Review
"[T]his entertaining and surprising book....is a wide-raging saga filled with attractive and repellant personalities.....Kritzler captures the spirit of that violent, lawless epoch and combines it with an interesting ethnic perspective."
--Booklist
"[A] breezy historical tale....[Kritzler] has a journalist's eye for detail, and his entertaining book will circulate well.
--Library Journal
"Kritzler's intellectual odyssey....shares various sagas of individual Jews who took to the sea as pirates, or masterminded the pirate operations from land....the material is so rich that the book is never boring."
--San Francisco Chronicle
In recent years the study of Caribbean piracy has become an increasingly noteworthy field of endeavor, with new chapters opening constantly. None will be quite so revelatory as Edward Kritzler's JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, for in it he details the story of a small group of Jewish merchants and adventurers who pioneered in the Jamaican pirate trade, and helped to create an outpost of religious freedom at the same time. A wonderful story, never before told."
— Jack Davis, author of The Pirates Laffite
"Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is a wonderfully informed book of maritime history. Edward Kristler is a splendid guide on a voyage through a dark and fascinating era of Jewish history."
-- Jay Neugeboren, author of 1940, The Stolen Jew
“Pirate rabbis? Warrior Jews? Sephardic seafarers escaping the fires of Inquisition in quest of gold and freedom in the New World? If, like mine, your knowledge of Europe’s fabled Age of Discovery hasn’t featured these colorful and, as Edward Kritzler’s diligent scholarship demonstrates, historically influential pioneers, then Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean presents a tale as essential as it is entertaining.”
--Robert H. Patton, author of Patriot Pirates and The Pattons: A Personal History of An American Family
“What a treasure! Ed Kritzler has literally dived the depth of the Caribbean to bring us a well documented book on a hitherto forgotten role of Jews and their involvement in a most unusual occupation in the New World: Piracy.”
--Bernard Diederich, author of Trujillo: Death of a Goat
“Using a warm style, Kritzler helps us understand why the pirate era occurred and how the Jews fitted into Caribbean history at that time. He also brings insights to little-understood historical facts, such as what really happened to that famous boatload of Jewish refugees that sailed from Recife to New Amsterdam in 1654; why Jamaica became a haven for Jewish merchants and how this morphed into its development as a center of the pirate trade; as well as the origin of the boucaniers, later known as buccaneers.
--Andree Aelion Brooks, author of The Woman Who Defied Kings and Out of Spain
"Ed Kritzler's book unlocks the long buried Jewish heritage of many famous pirates and their fascinating long forgotten empire building activities. This book is a must read for pirate lovers and history buffs alike."
--Gail Selinger, pirate historian and author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pirates
"Everyone is entitled to her own opinions on the matter but no one has given the subject of Jewish pirates more love and attention than Ed Kritzler. He is the aficionado of Jewish Pirates! Gangway! All Aboard! Onto the gunwales! We're off! What wild adventure!"
--Rachel Frankel, author of Remnant Stones
About the Author
EDWARD KRITZLER is a historian and a former New York-based reporter. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com What we have here is the obvious inspiration for Mel Brooks's next movie. Forget Capt. Jack Sparrow. How about Capt. Jacob Sparrowitz, swashbuckling around in a tricorn yarmulke, drinking, wenching and never paying retail? Alas, Edward Kritzler, a writer and tourism promoter in Jamaica, describes no such hi-jinks in this, his first book. Nor does he present much evidence of genuine piracy on the part of Jews in the Caribbean. What he gives us instead is an earnest but rather disjointed retelling of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and their flight to such refuges as Holland, Brazil and Jamaica, where they played a growing role in trade during the 16th and 17th centuries. True, some interesting Jewish seafarers crop up in this volume. Moses Cohen Henriques, a Dutch privateer, captured a Spanish silver fleet off Havana in 1628. Sinan "the Great Jewish Pirate" allied with the Barbary pirates in the mid-16th century. As a young man, Samuel Palache attacked Spanish ships and later, as a rabbi, helped found the Jewish community in Amsterdam. That was apparently enough evidence for Kritzler and his publisher to give the book its catchy title. They would have us believe that masses of Sephardic Jews took to the seas to wave a defiant cutlass at their persecutors. To make this stretch, the author blurs the lines between those accused by the Spanish Inquisition of being secret Jews (or "conversos") and those who actually were, between those who owned buccaneer ships and those who manned them, and between outlaw pirates and privateers who had legal backing from a sovereign state. Still, Kritzler usefully reminds us of the scholarly heritage that gave birth to Jewish astronomers and cartographers without whom Columbus (and wasn't he at least part Jewish? The debate goes on!) could not have sailed. Mel Brooks's Inquisition ("History of the World -- Part 1") may be more entertaining, but Kritzler should be commended for making us rethink a few historical assumptions. What's "Aarrgh!" in Yiddish, anyway?
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
COLUMBUS AND JAMAICA'S
CHOSEN PEOPLE
May 1504, Santa Gloria, Jamaica: For nearly a year, Columbus had been stranded in Jamaica with a hoard of gold, a mutinous crew, and a few dozen teenage loyalists, some of whom were secret Jews. Alone, melancholy, and confined to his cabin by gout, the great explorer wrote his patron Queen Isabella a despairing letter. He feared that even if he defeated the mutineers, the governor of Santo Domingo, who had promised to send a rescue ship, wanted him dead.
So much had happened since he had been making the rounds of Europe, a would-be explorer going from king to king seeking royal backing for a promised quick passage west across the Ocean Sea to India and the wealth of the East. In 1486, at his first meeting with Spain's royal couple, King Ferdinand, although intrigued by the plan, told Columbus the time was not opportune. They were in the midst of a war and could not seriously consider such an important matter until peace was restored. In parting, Queen Isabella counseled patience and awarded Columbus a retainer, promising they would meet again when the war was over.
On January 12, 1492, Columbus entered the royal quarters. He had been summoned a few days after Spain's final victory over the Moors at Granada, and the queen had sent him money to buy new clothes and a mule to ride. Encouraged by her gift, Columbus was confident. He had honed his proposal into a detailed presentation, with maps and charts from the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto, and quotes from the Bible and Greek sages supporting his view that the world was round, the oceans not large, and Japan lay three thousand miles to the west, across the Ocean Sea. Prepared for questions, he received none.
After an unsettling silence, Ferdinand spoke. Victory over the Moors had emptied the treasury, he said. Moreover, he could not abide Columbus's demand for hereditary rule over lands he might discover. The queen, his admirer, said nothing. The meeting broke up and Columbus left, angry and disgusted. All this time he had waited for the war to end. Now that it had, Ferdinand was pleading poverty. Pausing briefly in the corridor, he informed the king's treasurer that he was leaving for France where Bartholomew, his younger brother, was arranging an audience with the king. If that monarch wasn't interested, he would cross the channel to meet with the English king. He would not be denied his dream, one that, as Cervantes wrote of Don Quixote, "He hugged and would not part with even if barefoot friars had begged him."
Before Columbus rode past the gates of Santa Fe, the royal treasurer, Luis de Santangel, sought and was granted an audience with Queen Isabella. The royal chronicler noted, "[Santangel] appeared distressed as if a great misfortune had befallen him personally." He had good reason: Santangel was a secret Jew, and as a member of the royal court, he was aware his people were about to be expelled from Spain. There were upward of a half million Jews in the country they had called home since the time of Christ. Where would they go? India? China? Perhaps the explorer Columbus would discover a new land somewhere. Santangel and other secret Jews in the royal service hoped Columbus's voyage would provide an answer.
The Inquisition mandated that Jews, under penalty of death, must either leave or convert to Catholicism. Santangel, like many others, had converted and became a New Christian. If discovered Judaizing, the converts were liable to be burned at the stake. The Santangel family, long established in Spain, was among the first targets of the Inquisition. Luis's cousins had gone up in flames in Saragossa, and only the intervention of Ferdinand had prevented Luis from suffering the same fate.
Santangel addressed the queen. He was astonished, he told her, "to see Her Highness who has always shown such resolute spirit in matters of great consequence, should lack it now for an enterprise of so little risk for so vast a gain." He spoke to the queen of the wealth to be acquired, and the great service she would render to God, "all for the price of a few caravels [ships]." Alluding to Columbus's plan to seek royal backing elsewhere, he cautioned Isabella, "It would be a great damage to Her Crown and a grave reproach to Her Highness if any other prince should undertake what Columbus offered Her Highness." If money was a consideration, Santangel said, he would be glad to finance the fleet himself.
A mounted messenger caught up with Columbus as he was crossing the Bridge of the Pines, seven miles from Santa Fe, and bade him return. Later that day, with all parties again gathered in the royal quarters, the king informed Columbus that the Crown would sponsor his Enterprise of the Indies, and meet his demands. No mention was made of hereditary title. Two months later, it was still a stumbling block in his negotiations when an event occurred that made its inclusion mandatory.
On the morning of March 31, 1492, Columbus was in his room in Santa Fe overlooking the main square when the sound of trumpets brought him to his balcony. Below, the town crier, flanked by mounted guards, read the expulsion order of the Inquisition: Jews had four months to leave. After that, any "caught in Our domains will be punished without trial by death, and seizure of property."
The Jews of Spain had been threatened with expulsion before. Rulers since the Visigoths had used this threat to extract more money from them. A period joke compared the Jews to a "money box" that you break open when you need money. But this time it was different: The Church was involved.
To the Jews of the royal court who supported Columbus, the expulsion order made it essential that Columbus hold out for hereditary rule. If no Asian kingdom welcomed Jewish refugees, Columbus, as the ruler of a new land, would be able to provide a haven for Spanish Jews.
It is thought that Columbus himself was a descendant of Spanish Jews, the Colon family, who had converted and moved to Genoa a century before on the heels of the Massacre of 1391. Some even contend he was a Cabalist. Whatever his genealogy, he was in sympathy with the People of the Book, and they with him. In his early years, in Portugal and Spain, he lived in a largely Jewish and New Christian world of navigators, cartographers, astronomers, and mathematicians. While others looked askance at this wandering sailor and laughed at his dream, Iberian Jews and conversos assisted Columbus in developing his Enterprise of the Indies. In their learned circles, they dealt with a round world. Church geography did not apply to them.
On April 17, Columbus agreed to the Capitulations of Santa Fe, which limited his rights to lifetime rule. Two weeks later, this ruling was reversed, and Columbus was granted hereditary rule. No account exists of the final negotiations, but it is likely that court Jews, facing the forced exile of their people, counseled Columbus to hold firm to his demand. One imagines a scene in the royal chambers with Santangel persuading the royals that the explorer's demand should not trouble them. If his voyage were successful, Columbus and his crew of ninety men could not possibly subdue one of the powerful Asian nations. On the other hand, if he took possession of a few islands along the way, the Crown would benefit by having way stations for Spain's trading ships plying the shortcut passage to the wealth of the East.
Whether or not such a scene took place, Ferdinand finally relented: Columbus would sail with his right to rule any new lands he discovered, to be "enjoyed forever by his heirs and successors."
After Columbus returned from his successful first voyage, he made three more trips across the Western Sea. He never reached Asia, and didn't live long enough to fulfill his pledge to Santangel and the court Jews to provide a homeland for converted Jews. But it would be kept by his family in the "new land" the Crown did bequeath to Columbus's descendants, the island of Jamaica. How this came about goes back to a promise he made to the teenage conversos who stood by him when he was marooned there.
Returning from his fourth voyage to the New World, Columbus had been forced to beach his ships in Jamaica after sailing from Panama with a cache of gold objects bartered from the Indians. His two ships were leaking badly. Columbus hoped to reach Santo Domingo to obtain others to return to Spain. But his worm-eaten caravels, described by his son as "more full of holes than a bees' honeycomb," barely made Jamaica. With water rising in their holds, he ran them aground and lashed them together in a shallow, becalmed bay on the island's north coast, "a cross bow's shot from land." Atop his foredeck he fashioned a palm thatch hut to serve as his cabin.
In his first letter to the queen, written soon after he arrived, he bragged that he had discovered the source of Solomon's gold in the mines of Panama, and claimed to have seen more gold in a few days there than in all his previous trips. His fourteen-year-old son Fernando, brought along as cabin boy, later recorded that his father had traded small bells and mirrors for sixty-three gold pendants and other gold objects with the Veragua Indians of Panama.
This was his second trip to Jamaica. When he had discovered the island in 1494, he had named the half-moon bay where he was now stranded Santa Gloria for "the beauty of its glorious landscape." After a year, he thought he might never leave. Was this where his life was to end? Uncertain of his future, he wrote his queen:
We have been confined 10 months, lodged on the decks of our ships. My men have mutinied. My brother, my son, and those that are faithful are sick, starving and dying. Governor Ovando of Santo Domingo has sent to see if I am dead rather than to carry me back alive. I conclude Your officers intend my life should terminate here.
The object of his cynicism was the arrival the pr...
