Edward Kritzler: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

“Olivares’ opponents said he had invited the wolves into the hen house…His financial advisor was a prominent ex-Jew from Amsterdam, and his council was dubbed his sinogoga… Right before his downfall, Olivares’ own converso heritage was exposed. The king…threatened that should he return to court, ‘the public will not be appeased unless you are turned over to the Inquisition.’ With this change in climate, the grudging tolerance the conversos were accorded came to an end. Most of the community Olivares fathered soon departed for freer lands. For five years, Olivares kept the Inquisition at bay. In the free trade atmosphere of new business and fresh capital, Spain prospered. Innovative Portuguese letters of exchange and credit made capital portable and goods transportable to ports everywhere. But in the end, the Inquisition triumphed. An auto da fe on July 4, 1632 signaled the end to Olivares’ scheme. Olivares looked on as six Portuguese confessed to judaizing… The Grand Inquisitor, from atop a platform at one end of the square, condemned the six (four men and two women) to the quemadero (the burning place)…later that month the nephews of Olivares’ financial advisor disappeared into the secret cells of the Inquisition. Months later they…confessed under torture to judaizing. The message was clear: Spain was not ready to bring back her Jews.”

23. Using Jamaica as his base, he intended to recruit additional settlers from the French islands and capture the rest of Spain’s New World empire. Sweden’s account of the treaty is found in Aron Rydfors, De diplomatiska forbindelserna mellan Sverige och England 1624–1630 (Uppsala: 1890), 100–113, trans. on request by Hans Linton, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Stockholm.

24. Cundall and Pietersz, Jamaica Under the Spaniards, 39–40.

25. V. T. Harlow, “The Voyages of Captain William Jackson 1642–1645,” Camden Miscellany 13 (1923), 19.

26. Ibid., 20–21.

27. Cundall and Pietersz, Jamaica Under the Spaniards, 40: In October 1643, Governor Francisco Ladron de Zegama “died a prisoner without guards in his own house.”

28. John Taylor, Taylor’s History of his Life and Travels in America and other parts, with An Account with the most remarkable Transactions which Annuallie happened in his daies, vol. 2 (1688). See John Robertson, “An Untimely Victory: Reinventing the English Conquest of Jamaica in the 17th Century,” English Historical Review 117 (2002), 14: “In St. Mary, the Spanish settlers built a nunnery to mark their victory in a civil war with their Portuguese fellow colonists.”

29. Bryan Edwards, History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, vol. 2 (London: John Stockdale Pickadilly, 1801), 193. “The Jealousy occasioned by the revolution which had placed the Duke of Braganza on the throne of Portugal, caused the expulsion of almost all the colonists of that nation. When the British forces entered Spanist Town, they found 2000 houses but few inhabitants. The deserted house in the capital proved the want of tenants. This was due to the expulsion of Portuguese settlers.”

30. Carol S. Holzberg, Minorities and Power in a Black Society: The Jewish Community of Jamaica (Lanham, Md.: North-South Publishing, 1987), 16n: “15 or 20 years before British invasion…13 Portuguese families were expelled.”

31. I first came across Israel’s name in Captain Fonseca’s 1634 testimony before the Inquisition in Madrid. The spy listed Israel as “adjutant” (administrative officer) of the Recife-bound supply ships that allegedly were to stop off in Portugal, storm the Inquisition prison, and free the prisoners. Israel’s name also appears in the testimony of Abraham Bueno Henriques, a young Dutch Jew taken prisoner in the fighting in Brazil and sent to Lisbon for trial. W. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist (1616–1689) and the Jews,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 14 (July 1936), 49–50: In his confession to the Inquisitors, he noted that Abraham Israel was married to his niece. Since Israel’s full name “de Pisa” identifies him with Italy, and since the Bueno Henriques family also had links with that country, Samuel suggests that despite the commonality of the name Abraham Israel (one likely assumed by conversos upon their reversion to Judaism), the young prisoner was referring to his near kinsman Abraham Israel de Pisa. This relationship Samuel reinforces in the testimony of Sir William Davidson, who in urging the endenization [naturalization, or some rights of citizenship] of Daniel Bueno Henriques, a Barbados Jew, notes that Daniel Bueno Henriques is “a neir kinsman of the Portingall Merchand who goes for Jamaica for the discovery of the Myne ye know of.” However, the “neir kinsman” might just as likely have been Abraham Cohen, who was also an Henriques. My deduction is that all three were related. As Daniel M. Swetschinski has documented in his article “Kinship and Commerce: The Foundations of Portuguese Jewish Life in 17th Century Holland,” Studia Rosenthaliana 15, no. 1 (1981), 65, the partners in most business dealings were “almost inevitably related.”

32. Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875 (New York: Citadel Press, 1950), 1–2.

33. Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Exodus from Brazil,” 319–20: That some were left behind in Jamaica is documented in a “Letter of Protest of the States-General of the Netherlands to the King of Spain,” dated November 14, 1654.

34. Ibid., 320.

35. Schappes, Documentary History of the Jews, 5.

36. When the ship bearing the Company’s letter arrived in New Amsterdam granting the Jewish “boat people” admission, among its passengers were the sons of Cohen and Israel, Jacob and Isaac. Each was around thirty years old. Looking beyond the borders of New Amsterdam, the two friends applied for a license to trade for furs with the Indians, and Israel journeyed down to South River to barter for skins with the Delaware Indians. He returned with pelts, but their license was rejected, and only approved after Calvinists added their signatures. Hints of their characters are apparent in the court records: Cohen was charged with smuggling eleven carts of tobacco, and Israel with “punching [another Jew] in the face.” After securing rights for their people, the two wound up joining their fathers in Jamaica in the search for Columbus’s lost gold mine.

Chapter Eight: Cromwell’s Secret Agents

1. James Williamson, A Short History of British Expansion: The Old Colonial Empire (London: Macmillan, 1965), 249: The 1,500 ships were “double that of the English mercantile marine.”

2. Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951 (London: Methuen, 1951), 11: Daniel Cohen Henriques, aka Duarte Henriques Alvares from the Canaries, married a Jewess, Leila Henriques, in Amsterdam, and after their marriage they settled in England. “This was the first appearance in England of the well-known Sephardim family of Henriques.”

3. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974), 521.

4. Ibid. Fraser wrote that the preparations were so secret that “one Scottish soldier involved wrote, ‘if he suspected his shirt knew of the plans, he would be compelled to burn it.’”

5. Ibid., 522.

6. Irene A. Wright, “The English Conquest of Jamaica,” The Camden Miscellany 13, (1924), 11, quotes the Spanish captain Julian de Castilla’s report on the invasion: “Among the prisoners taken was an English youth who begged for his life in Spanish. He stated he was General Robert’s interpreter…He said his Protector…had received into London the greater part of the Hebrews of Flanders and sold them one of the best quarters in the city, with a church for synagogue. He understood that these Jews had urged the dispatch of this fleet and advanced a great loan for its fitting out. It is not difficult to believe this, since the example of Brazil exhibits similar treasons and iniquities committed by this blind people out of the aversion they have for us.”