Daniel Levi de Barrios (1635–1701) came from a family persecuted by the Inquisition. One of his relatives, Isaac de Almeyda Bernal, was burned at the stake when Barrios was twenty years old. Barrios is known today as the preeminent converso (descendent of Jews converted, whether forcibly or not, to Christianity) poet, and historian of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Yet, long before he became famous as a writer throughout the western Sephardic diaspora, he was a colonist in a fledgling settlement of Jews founded on the very edges of the South American continent. In one of his poems, he laments that “She died in Tobago, Debora my wife.”Footnote 1 This poem records de Barrios’ tragic loss of his young wife in this outpost of the Dutch empire. When their vessel dropped anchor she was already very ill, and she died shortly after the group’s arrival in Tobago on the “Wild Coast,” near the Spanish-held island of Trinidad. As newlyweds in Livorno in 1660, the couple had joined a group of 150 Jews bound for the New World. Devastated by his loss, Barrios temporarily abandoned Judaism and left for Europe. But other Jews stayed in the region, joining settlers from such diverse places as the Duchy of Courland in the Baltic in attempts to populate the area.Footnote 2
The Wild Coast, bounded to the south by the Amazon River and to the north by the Orinoco, which comprises present-day Guyana, French Guyana (see Gayle Brunelle’s contribution), and Suriname, is now a largely forgotten economic and political backwater.Footnote 3 But in the seventeenth century, it was the object of competing imperial ambitions. The Wild Coast was a constantly shifting frontier for the contestation of European rivalries, as the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French, not to mention groups such as the aforementioned Courlanders, all competed for control of this region. The European powers hoped to establish profitable plantation settlements, as well as trading posts. Moreover, the English, French, and Dutch sought to challenge Spanish and Portuguese hegemony on the mainland—an Iberian supremacy that the fall of Dutch Brazil in 1654 had reinforced. Yet to control the region, all the imperial powers were desperately in need of colonists to populate their settlements.
In the 1650s and 1660s, the Dutch, to a lesser extent the English, and for a short period even the French (before the Code Noir in 1685) vied for Portuguese and Spanish Jewish settlers on the Wild Coast, as well as in the Caribbean and the North American colonies. For the Dutch and English, this meant offering inducements such as liberties unheard of in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century, to attract these colonists. They hoped to keep these settlers, some of whom were “seasoned” by their experiences in Dutch-controlled Brazil, in order to make a go of their struggling agricultural and mercantile endeavours.Footnote 4 Moreover, in these sparsely populated regions, especially in places like Tobago on the Wild Coast where the death of Europeans such as Debora Vaez, de Barrios’ wife, was generally the rule rather than the exception, colonization was vital to the intertwined imperatives of mercantilist economic ideology and strategic military positioning. Settlers formed a bulwark against the encroachment of other nations, and Jews were often as inclined as (or even more so than) other Europeans to venture to the New World.
This essay will show that it makes little sense to look at Jewish colonization in the Americas in isolation, nor to look at this colonization as a purely strategic endeavour. As pressing as the need for settlers in these outposts was, the New World was only one corner of the stage on which imperial ambitions were played out. Jews were also being offered expanded rights and privileges in European cities such as Modena (Italy) and Glückstadt (Denmark/Germany) at the same time and were, in fact, active agents in the negotiation of these same rights and privileges. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the mid-seventeenth century was not only a time of imperial jockeying for territory on a global scale, but also a time of eschatological fervour in both Christian and the Jewish communities. Millenarianism and messianism, the often entwined ideas in Judeo-Christian theology that the end of the present times is imminent, because the arrival of the promised Messiah is impending, formed the backdrop against which Jewish colonization in the New World occurred. Thus, the competition for Jewish settlers in the Americas must be placed in its global economic, political, and religious context.
The Great Game: The Geopolitical Background of Jewish Settlement
The Dutch had had an ambitious start in the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century, with the triumphant phase of their revolt against the Habsburg monarchy (1568–1648) and the rise of the Republic as the commercial centre of Europe, the founding of the first Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 1621, explorations and conquests in both the Americas and Africa, crowned by a significant role in the spread of the plantation complex, including African slavery, to the Caribbean. This “Dutch moment in Atlantic history” was a period of military ambitions, framed in the wider context of the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish and an ensuing relatively short-lived Dutch hegemonic role in the Atlantic. This period extended from 1600 through the 1670s—a period that coincided with the settlement of Portuguese Jews in the Dutch Republic, where they were allowed the open practice of their religion. However, these glory days of the Dutch Atlantic empire were already on the wane after the consolidation of Iberian power in South America following the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil in 1654, and the nearly simultaneous consolidation of control over the disputed trading posts on the west coast of Africa.
The Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs had already ended with the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück in 1648. With the fall of Dutch Brazil six years later, the Spanish and the Dutch were largely at peace with one another, though hostilities with Portugal would continue until 1669. However, the conclusion of these hostilities coincided with other political and military events playing out on a global stage—events that were to have strong repercussions for Jewish settlement in the New World. Now that the Dutch and Iberians were no longer at war, the stage was set for other rivalries to come to the fore. The First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54) was fought over trade, but resolved little between the two states. Meanwhile, the English and the French had begun to supersede the Dutch as the major threat to the Spanish Americas, and both the English and French were at war with Spain during the second half of the 1650s.
During this same period, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, launched his Western Design (see the contribution by David Smith) with the intention of making inroads into Spanish territories in the Greater Antilles (including Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica). Although his plans failed, they were part of a wider intensification of European conflict and competition in North America and the Caribbean, including the Wild Coast. Only rarely did a territory remain the long-term property of a single European state during the mid-to-late seventeenth century. This increasing rivalry in the region was, of course, a reaction to the shifting geopolitical circumstances after the reconquests and reassertions of Iberian Atlantic hegemony on the South American mainland. The English, French, and, especially, the Dutch were left scrambling for strategic positions on the very edge of the South American continent, in the Caribbean islands, as well as in North America. But these rivalries also went hand in hand with the development and growth of plantation agriculture, particularly for sugar, and the concomitant increase in the trade in enslaved Africans. In addition to the imperial strategic imperatives for the stimulation of settlement, then, there were also increasingly important economic factors at play as European markets for colonial products—tobacco, cotton, indigo, cacao, and, most of all, sugar—continued to expand.
Therefore, there was a flurry of settlement activity all over the Americas in the mid-seventeenth century—from the early 1650s until the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67)—as the English, French, Dutch, and even smaller states sought to carve out profitable colonial empires for themselves while checking the advances of their European rivals. But these empires could not be created without settlers. The Zeeland Chamber of the WIC tried to stimulate emigration in 1656 by offering inducements such as land in the colony, transport to the region, and a sufficient supply of slaves to any inhabitant of the United Provinces who would go to the Wild Coast. Despite these inducements, potential colonists were in short supply. They were scared off by the risks of the long voyage and the perilous conditions in the colonies themselves, including the threat of Amerindian attack and the dangers posed by disease.
In 1657, an English agent in Livorno wrote home to say that the Dutch were “very wisely and politickly” attempting to “invyte many families of Jews and grant them many privileges and immunities.”Footnote 5 And there were many families in Livorno to invite. Livorno’s Jewish population had grown because of its liberal provisions for Jewish settlement and its location on major trading routes. It was especially well placed to receive refugees following the loss of Dutch Brazil three years before, as well as the Venetian war with the Ottoman empire (1645–69), which affected the Jewish communities in Venice and its Greek colonies such as the islands of Zante, Split, and Corfu, not to mention the increased persecution of New Christians in Spain after the fall of Count-Duke Olivares, the king’s favourite, chief minister, and protector of the New Christians, in 1643. Thus, the Dutch seem to have been actively recruiting Jewish settlers, perhaps because a significant number of them had stayed in Dutch Brazil. And they found willing colonists like Daniel and Debora Vaez de Barrios who set sail from this port to Tobago.
Yet Daniel and Debora might also have been tempted to stay in the Italian peninsula. In fact, there was such an influx of Jews to Livorno because Tuscany offered some of the most (if not the most) liberal terms for Jewish settlement in Europe at the time. In response, other Italian states took steps to attract Sephardim. The Duke of Savoy declared Nice to be a free port in 1648 and invited Sephardic merchants, several of whom were known to have come from the Dutch Republic and from Dutch Brazil. The Duke of Modena, in turn, issued three charters allowing for Jewish settlement in 1652–53, because “Sephardic immigrants are wealthy people and very apt to introduce traffic and commerce.”Footnote 6 And his efforts bore fruit. Jewish immigrants streamed into the city. Most of the sixty or so families of immigrants that came to Modena arrived from Venice, but nine families are listed as having come from Amsterdam or Hamburg, where there had been a Sephardic community since the early 1600s. Perhaps the fact that these cities were siphoning off these valuable merchants inspired Dutch attempts to keep Jews. At nearly the same time, Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil attained the right to settle and practice Judaism in Middelburg and new Sephardic communities were established in Amersfoort, Nijkerk, and Rotterdam—towns previously closed to Jewish settlement. Moreover, the king of Denmark had granted privileges for Jewish settlement in Glückstadt and there was likely already a nascent Jewish community in the English colony of Barbados by the late 1640s.
All of which illustrates that (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews were viewed by various European states as a valuable asset to be induced to settle in their European or New World territories. There was a paucity of European Christians inclined to settle in these regions at least in part due to the extremely high death rates of those Europeans who did venture to the other side of the Atlantic. This was known in Europe. Even the promotional material that most lauded the Wild Coast had to admit that new settlers would likely be sick. In George Warren’s otherwise lyrical description of Suriname, he acknowledges that newcomers would suffer from “fevers and agues . . . yaws . . . and dropsy.”Footnote 7 Gerardus de Myst, a member of a failed Dutch attempt at settlement on the Wild Coast in the late seventeenth century, wrote in his widely-read narrative of the expedition that one of the first things that the settlers had to do in the torrential rain was to set up a rudimentary hospital for all the sick.Footnote 8 And with every such straggling group of survivors from these failed colonization attempts who returned to tell their sad tales, Europeans became even less willing to venture across the ocean to these disease-ridden climes.
Therefore, European states were willing to offer incentives even greater than those offered in Europe to lure them to the Americas. At the same time, Jews themselves were active agents in securing rights to settle in Europe and the New World. Menasseh ben Israel, the well-known Portuguese Jewish scholar, was tireless in his efforts to arrange permission for Jews to live in England. And, as the leaders of the “Portuguese Nation” (Sephardic Jews) of the Dutch Republic wrote to the Amsterdam Chamber of the WIC in 1655 to lobby for permission to settle in the North American colony of New Netherland, “The more of loyal people that go to live” in the [American] colonies, “the better it is in regard to the population of the country.”Footnote 9
Jewish Settlements, Rights, and Privileges
The foundations had been laid for the extension of rights and privileges to encourage “these loyal people” to settle from nearly the beginning of Dutch colonization in the Americas. There was already provision made for the extension of liberties to Jews in the plan for how Dutch Bahia in Brazil was to be governed (1624), and these provisions were reiterated in the guidelines for the administration of all WIC colonies in 1629.Footnote 10 In the plans for the conquest of Brazil approved by the States General, the WIC promised that “the liberty of Spaniards, Portuguese, and natives, whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews, will be respected.” As was the case in other Dutch overseas territories, the WIC established the Dutch Reformed Church for public worship, but discouraged “inquires in matters of conscience or in their private homes.” In Brazil, it was explicitly stated that “no one should dare to disquiet or disturb them [Catholics or Jews] or cause them any hardship—under the penalty of arbitrary punishments or . . . severe or exemplary reproof.”Footnote 11 The Jews had more extensive rights in Dutch Brazil than they did in the metropolis. For instance, they could engage in retail trade, which was denied to them in Amsterdam. This “Brazilian blueprint” led to the gradual development of rights for Jews in the Dutch territories of the New World, usually as the result of political or commercial exigencies.
One of the most important of these rights was the recognition of belonging or citizenship on a “proto-national” level. In 1641, the States General signed a truce with Portugal. Included in this truce was a stipulation that Dutch Jews would be protected on Portuguese territory, just as all other Dutchmen and women were.Footnote 12 This status was also asserted in the draft version of the 1648 peace treaty with Spain, which stated that people of “the Jewish Nation” would receive the same treatment as other Dutch citizens in the empire, and that no inquiries were to be made about their religious beliefs, nor were their goods to be confiscated by the Inquisition.Footnote 13 This draft, however, was never signed. Perhaps even more significant than these articles having to do with the Portuguese empire, specifically, was the fact that, from 1645, Jews were considered full subjects of the Dutch state in Brazil, meaning that they were not to be treated any differently than non-Jews by foreign powers. This was a status that was not extended in the Republic itself until 1657 when the States of Holland and the States General declared that Jews were “subjects” of the Dutch Republic—a declaration that was issued over and against the seizures of Jewish-owned ships and cargoes by the Spaniards.Footnote 14
So the rights and privileges enjoyed by the Jewish settlers of Brazil set an example for both the “Old World” and for subsequent Jewish colonization in the Americas. The blueprint had been laid for what sort of legal protection potential Jewish colonists might expect from European states, and a glimpse had been seen of the lengths to which these same states might go to attract or keep these settlers. In fact, the Portuguese made some attempt to keep the Dutch, both Protestant and Jewish, in Brazil after they retook the territory. They included a pardon in article one of the surrender for “all nations of whatever quality or religion they may be . . . although they may have been rebellious against the Crown of Portugal—the same also granted to all Jews.”Footnote 15
There is no evidence that many Dutch Protestants or Jews accepted this pardon and stayed. However, the “adventure” of Jewish settlement in the New World was far from over. Some exiles from Dutch Brazil went directly to other Dutch Atlantic colonies, such as the twenty-three refugees who turned up in New Amsterdam, although these were the exception rather than the rule. The majority of refugees from Dutch Brazil returned to the Dutch Republic or other locations in Europe, including Livorno, rather than moving directly to new American locales. Nevertheless, Jews continued to be ready, willing, and able to settle in the Americas, even after the fiasco of New Holland, as the Dutch colony in Brazil was called, and some European states were more than happy to stimulate this settlement—if only out of a sort of enlightened self-interest.
In 1648, the WIC invited colonists—of whatever stripe—to settle in Curaçao. In 1651, João de Yllan, a Portuguese Jew based in Amsterdam with experience in Dutch Brazil, received a patent to bring fifty Jewish colonists to the island. But how would such a settlement actually have worked, in theory if not in practice? The Dutch Republic farmed out settlement in the colonies partly through the WIC, partly through mixed semi-state and partly through strictly private initiatives. The latter option, the so-called patroons—grants of parcels of land—were issued to applicants such as Yllan, with the understanding that they would ensure its colonization with at least fifty colonists within three years’ time. In this, the Dutch were similar to other European states. For instance, Portugal used a system of so-called “captaincies” and the English gave large grants of land to individual settlers and consortiums of investors to arrange for the colonization of vast swathes of territory under what might also be termed at least semifeudal conditions, such as the right to operate their own courts of justice. However, these sorts of settlement schemes met with limited success and died out fairly quickly.Footnote 16
Such was the case with Yllan’s proposed settlement on Curaçao. The directors of the WIC wrote to Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of Curaçao (1642–44), that “He [Yllan] intends to bring a considerable number of people there to settle and cultivate the land, but we began to suspect that he and his associates have quite another object in view, namely, to trade from there to the West Indies and the Main. Be that as it may, we are willing to make the experiment.”Footnote 17 However, the experiment never fully got off the ground—it seems that Yllan was not able to bring enough settlers—and was superseded by a grant made to David Nassy in 1652, also to set up a colony on Curaçao. In the agreements drawn up to allow for Nassy’s grant, the stipulations do not explicitly mention the freedom to worship but do state that Jews are not to work on the Christian Sabbath.Footnote 18 Once again, though, not much seems to have come of this scheme.
Although there was no official granting of a patroon for Jewish settlement in New Netherland in North America, as previously mentioned, a small group of Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil had arrived in the colony in 1654. This set off a flurry of correspondence about whether Jews should be allowed to settle there at all and, if so, under what conditions. After much back-and-forth between the directors of the WIC, Governor Stuyvesant, and the Amsterdam Jewish community, Jews in the colony were granted “the same liberty that is granted them in this country [Dutch Republic] with respect to civil and political liberties.”Footnote 19 Though these liberties were relatively generous, it should also be remembered that, in Amsterdam, guild restrictions excluded Jews from most crafts (except those having to do with colonial trade such as diamond-processing, chocolate making, and working with tobacco) and shopkeeping. They were not allowed to serve in the civil militias in Amsterdam, in contrast to New Netherland where Jews did take on that obligation, much to Stuyvesant’s chagrin. However, in Amsterdam, they could meet in synagogues to worship, while in New Amsterdam they were not allowed to “carry on their religion in synagogues or gatherings,” though this was a restriction in place for all non-Reformed groups, not just Jews.
So it is clear that, despite the desire to attract settlers, the Dutch were unwilling to extend the extensive rights that Jews had enjoyed in Brazil to Jews in their other American territories. Yet the WIC may have begun to feel pressure from the growing Jewish immigration to Barbados, colonized by the rival English, where sugar cultivation had begun to take off. In 1655, David Raphael de Mercado, a Jewish sugar planter with extensive experience in Brazil, was authorized by the English government to go to Barbados, where he joined a small community of Jews who had been trickling onto the island since the 1640s. At this point, the WIC seemed willing to grant more favourable concessions for Jewish settlement. In 1657, David Nassy, apparently not to be deterred even after the limited success of his Curaçao initiative, and a group of Jews who had recently left Brazil and were residing in Middelburg, met with a committee formed by the Zeeland Chamber of the WIC about setting up Jewish settlements in “Nova Zeelanda” on the Wild Coast along the Pomeroon, Essequibo, and Cayenne Rivers.
The so-called “Essequibo liberties” hammered out during these meetings in Middelburg guaranteed unprecedented privileges for Jewish settlers. Along with liberty of conscience which was not in and of itself a new right, as it was granted in all cases, Jews were allowed to “exercise their religious customs and ceremonies” and were to be given land to build their own synagogues, schools, and cemeteries. Moreover, Jews were exempted from appearing in court on the Sabbath and other holidays, were not required to serve in the militias except in case of emergency, and, echoing the “proto-national” citizenship rights awarded in Dutch Brazil, all Jews were to be “accepted as burghers, even as natives of the province of Zeeland.” (It is not clear what this actually entailed, however.) Two representatives of the Jewish community were to be at “all general meetings for the common welfare and commerce.” Jews could engage in any occupation, had full burghers’ rights to trade, and the right to exercise minor judicial functions within their community. And the Jewish community was also promised communal autonomy to govern its membership as it saw fit.Footnote 20 These rights and privileges were considered so attractive that they were advertised in Livorno where a copy of the terms was sent to the Sephardic congregation. And where, it is likely, Daniel and Debora de Barrios heard of them and were tempted to embark on their ill-fated adventure.
With these rights guaranteed, there began an intense period of Jewish settlement on the Wild Coast. Small colonies of Jews sprang up, though not in isolation from non-Jewish settlements. In fact, it was only Remire in Cayenne, for which David Nassy had arranged a patroon with the WIC in 1659, that seems to have been intended to be an exclusively Jewish settlement. The responsibility for settlement in the area had been given to three towns in the province of Zeeland—Middelburg, Veere, and Vlissingen (Flushing)—and there were, in addition, efforts to encourage colonization by non-Jewish merchants such as Jan Claessen Langendijck, who brought in settlers for his colonies of Cayenne and Tobago, and by the brothers Adriaen and Cornelis Lampsins from Vlissingen. The ship Concordia sailed to the small settlement on the Pomeroon with French, Dutch, and Jewish colonists. The English traveller John Scott described the colony on the Essequibo in 1658 as follows: “The twelfth Collonie was of Dutch settled by the Zealanders in the rivers Borowma (Pomeroon), Wacopon and Moroca, having been draue of from Tobago anno 1650 [sic]. And ye yeare following a great Collonie of Dutch and Jewes, draue of from Brazile, by the Portugaize, settled there, and being Experienced Planters, that soone grew a flourishing Collonie.”Footnote 21
But this intense period of colonization was destined to be short-lived. By 1666, these colonies had been taken over from the Dutch (though the WIC would later regain some of them). The French conquered Cayenne in 1664 with a fleet of five vessels and 1,200 French colonists. Various concessions were made to the Dutch after the takeover, including “the free and most public exercise of religion [for the Protestants]; the Jews also receive the free exercise of their religion; that the expenses incurred by the patroon and individuals of the Hebrew colony shall be repaid.”Footnote 22 This may seem surprising. However, the events occurred before the promulgation of the Code Noir in 1685, which outlawed non-Catholic settlement in France’s overseas territories. While French policy was not particularly favourable to Jewish settlement, and open Jewish settlement was not allowed in the metropolis, there was clearly a desire to keep settlers, whatever their religion, in this sparsely populated colony.
Indeed, Jews had been granted the privilege to “deal with commerce” in 1658 on Martinique. A Catholic priest visiting Martinique in 1662 reported that, “the Jews that are not tolerated in France have found a French island to practice Judaism.” In 1671, Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert, wrote Martinique’s governor, M. de Baas, “By this letter, I inform you that my intention is that . . . they have the same privileges as the inhabitants of the said islands, and you allow them complete liberty of conscience.”Footnote 23 In a further example of pragmatic toleration, when complaints were made in 1664 about the Jews on Martinique, the governor at the time, Prouville de Tracy, received a directive in which it was stated that “The King does not want to alter what has been practiced till now towards the Huguenots and the Jews.”Footnote 24
Despite this example of toleration on Martinique and the offer of the free exercise of their religion in newly conquered Cayenne, around 300 to 400 Jews chose to leave after the French took over the Wild Coast settlement. The Jews from Cayenne moved to the settlement in Essequibo, but their residency was disrupted by the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67), when the English took possession of the territory. The English expelled the Jews from this colony and those living on the Pomeroon River in 1666. This seems strange because Jews were welcomed in the English settlement of Suriname, and it seems that many or most of the exiles drifted into the English colony, including, quite possibly, the aforementioned David Nassy, who was instrumental to the foundation of the Jewish community in Suriname and, in fact, was of great importance to the colony as a whole. Despite having expelled the Jewish settlers from the other settlements, the English had actually been active in encouraging Jewish settlement in Suriname. In 1665, the English government opined that
Whereas it is good and sound policy to encourage as much as possible whatever may tend to the increase of a new colony, and to invite persons of whatsoever country and religion, to come and reside here and traffic with us; . . . we have found that the Hebrew nation now already resident here, have, with their persons and property proved themselves useful and beneficial to this colony, and being desirous to encourage them to continue their residence, and trade here.Footnote 25
In this same year, the English authorities granted several privileges to the Jewish population, based almost entirely on the Dutch “Essequibo liberties,” including freedom of worship, the free exercise of their customs, and exemption from work on Sabbaths and holidays. Likewise, on Sundays they were allowed to work, to have their slaves work, and to visit relatives.
However, the English interlude in Suriname was also to be brief, as the colony was taken over by a fleet sent by the Admiralty of Zeeland in 1667 as part of the ongoing hostilities between England, the Dutch Republic, and France (now allied with the Dutch). The new Dutch rulers maintained the privileges granted by the English to the Jews already in the colony. In fact, as Alison Games shows, the Dutch maintained many of practices set up by the English, including agricultural ones.Footnote 26 A year later, the States of Zeeland went a step further and affirmed that all Jews in their new territory were to be considered as if Dutch-born. And in 1669 they confirmed all the rights granted by the English (rights, ironically, that were based on their own liberties granted for settlement in Essequibo), including the right to work on Sunday, dispensation from court appearances on Saturdays, the dispensation of guard duty (Jews were allowed to form their own militias in 1671), the right to open Jewish schools on Sunday, and the freedom to select coreligionists “to govern their synagogues and administer the general affairs of their nation” in 1669.
The Dutch certainly already had an established precedent for the confirmation of Jewish privileges in Suriname. After all, the rights the English had granted them had been based on the liberties extended for Jewish settlement on the Wild Coast—rights granted in an effort to encourage Jewish colonists to come to their territory. Yet the 1668 extension of Dutch citizenship status to Jews in the colony points to concerns beyond legal precedent. The Treaty of Breda (1667) gave New Netherland to the English, who had also conquered the strategically important Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655. The English were also making inroads on the Wild Coast, and Barbados was becoming a sugar-producing powerhouse with a “Governor [who] has countenanced Jews who have become very numerous and engrossed the greatest part of the trade of the island.”Footnote 27 To counter these territorial gains and their rival’s increasing economic might, it was more important than ever to hold on to valuable colonists.
In a more extreme example of what the Portuguese had tried to do after they took over Brazil a little more than a decade before, the Dutch hoped to keep the Jewish settlers already resident in Suriname by confirming existing rights and extending more extensive privileges. But they also tried to keep Jewish settlers in Suriname by any means necessary. The Dutch stalled in allowing Jewish settlers to leave with the other English colonists after their takeover, as the terms of the peace treaty had stipulated. One of the English negotiators wrote to the English government that, “the Hollanders denied that the Jewes were his Majesties subjects or free denizens.”Footnote 28 Though ultimately successful, negotiations on behalf of ten Portuguese Jewish planters who desired to immigrate with 322 slaves to Jamaica from Suriname under the terms of the Treaty of Breda dragged on for over seven years. In the end, the departure of these settlers mattered little, and it was Suriname (along with Curaçao) where the rights and privileges given to Jews allowed for growth of a flourishing community in which anywhere from one-third to one-half of the white population would be Jewish by the mid-eighteenth century.
Why Did Jews Go to the New World?
Thus far, this essay has looked at Jewish settlement in the New World from the perspective of the European states that encouraged it. As has been argued thus far, these states saw settlers as a valuable asset. They had strategic importance in populating regions considered of value in the global geopolitical game of trying to check other states’ imperial advances. So colonization was encouraged and Jews were considered to be of importance in this overall strategy. Some had been “seasoned” by their experiences in Dutch Brazil and, therefore, knew something of plantation agriculture. Moreover, they might have built up the sorts of immunities to tropical diseases that killed off so many other colonists. In addition, their knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese and their connections to inter-imperial trade networks were already recognized and appreciated. But why did Jews themselves choose to embark on these dangerous expeditions?
Of course, there were very real economic incentives. As one of the pamphlets circulating in the Dutch Republic around this time, said, “Guyana is one of the most delightful, pleasurable, fertile and richest lands under heaven.” The products, such as “sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, ginger, cacao, indigo and dyewood” were praised as “there for great profit and gains to be made.” The sea and the rivers were full of the “largest, most beautiful and delicate fish of all sorts.” Moreover, “it was always summer.”Footnote 29
For Jews with experience in tropical agriculture, such as the veterans of Dutch Brazil, a return to the Americas was possibly appealing, especially given the growing poverty of the Portuguese Jewish communities in Europe. These communities were struggling to absorb the Brazilian refugees, most of whom had lost all their possessions and were in need of charity. These same communities were also trying to help New Christians fleeing from Spain after the intensification of Inquisitorial persecution and migrants from Venice and its colonies due to the ongoing war with the Ottoman Turks. So even Jews without experience in tropical agriculture and trade, such as Daniel and Debora de Barrios, might have been tempted by the prospects of a land of eternal summer in the Americas.
And Jews like Daniel and Debora who read the “Essequibo liberties” in the synagogue in Livorno (and possibly in other cities in Europe) would no doubt have been tempted by the opportunity to live openly as Jews, following the customs of their faith and practicing whatever trades and occupations they saw fit. After all, even the most “liberal” and “tolerant” of European cities and states such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno imposed limitations on the Jewish communities living within their borders. Moreover, the fall of Count-Duke Olivares and the subsequent increase in the persecution of New Christians reinforced the fact that Jews in Europe were only as safe as their powerful protectors. So the promise of rights far more extensive than those offered in Europe was no doubt a powerful inducement to move to the New World.
As reasonable as these rationales for Jews to settle in the New World might have been, it should not be forgotten that, as noted previously, the middle of the seventeenth century saw an increasingly acute expectation of apocalyptic events among both Christians and Jews, marked by an outpouring of messianic prophecy all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Protestants in England and The Netherlands had calculated that 1655–56 would be decisive, beginning with the conversion of the Jews.Footnote 30 Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel proclaimed in 1655 that the coming of the Messiah was imminent because a Portuguese explorer had reported finding one of the ten lost tribes of Israel in the Andes Mountains in Colombia.
In 1644, Antonio de Montezinos came to Amsterdam testified under oath before Menasseh ben Israel “and [d]ivers other chiefe men of the Portugall Nation” about his discovery. Simultaneously other reports about the appearance of the ten tribes reached Jews and Christians, creating an atmosphere of excitement that, as Menasseh ben Israel would write, “the day of the promised Messiah unto us doth draw near.”Footnote 31 The discovery of Israelites in South America was proof of the increasing dispersion of Israel, and, as Menasseh ben Israel pointed out in both Miqweh Israel (1650) and, six years later, in his Vindiciae Judaeorum, according to Daniel 12:7 (“And when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished”), this general dispersion was a necessary precondition for the Second Coming of the Messiah.Footnote 32
In short, the spread of Jews throughout the world, including the New World, would help usher in the end of days. Both Christian and Jewish millenarians hoped to effect this by enabling Jews to live peacefully in territories controlled by Christian states. This plan was among the motivations for the meeting in 1651, at which the members of an English mission in Holland assured Menasseh ben Israel that Oliver Cromwell would welcome the return of the Jews to a country from which they had been expelled nearly five hundred years earlier.Footnote 33 Despite long negotiations, Menasseh’s request for the readmission of Jews to England was rejected (though a blind eye was turned to Jews entering the country, which became a sort of de facto readmission); but the story nevertheless illustrates the importance that both Christian and Jewish communities attached to prophecies about the Jews and their dispersion.Footnote 34
A decade and a half after his departure for the New World, Daniel Levi de Barrios became a follower of Sabbatai Zvi, who claimed to be the long-awaited Jewish messiah and whose appearance on the scene brought about a brief, but intense, period of messianic fervour among Jews. De Barrios continued with his messianic and millenarian tendencies. In his Atlas angélico de la Gran Bretaña, published in 1688, he elaborated on the spiritual significance of the birth of the Prince of Wales in June of 1688, interpreting the event as a hidden defeat of popery in London and a triumph of the Protestant religion. He based his interpretation on chapter 19 of the Book of Isaiah. Barrios was deeply imbued with the idea that contemporary political events such as the Glorious Revolution in England were of profound spiritual significance for all mankind and had been foretold and announced in Scripture. Well after 1688, de Barrios continued to see the Glorious Revolution and events connected with it as the fulfilment of mystical prognostications of William III’s triumph and “Dutch salvation.”Footnote 35
So it not unlikely that at least some Jews such as Barrios were propelled by messianic beliefs and thought they might be helping to bring about the messianic age by venturing to far corners of the globe. This is not to say, of course, that the majority of Jews who embarked to the New World in the colonizing schemes of the mid-seventeenth century were necessarily driven by messianic fervour. Yet some, such as Barrios, seemed to have been, and this sort of ideology certainly formed a backdrop to these same colonizing efforts. Menasseh ben Israel’s thought was quite influential among Jews and Protestants alike.
There is some debate among historians concerning whether or not Menasseh’s personal motives for pursuing the readmission of the Jews by England were primarily political or religious. Ismar Schorsch, for example, argues that the idea of England being a final place for Jews to inhabit in order to bring about the coming of the Messiah was hardly present in Hope of Israel, but, rather, was developed by Menasseh later in order to appeal to English Christians with Millenarian beliefs.Footnote 36 Oliver Cromwell, for instance, was a fervent believer in the imminence of the Second Coming, which Menasseh no doubt knew.Footnote 37
It is certainly not the case that either the English or the Dutch encouraged Jewish settlement in the New World with the express idea of ushering in the much yearned for Second Coming. Yet, with religious issues holding such an important part in the conflicts all over Europe, it is hard not to think that this millenarian and messianic thinking, when combined with the pragmatic strategic and economic imperatives for European settlers in the New World, must have affected Jewish settlement to some extent.
Conclusion
When newlyweds Daniel and Debora de Barrios set out from Livorno in 1660, they were embarking on a journey to a still new world. They could have hoped for adventure and the beginning of a new life together in an exotic paradise. They may have hoped for economic stability, to prosper away from the cities of Europe like their own Livorno, which was crowded with Jewish refugees. Daniel’s experience of exile from Spain and the execution of his relative, Isaac de Almeyda Bernal in 1655 by the Inquisition, may have made the extensive liberties in their Wild Coast settlements advertised by the Dutch in Livorno particularly attractive to him. And, if his later fervent messianism is any indication, Daniel and Debora might have wanted to go to the Americas to contribute to the dispersion of the Jewish people to all corners of the globe, which would hasten the prophesized coming of the Messiah. These same combinations of reasons might have compelled other Jewish settlers, as well.
European states, likewise, had their own rationales—economic, strategic, and even religious. The Dutch above all needed settlers to populate their new territories. The growing plantation complex meant that unwilling settlers—enslaved Africans—were an increasingly important part of the picture, as were colonists of all sorts who would be helpful in the imperial New World endeavours. Thus, some European states were willing to offer Jews progressively more rights if they would help in the colonizing efforts. Jews were useful. At least some Jews had experience in tropical agriculture, many spoke multiple languages, including Spanish and Portuguese, and quite a few were connected to trans-imperial trading networks. Offering Jews the right to openly practice their religion, allowing them to work on Sundays, and to govern their own communities as they saw fit likely seemed a relatively small price to pay in exchange for the perceived benefits these settlers could bring. Of course, at an official level, religious difference still mattered, but economic, military, and political utility counted for more. Nor should it be forgotten that there was always a gap between official policy and actual practice when it came to the rights and privileges that Jews had in Europe’s overseas colonies, which sometimes meant that Jews enjoyed more privileges and rights than they had on paper, and other times fewer.
In any case, Jewish colonization in the Americas was part of a larger series of movements. The New World was only one corner of the stage on which imperial ambitions were played out. Jews were also being offered expanded rights and privileges in European cities in the 1650s and 1660s. This stemmed not (only) from some sort of enlightened tolerance, but from economic and strategic imperatives. And though the coming of the Messiah may not have been the foremost rationale for the Protestant Dutch Republic or England, millenarianism and messianism formed the backdrops against which a growing presence in Europe was tolerated and in which Jewish colonization in the New World was actually encouraged. Placing the competition for Jewish settlers in the Americas in its global economic, political, and religious context, therefore, is vitally important for understanding how and why European states acted as they did and, in turn, how and why Jews acted and reacted to American colonization.
