The Atlantic Trade & The Jewish Diaspora

Just as early modern Europe cannot be understood without discussing overseas expansion after 1492,
so the port Jews of early modern Europe cannot be understood without considering their traversing the Atlantic to New World colonies.
Port Jews in the Atlantic world Jewish history. Lois Dubin
The Atlantic Trade

& the Jewish Diaspora
Jews as the new Christians
and citizens in Europe, venturers and merchants
in the diaspora and the Atlantic world.
curated by
amma birago
Indeed, we would suggest that Diaspora, and not monotheism, may be the most important
contribution that Judaism has to make to the world, although we would not deny the positive role that
monotheism has played in making Diaspora possible.
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity
Those diasporas that were most involved in commerce had the added bonus of having kin and coreligionists spread
over vast distances. As the authors of a compelling global history of trade maintain, "trade diasporas remained the
most efficient way of organizing commerce across much of Afro-Eurasia until the nineteenth century."
Francesca Trivellato
The Sephardic Diaspora and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Trust, Contracts, and Courts
being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."
Becoming Jewish in early modern France.
Port Jews in the Atlantic: further thoughts

Jonathan D. SARNA
Port Jews extended the boundaries of the Jewish world and reimagined its contours. Pushing beyond harbors long
familiar to Jewish merchants, they daringly crossed over into the New World, establishing Jewish communities
around the Caribbean and up and down the Atlantic coast.
... Originally, they focused on Europe, where port Jews vie with court Jews as harbingers of Jewish modernity. But
recently, the scope of their interest has enlarged to encompass the Atlantic world, following port Jews as they began
to populate the entrepots of the Atlantic and beyond, reaching as far as the Indian Ocean. In fact Lois Dubin called
attention to Atlantic Jewry a few years back, and David Sorkin recognized the "'New World ports of Jamaica
Surinam, Recife and New Amsterdam" in his formulation of the port Jew as a social type.
Port Jews dominated the Jewish community of North America. Rather than being 'a' social type, they comprised the
leadership and heart of the community. Every single one of the organized North American colonial Jewish
communities - Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Newport - developed within a port city, and
almost all of the known community leaders were substantial merchants. No religious leaders challenged the
merchants for leadership.
For example, readers might have enjoyed learning of the major, early role of Jews in peopling the Cape Verde
islands (fleeing the Iberian Inquisitions), and of the nineteenth-century exodus of Jews from Morocco to Cape
Verde, combining to provide a compelling case study of an especially intriguing locale of Jewish activity;
Jews and Judaism in African History, Richard Hull, Reviewed by Alma Gottlieb
the foundation of the castle and city of So Jogre de Mina (El Mina); the building of the fort at Sierra Leone by
King John II of Portugal; the discovery of the kingdom of Benin, the conversion of Bemoym, a Joloff chief, to
Christianity; and the attempt to build a fort at the mouth of the River Senegal in 1488. Another interesting record
concerns the transport of Jews to settle in the Island of So Tom in 1493, which recalls the fact that the original
Portingals of the Gambia Valley were very largely half-breeds of Jewish parentage on the paternal side.
Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560 by J. W. Blake Review by H. R. Palmer
And moreover there was a widespread anxiety among the Christian community of the Portuguese settlements of
West Africa regarding the religious activities of the Sephardim. Thus in a letter of July 30th 1635, the Bishop of
Cabo Verde recounted a story which, for him, had all the hallmarks of another Jewish conversion in West Africa.
Equal partners? Proselytising by Africans and
Jews in the 17th century Atlantic Diaspora
Tobias Green
Richard L. Kagan; Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas:
Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800
Review by Jonathan Schorsch
Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta present an account of a few small communities consisting of Portuguese New
Jews from Amsterdam who moved in the early seventeenth century to Muslim West Africa. Enjoying the same
protection local Muslim leaders granted to all foreign merchants, these traders and opportunist/entrepreneurs
practiced Judaism openly, attracted Portuguese New Christians to their midst, and converted some of the Africans
they married and employed and birthed. These short-lived endeavors, showing signs of the pragmatic "going native"
that characterized merchant interlopers and intermediaries throughout colonization, reflect a bold assertiveness that
swept Portuguese Sephardim and conversos alike with the rise of the independence movement against Spain after
1580 and the founding of Sephardic Amsterdam just before 1600.
-
At the same time, moreover, as Africans were being converted to Jews in Amsterdam (and elsewhere), an analogous
process was occurring in reverse on the West African coast. Sephardim who had taken up residence in Senegambia,
and second and third generation Sephardic New Christians residing here and on the Guinea Coast, increasingly
adopted elements of African religion. This was indeed a long-standing process, since as long ago as 1546 an
accusation had been made to the Portuguese inquisitorial tribunal of vora that the New Christians who lived on the
African coast were adopting elements of African religious practice.
Tobias Green
the processes by which Africans proselytized Sephardic Jews on the coast of West Africa in the 16th and 17th
centuries and were in their turn proselytised by Jews both in West Africa and elsewhere in the Atlantic world in the
early modern era. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published sources, it shows that these activities were far
from unusual in the Atlantic world at the time, and are evidence of a world of receptivity and understanding that
belies traditional interpretations of Atlantic history. Analysing the conditions which produced the atmosphere in
which such mutual conversions could occur, the paper argues that a relatively equitable balance of power was
central to this process.
Personal knowledge and human experience were crucial in breaking down cultural barriers in a way which permitted
conversion; however, the wider economic forces which facilitated these exchanges were themselves distorting
power relations, helping to shape Atlantic history on its more familiar, and intolerant, path.
The Atlantic Sephardic diaspora is one which remains unfamiliar to some historians of the early modern period.
Only recently, indeed, has it become a focus of study for mainstream historiography. Yet this was, in the 16th and
early 17th centuries, a diaspora which was almost of equal import to the trajectory of Sephardic Jews as that in the
Ottoman Empire. Retaining a variable degree of Judaism beneath the cloak of an enforced Christian faith, these
Sephardic New Christians became important players on both sides of the Atlantic world: in Madeira, Cabo Verde
and So Tom, and in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.
Tobias Green
-

The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews

Jews invested heavily and became willing partners in the company seeking "dividendsfrom silver, gold, furs, and
[the] slave trade." At the time, Holland was the only country where Jews were permitted some semblance of
religious and economic liberty. The Dutch rulers, in promoting economic development, encouraged the immigration
of Jews for their business expertise and international connections and Holland soon became a center of Jewish
wealth and power. The Dutch had invented the doctrine of mercantilism, the notion that the state existed not to save
souls but to increase wealth, and for this the Jews were reputed to be expert. Marcus Arkin writes: "Since the main
industries in which [Jews] participated (silken textiles, sugar refining, diamond cutting, and tobacco blending) were
dependent on colonial sources of supply, it is not surprising to find the Jews of Amsterdam concernedwith Dutch
commerce to the Far East and the New World.... In the eighteenth century approximately one-quarter of the [Dutch
East India] company's shareholders were Jews, and its ultimate decline brought ruin to many a wealthy [Jewish]
family."
conversion to Judaism by the Black slaves was more than a religious ritual - it was a business arrangement in
which the Blacks were the productive partner. As in the case of Diogo Dias Querido, an Amsterdam Jew engaged in
"large-scale operations on the west coast of Africa" where he employed ten large vessels and many smaller ships:
The Inquisitors alleged that Querido employed in his household several Black slaves who were natives of that coast.
In his home they received instruction in the Portuguese and Dutch languages, "so that they could serve as
interpreters in Africa," presumably to be a more effective trader. Moreover, it was alleged, these slaves were given
instruction in Mosaic Law and converted to Judaism.
A Private Venture
It must be clarified that the bulk of the exploration of the West was promoted by private firms and financed for the
most part with private capital. The benefits of their discoveries accrued to the investors in the firm, not necessarily to
the government or the people of the nation of origin. The monarch would invest the nation's military as his or her
personal investment in the enterprise. The expeditions of Columbus, for instance, were private ventures
of Jewish financiers who received notice of his "discoveries" even before Ferdinand and Isabella.
With the protection of the Dutch military, the principal maritime power at that time, the Dutch West India Company
colonized and settled the Western Hemisphere solely to establish a steady flow of natural wealth back to its
European investors, not to any national authority.
This is a critical distinction and the source of much of the animosity against the Jews. The Gentiles were, for the
most part, nationalists, owing their allegiance to the nation in whose territory they resided. They respected the edicts
of their government particularly with regard to international relations. The Jews, on the other hand, considered
themselves as Jews first, particularly in international commerce. They remained internationalists without the
patriotic fervor of their Gentile countrymen. When their host country was at war with a trading partner of the Jews,
and on whom an embargo had been placed, the Jews would continue trade by various methods including the
changing the name of the ship and/or its owner to one suiting the law in the port where they desired entry. They did
not see this smuggling as illegal or even harmful - just business. These were, after all, private transactions among
private businesses and individuals - not with any government agency or national authority. But asthese arrangements
flourished, the national interests were circumvented and the local governments taxed and restricted the Jews as the
leading traders. These restrictions led to the historical application of the term "persecution," but evidence shows that
the practice of subordinating the national interest in pursuit of personal profit, and not religion, per se, raised the ire
of the Gentile.
The power of the Company's rulers rivaled that of the kings and queens of Europe, evidenced by this exchange
described by Arnold Wiznitzer: In a letter of July 20, 1645, Gaspar Dias Fereira had proposed to the Portuguese king
that he buy Brazil from the Dutch for the sum of 3 million crazados, payable in six monthly installments. Sousa
Coutinho, the Portuguese ambassador at The Hague, considered this proposal very practical. The Jesuit priest
Antonio Vieira, a man who exercised considerable influence in Lisbon and Brazil at the time, also advocated this
solution. The negotiations, however, yielded no results, since the West India Company declined the offer.
The power to sell, and perhaps to buy, nations was in the hands of the Company's rulers, not the monarch's, and even
with such power writes Arthur Hertzberg, "The Jewish leaders in Amsterdam knew that they had the power to cajole
or even to intimidate the West India Company..."
The Company performed governmental functions including the licensing of expeditions, issuing permits for slaves
and collecting taxes from settlers engaged in commerce. In 1674, the debt-ridden Company dissolved, no longer able
to administer its territories. Soon thereafter it was reorganized, though undercapitalized, to attempt to maintain its
former power. Slave dealing was its major income source and again, Jews invested heavily.82
Dutch Conquest in Brazil
The Dutch West India Company set its sights on the rich northeast coast of Brazil. They failed in a 1624 attempt to
take Bahia but succeeded in 1630 when they took the stronger port center of Recife, better known as Pernambuco.
Jews participated in planning the raids, went out with the expeditions as soldiers, and then settled in the conquered
areas. Soon thereafter, they set their sights on the slave trade: Portuguese merchants, many of them [Jews], had
controlled most of the slave trade between Africa and America until the Portuguese rebellion of 1640.... In 1635,
however, the Dutch West India Company had captured the African center of Elmina Castle, and, in 1641, the great
centers of Luanda and So Tom. Thus, as the Portuguese were forced out of the slave trade in 1640, their place was
taken by the Dutch West India Company and a few competitors, amongst whom only the English proved to be
formidable. The Company first turned Brazil and, after 1654, Curaao into large slave depots and concentrated most
of its remaining financial and military strength to supplying the Caribbean and the Spanish colonies with slaves.
The Dutch had a settlement policy more lenient than the Portuguese and Jews flocked in from all over Europe. As
fortunes grew, the Jewish scholars report, the Jews "appear to have been among the major retailers of slaves in
Dutch Brazil" between 1630 and 1654. In fact, slaves and sugar were the two main revenue sources to these
Brazilian Jews. Ownership of land and slaves conferred status, and apparently anyone who could acquire the means
to live like a lord was allowed to become one.
The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews
The voyage of Christopher Columbus from Spain to the Caribbean in 1492 set in motion forces that transformed the
world. As the nations of Western Europe competed for trade and colonies, they used the labor of enslaved Africans,
the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere and indentured Europeans, the resources and land of the
Americas, and trade with East Asia, to amass a level and concentration of wealth previously unknown in the world.
The investment of this wealth in building the physical infrastructure of European nations, in military might, in new
world plantations, in creating commercial and banking networks, and later in new technologies and industries, was
an essential element in the nascent industrial revolution in Great Britain and eventually led to European global
domination.
A Grossly Unequal Exchange: Looting, Slavery and Capitalism
Transform the World, by Alan Singer
Francesca Trivellato
The Sephardic Diaspora and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Trust, Contracts, and Courts
How could a Sephardi merchant in Livorno trust an agent who was negotiating deals on his behalf in Lisbon,
Hamburg, Aleppo, or even Goa? Many scholars have long assumed that blood ties and membership in the same
ethno-religious community were effective guarantees against ill-intentioned agents. Considering the diversity of
languages and customs that merchants had to master and the uncertainties that they faced, relatives and
coreligionists were indeed a fundamental resource less because of their natural tendency to cooperate than because
kin and coreligionists shared a community of meanings and overlapping social ties (they intermarried, belonged to
the same religious congregations, lived next door, and had lots of friends in common), which taken together raised
expectations of rectitude. Those diasporas that were most involved in commerce had the added bonus of having kin
and coreligionists spread over vast distances. As the authors of a compelling global history of trade maintain, "trade
diasporas remained the most efficient way of organizing commerce across much of Afro-Eurasia until the
nineteenth century."
History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles,

by Isaac & Suzanne A. Emmanuel
Review by Seymour B. Liebman
During the sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Spaniards and Portuguese developed their
colonial empires in the New World. England and Holland, too, began to look westward for expansion of their
commercial interests and to satisfy the hunger for more land to populate and rule. The area in the New World most
accessible for capture or takeover was the Caribbean. Consequently, the first non-Iberian colonies were established
on the Caribbean islands and in the northeast corner of South America. Among the early colonists were many Jews.
Jews in Amsterdam were straining the potential for their own development and with the influx of the Ashkenazim,
beginning with 1630, there began to be a shortage of available housing.
The first section opens with Wim Klooster's survey of a handful of mid- seventeenth-century Dutch Sephardic
merchants and their efforts at colonial settlement-building in various territories in the Americas. Most of these men
had already spent time in the short-lived Jewish haven of Dutch Brazil. They won grants to create new communities
in difficult and undeveloped territories, rustled up settlers in Europe (in some cases non-Jews), provisioned supplies
including slaves, and set sail. Though the majority of these settlements failed due to hardship or opposition by
colonial authorities (who did not always agree with policies set by leaders back in the metropole), they led to the
Sephardic communities of Curaao and Suriname.
Holly Snyder treats merchants, mostly Sephardic, operating within the English colonial orbit, tracing their efforts to
negotiate state regulation, which saw Jews as at best resident aliens, and to gain privileges or rights of residence and
trade. Moving from the relatively anarchic seventeenth century to the more ordered eighteenth century, Jewish
merchants continued to face legal and attitudinal discrimination and hence felt greater pressure than their non-Jewish
competitors to cultivate a strong and loyal customer base. Those who thrived in consumer retail trade, such as Aaron
Lopez of Newport, knew how to comport themselves with the necessary social graces and sold to their customers the
gentility and respectability that they sought for themselves and which to some degree could now be had for purchase
through goods like stylish textiles, Portuguese wine, tea, snuff, or spermaceti candles.
The Jewish community in Amsterdam, while possessed of an Iberian ancestry, used Portuguese as its lingua franca.
The name of the community was, and still is, the Portuguese Jewish Community. Even the recently arrived Spanish
Jews who came from Turkey, North Africa, or Italy adopted Portuguese for reasons not germane to this article. The
use of Portuguese continued for 150 years in Curaao (circa 1651-1800) as evidenced by their wills, contracts
among the Jews, correspondence, and the epitaphs of many tombs. The Sephardim, hardy and adventurous, found
allure in the ideas of conquering the underdeveloped New World and having a share of the wealth thought to be
easily attainable there. Curaao and Surinam were the first Dutch bases in the West, and it was to these places that
the Jews came. They brought with them the ability to speak Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish; an almost inbred ability
to adapt, possibly due to 1800 years of forced wanderings; their ready contacts for trade through their family
relationships all over Europe and in the lands of the Sublime Porte. We mention separately their determination to
practice and preserve their faith, since this was their rock. The familial devotion served to further commercial ties
without the necessity of large capital, since credit was to be had for the asking. The linguistic abilities permitted
contacts with the Spanish colonists who were groaning under the oppressive alcabala and the restraints on trade
imposed under the fallacious mercantile theories of Madrid and Seville. The family contacts extended to many of the
inhabitants of the viceroyalties of Nueva Granada and Peru.
Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560.
Translated and edited by J. W. Blake
H. R. Palmer
Portingals of the Gambia Valley were very largely half-breeds of Jewish parentage on the paternal side. Conditions
at Arguim castle in November, 1510, are graphically described, as are preparations for the dispatch of missionaries
from Portugal to Benin in November 1514. In 1557 Francisco Pires reports to Queen Catherine from El Mina " that
the Coast is overrun by corsairs ", that is by ships of other nations than Portugal.
This work is a compilation of translations of documents. It carries on and amplifies the record of the discovery and
conquest of Guinea, which for the period 1415 to 1448 is found in the chronicles of Azurara and the voyages of
Cadamosto. The documents " illustrate the nature and scope of Portuguese enterprise in West Africa, the abortive
attempt of Castilians to create an empire there, and the early English voyages to Barbary and Guinea ". They cover
Portuguese exploration from 1462 to 1480, Portuguese trade, the growth of Portugal's West African settlements
from 1481 to 1530, and the decline of her influence from 1530 to 1557. In Section II a number of contemporary
records, translated into English, bear upon the remarkable series of Castilian voyages to West Africa under taken
during the years 1454 to 1480 which, as the translator remarks, " arouse interest in a subject which provides a new
background for the Columbine (1492) voyages ". Section III contains records of English maritime activity in West
Africa from 1480-1560.
Section I of Volume I deals with the first century of Portuguese enterprise in West Africa, with the discovery of the
West African Coast 1462-1480, with the important trading station of Arguim near Cape Verde and its connection
with the ancient desert trade in gold and slaves which had existed all through the era of Moslem dominion in North
Africa and the Sudan ; with Santiago Island and the mainland between the Senegal and Sierra Leone ; with the fort
on the Gold Coast now called El Mina; and with So Tom Island and the Guinea Coast from the Volta to Cape St.
Catherine. Many of the documents are extremely interesting, as for instance the grant of an exclusive licence to trade
with Guinea by Affonso V of Portugal to one Fernao Gomes of Lisbon in 1469 for five years at 200,000 reis a year "
on condition that in each of these five years he should engage to discover one hundred leagues of coast further on " ;
the foundation of the castle and city of So Jogre de Mina (El Mina); the building of the fort at Sierra Leone by King
John II of Portugal; the discovery of the kingdom of Benin, the conversion of Bemoym, a Joloff chief, to
Portingals of the Gambia Valley were very largely half-breeds of Jewish parentage on the paternal side. Conditions
at Arguim castle in November, 1510, are graphically described, as are preparations for the dispatch of missionaries
from Portugal to Benin in November 1514.
In 1557 Francisco Pires reports to Queen Catherine from El Mina " that the Coast is overrun by corsairs ", that is by
ships of other nations than Portugal. Section II of Volume I deals with the early Castilian voyages to West Africa,
the first known (1453-4) being mentioned in a letter from King Affonso V of Portugal to King John II of Castile. In
1480 the same King Affonso V of Portugal is ordering his captains to " cast into the sea the crews of ships found
beyond the Canaries ". Until about 1550 the Papal Bull of 1493 which divided the New World between Spain and
Portugal was respected by England and France, but in 1553 a Portuguese refugee piloted two English ships to the
River Sestos, while by 1560 the merchants of Dieppe had established regular trade with Senegal and Cape Verde. In
1588 Queen Elizabeth granted letters patent to merchants of London, Exeter, and Barnstaple to trade in Senegal and
Gambia. The documents in vol. ii shed a new light on the earlier English voyages, for an extract from Pina's
Chronicle of John II of Portugal shows that as early as 1482, in the reign of Edward IV of England, John Tintam and
William Fabian planned to sail to Mina (el Mina) on the Gold Coast but were prevented by King Edward on the
urgent representations of the Portuguese ambassador. These English adventurers had been encouraged by the
Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia to undertake the voyage, and King Edward IV himself had actually petitioned the
Pope on 27th February, 1481, for leave to make voyages to Africa " as it is advantageous to the Christian Religion
that wealth and other things, precious for their natural excellence, should be drawn into its power from the hands of
the infidels ". In 1488 also a certain Count of Penamacor was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the King of
England at the instance of the King of Portugal for trying to organize an expedition to Guinea.
The work presents in a convenient compass a more comprehensive and varied picture of the impact on the West
Coast of Africa in the century 1450-1550 of the merchant adventurers of Portugal, Spain, and England than is
accessible in any other work in English, and it should therefore be valuable to students of a period when exploration
and commercial exploitation of Senegal and Guinea became the stepping stone to discovery of the sea route to Asia
via the Cape, and the sea route to America via Guinea and the West Indies.
Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560.
Translated and edited by J. W. Blake
H. R. Palmer
Richard L. Kagan; Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas:

Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800
Review by Jonathan Schorsch
Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta present an account of a few small communities consisting of Portuguese New
Jews from Amsterdam who moved in the early seventeenth century to Muslim West Africa. Enjoying the same
protection local Muslim leaders granted to all foreign merchants, these traders and opportunist/entrepreneurs
practiced Judaism openly, attracted Portuguese New Christians to their midst, and converted some of the Africans
they married and employed and birthed. These short-lived endeavors, showing signs of the pragmatic "going native"
that characterized merchant interlopers and intermediaries throughout colonization, reflect a bold assertiveness that
swept Portuguese Sephardim and conversos alike with the rise of the independence movement against Spain after
1580 and the founding of Sephardic Amsterdam just before 1600.
Even as they prospered financially, Amsterdams thriving community of

Portuguese merchants were burdened by the mandate imposed by the citys
regents in 1619 when they granted these ex-converso refugees from Iberia the right

to openly practice their Judaism.

William H. Beardsley, Steven Nadler
Spinozas Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind.
Indeed, the trajectory of the New Christians in this region of West Africa in the 16th and 17th century centuries is
largely that of a small minority group gradually being assimilated. While in the 17th century New Christian escapees
from the Inquisition such as Alvaro Gonalves Frances and Joo Rodrigues Freire continued to practice Jewish
rituals in the region, and to convert New Christians to crypto-Judaism, their children became fully assimilated.25
Alvaros son Jorge, for instance, married a certain Crispina Peres who was later tried by the Inquisition in Lisbon on
charges of witchcraft, having performed certain local religious practices in the port of Cacheu; in his testimony to
the inquisitors, written in the mid-1660s, Jorge Gonalves Frances recounted how there were only four people in
Cacheu who followed the Catholic ritual without incorporating any pagan rituals. As there remained not an
inconsiderable population of New Christians there at this date, this is evidence that many of them had adopted
African religious practice.
The religious world which the Sephardim found on the coast of Guinea was one that was both familiar and strange.
During her trial by the Inquisition in the 1660s, Jorge Gonalves Francess wife, Crispina Peres, was accused of
sorcery and worshipping fetishes, of organising pagan ceremonies on one of Jorge Gonalves Francess boats
which involved a libation with cows blood, of using local healers when her daughter fell ill in an attempt to
discover who had poisoned her, and of keeping a bewitched snake.
Yet to go with this sense of foreignness were ritual practices which were familiar. Circumcision was commonplace.
The cultures of the Guinea Coast were matrilineal, in keeping with the matrilineality of the Jewish faith (Newitt
1992: 42). And though polygamy was practised, this is not itself universally prohibited by the Jewish faith. Instead
the practice of diasporic Jews has often been to follow the marital customs of their host cultures, that is to be
polygamous among the Moslems and monogamous among the Christians. Given this heritage of adaptability, the
demands of polygamy would have been acceptable to many New Christians in West Africa.
In these circumstances one must recognise that there was a certain degree of inevitability in the adoption of African
religious practice by these Sephardic New Christians. Where there were very few Jews, or even crypto-Jews,
assimilation into the dominant cultural praxis was an obvious choice. By the mid-17th century thosewho genuinely
wanted to be Jews were able to go to Amsterdam and London, or to the nascent communities in the Caribbean, as
well as to the Ottoman Empire.
The history of the Jews in Portugal reaches back over two thousand years and is directly related to Sephardi history,
a Jewish ethnic division that represents communities who have originated in the Iberian
Peninsula (Portugal and Spain).
Jewish populations have existed on the area even before the country was established, back to the Roman era, or even
before an attested Jewish presence in Portuguese territory, however, can only be documented since 482 CE. [1] With
the fall of the Roman Empire, Jews were persecuted by the Visigoths and other European Christian kingdoms which
controlled the area after that period.
In 711, the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Peninsula was seen by the many in the Jewish population as a liberation,
and marked as the beginning of what many have seen as the Golden age of Jewish culture in the Iberian

Peninsula (the Islamic Al-Andalus), even if the Jews, as well as the Christians (theMozarabs of the Visigothic rite),
under Muslim rule were considered Dhimmi, and had to pay a special tax.
Rapidly in the 8th century, the Christian kingdoms of the north mountainous areas of the Iberian Peninsula
(Kingdom of Asturias) started a long military campaign against the Muslim invaders, the Reconquista. The Jews,
since many knew the Arabic language, were used by the Christians as both spies and diplomats on this campaign
that took centuries. This granted them some respect, although there was always prejudice.
Medieval Era[edit]
King Afonso I of Portugal entrusted Yahia Ben Yahi III with the post of supervisor of tax collection and nominated
him the first Chief-Rabbi of Portugal (a position always appointed by the King of Portugal). King Sancho I of
Portugal continued his father's policy, making Jose Ben Yahia, the grandson of Yahia Ben Rabbi, High Steward of
the Realm. The clergy, however, invoking the restrictions of the Fourth Council of the Lateran, brought considerable
pressure to bear against the Jews during the reign of King Dinis I of Portugal, but the monarch maintained a
conciliatory position.
Until the 15th century, some Jews occupied prominent places in Portuguese political and economical life. For
example, Isaac Abrabanel was the treasurer of King Afonso V of Portugal. Many also had an active role in the
Portuguese culture, and they kept their reputation of diplomats and merchants. By this time, Lisbon and vora were
home to important Jewish communities.
Portuguese discoveries[edit]
In 1497, Vasco da Gama took Abraham Zacuto's tables and the astrolabe with him on the maiden trip to India. [2] It
would continue to be used by Portuguese ships thereafter to reach far destinations such asBrazil and India.[3]
Zacuto might have an uncredited appearance in Lus de Cames's 1572 epic poem, The Lusiad, as the unnamed "old
man of Restelo beach", a Cassandra-like character that surges forward just before Vasco da Gama's departure to
chide the vanity of fame and warn of the travails that await him (Canto IV, v.94-111). This may be Cames' poetic
interpretation of an alleged meeting (reported in Gaspar Correia) between Vasco da Gama and the older Abraham
Zacuto at a monastery by Belm beach, just before his fleet's departure, in which Zacuto reportedly gave Gama
some final navigational tips and warned him of dangers to avoid. [4]
Inquisition[edit] Main article: Expulsion of the Jews from Portugal
In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish population as part of the Spanish Inquisition. Tens of thousands of Spanish Jews
subsequently fled to Portugal, where King John II granted them asylum in return for payment. However, the asylum
was only temporaryafter eight months, the Portuguese government decreed the enslavement of all Jews who had
not yet left the country. In 1493, King John deported several hundred Jewish children to the newly discovered
colony of So Tom, where many of them perished.[5]
Following John's death in 1494, the new king Manuel I of Portugal restored the freedom of the Jews. However, in
1497, under the pressure of the newly born Spanish State through the clause Marriage ofIsabella, Princess of
Asturias, the Church and also of part of the Christian people, King Manuel I of Portugal decreed that all Jews had to
convert to Christianity or leave the country without their children.[6]Hard times followed for the Portuguese Jews,
with the massacre of 2000 individuals in Lisbon in 1506, further forced deportations to So Tom (where there is
still a Jewish presence today), and the later and even more relevant establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in
1536.

The Inquisition held its first Auto da f in Portugal in 1540. Like the Spanish Inquisition, it concentrated its efforts
on rooting out converts from other faiths (overwhelmingly Judaism) who did not adhere to the strictures of Catholic
orthodoxy; like in Spain, the Portuguese inquisitors mostly targeted the Jewish New Christians, conversos,
or marranos. The Portuguese Inquisition expanded its scope of operations from Portugal to the Portuguese Empire,
including Brazil, Cabo Verde, and Goa. According to Henry Charles Lea[7] between 1540 and 1794 tribunals in
Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and vora burned 1,175 persons, another 633 were burned in effigy and 29,590 were
penanced, but documentation of at least fifteen Autos-da-f between 1580 and 1640 the period of the Iberian
Union disappeared[citation needed], so the real numbers must be higher. The Portuguese inquisition was extinguished in
1821 by the "General Extraordinary and Constituent Courts of the Portuguese Nation".
Most Portuguese Jews, thousands, would eventually leave the country
to Amsterdam, Thessaloniki, Constantinople (Istanbul), France, Morocco, Brazil, Curaao and the Antilles. In some
of these places their presence can still be witnessed, like the use of the Ladino language by some Jewish
communities in Turkey, the Portuguese based dialects of the Antilles, or the multiple Synagogues built by what was
to be known as the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (such as the Amsterdam Esnoga).
Post-Inquisition[edit]
Despite persecution, many Jews did stay in Portugal. A significant number converted to Christianity as a mere
formality, practicing their Jewish faith in secret. These Crypto-Jews were known as New Christians, and would
always be under the constant surveillance of the Inquisition many, if not most of these, would eventually leave the
country in the centuries to come and again embrace openly their Jewish faith, joining the communities of Spanish
and Portuguese Jews in places like Amsterdam, London or Livorno. (Such was the case, for example, of the family
of Baruch Spinoza).
Some of the most famous
descendants of Portuguese Jews who lived outside Portugal are the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (from
Portuguese Bento de Espinosa), and the classical economist David Ricardo.
Some Jews, very few, like the Belmonte Jews, went for a different and radical solution, practicing their faith in a
strict secret isolated community. Known as the Marranos, some have survived until today (basically only the
community from Belmonte, plus some more isolated families) by the practice of inmarriage and few cultural contact
with the outside world. Only recently have they re-established contact with the international Jewish community and
openly practice religion in a public synagogue with a formal rabbi.
In the 19th century, some affluent families of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese origin, namely from Morocco, returned to
Portugal (such as the Ruah and Bensaude). When the first Brazilian Constitution of 1824 allowed freedom of belief,
the first Jews to openly emigrate to Brazil were also Sephardi Jewish from Morocco. The first synagogue to be built
in Portugal since the 15th century was the Lisbon Synagogue, inaugurated in 1904.
World War II[edit]
A new chapter of Jews in Portugal was marked by World War II. Since 1929 Portugal was under the nationalist
regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, but Portuguese Nationalism was not grounded on race or biology. In 1934
Salazar made it clear that Portuguese Nationalism did not include pagan anti-human ideals that glorified a race, and
in 1937, he published a book where he criticized the ideals behind theNuremberg laws.[8] and in 1938 he sent a
telegram to the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin ordering that it should be made clear to the German Reich that
Portuguese law did not allow any distinction based on race and therefore Portuguese Jewish citizens could not be
discriminated against.[9] In 1937, Adolfo Benarus, Honorary Chairman of COMASSIS[10] and a leader of the
Lisbons Jewish Community published a book where he rejoiced with the fact that there was no anti-Semitism in
Portugal.[11]
Communities[edit]
The roots of Portuguese Jewry lay much prior to the forging of the Portuguese kingdom. When Afonso I of
Portugal obtained recognition of his independent kingdom, in 1143, Jews had lived in the Iberian Peninsula for at
least one millennium.[27] Jews differed from other people since they always considered themselves a nation in exile,
whose millennial longing was to return to their land. Nurturing no territorial ambitions wherever they found asylum,
Jews solely contributed to the prosperity of their host countries which ensured a good reception.
Nevertheless, there were times when Jews were not welcome. With the Edict of expulsion of the Jews by Manuel
I (1496) and the official establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition by John III (1536) came a period of intolerance
and prejudice that lasted for several centuries and led to the almost complete extermination of Judaism and the Jews
in Portugal.[28] It wasnt until the twentieth century that organizedJewish communities settled again in Portugal.
Lisbon[edit]
The Jewish Community of Lisbon was officially recognized in 1913. It brings together the Jews of Lisbon. Its
headquarters are on Avenida Alexandre Herculano, no.59 in Lisbon, where the synagogue Shaar Tikvah (Gates of
Hope) is located. According to its official website, the purpose of the Jewish Community of Lisbon is to promote
religious education for the new generations according to the values of Judaism, to recruit new members and to
strengthen its engagement in the local and national affairs, by means of dialogue and interaction with the authorities
as well as with civil and religious institutions. There is also a vibrant Conservative Jewish Community - Kehilat Beit
Israel. Beit Israel has an innovative approach counting women for minyan and making a bridge between the old
community and the outside world.
Porto[edit]
The Jewish Community of Porto was officially recognized in 1923. It brings together the Jews from Porto. Its
headquarters are located in Rua de Guerra Junqueiro, no. 340, in Porto, where the Kadoorie Synagogue "Mekor
Haim" (Fountain of Life) is located, the largest synagogue in the Iberian Peninsula and one of the largest in Europe.
According to the official website of the Jewish Community of Porto, it is ruled by the philosophy of Chabad
Lubavitch and among its members one finds Jews from sources as diverse as Egypt, India, Russia, United
States, Poland, Spain, Israel, Portugal, Mexico and Venezuela.
Belmonte[edit]
The Jewish community of Belmonte was officially recognized in 1989. It brings together the Jews of Belmonte and
its surroundings. Its headquarters are located in Rua Fonte Rosa, 6250-041, Belmonte, where the Synagogue Beit
Eliahu (Son of Elijah) was built. According to the official blog of the Jewish community of Belmonte, this is the
only community in Portugal that can be considered trulyPortuguese. Its members are descendants of cryptoJews that managed to preserve many of the rites, prayers and social relations throughout the period of the
Inquisition, marrying inside a community constituted by a few families.
Jerusalem Post: I understand that you have Jewish ancestry in your family. What is your personal connection to the
Jewish people? Do you consider yourself to be a Jew?
Jorge Sampaio: My grandmother belonged to a Jewish family that came from Morocco in the beginning of the 19th
century. She married a non-Jewish naval officer who later was Foreign Affairs minister. I am naturally very proud of
this ancestry and of all those that I call my "favorite Jewish cousins," one of whom is the president of the Lisbon
Jewish Community, as I am proud of the ancestry on my non-Jewish father's side. Personally, I am agnostic, and I
do not consider myself a Jew; but I am proud, as I said, of my ancestors.
First, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam enjoyed a much greater degree of toleration than their counterparts in the
rest of Europe. This uniqueness was due in part to the fact that Amsterdams Jews were relatively recent reconverts
to Judaism. To explain: having been forcibly converted to Christianity in their native Portugal and then having faced
persecution by the Inquisition in the late sixteenth century when the Catholic Church suspected the sincerity of their
conversion, these Marranos, as they were called, fled to Amsterdam. As Carl Gebhardt, quoted by Swetschinski,
summarizes, The Marrano is a Catholic without faith and a Jew without knowledge, but a Jew by will. According
to Swetschinski, Amsterdams Portuguese Jews were, therefore, modern Jews without ever having been Medieval
Jews. The primary consequence of being thus relatively unburdened by such a history, argues Swetschinski, was
the necessity of creating a Jewish identity for themselves rather than simply receiving one from their ancestors. In
refuting their recent, though perhaps only nominal, Christianity while embracing a biblical past as a new
beginning, the members of this relatively small community ultimately constructed an identity based on an important
contradiction. On the one hand, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were cosmopolitan, seeking religious or ethical
harmony with their Christian neighbors. On the other hand, they were initially reluctant to lose a sense of
themselves as Portuguese Jews. Indeed, as Swetschinski explains, Amsterdams Jews held onto their Portuguese
customs and cultural identity for a remarkably long time after moving to Amsterdam. Over the course of the
seventeenth century, however, The Portuguese Jews created anew an ethnic identity neither Iberian nor Jewish, a
hybrid identity in which the fusion of disparate religious and cultural elements occurred after the original union was
given up as too ambiguous to be shared and as off ering, moreover, no simple continuity, religious or other, from
past to present.
Reluctant Cosmopolitans is a rich and detailed description of the Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century
Amsterdam. Of particular note is Swetschinskis careful weaving together of archival and published primary sources
with secondary work, which gives the reader a sense of the norm of the daily existence of the members of this
community.
Taken together, these fi ve books point to the accuracy of Jaucourts belief that eighteenth-century European history
was dependent on its treatment of its Jewish citizens. These works offer us insights into Jewish experiences of early
modernity as well as greater understanding of how members of the dominant cultures depicted, related, and
sometimes even incorporated their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps the next step in writing about Jews in the eighteenth
century will be to study European Jewrys interactions with Europes other subalterns: Moslems, colonized people,
women, people who cross national boundaries, and sexual others.
Atlantic Diasporas:
Jews, Conversos, and Crypto- Jews in
the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800.
Richard L. Kagan & Philip D. Morgan
a glimpse of several disciplines meeting at the cutting edge. Economic history, Atlantic studies, Jewish studies,
and study of the African diaspora, among other fields, come together in these ten chapters, revisiting and revising
our understanding of the place of Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews and their converso kin in the formation
of the Atlantic world. As we see more clearly from this volume, while yet victims of exclusion and discrimination,
they comprised active players in European overseas expansion and early colonial- ism, even if in relatively small
numbers. Atlantic Diasporas opens with a swift overview by Jonathan Israel of the converso/Sephardic transoceanic
trade networks and their shifting political contexts. Adam Sutcliffe offers a second high-level sweep of the
Sephardic Atlantic, focusing more on cultural factors. The book then offers two main sections: one on mercantilism,
the other on identity and religion.
The first section opens with Wim Klooster's survey of a handful of mid- seventeenth-century Dutch Sephardic
merchants and their efforts at colonial settlement-building in various territories in the Americas. Most of these men
had already spent time in the short-lived Jewish haven of Dutch Brazil. They won grants to create new communities
in difficult and undeveloped territories, rustled up settlers in Europe (in some cases non-Jews), provisioned supplies
including slaves, and set sail. Though the majority of these settlements failed due to hardship or opposition by
colonial authorities (who did not always agree with policies set by leaders back in the metropole), they led to the
Sephardic communities of Curaao and Suriname.
Holly Snyder treats merchants, mostly Sephardic, operating within the English colonial orbit, tracing their efforts to
negotiate state regulation, which saw Jews as at best resident aliens, and to gain privileges or rights of residence and
trade. Moving from the relatively anarchic seventeenth century to the more ordered eighteenth century, Jewish
merchants continued to face legal and attitudinal discrimination and hence felt greater pressure than their non-Jewish
competitors to cultivate a strong and loyal customer base. Those who thrived in consumer retail trade, such as Aaron
Lopez of Newport, knew how to comport themselves with the necessary social graces and sold to their customers the
gentility and respectability that they sought for themselves and which to some degree could now be had for purchase
through goods like stylish textiles, Portuguese wine, tea, snuff, or spermaceti candles.
In the next essay, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert offers a comparative survey of Sephardic/converso trading networks of
the Portuguese nation, the Naa, alongside other Atlantic diasporic trading networks - the Huguenots, Basques, and
Genoese, among others. This sophisticated synthetic portrait shows that most of the particularities attributed to
Jewish (or "Jewish") commercial culture actually comprise features of all such trading networks. Endogamy, intense
family orientation, clannishness, law-stretching or - breaking - often laid at the feet of Judaism or Jewishness - really
derive from structural determinants. Studnicki-Gizbert shows us once again how the remarkable Sephardic/converso
trading diaspora featured a tight overlap between social and economic relations in two senses: people traded with
family and kin foremost, while cultural and religious ways aided and paralleled commercial needs and structures.
Asking about similar matters in a similarly comparative context, Francesca Trivellato challenges some of the
stereotyping and essentializations of Sephardic/converso trading networks. She argues against the notion that trading
with family and kin necessarily engendered trust and cooperation (or entailed a "progressive" trait), calling attention
to the internal divisions within Sephardic/converso trading diaspora, such as revolved around class, ethnicity,
gender, or religion.
Among other problems, family businesses and networks often fell apart, fractured, descended into squabbling.
Trivellato brings to bear her expertise regarding the Mediterranean commerce of Livornese Sephardim in probing
for detailed but more nuanced ways of depicting and explaining the tricks of the Sephardic/converso trade. In the
anthology's second main section, "Identity and Religion," Bruno Feitler takes us to northeast Brazil, conquered by
the Dutch for nearly three decades, a unique land from the perspective of the Jewish question in the Iberian world.
Here, as Feitler, discusses, Portuguese New Christians lived under Calvinists who tolerated open Judaism. With rich
examples he outlines the complicated religious life of the colonists, able to explore and experiment with an "enemy"
faith, pressured to choose between faiths, and sometimes uncertain how. Many individuals ultimately made their
choice based on "the sentimental bonds that tied them to local community groups and material concerns in lieu of
racial identity and religious convictions". Aviva Ben-Ur recounts the situation of slaves and freed individuals of
African origin, women in particular, within the unique Sephardic plantation community of Suriname between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on tantalizing bits in archival sources, she traces the complicated ways
Eurafricans became a significant part of the community, both demographically and in terms of communal
organization and the construction of the local meanings of Jewishness. Some slave or free women used their
relationships with Sephardic planters and the children they bore them as a means of upward mobility, while
segments of the community saw fit to adapt to local necessities and welcome these initiates who among other things
served to bolster their tenuous numbers. Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta present an account of a few small
communities consisting of Portuguese New Jews from Amsterdam who moved in the early seventeenth century to
Muslim West Africa. Enjoying the same protection local Muslim leaders granted to all foreign merchants, these
traders and opportunist/entrepreneurs practiced Judaism openly, attracted Portuguese New Christians to their midst,
and converted some of the Africans they married and employed and birthed. These short-lived endeavors, showing
signs of the pragmatic "going native" that characterized merchant interlopers and intermediaries throughout
colonization, reflect a bold assertiveness that swept Portuguese Sephardim and conversos alike with the rise of the
independence movement against Spain after 1580 and the founding of Sephardic Amsterdam just before 1600.
Coins unearthed in 1812 in the Great Polish village of Glenbok show conclusively that in the reigns of
Mieczyslauw III (1173-1209), Casimir, and Leshek (1194-1205), the Jews were, as stated above, in charge of the

coinage of Great and Little Poland.

[Funk & Wagnall's Jewish Encyclopedia, page 56, vol. 10]
The 14th century was the golden age of their history in Spain. In 1391 the preaching of a priest of Seville,
Fernando Martenez, led to the first general massacre of the Jews who were envied for their prosperity and hated
because they were the kings tax collectors.
Encyclopedia Britannica: [page 57, vol. 13 - 1947]

beginning with 1630, there began to be a shortage of available housing.
The Jewish community in Amsterdam, while possessed of an Iberian ancestry, used Portuguese as its lingua franca.
The name of the community was, and still is, the Portuguese Jewish Community. Even the recently arrived Spanish
Jews who came from Turkey, North Africa, or Italy adopted Portuguese for reasons not germane to this article. The
use of Portuguese continued for 150 years in Curaao (circa 1651-1800) as evidenced by their wills, contracts
among the Jews, correspondence, and the epitaphs of many tombs. The Sephardim, hardy and adventurous, found
allure in the ideas of conquering the underdeveloped New World and having a share of the wealth thought to be
easily attainable there. Curaao and Surinam were the first Dutch bases in the West, and it was to these places that
the Jews came. They brought with them the ability to speak Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish; an almost inbred ability
to adapt, possibly due to 1800 years of forced wanderings; their ready contacts for trade through their family
relationships all over Europe and in the lands of the Sublime Porte. We mention separately their determination to
practice and preserve their faith, since this was their rock. The familial devotion served to further commercial ties
without the necessity of large capital, since credit was to be had for the asking. The linguistic abilities permitted
contacts with the Spanish colonists who were groaning under the oppressive alcabala and the restraints on trade
imposed under the fallacious mercantile theories of Madrid and Seville. The family contacts extended to many of the
inhabitants of the viceroyalties of Nueva Granada and Peru.
Where faith was no barrier to the presence of the Jews qua Jews, they served in every capacity of public and
private life. Holland acknowledges its debt to them for their participation in its development. Cromwell's
benevolence in not opposing their reentry, after their expulsion in 1290, benefitted England. France, which had
expelled them in 1309 and 1396, permitted the Sephardim to reside and conduct some businesses in the Provence
area after 1500 but denied to Ashkenazim the same rights. While the French General Assembly granted full
citizenship to Sephardim in January 1790, it refrained from granting this privilege to the Ashkenazim of northern
France until September 1791. The Sephardim were referred to as the "Portuguese Nation."

there was an inevitable tendency for him to specialize in commerce, for which his acumen and ubiquity gave
him special qualifications. In the dark ages the commerce of western Europe was largely in his hands, in particular
the slave trade, and in Carolingian cartularies Jew and merchant are used as almost interchangeable terms.
[Encyclopedia Britannica, page 57, vol. 131947.]
Jewish Atlantic World

Jews in the Atlantic World (1620-1820) didn't stay put for long: one year they were Amsterdam, the next in London,
New York, Newport, Curaao, Jamaica, Barbados, or Suriname. These wanderers, referred to as Port Jews, were
primarily merchants who resided in and traveled between port towns during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Often Port Jews were descendents of conversos - Jews forced to convert to Catholicism under the Inquisition and
who may have practiced Judaism in secret for generations before they escape the Iberian Peninsula. Raised in two
worlds, Port Jews commonly saw their ties to the Jewish collectivity as voluntary and yet saw Jewish
(re)education as a must.
Many were quite wealthy and had at least indirect ties to the slave trade. They created and sponsored a rich visual
and literary culture that trod the line between devotion and heresy. They were deeply messianic, and their belief
permeated their shared visual and religious ethos.
The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia on the other hand is quite revealing,

as much for what it does not say as for what it does. The account begins with the very dubious claim that, "
As in all Mohammaden countries, the Jews lived in Granada in perfect freedom." "Since the Jews in Granada were
rich and powerful," the article continues, "they interfered at times in the dynastic quarrels."
According to him, converso residents of Saint-Esprit believed that being "of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount
to being" Jewish."This virtual equation of Jewishness and Portuguese ethnicity, however, obscures the fact that the
settlers had already been conscious of forming part of an ethnic naao well before they became a "nation" of foreign
merchants, and certainly before several of them came to view the association of their ethnicity with Judaism as
necessary and absolute.
Becoming Jewish in early Modern France:
Documents on Jewish community-building in seventeenth-century Bayonne and Peyrehorade
David Graizbord
William H. Beardsley, Steven Nadler

Spinozas Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind.
Even as they prospered financially, Amsterdams thriving community of Portuguese merchants were burdened by
the mandate imposed by the citys regents in 1619 when they granted these ex-converso refugees from Iberia the
right to openly practice their Judaism. The Dutch authorities expected them to regulate the social, moral, and
religious life of their community and to ensure that it kept to a strict observance of Jewish law. This led the
community to be especially sensitive to the concerns of their Christian neighbors. The famous toleration of the
Dutch could never be taken for granted and the Jewish community was aware of the many political and theological
divisions within their host community that constantly threatened to upset the delicate balance supporting continued
toleration. Furthermore, after generations of practicing Judaism in secret, the community had but a tenuous grasp of
their religious identity and needed to rediscover or even reinvent central religious practice. This sense of insecurity
arising from the perceived precariousness of their place in the city led them to reinstate the practice of expelling
heretics from the community. The issuance of writs of herem, or expulsion, became common and took on a
political as well as a religious dimension.
On 27 July 1656 the community issued an unusually harsh herem to twentythree-year-old Baruch Spinoza, who had
recently taken over his familys importing concerns. They accused him of monstrous deeds and of practicing and
teaching abominable heresies, researching carefully older writs to find the harshest and most colorful
formulations. Young Spinoza had as yet published nothing and the writ of expulsion gives no clue as to the precise
nature of these deeds and heresies.
Steven Nadler, in this sequel to his fine biography (Spinoza: A Life [1999]) addresses this mystery. The task is
doubly difficult. In the absence of any documentary smoking gun and given that any number of Spinozas later
published doctrines (for example, his denial of the divine origin of the Torah) would have been cause enough,
establishing the cause of his expulsion is, according to Nadler, a bit like finding the cause of the French
Revolution. Yet here the historian faces the supreme gift, a situation of overdetermination, and is free to pursue
interesting subplots . Based on some hints in the documentary record, Nadler chooses a particularly fascinating, if
controversial, subplot, Spinozas views on the eternity of mind and his apparent denial of personal immortality. This
then becomes the occasion for a detailed discussion of Spinozas philosophy, Jewish theology, and the views of the
great Jewish Aristotelians concerning the nature of mind and intellect.
That Spinoza in his mature writings rejected any notion of an individual mind or soul as a distinct, independent
substance is clear. This rejection of the Cartesian basis for immortality is a central component of his monism. Yet
many have seen in his cryptic remarks concerning the eternity of the mind some basis for a version of personal
immortality. Even after the destruction of the body, Spinoza writes, there is something of the human mind that
remains and is eternal. The question is whether this something is enough to secure personal immortality. The heart
of Nadlers book is a persuasive argument that these remarks in fact constitute a denial of immortality. Nadler
demonstrates that Spinoza is developing the views of Maimonides and especially Gersonides and presents an
interpretation on which Spinozas philosophy of mind constitutes the culmination of Jewish rationalism.
In rejecting any version of individual immortality, offering instead a vision of a single, divine eternal intellect,
Spinoza can be seen as pushing a particular intellectualist account of the mind to its ultimate logical conclusion.
Concerned that their Christian hosts would take offense if the community accepted someone who seemed to
undermine morality by removing the support of eternal reward and punishment, hoping that their cousins in Portugal
would, despite their outward rejection of Judaism, still have a share in the world to come and, most importantly,
committed to a version of Judaism still colored in various ways by Catholicism, the Amsterdam community expelled
the young heretic with prejudice. Nadler has not settled the question of Spinozas expulsion, but his well-researched
exploration of this aspect of the story will fascinate anyone interested in Jewish thought or early modern philosophy.
W. H. Beardsley
University of Puget Sound
Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds.

Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos and Crypto- Jews
in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800.
the active involvement of both Jews and conversos (the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were converted to
Christianity in Spain and Portugal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) in the development of the
commercial networks within the Atlantic World from which a large part of Western Europe's prosperity derived in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the "Age of Mercantilism".
Firstly, there is the problem of defining Jewish identity within the early modern Atlantic World. Secondly, it
addresses the issue of the manner in which Jews/Conversos dealt with the challenges presented by their "marginal"
identity with the societies in which they circulated, how they developed strategies to circumvent the obstacle this
marginal status presented and achieved commercial success. The book is divided into three distinct parts.
the manner in which a mixture of government policies, alterations in the balance of military and economic power
within the Atlantic World as well the cultural traits of Jewish and Converso communities not only enabled them to
create successful trade networks during the seventeenth century but eventually also contributed to their decline in
the following century.
In "Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: The Founders of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America" (pp. 33-49),
Wim Klooster offers a fascinating and very detailed study of the Converso/ Jewish merchants in those parts of the
American "New World" that came under Dutch control during the seventeenth century.
Synder's essay closely examines the fortunes of Jews engaged in British transatlantic trade by means of a number of
case- studies. This study exposes the remarkable complexity of trade networks maintained by the Jews in question
and the difficulties that resulted in their attempts to make supply and demand coincide, a challenged made all the
greater by their status as Jews. A particularly interesting aspect of this essay is its exposition of the manner in which
Jewish traders and communities who were active in British transatlantic trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries did not pursue legal privileges in order to assert a specific identity or with any grandiose aim in mind.
Instead, their objective was a rather more down to earth one: to achieve a secure and well-grounded place as a
merchant community operating within the economy of the developing overseas British Empire.
"La Nacin among the Nations: Portuguese and Other Maritime Trading Diasporas in the Atlantic, Sixteenth to
Eighteenth Centuries" by David Studnicki-Gizbert. Studnicki-Gizbert dissects the various strategies adopted by
Sephardic Conversos/Jews that helped to strengthen a sense of collective identity as the Nacion/Naco and which, as
such, were vital in secur- ing the sense of trust that enabled their vast commercial networks to thrive by facilitating
their commercial success. These included, amongst others, endogamy, clustering into specific urban areas,
communal confraternities and philanthropic institutions.
The second part ends with "Sephardic Merchants in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond: Toward a Comparative
Historical Approach to Business Cooperation" by Francesca Trivellato (pp. 99-120). Trivellato seeks to argue that
the Sephardic Converso/Jew Diaspora in the Atlantic World were not bound by an automatic sense of ethnic
solidarity but rather that the sense of community was dependent upon "specific safeguards, developed within
particular interpersonal networks and in concert with exogenous market and legal infrastructures". The third part of
this book is entitled "Identity and Religion". The first essay it contains is "Jews and Christians in Dutch Brazil,
1630- 1654" by Bruno Feitler. Feitler draws upon an abundant documentation, including inquisitorial trial dossiers
from the tribunal of Lisbon, to offer a vivid account of the life of Jews and Conversos residing in a Brazil that was
divided between Dutch-controlled and Portuguese- controlled territories. The result is a remarkable depiction of the
internal divisions that existed in Converso/Jewish communities and of the ambiguous religious identity of many
individuals whose religious ambivalence led them to exchange their religious identities.
Ben-Ur addresses the issue of slave-ownership amongst the Jewish community in Dutch-controlled Surinam. The
essay considers the particularly interesting question regarding Jewish identity within that community and that arose
as a consequence of the frequent birth of mixed-race children fathered by Jews from their African slave women. It
also considers the ambient hypocrisy amongst the male Jews of Surinam relating to attitudes towards Jewish women
who had sexual relations, and offspring, by Black Africans and their treatment. "Catholics, Jews and Muslims in
Early Seventeenth-Century Gui," jointly written by Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta (pp. 170-194) offers
readers a refreshing insight into the presence of Sephardic traders on the coast of Senegambia (western Africa). It is

particularly interesting in its use of inquisitorial sources to build an analysis of relations between Sephardic traders
and local Muslims rulers of Senegambia.
Ethnic and Religious Hostilities

in Early Modern Port Cities
Barrington Moore, Jr.
Evidently the economic interest of a social group, the "rising bourgeoisie," whose existence it is still unpolitic to
mention, did lead on occasion toward freedom. In this case the advance included the rejection of the grosser forms
of ethnic prejudice such as beating up foreigners simply because they looked, acted, or spoke strangely, an extension
of the principle of justice for all that went far beyond ethnic issues and included the very poor natives. On the other
hand, where there was little or no economic interest pushing in a liberal direction, as in the case of the Jews in
Genoa, unlike Amsterdam, or where economic interests worked in a repressive direction, the results, as we shall see,
were the opposite of morally uplifting. How a society treats its Jews is a good index of its general attitudes toward
ethnic minorities. According to a nineteenth century general history "opulent Jews and... these whom the Republic
found absolutely necessary for her commerce" could buy immunities in the earlier days of Genoa's prosperity. The
author does not explain what the immunities were from or the dates of the earlier days of prosperity. My guess is
that the im munities referred to ordinances about occupations open to Jews and that the early days could have
occurred between 1154 and 1257. Despite the vagueness surrounding Bent's claims I find them highly plausible
because they correspond with what we know about the Jews in Amsterdam and the rest of the Mediterranean. The
general policy was this: Rich Jews and those with skills useful to a commercial world were very welcome. The rest
(that is, the overwhelming majority) could take their troubles and com plaints elsewhere. The trouble was there
wasn't any elsewhere in those days. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 marks their first clear and tragic
appearance in Genoese history.
It was a cruel forced emigration of many thousands of people. Some of those managed to find their way by sea to
Genoa, where they were allotted a spot by the docks. "Huddled together in the cold and without food or shelter,"
according to a Genoese annalist, "they perished like flies before the wintry blast." Ships to carry them "elsewhere"
for gold simply threw their cargo of human flesh into the sea if the supply of gold fell short. As winter ended, most
of the Jews had died and the shore was strewn with their corpses. When the summer heat began, a terrible plague
broke out. At that point Genoa expelled all newly arrived Jews, allowing others to stay for three days on condition
that they did not leave their ships. Many could not pay their passage and were thrown into the sea. Others sold their
children into slavery to pay their passage. Such was Genoese hospitality toward these unfortunate foreigners. The
Genoese simply tried to get rid of the Jews any way they could, no matter what suffering the effort produced. In
judging this behavior the only mit igation I can see is to ask what else the Genoese authorities could have done.
Though accurate figures are probably not to be had, the number of helpless, hungry, and eventually mortally ill
refugees was very likely over whelming even for Genoa's resources.
In any case Epstein is basically correct in his assertion that Genoa was hostile to the Jews. They never established a
medieval community there. Not until 1660 was a ghetto allotted to the Jews. There, as usual, they were locked in
from one o'clock at night until day break. During Lent they were obliged to go and hear mass. The populace was so
rabid against them that the authorities were obliged to keep soldiers on guard to protect them as they came out of the
church. Nevertheless, says Bent, it was a lucky Jew who managed to get home safely without a bruise from brick or
tile. It was the institution of slavery that brought into open and widespread currency a series of ethnic
rationalizations to serve as moral justifications for the practice. In turn the powerful demand for labor, rural and
domestic, in the Venetian and Genoese lands of the Levant, fueled the slave trade. Thus the slave trade, buying
slaves in one place and shipping them for sale to another place, became a big business for the western maritime
cities. By the seventeenth century it may have become the biggest business of all in Atlantic and Mediterranean
shipping. Even the somewhat pious Dutch, some of whom had professed horror at Portugal's mistreatment of slaves,
became guilty of similar atrocities themselves. Reluctantly entering the trade early in the seventeenth century they
rapidly dropped their scruples to make up for a late start. The slave trade was as much a feature of the rise of the
bourgeoise as the conception of justice independent of social status. In both, the city of Genoa played a major role.
At the beginning of this discussion I pointed out that slavery was the source of ethnic rationalization at that
time. Stated so simply the remark is an anachronism. To my limited knowledge the expression "ethnic conflict"
was unknown in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Neither was the stronger expression "race riot." In those
days when one wanted to deny individuals or whole peoples membership in "our" society, the standard grounds
were religious ones. Those to be rejected or expelled were accused of belonging to the wrong religion?Catholic in a
Protestant area and vice versa?the wrong sect in a tolerable religion, or of using just plain dangerous practices, such
as magic. Expelling people from "our" society on such grounds provided moral justification for executing them or
enslaving them. Thus the behavior was the same under both religious and racial justifications. There may have been
a little difference insofar as religion could change while race could not, but practically speaking, very little.
Jewish Atlantic World

Jews in the Atlantic World (1620-1820) didn't stay put for long: one year they were in Amsterdam, the next in
London, New York, Newport, Curaao, Jamaica, Barbados, or Suriname. These wanderers, referred to as Port
Jews, were primarily merchants who resided in and traveled between port towns during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Often Port Jews were descendents of conversos - Jews forced to convert to Catholicism under
the Inquisition and who may have practiced Judaism in secret for generations before they escape the Iberian
Peninsula. Raised in two worlds, Port Jews commonly saw their ties to the Jewish collectivity as voluntary and yet
saw Jewish (re)education as a must.
Many were quite wealthy and had at least indirect ties to the slave trade. They created and sponsored a rich visual
and literary culture that trod the line between devotion and heresy. They were deeply messianic, and their belief
permeated their shared visual and religious ethos. The course examines this world through close reading of material
culture and literary and religious texts. There will be frequent writing assignments.
Jews and Judaism in African History.

Richard Hull. Princeton Reviewed byAlma Gottlieb
Evidence of trade with ancient Egypt shows that Jews have been actively engaged in Africa for more than 5,000
years. Given this long and multifarious involvement, the fact that the book under review is the first overview of the
topic is both shocking and exciting. The volume developed from a course the author teaches regularly at New York
University on "Jews and Judaism in Africa since Antiquity," and consolidates a wealth of historical information
concerning Jews' involvements across the continent. The broad scope of Hull's gaze in both time and space is one
great strength of the book. Few historians nowadays would contemplate tackling 5,000 years of history across a vast
continent but the underdeveloped scholarship on Jews in Africa invites such an ambitious undertaking. As such, the
book should quickly find its way to both scholars and students seeking an overview of the topic.
As the sweep of these chapters imply, Hull has read widely on diverse places and eras, thus he includes a plethora of
intriguing and stereotype challenging data. For example, Hull documents Jews proselytizing others (contra the
popular image that Jews have tended to keep to themselves and have avoided missionizing); he records Jews as
effective soldiers, even mercenaries (contra the popular image of Jews as intellectuals and traders); unlike most
histories of Africa, Hull gives the two tiny but historically significant islands of So Tom and Principe their due;
and he writes of Jews serving as advisors to African rulers at key points in their mutual encounters. Sephardim (Jews
with known ancestry in Iberia) occupy center stage in much of Hull's narrative, providing a welcome corrective to
the Ashkenazi-centric perspective (emphasizing northern and eastern European origins) taken by many U.S. and
European scholars of Jewish history; Hull also explores ties between these two Jewish groups that reveal them as
less distinct than many assume. A related contribution lies in the inclusion of the continent of Africa as a whole.
Gone is the scholarly tendency to disconnect North Africa from sub-Saharan Africa, based on unrealistic (and
perhaps unconsciously racialized) assumptions about the ways in which the Sahara divided the northern and
southern portions of the continent. Many traders and explorers including Jews regularly crossed the Sahara, and Hull
makes crystal clear how the scholarly convention of dividing the continent vis-a-vis the Sahara unacceptably distorts
the continent's history. A book of this wide scope inevitably provides uneven coverage; in that sense, its strength
also proves its weakness.
Verde, combining to provide a compelling case study of an especially intriguing locale of Jewish activity; and more
nuanced discussion of Jews' roles in the South African and other liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century
across Africa would have interested many readers (in places, Hull's discussion of South Africa reads more like a list
of famous South African Jews than a full analysis of the range of lives of Jews in that nation).
Moreover, South Africa is treated somewhat independently; although we know that both trade and kinship networks
often linked Jews across the continent, Hull does not connect his discussion of South African Jews with the lives of
Jews elsewhere in Africa. The reader is tantalized by mentions of other fascinating bits of information that could
have been further analyzed: brief mention of "Judaized Berbers," for example (p. 40); the textually oriented sect of
Karaite Jews (p. 232); or a troubling point about Ethiopian Jews having to "re-convert" to gain citizenship in Israel
(p. 206). The European orientation of Jews in Africa is also uneven. While he more than gives Sephardim their due,
Hull by far privileges Spanish over Portuguese Jews, despite the rich history of Portuguese Jews in Africa that is
beginning to be well documented by historians such as Tobias Green, Jose da Silva Horta, Peter Mark, and others.
When he does discuss Jews in Portugal, he overlooks key historical realities such as the fact that the Inquisition
continued actively into the nineteenth century. Beyond Iberia, the role of the Crusades (mentioned briefly) also bears
more discussion. In some sense, despite the unorthodox subject, this is a somewhat conventional history. Men's
lives, and military and political events, are privileged over social or intellectual history; one finds little on women's
perspectives, ordinary people's lives, aesthetic history, or religious experiences, for example. Accordingly, analytic
themes are implicit but rarely developed. Thus Hull hints tantalizingly at the relationship between the Iberian
Inquisitions and the European maritime explorations of the world beyond Europe (pp. 88-89), but does not explicitly
develop that theme.
Perhaps the major issue that looms large over the book concerns the ethical foundation of Jews' relations to Africans
in general, and during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in particular. Hull's narrative documents both Jews
who acted and/or spoke in explicitly racist ways, and Jews who actively challenged racist stereotypes. A
theoretically founded comparison of these two distinct groups could have offered a provocative and nuanced portrait
breaking down the larger category of "Jews in Africa." As a people who themselves endured slavery and, since their
liberation recorded in the book of Exodus, have celebrated annually that joyous moment during the Passover Seder,
Jews have often worked hard in sympathy with oppressed peoples elsewhere; historical research in West Africa is
also now disclosing many Jewish men who married African women with whom they raised legitimate children. So
the contrasting scenario?contexts in which Jews have fallen on the side of the perpetrators of oppression, as with the
involvement of some Jews in the slave trade?begs for an engaged discussion of that disturbing irony. On that point,
one is reminded of the thoughtful essay on "Fear and Atlantic History: Some Observations Derived from the Cape
Verde Islands and the African Atlantic" in which British historian Tobias Green suggests that the history of Jews in
Africa has deliberately been sidelined by historians precisely to avoid dealing with the disquieting implication of
some Jews in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and to avoid further enflaming troubled relations between contemporary
Jews and African-Americans in the wake of (unjustified) accusations that Jews were entirely responsible for that
trade (as popularized, for example, by the infamous The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, published by
the Nation of Islam in 1991). Writing more openly about the ethical issues involved in studying the history of Jews
in Africa (perhaps using the Green piece as a jumping-off point) could have provided Hull with an opportunity for a
thoughtful discussion. Finally, one has the impression that the text was rushed into production. The conventional
scholarly apparatus is rather sloppy in many places; the book needed another round of copyediting to smooth out the
flow of the argument, omit redundancy both across and within chapters, and produce a more chronologically clear
narrative. From chapters organized by geographic region, Hull tacks back and forth across history to follow specific
themes. ... Some odd geographic errors may confound student readers (e.g., Hull refers to the Azores as islands off
the African mainland); and many proper nouns are introduced in rapid succession, which risks confusing readers
(student and otherwise) unfamiliar with Muslim and Spanish history in particular. Not all facts are referenced; not
even all quoted statements are identified. It may well both presage and inspire a new round of scholarship
dedicated to further filling in the details of the broad outlines Hull has sketched in this overview.
The Forgotten Diaspora

Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World
Peter Mark & Jos Os da Silva Horta.
Bridging the Atlantic and Sephardi Diaspora
The past decade has seen the beginnings of a renaissance in historical studies of those areas of precolonial Africa
most heavily influenced by contact with the Portuguese. While a decade ago, scholars such as David Eltis
underrepresented the role of Portuguese trade in societies of the African Atlantic, this is now no longer possible.
For Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Hortas book concentrates on the Petite Cte region of Senegambia, an area more
traditionally seen as falling under Dutch and French influence, and one for which, as they write in their introduction,
the importance of Portuguese sources has traditionally been underrated. Yet as they show, in the first third of the
seventeenth century there was a strong Brazilian and Portuguese influence in the region, and hence their book is of
great interest to scholars of Lusophone Africa.
The main focus of The Forgotten Diaspora is on two communities of Sephardic Jews who established settled
communities in the towns of Portudal and Joal, complete with synagogues and other ritual features necessary for the
practice of Judaism, in the early seventeenth century. Mark and Horta have conducted an enormous amount of
meticulous archival research, principally in Holland and Portugal, uncovering precious caches of documents which
allow them to build a detailed picture of the commercial, material, religious, and social lives of these communities at
an early time in Atlantic history. As this picture unfolds, searching questions are also asked relating to AfricanEuropean relations, constructions of identity, and the unfolding of commercial practices in the early Atlantic world.
The Forgotten Diaspora is divided into six chapters. Chapters 1-3 situate the these communities in religious context,
with chapters 1 and 2 detailing the documentary evidence on the presence of these communities in Senegambia, and
outlining their ritual and religious functions in the context both of Atlantic pressures and of their existence as guests
of an Islamic African community, and chapter 3 focusing on attitudes of members of these communities to
Christianity and Islam. Chapters 4 and 5 focus especially on material culture, with chapter 4 dealing with the role of
these Sephardic Jews in the sword trade linking Portugal and Senegambia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and chapter 5 with the way in which ivory carvings originating from Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century may
elucidate some aspects of the ritual and cultural lives of these communities. The final chapter places the community
in a broad Atlantic context, examines the question of Atlantic slavery in this region, and looks at how the
communities disappeared in the second half of the seventeenth century.
One of the great strengths of the book is the authors focus on material culture. The documentary evidence is rich
indeed, and Mark and Horta succeed in constructing as detailed a portrait as I have read of the material, religious,
and social contexts of a community in seventeenth-century Africa. The characters of the community members
emerge as more than just ciphers who crop up in a handful of written documents. We learn about the nature of the
religious books and practices, the types of clothing worn, the ways in which Jews in Senegambia related to and
talked to their Islamic Jolof hosts, and much more. This is a triumph of historical reconstruction, and is due in large
part to the meticulous thoroughness with which the authors have read and interpreted the documents they have
found, and the deep knowledge they have of the sources.
However, it must be recognized that such a focus is unorthodox in contemporary African studies. Where African
history as it was written prior to the post-independence revolution in the field tended to focus on European deeds in
Africa, the publication of a book which again focuses on Europeans in Africa--albeit European others--might
seem to risk revisiting such retrograde tendencies. And yet, all in all, Mark and Horta avoid such potential pitfalls
with great skill. Far from writing Africa out of history, their book seeks to place African histories within a broader
global context, and insists on the relevance of the African context to a broader understanding of the formation of
Atlantic societies in the early seventeenth century. When so many soi-disant Atlantic histories willfully omit an
entire continent--Africa--in their analysis, this context matters a great deal, and Mark and Horta put forward the
important argument that relations between Senegambians and Sephardic Jews in this era were significant in
influencing the formation of early mixed communities throughout the Atlantic world.
Indeed, one of the things which emerges most clearly from the book is just how deeply connected this small corner
of Africa was with places as far distant as Amsterdam, Brazil, Cartagena (in modern Colombia), Livorno, and
Morocco. In perhaps their most path-finding chapter, on the sword trade, Mark and Horta show how members of
these Jewish communities connected both to artisans in Morocco linked to Al-Mansur and his conquest of Songhay
in 1591, and to slave traders who returned to Iberia via Cartagena in the same era. Though as they stress, most of the
members of these Jewish communities were not slave traders themselves, it was impossible to separate their
activities from those of the wider trading environment of Senegambia, which already in the late sixteenth century
was connected to spaces across the globe. Thus for the many historians today who need prodding to recognize that
African history and historical influences in the world did not begin in the nineteenth century, this book is a timely
and important reminder.

Tobias Green
This paper examines the processes by which Africans proselytized Sephardic Jews on the coast of West Africa in the
16th and 17th centuries and were in their turn proselytised by Jews both in West Africa and elsewhere in the
Atlantic world in the early modern era. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published sources, it shows that
these activities were far from unusual in the Atlantic world at the time, and are evidence of a world of receptivity
and understanding that belies traditional interpretations of Atlantic history. Analysing the conditions which
produced the atmosphere in which such mutual conversions could occur, the paper argues that a relatively equitable
balance of power was central to this process.
Personal knowledge and human experience were crucial in breaking down cultural barriers in a way which permitted
conversion; however, the wider economic forces which facilitated these exchanges were themselves distorting
power relations, helping to shape Atlantic history on its more familiar, and intolerant, path.
The Atlantic Sephardic diaspora is one which remains unfamiliar to some historians of the early modern period.
Only recently, indeed, has it become a focus of study for mainstream historiography. Yet this was, in the 16th and
early 17th centuries, a diaspora which was almost of equal import to the trajectory of Sephardic Jews as that in the
Ottoman Empire. Retaining a variable degree of Judaism beneath the cloak of an enforced Christian faith, these
Sephardic New Christians became important players on both sides of the Atlantic world: in Madeira, Cabo Verde
and So Tom, and in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.
In the vast geographical space which was occupied by this diaspora, there has now been a reasonable amount of
research and publication devoted to the Sephardic New Christians of the American sphere.2 Only recently, however,
has there been any sustained research and publication on the question of the activity of the diaspora in Africa. Here,
landmark new research by Mark and Horta, Mendes and Green has uncovered a significant amount as to the
activities of a group of Sephardim living and trading on the petite cte of Senegal in the first three decades of the
17th century (Mark/Horta 2004; Mendes 2004; Green 2005; 2008).
This research has been very revealing. The Sephardim in question originated from Amsterdam, and belonged to that
group of New Christians who had sought religious sanctuary in the Dutch United Provinces and returned to their
ancestral faith. Their presence in Senegambia was related to the trade in wax and hides in which the region
specialised in these years (Green 2005: 172-3). The community grew to be quite sizeable in the second decade of the
17th century, running its own prayer meetings with the help of Torahs imported from Europe, and having ritual
butchers who killed meat according to the laws of kashrut (Mark/Horta 2004: 247, 251). However, following a
disastrous trading expedition in 1612 led by the communitys leader, Jacob Peregrino, the Sephardic community in
Senegal fell into a long decline from which it never recovered (Green 2005: 180-182).
One of the investors in these trading ventures from Amsterdam to West Africa was a certain Diogo Dias Querido.
Dias Querido is an interesting figure from the period who has been discussed by various historians in the field
(Wiznitzer 1960: 47; Schorsch 2004: 178). He appears to have developed his experience of the Atlantic world
through managing a sugar refinery in Baha, north-eastern Brazil, in the 1580s (Wiznitzer 1960: 47). Here he
developed a reputation as a crypto-Jew, and may have been tried by the Portuguese Inquisition during the
inquisitorial visit to north-eastern Brazil of 1591-1595.4 He arrived in Amsterdam towards the end of the 16th
century and was one of the founder members of Beth Yahacob, the first synagogue in the city.
There is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that Dias Queridos work in Baha may have brought him into
personal contact with the peoples of the Senegambian coast in the 1580s. This may perhaps explain his willingness
to invest heavily in trading voyages to the region once established in Amsterdam, and also perhaps one of the more
controversial elements of his Jewish practice in the Dutch United Provinces: for Dias Querido was one of those who
actively sought to convert his African slaves to Judaism.
The conversion of a Jewish masters slaves to Judaism was in fact
far from unknown in Amsterdam, and, later, in the Sephardic colony of
Suriname (Arbell 2002: 108).

Tobias Green
The congregational records of the 1640s reveal several interdictions regarding the participation of African members
of the congregation in synagogal services (GAA, Portuguese Jewish Archives, Book 19, folios 173, 224, 281). This
is evidence both of a reasonable African contingent in the congregation, and of a hardening of the inclusiveness
which had characterised the congregation in its early years, a hardening which itself was probably the corollary of an
increasingly racialised discourse as the 17th century unfolded.
At the same time, moreover, as Africans were being converted to Jews in Amsterdam (and elsewhere), an analogous
process was occurring in reverse on the West African coast. Sephardim who had taken up residence in Senegambia,
and second and third generation Sephardic New Christians residing here and on the Guinea Coast, increasingly
adopted elements of African religion. This was indeed a long-standing process, since as long ago as 1546 an

accusation had been made to the Portuguese inquisitorial tribunal of vora that the New Christians who lived on the
African coast were adopting elements of African religious practice (A. Teixeira da Mota 1978: 8).
This paper seeks to build on this evidence of a mutual receptivity of Sephardim and the peoples of this part of West
Africa towards the religious practices of one another.
For in this evidence of accommodation and reciprocity emerge ideas concerning the practice and the relationship of
Africans and Europeans in this period which are at odds with some more traditional historiography. The willingness
of Africans and Jews to adopt the faiths of one another hints at a clear acceptance by each group of certain
common values, and at a level of cultural respect it is not a world of exclusion, prejudice and unmitigated
exploitation.
Thus through this investigative framework we can attempt to answer some critical questions. What was it that
allowed distinct groups such as Senegambians and Sephardim to find a shared context for their religious practice?
And what was it, by contrast, which allowed this shared context to be overshadowed, permitting a more polarised
Atlantic world to emerge? By studying how the process of mutual conversion worked, and how it eventually
declined, we can perhaps begin to understand whether the Atlantic world which eventually emerged in the long 18th
century had to be as brutal and as tragic as it turned out to be.
By the early 17th century, one of the most unlikely centres for proselytizing activity on the part of Jewry was the
coast of West Africa. Many of the Sephardic New Christians who apostasised from Christianity and began to
practise elements of Judaism did so after visiting the ports of Senegambia and Upper Guinea. One of them, Antonio
Espinosa, gave a typical account of the evangelical activities of Jews in the port of Cacheu (modern Guin-Bissau)
circa 1630: One day he and his crewmates gathered with four Portuguese men who knew Captain Correa [the
captain of the ship in which Espinosa was sailing, who had already tried to convert Espinosa to Judaism] and they all
said so many things to [Espinosa] about the Mosaic law, discoursing about it for a long time, and recounting how
God had given the law to Moses on the mountain, and how on his descent from it he had found the people of Israel
fallen into idolatry, spending more than a whole sheet of paper explaining this to him, so that at the end [Espinosa]
decided to follow the Mosaic law himself.
However, this evangelical activity was not limited to the New Christians (and Old Christians) who passed through
the region. The more devout Sephardim in the area began to proselytise some of their African servants and slaves. A
document written in around 1620 referring to the stubbornness [pertinacia] of the New Christians around the
world cited especially the dangers of the New World Amerindians being perverted by the many New Christians
who were then making their way to the Viceroyalty of Peru via the River Plate. It was noted that:
... the Gentiles [Amerindians] are at great risk of being taught Judaism, as experience has shown that this occurs in
some of the provinces of Guinea, where [the people of the Hebrew nation] manage to teach Jewish rites and
ceremonies to the Gentiles.
Tobias Green
This general evidence related to the conversion of Africans to Judaism on the Guinea Coast can be supplemented by
other findings in the relevant archives. Mulatto Jews belonged to the congregation of Sephardim established in
Portudal, Senegambia, in the 1610s (IAN/TT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Livro 58, folio 155r; IAN/TT, Inquisio de
Lisboa, Livro 205, folio 583v). And moreover there was a widespread anxiety among the Christian community of
the Portuguese settlements of West Africa regarding the religious activities of the Sephardim. Thus in a letter of July
30th 1635, the Bishop of Cabo Verde recounted a story which, for him, had all the hallmarks of another Jewish
conversion in West Africa. Three African servants had circumcised themselves, although they were Christians; this
was a matter of perplexity, since they gave signs of being good Christians: nonetheless, they were put in the stocks
and given harsh penance as a warning to others (IAN/TT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Livro 217, folio 475v).

In this last case one can see many of the difficulties which emerge when trying to understand this question of
conversion by Africans to Judaism. The bishop of Cabo Verde appeared to assume that circumcision was an
irrefutable sign of Jewish influence, and was therefore somewhat confused by the strong signs of Christian faith
among these converts. Yet circumcision was just as strong a cultural practice for the peoples of the coasts of
Senegambia and Guinea as it was for Sephardim. It may well be that there was nothing Jewish about this last trait
at all, and that the autocircumcision of these three Africans was merely a melding of their ancestral practice with
Christianity.
The problem with such cases, in other words, is that of the perceptions and preconceptions of the sources. There was
a certain blurring at the edges in the way in which Sephardim and Africans were perceived by [4]Iberian Christians
of the early modern period. This makes specifics as regards the precise ritual activities of Judaism which Africans
may have adopted in Senegambia elusive. As Sephardim had until recently been the stereotyped other of Iberian
culture, Africans were often perceived through a Sephardic lens. It was this which led some of the first navigators to
reach the Senegambian coast to believe that there were communities of Jews here already the griots, or
praisesingers, whom, like Iberian Jews, lived in ghettos, married within their caste and were buried outside the
communal cemetery.
In such circumstances, the existence of a corroborative source for the conversions of Africans to Judaism is
important, and in this case we are fortunate to have such a source through the existence of the aforementioned
converted African Jews who were members of the Amsterdam synagogue in the early 17th century. Here the
thorough research of Jonathan Schorsch on the relationship between Africans and Jews in the Atlantic world is of
interest. Schorsch notes how no more than 15 Africans were buried in the community cemetery at Oudekerk in the
years 1614-30 and 1680-1716 (Schorsch 2004: 178). This implies a thorough integration into the rituals of Judaism,
as does the above-cited regulation that Africans could not read Torah portions in the synagogue of Amsterdam
implying that hitherto they had done so.Although, as Schorsch notes, this must have represented a very small
minority of cases, it nonetheless is evidence that such conversions did occur, and therefore supports the evidence
noted above that they also occurred in West Africa.
Moreover, that the Sephardic communities of the Atlantic world were open to the conversion of Africans or those of
African descent is attested by subsequent developments in the Atlantic. As Arbell has shown, the Dutch colony of
Surinam on the northern coast of South America is of particular relevance here. In Surinam, the Sephardic
population amounted to something like one third of the total population of free persons in the colony. Some of the
Sephardim had sexual relations with African slaves in the colony, and a number of mixed race children were born
(Arbell 2002: 108).
Although most of these children had not been born to Jewish mothers, many of them were instructed in the Jewish
faith and took the names of Portuguese Jews. In the mid-18th century, as the community gravitated from the
plantations towards Paramaribo, the colonys capital, many of these free mulattos became craftsmen and
shopkeepers, some becoming quite wealthy. A ruling of 1754 entitled them to be admitted as members of the Jewish
community, if not as yehidim (full-fledged members), and by 1759 a siva, or brotherhood of Jewish mulattos was
established known as Darkhe Sevarim (The Ways of the Righteous).
While this congregation consisted largely of the descendants of male Sephardim, and thus not of non-Jews who had
been converted per se, the 1787 Hascamoth of the congregation included a provision which made it clear that blacks
and mulattos were freely joining the congregation even though they had no Jewish forebears:
About the difference between a full member and a congregant, it is resolved that all Jewish mulattos, blacks,
mestizas and castices who carry the name of, or are known to be descended from the Portuguse/Spanish nation, will
be considered Congreganten. All other Negroes (sic) and Mulatto Jews who want to join voluntarily in the
Portuguese Jewish persuasion as Congregant, will be obliged to affirm this with their signature at the time of their
acceptance, one and for all on equal terms.

It is not clear from this Hascamah whether these converts were proselytised or whether they were voluntary
congregants attracted in part by a thriving religious community. Yet even if this cannot therefore be taken as
evidence of an overt, proselytising effort on the part of the Sephardim in the Atlantic [5]world, it does still
show a certain openness and tolerance of difference within the Sephardic community, and a recognition on the part
of some that Africans, or those of African origin, could be members of a Jewish community.
When one considers this evidence on the conversion of Africans to Judaism, it appears both logical and anomalous.
The logic follows on from the fact that, in contrast to the stereotypes which existed and exist with regards to the
closed nature of the Jewish community, Jews had traditionally been open to the conversion of non-Jews into their
fold. As the scholar of the Sephardim, B. Netanyahu, has pointed out, the great Jewish sage born in medieval Iberia,
Maimonides, had once written that people of all nations were able to be Jews, while in Roman times Cassius Dio
had written that he could not define who the Jews were except to say that they are a people of different races who
follow the laws of the Jews.
Tobias Green
Yet in spite of this history of openness there is something anomalous in this story, and this is that it was in
opposition to the prevailing trends of the early modern era. For while it is true that the Jewish faith had in ancient
and even medieval times been open to people converting from other faiths, it is also true that in Iberia this openness
had been severely curtailed by the mid-13th century statutes of Alfonso X el sabio prohibiting any proselytising
activity on the part of Jews (and Moslems).
Nevertheless, the evidence shows that this proselytising is what occurred, at least somewhat, in the early modern
Atlantic. What is implied is a certain openness towards Africa and Africans on the part of the Sephardim, and
towards Judaism on the part of Africans. It was in fact those Sephardim who had close personal knowledge of Africa
and Africans who generally engaged in proselytising activity, men such as Diogo Dias Querido or the slave owners
of Surinam. Knowledge and understanding of those of a different culture could bring respect and a desire to
integrate, as the Sephardim themselves had discovered in West Africa.
While, as this paper has already noted, an active Sephardic community did exist on the Senegambian coast in the
early 17th century, most of the Sephardic New Christians who came to this part of West Africa in the early modern
period did so nominally as Christians. Whilst some of them retained a deep attachment to Judaism, and practised
elements of the faiths rituals, most practised a sort of hybrid faith, maintaining some of the cultural and religious
traditions of Judaism and some of those of Christianity; others were outright sceptics of all religion, perhaps hardly
surprising given the experience of their parents generation in Iberia. As Israel has shown, the categories of Jew
and Crypto-Jew were to a certain degree artificial in the early modern Atlantic; there was more of a continuum
between the two groups, with individuals practising greater or lesser degrees of Judaism and Christianity (Israel
2002: 146).
In this situation, where the New Christians in the Caboverdean region of West Africa most often observed a
hybridised religious form, it should not be surprising that many of them were willing to adopt elements of African
religion. From a very early time in the interactions between Africans and Europeans, it was held that most of those
Portuguese trading and settling in Senegambia and Guinea were New Christians. This perception owed a great deal
to existing prejudices regarding the ambiguous condition of New [6]Christians in Portugal, and to the perceived
ambiguous condition of those so-called lanados, Europeans who had literally thrown themselves in with African
societies:20 both groups were seen as being both part of and yet alien to the Portuguese community. Nevertheless
the upshot of this interplay of preconceptions was that a significant proportion of the Portuguese in West Africa
were in fact New Christians, since the category of lanado threatened Old Christian taboos.
Many of these New Christian lanados adapted quickly to cultural practices of West Africa. Already, as we have
seen, by 1546 the New Christians of Guinea were said to be adopting elements of African religion. Similarly, the
most powerful Portuguese in the Senegambian region in the middle of the 16th century, known as Ganagoga, was a

New Christian who had made a marriage alliance with the Fulani king (Almada 1994: willingness of Ganagoga to
assimilate into the dominant cultural atmosphere of the Fulani of Futa Toro.
Indeed, the trajectory of the New Christians in this region of West Africa in the 16 th and 17th century centuries is
largely that of a small minority group gradually being assimilated. While in the 17th century New Christian escapees
from the Inquisition such as Alvaro Gonalves Frances and Joo Rodrigues Freire continued to practice Jewish
rituals in the region, and to convert New Christians to crypto-Judaism, their children became fully assimilated.
Alvaros son Jorge, for instance, married a certain Crispina Peres who was later tried by the Inquisition in Lisbon on
charges of witchcraft, having performed certain local religious practices in the port of Cacheu; in his testimony to
the inquisitors, written in the mid-1660s, Jorge Gonalves Frances recounted how there were only four people in
Cacheu who followed the Catholic ritual without incorporating any pagan rituals. As there remained not an
inconsiderable population of New Christians there at this date, this is evidence that many of them had adopted
African religious practice.
Tobias Green
The religious world which the Sephardim found on the coast of Guinea was one that was both familiar and strange.
During her trial by the Inquisition in the 1660s, Jorge Gonalves Francess wife, Crispina Peres, was accused of
sorcery and worshipping fetishes, of organising pagan ceremonies on one of Jorge Gonalves Francess boats
which involved a libation with cows blood, of using local healers when her daughter fell ill in an attempt to
discover who had poisoned her, and of keeping a bewitched snake.
Yet to go with this sense of foreignness were ritual practices which were familiar. Circumcision was commonplace.
The cultures of the Guinea Coast were matrilineal, in keeping with the matrilineality of the Jewish faith (Newitt
1992: 42). And though polygamy was practised, this is not itself universally prohibited by the Jewish faith. Instead
the practice of diasporic Jews has often been to follow the marital customs of their host cultures, that is to be
polygamous among the Moslems and monogamous among the Christians. Given this heritage of adaptability, the
demands of polygamy would have been acceptable to many New Christians in West Africa.
In these circumstances one must recognise that there was a certain degree of inevitability in the adoption of African
religious practice by these Sephardic New Christians. Where there were very few Jews, or even crypto-Jews,
assimilation into the dominant cultural praxis was an obvious choice. By the mid-17th century those who genuinely
wanted to be Jews were able to go to Amsterdam and London, or to the nascent communities in the Caribbean, as
well as to the Ottoman Empire. These were areas to which the African coast had a long-standing connection, and
thus those New Christians who failed to go were, by default, opting for the adoption of African religious practice.
This might imply that the choice of whether or not to adopt African rituals was down to the Sephardim themselves,
were it not for an important additional datum. This is that the only region in this part of West Africa which had a
recognised synagogue, Senegambia, was a region where many of these cultural characteristics did not pertain.
The cultures in Senegambia were patrilineal, not matrilineal like those of Guinea (Havik 2004: 26-7; Brooks 2003:
51-2). This was moreover a region heavily influenced by Islam, the religion of the dominant Wolof people of the
region. These cultural factors were crucial to the existence of the Jewish community in Senegambia.
Judaism was a faith recognised and discussed in the Quran, while the existence of a patrilineal culture made
intermarriage and integration into the host community difficult (ibid.). In these circumstances, it was much easier for
the Sephardim to retain their own community and their separate practices which were recognised by the
dominant religion of the region, Islam.
Paradoxically, it was in fact precisely the cultural points of similarity in the region of Guinea south of the Gambia
river matrilineality in particular which made it easier for Sephardim to assimilate into the host culture and to lose
their distinctive Jewishness. The conversion of the Jews to African religious practice was, therefore, whilst
apparently a choice on their part, influenced by complex cultural factors which depended upon African realities and
decisions.
This reveals that in the case of the conversions both of Africans to Judaism and of Jews to African religions, the
main accent of emphasis for the conversion resided with the proselytiser rather than the proselytised. In this sense,
Africans and Sephardim were equal partners in the complex cultural interactions which accompanied the rise of the
Atlantic world in the early modern era. Each group had the cultural facility both to open to another cultural practice,
and to accept the other group into their practice.
And this is of vital importance, since this reality hints at a level of potential cooperation and understanding which is
at odds with the general perception of the trajectory of the Atlantic world in these years.
It is perhaps a melancholic truism that few movements are as new as they may seem. The roots of many innovations
may well be seen in previous developments. Often, a moment of brilliance in art or literature is itself derivative of
something else; and the same can be seen in social change, even in a space like the early modern Atlantic, which
was in so many ways an entirely novel space, and an early prototype for the sort of porous internationalism so
common in the 21st century.

Tobias Green
This conversion of Africans and Jews to the religions of one another appears as something of a surprise. But it is a
surprise to readers of this paper perhaps largely because it is not a subject which has hitherto been given much
attention. To the individuals involved, and in the time and space in which they moved, the reality would have been
very different and not so much of a surprise.
Firstly, one must recognise that from the moment of African-European contact on the coast of Guinea, a tradition
developed of the conversion of Africans to the dominant European religion, Christianity. This was of course most
marked through the onset of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The entire moral justification of this trade was couched
in the terms of the saving of African souls through their conversion to Christianity. The islands of Cabo Verde
were originally something of a holding ground for recently enslaved Africans, where the new slaves were instructed
in the rudiments of Christianity, converted, and then shipped across the Atlantic to continue with their saved
existence elsewhere.
The importance of the conversion of Africans to Christianity in the rising ideology of the Atlantic world in the early
modern era is underlined by the perception of Africans once this process had been completed. For, unlike the
Amerindians, African slaves were seen as falling under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition in America as, in other
words, fully rational humans (Thornton 1998: 141; see also Green 2007c: 37). This therefore emphasised the role of
conversion in the moral underpinning of the slave trade and in the economic fabric of the Atlantic world.
The key in this process transcended mere hypocrisy. What was at stake was the conversion of the subjugated
majority to the religion practised by the dominant minority that is, to the religion of the dominant power in the
space in question. And this was something which in fact was in keeping with other trends in areas influenced
by the Iberian world in this period.
There were, in other words, many contemporary examples to hand of peoples adopting the religions of others with
whom they had come into close contact. In this sense there was nothing unusual about the process which has been
outlined in this paper with regard to the Africans of the Upper Guinea Coast and the Sephardim. Yet as these
examples also reveal, this process of conversion usually occurred when one or other of the groups was in a position
of dominance within a given space. Thus what these stories of conversion can tell us is something about both the
political and social condition of various nodes in the Atlantic at this time, and how the Africans and Sephardim
viewed one another.
This is a subject which has recently entered the mainstream of Atlantic historiography following Jonathan
Schorschs magisterial book, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Schorsch 2004). Schorschs analysis
reveals the diversity of attitudes of Sephardim towards Africans and African-descended peoples in the Atlantic
world, ranging from outright racism to co-operation and conversion. This range of attitudes suggests that the
adoption of racist attitudes in the Atlantic was by no means an inevitability. Many other types of relationship were
possible at the first meetings of Africans and Europeans, including those of reciprocity and co-operation.
From the foregoing analysis, it would appear that central elements in this framework of reciprocity were personal
experience and contact in a space with a relatively equitable balance of power. Those Sephardim who did proselytise
their slaves in Amsterdam appear, like Diogo Dias Querido, often to have been those who had personal knowledge
of the African coast. At the same time, this contact was couched within a political reality where the African kings
were undisputed political masters of the coast. Personal relationships with Africans derived from a sphere where
there was an equitable balance of power which did not foster prejudice, but rather a belief in a common, shared
humanity, and in the applicability of religious tropes to peoples of different backgrounds.
Yet at the same time, the first 150 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade had done much to weaken the power of the
polities of Senegambia and Upper Guinea. The arrival of more horses had challenged existing military relationships
and led to the fragmentation of the Wolof empire into 5 sub-kingdoms; it may also have weakened the hold of the
empire of Mali over the principality of Kaabu, in modern Guin-Bissau, leading to a power transfer from Niani, the
previous capital of Mali located on the border of modern Guinea and Mali, to Songhai, further east into the central
Sahel (Levtzion 1980: 96; Curtin 1975: 9). Thus, although personal contacts between Sephardim and Africans could
lead to reciprocity and shared purpose, these contacts occurred within a wider framework where the conditions
necessary for these harmonious relationships an equitable balance of power were being eroded.
One cannot therefore say that the rise of modern racism and prejudice in the Atlantic world was an inevitability. The
shared conversions of Africans and Sephardim outlined in this paper, and the conditions in which they occurred,
belie this familiar hypothesis. Yet at the same time, the conditions for relationships based on mutual humanity were
eroded by economic conditions from the very moment that these relationships began. And thus, in spite of this
papers excursus into a secret history with more positive overtones, does the trajectory of Atlantic history retain its
classical aura of tragic inevitability.
Tobias Green
Impact of Europeans on the Benin Kingdom

When Portuguese mariners became the first Europeans to visit this part of West Africa in 1486, the obas
(rulers) benefited from trade with them. Esigie, who ruled from about 1504 to 1550, established close contacts with
the Portuguese and, according to some accounts, learned to speak and read Portuguese. The obas established a royal
monopoly over trade in pepper and ivory with European and Benin became an important exporter of cloth. Benin
prevented the depletion of its own population by prohibiting the export of males slaves during the 16th and 17th
centuries, although it did import and resell captives purchased by Europeans elsewhere in West Africa.
The First Global War: The Dutch versus

Iberia in Asia, Africa and the New World, 1590-1609
Peter C. Emmer
Are the beginnings of the Dutch expansion outside Europe to be viewed as war or commerce? In assessing the
damage done by the Dutch to the various Iberian trade circuits in Asia and the Atlantic during the period between
1585 and 1609, this contribution shows that the Dutch actions against Spain and Portugal had virtually no effect.
The Dutch - as well as the other Northwest European powers - could not seriously harm the Iberian expansion
system. After 1620 this situation changed, but it remains remarkable that between 1500 and 1800 two expansion
systems continued to co-exist in Asia, Africa and the New World.
a) The Iberian Expansion System
It seems remarkable that the world outside Europe should have played such an important role in the Dutch struggle
for independence against Spain. Before the beginning of the Dutch rebellion, the non-European world was
peripheral to the economic interests of the insurgents. However, after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, the Northern
Netherlands started a global war with the Iberian powers in Asia, on the coast of West Africa, in parts of South and
North America and in the Caribbean. This global war was waged in part with the objective of harming the enemy
and in part to increase the benefits derived from trade, which in turn would help to finance the war effort. On the
Iberian Peninsula, the profits derived from intercontinental trade and overseas colonization contributed significantly
to the financing of the Spanish armies and navies used against the Dutch insurgents. By rapidly expanding to the
East and West, the Dutch were hoping to transfer some of those benefits from Spain to themselves.
In order to understand the beginning of the Dutch exploits outside Europe, it is important to survey the structure of
the first or Iberian expansion system in order to pinpoint those areas that were most prone to penetration and attacks
by the Dutch. The Iberian maritime empire consisted of seven separate circuits. First of all, the Atlantic islands and
the west coast of Africa should be mentioned as the first circuit of the Iberian expansion system. The first explorers
from Europe in this part of the world were the Portuguese. They traded with the Senegambia region, as well as with
the Gold Coast.
In these two areas, the Portuguese had hardly any footholds; they only established regular contacts with the Africans
along the coast and did not attempt to conquer or occupy any part of it. In addition to these two trading regions, the
Portuguese made contact with the Congo and Angola. In both areas the Portuguese extended their influence beyond
trade. In the kingdom of the Congo the Portuguese missionaries converted part of the population to Christianity. In
Angola the Portuguese established some small settler communities of about one thousand Europeans in total.
Luanda became the center of the Portuguese in Africa.
The second circuit was directed towards the New World, where Spain was the dominant power. This country had
established colonies in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Isthmus, and along the Pacific coast. The Spanish presence in this
enormous empire was very marginal. It has been estimated that about a quarter of a million Spanish moved to the
New World during the sixteenth century. The number of Amerindians in Spanish America has been estimated at
around 9 million. The number of Africans remained limited, with an estimated total of 40,000 in around 1600. The
principle economic activity in Spanish America was agriculture aimed at local consumption. The main export
activity was silver mining, which was responsible for three quarters of the worlds production of this precious metal.
The massive export flow of silver enabled the colonists in Spanish America to pay for the importation of
both luxury products from Europe and expensive slave laborers from Africa (Rahn Phillips 1990: 76).
The third circuit was set up by the Portuguese in the New World. Their colony, Brazil, occupied the coastal area
from Recife in the North to Rio de Janeiro in the South. This long coastal strip attracted around 200,000 Portuguese
settlers during the period between 1500 and 1600, as well as about 50,000 slaves. The number of Amerindians is
unknown, but it seems unlikely that there were more than about 20,000 to 30,000. The principle economic activity in
Portuguese America was the production of sugar cane and Brazil wood for export, in addition to subsistence
agriculture (Andrade Arruda: 375; Eltis 2000: 9).
In Asia the Portuguese and Spanish presence was extremely limited. Yet both countries were able to organize two
separate flows of trade. The fourth circuit was developed by the Portuguese and included the Portuguese trade in
Asia. The fifth circuit comprised the trade between Portugal and Asia.

The Portuguese presence in Asia averaged around 60,000 men. Most of these Portuguese were in Asia on a
temporary basis, as there were no Portuguese colonization schemes. No more than seven ships left each year from
Lisbon to the East and the yearly return fleet consisted of about 4 ships. It seems that the Portuguese in Asia made
most of their profits in the inter-Asian trade, as well as in privateering, an activity by which they captured Arab,
Indian and Chinese vessels (Subrahmanyan and Thomaz: 306-331). The sixth circuit centered on the Philippines, in
which Manila became the center of exchange for the silver of Spanish America against products from China and
Japan, such as silk and lacquered objects (McAlister 1984: 316,317,371).
The seventh circuit within the Iberian expansion system was the slave trade from West Africa. During the 16th
century, the Portuguese brought around 250,000 slaves to Europe, the Atlantic Islands, Spanish America and Brazil.
The changing figures and destinations are clearly visible: between 1500 and 1525 the yearly volume of the slave
trade averaged 600 slaves and the main destinations were Europe, the Atlantic islands and So Tom. During the last
quarter of the 16th century, the volume of the Portuguese slave trade had risen to 3,800 slaves per year and the main
destinations had become Spanish America and Brazil (Curtin 1969: 116,119).
The principal breakthrough for the Dutch toward exploring and exploiting economic opportunities outside Europe
came in 1585, when Antwerp fell into Spanish hands. This caused an exodus of merchants who had the necessary
knowledge, capital and contacts to trade with other continents. In the North, these refugees from Antwerp were most
cordially welcomed, as they could help in the patriotic struggle against the Spanish tyrant and worldwide
popish superstition. At the same time, however, these merchants from Antwerp, many of them crypto-Jews and
cristos novos (New Christians) continued to conduct business within the Iberian trading system (Enthoven 1996:
111; Israel 1989: 29,30; van den Boogaart: 75).
Which Iberian trading circuits were first attacked or penetrated? In Asia, the Dutch attacked the Portuguese trading
empire and, after some years, they managed to construct their own trading empire, which seems to have
marginalized and even replaced the Portuguese seaborne empire there. In the Atlantic, the Dutch attacked the
Portuguese in West Africa and penetrated the trade between Europe and Brazil in a peaceful manner. The Spanish
empire overseas was more difficult to tackle.
First of all, it was better defended than that of the Portuguese. Second, the trade to and from Spanish America was
organized in convoys, or flotas. These were much more difficult to attack than the Portuguese ships which sailed to
both West Africa and Brazil all year round, as the trade in slaves and sugar could not be temporized in the same way
as the transport of precious metals from Spanish America.
b) The Dutch Revolt and the Beginning of a Dutch Seaborne Empire
As pointed out in the first section of this contribution, the Dutch had little experience in trade outside Europe at the
time when Antwerp was taken by the Spanish in 1585. By 1609, however, the Dutch were well on the way to
establishing a worldwide trading network with six separate trading circuits. First, the Dutch were growing rapidly as
traders and privateers in Asia. Second, the Dutch had developed a regular exchange trade in goods on the coast of
Africa, while they were also carrying increasing amounts of sugar from Brazil to the ports of both Holland and
Zeeland, directly or indirectly.
This constituted a third circuit. Fourth, the Dutch had established some small settlement colonies on the Wild
Coast, i.e. in the coastal parts of the Guianas. Fifth, the exclusion of the Dutch from the saltpans of Portugal had
forced the Dutch to look for salt on the Venezuelan coast, as the salt from Brittany was not suited for preserving
herring. The sixth and final circuit consisted of the Dutch trade with North America, but this trade did not really
develop until the second decade of the seventeenth century (de Vries and van der Woude 1995: 450-469).
Portugal, on the other hand, seems to ha ve reacted much more adequately to the commercial challenges of its over
seas expansion, at least until 1600. Why wa s that? The monar chy and nobility in Portugal were no less unsympa
thetic to trade and commerce than their equiva lents in Spain.

However , unlike Spain, Portugal ha d not expelled its Jews as ea rly as 1492, and during the sixteenth centur y the
Portuguese Jews (now conver ted to Christia nity, at least nominally) together with merchants from Italy were the dr
iving force behind the foundation of a worldwide Portuguese trading network. Of cour se, we should bear in mind
that this trading network wa s ra ther limited in both scope and volume. The Portuguese ha d only a few str ongholds
in Asia and Africa , and much of their tra de consisted of looting the ships of Ar ab, Chinese, and Indian trader s.
Mor eover, the beginning of the Portuguese exploita tion of Brazil wa s very modest and did not requir e much
investment in labor and equipment until the beginnings of sugar cultivation after the mid-six teenth centur y
(Schammell 1981: 240).
Yet ther e wa s a Portuguese trade empire in the making, and the Jews and New Christia ns played an important if
not dominant role in this. Some historians even claim that all merchants in Portugal were of Jewish or igin since the
contempor ary sour ces used homens de ne gcio (businessmen) synonymously with Crist os Novos and conver sos
(converts). Other s estima te that about one thir d of all merchants in Portugal were of Jewish descent. Even the king
of Spain at the time seemed to ha ve equa ted Portuguese merchants and fina nciers with New Christia ns, since he
hesitated to ask them for help in fina ncing his wa rs (Ebben 1996: 110,111).
The dominant New Christia n and cr yptoJewish pr esence in Portuguese commerce came to an abrupt end towa rds
the end of the six teenth centur y when Portugal bega n to persecute its ba ptized Jews and recent conver ts from
Juda ism. The Inquisition ha d been active in Portugal since 1547, but its actions became more severe once the King
of Spain, Philip II, ascended to the Portuguese throne. The results of this religious clea nsing were disastrous: The
main change between the mid-sixteenth centur y and the mid-eighteenth century wa s that the Portuguese merchants
had disappear ed as a commercial force. (Shaw 1989: 416) The Portuguese New Christia ns took up residence fir st
in the colonies such as Angola and Br azil and, when living ther e became difficult or impossible, in the port cities of
Italy, Fr ance, the Low Countries, England, and in some Hanseatic cities. The disper sion of New Christia n families
to Madeira , S o Tom, Angola, Br azil and the trading cities of Northwest Europe turned out to be a commercial
blessing in disguise.
The diaspora of the New Christians coincided with the development of the second Atlantic system of trade
and settlement, and the New Christians (in some ca ses returning to Juda ism) were the fir st to exploit the new
economic opportunities by transfer ring to the second system an important percentage of the trade in goods
and sla ves between Portugal and West Africa and Angola, the production, transpor t, and sale of ca sh crops
from Br azil, and the sla ve trade between Africa and the New Wor ld (Ebben 1996: 111-113).
Why did Portugal delibera tely shoot itself in the foot by virtua lly ex pelling its commercial class? The answer is
that Portugal during the ancien r gime wa s a very religious countr y and that the king and the nobility could do
little to stop the policies of the Ca tholic chur ch. The chur ch in Portugal controlled about a third of all economic
activities. In Lisbon alone ther e were 5,000 to 6,000 mendica nt friars. Within the Ca tholic chur ch, the Inquisition
ha d a large degr ee of autonomy. Its victims ha d to surr ender all their assets, which the Inquisition used to find
more victims. Many Portuguese merchants disappear ed into this vortex without a trace, because the Inquisition
knew that ther e were many cr ypto-Jews among the New Christian mercantile groups and that they usua lly
possessed consider able wealth. The Inquisition tended to stifle all trade, not only that of vulner able merchants. Cr
edit ex tended to Portuguese merchants could not be retr ieved if the debtor ha d been put in pr ison by the
Inquisition. Hence, nonPor tuguese merchants became reluctant to do business with their Portuguese counterpa rts
(Shaw 1989: 423).
d) The Dutch on the Coast of West Africa, 1590-1609

When did the Dutch first sail to Africa? There is some evidence to show that a captain from Medemblik, Barent
Erickz, was the first Dutchman to do so. He was captured by the Portuguese and imprisoned on the islands of
Prncipe and So Tom. There he learned about trading practices on the African coast and, after his release, the
Medemblik captain returned to West Africa in 1593, buying pepper, ivory and gold (Enthoven: 264). It seems
remarkable how quickly the Dutch were able to establish themselves on the African coast, particularly in the
Senegambia area, Cape Verde and the Gold Coast. Most of the Dutch merchants sending ships to Africa had had no
previous experience in trade with Africa. The exceptions were the Antwerp merchants in Amsterdam, who had
established trading networks along the coast, relying on the support of family members.
To date no comprehensive survey exists of all the Dutch voyages to Africa between 1593 and 1609. All we know is
that around 1600 a yearly average of about 20 ships sailed to Africa. Some merchants in Amsterdam founded a
company for conducting trade with Africa in 1600 and somewhat later another company was set up for trade with
Africa by some merchants in Zeeland. Trade with Africa remained hazardous as the Portuguese continued to take
Dutch ships even after 1609, when the Dutch and Philip III, king of Spain and Portugal signed a truce. The Dutch
federal government was slow to offer protection to its Africa traders. No Portuguese strongholds were captured and
it was not until 1612 that the Dutch government constructed a fort on the African coast in order to serve as a
foothold for Dutch traders (Unger 1956: 135-137).
What do we know about the nature and volume of the Dutch trade with West Africa? Again, no systematic study
exists, but the available evidence shows that Dutch textiles were exchanged for hides, gum, ivory, beeswax and
pepper. The most important African export at the time was undoubtedly gold.
The profit rate in the gold trade had been calculated at 77 percent. The total volume per year has been estimated at 1
million guilders (den Boogaart: 80-88,101,102). As a final observation, it should be pointed out the Dutch did not
trade in slaves until after truce with Spain ended in 1621. It seems likely, however, that the Dutch traders on the
African coast might have bought slaves in order to sell them at some other section of the coast. Also, Dutch ships
were used by the Portuguese to bring slaves from Africa to Portugal and to transport slaves from Africa to Brazil
and - under special asiento - to Spanish America (Phillips, Jr. 1985: 188).
e) The Dutch in Brazil, 1587-1609

There is no doubt that Brazil offered the best commercial opportunities to the Dutch outside Europe. The shortage in
tonnage on the route between the Iberian ports and Brazil was such that, in 1585, Philip II allowed Dutch vessels to
sail in charter to Brazil for some Spanish merchants. Around 1590, 14 Dutch ships sailed to Brazil, and it must also
have been around that year that the first direct voyages took place between the Netherlands and Brazil, returning
with Brazil wood and sugar. Of course these direct voyages of Dutch ships were risky, and for that reason the Dutch
captains had their vessels re-flagged at neutral ports such as Emden and Hamburg (den Boogaart: 76). The neutrality
of these German ports had also been attractive to the Protestant and Jewish merchants of Antwerp who had left this
city after it had been taken by the Spanish. However, during the course of the next ten years, a number of these
refugee merchants moved to Amsterdam, as business opportunities seemed better there. The main expertise of these
ex-Portuguese merchants was in the sugar trade, and they held on to this trade for some time to come.
It should be remembered that the anti-Jewish policies of the Portuguese Inquisition had led to a exodus of Jews,
crypto-Jews and cristos novos and that many had gone to the Atlantic islands and Brazil and had specialized in the
production of, and trade in, sugar. One of the founding members of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam, Jacob
Lopes da Costa, obtained his wealth during his period of residence in Brazil as a tax farmer and as the owner of a
sugar mill. Another member of the Sephardi 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 once more to
Amsterdam during the Dutch occupation of Recife (1630-1654). Some members of the Sephardi community had
resided previously in Hamburg, Portugal and Venice (Stols 1997: 119-147; den Boogaart: 76-78).
Why did the Sephardi community seem to have an advantage in the sugar trade? The explanation for their dominant
position in this trade can be found in the archives of some notaries public in Amsterdam. These archives show how
the Sephardi family network operated, as demonstrated by a charter contract in which an Amsterdam Sephardi
merchant was the charterer of a ship. According to this contract, the chartered ship was to leave the port of Danzig
with grain and sail to the southern coast of Spain or to the north 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 transported to
Bahia in Brazil.
From Brazil, the ship would then sail to Lisbon laden with sugar. In most of the ports mentioned, a family member
of the Amsterdam merchant would be residing, or at least a common representative shared by several Sephardi
families. In the sugar trade, family networks were indispensable and this explains why the Sephardim were able to
remain the dominant importers of sugar in Amsterdam (Vlessing 1995: 225,231-233).
The Sephardim remained pivotal in the Brazilian sugar trade via Lisbon because the beginning of direct shipments
between Brazil and the Netherlands were aborted by the Dutch reprisals against the embargo of 1598. In 1599, the
Dutch started a series of expeditions aimed at disturbing the Portuguese trade circuits in the Atlantic. The Canary
Islands were attacked, So Tom conquered, and then lost again. In 1604, another Dutch fleet was sent with the aim
of disrupting Iberian trade in the Atlantic. As a counter measure, Philip II of Spain expelled all Dutch residents from
Brazil, but it is to be doubted whether this ban was very effective. Only the Sephardi networks in the sugar trade
were able to cope with all these disruptions (Mauro 1984: 459; Israel 1990: 251,252).
The Sephardim got Holland hooked on sugar. During the first decade of the seventeenth century the number of sugar
refineries grew rapidly. The Portuguese Jews were very much aware of the fact that their economic clout was
disproportionate to their numbers. In fact, they threatened to leave Holland if the authorities did not hand over their
consignments of sugar captured aboard Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch ships, assuming these ships had been trading
illegally with the Iberian enemy.
When the federal government of the Netherlands proposed the grant of a trade monopoly in the Atlantic to the newly
founded West India Company (WIC) in 1621, the Sephardim of Amsterdam made a passionate plea to be allowed
their own particular trade niche. The document beginning with a quotation from the 1600 sauvegarde allowing the
Portuguese 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 harbours of Viana and Oporto, as well as Lisbon. During these 12
years of peace shipping and commerce increased so considerably 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 all the Portuguese caravels that used to carry the sugar from these waters.
This was caused by the capacity of our ships so that we could attract half, even two-thirds of this trade to
ourselves.
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 merchandise. 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 twenty-five years. Some of the refineries processed 1500 cases of sugar each year and the
refined product was exported to other countries. At the end of this document they emphasized that the Brazil trade
was their main overseas commercial activity, not commerce with the East Indies or other areas. (Vlessing 1995:
231,232)
What was the value of the direct and indirect trade between the Netherlands and Brazil during the first decade of the
seventeenth century? Van den Boogaart calculated a yearly average of between 3 and 6 million guilders for the
period from 1600 to 1624. It stands to reason to assume that during the first decade of the trade the yearly value was
around the lower limit of 3 million guilders (den Boogaart: 127).
In addition to Asia, Brazil also presented Portugal with a challenge to which it could not respond fully. The slaveworked plantations constituted the most dynamic growth sector of the Atlantic economy at the time. The dramatic
increase in the demand for slaves, capital goods, transportation, and refining capacity could not be met by the
Portuguese alone. Merchants, investors, colonists and slave traders from the Low Countries - mainly from Flanders were able to penetrate the trade and production of the Portuguese Atlantic area. After the fall of Antwerp in 1585,
merchants and investors with expertise and investments in Brazilian trade and production moved to Zeeland and
Holland (Stols: 124-133; Israel 1990: 419-421). This peaceful Dutch penetration of the Brazilian trade turned out to
be very advantageous, as was shown above. This leads to the conclusion that a takeover by force would have done
more harm to the Dutch than good.
Communities of port Jews

and their contacts in the Dutch Atlantic World
WIM KLOOSTER Clark
In the late 16th century, Jews and conversos created a trading network that tied together ports in Portugal, Brazil and
the Netherlands. This network became the chief Dutch commercial circuit in the first quarter of the 17th century and
offered benefits to Jews and conversos that were not solely economic ones. This circuit made it possible for
Brazilian New Christians to return to Judaism in Amsterdam and Amsterdam Jews to establish a community in
Brazil. In the process, the port Jew^s of Recife (Brazil) and Amsterdam became closely connected, especially after
warfare closed off access to Portuguese ports in the network. Amsterdam Jews arrived in force in Recife during the
1630s, but traveled back to Amsterdam during the years 1645-54, since the Dutch colony in Brazil was shrinking
and, eventually, was captured by Portuguese troops. Jews contributed commercially, financially, and militarily to
this short-lived colony and were rewarded with privileges, which, for this time, were remarkable.
"Port Jews," it has been said, "were travelers, strangers, boundary crossers and cultural brokers... purveyors of
products... between far and near." So true is this statement that 'port Jews' must be viewed from a perspective much
like that used by practitioners of Atlantic history, who place interconnectedness at center stage. Their studies
concentrate on the flow of people, commodities, microbes, and information, and, in the end, they offer a new
perspective that goes beyond the traditional one of studying people in their immediate locale and changes the way
we understand people, communities, and nations. For it takes into account social, cultural, political, and economic
impact over a wide area, in our case in particular, that of the Atlantic world. This perspective is especially useful for
studying Jews and crypto-Jews in the 17th century Dutch colonies of Recife in Brazil and Willemstad in Curaao.
These port Jews par excellence will now be at the center of this study. The Jews of New Amsterdam, who were not
commercially important, and the Jews of Suriname, who settled in the New World expressly in order to engage in
plantation agriculture, will not be discussed.
The port Jews who settled in the Dutch colonies began their journey in Portugal from where they migrated to Brazil
and northern Europe in the late 16th century. They did not sever relations with their native soil, but created a
commercial network that tied together Portugal, northeastern Brazil, and Amsterdam into a neat triangle. The well
traveled commercial highway between Brazil and the Dutch Republic enabled Brazilian New Christians to return to
Judaism in Amsterdam and Amsterdam Jews to establish a community in Brazil. In the process, the port Jews of
Recife and Amsterdam became intimately connected. Many poor Jews from Amsterdam settled in Recife and the
adjacent town of Mauricia. This temporary relief from caring for the poor came to an end, however, after 1645,
when the Portuguese conquest of Brazil forced the Jews - now illegally - living there to return to Amsterdam. Some
of the returnees were also well-to-do, and they provided the Amsterdam Jewish community with a significant
commercial stimulus. Yet it would be wrong to view the Sephardim in the Dutch orbit merely as beneficiaries of
enlightened policies. Sephardim in Portugal and Brazil helped shape Dutch trans-Atlantic trade, while others
contributed significantly to the creation and expansion of Dutch Atlantic ports. Jewrs also distinguished themselves
on the battlefield, which prolonged the life of Dutch Brazil. The privileges these Jews received were a reward for
indispensable contributions. The three stages of Sephardi port Jewry Many of the Sephardim studied here did not
revert to Judaism until after they had migrated from the Iberian peninsula to northern Europe. The same goes for the
Sephardim whom David Sorkin has studied. Sorkin argues that "[m]any of the conversos and crypto-Jews who left
the Iberian peninsula moved to the Mediterranean ports of Venice and Livorno, the Atlantic ports of Bordeaux,
London, Amsterdam and Hamburg, and the New World ports of Jamaica, Surinam [sic], Recife and New
Amsterdam. Many of those who remained in Spain and Portugal were active in commerce as well. The result was a
Sephardi trade network which connected the old Mediterranean routes with the new Atlantic economy."3 This
portrayal may be further articulated. In the Atlantic world, there were three, partly overlapping, stage in the history
of Sephardi port Jews: those of Antwerp, the Spanish-Atlantic, and the (European)
North Atlantic. The first began in the mid- 16th century, when Portugal's trade with Brazil grew more important.
As New Christian merchants came to control commercial ties with Brazil, they also became heavily involved in the
African slave trade. In Europe, their presence was particularly important in the Flemish port of Antwerp, which
rapidly became one of Europe's main commercial centers, combining the functions of entrep?t and financial center.
Converso merchants settling in Antwerp enjoyed a special asset, their excellent relations with the Portuguese crown,
which practically monopolized the spice trade. Consequently, Jonathan Israel writes, in the last decades of the 16th
century, until 1595 "almost the whole distribution of Portuguese East Indian spices and Brazil sugar to northern
Europe was handled by the Portuguese New Christians ... residing in Antwerp." The crown-union between Spain
and Portugal in 1580 signaled the start of the second stage, during which converso businessmen crossed the Spanish
border and infiltrated the Seville-based trade with the Americas. Portuguese merchants, or their agents, settled in
Panama, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Cartagena de Indias. The increased complex ity of the Sephardi trade networks
can be seen in the activities of two conversos: Garcia de Ylln Barraza (1591-1655) and Manuel Bautista P?rez
(1593-1639). Lisbon-born Garcia de Ylln, a staunch Catholic who worked his way up to become one of the premier
Portuguese financiers at the court of Spain's King Philip IV, also conducted trade with his brothers in Cartagena de
Indias and Lima, as well as with Jewish or crypto-Jewish business partners in Valencia, Amsterdam, Antwerp,
London, and Hamburg. Manuel Bautista Perez, a Portuguese merchant who moved from Seville to Lima in Peru
around 1620, dealt in slaves, pearls, jewelry, indigo, and textiles from Spain and China. His commercial contacts
extended to Seville, Lisbon, Luanda de Angola, Veracruz, Guatemala, Panama, Cartagena de Indias, Potos? and
Santiago de Chile.
At the same time, he was the linchpin of a more localized Peruvian network. By also investing in the Portuguese
trade with Asia, men such as Perez spanned the world. By selling products from the Indian subcontinent at trade
fairs in Spanish America and shipping American silver to the Far East, they brought Atlantic and Asian trade into
one orbit. The growing economic power of New Christians may have brought the Spanish Inquisition into play, most
famously in Lima, where an alleged conspiracy in 1639 resulted in an auto-da-f?, in which P?rez and ten others died
at the stake.8 The mid-17th century was a traumatic period for American conversos, many of whom assimilated into
Old Christian society, especially in Peru and, later, in New Spain. The third stage in the history of Sephardi port
Jews began at a time roughly contemporaneous to the second, about the end of the 16th century. The Portuguese
Inquisition had become more active, and the Dutch ban on trade with the Flemish coast, introduced in 1595, was
causing problems for Antwerp's commerce with Portugal. The com bined effect was that New Christians left their
native soil in large numbers and moved to northern Europe. But their destination was no longer primarily Antwerp,
which was losing its significance as an international commercial center. They went, instead, to Amsterdam,
Hamburg, Rouen, and a number of other towns that had previously received Portugal's colonial imports from
Antwerp.9 We may speak of 'port Jews proper' only in this third stage, when Sephardim finally begin to profess
Judaism freely, first in northern European ports, and after 1630 in Dutch and English port cities in the New World as
well. Relocating from Brazil to Amsterdam The three stages thus overlapped, as the protagonists of the first two
stages cleared the way for those of the third. The Dutch established colonies in Brazil in 1624-25 and 1630-54 (see
Appendix), but prior to these conquests, scores of conversos from the New World had begun to trade with
Amsterdam and to travel there.
Confessions and accusations obtained by the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias reveal that
Antonio M?ndez, who lived as a Jew in Amsterdam in the 1620s, had previously resided in Santa Fe de Bogot?.
Antonio Hern?ndez had moved to Amsterdam from a small town in New Granada. The attraction of Amsterdam was
even stronger for Portuguese crypto-Jews in Brazil. Diogo Gomes Lobato left Portugal for Brazil in 1599 and
transferred from there to Amsterdam, Jo?o Castelli moved from Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil to Amsterdam
before 1604, and Sirnao Gomes Dias traveled in 1609 from Pernambuco to Lisbon, fleeing from there to
Amsterdam. In Pernambuco, he stayed in the house of Manuel Cardoso Mil?o, who later moved to London,
Amsterdam, and Hamburg.11 The co-owner of a sugar mill in Pernambuco, Portuguese-born Jo?o Luis Henriques,
moved to Amster dam with his sons Manuel Sanches and Jer?nimo Henriques, who declared themselves Jews in
Amsterdam. Other former residents of Pernambuco who arrived in Amsterdam in the 1610s included Manuel
Carvalho, Thomas Fernandes, Joseph Fraz?o, Gonsalo Nunes, David Ovale, Paulo Pinto, and Diego Nunes Vitoria.
Finally, Manuel de Campos left Bahia and settled in Amsterdam in 1619.
These men were all merchants, and many of them were involved in exporting Brazilian sugar to Amsterdam. Their
commercial ties facilitated a return to Judaism. In the late 16th century, Diogo Dias Querido moved from his native
Porto to the Brazilian capital of Bahia, from where he shipped sugar to Portugal, insuring it in Amsterdam. He then
relocated to Amsterdam, was formally converted to Judaism, and was one of the founders of the city's first Jewish
congregation.13 A visitation by the Portuguese Inquisition to Brazil in 1618-19 revealed that the connections
between local New Christians and Amsterdam went beyond commerce. The many Brazilian conversos discovered
judaizing were in touch with openly professing Jews in Amsterdam. Francisco Gomes Pina exemplified the bond
between commerce and religion in this city. Pina exported sugar from Pernambuco to Amsterdam, but he was also,
in absentia, the co founder of Amsterdam's Santa Companhia de Dotar Orf?s e Donzelas Pobres in 1615, an
organization which gave dowries to poor and orphaned Sephardi girls in the region stretching from Saint-Jean-deLuz in France to Danzig, including the Netherlands and Germany. The man who represented him was Paulo de Pina,
a fellow founder of the institution. Perhaps the first Pina's relative, Paulo had moved from Lisbon to Pernambuco
around 1600, returned to Lisbon nine years later, and arrived finally in Holland, where he shed his Christian guise.
The conversos who traded and traveled in the Portugal-Brazil Amsterdam triangle helped create the premier Dutch
commercial circuit in the Atlantic world. These merchants included some of the earliest Sephardi settlers of
Amsterdam, such as Manoel Rodrigues Vega and Garcia Pimentel, who arrived, respectively, from Antwerp and
Venice in the mid-1590s. Their commercial contacts extended to Portugal, Brazil, North Africa, Spain, England, the
Atlantic islands, and the Levant. Manuel's brother, Pedro Rodrigues Vega, who moved from Antwerp to Amsterdam
in 1599, soon left for Bahia. There he bought a sugar plantation and sent cargoes of sugar and ginger to Manoel in
Amsterdam. And in the year 1618 alone, Paulo de Pina imported cargoes, no doubt principally sugar, from Brazil on
five different ships, three Dutch and two Portuguese. In the same year, the Portuguese Inquisition began its offensive
against converso merchants, especially in Porto, whose records reveal the variety of commercial connections
between that port city and Amsterdam. This offensive cost the conversos and their Jewish relatives dearly, whether
through arrests or confiscations. By September, the Jews of Amsterdam claimed to have lost more than half a
million guilders, "much of which was generated by the Brazil trade."16 Portuguese Jews and the Dutch invasion of
Brazil Conversos in Portugal and Jews in Amsterdam also incurred serious losses after the renewal of DutchHabsburg hostilities in 1621. As a rule, Dutch ships had previously left shipping between Portugal and Brazil
unharmed, but with the establishment of the Dutch West India Company in 1621, there was a change of course. The
Company was founded, as one of its directors put it, to "cut off the nerves and veins of the King of Spain's annual
revenues, from which the blood and vivifying spirit spreads through his large body."
Statements like this one paved the way for Dutch privateers to target shipping in the South Atlantic between
Portugal and its South American colony. A contem porary Dutch historian asserted that the Portuguese port of Viana
alone lost twenty-six of twenty-nine ships active in the Brazil trade in the mid-1620s. Although the Jewish residents
of Amsterdam were unintended victims of these maritime attacks, they could not count on compassion from the
Dutch authorities. Attempts by Sephardi merchants in Amsterdam who shipped sugar from Brazil to Portugal to
secure immunity from confiscation in the war that the West India Company was waging on Iberian shipping were
unsuccessful. Nonetheless, better times were ahead for Amsterdam's Sephardim. Gentile Dutch entre preneurs began
to envisage direct control of all aspects of the sugar business, from cultivation to distribution. Profits would
undoubtedly be higher and supplies to Brazil cheaper once customs duties were removed.20 The conquest of Brazil
thus became an important item on the agenda at the first board meeting of the West India Company. The Dutch war
of independence was to be extended to the Americas, the source of the silver which financed Habsburg war-making.
And Brazil, commercially so attractive, yet formally under Habsburg rule since 1580, was the West India
Company's prime target. The 'Portuguese nation,' as Amsterdam's Jewish community was known, contributed little
to the West India Company; its investments amounted to a mere 36,100 guilders, or half a percent of all capital
raised between 1623 and 1626.

Nevertheless, Jewish Portuguese participation grew over time, as suggested by contemporary documents from the
Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias (in present day Columbia). Members of that town's 'Cofrad?a de Holanda,' a
crypto-Jewish organization founded to support the Dutch in their naval warfare with the Spanish, were each required
to send three hundred pesos annually to Amsterdam's Portuguese Jews. More than one witness attested that Juan
Rodriguez Mesa, a Jew apparently born a New Christian in Portugal, possessed the Libro Grande of Cartagena's
cofrad?a, which, lined in colored calico, contained the names of all the group's members. Another converso member
of this group, the Portuguese Duarte L?pez Mesa, told the Inquisitors that he had traveled to Amsterdam, describing
how he had attended a meeting of what could only have been the West India Company board, although he did not
call the Company by its name. Support for Dutch military actions against Habsburg Spain also came from
Portuguese New Christians and Jews in the Netherlands. Many of them had no doubt once lived in Brazil, and soon
after the West India Company was founded, their leaders, including one David Senior Coronel, alias Duarte
Sarayva, had openly lobbied for a Dutch conquest of Brazil.
Born in the Iberian peninsula around 1570, Duarte Sarayva escaped to Amsterdam, where he remarried in 1598. He
was in Pernambuco in 1612, to which he later returned; in the years following the Dutch invasion of 1630, he
acquired five sugar plantations. The first Dutch conquest of Brazil had taken place six years earlier. When a fleet
sponsored by the Dutch West India Company, carrying 3,300 soldiers, arrived at Brazil's capital of Salvador de
Bahia in May 1624, the surprised Portuguese defenders quickly surrendered. This action was but an interlude.
Within one year, a Habsburg fleet had restored Spanish control of Bahia. Undaunted, the Dutch West India
Company dispatched another fleet in December 1629. It was perhaps the largest that had ever crossed the Atlantic.
Among the soldiers on board were at least forty Iberian and twenty German Jews. The arrival of fifty-two ships and
thirteen sloops in Pernambuco in February of the next year augured a successful conquest. As the Dutch
consolidated and then expanded the territory under their control in subsequent years, acquiring a large sugarproducing area, Jews and conversos started settling in the port town of Recife and other parts of Pernambuco. In
addition, several conversos living in Pernambuco reverted to Judaism. Still other New Christians adopted Judaism
after coming to Recife from Portuguese Angola, while some Brazilian New Christians embarked for Amsterdam,
also in order to embrace Judaism. The Dutch conquest of the town of Paraiba may have convinced Domingos da
Costa Brand?o and Mois?s de Almeida to travel to Amsterdam, where they were circumcised. Mois?s' friend
Manuel Rodrigues Monsanto did the same, leaving with his family for Amsterdam and returning to Brazil around
1640.28 Not all Brazilian Jews remained faithful to Judaism; starting in the early 1640s, some returned to
Catholicism. Still by 1645, there wrere hundreds of Jews in the region, and, as late as 1649, four years after a
movement of return migration to Europe had begun, some 350 Jews remained in Recife. Among the Jewish settlers
arriving from Amsterdam, there were numerous poor, who planned to settle in as yet uncolonized areas. Their
disembarkation in Recife in 1638 caused some consternation. Governor Johan Maurits von Nassau-Siegen and his
government believed these poor newcomers would harm Brazil's economy. And, in fact, in the following years, their
condition did not improve.
By 1645, community leader Moses Navarro complained about "the extreme poverty of the Jewish nation." Even
respectable persons, he argued, had resigned themselves to live on charity.31 Jewish activity and liberties in Dutch
Brazil If Jews had encouraged the West India Company to invade Brazil, Jewish intervention was also instrumental
in the extension of the privileges that were granted in the Dutch colonies. Jewish liberties were already prescribed in
both the outline for the government of Dutch Bahia in 1624 and the administrative rules issued in 1629 for all Dutch
colonies then, or ever to be, possessed by the West India Company. Whether Jews had actively lobbied for these
privileges is not clear. But the privileges were no simple act of gentile benevolence. The Jews' conspicuous
significance in trans-Atlantic commerce earned them the right to retail trade in Brazil, which was not recognized in
Amster dam. What is more, after a Jewish company lost 50 men, in 1645, fighting against the Portuguese enemy,
even on the Sabbath, the Dutch Estates General ordered that Jews in Dutch Brazil were to be compensated for
damage to person or property. Thus, from 1645, Jews were considered full-fledged subjects of the Dutch state, a
status the Jews in the United Provinces would not obtain until the 1650s.
Still, the Jews of Recife had to defend their privileges both before and after 1645. The Dutch Reformed Church in
Brazil consistently opposed religious tolerance and on at least two occasions (in 1637 and 1653), private Christian
residents tried to have the privilege of retail trade revoked. The Jews of Brazil, they said, should enjoy no wider
rights than did those of Amsterdam. Abraham d'Azevedo responded in 1653. In a letter sent to the West India
Company, D'Azevedo argued that every resident of the colony came from abroad; no one group could claim prior,
or superior, rights. In addition, through their service on guard duty and their provisioning of the various territories
conquered by the Dutch, Jews had been indispensable to the colony. Third, contrary to other nations, the Jews in
Brazil had never wavered in their loyalty; not a single person had defected to the enemy. The Estates General fully
agreed with d'Azevedo's claim that the economic and military contributions of the Jews were vital. Recife's Jews
also joined hands with their Christian neighbors, in 1637, and sent a letter to the West India Company requesting a
measure of free trade between the United Provinces and Brazil. A year later, the Estates General agreed to the
request, stripping the West India Company of its monopolies, except for the slave trade, the import of war
ammunition, and the export of Brazilwood. The liberalization of trade benefited Jews who were already in Brazil
and lured new groups of Jews from across the Atlantic. Along with other settlers, Jews also helped build the towns
where they resided. The twin cities of Dutch Brazil were almost entirely new creations. Recife was originally but a
small port and the nearby island of Antonio Vaz was almost uninhabited. Jews contributed to the construction of the
town of Mauricia on that island and were involved in the remarkable expansion of Recife. A Jew was also involved
in the construction of the long bridge that linked the towns. Jewish foundations of Curaao The Jewish contribution
to Curaao was even more important. Although blessed with an excellent natural harbor, Curaao did not have a
town when the first Jews arrived in 1651. The coming of the Jews changed the island's character beyond recognition.
From a barren place where the European presence was largely confined to a fort with a garrison. Curaao was
transformed into one of the busiest ports of the New World. Significantly, Willemstad, the town that sprang up
around the harbor, was first mentioned by name in a letter written by a Jewish settler.39 Joao.de Ylln (1609-1697),
a former settler of Dutch Brazil and a cousin of the above-mentioned Garc?a de Ylln, was a vital link in Curaao's
development.
After successfully negotiating the establish ment of a Jewish colony, despite the negative attitudes toward Jews held
by members of the West India Company board, Ylln risked expulsion by engaging in commerce. His permit of
residence allowed him only to cultivate fruits and other produce. The Company directors in Amsterdam worried
aloud that "Jan de Yllan accomplishes little there [and] concerns himself little with agriculture." Ylln was a port
Jew, even if, in his day, Curaao lacked all port functions, from ship-owning, ship-building and repair, to
stevedoring, finance, or inland transport facilities.
In Europe a decade before, Ylln's commercial contacts had extended to Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Angola. In
Curaao, he started importing horses, and supplying flour and clothing to the West India Company employees. He
was followed by other Jews, such as Jeoslmah and Mordechay Enriquez, described in contemporary documents as
peddlers and traders in cattle. Jeoslmah is also said to have encouraged Jews from Amsterdam to move to Curaao.
In due course, commercial ties were forged with Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the mainland, but initially
Curaao's Jews had no choice but to sell goods to the West India Company, which distributed these supplies among
its garrison. In the 1640s and 1650s, soldiers still made up the bulk of the island's Dutch population. The port Jews
of Willernstad and Recife-Mauricia must be understood in terms of their hinterlands and forelands. The expanding
and contracting areas that made up Dutch Brazil formed the hinterland exploited by the Jews of Recife. In the
peaceful years until 1645, when the twin cities of Recife and Mauricia grew and the sugar trade boomed, they
collected taxes and freighted ships bound for the United Provinces. After successive defeats had reduced the area
under Dutch control, blocking Dutch access to Brazilian sugar, the port Jews transformed themselves into army
contractors, ironically a line of business in which the court Jews of Europe excelled. Their main customers were the
Dutch troops, who were always in need of shirts and shoes. From a commercial perspective, Dutch Brazil's last
years thus resembled the early period of Dutch Curaao.
Shuttling back and forth between Recife and Amsterdam As settlers in a colonial empire, the port Jewrries of Brazil
and Curaao had the same foreland. They shared the same land area "on the seaward side of a port, beyond maritime
space, and with which the port [was] connected by ocean carriers." Since trade was only allowed with ports in the
colonial metropolis, ships sailed back and forth to Amsterdam. The old triangle Brazil-Portugal-Amsterdam had
vanished after the Dutch invasion of Brazil. Amsterdam's Sephardim tried hard to resuscitate the triangular trade
during truce negotiations between Portugal and the United Provinces in 1641, but their efforts were in vain.With
Portugal inaccessible, the only Atlantic passage open to the Jews of Recife and Amsterdam in the mid-17th century
was that between these two ports, which also furthered these two communities' integration. Yet there were limits.
Daniel Swetschinski has shown how closely integrated the Amsterdam Sephardi community was with those of
Hamburg and later London. The same numbers of Amsterdam brides and grooms married in Hamburg as vice
versa.49 This level of reciprocity did not exist between Recife and Amsterdam. Nonetheless, the trans-Atlantic route
connecting the two ports was well traveled. Ishak Mocata o Velho, for example, probably a native of Brazil, lived in
Amsterdam in 1639, 1642, and again in 1644. He returned to Recife in the latter year, but was back in Amsterdam
five years later. Francisco de Faria was born in Portuguese Pernambuco, converted to Judaism, went to Amsterdam
in 1635 with his wife and two children, appears on communal lists in Recife in 1643, and returned, finally, to
Amsterdam by 1652. Aharon Serfaty was not a native of Brazil. A relative of Paulo de Pina, Serfaty was the first
Portuguese Jew to be circumcised in Amsterdam in 1597. His name is found in Dutch Brazil in 1637, but a year
later, he returned to Amsterdam and became president of the Talmud Torah. However, after 1646, he returned to
Brazil, where he was elected president of Recife's Tsur Israel congregation in 1653. He died in Amsterdam in 1670.
The Jews of Willemstad repeated this pattern of frequent oceanic crossings. Abraham Drago, for instance, himself a
former resident of Recife, was among the first Jewish settlers in Curaao in 1651. He returned to Amsterdam within
a few years, but as late as 1680, he brought seven families to Willemstad. Jews began to leave Recife-Mauricia after
the start of a rebellion in 1645 that ended in the Portuguese conquest of Dutch Brazil in 1654. Admittedly, the return
of two hundred Jewish families to Amsterdam weighed heavily on the local community, but thanks to the resources
of some of the more well-to-do, Amsterdam's Sephardim witnessed a new economic boom. Moreover, despite
Brazil's disappearance from their horizons, the world beyond the Atlantic kept beckoning. In coming years, Jewish
settlements were founded in various locales in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. This settlement was encouraged
by a number of crises, especially a demographic one. The arrival in Hamburg and Amsterdam of Jews from Dutch
Brazil and crypto-Jews from the Iberian peninsula (following the downfall of Gaspar de Guzman, the once powerful
Count-Duke of Olivares, who had been their protector) led to overcrowding in both cities. The need to create new
places where these Jews might live was urgent.
Communities that came into being after the Brazilian exodus included Barbados, Martinique, and New Amsterdam.
Settlements in Guiana were founded through the efforts of former residents of Dutch Brazil who had initially
returned to the Netherlands, most notably, David Cohen Nassi, Abraham Cohen, Philipe de Fuentes, and Moses
Netto. In 1657 Nassi signed a contract with the Estates of Zeeland, which allowed him and other Brazilian veterans
'of the Hebrew nation' to carve out an agricultural colony in Essequibo in western Guiana. All Jews were granted
freedom of religion and conscience, and they were not required to appear in court on the Sabbath or on Jewish
holidays. Jews also settled on the nearby Pomeroon river. However, both colonies were destroyed by English troops
in 1666. An equally short life was granted to the Dutch colony of Cayenne, where Nassi had obtained extensive
privileges in 1659, but which fell into French hands five years later. Some refugees from these abortive colonies
found their way to the English settlement of Suriname, which in turn was seized by a Dutch force in 1667. In
Guiana, therefore, rural Jewish settlements, far from any port, were the legacy of entrepreneurial port Jews like
Nassi. Port Jews thus were sojourners in a dynamic Atlantic world. During the first decades of the 17th century,
Portuguese crypto-Jews established connections between Amsterdam and various ports in the Atlantic through
migration, travel, and trade. Although Portuguese ports were originally an important link in the Sephardi
commercial networks, warfare virtually precluded the continuation of trade with Portugal after 1621. Attempts to
revive the old network after Portugal's independence in 1641 failed, as the Dutch authorities vowed to continue the
war. Under the circumstances, the link between Amsterdam and Recife assumed great significance for the
Portuguese port Jews, who incessantly crossed the ocean with their goods and letters of exchange. But the Atlantic
route was not just a trade route. Both before and after 1630, it was a road that enabled a return to ancestral belief and
served to unify port Jewries on both sides of the ocean.

beginning with 1630, there began to be a shortage of available housing. The Jewish community in Amsterdam,
while possessed of an Iberian ancestry, used Portuguese as its lingua franca. The name of the community was, and
still is, the Portuguese Jewish Community. Even the recently arrived Spanish Jews who came from Turkey, North
Africa, or Italy adopted Portuguese for reasons not germane to this article. The use of Portuguese continued for 150
years in Curaao (circa 1651-1800) as evidenced by their wills, contracts among the Jews, correspondence, and the
epitaphs of many tombs. The Sephardim, hardy and adventurous, found allure in the ideas of conquering the
underdeveloped New World and having a share of the wealth thought to be easily attainable there. Curaao and
Surinam were the first Dutch bases in the West, and it was to these places that the Jews came. They brought with
them the ability to speak Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish; an almost inbred ability to adapt, possibly due to 1800
years of forced wanderings; their ready contacts for trade through their family relationships all over Europe and in
the lands of the Sublime Porte. We mention separately their determination to practice and preserve their faith, since
this was their rock. The familial devotion served to further commercial ties without the necessity of large capital,
since credit was to be had for the asking. The linguistic abilities permitted contacts with the Spanish colonists who
were groaning under the oppressive alcabala and the restraints on trade imposed under the fallacious mercantile
theories of Madrid and Seville. The family contacts extended to many of the inhabitants of the viceroyalties of
Nueva Granada and Peru.
Seymour B. Liebwan
Merchants and Jews:

The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650- 1750.
Stephen Alexander Fortune
Would a passage to the plantations have changed Dr Johnson's verdict that the business of trade could not be
conducted by those who conduct it, if it presented any difficulty? In the Caribbean, everyone busy in trade was
constantly declaiming his state of difficulty amid a stream of irascibility. Those who did not vocalize their problems
- the women, the smugglers, the seamen, and the slaves who have bequeathed whatever records they kept to the
termites rather than to posterity - allowed the dominant and talka-tive planter class to make this case without demur.
Perhaps they did not take it seriously. The West-India sugar-plantocracy was the earliest, the ablest, and the most
self-assured of English parliamentary lobbyists. In 1689, the Jamaican magnate Edward Littleton published his
Groans from the Plantations: their principal point was that rich men were being stopped from becoming richer by the
intolerable injustice of the English government's navigation acts, which barred their access to the European and
Spanish- American markets. For another two centuries, the trade wind was to catch up and blow home this same
lamentation, with a regularity which proves we need not take it all that seriously either. This is not, however, the
proof accepted nor the stance taken by Stephen Alexander Fortune's book. He focuses on yet another reticent and
retiring tribe: those Sephardic Jews who, coming up from Brazil and Peru, had camp-followed Dutch and English
colonization in the Antilles. He declares his hope to avoid 'the pitfalls of seventeenth and eighteenth-century antiSemitism' - but why should this prejudice, historically so formidable, not be - but he does not avoid those of
twentieth-century sociology. He sees the interplay of personal ambition in West-India society as a melo-drama laced
with tension and conflict. As these heighten, everyone strains after upward mobility. He insists that the presence of
hostile slaves, plus Jews and Quakers and Irish Catholics, bred ominous distrust. Very likely: life is hard, there is
always something to worry about. But it would surely have astonished all those planters, relaxing in their greathouses and practis-ing their groans, to learn (p. 69) that 'their whole society was ridden with fear, fragmentation,
confrontation, and conflict, giving rise to a pattern of competition and, paradoxically, co-operation that allowed for
Jews, Scots, Quakers and other non jurors to function with prescribed social and physical limits.' If this premise of
Mr Fortune's is true, his conclusion cannot be and his paradox is impossible. A society in that predicament would
not be a society and would have become incapable of prescribing, or for that matter of proscribing, anything at all.
The Sephardim on their Jew Streets in the island-capitals did not meddle with melodrama or mobility. They did not
miss what they had never had. All with Portuguese names, they called themselves Israelites and compacted their
infiltration into minuscule communities, wherein they kept close their counsels and customs. They held 54
households in Barbados in 1680; they were 21 out of 1,204 inhabitants on Dutch St. Eustatius (Statia) in 1722; an
Anglican source reckons they composed 1 8 % of the whites in Jamaica's Kingston and Spanish Town, but this is
doubtful, since their population in eighteenth-century Jamaica did not exceed a thousand - one-eighth of their
numbers in England itself.
Toleration and prosperity, she recognized, were sides of one coin.' (Ibid., i. 481.) Within a generation after
Cromwell had opened the door in England in 1655, Jews secured the basic rights they needed to live and trade there:
hence, 'all the rest of Anglo- Jewish and colonial American- Jewish history is commentary.' (Ibid., i. 491.) There is
an undramatic answer to Mr Fortune's question 'What lay at the roots of the Creole merchant's and the Jewish
businessman's perceptions of each other?' (p. x) . Both recognized a mutual utility.
The Jews found a haven. Through them, the planters and their agents got access on credit to goods and services they
themselves could not have supplied, which became indispensable to them. Mr Fortune details this traffic (p. 135) :
Jewish merchants imported linen and provisions from Ireland, ironware and wool-lens from England, foodstuffs and
lumber from New England, wine from Madeira, brandy and silks from France, satin and pearls from Italy, oil and
olives from Spain, diamonds from Portugal, and rubies from Turkey. Men who were forever short of cash to pay for
some or all of the above, were not about to harass the only people around who could solve that problem. Jamaica's
governor assured London so early as 1671 that His Majesty had no more profitable subjects than the Jews : 'they
were not numerous enough to supplant us, nor is it in their interest to betray us.' Above all, they had a wealth of
'stocks and correspondence'. (Fortune, loc. cit., p. 134.) It was this fact that continued to signify. Once sugar had
transformed the economy, the Jews in the Dutch and English settlements in company with their kin in Amsterdam
and London consolidated a commercial network that endured. Joseph Addison in 171 2 likened them to 'pegs and
nails in a great building, which though they are but little value in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the
whole frame together'. (Ibid., p. 131.) Edmund Burke seventy years later saw them as the links of communication in
the mercantile chain. The value of these links was best displayed when they were broken. When, in 1678, no English
ship had visited Barbados for twenty months, it was Jewish specie that rescued the economy. When, on 3 February
1781, Admiral Rodney captured Statia, he absconded with 2 millions' worth of goods and 175 ships, 34 of which
he sent home laden with treasure. He also personally extorted some 8000 in cash from some Jews in lieu of their
deportation - an action which drew Burke's atten-tion, although he could not persuade the Commons to vote for
Rodney's censure. Curaao, occupied between 1800 and 1803 and again between 1807 and 1 816, learned also about
confiscation and requisition: 'the English greed,' says the island's Jewish historian, 'was unparalleled.' (Emmanuel,
Antilles, i. 288-9.) But so glaring a light is not often played on the affairs of the business world, as its historians
have long known. And it serves only to deepen the surrounding murk. It was Jacob Marcus's opinion that anyone
seeking source material on the Jews of the British West Indies would find only 'lean pickings', and that nobody
would ever give a detailed description of their communities. (Marcus, Colonial Jew, i. 100; iii. 349.) Mr Fortune has
done all he can and that is a lot: but he has not removed the cloak of darkness. His book accordingly is less about
Jews than the intricacies of West-India commerce, to which indeed they very heavily contributed. That subject he
understands thoroughly, and he writes of it well : his account of the commission-system is a model of clarity about a
difficult topic. But the Jews, like those smugglers with whom they so often and so necessarily dealt, stay absent for
many pages at a time from a book ostensibly about them and about a 'struggle' to which they were supposedly, a
party. But this would not, oneself supposes, have displeased them.

Merchants and Jews:

The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650-1750.
Stephen Alexander Fortune
After executing his king, hammering the Scots, crushing the Irish, and breaking the Levellers, Oliver Cromwell, that
stern, devout, but open Puritan, agreed that Jews could, once again, settle in the British Isles. The restoration of the
monarchy in 1660 did not alter the position of the Jews. Although numerically small, significant Jewish commercial
communities rapidly emerged in London, Barbados, and Jamaica. Stephen Alexander Fortune argues persuasively in
this fine study, based upon extensive archival research, that Jews played an important role in the growth of trade
between England and her West Indian plantations and between the British West Indies and other Caribbean territories controlled by the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese. Barbados, settled by the English in the
1620s, and Jamaica, seized from Spain in 1655, were soon dominated by sugar plantations and slaves. Fortune's
major con-cern, however, is not with the planters but with the merchant groups on both is-lands. It was their task to
maintain reasonably stable economies when the sugar crop was poor or sugar prices had collapsed. The merchants
managed to do this by trading in such secondary staples as tobacco, dyestuffs, logwood, coffee, and cotton. Hides,
gold, silver, emeralds, and cochineal could also be moved between the islands and England. A better title for this
stimulating analysis might have been, "Some Christian merchants versus Some Jewish Merchants", since intriguing
alliances and align-ments were constantly taking place. Most whites, no matter their religious views or ethnic
differences, were automatically allied against the threat from a hostile slave majority. Christian merchants and
Jewish merchants could find a bond of loyalty when London imposed disagreeable rules and regulations. But they
could also fight bitterly for a share of the market and Christian businessmen did not hesitate to press local
legislatures to discriminate against Jews. One is curious to know if Fortune found any material about the genuine
religious convictions of both Christian and Jewish merchants. The great religious wars which had torn Europe apart
for a century were coming to an end by 1650. Institutional-ized religion was being challenged as never before by
new methods of scientific inquiry which would usher in the paganism of the Enlightenment. Men and women were
becoming more secular and more concerned with the pursuit of wealth than with the saving of their souls. Many of
the Jews in Barbados and Jamaica drifted northwards from Portuguese and Dutch possessions on the mainland of
South America. The Dutch had taken Curaao from the Spaniards in 1634 and Jewish traders were very active on
that island. By 1770, Fortune concludes that 900 Jamaican Jews lived within a white population of some 19,000.
The 400 to 500 Jews in Barbados in 1750 constituted about three percent of the total number of whites. Some
English politicians and financiers welcomed the arrival of Jews in London, Barbados, and Jamaica, be-lieving that
this would enlarge English commerce with Jewish merchants in the Netherlands, the Iberian Peninsula, and other
regions of the world. England's goal throughout was for a prosperous mercantile Empire that would be regulated by
London. While the economic well-being of the mother country was paramount, it was hoped that there would be a
shared community of interests.
The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 gave English shipping a monopoly of the colo-nial trade and the Staple Act
of 1663 restricted all commerce in colonial staples to England and her colonies. Rigidly enforced, these laws could
have destroyed the economies of Barbados and Jamaica; the only alternative was massive smuggling. Fortune
demonstrates that Jewish merchants were very efficient in the clandestine movement of imports and exports. Their
internationalc onnections made them the best supplied merchants in the Caribbean. In a tricky occupation, their
survival rate was better than many others. Close contacts with the South Sea Company and the trade advantages
derived from the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 enabled some Jewish merchants in Barbados and Jamaica to acquire
sufficient funds so that they might depart for England. In 1727, Daniel Defoe observed that Jews had been quite
active in constructing country homes in Hampstead and Highgate. English Jews might well have been delighted by
their achievements and have felt that the Jewish Naturalization A ct of 1753 was only to be expected. Alas, jealousy
and anti-semitism were far from dead. A hostile reaction led to the repeal of this legislation in the following year.
Between 1650 and 1750, England became the commercial capital of the world. The Dutch were broken in three wars
and the Spanish and French Empires were mauled and plundered. Stephen Alexander Fortune has provided many
useful in-sights into the activities of Jewish merchants in London, Barbados, and Jamaica. They helped to create the
capital formation that would provide the impetus for the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century.

Swimming the Christian Atlantic:

Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amer- indians in the Seventeenth Century.
JONATHAN SCHORSCH.
Specializing in the field of Jewish history, especially as it relates to the Atlantic diaspora sparked by the expulsion of
Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492, Jonathan Schorsch is best known for Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern
World. This important work, based primarily on the inquisitorial records, both Spanish and Portuguese, documented
the "contradictions" and "ambivalences" of Jewish-Black relations in the early modern Ibero- Atlantic world.
Inquisition records also constitute the basis of Schorsch's new, two-volume study, which again focuses on the
relations between Jews, judeoconversos, and blacks, and to a much lesser degree, Amerindians. It also centers on
the Ibero- Atlantic, although the Dutch colonies of Suriname and Curaao make cameo appearances insofar as they
were home to relatively large con- centrations of Jewish traders and landowners, many of whom owned plantations
worked by retinues of black slaves. Schorsch's aim in this work is to demonstrate the extent to which the racial and
religious prejudices generally associated with white Christians permeated the various subaltern groups - Jews,
judeoconversos, mulattos, mestizos, blacks, and so forth - to which they were originally directed. The key question
is the manner in which these subalterns (Schorsch's language) wielded these prejudices in their relations with one
another. Did these subalterns treat one another in the same fashion as white Christians treated them? The answer:
both yes and no, a conclusion which echoes that of Schorsch's previous treatment of this subject. Thematically, this
book goes over much of the same ground as Schorsch's earlier work, albeit with the addition of new material
highlighting the complexity inherent in the relations between the Jews, judeoconversos, and blacks. This material
is spread somewhat thin, and is only loosely connected by argument and theme. Each chapter reads as an
independent essay highlighting what Schorsch calls "textual moments and physical sites of interaction" (p. 2), and
alternatively, "explorations of day-to-day ethnology," which are both elaborate ways of saying that they revolve
around archival documents that have some bearing on the topic of interracial and interreligious interaction.
Schorsch, however, is often at pains to determine what these interactions mean. For example, the two chapters based
largely on inquisitorial records from the port town of Cartagena de ndias offer instances of Jews behaving badly
toward blacks and blacks treating both Jews and judeoconversos in the same way. In the end the only conclusion
drawn from this confusing smorgasbord of "textual moments" is that of a multi-ethnic, polyglot city in which racial
epithets of various kinds figured in daily discourse, a message that does not come as much of a surprise.
The overall impression is that of a series of out takes that failed to find a place in Schorsch's previous study and are
loosely assembled here. In the end, reading Swimming the Christian Atlantic is much like swimming against the
tide. Some of the book's "textual moments" are more revealing than others, and I imagine specialists will mine them
for both anecdotes and examples for years to come. Left unresolved, however, are questions concerning the origins
of the racial and religious prejudices that figure cen- trally in this book. Schorsch contends that the subalterns he
studies did little more than assimilate the racial and religious attitudes and prejudices previously formulated by
dominant - meaning white Christian - groups of the Atlantic world. But were not these subalterns incapable of
crafting prejudices of their own? Complicating matters yet further is the famed "curse of Ham," which
commentators, both Jewish and Christian, often interpreted in racial terms and which prefigured and indeed
facilitated the enslavement of blacks by generations of Iberian traders, including those of Jewish origin. Societies
throughout history manifest prejudice, even outright hostility toward groups whose customs, color, and religion
differ from their own.
Isaac da Costa was given a grant by the Dutch West India Company. This group consisted mainly of Brazilian
refugees which were forced to leave Pernambuco after its reconquest by the Portuguese in 1654. Most of the Jews
leaving Brazil sailed back to Amsterdam, while others attempted to settle in New Netherlands, where they were met
by the open hostility of Peter Stuyvesant. Still others went to London, Barbados, Martinique, and Essequibo.T he
Dutch West India Company, which was mainly concerned with trade, thus took practical measures to stem this flow
and have it directed to Curaao. The Company was instrumental in having the government of the island grant Da
Costa and his group specific religious freedom, and privileges including the right of buyings lavesd irectlyf roms
laved eposits-at leastu p to the end of the eighteenthc entury slaves constituted the large majority of the population in
the island, which, was a center of slave commerce for the Americas.
The Jewish population remained basically Sephardic, until a group of Ashkenazim, mostly from Roumania, settled
in Curaao after 1926. Throughout its history, the Se-phardic community, centered around its synagogue, Mikve
Israel, retained strong ties with its "Mother Community" in Amsterdam. Thus the statutes and regulations of the
synagogue followed in detail those of the Amsterdam synagogue. The Mahamad was also in constant contact with
the Am-sterdam Mahamad, which elected and pro-vided for Mikve Israel's hahamim, cantors, teachersa nd ritual
slaughterers. Just as in Amsterdam, the Curaao community was governed by the Jewish elite and monetary
aristocracy. This madef or an excessivep ower in the hands of the pamassim, which on different occasions was
implemented even against their rabbis. In Holland Jews were accorded privileges and considerations exceeding
those en-joyed by Catholics some two centuries be-fore the French Revolution. The Portuguese Jews there were
shareholders in the Dutch East and particularly in the Dutch West India Companya nd furthermore, were con-sidered
a faithful and helpful element in the country.
Thus relations between the Jewish leaders, usually also the most active traders, and the Council of the Company
were cordial. However, such harmony did not always prevail in Curaao, and our authorsg ive extensived
escriptionso f various incidents in which Jews had to confront the West India Company and the Curaao
government. But the rule was one of good relations between Jews and Gentiles; the former were free to live where
they wished, owned vast proportions of real estate, and were very conspicuous for their religious ceremonies and
celebrations, and for their practical control of Curaoan commerce and navigation. Ceremonies in the synagogue
were quite pompous, and some families exercised a monopoly over certain synagogal privileges. Festivalsw erec
elebratedw ith muchs pendor; the Purim feast, for example, was actually the "carnival"o f CuraoanJ ewrya nd lasted
from eight to ten days, with masked parades and singing. The community was fortunate in having had devoted
rabbis in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries who knew how to preserve Jewish practices and ob-servances
among their congregants. This situation changed after the ministry of Ha-ham Aharon Mendes Chumaceiro-the
greatest Jewish religious leader in nine-teenth-century Curaao-who "fought vigorously for the preservationo f the
religious tradition-a tradition which for want of a rabbi deteriorated rapidly after his depar-ture" (p. 495). At the eve
of the American Revolution Curaao attained her maximum prosperity, and since her trade was in Jewish hands, the
Jews profited the most in this period.
This is also seen from the fantastic dowries parents were bestowing on their children, running sometimes as high as
fourteen thou-sand pesos, in an age when a married couple could live comfortably on 300 pesos a year. Although the
Jews accounted for almost half the white population, their holdings were only one-third of those of the Protes-tants,
who owned large plantations and thousands of slaves. A careful census of slaves taken in 1765 showed that Jews
owned of a total of 5,534 slaves. The Jews ex-celled in trade and navigation, though the latter was a risky business,
especially in view of piracy. In several instances during the eighteenth century the parnassim of Curaao requested
the intercession of their colleagues in Amsterdam to have the States General of Holland act on behalf of Jewish prisoners from the island seized by Spanish ships and transported to Spain. In some cases the prisoners were released
thanks to the inter-vention of the parnassim of Amsterdam, Curaao, and Bayonne, and the States General of
Holland. This work is most important also for the light it sheds on the early stages of Latin American Jewry.
Curaoan Jewry spread to the South American mainland, especially the coasts of present day Colombia and
Venezuela, even during the Colonial Era, but with more regularity after 1810. Jewish vessels bearing cargoes of
Jewish merchants made frequent calls at La Guaira, Coro, Cartagena, Puerto Bello, Maracaibo, Santa Marta,
Havana, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and other ports still in the hands of the Spanish, even in the mid-eighteenth century.
Jews in Curaao, furthermore, along with the gen-eral policy of the British administration of the island at the time,
secretly favored the Venezuelan rebels and supported their revolt against Spain. One of them gave refuge to Simon
Bolivar when he sought shelter in the island during 1812. After independence a number of Curaoan Jewish
merchants and sailors settled in Coro by invitation of the Venezuelan government.
The Jews, on the other hand, remained loyal, almost to a man, to the House of Orange, especially in times of crisis
as during the "French Oppression" in the island in the 1790's, and during the English occupation of Curaao (180003; 1807-16). The Emmanuels have presented us with a detailed description of the religious, polit-ical, economic,
and social life of the Jews in Curaao. They have also described the major rifts and conflicts that arose within the
community, mainly those of the 1840's and those that caused the division of the community and the foundation of
the Dutch Jewish Reform Community in 1864. Chapters are also devoted to Jewish scholars and their contributions,
to Jewish professionals, and the contribution of the Jewish community to the general life of the island. These books
were completed after a painstaking endeavor of thirty years, during which a thorough research was made in archives
of Curaao, Amsterdam, The Hague, and the United States, as well as several memoires of Curaqoan Jews. Isaac
Emmanuel was most qualified for this task. Born in Salonika, he was ordained as Rabbi both there and at the
Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary, and later, 1936-1939, held a pulpit at Mikve Israel. The war years kept him in
Curaao, where he was engaged as Chief Librarian of the Govern-ment Library. After the war he came back to the
island several times for continuous research in the archives. In 1957 he pub-lished Precious Stones of the Jews of
Curaao. He has also written several books on the Jews of Salonika. The second volume consists of 31 appen-dices
which provide a wealth of archival material and minute information ranging from old Hascamoth to lists of
Curaoan slaveholders, and from Marranos in Curaao to lists of Jews in the National Guard.
Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds.

Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos and Crypto- Jews
in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800.
the first Lavy Colloquium, which was held at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, U.S.A.) in March 2005 with
the theme of "Atlantic Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism." It seeks, in the words of the editors Richard Kagan and
Philip Morgan, to contribute to "the convergence of two streams of scholarly endeavour: one focused on early
modern Atlantic history and the other on so-called Port Jews" (p. vii). These two streams have indeed developed in
parallel directions although great efforts have been made in the past to link them. As early as 1985, Jonathan Israel
published his magisterial European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750 (Clarendon Press) and the subject
has witnessed a surge of academic interest and research in these two streams during the past decade.
The study of "Port Jews" has most notably been advanced by two absorbing collections of essays on this topic
published under the editorial direction of Professor David Cesarani: Port Jews and Jewish Communities in
Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550-1950 (Routledge, 2002) and, edited in collaboration with Gemma
Romain, Jews and Port Cities 1590-1990: Commerce, Communities and Cosmopolitanism (Vallentine Mitchell &
Co Ltd, 2006). Likewise, there has been a growing focus on the active involvement of both Jews and conversos (the
descendants of Sephardic Jews who were converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries) in the development of the commercial networks within the Atlantic World from which a large
part of Western Europe's prosperity derived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the "Age of Mercantilism".
As they specify in their preface, the editors of this book seek to build upon previous studies. The questions that this
collection of essays seeks to examine can be divided into two categories: Firstly, there is the problem of defining
Jewish identity within the early modern Atlantic World. Secondly, it addresses the issue of the manner in which
Jews/Conversos dealt with the challenges presented by their "marginal" identity with the societies in which they
circulated, how they developed strategies to circumvent the obstacle this marginal status presented and achieved
commercial success. The book is divided into three distinct parts. Part one is entitled "Context" and contains two
essays: "Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500-1800" by Jonathan Israel (pp. 3-17) and
"Jewish History in the Age of Atlanticism" by Adam Sutcliffe (pp. 18-30). These essays seek to offer the reader the
context that is necessary to fully grasp the arguments of those in the following two parts. Israel's essay analyses the
complex realities behind the Jewish and Converso presence in the early modern Atlantic World. He examines the
manner in which a mixture of government policies, alterations in the balance of military and economic power within
the Atlantic World as well the cultural traits of Jewish and Converso communities not only enabled them to create
successful trade networks during the seventeenth century but eventually also contributed to their decline in the
following century. Adam Sutcliffe's study highlights the problems of studying "Jewish History" within the context
of the early modern Atlantic. His well-structured essay insists upon the importance of recognizing the complex
nature of Converso identity and the need not to examine it by using the traditional narrative of the experience of
Jewish minorities living in non- Jewish states. Sutcliffe's essay will therefore give the reader much food for thought.
Part two is entitled "Mercantilism" and, as its title suggests, it contains four essays examining different though
interrelated aspects of the role of Jews and Judeoconversos within the trade networks in the early modern Atlantic
world.
In "Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: The Founders of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America" (pp. 33-49),
Wim Klooster offers a fascinating and very detailed study of the Converso/ Jewish merchants in those parts of the
American "New World" that came under Dutch control during the seventeenth century. Klooster focuses especially
on Joo de Ylln (1609-1696), David Cohen Nassi (1612-1685) and Abraham Drago (1628-1697), who developed
trade networks and played an effective role as "colonial entrepreneurs" within the Dutch colonies in Brazil (between
1630 and 1654) and elsewhere in the Americas (Surinam and Curaao). Following in close order is "English
Markets, Jewish Merchants, and Atlantic Endeavours: Jews and Caribbean Studies Vol. 38, No. 2 (July - December
2010)
Synder's essay closely examines the fortunes of Jews engaged in British transatlantic trade by means of a number of
case- studies. This study exposes the remarkable complexity of trade networks maintained by the Jews in question
and the difficulties that resulted in their attempts to make supply and demand coincide, a challenged made all the
greater by their status as Jews. A particularly interesting aspect of this essay is its exposition of the manner in which
Jewish traders and communities who were active in British transatlantic trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries did not pursue legal privileges in order to assert a specific identity or with any grandiose aim in mind.
Instead, their objective was a rather more down to earth one: to achieve a secure and well-grounded place as a
merchant community operating within the economy of the developing overseas British Empire.
The third essay of the second part of this book is "La Nacin among the Nations: Portuguese and Other Maritime
Trading Diasporas in the Atlantic, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries" by David Studnicki-Gizbert (pp. 75-98).
Studnicki-Gizbert dissects the various strategies adopted by Sephardic Conversos/Jews that helped to strengthen a
sense of collective identity as the Nacion/Naco and which, as such, were vital in secur- ing the sense of trust that
enabled their vast commercial networks to thrive by facilitating their commercial success. These included, amongst
others, endogamy, clustering into specific urban areas, communal confraternities and philanthropic institutions. The
second part ends with "Sephardic Merchants in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond: Toward a Comparative
Historical Approach to Business Cooperation" by Francesca Trivellato (pp. 99-120). Trivellato seeks to argue that
the Sephardic Converso/Jew Diaspora in the Atlantic World were not bound by an automatic sense of ethnic
solidarity but rather that the sense of community was dependent upon "specific safeguards, developed within
particular interpersonal networks and in concert with exogenous market and legal infrastructures" (p. 119). The third
part of this book is entitled "Identity and Religion".
The first essay it contains is "Jews and Christians in Dutch Brazil, 1630- 1654" by Bruno Feitler (pp. 123-151).
Feitler draws upon an abundant documentation, including inquisitorial trial dossiers from the tribunal of Lisbon, to
offer a vivid account of the life of Jews and Conversos residing in a Brazil that was divided between Dutchcontrolled and Portuguese- controlled territories. The result is a remarkable depiction of the internal divisions that
existed in Converso/Jewish communities and of the ambiguous religious identity of many individuals whose
religious ambivalence led them to exchange their religious identities.

The Atlantic Trade

& the Jewish Diaspora
Jews as the new Christians
and citizens in Europe, venturers and merchants
in the diaspora and the Atlantic world.
Indeed, we would suggest that Diaspora, and not monotheism, may be the most important
contribution that Judaism has to make to the world, although we would not deny the positive role that
monotheism has played in making Diaspora possible.
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity
Verde, combining to provide a compelling case study of an especially intriguing locale of Jewish activity;
Jews and Judaism in African History, Richard Hull
Review by Alma Gottlieb
Portingals of the Gambia Valley were very largely half-breeds of Jewish parentage on the paternal side.
Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560 by J. W. Blake
Review by H. R. Palmer


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Just as early modern Europe cannot be understood without discussing overseas expansion after 1492,

The Atlantic Trade

Port Jews in the Atlantic: further thoughts

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews

History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles,

Richard L. Kagan; Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas:

Even as they prospered financially, Amsterdams thriving community of

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

to openly practice their Judaism.

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

coinage of Great and Little Poland.

History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles,

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

Jewish Atlantic World

The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia on the other hand is quite revealing,

William H. Beardsley, Steven Nadler

Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds.

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

Ethnic and Religious Hostilities

Jewish Atlantic World

Jews and Judaism in African History.

The Forgotten Diaspora

Equal partners? Proselytising by Africans and

Equal partners? Proselytising by Africans and

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

Equal partners? Proselytising by Africans and

Impact of Europeans on the Benin Kingdom

The First Global War: The Dutch versus

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

d) The Dutch on the Coast of West Africa, 1590-1609

e) The Dutch in Brazil, 1587-1609

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

Communities of port Jews

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles,

Merchants and Jews:

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

Merchants and Jews:

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

Swimming the Christian Atlantic:

Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds.

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

The Atlantic Trade

being" of the Portuguese Nation" was tantamount to being "Jewish."

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