Edward Kritzler - Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

43. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (London: Clarendon Press, 1964), 56.

44. Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews,” 47. Samuel Tolkowsky, They Took to the Sea (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), 245: In April 1661, the king of Denmark endorsed the Caceres brothers’ request to Charles II to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname.

45. Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 1540–1740 , Brill Series in Jewish Studies (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 298–99, quoting Simon De Vries, Historie van Barbaryen : From 1626, when the port city of Salé, Morocco, just north of Rabat, formed “a self-governing pirate republic,” the leaders and financial backers of the corsairs were “a small resident community of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam [who] divided between them the captured booty taken from Christians.” The States General, in a dispatch to Morocco’s sultan, identified two familiar names, Moses Cohen Henriques and Aaron Querido, as “prominent” traders who supplied arms and munitions to Salé. Other familiar figures were the sons of the Palache brothers, members of the Bueno Mesquita family, and Moses’s cousin, Benjamin Cohen Henriques, described in 1634 as Salé’s “pre-eminent resident Dutch Jewish merchant.” Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 73.

46. Richard Hill, Lights and Shadows of Jamaica History (Kingston, Jamaica: Ford & Gall, 1859), 37: “The Jewish families laid the foundation of the trade and traffic of Jamaica as soon as mercantile business became organized with the Freebooters. With the Jewish settlers, properly opens the connexion of the colony with the Buccaneers.”

Chapter Nine: The Golden Dream of Charles II

1. Benjamin Keen, ed. and trans., The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), li: As Columbus wrote in his Book of Prophecies: “O, most excellent gold! Who has gold gets what he wants, imposes his will on the world, and helps souls to paradise.”

2. Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 40–43.

3. Samuel Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana and Its Relation to the Jews of Suriname, Cayenne and Tobago,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 16 (1907), 108–9.

4. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 44: In 1659, David Cohen Nassi, who contracted with the Company to found a Jewish colony in Cayenne, bought “52 negro slaves from Abraham Cohen do Brazil who had paid the Company 2995.50 florins cash for them and he would reimburse Cohen within three years.” Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, Institute for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, 1991), 59–60: In August 1659, Abraham Cohen and A. Luis, merchants in Amsterdam, ship “goods and passengers” to Cayenne with the agreement of the West India Company; in November 1659, Abraham Cohen and A. Luis, acting under Power of Attorney of the New Cayenne Company, send the ship Abrahmas Offerhande “laden with wares” to Cayenne. March, 3 1660: “Abraham Cohen chartered the Hamburch to ship cargo and several Jews to Curacao and Cayene” May 1660: “A. Cohen to ship to A. Luis \ part of his property from the island ‘Ayami’ on the river in the wasteland of the Wild Coast.”

5. Loker, Jews in the Caribbean, 107.

6. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 43.

7. Brian Masters, The Mistresses of Charles II (London: Blond and Briggs, 1979), 45.

8. Jean Plaidy, The Wandering Prince (New York: Fawcett, 1971), 164–65.

9. Quoted in Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 139, 173.

10. See http://www.contemplator.com/england/phoenix.htm.

11. Fraser, Royal Charles, 139.

12. Masters, The Mistresses of Charles II, 45.

13. Ibid., 47.

14. A. G. Course, A Seventeenth-Century Mariner (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1965), 24–26.

15. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (London: Clarendon Press, 1964), 167.

16. Lucien Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 5 (1896–98), 13.

17. Lucien Wolf, “Status of the Jews in England After the Resettlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 4 (1899–1901), 181–82.

18. Ibid., 182.

19. Edgar R. Samuel, “David Gabay’s 1660 Letter from London,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 25 (1973–75), 38–42.

20. Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles, 195: Fraser quotes an entry in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles II, no. 140, November 30, 1660.

21. Roth, History of the Jews in England, 160–61.

22. Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” 15: María Fernandez de Carvajal, née Rodrigues, was maternal aunt of Antonio Rodrigues Lindo (brother of Lorenzo), who was arrested in Lisbon for Judaizing when he was twenty-three in 1660. Of María, a tough gal—“when the community was threatened in 1660, she called a meeting of her co-religionists at her house in Leadenhall St, that petitioned Charles II for ‘his Majesty’s protection to continue and reside in his dominions.’”

23. Wolf, “The Jewry of the Restoration,” 15–16: While Charles hadn’t yet formally sanctioned their presence, he had reason to. While most Jews sided with the Protector, others in Amsterdam and London, led by the da Costa family, were sympathetic to his cause. Reportedly, they advanced Charles one million guiders (about $600,000). Thus, while Cromwell had his Jewish intelligencers, other Jews supported the exiled king.

24. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668 (National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England), 7/24/1661 #139: In April 1661, Charles approved their petition to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname, endorsed by the king of Denmark.

25. Within two years after his restoration, the number of London Jews holding bank accounts increased from thirty-five to ninety-two.

26. Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951 (London: Methuen, 1951), 19.

27. Yosef Kaplan, Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981), 214, 221.

28. Calender of State Papers, Colonial America and West Indies, 1661–1668, no. 216, 69.

29. Charles II’s contract with Abraham Israel de Piso and Abraham Cohen, Egerton MSS., folios 152b–158b, British Museum.

30. Domestic Entry Book, Charles II, vol. 14, 57, National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England.

31. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist,” 46.

32. Nigel Cawthorne, Sex Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (Chicago: Trafalgar Square, 1997), 72.

33. Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist,” 46.

34. Herbert Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews in the British West Indies,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1897), 69, transcribes the letter as “the gold finding Jew left…here ore and directions to find the gold.” Samuel transcribes the same passage as “ care and directions…”

35. Nuala Zahedieh, “The Capture of the Blue Dove, 1664: Policy, Profits and Protection in Early English Jamaica,” in R. McDonald, ed., West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1996), 29–47.