10. Ibid., 55.
11. Ibid., 58.
12. Ibid., 59.
13. Ibid., 61.
14. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 43–44; Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Kinship and Com-
merce: The Foundations of Portuguese Jewish Life in Seventeenth-Century Holland,”
SR 15 (1981):52–74, quots. on 61, 65.
15. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 45–49, 52, 56. For more on the Jews in Brazil, see Mar-
cus, Colonial American Jew, chap. 3, and C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654
(Oxford, 1957), passim.
16. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 57–58. Toleration quotations are from Article 10 of the
conquest plans approved by the States General on 13 October 1629. For Brazilian per-
spectives on Dutch Brazil and the Jews, see G. Freyre, “Johan Maurits van Nassau-
Siegen from a Brazilian Viewpoint,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, 1604–1679: A
Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, ed. E. van den Boogaart (The Hague, 1979),
237–46; José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação: Cristãos-novos e judeus em
Pernambuco, 1542–1654 (Recife, 1989), part II; Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, Igreja e Estado
No Brasil Holandês, 1630–1654 (Recife, 1986); and José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Cristãos-
Novos: Povamento e Conquista do Solo Brasileiro (1530–1680) (São Paulo, 1976), 328–68.
17. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 59–60; R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, “Bevolkingsproblematiek
in Joods Amsterdam in de Zeventiende Eeuw,” SR 18 (1984):141–42. See also Arnold
Wiznitzer, “Jewish Soldiers in Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654,” AJHS Publs. 46 (1956):40–50,
and idem, “The Jews in the Sugar Industry of Colonial Brazil,” Jewish Social Studies 18
(1959):189–98.
18. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 64–65, 69, 71–72.
19. See M. E. H. N. Mout, “The Youth of Johan Maurits and Aristocratic Culture in the Early
Seventeenth Century,” in van den Boogaart, Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, 13–38.
20. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 65–66; Jose Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, “Vincent
Joachim Soler in Dutch Brazil,” in van den Boogaart, Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen,
249–51, quot. on 251. See also Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Synagogue and Cemetery of the
Jewish Community in Recife, Brazil, 1630–1654,” AJHS Publs. 43 (1953):127–30.
21. De Mello, “Vincent Joachim Soler,” in van den Boogaart, Johan Maurits van Nassau-
Siegen, 249; Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 73.
22. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 73–75; José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, “The Dutch
Calvinists and Religious Toleration in Portuguese America,” The Americas 14 (1957–58):
485–88.
23. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 122; Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 75.
24. I thank Pieter Emmer for this point. Wim Klooster reminds us that, contrary to some
writings on the subject, the Jews of Brazil never outnumbered those in the Nether-
lands. Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas, 1600–1800 (Providence, R.I., 1997), 28.
25. Wiznitzer estimates 1,450 Jews in 1645 (Jews in Colonial Brazil, 130). Isaac S. Emmanuel
has challenged that estimate with his own: no more than 1,000 [“Seventeenth-Century
Brazilian Jewry: A Critical Review,” American Jewish Archives 14 (1962):32–68, on 41]. C.
R. Boxer emphasizes the religious and cultural differences between the Dutch and Por-
tuguese that Johan Maurits was never able to bridge and that contributed to the Por-
tuguese revolt [“The Recovery of Pernambuco (1645–1654),” Atlante 2 (1954):1–17, on 2].
26. Accord van Brasilien, Mede van ’t Recif, Maurits-Stadt ende de omleggende Forten van Brasil
(Amsterdam, 1654), quoted in Arnold Wiznitzer, “Exodus from Brazil,” 81–82.
27. Quoted in ibid., 84.
28. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 140–41, and “Exodus from Brazil,” 80–97; Isaac S.
Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2
vols. (Cincinnati, 1970), 46. For the difficulties of tracing the Jews from Recife to New
Amsterdam, see Egon and Frieda Wolff, “The Problem of the First Jewish Settlers in
New Amsterdam, 1654,” SR 15 (1981):169–77.
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An Atlantic Perspective | 391

29. Record from the burgomasters and schepens of New Amsterdam, 7 September 1654,
transcribed and translated in Arnold Wiznitzer, “Exodus from Brazil,” 87, 91–93;
Samuel Oppenheim, “More about Jacob Barsimson, the First Jewish Settler in New
York,” AJHS Publs. 29 (1925):39–52. For a convincing analysis of the origins of the 1654
cohort of Jews in New Amsterdam, see Leo Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-
Three Jews—Myth or Reality?” in Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Cen-
turies, ed. Shalom Goldman (Hanover, N.H., 1993), 171–83.
30. Henry H. Kessler and Eugene Rachlis, Peter Stuyvesant and His New York (New York,
1959), 37, 47–49.
31. Ibid., 37, quot. on 6.
32. Jonathan Israel, “The Intellectual Debate about Toleration in the Dutch Republic,” in
The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel,
and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 76
(New York, 1997), 10–19. See also M. E. H. N. Mout, “Limits and Debates: A Compar-
ative View of Dutch Toleration in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,”
37–47, and James D. Tracy, “Erasmus, Coornhert and the Acceptance of Religious Dis-
unity in the Body Politic: A Low Countries Tradition?,” in The Emergence of Tolerance in
the Dutch Republic, ed. Berkvens-Stevelink et al., 49–62; and Andrew Pettegree, “The
Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in
the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (New York, 1996),
182–98.
33. The full story of the New Amsterdam Jews is omitted here in favor of using only
enough to draw parallels and distinctions between Holland, Brazil, and New Nether-
land. For reliable accounts, see Marcus, Colonial American Jew, chap. 9; George L. Smith,
Religion and Trade in New Netherland: Dutch Origins and American Development (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1973), chap. 13; and Henri and Barbara van der Zee, A Sweet and Alien Land: The
Story of Dutch New York (New York, 1978), 290–93.
34. Stuyvesant to the Amsterdam chamber (WIC), 22 September 1654, in Samuel Oppen-
heim, “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664: Some New Matter on
the Subject,” AJHS Publs. 18 (1909):4–5. If Stuyvesant had ever had thoughts that Jews
could benefit the WIC’s colonies and live harmoniously with other colonists, his expe-
rience with a group of Jews in Curaçao in the early 1650s may have convinced him oth-
erwise. As the non-resident governor of Curaçao, Stuyvesant knew that Jews admitted
onto the island to farm had instead traded with the Spanish, in competition with the
WIC (Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 176–77).
35. Petition of the Jewish Nation to the Amsterdam chamber (WIC), January 1655, in
Oppenheim, “Early History of the Jews,” 9–11.
36. Ibid., 10.
37. Amsterdam chamber (WIC) to Stuyvesant, 26 April 1655, in ibid., 8. Estimates of Jew-
ish investment in the WIC vary. C. R. Boxer states: “The part played by the Jews in the
formation of the two great India Companies was virtually negligible.” In the WIC,
eighteen Jews contributed 36,000 of the original 3 million guilders (1.2 percent). In
1658, eleven Jews appeared on a list of the 169 leading shareholders (Dutch in Brazil,
10–11). Stephen Alexander Fortune cites Jews as 4 percent of WIC investors in 1656
with an increase to 6.5 percent in 1658 and 10 percent in 1674 [Merchants and Jews: The
Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750, n. 37 (Gainesville, Fla., 1984):
177–78].
38. Stuyvesant to the Amsterdam chamber (WIC), 30 October 1655, in Oppenheim, “Early
History of the Jews,” 20.
39. Megapolensis to the classis of Amsterdam, 18 March 1655, in ibid., 74. This is a retrans-
lation of the letter originally translated in Ecclesiastical Records: State of New York, ed.
Edward T. Corwin, 7 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1901–16), vol. 1, 334–36.
40. Resolution to exempt Jews from military service, 28 August, Petition, 5 November
1655, in Council Minutes, 1655–1656, ed. and trans. Charles T. Gehring, New Nether-
land Documents Series, vol. 6 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1995), 81, 128.
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392 | James Homer Williams

41. Petition of Salvador Dandradj, 17 December, Decision on the petition, 23 December

1655, Petition of Teunis Craay, March 1656, in Gehring, Council Minutes, 149–50,
166–67, 268.
42. Amsterdam chamber (WIC) to Stuyvesant, 13 March, Stuyvesant to Amsterdam cham-
ber (WIC), 10 June 1656, in Oppenheim, “Early History of the Jews,” 21.
43. Amsterdam chamber (WIC) to Stuyvesant, 14 June 1656, in ibid., 33.
44. It is most likely that his language was Portuguese, although the court secretary noted
at one point that “Frere was always accompanied by a Jew who understood and spoke
both Dutch and Hebrew.” Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from
1653 to 1674 Anno Domini, 7 vols. (New York, 1897), vol. 2, 141.
45. Ibid., 130–31, 141–43.
46. Ibid., 141–47; David Ferera and Joseph D’Acosta to the director general and council, 24
July 1656, in Oppenheim, “Early History of the Jews,” 82.
47. Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 2, 396.
48. Oppenheim, “Early History of the Jews,” 35.
49. Ibid., 36.
50. A. J. F. van Laer, ed. and trans., Documents Relating to New Netherland, 1624–1626, in the
Henry E. Huntington Library (San Marino, Calif., 1924), 2, 5, 6, 8, 93–94, 113–14, 117.
51. Dutch-English relations are recounted in more detail in Chapter 4 of my dissertation,
“Cultural Mingling and Religious Diversity among Indians and Europeans in the
Early Middle Colonies,” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1993).
52. Quoted in de Mello, “Vincent Joachim Soler,” in van den Boogaart, Johan Maurits van
Nassau-Siegen, 253.
53. Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 144–50, quot. on 145; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, His-
tory of the Jews, 68.
54. “The most notable characteristic of the Suriname Jews was their dedication to agri-
culture. The colony grew into the largest Jewish agrarian settlement in the world,”
called the Jodensavanne. A synagogue was built in 1685. Klooster, The Dutch in the
Americas, 68.
55. Ibid., 75.
56. Marcus, Colonial American Jew, chap. 7; Yosef Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam
Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” 193–211, and Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi, “Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam: The Place of Curaçao and
the Caribbean in Early Modern Jewish History,” American Jewish History 72 (1982–83):
172–92. “Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cockpit of Western
Hemisphere Jewry remained in the Caribbean …,” concludes Robert P. Swierenga in
The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North Atlantic Diaspora (Detroit, 1994), 33. He over-
estimates the “civil and economic rights” gained by the Jews in New Amsterdam and
ignores the Essequibo colony (ibid., 38).
57. “Before 1701 the state oaths (oath of allegiance and oath of supremacy) were sworn
under the Test Act and required the taking of the Anglican sacrament as a precondi-
tion, thus disabling Protestant Dissenters, Jews, and Roman Catholics.… After 1701 the
state oaths were no longer sworn under the Test Act but a new oath, the oath of abju-
ration included the phrase ‘upon the true Faith of a Christian,’ thus disabling Jews.”
Sheldon J. Godfrey and Judith C. Godfrey, Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth
of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal, 1995), 16, Table 1 on p. 19.
For the roots and transplantation of anti-Semitism to the Americas, see Frederic Cople
Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1994), esp. chap. 3, and Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in Amer-
ica (New York, 1994), chap. 1.
58. Godfrey and Godfrey, Search Out the Land, 16, 23, 40–42; Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith
Hurwitz, “The New World Sets an Example for the Old: The Jews of Jamaica and Polit-
ical Rights, 1661–1831,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 55 (1965–66):37–56.
59. Answers of inquiries of New Yorke, 16 April 1678, in E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold
Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols.
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An Atlantic Perspective | 393

(Albany, N.Y., 1853–87), vol. 3, 262; Leo Hershkowitz, “Asser Levy and the Invento-
ries of Early New York Jews,” American Jewish History 80 (1990–91):21–55; Her-
shkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” in Goldman, Hebrew and the Bible
in America, 179–81.
60. Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 308–9; Richard B. Morris, “Civil Liberties and the Jewish
Tradition in Early America,” AJHS Publs. 46 (1956):20–39; Zvi Loker, Jews in the
Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times
(Jerusalem, 1991), 80–81.
61. Quoted in Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 397–98, 401.
62. Ibid., 405–8; Godfrey and Godfrey, Search Out the Land, 55; Morris, “Civil Liberties and
the Jewish Tradition,” 32–33. Milton M. Klein, the eminent historian of colonial New
York, states: “In general, I am not persuaded that conditions were better for Jews under
the English than under the Dutch. The Jews did not have the influential friends in high
places in England that they had in Holland” (letter to the author, 6 June 1997). For more
on the growth of the early New York Jewish community, see Hershkowitz, “Asser Levy
and the Inventories of Early New York Jews,” 21–55; idem, “Some Aspects of the New
York Jewish Merchant Community, 1654–1820,” 10–34, and Doris Groshen Daniels,
“Colonial Jewry: Religion, Domestic and Social Relations,” American Jewish Historical
Quarterly 66 (1976–77):375–99.
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– Chapter 20 –

ANTECEDENTS AND REMNANTS OF

JODENSAVANNE: THE SYNAGOGUES AND
CEMETERIES OF THE FIRST PERMANENT
PLANTATION SETTLEMENT OF
NEW WORLD JEWS

Rachel Frankel

O N 12 OCTOBER 1785 the synagogue Bracha veShalom (Blessing and

Peace), in Jodensavanne (Jews’ Savannah) of the Dutch colony of
Suriname, celebrated its hundredth anniversary. Governor Wichers, the
Councils of Police, notable citizens from the capital city of Paramaribo,
and some sixteen hundred other people attended. There were tables with
over three hundred dishes and one thousand Chinese lanterns. People ate
and drank. Speeches were made, Hebrew prayers were delivered, and
poems were recited. The concluding celebration, a splendid ball at mid-
night, lasted until dawn.1
Today all that remains of Jodensavanne, the first permanent Jewish
plantation settlement in the Americas, is a brick ruin of the formerly
grand synagogue (see Fig. 20.1), the first of any architectural significance
in the New World. Additionally, there remain two overgrown cemeteries,
each with marble and bluestone graves inscribed primarily in Hebrew
and Portuguese, some with illustrative imagery. Also, there exists a third
weathering cemetery with uniquely and artistically crafted wood and
concrete grave markers. Furthermore, it is possible that remains of an ear-
lier and more modest synagogue of the settlement lie buried in the jun-
gle.2 Jodensavanne is remotely located north of the Amazon River Basin.
Planting primarily sugar, the Jews on the upper reaches of the Suri-
name River in 1667 (see Fig. 20.2) were predominantly Sephardic. They
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FIGURE 20.1 Courtyard entrance gate posts and remains of the east wall of the synagogue, Bracha veShalom, Jodensavanne
[Jews’ Savannah], Suriname. Built in 1685; last used in 1865. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1995.
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 395
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396 | Rachel Frankel

FIGURE 20.2 Detail from an anonymous manuscript map on vellum, “A Discription of the
Coleny of Surranam in Guiana Drawne in the Yeare 1667.” The location of the Jewish set-
tlement on the upper reaches of the Suriname River is indicated with the word “Jews,” to
the upper right of the large lettering “MOR.”

came to Suriname from a variety of places. Some came from Amsterdam

as well as other cities in Europe. Others came from Brazil, where they had
mainly been planters and had been introduced to the practice of slavery.3
By 1664 roughly two hundred Jews, who had been settled for less than a
decade in neighboring Cayenne while it was in Dutch hands, came to
Suriname. The Jews from Cayenne originated in such places as Livorno
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 397

(Italy), Amsterdam, and Brazil. Jews might also have come to Suriname
from the Pomeroon settlement in what was the Dutch colony of Essequibo
(today, the Republic of Guyana).4 Some claim that Jews came to Suriname
in the 1650s from Barbados, with the English royalist Willoughby. While
the exact demographic make-up of the Jews who settled Suriname may
be debated, it is certain that they were not a homogeneous group. Ams-
terdam’s Sephardic community served as the religious authority, but the
Jews of Suriname had many other places, references, and experiences
from which to draw to form their identities.
Likewise, the Africans enslaved in Suriname on the plantations of
the Jews were not a homogeneous group. Although they were, at this
time, predominantly from what was referred to as Guiny, on the west
coast of Africa in the area of the Congo, they were a mixture of several
nations—nations who often were at war with one another on the African
continent.5 Upon the arrival of a shipment of enslaved Africans, planters
used a divide-and-rule strategy and are said to have not “put two [of the
same ethnic group] in any one lot.”6 While most of the Africans in Suri-
name were brought directly from Africa, some were brought to Suriname
by Jews who emigrated there from other sugar planting colonies in the
New World.
Although there were many differences among the religious practices
of the Africans in Suriname, they all believed in a supreme power, an
omnipotent god on whose supernatural power man is wholly dependent.
In addition to the supreme being, there were also earth-spirits and the
world of ancestors, the last of which are much closer to man and directly
influence his life.7 The belief in the world of ancestors for the Africans in
Suriname meant belief in the transmigration of souls from one body into
another. This meant that they would, upon death, return to their own
countries where they would be reincarnated. Death for these enslaved,
frequently tortured, and sometimes executed Africans on Suriname’s
plantations, was seen as freedom. Like the Jews, many of the Africans
were circumcised.8
Suriname became a Dutch colony in 1667. The peace treaty of Breda
confirmed the Dutch title to Suriname and ceded New Amsterdam, later
New York, to the British. In the 1660s, privileges were accorded to the
Jews, first by the English, and then again by the Dutch. These rights
granted the Jews exemptions and immunities both as an ethnic minority
and as Dutch burghers. Furthermore, the Jews had the opportunity to live
their lives as an autonomous religio-cultural enclave. These privileges
were the most liberal Jews had ever received in the Christian world, for
it had not been since the first century, when Rome made it possible for
some privileged Jewish subjects to become citizens of the Roman Empire,
that Jews had benefited from such rights.
Prior to the 1685 construction of the synagogue Bracha veShalom,
there did not exist in the New World any synagogue of major architectural
stature. However, the Jews of Suriname did have European architectural
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398 | Rachel Frankel

sources from which to draw for inspiring the design of a great syna-
gogue: Jacob Jehudah Leon Templo’s model of Solomon’s Temple, and
the illustration (see Fig. 20.3), first published in 1642 and then again in
1667 in Biblia Hebraica by the Amsterdam Jewish printer Joseph Athias,
had provided an influential model for the construction of Amsterdam’s
1675 united Sephardi congregation’s “Esnoga [synagogue].” Nonetheless,
a synagogue is not the Temple, for the latter was believed to be instituted
by the Lord, whereas a synagogue becomes sacred because God’s law is
read there by men. In addition to drawing upon the authoritative work on
Solomon’s Temple by the Jesuit Fathers Geronimo Prado and Juan Bap-
tista Villalpando, Templo contributed some differences. He conceived of a
more sober, less baroque, more Dutch vision of the Temple.9 Templo’s
model, which he displayed in his home, and the published illustrations
undoubtedly provided architectural imagery for the design of Bracha
veShalom as well.
The magnificent synagogue of Amsterdam (see Fig. 20.4), built ten
years prior to that of Jodensavanne, provided a significant precedent for
Jodensavanne’s synagogue, for not only were the Jews of Amsterdam
closely linked through business, family ties, and historic background to
those in Suriname, they also observed the faith identically. The services
in Suriname attempted, although not necessarily with success, to dupli-
cate those of Amsterdam. The Jews of Amsterdam and those of Suriname
both referred to themselves as “of the Nation,” meaning the Portuguese-
Hebrew Nation, or as “Portuguese Jews.” Both groups of Jews were of the
same double diaspora: firstly, from Roman-occupied Palestine, and sec-
ondly, fourteen centuries later, from the Iberian Peninsula.
Nonetheless, however much the two communities resembled one
another, there were significant differences. Although both communities
used outsiders to design and build their synagogues, these outsiders
were quite different from each other. In Amsterdam, where Jews were
banned from the Dutch guilds, the congregation’s leaders selected Elias
Bouman, a gentile, as the architect for their new synagogue. Similarly, a
gentile, Gillis van der Veen, served as the Amsterdam synagogue’s mas-
ter carpenter. In Suriname, likewise, the Jews presumably depended on
others,10 primarily Africans,11 to build their synagogue, but it is still
unknown who designed Bracha veShalom. Additionally, the two com-
munities existed in different environments. The Jews of Amsterdam lived
in an urban and cosmopolitan environment, surrounded and dominated
by gentiles. The Jews of Suriname lived in an isolated autonomous colo-
nial agricultural settlement (see Fig. 20.5) with 105 Jewish men, in 1684,
outnumbering Jewish women by a ratio of almost two to one. Enslaved
Africans constituted 84 percent of the total Jodensavanne population, with
543 males and 429 females. Additionally, there was a small minority of
enslaved American Indians as well as those more numerous who main-
tained their freedom.12 Furthermore, in Amsterdam there was an Ashke-
nazic community of Jews who had their own monumental synagogue. In
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 399

FIGURE 20.3 Anonymous colored engraving of Solomon’s Temple according to Jacob Juda
Leon Templo, taken from Biblia Hebraica (1667). Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Museum,
Amsterdam, from the book The Esnoga: A Monument to Portuguese-Jewish Culture (Amster-
dam, 1991).
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Page 400

FIGURE 20.4 Southwest view of Amsterdam’s Esnoga, inaugurated in 1675. The auxiliary buildings in the foreground
fortress the sanctuary building. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1996.
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FIGURE 20.5 View from the west of the synagogue Bracha veShalom, a detail from the lithograph Vue de la Savanne des Juifs
sur la Rivière de Surinam (View of the Jews’ Savannah on the Surinam River), P. J. Benoit, Voyage à Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839).
Courtesy of General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations .
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 401
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402 | Rachel Frankel

Jodensavanne, there was no Ashkenazic community, only ten to twelve

Ashkenazic Jews who, according to Essai Historique, resided at Joden-
savanne through the bonds of marriage. Although there were other
Europeans and religious minorities living in Suriname at the time of the
construction of Bracha veShalom, including the pietest sect of Labadists
whose utopian settlement existed further up on the Suriname River, the
various European groups lived apart from one another. In 1684 Jews
made up 25 percent of the total European population of Suriname.13
For all Jews, the most sacred religious act is that of reading the Pen-
tateuch, or Torah, the first five books of the Bible believed to be given to
Moses by God. The Torah, considered in its widest sense, is the Lord’s
will and deed.14 Objects in which the Torah is stored and the spaces it
traverses on its way to being read become sacred. The Torah is kept in
the hekhal (ark) and read from the tevah (reader’s platform). Typical of
Spanish-Portuguese synagogues as far back as those of Italy of the early
seventeenth century (which are thought to have influenced that of Ams-
terdam) is a bifocal layout with the hekhal and tevah at opposite ends of
the sanctuary. The hekhal is always on the side of the sanctuary facing
Jerusalem. In the Western world this is the east wall. The tevah is opposite
it, at the western end of the sanctuary. Also typical of Spanish-Portuguese
synagogues is that half the congregation sits on the north side of the sanc-
tuary and the other half on the south side. Each half of the congregation
faces both the hekhal and the tevah. This split-congregation, bifocal layout
not only activates the reading of the Torah, as it is walked from one end
of the sanctuary to the other—from the hekhal to the tevah—to be read, but
it dynamically demonstrates the focus of the faith. This floor plan config-
uration perfectly describes that of Amsterdam’s synagogue (see Fig. 20.6)
and many others.
In traditional orthodox Judaism, Jews must learn Hebrew, study the
Torah, and practice its teachings. However, Jewish law exempts women
from required attendance in synagogue due to their domestic obligations.
The Torah can not be publicly or ritually read unless ten men are present.
Subsequently, space must be created for keeping the Torah and for gath-
ering to read it. Jewish men are esteemed if they participate in reading the
Torah and are scholars of the literature. Jewish women, quite differently,
are responsible for executing the domestic laws and teachings of the
Torah. During the centuries of the Inquisition, when Jews were forbidden
to gather to study the Torah, Judaism persisted cryptically, primarily in
the privacy of the home. In this period, women were often the keepers of
the faith, taking over roles formerly held by men. They conducted mar-
riages and performed other rituals of Judaism, which had to be per-
formed in secret, usually within the confines of home.15 Synagogues are
not, typically, the realm of women. In the Amsterdam synagogue, as in
most of the Spanish-Portuguese synagogues, women wishing to attend
services sat separately in a gallery reserved exclusively for them, elevated
and directly above that of the men.16 In other European synagogues, since
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FIGURE 20.6 Interior view, facing east, of Amsterdam’s Esnoga. The tevah (reader’s platform) in the foreground; the hekhal
(ark) in the background. Photograph courtesy of Sephardic Congregation of Amsterdam.
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 403
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404 | Rachel Frankel

the fourteenth century, women sat separately from the men, sometimes in
an annex elevated above the men and sometimes to the side.17 The
women’s gallery at Jodensavanne was, as shall be shown, different from
that of Amsterdam.
Although it is not clear where converted male Jews may have sat in
the Amsterdam synagogue, it is known that they were never appointed
to official posts in the Jewish community and that the Jewish law stipu-
lating that a convert not be given a post with coercive authority was fol-
lowed. Furthermore, in 1644, the men of the Mahamad (governing body)
decreed that “circumcised Negro Jews” were not to be called to the Torah
or given any honorary commandments to perform in the synagogue.18 In
Suriname, in the eighteenth century, this lack of full privileges among
both the male and female Jews of African descent would lead to unprece-
dented disruptions and acts in the greater Jewish community.
There are additional dissimilarities between the synagogue of Ams-
terdam and that of Jodensavanne. In Amsterdam, the synagogue plan is
a complex of buildings, at the center of which is the sanctuary building
(see Fig. 20.7). An asymmetrical courtyard surrounds the sanctuary
building on three sides. Auxiliary buildings, such as the religious school,
the library, and the mikveh (ritual bath) surround the courtyard. Although
there are several entrances to the courtyard, through the wall of auxiliary
buildings, and several to the synagogue, the western entrance dominates
the plan. Unlike Amsterdam’s synagogue, the synagogue in Joden-
savanne, including the sanctuary and auxiliary spaces, is all assembled in
one building (see Fig. 20.8). Furthermore, the synagogue building existed
at the center of a four-sided symmetrical courtyard, and instead of being
protected by a perimeter buffer of buildings, the synagogue was sur-
rounded only by a wooden gate with identical gate entrances at each of
the four sides. Three of the four gates led directly to the three entrances
to the synagogue. The west gate led to the entrance hall and auxiliary
spaces of the synagogue. The north and south gates led to the symmetri-
cal entrances to the synagogue sanctuary. The two synagogues are further
distinguished from one other stylistically. The exterior of the Amsterdam
synagogue expresses Classical symmetrical architecture, whereas that of
Jodensavanne recollected Dutch vernacular (see Fig. 20.9) and exhibited
asymmetry on its north and south façades.
Just outside of Amsterdam, on the Amstel River, at Ouderkerk, is the
cemetery of the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam. In 1614 the first burial
took place. A small gravestone bears the inscription of a Hebrew poem in
which the deceased, a child, himself speaks and says that he was the first
to be buried in the cemetery. This cemetery is renowned for its illustrated
engraved tombstones that some say are in defiance of the second com-
mandment in the Torah (Exod. 20: 4–5) against graven images (a measure
against idol worship). The ohelim (solid tent or prism) tombstone forms
found at Ouderkerk resemble the grave markers in Spanish Muslim
cemeteries.19 More common at Ouderkerk—and also found in the
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FIGURE 20.7 Plan of the Amsterdam Esnoga complex. Sanctuary building at center, isolated from surrounding buildings housing auxiliary functions.
1= Hekhal. 2=Tevah. 4=Men’s entrance to sanctuary. 8=Women’s entrance to stairs to gallery. B=Main entrance to synagogue complex. Courtesy of His-
torical Buildings Department, after J. S. Baars and J. W. Kuiper, with additions by D. P. Cohen Paraira, from the book The Esnoga: A Monument to Por-
tuguese-Jewish Culture (Amsterdam, 1991).
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406 | Rachel Frankel

FIGURE 20.8 Plan of the extant remains of Bracha veShalom synagogue complex with
building and courtyard, built in 1685, Jodensavanne, Suriname. Drawing by architect
Rachel Frankel, based on 1997 field survey by Rachel Frankel and Caribbean Volunteer
Expeditions.
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FIGURE 20.9 View of Jodensavanne with Bracha veShalom, the tallest building, on the far right, from G. W. C. Voorduin,
Gezigten uit Neerland’s West-Indien, naar de natuur geteekend (Amsterdam, 1860–62).
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 407
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408 | Rachel Frankel

Sephardic cemeteries in Curaçao, Suriname, and other places—are the flat

horizontal slabs with imagery depicting episodes of the biblical name of
the deceased. Imagery referring to an individual’s life is also common. The
sources of the imagery were the illustrated publications, Bibles especially,
of the day.20 According to Joseph Gutmann: “… the stones at Ouderkerk
[and Curaçao] differ entirely from the austere tombstones of their Dutch
Protestant neighbors and from their Ashkenazim brethren. Such elabo-
rately sculpted horizontal Jewish tombstones were unknown in Medieval
Spain. Devoid of figural ornamentation, the medieval Spanish Jewish
tombstones followed the practice found in Muslim cemeteries.”21
Also at the Bet Haim (House of Life, a common term for a Jewish
cemetery) at Ouderkerk is the cleansing house or Rodeamentos House
(House of Circlings). The first name refers to the house’s function as the
place where the ritual washing of the dead body takes place. The second
name refers to the seven circular walks that are made around the coffin of
the deceased male. The house was built in 1705, and although there is no
known information about a cleansing house that existed before 1705, it is
thought that one did exist.22
The cemetery and burial practices at Ouderkerk in some ways foretell
what would occur at Jodensavanne. Firstly, Ouderkerk replaced an earlier
cemetery in Groet, which was unsatisfactory for the Jews because of its
distant location from Amsterdam, and up until 1634, bodies were re-
moved from Groet and reburied at Ouderkerk. Thus, one can conclude
that it was permissible among the Sephardim of Amsterdam not only to
start new cemeteries, but also to remove and reinter the deceased. Sec-
ondly, the original parcel of land of the Ouderkerk cemetery was aug-
mented by subsequent purchases; hence, one can conclude that unlike the
Ashkenazim, who were prohibited to add to the land of a cemetery, these
Sephardim could. Thirdly, adjacent to the cemetery at Ouderkerk is the
so-called del Sotto cemetery. This cemetery resulted from a dispute
between the Jewish community and the del Sotto family who, in 1670, pur-
chased their own tract of land for their family burials. In 1691 the dispute
was resolved, and three-fourths of the del Sotto family cemetery was
merged with that of the Jewish community. One-fourth, however,
remained in the hands of the del Sotto family, who continued to be buried
there.23 Thus, there is a precedent for a separate family cemetery. Fourthly,
the deceased were transported to the riverside location of the Ouderkerk
cemetery by boat, as would have been the case for Jews of Suriname,
whose plantations, cemeteries, and synagogues lined the Suriname River
and, later, whose town homes were farther downriver in Paramaribo.
Fifthly, although the feet of the deceased usually are placed facing east
toward Jerusalem,24 at Ouderkerk, and at Jodensavanne, the graves do not
uniformly adhere to this custom. Sixthly, unlike the Ashkenazim, many
Jews of Amsterdam, like those before them in Spain, acquired burial
places during their lifetime.25 Jews of Amsterdam, Curaçao, and Suriname
were also known to commission their tombs during their lifetime. Lastly,
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 409

in 1647, it was decided that a separate section of the cemetery at Ouder-

kerk would be marked off for the burial of all the “Jewish Negroes and
mulattos” except for those Negroes and mulattos who had married
whites or those who were born of a marriage performed under a bridal
canopy with a religious ceremony.26
Almost as early as the Jews came to Suriname, they buried their dead
with expensive imported tombstones much resembling those at Ouder-
kerk and on the island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. The first cemetery of
the Jewish settlement, referred to as the Cassipora cemetery (because of its
proximity to the creek so named that flows into the Suriname River), holds
about two hundred tombstones that may date back at least to 1669, if not
before. The latest grave is thought to be of 1840.27 Like Ouderkerk, the
graves are inscribed with texts in as many as three languages: Hebrew,
Portuguese, and Dutch. There are a few ohelim (see Fig. 20.10) and some of
the more numerous horizontal graves at Cassipora have illustrative
graven images. The tree being axed down by the angel of death (see Fig.
20.11), or the hand of God, is an ancient and popular Jewish symbol, espe-
cially in sepulchral art. Its antecedent appears as early as in the mosaic
floor at the fifteen-hundred-year-old Bet Alpha synagogue in Israel, where
Abraham is shown about to sacrifice the life of his son. This image refers
usually to a life taken before its time, typically that of a young person.
The Cassipora cemetery shares another similarity with that of Ouder-
kerk. According to the rigorous investigative work done in 1995 by Dr.
John DeBye and Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Strelick, it appears that the Da Costa
family had a separate section of the cemetery and that it was not uncom-
mon for families to group themselves together,28 as at Ouderkerk. How-
ever, unlike Ouderkerk, the majority of tombs at the cemetery at Cassipora
are oriented similarly but unusually northeast, rather than east.
The question of a separate section of the Cassipora cemetery for Jews
of African descent remains unanswered. According to the late Robert
Cohen, the 1754 hascamoth (rules) continued a trend of earlier bylaws,
containing a full section about the relationship between black and white
Jews, which Cohen quotes: “… since experience has taught how prejudi-
cial and improper it would be to admit Mulattos as Yahidim [full mem-
bers], and noting that some of these have concerned themselves in
matters of the government of the community [the Jewish community], it
is resolved that henceforth they will never be considered or admitted as
Yahidim and will solely be Congreganten, as in other communities.”29
However, based on the reactionary tone of the hascamoth, it is likely that
in early Suriname, Jews of African descent enjoyed fuller rights than they
did in subsequent years and in other places.
In 1682, the Jews of Suriname secured a land grant from Samuel
Nassy, a Jewish planter on the Suriname River. This property, a bit down
the river, about one mile north, from the Cassipora cemetery (and, it is
said, from the location of the earlier synagogue, see Fig. 20.12), according
to the Essai Historique, existed on fresh ground, on the Savannah.30 This
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FIGURE 20.10 Ohelim (prism-shaped) tombstones at Cassipora cemetery. Tomb of David de Meza, inscribed with Hebrew calendar date of
death, 5499 (1739). One side of the stone is carved in Hebrew and the other in Portuguese. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
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FIGURE 20.11 Tomb at Cassipora cemetery with two graven images. Above are crossbones and a skull, a common image, possibly alluding to
messianic passages in the book of Ezekiel. The ax cutting down a tree refers to a life ended before its time (see Rochelle Weinstein, Sepulchral
Monuments of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [New York, 1979]). Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 411
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412 | Rachel Frankel

FIGURE 20.12 [Willem Mogge], “Caerte ofte vertooninge vande Rivieren van Suriname en
Commewijne” (Chart or display of the Suriname and Commewine Rivers) (Amsterdam?
Anno 1671), which includes the place name “Joodese Synagoge,” roughly in the center of the
map, above “Morgename,” at the approximate location of the first synagogue of Suriname.

location would become the new town center, Joods Dorp (Jews’ Village),
and the site of the community’s second synagogue and cemetery.
In 1684, one year prior to the time of the construction of Bracha
veShalom, what would become known as Jodensavanne contained a
population of at least 1,158 people, with Africans outnumbering Jews at
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 413

least six to one.31 Central to Jodensavanne’s culture were its riverside

sugar plantations, grand synagogue, and cemeteries, built primarily by
African hands. Jodensavanne flourished for a century. In fact, it was prof-
itable enough to have helped to finance the construction of the Congrega-
tion Shearith Israel’s early synagogue in Manhattan, as remembered twice
a year by its present-day congregation.32
Despite the absence of any precedent for New World synagogue
architecture and the Jews’ inexperience in building design and construc-
tion concerning edifices of any significance, Bracha veShalom was built.
According to Essai Historique, the synagogue existed on high ground,
thirty to thirty-six feet above the river to which it was adjacent. It sat in
the middle of a spacious rectilinear courtyard, met by four cross streets,
with large houses built at its corners. This village square measured 450
feet long by 300 feet wide. The houses, reports Essai Historique, were
“grandes & commodes, quoique d’une Architecture médiocre qui sent
encore l’économie de nos ancêtres: il y en a cependant quelques unes
passablement belles” (large and commodious, although of a mediocre
architecture which as of yet expresses the thrift of our ancestors; however,
there are some which are passably attractive).33 The lithographs of Benoit
and Voorduin confirm the synagogue’s hilltop location and show it as the
tallest building at Jodensavanne’s town center.
The choice of site for Bracha veShalom is not unusual. According to
Talmudic interpretation, a synagogue should be located on the highest
site in a town; also, the synagogue should be taller than other houses in a
town. Furthermore, it is convenient to locate a synagogue near water for
the ritual bath and other religious observances.
A new cemetery was also established at this time, the community
thereby abandoning its first, except for the interment of those members of
the old families who wished to be buried near their ancestors.34 This sec-
ond cemetery is but a few hundred yards east from Bracha veShalom. It
contains about five hundred marble and bluestone tombs. The flat stones
rest horizontally and have epitaphs in Hebrew, Portuguese, and/or Dutch
and illustrative graven images, much like those at Cassipora and Ouder-
kerk (see Figs. 20.13 and 20.14). The inscriptions date from the seven-
teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The arrangement of the
graves, as at Cassipora and Ouderkerk, is not regular per cardinal direc-
tion. It is yet to be determined if bodies were removed from the Cassipora
cemetery and reinterred at the later cemetery.
Like the Cassipora cemetery, the second cemetery does not seem to
have had a separate section for Jews of African descent. However, it is
known that in 1790 the leader of the black Jews, Joseph de David Cohen
Nassy, was given a marginal grave “in a swamp and only one foot
deep.”35 Although the cemetery is not distinguished, it may be that the
grave of this Jew is at the second cemetery where its south portion has
lower ground compared to that of Cassipora and thus where one might
encounter swampy shallow earth.
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FIGURE 20.13 Tomb at the second Jewish cemetery in Suriname, with the image of a ruler on a throne and a poetic Hebrew text. The text was transcribed and
translated by the late Manfred Lehmann during his 1959 visit to Jodensavanne, and was reproduced in The Jerusalem Post, 7 April 1978. It reads in part that the
deceased was “a man who was always first in every holy enterprise … who chanted pleasantly the songs of Israel within the congregation named Bracha
veShalom in the city of Suriname, the wise and understanding communal leader, the exalted, pious and humble Rabbi David Hezekiah Baruch Louzado …
who departed this life at the will of the Lord of Heaven and earth on the second day of the new moon of Iyyar 1825.” Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
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FIGURE 20.14 Tomb at the second Jewish cemetery in Suriname, with Portuguese text and
an image indicating that the deceased was taken before his or her time. Photograph by
Rachel Frankel, 1995.
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416 | Rachel Frankel

What remains of the synagogue, originally built of brick with flat clay
tile roofing, sits in the midst of the no longer apparent village square. The
ruin of the synagogue measures ninety-four feet along its east-west axis
and forty-three feet across its north-south width (see Fig. 20.15).36 Accord-
ing to Teenstra, who visited Jodensavanne in 1828, the synagogue was
thirty-three feet high and had two pointed gables.37 Teenstra’s account
concurs with that of Essai Historique in that the synagogue had large,
brown hardwood columns with a properly constructed wooden vault ris-
ing above. In this double-height space, reserved for the men, existed a
large ark of beautiful cedar wood, in which the Scrolls of the Law were
kept: “… it is of a beautiful architecture, and ornamented with very well-
executed sculptures which reflect much honor (considering the infancy of
the colony when it was built) upon the one who fashioned it.”38 Opposite
the heckal, on a kind of raised platform or second story, beyond the main
sanctuary, which was the section for the men, was the section for the
women, which was situated above the synagogue’s auxiliary spaces that
were separate from the sanctuary. The extant remains and historical
descriptions of the main sanctuary suggest that it duplicates the north-
south, split-congregation, bifocal layout, with seating facing both the ark
and reader’s platform as exists in Amsterdam and is typical in other
Sephardic synagogues. However, at Bracha veShalom, the women’s seat-
ing does not conform to that of the men as it does in Amsterdam and
other places. At Jodensavanne the women faced the ark and the whole of
the sanctuary, as a conventional audience does a stage. Also, the women’s
gallery was set back from the men’s sanctuary, rather than above it.
At Bracha veShalom, the women’s section could have held at least
eighty women, about twenty more Jewish females than were inhabitants
of Jodensavanne in 1684.39 Each row (see Fig. 20.16) could have been
made up of four five-person benches, and there could have been at least
four rows of benches, with leftover room in the rear of the gallery where
views to the sanctuary would have been more or less obscured. Seats
there would have been deemed unacceptable and undesirable. The men’s
section had capacity for at least 160 individuals, roughly fifty-five more
males than the settlement had in 1684. While it is known that in the eigh-
teenth century male Jews of African descent were relegated to the bench
of the Abelim (mourners),40 it is unknown if this was the case in the first
years of the synagogue. Naturally, in 1685, at the time of constructing the
synagogue, the Jews of Jodensavanne would have built a structure that
could support a hoped for expanding population.
Essai Historique provides further descriptions of Bracha veShalom:

as its other ornaments [the synagogue had] the crowns of silver with which
the Scrolls of the Law are decorated, and other necessary furnishings of the
same metal, large candlesticks of yellow copper with several branches, and
chandeliers of several kinds which cost the individuals who donated them a
considerable sum. Below the women’s gallery there is a chamber where the
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FIGURE 20.15 Courtyard entrance gate posts and remains of the west wall (and twentieth-century reconstructions) of
the synagogue Bracha veShalom. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1995.
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 417
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418 | Rachel Frankel

FIGURE 20.16 Preliminary interpretative drawings of the plan and section of the synagogue
Bracha veShalom, 1685, Jodensavanne, Suriname. Drawing by architect Rachel Frankel,
based on a 1997 field survey by Rachel Frankel and Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions.

regents hold their meetings, having next to it the archives of the Jewish com-
munity kept in very good order. Everything there is so properly built and the
synagogue has such an indescribable majesty, that although its size is quite
ordinary, it elicits the admiration of those who see it for the first time.41

The open town plan of Jodensavanne, defined by four streets meeting

at right angles forming an orthogonal gated courtyard with entrances at
each of its four cardinal points, with the synagogue at the center, is
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 419

unprecedented in synagogue architecture and synagogue site planning.

Nonetheless, it is not unexpected in the context of Jodensavanne, a Jewish
haven, where for the first time Jews had the opportunity to design virgin
landscape and construct it according to their needs, beliefs, and hopes.
Whereas their brethren in Europe lived in cramped and, in some instances,
walled cities where permission to build a synagogue was difficult to
obtain and Jews were rarely given any choice of the site upon which to
build their synagogue, the Jews of Jodensavanne found themselves in a
place with almost no man-made environment and at full liberty to site and
build their synagogue on the acreage given them by their own Samuel
Nassy in 1682.42 Thus, the Jews had the unique opportunity to model and
build their view of the world and how it should be. Therefore, in accor-
dance with Talmudic interpretation, the synagogue was sited upon a hill
and was the tallest building in the town. Additionally, the synagogue was
adjacent to a river, convenient for access to flowing water for the purifica-
tion rituals. More unusual and significant, the site plan for Jodensavanne
permitted approach to the synagogue courtyard from all sides: from
north, south, east, and west. Despite the harsh reality of the threat of slave
revolts or of raids from former slaves living independently in their newly
established villages in the interior, from European powers, and from
native Americans, the town was laid out as if in a perfect world. In an
environment in which the river was the medium of transport, the Jews
built four roads, in parallel and perpendicular pairs, beside the river front.
These came together in idealized geometry to form the synagogue square.
The courtyard surrounding the synagogue and defining the square had
four gates, each at the midpoint of its four sides. Three of the courtyard
gates led directly into the synagogue. Two of these, on the north and south
sides, led directly into the sanctuary. It is unlikely that this plan evoked
anything but the age-old messianic hope of the Jewish people and echoed
the messianic literature and expectations popular in this era.
The novel synagogue and town plan, instead of having buffer auxil-
iary buildings on its courtyard perimeter, as in Amsterdam and else-
where, had only railings and gated entrances at each of its four sides. It
also had a geometrically idealized village square, which testified to the
Jews’ hope for the coming of the messianic age, as anticipated daily by
their (and all observant Jews’) recital of the Amidah:

Sound on the great Shofar the summons for our freedom; set up the banner to
gather our exiles, and bring us together from the four corners of the earth
soon unto our own land. Blessed art Thou, Lord, who wilt gather in the dis-
persed of Thy people Israel.

The town plan of Jodensavanne, an unprecedented place of full Jewish

life, symbolically and spatially, if not architecturally, refers most certainly
to the ideal of an age of peace—an end of war and of oppression, as stated
in Isaiah 43: 5–6:
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420 | Rachel Frankel

Fear not for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from
the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, give up, and to the south, do
not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the
earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.

Although slavery is sanctioned by the Bible, consider the irony of the

design intent, in that the majority of Jodensavanne’s inhabitants were
held in bondage.
Unfortunately, what remains today of Bracha veShalom is not neces-
sarily authentic. There have been two efforts of ruin preservation in this
century, both of which have resulted in some misleading effects. The first
cleanup of Jodensavanne was conducted in the 1940s. The Dutch colonists
used Nazi and German prisoners, formerly held in Indonesia, to perform
the labor of cleaning up both the cemetery and the ruins of the synagogue
of Jodensavanne. About thirty years later, another cleanup was per-
formed. As a result, the extant remains can not be relied upon to be
authentic when judging from a non-invasive field investigation. Archival
documents, historical descriptions, and comparative studies are critically
necessary to reconstruct the architectural history of the synagogue.
For example, the Voorduin sketch of 1860 of Bracha veShalom shows
that windows did not exist at the ground level of the synagogue’s east
wall (see Fig. 20.17). Yet the extant remains indicate that there were four
windows at what would have approximated ground level inside the
raised sanctuary. To further confuse matters, the sketch shows that at the
upper height of the sanctuary, the synagogue had three windows. Such
asymmetric fenestration, with three windows above and four below,
would not have existed on even the most common of buildings at the
time, let alone the synagogue.
It is quite common, as Voorduin’s sketch indicates, to eliminate fen-
estration on the portion of the east wall where the Torah is kept. The syn-
agogue in Amsterdam exemplifies this. Also, in the Dutch Caribbean
colony of St. Eustatius, the synagogue there, initially built in the early
1730s and then rebuilt in 1772, does not have fenestration on the portion
of the east wall where the hekhal existed. Rather, the eastern façade (exte-
rior) at St. Eustatius employs faux windows on the portion of wall where,
on the interior side, the ark is kept, thereby creating the illusion of a
façade of full fenestration. Perhaps at Bracha veShalom, the fenestration
on the eastern façade was similar. It is easy to conclude that such design
was merely architecturally correct—to avoid the monotony of portions of
blank wall. However, it may express the persistence of the masking,
secrecy, and illusion practiced by crypto-Jews in places where the Inqui-
sition existed. For example, some historians believe that the sand on the
floor of the sanctuary at the synagogue in Jodensavanne—as well as at
those synagogues built later in the capital of Suriname and on the island
of Curaçao—is thought, in part, to recollect the need to muffle the sounds
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FIGURE 20.17 Looking west at the cemetery and east façade of the synagogue of Jodensavanne, from G. W. C. Voorduin,
Gezigten uit Neerland’s West-Indien, naar de natuur geteekend (Amsterdam, 1860–62).
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 421
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422 | Rachel Frankel

of the footsteps of the men who gathered to read the Torah in places
where the Inquisition was feared.
Techniques of masking and the making of masks were also common in
the rich artistic traditions of the Africans enslaved on the plantations of the
Jews. The earth-spirits, previously mentioned, were often presented as
masks, whereas the supreme being is never pictured as images in Africa, for
the supreme being is so distant and so comprehensive in its nature that it is
not to be imagined.43 (Ironically, this is much in keeping with the Torah’s
second commandment against graven images, which was less conserva-
tively adhered to by the Jews of Jodensavanne.) Masking is also an impor-
tant technique for expression among the various secret societies of Africa,
which form to govern communal life or comprise a particular guild.44
In Suriname, where Africans no longer were among their own kin or
ethnic group, they developed new languages, religious rites, and burial
practices, many of which persist to this day as practiced by their descen-
dants. The African techniques of masking, secrecy, and illusion persisted
in Suriname not only because they were universally familiar to the
diverse population of Africans, but also because they provided strategies
required for survival under the institution of New World slavery.
Bracha veShalom had a typically Dutch-style profile. The squared-off
top parts of the end brick walls served two purposes for building in Hol-
land. They create an architectural detail for chimneys and provide a prac-
tical way to finish off masonry; pointed top ends do not typically or
practically exist in masonry construction. However, there would have
been no need for a chimney at the synagogue in tropical Suriname. Might
then the typically Dutch style of the synagogue building express the
Jews’ patriotism, remembrance of, or deference to the Netherlands—the
nation that had given them and their brethren back in Amsterdam reli-
gious rights? Or is it the style imposed in absentia by a Dutch architect
back in Amsterdam, where Jews were excluded from the building guilds?
Regarding the Bet Haim at Jodensavanne, three critical questions
arise. Firstly, did there ever exist a house of seven circuits in which the rit-
ual washing and circlings occurred? If not, how did the burial rites pro-
ceed and how did they come to be? Secondly, do the graven images on
Jodensavanne’s tombstones, which so closely resemble those of contem-
poraneous Portuguese Jewish cemeteries in Amsterdam and Curaçao,
suggest an intended uniformity in the sepulchral art of Portuguese Jews
throughout the New World and Europe, or was it simply due to the com-
munity’s lack of sufficiently skilled craftspeople and of adequate stone?
Thirdly, does the irregular layout of the cemetery’s tombstones, often in
opposition to rabbinical rules on burial placement arrangements, reflect
the persistence of individuals who desired unconventional burial adja-
cencies due to intermarital ties (unusually close among the Sephardim of
the time), or might it express a cabalistic idea that cemeteries be
labyrinthine? Or, does it reveal special conditions of burial placement for
Congreganten Jews of African descent?
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 423

The discussion of the African antecedents of the architecture and cul-

ture of Jodensavanne is enormously important. African and Jewish cul-
tures were in close contact in Suriname and clearly affected one another.
Benoit’s drawing (see Fig. 20.18) documents or perhaps illustrates such
proximity: On the right is the workshop of an African-American tailor,
complete with his African name (Koffi is a common West African name,
particularly among the Eve people of West Africa) prominently dis-
played. On the left is a shop of clothes and other ready-made goods. Its
proprietor is a merchant of Sephardic stock, with his ethnic name simi-
larly displayed.
From Zimmerman’s map of 1877, another example of Jewish and
African-American cultural proximity exists. The map shows an enlarge-
ment of a section through the Suriname River at the location of Joden-
savanne. It depicts the synagogue and, adjacent to it and specifically
noted, a Bomax ceiba tree, the formal embodiment of immortal ancestors
in West African worship and referenced as such on Zimmerman’s map.
Does this represent Jewish tolerance of African religion or African adop-
tion of ground considered holy by the Jews? Do the Jewish converts and
offspring of Jewish fathers and African, non-Jewish mothers—considered
by authoritative Jewish law to be non-Jews—who were raised, educated,
and identified as Jews, exemplify the Jews of Jodensavanne’s rejection of
the usual reluctance of Jews to accept converts,45 or does it simply imply
dominance by the ruling minority? Whichever may be the case, are there
parallels to be found in the architecture of the synagogue or in the con-
figuration of the cemeteries? Why at Bracha veShalom is the design of the
women’s gallery less inclusive compared to its predecessor in Amster-
dam? Did it reflect less honor given to Jodensavanne’s Jewish women,
some of whom, as early as 1685, were of African as well as Ashkenazic
descent? Does the consolidation of functions within one building at
Bracha veShalom—as opposed to the design of Amsterdam’s synagogue
and subsequent synagogues in Suriname and the Caribbean with their
separate auxiliary buildings—simply express economical use of materials
(shared walls, foundations, and roofs), or is it evocative of the freedom
and optimism felt by these uniquely privileged New World Jews, antici-
pating the messianic age with open arms and architecture?
By the mid-eighteenth century, Jodensavanne was in decline. Sugar
prices had dropped, many planters found themselves in default on their
loans, and raids on the plantations by Bosnegroes (enslaved Africans who
escaped the plantations and established their own distinctively ethnic
communities farther into the country’s interior) threatened all. In 1757,
John Greenwood, an American artist visiting Jodensavanne, noted in his
diary that the place “is as empty as the church is of Sunday, the Jews
being all gone to the plantations, except a few vagabonds who make this
place their sanctuary or asylum, when they run from the town for debt or
any misdemeanors.”46 At the time of the hundredth anniversary jubilee,
in 1785, the synagogue of Bracha veShalom was already a relic of the past,
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Page 424

FIGURE 20.18 “A gauche, la boutique d’un vette warier; à droite, la boutique d’un snerie ou tailleur" (To the
left a clothier’s shop; to the right that of a tailor), from P. J. Benoit, Voyage à Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839). Cour-
tesy of General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
20 1/24/01 12:11 PM Page 425

Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 425

visited and cherished as a historic monument by Jodensavanne’s former

inhabitants and their descendants. By 1787, meetings of the Mahamad
were no longer held at Jodensavanne, now replaced by Paramaribo. By
the 1830s Jodensavanne was all but abandoned. The year 1865 was the
last time the synagogue was used, and in 1873 its roof caved in, with no
subsequent repairs being made.
By the early eighteenth century some of the Jews of Jodensavanne
had already begun to move to Paramaribo, where they constructed new
synagogues and cemeteries and established themselves primarily as
merchants. Some also emigrated to other places in the Caribbean and
North America or returned to Amsterdam. In Paramaribo, there are two
synagogues, both of wooden construction. The first, built in 1716,
replaced an earlier synagogue that was converted into a house for the
sexton of the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. A new synagogue, Neveh
Shalom (House of Peace), was completed in 1723. However, this building
was completely rebuilt between 1834 and 1842 (see Figs. 20.19 and 20.20).
In 1735 Neveh Shalom was sold to the Ashkenazi Jews, and the Spanish-
Portuguese Jews built a new synagogue, Tsedek veShalom (Justice and
Peace), that same year. This synagogue, although never completely
rebuilt, was significantly altered when its roof was raised to provide
gallery space for the women (see Fig. 20.21).47 It is unclear where the
women sat prior to the gallery addition. Despite the grandeur of these
buildings, the Portuguese Jews considered their building only a house of
prayer, not a synagogue. In their regulations, the Jews stated that there
was only one synagogue, the one at Jodensavanne.48
At the end of the eighteenth century, a synagogue of the Jews of
African descent existed in Paramaribo. Prior to the establishment of their
synagogue, these Jews founded their own society, in 1759, which they
called Darkhei Yesharim (The Ways of the Righteous). Their synagogue
was demolished around 1800.49 Unfortunately, little is known of the
architecture of this latest, now lost, synagogue of Paramaribo. However,
the earlier two synagogues exist to this day and manage, against great
odds, to survive. Although these two synagogues share architectural fea-
tures with the one at Jodensavanne and with other Sephardic syna-
gogues, they lack Jodensavanne’s unique elements. Absent are the
messianic design intent in the plan of the synagogue complex, the Dutch-
style building profile, the attached auxiliary spaces, the faux windows (if
in fact they did exist at Jodensavanne), the set-back and perpendicularly
aligned women’s gallery, and, most apparently, the brick construction.
Within walking distance of the Jewish cemetery at Jodensavanne is
the so-called “Creole” (in Suriname, meaning descendant of an African
slave) cemetery. Those graves still visible date from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The heart shape found on some of the graves in this
cemetery (see Figs. 20.22 and 20.23) is most likely a sankofa (go back to
fetch it), a symbol for the important proverb of the Akan people of West
Africa, from whom many Surinamers descend, “Se wo were fi na wo
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426 | Rachel Frankel

sankofa a yenkyi” (it is not a taboo to go back and retrieve if you forget).50
It may also be an akoma (the heart) symbol of love, patience, goodwill,
faithfulness, and endurance.51
When displayed, the sankofa symbolizes the wisdom in learning from
the past in building for the future. Elsewhere, in Africa and in African-
American cemeteries, the sankofa is found. One example, in particular, is
that on the remains of an eighteenth-century coffin in the New York
African Burial Ground.52 The shape at the tip of the grave marker in Suri-
name symbolizes the same, although upside down. The sankofa symbol,
typical of African symbols, is flexible and can be adapted as required.53
Descendants of the African diaspora in Jodensavanne, not unlike the
Jews, held respect for the belief that wisdom was passed down by the
ancestors to future generations. Surinamer-Africans expressed this belief
on their tombs, in particular, through this age-old symbol—as did the
Jews with their graven images of biblical episodes—for the edification of
posterity.
In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sephardic cemetery in Para-
maribo, the heart-shaped sankofa and akoma symbols appear (see Fig.
20.24), coinciding with the Star of David (see Fig. 20.25), the Hebrew
name of the deceased, and the typical Sephardic flat horizontal tomb.
However, gone are the illustrative engraved images. Here, the horizontal
stone tombs, European in origin, are joined by sepulchral art of African
origin, thereby forming the only uniquely Jewish-African style of tomb
known in the New World.
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FIGURE 20.19 Exterior view of the south and west façades of the synagogue Neveh Shalom in Paramaribo, Suriname, which was originally
built in 1723 and completely rebuilt between 1834 to 1842. The sanctuary was entered at doors on the south façade (under the pediment
and columns), from the north (not shown), and at the center door (of three) on the western façade. The second-story women’s gallery was
accessed by two staircases located to the left and to the right of the center door on the western façade. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 427
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Page 428

FIGURE 20.20 Interior view of the synagogue Neveh Shalom, in Paramaribo, looking east. The tevah (reader’s platform)
is in the foreground, the hekhal (ark) in the background. Note the minimal fenestration on the east wall and the sand-
covered floor. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
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FIGURE 20.21 Exterior view of the north and east façades of the synagogue Tsedek veShalom, in Paramaribo, Suriname, built in
1735 and significantly altered over time. Regrettably, the entire interior of this synagogue has been removed from the building
and sent to Israel because the local population can no longer afford to maintain it. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1995.
Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 429
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Page 430

FIGURE 20.22 Tomb with sankofa (or akoma) on a horizontal gravestone from Jodensavanne’s “Creole” cemetery. Photograph
by Rachel Frankel, 1995.
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 431

FIGURE 20.23 Vertical grave marker with sankofa, from Jodensavanne’s “Creole” cemetery.
Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
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Page 432

FIGURE 20.24 Tombs with horizontal gravestones, vertical wooden markers with sankofa finials, and akoma heart symbols
attached, Sephardic cemetery, Paramaribo, Suriname. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 433

FIGURE 20.25 Vertical wooden post, fallen down, with sankofa finial and Star of David
attached, Sephardic cemetery, Paramaribo, Suriname. Photograph by Rachel Frankel, 1997.
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434 | Rachel Frankel

Notes

1. Translated by Ir. D. P. Loemban Tobing from the Dutch article by Fred. Oudschans
Dentz, “Wat er Overbleef van het Kerkhof en de Synagoge van de Joden-Savanne in
Suriname,” in De West-Indische Gids (Negen en Twintigste Jaargang, 1948), 214.
2. [David Cohen Nassy?], Essai Historique sur la Colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo, 1788),
refers to the location of Suriname’s first synagogue in Torrica (or Thorarica). In 1788,
at the time of the writing of the historical essay, as well as in 1672, when this syna-
gogue was built, Torrica was the name of the important harbor town, further down-
river from where the Jews had settled by the mid-1660s. Torrica was also the name
of one of the five divisions that the Dutch formed in their new colony as early as
1670. The town of Torrica existed in Divisie Thorarica (the Division of Torrica) much
like New York City exists in the State of New York. By the mid- to late nineteenth
century, the original five divisions had changed and merged, and the once important
town of Torrica had long since disappeared. However, the town persisted in memory
as the only place bearing this name, and by the turn of the twentieth century this ref-
erence, in Essai Historique, to the early synagogue being located “in Torrica,” served
to confuse readers into thinking that this synagogue existed in the town of Torrica.
In fact, this synagogue was in the Divisie Thorarica, on the Suriname River, about
one mile south of Jodensavanne where exist the remains of the synagogue Bracha
veShalom. The fact that no synagogue existed in Torrica, the town, at this time, is fur-
ther substantiated by the absence of any mention of Jews being there in an otherwise
complete and “impartial description” of the place by George Warren in 1667. How-
ever, prior to the establishment of the Jewish settlement in the Division of Torrica in
the 1660s, it may be possible that a small and short-lived Jewish community existed
in the town of Torrica.
3. Alex van Stipriaan, “An Unusual Parallel: Jews and Africans in Suriname in the 18th
and 19th Centuries,” in Studia Rosenthaliana 31 (1/2) (1997):74.
4. Mordechai Arbell, “The Jewish Settlement in Pomeroon/Pauroma (Guyana) 1657–
1666,” in Revue des Etudes Juives (July–December 1995):358–59.
5. George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam (London, 1667), 19.
6. Richard Price, The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction (Balti-
more, 1976), 19.
7. Rene S. Wassing, African Art: Its Background and Traditions (Hong Kong, 1968), 192.
8. Warren, Impartial Description, 19–20.
9. Judith Belinfante et al., The Esnoga (Amsterdam, 1991), 56–58.
10. Victor Enthoven, “Suriname and Zeeland: Fifteen Years of Dutch Misery on The Wild
Coast, 1667–1682,” in International Conference on Shipping, Factories and Colonization, ed.
J.Everaert and J. Parmentier (Belgie, 1996), 253–54. It was hard to find personnel, and
all kinds of private initiatives were taken to hire a work force. Agents of planters in
Holland, from 1669–1679, contracted craftsmen such as carpenters, mill builders, coop-
ers, bricklayers, etc.
11. Enthoven, “Suriname and Zeeland,” 255, Table I, from Algemeen Rijksarchief, The
Hague (ARA). In 1684, the year prior to the construction of Bracha veShalom, there
were 163 Jews in Suriname and 972 Africans enslaved to them.
12. Enthoven, “Suriname and Zeeland,” 255, Table I (ARA).
13. Johannes M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990), 185.
14. Carol Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe (Cambridge, 1985), 6.
15. Israel Broadcasting Authority, “The Crypto-Jews of Portugal,” Out of Spain, 1492: A
Journey Through Spain with Yitzhak Navon (Israel Broadcasting Authority, 1992), Parts 1
and 2.
16. Nonetheless, there are exceptions among the Sephardim of Amsterdam and those of other
places. Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe, 390, writes: “in the synagogue [of Amsterdam] of
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Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne | 435

1639, some of the gallery space was reserved for men; at least one of the galleries
which ran around three sides of the interior held men.” Additionally, according to
the Italian Jesuit priest, Pietro della Valle—who in 1626 visited the Great (Old) Syn-
agogue at Aleppo, Syria—men and women sat together, each family having its par-
ticular place, with Syrians on the right side and Sephardim on the left (from the
photographic exhibit, The Jews of Syria by Robert Lyon, co-curated by Professor
Samuel Gruber and Dr. Edward Aiken at Yeshiva University Museum, New York,
1997–98).
17. Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe, 29.
18. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin, Menasseh Ben Israel and His
World (Leiden, 1989), 57–58.
19. Rochelle Weinstein, “Sepulchral Monuments of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1979), 49.
20. Weinstein, “Sepulchral Monuments.”
21. Joseph Gutmann, The Jewish Life Cycle (Leiden, 1987), 20–21.
22. L. Alvares Vega, Het Beth Haim van Ouderkerk (Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, 1994), 23.
23. Alvares Vega, Het Beth Haim van Ouderkerk, 15–16.
24. Gutmann, The Jewish Life Cycle, 19.
25. H. J. Zimmels, Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Hoboken, N.J., 1996), 183.
26. Yosef Kaplan et al., Menasseh Ben Israel, 58.
27. John DeBye, De Joodse begraafplaats te Cassipora (http://www.cq-link.sr/personal/
debye/cassipora/index.ht, 1998), graciously translated by Wim Klooster.
28. Ibid.
29. Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Suriname in the Second Half of the Eighteenth
Century (Leiden, 1991), 161.
30. [Nassy?], Essai Historique, seconde partie, 23 and 49.
31. These are figures from Enthoven’s article, “Suriname and Zeeland,” Table 1: 255. How-
ever, Essai Historique claims that in 1690 there were ninety two Jewish families, ten to
twelve German Jews united to the Portuguese there by bonds of marriage and fifty
bachelors who did not belong to these families. Of the Black slaves, there were said to
be at least nine thousand. In contrast, according to the Johannes Postma (The Dutch in
The Atlantic Slave Trade, 185) the population of Suriname in 1684 was no more than four
thousand people in total, and by 1695, the total population was still less than five thou-
sand people.
32. Prayer Book for Yom Kippur [Day of Atonnement] of the Congregation Shearith Israel in
The City of New York, 332; four synagogues are named in the customary blessing on
Yom Kippur given to those who contributed to it. Thanks to the Rev. Abraham Lopes
Cardozo and his wife, Mrs. Irma Carodozo, of Shearith Israel for finding this reference
and to Professor Jonathan Sarna for his help with its translation and explanation.
33. [Nassy?], Essai Historique, seconde partie, 50.
34. Ibid., 23.
35. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 163.
36. From the 1997 field survey done by the author and the volunteers of Caribbean Vol-
unteer Expeditions.
37. M. D. Teenstra, De Landbouw in de Kolonie Suriname (Groningen, 1835), 137.
38. [Nassy?], Essai Historique, 51.
39. Enthoven, “Suriname and Zeeland,” Table 1: 255.
40. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 161.
41. [Nassy?], Essai Historique, 51.
42. Ibid., 49.
43. Wassing, African Art, 192.
44. Wassing, African Art.
45. Yosef Kaplan et al., Menassah Ben Israel, 54–55.
46. John Greenwood, 2 Diaries or Notebooks (Manuscript Department, New York Historical
Society), 101–2, transcribed and shared by Wim Klooster.
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436 | Rachel Frankel

47. Günter Böhm, “The Synagogues of Surinam,” Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1978):103.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 104.
50. Kwaku Ofori-Ansa, Meanings of Symbols in Adinkra Cloth (1993).
51. Ibid.
52. Kwaku Ofori-Ansa, Associate Professor of African Art History at Howard University,
written and oral communications with the author, winter 1997–98.
53. Ibid.
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PART VI

“THE BROKERS OF THE WORLD”:

AMERICAN JEWS, NEW CHRISTIANS,
AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE
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– Chapter 21 –

JEWS AND NEW CHRISTIANS IN THE

ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Seymour Drescher

I N STUDYING THE WESTWARD EXPANSION of Europe after 1500, “the devel-

opment of an Atlantic economy is impossible to imagine without slav-
ery and the slave trade.”1 During three and a half centuries, up to twelve
million Africans were loaded and transported in dreadful conditions to
the tropical and subtropical zones of the Americas. This massive coerced
transoceanic transportation system was only one element of a still
broader process. Probably twice as many Africans were seized within
Africa for purposes of domestic enslavement or transportation to pur-
chasers in the Eastern Hemisphere during the same period. The coerced
movement of Africans long exceeded the combined voluntary and invol-
untary migrations of Europeans. By the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, between two and three Africans had been landed in the Americas for
every European who crossed the Atlantic.2
This major human migration involved the direct and indirect partic-
ipation of many individuals and institutions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and
the Americas. It required an enormous number of interlocking activities,
within and between continents. Although tens of thousands of direct
participants involved Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others who could
be classified by religion, and scores of groups that could be classified by
ethnic affiliation, the history of the slave trade is usually considered in
terms of geography and state sponsors. Geographically, the trade is ana-
lyzed in terms of a triangular trade in which Europeans provided capi-
tal, organization, and the means and manpower of transoceanic
transportation; Africans provided the captives and the means of intra-
continental movement; and Europeans in the Americas provided the
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440 | Seymour Drescher

means for redistributing transported captives to productive occupations

in various regions.3
Politically, the slave trade is usually framed in terms of a succession
of national entities drawn into and dominating the trade as suppliers,
carriers, and purchasers. Although every European polity bordering the
Atlantic attempted to enter into the Atlantic slave trade between 1450 and
1800, a small number of states dominated the European-sponsored enter-
prises. Chronologically, the trade as a whole is generally broken down
into three phases. Each succeeding phase of the slave trade was numeri-
cally larger than its predecessor. In the century and a half of the first
phase (1500–1640), 788,000 Africans were embarked on the “Middle Pas-
sage,” or about 5,600 per year. During the course of the second phase
(1640–1700), 817,000 left Africa, or about 13,600 per year. In the final
phase, between 1700 and British abolition in 1807, 6,686,000 were ex-
ported, or about 62,000 per year. Thus, four out of every five Africans
transported to the New World between 1500 and 1807 were boarded in
the final phase (see Map 10 and Table 21.1).4

TABLE 21.1 Coerced African Migrants Leaving for the Americas by National
Carrier (in thousands)

1500–1700 (Phases I and II)

Carrier Before 1580 1580–1640 1640–1700

Spanish 10 100 10
Portuguese 63 590 226
British 1 4 371
Dutch 0 20 160
French 0 0 50
Total 74 714 817

1700–1808 (Phase III)

Carrier Totals
British 3,120
Portuguese 1,903
French 1,052
Dutch 352
American 208
Danish 51
Total 6,686

Sources: David Eltis, The Rise of the African Slave Trade in the Americas (New York, 2000), 9,
table I-I; and David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa,
1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30
(1989):1–22, 10, table 4.
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 441

Destinations of the Atlantic slave trade, 1451–1600

40˚N
Old
World

20˚N

Spanish America

0˚ 0˚
l
Brazi

20˚S 20˚S

0 1000 mi
0 1000 km

140˚W 120˚W 100˚W 80˚W 60˚W 40˚W 20˚W 0˚ 20˚E 40˚E 60˚E

Destinations of the Atlantic slave trade, 1601–1700

40˚N

Old World

sh America
ani
Sp
20˚N British C
arib
bea
n
F r en
ch C
aribbea
Dutch n
Caribbe
0˚ an 0˚
il
Braz

3,000,000
20˚S 20˚S
1,500,000
500,000 0 1000 mi
0 1000 km

140˚W 120˚W 100˚W 80˚W 60˚W 40˚W 20˚W 0˚ 20˚E 40˚E 60˚E

Destinations of the Atlantic slave trade, 1701–1810

40˚N
British North A
mer
ica
ca
meri
hA
anis
Sp

20˚N British Carib

bea
n
Danish Car
ibbea
n
Frenc
h Carib
bean
0˚ Dutc 0˚
6,000,000 h Cari
b be a n
4,500,000

3,000,000

20˚S 1,500,000 Brazil 20˚S

500,000
0 1000 mi
0 1000 km
140˚W 120˚W 100˚W 80˚W 60˚W 40˚W 20˚W 0˚ 20˚E 40˚E 60˚E

Adapted from maps in Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969).

MAP 10 Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade

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442 | Seymour Drescher

For most scholars of the slave trade, economic, demographic, and

political categories are the most significant variables in determining the
coerced movement of Africans. Once launched, they look to economics or
political economy to explain the flow of people from Europe to the coast
of Africa and of captive Africans from the coast of Africa to the Americas.
Price, mortality, health, age, sex, provenance, destination, and occupation
are the key variables. Economic and demographic conditions, inflected
by political attempts to bend those conditions in favor of one nation or
another, define the priorities of analysis.5
This essay, however, deals with the impact of a particular religious
minority upon economic and demographic developments in the Atlantic
world over three centuries. Analyzing the role of religious or ethno-reli-
gious groups in the African slave trade within the familiar framework of
nations and regions presents unusual methodological difficulties. Histo-
rians are acutely aware that the trade involved tens of thousands of per-
petrators. Among them were pagans, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants,
and Jews. Those who were involved may be further divided into scores
of groups by ethnic designation, including every major entity ever
defined as a “race.” Scholars incorporate these entities contingently as
they analyze the core processes of the trade itself. Even in regard to the
study of slave trading collectivities, it is rare that historians regard the
religious affiliation of the European participants as of more than limited
significance, compared with economic relationships. The trade flowed
easily from one religious and commercial entity to another. Culturally
defined identities may have had some impact upon the fundamental
choice of viewing Africans as enslavable, but over the whole period of its
rise the transatlantic slave trade appears to have been an activity extraor-
dinarily responsive to cost-benefit calculations.6
Analyzing the specific relation of Jews to the Atlantic slave trade is
warranted by a peculiar historiographical tradition. “Scarcely were the
doors of the New World opened to Europeans,” declared the economist
and historian Werner Sombart, “than crowds of Jews came swarming
in.… European Jewry was like an ant-heap into which a stick [expulsion
from Spain] had been thrust. Little wonder, therefore, that a great part of
this heap betook itself to the New World.… The first traders in America
were Jews,” as well as “the first plantation owners” in African São Tomé
and the first transplanters of sugar and slaves across the Atlantic. Jews
were the “dominant social class [die herrschende Kaste]” of Brazil. Along
with Portuguese criminals, they constituted almost the entire population
of that colony, which reached its peak of prosperity only with “the influx
of rich Jews from Holland.” In support of his interpretation, Sombart
drew heavily upon accounts by Jewish historians and encyclopedists. As
Jewish migration to the Americas swelled at the end of the nineteenth
century, writers sought to establish the earliest possible Jewish presence
of their ancestors in the New World and to magnify their role in the
grand narrative of European westward expansion. The search for Jewish
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 443

preeminence in Atlantic development continues to find supporters

among authors with dramatically contrasting motives.7
Sombart’s hyperbolic account was correct in one respect. Three cen-
turies of cumulative expulsions of Jews from Atlantic maritime states
reached their climax as Europe’s great westward expansion began in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The simultaneous departure of both the
Columbian expedition and Jews from Spain in 1492 was merely emblem-
atic of a broader movement in European Jewish history. By 1500, Jews
had been expelled from the kingdoms of England, France, Spain, and
Portugal. Two generations later they had also been excluded from most
of the Habsburg Netherlands, from the Baltic seacoast, and from large
parts of Italy. This meant that by the time Africans began to be exported
to the Americas in significant numbers (ca. 1570), Europe’s rulers had
forced the overwhelming mass of European Jewry eastward to Poland,
Lithuania, and the Ottoman empire. Neither the rulers nor the merchants
(including the Jewish merchants) of those new regions of settlement were
involved or interested in the Atlantic slave trade.8
Jews could not live openly or securely anywhere along the European
Atlantic seaboard during the first century after the Columbian expedi-
tion, the century in which the Euro-African coastal supply systems and
the Iberian-American slave systems were created. Jews were conse-
quently prohibited from openly participating in co-founding the institu-
tions of the slave trade at any terminus of the triangular trade, or in the
transoceanic “Middle Passage.” One characteristic of this “religious
cleansing” of Europe’s Atlantic littoral also carried over into the second
phase of the slave trade (1604–1700). African forced migration was dom-
inated by political entities that tried to limit the slave trade to their own
sponsored contractors in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Success in
long-distance and long-term voyages, as Europeans discovered, was ini-
tially enhanced by access to politically privileged monopolies in Europe,
trade enclaves on the African coast, and colonial settlements in the Amer-
icas. Until the end of the seventeenth century, governmental agencies or
quasi-public trading companies aspired to monopoly positions.
The greater the advantage offered by official patronage in any European
polity, the less likely there was to be a Jewish presence. In a confessionally
intolerant Europe and its overseas extensions, it was virtually impossible
for Jews to hold the principal managerial positions in official slave trading
entities. During three centuries, Spanish slave trade licenses and asientos
(monopoly contracts for the delivery of slaves to the Spanish colonies) were
never awarded to Jews. Apparently, this was as true in the Portuguese,
Dutch, English, and French trades as it was for the Spanish asiento. Jews
could, at most, exercise occasional influence at the margins of these offi-
cial agencies as negotiators and consular intermediaries. Even subcon-
tracting to Jewish merchants for the delivery of slaves contributed to the
refusal of the Spanish government to renew the asiento to the Portuguese
Royal Guinea Company at the beginning of the eighteenth century.9
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444 | Seymour Drescher

Phase One

The Portuguese Atlantic slave trade to the Americas was an offshoot of

their fifteenth-century slave trade from the African mainland to offshore
islands and metropolitan Portugal. Historians of this pre-Columbian
migration stream always emphasize the high degree of state control over
this trade. It was conducted under the auspices of a crusading monarchy
that was engaged in almost continuous religious warfare with North
African Muslim kingdoms. Those who participated in the African coastal
voyages of exploration by supplying capital, ships, or manpower included
English, French, Polish, and Italians, as well as Iberians. None of the his-
torical accounts of the Portuguese slave trade during the pre-Colombian
period discusses a Jewish slaving dimension. The only accounts of a promi-
nent Jewish presence in this initial process of oceanic exploration and trade
are related to the scientific and cartographic experts mobilized by Prince
Henry the Navigator to track his African exploratory expeditions.10
If Jews could play no role in the initial political and legal foundations
of the European transatlantic slave trade, the elimination of Jewry from
the Iberian Peninsula created a major economic niche for some genetic
descendants of the Jews. In 1497, the forced mass conversion of one hun-
dred thousand Iberian Jews residing in Portugal created a novel situation.
As Christians, ex-Jews were free to take full advantage of the Portuguese
seaborne empire, the first fully global network of its kind in human his-
tory. The Portuguese trading network expanded explosively along the
coasts of Africa, into South Asia and to the east coast of South America.
For nearly a century after the 1490s, the Portuguese held a virtual monop-
oly in the trades to Europe from these areas.
In one respect, Portugal’s post-conversion legislation tended to
enhance and prolong the commercial orientation of these legally desig-
nated “New Christians” in a society dominated by a traditional system of
values and institutions. At the same time, however, Portugal’s stigmati-
zation of New Christians as members of a legally separate and inherited
status also rendered its members subject to endless genealogical scrutiny,
humiliation, confiscation, and violence from generation to generation.
The volatile nature of the New Christian position was symbolized by the
first mass deportation of European children to the tropics. Following the
flight of Jews to Portugal after the Spanish expulsion of 1492, the Por-
tuguese monarch had two thousand children abducted from their Jewish
families. They were baptized and deported to Saõ Tomé, an island off the
coast of Africa at the latitude of the equator. In a few years, only six hun-
dred children remained alive. The continent that was soon to be called
“the white man’s grave” was first a “white child’s grave.” This first
cohort of New Christians in Africa was mated at maturity with Africans.
Their descendants, along with New and Old Christian Portuguese immi-
grants who arrived both involuntarily and voluntarily, became Saõ
Tomé’s principal inhabitants and traders.11
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 445

New Christians were, of course, legally denied the opportunity to

openly profess or transmit Jewish culture and ritual. The Inquisition’s
premise of “impure blood” and the alleged collective propensity to
heresy and “Judaization” transformed descent and kinship linkages into
socially explosive material. However, these descendants of Jews were far
from being frozen within a rigid endogenous caste system. The idea that
New Christians overwhelmingly maintained religious, cultural, or even
genealogical continuity with fifteenth-century Iberian Jewry into the
eighteenth century was a racial myth. Most of those who remained
within the Iberian orbit in fact attempted to assimilate as rapidly as pos-
sible. Intergenerational studies of Portuguese and overseas New Chris-
tians have concluded that each generation became culturally and
religiously more able to live among, practice with, and marry Old Chris-
tians. For more than two centuries, however, this trajectory toward assim-
ilation was intercepted by waves of official and popular coercion. Of an
estimated one hundred thousand Jews at the time of conversion in 1497
(one-tenth of Portugal’s population), no more than sixty thousand New
Christians remained in 1542, and perhaps half that number in 1604 (or 2
percent of the population) at the height of their influence in the Por-
tuguese slave trade.12
This marginalizing and volatile environment has serious implications
for anyone wishing to analyze the economic behavior of New Christians
both in general and as slave traders in particular. Their reaction to stigma-
tization punctuated by purges was a complex pattern of social organiza-
tion and behavior. Denied full legitimacy in the community of the
faithful, New Christians tended to develop trading networks that, as a
means of survival, were based above all on family connections, and also
tended to narrow their loyalties only to kinsmen or, at the most, to other
New Christians who were similarly marginalized. Their ties to a geo-
graphically and culturally distant Jewry were often as fragile as those to
the more proximate Old Christians among whom they lived in uncom-
fortable conformity. Unpredictable purges created periodic crises of iden-
tity. Those with sufficient resources and anxiety sometimes exited from
the Iberian orbit altogether. Small waves of individuals periodically fled
to areas where they could escape the Inquisition’s procedures.
Not all of those who left Iberia rejoined Jewish communities. Many
fled under threat of Inquisitorial persecution to the domains of more tol-
erant Catholic princes, an indication of a propensity toward Christian-
ization. Economic opportunities frequently took precedence over
genealogical vulnerability, even among those who lived beyond the
power of the Iberian Inquisitions. A considerable number of those
arrested as crypto-Jews in Mexico between 1620 and 1650, for example,
had lived unmolested in Catholic Italy and France before risking immi-
gration to the Spanish empire. Moreover, the documented phenomenon
of New Christians returning to Iberia from Africa, Asia, or the Americas
after having made their fortunes indicates that most wealthy merchants
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446 | Seymour Drescher

and mercantile families were not necessarily inclined to resettle where

they could openly practice Judaism or even practice syncretic brands of
family religiosity.13
The exercise of caution in lumping together Jews and New Christians
in Europe or America is further warranted by developments in Africa.
During the late sixteenth century, at the height of their participation in the
Atlantic slave trade, a number of New Christians were living as defectors,
beyond the Portuguese zone of control in Africa. These New Christian
lançados, notes John Thornton, established a whole chain of settlements
“with posts in Kongo (and often positions in the church and administra-
tion of Kongo) and its eastern neighbors as well as in states in the
Ndembu region and Ndongo.” Thornton, however, makes no mention of
the reestablishment of Jewish communities among these New Christian
defectors living there or anywhere else beyond the power of the Inquisi-
tion and the exclusivist definition of Christianity prevalent in Portugal.
On the American side of the Iberian empires, New Christian merchants in
the seventeenth-century New World “could social-climb almost as well
as Old Christian merchants; it simply took them another generation or
two to reach their goal.” That goal was “the foundation of an entailed
estate and a patent of nobility as a fidalgo da casa real.” We have no evi-
dence that the Dutch, English, or French Caribbean islands constituted
important places of refuge for New World New Christians who might
possibly have wished to flee Inquisitorial threats in the nearby Spanish
American mainland colonies.14
Neither in their social orientation nor in their approach to economic
activity, can one differentiate significantly between New and Old Chris-
tians in the slave trade. The latter certainly did not shun that economic
activity because of its association with crypto-Jews in the popular men-
tality. Especially in discussing economic activity in the early modern Iber-
ian empire, there is no heuristic value in generically identifying New
Christians more closely with Jewish merchants among whom they did
not live, than with Old Christian merchants among whom they did live.
To conflate two distinct social entities (Jews and New Christians) when
attempting to assess the potential roles of religious formations simply
begs the question of affiliation.15
In comparative terms, however, the early modern Iberian empires
allowed New Christians to play a role in the Atlantic slave trade that was
never to be matched by Jews in any part of the Atlantic world. When the
first global trade network in the world formed at the beginning of the six-
teenth century, the New Christians were positioned to become its first
trade diaspora. If their quasi-pariah religious status kept them at least
once removed from institutional power, that same status tended to make
them most effective in a world in which opportunities for long-term
credit were dependent upon kinship and trust.
The African slave trade depended upon a complex series of exchanges
—from Europe to Africa to America to Europe—in which trustworthy
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 447

interlocking agents and trained apprentices offered enormous advan-

tages to competing traders. As Joseph Miller notes, slave traders always
operated at the margins of the rapidly expanding Atlantic system: “To the
extent that merchants from the metropole involved themselves at all in
this early trade in slaves, they tended to come from New Christian circles
then coming under heavy pressure from the Inquisition at home and
seeking respite from persecution in flight to the remote corners of the
empire or to Protestant Northern Europe.”16
The slave trade, therefore, opened up transoceanic niches of entrée
and refuge that gave New Christians an initial advantage in human cap-
ital over other merchants. Slaving was so valuable an activity in the eyes
of rulers that its New Christian practitioners might hope to be specifically
exempted from periodic group expulsions. In one purge, New Christians
were allowed to remain in Angola only if they were merchants. As com-
modities, slaves themselves opened niches into the American empires at
times when other types of goods were restricted or excluded. Slaving was
long a privileged means of gaining a foothold in Spanish as well as Por-
tuguese America, even though there was a tendency for slavers, once
established, to switch to other economic activities.17
Given this balance of negative institutional, social, and legal coercion
and their positive technical and familial advantages, New Christian mer-
chants managed to gain control of a sizable, perhaps major, share of all
segments of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade during the Iberian-dom-
inated phase of the Atlantic system. I have come across no description of
the Portuguese slave trade that estimates the relative shares of the vari-
ous participants in the slave trade by this racial-religious designation, but
New Christian families certainly oversaw the movement of a vast num-
ber of slaves from Africa to Brazil during its first-century period. James
Boyajian identifies one New Christian whose network was responsible
for transporting more than 10,200 “pieces” to the New World.18 Another
individual, António Fernandes de Elvas, operated the Angola and Cape
Verde contracts between 1615 and 1623. This was also the peak period for
general attacks on the crypto-Jewish monopoly of Portuguese trade.

Phase Two

During the “second Atlantic system,” about 1640 to 1700, the Iberian
near-monopoly was definitively broken. The focus of the slave trade
expanded northward from Portuguese Brazil to the Caribbean region.
Most northern Atlantic and Baltic Sea states attempted to enter the
transatlantic slave system: the Netherlands, England, France, Denmark,
Sweden, Brandenburg, and Courland. In the second half of the seven-
teenth century, the sheer number of state-sponsored companies en-
gaged in the transportation of African slave-laborers reached its peak.
For the first time, Jews participated substantially in this more open and
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448 | Seymour Drescher

competitive environment (Map 11) and played their most tangible role
in the slave trade.19
By the end of the sixteenth century, a small stream of New Christians
had already moved northward from Iberia, settling (either as Christians
or as Jews) along a string of Atlantic and North Sea ports from southern
France to northwestern Germany (and, eventually, England).20 Before
full-scale Dutch entry, Jewish Sephardim residing in Amsterdam used
their comparative advantage in Iberian contacts to begin the first African
slaving voyages conducted by professing Jews. Before the founding of
the Dutch West India company, Amsterdam Jewish merchants chartered
several vessels specifically for the slave trade from West Africa to Brazil
and the Spanish Caribbean. The interest of Jewish merchants in the slave
trade constituted a small part of their larger interest in the African and
Brazilian trades to Europe.21 Jews operating out of (or migrating from)
the Netherlands still did not make a major contribution to the slave trade
in most of the geographic segments of the system: fitting slave ships in
Europe; managing slave factories, i.e., trading outposts, in Africa; or
transporting slaves to the Americas.
During most of the seventeenth century, the Dutch transatlantic trade
was conducted primarily by means of a chartered slaving monopoly
given to the Dutch West India Company. That Company held on to the
slaving monopoly long after it lost its exclusive rights over all other
commodities. As they were unable to operate freely outside the Company
and were excluded on grounds of religion from serving on its directorate,
Jewish merchants could enter the Dutch slave trade in only two ways: as
passive investors in the Company itself, or as illegal private traders
(interlopers). In the first case, Jewish investment in the West India Com-
pany was remarkably small. It amounted to only a 1.3 percent share of the
founding capital. At the peak of Dutch influence in the Atlantic slave
trade between the early 1640s and the early 1670s, Jews appear to have
constituted between 4 and 7 percent of the membership in the West India
Company.22 Jews were a much smaller segment in the Dutch overseas
trade than were New Christians in the Portuguese global trade. Dutch
society was comparatively much better endowed with capital, commer-
cial skills, and entrepreneurial expertise. There remains, however, the
possibilities of illegal, or interloper, trade. It is the one branch of the
Dutch slave trade for which I have seen no quantitative estimate of Jew-
ish mercantile participation. However, according to Johannes Postma’s
comprehensive quantitative estimate of the Dutch slave trade, interlopers
accounted for no more than 5 percent of the total transatlantic trade.23
In terms of company-sanctioned slaving, Jews were hardly involved
in the “Middle Passage.” Throughout the period of the West India Com-
pany’s slave trade monopoly, from 1630 to 1730, only a handful of Jewish
merchants are recorded as having been given permission to sail on their
own account directly to the African coast. In Africa itself, the rise of the
Dutch empire seems to have contributed equally little to the establishment
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 449

180°

°W
160

W
0°
14

A
C
I
ER
AM

W Leipzig
0° Amsterdam
12 Vienna
H
RT

Venice
NO

Bordeaux
20
New Amsterdam
°N
N ORTH
Lisbon Algiers
AT LA N TIC
Tangier

OCEA N

Saint Martin AFRICA

0° Curaçao
EQ
UA
TO
R
Tobago
Gorée
Esequibo

Elmina
GUYA NA
S PA N I S H AME R I C A

20°
S
Ceara

BR A ZI L
Pernambuco

40°
S
SOUTH
ATLA N TIC Participation of Amsterdam’s
Jews in Dutch trade in the
17th century
OCEA N
In the colonies and
trading posts
60°
S In the great marketplaces

0 600 km

0 600 mi
Scale at the Equator

40° W 20° W

MAP 11 Participation of Amsterdam’s Jews in Dutch Trade in the Seventeenth Century

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450 | Seymour Drescher

of a strong Jewish presence. The Dutch seizure in the 1630s and 1640s of
many important Portuguese trading centers and possessions in Africa
resulted in neither a great influx of European Jews nor in a sudden relaps-
ing of resident New Christians (whose ranks, according to contemporary
polemicists, were filled with crypto-Jews) into professing Jews.
The main Jewish link with Dutch and other slaving came at the New
World terminus. The Dutch were fully launched as a slaving power after
their conquests in Brazil and Africa during the 1630s and early 1640s.
However, they lacked a metropolitan population eager or desperate
enough to relocate to the American frontiers. It was at the first western
margin of the Dutch transatlantic trade that Jews played their largest role.
Around 1640, the Dutch briefly became Europe’s principal slave traders.
They welcomed Jews as colonizers and as onshore middlemen in newly
conquered Brazil. During the eight years between 1637 and 1644, Jewish
merchants accounted for between 8 and 63 percent of first onshore pur-
chasers of the twenty-five thousand slaves landed by the West India
Company in Dutch-held Brazil. Perhaps a third of these captives must
have reached planters through Jewish traders.
The progressive loss of Dutch Brazil to the Portuguese between 1645
and 1654 brought the Jewish presence to an end. The recapture of Brazil
also revealed the degree to which religious affinities between Dutch Jews
and Portuguese New Christians were limited by overriding economic
interests. It was the New Christians who financed the Portuguese expedi-
tion to recapture Brazil. The ritual public burning of one of Brazil’s cap-
tured Jews in Lisbon marked a definitive point of cultural and commercial
alienation between the Jewish community in Holland (which also suf-
fered heavy economic losses from the reconquest of Brazil) and the New
Christian merchants in Portugal.24
Jewish merchants took up a similar activity at another margin of the
Dutch empire, in the Caribbean colonies. Even in the relatively tolerant
Dutch empire, Jews were initially more welcome in tropical areas of
polyglot European and slave colonization than in temperate zone areas
originally designed to be outposts of Dutch culture, including the
Reformed religion. Refugees from Brazil and Europe were resettled pri-
marily in Dutch-controlled islands and in Suriname on the coast of South
America. By the end of the seventeenth century, the island of Curaçao
contained the largest Jewish settlement in the Americas. From Curaçao,
Jews engaged extensively in a transit trade with the British and French
islands, and, more significantly, with the Spanish mainland. Over the
course of the century between its establishment as a Dutch colony in 1630
and the virtual end of its transit slave trade in the 1760s, Jewish mer-
chants settled or handled a considerable (but not yet precisely defined)
portion of the eighty-five thousand slaves who landed in Curaçao, about
one-sixth of the total Dutch slave trade (see Table 21.2).
As in other sectors of the slave trade, the West India Company’s local
agents were invariably Christians, and the island’s commercial life was
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 451

TABLE 21.2 Estimated Traffic and Destination of Slaves Delivered by the Dutch
to Curaçao, 1658–1732

Period Number of Slaves

1658–1674 24,555
1675–1699 25,399
1700–1730 23,716
1731–1795 15,587

Source: Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600– 1815, 35,
45, 48, 223.
Note: Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel affirm that Jewish participation
in the slave trade was large in the twenty-five years between 1686 and 1710 (History
of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, vol. 1 [Cincinnati, 1970], 78), a period during
which Postma records 26,364 slaves having landed in Curaçao (The Dutch, 45, 48).
Comparing the Emmanuels’ figures for 1700–1705 (1,108 slaves purchased by Jews)
with Postma’s total of 6,348 slaves delivered to Curaçao in the same period, Jews
accounted for 18 percent of the large batch purchases of slaves landed. The
Emmanuels listed only purchases of obvious “trade” slaves (ten or more) in their
individualized list. However, like other islanders, “almost every Jew bought from
one to nine slaves for his personal use” (History of the Jews, 78). Since Jews were “the
second most important element” of Curaçao’s population after the Protestants,
amounting to 40 percent of the population of Punda about 1715 (ibid., vol. 1, 115),
they may have accounted for nearly half of the slaves purchased in Curaçao from the
West India Company in the twenty-five years between 1686 and 1710. By 1765, Jews
held only 867 (or 16 percent) of the 5,534 slaves on Curaçao.

dominated by the Protestant majority. Just when Curaçao’s participation

in the transit slave trade was reaching its zenith at the end of the seven-
teenth century, wealthier Jews in the Netherlands were forging strong
business ties with the island. Sephardic Jewish investors were involved
in shipments of slaves from West Africa and in Dutch participation in the
Spanish asiento. One Jewish family acted as Amsterdam factors for the
Portuguese Guinea Company and as its delegates to the Dutch West
India Company. Jewish mercantile influence in the politics of the Atlantic
slave trade probably reached its peak in the opening years of the eigh-
teenth century. During the War of Spanish Succession (1702–13), the
whole trade of Spanish America seemed open to the Dutch. Both the
political and the economic prospects of Dutch Sephardic capitalists rap-
idly faded, however, when the English emerged with the asiento at the
Peace of Utrecht in 1713.25
Less discussion is necessary regarding the Jews in the other colonies
of the seventeenth-century Caribbean region. Jewish mercantile activity
in the British colonies was a more modest replication of the pattern in the
Dutch Antilles. As in the Dutch case, metropolitan Jews played a minor
role as passive investors in the seventeenth-century chartered slaving
monopolies. Jewish merchants did not invest in the first such company,
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452 | Seymour Drescher

the Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, which lasted from 1660 to
1672. Nor did they initially invest in its successor, the Royal African Com-
pany (RAC), until the 1690s. Eli Faber’s assiduously researched study of
Jewish participation in British imperial slavery shows that the peak of
Jewish mercantile investment in the Royal African Company lasted from
the mid-1690s to the second decade of the eighteenth century. Owning
about 10 percent of the RAC’s shares during the period when the com-
pany accounted for about 20 percent of the English slave trade, Jewish
merchants accounted for about 2 percent of metropolitan slaving capital.
With the removal of charter restrictions on the Anglo-African trade in
1712 the Jewish metropolitan role declined still further.
During the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Jewish mer-
chants also established a presence in some of the English West Indies,
especially Barbados and Jamaica. In neither island did they acquire a
large proportion of the island’s slaves as planters. However, like non-
Jews who resided in the urban areas, they bought a small percentage of
less desired slaves, often known as “refuse slaves” for resale and redis-
tribution in the Caribbean transit trade. Eli Faber calculates that Jews pur-
chased 7.1 percent of the slaves landed by the Royal African Company in
Jamaica between 1674 and 1700. A corroborating study by Trevor Burnard
calculates the Jewish share at 6.5 percent for the slightly longer period of
1674–1708. As in the Dutch Caribbean, Jews were most prominent in the
intra-Caribbean branch of the slave trade. Jewish merchants in the Eng-
lish islands never attained the significance of the Curaçao merchants in
the Dutch Caribbean. Nowhere in the English Atlantic colonies did Jews
own much more than 1 percent of the slaves.26
Jewish participation in the French slave trade was more evanescent.
In the French Caribbean colonies, a Jewish presence established in the
1660s and 1670s was virtually eliminated by expulsions in the mid-1680s.
As slave traders in the French colonies, Jews never approached the sig-
nificance of their counterparts in the Dutch Antilles. Jews also played
marginal roles in the efforts of smaller Northern European maritime
states to become players in the Atlantic economy. At a moment when
access to this second Atlantic system seemed open, the rulers of Den-
mark, Sweden, Courland, and Brandenburg all attempted to enter it. Jews
of Hamburg and Amsterdam were sought out for advice or expertise.
Again, one must note the relatively modest role of even the most promi-
nent of Europe’s mercantile Jews in the formation of Atlantic trading
enterprises. When the Brandenburg African Company was formed, late
in the seventeenth century, its subscribers were principally the elector of
Brandenburg, the elector of Cologne, and Benjamin Raule (Zeelander and
director-general of the Brandenburg navy). Smaller sums were offered by
several of the elector’s privy councilors. Raule’s own share was under-
written by Dutch investors, presumably including Jews. As in the Dutch
case, Jewish participation was auxiliary and nonmanagerial. Jews played
an even more marginal role in another slave trade project. In 1669, the
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 453

count of Hanau wished to found a slave-labor colony within the Dutch

West India Company’s colonial sphere in South America. His agent made
contact with the Company’s executive in Amsterdam through a Jewish
intermediary. Neither the German prince nor the West India merchants
thereafter required the Jew’s services.27
During the same period, however, other Jews occasionally had more
important roles as agents and intermediaries. “The Nunes da Costa, in
Amsterdam and Hamburg, were leading participants in setting up of the
Portuguese Brazil Company. They also aided the colonial schemes of
Duke James of Courland. The Belmontes were closely connected with
Dutch bids for the Spanish slaving asientos.” This flurry of activity coin-
cided with the peak of Jewish entrepreneurial activity in the last third of
the seventeenth century.28 At the height of this second phase of the
Atlantic slave trade, the Jewish mercantile influence on its development
in Europe, in Africa, and on the Atlantic remained modest. The real
importance of the sojourn of Jews in Brazil was that it gave some of them
an initial technological advantage in their movement into the Caribbean.
Elsewhere, Jewish capital and organization never approached the level of
significance attained by that of New Christians in the Americas during
the previous century and a half of Jewish exclusion.

Phase Three

The long eighteenth century (1700–1807) witnessed the absolute peak of

the Atlantic slave trade in terms of annual slave departures and arrivals.
With some local exceptions, the Jewish presence in the slave trade
declined rapidly. Intensive research into each of the national trades has
failed to turn up more than a handful of Jewish individuals or mercantile
families in any of the great slaving systems of the eighteenth century.
Research on the French trade has turned up detailed records of a few Jew-
ish families in a trade dominated by merchants of other religious groups.
In Bordeaux, the center of Jewish activity in the French colonial trade,
Jewish traders accounted for only 4.3 percent of the slaves exported to the
New World by the merchants of that city. One Jewish family, the Gradis,
ranked among the seven major slavers in eighteenth-century Bordeaux.
The prominence of the Gradis family was yet one more demonstration
that special political influence was a significant comparative advantage
for dealers in slaves. The Gradis family had greater access to institutional
centers of power, both on the African coast and in France, than other Jew-
ish mercantile families in the port.29
Concerning Britain, Faber shows that the Jewish share of Britain’s
African trade declined from its minor role in the Royal African Company.
Jewish shareholders accounted for less than 1.6 percent of the original
capital of the South Sea Company in 1714. As independent investors and
ship-owners, the metropolitan Jewish capitalists never accounted for
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454 | Seymour Drescher

more than 1 percent of Britain’s African trade during the last fifty years
before slave trade abolition. Eighteenth-century Jews were equally mar-
ginal as receivers of consignments of slaves in the colonies. Only an occa-
sional Jewish factor can be identified in any of the islands. Jewish
merchants continued to occupy their traditional niche as purchasers of
slaves for resale. According to British Naval Office records, 5.9 percent of
the twenty-four thousand slaves reexported from Jamaica between 1742
and 1769 were carried on Jewish-owned vessels. Only in two British
colonies did Jewish participation rise above the 6 to 7 percent share level
of seventeenth-century traders. During the third quarter of the eighteenth
century, the combined African slaving voyages of the Rivera and Lopez
families of Newport, Rhode Island, accounted for 9 percent of that
colony’s slaving activity. During the century before Anglo-American abo-
lition in 1807, Jews accounted for about 2 percent of Newport’s transat-
lantic slave trade.
In Jamaica, the Jewish role was more volatile. The revival of the slave
trade after the war of the American Revolution was accompanied by a rise
of Jewish mercantile participation in the reexport trade. During the mid-
1760s, as in the metropolis, fewer than 1 percent of the ships in Jamaica’s
ports belonged to Jews. Twenty years later their ownership share had
increased to 4.3 percent. In the late 1780s, an unprecedented 26.7 percent
of reexported slaves were carried in their vessels. Thereafter, their share
fell to the seventeenth-century level of 6 percent before British slave trade
abolition. The post–American Revolution recovery also stimulated a dra-
matic increase in the role of Jamaican Jewish merchants as slave factors.
From the mid-1790s until 1802, the Jewish-Christian partnership of
Alexandre Lindo and Richard Lake was responsible for between 22 and 37
percent of Africans advertised for sale in Kingston, Jamaica.30
The eighteenth-century Iberian slave trade is equally notable for the
declining significance of its New Christians. They seem to have rapidly
disappeared from the discourse of the South Atlantic slave trade. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, Portuguese polemicists inveighed
against the New Christian monopoly of the Portuguese trade. By the
1680s, however, the most serious petition against African slavery and the
slave trade ever to be laid before the Roman curia failed to evoke the old
charge of New Christian preponderance. The anti-slavery petitioner had
no qualms about invoking Iberian racial prejudice toward the descen-
dants of Jews in support of his case against African enslavement. It was
scandalous that impure crypto-Jewish masters held black Christians of
pure blood in bondage. The petitioner, however, remarkably failed to
assail the predominance or to mention the function of contemporary New
Christians in the African slave trade.31
Flights of New Christians from the Iberian orbit dwindled in propor-
tion to the decline of Inquisitorial persecutions. The last century and a
half of the Portuguese-Brazilian slave trade is a period in which New
Christians simply faded into obscurity. When the Iberian Inquisitorial
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 455

period came to an end and freedom of religion was introduced in Latin

America after the wars of independence, former New Christians did not
reemerge as Jews, Protestants, or marranists. Roman Catholicism
remained the overwhelming locus of communal religious identity, what-
ever the genealogical composition of the inhabitants. Except in some iso-
lated villages in Portugal and the Americas, crypto-Jewry had to be
rediscovered or reinvented in the late twentieth century.

Conclusion

During the first three centuries of Atlantic slaving, Europeans landed

eight million African captives in the Americas. By 1800, three million
African-American slaves toiled in houses, shops, farms, and plantations
from the Hudson River Valley to the Rio de la Plata. If it is impossible to
imagine the expansion of the early Atlantic economy without the slave
trade, can the same be said about the role of Jewish merchants in that
trade? Had the return of the Jews to Europe’s Atlantic ports been post-
poned until the 1790s instead of the 1590s, the volume of enslavement or
distribution of Africans in the Atlantic system would hardly have been
altered. The “Jewish presence” in the slave trade was too ephemeral, too
localized, and too limited to have made an appreciable difference.
The economic, social, legal, and racial pattern of the Atlantic slave
trade was in place before Jews made their way back to the Atlantic ports
of northwestern Europe, to the coasts and islands of Africa, or to Euro-
pean colonies in the Americas. They were marginal collective actors in
most places and during most periods of the Atlantic system: its political
and legal foundations; its capital formation; its maritime organization;
and its distribution of coerced migrants from Europe and Africa. Only in
the Americas—momentarily in Brazil, more durably in the Caribbean—
can the role of Jewish traders be described as significant. If we consider
the whole complex of major class actors in the transatlantic slave trade,
the share of Jews in this vast network is extremely modest.
Considering the number of African captives who passed into and
through the hands of captors and dealers from capture in Africa until sale
in America, it is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the
twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by
Jewish merchants even once. If one expands the classes of participants to
include all those in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas who produced
goods for the trade or who processed goods produced by the slaves, and
all those who ultimately produced goods with slave labor and consumed
slave-produced commodities, the conclusion remains the same. At no
point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous
enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the
structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its
African victims.32
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456 | Seymour Drescher

The same conclusion does not hold true for the New Christian mer-
chants during one phase of the trade. The foundations of the Atlantic slave
trade were indeed firmly in place before New Christians began to appear
in the documents of the sixteenth-century Portuguese Afro-European
slave trade. They again rapidly diminished in significance by the eigh-
teenth century; however, their role in the development of the slave trade to
the Americas must be given its full weight. When Portuguese merchants
became the first fully global trading diaspora in the history of the world,
New Christian merchants were prominent in the growth of the Atlantic
economy.33 Distrusted by Old Christian political and religious elites, New
Christians found a precarious niche in the Atlantic system. Less as a reli-
gious group than as a loose network of trading families, they were pio-
neers in the formation of the European-Asian-African-American complex
that supported the New World’s first African-based slave economies.
I lack the basis for a quantitative breakdown of New Christians in the
Atlantic system. However, they seem to have had a more significant func-
tion in the operations of the slave trade than would be indicated by their
numerical proportion of the Portuguese or Ibero-American populations.
During the period when Portugal dominated the slave trade to the Amer-
icas (1570–1630), New Christians dominated important segments of Por-
tuguese long-distance trade. The majority of these New Christians
successfully effected their own disappearance into African, Iberian, or
Ibero-American identities. A minority worked their way northward or
eastward into various forms of Christianity, Judaism, or a syncretistic
amalgam of both religious systems. In assessing the economic links
between African slaves, New Christians, and Jews in the Americas, one
must bear in mind that although Jews and New Christians shared some
common ancestors, the differences between them became progressively
deeper.34 Economically speaking, in any given area of the Iberian orbit,
New and Old Christian slave traders constituted denser networks of
interaction than those that remained between Jews and New Christians
across great geographical distances.
Viewing the Atlantic system over the whole period from 1500 to the
age of the American revolutions, it is clear that merchant families of Jew-
ish ancestry possessed their greatest comparative economic advantage at
the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1500 they found them-
selves trapped and forcibly converted in a poor country where mercan-
tile skills and capital were at a premium. They also found themselves at
the center of a trading network that circled the globe in a single genera-
tion. The network deepened and broadened when the Portuguese and
Spanish empires were ruled by a single monarch between 1580 and 1640.
New Christian families were represented in all zones of the early Atlantic
trade—in Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
During the second phase of the Atlantic slave trade, when observant
Jews first entered the system, they found that their relative advantages
and significance were both sharply reduced in comparison to those of
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 457

New Christians within the Iberian orbit. They played minor roles in the
European, African, and transoceanic branches of the Northern European
trade. Their mercantile communities were far smaller in proportion to
Christian networks in Northern Europe than were those of New Chris-
tians to Old Christians in Iberia. Their working capital was correspond-
ingly less significant. Finally, any technical advantages that Jewish
traders enjoyed over their Dutch, English, or French Christian competi-
tors was far more restricted than had been those of the New Christians in
sixteenth-century Iberia.35
Only in the Dutch orbit did Jews play a durable, if modest, role. In
part, their brief prominence depended as much upon their availability as
refugee “risk-takers” in tropical frontier colonies as upon their experience
as merchant entrepreneurs in Europe. They were, as the English essayist
Joseph Addison correctly noted, “pegs and nails” rather than architects
and master builders in the second Atlantic system after 1640. During the
third phase of the trade, the significance of Jewish capitalists declined
further. When the Afro-American slave trade reached its absolute peak
toward the end of the eighteenth century, both Jews and New Christians
had nearly disappeared from the records of the transatlantic slave trade.
There is one final indicator of the Jews’ eighteenth-century marginal-
ity. At two important flashpoints, one in the history of British Jewry, the
other in the history of the British slave trade, the empirical insignificance
of the relationship between Jews and the Atlantic slave trade was
matched by its insignificance in contemporary discourse. In 1753 a bitter
debate erupted over a bill to naturalize foreign-born Jews residing in
England. A friendly pamphleteer cited as many Jewish contributions to
the welfare of the British nation as he could, pointedly including Britain’s
overseas trades with East India, Jamaica, and Spanish America. There
was no mention of Africa or the transatlantic slave trade.36
Thirty-five years later, the first European abolitionist crusade began
in Great Britain. By the end of the American Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars, its target had expanded to include the entire Atlantic
slave trade, symbolized by a declaration against the trade at the Congress
of Vienna in 1815. Yet, steeped as they were in the Christian tradition,
European abolitionists never sought to add a specifically “Jewish”
dimension to their rhetorical attack on the slave traders. Nor did they
shift religious responsibility for the traffic from the overwhelming major-
ity of Christian traders toward the few Jewish traders in their midst. Still
more significantly, British and French abolitionists never responded to
the temptation offered by the mentality of the Iberian Inquisitions. They
did not attempt to rewrite the history of the Atlantic slave trade within an
antisemitic framework, or to construct a Jewish or crypto-Jewish creation
myth. Sombart’s later variant of this myth did not draw nourishment
from the main current of European antislavery sentiment.
I have not touched upon another large historiographic question—the
relation of the eighteenth-century slave trade to the British Industrial
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458 | Seymour Drescher

Revolution. Suffice it to say that if the Jewish role in the slave trade was
meager, the slave trade’s role in generating capital for the British Indus-
trial Revolution (or for the prior Dutch “Golden Age”) was equally mod-
est. The Jewish merchants’ share of the slave trade’s share in accounting
for European economic expansion and industrialization was a small frac-
tion of a small fraction. Here again, Iberian New Christian merchants
presumably played a much larger role in a trade that probably made
them much more important to Portuguese commerce than Jews had been
to any early modern European economy. To conclude from this, however,
that the slave trade “helped” Portugal to achieve sustained economic
progress would be absurd. After three hundred years of sponsoring colo-
nial slavery, neither the Portuguese nor their observers could detect much
in the way of economic development in Portugal.37
Thus far I have considered what Jewish and New Christian mer-
chants did to expand the flow of Africans within the Atlantic system.
But what did the slave trade do for the expansion of European Jewry to
the Americas? I noted the important function of the slave trade as an
escape hatch for New Christians in Africa and in Latin America, and for
Jews in the Caribbean region. One common historiographic inference is
that the settlement and liberty of Jews in the New World (albeit on a far
smaller scale and less completely than that of other European migrants)
was aided by the forced migration of enslaved Africans. The most sig-
nificant point, from this perspective, is not that a few Jewish slave deal-
ers changed the course of Atlantic history, but that Jews in general
found their “threshold of liberation” in regions newly dependent upon
black slavery. In this scenario, Sephardic Jews and New Christians who
engaged in the European slave trade were pioneers of Jewish resettle-
ment in the early modern world, blazing a path for the liberation of
their co-religionists.38
A still more intriguing historical question has begun to emerge in
scholarly discourse on the role of Jews in the African slave trade. If the
empirical record makes it relatively easy for historians of the trade to
verify empirically that Jews did not dominate this segment of the
Atlantic economy, historians of Jewry have begun to ask why Jews were
not more involved than they were in the trade. If there was no special
religious inhibition against buying and selling human beings among
early modern Jews, why didn’t Jewish merchants maximize their pre-
sumed advantages: a transoceanic ethno-religious network, and a facil-
ity with the important trading languages of the early Atlantic world?
From the perspective of a historian of the slave trade, the response might
be that these putative advantages were not the significant ingredients for
success in the transatlantic slave business. In ethno-religious terms, there
was no Jewish communal network on the coasts of Africa. Nor did Jew-
ish multilingualism extend to any special competence in the languages
of Africa, although it probably helped in the Caribbean transit trade,
where they did find a niche. Success in the African trade depended far
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 459

more on up-to-date intelligence about the changing tastes of Africans,

translatable into rapid business decisions about the optimum assortment
of goods for slaving voyages.
Even in most of the Americas, there is ample evidence that the Jew-
ish mercantile network probably counted for little in Atlantic slaving. The
evidence of Jewish involvement in the eighteenth-century slave trade
presents us with a trail of inter-religious networks as keys to success. In
case after case, Jewish merchants who participated in multiple slaving
voyages or similar long-term activities linked themselves to Christian
agents or partners. In Newport, Barbados, Jamaica, New York, Philadel-
phia, and Charleston, the pattern was replicated throughout the century
before British abolition. A close study of Jews in the slave trade seems to
confirm the main focus of slave trade historiography during the past half-
century. Economic and demographic variables, inflected by political con-
ditions, remain the decisive elements. It was not as Jews but as merchants
that Jewish traders ventured into one of the significant enterprises of the
early modern world.39
In light of the above analysis, we need to reconsider older assess-
ments of New Christian and Jewish participation in European expansion
to the Americas. Tens of thousands of Portuguese New Christians emi-
grated from Portugal after 1500. If we suppose that they departed from
the metropolis at least proportionately to their estimated share of the Por-
tuguese population (10 percent), then seventy thousand of the seven hun-
dred thousand who left Portugal between 1500 and 1700 were New
Christians. The movement of Spanish conversos would only add to this
total. From a cultural perspective, however, three centuries of New Chris-
tian migration to the Ibero-Americas and to Ibero-Africa resulted only in
the disappearance of New Christians, almost always in favor of fusion
with other Catholics. There is no evidence of a rapid reappearance of dis-
tinctive marrano (still less of a “New Jewish”) religiosity when Ibero-
American citizens were finally allowed freedom of worship after their
successful wars of independence. At best, New Christian crypto-Jews
remained as a smattering of isolated families in the Americas, with a
secretive “culture of difference,” rather than a web of Jewish or marrano
cultural formations. The migratory wave of seventy thousand New
Christians to the New World left less of a cultural or communal trace in
the Atlantic world of 1800 than a Jewish migration one-tenth as large.40
Professing Jews, by contrast, did gain a foothold in the Americas by
1800. Their largest and most successful communities were located in non-
Iberian colonies dominated by slave agriculture. Even with the assump-
tion that the Sephardic archipelago was indebted to the Atlantic slave
trade for its expansion, it would be truly hyperbolic to say that European
Jewry had gained much demographic or cultural advantage from their
economic involvement. Nowhere in the Atlantic world did Jews collec-
tively identify themselves in terms of some of their co-religionists’ pres-
ence in the slave trade. Nor did their economic activities depend more
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460 | Seymour Drescher

TABLE 21.3 Jewish Population Centers in the Western Hemisphere, 1500–1800

Area Census Date Population (est.)

Recife (Brazil) 1645 1,450
Barbados 1699 250
Martinique 1685 96
Curaçao 1745 1,500
Jamaica 1770 900
Nevis 1678 25
Saint-Domingue 1765 120
New Amsterdam 1654 100
Rhode Island 1774 120
Savannah, Georgia 1733 41
Charleston, S.C. 1800 600
Suriname 1787 1,292

Sources: Malcolm H. Stern, “Portuguese Sephardim in the Americas,” American Jewish

Archives 44 (1992):141–78; R. van Lier, Samenleving in een grensgebied. Eeen sociaal-historische
studie van Suriname (Deventer, 1972), 24; cited in Jan Lucassen, “The Netherlands, the
Dutch, and Long-Distance Migration in the Late Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries,”
in Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), 153–91.

heavily upon that trade than those of other European or African ethnic
groups. Even in Curaçao, “it was textiles and hardware which were the
real backbone” of the trade of Jewish merchants with Spanish America.
Demographically, of the nearly two million Europeans migrating across
the Atlantic from 1500 to 1800, far less than 1 percent could conceivably
have been Jews. In 1800, the fraction of world Jewry and wealth on the
western shores of the Atlantic was smaller still. No Jewish settlement in
the Americas had yet gained repute among European Jewry as a vital
center of religious or cultural eminence. The appeal of the transatlantic
world to the European Jewish imagination before 1800 seems to have
been limited.41 (See Table 21.3.)
Even before the onset of revolutions for independence in the Ameri-
cas, the largest Caribbean Jewish communities were in decline. Curaçao
and Suriname were already stagnant colonies in a minor empire. In the
latter case, the late eighteenth-century movement of Jews into the tropi-
cal Atlantic eerily echoed the coerced migration with which it had begun
from Portugal three centuries before. After 1750, Jewish arrivals in Suri-
name only barely exceeded departures because of a semicoerced migra-
tion from Amsterdam.42
As the volume of the transatlantic slave trade moved toward its peak
on the eve of the Saint-Domingue revolution of 1791, the Jewish presence
in that trade had long since shrunk even from its modest dimensions of the
previous century. Above all, no Jewish community in the Americas had
emerged as a magnet for the Jewish populations living in the heartland of
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 461

Jewry—Eastern and Mediterranean Europe. When a second and far

greater wave of Jewish migration flowed to the New World a century after
1800, it owed nothing to the slave trade or to plantation slavery. It began
after the demise of the Atlantic slave trade, and it largely avoided the great
arc of the Caribbean basin that had once been the center of Sephardic set-
tlement. When the mass Jewish and mass African migrations finally con-
verged in the late nineteenth-century Americas, they were the voluntary
migrations of two peoples, among many, yearning to breathe free.

Notes

This essay is revised from a paper delivered at The John Carter Brown Library, 15–18 June
1997. For their helpful comments and generous suggestions, I would like to thank Reid
Andrews, Ralph A. Austen, Harold Brackman, Pieter Emmer, Stanley Engerman, Frederic
Jaher, Wim Klooster, John McCusker, Robert Paquette, Ernst Pijning, Jonathan Schorsch,
Matilde Zimmermann, Norman Fiering, and the participants in the conference (hereafter,
JCB Conference) on “The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West.”

1. P. K. O’Brien and S. L. Engerman, “Exports and the Growth of the British Economy
from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens,” in Slavery and the Rise of the
Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge, 1991), 177–209, esp. 207.
2. For estimates, see Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969);
Paul E. Lovejoy, “Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” Journal of African
History 23 (1982):473–501; David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations:
Some Comparisons,” American Historical Review 88 (1983):251–80; David Richardson,
“Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Vol-
ume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30 (1989):1–22; Richardson, review
essay, “Across the Desert and the Sea: Trans-Saharan and Atlantic Slavery, 1500–1900,”
The Historical Journal 38(1) (1995):195–204; and David Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade, a data base on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).
3. See Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in
the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979); Barbara L. Solow,
ed., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery (Cambridge, 1991); J. I. Inikori and S. L.
Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economics, Societies and Peoples in
Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, N.C., 1992); and John Thornton, Africa and
the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge, 1992), 152–82,
206–53. On the Asian dimension of the Atlantic trade, see Sandra Lee Evenson, “A
History of Indian Madras Manufacture and Trade Shifting Patterns of Exchange”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1994). Evenson maintains that Indian madras
was a “currency that financed two major global trade networks,” including the
slave trade.
4. For estimates, I have relied upon David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
(Cambridge, 2000), 9, table 1; Eltis, “Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations,”
251–80; and David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa:
New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30 (1989):1–22,
10, table 4.
5. See essays in Gemery and Hogendorn, The Uncommon Market; Herbert Klein, The Mid-
dle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, 1978); Julian Gwyn
“The Economics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Review,” Social History 25 (1992):
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462 | Seymour Drescher

151–62. For examples of systematic analysis, see Robert W. Fogel et al., Without Consent
or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, 4 vols. (New York, 1989–92); David
Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987).
For the cultural context of the selection of Africans as the primary labor force in the
plantation Americas between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, see
Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, chaps. 1, 3.
6. William A. Darity, “A General Equilibrium Model of the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
Slave Trade: A Least-Likely Test for the Caribbean School,” Research in Economic History
7 (1982):287–326; Hilary McD. Beckles, “The Economic Origins of Black Slavery in the
British West Indies, 1640–1680: A Tentative Analysis of the Barbados Model,” Journal of
Caribbean History 16 (1982):35–56; Raymond L. Cohn and Richard A. Jensen, “The
Determinants of Slave Mortality Rates on the Middle Passage,” Explorations in Eco-
nomic History 10(2) (1982):173–76; David W. Galenson, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and
the Barbados Market, 1673–1723,” Journal of Economic History 42(3) (1982):491–511;
Gemery and Hogendorn, The Uncommon Market; Klein, The Middle Passage; Julian
Gwyn “The Economics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Review,” Social History 25
(1992):151–62; and Inikori and Engerman, Atlantic Slave Trade, passim.
7. Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein, with an American
edition by Bert F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), 32–33, 363, notes 61–70. For more recent
scholarly assertions of Jewish dominance in the early Atlantic slave system, see note 12
below. For polemical accounts of Jewish dominance, see The Secret Relationship Between
Blacks and Jews (Chicago, 1991), and the commentary of Harold Brackman, Ministry of
Lies: The Truth Behind the Nation of Islam’s “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews”
(New York, London, 1994), esp. 15–17. In scholarly perspective, David Brion Davis
notes “the negative but legitimating review” of The Secret Relationship by Winthrop D.
Jordan in Atlantic Monthly (September 1995):109–14; see David Brion Davis, “Con-
structing Race: A Reflection,” in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54(1) (January
1997):7–18, esp. 11 and note: and the letters of commentary and reply in the January
1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, 14–15. For a survey of ascriptions of Jewish domi-
nation of the slave trade, see Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New
Brunswick, London, 1998), esp. 1–15, 235–52. Early Jewish historiography on the
Americas affirmed the active participation of Jews in transatlantic slavery: “The Jews
settled in the American colonies were as actively identified with the institution as any
other class of settlers.” Max Kohler, “The Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Move-
ment,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1897):137–155. Jewish
slave traders in Brazil were also the focus of historical scholarship. See Herbert I.
Bloom, “A Study of Brazilian Jewish History, 1623–1654,” Publications of the American
Jewish Historical Society 33 (1934):43–125. Jews, while subjected to civil and political dis-
abilities, were always considered to be non-enslavable “Europeans,” rather than
enslavable Africans. See Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 60. Ironically, the tradition of
“Jewish difference” was sometimes exaggerated by Jewish historians to explain the
lack of early Jewish opposition to transatlantic slavery. Max Kohler, no less “Oriental-
ist” than his non-Jewish contemporaries, attributed Jewish acceptance of slavery dur-
ing the colonial period to “oriental customs,” which did not tend “to make the Jew an
enemy of slavery.” See Kohler, “Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Movement,” 145.
Jews were rather less distinct from their European, American, and African contempo-
raries than Kohler imagined. See, inter alia, Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, chaps. 1 and 3.
8. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750, 2nd ed. (Oxford,
1989), 5–34. In Polish Lithuania, Jews settled away from the Baltic seaboard provinces
(ibid., 27).
9. On the establishment of a transoceanic slaving network well before the end of the fif-
teenth century, see John Vogt, “The Lisbon Slave House and African Trade 1486–1520,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117(1) (1973):1–17. For a brief period,
from 1698 to 1701, the bulk of Dutch investments in the Spanish slave trade asiento also
came from Portuguese Jews in the United Provinces. See Wim Klooster, “Contraband
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 463

Trade by Curaçao’s Jews with Countries of Idolatry, 1660–1800,” Studia Rosenthalia 31

(1977):58–73.
10. Charles Verlinden, who magnified the role of Jews in the early medieval slave trade,
no longer treated them as significant actors in the late medieval period and the transi-
tion to the Atlantic system. See Charles Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe Médiévale,
2 vols. (Brugge and Ghent 1955–77), and idem, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization:
Eleven Essays with an Introduction, trans. Y. Freccero (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970). On the Genoese
as the principal financiers of the Spanish slave trade of the sixteenth century, see Ruth
Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: The Genoese in Seville and the Opening of the New World
(Ithaca N.Y., 1966). The only reference to Jewish involvement in the African trade prior
to 1500 that I have come across is a Portuguese license for trading to Guinea in pre-
cious minerals and animals from 1469 to 1474. Complaints against a Jewish presence
in the Portuguese empire before the expansion to the Americas were directed toward
their participation in the sugar trade. See Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foun-
dations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Minneapolis, 1977), 307.
11. Timothy Joel Coates, “Exiles and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in
the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1720” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1993). On
the rapid intermixing of Africans and Europeans, see Omanuscrito Valentim Fernandes
ed. Joaquim Bensaúde and António Baião (Lisbon, 1940), 122. Robert Garfield con-
cludes that by 1530 most of the surviving original children were probably Christian in
fact. At the peak of São Tomé’s role in the New World slave trade, it had “a thoroughly
Portuguese mulatto population.” A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 2 vols.
(New York, 1972), vol. 1, 374–75.
12. On the New Christian population of Portugal, see Oliveira Marques, History of Portu-
gal, vol. 1, 287. On the complexity of New Christian identity over three centuries, see
Anita Novinsky, “Sephardim in Brazil: The New Christians,” in The Sephardi Heritage,
ed. R. D. Barnett and W. M. Schwab, 2 vols. (Grindon, Eng., 1989), vol. 2, 431–44; Mar-
tin A. Cohen, “The Sephardic Phenomenon: A Reappraisal,” American Jewish Archives
44 (1992):1–80; and B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century
Spain (New York, 1995), xix, 1041–42. One historiographic tradition, represented by
José Goncalves Salvador, Os Magnatas do Tráfico Negreiro XVI e XVII (Sao Paulo, 1981),
6, is very similar to Gilberto Freyre’s earlier portrayals of Jewish merchants as essen-
tially running the Portuguese economy. The state was merely “an obligatory client of
the Portuguese Sephardim.” Salvador, in an extensive series of racial-cultural cate-
gories, places Jews, Semites, ethnic Hebrews, Sephardim, New Christians, and the Jew-
ish race in opposition to Aryans and Old Christians. In this perspective, Salvador
claims that by 1600 most of Brazil’s churches were run by New Christian Hebrews (Sal-
vador, Os Magnatas, 86), and sees the “Jewish” presence as pervasive in Iberian and
Ibero-American commercial institutions. Indeed, Spain’s “tolerance” for Jews in the
seventeenth century is offered as a major reason for Portugal’s reassertion of inde-
pendence in 1640. Compare Salvador’s perspective with those of C. R. Boxer, The Por-
tuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (New York, 1969), 269–72; and Anita Novinsky,
“Padre Antonio Vieira, The Inquisition, and the Jews,” Jewish History 6(1–2)
(1992):151–62. Novinsky found that Brazilian New Christians integrated more fully
into the local society than those who went east or north from Iberia. See Anita Novin-
sky, “A Posição dos Cristãos Novos na Sociedade Bainana,” in Cristãos Novos na Bahia
(Sao Paulo, 1972), 57–103, esp. 57–58. Novinsky and Günter Böhm both deem it signif-
icant that when a Jewish community formed in Bahia during the period of Dutch occu-
pation, New Christians did not hasten en masse to join the Dutch Jewish community.
See Günter Böhm, Los sefardies en los domenios holandeses de America del Sur y del Caribe,
1630–1750 (Seville, 1977), 21. On the refusal of many conversos to be circumcised so that
they could return to Iberia, see Yosef Kaplan, “Wayward New Christians and Stubborn
Jews: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity,” Jewish History 8 (1994):27–41. On the return of
many wealthy New Christians from Brazil to Iberia in the 1600s, see Vitorino Magal-
hães Godhino, “Portuguese Emigration from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth-Century:
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464 | Seymour Drescher

Constants and Changes,” in European Expansion and Migration: Essays on the Interconti-
nental Migration from Africa, Asia and Europe, ed. P. C. Emmer and M. Mörner (New
York, Oxford, 1992), 17. On hasty ascriptions of “Judaization” elsewhere in Europe, see
Rose-Blanche Escoupérie, “Sur quelque ‘Marchands Portugais’ établis a Toulouse à la
fin du XVII siècle,” Annales du Midi 106(205) (1994):57–71. David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and
Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia, 1996), 76, also concludes that those
who assimilated substantially outnumbered those who identified as Jews. It must be
emphasized that Jewish historiography in the United States sometimes fused “Marra-
nos, New Christians, or Secret Jews,” “whose astonishing tenacity, nay admirable
obstinacy” for centuries was verified by the record of Inquisitional confessions, pro-
cessions, and executions. See M. Kayserling, “The Colonization of America by the
Jews,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 2 (1894):73–76. Kayserling
was a major authority for Sombart. The casual conflation of Jews and New Christians
occasionally continues in otherwise well-researched histories of slavery.
13. See Jonathan I. Israel, Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the
Jews 1585–1713 (London, 1990), 328. In economic, as in religious, assessments, the con-
flation of New Christian and Jewish traders relies on elusive combinations of expan-
sive metaphors and fragmentary “for example” evidence. Among the most notorious
and entrepreneurial Portuguese Sephardic families, the Nunes da Costa, one promi-
nent slave trading member (Diogo Peres da Costa) ended his days in Safed having
eluded the Inquisition. Another slave trader (Francisco de Victoria), however,
remained a sincere Christian, the only New Christian to become a bishop in sixteenth-
century America. See Jonathan I. Israel, “Duarte Nunes da Costa (Jacob Curiel) of
Hamburg, Sephardi Nobleman and Communal Leader 1585–1664,” Studia Rosenthalia
21 (1987):14–34. Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Kinship and Commerce: The Foundations of
Portuguese Jewish Life in Seventeenth-Century Holland,” Studia Rosenthalia 15
(1981):52–74: “We can no longer take the proverbial interdependence of the Sephardic
diaspora for granted. If and when such interdependence existed, it had little to do with
shared ‘Sephardichood’ per se, but derived more precisely from an intricate network of
personal kin relations …” (67). In the economic sphere: “Commercial interests of sep-
arate families were paramount …” (74n.). Chains of commercial-familial links, like
chains of Inquisitorial-familial associations, present quite similar conceptual tempta-
tions to envision the presence of Portuguese traders as the tip of a “Jewish” or “crypto-
Jewish” iceberg: “The problem thus becomes one of trying to imagine from a view of
the proverbial tip of the iceberg the contours and size of its invisible larger part.”
Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in ‘Europe’s Other Sea’: The
Adventure of Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish History 72 (1982):212–40,
esp. 215. The iceberg does not travel too well in those tropical waters where we have
more precise records of the role of Jews in the slave trade.
14. See Thornton, Africa and the Africans, 61–62; idem, “The Development of an African
Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25
(1984):146–67; David Grant Smith, “Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of
the Brazil Company, 1649,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54(2) (1974):233–59.
Some New Christians in Spanish America confessed to being introduced to the “law of
Moses” in Angola, or going to Angola out of fear of the Inquisition because they
belonged to the “Jewish Nation.” See Boleslao Lewin, Singular Proceso de Salomón
Machorro [Juan de Léon]: Israelita liornés condenado por la Inquisición [Mexico 1650]
(Buenos Aires, 1977), xii–xviii; and Manuel Tejado Fernandez, Aspectos de la vida social
en Cartegna de Indias durante el seiscientos (Seville, 1954), 186. These works were kindly
brought to my attention by Jonathan Schorsch.
15. See David Grant Smith, “The Mercantile Class of Portugal and Brazil in the Seven-
teenth Century: A Socio-economic Study of the Merchants of Lisbon and Bahia,
1620–1690” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1975), 103: “… the distinction between
New and Old Christian is quite irrelevant to their functions as merchants and mer-
chant bankers … engaged in precisely the same kinds of operations, as often as not in
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 465

partnership with each other.” David Grant Smith and Rae Flory, “Bahian Merchants
and Planters in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 58(4) (1978):571–94; James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court
of Spain 1626–1650 (Rutgers, 1983), esp. chaps. 1–3; idem, “New Christians Reconsid-
ered: Evidence from Lisbon’s Portuguese Bankers, 1497–1647,” Studia Rosenthalia 8
(1978): 129–56; and Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, vol. 1, 287–88. On the
insignificance of the migratory flow of New Christians from Latin America to the
Northern European-controlled Caribbean, see Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportu-
nity,” 212–40. On Africa, see Robert Garfield, “Public Christians, Secret Jews: Religion
and Political Conflict on São Tomé Island in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,”
Sixteenth-Century Journal 21(4) (1990):645–54. Garfield concludes that Jews had van-
ished from the community a century before the outburst of conflict between Old and
New Christians. Even in northwestern Europe, “the cultivation of Iberian cultural
habits and aristocratic pretensions became a strong distinguishing feature of their Jew-
ish communities.” Conversos within the peninsula were often regarded “as practicing
Catholicism out of prudence, conviction, or inertia.” See Miriam Bodian, “‘Men of the
Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present
143 (1994):48–76; esp. 66, 74; and idem, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and
Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1977), 30–52. Dutch suspicion of
Catholics may have encouraged Amsterdam’s original Sephardic settlers to hasten
conversion to Judaism, even when its practices were still largely unfamiliar to them.
Kaspar von Greyerz finds that sixteenth-century New Christians who settled in the
Upper Rhine show evidence of an Iberian subculture, but evidence of a “deviant” reli-
gious subculture is lacking. “Judaizing” by conversos in that region was, as in many
other cases, a projection of the Inquisitorial imagination. See Kaspar von Greyerz,
“Portuguese Conversos on the Upper Rhine and the Converso Community of Six-
teenth-Century Europe,” Social History 14(1) (1988):59–82. In Brazil, the concept of hid-
den “Jewish characteristics” could paradoxically subvert all distinctions between
“Christian” and “Jewish” practices. The Inquisition’s assumptions rendered all reli-
giosity suspect, conformist as well as deviant. In Bahia, the more ostentatiously one
wore rosaries and effigies, the greater might be the suspicion of crypto-Judaism. See
Pierre Vergier, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the Seventeenth to
Nineteenth Century, trans. Evelyn Crawford (Ibadan, 1976), 69n. On the often unsuc-
cessful attempt to enforce the “congruence of legally defined ethnic and racial cate-
gories with social realities,” see Stuart B. Schwartz, “Spaniards, Pardos, and the
Missing Mestizos: Identities and Racial Categories in the Early Hispanic Caribbean,”
New West Indian Guide 71(1/2) (1997):5–19.
16. Joseph C. Miller, “A Marginal Institution on the Margin of the Atlantic System: The
Portuguese Southern Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in Solow,
Atlantic System, 120–50, esp. 122–23, 126. See also James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade
in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore, 1993).
17. Felipe de Alencastro, “The Apprenticeship of Colonization,” in Solow, Atlantic System,
151–76, esp. 162–63. On the utility of slave trading as an entrée to Mexican residency,
see Israel, Empires and Entrepots, 322–23; and Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 13, 33. “Only
the Portuguese, who controlled the principal slave stations of West Africa could satisfy
the escalating demands of both Brazil and the Spanish colonies for black slaves,” and
draw Asian commodities into the economic expansion of the Americas (Boyajian, Por-
tuguese Trade, 15). On the Atlantic network to Spanish America, see Enriqueta Vila Vilar,
“Aspectos Maritimos del commercio de esclavos con Hispanoamerica en el siglo XVII,”
Revista de Historia Naval 5(19) (1987):113–31. Within Europe, Jews also entered trades not
blocked by guilds, including newly imported commodities (Israel, European Jewry, 62).
18. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 32, 233n; Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, vol. 1, 363,
373; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 331, 333.
19. See P. C. Emmer, “The Dutch and the Making of the Second Atlantic System,” in Solow,
Atlantic System, 75–96.
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466 | Seymour Drescher

20. See Israel, European Jewry, chap. 2.

21. Israel, Empires and Entrepots, 438–40. Herbert Bloom, whose richly documented study
seeks to maximize the Jewish role in Dutch economic activity, does not list slave trad-
ing as an occupation of Jews of Amsterdam during the “Golden Age.” Herbert
Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (Williamsport, Penn., 1937), chap. 1. In all ambiguous cases, Bloom favors a
Jewish identity (see, for example, p. 133, note 52). It is worth noting that of the dozen
early seventeenth-century Dutch Sephardim described by Jonathan Israel as traders
“on any scale” with the Iberian Peninsula, only Diogo Nunes Belmonte (Ya’akov
Israel Belmonte) is identified as a slave trader. See also Jonathan Israel, “Spain and
the Dutch Sephardim, 1609–1660,” Studia Rosenthalia 12 (1978):1–61; esp. 5–6.
Although the Portuguese imperium was central to the commercial activities of New
Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews, slaving seems to have been peripheral to those activ-
ities. (See also Swetschinski, “Kinship and Commerce,” 52–74.) Jews entered the slave
trade primarily as intermediaries in the distribution process once slaves were landed
in the Americas.
22. See Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (Oxford,
1982), 127; José António Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da nação (Recife, 1987), 208; and
Stephen Alexander Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian
Commerce, 1650–1750 (Gainesville, Fla., 1984), 178n. 34.
23. See Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (Cambridge,
1990). Some who have argued for a larger Jewish role in Dutch African slaving than is
indicated by Jewish investment in the Dutch West India Company invoke private trad-
ing as an alternative activity. Postma, however, estimates the entire Dutch interloper
trade in slaves at only 14,000 out of 286,000 Africans delivered to America by Dutch ships
between 1600 and 1738, or about 5 percent of the total (ibid., 110). Even if one were to
discover that Jews were heavily represented in the private Atlantic trade, the vast major-
ity of the Dutch interlopers on the African coast were interested in the Euro-African com-
modity trade and not the slave trade (ibid., 80). Odette Vlessing asserts that Portuguese
Jews had an enormous influence on the development of the Dutch “Golden Age.” See
Odette Vlessing, “New Light on the Earliest History of the Amsterdam Portuguese
Jews,” in Dutch Jewish History, ed. Joseph Michman (Jerusalem, Assen, Maastricht, 1993),
43–76, esp. 64. Vlessing makes no reference to the magnitude of the Portuguese-Jewish
share in the Dutch slave trade. Herbert Bloom indicates that some Jews, in partnership
with a Spanish national, financed private slavers to the Spanish colonies (Bloom, Jews of
Amsterdam, 147 and note). In Bloom’s example, however, the slaver’s itinerary included
Curaçao, where the ship’s slaves would have been recorded in the island’s imports and
in Postma’s estimate of interloper traders. See also note 12 above.
24. See Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960); Gonsalves de Mello,
Gente da nação, 233; and Jonathan Israel, “Dutch Sephardi Jewry, Millenarian Politics,
and the Struggle for Brazil, 1640–1654,” in Skeptics, Millenarians and Jews, ed. David S.
Katz and Jonathan I. Israel (Leiden, New York, 1990), 76–97. See also Günter Böhm, Los
Sefardies en los dominios holandeses del Sur y del Caribe, 1630–1750 (Seville, 1977), 75. The
Dutch occupied part of northeastern Brazil from 1630 to 1654. Jews clearly played a
dominant role as wholesale purchasers of slaves from the Dutch West India Company
during five of those years. Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, Dictionário Biográfico:Judaizantes
e Judeus no Brazil 1500–1808 (Rio de Janeiro, 1986), show that virtually all Jewish pur-
chases of slaves were clustered between 1641 and 1645. On the dearth of the Jewish
merchant involvement in the transatlantic slave trade to the Caribbean, see also Zvi
Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colo-
nial Times (Jerusalem, 1991), 48–49.
25. The landing in the Americas usually marked the end of the worst horrors of the slaves’
coerced migration, but the captives had to endure long and repeated physical inspec-
tions by prospective buyers. The healthiest and strongest slaves went first. The re-
maining (“refuse”) slaves were sometimes taken on to other ports for resale. Those
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 467

whose family and kinship contacts had survived the “Middle Passage” might be sub-
ject to a final separation at this point. See Seymour Drescher, “The Atlantic Slave Trade
and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis,” in From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative
Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York, 1999), 312–338. On Jewish mer-
chants in Curaçao’s slave trade, see especially Klooster, “Contraband Trade,” 61–63.
The heyday of Curaçao’s transit trade occurred later in the eighteenth century, when
it was decreasingly dependent on slaves. See P. C. Emmer, “‘Jesus Christ Was Good,
but Trade Was Better’: An Overview of the Transit Trade of the Dutch Antilles,
1634–1795,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette
and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville, Fla., 1996), 206–22; and Postma, The Dutch,
26–55, 197–200, 268–72. Compare these modest assessments of Curaçao’s role with
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s, “Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam: The Place of
Curaçao and the Caribbean in Early Modern Jewish History,” American Jewish History
7(2) (1982):172–92. Yerushalmi maximizes the value of Curaçao to European expan-
sion from the perspective of a historian of Jewry. On the reception of Jewish refugees
in New Amsterdam, see James H. Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish
Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland, and New York,” in
this volume, Chap. 19. On Jewish involvement in European diplomacy and the poli-
tics of the slave trade, see Jonathan I. Israel, Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Coun-
tries and the Struggle for World Supremacy 1585–1713 (London, 1997), 392–401. For the
latest calculations on the role of Sephardic capital in the Dutch West India Company,
see Klooster, “Contraband Trade,” 63. By the 1650s, the share of Jews investing in the
West India Company had risen to around 4 percent, sufficient perhaps for the Com-
pany to protect Brazilian refugees in New Amsterdam from Governor Peter
Stuyvesant’s expulsion orders. By 1674 Jews owned about 5 percent of the Dutch West
India Company’s stock.
26. On Jewish merchants in the early English slave trade, see, above all, Eli Faber, Jews,
Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York, 1998), esp. 11–56; and
Trevor Burnard, “Who Bought Slaves in Early America? Purchasers of Slaves from the
Royal African Company in Jamaica, 1674–1708,” Slavery and Abolition 17(2) (August
1996):68–92. See also Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 48.
27. See Israel, European Jewry, 139; Adam Jones, Brandenburg Sources for West African History
1680–1700 (Stuttgart, 1985); and Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Cul-
ture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, 1994), 151. On Portuguese Jewish participa-
tion in various African voyages from Baltic ports in the seventeenth century, see Georg
Nørregard, Danish Settlements in West Africa, 1658–1850 (Boston, 1966), 11, 12, 53, 54, 57.
28. Israel, European Jewry, 139. Jeronimo Nunes da Costa (1620–1697) seems to have been
unusually active among Jews of Northern Europe in his ability to direct mercantile
capital toward the Guinea trade of Baltic states at the end of the seventeenth century.
He was frequently involved in slaving expeditions from Brandenburg, Glückstadt, and
Copenhagen. See Jonathan I. Israel, “An Amsterdam Jewish Merchant of the Golden
Age: Jeronimo Nunes da Costa (1620–1697), Agent of Portugal in the Dutch Republic,”
Studia Rosenthalia 18 (1984):21–40, esp. 35–37.
29. On the French slave trade, see Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eigh-
teenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison, 1979). In Bordeaux, “only two Jewish
families, Gradis and Mendez, fitted out more than one slave ship each during the
entire eighteenth-century …” (ibid., 159). See also Silvia Marzagalli, “Atlantic Trade
and Sephardim Merchants in Eighteenth-Century France: The Case of Bordeaux” (pre-
sented at JCB Conference, “The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West,” 16
June 1997, and chap. 14 in this volume); Eric Saugera, Bordeaux, Port Négrier
XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Biarritz, 1995), 229–34; Richard Menkis, “The Gradis Family of
Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux: A Social and Economic Study” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis
University, 1988). Silvia Marzagalli kindly brought these last two studies to my atten-
tion. Across the Atlantic, Jews of Saint-Domingue constituted about 1 percent of the
colony’s white population in the late eighteenth century. See Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et
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468 | Seymour Drescher

Juifs au XVIII siècle: Le racisme au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1984), 19–93. As with the
Gradis family in France, one should note the similarly atypical involvement of Ams-
terdam’s Jeronimo Nunes da Costa in the slave trade of the previous century. His
access to the Saõ Tomé and Guinea trades probably depended upon his status as the
agent of the Portuguese crown in the Dutch Republic and on his personal link to Por-
tugal’s Brazil Company. Thus privileged, Jeronimo seems to have been far more
involved in the sugar trade than in the slave trade of Saõ Tomé and the African coast.
Jonathan Israel regards this African extension of Jeronimo’s economic activity as
exceptional (see Israel, “An Amsterdam Jewish Merchant,” 30–37).
30. See Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 73–82, 113–23.
31. See Richard Gray, “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Lourenço da Silva, The
Capuchins and the Decisions of the Holy Office,” Past and Present 115 (May 1987):
52–68. Joseph Miller, a historian of the eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian slave trade,
observes that New Christians were no longer a subject of discussion in this period.
(mail communication of 14 June 1996). In Miller’s monumental Way of Death: Merchant
Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1830 (Madison, Wis., 1988), “New Chris-
tians” is not an indexed term. Martin Klein, a historian of Africa, has never seen a ref-
erence to Jewish slave traders on the African coast in the final period of the Atlantic
slave trade (e-mail communication, 22 December 1995). On the general reduction of
New Christian influence in the metropolitan Portuguese economy during the second
half of the seventeenth century, see Carl A. Hanson, Economy and Society in Baroque Por-
tugal 1668–1703 (Minneapolis, 1981), 218.
32. Of the fifty to sixty million working Europeans during the peak of the slave trade in
the 1780s, up to two million might have been implicated in the trade in one way or
another, or in the importation of slave-grown products. In the Americas, a still larger
proportion of the descendants of Europeans must have been similarly involved in the
same range of economic activities. Given the far larger numbers of those who were
enslaved in Africa compared to those who were deported, a large proportion of the
active West African population (perhaps twenty-eight million in 1820) must also have
been direct participants in the slave trade and its collateral activities along the coast of
Africa. For these estimates, see Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, La Traite des Noirs (Paris,
1997), 42–50; and Eltis, Economic Growth, 67, and notes.
33. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade, 17. For those who view New Christians interchangeably with
Jews, it may indeed be impossible to imagine the Atlantic system without Jewish slave
traders: “So we see therefore that if it were not for the high percentage of ships in the
hands of men of the Hebrew nation, commerce in the South Atlantic would be almost
impossible and therefore likewise the sugar industry and African slavery” (Salvador, Os
Magnatas, 96). For Salvador, Jews were the proverbial nail for want of which American
sugar, African slavery, and the entire black Atlantic diaspora would never have existed.
34. Germán Peralta Rivera, Los Mecanismos del comercio negrero (Lima, 1990), 280. For recent
attempts to rediscover a vanished Jewish presence in Africa, see Yossi Halevi, “Look-
ing for Jews off Africa’s Coast,” Central African Zionist Digest (April 1995). The recent
revival of interest in Jews hidden during the Holocaust seems to find an echo in a rekin-
dled interest in marrano ancestry. Recently, a society for crypto-Judaic studies was
formed by people seeking to reclaim a Jewish heritage. See Mary Rourke, “In Search of
Hidden Jews,” Los Angeles Times, 8 February 1997.
35. Greater degrees of human diversity in Africa than on other continents meant that mar-
ket breakdowns, costly violence, and trade customs varied greatly from region to
region. Divergent trading rules had to be learned in Africa, which put a premium on
local factors. The Euro-African trade “had to get by without the cross-cultural dias-
poric merchant communities that [Philip] Curtin describes for other parts of the globe”
(Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 154, 164–92).
36. See Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 35–36 and 271n.
37. See Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 265–66; and Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the
Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), 17. Jonathan Israel notes that apart from the trade in
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Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade | 469

diamonds and coral and the Spanish Caribbean trade via Cadiz, Jewish activity in gen-
eral counted for relatively little in England’s eighteenth-century rise to commercial
dominance (Israel, European Jewry, 242). That characterization equally applies to Jew-
ish activity in the British slave trade. Stephen Alexander Fortune claims “a striking dis-
covery” in finding “a close business relationship between the South Sea Company and
Jamaican Jews. He also notes that Jews were stockholders of the company in England
and had contacts in the Caribbean (Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 137–38). Fortune does
not offer any estimate of the amount or proportion of capital so invested by English
Jews, or their relative importance as agents or factors in the transoceanic chain of com-
merce. John G. Sperling, The South Sea Company: An Historical Essay (Boston, 1962), is
silent on any Jewish role, as is Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to
Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana, Ill., 1981). As for the Netherlands, by the late eigh-
teenth century, its “Portuguese” Jewry was recognized as having abandoned trading
in favor of stock-brokering. See Charles Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce and Finance
(Cambridge, 1966), 14–15.
38. See, above all, David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 101;
Seymour Drescher, “The Role of Jews in Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Immigrants and
Minorities 12(2) (July 1993):113–125; David Brion Davis, “The Slave Trade and the
Jews,” New York Review of Books, 22 December 1994, 14–17; and Yosef Hiam Yerushalmi,
“Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam,” 177.
39. Gleaned from Faber’s accounts of slave traders in Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, pas-
sim. I have discovered no evidence of a link between metropolitan religious move-
ments and any documented unease about Jewish transatlantic slaving. See Seymour
Drescher, “The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Per-
spective,” in Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit,
ed. Gert Oostindie (Leiden, Pittsburgh, 1995, 1996), 25–66, esp. 35n. 22. For a detailed
study of Jewish and black interaction during the initial period of European overseas
expansion, see Jonathan Schorsch, “Jews and Blacks in the Early Colonial World,
1450–1800” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000).
40. For an estimate of overall Portuguese emigration after 1500, see Stanley L. Engerman
and João César das Neves, The Bricks of an Empire 1415–1999: 585 Years of Portuguese
Empire (Lisbon, 1996), WP22–96, 12. The estimate is based upon data in V. M. Godinho,
“L’Emigration Portugaise (XV–XX siècles)—une constante structurale et les réponses
aux changements du monde,” Revista de História Económica e Social 1 (1978). They esti-
mate the total outflow from Portugal for the years 1500 to 1760 at about 1.3 million.
Magnus Mörner and Harold Sims, Adventurers and Proletarians: The Story of Migrants in
Latin America (Pittsburgh, 1985), 10 (also citing Godhino), estimate the total net emi-
gration from Portugal to Brazil between 1500 and 1760 (the limits of Inquisitorial con-
cern with New Christians) at 790,000. A much smaller flow of conversos may have
emigrated from Spain to the New World. I follow Boyajian in assuming that New
Christian emigration from Portugal was at least proportionate to their share of the Por-
tuguese population in 1500 (10 percent). Anita Novinsky finds that at one point New
Christians represented 10 to 20 percent of the population of Bahia (see Novinsky, “A
Posição dos Cristãos Novos,” 57–103, esp. 65).
41. For an estimate of early modern European migration to the Americas, see Eltis, “Free
and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations,” 255. Based upon Robert Swierenga’s estimates,
the Jewish population of the New World in about 1800 could not have exceeded 10,000,
and no more than that number migrated from Europe to the Americas between 1500
and 1800. He estimates that the Jewish population of the Caribbean was five times its
counterpart in the United States in 1790. See Robert P. Swierenga, The Forerunners: Dutch
Jewry in the North American Diaspora (Detroit, 1994), 36. In a study of Dutch emigration,
Jan Lucassen estimates that as many as fifteen thousand Netherlanders may have emi-
grated “to the colonies in South Africa, the Caribbean, and West Africa” before 1800. Only
one quarter of that total would have landed before 1750 (the high tide of Jewish migra-
tion). See Jan Lucassen, “The Netherlands, the Dutch, and Long-Distance Migration, in
21 1/24/01 12:17 PM Page 470

470 | Seymour Drescher

the Late Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Europeans on the Move: Studies on
European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford, 1994), 153–91, esp. 175–78.
Regarding New Christians, the destruction of the genealogical records by the Por-
tuguese government in 1773 completed the official fusion of Old and New Christians
and “the disappearance of the Jews and their descendants from Portugal and Brazil.”
In 1797 the Portuguese government explicitly invited Suriname’s Portuguese Jews
back “where you would enjoy the greatest security and peace. For presently … none
of the reasons which occasioned your expatriation exists any longer” (quoted in
Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity,” 212). Swetschinski does not mention any
Jewish migration in response to the belated invitation. Nor does he indicate any “inter-
nal immigration” by descendants of the New Christians within Portugal or Brazil into
the Jewish fold. See also Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, vol. 1, 380. There is no
evidence to indicate that any large group of Latin Americans rejoined the Jewish com-
munity when a continuous Jewish migration to Ibero-America resumed early in the
nineteenth century. See Judith Laikin Elkin, Jews of the Latin American Republics (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1980), 14–20. The deeper Jewish and African relationship began, of course,
where the transoceanic slave trade finally deposited its victims. Whatever its attrac-
tions for seventeenth-century Sephardim, the transatlantic world seems to have
appealed much less to the literary imagination of Ashkenazi Jewry. In her biographi-
cal sketch of Glikl bas Judah Leib, a merchant of Metz, Natalie Zemon Davis notes that
Glikl’s autobiography was written “at a time when … Jews were among the new own-
ers of sugar plantations and of African and Indian slaves in Suriname …,” and when
Menasseh ben Israel, of Amsterdam, played with the idea “that the Amerindians were
the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel.” See Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the
Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass, 1995), 41. Yet when she
chose to weave an exotic tale about the seafaring quest of a wise Talmudist, Glikl had
her hero board a boat bound for the East Indies.
42. See Wim Klooster, “The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao,” presented at the JCB confer-
ence “The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West,” and chap. 18 in this volume.
On Suriname, see Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half
of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, New York, 1991), 18–20, 175–80.
22 1/24/01 12:19 PM Page 471

– Chapter 22 –

NEW CHRISTIANS AND JEWS IN THE

SUGAR TRADE, 1550–1750: TWO CENTURIES OF
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATLANTIC ECONOMY

James C. Boyajian

S CHOLARS HAVE LONG BEEN AWARE of the salient role New Christians of
Portugal and their Sephardi relatives in Holland, England, France,
and the Baltic region played in the development of the Atlantic sugar
trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 For New Christian mer-
chants of the Iberian Peninsula, the Americas, and the Far East, however,
sugar was but one element in a global trading network. To be sure, from
the early sixteenth century, sugar and sugar trading were important ele-
ments in the complex trade. Indeed, many of the leading merchant fami-
lies of Lisbon, Oporto, and other Portuguese seaports achieved their
fortunes through sugar plantation and mill development in Pernambuco,
Bahia, and the southern captaincies of Brazil, as well as through the intro-
duction of slaves into Brazil and Spanish America. In the latter half of the
sixteenth century, sugar became the springboard to greater commercial
activities and wealth. The wealthier New Christians invested in Asian
trading to augment their fortunes. In turn, the Asian trade yielded goods
marketable primarily in western Africa and the American tropics.2 Finally,
by the early seventeenth century, fortunes amassed initially in sugar trad-
ing had propelled a limited number of New Christians into the role of fin-
anciers of the Spanish Habsburgs and had thus enabled them to play a
major part in European exchange.3
Underlying these developments and the ebb and flow of family for-
tunes was the emerging Atlantic economy. Fueled by the Cape trade to India
and the transatlantic slave and commodities trade with the bullion-rich
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472 | James C. Boyajian

Spanish American colonies, the commerce of Europe’s Atlantic ports

eventually overshadowed the ancient Mediterranean trade that had been
the center of European economic life since antiquity. New Christians of
Lisbon, Seville, Madrid, and Antwerp and their Sephardic cousins in
Amsterdam, Hamburg, the Baltic ports, Venice and other northern Italian
cities, and the French Atlantic and Channel ports played a prominent role
in the elaboration of the Atlantic economy precisely because of their con-
nections to overseas trade in Asia and the South Atlantic.4 Dutch, French,
and English merchants might have enjoyed the advantages of being at or
near the source of Baltic grain and timber and of the production of hard-
ware, woolens, and other artisan-crafted goods in Northern Europe, but
New Christians, who settled in all corners of the Spanish imperium, were
in a unique position to penetrate Spain’s bullion-producing transatlantic
colonies. In exchange for African slaves, Italian and Northern European
goods, and Asian cotton and silk cloth, the New Christians extracted sil-
ver and gold bullion and coin from Mexico and Peru. Access to silver bul-
lion enabled New Christians to expand Asian commerce, on the one
hand, and to pay for the copper implements and hardware that went into
the sugar mills of Brazil, on the other.5

* * * *

THE ASIAN TRADE WAS A LUXURY TRADE in speculative goods of high unit
value consumed by the relatively small number of persons comprising
the wealthiest echelons of society. The trade produced large profits for a
handful of very wealthy merchants who could afford the risks and delays
involved in the long and hazard-plagued Cape voyages to and from India
(carreira da Índia) or the Mexican galleon circuit between Acapulco and
Manila. Certainly, many smaller investors were tempted to invest in
Asian cotton and silk cloth, diamonds, spices, and drugs, and they did so
primarily by consigning their capital to the larger players who earned
handsome commissions and shares of profits from the joint ventures.6
Sugar, too, was a luxury in the sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
turies, but the ease of the transatlantic voyage to the sugar-producing
islands of Madeira and São Tomé and later to Brazil combined with the
rather brief turnaround time (a couple of months compared to up to two
years for the Cape trade to and from India) enabled many modest
investors to participate in sugar cargoes.7
Sugar founded the fortunes of many New Christian commercial fam-
ilies in the period from 1550 to 1650, and was absolutely essential to the
viability of the small and much less wealthy Sephardi communities that
took root in Holland, the French ports, and the Baltic during the final
decades of the sixteenth century. With few exceptions, the founders of the
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Rouen, and Bordeaux Sephardic
communities were New Christians who had returned to Judaism. They
were merchants of rather modest means whose commercial ventures
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New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade | 473

depended on connections to family and associates among the merchants

of Antwerp, Seville, Lisbon, Oporto, and the lesser ports of Portugal. The
first Jewish merchants of Amsterdam naturally survived by shipping
grain, cloth, hardware, and naval stores to Iberian ports. They consigned
these goods to New Christian merchants (often their relatives) who
loaded return shipments of dried fruit, olive oil, dyes, and wines pro-
duced in Portugal and Spain.8 Yet it is doubtful that the Sephardic com-
munity could have thrived and grown as it did were it not for the
opportunity to invest in sugar. In most of their trading ventures of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Sephardim acted primarily
on commission from their wealthier New Christian kinsmen, who owned
the merchandise and earned most of the profits. The Brazilian circuit
along with the trade to Barbary were two sectors of Iberian trade in which
Sephardi merchants acted as principals, owning a major share in the
sugar and other shipments.
For example, Manuel Dias Henriques was among the Sephardi mer-
chants arriving in Amsterdam during the early seventeenth century. Both
Manuel and his cousin Miguel Dias de Santiago,9 who had settled in
Antwerp just prior to 1620, had had personal experience in the sugar
trade of Brazil between 1595 and 1619. Miguel in Antwerp and Manuel in
Amsterdam were able to deal directly with many kinsmen still in Brazil
and arrange for shipments of sugar from Brazilian ports directly to Ams-
terdam. Manuel Dias Henriques was far from alone. Francisco Mendes de
Medeiros (alias Isaac Franco Mendes) and Jeronimo Rodrigues de Souza
(alias Samuel Abrabanel) were also among the many Sephardi merchants
of Amsterdam dealing in sugar in the early seventeenth century with rel-
atives in Brazilian and Portuguese ports.10

* * * *

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWISH AND NEW CHRISTIAN INVOLVEMENT in the

sugar trade must be gauged by the economic importance of the sugar trade
as a whole. The Portuguese introduced sugar culture in Madeira prior to
1497—before the forcible conversion of Iberian Jews in Portugal created the
New Christian community—and it spread from there to São Tomé, an
island off Africa’s western coast. In Madeira, sugar production was on a
small scale, characterized by individual landowners working their land. In
São Tomé and Brazil, however, the sugar cultivators, or lavradores, intro-
duced slave labor to work large tracts. It was only with the development of
Brazil’s sugar industry and of the slave economy that sugar became a sig-
nificant element in Atlantic trade and a major new source of wealth.11
Perhaps the earliest usable measure of the development of the Brazil-
ian sugar industry is the number of sugar mills. A Brazilian sugar mill
typically was built on a large tract of land owned by a senhor de engenho
who leased out the land to the lavradores, who actually cleared the land
and cultivated the cane. The lavradores delivered the harvested cane to the
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474 | James C. Boyajian

mill for processing into crude sugar. The senhor de engenho exacted a por-
tion of the sugar production in return for the milling and as land rent.
Each mill thus served as a complete unit of production, some more suc-
cessful and productive than others, of course.12
By 1570 there already were seventy sugar mills in Brazil, most of
them concentrated in Pernambuco and secondarily in Bahia’s hinterland.
By 1581, little more than ten years later, the number had increased to 131
and twenty years later (ca. 1600) to 230; finally, by 1629 Brazil boasted
346 mills.13 In less than sixty years the number of mills had increased
nearly fivefold. The area of sugar cultivation had expanded, as well,
beyond Pernambuco and Bahia in the north. São Vicente, Espirito Santo,
and Rio de Janeiro in the south had also become important sugar-pro-
ducing regions.14
What makes this growth all the more remarkable is the fact that each
mill represented a fixed investment of at least 6,000 cruzados in costs for
construction, materials, copper implements, and many slaves for labor.15
It is probable that by 1629 the total investment in the sugar industry
exceeded 2 and perhaps 3 million cruzados. By 1710, the number of mills
grew substantially again, representing an investment of 5 to 6 million
cruzados. In addition to the sums expended on mills, lavradores had to
invest thousands of cruzados in slaves to produce the cane.
The value of the annual sugar production directly reflected the increase
in the number of mills and in the investment in production. The tithes (díz-
imos) that the king collected on Brazil’s produce are an excellent indicator
of the value and growth of sugar production, since sugar comprised over
90 percent of the total value of all Brazilian products. In 1618 the contracts
for the collection of the dízimos, which prominent New Christian mer-
chants usually held, produced the following revenues (in cruzados):16

Pernambuco 75,000
Bahia 62,500
Southern captaincies
(Rio, São Vicente,
Espirito Santo) 75,500
Total 213,000

Even if we ignore the fact that in order to profit from the venture the con-
tractors had to collect more tithes from the sugar producers than they
paid to the crown, Brazil’s annual sugar production certainly exceeded 2
million cruzados’ worth in Brazilian ports and probably 4 million cruza-
dos delivered in Portugal.17 During the 1630s and 1640s, when the Dutch
temporarily occupied Pernambuco and disrupted sugar production and
the trade between Portugal and Brazil, Portuguese sugar production
nevertheless increased overall, as sugar cultivation shifted to the south.
The tithes for the southern captaincies alone had increased to 100,000
cruzados from 1639 to 1640, to 142,000 from 1648 to 1649, and to 155,000
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New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade | 475

cruzados in 1651, representing annual production valued at 2 million, 2.8

million, and 3.1 million cruzados in Portugal respectively.18
To better appreciate what these numbers mean, by way of compari-
son, the Dutch capitalized their United East India Company in 1602 with
a total of 2.3 million cruzados. In 1640, after almost forty years of opera-
tion, the Dutch Company’s total capital in Asia was about 4.5 million
cruzados, and its annual trade in Asia did not exceed 600,000 cruzados.19
The Dutch East India Company, which historians often cite as the most
successful commercial enterprise of the seventeenth century, returned car-
goes of spices and other Asian goods to Amsterdam that were less valu-
able than Brazil’s annual sugar production in the 1630s and 1640s, and the
East India Company enjoyed a strict monopoly of Dutch trade with Asia.20

* * * *

WHAT PART DID NEW CHRISTIANS and their Sephardic relatives play in
this extraordinary commercial development? We have mostly anecdotal
evidence of New Christian and Jewish participation in sugar production
and trade. Although many New Christians were prominent in the initial
development of sugar mills and cultivation in Pernambuco and Bahia
during the early decades of the sixteenth century, few of them have left
accounts books or other direct evidence of their trade. Employing Inqui-
sition records, Arnold Wiznitzer’s pioneering study of “Jews” in Brazil
first revealed the exploits of Diogo Fernandes Santiago, who, among
others, developed his own sugar mill at Olinda in Pernambuco cap-
taincy. After Indians destroyed the mill, Diogo managed the mills his in-
law Bento Dias de Santiago developed and owned near Camaragibe,
also in Pernambuco captaincy.21 Diogo’s several daughters married into
families (mostly New Christian) that owned a number of sugar mills.22
By the 1580s João Nunes Correia and his kinsmen also owned up to four
sugar mills near Olinda.23 Meanwhile, in the Bahia region the several
members of the large Lopes d’Ulhoa clan developed perhaps a half-
dozen sugar mills.24 In the southern captaincies Duarte Fernandes
Vitória, his sons Diogo Fernandes Vitória and Henrique Rodrigues de
Barcelos, and their cousin Manuel de Medeiros owned one and possibly
several mills in the São Vicente captaincy during the final decades of the
sixteenth century.25 The sum of such evidence supports New Christians
developing, owning, and operating fifty-nine mills by the 1630s. A fur-
ther nine mills belonged to Sephardic owners in Brazil around 1645, after
the Dutch invasion and occupation.26
Many of these investments were short-lived. In the process of recon-
quering northern Brazil from the Dutch, the victorious Portuguese seized
the Sephardi-owned mills from their owners. Some New Christians sold
their mills to Old Christians. Other mills were destroyed in Indian wars
or in the struggle with the Dutch, or were confiscated by the Inquisition.
Yet each generation produced more New Christian investors in sugar
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476 | James C. Boyajian

mills in Brazil, suggesting a sustained New Christian investment in

sugar production.27
From these sparse data alone we can glean that New Christians and
Sephardic Jews appear to have played a direct role in developing at least
20 percent of Brazil’s sugar productive capacity. Substantial as that was,
their role was greater still when we consider the New Christians’ financ-
ing of sugar cultivation through the slave trade. Slaves and slave labor
were indispensable to the colony’s economy. Slaves not only cleared the
land and planted, harvested, cultivated, and processed the sugar cane,
but were also ubiquitous as domestic labor and were even represented
in certain positions of skilled labor. In the early seventeenth century,
Brazil’s merchants and sugar cultivators imported up to four thousand
slaves annually.28 New Christians provided the bulk of these slaves.
They contracted with the Portuguese king to administer the slave licens-
ing regime in Portuguese slave stations in Guinea and the Cape Verde
islands, and in Angola. The contractor paid the Portuguese king a flat
sum for the right to sell the licenses. Although New Christians certainly
were not the only slave traders among the Portuguese, the evidence is
conclusive that the contractors reserved the bulk of the licenses—and
therefore the bulk of the slave trade—for their relatives and other New
Christian associates.29
At an average of 70 cruzados a head delivered in Brazilian ports, the
four thousand slaves were worth 280,000 cruzados annually.30 Most
would have been sold to lavradores and mill owners on credit. The parties
typically drew up a bill of exchange or other evidence of debt providing
for payment of the debt in Brazil at a certain future date when the year’s
sugar production would have been available. Such financing enabled
planters to expand cultivation and yet maintain the lavish lifestyles many
were pursuing in the tropical colony.
It is noteworthy that there is little evidence that the Sephardim (that
is, observant Jews) participated in the slave trade of their New Christian
relatives and associates, or did so on their own—at least not prior to the
development of Dutch Brazil in the late 1630s and 1640s.31 This apparent
lack of participation in the slave trade is puzzling, since the New Christ-
ian role in the slave trade was so important and the Sephardim’s cooper-
ation with New Christian merchants in trade was so intimate. This is
particularly true when we consider that family ties were the only reliable
vehicle for extended commercial operations and the only guarantee of
reasonable transaction costs.
Take, once again, the example of Miguel Dias de Santiago and his
cousin Manuel Dias Henriques. Both lived for a period in Brazil as New
Christians.32 Miguel resided in Bahia and traded with Portugal and
Northern Europe between 1595 and 1615. Miguel’s account books from
that period demonstrate his interest in the exchange of all manner of
European and Asian commodities for sugar, but there is not one entry
recording the exchange of slaves for sugar. When Miguel departed from
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New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade | 477

Brazil, he settled in Antwerp and continued trading with Brazil in asso-

ciation with Manuel Dias Henriques, who was established by the 1620s in
Amsterdam and had assumed the name Matathias Aboab after he
reverted to Judaism.33
While still a New Christian, Manuel Dias Henriques had shuttled
slaves between Angola and Brazil and had finally delivered slaves to
Mexico and Guatemala in the early 1620s. He certainly acquired slaves
under licenses obtained through another New Christian cousin, Duarte
Dias Henriques, who held the slave contract for Angola from 1607 to
1614.34 Manuel departed from the New World suddenly in 1621, when the
Mexican Inquisition initiated a manhunt for him in Guatemala.35 Manuel
arrived in Amsterdam by 1626 (following his late cousin Duarte Fernan-
des, alias Josua Habilho, another associate in Atlantic sugar trading who
had preceded him there by more than a decade).36 Once established in
Amsterdam, it would have been natural for Manuel (now an observant of
the “law of Moses”) to continue the slave trade he obviously knew from
his earlier days and to combine it with his cousin Miguel Dias’s sugar
trading (now from Antwerp).
Why did Manuel cease slave trafficking when he arrived in Amster-
dam? A personal moral aversion to slavery and the slave trade, after his
experience in Atlantic slave trading, is possible in Manuel’s case. But why
did other Sephardic merchants who had similar family commercial con-
nections in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, and the Americas not participate in
the slave trade? If the reversion to the Jewish faith was a factor in the
Sephardi avoiding the very profitable trade in human cargo, why did
many of the Sephardim become slave owners and some Sephardic Jews
become slave merchants later, beginning with the development of the
sugar industry in Dutch Brazil? Did the licensing regime for the intro-
duction of slaves into Brazil preclude Jews from the trade? If New Chris-
tians in Portugal and Brazil could include Jewish relatives in shares of
sugar cargoes surreptitiously, why not include them in licenses and car-
goes for slave trading? Or did they obscure Jewish participation in this
profitable trade so well that today no evidence has survived? We shall
probably never have entirely satisfactory answers.
In addition to slaves, Brazilian planters demanded many luxury
items and necessities. Many of the luxuries originated in Asia.37 Cotton
and silk cloths from Asia were especially well suited in weight to the
tropics, and their high quality appealed to the taste for ostentation that
was evident in colonial life. India and the Far East also produced quanti-
ties of carved, inlaid, and gilded chests, serving trays, writing boxes, and
bedframes. New Christians were well represented in the Asian trades
that brought such goods from India annually to Lisbon via the Cape of
Good Hope,38 and we have ample evidence that the Sephardim and New
Christians provided many of the luxuries, as well as necessities, to Brazil-
ian markets. As return cargo for these luxuries, of course, New Christian
and Sephardi merchants carried off still more sugar.
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478 | James C. Boyajian

In terms of value, the Portuguese Asian trade probably topped sugar,

at least through the 1620s, and the crown derived more revenue still from
the carreira da Índia than from Brazil.39 We know that in the early seven-
teenth century, Brazil’s dízimos (tithes) yielded the crown approximately
200,000 cruzados per year, and the brazilwood contract another 60,000
cruzados.40 At the same time, however, the crown derived as much as
137,500 cruzados in customs from the cargo of a single Indian carrack
delivered in Lisbon, and the total revenue from the annual fleet of two or
three carracks from India was not far below 300,000 cruzados.41 This
much we know with relative certainty; however, much controversy sur-
rounds the estimated value of an annual carreira cargo in Lisbon. A con-
siderable body of evidence supports annual values in the range of 4 to 5
million cruzados delivered in Lisbon between 1580 and 1620, or some-
what more than Frederick Mauro’s estimated value of sugar trade of 4
million cruzados during roughly the same period.42
Given the importance of both the Brazilian sugar and Asian trades
throughout much of the century (1550–1650), it is not surprising that
many of the leading merchants of the New Christian and Sephardic com-
munities who began dealing in Atlantic sugar and African slaves were
attracted to investing in the carreira da Índia’s more risky but equally
rewarding trade, once they had accumulated excess capital. In the early
seventeenth century, the most successful New Christian merchants of Lis-
bon, Oporto, Antwerp, and Seville all included Brazilian sugar; Indian
diamonds, cottons, and silks; southeast Asian rubies; African slaves; and
Asian spices in their merchandise inventories.43 Similarly, Amsterdam’s
and Hamburg’s more successful Sephardim (including Bento Osorio,
Manuel Dias Henriques, Diogo Dias Queirido, João de Paz, André
d’Azevedo, and Duarte Nunes da Costa) invested in the Portuguese
Asian trade, especially in diamonds and other precious stones.44 The
connection went further, for the Portuguese imported an entire range of
cotton cloth—guinea cloth or panos pretos—from India exclusively to
trade for West African slaves, while every shipment of cottons included
quantities of dotins, or loin cloth, for the slaves’ clothing. New Christian
merchants then introduced slaves (as well as the highest quality Indian
cottons) into Brazil and exchanged both for sugar.45
Manuel de Paz and his half-brother Fernando Tinoco, who headed
one of the largest and wealthiest groups of New Christian merchants
during the first half of the seventeenth century, illustrate sugar’s role as
a commercial steppingstone to greater wealth. Indeed, de Paz and
Tinoco epitomized the interconnection of the several enterprises. In the
mid-sixteenth century their father, Diogo Fernandes do Brasil, managed
sugar mills in Pernambuco for absentee mill owners. Prior to marrying
Ana de Paz (ca. 1580), daughter of the above-mentioned Diogo Fernan-
des Santiago, Diogo Fernandes do Brasil and his brothers Duarte Fer-
nandes and Simão Rodrigues do Brasil were developing their own sugar
mills near Camaragibe.
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New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade | 479

Manuel de Paz himself was born in Brazil around 1581, but grew up
in Lisbon with his younger half-brother Tinoco. During the first two
decades of the seventeenth century, Manuel lived and traded in Goa,
investing his father’s sugar fortune in diamonds and cotton and silk cloth
from India. Manuel’s far-flung enterprise eventually involved cousin
Francisco Tinoco de Carvalho in Goa as well as another half-brother,
Francisco Duarte Tinoco, in Bahia and a cousin, Manuel Rodrigues do
Porto, in Olinda.46 At the same time cousin Diogo Fernandes Tinoco
resided in Angola, whence he shipped slave cargoes to Brazil and Span-
ish America.47 Still other kinsmen—most notably Duarte Dias Hen-
riques—held slave contracts and were prominent in the slave trade to
Brazil and Spanish America. The complex commercial and familial rela-
tions among these individuals and members of the Lopes Pinto and
Ribeiro, Ulhoa, Nunes de Mattos, Vaaz de Paiva, and Dias Henriques
families who dealt in brazilwood and developed their own sugar planta-
tions and mills are too numerous to mention here.48
During the 1630s and 1640s, sugar wealth finally brought Manuel de
Paz and Fernando Tinoco to Madrid, among the dozen or so New Chris-
tian and Genoese merchant-financiers of sufficient wealth to serve as fin-
anciers of the vast Spanish monarchy. The network of relatives living in
Antwerp as New Christians and in Rouen, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg,
and Venice privately or publicly as Jews assisted Manuel de Paz and Fer-
nando Tinoco and their associates in Seville and Lisbon in establishing an
international payments network that they directed from Madrid.49
At least through the early 1600s, the Iberian empires could claim near
exclusive sovereignty over Europe’s overseas commerce, and even into
the 1650s they enjoyed distinct advantages over their rivals in sugar,
slave, and diamond trades. The Jewish communities of Amsterdam,
Hamburg, and the French ports most of all, and to a lesser extent those of
Venice and other Italian cities, depended upon the connection to wealth-
ier Iberian kinsmen, such as Manuel de Paz in Spain and many others
overseas. Commercial opportunities in the sixteenth and much of the sev-
enteenth century thus tied Sephardic fortunes to Spain and Portugal.
In the period from 1650 to 1750, however, circumstances had changed
for New Christians as well as for Jews. As fortune turned against Spain’s
and Portugal’s rulers, wealthy New Christians, as well as their more
modest cousins in Sephardic communities across Europe, suffered signif-
icant commercial and financial losses. In the 1630s both Brazilian sugar
and the Portuguese Asian trades suffered first from Dutch aggression and
secondarily from Dutch competition. Dutch occupation of Brazil’s richest
sugar-producing captaincies from the early 1630s, of El Mina on the
Guinea coast in 1637, and of Angola in 1641, and the privateering activ-
ity of the Dutch West India Company (founded in 1621) robbed New
Christians of much trade and capital invested in sugar and slaves.50 The
development of sugar production in Rio de Janeiro and other southern
captaincies of Brazil and more thoroughgoing New Christian penetration
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480 | James C. Boyajian

of Spanish American markets largely offset these losses. Rio de Janeiro’s

sugar industry expanded into the 1640s, only to be depressed in turn dur-
ing the period from 1650 to 1670 as the Dutch developed sugar culture on
a large scale in the West Indies.51
Over the long term, the Brazilian sugar trade and the merchants asso-
ciated with it proved themselves more resilient than their counterparts in
the Asian trade. The eclipse of the Portuguese empire and its trade in Asia
were pronounced; carreira cargoes dwindled to values barely above 1 mil-
lion cruzados by the 1640s and never recovered. Only a significant dia-
mond trade survived, as New Christian merchants transferred shipments
of Indian diamonds (formerly carried in Portuguese carracks via the Cape
of Good Hope to Lisbon) to Manila galleons in the Pacific and English
shipping via the Cape route, both relatively secure from Dutch attacks.52
The separation of the Portuguese from the Spanish crown (the union
lasted from 1580 to 1640) also damaged the New Christians’ fortunes. In
1640 many prominent New Christians were residing in Spain and Spain’s
overseas colonies. The new Braganza monarchy in Lisbon, desperately
short of funds to finance the protracted struggle with Spain that was nec-
essary to maintain its independence, was only too glad to declare the
absentees traitors and confiscate their goods, including sugar mills and
plantations in Brazil. The heirs of Duarte Dias Henriques, who owned at
least one mill in Pernambuco, and Marcos Fernandes Monsanto, who
owned a total of four mills in Espirito Santo, were among the losers.53 The
final blow to the wealthiest New Christian families, however, was the
1648 Spanish bankruptcy that left New Christian financiers (including the
heirs of Manuel de Paz and Fernando Tinoco) crippled with millions of
ducats of uncollectible loans to the Spanish Habsburgs.54
In the century from 1650 to 1750, in the aftermath of New Christian
commercial losses, Jews of Holland, England, and France (many of them
the direct heirs and commercial successors of New Christians in Portugal,
Spain, Brazil, Spanish America, and Portuguese Asia) appeared promi-
nently in the sugar trade of the West Indies (Curaçao, Jamaica, and Bar-
bados in particular), but the Atlantic trade had changed. In the hundred
years prior to 1650, colonial trade passed through the Iberian metropolis
without stimulating the economy, as the produce—precious metals above
all—immediately left the peninsula for the northern markets in exchange
for Baltic grain, timber and naval stores, and manufactures. These were
the products that the Iberian economies needed for their own populace or
to sustain the colonial economies, and which Spain and Portugal did not
produce. Additional precious metal flowed out of Spain to finance the
imperial burden of defending the Southern Netherlands, Milan, and the
Habsburg hegemony in Central Europe. In the period from 1650 to 1750
sugar was but one of several products—including raw cotton, coffee, tim-
ber, indigo, cacao, tobacco, and vanilla—that were now the objects of
wider consumption.They were no longer viewed as luxuries to be con-
sumed by the few, but rather as staples that had become necessities to a
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New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade | 481

wider urban populace.55 While the consumption of luxuries and the pur-
suit of imperial ambitions dominated the Iberian economies, trade and
commerce dominated the English economy.56 The colonial trades thus
necessarily had a powerful impact on the metropolitan economy in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England.57
At the same time, other conditions of trade had not changed. Hav-
ing connections in Iberian colonial markets, which produced much sil-
ver to exchange for the manufactures the colonial economies could not
produce, still carried distinct advantages. Thus, Jews in the West Indies
were prominent among smugglers to Spanish America and as staple
merchants because they enjoyed the advantages of connections to the
Iberian economies.
In the period from 1650 to 1750, the Jewish and New Christian mer-
chants of the sugar and staple trades, many of whom had West Indian
representatives, were providing the cheap transaction costs that were
necessary to accumulate wealth and induce industrialization in Europe.
Their successes, as in the earlier period, were due in part perhaps to reli-
gious traditions, but certainly to experience and to family representation
throughout the Iberian overseas empires. The family networks expanded,
of course, to include new posts in North America, such as New York and
Newport in the early eighteenth century.58 For example, Isaac Henriques
of Jamaica had relatives in New York around 1700, and about the same
time Moses Lucena and Joseph Mendes of Barbados traded with Joseph’s
brother Menasses Mendes in London. Earlier in 1685, the Navarro broth-
ers (Moseh of Brazil, Aaron of Amsterdam, and Jacob of London) were
prominent in the Atlantic sugar and staple trades.59
Jews were unwelcome competitors to the creole merchants of the
West Indies, as they had been to Old Christians in the Iberian Peninsula.
In Iberian society, the identification of “Jew” with “merchant” in the
course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought even those of
partial New Christian ancestry under suspicion, and resulted in their
being subjected to the Inquisition’s violent persecution. The result of this
persecution on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Iberian overseas colonies
was to reduce the survivors to a popularly despised caste, distinct from
an Old Christian majority who did not (in theory at least) openly follow
the commercial profession. To be sure, there was friction between Jews
and creoles in the West Indies, too, but there was no comparable institu-
tion like the Inquisition. The involvement of the English aristocracy in
commerce was such that the social and political elite could not disparage
the merchant’s work and thus stigmatize the Jew who earned his liveli-
hood from commerce.60
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482 | James C. Boyajian

Notes

1. See, among other early works, J. Lúcio d’Azevedo, História dos cristãos-novos portugueses
(Lisbon, 1921), and Jean Denucé, L’Afrique au XVIe siècle et le commerce anversois
(Antwerp, 1937). I use the term “New Christian” (Cristão novo) to refer exclusively to
Portuguese Jews in the early sixteenth century who adopted the Christian religion, with-
out consideration of the sincerity, depth, or permanence of that conversion, and as dis-
tinct from Spanish conversos. I use the term “Sephardic” (Sephardi, Sephardim) to refer
to practicing or observant Jews, who were, of course, descended from Iberian Jews.
2. See James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Balti-
more, London, 1993), esp. 33–38.
3. See James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1650 (New
Brunswick, 1983), esp. 25–35.
4. The classic statement of the shift to Atlantic preponderance in Europe’s economic life
is Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(Paris, 1966). See also Frédéric Mauro, Le portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle,
1570–1670; Étude économique (Paris, 1960). On the New Christians and the Atlantic
economy, see Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 1–16.
5. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 29–52.
6. Ibid., 33, 38.
7. Mauro, Le portugal et l’Atlantique, 526, and Frédéric Mauro, “L’Atlantique portugais et
les esclaves (1570–1670),” Revista da Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, 2nd ser.,
22 (1956):5–55.
8. The shipments are extensively documented in E. M. Koen et al., “Notarial Records in
Amsterdam Relating to the Portuguese Jews in That Town up to 1639,” Studia Rosen-
thaliana 1 (1967):109–15; 4 (1970):115–26, 243–61; 5 (1971):211–25; 10(1976):212–30; and
13 (1979):220–43.
9. Public Records Office (PRO), State Papers Miscellaneous (SP), 9/104, “Account Books
of a Portuguese Merchant, Miguel Dias de Santiago, 1595–1615,” unfoliated; for the
family history of Manuel Dias Henriques and his clan, see I. S. Révah, “Pour l’histoire
des Nouveaux-Chrétiens portugais. La relation généalogique de I. de M. Aboab,” Bole-
tim Internacional de Bibliografia Luso-Brasileira 2 (1961):276–312.
10. Koen et al., “Notarial Records,” III, no. 1 (1969):123; notarial deed no. 150, 7 September
1604, Francisco Mendes de Medeiros.
11. Mauro, Le portugal et l’Atlantique, 1–142
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. José Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos e o comércio no Atlântico meridional (Com
enfoque nas Capitanias do Sul 1530–1680) (São Paulo, 1978), 39–52.
15. Data for the cost of an engenho are scarce, and the value given here is tentative, though
I believe it to be a rather low estimate. We know that by the early eighteenth century
Manuel do Valle da Silveira, a New Christian merchant of Rio de Janeiro, reported pay-
ing 4,000 cruzados for a “share” in an engenho. If we assume that his share was one half,
then this engenho was worth at least 8,000 cruzados. The 4,000 cruzado “price” or val-
uation may have actually exceeded or fallen below the engenho’s original cost, how-
ever, depending on its condition and the current market for sugar. The source is
Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 143.
16. Data for the table are drawn from Mauro, Le portugal et l’Atlantique, 220.
17. Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, vol. 1 (London, 1949–50), 105.
18. Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 181–82.
19. F. S. Gaastra, “The Shifting Balance of Trade of the Dutch East India Company,” in
Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Regime, ed.
L. Blussé and F. S. Gaastra (Leiden, 1981), 47–69, esp. 60.
20. Gaastra, “The Shifting Balance of Trade,” 60.
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New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade | 483

21. Arnold Wiznitzer, The Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960), 14–23.
22. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Inquisição de Lisboa, proceso 6321,
Andresa Jorge; proceso 4580, Beatriz Fernandes; proceso 4273, Beatriz de Souza; pro-
ceso 9417, Briolangia Fernandes; proceso 11116, Ana da Costa do Brasil.
23. ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, proceso 12464, João Nunes Correia; see also Gonçalves
Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 166.
24. Charles de Vos, “Limal, ses seigneurs et seigneuries: Don Thomás López de Ulloa, pre-
mier Baron de Limal (1621–1655),” Wavriensia—Bulletin du cercle historique e archéo-
logique de Wavre et de la région 13 (1964):33–87; ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, proceso
5391, André Lopes d’Ulhoa; Primeira visitação do Santo Ofício ás partes do Brasil, pelo
licenciado Heitor Furtado de Mendonça. Denunciações do Bahia, 1591–1593. Serie Eduardo
Prado, para melhor se conhecer o Brasil (São Paulo, 1925), 280.
25. Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 51.
26. Herbert I. Bloom, “A Study of Brazilian Jewish History, 1623–54, Based Chiefly upon
the Findings of the Late Samuel Oppenheim,” Publications of the American Jewish His-
torical Society 33 (1934):43–125.
27. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 10, 14–23, 55–56.
28. I have based my estimate of the volume of slave trade to Brazil on the work of Enrique
Otte and Conchita Ruiz-Barruecos, “Los portugueses en la trata de esclavos negros de
las postrimerías del siglo XVI,” Moneda y crédito 85 (1963):3–40.
29. Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla (AGI), Contratación, legajo 5763, “Libros de asien-
tos de licencias y despachos de esclavos”; legajo 5766, “Libros de asientos de comis-
siones y contratos y de despachos de naos.”
30. The selling price of slaves in Brazil is based on fragments of the Ximenes d’Aragão
family’s accounts published in Denucé, L’Afrique au XVIe siècle, 52–53.
31. Koen et al., “Notarial Records,” 1 (1967):109–15; 4 (1970):115–26, 243–61; 5 (1971):
211–25; 10 (1976):212–30; and 13 (1979):220–43.
32. I. S. Révah, “Pour l’histoire des Nouveaux-Chrétiens portugais,” 276–312; PRO, SP,
9/104, “Account Books of a Portuguese Merchant, Miguel Dias de Santiago, 1595–
1615,” unfoliated.
33. PRO, SP, 9/104, “Account Books of a Portuguese Merchant, Miguel Dias de Santiago,
1595–1615,” unfoliated.
34. Mauro, “L’Atlantique portugais et les esclaves,” 5–55; AGI, Contratación, “Libros de
asientos,” no. 2, no. 3.
35. Archivo General de la Nación, México (AGN), tomo 331, “Manuel Díaz Henríquez y
Pedro de Silva Saucedo, portugueses, por judaisantes,” Guatemala, no. 7.
36. Koen et al. “Notarial Records,” II, no. 2 (1968):264–65; Miguel Dias de Santiago’s
accounts include numerous entries of sugar shipments to Duarte Fernandes and to his
several sons (PRO, SP, 4/109, “Account Books of a Portuguese Merchant, Miguel Dias
de Santiago, 1595–1615,” unfoliated).
37. PRO, SP, 9/104, “Account Books of a Portuguese Merchant, Miguel Dias de Santiago,
1595–1615,” unfoliated.
38. For example, the cargo of the galleon Santo António from India, arriving in Lisbon in
1616 (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisboa [AHU], Caixas da Índia, caixa 326
[1616–17], no. 25, “Caderno das fazendas que leva esta naveta Santo António”).
39. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 39–42, 247–53.
40. Mauro, Le portugal et l’Atlantique, 220; Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 181–82.
41. AHU, Caixas da Índia, caixa 323 (1509–1611), no. 57; caixa 324 (1612–14), no. 140; caixa
330 (1624–25), no. 47; AHU, Caixas do Reino, caixa 1 (1568–1615), no. 85; caixa 2
(1616–18), no. 119.
42. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 29–52. The comparison of the Portuguese king’s rev-
enues from Brazil and those from the Cape trade to India do not take into account the
crown’s expenditures in those regions.
43. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 29–52.
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484 | James C. Boyajian

44. Koen et al., “Notarial Records,” Studia Rosenthaliana 19 (1985):88, no. 2440, 25 June
1621.
45. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 141.
46. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 26–28, and idem, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 109, 119, 133,
136, 163–64.
47. Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 310.
48. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 26–29, 74–75, 184–204, 207–09.
49. Ibid.
50. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 185–201.
51. Mauro, Le portugal et l’Atlantique, 488–95; Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 182.
52. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 202–40.
53. Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos, 52.
54. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 154–80.
55. Stephen Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce,
1650–1750 (Gainesville, Fla., 1984), 78–98.
56. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 166–84.
57. Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 78–98.
58. Ibid., 130–50.
59. Ibid., 133.
60. Ibid., 99–129, 130–50; Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 166–84.
23 1/24/01 12:27 PM Page 485

– Chapter 23 –

NEW CHRISTIANS AS SUGAR CULTIVATORS

AND TRADERS IN THE PORTUGUESE
ATLANTIC, 1450–1800

Ernst Pijning

S UGAR SHAPED NEW WORLD SOCIETY in the Portuguese, British, French,

Dutch, and Danish colonies of South America and the Caribbean.
Between 1400 and 1800, sugar, slavery, and plantations were the three key
factors in the Atlantic economy in which Europeans, Americans, Africans,
and Asians of different religious backgrounds entered. Settlers of Jewish
descent, called New Christians, were among the participants who culti-
vated and traded this sweet cash crop (see Fig. 23.1).1 This chapter will
demonstrate that New Christians found in sugar cultivation and trade
new opportunities to gain upward social mobility, but that in order to
prosper from their newly acquired status and to avoid Inquisitorial pros-
ecution, New Christians accommodated socially and religiously to local
society and its mores.
Jews occupied a precarious position in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1492
the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, ordered the expul-
sion of all practicing Jews from their territories. Those who remained had
to convert to Christianity and were designated as “New Christians.” New
Christians were barred from public office and could not receive any royal
favors and privileges, and were therefore viewed as second-class inhabi-
tants of the peninsula. Many practicing Jews fled to Portugal, but in 1497
king Manuel followed suit and expelled all unconverted Jews from the
Portuguese territories. These measures were enforced through the estab-
lishment of the Inquisition, and the first Portuguese auto-da-fé (Inquisi-
torial punishment in the form of a public procession) was held in 1540.2
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486 | Ernst Pijning

Both Sephardic Jews, who had fled from the Iberian Peninsula to
Northern Europe, and New Christians in Portugal and its overseas terri-
tories found attractive opportunities in the trade and cultivation of sugar.
Their international network of connections and strategic position in core
areas of the sugar market in the commerce of Northern Europe and the
Iberian Peninsula gave Sephardic Jews and New Christians an edge over
their competitors. Thus, ironically, the expulsion of the Sephardim had
given them an economic advantage—one which was, however, checked
by the Portuguese Inquisition’s activities.
Before addressing the issues of social mobility and accommodation,
it is necessary to clarify some terms describing a person’s Jewish back-
ground. “New Christians,” “Old Christians,” “Sephardim,” “marranos,”
“Jews,” and “crypto-Jews” need explanation, for they are confusing and
are used interchangeably in the literature. Before 1492 in Spain and 1497
in Portugal, Jews were allowed to live and worship in the Iberian territo-
ries and the Atlantic islands of the Azores, Cape Verdes, Madeira, and São
Tomé. Like the authorities in Spain and Portugal before the expulsion,
Dutch authorities allowed the practice of Judaism in most of their Euro-
pean and overseas territories throughout the early modern period. Thus,
when writing about “Jews” or “Sephardim,” I am referring either to Por-
tugal and its territories before 1497 or to the period when the Dutch occu-
pied the northeastern part of Brazil (1630–1654). New Christians are all
persons of Jewish descent, in this case Sephardim, living in Portuguese or
Spanish territories who were forced to convert to Catholicism and were
liable to suffer prosecution by the Church or the Inquisition if found pro-
fessing their old faith. “New Christian” was a juridical term and does not
mean per se that a person so designated was a crypto-Jew or marrano,
that is, one secretly professing the Jewish faith and not a sincere Christian.
Whether New Christians were crypto-Jews or not falls beyond the scope
of this chapter. Rather, I am concerned with the economic and social
strategies of all persons of Sephardic origin in the Portuguese Atlantic,
whatever their religious practices or beliefs.
Sugar was an international commodity the cultivation of which had
spread geographically throughout the early modern period. Sugar origi-
nated in Asia, probably in New Guinea, and spread from there through
the Far and Middle East to the Mediterranean.3 Portuguese and Italian
merchants first introduced it in the Atlantic from the south of Portugal,
the Algarve, in the early fifteenth century.4 The crop spread to the
Madeiras around 1430, and then to other Atlantic islands, such as São
Tomé and the Cape Verdes.
The two main areas of cultivation were Madeira and São Tomé, each
with its own peculiarities. Madeira’s residents were small-scale sugar
farmers, whereas São Tomé’s cane growers worked on a larger scale,
using African slavery in a system that became the model for that of the
New World plantations. The difference between the islands can be attrib-
uted to climatic conditions. Madeira had a moderate and healthy climate,
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New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 487

which attracted many Portuguese and foreign settlers; labor was there-
fore less difficult to obtain. In contrast, settling on tropical and unhealthy
São Tomé meant almost certain death, and this island consequently
charmed fewer planters. Portugal profited most of all from enterprising
Genoese merchants, who had introduced the crop from the Mediter-
ranean to Portugal and the Atlantic islands. The Italian presence was
widely felt in Madeira, but it declined as Portuguese settlers became
more attracted to this island.5
The New Christian presence on Madeira continued until the early
seventeenth century. Jews and later New Christians who settled on the
island in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were primarily engaged in
the sugar trade, but only a few were sugar mill owners.6 Subsequently,
Madeira’s New Christian population declined rapidly, particularly fol-
lowing the Inquisition’s three visits to the island (in 1591, 1612, and 1620),
in conjunction with the effects of declining sugar cultivation.7 Most New
Christians left for Brazil and Northern Europe.
The São Tomé case demonstrates that the New Christian presence
was not always voluntary. The island served as a dumping ground for the
children of Jewish emigrants who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and
forcibly converted to Catholicism in Portugal. The Portuguese king ban-
ished to São Tomé all Spanish Sephardic children who had not paid a tax
for entering the country.8 Banishment was part of a royal policy to settle
the island. Although exile to São Tomé was virtually a death sentence,
some New Christian children did survive, but given their young age
upon arrival, it is unlikely that they had continued to adhere to their for-
mer religion.9 Their role was important, since all trade became dependent
on the local population, who were immune to tropical diseases.
In São Tomé, New Christians became integrated into local society.
Given the island’s small white population, New Christian status pre-
sented no obstacle to marriage; similarly, persons of Jewish descent did
not hesitate to marry Old Christians. Thus, men of Jewish descent ended
up becoming sugar cane growers, officials, and traders.
In Brazil, New Christians felt much safer. Unlike the situation in
Spanish America and Portuguese India, the Portuguese king never per-
mitted the Inquisition to gain a firm foothold in Brazil.10 Nevertheless,
through a system of visits and denunciations, almost two thousand
Brazilian New Christians were sent to Portugal and found guilty by the
Lisbon Inquisition in the eighteenth century alone.11
As in the Atlantic islands, New Christians in Brazil found in sugar a
quick means for upward social mobility. Recognition of their status, how-
ever, depended on their adoption of metropolitan and local norms and
values. Therefore, New Christians had to prove their “purity of blood”
(pureza de sangue) in order to assume their elite status in colonial society.
Thus, only through accepting Portuguese ideas of social ascendance
could New Christians become part of the colonial elite and diminish their
chances of being denounced by the Inquisition.
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488 | Ernst Pijning

Portuguese elite status was recognized through one’s “purity of

blood,” which was enhanced by one’s ancestors’ religion, race, and pro-
fession. One had to be of Old Christian origin and be free of any African
or American Indian blood, and one’s forefathers may not have engaged
in any mechanical trade or have worked with their hands. Thus, in order
to be accepted to the elite and to display one’s wealth and standing—by
means of assuming social responsibilities, by donations, by entering a
Catholic brotherhood or a third order of a religious congregation, by
holding office, or by becoming a member of a military order or an inform-
ant of the Inquisition (familiar)—one’s purity of blood had to be attested
to and recognized by a Portuguese council.
Official acceptance of New Christians’ elite status depended on their
denial of their own ancestry. New Christian elites publicly ignored their
Jewish background by seeking to hold offices or honorary functions that
were open only to Old Christians. Royal and local acceptance of New
Christians in these functions thus allowed the new elites to free them-
selves from their New Christian ancestry.
Before New Christians could remove the “stain” of their ancestry,
they had to avoid engaging in any manual labor and become landowners.
In 1803, an anonymous Brazilian complained, “Even the most humble
European emigrant, once he has left the shores of Portugal, is never again
to use the plough or hoe.”12 Such was the essence of Portuguese society in
the tropics: performing manual labor violated Portuguese concepts of sta-
tus. The very fact of having an ancestor who had been employed in a
“mechanical trade” sufficed to disqualify one for elite membership.
Hence, even artisans employed slaves, acted as overseers, and left their
trade whenever possible. The Portuguese, like every other European
country, had a similar bias against merchants: commercial activities were
seen as suspect and thus could not increase status.13 Many Brazilians pre-
ferred to leave trade after earning enough profits and credit in the mar-
ketplace, and the same was true for the New Christian population.
Though they may have been previously engaged in the commercial sec-
tor, New and Old Christians alike chose to leave trade for agriculture—
which in colonial Brazil meant sugar plantations—upon arrival in the
New World, whenever circumstances allowed them to do so.
New Christians followed a career pattern similar to other new Iber-
ian immigrants to the New World colonies—most arrived as bachelors
and first engaged in commercial activities.14 Portuguese emigrants were
hired by mercantile houses, which profited from their recent knowledge
of the Portuguese market and their connections with the other side of the
Atlantic. As David Grant Smith and Rae Flory’s study on merchants in
Salvador (Bahia) has demonstrated, about 90 percent of all merchants in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were born in Portugal
or the Atlantic islands.15 Between one-third and one-fourth of the traders
were married to merchants’ daughters, but the rest married daughters of
landowners, professionals, and artisans.16
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New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 489

For a newly arrived bachelor, a position in commerce was only tem-

porary. What was most important for his rise in social status was
landownership. If he did well in commerce, he could obtain the honorific
title of homem de negócio, in other words, a long-distance trader, especially
in sugar, tobacco, and brazilwood to Europe and slaves from Africa. A
newly arrived bachelor would start out humbly as an office clerk for a
merchant, with some side dealing of his own. He would subsequently
gamble by investing in one or two slave voyages, which were highly
profitable, but also highly risky.17 If he did well, he could either establish
his own shop (mercador de loja) or become a small trader (tratante), or, even
better, make a good match and marry the daughter of a homem de negócio.
After gaining profits and establishing credit through commercial
activities, the merchant or his offspring would turn to agriculture, the
military, the clergy, or officialdom to display his wealth and status. Social
ascendancy counted for more than monetary profits, but it needed a sub-
stantial investment. Sugar cultivation, the most noble of all professions,
was less profitable than trade in the commodity, even though building a
sugar mill and acquiring slaves required substantial capital and credit.18
The highest position to which a Brazilian could rise was a sugar mill
owner (senhor do engenho). A senhor do engenho was a sugar cultivator who
possessed his own sugar mill to grind the cane into molasses. Ennobled
by landownership, a senhor do engenho was far more than a sugar mill
owner. He was part of the elite of colonial society, and he could enhance
his status by becoming a government representative, either as a member
of a nearby municipal council or as a military officer in the backcountry.
Even today, large landowners bear the semi-military title of coronel and
have nearly absolute power over their fellow citizens in the hinterlands
of northeast Brazil.
The senhor do engenho rented out pieces of his land to other sugar
farmers called lavradores da cana, who did not possess their own mill, and
had to bring the cane to the senhor do engenho. These lavradores de cana had
thus a far lesser social status, but some might amass enough capital or
marry well enough to become a senhor do engenho themselves. Apart from
the senhor do engenho or lavrador da cana and his family, the only other
white persons on a sugar plantation were either an overseer or an engi-
neer (feitor), although sometimes even these positions were filled by
trusted and skilled slaves or freedmen (see Fig. 23.1)
Farmers (lavradores) of other crops, such as tobacco, and manioc were
considered to be of a lesser social status. However, Bahian tobacco gained
an excellent reputation and became an essential product in the slave
trade. Some tobacco farmers did own quite large plantations and could
therefore rise in social status, but none of these lavradores could approxi-
mate the elevated position of a senhor do engenho.
The ability of New Christians to reach and maintain a position in the
higher social strata of colonial Brazilian society differed among areas and
eras. Sugar was first cultivated in Pernambuco, the northeast of Brazil,
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490 | Ernst Pijning

Page 490

FIGURE 23.1 “Brasilise Suyker Werken.” The different stages of sugar production in Brazil, from Simon de Vries,
Curieuse aenmerckingen der bysonderste Oost en West-Indische verwonderens-waerdige dingen (Utrecht, 1682).
23 1/24/01 12:27 PM Page 491

New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 491

where settlers were in high demand and the crown and private owners of
captaincies (donatórios) appreciated any investment or colonization. The
Bahian region was also rich in sugar mills, and became the most impor-
tant sugar region after the Dutch invasions had destroyed many sugar
plantations in Pernambuco. Rio de Janeiro was a minor but not unimpor-
tant region for sugar cultivation. In this area, New Christians had many
possibilities to establish themselves.
In late sixteenth-century Pernambuco, participation in the Brazilian
sugar trade by colonists of Jewish descent was significant, but not domi-
nant. New Christian merchants had invested much in the trade of Per-
nambuco, the most important Brazilian sugar area before the Dutch
invasion of 1630.19 They used their personal commercial connections in
Portugal, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg to move sugar from
farmer to consumer, but this network was not necessarily ethnically
determined, for Old Christians also participated in these commercial
transactions.20 Moreover, the Amsterdam Sephardim did not try to inte-
grate the complete industry, for they rarely invested in the final stage of
production, the sugar refineries in the Netherlands.21
The situation in Pernambuco changed dramatically when the Dutch
occupied the area from 1630 to 1654. During that time, persons of Jewish
descent could be divided into two groups: those arriving with the Dutch
invaders who previously had lived as openly practicing Sephardic Jews
in the Low Countries, and those who had settled in the area as New Chris-
tians before the Dutch conquest.22 Both groups actively participated in
the cultivation and trade of sugar, but in different ways.23
The Jewish population of Recife was quite large, and principally
engaged in trade. About 1,450 Sephardim settled there, making up half of
the total white population; they were engaged mainly in the commercial
sector.24 Their expertise in trade may be explained by the specific advan-
tages that the Sephardim possessed. Speaking both Dutch and Por-
tuguese, they could use their linguistic skills to mediate between the two
populations. The newly arrived Dutch urban Jewish community had a
large stake in the sugar trade, but less so in the crop’s cultivation. In some
instances, up to one-third of the cargo of homeward-bound sugar vessels
was owned by Sephardim.25
The number of the newly arrived Dutch Sephardim involved in sugar
cultivation, however, was smaller (see Table 23.1). This limited participa-
tion contrasts sharply with that of the Portuguese New Christians, who
had already been settled for several decades in Pernambuco. The partici-
pation of New Christians as senhores do engenho in Pernambuco was more
substantial.26 There was a fairly even distribution of New Christians
among the agricultural (which included sugar cultivation) and commer-
cial sectors (including the sugar trade) of the Pernambucan economy.
As the Bahian case demonstrated, regional differences played an
important role regarding New Christian participation in the sugar trade.
In this Brazilian captaincy, New Christian involvement in the sugar trade
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492 | Ernst Pijning

TABLE 23.1 New Christians’ Professions, According to the Pernambuco Visit of

the Inquisition, 1593–1595

Profession Number of People Percentage

Agriculture (total) 14 42
Sugar mill owner 3 9
Sugar cane grower 2 6
Sugar mill employee 2 6
Farmer (general) 7 21
Commerce (total) 12 37
Trader 11 34
Commercial (general) 1 3
Professional (total) 7 21
Official 1 3
Artisan 3 9
Other urban professions 3 9
Total 33 100

Source: Heitor Furtado de Mendoça, Primeira Visitação do Santo Officio as Partes do Brasil:
Denunciações e Confissões de Pernambuco, 1593–1595, 2nd ed. (Recife, 1984).

was more significant than in Pernambuco. David Grant Smith has shown
that about 45 percent of the merchants of Salvador in the late seventeenth
century were of New Christian origin. This proportion was, however,
substantially lower than his finding for Lisbon, where in the same period
70 percent of the merchants were New Christians.27 More than in the Old
World, the New World provided New Christians a better opportunity to
involve themselves in more prestigious agricultural activities
New opportunities for enterprising farmers of any denomination
were promoted in the early colonization efforts. One of the striking ele-
ments of the royal instructions that Tomé de Souza, the first governor-
general of Brazil, received in 1548 while settling the new capital, São
Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, addressed the distribution of
land.28 It read that land should be liberally granted to any person who
possessed the capital to build a sugar mill and a fortified tower. In Bahia,
as in Pernambuco, all colonists were welcomed enthusiastically, and their
efforts to populate the New World were compensated with free land
grants. These colonists included people of diverse backgrounds, even for-
eigners of English, Flemish, and Italian origin, as well as New Christians.
No prosecution of crypto-Jews in Brazil and the Atlantic islands occurred
until the 1590s, under the Spanish regime of Philip II (Philip I of Portu-
gal) and his successors, with the exception of one Inquisitorial visit in
1570 to the Azores. In this initially favorable climate, New Christians set-
tled freely in Brazil and engaged in sugar cultivation and trade. As a con-
sequence, by the end of the sixteenth century, no less than 30 percent of
the Bahian sugar mills were owned by New Christians.29
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New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 493

Recently arrived New Christians quickly integrated into the sugar

economy, and some even made the rapid advance to become sugar mill
owners as first-generation immigrants. Whereas in the early seventeenth
century most New Christians in Bahia were predominantly Portuguese
born and active in the commercial sector, by the mid-seventeenth to the
early eighteenth century their most successful descendants had entered
the socially more elevated profession of sugar mill owner (see Tables 23.2
and 23.3).30 The absolute number of New Christians involved in trade as
opposed to agriculture remained very high, as the number of New Chris-
tian immigrants from Portugal had increased in the early eighteenth cen-
tury. However, the possibilities for promotion from commerce to
agriculture became more limited in the eighteenth century when the prof-
its from sugar diminished as a consequence of the lower sugar prices.
The surprisingly large involvement of New Christians in sugar culti-
vation in Rio de Janeiro stands in stark contrast to the cases of Bahia and
Pernambuco. Rio de Janeiro had a different economic make-up than the
other two captaincies.31 Unlike Bahia, Rio de Janeiro was not a major
source of sugar exports; rather, the town concentrated on trade with Rio
de la Plata (for silver), Minas Gerais (for gold), and Angola (for slaves).
In the early eighteenth century, a surprising number of Carioca New
Christians were engaged in sugar cultivation (see Table 23.4). Thus, New
Christians were more firmly established in this captaincy than in Per-
nambuco or Bahia. Agriculture, rather than commerce, was the main

TABLE 23.2 Professions of New Christians in Salvador, Bahia, 1618, According to

Inquisition Records

Profession Number of People Percentage

Agriculture (total) 16 30
Sugar mill owner 8 15
Sugar cane grower 4 7.5
Farmer (general) 4 7.5
Commerce (total) 26 48
Trader 17 31
Commercial (general) 9 17
Professional (total) 12 22
Official 2 4
Artisan 5 9
Other urban professions 5 9
Total 54 100

Sources: “Livro das Denunciações que se fizerão na Visitação do Santo Officio á Cidade do
Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos do Estado do Brasil, no anno de 1618,” Anais da Bib-
lioteca Nacional 49 (1927):76–198; Eduardo d’Oliveira França and Sonia A. Siqueira,
“Segunda Visitação do Santo Officio às Partes do Brasil pelo Inquisidor e Visitador o
Licenciado Marcos Texeira. Livro das Confissões e Ratificações da Bahia: 1618-1620,” Anais
do Museu Paulista 17 (1967):351–526.
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494 | Ernst Pijning

TABLE 23.3 Professions of Male New Christians Found Guilty by the

Inquisition, Bahia, 1700–1749 (According to Place of Birth)

No. of Place of Birth

Profession People Brazil Other Unknown
Agriculture (total) 12 (13%) 7 2 3
Sugar mill owner 8 4 1 3
Sugar cane grower 1 1 0 0
Farmer (general) 3 2 1 0

Commerce (total) 55 (60%) 7 39 9

Merchant 18 0 15 3
Trader 31 4 21 6
Commercial (general): 6 3 3 0

Professional (total) 24 (27%) 7 12 5

Artisan: 5 0 3 2
Other urban professions: 19 7 9 3
Total 91 (100%) 21 53 17

Source: Anita Novinsky, Inquisição, Rol dos Culpados, Fontes para a História do Brasil (Século
XVIII) (Rio de Janeiro, 1992).

TABLE 23.4 Professions and Places of Birth of Male New Christians Prosecuted
by the Inquisition, Rio de Janeiro, 1700–1749

No. of Place of Birth

Profession People Brazil Other Unknown
Agriculture (total) 101 (35%) 56 24 21
Sugar mill owner 35 17 9 9
Sugar cane Grower 30 15 10 5
Sugar mill employee 3 3 0 0
Farmer (general) 33 21 5 7
Commerce (total) 79 (27%) 29 35 15
Merchants 9 2 6 1
Traders 44 12 22 10
Commercial (general) 26 15 7 4
Professional (total) 111 (38%) 69 18 24
Official 6 3 2 1
Artisan 11 6 3 2
Other urban profession 94 60 13 21
Total 291 (100%) 154 77 60

Source: Anita Novinsky, Inquisição, Rol dos Culpados.

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New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 495

occupation of New Christians in Rio de Janeiro, and they had become a

substantial part of the city’s elite, which was closely intermarried (see
Table 23.5). Especially interesting is the large number of New Christian
sugar mill owners; in about twenty years between a third and a fourth of
all senhores do engenho were prosecuted by the Inquisition.32
The number of New Christian sugar mill owners was even higher
than that of the less prestigious sugar cane growers. In contrast, only a
few Carioca New Christians were established under the most prestigious
commercial title of homens de negócio. As in Bahia and Pernambuco, newly
arrived, Portuguese-born New Christians still preferred commerce.
Those who had already settled engaged in agriculture, preferably sugar
cultivation, or in major urban professions.
Rio de Janeiro was exceptional. Even though the region was a minor
sugar center, its agriculture was stronger than its commerce. The relative
weakness of the Carioca commercial sector has been noted before. Many
historians have cited the Marquis of Lavradio, a viceroy of the 1770s, who
complained that the merchants from Salvador had more capital than
those of Rio de Janeiro.33 Recently, the Brazilian historian João Fragoso
documented this discontinuity of the Carioca mercantile enterprise.34
In sum, persons of Jewish descent were well represented among the
sugar growers on the Atlantic islands and in Brazil. They helped to spread
sugar cultivation and its techniques. In Brazil, New Christians shared
many norms and values with Old Christians. They moved away from
commercial activities as soon as possible in order to climb the social ladder
through the more prestigious agricultural activities. However, different

TABLE 23.5 Professions of Partners of Carioca Female New Christians

Prosecuted by the Inquisition, 1700–1749

Profession Number of People Percentage

Agriculture (total) 89 51
Sugar mill owner 25 14
Sugar cane grower 31 18
Sugar mill employee 2 1
Farmer (general) 31 18
Commerce (total) 41 23
Merchant 2 1
Trader 22 12
Commercial (general) 17 10
Professional (total) 46 26
Official 3 2
Artisan 6 3
Other urban professions 37 21
Total 176 100

Source: Anita Novinsky, Inquisição, Rol dos Culpados.

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496 | Ernst Pijning

areas and eras reveal different patterns. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-

century Pernambuco and Bahia, there was a high degree of mobility.
Most of the New Christian sugar mill owners of Bahia were Portuguese
born; these immigrants appear to have entered quickly into the local
elites. In contrast, New Christians born in Brazil owned a substantial
number of the sugar mills in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, they seemed to
have created an exclusive elite through intermarriage within a closed cir-
cle. However, even though New Christians successfully achieved social
mobility and accommodated to Old Christian norms and values, this did
not completely free them from prosecution.
The prosecution of New Christians was strongly motivated by polit-
ical and economic factors. New Christians’ adaptation to local society
was therefore no guarantee against Inquisitorial arrests. New Christians
had to obscure their Sephardic ancestry by seeking offices, through
membership in religious and military orders, and even as informants for
the Inquisition. These were all positions that could only be obtained by
Old Christians.
Inquisitorial prosecutions were clustered in specific areas and eras.
Most Inquisition visits to Brazil and the Atlantic islands took place when
Portugal was ruled by Spanish kings, the so-called “Babylonian Captiv-
ity” (1580–1640), especially in the 1590s and 1610s. The same occurred in
Pernambuco, but hardly any New Christians were prosecuted in this area
during the eighteenth century, even though the Inquisition did bring
many New Christians from the neighboring captaincy of Paraíba to Lis-
bon for interrogation.35 In Bahia, the waves of prosecution were more
political than religious in nature, depending on circumstances such as the
Dutch invasion of northeast Brazil. One historian has even suggested that
they were used to whitewash the clergy’s failure to oppose the Dutch
invasion after the Dutch were on the defensive in the 1640s.36
Political circumstances were most obviously a background to the
prosecutions in Rio de Janeiro. Most of the New Christians were incar-
cerated in the 1710s. Indeed, the Inquisitorial activities were so strongly
felt that the French consul to Lisbon remarked in 1714 that the amount of
sugar from the Rio de Janeiro fleet had declined dramatically as a conse-
quence of their zealous activities.37 In the 1710s, a turbulent political
decade from both a local and international point of view, Rio de Janeiro
survived two invasions by the French, during the second of which the
city was effectively ransacked. By that time, the Portuguese king, fearing
foreign infiltration of the mining districts, had instituted a policy calling
for expulsion of all foreigners from Brazil.38 Moreover, the first two
decades of the eighteenth century displayed constant bickering between
ecclesiastical and civil authorities, leading to murders, arrests, suspen-
sions, judicial inquiries, and numerous complaints.39 The government of
Rio de Janeiro, a city strongly influenced by the gold rush, was unstable
and seriously challenged, a situation that lasted until Gomes Freire de
Andrade’s governorship in the 1730s. Although New Christians were
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New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 497

officially banned from holding any administrative position, in practice

they did. Manoel Correa Vasques, a New Christian, was the judge of the
customs, a powerful position in the Carioca administration; he had to sail
to Lisbon in order to clear himself of any suspicion of Judaizing.40 In 1709,
one member of the Municipal Council was dismissed for professing the
Jewish faith.41 The presence of New Christians on the Municipal Council
was to be expected. They made up a major part of the landed elites in Rio
de Janeiro and were therefore identified with the office that promoted the
interests of sugar planters.42
Local accusations against New Christians were more economically
based. Stephen Fortune has argued that British merchants on Barbados
and Jamaica petitioned against the presence of Jewish colleagues as soon
as they became competitors.43 In an initial stage, Jews were seen as a pow-
erful stimulus to the economy and invited to the territories. Later, they
were persecuted so that British traders might reap economic rewards.
Portuguese policies against Jews and New Christians showed similar
ambivalence. New Christians were accepted insofar as they could con-
tribute substantially to the Portuguese and Brazilian economies. Thus,
Spanish Jews were allowed to settle in the Portuguese territories in 1492
(as well as in the Atlantic islands) and to contribute to the Brazilian Com-
mercial Company in 1649, aiding the Portuguese in their fight against the
Dutch. Despite this degree of tolerance, however, New Christians re-
mained suspect to the Portuguese: former Jews were not to be trusted. If
economic competition became tense, New Christians were often de-
nounced for secretly professing the Jewish faith, as the cases of Cape
Verde, São Tomé, and Dutch Brazil have already shown.44 In contrast,
when politicians sought to stimulate commerce, they raised voices to wel-
come Jews back with a grant of religious freedom.45
As a consequence of this persecution, settlers of Jewish descent
sought, and often managed, to become integrated into local society. Social
status—the display of wealth rather than wealth itself—brought the
greatest personal advantages for New and Old Christians alike. New
Christians’ involvement in the cultivation of sugar was substantial, but
their success was enduring when they not only accommodated to the
Luso-Brazilian norms, but also denied their Jewish background. As the
Brazilian historian Evaldo Cabral de Mello has demonstrated in the case
of Pernambuco, this was exactly what the sugar elites did.46 It is telling
that after 1771, when the Portuguese crown formally abolished the legal
distinction between New and Old Christians, the number of Inquisition
informants (familiares) in Brazil remained quite substantial.47 Brazilian
society was flexible and incorporated New Christians if they had
acquired enough status and publicly denied their Jewish background.
Even though Portuguese authorities went to great lengths to prove that a
person was really pure of blood, Brazilian families were able to manipu-
late their genealogies, thereby officially changing a New Christian into an
Old Christian upon entering the ranks of the elite.48
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498 | Ernst Pijning

Acquisition of social status, accommodation to local society, and

denial of Jewish ancestry were the three steps that New Christians had to
take to avoid Inquisitorial prosecution. Portuguese inhabitants of the
tropics accepted this integration because they still retained the power to
co-opt powerful New Christians once they had complied with their
unwritten standards. Conveniently, legal concepts such as “race” and
“Jewishness” were negotiable. Thus, for “mulatto” we can read “New
Christian” in the following famous words spoken by a Pernambucan
man of color to an English settler (about a mulatto sea captain): “He used
to be a mulatto, but he isn’t any more. How can a member of the elite be
a mulatto?”49 Members of the elite were by definition Old Christians—
even if they weren’t.

Notes

I would like to thank Norman Fiering, John J. McCusker, Dirk Bönker, and Natalie Zacek
for their comments, and Jennifer Curtis Gage for her help with my English.

1. See Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic His-
tory (Cambridge, 1990).
2. António José Saraiva, Inquisição e Cristãos-Novos (Lisbon, 1969), 68–71.
3. On the spread of sugar cultivation, see Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, vol. 1 (Lon-
don, 1949).
4. Virginia Rau and Jorge Borges de Macedo, O Açucar da Madeira nos Fins do Século XV.
Problemas de Produção e Comércio (Funchal, 1962), 11.
5. José Manuel Azevedo e Silva, A Madeira e a Construcção do Mundo Atlântico (Séculos
XV–XVII), vol. 1 (Funchal, 1995), 404–6.
6. Rau and Macedo, O Açucar da Madeira, 23.
7. Azevedo e Silva, A Madeira e a Construcção, vol. 2, 998–991; for the Inquisition in the
Atlantic islands, see José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Cristãos-Novos e o Comércio no Atlân-
tico Meridorial (Com Enfoque nas Capitanias do Sul 1530–1680) (São Paulo, 1978), 246–51.
8. On sugar in São Tomé, see Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655: The
Key to Guinea (San Francisco, 1992), chap. 4.
9. Robert Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora: The Jews of the São Tomé
Island,” in The Expulsion of the Jews, 1492 and After, ed. Raymond B. Waddington and
Arthur H. Williamson (New York, 1994), 73–87.
10. There was some debate about the establishment of the Inquisition. See Royal Letters to
Inquisitor General, 22 July 1621 and 8 June 1623, in A Inquisição em Portugal. Séculos
XVI–XVII—Período Filipino, ed. Isaías Rosa Pereira (Lisbon, 1993), 117, 129–30.
11. Anita Novinsky, Inquisição, Rol dos Culpados, Fontes para a História do Brasil (Século
XVIII) (Rio de Janeiro, 1992).
12. Memorandum, 1803, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino [A.H.U.] (Lisbon), Rio de Janeiro,
papeis avulsos não catalogados [p.a.n.c.], caixa 204, doc. 9. “Que o Emigrado Europeo
da mais humilde classe, depois que sahe do Reino, nunca mais pega no Arado, nem
na Enchada.”
13. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London, 1969), 318–19. For
the British case, see, David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the
Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), chap. 9.
23 1/24/01 12:27 PM Page 499

New Christians as Sugar Cultivators | 499

14. See Catherine Lugar, “Merchants,” in Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America, ed.
Louisa S. Hoberman and Susan M. Socolow (Albuquerque, N.M., 1986), 47–76; Rae
Flory and David Grant Smith, “Bahian Merchants and Planters in the Seventeenth
and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58(4) (1978):
571–94; Susan M. Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires: Family and Commerce (Cam-
bridge, 1978).
15. Flory and Smith, “Bahian Merchants and Planters,” 575; Catharine Lugar gave an esti-
mate of 80 percent for late eighteenth-century Salvador in “The Merchant Community
of Salvador, Bahia, 1780–1830,” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony
Brook, 1980), 55.
16. Flory and Smith, “Bahian Merchants and Planters,” 578.
17. João L. R. Fragoso, Homens da Grossa Ventura: Acumulação e Hierarchia na Praça Mercan-
til do Rio de Janeiro (1790–1830) (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), 179–98.
18. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia
1550–1835 (Cambridge, 1985), 218–41.
19. José António Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação: Cristão Novos e Judeus em Pernambuco,
1542–1654 (Recife, 1989), chap. 2.
20. Daniel M. Swetschinski, “The Portuguese Jewish Merchants of Seventeenth-Century
Amsterdam: A Social Profile,” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1980), 219–23.
21. J. J. Reesse, De Suikerhandel van Amsterdam van het Begin der 17de Eeuw tot 1813 (Haar-
lem, 1908), chap. 6.
22. The major work in English on this topic is still Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil,
1624–1654 (Oxford, 1957). For an overview of Jews in Brazil until 1654, see Arnold Wiz-
nitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960).
23. Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, chaps. 1 and 2.
24. Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, Igreja e Estado no Brasil Holandês 1630–1654 (Recife, 1986), 369.
25. Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, 232.
26. Ibid., 7–9.
27. David G. Smith, “The Mercantile Class of Portugal and Brazil in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury: A Socioeconomic Study of the Merchants of Lisbon and Bahia,” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin, 1975), 280–81.
28. Regimento of Tomé de Souza in Ignacio Accioli de Cerqueira e Silva, Memórias Históri-
cas e Políticas da Provincia da Bahia, ed. Braz do Amaral, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Salvador, Bahia,
1919), 266, § 11.
29. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 265.
30. Novinsky, Cristãos Novos na Bahia, 176; Flory, “Bahian Society,” 97.
31. For a comparison between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, see A. J. R. Russell-Wood,
“Ports of Colonial Brazil,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the
Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville, Tenn.,
1991), 196–239. For an estimate of the New Christians in seventeenth-century Rio de
Janeiro, see José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Cristãos-Novos, Povoamento e Conquista do Solo
Brasileiro (1530–1680) (São Paulo, 1976), 62–64.
32. According to Antonil (1711), there were 136 sugar mills, while Rocha Pitta (1730) men-
tioned the number of 101. André João Antonil, Cultura e Opulência das Drogas e Minas,
ed. Andrée Mansuy (Paris, 1965), 274 and 274n. 1. For the activities of the Inquisition
in Rio de Janeiro, see Alberto Dines, Vínculos do Fogo, António José da Silva, o Judeu e
Outras Histórias da Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil (São Paulo, 1992); Lina Gorenstein
Ferreira da Silva, Heréticos e Impuros, a Inquisição e os Cristãos-Novos no Rio de Janeiro—
Século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro, 1995).
33. See, for instance, Larissa V. Brown, “Internal Commerce in a Colonial Economy: Rio de
Janeiro and Its Hinterland, 1790–1822,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1986), 577;
Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil: With a Special Reference to the Admin-
istration of the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968),
381–82. For a description of Luso-Brazilian slave traders, see Joseph C. Miller, “A Mar-
ginal Institution on the Margin of the Atlantic System: The Portuguese Southern
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500 | Ernst Pijning

Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic
System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge, 1991), 120–51.
34. Fragoso, Homens da Grossa Ventura, 179–98.
35. Novinsky, Inquisição. Rol dos Culpados.
36. Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Voyage of the Vassals: Royal Power, Noble Obligations, and
Merchant Capital before the Portuguese Restoration of Independence, 1624–1640,”
American Historical Review 96(3) (1991):735–62. For the Bahia prosecutions, see Novin-
sky, Cristãos Novos na Bahia; see also Sonia A. Siqueira, A Inquisição Portuguesa e a
Sociedade Colonial (São Paulo, 1978), 191–93.
37. Dispatch Du Verger to French secretary of state, 22 October 1714, Archives Nationales
Paris, Affaires Étrangeres, B/I/653, fl.178r–181v.
38. Manoel S. Cardozo, “The Brazilian Gold Rush,” The Americas 3 (1946):137–60; Ernst
Pijning, “Passive Resistance: Portuguese Diplomacy of Contraband Trade During King
John V’s Reign (1706–1750),” Arquipélago-História, 2nd series, 2 (1997):171–91.
39. See, for instance, dispatch Juiz de Fora to king, 19 December 1707, A.H.U., Rio de
Janeiro, papeis avulsos catalogados [p.a.c.] 3051; idem to idem, 2 February 1708,
A.H.U., Rio de Janeiro, p.a.c., 3164–3197; Consultation Overseas Council, 2 February
1709, A.H.U., Rio de Janeiro, p.a.c., 3145; idem, 4 November 1715, A.H.U., Rio de
Janeiro, p.a.c., 3434–3436; idem. 27 August 1716, A.H.U., códice 233, fl.103r–105r.
40. Dispatch Manoel Correa Vasques to king, 24 November 1722, A.H.U., Rio de Janeiro,
p.a.n.c., caixa 13, doc. 22.
41. Representation Municipal Council to king, 26 June 1709, A.H.U., Rio de Janeiro,
p.a.n.c., caixa 8, doc. 39.
42. See, for instance, Representation of Municipal Council to king, 6 November 1766,
A.H.U., Rio de Janeiro, p.a.n.c., caixa 86, doc. 37. Anita Novinsky observed the same
for seventeenth-century Salvador, where quite a few New Christians condemned by
the Inquisition had served in the Municipal Council (Novinsky, Cristãos Novos na
Bahia, 84–87).
43. Stephen A. Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce,
1650–1750 (Gainesville, Fla., 1984).
44. Luís de Albuquerque and Maria Emília Madeira Santos, eds., História Geral de Cabo
Verde, vol. 1 (Lisbon, 1991), 169; Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, chap. 3; Schalk-
wijk, A Igreja, 376–77; Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment.”
45. See, for example, Dom Luís da Cunha, Instrucções Inéditas de Dom Luís da Cunha a Marco
António de Azevedo Coutinho, ed. Pedro de Azevedo (Coimbra, 1929), 98–99; Letter A.
Castres to Mr. Amayrand, 26 June 1753, Public Record Office, State Papers Portugal 89,
vol. 48, fl.149r–152v; “Plano Geral de Comércio para o Reyno de Portugal,” [1767],
British Library, Egerton 528, fl.137r–223r; Domingos Vandelli, “Memória sobre a
Entrada dos Judeus em Portugal,” and “Memória II sobre os Judeus,” in Aritmética
Política, Economia e Finanças, ed. José Vicente Serrão (Lisbon, 1994), 235–40; Daniel M.
Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in ‘Europe’s Other Sea’: The Adventure of
Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish History 72 (1982):212–13.
46. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O Nome e o Sangue. Uma Fraude Genealógica no Pernambuco
Colonial (São Paulo, 1989).
47. Francisco Bethencourt, História das Inquisições, Portugal, Espanha e Itália (Lisbon,
1994), 129.
48. Cabral de Mello, O Nome e o Sangue, passim.
49. Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil in the Years from 1809 to 1815, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1817),
175–76.
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– Chapter 24 –

THE JEWISH MOMENT AND THE

TWO EXPANSION SYSTEM S IN THE
ATLANTIC, 1580–1650

Pieter Emmer

Introduction

W HY DID EUROPE EXPAND? Was it because the smallest of the conti-

nents had developed so many dynamic and innovative elements
that it had to spill over? Or was it the other way around—that the process
of rapid innovation and competition pushed out those who could not
keep pace with the developments at home, and who by moving overseas
hoped to re-create the world they had lost in Europe?1
To my mind there are many reasons to support the view that the
European expansion contained both progressive and regressive elements.
In fact, it is possible to argue that there came to exist two expansion sys-
tems, one dominated by the Iberians and one dominated by Northwest
Europeans, mainly the British, French, and Dutch. In the Iberian, or first,
expansion system, the conservative elements dominated the process,
while in the second expansion system, the innovative elements gained
the upper hand.
I want to consider here various factors that were part of both expan-
sion systems, and to stress that neither of the two expansion systems could
have grown had it not been for the activities of Jews, crypto-Jews and New
Christians, who played a distinct role in both systems. This group con-
stituted the innovative element in the Iberian system of overseas expan-
sion, and after 1580 they were instrumental in transferring the know-how
and the techniques of innovation—indeed, the positive attitude toward
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502 | Pieter Emmer

discovery—to the second system. However, after around 1650 the Jewish
moment in the expansion of Europe had passed. The Jews had been
expelled or had moved from the Iberian world and thus could not oppose
the conservative tendencies of the first expansion system. Exactly the
opposite development ended the role of the Jews as founding innovators
of the second expansion system. In Northwest Europe the innovative par-
ticipation of Jewish intercontinental settlers, traders, and investors was
quickly dwarfed by that of their gentile counterparts. The Jews remained
relatively important as traders and planters in the West Indies, but their
family networks could no longer compete with the rapidly increasing
number of non-Jewish merchants, private firms, and companies operat-
ing outside Europe.
In the first section of this chapter, the two expansion systems are
described. In the second section, the special link between the Jews and
the system of Iberian commerce and colonization is examined. In the
third section, the construction of the second expansion system is consid-
ered, as well as the vital role of Jews in the various transfers between the
two systems. In the last paragraphs, we look at the aftermath of the Jew-
ish moment in the expansion of Europe.

The Two Expansion Systems

The Iberians created a system of overseas trade and settlements that was
novel at the beginning, but which soon turned out to be predominantly
conservative, i.e., characterized by stagnant economic growth and rela-
tively few geo-political and demographic changes. In Africa and Asia,
the first expansion system only established trading forts. Yet, the global
web of trading positions was in itself an innovation, which offered
wealthy European consumers a vast array of new Asian and African
goods. Neither Spain nor Portugal, however, was able to exert much
influence on the production of these products. They could not alter the
production process, nor were they able to create important industries at
home to process semi-finished products from overseas. With the end of
the virtual Iberian monopoly on interoceanic trade, which had been in
force for more than a century after 1500, the second expansion system
developed. The new system saw the installation of a similar network of
trading posts in Africa and Asia. This competition brought stagnation
and decline to the Iberians. Part of that stagnation, no doubt, could be
blamed on the papal treaty that divided the non-European world
between the Spanish and Portuguese, precluding competition between
them, for competition became the driving force behind the growth of the
second expansion system.
A similar division of spheres of influence occurred in the New World,
where most conquests were Spanish and only Brazil was in the hands of
the Portuguese. In the Americas, the Iberians went far beyond establishing
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The Jewish Moment | 503

trading posts, creating settlements soon after initial contacts; however,

few of these settlements in Spanish America were dynamic. Their agri-
cultural sector was geared to subsistence farming, and production for
export was limited. The main export commodity of Spanish America was
precious metal, and even that sector of the economy did not show con-
tinued growth, for over time, the silver and gold deposits in the New
World became more expensive to mine.2
That leaves us with the only truly dynamic sector of the colonial New
World in this period: the plantation belt of Brazil, which produced sugar
for the world market. It was not difficult to increase the amount of land
available for the production of sugar since the owners, the Amerindians,
could be removed either by treaty or by war at no great cost. Moreover,
the importation of machinery and “labor in the cane” could take place in
increasing quantities without much restraint. All this suggested that
Brazil would become a booming producer of plantation cash crops in
ever increasing quantities. In fact, that is what happened—at least until
the middle of the seventeenth century. It must be noted that the early
growth of the Brazilian plantation economy could not have taken place
without the contribution of New Christians who had emigrated from the
Iberian Peninsula and without the aid of investors, traders, and shipping
firms from Northwest Europe.3
The overseas expansion of the British, French, and Dutch got under
way a century after the Iberians had started the process. They may have
been late, but as soon as their ships crossed the oceans, the impact of the
second wave of discoveries, conquests, and settlements was dramatic.
True, in Africa and Asia the Northwest Europeans could do little more
than create trading establishments, for their immunity from tropical dis-
ease was perhaps even less than that of the Iberians. In the New World,
however, the Northwest Europeans were able to duplicate the Iberian
policy of founding settlement colonies. As in Spanish America, the set-
tlers in British, French, and Dutch North America were mainly interested
in subsistence farming and interregional trade—with the exception of
New England, which was able to develop transoceanic trading to an
extent that surpassed the volume of overseas trading generated by the
merchant communities of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. In addition to
trade and settlement, the Northwest Europeans also developed a planta-
tion zone, situated in the southeast of North America and in the
Caribbean. At first glance, the Northwest Europeans might seem only to
have replicated the first expansion system.4
That conclusion, however, would be wrong. On the surface, the trad-
ing networks of the first and second systems in Africa and Asia were
similar, but in reality there was a great quantitative difference, for the
British, the French, and the Dutch sent many more ships and traded in
much larger quantities than the Iberians. Great differences—social, eco-
nomic, and religious—can also be observed between the two systems
with regard to the settlement of colonies. In many of the Iberian colonies
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504 | Pieter Emmer

the Roman Catholic Church had more political power and influence than
it possessed even in Spain and Portugal. This also applied to French
North America, but much less so to the French Caribbean. In the settle-
ment colonies of the second expansion system, on the other hand, the
competing influence of both official and dissenting Churches of North-
west Europe prevented an analogous situation in which a single reli-
gious group would virtually exclude all others. Consequently, British
and Dutch North America became a haven for a variety of religious
refugees from Europe. In the same fashion, the economic and social
make-up of the settlers in North America did not stimulate the creation
of large haciendas with their web of semi-feudal relations, incorporating
a substantial Amerindian element. In North America, differences in
income, status, and wealth were smaller than in colonial South America,
which explains why economic growth in the settlement colonies of the
second system was more rapid than in those of the first system. Particu-
lar attention should be paid, also, to the different ways in which immi-
gration was organized. In the case of economic expansion, the employers
of colonial North America drew labor from the market of mobile prole-
tarian labor in Northwest Europe. Neither Spain nor Portugal had such
a labor market.5
The economic differences between the first and second expansion
systems can best be observed in the distinct plantation belts of Brazil and
the Caribbean. From the beginning to the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, when slavery was abolished, the Caribbean and North American
cash crop plantations showed unrivaled economic growth. These planta-
tions can be compared with the oil-exporting states of the Middle East
today. In comparison, the growth of the Brazilian cash crop sector was
much slower and certainly much more uneven. The same discrepancy is
evident between the export sectors of the Spanish and North American
economies. In both the Portuguese and Spanish cases, non-Iberian
investors, merchants, and shipping firms played an important if not a
dominant role. At times, it even seemed as if the export sector of the first
expansion system had become a function of the second one.6
The origins of this massive commercial hemorrhaging of the first
expansion system go back to the emigration of the Jews and New Chris-
tians from the Iberian Peninsula. In order to survive, these exiles and
emigrants took their commercial know-how, their connections and fam-
ily ties, and their international language skills to the port cities of the
second system, to commercial centers such as Bayonne, Bordeaux, Am-
sterdam, London, and Hamburg. By alienating the Jews, crypto-Jews,
and New Christians, the trading sector of Spain and Portugal appears to
have hurt itself badly, much more so than the French mercantile and pro-
fessional sectors were damaged after the expulsion of the Huguenots a
century later.7
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The Jewish Moment | 505

The Jews and the First Expansion System

An Iberian venture into the exploration of the world might have followed
naturally from the reconquista of the peninsula. Because Spain and Portu-
gal were not among the premier trading nations in Europe, this develop-
ment did not take place. The Italian city-states, not Spain and Portugal,
were the dominant shippers of inter-European trade. After 1492, they
continued their commercial ventures behind Spanish and Portuguese
fronts. In fact, the Spanish and Portuguese nobility seemed to be inter-
ested only in the power and politics of the expansion movement, not in
its commercial opportunities.8
In the course of the fifteenth century, the Genoese lost their com-
mercial dominance as the bulk of European trade shifted from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, yet Spain itself was unable to fill the gap.
Surely, many port cities stimulated the rise of a group of Spanish mer-
chants and entrepreneurs, but their number and their abilities always
fell short of what was required. Throughout the history of Spain, non-
Spanish merchants dominated the most dynamic sectors of its trade,
commerce, and finance, both inside and outside Europe. The actual
development of commercial and financial connections with Spanish
America is a case in point. On paper, the Spanish merchants had every-
thing under control. Once or twice a year, a convoy of ships (flotas)
would sail to the New World carrying products as ordered by the
colonists, while on the return voyage the Spanish ships would carry pre-
cious metals and some other high-value products. Every effort was
made to exclude competition. Unfortunately for the Spanish merchants,
the export sector of their New World economy was far more dynamic
than the flota system allowed for.
The production of the silver mines, for example, could be increased
only when more labor became available. Since the Spanish were unable
to import more mobile labor from the metropolis by instituting a system
of indentured labor, the only alternative was the importation of African
slaves. The Spanish commercial community, however, never succeeded in
developing a slave trade of its own. As a result, the central agency in
charge of the commercial connections between Spain and Spanish Amer-
ica (the Casa de Contratación in Seville) had to arrange for foreigners to
provide their colonies with slaves, but these contracts were based on the
demand for slaves as recorded in past years and could not be continually
adjusted when suddenly more slaves were needed. As a result, large
numbers of slaves were smuggled in by non-Spanish slave suppliers.9
Similarly, major quantities of Spanish American exports “leaked”
away to non-Spanish destinations in exchange for these very imports
that Spanish manufacturers could not provide. It seems that neither the
Spanish government nor the Spanish mercantile elite invested the prof-
its from its American colonies in ways that would boost the productive
capacities of the metropolis. Most of the gold and silver from America
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506 | Pieter Emmer

was consumed in an attempt to prevent the decline of Spain’s military

position in Europe, notably in Italy and Flanders.10
Portugal, on the other hand, seems to have reacted much more ade-
quately to the commercial challenges of its overseas expansion, at least
until 1600. The monarchy and nobility in Portugal were no less unsym-
pathetic to trade and commerce than was Spain. However, unlike Spain,
Portugal had not expelled its Jews as early as 1492, and during the six-
teenth century the Portuguese Jews (now converted to Christianity, at
least nominally) together with merchants from Italy were the driving
force behind the foundation of a worldwide Portuguese trading network.
Of course, we should keep in mind that this trading network was rather
limited in scope and volume. The Portuguese had only a few strongholds
in Asia and Africa, and much of their “trade” consisted of looting the
ships of Arabs, Chinese, and Indian traders. Moreover, the initial phase of
Portuguese exploitation of Brazil was also very modest and did not
require much investment in labor and equipment—until the beginning of
sugar cultivation after the middle of the sixteenth century.11
Yet there was a Portuguese trade empire in the making, and the Jews
and New Christians played an important if not dominant role in it.
Some historians even claim that all merchants in Portugal were of Jew-
ish origin since the contemporary sources use homens de negócio synony-
mously with Cristãos novos and conversos. Others estimate that about
one-third of all merchants in Portugal were of Jewish descent. Even the
king of Spain at the time seemed to have equated Portuguese merchants
and financiers with New Christians, since he hesitated to ask them for
help in financing his wars.12
The dominant New Christian and crypto-Jewish presence in Por-
tuguese commerce came to an abrupt end toward the latter part of the
sixteenth century when Portugal began to persecute its baptized Jews
and recent converts from Judaism. The Inquisition had been active in Por-
tugal since 1547, but its actions became more severe once the king of
Spain, Philip II, also became the king of Portugal. The results of this reli-
gious cleansing were disastrous: “The main change between the mid-six-
teenth century and the mid-eighteenth century was that the Portuguese
merchants had disappeared as a commercial force.”13 The Portuguese
New Christians took up residence first in the colonies such as Angola and
Brazil and, when that became difficult or impossible, in the port cities of
Italy, France, the Low Countries, England, and in some Hanseatic cities.
The dispersion of New Christian families to Madeira, São Tomé, Angola,
Brazil, and the trading cities of Northwest Europe turned out to be a com-
mercial blessing in disguise. The diaspora of the New Christians coin-
cided with the development of the second Atlantic system of trade and
settlement, and the New Christians (in some cases returning to Judaism)
were the first to exploit the new economic opportunities by transferring
an important percentage of the trade in goods and slaves between Portu-
gal and West Africa and Angola; the production, transport, and sale of
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The Jewish Moment | 507

cash crops from Brazil; and the slave trade between Africa and the New
World to the second system.14
Why did Portugal deliberately shoot itself in the foot by virtually
expelling its commercial class? The answer is that Portugal during the
ancien régime was a very religious country, and the king and the nobility
could do little to stop the policies of the Catholic Church. The Church in
Portugal controlled about a third of all economic activities. In Lisbon
alone there were five thousand to six thousand begging friars. Within the
Catholic Church, the Inquisition had a large degree of autonomy. Its vic-
tims had to surrender all their assets, which the Inquisition used to find
more victims. Many Portuguese merchants disappeared without a trace
into this vortex, because the Inquisition knew that there were many
crypto-Jews among the New Christian mercantile groups and that they
usually possessed considerable wealth. The Inquisition tended to stifle all
trade, not only that of vulnerable merchants. Credit extended to Por-
tuguese merchants could not be retrieved if the debtor had been put in
prison by the Inquisition. Hence non-Portuguese merchants became
reluctant to do business with their Portuguese counterparts.15
Of course, there is debate about the causes of Portugal’s decline, not
all of which were directly related to the persecution of New Christians. It
has been pointed out that the profits Portugal derived from non-Euro-
pean trade were bound to decline as soon as the Dutch, the French, and
the British ended the Iberian monopoly. It has also been suggested that
the Portuguese traders would have lost ground even had the New Chris-
tians remained because these merchants had only family networks to rely
on, which were not capable of reaching the same level of achievement as
that of the overseas trading companies of Northwest Europe.16
Despite these explanations, there can be no doubt that the root cause
of Portugal’s economic decline was the emigration of its merchant class,
the intimidation of those merchants who remained, and the absence of an
established class of manufacturers. Many of these same causes also apply
to Spain. Both countries were monolithically Catholic and, after the
departure of the Jews and their descendants, did not even have the
advantage of a “Huguenot challenge,” as had France. No wonder that
later, during the seventeenth century, some Portuguese pamphleteers
pleaded for the return of the expelled Cristãos novos, but it was too late.
“Portugal, awash in gold, knew itself to be poor because it had to pay out
that same gold to England and other industrial nations in order to feed
and cloth its own inhabitants with foreign products, traded by foreign
merchants and conveyed in foreign ships.”17

The Jews and the Second Expansion System

In view of the disastrously anti-commercial policies of the Spanish and

the Portuguese governments, it seems strange that it took the countries of
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508 | Pieter Emmer

Northwest Europe so long to break the monopoly of trade and coloniza-

tion in the overseas world; however, neither France nor England had its
own house in order. It was the Dutch who took the lead in the first global
war to break the Iberian hold on Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
How did the Dutch become a world power (albeit for only half a
century) between 1600 and 1650? It was as though the whole country
turned into one gigantic shipyard. Merchants abounded, sending ships
everywhere in order to buy and sell. Industries abounded, although at
that time there was only small-scale manufacturing rather than the
large-scale factories we have known since the Industrial Revolution.
How were the Dutch able to become the center of the world? Surely,
Great Britain, with more space and double the population, or France,
with six times the population of Holland, both had a greater chance of
becoming world powers before that small, swampy area on the shores of
the North Sea.
There are several reasons why the Netherlands gained ascendancy,
but the three most important factors are: (1) the Dutch internal political
structure, (2) the Dutch position in international politics at the time,
and (3) the superior skills of the Dutch in shipbuilding, manufacturing,
and management.
Although these advantages did help the Dutch to become the world’s
most important traders, they were not enough to keep the Dutch in
ascendancy for long. After the middle of the seventeenth century, both
France and England overtook the Netherlands; they simply had more
people, more money, and a much larger internal market. It is remarkable,
in fact, that the Dutch were able to become the leading commercial nation
in the world, even for a relatively brief period.
England and France should have taken the lead in the fight against the
Iberians for mastery of the oceans. England, however, first turned west
toward Ireland, and later had to contend with civil war and regional con-
flicts as parts of Scotland and Ireland were incorporated into the United
Kingdom. Similarly, religious and regional problems absorbed much of
the energy of the French central government in Paris. That is when the
Dutch saw their chance. They declared themselves to be no longer sub-
servient to the king of Spain, and in so doing they became champions of
local government. Actually, a central Dutch state did not exist; the con-
stituent components—seven independent Dutch states—were the real
powers. Among these states, Holland was the most influential. Within the
state of Holland the cities decided what had to be done. The cities in Hol-
land were all heavily involved in commercial expansion, and the city gov-
ernments were mainly elected by and composed of merchants.
In addition to their political structure, the organizational talents of
the Dutch should be stressed. The shipping firms were able to offer
freight rates cheaper than their foreign competitors. Dutch merchants
were able to provide an assortment of goods (cloth, spices, grain, and tim-
ber, just to name a few) at unbeatable prices. Unlike Spain and Portugal,
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The Jewish Moment | 509

and long before they had started to trade globally, the Dutch had worked
hard to become the transit market of Europe, in which goods from south-
ern Europe were exchanged against goods from the Baltic. Last, but not
least, the Dutch managed to create an environment in which innovations
not only could be introduced, but also applied. The decentralized politi-
cal structure of the Dutch Republic made it very difficult to restrict reli-
gious and other freedoms, which was exactly the environment that
innovators, many arriving from abroad, needed: a society in which they
were able to read and write what they wanted to and where new designs
could be tried out for such diverse items as ships, fire extinguishers, lim-
ited companies, insurance, drainage pumps (for reclaiming land), cartog-
raphy, and optical instruments.18
A decentralized government made up of merchants, the availability
of cheap goods and services, and an innovative environment were the
three most important factors that enabled the Netherlands to take the
lead in world trade. However, it should be stressed again that none of
these factors provided the Dutch with a structural advantage over their
competitors. Political decentralization might work wonders for the devel-
opment of private commerce, but not for the development of empire. In
the long run, a strong, central government backed by an efficient tax sys-
tem would be better able to protect an overseas empire by providing suf-
ficient military and naval power. Between 1620 and 1670 the Dutch
merchants were interested in one-time investments and in conquest, but
they were not willing to keep paying the large overhead costs necessary
to secure their overseas colonies. A diverse market with low prices and
cheap freightage was not a great advantage when the number of naval
guns and the size of armies decided the fate of overseas colonies.
It was the Portuguese immigrants who taught the Dutch to make
money without possessing a large overseas empire. After the immigrants
had moved from Portugal, they still profited from the Portuguese empire
by developing direct trade with Africa and Brazil, in addition to the tri-
angular trade from their new hometowns. After the Portuguese Jews fled
the crumbling Dutch colony in Brazil, they developed an illegal but prof-
itable trade with Spanish America as well as the equally illegal intercolo-
nial trade in the Caribbean. Having imitated the Sephardic example in
siphoning off the trade to and from Brazil, the Dutch between 1620 and
1660 temporarily deviated from the Jewish example of trade without
empire by conquering part of Brazil, which cost them dearly. After the
loss of Brazil, the Dutch once again specialized in trade without empire,
and did very well.
Let us return to the first period between 1580 and 1620, when the
Dutch started to explore the world beyond Europe and when the New
Christians were looking for another foothold in Western Europe after
their emigration from the Iberian empire. Amsterdam was an attractive
alternative, since the New Christians were granted the right to conduct
trade on an equal footing with Dutch merchants and to practice Judaism
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510 | Pieter Emmer

freely there. However, Portuguese emigrants were well aware of the fact
that many other cities were offering similar conditions. Every time the
Dutch navy confiscated the ships arriving from Spanish and Portuguese
harbors (considered enemy territory), the Portuguese Jews threatened to
leave Holland and go elsewhere. Usually, these ships and their cargoes
were handed back to the Sephardic merchants of Amsterdam. From the
relevant documents it is possible to see that the Amsterdam Sephardic
community specialized in the sugar trade. Recent research further
allows us to conclude that the Portuguese Jews controlled about 4 to 8
percent of all Dutch trade and about 8 to 16 percent of all Amsterdam
trade. The Amsterdam department of the famous Dutch East India Com-
pany did not contribute as much trade to the economy of the city as did
the Sephardim!19
The advantage of the Sephardic community in the sugar trade can be
explained by the fact that many had first moved to the Atlantic islands and
Brazil after their departure from Portugal. The production and trade of
sugar were the principal economic activities of the Portuguese colonies.
As a case in point, one of the founding members of the Portuguese com-
munity in Amsterdam, Jacob Lopes da Costa, should be mentioned. He
obtained his wealth during his residence in Brazil as a tax farmer and as
the owner of a sugar mill. Another member of the Sephardic community,
Duarte Saraiva (1572–1650), was a member of a well-to-do Pernambuco
family. He married in Amsterdam in 1598, returned to Brazil in 1612, and
went again to Amsterdam during the Dutch occupation of Recife
(1630–1654). Some members of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam
had resided previously in Hamburg, Portugal, and Venice.20
The contracts in the archives of some of the notaries public in Ams-
terdam show how the Sephardic family network operated. In one such
contract between the owner of a ship and an Amsterdam Sephardic mer-
chant, the latter is identified as the charterer of the ship. According to this
contract, the chartered ship would leave the port of Dantzig with grain
and sail to the southern coast of Spain or to the northern coast of
Morocco, where the grain was to be unloaded. From there, the ship
would proceed to Tenerife or Cadiz and take in wine, which was to be
brought to Bahia in Brazil. From Brazil the ship would sail to Lisbon
loaded with sugar. In most of the ports mentioned, a family member of
the Amsterdam merchant, or at least a common representative shared by
several Sephardic families, would be residing. In the sugar trade, family
networks were indispensable, which explains why the Sephardim were
able to remain the dominant importers of sugar in Amsterdam until the
Dutch conquest of part of Brazil.21
The founders of the Dutch West India Company wanted to include
the profitable sugar trade with Brazil as part of its monopoly.22 Of course,
the Amsterdam Jews resisted and pleaded to keep their position in the
sugar trade to Brazil an exclusive privilege. The cities in North Holland
that specialized in the salt trade to the Caribbean were similarly opposed
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The Jewish Moment | 511

to the inclusion of their trade in the Company’s monopoly. In the period

before the foundation of the Dutch West India Company, there had been
a truce for twelve years (1609–21) between Iberia and Holland. During
that time the trade between Brazil and Amsterdam had prospered as
never before, so much so that the South American colony seemed to have
provided more commercial profits to the Dutch than to its imperial rulers,
the Portuguese. Clearly, the incorporation of the trade to Brazil in the
West India Company’s monopoly could endanger the position of the
Sephardic Jews in this trade. In a document dated 1622, the Sephardim of
Amsterdam put in a passionate plea to be allowed to retain their particu-
lar trade niche. The document begins with a quotation from the 1600 safe-
guard allowing the Portuguese Jews in the Netherlands to trade with
Brazil by way of Portugal. The Jews write that they had conducted trade
with Brazil for about forty years, mainly through the Portuguese harbors
of Viana and Oporto, as well as Lisbon. This trade had prospered espe-
cially during the period of the truce.

During these 12 years of peace shipping and commerce increased so consid-

erably that more than 10, 12 and even 15 ships were built in this country each
year. Those ships brought here by way of Portugal 40, 50 thousands of cases
of sugar each year, as well as Brazil wood, ginger, cotton, hides and other
goods. We were so successful that during that 12-year period we drove from
these waters all the Portuguese caravels that used to carry the sugar. This was
caused by the capacity of our ships, so that we could attract half, even two-
thirds of this trade to ourselves.23

Next the Sephardim described the “profits this province enjoy from this
shipping and commerce.”

Building the ships stimulated employment in shipbuilding and shipping

through the import of trunks for masts, which were not available in the
Netherlands. The Brazil trade also stimulated the export of Dutch merchan-
dise. But most important was the sugar trade itself. It caused the number of
sugar refineries in Amsterdam to increase from three to twenty-five in 50
years. Some of the refineries processed 1,500 cases of sugar each year, and the
refined product was exported to other countries. At the end of this document
the Sephardim emphasized that the Brazil trade was their main domain, not
commerce with the East Indies or other areas.24

The Jewish share in the export of sugar from Portuguese Brazil to the
Netherlands amounted to more than 50 percent. Two-thirds of this trade
was in the hands of only twenty-seven Jewish merchants, and their trade
niche was severely threatened when the Dutch West India Company
launched a series of massive attacks on Portuguese Brazil beginning in
1624. The unobtrusive Jewish penetration of the Brazil sugar trade was
replaced by a policy of power politics. The results were disastrous. Dur-
ing the occupation of Pernambuco, the Dutch West India Company was
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512 | Pieter Emmer

indeed able to obtain sugar from its own colony, but only for a couple of
years. The overhead expenses turned the profits of the Brazil trade into a
bottomless deficit, and as a result the Dutch West India Company lost its
Brazilian possessions again to the Portuguese—without the restoration of
the old informal trading networks. In 1674 the Dutch West India Com-
pany went bankrupt, which confirmed the wisdom of the Sephardic
attempt to steer clear of the Company and preserve its own carefully
developed links with Brazil. No wonder relatively few Jewish merchants
in Amsterdam invested in the Dutch West India Company.25
The conquest of Brazil by the Dutch did offer some new opportuni-
ties to the Sephardic community. Large numbers of Portuguese planters
and owners of sugar mills fled to the south of Brazil, which remained in
Portuguese hands. That abandonment enabled the Dutch as well as
Sephardic Jews from Holland to take over Portuguese plantations and
sugar mills. Their profits, however, must have been limited, since they
lost everything once the Dutch had to surrender the colony in 1654.26
The diaspora of about 1,500 Sephardic Jews from Dutch Brazil at the
time of the reconquest by Portugal was instrumental in developing a
“second Brazil” in the Caribbean. After an initial period during which the
European settlers in the Caribbean grew tobacco for export, there was
room for change when competition from tobacco growers in Virginia
became more intense. Sometime after 1640, the technique of producing
sugar was introduced in Barbados, and over time most Caribbean
colonies took up producing sugar cane, since the conditions in the region
were very favorable. The nucleus of each community of sugar planters in
the region was made up of sugar planters from Dutch Brazil, among them
an unknown percentage of Sephardim. Other Sephardim settled in the
Caribbean to specialize in trade, and the same can be said of those
Sephardic exiles who moved from Dutch Brazil to North America. After
1650, however, the Sephardic Jews’ contribution to the Atlantic economy
was small because their privileged position in the illegal trade to and
from Portuguese Brazil had been destroyed.27

The End of the Jewish Moment in the Atlantic

After the middle of the seventeenth century, the strategic position of the
Sephardim in Atlantic commerce had come to an end. The volume and
the complexity of the Atlantic trade began to grow so rapidly that the
Jewish share in it was dwarfed. The motor behind this rapid growth in
trade was situated in the second expansion system. The plantation belts
in North America and in the Caribbean expanded unlike any other region
in the Atlantic, as is illustrated by the dramatic increase in the number of
slaves exported from Africa to the New World. Between 1600 and 1650,
each year on average 7,500 slaves were imported into the New World;
between 1650 and 1700, the annual figure averaged 19,400. Jews and
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The Jewish Moment | 513

Cristãos novos had played a role in the slave trade before 1650. Their
impact was probably at its peak when Sephardic Jews from Portugal
moved to Amsterdam and continued their participation in the sugar and
slave trades from there. By so doing they taught Dutch merchants how to
conduct this trade. However, only non-Jewish Dutch merchants were
responsible for the dramatic increase of the slave trade after 1635.28
The rapid growth of the Atlantic trade called for new forms of organ-
ization. The single Jewish merchant had become a thing of the past, even
when he could rely on a network of relations in strategic places. After
1650, the most risky and capital-intensive trades in the Atlantic were exe-
cuted by trading companies such as the Royal African Company, the Com-
pagnie du Sénégal, and the first and second Dutch West India companies.
Hebrew, Ladino, and Portuguese were no longer required as the lin-
guae francae of the Atlantic, and that advantage of the Sephardic com-
munity diminished in value. It was not that another generally accepted
language had made the linguistic skill of the Jewish merchant redundant.
Exactly the opposite had happened. The creation of multiple trading
empires and the commercial compartmentalization of the Atlantic as the
result of growth and the policies of mercantilism diminished the need for
a lingua franca. After the middle of the seventeenth century, most ships
trading in the Atlantic would no longer visit several European ports in
order to assemble its cargo. The coast of Africa had been divided into sev-
eral spheres of influence in which Dutch, French, and English were spo-
ken in addition to pidgin Portuguese. The same applied to the colonies in
the New World.
Jewish specialization in finance had also diminished in value. The need
for capital in plantation economies in particular had grown so rapidly that
most metropolitan firms trading with the plantation belt in the New World
were now providing credit and investment capital to the planters. In
addition, special investment funds were created allowing metropolitan
investors to put their capital into the booming New World ventures.
A good example of the diminishing role of the Jews in the Atlantic
economy is provided by the Dutch colony of Suriname. In that colony, the
Jews made up a quarter of the planter population. In fact, no country in
modern history before the foundation of the state of Israel counted such
a high percentage of Jews as Suriname did among its citizens during the
plantation period (if one excludes from the total population the black
enslaved majority). The Jews were among the first plantation owners in
Suriname, and they also constituted the only segment of the white popu-
lation who remained in Suriname generation after generation and who
did not aim to make a fortune solely to return to Europe, as most other
whites aspired to do. Over time, however, the Jews became the least suc-
cessful and indeed the poorest section of the Suriname planter class
because they could not keep pace with the growth of the plantation sec-
tor in which the number of acres under cultivation, the number of slaves,
and the investment in equipment all increased rapidly. At the end of the
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514 | Pieter Emmer

eighteenth century, the Jewish planters in Suriname were considered to

be old-fashioned, backward, and out of step with the new demands and
new opportunities (industrialization) of sugar cane production.29
The Jews who stayed in the Caribbean and specialized in trade rather
than in agriculture, on the other hand, seemed to have fared better. Again,
a Dutch colony stands out—the island of Curaçao, which housed one of
the oldest Sephardic communities in the West Indies. Curaçao prospered
by becoming one of the main exchange centers between the various
Caribbean colonies as well as the coastal regions of the Spanish main. Yet
it must be stressed again that the majority of the merchants in the Dutch
Antilles were not Jewish and that the increase in trade and in the number
of merchants over time diminished the relative share of the Sephardim.30

* * * *

WHAT SIGNIFICANCE SHOULD BE GIVEN to the Jewish moment in the

Atlantic? It seems obvious that the large majority of settlers and slaves
moved across the Atlantic only after the Jews had lost their numerically
marginal but strategically important position. The Jews were the mid-
wives of the second European expansion system, and that second system
in turn was the midwife of the Industrial Revolution (albeit the link is of
a qualitative and not a quantitative nature). Around 1750, the American
colonies might have been the most rapidly growing market for European
goods, but most European goods and services were still consumed in
Europe itself. The profits of the plantations and of the Atlantic economy at
large could have provided only a minor share of the investments in the
nascent industry in Britain; nonetheless, the Atlantic system certainly con-
tributed to the commercial and technological environment in which rapid
economic expansion and technical innovation could take place. Seen in
this perspective, the Jewish moment in the Atlantic was a steppingstone to
the modernization of the world insofar as the Jews mediated the transfer
of the innovative elements of the Iberian expansion system to that of
Northwest Europe. Jews and Protestants were both religious minorities,
but their impact on the making of the modern world was far larger then
their numbers would suggest. Max Weber pointed this out regarding the
Protestants of nineteenth-century Germany. He could have done the same
for the Sephardim of seventeenth-century Western Europe.
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The Jewish Moment | 515

Notes
1. G. V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion c. 1400–1715 (Lon-
don, New York, 1989), 51–71.
2. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America and Brazil (Cambridge,
1983), 151.
3. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia,
1550–1835 (Cambridge, 1985), 204.
4. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789
(Chapel Hill, N.C., London 1985), 32.
5. Russell R. Menard, “Migration, Ethnicity, and the Rise of an Atlantic Economy: The Re-
Peopling of British America, 1600–1790,” in A Century of European Migrations,
1830–1930, ed. Rudolf J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke (Urbana, Ill., Chicago, 1991),
58–77; and B. H. Slicher van Bath, “The Absence of White Contract Labour in Spanish
America during the Colonial Period,” in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour
Before and After Slavery, ed. P. C. Emmer (Dordrecht, 1986), 19–32.
6. For gaps in the monopoly system of Spanish America, see James Lang, Conquest and
Commerce: Spain and England in the Americas (New York, 1975), 55–60; and G. V. Scam-
mell, The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires, c. 800–1600 (London,
1981), 343, 344, 365, 367.
7. James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore,
London, 1993), 243.
8. Scammell, The World Encompassed, 180–83.
9. James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, London, 1981), 51–77.
10. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (Harmondsworth, 1970), 283–91.
11. Scammell, The World Encompassed, 240.
12. Maurits Ebben, Zilver, brood en kogels voor de koning. Kredietverlening door Portugese
bankiers aan de Spaanse kroon, 1621–1665 (Leiden, 1996), 110, 111.
13. L. M. E. Shaw, “The Inquisition and the Portuguese Economy,” in Journal of European
Economic History 18(2) (1989):416.
14. Ebben, Zilver, brood en kogels, 111–13.
15. Shaw, “The Inquisition,” 423.
16. Pieter Emmer and Femme Gaastra, eds., The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in Euro-
pean Expansion, 1450–1800 (Aldershot, 1996), xvi–xxii.
17. Shaw, “The Inquisition,” 416.
18. Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989), 12–37.
19. Odette Vlessing, “The Portuguese-Jewish Merchant Community in Seventeenth-Cen-
tury Amsterdam,” in Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Early Modern Times: Mer-
chants and Industrialists within the Orbit of the Dutch Staple Market, ed. C. Lesger and L.
Noordegraaf (The Hague, 1995), 229.
20. Eddy Stols, “Convivências e conivências luso-flamengas na rota do açuzar brasileiro,”
in Ler Historia 32 (1997):119–47; Ernst van den Boogaart, “Los Neerlandeses en el Mundo
Commercial Atlántico de la Doble Monarquia Ibérica, 1590–1621,” in Ernst van den
Boogaart et al., La Expansion Hollandesa en al Atlántico (Madrid, 1992), 76–78.
21. Vlessing, “The Portuguese-Jewish Merchant Community,” 225, 231–33.
22. Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680
(Gainesville, Fla., 1971), 88–93.
23. Vlessing, “The Portuguese-Jewish Merchant Community,” 231.
24. Ibid., 231, 232.
25. Jonathan I. Israel, Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews,
1585–1713 (London, 1990), 338.
26. José Alexandre Ribemboim, Senhores de Engenho em Pernambuco Colonial, 1542–1654
(Recife, 1995), 338.
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516 | Pieter Emmer

27. Israel, Empires and Entrepots, 437–440.

28. Seymour Drescher, “The Role of the Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Immi-
grants and Minorities 12(2) (1993):113–25.
29. R. A. J. van Lier, “The Jewish Community in Surinam: A Historical Survey,” in The Jew-
ish Nation in Surinam, ed. R. Cohen (Amsterdam, 1982), 19–27.
30. Willem Wubbo Klooster, Illicit Riches: The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Ph.D.
diss., University of Leiden, 1995), 42–44.
25 1/24/01 2:37 PM Page 517

PART VII

THE JEWS IN COLONIAL BRITISH AMERICA

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25 1/24/01 2:37 PM Page 519

– Chapter 25 –

THE JEWS IN BRITISH AMERICA

Jonathan D. Sarna

T HE JEWS IN BRITISH AMERICA” is a topic that could easily consume

many more pages than are available here. To do the topic full justice,
one would need to look not only at the British North American colonies
but also at English Suriname, Barbados, Nevis, and Jamaica, all of which
already had at least some kind of Jewish presence in the second half of
the seventeenth century. In addition to the usual topics—political rights,
economic structure, social and intergroup relations, cultural life, and so
on—one would also want to undertake a detailed comparison between
the condition of Jews in the English colonies and the condition of Jews
back home in the English mother country. Jews were readmitted into
England only in 1655, and began worshipping in public only in 1657. As
a result—and in contrast to what we find in the Dutch colonies—Jews in
British colonies could not look back to the mother country as a model for
how Jews should be treated. Instead, we find Jewish life on both sides of
the Atlantic developing more or less simultaneously. This had important
and relatively unexplored implications both for the Jews and for those
who sought to govern and regulate them.
The more limited topic that I will focus on in this chapter is Jewish
religious life in British America. This is appropriate given the setting in
which this essay was originally presented as a public lecture—the historic
Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island—and the topic also serves as
something of a corrective to the economic emphasis of so much of the lit-
erature concerning this period. Unfortunately, the available data is some-
what skewed, since we know more about Jewish religious life in colonial
New York than anywhere else in British America. Some broader compar-
isons are possible, however, and there is in any case no reason to believe
that Judaism in New York was sui generis. To the contrary, throughout
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520 | Jonathan D. Sarna

British America during our period, Judaism was becoming increasingly

distinctive from its European counterpart. This distinctiveness, rooted in
the peculiarities of colonial life, set the stage for the better known and
more significant transformation of Judaism in the United States that took
place following the American Revolution.
From the beginning, religion served as a motivation for Jews who set-
tled in the New World colonies. Following Menasseh ben Israel, many
fervently believed that the dispersion of the Jews to all corners of the
world was “the hope of Israel,” a harbinger of the messianic age. The pre-
sumed religious implications of New World settlement are reflected in
the revealingly messianic names that many New World synagogues bear:
Mikveh (Hope of) Israel (Curaçao and Philadelphia); Shearith (Remnant
of) Israel (New York); Nidhe (Dispersed of) Israel (Barbados); Jeshuat
(Salvation of) Israel (Newport). Nor should we assume that this is mere
lip service to messianic ideas. We know that the Messiah was fervently
anticipated by some North American Jews in 1768 and in 1783 on the
basis of religious calculations that paralleled Protestant calculations of
the same kind. In 1769 we have a remarkable account from the Reverend
Ezra Stiles in Newport that during a thunderstorm Jews in his city threw
open doors and windows while “singing and repeating prayers … for
meeting Messias.” This exotic practice, apparently inspired by the mysti-
cal belief that Jews were to be spirited away upon a cloud to Jerusalem,
is mentioned by Gershom Scholem, and reflects a custom found in some
places in Europe as well at that time.1
The defining Jewish symbol of communal religious life and culture
in British North America, as elsewhere, was the Torah scroll. Historians
generally have not paid sufficient attention to this ritual object; for the
most part, they have defined community in terms of institutions, such
as when a cemetery was acquired or when a synagogue was estab-
lished. I would argue, however, that the presence of a Torah scroll is a
much more reliable marker of an ongoing Jewish presence, for it created
a sense of sacred space, elevating a temporary habitation into a cher-
ished place of holiness and a private home into a hallowed house of
prayer. The arrival of a Torah scroll in New Amsterdam in 1655
(brought over from Holland) was a defining moment in the life of the
first Jews in that community, while the return of that Torah in 1663
demonstrates that the city’s Jewish community had by then scattered.
The subsequent reappearance of Torah scrolls in New York under the
British signaled that Jewish communal life had been reestablished, and
private group worship resumed. Wherever Jews later created commu-
nities in British America, as in Savannah, they also brought Torah scrolls
with them, or, as was the case in Newport in 1760, they borrowed a
Torah from a larger congregation. In smaller eighteenth-century colo-
nial Jewish settlements such as Lancaster and Reading, where Judaism
was maintained for years by dedicated laymen without a salaried offi-
ciant or a formal synagogue, the Torah scroll functioned similarly as
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The Jews in British America | 521

something of a Jewish icon. It embodied the holy presence around

which Jewish religious life revolved.2
Public worship became available to North American Jews around the
turn of the eighteenth century, just about the time that New York’s first
Quaker Meeting House was erected, and before the Baptists and
Catholics had opened churches in the city.3 For the next 125 years,
Shearith Israel dominated Jewish religious life in New York. Indeed, the
synagogue and organized Jewish community became one and the
same—a synagogue-community—and as such it assumed primary
responsibility for preserving and maintaining local Jewish life.
The synagogue-community descended from the kehillah, the distinc-
tive form of communal self-government that characterized Jewish life in
the Middle Ages. With the advent of modernity, as states consolidated
their power over their citizens and individual rights gradually tri-
umphed over corporate or group rights, Jewish communities as corpo-
rate political entities came to an end, and in seventeenth-century Western
Europe the synagogue became the locus for Jewish self-government.
Where multiple synagogues existed, this resulted in communal fragmen-
tation, and in response the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1638 to 1639
merged their city’s synagogues into one, “Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah.”
It governed its members much like a church governed its parish, thereby
promoting discipline while avoiding the appearance of a Jewish “state
within a state.” This synagogue-community model, akin to the prevail-
ing Protestant model of the established church, spread quickly and
widely, taking hold in Recife, Hamburg, London, the West Indies—and
then New York.4
The synagogue established in New York, Shearith Israel, was located
in a small rented house on Mill Street, today South William Street, but
then popularly known as Jews’ Alley. The synagogue closely resembled
its Old and New World counterparts in assuming responsibility for, and
monopolizing, all aspects of Jewish religious life: communal worship,
dietary laws, life cycle events, education, philanthropy, ties to Jews
around the world, oversight of the cemetery and the ritual bath, even the
baking of matzah and the distribution of Passover haroset (used as part of
the Seder ritual). The synagogue saw itself and was seen by others as the
representative body of the Jewish community; it acted in the name of all
area Jews. In addition, it served as a meeting and gathering place for local
Jews, a venue for exchanging “news and tatle.”5
The advantages of this all-encompassing institution were, from a
Jewish point of view, considerable: the synagogue-community proved an
efficient means of meeting the needs of an outpost Jewish community. It
promoted group solidarity and discipline, evoked a sense of tradition as
well as a feeling of kinship toward similarly organized synagogue-com-
munities throughout the Jewish world, and enhanced the chances that
even small clusters of Jews, remote from the wellsprings of Jewish learn-
ing, could survive from one generation to the next.
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522 | Jonathan D. Sarna

Looming large among the values espoused by the synagogue-com-

munity throughout British America (and beyond) were tradition and def-
erence. These values had stood Sephardic Jews in good stead for
generations and were considered essential to Jewish survival itself. At
Shearith Israel, various prayers, including part of the prayer for the gov-
ernment, continued to be recited in Portuguese, and the congregation’s
original minutes were likewise written in Portuguese (with an English
translation), even though only a minority of the members understood that
language and most spoke English on a regular basis. Still, Portuguese rep-
resented tradition; it was the language of the community’s founders and
of the Portuguese Jewish “Nation” scattered around the world. (Ladino,
or Judeo-Spanish, written in Hebrew letters, was spoken only by the
Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire.)6 In matters of worship, too, Shearith
Israel closely conformed to the traditional minhag (ritual) as practiced by
Portuguese Jews in Europe and the West Indies. Innovations were prohib-
ited; “our duty,” Sephardic Jews in England (writing in Portuguese) once
explained, is “to imitate our forefathers.” On a deeper level, Sephardic
Jews believed, as did the Catholics among whom they had for so long
lived, that ritual could unite those whom life had dispersed. They wanted
a member of their “Nation,” the term commonly used to characterize
Sephardic Jewry, to feel at home in any Sephardic synagogue anywhere in
the world: the same liturgy, the same customs, even the same tunes.7
Deference formed part of Sephardic tradition as well. Worshippers
expected to submit to the officers and elders of their congregation, which,
then and later, were entirely lay dominated. Yehidim, generally men of sta-
tus who materially supported the congregation and subscribed to its
rules, made most of the important decisions; they were the equivalent of
“communicants” in colonial Protestant churches. The rest of the wor-
shippers, including all of the women, occupied seats but held no author-
ity whatsoever. Within the congregation, as in most religious and political
institutions of the day, power was vested in men of means.
Even those without power agreed that disobedience to authority
should be punished. In 1760, for example, the congregation severely pun-
ished Judah Hays for disobeying the parnas (president), although he him-
self was a significant member.8 In enforcing discipline through such
edicts, Jews were following both the teachings of their ancestors and the
practices of their non-Jewish neighbors. Indeed, deference to those in
authority and to those who held the largest “stake in society” was
accepted by “the bulk of Americans” in the mid-eighteenth century.9 By
contrast, the right to dissent, the right to challenge the leadership in a free
election, the right to secede and establish a competing congregation, the
right to practice Judaism independently—these were unknown in colo-
nial synagogues. Jews of that time would have viewed such revolutionary
ideas as dangerous to Judaism and to the welfare of the Jewish commu-
nity as a whole—which, of course, helps to explain why the impact of the
American Revolution on American Judaism proved so profound.
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The Jews in British America | 523

No Jewish religious authority of any kind in colonial North America

possessed sufficient status to challenge the authority of the laity. Neither
Shearith Israel nor any of the synagogues subsequently established prior
to the Revolution ever hired a haham (the Sephardic equivalent of an
ordained rabbi), nor did rabbis grace any American pulpit until 1840.
London’s Sephardic synagogue, by contrast, considered it “necessary and
imperative … to have a Haham,” and appointed one in 1664, just seven
years after that congregation’s founding, to “instruct us and teach the
observance of the most Holy Law.” In the New World, the Jewish com-
munities of Recife, Curaçao, Suriname, Barbados, and Jamaica all enjoyed
the religious leadership of a haham at various times in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.10 New York, the “mother” congregation of
North American Jews, was the exception; indeed, so far as we know no
haham was ever employed by any North American colonial congregation.
Lack of members and funds partly explain why, but the practice of local
Christian churches was probably more important. Only about a fourth of
the congregations in the province of New York enjoyed full-time pastors
in 1750, and even the Anglicans failed to appoint a bishop to oversee their
flock.11 Jews, therefore, felt no pressure to import a religious authority
from abroad. The absence of a professional religious authority did not
embarrass them in the eyes of their neighbors. Moreover, the diversity of
the North American Jewish community, which by the mid-eighteenth
century embraced Sephardim and Ashkenazim from many different
locales and was much more diverse Jewishly than Jamaica and Barbados,
would have made the task of finding an appropriate haham difficult, if not
impossible. To compensate, the officiating hazan (cantor), in addition to
chanting the liturgy, assumed many of the ceremonial functions that a
haham might otherwise have performed, including, on rare occasions,
public speaking.12
Colonial mainland American synagogues also differed from their
European and West Indies counterparts in their relationship to the state.
In Sephardic communities as diverse as those at Bayonne, France,
Curaçao and the Virgin Islands, synagogue leaders looked to government
to buttress their authority. The leaders of Curaçao’s congregation, for
example, were constitutionally empowered under various circumstances
to seek “the intermediation of the Honorable Governor should all other
means fail.”13 In other communities, fear of the state justified extraordi-
nary extensions of Jewish communal power. Concern for “our preserva-
tion” led synagogue leaders in London, for example, to demand the right
to have “revised and emended” any book written or printed by any local
Jew in any language.14 No such clauses, however, appear in any known
American synagogue constitution. In the religiously pluralistic colonial
cities where Jews principally settled, local governments (at least in the
eighteenth century) extended a great deal of autonomy to churches and
synagogues and rarely intervened in their internal affairs. As a result,
synagogue leaders, like their church counterparts, found it necessary to
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524 | Jonathan D. Sarna

fall back upon their own authority. Under ordinary circumstances, they
knew, local officials would not step in to help them.
The ultimate authority available to the synagogue-community was
the power of the herem (excommunication), “the principal means of defin-
ing social deviance and of removing from the community wayward
members whose actions and behavior offended its values.”15 In the North
American colonies, as in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, this punish-
ment was threatened far more often than it was actually invoked, for its
effectiveness in a society where Jews were not solely dependent upon one
another and where compliance could not be overseen was doubtful.
There was, moreover, always the danger that excommunication would
backfire and bring the whole Jewish community into disrepute. More
commonly, therefore, punishments consisted of fines, denial of syna-
gogue honors, and, most effective of all, threatened exclusion from the
Jewish cemetery—punishments limited to the religious sphere and thus
parallel to church forms of discipline.
Even these punishments required some degree of communal consen-
sus. The leaders of Shearith Israel found this out the hard way in 1757
when they attempted to crack down on outlying members of the congre-
gation who were known to “dayly violate the principles [of] our holy reli-
gion, such as Trading on the Sabath, Eating of forbidden Meats & other
Henious Crimes.” Citing Biblical passages, the adjunta darkly threatened
these wayward members with loss of membership and benefits, including
that “when Dead [they] will not be buried according to the manner of our
brethren.” But six months later, in the face of opposition, they decided to
“reconsider.” Relying on Isaiah’s call to “open the gates” (Isa. 26:2), they
welcomed everybody back into the congregation’s good graces.16 Syna-
gogue-communities thus may be said to have patroled “the edges” of irre-
ligious behavior, much as Jon Butler shows New England congregational
parishes of the time did. They punished some, a few severely, but let many
violations pass without comment. It was more important, they knew, to
blazon the possibility of censure than to pursue every accusation.17
What really sustained the colonial synagogue-community was not so
much discipline as a shared consensus concerning the importance of
maintaining Judaism and its central values. Shearith Israel’s new Mill
Street synagogue, consecrated in 1730, reflected this consensus in its very
architecture and design. Never before had North American Jews built (or
even owned) a synagogue, so this was their first opportunity to shape the
urban landscape. Since the completion of Trinity Church by the Anglicans
in 1696, a slew of competing churches had been built in New York City,
including a French church, a Dutch church, a Lutheran church, and a
Presbyterian church. These opulently designed buildings, with their large
spires and towers, had transformed and sacralized the city’s religious
skyline, displaying the colonists’ burgeoning material success for all to
see.18 Jews had likewise achieved material success (the house of Lewis M.
Gomez, for example, was assessed at nearly ten times the value of the
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The Jews in British America | 525

Jews’ rented house of worship), but the new synagogue building as

finally constructed favored tradition over external display. The principal
investment was in the interior of the synagogue, designed in classical
Sephardic fashion, while keeping the exterior comparatively simple, on
the scale of the modest New York churches built by the persecuted Bap-
tists and Quakers. In this, local Jews emulated the pattern of the English
Sephardic synagogue Bevis Marks (completed in 1701), and anticipated
what the Jews would do in Newport when they built their synagogue in
1763.19 The architectural message in all three cases was the same—that
Jews should practice discretion on the outside by not drawing excessive
attention to themselves, while glorying in their faith on the inside, where
tradition reigned supreme.
Seating arrangements in the New York and Newport synagogues
underscored the power of deference. They mirrored social and gender in-
equalities within the community and reinforced religious discipline. The
congregation assigned a “proper” place to every worshipper, and each
seat was assessed a certain membership tax in advance. In New York,
members of the wealthy Gomez family thus enjoyed the most prestigious
seats and paid the highest assessments. Others paid less and sat much
further away from the holy ark. Women, in accordance with Jewish tra-
dition, worshipped apart from men; they sat upstairs in the gallery, far
removed from the center of ritual action below. Few women attended
synagogue services in Amsterdam, Recife, and London, so there they
were free to take any available gallery seat; none was assigned. By con-
trast, in New York and probably also in Newport, where Jewish women,
like their Protestant counterparts, attended public worship much more
punctiliously, seats had to be assigned to them on the same basis as for
the men. Since the women’s section was small, disputes over status and
deference abounded—so much so that in New York a special area was
eventually reserved just for the elite women of the Gomez clan.20
An additional source of tension at Shearith Israel and throughout
colonial Judaism—more in North America, as I indicated, than in the
Caribbean—stemmed from the ever-growing number of Ashkenazic
Jews, immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe whose traditions,
background, and world-view diverged markedly from those of the
founding Sephardim. In Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Bordeaux, Suri-
name, and many other places where Jews lived, Sephardim and Ashke-
nazim worshipped apart. They formed two Jewish communities, married
among themselves, and co-existed uneasily. North American Jews, by
contrast, worshipped together, as had also been the case in Recife, with
the Sephardim exercising religious and cultural hegemony. This contin-
ued to be true in New York, despite the fact that by 1720 Ashkenazim
formed a majority of the Jewish population.21 The fact that the Sephardim
came first and enjoyed higher status than the Ashkenazim partly explains
this arrangement, but the threat on the part of Curaçao’s wealthy
Sephardic congregation to stop assisting the New Yorkers unless they
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526 | Jonathan D. Sarna

agreed not to allow the German Jews “any More Votes nor Authority than
they have had hitherto”22 probably explains more. Nevertheless, Ashke-
nazim did come to exercise considerable authority within Shearith
Israel’s new synagogue, serving as officers slightly more often, according
to Eli Faber’s calculation, than the Sephardim. Jacob Franks, an Ashke-
nazic Jew, was a perennial leader of the congregation, and Gershom
Seixas, its most important and beloved colonial-era hazan, was the prod-
uct of mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazic parentage—as were a growing num-
ber of other colonial Jews.23 Sephardic traditions still held firm, but
increasingly it was not Iberian blood ties among kindred members of the
“Nation” that buttressed them. Instead, religious ties had become the
dominant force among the Jews of diverse origins who worshipped
together in New York, and power was slowly shifting to the Ashkenazim.
Synagogue-communities, as they developed in the major cities where
Jews lived, bespoke the growing compartmentalization of eighteenth-cen-
tury Jewish life in British America into Jewish and worldly domains—a
distinction unknown to medieval Jews or, for that matter to most Euro-
pean Jews of the day, but characteristic of American Judaism almost from
the very beginning. Colonial synagogue-communities did not tax com-
mercial transactions, as synagogues in Amsterdam, London, and Recife
did. They did not censor what Jews wrote on the outside, and they did not
punish members for deviant personal beliefs or for lapses in individual or
business morality. Instead, akin to neighboring churches, they confined
their activities to their own sphere, disciplining some religiously wayward
congregants with fines and loss of religious privileges, but leaving com-
mercial and civil disputes, even those that pitted one Jew against another,
to the general authorities. Some Sephardic Jews went so far as to employ
different names in each realm, recalling their former multiple identities as
crypto-Jews. The renowned Newport merchant Aaron Lopez, for exam-
ple, inscribed his business ledgers with his Portuguese baptismal name,
Duarte. In the synagogue, he was always known as Aaron.24
The problem for early American Jews was that central Jewish obser-
vances—maintaining the Sabbath on Saturday, celebrating Jewish holi-
days in the fall and the spring, and observing the Jewish dietary
laws—infringed upon the boundaries that the separation of realms sought
so scrupulously to maintain. This engendered painful conflicts between
the demands of Jewish law and the norms of the larger secular or Christ-
ian society in which Jews moved. Refusing to work on the Jewish Sabbath
effectively meant working five days instead of six, since local “blue” laws
prohibited work on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Jewish holidays simi-
larly conflicted with the workaday world of early America. As for Jewish
dietary laws, they made both travel away from home and social interac-
tions outside of Jewish homes both difficult and embarrassing.
Early British American Jews found no easy solutions to these dilem-
mas. Religious laxity was plentiful, just as Todd Endelman found among
English Jews of the time,25 but there were also those who managed to
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The Jews in British America | 527

weave Judaism into the fabric of their daily existence. Indeed, the most
striking feature of Jewish ritual life in the colonial period was its diver-
sity—a feature that continued to characterize American Judaism long
after the uniformity of colonial synagogue life was forgotten. Within
every community, even within many individual families, a full gamut of
religious observances and attitudes could be found, a spectrum ranging
all the way from deep piety to total indifference.
When it came to the Sabbath, for example, the wealthy Aaron Lopez
“rigidly observed … Saturday as holy time,” closing from Friday after-
noon to Monday morning. Over a three-year period for which we have
records, none of his ships left port on a Saturday.26 Many surviving colo-
nial Jewish letters also reflect strict Sabbath observance, closing abruptly
with comments like “Sabbath is coming on so fast”—writing would then
be prohibited.27 Visiting New York in the middle of the eighteenth century,
the Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm heard that the city’s pious Jews “never
boiled any meal for themselves on Saturday, but that they always did it the
day before, and that in winter they kept a fire during the whole Satur-
day.”28 On the other hand, Kalm also heard reports of Jewish ritual laxity.
Indeed, evidence abounds that Jews were trading on the Sabbath and trav-
eling in violation of its commandment to rest—so much so that Shearith
Israel once threatened with excommunication wayward members who
violated the Sabbath in these ways.29 The most revealing of all accounts of
Jewish Sabbath observance in the colonial period, however, comes from a
missionary to the Delaware Indians named David McClure. Sometime in
1772, he spent a weekend in Lancaster and went with a business order on
Saturday to the home of Joseph Simon, a prominent local Jewish merchant:

[Simon] said, “Gentlemen, today is my Sabbath, & I do not do business in it;

if you will please to call tomorrow, I will wait on you.” We observed that the
same reasons which prevented his payment of the order on that day would
prevent our troubling him the day following [Sunday]. We apologized for
our intruding on his Sabbath, & told him we would wait until Monday. He
replied, you are on a journey, & it may be inconvenient to you to wait. He
went to call in his neighbor, Dr. Boyd, & took from his Desk a bag, laid it on
the table & presented the order to the Dr. The Doctor counted out the money
and we gave a recipt. The Jew sat looking on, to see that all was rightly trans-
acted, but said nothing, & thus quieted his conscience against the rebuke of a
violation of his Sabbath.30

Simon’s dilemma—torn between his Sabbath, his business, and what he

saw as common courtesy—very much reflected what many an observant
American Jew of his day experienced. His use of a surrogate to solve the
problem failed to impress the missionary: “… he might as well have done
the business himself,” he groused. But what made Jewish life among the
gentiles so difficult was that any solution would likely have been wrong;
often Jewish law and American life simply proved irreconcilable. Jewish
holidays, of course, posed similar problems.
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528 | Jonathan D. Sarna

Dietary laws posed an even greater problem for colonial Jews, for
they were supposed to be observed at all times and had as their religious
objective the goal of preventing precisely those kinds of social interac-
tions with non-Jews that commerce and good neighborly relations
demanded. Accurate statistics on colonial American Jewish observance of
the dietary laws are unavailable. Even without them, however, we know
that Jews defined themselves religiously through their practice of these
laws; they were what they ate. Some labored to uphold the dietary laws
wherever they were, while others quickly abandoned them. Still others,
probably the majority, struggled somewhere in between. They main-
tained a double standard—one for home and one for outside—that effec-
tively mirrored the bifurcated world they inhabited.
While private beliefs and practices defined Jews in British America
religiously, and distinguished them from their Christian neighbors, social
interactions in trade, in the street, and wherever else Jews and Christians
gathered inevitably blurred these distinctions. The majority of Jews, espe-
cially in North America, resided in religiously pluralistic communities
where people of diverse backgrounds and faiths, including many who had
themselves experienced religious persecution, lived side by side. Perhaps
for this reason, they felt more comfortable interacting with Christians than
Jews did in most parts of the world—so much so that we know of Jews and
Christians who joined forces in business, witnessed each other’s docu-
ments, and socialized in each other’s homes. Jews certainly faced continu-
ing outbreaks of prejudice and persecution on account of their faith, and,
legally speaking, in most colonies they remained second-class citizens. But
from the very beginning of Jewish settlement, Jews and Christians also fell
in love and married. This was an alarming development from the point of
view of the Jewish community, which for religious and social reasons con-
sidered intermarriage anathema. It was also, however, a sure sign of the
acceptance of Jews—particularly as only a small number of the Jews who
intermarried converted to Christianity in order to do so.
Estimates of Jewish intermarriage in the colonial period range from
10 to 15 percent of all marriages, with men intermarrying more fre-
quently than women, and those living far from their fellow Jews more
likely to intermarry than those who lived near them. Available statistics
leave many questions unanswered, chief among them whether the rate
rose or fell over time. Still, the numbers are far lower than for some other
religious groups of the day. New York City’s French Huguenots, to take
an extreme case, married non-Huguenots between 1750 and 1769 at a rate
that exceeded 86 percent!31
Colonial Jews mostly dealt with intermarriages on an ad hoc basis.
Thus, when Phila Franks married the wealthy Huguenot merchant Oliver
DeLancey in 1742, her pious, grief-stricken mother withdrew from the
city and in traditional Jewish fashion resolved never to see her daughter
again, “nor Lett none of the Family Goe near her.” Her more politic hus-
band, however, demurred: “Wee live in a Small place & he is Related to
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The Jews in British America | 529

the best family in the place,” he explained, and tried to promote reconcil-
iation.32 As a rule, intermarried Jews did sooner or later drift away from
the Jewish community, but exceptions to this rule were not shunned, as
they might well have been elsewhere. David Franks continued to main-
tain close social and economic ties to Jews. Benjamin Moses Clava was
buried as a Jew. Samson Levy and Michael Judah had their non-Jewish
children ritually circumcised, and half a dozen intermarried Jews num-
bered among the twenty original founders of the Shearith Israel Congre-
gation in Montreal.33 In each of these cases, a Jewish tradition that was
uncompromising on the subject of intermarriage clashed with colonial
society’s more indulgent social norms. Caught between two realms that
they strove mightily to keep separate, colonial Jews vacillated. Once
again, Jewish law and American life proved difficult to reconcile.
By the time of the American Revolution, the pluralistic character of
American religious life had begun to transform not only social relations
between Jews and Christians, but also American Judaism itself. Where in
so many other diaspora settings, including the Caribbean, Judaism stood
all alone in religious dissent, in America it shared its status with many
another minority faith. This forced Jews to change the very way that they
thought about themselves; religious pluralism demanded that they
reimagine who and what they were. While early on they defined them-
selves, akin to other Sephardim, as members of the Jewish or Portuguese
“Nation,” by the eve of the Revolution they more commonly spoke of
themselves as members of a “religious society,” on the model of parallel
Christian religious societies, like the “Society of Friends” (Quakers).
When Ezekiel Levy was hired in 1774 to serve as ritual slaughterer,
reader, and teacher in Philadelphia, his contract was thus with the “Jew-
ish Society” of that city, not as earlier contracts had read with the “Jew-
ish Nation.” Later, in 1783, when New York Jews wrote a formal letter of
welcome to Governor George Clinton they used the same term. Reveal-
ingly, they juxtaposed “the Society, we Belong to” with “other Religious
Societies,” as if to underscore that Judaism stood on an equal footing
with all the rest.34
This development, which as we have indicated was also very much
influenced by the increasingly diverse and pluralistic character of North
American Jewry—the large number of Ashkenazim and mixed Ashke-
nazi-Sephardi families—pointed to the growing distinctiveness of the
North American Jewish community; increasingly, it was marching to the
tune of its own drummer. Elsewhere, in Jamaica and Barbados, Judaism
developed along British lines, maintaining for as long as possible the tra-
ditions that characterized Anglo-Jewry in the eighteenth century. By con-
trast, in the wake of the American Revolution, Judaism in the United
States, heavily influenced by democratization and American Protes-
tantism, developed during the half-century following independence a
character all its own—one that had been anticipated in significant
respects already in the colonial era.
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530 | Jonathan D. Sarna

Notes

1. Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 (Detroit, 1970), 954; Publications
of the American Jewish Historical Society 34 (1934):70; The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed.
Franklin B. Dexter, vol. 1 (New York, 1901), 19; Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The
Mystical Messiah (Princeton, 1973), 594–95. I am grateful to Jonathan Schorsch for this
last reference.
2. American Jewish Archives 7 (1955):17–23, 56; American Jewish History 80 (1990):22; David
de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone (New York, 1952), 188; American Jewish Historical
Quarterly 54 (1965):247; Morris Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport (New York,
1936), 94; David Brener, “Lancaster’s First Jewish Community 1715–1804: The Era of
Joseph Simon,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 80 (1976):232; Joshua
Trachtenberg, Consider the Years: The Story of the Jewish Community of Easton, 1752–1942
(Easton, 1944), 31.
3. Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 402; Leo Hershkowitz, “The Mill Street Synagogue
Reconsidered,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 53 (1964):408.
4. Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Merger Agreement and Regulations of Congregation Talmud
Torah of Amsterdam (1638–39),” Historia Judaica 20 (1958):109–32; Daniel Swetschinski,
“The Portuguese Jewish Merchants of 17th-Century Amsterdam,” (Ph.D. diss., Bran-
deis University, 1980), 337–66; Miriam Bodian, “The Escamot of the Spanish-Portuguese
Jewish Community of London, 1664,” Michael 9 (1985):12–13. The Ashkenazi commu-
nity in Amsterdam established its own congregation in 1635; see Yosef Kaplan, “The
Portuguese Community in 17th-Century Amsterdam and the Ashkenazi World,”
Dutch Jewish History 2 (1989):29.
5. Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 855–1110; Leo Hershkowitz, ed., Letters of the Franks
Family (1733–1748) (Waltham, 1968), 60.
6. Herman P. Salomon, “K. K. Shearith Israel’s First Language: Portuguese,” Tradition 30
(1995):74–84.
7. Lionel D. Barnett, ed., El Libro de los Acuerdos (Oxford, 1931), 3; H. P. Salomon, “Joseph
Jesurun Pinto (1729–1782): A Dutch Hazan in Colonial New York,” Studia Rosenthaliana
13 (1979):18–29.
8. Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society [=PAJHS] 21 (1913):50–51, 84.
9. John B. Kirby, “Early American Politics—The Search for Ideology: An Historiographi-
cal Analysis and Critique of the Concept of Deference,” Journal of Politics 32 (1970):
808–38; J. A. Pocock, “The Classical Theory of Deference,” American Historical Review
81 (1976):516–23.
10. Barnett, El Libro, 15; Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean (Jerusalem, 1991), 41.
11. Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience (Bloomington,
1988), 13–15.
12. Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York (Philadelphia, 1945),
84–87; Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 928–34.
13. Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands
Antilles (Cincinnati, 1970), 544; Judah Cohen, “Documents Concerning the Jews of the
Virgin Islands” (private collection); Gérard Nahon, “From New Christians to the Por-
tuguese Jewish Nation in France,” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim
Beinart, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1992), 248.
14. Barnett, El Libro, 11.
15. Yosef Kaplan, “Deviance and Excommunication in the Eighteenth Century: A Chapter in
the Social History of the Sephardi Community of Amsterdam,” Dutch Jewish History 3
(1993):103.
16. The minutes are reprinted in PAJHS 21 (1913):74–76.
17. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, 1990),
173–74.
18. Ibid., 113–16.
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The Jews in British America | 531

19. Rachel Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture in the United States (Philadelphia, 1955), 11–
19; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (Cam-
bridge, 1985), 412–15.
20. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Seating and the American Synagogue,” in Belief and Behavior:
Essays in the New Religious History, ed. Philip R. Vandermeer and Robert P. Swierenga
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1991), 189–94; Arnold Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jew-
ish Community in the New World (New York, 1954), 17; Barnett, El Libro, 4; David and
Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel 1654–1954
(New York, 1955), 44.
21. Jacob R. Marcus, Studies in American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 1969), 50; Pool, Por-
traits, 169–73.
22. PAJHS 27 (1920):4.
23. Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration (Baltimore, 1992), 64; Malcolm H.
Stern and Marc D. Angel, New York’s Early Jews: Some Myths and Misconceptions (New
York, 1976).
24. Stanley F. Chyet, Lopez of Newport (Detroit, 1970), 173.
25. Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714–1830 (Philadelphia, 1979).
26. Gutstein, Jews of Newport, 132; Chyet, Lopez of Newport, 158.
27. Jacob R. Marcus, American Jewry: Documents: Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati, 1969), 265.
28. Reprinted in Oscar Handlin, This Was America (New York, 1964), 32.
29. Grinstein, Jewish Community Life of New York, 334; Marcus, Colonial American Jew,
956–57.
30. “Lancaster in 1772,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 5 (1901):108–9.
31. Malcolm H. Stern, “The Function of Genealogy in American Jewish History,” in Essays
in American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 1958), 85; Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 1232;
Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America (Cambridge, 1983), 187.
32. Hershkowitz, Letters of the Franks Family, 116–25.
33. Stern, “Function of Genealogy,” 94–97; Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 1225–35; Shel-
don J. Godfrey and Judith C. Godfry, Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of
Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal, 1995), 294n. 14.
34. Marcus, American Jewry, 104; Morris U. Schappes, A Documentary History of the Jews of
the United States, 1654–1875 (New York, 1971), 67.
26 Contrib. 1/24/01 2:39 PM Page 532

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Solange Alberro, who earned her Doctorat d’Etat from the Sorbonne, is
professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos de El Cole-
gio de México and director of Historia Mexicana. She is the author of sev-
eral books including Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (1988)
and El Aguila y la Cruz. Orígenes religiosos de la Conciencia Criolla (1999).

Mordechai Arbell, Research Fellow at the Ben Zvi Institute for the Study
of Jewish Communities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sits on the
board of the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv, and has served as
ambassador or consul from Israel to Panama, Haiti, Colombia, Korea, and
Turkey. His publications include La Nacion, the Spanish-Portuguese Jews of
the Caribbean (1981) and Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the Caribbean and
the Guianas: A Bibliography (1999).

Paolo Bernardini earned a doctoral degree from the European University

Institute in Florence, Italy, and has held academic and research positions
in Germany, England, France, Israel, and the United States, including fel-
lowships at the John Carter Brown Library and the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The author of six books, he is
presently teaching at the Institute for International Studies, University of
Technology, in Sydney, Australia. Among Dr. Bernardini’s publications
are: La questione ebraica nel tardo illuminismo tedesco (1992) and La sfida del-
l’uguaglianza. Gli ebrei a Mantova nell’età della rivoluzione francese (1996).

Günter Böhm is Professor of History and co-founder and director of the

Center for Jewish Studies at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago. In addi-
tion to some two hundred articles, he has published nine books, includ-
ing Los Sefardíes en los dominios holandeses de América del Sur y del Caribe,
1630–1750 (1992); Historia de los Judíos en Chile: El Bachiller Francisco Mal-
donado de Silva (1984); and Los Judíos en Chile durante la Colonia (1948).

James C. Boyajian earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at

Berkeley. The recipient of several grants, including two from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, he has published numerous articles and
26 Contrib. 1/24/01 2:39 PM Page 533

Contributors | 533

two monographs: Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640

(1993) and Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain (1983). He is currently
engaged in a study of family and economic history of New Christians and
Sephardim from 1500 to 1700.

Seymour Drescher is University Professor of History and Professor of

Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and a past secretary of the
Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He is the
author of Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (1977), Capitalism
and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (1986), and
From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic
Slavery (1999). He has also co-edited several works, including A Historical
Guide to World Slavery (with Stanley L. Engerman, 1998).

Noah J. Efron founded and heads the Program for the History and Phi-
losophy of Science and Ideas at Bar Ilan University. He recently edited a
special volume of Science in Context about Jews and science in early mod-
ern Europe and is at present completing a book about Jews, Christians,
and natural philosophy in Rudolfine Prague. Efron is also a contributing
writer for the Boston Book Review.

Pieter Emmer is a professor at the University of Leiden, The Nether-

lands, specializing in the history of European expansion. He has pub-
lished extensively on the history of the Dutch slave trade, slavery, and
migration. His latest book is The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880:
Trade, Slavery, and Emancipation (1998).

Norman Fiering has been Director and Librarian of the John Carter
Brown Library since 1983. For eleven years he was editor of publications
at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in
Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the author of Moral Philosophy at Seven-
teenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition and Jonathan Edwards’s
Moral Thought and Its British Context, both published in 1981.

Rachel Frankel, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa,

with a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University’s Gradu-
ate School of Design, opened her own architectural office in New York in
1996. Since 1994, she has been researching, documenting, and preserving
the architectural remains and history of the Jodensavanne settlement in
Suriname. The winner of numerous design competitions, she has exhib-
ited throughout the United States and published extensively.

John D. Garrigus is Professor of History at Jacksonville University in

Jacksonville, Florida. He has published a number of articles on pre-revo-
lutionary Haiti and is working on a book manuscript about conditions
leading to the Haitian revolution.
26 Contrib. 1/24/01 2:39 PM Page 534

534 | Contributors

Jonathan I. Israel is a permanent member of the School of Historical Stud-

ies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. His Race, Class,
and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670, based on his Ph.D. thesis at
Oxford and the Colegio de México, appeared in 1975. Subsequently, he has
written mainly on Dutch-Spanish topics as well as on Jewish history. His
European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, first appeared in 1985
and won the Wolfson Literary Prize for history the following year. He is a
member of the British Academy and a Corresponding Member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

David S. Katz is Abraham Horodisch Professor for the History of Books

at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His publications include The Jews in the
History of England, 1485–1850 (1994) and (with Richard H. Popkin) Mes-
sianic Revolution (1999). His research has concentrated on the boundaries
between Christianity and Judaism, and he is now working on a history of
the English Bible and a study of the occult tradition between the Renais-
sance and Fundamentalism.

Wim Klooster, Assistant Professor of History at the University of South-

ern Maine, earned his doctorate at the University of Leiden. He was a
Fulbright Fellow and an Alexander O. Vietor Memorial Research Fellow
at the John Carter Brown Library in 1995–96 and a Charles Warren Fellow
at Harvard University in 1997–98. He is the author of The Dutch in the
Americas, 1600–1800 (1997) and Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean,
1648–1795 (1998).

Silvia Marzagalli holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in

Florence and is maître de conférences at the University “Michel de Mon-
taigne” in Bordeaux, France. She has published a number of articles on the
commercial and maritime history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries and is the author of “Les boulevards de la fraude.” Le négoce maritime
et le Blocus continental, 1806–1813. Bordeaux, Hambourg, Livourne (1999).

Gérard Nahon is Directeur d’Etudes in the area of medieval and modern

Judaism at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. A former presi-
dent of the Société des Etudes Juives, he served from 1980 to 1996 as edi-
tor of the Revue des Etudes Juives. He is the author, co-author, or editor of
numerous books, including Rashi et la culture juive en France du Nord au
moyen âge (1997), La Terre sainte au temps des Kabbalistes, 1492–1592 (1997),
Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident. Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne,
Bordeaux, Jérusalem (1993), and Inscriptions hébraïques et juives de France
médiévale (1986).

Anita Novinsky is an Associate Professor in Brazilian history at the Uni-

versity of São Paulo. The author of numerous articles in books, journals,
and encyclopedias, she has also published several monographs, including
26 Contrib. 1/24/01 2:39 PM Page 535

Contributors | 535

A Inquisição (1995), Cristãos-Novos na Bahia (1972), Rol dos Culpados (1992),

and Inquisição. Bens confiscados a Cristãos-Novos no Brasil, século XVIII (1978).
In 1987–88 she was a research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library.

Geraldo Pieroni holds a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne. A mem-

ber of the history department at the University of Brasilia, he is currently
engaged in research on the Portuguese Inquisition and the Brazil colony.
He is the author of Les exclus du Royaume: l’inquisition portugaise et le ban-
nissement au Brésil, XVIIe siècle (1996) and Purgatório colonial: inquisição
portuguesa e degredo no Brasil (1994).

Ernst Pijning, an Assistant Professor at Minot State University in North

Dakota, earned his Ph.D. in history from the Johns Hopkins University
with a dissertation entitled “Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Econ-
omy and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro.” He has recently
begun a study of the diamond trade between Brazil and Amsterdam dur-
ing the eighteenth century.

James Romm, who has taught at Cornell University and Fordham Univer-
sity, is a Professor of Classics at Bard College. In 1993 he held a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the John Carter Brown
Library. Since the publication of his first book, The Edges of the Earth in
Ancient Thought (1992), he has completed a monograph on Herodotus as
well as a series of articles on the Renaissance debate over Greco-Roman dis-
coveries of the Americas. He is currently researching ancient Greek ideas
about India and their influence on the European view of the New World.

Robert Rowland, Professor of Anthropology at ISCTE in Lisbon, previ-

ously held the Chair of European Social History at the European Univer-
sity Institute, Florence, and served as director of the Historical Sociology
Unit at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Oeiras, Portugal. He has
published widely in the fields of historical anthropology and social his-
tory, with particular reference to South European demography and fam-
ily history, the history of the Portuguese Inquisition, and the
methodology of research computing. His latest book is População, Família,
Sociedade (Portugal, Séculos XIX–XX) (1997).

Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of Amer-

ican Jewish History and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern and
Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. He has held fellowships from the
American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for
the Humanities. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of sixteen books,
including Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream (1997),
Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience (with David Dalin,
1997), JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture (1989), and Jacksonian Jew:
The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (1981).
26 Contrib. 1/24/01 2:39 PM Page 536

536 | Contributors

Benjamin Schmidt is an Assistant Professor of History at the University

of Washington in Seattle. His publications include Innocence Abroad: The
Dutch Imagination and the Representation of the New World (forthcoming)
and numerous articles pertaining to early modern cultural history and
the development of geography in the Renaissance. He has held fellow-
ships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the
Ahmanson and Getty Foundations.

Patricia Seed, Professor of History at Rice University, is the author of Cer-

emonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (1995)
and of a web site on virtual cartography and the history of navigation.

Eva Alexandra Uchmany, professor and researcher at the Universidad

Nacional Autónoma de México, was awarded the 1992 Fernando Jeno
International Prize for her book Life between Judaism and Christianity in
New Spain, 1580–1606 (1992). She was a Fulbright Scholar in 1982, and in
1997 a Center for New World Comparative Studies Fellow at the John
Carter Brown Library. Her most recent book is Mexico—India: Similarities
and Encounters throughout History (1998).

Nathan Wachtel is Professor at the Collège de France and Directeur d’E-

tudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. The
founder and director of the Centre de recherches sur les Mondes améri-
cains at the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, he has
since 1998 served as director of the CNRS Laboratory of Social Anthro-
pology. Of his numerous publications, those translated into English
include Dieux et vampires. Retour à Chipaya (1992; English translation,
1994); Le retour des ancêtres. Les Indiens Urus de Bolivie, XXè–XVIè siècle.
Essai d’histoire régressive (1990); Mémoires juives (with Lucette Valensi, 1986;
English translation, 1993); and La vision des vaincus. Les Indiens du Pérou
devant la Conquête espagnole (1530–1570) (1971; English translation, 1977).

James Homer Williams, who earned his doctorate at Vanderbilt Univer-

sity, is an Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State Uni-
versity. In 1998–99 he was a National Endowment for the Humanities
Fellow at the Newberry Library. He is completing a book, to be entitled
The Cultural Struggle for the Early Mid-Atlantic Colonies, and has pub-
lished several articles about the colony of New Netherland. He is a mem-
ber of the executive committee of the Forum on European Expansion
and Global Interaction.
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 537

NAME INDEX

A Alva, Jeudah, 367n

Abadal y Vinyals, Ramón, 85n Alvares, Antoine, 257
Abchee, 301 Alvarez, Martinho, 225
Aboab da Fonseca, Isaac, 95, 106n Al-Zarqel (Al Zarqello), 77, 79
Aboab, Jacob, 66n Amador de los Ríos, José, 200n, 201n
Abraham, 112 Amayrand, 500n
Acosta, Blas de, 154 Andrade, A. P. M. Jacob, 264n
Acosta, Diego Pérez de, 208 Andrade, da Costa de (family), 294
Acosta, José de, 40–42, 45n, 58 Andrade, Benjamin da Costa de, 257, 265n,
Acosta, Joseph de, 392n 291–93, 295, 297
Acosta, Yshak de, 257 Andrade, David da Costa de, 310n
Adam, 107f, 118 Andrade, Gomes Freire de, 496
Adams, Christine, 328n Andrade, Leanor de, 207
Addison, Joseph, 457 Andrade, Moïse Frois, 259, 266n
Aguilar, Isabel de, 190 Andrews, Reid, 461n
Aguilar, Simon de, 320 Andrews, William, 85n
Aiken, Edward, 435n Andros, Edmund, 387
Ainé, Fernandes, 329n Angel, Marc D., 531n
Alberro, Solange, 8f, 22n, 168n, 172, 185n Ankarloo, B. 146n
Albuquerque e Aguilar, Manuel de, 220, 222 Antería (Count of), 360
Albuquerque, Diego Peréz de, 194 Anthony (Saint), 159, 161
Albuquerque, Luís de, 85n, 500n Antonil, André João, 499n
Alden, Dauril, 499n Antunes, David Diaz, 296
Alden, John, xii Applebome, P., 121n
Alemán, Martín Alonso, 191 Araujo, Abraham Senior, 194
Alencastro, Felipe de, 465n Araujo, Balthazar de (Núñez Coronel), 194
Alexandre, Samuel, 265n, 278 Arbell, Mordechai, xiv, 12, 22n, 259, 264n,
Al-Farabi, 74 287, 329n, 348n, 349n, 434n
Ali ibn Khalaf, 79 Aresti, Vicente de Amézaga, 366n
Almagro, Diego de, 205 Argensola, Bartolome Leonardo, 153
Almanzán, Miguel Pérez de, 188 Arias Montano, Benito, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41,
Almeida (family), 247 42, 45
Almeida, António, 247 Arias, Diego, 189
Almeida, Helena, 247 Aristotle, 29, 33, 58, 77
Almeida, Inês, 247 Arostegui, Domingo de, 367n
Almeida, Lourenço de, 222 Arrian, 28
Almeida, Maria de, 247, 251n Arrington, Leonard J., 120n
Almeida, Pedro, 247 Asensio, J. Torres, 44n
Almeyda, Jorde de, 193 Asher, A., 67n
Almeyda, Leonor, 193, 194 Athias, Joseph, 398
Alonso, Hernando, 191 Auberteuil, Hilliard de, 330n
Alphonse The Wise (King of Portugal), Austen, Ralph A., 461n
68n, 77 Aventroot, Joan, 94, 95, 103n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 538

538 | Name Index

Avila, Alonso de, 188, 200 Benbassa, Esther, 264n

Avila, Gil Gonzáles Benavides de, 188, 200n Benoit, P. J., 413, 424
Avila, Pedro Arias de (Pedrarias Dávila), 189 Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillen, 70n
Avilar, Samuel de, 351 Bensaude, Joaquim, 85n, 463n
Azambuja, Diogo de, 80 Berg, J. van der, 102n
Azavedo, Jacob, 273, 280, 281, 286n Berkvens-Stevelinck, C., 391n
Azevedo, André de, 478 Bernal, Albert, 261, 267n
Azevedo, João Lúcio de, 146n, 147n, Bernal, Jacob Rodrigues, 261f, 267n
148n, 482n Bernal, Maese, 187
Azevedo, Pedro de, 500n Bernal, Manoel Nunes, 227
Azevedo e Silva, José Manuel de, 498n Bernard, Gildas, 263n
Azevedo Mea, Elvira Cunha de, 148n Bernardini, Paolo, 1, xiii–xiv
Berthomé, Dominique, 264n
Bertram-Wallace, K., 265n
B Bethencourt, Francisco, 11, 146n, 245,
Bacelar, Manuel de Abreu, 249 251n, 500n
Baião, António, 463n Beuningen, Jonathan van, 367n
Bailyn, Bernard, 389n Biet, Antoine, 291
Baiz, Jacob, 259 Bigot, François, 279
Baker, J., 129, 139–41 Bitton, David, 120n
Barcelos, Henrique Rodrigue de, 475 Blaeu, Joan, 105n
Barjuda (family), 294 Blaeu, Willem, 96
Barkun, Michael, 121n Blankert, Albert, 101n
Barlaeus, Caspar, 94, 96, 104n, 105n, 106n Blok, F. F., 105n
Barminson, Jacob, 378, 381, 382 Blom, J. C. H., 103n
Barnavi, Eli, 285n, 389n Blome, Richard, 260, 266n
Barnett, Richard D., 263n, 265n, 267n, 286n, Bloom, Herbert I., 310n, 462n, 466n, 483n
463n, 530n, 531n Blumenkranz, Bernhard, 285n
Baron, Salo Wittmayer, 19, 70n, 71n Blussé, L., 482n
Barreiros, Gaspar, 42, 45n Bock, A. W., 121n
Barrionuevo, Pedro de, 191 Bodian, Miriam, 102n, 106n, 148n, 371–74,
Barron, Bruce, 122n 389n, 465n, 530n
Barros, João de, 85n Boeij, W. C., 365n
Barruel, Augustin, 8 Boemus, Johannes, 56, 67n, 68n
Baruchson, Shifra, 67n Böhm, Günther, 9, 22n, 203, 212n, 348n,
Bataillon, Marcel, 45n, 202n 364n, 436n, 463n
Beam, Louis R., 121n Bol, Ferdinand, 101n
Beaufleury, Louis Francia de, 263n Bonardo, Giovanni Maria, 67n
Beaufleury, Salomon Francia de, 283n, 284n Bonfil, Roberto, 71n
Beck, Balthasar, 354 Boniface IX (Pope), 146n
Beckles, Hilary, 462 Bonilla, Alonso de, 153
Beddall, Barbara, 45n Bönker, Dirk, 498n
Begon, 293 Boogaart, Ernst van der, 101n, 103n,
Behaim, Martin, 28 390n, 515n
Behrendt, Stephen, 461n Boorstin, Daniel J., 82, 85n
Beinart, Haim, 102n, 201n, 239n, 263n, 264n Borges Coelho, António, 146n, 148n
Belair, Daudin de, 329n Borges, Analola, 367n
Belinfante, Judith, 434n Boschi, Caio, 217, 223, 239n, 240n, 285n
Bell, Bernard, xiv Botello, Francisco, 155, 157, 159, 165, 167n,
Bellin, Jacques, 296, 311n 170n, 171n, 199
Belmonte (family), 453 Böttcher, Nikolas, 367n
Belmonte, Abraham de, 367n Bouchardeau, 298, 310n
Belmonte, Diego Nunes (Ya’kov Israel Bouille, Pierre, 328n
Belmonte), 466n Bouman, Elias, 398
Benayahu, M., 68n Bowser, Frederick, 167n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 539

Name Index | 539

Boxer, C. R., 102n, 239n, 349n, 376, 389n, Cameron, Don Allen, 45n
390n, 463n, 498n, 499n Camões, Luís de, 85n
Boyajian, James C., 17, 23n, 66n, 465n, Campbell, Mary, 45n
468n, 482n, 484n, 515n Campen, Nicolaes van, 373
Bozio, Thomas, 43, 44, 45n Campos (family), 177
Brackman, Harold, 461n, 462n Campos, Antônio Rodrigues, 227
Brahe, Tycho, 61 Campos, Maria de, 163, 170n
Brakel, S. van, 349n Canny, Nicholas, 470n
Brandeau, Esther, 261, 267n Capotte, Jacob Mendes, 262, 267n
Brandon, Joseph, 261 Capsali, Eliahu, 67n
Brasil, Ana da Costa do, 482n Caraci Luzzana, Ilaria, 68n
Brasil, Diogo Fernandes do, 478 Caravallo, Antonio de, 166n
Brasil, Simão Rodrigues do, 478 Cardado, Antonio Fernandez, 151, 152,
Braude, Benjamin, 45n 155f, 166n
Braudel, Fernand, 11, 482n Cardoso Porto, Antônio (Melchior Mendes
Bréard, Jacques-Michel, 279 Correa), 221
Brites, Maria, 245 Cardoso, Ignacio Dias, 220
Brito, Francisco Tavares de, 239n Cardoso, Joseph Rodrigues, 227
Brochado, Costa, 85n Cardosso, Jussurun Moses, 259, 266n
Brodie, Fawn M., 120n Cardoze, David, 331n
Bromley, J. S., 103n Cardoze, Sara, 259
Brooke, J. L., 120n Cardozo, Abraham Lopes, 435n
Brooke, Nathaniel, 434n Cardozo, Aron de David Uziel, 367n
Brouwer, Hendrick, 94, 95 Cardozo, Irma, 435n
Brown, Larissa V., 499n Cardozo, Isaac, 305
Brunner, Otto, 9 Cardozo, Manuel S., 500n
Bruno, Giordano, 3 Carena, Cesare, 146n
Bruyn, J., 101n Carothers, Robert L., 389n
Bubberman, F. C., 364n Carpenter, Rhys, 44n
Buddingh, Bernard R., 365n Carrera, José Miguel, 205
Bueno (family), 294 Carvaillo Frois, Rachel, 258
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de, Carvajal (family), 177, 180, 193
12, 323 Carvajal, Luis de (El Mozo), 151, 157, 196
Burgos, Baltazar de, 159 Carvalho, Flavio Mendes de, 220, 221, 239n
Burnard, Trevor, 452, 467n Carvalho, Francisco Tinoco de, 479
Buron, Edmond, 44n Carvallo, Isaac Nunes, 258
Butel, Paul, 283n, 284n, 286n, 328n, 329n, Casseres, de (family), 354
330n Casseres, Benjamin de, 365n
Butler, Jon, 524, 530n Casteloblanco, Antonio Vaez, 155, 162f,
Butler, Richard Grint, 116, 118 167n, 170n
Butterfield, Herbert, 85n Castillo, Francisco Fernández del, 201n
Castres, A., 500n
C Castries (Marechal of), 324
Caballería, Marina de la, 191 Castro y Tosi, Norberto, 201n
Cabot, Sebastian, 71n Castro, Abigail Henriquez de, 306
Cabral, Pedro Alvares, 80, 244 Castro, Carlos Larrain de, 203, 212n
Cáceres y Osorio, Isabel, 205 Castro, Francisco Mendes de, 219
Caceres, Antonio Diaz de, 151 Castro, Henri de, 263
Cáceres, Diego García de, 205 Castro, Jacob Henriques de, 256, 265n
Caceres, Leonor de, 151 Castro, Jacob, 329n
Cahen, Abraham, 264n, 265n, 267n, 283n, Castro, João de, 81, 83
284n, 301, 310n, 329n Castro, Joseph Henriquez de, 305
Caldeirâo, Diogo Dias, 247 Castro, María Ana de, 210
Calmon, Joâo, 250 Castro, Moïse Henriquez, 263
Calvo, Salomon, 367n Cato, 34
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 540

540 | Name Index

Cavignac, Jean, 263n, 269, 271, 276, 281, Conchillos, Lope de, 187
283n, 284n, 285n, 312, 328n Cone, G. H., 349n
Censer, Jack R., 328n Contreras, Jaime, 130, 146n, 147n, 202n
Centeno, Yvette Kace, 251n Cook, Harold J., 69n
Cerqueira e Silva, Ignacio Accioli de, 499n Cooper, M., 121n
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 195, 202n Coppenhagen, J. H., 102n
Chacón, Juan, 200n Cordeira, Maria, 249, 250
Champigny, 302 Cordero, Antonio, 210
Charles (Archduke), 360 Córdoba, Juan de, 189
Charles I (King of England), 106n Cordova, 304
Charles I (King of Spain) (Charles of Flan- Corrêa do Vale, Diogo, 225
ders), 190 Correa, Amanuel Alvares, 359
Charles V (Emperor), 55, 60 Corrêa, Diogo Dias, 227
Charlevoix, Pierre François Xavier de, 328n Corrêa, Luis Miguel, 223, 225f, 241n
Cheong, Y., 122n Corrêa, Luiz, 225
Cheops (Pharaoh), 115 Correa, Manuel Alvares, 366n
Chismar, D. E., 122n Corrêa, Tomás Pinto, 222
Chittick Neville, H., 85n Correia, João Nunes, 475, 482n
Choiseul, duc de, 306, 307, 322 Corte-Real, 74
Chorba, Carrie C., 166n, 212n Cortés, Hernán, 74, 188, 189, 190, 191, 201,
Christ, 34, 110, 112, 115, 151f, 157, 161 Cortesão, João de, 85n
Christian III (King of Denmark), 375 Corvisier, André, 330n
Christidès, Vassilios, 44n Corwin, Edward T., 391n
Christina (Queen of Sweden), 106n Cosa, Juan de la, 84n
Chyet, Stanley F., 531n Costa, da, (family), 409
Cirot, Georges, 263n, 283n, 284n Costa, Diogo Peres da, 464n
Clava, Benjamin Moses, 529 Costa, Duarte Nunes da, 478
Clay, Diskin, 45n Costa, Jacob Lopes da, 510
Clement VIII (Pope), 197 Costa, Jeronimo Nunes da, 467n, 468n
Clinton, George, 529 Costa, José da, 221f
Clinton, William, 44 Costa, Joseph da, 382
Coates, J., 121n Costa, Judith da, 277
Coates, Timothy Joel, 463n Costa, Miguel Teles da, 239n
Coelho, António, 248 Costa, Sara de David Rodriguez da, 259
Coelho, Gonçalo, 74 Costa, Uriel da, 100, 106n
Coggiola, Osvaldo, 241n Courbon, Charles de, Count de Blenac,
Cohen (family), 294 293, 294
Cohen, Henry, 267n Cournand (Abbé de), 326, 332n
Cohen, Jeremy, 365n Couto, Diogo de, 153, 220
Cohen, Judah, 530n Cozzi, Gaetano, 348n
Cohen, Martin A., 463n Craay, Teunis, 392n
Cohen, Robert, 14, 348n, 349n, 364n, 365n, Crawford, Evelyn, 465n
409, 435n, 470n Cresques, Abraham, 77
Cohen, Thomas, 47f Croesus, 95
Cohen, Tobias, 66 Croix, de la, 302
Cohen, William B., 328n Cromwell, Oliver, 5, 106n, 119, 343
Cohn, Raymond L. 462n Crosby, Alfred W., 84n
Colace, Aron, 260, 266n Cross, Whitney R., 120n
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 292, 294, 298 Crouzet, François, 283n
Collen, Jeremias van, 368n Cruz, João da, 227
Collen, Juan Pedro van, 367n Cruz, Miguel da, 227
Columbus, Christopher, xv, 2–5, 27–29, Cuéllar, Ferdinando de, 47
31–34, 41–44, 44n, 47, 56, 64, 74, Cueva, Catalina de León de la, 151
81, 107f Cunha, Luís da, 500n
Columbus, Fernando, 31 Curtin, Philip D., 461n, 468, 498n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 541

Name Index | 541

D Dias, Bartholomeu, 80
D’Ailly, Pierre, 29, 44n Dias, Carlos Malheiro, 84n
Dacosta, Benjamin, 274 Dias, Diogo, 245
Daguilar, David, 329n, 331n Dias-Pereyra (family), 277
Daguilard (d’Aguilar), 306, 308 Díaz, Manuel, 196
Daguilard, Louis, 330n Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 201n
Dalmeida, Antoine Robert Suarès, 329n Díaz Nieto, Diego, 193, 199
Dalmeïda, Jean-Baptiste Suarez (Suarez Díaz Nieto, Ruy, 193
d’Almeyda), 324 Diederen, Roger, 101n
Dalmeyda, Jacob, 329n Diffie, Bailey W., 463n
Dan, 113 Dillen, J. G. van, 103n
Dandradj, Salvador, 381, 392n Dines, Alberto, 499n
Daniel (Prophet), 4 Dionis, Amaro, 167n
Daniels, Doris Groshen, 393n Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von, 14
Darity, William A., 462n Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, 146n, 200n
David (King), 31, 43, 45n, 159, 426 Dost, Willem, 88
Davis, David Brion, 366n, 462n, 469n Dourado, Antonio Ferreira, 239n
Davis, Joseph Maurice, 70n Dovales (family), 354
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 470n Drescher, Seymour, xiv, 16f, 23n, 66n, 366n,
De Baas, 293 439n, 467n, 469n, 516n
De Rossi, Azariah, 5, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, Drosnin, Michael, 43
67n, 70n, 71n Drost, Willem, 101n
Debbasch, Yvan, 285n, 331n Drouillet, Jean, 265n
Debien, Gabriel, 332n Duarte, Jorge, 168n
DeBye, John, 409, 435n Duarte, Luis, 205
Decastro (family), 305 Dueñas, Beatríz, 205
Dedieu, Jean- Pierre, 146n Dulièpvre (family), 330n
Deerr, Noel, 482n Dury, John, 99
Dees, M., 121n
Del Bene, Judah, 71n E
Del Cano, 60, 61 Ebben, Maurits, 515n
Del Sotto (family), 408 Edward VIII (King of England)
Delacrut, Mattityahu, 67n Efron, Noah J., 5f
DeLancey, Oliver, 528 Elias (Prophet), 163
Delcampo, Izaac, 257 Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, 67n, 71n, 72n
Delvaille, Debora, 259 Elkin, Judith Laikin, xi, xiv, 470n
Delvaille, Jacob d’Isaac, 259, 261 Elliott, John H., 67n, 515n
Delvaille, Moïse, 259 Ellis, Nathaniel, 367n
Delvalles, Abraham, 262 Eltis, David, 439, 461n, 462n, 468n, 469n
Demonet, J., 146n Elvas, António Fernandes de, 447
Dentz, F. Oudschans, 311n, 434n Emmanuel, Isaac S., 265n. 266n, 283n, 294,
Denucé, Jean, 482n, 483n 329n, 331n, 348n, 349n, 365n, 367n,
Depas, François Lopez, 319 390n, 451, 530n
Depas, Henriette Lopès, 329n Emmanuel, Suzanne A., 265n, 266n, 329n,
Depas, Louis Lopès, 317, 329n 331n, 348n, 349n, 365n, 367n, 390n,
Depas, Michel Lopez (Medina, Michel), 451, 530n
317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 324, 327, Emmer, Pieter C., 18, 23n, 66n, 366n, 390n,
328n, 329n 461n, 465n, 467n, 501, 515n, 464n
Depas, Philippe Lopez, 324, 327, 329n, Endelman, Todd, 284n, 286n, 526, 531n
330n, 332n, Engerman, Stanley, 461n, 467n, 469n
Derosas, Renzo, 22n Enoch, 115, 163
Detcheverry, Armand, 263n, 283n Enríquez (family), 179, 185n
Deursen, A. T. van, 389n Enriquez, Blanca, 152, 162, 179, 185n
Dexter, Franklin B., 530n Enriquez, Francisco Fernández de la
Dias, Abraham, 367n Cueva, 66n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 542

542 | Name Index

Enriquez, Juana, 159, 161, 168n, 169n, 180, Fiering, Norman, xv, 66n, 461n, 498n
196, 199 Fischer, John R., 367n
Enriquez, Micaela, 166n, 167n, 179 Flinck, Govaert, 101n
Enriquez, Rafaëla, 162, 167n, 169n, 179, 185n Flint, Valerie, 44n, 45n
Enthoven, Victor, 364n, 434n Flores, Abraham Enriquez, 259, 266n, 297
Ephraim, 112 Flores, Diogo Lopes, 219
Episcopius, Simon, 378 Flores, Ribca, 259
Epstein, M., 462n Flory, Rae, 465, 488, 499n
Erasmus (humanist), 6, 45n Fogel, Robert W., 462n
Erikson, Leif, 114 Folch, José Armando de Ramón, 212n
Escandell Bonet, B., 147n Fonseca, Cristobal de, 153
Escoupérie, Rose-Blanche, 464n Fonseca, Mosseh Hizquia da, 365n
Esmanbuc, Pierre Belain de, 288, 289 Fonseca, Moyse Gomez, (Mozes Gomes
Espinosa, Juan Jacobo Montero de, 367n de), 259, 266
Espinosa, Vázquez de, 208 Fonseca, Rodriguo Henríquez de, 206, 207
Espinoza, Pedro de, 168n, 169n Fora , Juiz de, 500n
Estaing, Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Comte Forgues, Bertrand, 267n
de, 257, 306–8, 321, 329n, 322 Fortune, Stephen Alexander, 348n, 391n,
Esther (Queen), 136, 160, 196 466n, 469n, 484n, 497, 500n
Estrada y Escobedo, Francisco de, 202n Fouchard, James, 330n
Estrada y Escobedo, Pedro de, 202n Fragoso, João L. R., 495, 499n, 500n
Estrada, Alonso de, 191 Franbreu, 110
Estrada, Francisco de, 179 França, Eduardo d’Oliveria, 493
Eve, 107f Francia, Salomon, 273
Everaert, J., 434n Franco Athias (family), 294
Exteen, Jurriaan (Jorge Christian), 358 Frankel, Rachel, 15f, 348n, 396
Eymericus, Nicolaus, 146n Franks, David, 529
Franks, Jacob, 526
F Franks, Phila, 528
Faber, Eli, 366n, 389n, 452, 467n, 526, 531n Freccero, Y., 463n
Fabritius, Barent, 101n Frederick Henry (Stadtholder), 106n
Faesch, Isaac, 353, 366n, 367n Freires, Lourenço de Valadares, 225
Farissol, Abraham, 49–53, 57, 64, 67n, Freyre, Gilberto, 390n, 463n
68n, 71n Friedman, Saul S., 462n
Farley, C. J., 121n Frostin, Charles, 328n, 331n
Fasto, Sara, 304 Fuenleal, Sebastián Ramírez de, 201
Ferdinand (of Aragon, King of Spain), 30f, Fuks-Mansfeld, R. G., 103n, 390n
45n, 132, 188, 191, 485 Fuller, Thomas, 118, 122n
Ferera, David, 382, 392n
Fermin, Philippe, 266n G
Fernandes, Beatriz, 482n Gaastra, Femme S., 23n, 482n, 515n
Fernandes, Briolangia, 482n Gabay (family), 294
Fernandes, Duarte (Joshua Habilho), Gage, Jennifer Curtis, xiv, 166n, 263n, 498n
477, 483n Gale, William Potter, 116, 117
Fernandes, Joâo, 245 Galenson, David W., 462n
Fernandes, Vasco, 34 Galileo (Galilei), 81
Fernandez, Manuel Tejado, 464n Galvez, José de, 366n
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 3 Gama Lima, Lana Lage de, 240n
Fernow, Berthold, 392n Gama, António da, 250
Ferreira Izidro (Isidoro), Francisco, 220 Gama, da (family), 294
Ferreira, Gaspar Fernandez, 227 Gama, Vasco da, 5, 42, 80
Ferreira da Silva, Lina Gorenstein, 499n Gans, David, 5, 61–65, 67n, 69n, 71n
Ferro, Josias Gabay, 258 Garcia, Maria Antonieta, 148n
Ferry, Robert James, 367n Garcia, R., 148n
Ficino, Marsilio, 3 Garfield, Robert, 463n, 465n, 498n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 543

Name Index | 543

Garrigus, John D., 12f, 22n, 328n, 329n, 331n Gould, Alice B., 200n
Gassman, Albert, 310n, 312n Goutiérez, Izaac, 262, 267n
Gastaldi, Giacomo, 67n Govett, R., 120n
Gatardo, Joseph, 366n Gradis (family), 17, 277f, 280, 282, 301, 317,
Gaudin (notary), 329n, 330n 319, 321, 325, 327, 329n, 331n, 468n
Gautier, Bertrand, 285n Gradis, Abraham, 275, 278, 285n
Gavay Ferro, Josias, 258 Gradis, David, 265n, 272, 277–79, 285n, 295,
Gavay, Abraham, 258 301f, 306, 326
Gavay, Isaac, 258 Gradis, Mendes, 295
Gaytan, Andrés Juan, 207, 212n Gradis, Miranda, 295
Gebhardt, Carl, 106n Gradis, Ricka, 329n
Gedaliah ibn Yahya, 57, 67n, 69n Gradis, Samuel, 265n, 295
Geggus, David, 332n Grafton, Anthony, 3, 45n, 67n, 69n, 70n
Gehring, Charles T., 391n Graham, Lisa Jane, 328n
Gemery, Henry A., 461n Grahn, Lance R., 367n
Gerber, Jane, 389n Gray, Richard, 468n
Gerbi, Antonello, 22n Greenwood, John, 423, 435n
Gerson, Levi ben, 79 Grégoire, Henri, 12, 14, 326, 327, 332n
Gilbert, Martin, 124 Gregory XIII (Pope), 128
Ginsburger, Ernest, 266n Grell, Ole Peter, 391n
Girod-Chantrans, Justin, 365n Greyerz, Kaspar von, 465n
Gitlitz, David M., 464n Grimson, E., 45n
Glikl bas Judah Leib, 470n Grinstein, Hyman B., 530n
Gliozzi, Giuliano, 22n, 40, 45n, 67n, Grotius, Hugo, 94–97, 104n
120n, 104n Grovenstein, W. A. I. van, 365n
Gobat (bishop), 113 Gruber, Samuel, 435n
Godbid, William, 434n Guibovich Perez, Pedro, 167n
Godfrey, Judith C., 392n, 393n, 531n Guillén, Claudio, 200n
Godfrey, Sheldon J., 392n, 393n, 531n Gutierez, Moses, 257
Godhino, Vitorino Magalhães, 463n, 469n Gutmann, Joseph, 408, 435n
Góis, Damião de, 132, 147n Gutstein, Morris, 530n
Goldish, Matt, 67n, 68n Gwyn, Julian, 461n, 462n
Goldman, Shalom, 391n
Goldthorp, Audrey, 267n H
Goltzius, Hendrik, 87, 101n Hacking, Ian, 82
Gómara, Francisco López de, 56, 68n, Ha-Cohen, Joseph, 53, 55–57, 61, 66, 67n,
69n, 201n 68n, 69n
Gomes, Andresa, 247 Ha-Cohen, Tuvia, 71n
Gomes, Fernando Nunes, 239n Hagen, Peter, 102n
Gomes, Jacob, 262, 267n Haim, A., 102 n
Gomes, Maria, 245, 248 Ha-Levi, Joseph ben Isaac, 59
Gomez (family), 525 Ha-Levi, Joseph ben Isaac, 70n
Gómez, Antionio Henríquez, 6 Halevi, Yossi, 468n
Gómez, Gonzalo, 188 Hall, Moses, 22n
Gomez, Maria, 168n Ham, 34, 107
Gómez, Moisés, 199 Hamilton, Jennifer, 304
Gonçalves, Lopo, 78 Hanau (Count of), 453
Gonçalves Salvador, José, 217, 221, 239n, Hancock, David, 498n
390n, 463n, 482n, 498n Handlin, Oscar, 531n
Gonsalves de Mello. See Mello Hanson, Carl A., 468n
Goodrich, Thomas D., 67n Harley, Brian J., 85n
Gorricio (Carthusian Friar), 31 Harlow, V. T., 311n, 349n
Goslinga, Cornelis Ch., 328n, 348n, 364n, Harman, John, 300
365n, 515n Harrison, Marguerite I., 239n
Gottheil, R. J. H., 66n Hart, Simon, 103n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 544

544 | Name Index

Hartog, Johannes, 365n Hourmat, Pierre, 263n

Hartsinck, Jan Jacob, 299, 310n House, H. W., 122n
Hattal, 35, 39 Hyde, Thomas, 52
Havilah, 37, 39
Hays, Judah, 522 I
Heath, T., 121n Ibn Assafar, 79
Heemskerck, Maarten van, 101n Ice, T., 122n
Heijer , Henk den, 103n, 364n Iektan. See Yoktan
Heinsius, Anthonie, 368n Inikori, J. I., 461n
Hendricus, Jacob Cohen, 383 Innocent XI (Pope), 224
Henequim, Pedro Rates, 223 Iobab, 39
Henningsen, Gustav, 130, 146n Isabel (of Castile, Queen of Spain), 30f, 132,
Henrietta Maria (Queen of England), 106n 188, 194, 485
Henriques, David Lopez, 310n Isaiah (prophet), 110
Henriques, David, 320 Isidore of Seville, 35
Henriques, Diogo Nunes, 226, 227, 241n Isidro, Abraham Gabay, 262
Henriques, Duarte Dias, 477, 479f Isidro, Lea Oliveira, 259
Henriques, Felipe (Juda Senior), 359 Isidro, Moses Oliveyra, 259
Henriques, Gaspar, 359 Israel (family), 294
Henriques, Isaac, 481 Israel, Jonathan, xiii, 13f, 22n, 23n, 66n,
Henriques, Jacob Mendes, 320 102n, 103n, 104n, 106n, 216n, 239n,
Henriques, João, 223, 240n 284n, 335, 348n, 368n, 389n, 391n,
Henriques, Joseph da Cruz, 227 462n, 464n, 467n, 468n, 469n, 515n,
Henriques, Manuel Dias (Matathias 516n
Aboab), 473, 476–78 Israel, Rachel, 365n
Henriques, Miguel, 227
Henríquez, Agustín Moreno, 366n J
Henriquez, David Jesurum, 367n Jackson, Melvin H., 366n
Henriquez, Felipe, 14 Jaher, Frederic Cople, 392n, 461n
Henriquez, Jacob Moreno, 367n James (Duke of Courland), 453
Henriquez, Mordechay, 359 James (Duke of York), 387
Henriquez, Phelipe (Jacob Senior), 359, 360 Jameson, J. Franklin, 103n
Henriquez, Phelipe (Junior), 359 Jane, C., 119n
Henry II (King of France), 256, 302 Janofsky, M., 121n, 122n
Henry the Navigator (Prince), 17, 75f, 444 Janssonius, 96, 105n
Herculano, Alexandre, 147n Janus, 34–36, 45n
Hericourt, Jean Schwob de, 285n Japheth, 34f, 107
Hernández, Violante, 192 Jaramillo, Leon, 157
Herodotus, 28 Jason, 32
Hershkowitz, Leo, 387, 389n, 391n, 393n, Jeansonne, G., 121n
530n, 531n Jensen, Richard A., 462n
Hertzberg, Arthur, 19 Jerome (translator of the Bible), 28f
Hine, Edward, 113, 115, 120n Jesus, 164
Hipparchus, 70n Jiménez, Alfonso, 205
Hiram, 29, 32f Job, 115
Hitler, Adolf, 44 John II (King of Portugal), 53, 68n, 132
Hoberman, Louisa S., 499n John III (King of Portugal), 133, 371
Hoboken, W. J., van, 103n John of Lisbon, 84n
Hodges, William, 304, 312n John V (King of Portugal), 221
Hogendorn, Jan S., 461n Jones, Adam, 467n
Hoogbergen, Wim S. M., 364n Jones, William, 119
Hordes, Stanley, 185n Jorge, Andresa, 482n
Hoselitz, Bert F., 462n Josephus (historian), 28f, 31
Houdaille, Jacques, 329n Journu (brothers), 281
Houel (Governor of Guadaloupe), 289 Juarez, Blanca (Blanquita), 161, 169n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 545

Name Index | 545

Judah, 116, 118 Lafourcade, Maïté, 264n

Judah, Michael, 529 Lake, Richard, 454
Judas Iscariot, 354 Landes, Joan, 330n
Julian, Isaac Henriques, 261 Landis, Dennis C., xii
Júnior, Augusto Lima, 217, 239n Lang, James, 515n
Langendijk, Jan Classen, 296
K Lardizábal, Martín de, 359, 367n
Kalm, Peter, 527 Larnager, 303
Kaplan, Yosef, 45n, 102n, 103n, 104n, 121n, Larsen, Erik, 101n
348n, 366n, 392n, 435n, 463n, 530n Larsen, Jean, 264n
Kates, Gary, 327n Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 187, 200n
Katz, David S., 4f, 22n, 45n, 101n, 102n, Las Casas, Pedro de, 187
105n, 119n, 120n, 466n Lavaux, A. de, 365n
Kayserling, M., 146n, 147n, 464n Lavradio (Marquis de), 495
Kellenbenz, Hermann, 2 Le Fevre de la Barre, Antoine Joseph, 293,
Kelly, M., 121n 298, 310n
Kennedy, John, 44 Le Goff, Jacques, 167n
Kepler, Johannes, 61 Lee, Sandra Evenson, 461n
Kerckrinck, Clara Catharina, 367n Leibovici, Sarah, 2
Kessler, Henry H., 391n Lemesurier, Peter, 115, 120n, 121n
Keyser, Adriaen, 382 Leon, David, 258
Khan (Grand), 33, 187 Leon, Francisco de, 163, 164
Kieval, Hillel, 101n Léon, Henri, 283n, 267n
Kirby, John B., 530n Leon, Isaac Rodrigues de, 258, 265n
Kittle, Lester K., 365n Leon, Jacob Campos de, 258f
Klein, Herbert, 461n León, Juan Pacheco de, 158, 168n, 170n,
Klein, Martin, 468n 184, 195
Klein, Milton M., 389n, 393n Leon, Rachel, 259
Klein, Nancy H., 23n Leon, Zipporah de, 259
Kling, August, 45n Lesger, C., 515n
Klooster, Wim, 14, 23n, 331n, 350, 366n, Letov (family), 294
385, 390n, 435n, 461n, 462n, 467n, Levi de Barrios, Miguel (Daniel), 5, 311
470n, 516n Levi, Aharon, 97
Knight, Franklin W., 499n Levkovitch, Ida, 220
Kock, Willem, 366n Levy, Asser, 381, 383, 387
Koeman, C., 45n Levy, Esther, 354
Koen, E. M., 348n, 482n, 483n, 484n Levy, Ezekiel, 529
Kohler, Max, 462n Levy, Salomon, 258
Korn, Bertram Wallace, 304, 312n Levy, Samson, 529
Kossmann, E. H., 103n Lewin, Boleslao, 168n, 170n, 464n
Koster, Henry, 500n Lewkowicz, Ida, 240n
Krantz, Frederick, 328n Lezy, de, 300
Krinsky, Carol Herselle, 434n, 435n, 531n Liebergen, Nicolaas van, 365n
Kuethe, Allan J., 367n Liebman, Seymour B., 185n, 354, 366n
Kuperman, Diane, 22n, 239n Lier, R. A. J. van, 460, 516n
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, xii Ligtenberg, C., 103n
Linder, J. M. van der, 364n
L Lindo, Alexandre, 454
Labat, Jean Baptiste, 295, 297, 264n, Linschoten, Jan Huygen van, 97
310n, 328n Lipman, V. D., 105n
Laborde-Sabarots, Claudine, 264n Liss, Peggy K., 499n
Lacouture, Jean, 313n Lockhart, James, 515n
Laer, A. J. F. van, 392n Loew, Judah ben Bezalel (Maharal), 58, 64,
Laet, Johannes de, 97, 101n, 104n 66, 70
Lafarge, Jacques, 261 Lohmeier, Gudrun, 201n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 546

546 | Name Index

Loker, Zvi, 12, 276, 283n, 284n, 311n, 312n, Malouet, V. P., 351, 364n
313n, 328n, 329n, 332n, 331n, 367n, 466n Malvezin, Théophile, 263n, 283n
Lollis, Cesare de, 44n Manoah, 86–88, 91
Long, Huey, 116 Mañozca, Juan Sáenz, 181, 184
Lopes, 304 Mantecón, J. I., 201n
Lopes d’Ulhoa (family), 475 Manuel (King of Portugal), 132, 133, 485
Lopes Dias (family), 304 Marcus, Jacob Rader, 19, 262, 265n, 267n,
Lopes Pardo (family), 304 365n, 385, 389n, 391n, 392n, 393n, 530n,
Lopès-Depas, Louis, 278 531n
Lopès-Dubec (family), 277 Margarido, Alfredo, 216, 239n
Lopès-Dubec, Salomon, 277, 285n Marques, A. H. de Oliveira, 463n
Lopez (family), 294, 454 Martines, Daniel, 367n
Lopez, Aaron (Lopez, Duarte), 526f Martire d’Anghiera, Pietro, 30, 67n
López, Diego, 195, 208 Mary (Virgin), 151, 157
López, Martín, 190 Marzagalli, Silvia, 11, 22n, 66n, 268, 330n,
Lopez, Melchior Rodriguez, 168n 467n
Lopez, Moshe (Francisco Lopez Henriquez), Mascarens, Martins, 226
366n Masini, Eliseo, 146n
Lopez, Thomas, 42 Master John, 80, 84n
Lopez da Fonseca (family), 354 Matthews, R. J., 120n
Lopez Depas (family), 325, 330n Maupassant, Jean de, 285n
Lopez Depas, François, 280 Maurits, Johan, 15, 88, 94, 359, 375, 376,
Lopez Laguna, Daniel Israël, 11, 257 377, 379, 384
López-Méndez-Enríquez (family), 198 Mauro, Frédéric, 389n, 478, 482n, 483n
Louis (family), 294 Maximilian I (Emperor), 55
Louis XIII (King of France), 264n Maxwell, Kenneth, 468n
Louis XIV (King of France), 257, 264n, 272, Mazariegos, Diego de, 191
288, 360 McClellan, James E., 330n
Louis XV (King of France), 256 McClure, David, 527
Louis XVI (King of France), 323 McCusker, John J., 461n, 515n
Lovejoy, Paul E., 461n McVeigh, Timothy, 108, 119
Lucassen, Jan, 460, 469n Méchoulan, Henri, 22n, 45n, 70n, 104n,
Lucena, Moses, 481 105n, 106n, 102n, 120n, 263n, 435n
Lugar, Catherine, 499n Medeiros, Francisco Mendes de (Isaac
Luna y Vilchas, Maria de, 157 Franco Mendes), 473
Luther, Martin, 55 Medeiros, Manuel de, 475
Luzzati, Michele, 146n Medici, Lorenzo de, 3, 155, 165, 167n,
Luzzatto, Simone, 14 171n, 199
Lyon, Robert, 435n Medina, Isabel de, 159
Lyra, Nicholas of, 29 Medina, Ishac de, 367n
Medina, José Toribio, 9, 170n, 202n, 203, 212n
M Medine, Mendes de, 265n
MacArthur (General), 116 Megalopolensis, Johannes, 380, 391n
Macedo, Jorge Borges de, 498n Meirelles, Manuel Cardoso, 250
Madariaga, Salvador de, 2 Melamed, Abraham, 65, 66n, 69n, 71n, 72n
Maduro, Mosseh de Selomoh Levy, 367n Melamed, Meir (Pérez Colonel), 194
Magellan, Ferdinand, 55, 56, 60, 80 Melchizedek, 115
Magon, 307 Mello, Evaldo Cabral de, 497, 500n
Maika, Dennis, 389n Mello, José António Gonsalves de, 368n,
Maillart, 303 390n, 392n, 466n, 499n
Maisler, B., 44n Mello e Souza, Laura de, 240n
Maldonado de Silva, Francisco, 154, 210 Menard, Russell R., 515n
Maldonado de Silva, Pedro, 206 Menasseh ben Israel, 4f, 21, 22n, 69n, 70n,
Malino, Frances, 269, 263n, 272, 283n, 91f, 95–97, 99f, 104n, 105n, 106n,
284n, 328n 108–10, 520
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 547

Name Index | 547

Mendaña, Alvaro de, 71n Monsanto, Isaac, 257, 265n

Mendès (family), 329n Monsanto, Marcos Fernandes, 480
Mendes, David, 227 Montalboddo, Fracanzano da, 50
Mendès, David, 279 Montañes, Diego de Matos, 366n
Mendes, Georges, 257 Montejo, Francisco de, 188, 200n
Mendès, Jacob, 279 Monter, E. W., 146n
Mendes, José, 248 Montesinhos, João de Moraes, 222
Mendes, Joseph, 481 Montesinos, Fernando de, 202n
Mendes, Menasseh, 481 Montesquieu, Charles de la Brede, de,
Mendès, Miranda, 279 12, 323
Mendes da Gama (family), 354 Montezinos, Antonio de, 97–99, 108
Mendes France (family), 313n Montezinos, Elizabeth Levi de, 105n
Mendes France, 304 Morales, Diego, 190
Mendes France, David, 309 Morales, Gonzalo, 190
Mendes France, Isaac, 309 Moreau, Méderic Louis Elie de Saint-Méry,
Mendes France, Pierre, 309 312, 322, 328n, 331n
Mendes Frances, Mardochee, 306 Moretti, Gabriella, 45n
Mendes Frances, Rachel Felicite, 306 Morin, Edgar, 226, 241n
Mendès-France, Isaac, 277, 278, 279 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 34, 45n
Mendès-Furtado, Isaac-Henry, 277 Mormon, 110, 111
Mendes-Pereira, Moïze, 256 Mörner, Magnus, 464n, 469n
Méndez, Alvaro, 194 Moron, Abraham Henriquez, 367n
Méndez, Diego, 189 Moron, Jacob Henriquez, 367n
Mendoça, H. Furtado de, 492 Moroni (angel), 110
Menezes, Francisco Barreto, 377 Morris, Richard B., 393n
Menkis, Richard, 267n, 279, 283n, 284n, Moses, 136, 151, 159, 161, 164, 402
285n, 286n, 328n, 329n, 467n Motecuhzoma, 188
Merrick, Jeffrey, 327n Mott, Luiz, 240n
Merton, Robert K., 85n Mout, M. E. H. N., 103n, 390n
Mesquita, Abraham Péreira, 260 Mullins, Eustace Clarence, 117, 122n
Meyer, Jean, 327n Murrin, John, 389n
Meyjes, G.M.H. Posthumus, 391n
Mezas, Esther de, 259 N
Michael, Reuven, 70n Naftalis (family), 354
Michelangelo, 3 Nahon, Gérard, 11f, 22n, 70n, 104n, 105n,
Michman, Joseph, 368n, 466n 106n, 120n, , 256, 263n, 265n, 283n, 284n,
Millares Carlo, A., 201n 286n, 530n
Miller, Joseph C., 447, 465n, 468n, 499n Nairac, 282
Milton, John, 108 Nassi. See Nassy
Miranda, Christóbal de, 192, 201n Nassy, David de Isaac Cohen (Joseph
Miranda, David de, 222, 227 Nunes da Fonseca), 296, 345, 350f, 364n
Miranda, Francisco Nunes de, 222 Nassy, Joseph David Cohen, 413
Miranda, Francisco, 355 Nassy, Samuel, 409
Mizrahi, Rachel, 239n Nathan, 304
Moeda, Damião Rodrigues, 222 Navarro, Aaron, 481
Moerbeeck, Jan Andries, 375 Navarro, Francisco, 367n
Moeyaert, Claes Corneliszoon, 88f, 101n Navarro, Jacob, 481
Mogge, Willem, 412 Navarro, M., 122n
Molina (family), 294 Navarro, Moseh, 481
Molina, Abraham, 304 Navarro, Moses, 375
Molko, Solomon, 57 Navia, Pedro de, 195
Moll Blanes, Isabell, 22n Neher, André, 6
Monfante, Celestino Andres Arauz, 328n Neher-Bernheim, Renée, 167n
Moñino, Antonio R. Rodriguez, 212n Nellen, J. M. Henk, 104n
Monneront (notary), 330n Nero, Iraci del, 240n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 548

548 | Name Index

Netanyahu, B., 463n Ortiz, Hernando, 192

Neuhaus, R. J., 122n Osorio, Bento, 478
Neves, João Cesar das, 469n Oss, D. A., 122n
Newman, A. N., 286n Otte, Enrique, 201n, 483n
Newton, Isaac, 114 Ovando, Pedro Mejía de, 205
Neyra, Athias de, 259 Oxeda, Sara, 262
Neyra y Chaves, Esther de Jacob Athias
de, 259 P
Niebuhr, G., 121n Padthuysen, Pieter, 310n
Nieto, Ruy Diaz, 166n, 167n Paillou (notary), 329n, 330n
Noah, 27, 34–36, 45n, 107f Pais, Dias Fernão, 218
Noble, Luis, 205 Pais, Garcia Rodrigues, 218, 239n
Nones, Benjamin, 263 Palafox, Juan de, 181
Nones-Lopes, David, 258 Palmer, Colin, 469n
Noordegraaf, L., 515n Paquette, Robert, 461n, 467n
Norregard, Georg, 467n Pardo, Abraham, 260, 266n
Novinsky, Anita, 10, 22n, 66n, 148n, 239n, Pardos (family), 354
240n, 241n, 249, 251n, 263n, 463n, 469n, Pariset, François-Georges, 283n
494, 495, 498n, 500n Parmentier, J., 434n
Nunes, Domingos, 223, 227–29 Parquet, Dyel du, 288, 290
Nunes, Francisco, 227 Pas, Michel Lopes de, 309
Nunes, Pedro, 84, 85n Patai, Raphael, 6
Nunes da Costa (family), 453, 464n Paul III (Pope), 134, 242
Nunes-Tavarez, David de Jacob, 266n Pax, J. G., 367n
Nunez (family), 294 Pax, Manuel Nunes da, 227
Núñez, Adrián, 189 Paz, Alonso de, 189
Núñez, Ana, 189 Paz, Blas Pinto de, 195
Nuñez, Isabel, 157, 168n Paz, Inés Gómez de, 189
Núñez, Juan, 189 Paz, João de, 478
Nunez, Leonor, 160, 169n Paz, M. De, 304
Nuñez de Peralta, Tomás, 182, 185n Paz, Manuel de, 195, 210, 478, 479, 480
Nuñez de Valera, Francisco, 189 Paz, Manuel Nunes de, 227
Nunn, G.E., 44n Paz, Miguel Lopez de, 257
Paz, Rodrigo de, 189, 190
O Peabody, Sue, 328n
O’Brien, P. K., 461n Pedro (Don, of Portugal), 272
O’Callaghan, E. B., 392n Peixotto, Jacob, 273, 278
O’Gorman, E., 45n Penso, Fernando de Morales, 248
Ocaña, Diego de, 191 Penso, Francisco de Morales, 251n
Offenberg, A. K., 105n Pereira (family), 294
Ofori-Ansa, Kwaku, 436n Pereira, David Cardozo, 259
Olavarriaga, Pedro José, 358, 366n Pereira, Isaac, 274
Oliva, Léon Gómez de, 207 Pereira, Nuno Marques, 219
Olival, Fernanda, 148n Pereira da Silva, Jacob, 310n
Olivares, Count-Duke of, 181 Péreira-Mesquita, Jacob, 266n
Olivares y Butron, Hipolito de, 153 Péreire, Jacob Rodrigue, 267n, Jacob
Oliveira Marques, A. H., 463n, 470n Rodriguez, 261
Oliveira, Luiz Vaz de, 227 Pereyra, 304
Oliveira, Martinho da Cunha, 223 Pereyra, Leonel Gómez, 207
Olivera, Mathias Rodriguéz de, 185n Pérez Villanueva, J., 147n
Oostindie, Gert, 469n Perez, Manuel Bautista, 153, 154, 166n,
Oppenheim, Samuel, 311n, 364n, 391n, 392n 167n, 210
Orgoños, Rodrigo, 205 Perozo, Mario Briceño, 366n
Orgoñoz, Juan de, 189 Perreire, Jacques, 280
Ortelius, Abraham, 41, 42, 45n, 96 Perrotine, Hugues Dianoux de la, 265n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 549

Name Index | 549

Pessoa, Abraham, 259, 266n Postma, Johannes Menne, 349n, 364n, 434n,
Pessoa, Moïse, 260, 266n 435n, 448, 451, 466n
Petitjean-Roget, Jean, 264n, 284n, 285n, 286n Prado, Geronimo, 398
Pétré-Grenouilleau, Olivier, 468n Prester John, 64, 78
Pettegree, Andrew, 391n Preston, Douglas, 45n
Peyrère, Isaac de la, 4, 34, 107 Price, Richard, 434n
Phélipaux, M. de., 301, 302, 303 Prins, Isaac, 310n
Philip II (King of Portugal), 242 Pritchard, J. S., 286n
Philip II (King of Spain) (Philip I of Portu- Prosperi, Adriano, 9
gal), 92, 103n, 183, 492, 506 Ptolemy, 28f, 32f, 70n, 81
Philip V (King of Spain), 360, 367n Purdum, T.S., 122n
Pico (della Mirandola), 3 Pyzynski, Susan, 389n
Piedras Santas (family), 208
Pierce, William L., 122n Q
Pieroni, Geraldo, 10f, 22n, 242 Querido, David, 341
Pietrz, 294f Querido, Diogo Dias, 341, 478
Pietrz, Salomon, 310n
Pijning, Ernst, 18, 23n, 66n, 240n, 389n, R
461n, 485, 500n Raba (brothers), 276–78, 282
Pike, Ruth, 201n, 463n Rabbie, Edwin, 104n
Pimentel (family), 277 Rachlis, Eugene, 391n
Pina, Manuel de, 366n Raimond, Julien, 316, 320, 324–27, 332n
Pina, Rachel, 331n Ramires, Domingos Rodrigues, 227
Pina, Raphael, 329n Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 42, 45n
Pinedo, Abraham, 367n Raphaël, Jacob, 273
Pinelo, Antonio, 208 Raposo de Figuereido, Luciano, 240n
Pinelo, Léon (Diego López), 208 Raposo, Jose do Nascimento, 283n
Pinet (family), 330n Rau, Virginia, 498n
Pinet, Rachel, 329n Raule, Benjamin, 452
Pinheiro (family), 294 Rausch, D. A., 122
Pinheiro, Francisco, 222 Ravel, 304
Pinheiros (family), 354 Ravenstein, E. G., 44n
Pinto, Fernão Mendes, 153 Rawley, James A., 515n
Pinto Ferreira, Jose, 239n Raza, Ignacio de la, 366n
Pinto Ferreira, Thomas, 239n Reesse, J. J., 499n
Pius II (Pope), 29 Rego, Antônio da Fonseca, 227
Plancius, Petrus, 96 Reinel, Pedro, 83
Plata, Cristóbal Bermúdez, 201n Reinoso, Arce, 181
Plato, 35 Reiss, T., 121n
Plessis, Jean du (Sieur d’Osseville), 288 Rembrandt, 87, 105n
Pliny, 30 Renkema, W. E., 365n
Pluchon, Pierre, 285n, 328n, 310n, 329n, Renn, Walter, 389n
331n, 332n, 467n Rens, L. L. E., 311n
Pointer, Richard W., 530n Reparaz, Gonçalo de, 167n
Polo, Marco, 30 Rephael, Abraham Lopes, 258
Pombal, Marquis de, 131 Reuben (tribe of), 98
Ponces, Charles, 295 Reuben, 108
Pool, David de Sola, 365n, 530n Reuven, Michael, 69n
Popkin, Richard H., 45n, 102n, 119n, 435n Reuveni, David, 50, 53, 57, 134
Porqueres, Enric, 147n, 148n Révah, Israel S., 7, 141, 142, 143, 146n, 148n,
Portaleone, Abraham, 67n, 68n 240n, 482n, 483n
Portales, Diego, 205 Ribeiro, Manoel da Costa, 223
Post, Frans, 86–88, 90, 102n Ribemboim, José Alexandre, 515n
Postal, Bernard, 267n Ribeton, Olivier, 264n
Postel, Guillaume, 4, 34–37, 40–42, 46n Richardson, David, 439, 461n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 550

550 | Name Index

Richelieu (Jean Armand du Plessis), 288 Salomon, Herman P., 103, 104n, 106n,
Rivera (family), 177, 454 148n, 530n
Rivera, Blanca de, 157 Salvador, José Gonçalves. See Gonçalves
Rivera, Margarita de, 155, 163, 167n, Salvador
168n, 170n Sampayo, Jean Gomes, 257
Rivero, Luis (Sotelo), 206 Sampayo, Leonor Gomes, 265n
Rivkin, Ellis, 216, 239n Samson, 88, 91
Robles, Antonio, 192 Samuel Hebreo, 359
Robles, Aron, 258 Sanches, Antonio Ribeiro, 239n
Robles, Gaspar, 198 Sanches, Manuel Nunes, 227
Robles, Gregorio de, 317, 328n Sanches, Miguel Nunes, 239n
Rocha Pitta, Sebastião da, 499n Sanches, Ribeiro, 148n
Rochefort, Cesar de, 260 Sánchez, Miguel, 183, 185n
Rockfeller, Nelson, 117 Sánchiz Ruiz, Javier E., 201n
Rockwell, George Lincoln, 122n Santa María (Dominican Friar), 190
Rodrigues, Ana, 248, 251n Santángel, Luis de, 187
Rodrigues, Duarte, 227 Santiago, Bento Dias de, 475
Rodrigues, Francisco, 250 Santiago, Diogo Fernandes, 475, 478
Rodrigues, Jeronimo, 227 Santiago, Miguel Dias de , 483n, 476, 473
Rodríguez, Blanca, 193 Santos, Maria Emília Madeira, 500n
Rodriguez, Jacob de Abraham, 259 Sâo Bento, Escolástica de, 249, 250, 251n
Rodríguez, Luis Franco, 194 Saraiva, António José, 240n, 498n
Rodriguez-Silva, Gabriel, 265n Saraiva, Duarte, 510
Rodway, James, 310n, 311n Saravia, Eugenio de, 179, 185n
Roessingh, H. K., 366n Saravía, Ramiro Yañez de, 205
Rohan-Montbazon (Prince of), 323 Sargent, L. T., 121n, 122n
Roiz, Simâo, 245 Sarna, Jonathan D., xiv, 19, 23n, 531n
Rojas, Alfonso de, 193 Sartre, Jean Paul, 183
Rojas, Fernando de, 183 Sasportas (family), 277
Romm, James, 3f, 22n, 45n Sasportas, Isaac, 332n
Rosenbloom, Joseph R., 267n Sasson, I. S. D., 106n
Rotberg, Robert I., 85n Satan, 117, 118, 127
Roth, Cecil, 95, 104n, 120n, 265n, 267n Saugera, Eric, 285n, 467n
Rothstein, Edward, 45n Savage-Smith, Emile, 85n
Rourke, Mary, 468n Sawyer, Reuben H., 116
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 262 Scammell, G. V., 515n
Rowland, Robert, 7f, 22n, 146n, 148n Scelle, Georges, 348n, 349n
Rubiés, J. P., 104n Schalkwijk, Frans Leonard, 390n, 499n
Ruderman, David B., 6, 50, 53, 66, 67n, 68n, Schama, Simon, 105n
70n, 71n Schappes, Morris U., 531n
Rudolf II (Emperor), 61 Schiltkamp, J. A., 365n
Rufina (slave), 195 Schmidt, Benjamin, 4f, 86, 103n, 389n
Ruiz-Barruecos, Conchita, 483n Schneider, K., 121n
Russell-Wood, A. J. R., 499n Schnurmann, Claudia, 364n
Rutherford, Adam, 115, 121n Schöffer, I., 103n
Ryan, M.T., 67n Scholem, Gershom, 170n, 520, 530
Schomburck, Robert H., 264n
S Schorsch, Jonathan, 461n, 464n, 469n, 530n
Sá, Luis Mendes de, 223 Schreiden, Jacques, 44n
Sachar, Howard M., 389n Schulten, C.M., 102n
Sack, Benjamin G., 267n Schwab, W. M., 263n, 286n, 463n
Sahlins, Peter, 320, 321, 328n, 331n Schwartz, Stuart B., 465n, 499n, 500n., 515n
Saint-Mery, Moreau. See Moreau Scovaud (notary), 329n
Salamanca, Christóbal de, 189 Scribner, Bob, 391n
Salazar, Fernando Quirino de, 153 Seed, Patricia, 5, 22n, 73
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 551

Name Index | 551

Seixas, Gershom, 526 Smith, Pamela, 467n

Selim I (Ottoman Emperor), 55 Smith, Roger C., 85n
Seneca, 29, 32 Smolowe, J., 121n
Senior, David, 367n Soares, Baltasar, 247, 251n
Sequeyra (family), 277 Soares, Inês, 247
Sergio, Antonio, 240n Sobel, Dava, 85n
Serra, Antonio-João Simoes, 264n Sobremonte, Thomas Treviño Martínez de.
Serrano y Sanz, Manuel, 200n See Treviño
Serrão, José Vicente, 500n Socolow, Susan M., 499n
Sestieri, Lea, 147n Soeiro (family), 104n
Sevilla, Simon Vaez, 152f, 155, 158, 162f, Sola, Isaac Mendès de, 259
168n, 169n, 179, 180, 181, 195, 199. Solar, Aron de Castro, 257, 265n
See also Vaez Solomon (king), 4, 27–29, 31, 37, 40–42, 45n,
Shapin, Steven, 85n 60f, 64, 398
Shaw, L. M. E., 515n Solow, Barbara L. 461n, 500n
Sheinin, David, 389n Sombart, Werner, 10, 283n, 439f, 462n, 464n
Shelford, April, 67n, 45n Sordis, 304
Shem, 27, 34, 36, 107 Sossa, Isaac (Souza, Izaac), 262, 267n
Shupe, A., 122n Sousa-Leão, Joaquim de, 101n
Sibyl (prophet), 36 Souza, Beatriz de, 482n
Silber, Mendel, 66n Souza, Ishac de Selomoh Abarbanel, 258
Siliceo, Juan Martinez, 165 Souza, Jeronimo Rodrigues de (Samuel
Sille, Nicasius de, 382 Abrabanel), 473
Silva, Antonio da, 239n Souza, Margarida de, 245
Silva, António José da, 142 Souza, Tomé de, 492, 499n
Silva, David da, 329n Soza, Isacq Rodriquez, 258
Silva, David Mendes da, 227 Soza, Jacob Henriques, 258
Silva, Diego Núñez de, 206 Sperling, John G., 469n
Silva, Francisco Maldonado de. Spinoza, Baruch, 100, 365n
See Maldonado Spranger, Querin, 296f
Silva, Gabriel da, 273, 283n St. Juste, Laurore, 312n
Silva, Gabriel Rodriguez, 257 Stedman, John Gabriel, 299, 311n
Silva, Jacob Pereira da. See Pereira da Silva. Stein, Robert Louis, 467n
Silva, Jacob, 257, 265n Stern, Malcolm H., 460, 531n
Silva, Joseph David Gabriel da, 281 Stiles, Ezra, 520
Silva, Juan Rodríguez de, 193 Stillman, Yedida K., 202n
Silva, Lina Gorenstein Ferreira da. Stipriaan, Alex van, 364n, 434n
See Ferreira da Silva Stols, Eddy, 515n
Silva, Pedro Maldonado de. See Maldonado Stow, Kenneth R., 146n
de Silva Strauss, Walter, 101n
Silveira, Manuel do Valle da, 482n Strelick, Arthur, 409
Silveyra, Abraham, 261 Stuarts (Kings of England), 343
Simoes. See Serra Stuyvesant, Peter, 15, 344s, 370, 378f, 383f,
Simon, Joseph, 527 388, 391n, 392n, 467n
Simon, Richard, 3 Suarès, Abraham, 258
Sims, Harold, 469n Suarez, Moïse, 262, 267n
Sinke, Suzanne M., 515n Suliman (Ottoman Emperor), 55
Siqueira, Sonia A., 493, 500n Sweet, Leonard I., 70n
Siraisi, Nancy, 45n, 67n Swetschinski, Daniel M., 103n, 374,
Slinkard, Beth, 389n 390n, 464n, 465n, 466n, 470n, 499n,
Smidt, J. Th., 364n 530n
Smith, David Grant, 464n, 465n, 488, Swierenga, Robert P., 392n, 531n, 469n
492, 499n Swift, Lesley A., 121n
Smith, Gerald L. K., 116, 348n Swift, Wesley, 116
Smith, Joseph, 110, 111, 120n Szajkowski, Zosa, 284n, 285n, 286n
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 552

552 | Name Index

T Ulloa, Thomás López, 483n

Tabuada, Manuel, 367n Ultee, Maarten, 389n
Taeijste, Pieter, 366n Usque, Samuel, 53–55, 57, 68n, 132, 142,
Tamaro, Dorothy Cairns, 367n 147n, 148n
Tapper, Laurence F., 267n Usselincx, Willem, 93, 95, 103n
Tarrade, Jean, 328n
Tavares, Alexandre, 245 V
Tavares, Maria José Pimenta Ferro, 146n, Vaez, Abraham Gomez, 259
251n Váez, Caspar, 196
Tavares de Brito. See Brito Váez, Elena, 180
Tavarez-Nunes, David de Jacob, 259 Vaez, Leonor, 168n
Te Water, J. W., 103n Váez, Simon, 196. See also Sevilla
Tedeschi, John, 146n Váez Acevedo, Sebastián, 179
Teenstra, M. D., 352, 365n, 416, 435n Vainfas, Ronaldo, 240n
Teilles, Samuel, 256, 265n Valdivia, Pedro de, 205
Tejado Fernández, Manuel, 202n Valensi, Lucette, 7, 22n
Teles da Costa, Miguel, 218 Valladolid, Miguel Mendonça de, 219,
Templo, Jacob Jehudah Leon, 398, 399 223, 239n
Ternaux-Compans, H., 297, 311n Valle, Diogo Corrêa do, 223, 241n
Tertre, Jean Baptiste du, 289, 290, 297, 299, Valle, Pietro della, 435n
310n, 311n Valverde Mercado, Francisco, 197
Teyssier, Paul, 147n Van Noort, Olivier, 66n
Thersites, 95 Vandelli, Domingos, 500n
Thomas, J., 121n Vandermeer, Philip R., 531n
Thornton, John, 446. 464n Vasques, Manoel Correa, 497, 500n
Thorowgood, Thomas, 105n, 120n Vassière, Pierre de, 328n
Tinoco, Fernando, 478–80 Vaz (family), 294
Tinoco, Francisco Duarte, 479 Vecoli, Rudolf J., 515n
Tinoso, Pedro, 167n Veen, Gillis van der, 398
Tiphys, 32 Veenendaal, A. J., 368n
Tisdel, Gaston, 267n Vega, Alvares L., 435n
Tobing, D. P. Loemban, 434n Vega, Lope de, 8, 174
Toribio Medina, José. See Medina Vega, Manoel Rodrigues, 341
Torres, Louis (Luis) de, 107, 187 Veiga Torres, José, 146n, 148n
Totten, Charles A. L., 115 Verdugo, Francisco, 207, 212n
Toussaint Louverture, 332n Verga, Solomon ibn, 53, 54, 57, 68n
Towle, Dorothy S., 367n Vergier, Pierre, 465n
Townsend, Louise, 101n Verlinden, Charles, 463n
Toy, E. V., 121n Vespucci, Amerigo, 64, 69n, 74
Trachtenberg, Joshua, 530n Viana, Manuel Nunes, 218, 220, 239n
Tracy, Alexandre Prouville de, 292, 298 Vicente, Gil, 133
Tracy, James D., 391n Victoire, Izaac, 258
Treviño Martínez de Sobremonte, Thomas Victoria, Francisco de, 464n
160, 197 Vidal Luna, Francisco, 240n
Trimingham, Spencer J., 85n Vieira, Antônio, 224, 225, 245, 371
Trochmann, John, 122n Vigneras, L.A., 119n
Tsevi, Sabbatai, 163 Vila Pilar, Enriqueta, 465n
Tucci Carneiro, Maria Luisa, 240n, 263n Viles, Perry, 283n
Tümpel, Astrid, 101n Villalpando, Juan Baptista, 398
Tumpel, Christian, 101n, 102n Villarias (Marquis de), 367n
Villena (Marquis de), 181
U Vinci, Leonardo da, 3
Uchmany, Eva Alexandra, 9, 22n, 66n, 200, Vitória, Diogo Fernandes, 475
201n, 202n Vitória, Duarte Fernandes, 475
Ugarte, Fernando Arias de, 208 Vitoria, Francisco de, 208
27 Name Index 1/24/01 2:40 PM Page 553

Name Index | 553

Vizinho, José, 80 Wilson, Charles, 469n

Vlessing, Odette, 367n, 466n, 515n Wilson, John, 112f, 120n
Vogt, John, 462n Wilton (intendant), 309
Voll, D., 122n Winius, George D., 463n
Voorduin, G. W. C., 407, 413, 420 Winter, P. J. van, 103n
Vos, Charles de, 482n Wischnitzer, Rachel, 531n
Voss, Peter, 283n Wiznitzer, Arnold, 349n, 389n, 390n, 466n,
Vossius (Voss), Gerardus, 96, 104n 475, 482n, 530n, 531n
Vries, A. B. de, 102n Wolf, Lucien, 102n
Vries, Simon de, 490 Wolff, Egon, 390n, 466n
Wolff, Frieda, 390n, 466n
W Woodward, David, 85n
Wachtel, Nathan, 7f, 10, 22n Wright, Philip, 265n
Waddington, Raymond B., 498n
Walker, Geoffrey J., 367n Y
Wall, G. E. van der, 102n Yagel, Abraham, 67n
Wall, Moses, 108 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 67n, 70n, 146n,
Wansink, H., 103n 348n, 392n, 467n, 469n
Warren, George, 434n Yllão, João de, 345
Wassing, Rene S., 434n Yoktan, 27, 36, 39
Waters, David, 85n
Watts, Pauline Moffitt, 32, 44n, 45n Z
Waugh, Julia Nott, 267n Zacek, Natalie, 498n
Weaver, Bobby, 267n Zacuto, Abraham, 5, 64, 67n, 79f, 84n, 85n,
Weber, Max, 10, 283n, 514 147n
Weber, T. P., 122n Zamora, Margarita, 45n
Webster, Nesta H., 117, 122n Zarate, Maria de, 165, 170n
Weinberg, Raphael, 69n Zee, Barbara van der, 391n
Weinstein, Rochelle, 435n Zee, Henri van der, 391n
Werner, J., 105n Zell, Michael, 105n
West, Delno C., 45n Zimmels, H. J., 435n
Westergaard, W., 348n Zimmerman (painter), 423
Westerveit, Ben, 101n Zimmermann, Matilde, 461n
Wichers (Governor), 395 Zink, Anne, 256, 258, 265n, 266n
Wickstrom, James, 117 Zorzi, Alessandro, 85n
Wildt, J. de, 368n Zucker, Georges K., 202n
William I (Prince of Orange), 93f, 103n, Zumárraga, Juan de, 188
371, 375 Zunz, Leopold, 67n
Williams, James Homer, 15, 369, 467n Zwarts, Jac, 310n
Williamson, Arthur H., 498n Zwierlein, Frederick, 370, 389n
Willoughby, Henry, 300, 397
28 Place Index 1/24/01 2:42 PM Page 554

PLACE INDEX

A Aruba, 337f, 345f, 353, 378

Acapulco, 472 Asia Minor, 29, 32
Actopan, 190 Atlantis, 35
Aleppo, 435n Aurea (Ophir), 31
Alexandria, 194 Austria, 360
Algarve, 486 Avignon, 49, 271, 284n, 305
Algiers, 297 Aviz, 250
Alsace, 271 Azores, 340, 486, 492
Amarillo, 263
Amazon (river basin), 394 B
Amstel (river), 404 Babylon, 112
Amsterdam, 102n, 106n, 198, 262, 277, Baeza, 153
329n, 335, 355f, 359f, 434n, 460, 465n, Bahia (region), 491
481, 505; Bordeaux and, 280, 282; as Bahia (Salvador de Bahia de Todos los San-
importer of Brazilian sugar, 340f; tos), 215, 219, 227, 250, 341, 465n, 479;
Cayenne and, 296; and the Hope of conquest of, by the Dutch, 375; mer-
Israel, 97, 108; as base for emigration to chants in, 488, 492f; and the slave trade,
America, 145, 258, 288f, 296, 396; Jewish 221f; and the sugar trade, 471, 474f, 510;
population in, 222; compared with New sugar mill owners in, 495f
Amsterdam, 15, 379ff, 524; Sephardi Balkans, 194
community in, 5, 92, 95, 100, 371–74, Baltic (region), 471
521, 524; and the slave trade, 448f, 451ff, Baltic (sea), 447, 472, 509
477, 513; and the sugar trade, 491, 513; Baltic ports, 472
as trading center, 472f, 475, 477ff, 510ff; Baltic states, 467n
synagogues in, 398, 402, 404–8, 416, 419, Barbados, 300, 523, 529; and Bayonne, 256,
422; and trade with Curaçao, 339; and 262; as open to Jews, 274f, 342f; Jewish
trade with French islands, 292f; treat- merchants in, 452, 459, 497; Jewish pop-
ment of Jews in, 345, 369, 371–74, 376, ulation of, 337, 519f; Protestant mer-
383, 388 chants in, 339; and the sugar trade, 480f,
Andean (passes), 338 512; and Suriname, 397
Angola, 18, 198, 221f, 351, 447, 476f, 479, Barcelona, 146n
493, 506 Bayonne (Saint-Esprit-Les-Bayonnes), 12,
Anian (strait of), 37 194 255–62, 266n, 279, 290, 504, 523;
Antilles, 257, 451f, 514; British, 259; Dutch, and Bordeaux, 281; residents of, in the
259; French, 255 French islands, 301, 305
Antwerp, 40, 371, 472f, 477f, 491 Beersheva, 261
Aquin, 324 Berbice, 287
Arabia, 28, 78 Bering (strait), 37, 46n
Aragon, 75, 130f, 145 Berlin, 14
Armenia, 34 Bidache, 255
Armire, 299 Bogota, 97
28 Place Index 1/24/01 2:42 PM Page 555

Place Index | 555

Bonaire, 345, 353, 377 Cartagena de Indias, 98, 105n, 146n, 161,
Bordeaux, 11f, 17, 151 194, 199, 261, 263, 195, 197f, 353, 360, 367n
290, 295, 309, 328n, 331n, 472, 504, 525; Cassipora, 409, 413
and Bayonne, 255, 257; and trade with Castile, 75, 128, 130f, 146n, 173, 186f, 189
Curaçao, 356, 268–82 passim; residents Castroville, 263
of, in the French islands, 301, 303ff; Cauca (river), 98
Gradis family and, 319f, 327, 453; Jew- Cayenne, 255, 273, 287, 291, 293, 296, 298f,
ish merchants in, 316f 301, 306, 350, 396
Boston, 19, 338 Cayes de Jacmel, 329n
Bragança, 276 Cefala (Sefala) (port), 42
Brandenburg, 360, 447, 452, 467n Charleston, 305, 459
Brazil, 10, 13, 18, 102n, 145, 206, 215–30 pas- Chiapas, 191
sim, 242–50 passim, 255, 287, 359, 390n, Chile, 9, 94, 203–6, 209f
465n; the Dutch in, 88, 91, 95f, 99, 289, China, 78
340–45; emigrants from, in the Carib- Chryse, 28
bean, 290f, 316, 396f; and settlers in Cilicia, 29
Cayenne, 296; Inquisition in, 131; Jews Cincinnati, 19
in, 369, 372, 374–77, 384f, 387f; and Mar- Ciudad Real, 191
tinique, 294; New Christians as sugar Clifton, 114
cultivators in, 486–98; nostalgia for, Cochin, 195
among Jews, 261; in the Portuguese Coimbra, 131, 134, 137, 224, 239n, 245, 249f
trading empire, 502–12 passim; and the Cologne, 452
slave trade, 442–55 passim; and the Colombia, 174, 360, 366n
sugar trade, 471–81; voyages to, 80 Colônia do Sacramento, 219
Breda, 397 Commewijne (river), 352, 412
Bristol, 114 Comtat Venaissin, 271
Britain, 21, 112, 360, 368n, 453, 457, 508 Congo, 397, 446
Brittany, 257 Congonhas, 228
Bruges, 320 Constantinople, 194
Bruxelles, 92 Copenhagen, 130, 467n
Buenairo, 346 Córdoba, 79, 146n, 206
Buenos Aires, 94, 206, 343, 503 Coro, 338, 355, 358f
Costa Rica, 188
C Courland, 447, 452
Cáceres, 205 Covilhã, 143
Cachoeira, 228 Cuba, 188, 356
Cádiz, 357f, 469n, 510 Cubagua, 191
Caeté, 228 Cumorah (hill), 111
Cairo, 194 Curaçao, 14, 21, 274f, 331n, 372, 377, 391n,
Calcutta, 55 460, 467n, 514, 520, 523; and Bayonne,
California, 116 256–60; cemeteries in, 408f; as com-
Callao, 206 mercial hub, 335–39; and Haiti, 305,
Camaragibe, 475, 478 317–20, 325; Jewish settlement of,
Campeche, 356 345; and Martinique, 292, 294; and
Canada, 115, 261, 265n the slave trade, 344, 356–61, 450ff;
Canary (islands), 146n synagogues on, 420–22; tolerance in,
Cap-Français (Cap-Haitien, Le Cap) 258, 350, 385
261f, 277, 301, 304f, 308f, 324 Cuzco, 189
Cap Tibouron, 304
Capão da Traição, 219 D
Cape Breton (Nova Scotia), 256 Dantzig, 510
Cape of Good Hope, 477, 480 Danube (river), 113
Cape Verde, 447, 476, 486, 497 Delaware (river), 344
Caracas, 257, 337f, 355f, 367n Demerara, 287
Carmel, 261 Denmark, 447, 452
28 Place Index 1/24/01 2:42 PM Page 556

556 | Place Index

Don (river), 113 Granada, 30, 131, 146n, 164, 208, 274
Dresden, 101n Greenwich (England), 81ff
Dublin, 112 Grenada, 289, 306
Grenadines, 289
E Groet, 408
East India, 457 Guadeloupe, 12, 255, 268, 288ff, 306, 317,
Ecuador, 108 321, 347, 356
Egypt, 115 Guatemala, 477
El Mina, 479 Guayanguareo (Morelia), 188
England, 4, 172, 260, 393n, 448, 469n, 471, Guinea, 341, 397, 451, 463n, 468n, 476, 479
480f; and Bordeaux, 282; as European Guyanas, 255, 287f, 290, 297ff, 335f, 339,
power vs. Spanish and Dutch, 343, 508; 346, 385, 397
Jews in, 386, 519; and the Lost Ten
Tribes, 108, 110–15; and maritime his- H
tory, 81ff; and the slave trade, 443 Hacha (river), 174
Espirito Santo, 474, 480 Haemus (river), 40
Essequibo, 287, 350, 385 Haiti, 13, 30, 274f, 287, 301f, 304–7, 309, 327.
Este (duchy of), 193 See also Saint-Domingue
Estremoz, 248 Hamburg, 282, 340, 372, 452f, 472, 478f,
Ethiopia, 55, 57, 64 491, 505, 510, 521, 525
Évora, 131, 134, 142, 148n, 243, 245, 247 Hanseatic (cities), 506
Hayden (lake) (Idaho), 118, 122n
F Hebron, 261
Fanado Mines, 228 Hibueras (Honduras), 201n, 189
Faro, 243 Hillsboro (West Virginia), 122n
Ferrara, 49, 59 Hispaniola (Haiti), 4, 30, 188, 301, 337
Flanders, 53, 194, 506 Honda, 97f
Florence, 49 Honduras, 188
Fond des Nègres, 317, 319, 324, 329n Hudson (valley), 386, 455
Fonds-de-l’Isle à Vaches, 301 Hudson (river), 344
Fort Orange (Albany), 344f Huelvas, 190
Fort St. Pierre, 274
France, 11f, 17, 21, 156, 172, 193, 199, 218, I
281, 343, 360, 445, 471; and Cayenne, Iberian Peninsula, 6f, 76, 126, 255, 270, 445,
295, 298; colonies of, 273f; emigrants 448, 457, 471, 485f, 511
from, to America, 260f, 446; Gradis fam- Idaho, 117, 121n
ily links to, 279; and Haiti (Saint- Ilha Grande, 218
Domingue), 301–5, 314–27 passim; India, 28, 80, 114, 216, 478
expulsion of Jews from, 443; Jewish Isle Royale, 256f
merchants in, 270, 453; and the slave Israel (state of), 115
trade, 447, 453; and the sugar trade, 480, Israel, 20, 28, 50, 97, 107f, 110ff, 305, 409
506ff, 523 Italian (city states), 505
Friuli, 130 Italy, 34, 130f, 136, 158, 172, 193f, 205, 218,
443, 445, 506
G Itanhaen, 218
Galicia, 146n, 194 Ivory Coast, 222
Ganges, 28
Germany, 82, 309, 448 J
Gironde, 304 Jackson County (Missouri), 111
Glückstadt, 467n Jacmel, 304f, 329n
Goa, 18, 147n, 195f, 479 Jamaica, 14, 266n, 343, 519, 523, 529; and
Goiás (region), 239n Bayonne, 256–62; and Haiti, 305, 317,
Goiás, 221 319; Jewish population of, 337; Jewish
Good Hope (cape of), 76 merchants on, 452, 459, 497; Protestant
Gorée, 278 merchants on, 339; as refuge for Jews,
28 Place Index 1/24/01 2:42 PM Page 557

Place Index | 557

351; and the slave trade, 454, 457; and Mantova (Mantua), 19, 48, 59
the sugar trade, 480 Maracaibo, 338, 353, 358
Jeremie, 305 Margarita, 357
Jerusalem, 30, 33, 37, 110f, 113, 261, 372, 402 Mariana, 223
Jodensavanne, 336, 351f Marie Galante, 289
Marseilles, 281, 356
K Martinique, 12, 255ff, 268, 273–78, 280, 287f,
Kingston, 454 306, 316f, 353, 356
Medellin, 91
L Medina, 263
La Guaira, 337, 358, 366n Melaku (island), 80
La Mancha, 151 Mers el Kebir, 297
La Rochelle (Suriname), 256, 299 Metz, 470n
Labastide-Clairance, 255 Mexico City, 180, 190, 193f, 199, 202n, 208
Labrador, 256 Mexico. See New Spain
Lamego, 134 Michoacán, 188
Lancaster (U.S.A.), 520, 527 Milano (Milan), 480
Leogan, 301, 304 Minas Gerais, 10, 215, 217, 219f, 222f, 226f,
Les Cayes, 305, 306 229f, 240n, 493
Lima, 146n, 153, 161, 167n, 193, 198, 202n, Missouri, 111
203, 205–11 Montana, 121n
Limbé, 304 Monte-mor-o-Novo, 248
Limoeiro, 243 Montreal, 529
Lisbon, 73, 153, 218; Church control in, 507; Moral, 151
Inquisition in, 134f, 161, 226f, 242–48 Moriah, 261
passim, 487, 496; navigation studies in, Morocco, 385, 510
77; New Christians in, 142; persecutions Moron, 309
of Jews in, 53, 132; and the sugar trade, Münster, 343
471ff; trade with, 340f, 477–80, 511. See Murcia, 146n, 187
also Portugal
Lithuania, 443 N
Liverpool (England), 120n Nancy, 304
Livorno (Leghorn), 158, 184, 195, 297, 341, Nantes, 304, 320
359, 372, 385, 396 Nassau, 88, 94
Llerena, 146n Ndembu (region), 446
Logroño, 146n Netherlands, The (Holland), 4, 16, 21,
London, 15, 110, 113, 116, 138, 148n, 257f, 86–101 passim, 105n, 208, 218, 282, 365n,
280, 282, 481, 505, 521, 523, 525f 393n, 462n; colonies of, in America,
Long Island, 384 350–60 passim; colonies of, and Spanish
Lorraine, 271 policy, 344; Jews in colonies of, 273ff,
Los Angeles, 115f 298; rise to world power of, 508–12;
Louisiana, 256, 274 synagogues in, 422; and the slave trade,
Low Countries, 92, 172, 198, 371, 506 443, 447f, 450; and the sugar trade, 471f,
480, 491; tolerance of Jews in colonies
M of, 339–41, 370–88 passim. See also Low
Macao, 195 Countries
Madeira, 81, 96, 104n, 340, 356, 372, 472f, Nevis, 519
486f, 506 New Amsterdam (New York), 15, 344, 369,
Madrid, 153, 167n, 181, 185n, 194, 207ff, 388, 520
212n, 343f, 479 New England, 384, 503
Maghreb, 172 New France, 268, 278
Majorca, 77, 143, 146n New Granada, 91, 97, 174f, 356
Malacca, 195 New Guinea, 486
Manhattan, 370, 384, 386ff, 413 New Holland, 342
Manila, 472, 480 New Jersey, 116
28 Place Index 1/24/01 2:42 PM Page 558

558 | Place Index

New Mexico, 175 Parva’im (Paruvim), 37, 39, 61

New Netherland, 344ff, 369, 377, 381ff, Pennsylvania, 121n
385, 387 Pernambuco, 101n, 145, 215, 221, 227, 375,
New Orleans, 257, 304f 511; social mobility in, 495f; and the
New Spain, 8, 73, 115, 146n, 153–65 passim, sugar trade, 471–81 passim, 491ff
172–84 passim, 187–200 passim, 201n, Persia, 78
255, 445, 472 Peru, 9, 71n, 166n, 173ff, 180f, 189, 193–98
New Walcheren, 346 passim, 202n, 338, 472; as biblical Ophir,
New York, 15, 122n, 366n, 369–88 passim, 36–41; Dutch interest in, 94; Jews in,
389n, 391n, 393n, 397, 434n, 435n, 203–9 passim
519–29 passim; African cemetery in, 426; Petit Gôave, 277, 304, 309, 317
and Curaçao 335, 338f, 354; and the Petit Trou, 320
sugar trade, 481 Peyrehorade, 156, 255, 257
Newfoundland, 256 Philadelphia, 21, 459, 520
Newport, 359, 454, 459, 481, 519f, 525f Philippines, 56, 116, 174f, 179, 195
Nicaragua, 175, 188, 201n Pietermaal, 354
Niebla, 190 Pisa, 372
Normandy, 351 Plata (river) 206
North Sea, 448 Point-au-Pitre, 295
Nossa Senhora do Carmo, 218 Poland, 61, 443
Nova Scotia, 265n Pole (north), 77
Nova Zeelandia (Western Guyana), 346, 385 Pomeroon, 287, 297, 350, 385, 397
Popoyán, 338
O Port-au-Prince, 257f, 260, 262, 304f, 309,
Oklahoma City, 108, 119 320, 323
Olinda, 88, 101n, 102n, 475, 479 Port Royal, 259
Ophir (Ofir, Feyti, Cipangu, Uphaz), 4, 6, Portalegre, 243
27–30, 33f, 36f, 43, 61, 64, 71n Portland (Oregon), 115ff
Oporto, 132, 134, 224, 340f, 471, 473, Porto, 243
478, 511 Portugal, 7–10, 21, 146n, 147n, 176, 198,
Oran, 297 207, 219, 355, 468n, 469n; banishment
Oregon, 45n, 115ff from, 242–50 passim; and Bordeaux, 281;
Orinoco (river), 32 control of Brazil by, 220–22; and the
Oropresa, 205 Dutch in Brazil, 377; emigration from,
Ostende, 320 215, 270, 272, 316, 459f; and European
Otrabanda, 354 expansion, 502–11 passim; expulsions
Ottoman Empire, 182, 443, 522 from, 58; Inquisition in, 136–45 passim,
Ouderkerk, 404, 408f, 413 192, 216, 224; Jews and New Christians
Ouro Preto, 218, 220, 224, 226f, 229 in, 53, 125–35 passim, 150f, 172f, 186f,
230, 371f, 450; and messianic move-
P ments, 163f; navigation science in, 76,
Pachuca, 151 81–84 passim; “purity of blood” statutes
Pactolus (river), 40 in, 226; and the slave trade, 443–46, 454;
Palestina, 110 and the sugar trade, 471–81 passim,
Palos, 190 485ff. See also Lisbon
Panama, 197 Potosí, 192, 206, 207f
Pánuco, 190 Prague, 61
Paracatu, 227, 239n Providence, 27
Paraguana, 338 Prussia, 360
Parahiba, 221, 229, 290 Puebla, 151, 174, 194, 199
Paramaribo, 16, 262, 336, 339, 352, 394, Puerto Cabello, 366n
408, 425 Puerto Lopez, 366n
Paraopeba, 228 Puerto Rico, 337f, 356f
Parati, 216, 218, 261, 273, 279, 288, 316, Punda, 266n, 354, 451
326f, 479
28 Place Index 1/24/01 2:42 PM Page 559

Place Index | 559

Q São Vicente, 229, 474

Quebec City, 279 Saragossa, 146n
Quito, 97f, 108, 338 Sardinia, 146n
Savannah, 520
R Saxony, 356
Reading (U.S.A), 520 Scharloo, 354
Recife, 95, 99, 261, 274, 341f, 369, 375ff, 379, Schell City (Missouri), 118
491, 523, 525f Scopus (mount), 111
Red Sea, 28, 78 Sepher (mountain), 39
Remire, 273, 297–300 Sergripe, 221
Rhine (river), 465n Serro Frio, 228
Rhode Island, 335, 338, 359, 454, 519 Setúbal, 243
Ribeirão do Carmo, 227, 229 Sevilla (Seville), 146n, 152, 161, 172ff, 181,
Rio das Mortes, 218f, 222, 228f 185n, 189, 192f, 198, 202n, 224, 472, 478f,
Rio de Janeiro, 215, 218f, 221f, 225, 227, 474, 473, 505
479f, 482n, 491, 493–97, 499n, 503 Sharm el Sheik, 28
Rio de La Hacha, 338, 356, 358, 360 Sicily, 146n
Rio de La Plata (river), 455, 493 Silesia, 356
Rome, 35, 50, 134, 397 Sinai (peninsula), 28
Rotterdam, 472 Solomon Islands, 71n
Rouen, 194, 275, 372, 472, 479 Souppara, 28
Russia, 110 Spain, 6f, 21, 29, 35, 43, 146n, 355, 371, 374f;
Ryswick, 301 and Bordeaux, 270, 281; decline of, 198;
Dutch revolt against, 92f; emigration
S from, 150; and European expansion,
Saint Christopher (St. Kitts), 288, 359 502–5 passim; expulsions from, 53, 58,
Saint-Domingue (cape), 259 172, 442f; and Hispaniola, 301; Inquisi-
Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingue), 12, 13, tion in, 145; international relations of,
256–58, 264n, 268, 274–78, 308, 314, 324, 343, 360; Jews and conversos in, 187, 190,
351, 356f, 460, 467n. See also Haiti 193, 205f, 408; New Christians as finan-
Saint-Esprit, 284n ciers of, 479f; persecution of Jews in, 75,
Saint Eustatius, 256, 262, 275, 335, 337, 339, 125–33, 158; and trade with America,
346, 420 358, 473, 477
Saint Jean de La Luz, 151 Sparta, 323
Saint Louis (Haiti), 301–6 Succoth, 261
Saint Lucia, 289 Sudan, 221, 222
Saint Martin (St. Maarten), 335, 378 Suriname (river), 351f, 394, 402, 408f,
Saint Thomas, 256, 259, 264n, 305, 337, 339, 423, 434n
346, 365n Suriname, 14ff, 287, 372, 460, 470n, 519;
Saint Vincent, 306 Africans in, 397f; decline of, 513f; and
Sainte-Croix, 264n Dutch policies, 339f; Jewish agriculture
Salamanca, 189, 193, 197 in, 350–53; Jewish community in, char-
Salonica, 194, 372 acterized, 335f, 361, 523–25; Jewish set-
Sambatyon (river), 108 tlers in, 300, 385, 450; and the
San Lúcar de Barrameda, 192 Jodensavanne, 394–433 passim; Portu-
San Marcos, 208 guese Jews in, 255f, 260ff
Santa Clara, 207 Sweden, 447, 452
Santa María, 192 Syria, 309, 435n
Santa Marta, 353, 356, 360
Santarém, 243 T
Santiago, 203, 206f, 210 Tagus (river), 73, 83, 84
Santos, 227f Tamarica, 290
São Paulo, 215, 219, 221, 240n Tarshish, 29f, 43, 55, 61, 71n
São Tomé, 53–57, 341, 442, 444, 468n, 472f, Tarsus, 29, 32
486f, 497, 506 Tartessus, 29
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560 | Place Index

Tenerife, 510 Viana do Castelo, 207, 219, 511

Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), 189f Vienna, 457
The Hague, 367n Vila Boa de Goiás, 239n
Tijuco, 229 Vila Pitangui, 228
Tlaxcala, 151 Vila Rica, 224
Tobago, 5, 298, 346, 350 Villaflor, 97
Toledo, 130, 132, 146n, 153, 165, 191, 205 Virgin Islands, 523
Tomar, 134 Virginia, 338
Tordesillas, 80
Torrica (Thorarica), 351, 434n W
Trent, 192 Weimar, 19
Tucacas, 338f, 348n, 358f West Indies, 521
Tucumán, 206, 208 Westphalia, 356
Tunis, 372 Wild Coast, 297, 298
Tuy (river), 359 Willemstad, 266n, 337f, 345, 354, 357,
366n, 387
U Windward Islands, 302
United States of America, 19, 108, 113,
115ff, 119, 469n, 520 Y
Utrecht, 357, 368n, 451 Yaracuy (river), 358
Yucatán, 188, 192
V
Valencia, 146n Z
Valladolid, 146n Zacatecas, 194
Vancouver, 115 Zeeland, 344, 346, 350, 360, 385
Venezuela, 337f, 356, 358ff, 366n Zion (mount of), 31
Venezia (Venice), 50, 130, 194, 341, 472, Zion, 111
479, 510
Veracruz, 151, 188, 192, 357
Versailles, 264n, 317, 319, 322, 324
29 Subject Index 1/24/01 2:43 PM Page 561

SUBJECT INDEX

A Baptists, 525. See also Protestantism,

Adamites, 118. See also pre-Adamitic people Protestants
affranchis, 305. See also slaves baroque poetry, 5
agriculture, 291; abolition of slavery and, bezerrinha de prata, 143
504; agro-industry and, 291; Brazilian Bible: division of the world according to,
plantation economy and, 503; cacao and 107f; exegesis of, 3; geography in, 28f;
sugar plantations, 317; Catholic planters landscape painting and, 86f; Latin
and, 342; Jewish role in the Caribbean translation of, 28f; Mormons attitude
and, 352, 513f; Dutch sugar refineries toward, 111; narratives, 88; Polyglot, 37.
and, 491; evolution of, in Suriname, 336, See also messianism, millennialism,
350ff, 423; involvement of New Chris- prophecy, Ophir, Solomon’s travels
tians in, 493; slave operated, 459f; and Bible Society, 114
cultivation of sugar cane, 291, 336; and bigamists, 244
sugar growing in Haiti, 301; and sugar Black Code. See Code noir
mills in Brazil, 473; tobacco production blacks, conversion to Judaism of, 404
and, 288; and tropical products, 287, 296 blasphemy, 157
American dream, 260ff book of nature, 81
American Judaism, 21 bosnegroes, 423
Antiqua Iudaeorum Improbitas, 128 British Israelite movement: and anti-Semi-
anti-Semitism, 21. See also toleration, race, tism, 116; Aryan Nations and, 119;
racism origins of, 115
Aristotelianism, 77 British merchants, 19
art and representations of the New burial, 259. See also cemeteries
World, 88f
Aryan race, 119 C
Ashkenazim, 525 Calvinism, 15, 373, 385. See also Protestant-
asientos. See slave trade ism, Protestants, West India Company
assimilation, 186, 269f; Catholicism and, Caminho novo, 218
245; rejection of, by Portuguese Jews, Cape North Company, 295
192; in Brazil, 218 carreira da Índia, 478
astrolabe, 77, 79 castas, 175
astronomical techniques, 79f cemeteries: at Cassipora, 409; Suriname
Atlantis (myth of), 35 and rabbinical rules regarding, 422; in
aubaines, 321 Jodensavanne, 394ff; Ouderkerk, 409.
auto-da-fé, 137, 198; in Lima, 209–11; in Por- See also burial
tugal, 242, 247. See also exile, Inquisition Children of Satan, 117f
Christian Aryanism, 119. See also British
B Israelite movement
banishment, 84, 172f; of New Christians, Christianization, 175, 187
10; from Cap-Français, 308; from Spain Christology, 153
and Portugal, 53, 465, 242f. See also citizenship, 314, 322ff, 386. See also French
exile, Inquisition Revolution, toleration
29 Subject Index 1/24/01 2:43 PM Page 562

562 | Subject Index

civilization: as French concept, 323; of the E

Indians, 94 eclecticism, 188
Code Noir (Black Code) (1685), 274, 288, economy, participation of Jews in, 13ff, 270,
301, 306; in Haiti, 301f, 306; interpreta- 280f. See also agriculture, trade, West
tions of, 295 India Company
Colegios mayores, 191 Enlightenment, 12, 320. See also French
Columbus, “Jewishness” of, 3 Revolution, toleration
Communists, 117 European expansion, 502f
Compagnie des Isles d’Amerique, 288 “exclusive system,” 268
compellere intrare, 243 exile: as punishment, 243f; as exclusion of
confession, legal practice of, 127. See also individuals, 250. See also banishment,
Inquisition diaspora
conspiracy theories, 117. See also exoticism: in Dutch context, 97; and Jews,
Great Plot 57; of Jews in America, 92
“converso problem,” 134
Copernican system, 59 F
cosmography, 4 “Familiars” (collaborators of the Inquisi-
Council of Trent (1545–63), 192 tion), 144. See also Inquisition
creolism, 183 familial strategies, 258f. See also family net-
crypto-Jews, 1, 126; assimilation of, 180; works, trade, New Christians
beliefs of, 230; and celebration of holi- family networks, 12. See also familial strate-
days, 195f; communities of, in New gies, trade, New Christians
Spain, 199; lack of formal religious flota system, 505
training of, 182; and New Christians, Frankism, 7
245; new wave of, in New Spain, 197; Freemasons, 117
persecutions of, in Brazil, 492; survival freethinking, 226
of, 199f; preserving the faith of, 402. See French Company of the West Indies, 292
also crypto-Judaism, Inquisition, mar- French legislation about the Jews, 271
ranism, secrecy French model, 256
crypto-Judaism: accusations of, 244; cult of French Revolution: attitudes of, towards
memory of, 154; practices of, 154; ap- the Jews, 326f. See also Enlightenment,
pearance of, in Portugal, 173. See also toleration, revolution
crypto-Jews, identity, Inquisition,
marranism G
Genoese merchants, 19. See also trade
D geographical mobility, 12. See also family
diaspora: of Sephardim in Holland, 372. networks, economy, trade
See also banishment, exile geography: Classical, 3, 28f, 35, 40; views
dietary laws, 191, 226 of Columbus on, 31; and ethnography,
discovery: effect of, on ancient sources, 58; 38; its study among the Jews, 47ff;
irenic interpretations of, 59f; Jewish sci- medieval, 33; Menasseh ben Israel’s
entific accounts of, 58ff; Jewish teaching views on, 96. See also Bible, discovery,
of, 65 Ophir
dual identity. See identity German merchants, 19
Dutch discourse on America, 93ff, ghettoes, 243; in Italy, 193
98ff, 100 gold mining in Brazil, 217
Dutch East India Company, 510; Jewish Great Plot (Great Complicity) (complicidad
investments in, 341. See also West India granda), 8f, 175, 209; in Peru, 180; mean-
Company ing in political history, 8. See also con-
Dutch republican dimension, 92 spiracy theories
Dutch West India Company. See West India
Company H
Dutch-Indian Confederation, 94 haham, 522
Dutchness, 383. See also racism haroset, 521
29 Subject Index 1/24/01 2:43 PM Page 563

Subject Index | 563

Hassidism, 7 172, 216; practice of denunciation of, 245;

hazan, 526 public opinion and, 200; social contexts
Hebreeusche Natie, 374. See also nation of, 143; in Spain, 131; success of, in
herem, 524 Latin America, 199f; the Suprema of,
heresy, 128. See also Inquisition 181; trials of 1639, 210. See also crypto-
heterodoxy in Spain, 175 Jews, crypto-Judaism, marranism, New
Huguenots, 504. See also Protestants, Christians
Protestantism intermarriage, 528. See also mixed marriage
Hutterites, 9. See also Protestants, Protes- intolerance, 271. See also anti-Semitism,
tantism racism, toleration
irenism, 60ff
I
identity: and African converts in Suriname, J
423; of conversos, 92; and dual identity, Jansenism, 316
7, 128, 177; French, 316; orthodox Jew- Jesuits, 274, 290
ish, in the New World, 389; Jewish Jewish “colonization,” 2
political, 314; and memory, 7; of “New Jewish communal authority, 20
Whites” in Saint-Domingue, 323; and Jewish communities: in the New World, 48;
orthodoxy, 141; and race in Saint- in Mantua, 48
Domingue, 327; theoretical issues con- Jewish “factor,” 3, 19. See also economy,
cerning, 6; transformation of, 186. See family networks, New Christians, trade
also crypto-Jews, crypto-Judaism, dual Jewish “Nation”. See nation, nations
identity, Inquisition, marranism, New Jewish science, 6. See also discovery, science
Christians, syncretism Jews in Europe: and Christian scholarship,
importation. See smuggling, trade 66; and collaboration with Christians,
impurity of blood, 142. See also Inquisition, 49; and maritime explorations, 48; con-
purity of blood ditions of, 54
Indians: Brazilian, 34; Calvinism and, 376; Judaism: European and North American,
discovery of, 107; Dutch sympathy for, 520ff; reversion to, 248
93; first encounter with, 187; Lost Ten Judaizing: accusations of in Brazil, 225;
Tribes and, 111; and Reubenites, 91f forms of, 136. See also crypto-Jews,
Inquisition 8, 125f, 137f, 181, 243; attitude crypto-Judaism, dual identity, Inquisition
of, toward trade, 507; in Brazil, 220, 223; Judeo-Catholics, 129. See also marranism,
in Brazil and West Africa, 131; and New Christians
burning in effigy, 193; and A. F. Car-
dado, 151; in Castile, 128; in Chile, 203; K
in Coimbra, 249; in comparative per- Karaitism, 7
spective, 11; compared in Italy and kehilla, 521
Spain, 131; crypto-Jews and, 142, 183ff; Ku Klux Klan, 116
death penalty and, 138; doctrinal and
institutional framework of, 131; eco- L
nomic origins of, 132f; activities of, in latitude, determination of, 76
Évora, 247; formal questions of, 154; his- lavradores, 476
toriography of, 130, 250; informants for, Lettres patentes (1717), 263n, 278, 302f
488; institutional networks of, in the Lost Ten Tribes, 59; British Israelite Zion-
New World, 176; in Italy, 131; itinerant ism and, 113; Columbus and, 107f;
tribunals of, 224; knowledge of New Dutch and, 97; Menasseh ben Israel
Christian trade by, 209; in Lima, 193, and, 108; Reuveni’s travels and, 50. See
206f; Lutherans and, 137; methods of, also Bible, messianism, millennialism,
126, 249; in Minas Gerais, 219f, 229; prophecy
Mohammedanism and, 130; moriscos and,
145; New Christians and, 127, 248; in
M
New Spain, 162, 179ff; penalties of dimin-
maps. See geography
uto and negativo, 137; in Portugal, 11, 131f,
Marian cults, 153
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564 | Subject Index

marranism, 142; agnosticism and, 10; in with the Jews, 83. See also
Brazil, 229f; Christian majority and, 182; Mohammedanism
definition of, 150f; divisions among
family members and, 151; evolution of, N
182f; fasting and, 160f; features of, 183f; nation: concept of, 372; Hebrew, in Holland,
forms of prayers of, 228f; lack of reli- 374; Jewish, 1; meaning of, as referred to
gious authorities for, 173; learning and, the Jews, 522; Portuguese, 92; Portu-
227; Messianism and, 161f; as multifac- guese-Jewish, 92; Sephardim of Amster-
eted phenomenon, 226; origins of, in dam as, 100. See also Hebreeusche Natie
New Spain, 172; and reconversion to National Legion, 321
Christianity, 297; relativism and, 165; Native Americans: Columbus’s views on,
reversion to Judaism and, 297; and reli- 33. See also Indians
giosity, 150, 157f; rituals of, 178; skepti- natural philosophy, 60
cism in, 230; syncretic aspects of, 164. navigation, 41; and early modern instru-
See also crypto-Jews, crypto-Judaism, ments, 74. See also science, trade
dual identity, identity, Inquisition, mar- New Christians: and agnosticism, 11; Asian
ranos, New Christians trade of, 471, 477; Atlantic system and,
marranos: in Brazil, 215f; their knowledge 456; beliefs of, 88f, 155; in Brazil, 220,
of Inquisitorial practices, 225. See also 223f; and Catholicism, 150, 249, 272f;
crypto-Jews, crypto-Judaism, dual iden- classification of, 135ff; at the time of the
tity, identity, Inquisition, marranism, Conquest, 189f; commercial networks
marrano religiosity, New Christians of, 186f, 473, 506; crypto-Judaism, 1,
martyrdom, and Jews in Europe, 55 145; defense strategies of, 138, 224f; eco-
massacres of Jews, 130f; at Capão da nomic impact of, 479; in France, 270f; in
Traição, 219; at Lisbon, 1506, 133 French colonies, 287; and the gold rush
“Meditatio Cordis,” 242 in Brazil, 215; and the Great Plot, 163;
merchants: in Bordeaux, 269; Jewish, in the and identity, 8, 165, 190; Inquisition
Caribbean colonies, 450; Jewish, in the and, 126f; and intermarriage, 133;
English West Indies, 452; in the Judaism and, 244; and literature, 193; in
Caribbean, 338. See also economy, mer- Madeira, 487; and New Whites, 314;
chant community, New Christians, and Old Christians, 149, 191ff, 495ff;
trade, West India Company persecution of, 143, 496; in Peru, 203ff;
messianism: among Mexican New Chris- in Portugal, 135, 444f; and the Sabbath,
tians, 161; architecture and, 423; 178; and the slave trade, 17; and social
chronology and, 163; as redemption in status, 18, 486ff; in Spain, 145; and
history, 193; and millennialism, 5; sugar cultivation, 465; women among,
Dutch culture and, 94; the New Messiah 177. See also agriculture, crypto-Jews,
and, 196; in Eastern Europe, 99; Faris- crypto-Judaism, Inquisition, identity,
sol’s accounts of, 53. See also Bible, mes- marranism, marranos, trade
sianism, prophecy New Spain, society in, 176
minhag, 522 “New Whites,” 13, 323–27. See also race,
mixed marriage, 133, 135. See also racism
intermarriage
modernity, emergence of, in the Western O
Hemisphere, 164 Ophir, 38ff; political significance of, 41. See
modernization, the role of New Christians also Bible, Solomon’s travels
in, 216f
Mohammedanism, 130. See also Inquisition,
Muslims
P
monotheism, diffusion of, 36
Padrón de Conversos, 187
Mormons, 9, 110f. See also Bible, Protes-
panos pretos, 478
tantism, Protestants
Paradise: discovery of, 33; location of, 50.
mulattos, 315
See also Bible, geography
Muslims: and science, 74f; fight of, against
pardos, 223
the Jews, 50; and scientific competition
29 Subject Index 1/24/01 2:43 PM Page 565

Subject Index | 565

paulistas, 219 118f; and “Dutchness,” 383; as ideology,

persecutions, 173. See also banishment, 316; and national character, 20; in Span-
exile, Inquisition, toleration ish and Portuguese society, 142. See also
plantation economy, 18. See also agriculture, anti-Semitism, race, racial integration,
economy toleration
poortersrecht, 373 reconquista, 505
pre-Adamitic people, 34. See also Adamites reconversion (double conversion), 152. See
predikants, 372 also marranism, New Christians
printing press, in Saint-Domingue, 322 régnicoles, 321
prophecy: biblical landscape painting and, religion: in contemporary America, 108;
91f; and British Israelitism, 113; Colum- and pluralism, 528; popular forms
bus’s voyages and, 43; Daniel and, 4; of, 142f
discovery of the New World and, 57f; religious identity, and Jews, 11. See also
Abraham Farissol and, 49; Isaiah and, crypto-Jews, crypto-Judaism, identity,
110; Jerusalem and, 31; 33; Jewish marranism, marranos, New Christians
prophets and, 43; and Montezinos’s Renaissance, 3
accounts, 108; in the Netherlands, 97; Reubenites, 91
Ophir and, 29. See also Bible, British Revolution: American, 529; French, 316;
Israelite movement, messianism, mil- Haitian, 304f
lennialism, Ophir Royal African Company, 453
Protestantism, 7, 99; and Inquisition, 205;
in England, 110; in Italy, 130; meaning S
of, in economic history, 514. See also Sabbataeanism, 7
Inquisition, Mormons, Protestants, sabbath, 526; celebration of, among marra-
Quakers nos, 178; celebration of, in the New
Protestants: and Jews, 111; as colonists in World, 60; millennial dimension of, 115;
the Caribbean, 350; as merchants in observance of in New Spain, 195; of the
Amsterdam, 282; toleration of, in Hol- witches, 127. See also crypto-Jews,
land, 387. See also Inquisition, Calvin- crypto-Judaism, marranism
ism, Mormons, Protestantism, Quakers sambenito, 191, 199, 201, 247. See also
Psalms, translation into Spanish of, 11. See Inquisition
also Bible science: and early modern Jews, 6, 75; navi-
Purgatory, conception of, among New gation and, 83; medieval Christian, 75;
Christians, 155 modern academic history of, 82
purity of blood (pureza de sangre, limpieza de Sebastianism, 163
sangre), 7, 126, 445, 487; statutes con- second coming, 3f. See also millennialism,
cerning, in Brazil, 227; statutes of, 191. prophecy
See also impurity of blood, Inquisition, secrecy, and practice of Judaism, 126, 128.
New Christians See also crypto-Jews, crypto-Judaism,
pyramidology, 114f Inquisition, marranism, marranos,
sabbath
Q secret societies, in Brazil, 229f
quadroons, 316 secularization, 10
Quakers, 9, 525, 529. See also Protestantism, senhores do engenho, 491
Protestants Sephardim in world trade, 216
Seven Years’ War (1756–63), 321
R skepticism, 2f, 156
race: definition of, in the slave trade, 441; slave trade, 16f, 153; abolition of, 440; asien-
legal concepts of, 498 tos and, 197; Atlantic economy and, 221;
racial integration, 324. See also “New to Brazil, 221, 476; first phase of, 443–47;
Whites,” racism “middle passage” and, 440; involve-
racism, 15, 314; and anti-Semitism in New ment of Muslims and Christians in, 440;
Netherlands, 382f; Christian Aryanism involvement of New Christians and
and, 119; in contemporary America, Jews in, 440ff, 458ff; official trading
entities of, 443; participation of
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566 | Subject Index

slave trade (cont.) Dutch, 339, 369f, 374, 385, 397; in

Bordeaux Jews in, 278f; New Christians France, 281f; views of Grégoire on, 326;
in, 479; second phase of, 447–53; third in Haiti, 321; reasons for, 294; in Suri-
phase of, 453–55. See also agriculture, name, 361. See also anti-Semitism,
New Christians, slavery, slaves, trade, Enlightenment, French Revolution, Tol-
West India Company eration Act
slavery: in French colonies, 278; treatment trade: Amsterdam role in, 341; in cacao,
of, in the Bible, 420. See also slave trade, 292; relations of Caribbean with Hol-
slaves, trade land, 352f; and Christian-Jewish rela-
slaves: “Brazilian Savages” as, 290; African, tions, 372; in colonial products, 17; and
in Suriname, 351f, 397f; and agriculture comparative advantage of Jews and
in Madeira, 486; Christians as, 294; New Christians, 276, 354, 479; of
freed (affranchis), 305; in French colo- Curaçao and Jamaica, 319; with
nies, 274; importation of, to Suriname, Curaçao and Suriname, 352f; competi-
351; mortality of, in the Caribbean, 351; tion of French and Dutch, 317; in Dutch
rebellion of, in Haiti, 309; trade in, from America, 335; Dutch supremacy in, 508;
Curaçao, 356. See also affranchis, agricul- and England after 1655, 343; French
ture, slave trade, slavery, trade colonial, 269, 273; exports to Holland
smuggling: in the Caribbean, 353; in from the Caribbean, 338; illegal, 222;
Curaçao and Suriname, 353f; in the inter-American, 337; and intermarriage
French Caribbean, 317f. See also illegal between New Christians, 488; interna-
trade, New Christians, trade, West India tional system of, 480f; international
Company French, 273; Jewish, as factor in
social exclusion, 243 Atlantic economy, 16ff, 276, 512f; and
social mobility, 220 Jewish financial involvement, 280f; and
sodomites, 244. See also Inquisition Jewish mercantile networks, 354ff, 459f;
Solomon’s voyages, 28f. See also Bible, and Jewish networks in the Caribbean,
geography, Ophir 337, 354ff; Jewish role in, 374f; and lux-
Spanish culture, its influence on ury goods in the Caribbean, 356; lux-
marranos, 174 ury, in Asia, 472; Mediterranean, 472;
Spanish theologians and the Indians, 112 merchants and, 489; networks in the
statutes of Toledo (1449), 132 Americas, 503ff; and New Christian
synagogue(s): in Amsterdam, 398; and networks in Brazil, 475; New Chris-
Christian Church, 190; as community, tians’ emergence in, 371; and New
521f; Bracha veShalom (Jodensavanne), Christian family networks, 446; Por-
394; in Curaçao, 21; in Europe and tuguese decline in, 507; Sephardim suc-
America, compared, 523; in Jodensa- cess in, 279; in slaves, 356; sugar
vanne, 15, 336, 419; in London, 523; in cultivation and, 465, 471f, 511. See also
Martinique, 293; Mikveh Israel agriculture, family networks, familial
(Curaçao), 259, 336, 387; in Paramaribo, strategies, merchants, New Christians,
425; in Philadelphia, 21; Shearith Israel slave trade, toleration, West India Com-
(New York), 521; Touro (Newport), 519 pany
syncretism, 150; assimilation and, 184; Treaty of Paris (1763), 321
Christian iconography and, 159; mar- Treaty of Tordesillas (1494—sanctioned
ranism and, 159; in Surinamese ceme- 1506), 80f
teries, 426. See also crypto-Jews, trigonometry, 82
crypto-Judaism, marranism Tychonic system, 59

T U
Toleration Act (1689), 386. See also toleration Urim and Thummim, 110
toleration, 14, 125, 321; and anti-Semitism
in England, 386; Arminian positions on, V
378; in Brazil 376f; in the British vrijluiden, 375
colonies, 350, 374, 397; towards
Catholics, 373; in Curaçao, 361; by the
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Subject Index | 567

W X
West India Company (WIC), 93, 95, 99, 342, Xuetes, 143
380, 510; and Brazil, 99, 341; and Jewish
private trade, 344f; and toleration, 377; Y
New Netherlands and, 383f; policies of, Yehidim, 522
in New Amsterdam, 379; and relations Yom Hakkipurim, 196
with the Jewish community of Amster-
dam, 381; and slaving monopoly in the
Atlantic, 448. See also slave trade, tolera-
tion, trade
witchcraft, 127. See also Inquisition
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