Now I really need to grant at the outset that this month’s selection is a wee bit off the beaten path. It is not the sort of book I would normally read, but at the same time, it is just the kind of book that I know I have to read just as soon as I glance at the title. That book would be Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean. This was clearly an historical nook that I knew little or nothing about, and it was obviously high time to fix that.
What I am going to do here is just set up a few of the circumstances that set the stage for the very able historical descriptions and story-telling that Edward Kritzler gives us.
As a result of religious turmoil and persecution in the 14th century, a number of Spain’s Jews had converted to Catholicism, and had done so in large numbers. These “conversos” were known as New Christians as distinct from the Old Christians of the Gentile population. But a large percentage of these conversions were in name only—Judaism was still the religion at home, in private. There was public conformity, but that was it. In part, the Inquisition was intended to root out those who were faking it. And then the Jews who were still openly Jews were the cause of the conversos reverting back. So then, in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain. I trust that those names and that year ring a bell, perhaps?
Now as it happened, many of these Jews were experts in fields like map-making, or in crafting navigation instruments, and such like. The exploration of new territories put them in high demand. And when the persecution got hot in Spain, a number of them headed for the New World. It was not as though the Inquisition had no power over here, but it had a lot less, and the Inquisition meant they had to go somewhere. And as events unfolded some of them took to piracy.
Piracy was sometimes, well, just piracy. Other times, pirate kings—like Barbarossa back in the Mediterranean—were in a position to go to war with kings, and his number two man was Sinan, the great Jewish pirate. Other times, the pirates were politically aligned—privateers—and there were a lot of geopolitical machinations going on.
Protestant countries were much friendlier to the Jews than were Catholic countries. The Netherlands was one example—and Amsterdam’s Jewish colony was founded by Samuel and Joseph Palache, a couple of Jewish pirates. And while the Jews had been expelled from England by Edward I (Longshanks) in 1290, it was Oliver Cromwell who brought them back in the mid-1650’s. As it happened, the Jews living in Jamaica were a big help to Cromwell in the English conquest of Jamaica.
And the dreaded pirates of the Spanish Main had backers, who turned out to be a number of Jewish merchants who would finance, advise, and sometimes lead the raids on merchant ships. Perhaps you thought you would never get to read a book that combined swashbuckling Judaica with sober history. But now . . . now if you don’t it is your own fault.