Oy, Oy, Oy and a bottle of Rum
Were there Jewish Pirates in the Caribbean?
In 2008 Random House published a book by the Jamaican historian and journalist Edward Kritzler. Called Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean it carried the subtitle How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom – and Revenge. It is a title that promises much and the book is undoubtedly based on historical records. It seems, however, that the story it tells has been so sensationalised that it is hard to tell how much is true and how much is exaggeration.
One of the so-called ‘Swashbuckling Jews’ discussed in the book is Moses Cohen Henriques. He is important, not just because of his swashbuckling, but because his family became prominent in Britain and its Jewish community. The family probably knew that their ancestor had a colourful history but they would have disputed the charge that he’d been a pirate.
The Henriques family had been forcibly converted from Judaism to Christianity in Portugal at the end of the 15th century. They eventually managed to escape their birthplace and travel to Amsterdam where they were able to life their lives as Jews. That much is not in dispute. It is the accuracy of the stories told about Moses Henriques the swashbuckling Jew, that has been questioned.
Moses Henriques, if the stories are true, sailed with other Jewish pirates. Their ships had names like Queen Esther, Prophet Samuel and Shield of Abraham (presumably these names are translations from the Portuguese or Hebrew). The Caribbean, at the time, was being plundered by every European maritime nation; exploiting the region’s natural resources, building plantations and shamefully shipping slaves across the Atlantic to work them. The ocean was was a pirate’s paradise, awash with ships laden with loot and bounty. Many of the ships sailed under the Spanish and Portuguese flags, offering an unrivalled opportunity to any Jewish pirate whose family had once lived in those countries, who wanted to take revenge for their expulsion or forced conversion in the 1490s.
One of the best ways for a Jewish pirate to take revenge on the Spanish and Portuguese was to join forces with the Dutch West India Company. They were competing with Spain and Portugal for control of the Caribbean’s rich bounty. Moses Henriques, according to Edward Kritzler’s book, fought alongside the famous Dutch Admiral Piet Hein in 1628, in the biggest heist the Caribbean had ever seen. They captured a Spanish treasure fleet and made off with a gold and silver booty worth 4 million ducats; about $1 billion in today’s money.
After this triumph Moses Henriques is said to have set up his own pirate colony, a treasure island off the coast of Recife, in Brazil. He didn’t stay there long. When the Portuguese conquered Brazil in 1654 he and the other pirates fled to Jamaica. Tired of pirating, they settled down to live ordinary, less swashbuckling lives. There, Moses Henriques apparently became an adviser to the most famous of all British pirates, Henry Morgan, whose success at stealing treasure from Spanish ships earned him a knighthood from King Charles II. Moses Henriques, we see, was man who moved in distinguished piratical circles. Unfortunately, other than in Kritzler’s book, there seems to be no corroborating information available on his life, or his derring-do.
There is one possible clue though. According to those people whose hobby is the study of Jewish pirates, Moses Henriques and his marauding colleagues left evidence in Jamaica of their former buccaneering lives. If you visit Jamaica’s oldest Jewish burial ground, the Hunts Bay cemetery, you will come across tombstones engraved with the well-known pirate symbol; the skull and crossbones. In itself that’s not surprising; there is a long tradition of inscribing Jewish graves with an image alluding the deceased’s former role: two hands with spread fingers to symbolise a Cohen, a water pitcher for a Levite, a stack of books for a scholar, a broken tree for someone who died young. You might imagine then that a skull and crossbones indicates that the deceased had been a pirate. There are about 50 tombstones bearing a skull and crossbones in the Hunts Bay cemetery. That’s a lot of Jewish pirates.
The trouble is that Jamaica is not the only place where graves are inscribed with skulls and crossbones. The old Sephardi cemeteries in Hamburg, Amsterdam and The Hague have them too. And the emblems are not just confined to Jewish graves. Skull and crossbone symbols can be found on graves across Europe, particularly in Britain and Spain. Rather than indicating that the deceased was a pirate, they seem to have been placed on the graves as a memento mori, a reminder to the passer-by that death comes to us all (as if they needed reminding, in a cemetery).
This doesn’t mean there were no Jewish pirates in the Caribbean; there almost certainly were. We just don’t know their names, any more than we know the names of most other pirates who once sailed the seven seas. We do have names though of a few Jewish sailors who did dastardly things in the Caribbean. They just weren’t pirates. Instead of sailing in ships flying the Jolly Roger, they were privateers, naval captains who commanded their own private ships and were engaged by governments to attack the boats of enemy nations.
One of the best known Jewish privateers was Samuel Pallache. Often misrepresented as the ‘pirate rabbi’, Pallache was born in Morocco, into a Jewish family which had been expelled from Spain. In 1608 he travelled to Amsterdam where he acted as an envoy and agent for the Sultan of Morocco, liaising with the Dutch government and trading between the two countries. He also did a bit of double dealing on the side, selling secret information about Morocco to the Dutch. In 1614 the Dutch government commissioned him to sail to Morocco, to expel a band of pirates who had taken control of the harbour at La Mamora. The Moroccans had agreed with the Dutch that if they liberated the port, they could build a fortress there.
Samuel Pallache set off for Morocco. He engaged in a spot of piracy on the way, capturing and looting three boats, at least one of which was Spanish. He probably should not have allowed himself to become distracted because when he arrived in Morocco he discovered that the Spanish had got there first and had seized the harbour for themselves.
Having failed in his mission, Samuel Pallache turned around and headed for home, capturing a Spanish boat on the way. A storm blew him off course and he put into Plymouth harbour for shelter. The Spanish ambassador to England heard that he was there and asked the English to arrest him. He was captured and put on trial, charged with piracy.
Officially Jews were still forbidden to be in England at this time, but the English hated the Spanish even more than the Jews. Pallache’s case went all the way up to the Privy Council, the highest court in the land. They found him not guilty and allowed him to return to Amsterdam.
It has been said that Pallache turned to piracy because he wanted to emulate the exploits of an even more famous Jewish pirate, Sinan Reis, a man known as “the great Jew”. Expelled from Spain in 1492, Sinan took his revenge by raiding and looting Spanish ships in the Mediterranean. His fame was global- he was mentioned by the Portuguese governor of India in 1528 and in in English State Papers five years later .
Sinan Reis, Samuel Pallache and even Moses Henriques, if he really was a pirate, were all motivated more by revenge against Spain and Portugal than by adventure and personal gain. It wasn’t always so. Over 1,000 years earlier, some Jews had turned to piracy out of desperation.
In his account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the historian Josephus described the despoiling of the towns and villages, and the impossibility for most people of making a living among the devastation. Desperate, some turned to piracy. They sailed out of Jaffa, the only port that hadn’t been destroyed, and attacked Roman, Greek and Egyptian shipping. They made the seas, in Josephus’s words, ‘unnavigable to all men’.
Nor were they the first. According to an 18th century book of Biblical Archaeology, even before then, in the 1st century BCE, there were so many Jewish pirates in the Mediterranean that Antigonus, the Hasmonean king of Israel, was accused of having sent them out on purpose.
But the evidence for that is even more flimsy than it is for Moses Cohen Henriques.
Shiver me timbers, mensch...