Read Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Authors: Edward Kritzler
Fonseca claimed that funds for the expedition had been “raised by subscription among all the Jews of Holland,” and that the armada was “governed by a Jew who takes in his company 100 Jews…I shall name only the principal ones, for I should never get through if I named them all.” Fonseca then named ten Jews—a minyan—including Moses’s close friend Abraham Israel, whom he identified as the fleet’s adjutant (administrative officer). Beyond elaborating on Moses’s piracy and spying, Fonseca also accused him of concocting a particularly bold plan to capture Havana with African warriors disguised as slaves: “The landing is to be made under a flag of truce, pretending they escaped from the Hollanders, and [once inside the city] under cover of night, they would arm themselves and slaughter the soldiers.”
Neither event occurred: There is no record of a Brazil-bound fleet stopping off in Portugal to sack the Inquisition, nor a Trojan horse ploy to capture Havana. Perhaps the backers of the Jewish-led armada learned their plans had been exposed and canceled them. Or perhaps Fonseca’s charges were nothing more than barroom talk—he claimed to be a former crew member. In either case, his statement affirms the mettle of Moses and his mates. Over card games, they drank rum, smoked cigars, and discussed their various enterprises—shipping sugar, selling slaves, smuggling silver from Potosí—and plotted the overthrow of the Inquisition empire.
As long as Johan Maurice was governor, New Holland thrived. The colony’s disparate groups regularly condemned one another, but ultimately got along. Annual sugar production doubled, from fifteen thousand tons at the beginning of the seventeenth century to thirty thousand tons during Maurice’s tenure. In the process, the retail price of sugar was halved, thereby spreading consumption from the banquet table of the rich to the penny candy counter.
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While the Cohen Henriques brothers and their friends were carving a niche for themselves in Brazil, their cousins in Amsterdam were growing rich importing and exporting goods from all over the known world. Dutch captains, trading illegally with converso agents in ports throughout the Spanish Empire, brought cargo direct to Amsterdam. In Peru, where Jews controlled the silver trade, ore skimmed from the mines was exchanged for silk from China via Mexico; pimento spice from Jamaica found its way into Holland’s smoked herring; pearls from Venezuela were a viable currency most everywhere. Spanish traders could match neither the price nor the quality of the goods the
contrabandistas
(free traders) had to offer.
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Jews in Amsterdam in contact with Sephardic merchants in Europe, the Mediterranean, and points east passed the New World’s resources on to them, and their goods on to the New World. As middlemen in this commerce, Amsterdam Jews made profits to and fro.
In 1640, after sixty years of union with Spain, Portugal again achieved its independence, the result of a bloodless coup in Lisbon by followers of the Duke of Braganza. The duke, now reigning as King John IV, sent a delegation to Holland to sign a peace pact and form an alliance against Spain.
The resulting treaty created a peculiar situation in Brazil. Holland was now an ally of Portugal, yet occupied a major part of her New World colony. Rather than acknowledge this anomaly, and perhaps award Brazil’s Portuguese certain privileges in recognition of their new status, the States General instead ordered Prince Maurice to capture as much surrounding territory as he could. The prince lost no time in carrying out this Machiavellian move. While he was ostensibly negotiating a truce with leaders of adjacent provinces under Portugal’s control, his soldiers occupied their territory. At the same time, he sent a naval force to Africa to capture São Tomé and the port of Luanda in Angola.
By 1642, New Holland ruled most of northeast Brazil and the African entrepôts that transshipped most of the colony’s slave labor.
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The colony was at its zenith, but not for long. When the prince’s contract was up, the States General decided his administration was too costly, and did not renew it. Admittedly, New Holland had become the most expensive colony in the Dutch empire, but she also produced the most money. Nevertheless, in September 1643, the prince was notified to return to Holland forthwith. To no avail did the leaders of New Holland’s religious communities formally request he remain. The Jews’ letter praised his “wise and happy rule,” and thanked him for “the protection he had granted [them].” If he stayed, they promised to triple his income with an annual annuity.
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But if he had to go, they wished to buy his castle and make it their synagogue. The Calvinists objected strongly to this, and persuaded the governor to decline.
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Whatever compelling reasons the States General may have had, the move to recall Maurice was shortsighted. In retrospect, the States General apparently had not taken into account that Portugal would not honor a peace treaty the Dutch themselves had voided. As soon as the prince stationed troops in the neighboring provinces, Portuguese nationals in New Holland began plotting to regain their colony, and two months before his departure, he received news that a border state had fallen to Portuguese rebels. It was March 1644, the beginning of the end of New Holland.
The revolt was led by João Fernando Vieira, a leader of the Portuguese community, who vowed to put his life and property at the service of “the restoration of our fatherland.”
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He, along with eighteen compatriots, concocted an assassination plot. They would invite “our Dutch chiefs” to a June banquet at Vieira’s home to celebrate a saint’s birthday, and then murder them all. Among the conspirators was a covert Jew, Sebastian Carvalho, who passed word of the plot to the leader of the Mahamad, Dr. Abraham de Mercado. The doctor, in turn, gave a letter to Abraham Cohen detailing the conspiracy and signed it “A Verdade Plus ultra” (The Ultimate Truth). When Cohen informed Prince Maurice of the deadly scheme, the ex-governor asked him to aid in the capture of the traitor.
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Vieira, having learned his plan had been exposed, gathered his men and escaped into the forested countryside. Cohen armed some comrades to go after them. In a brief skirmish, two Jews were slain. Cohen and other prosperous Jews, pledging “the dead must be avenged,” financed a government expedition to track down the guerrillas. Six hundred Dutch soldiers and three hundred Indians were soon on Vieira’s trail. Confidently, they marched in formation into the bush, only to fall into a rebel ambush and be routed. So began a civil war that was abetted by a run of poor sugar harvests in 1642, 1643, and 1644 that gained the rebellion the financial support of the major Portuguese planters. Faced with economic ruin, they renounced their debts and sided with the rebels.
In the summer of 1645, a horrific incident took place, with major repercussions. Rebel soldiers, attacking an island off Recife, captured a Dutch militia that included a squadron of thirteen Jews led by a Jewish captain. Separating the Jews from the other Dutch prisoners, they hanged them all. To the rebel commander, the Jews were more than enemy soldiers: they were traitors. The Portuguese leader therefore felt no qualms about stringing them up and burning their captain alive.
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When news of the atrocity reached Recife, the Supreme Council sent a formal communiqué to the Portuguese commander that caustically asked: “Why are Jewish prisoners of war martyred unto death in so beastly a manner? Are they worse people than we?”
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In Amsterdam, the Jewish council, the Parnassim, led by Uriel da Costa’s younger brother, Abraham, petitioned the States General, “With tears of blood running from [our] hearts, order the government in Brazil to insure that in all agreements with the enemy, members of the Hebrew Nation should be treated like other Dutch subjects.” The Jewish soldiers, they wrote, had been volunteers “vigilant in their efforts against the rebels [and] their undying loyalty had been proven by their denunciation of the conspiracy headed by Johann Vieira which failed thanks to Abraham Cohen and Dr. Mercado.”
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Appealing to the Calvinists’ devout belief in the Old Testament, in which Israel is called the people of God, the petitioners reminded the States General that the Lord loved and protected His people “at all times and will help and deliver from all danger those whom He has named His people…because God rewards those who have acted kindly towards this poor, dispersed Nation.” They concluded their memorandum, quoting Queen Esther’s plea to King Ahasuerus: “If it pleases the king, give me my life—that is my petition! Grant me my people—that is my request!”
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Responding to the Parnassim, the States General issued the Patenta Onrossa (Honorable Charter) declaring Holland’s Jews to be Dutch subjects, entitled to nearly all rights pertaining to the burgher class. This decree on December 7, 1645, represents the first charter of equality a sovereign state conceded to the Jewish nation in the Western Hemisphere.
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The Supreme Council in New Holland was thereupon instructed:
The Hebrew Nation in Brazil [is] to be protected from any damage to person or property, in the same manner as all the citizens of the United Netherlands…[and] we shall favor…the Jewish nation on all occasions…without…making any distinction…between them and those of our other nationals…The Jewish nation will thereby…be animated and encouraged to further the service in this state and that of the West India Company.
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Owing to the civil war, by the fall of 1645 many Dutch colonists had returned to Holland, and the 1,450 remaining Jews now comprised nearly half of the white settlers. Recife had come under siege. A German working for the Company, informed that a regiment of 350 Jews was among the city’s defenders, reasoned: “The Jews, more than anyone else, were in a desperate situation and preferred to die sword in hand than face their fate under the Portuguese yoke: the flames.”
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The chief rabbi would later write: “Rich and poor alike could not obtain food…we starved…there was nothing left. Any dried up bread was considered a delicacy.”
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The rebels gave the Dutch three days to surrender, and promised the Jews “quarter if they accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior.” The offer was rejected after a “fierce debate” when Abraham Cohen told his comrades not to delude themselves that the rebels would be taken in by a sham conversion, and warned “if they fell into Portuguese hands they would be burned at the stake.”
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Later, four Dutch fugitives who deserted the city told the rebels, “None were opposed to surrender more than the Jews…[who swore] to sell their lives dearly.”
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Despite the Jews’ loyalty, some clergy continued to fault them. When the siege began, they complained to the Supreme Council that “on the Lord’s day,” the Jews keep their stores open, send their children to religious school, and make their slaves work. The Jews, rather than assert that they observed a Saturday Sabbath, chose to appease the petty minds of the ministers and agreed to also honor Sunday as a day of rest. With the city under siege, they had more vital concerns than contending over the Lord’s Day.
Cohen took up a collection of money that sustained the war effort until the following spring, when the long-awaited relief ships arrived from Holland. Not everyone was pleased by his action. Those who favored surrender accused Cohen of bribing the Supreme Council to continue what they saw as a Jewish war.
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(After the siege, the charges were dismissed, and Cohen was honored by the Council for his deed.)
The Patenta Onrossa was put to a test two years later, when rebels seized ten Jews from a Dutch ship and sentenced them to die as “blasphemous apostates.”
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The States General protested to Portugal’s King John with a demand that Jews be treated like other Dutch subjects. In August 1649, the king replied that the rebels assured him those Dutch Jews who had not been baptized would be set free, but added that he could not interfere in “heretical matters involving false conversos.”
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Among the latter was a cousin of the Cohen Henriques brothers, Abraham Bueno Henriques. Born and baptized in Portugal, he was declared a heretic and handed over to the Inquisitions; his sentence is unknown.
King John, at the time, denied supporting the rebellion while preparing to do just that. Moreover, in 1649, he secured the support of Portugal’s New Christians by promising them a blanket pardon and trade concessions. Anticipating victory, one of Portugal’s richest conversos, Duarte da Silva, arranged with the king to set up the Compania du Brasil on the lines of the Dutch West India Company. Once victory over the Dutch was attained, the company would deal in Brazilian sugar, dyewood, and other imports, and supply the colony with wine, oil, and flour. No mention was made of the slave trade. In return, King John pledged that the estates of converso shareholders would be exempt from confiscation by the Inquisition, and he pardoned them for past offenses.
It is one of the sad ironies in the history of these beleaguered people that the cost of the reconquest and the destruction of the first open Jewish community in the New World was borne by Portugal’s
gente da Nação
(people of the Nation). Da Silva assumed that he would head up the new company, but it didn’t turn out that way. A year before “the war of divine liberty” was won, he was imprisoned as a Judaizer, and the business of Brazil became the province of the king.
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The final battle began on December 20, 1653, when a Portuguese armada—paid for by her New Christians—sailed into Recife. Although the few remaining settlers had enough food and munitions to hold out until Holland sent reinforcements, morale was understandably low. Two months before, Holland had recalled home the two warships guarding Recife to defend her ports against a possible sea attack by England.
In early January, Abraham Cohen informed New Holland’s military commander that he had overheard Dutch soldiers say they would rather sack the houses of the city’s rich Jews than continue fighting. This development so enraged the commander that he immediately mobilized everyone in the city and called on them “to protect themselves from their own troops.” It was a futile move. All knew the desertion of the troops signaled the end.
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