Schwab
From Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael
And I’m Yael Steiner, and we’d like to welcome you to our second episode in a special series on the Americas. Schwab, you led our first episode with a fascinating tale about Jews in Recife, Brazil. And I think you have some follow-up.
Schwab
Yes. So where we left off was Jews being expelled from their homes — not for the first time — in this case in Recife, Brazil, and spread all throughout the Western Hemisphere, but really primarily the Caribbean. And that’s where we’re going to be talking about today.
It will take us to a lot more places. I want to start off with a really interesting, colorful tale, and then we’ll unpack it a little bit. September of 1628, in the Bay of Matanzas on the north coast of Cuba, a very large fleet of Dutch ships flying a Dutch flag are closing in on a Spanish treasure fleet. Sixteen Spanish ships carrying an entire year’s worth of silver that had been mined from Peru and Mexico, intending to carry it back to Spain. The Dutch, with a much larger fleet, capture this entire Spanish convoy — all sixteen ships and all of the silver they are holding, which is eleven and a half million guilders of silver. In today’s money, it’s something like a billion dollars — a very large sum, enough to fund a lot more Dutch warships. It may be the greatest treasure capture in the history of the Spanish Main, of the Caribbean, possibly in the New World.
Yael
That’s insane. That’s a huge amount of money.
Schwab
It’s a massive, massive amount of money. And riding alongside the Dutch admiral at the head of this fleet is a Portuguese Jew named Moses Cohen Enriquez, a Jew whose family fled the Inquisition, now getting his ultimate revenge on the Spanish.
Yael
Wow. Who would have thought? He is the captain now.
Schwab
Yes. It’s an amazing, remarkable story. Except it’s not exactly true.
Yael
Which part is not exactly true?
Schwab
Moses Cohen Enriquez — we have very little to go on that there was such a person or that he was involved in this. The Dutch capturing the Spanish silver? Absolutely — we have historical evidence for that. The Dutch are great record keepers, as we’ve talked about many times on the show, and they document down to the individual barrel exactly what they captured. So we know the battle happened, we know they counted the guilders of silver. But Moses Cohen Enriquez is a very appealing story — a Jew being centrally involved in this — and the evidence is thin for the way it’s told.
Yael
Where does that story come from? Is there written evidence that this person existed or was there?
Schwab
Where that story comes from is a book published in 2008 called The Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, subtitled How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom, and Revenge. Very appealing narrative. Not excellent historical work.
Yael
Also very much right in the heart of the Pirates of the Caribbean / Jack Sparrow popularity era. So there could definitely be some motivation to embellish a story in order to capitalize on that.
Schwab
A hundred percent, yes. I don’t need to spend our whole time dunking on Kritzler, who’s an amateur historian — a Jewish guy who moved to Jamaica. How he draws his conclusions and how he quotes things is, let’s say, embellishing and creative. But it’s really largely not true. What is interesting — and that’s how I want to break down our discussion today — is that he talks about Jewish pirates in the Caribbean. There’s not a lot there, really. There were Jewish pirates, although we’ll get into how we define that term. There were pirates in the Caribbean. And there were Jews in the Caribbean. But there’s no center of that Venn diagram that incorporates all three. Any two of them, though, there is a lot to talk about. So let’s talk about pirates in the Caribbean, let’s talk about one particular fascinating Jewish — air quotes — pirate, and let’s talk about Jews in the Caribbean. But let’s say at the outset: this book is swept along by its own enthusiasm rather than extensive research.
Yael
Sometimes I feel like that’s my MO — I’m often swept away by my own enthusiasm. My initial thought, and maybe this is because I’ve been captured by a lachrymose conception of Jewish history, is that casting Jews as pirates is very much in keeping with all sorts of antisemitic tropes. Usurers, thieves, that kind of thing.
Schwab
Interesting. I actually thought you were going to say something different — that it’s a nice, appealing way of looking at Jews rather than just scholars who kept their noses in their books and were persecuted. Like, this is Jews taking their agency into their own hands and being swashbuckling. There’s a great Unpacked video on this, and I think it’s described as like a Tarantino-esque retelling — this didn’t happen, but isn’t it appealing to think about Jews acting this way?
Yael
I love that. I walked out of Inglourious Basterds on such a high. It really is appealing to think about it that way.
Schwab
It is. So let’s start by talking about pirates and piracy. My youngest daughter just had a pirate day at her daycare, and they were visited by a pirate — meaning a person dressed as a pirate — and he was dressed basically exactly as you’re probably picturing right now.
Yael
He has the Party City adult pirate costume. A red bandana that ties on the side. A plastic sword attached to some kind of belt. And the puffy shirt that Jerry Seinfeld wore on The Tonight Show.
Schwab
Precisely. And you’re forgetting a really important element — an eye patch. I think he also had a skull and crossbones. But all of those things together are a very Hollywood, Disney picture of pirates. Apparently Lego has played a role in this too. But that’s not what actual pirates looked like, and what a pirate was is also more complicated than we think.
The skull and crossbones — we now associate it as a pirate symbol, but for a long time it was just a generic symbol that appeared on a lot of graves. Edward Kritzler cites all these pictures of Jewish graves in the Caribbean with skull and crossbones on them as evidence of Jewish pirates, but that doesn’t mean they were pirates. That just means this person died.
Yael
Maybe of poison. Got it.
Schwab
Pirates and privateers are different jobs, different people operating in different ways.
Yael
Isn’t a privateer just a paid pirate? To quote the master?
Schwab
I would say it’s a legal pirate — meaning someone who has a legal job, is licensed and bonded by whatever kingdom has employed them. Sometimes they were looking for specific bounties, sometimes they were allowed to engage in capturing any enemy of their state. But they’re much closer to military people than pirates as we think about them today.
Yael
Understood. So where do the Jews fit into this culture of seafaring capture?
Schwab
Very little, honestly. Jewish involvement in the Caribbean was mostly not in this area of the economy. They were much more involved in legal — hopefully less violent — trade, although that trade did include slavery, which we’ll talk about. And in the cultivation and manufacture of goods, the exchange of goods, but not so much in piracy or privateering in the Caribbean. Where there was a little more Jewish involvement in privateering was actually not in the Caribbean, but in the Mediterranean and the European Atlantic.
Kritzler, in talking about Jewish pirates of the Caribbean — again with a lot of creative license — makes one of his important figures this man he calls the Pirate Rabbi: Samuel Palache. Who was never in the Caribbean in his life.
Yael
Yeah, but there was no popular movie series called Pirates of the Mediterranean and European Atlantic.
Schwab
Someone should honestly do a movie about this guy’s life. Kritzler makes him out to be this pirate rabbi — and I had this image of a skull and crossbones with a kippah on it, and a beard somehow — the head of a fleet operating in the Mediterranean and European Atlantic. He was a learned Jew, but he wasn’t exactly a pirate, and he definitely wasn’t a rabbi. The real story is even cooler. To tell his story, we have to go somewhere I think we’ve never gone before in fifty-some odd episodes of this podcast: Morocco.
Yael
I don’t think we have either. Maybe just in passing — Spanish Jews fleeing to Morocco. But we haven’t done it, and it’s definitely on my list of places I would like a benefactor to send us.
Schwab
So, as you said, Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition and persecution in Spain — a lot of them flee to Morocco, which under Muslim rule is friendlier to Jews. In the fifteenth century it’s hard to say any place was great for Jews, but Morocco is a lot better than Spain, which is a very low bar.
A fairly large Jewish community grows in the city of Fez, which was at that time the capital and most important city in Morocco. There were popular uprisings against the Jews, and the Sultan of Morocco, wanting to protect them, creates a special area just for Jews to live in — with some sort of gate or barrier around it. Only Jews are allowed to live there, and non-Jews can’t come in, and Jews can’t go out after a certain time of day. If this all sounds really familiar —
Yael
It’s a ghetto?
Schwab
The ghetto — but the Mellah in Fez in Morocco actually predates the ghetto by almost a century. The Venetian ghetto is 1516. The Mellah in Fez is 1438. Jews were being persecuted before it became fully formalized and illegal. There were plenty of Jews fleeing Spain throughout the 1400s, and then even more after the expulsion.
Yael
So this is prior to the expulsion. Interesting. Maybe not directly relevant to this episode, but it piqued my curiosity — what is the Sultan’s interest in protecting the Jews?
Schwab
What do you think?
Yael
Commerce?
Schwab
Exactly. Jews were very important to economic activity. More and more networks were emerging — and as we talked about last week, Jews who were becoming fluent in Arabic were also fluent in Spanish and keeping their Spanish heritage, teaching their kids Spanish. Very useful for trading connections back to Europe. Which becomes important for a man by the name of Samuel Palache, who was part of this Moroccan Jewish community of Spanish descent that had been in the Sultan’s favor for a long time.
Palache had a whole pitch: I have ideas for how to improve Morocco’s standing in the world. One of those things is creating a major trade and military alliance with the Dutch Republic, which — as we talked about last time — was emerging as a serious power in Europe, a real counterweight to the Habsburg Empire. The Dutch Republic, as a Protestant country, was more openly accepting of Jews, which is what drew so many Jews to Amsterdam. And they were at war with Spain — the Dutch had freed themselves from the Spanish Empire in a war that took eighty years, which you’ll never guess the name of.
Yael
The Eighty Years’ War.
Schwab
That’s the one. So there was a lot of animosity between the Dutch and the Spanish. And Palache’s idea was: if Morocco sides with the Dutch, that’s great for fighting the Spanish. There was also, beyond just the pragmatic, sometimes a religious significance to Jews seeing the Dutch as aligned against their hereditary enemy — the Spanish who had persecuted, expelled, and then foisted the Inquisition on them. There were plenty of Jews in Morocco who saw their allies as the Muslims fighting the hated Catholics.
Just like we talked about last week — the Jews in Recife who might have originally come over as Portuguese in name, siding with the Dutch when the Dutch invaded, because the Portuguese didn’t let them be Jews. They would love for someone to take over and let them live freely.
Yael
Right. It wasn’t deeply seated nationalistic loyalty. It was practical.
Schwab
At the same time, Samuel Palache was still speaking Spanish, still teaching his kids Spanish. There was still a Spanish element — a pintele Spaniard in them, because they felt a strong connection to a country that had kicked them out.
Yael
It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t until your friend Isabella came onto the scene that they really had true trouble in Spain. Okay, so Samuel Palache —
Schwab
He’s a wheeler-dealer. He approaches Sultan Moulay Zaydan, gets into his favor, and convinces him to send Palache to Amsterdam as the principal negotiator of this Morocco-Dutch treaty — Palache’s own idea. From 1609 to 1614, he sails back and forth between the Netherlands and Morocco at least five times, which is a lot. He wasn’t getting on a plane. And ultimately, when the treaty is agreed on, he is the one who signs it for the Sultan.
Yael
So he’s the Jared Kushner of Morocco.
Schwab
Maybe — I don’t want to promise that, and things change a little bit later. But at this point, if you’re calling Samuel Palache a pirate, he is basically the Moroccan ambassador to the Netherlands. That’s not a pirate. That’s actually a much more interesting job.
He gets paid for this. He’s put in charge of a group of Dutch warships that are supposed to be sent to Morocco to help defend a port — though it’s unclear whether he was promising a little too much to both sides. He does talk out of more than two sides of his mouth. For one of the ships, he recruits additional sailors who are not Dutch military officers or conscripts but are known pirates — not in the employ of the Dutch. And he uses that ship to capture a couple of Spanish ships. He’s doing privateering bordering on piracy at various points while simultaneously serving as ambassador and negotiating a state treaty.
Yael
He might be the first, but he certainly won’t be the last.
Schwab
Yeah. But then the English arrest him on the grounds of piracy. And that’s where it gets really interesting. In his legal defense, he says: I am not a pirate. I am an agent of the Moroccan Sultan. Morocco is at war with Spain. Yes, I’m using Dutch ships, but as an agent of Morocco, I’m allowed to capture a Spanish ship. That’s not piracy — that’s legal war. The English don’t have the purview to arrest him for that. The Dutch say, yeah, he was using our ships, but he’s acting on behalf of the Moroccans. When we picture pirates, that’s not what we imagine — someone in an English jail writing to friends throughout Europe, making legal arguments about what fits under international norms that don’t yet formally exist.
Yael
So there’s no parrot, no peg leg, no rum — well, there might have been rum. Okay, so he gets arrested by the English and gets released.
Schwab
He does successfully argue for his release. But then things have soured a little. The Sultan is growing less impressed with him. And here’s where it takes a really fascinating turn.
First, the notion of the pirate rabbi — Kritzler bizarrely claims he was the head rabbi of a school in Amsterdam. That’s not the case. He’s actually not that accepted in the Amsterdam Jewish community. The relationship is strained because he’s not like them. He’s not a Spanish or Portuguese converso who secretly kept his Jewish identity for generations. The Amsterdam Jews are a bit like: you don’t get it. Your family left Spain while it still wasn’t that bad, without converting. You lived in Morocco where life was fine for you. You don’t have the same Jewish identity as we do. You’re not one of us.
Yael
It’s a little bit like the tension between people who came to the Lower East Side in the 1880s and 1890s and people who came in 1947.
Schwab
Exactly. So he’s not accepted in the Amsterdam community that way. The Dutch are growing less impressed by him. Morocco is disappointed at his inability to deliver. And then — and the authors of this book uncovered this through his letters — he makes a truly surprising choice: he approaches the Spanish and says he can feed them information that would be very valuable in their campaign against the Dutch and the Moroccans. He is incredibly well placed to be a perfect double agent.
Yael
Wow.
Schwab
He keeps that going for a while, but eventually winds up destitute, rejected by everyone, falls ill, and dies, leaving a very complicated legacy for his family to sort out. One of the things he was apparently negotiating with the Spanish — it wasn’t just about money, though he did want to be paid well — was finding a place where his family could comfortably live, with legal right to reside in Spain under the protection of the crown. Which was not something granted to many Jews in the 1600s, given that Spain had so recently been actively running the Inquisition. Why would he want that? We don’t know.
Yael
But why would he want to go back to Spain? He just burned all his bridges in Morocco and Amsterdam.
Schwab
Maybe he just wanted to protect his family and had the unique ability to do so. But what it makes me think about is: when we talk about Jewish loyalty, let’s talk about who’s loyal to the Jews. Palache is actually in some ways a very modern figure — a renegade figure — because he holds several loyalties and identities and is throughout his life actively choosing them and figuring out where he wants to be.
Yael
But he’s never in the Caribbean.
Schwab
But he’s never in the Caribbean. Right. He’s an interesting model not for a Jewish pirate exactly, but for a Jew in a very complicated position in a world that is growing more and more connected. These powers that are colonizing places, setting up networks of trade, warring with each other — they’re only growing more powerful. Where do the Jews fit into all of this? Is it better to be a boundary crosser, to move from one to another, to be the nodes of connection? Or are they better off centered in one place, like Amsterdam? And they’re bearing all the trauma of every place they’ve been expelled from — Spain, England, France — because those expulsions seeded this whole network in the first place.
Yael
Jews have repeatedly shown their loyalty to a variety of countries who have then not repaid it in the least. As we talked about very recently, Otto Frank was an officer in the German army in World War One. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of examples of people who served their countries admirably and honorably and got no loyalty in return — and then had their citizenship revoked. For a Jew at this particular period, when the powers that be are so consistently shifting, you don’t necessarily want to tie yourself to one particular regime. And if you feel like no regime is ever going to have your back, then maybe your conscience is clear to be, you know, a backstabber or a double agent.
Schwab
Right. So getting back to the Caribbean — what does the Caribbean represent, with all of that as background? It’s colonized by European powers, but it’s farther from the center of things. There’s more opportunity, a looser approach, fewer rules. A lot of Jews do move to the Caribbean and get involved in the biggest economic activity there: the cultivation of cash crops. They own land in some cases, and do a lot of trading and refining, which becomes a big part of the economics of the Caribbean and the New World.
It’s worth noting — and I want to be honest and direct about this — that a big part of that economy is slavery. The best way to put Jewish involvement in the slave trade is that it was undistinguished, which is to say they were not all that much better or all that much worse than everybody else involved in it. It would be nice if we could point to Jews morally objecting and refusing to use slave labor. The evidence for that isn’t there. But it’s also not true — and this is another antisemitic trope — that Jews were the ones running the slave trade. They were not.
Schwab
And one of the cash crops of the New World that becomes wildly popular in Europe — we think a lot about sugar, which is the most commonly known, but you know what else becomes wildly popular as a treat?
Yael
As a treat?
Schwab
A sweet treat. Well, sweet if you put a lot of sugar in it. Chocolate.
Yael
Chocolate? Cocoa?
Schwab
One Jew in particular, Benjamin da Costa de Andrade — and his story is a familiar one by now — was a converso who, when the Dutch took over Brazil, returned to Judaism. He flees Recife in 1654 and has the idea of refining and processing cacao into something that can be stored and shipped for a much longer time. Until that point, you mixed cacao powder or cacao beans with water and drank chocolate — which, incidentally, the Spanish would drink at auto-da-fés, the burning of people during the Inquisition, as a leisure activity. Da Costa de Andrade comes up with a process for refining cacao into something that can be stored and shipped, and then uses the Jewish merchant network — including a Jewish family in New Amsterdam — to process, refine, and ship it to Europe, which becomes a massive trade.
Yael
Up until the abolition of slavery, there were only a few thousand Jews in the mainland United States. That’s something I often forget — that Jewish life flourished in the Caribbean, and so there were more Jews there.
Schwab
Right, you’re talking about the mainland United States. There were more than that in the Caribbean. Jewish life does flourish there. Jews were in Curaçao — which we mentioned last week, a big destination for Jews fleeing Recife because it was Dutch. As Amsterdam was the center of Jewish life in Europe, Curaçao became that in the Caribbean. They tried to replicate the communal model from Amsterdam. In Amsterdam there was an institution called the Mahamad — a council of not necessarily rabbis but lay leaders, wealthy influential Jews who took turns on this board making decisions about what should happen in the community. They institute their own communal organization in Curaçao, and some of the smaller islands and colonies looked to Curaçao as the hub of Jewish life in the Caribbean. There were only a few hundred or few thousand Jews in what becomes the United States. There were far more in the Caribbean.
Yael
And it’s interesting — even today, Spanish and Portuguese congregations are more lay-led than other similarly situated synagogues, because of this tradition stemming back to the Mahamad in Curaçao, that structure and infrastructure based on what we saw in Amsterdam.
Schwab
Mm-hmm. And they didn’t always have access to rabbis. There aren’t centers of rabbinic learning in the Western Hemisphere, and there won’t be for a long time.
One of the things that’s always fascinating to me is how Jewish communities evolve and change over time. There’s a very particular custom universal to all Jewish synagogues in the Caribbean but unheard of everywhere else in the world: they build their synagogues with sand floors. Have you seen this?
Yael
I’ve heard about it. I first heard about it with respect to Curaçao, but I’ve heard it in Barbados as well.
Schwab
The synagogue in Curaçao is still in use — a very small community now — and it’s the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas, predating Newport and Touro and the Spanish-Portuguese congregation in New York by a long time. And it has this very distinctive sand floor, which is a bit of a historical mystery. We don’t know exactly why. But whatever the reason, it emerged as a tradition and spread throughout the Caribbean. It’s like everywhere Jews land, some part of Jewish tradition picks up a local flavor that becomes part of the tradition.
Yael
Even the way ultra-Orthodox Jews dress today is not rooted in halacha or Jewish history — it’s rooted in the fact that that’s how Polish and Eastern European nobility dressed, and it somehow stopped at that moment and got perpetuated.
Schwab
That’s exactly what I was thinking of. Wherever Jews land, their practices pick up some local flavor and it becomes that — like the dress of Polish nobility. It no longer has anything to do with Poland, but it gets incorporated into Jewish identity.
Yael
And this is jumping ahead to colonial Judaism, but the now widespread practice of having a weekly sermon in synagogue on Shabbat was very much adapted from Protestant practice in the British colonies. It’s not that a sermon was never given at Jewish services, but the concept of the rabbi’s weekly speech — which is almost universal across most of Judaism now, except for people who hate the rabbi’s speech enough to pray outside the synagogue —
Schwab
The rabbi’s speech is a really important part of going to synagogue, even if your practice is to leave during the rabbi’s speech.
Yael
Exactly. That comes from Protestant practice in the colonies, and it seems to have been picked up in the first synagogues in North America as a reflection of what was going on with their peers outside of Judaism. It happens everywhere.
Schwab
Thank you for bringing that up, because that’s the direction I wanted to go. Part of understanding the history of Jews in the Americas is recognizing that before there was an American Jewish community as we know it today — which has emerged over the last two hundred and fifty years in various forms — there were fairly small Jewish communities in New Amsterdam, Newport, Savannah. But there were much larger, much stronger Jewish communities in the Caribbean. Those fade out over time. There are not large Jewish communities in the Caribbean now.
Yael
And the infrastructure — there were Jewish schools in the Caribbean, which really didn’t exist in the British colonies at all.
Schwab
Yeah. You know who goes to a Jewish school in the Caribbean?
Yael
I knew we were going to get to the hot topic. Alexander Hamilton. My name is Alexander Hamilton.
Schwab
Not mentioned in the play. He grows up in the Caribbean, on the small and little-known island of Nevis, which has a significant Jewish population and a real Jewish world. There’s a lot of theorizing about how Jewish the world of Alexander Hamilton was, whether his genealogy was possibly Jewish — his mother had been married to a Jewish man, apparently not his father but a stepfather.
Yael
A large Jewish community, and his mother was married to a Jew.
Schwab
Right. Regardless of his own genealogy, he grows up in a context that has a lot of Jewishness to it in the Caribbean. And when we think about the Caribbean origins of Alexander Hamilton, that is an important part of the story — it was a big piece of what life in the Caribbean looked like at that time.
Yael
So we have a lot of Jews, Jewish life flourishing in the Caribbean — pirates or not — and then sometime while that life is flourishing, we have some Jews making their way to what will ultimately become the United States. And the impact of the culture in the Caribbean and Europe will ultimately define what Jewish life looks like in the thirteen colonies and what Jewish life looks like today.
Schwab
Right. Is that where you’re taking us for the next episode?
Yael
I think so. I think so.
Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an open-door media brand.
Yael
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Schwab
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Yael
Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds at unpacked.media. We really love to hear from you. Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Jael Steiner.
Schwab
and by me, Jonathan Schwab. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson, and our editors are Rob Perra and Ari Schlacht.
Yael
We’re produced by Jenny Falcon. Thanks for listening.