Kritzler E. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

Doubleday, 2008. — 325 p. — ISBN: 978-0-38551-398-2.In the midst of the Age of Discovery, the Inquisition took hold in Spain and Portugal, forcing many underground Jews to flee the peninsula. The most daring went to the New World as explorers, conquistadors, and pioneering merchants. Others became freewheeling outlaws, practicing piracy on the high seas. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, Sephardic Jewish pirates plundered Spanish and Portuguese posses- sions for riches and revenge.
The seventeenth century began with Jews outlawed in the New World and most of Europe, and it ended in their freedom. The participants in the liberation included the “Great Jewish Pirate” Sinan, Barbarossa’s crafty second-in-command; Rabbi Samuel Palache, who went from commanding pirate ships to founding Holland’s Jewish community; brothers Abraham and Moses Cohen Henriques, one a merchant, the other a pirate who used cunning and economic muscle to rob the evil empire.
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean delves into the lives of these and other Jews who chose the free- dom of the seas and New World adventure over the persecution of the Old World. It is about how they helped build the Spanish Empire and — when Jewish survival demanded — brought it down by forming secret alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding.
Such was the situation in Jamaica, home to Jews disguised as Portuguese Christians since the time of Columbnis, where they conspired with England in the takeover of the island when the Inquisition threatened this Jewish safe haven. Awarded settlement rights, these so-called “Portugals” were soon joined by other New World Jews, and together with an irregular army of cutthroat seamen known to history as the buccaneers of the West Indies, they transformed Jamaica’s Port Royal into the pirate capital of the New World and brought the Spanish Empire to its knees.
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean brings to light this strange-but-true tale of Jews who battled the forces of the Inquisition to gain the rights Jews in the West enjoy today. It concludes with their last hurrah — the search for the lost gold mine of Columbus in Jamaica.