JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Sometimes books that deal with historical events are interesting because they present you with things you’ve never heard about. Sometimes, however, such books are interesting because they present you with a new look at familiar territory. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom, and Revenge, by Edward Kritzler, is one of these latter sort of books.

In 1492, as we all know, Christopher Columbus managed to secure the patronage of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, equip an expedition, and cross the Atlantic, where he stumbled across the New World. But other equally momentous events happened that year in Spain. The Reconquista—the series of military campaigns carried out by the Spanish to reclaim the territory on the Iberian Peninsula occupied by Muslims (who had occupied al-Andalus, as they called it, from the eighth century onwards)—culminated that year in the conquest of the last Muslin Kingdom, in Grenada, in southern Spain. Tens of thousands of Muslims were driven from the country. They were not the only ones, though.

That same year, perhaps feeling an elated rush of victory, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Decreto de la Alhambra, Edicto de Granada (the Alhambra Decree, Granada Edict), also known as the Edict of Expulsion, in which they declared that all practicing Jews must depart from Spain.

Before the expulsion something like 200,000 Spanish Jews (it’s difficult to come up with an exact number) had converted—been forced to convert—to Catholicism. They were known as conversos. The (in)famous Spanish Inquisition got its start as a kind of thought police whose mission was to make sure that conversos—also sometimes known as New Christians—followed orthodox Catholic beliefs and didn’t backslide secretly into Jewish heresies.

In 1492, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 (again, it’s difficult to come up with an exact number) ‘practicing’ Jews (that is, those who had not converted) were expelled from Spain.

This is the part most people know. And in the usual histories of these events, that’s pretty much all there is: the exiled Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean basin, from Istanbul to Fez, where they somehow made new lives for themselves and managed to carry on. End of story.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean focuses on the untold story of the exiled Iberian Jews.

Most of these exiled Jews fled to the Muslim towns and cities of North Africa and the Near East. Some went to Portugal. A few generations later, however,  when Spain annexed Portugal in 1580,  they were forced out and scattered far and wide.

These various displaced Jews—who sometimes posed as conversos or worked with conversos who still felt an allegiance to their (ex)coreligionists—had a vast network of trading partners scattered across the entirety of the known world, and they used this network in a myriad of creative ways not only to support each other but also to try to influence various European powers in ways that would better their collective lot in life—including attempting to form a Jewish homeland in the New World, where, technically, they were forbidden to go.

One of the most interesting examples of all this is the history of Jamaica.

Kritzler lays out the basics in the book’s Introduction:

“Before England conquered Jamaica in 1655, the island belonged to the family of Christopher Columbus, who provided a haven for Jews otherwise outlawed in the New World… They came disguised as Christians. They and the other settlers were similar in spirit, but while the others came to conquer, convert the heathen, search for gold, or collect a bevy of Indian women, the Jews came to escape persecution and settle a land beyond the tentacles of the Inquisition.”

Columbus ‘discovered’ Jamaica in 1494, on his second voyage to the New World. The island was colonized by the Spanish. But it proved to have no gold, nor much of anything else to make men quickly rich, and as the settlers began dying of disease, the colony all but collapsed. Charles V, the Spanish King, wanted to hang on to the island—it was in a vitally strategic location in the Caribbean. His solution was to deed it to Columbus’ descendants.

They agreed to take control of Jamaica, but on one condition: that they maintained local sovereignty over the Church. They did this, according to Kritzler, because there was already a colony of ex-Portuguese conversos on the island, and the Columbus family and another group of conversos (who were really secret Jews) were working together to create a new home for displaced Iberian Jewry.

The Columbus family ruled Jamaica for the better part of a century, and the island became a haven for conversos and secret Jews.

Until things began to fall apart.

In 1654, a ship carrying converso refugees from Recife—a colony in Portuguese Brazil that the Dutch held for a time (with the help of more conversos) and then lost—was driven to Jamaica by a storm. The conversos aboard the ship were fleeing from the threat of the Inquisition, for now that Recife was in the hands of the Portuguese again, the Inquisitors were going to descend upon the place.

The ship carrying the converso refugees ended up caught in the middle of a power struggle on Jamaica. The island’s plantation owners were trying to wrest control from the Columbus family. They used the shipload of conversos—whom they accused of being heretics—as a pretext for bringing the Inquisition onto Jamaica. Their plan was to use the Inquisition as a lever to pry the Columbus family from the island.

This was very bad news indeed for the island’s resident, ex-Portuguese conversos.

Their solution was to invite the English to invade.

Here is Kritzler’s description of what happened:

“Fearing an investigation of the refugees [aboard the ship from Recife] might lead to their own exposure, Jamaica’s Portugals sent a note to [Oliver] Cromwell’s agent: Jamaica could be conquered with little resistance, and they pledged their assistance. The following year [1655], a Jew from Nevis led thirty-six English ships into the harbor, and two local Jews negotiated and signed the peace treaty surrendering the island to England. The treaty exiled the Spanish, and Cromwell invited Jamaica’s Portugals to stay on openly as Jews.”

Conquering the island was one thing. Holding it was another. There was a solution to this, however.

“Soon after the English conquest, Jamaica’s Jews convinced the island’s new leaders that the best way to defend the colony and have it prosper was to invite the pirates of the Caribbean to move there. The Spanish would think twice about attacking Jamaica if its principle port was the home base of the feared buccaneers of the West Indies. In return for a safe harbor, these pirates, the Brethren of the Coast, became Jamaica’s defense force and piracy its principle industry.”

So the exiled Iberian Jews were the architects of what became the great age of piracy in the Caribbean.

Remember how this post began:

Sometimes, books that deal with historical events are interesting because they present you with a new look at familiar territory

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean certainly does that.

Kritzler sometimes indulges in unsubstantiated speculation, like the suggestion that Christopher Columbus was descended from Iberian conversos who fled Spain in the late fourteenth century and settled in Genoa. But most of what he presents—and that includes much, much more than just the story of Jamaica—is perfectly believable. It’s just very different from the usual descriptions of this period in history.

All in all, it’s a fascinating read.

And the title, you have to admit, is quite wonderful.