CHAPTER 4

Trading Violence

Four Jewish Soldiers between Atlantic Empires (ca. 1600–1655)

VICTOR TIRIBÁS

On the morning of February 15, 1630, the fleet of the West India Company (WIC) emerged on the horizon off the coast of Pernambuco, in northern Brazil. The sixty-seven vessels, which had departed from Texel three months earlier, were carrying more than seven thousand troops, including some Jewish soldiers. According to friar Manoel Calado, the armada “started firing so many shells with the artillery that it look[ed] like they were raining from the sea to the land.” Portuguese settlers escaped in an uproar, abandoning their properties and possessions. Parents were separated from their children, husbands lost their wives while escaping, “and so each one ended up where his strength had failed him, and where his fortune, or misfortune, took him.” In the words of Calado himself, “the fear was great, the danger was certain, death was present.”1

This essay follows the paths of four Jewish soldiers who fought among the WIC’s troops and conquered, garrisoned, and eventually lost northern Brazil between 1630 and 1654: Moisés Cohen Henriques alias Antônio Vaz Henriques; his brother, Lieutenant Jacob Cohen Henriques alias Jerônimo Vaz Henriques; Captain Moisés Cohen Peixoto alias Diogo Lourenço Peixoto; and his brother, Lieutenant Joshua Cohen Peixoto alias Antônio Mendes Peixoto.

With very few exceptions, the theme of Jews’ military service in early modern armies has been neglected in scholarship.2 Although Jews are featured in some studies as financiers of wars and army contractors, scholars rarely acknowledge that they did some of the fighting on the ground.3 This choice, I believe, reflects a widespread tendency in Jewish studies to prefer “trading diaspora” as the model for how Jews participated in the early modern empires. Employing the softer vocabulary of “milder colonization” to describe Jewish participation in the Atlantic empires,4 the narrative of “trading diaspora” detaches Jewish traders from the inherent violence (physical and symbolic) of imperial expansion. A further consequence of the “trading diaspora” model is to reduce the Americas to a place of mere economic exploitation and confine connectivity to trade.

By analyzing the lives of four soldiers, this essay reintroduces the theme of violence in the encounter between Judaism and the Americas. The period of Dutch control in northern Brazil marked a turning point in Jewish history, when Jews became more explicitly what some scholars called “colonized colonizers”—that is, they participated in colonial oppression as part of a local elite while still subjected to the religious prejudices of other groups.5 In this sense, the trajectory of Jewish soldiers can be exemplary: at the same time that they killed and died in the name of Protestant empires and participated in the Atlantic slave trade, they were excluded from promotion to high rank because of their religious beliefs, commanding only other marginalized groups like Indigenous Americans and Africans. One of this essay’s fundamental questions is this: Why did Jews choose military service when they experienced prejudice and limitations on their ascension in early modern armies, not to mention the possibility of death or disability?

Increasingly, there is a shared understanding among historians that behind the choices of conversos and Jews “was fundamentally a quest for social and material security.”6 For example, based on the inquisitorial trials of merchants who shifted between Catholicism and Judaism, David Graizbord argued that these renegades and returnees shared a “pragmatic religious mentality,” that is, a willingness to accommodate the expression of their religious identities to economic opportunities.7 According to Adam Sutcliffe, these conclusions may be extended to the Atlantic context, where traversing frontiers required “radical pragmatism.”8 In the hope of achieving commercial prosperity, Iberian Jews allegedly cultivated an ability to adapt to circumstances: “fluidity of identity” and “weak political loyalties” were hallmarks of the diaspora’s economic strength.9 Martyrs and soldiers, however, are not normally among the historical subjects of scholars who insist on the commercial pragmatism of Jews within the diaspora.

Parting ways with this historiography, I show that Jewish men joined the army out of a desire for status and religious zeal. The soldiers at the center of this essay received a solid education in Judaism and achieved social ascension within their communities through military service. None of the four soldiers treated in this essay ever oscillated in their faith once they started to serve. Public demonstrations of honor and courage lent soldiers prestige among their coreligionists and allowed them to assume religious and political leadership roles. As we shall see, their decision to fight Catholics and settle in the Americas was related to messianic prophecies about the dispersion of the Jews and the arrival of the fifth monarchy. Fighting for the Dutch WIC also presented an opportunity to seek vengeance for inquisitorial persecution. Poems written by two of this essay’s subjects clearly drew parallels between the figure of the soldier and that of the martyr. In sum, though marginalized in scholarship, soldiers occupied a central role in the Jewish diaspora side by side with merchants and rabbis. Through military service they expressed their Jewishness, reinforcing, rather than weakening, their ties with Judaism.

The trajectories of the brothers Cohen Peixoto and the brothers Cohen Henriques connect Jewish hubs in the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean. They underline the need to reconsider the Jewish diaspora on a global scale, without losing sight of individuals, the close analysis of primary sources, or the concept of the Atlantic world as a unified, distinctive region.10 The stories of these four soldiers will provide a medium for reflecting on entanglement between empires, religions, and ethnicities.

The first section centers on the roles of the soldiers Moisés Cohen Henriques and the brothers Moisés and Joshua Cohen Peixoto in the Dutch invasion of northern Brazil, probing the limits and obstacles to Jews’ integration into the WIC’s multiconfessional troops, and showing how early modern armies can be fruitful spaces for studying cultural history. The second and third sections focus respectively on the trajectories of the brothers Cohen Peixoto and Cohen Henriques to examine more closely their familial backgrounds and religious education, their strategic marriages and economic situations, and their first steps in their military careers. Such a reconstruction will allow us to better understand why these four soldiers joined the WIC’s army. The fourth and last section continues with the soldiers’ activities after the completion of their service in Dutch Brazil and their embodiment of what I have called the “colonial metamorphosis” of Judaism.11 We will observe the soldiers acting as community leaders and informal rabbis. The theme of violence will reemerge with the participation of the Jews in the Atlantic slave trade, in their clashes with Christian authorities, and in the start of a new war between 1645 and 1654, when Portuguese settlers rebelled against the Dutch occupation.

A Babylonian Army

The WIC troops who landed on Pau Amarelo beach on February 15, 1630, constituted a Babylonian army. Dutch Calvinists, French Catholics, English Anglicans, German Lutherans, and Iberian Jews marched side by side. The company itself had encouraged such a multilinguistic and multiconfessional military configuration, publishing regulations in 1629 and 1634 that guaranteed freedom of religious conscience overseas to increase the number of enlistments.12 It took only a few hours for WIC soldiers to subdue the capital Olinda, and in a matter of days the city of Recife and the island of Santo Antônio also fell. For years the Company’s board of directors (Heeren XIX) had carefully planned the invasion of Pernambuco. They collected information about the captaincy through the reports of Indigenous Americans brought to the United Provinces, veterans of the attack on Bahia in 1624, as well as Jews and New Christians who had lived in the colony.13

Because some of the Jewish soldiers knew the region and Portuguese language well, they served as guides and translators during the invasion, and sometimes even represented the WIC as envoys to seal alliances with the Indigenous nations in Pernambuco’s hinterlands.14 One of these advisers aboard the invading squadron was Moisés Cohen Henriques. According to an inquisitorial denunciation, he “went with the said Hollanders and instructed them and gave them plans showing how to take the said place, for he had spent many days in the said Pernambuco and was well acquainted with the entrances and the exits.”15 Moisés then certainly participated in the violent sack of Recife described by Calado, perhaps even destroying the Catholic statues of saints alongside Protestant soldiers of the company.16

But if the Heeren XIX had carefully planned the invasion of Pernambuco, the occupation was not as well plotted. The commanders of the WIC army soon realized that Olinda’s location and the surrounding terrain would not allow for its fortification, leaving them no choice but to set the city on fire and transfer the capital to Recife. Moreover, Luso-Brazilian troops continually organized raids and guerrilla attacks in a style of fighting totally alien to the Dutch invaders that became known as “Brazilian war” (guerra brasílica).17 As a result, the WIC’s army reached an impasse, which disrupted the local sugar economy and impacted the transatlantic networks of Iberian Jews as far as Tuscany. In the most critical years of the war (1630–36), Livorno’s importation of sugar from Lisbon abruptly decreased, while imports from Amsterdam increased immediately after the Dutch had consolidated their control of the colony.18

FIGURE 4.1. Import of sugar to Livorno from Lisbon and Amsterdam, five-year average. Source: Renato Ghezzi, Livorno e l’Atlantico: I commerci olandesi nel Mediterraneo del Seicento (Bari: Cacucci, 2011), 155–57.

Though Moisés Cohen Henriques’s deployment only lasted until 1631, it was long enough for him to share in the war’s hardships. Without access to the sugar mills in the countryside, the WIC racked up debts on the order of millions of florins.19 But the soldiers suffered the human costs of the stalemate. Unable to penetrate the territory, they were deprived of access to first-rate supplies. Little by little, reports of starvation among the soldiers began to arrive in Amsterdam through alternative channels, undermining the company’s propaganda in the newspapers.20

The soldiers’ basic diet was supposed to consist of bread, meat, vinegar, olive oil, and bacon and was to be distributed according to the portions indicated in the “charter” (rantsoen-brieff) of each officer. Soldiers stationed in Brazil, however, were forced to supplement meals by hunting wild doves and capybaras, collecting seaweed and fruit, or fishing. During expeditions in the countryside or during sieges, dogs, cats, horses, mice, and iguanas entered the menu.21 Diseases such as scurvy, dysentery, and night blindness proliferated as a result of the shortage.22 The historical literature on soldiers’ experiences in the WIC army makes no mention of dietary accommodations for Jewish soldiers. It is also unclear how Jewish soldiers classified and related to local food sources, when many were seeing Brazilian fauna and flora for the first time. Under extreme conditions and the threat of starvation, they probably allowed themselves to violate the dietary law (kashrut).23

This Babylonian army of underpaid, underdressed, and malnourished men slowly and with great sacrifice gained headway in the war. New alliances with local Indigenous groups and the betrayals of crucial figures in the Luso-Brazilian resistance finally tipped the balance in favor of the Dutch.24 In 1634, the WIC continued to invest heavily in breaking through the Luso-Brazilian siege, sending over 3,500 soldiers to consolidate its conquest.25 It was during this influx of recruits that the brothers Captain Moisés Cohen Peixoto and Lieutenant Joshua Cohen Peixoto landed in Brazil.

According to an inquisitorial denunciation in Madrid, Moisés had recruited a “company of rebels” to go to Pernambuco and fight against “the Catholics that live there.”26 His troops comprised about a hundred Iberian Jews and Ashkenazim, including a physician, an apothecary, a barber, a preacher, and a Hebrew teacher. A second source confirmed that “two Dutch ships” arrived in Recife, “and they brought eighty or one hundred Jews as soldiers.”27 The presence of these medical and religious personnel alongside the combatants indicates both the kind of assistance that Jews may have needed in war and the regiment’s intentions to settle in Dutch Brazil in the long term. Moisés also brought his younger brother Joshua along as his lieutenant. Most of the company crossed the Atlantic under Peixoto’s command on the ship Las Tres Torres, which sailed with a mainly African-descended crew.28

Jewish soldiers usually traveled and fought in groups with their coreligionists, sometimes even with family members. The presence of a military installation called the “Sentinel of the Jews” in the outskirts of Olinda is one piece of evidence that there were distinctly Jewish companies in the WIC forces.29 Jews served together for safety reasons. The religious stereotypes that permeated daily life in early modern Europe probably manifested themselves in their most aggressive forms within the army. Long Atlantic voyages, crowded camps during campaigns, and uncertain expeditions through the hinterlands created a powder keg for the tenuous alliances in the WIC’s Babylonian army. Caspar Barlaeus did not hesitate to defame the Jewish soldiers of Dutch Brazil during the Portuguese insurrection of 1645, claiming that “the loyalty of the Jews, who were by nature inclined to underhanded practices, could not be trusted.”30 In this hostile context, it seems quite likely that any Jew traveling alone would be easy prey for every sort of abuse, such as WIC sailors’ tradition of “baptizing” green recruits by submerging them in the sea on the way to the Americas.31

Captain Peixoto and his company of rebels certainly fought in the Paraíba campaign in November 1634. The offensive brought “a lot of bloodshed” for both sides and marked the beginning of the end of the Luso-Brazilian resistance.32 As we shall see, Moisés’s younger brother, Lieutenant Joshua, died in one of these battles. After the bitter victory, Moisés remained in Paraíba. In January of the following year, Dutch authorities signed the “Capitulations of Paraíba” (1635), which enumerated the rights of residents throughout the occupied territory and extended liberty of conscience to Catholics. Once the invasion was over, colonial administrators were tasked with encouraging new settlement of the territory and with managing peaceful coexistence between the members of the Babylonian army, civilian immigrants, and local populations. Such religious and ethnic plurality was unprecedented in Europe. Dutch Brazil would become a true social laboratory, from which Judaism would emerge transformed.

Before moving on to the colonial metamorphosis to which our soldiers would be subjected, it is useful to understand who these characters were prior to their arrival in Pernambuco. What was their family background? What sort of Jewish education did they receive? Where did they acquire military experience? And why did they choose to fight for the Dutch?

Martial Honor and Prestige

Moisés Cohen Peixoto was probably born in Lamego, Portugal, between 1581 and 1593.33 His brother and faithful comrade in battle, Joshua, came into the world a few years later, around 1597.34 Aside from this scant information concerning their birth, little is known about either their family or their past in the Iberian Peninsula.35 Around 1611 Moisés migrated to Livorno, a city that was gradually becoming a nodal port in the Mediterranean and a center of the Jewish diaspora.36 In that period, however, he was still living publicly as a Catholic, known by his baptismal name, Diego Lorenzo Pisciotto, in the Italian style. His sojourn in Livorno was brief and tumultuous. A young man, Peixoto showed himself to be a trickster and a brawler who was jealous of his honor.

Behind the commercial success of Livorno lay a set of privileges known as livornine (1591–93), which assured Jewish merchants liberties that were unprecedented in Catholic territories. The livornine granted the community judicial autonomy, the cancellation of all previous debts, and exemption from inquisitorial examination for past apostasies. The charter also enabled Jews to acquire property, hire Christian servants, and live outside a ghetto.37 Since Iberian Jews and New Christians spoke the same language, dressed similarly, and did business together, distinctions between the two groups became blurred, making room for many rumors and intrigues.38 People in Livorno soon learned how to take advantage of this ambiguity, and through false denunciations sought to destroy the reputation of their enemies and commercial competitors, manipulating the Inquisition for personal ends.

On Christmas 1611, Peixoto requested an audience with the inquisitor of Pisa. He presented himself as a prosperous Portuguese merchant who wished to make a complaint to discharge his Catholic conscience.39 Armed with an interpreter, Peixoto reported that a certain Dona Maria de Castro, a Portuguese resident of Livorno, had never attended church, always talked to Jews, and observed the Sabbath. He accused her of being a Judaizer, to which Dona Maria responded with the same counteraccusation. As investigations progressed, it was revealed that at the root of what appeared to be a disinterested accusation was a commercial dispute between Peixoto and Dona Maria. In this instance, the inquisitor suspended the trial without proclaiming a sentence, but it would not be long before the hot-headed Peixoto got into another mess.

In September 1612, a group of Jews was talking in front of the tailor Moisés Salama’s shop when Peixoto passed by and greeted them, taking off his hat as a sign of courtesy. Everyone returned the gesture, with the exception of Salama, who had his back turned. Peixoto interpreted Salama’s attitude as a deliberate insult:

Then Peixoto squared off with Salama, who roughly pushed him away. Angrily, Peixoto drew his dagger, but Salama instinctively disarmed him. Meanwhile, the colonel and sergeant of Livorno rushed in to separate both parties. Peixoto left the incident dishonored and disarmed. A few days later, he went after Salama, “gave him two blows and then put his hand to a half sword that he had underneath.” Recovering in time once again, Salama took the first object that came to hand and hit Peixoto with a chair. Were it not for that, Peixoto “would have killed him or hurt him badly.”

Members of the Jewish community who had witnessed the altercation wrote a public petition demolishing Peixoto’s reputation: “He is not a gentleman, nor is he a merchant, but a weak and simple commissioner who survives through sending and receiving the goods of some Jews from Pisa.”41 Acceding to these pleas, the governor requested the grand duke to subject Peixoto to exemplary punishment for attempted murder. Peixoto was then forced to flee Livorno.

Moisés was not the only one of the Peixotos to have a run-in with justice around that time. In the same year of 1612, a scandal broke out in the island of Santiago, in Cabo Verde, involving his brother, Joshua (then living disguised under his baptismal name, Antônio Mendes Peixoto). He was seen among a group of “men of the Hebrew Nation” who gathered every Friday in the house of a certain Diogo Lopes Ferreira to celebrate the Sabbath.42 When these rumors reached the governor of Cabo Verde, he dispatched a letter to the Inquisition in Lisbon. According to his report, a little boy had sneaked into the room where the worshipers used to meet and witnessed how “a calf which had golden horns was placed on a table and they were reading from a book.” Because of its resemblance to the episode of the golden calf in Exodus, perhaps the story should be dismissed as nothing more than a child’s fancy.43 However, several testimonies confirmed the boy’s story. A servant of the house even described in detail the calf as “very big, and compared it with the size of a chicken that she had in front of her, adding that the entire body of the calf was white, like the chicken’s, and that it had golden horns.”44 Two years after the secret meetings were unveiled, the governor of Cabo Verde was still complaining to the inquisitors that they had done nothing to curb these misdeeds, and the inquiry apparently faded away without arrests. Afterwards, we lose track of Joshua for several years.

Meanwhile, Moisés reappeared in 1614 in Rome, working as a commercial agent.45 From there he likely went to Antwerp, where he married Ester Peixoto and publicly assumed Judaism. Peixoto’s brother-in-law, Vicente da Costa, also an inhabitant in that city, was a notorious pasador (a sort of early modern coyote) who smuggled crypto-Jews from Spain to Amsterdam.46 Moisés himself soon immigrated to Amsterdam, arriving in 1615 or 1616. He became an active member in Neveh Salom, one of the two Jewish congregations in the city, donating to charity and paying the community tax (imposta). It is very probable that Peixoto also gained a more solid Jewish education in this period, since we find him officiating on the Sabbath in an informal synagogue years later in Paraíba.

Despite his integration into the Jewish community, Peixoto’s first years in Amsterdam were characterized by personal and economic hardship. On September 1618 he suddenly lost his wife Ester.47 The scant references to commercial transactions in his name are a strong indication that he never quite made a living as a merchant, though a notary defined him as such.48 This is corroborated by the very small sums he contributed to charity, and also by the low amounts he paid in taxes, which were assessed as a percentage of his income.49 In an episode from 1619 that is emblematic of Peixoto’s financial struggles, his brother-in-law Abraham Serra refused to keep paying his rent, leaving Peixoto insolvent.50

As Peixoto never held a position in the Jewish community, nor does he seem to have been a successful merchant, it is plausible that after his wife’s death he joined the army. By the time Moisés arrived in Pernambuco in 1634, he was a seasoned military officer with the rank of captain. He must have gained this experience between 1618 and 1634, fighting in either the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) or the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648).

Besides a regular stipend, a military career in the early modern period brought social prestige. Like other Jewish soldiers, Moisés did not hesitate to flaunt his military rank when the occasion arose.51 It seems that it was precisely this prestige that allowed him to make an advantageous marriage in 1623 to Ester de la Faya, daughter of the prominent merchant Abraham de la Faya.52 The alliances between the two families were strengthened by the simultaneous marriage of Moisés’s younger brother, Joshua, to another daughter of Abraham, Rachel de la Faya.53 While Moisés apparently remained at a distance from commercial affairs, Joshua formed a partnership with their father-in-law, importing sugar and fabrics from Porto and Madrid.54 He also traded diamonds and became involved in the commerce of tobacco.55

But not everything was a bed of roses for the Peixoto brothers in those years. Between 1625 and 1628, they mourned together no less than five of their children, all buried in the Jewish cemetery of Ouderkerk.56 Moisés began to struggle financially once again, for reasons that still remain obscure. While in 1631 he paid thirty-one guilders in taxes, in 1632 he paid only five guilders, and around seven guilders in 1634.57 Moisés and his younger brother Joshua then had recourse to the biggest employer in the United Provinces at that time: the West India Company. They momentarily left the de la Faya daughters at home, recruited a “company of rebels,” and headed toward northern Brazil to fight for the Dutch.

“Priests of the Law”

The path of the brothers Moisés Cohen Henriques and Jacob Cohen Henriques to the army in Pernambuco was distinct from the one taken by the Peixotos. Born in the first decade of the seventeenth century, likely in Andalusia, they came from a wealthy family of crypto-Jewish merchants and moved to Amsterdam with their father Abraham Cohen Henriques alias Francisco Vaz de Leão in 1617.58 By that time, doctrinal divisions between the members of the Jewish community were increasing, and in 1618 a third congregation emerged in the city: the Bet Israel.59 The newcomer Abraham and his sons affiliated with this third community.

In the following years, Abraham played a notable role in the congregation. Besides being periodically elected parnas, the most powerful position in the Jewish community, he also served as a director of the dowry society (Dotar) and made significant donations to the Jews in the Holy Land.60 When in 1634 the Bet Israel was considering merging with Amsterdam’s two other congregations, Abraham was chosen as one of seven representatives who would work out the terms of the agreement.61 Meanwhile, his business in Amsterdam thrived, its branches extending to Antwerp, Bayonne, Livorno, and Saleh, where he traded tobacco, Moroccan almonds, and Brazilian sugar.62

As a diligent Jew, Abraham invested greatly in the education of his children, enrolling both Moisés and Jacob Cohen Henriques in a yeshiva. In 1621–22, Moisés was listed in the records of Bet Israel as a student (talmid), helping with the reading of the haftarot for Yom Kippur and giving to charity.63 In this year he seems to have either finished or abandoned his studies. In any case, he left Amsterdam.

Between 1621 and 1627, Moisés probably launched his military career by fighting alongside Dutch forces in the Eighty Years’ War against Spain, and he may have even taken part in the conquest of Bahia in 1624 by WIC troops under the command of Piet Heyn. When Moisés returned to Amsterdam, in 1627, he assumed his first institutional position as treasurer (gabai) of the brotherhood for ransoming Jewish captives in the Mediterranean.64 After a one-year term as treasurer, he exchanged the comfort of his office in Amsterdam for a much more uncertain life as a privateer, participating in Heyn’s capture of the Spanish treasure fleet off the coast of Cuba in 1628. Though only in his twenties by that time, Moisés was already an experienced fighter. Months before, he had journeyed to Spain under Catholic disguise to collect information in preparation for the assault on the flota.65

While Moisés was invading Pernambuco with the Dutch in 1630, Jacob Cohen Henriques married and paid his annual membership fee (finta) in the Jewish community for the first time—two signs of entrance into adulthood.66 His union with Judith Arari, daughter of Doctor David Arari alias Diego Lopes Telles, brought him an extraordinary dowry of sixteen thousand guilders.67 Returning from Pernambuco in 1631, Moisés married Rachel Spinoza alias Rachel Figueroa and received a much smaller dowry of four hundred guilders.68

The difference in the economic circumstances of the two brothers was considerable in the early 1630s, as their payments of taxes and charitable donations show.69 Moisés followed in the footsteps of their father, investing in the sugar and almond trades in Morocco, the Canary Islands, and Livorno.70 The activities of Jacob during this time are less well known. A balance sheet that offers a glimpse of his investments was prepared after the sudden death of his wife in 1633. Jacob owned shares in the WIC and Dutch East India Company and other assets including insurance contracts, bills of exchange, and promissory notes. Among his personal possessions were diamonds, jewels, and clothing made of linen and silk.71

After his adventures as a soldier, merchant, and privateer, Moisés finally gained entrance to the oligarchy of the Mahamad. He was elected parnas of Bet Israel for the first time in 1638.72 It seems that sometime between 1634 and 1639 Jacob followed the example of his brother and began a career in the army. In a denunciation to the Portuguese Inquisition from 1640, a person who claimed to have met Jacob in Amsterdam the previous year described him as “a man born in this Kingdom [of Portugal, and thus baptized] . . . who used to say that he descended from the priests of the law.” This informer also testified that Jacob earned his living as a soldier.73

The fact that Jacob was publicly boasting in Amsterdam that he descended from the “priests of the law” is revealing. By taking the surname “Cohen,” which in Hebrew means “priest,” his family was associating itself with the lineage of Aaron and the high priests.74 Symptomatic of the genealogical strategy that certain clans employed to reinforce their Jewishness and detach themselves from their Catholic past in the Iberian Peninsula, the choice of that specific patronymic embodied the Cohen Henriqueses’ aspirations for power within the Jewish community and preeminence in religious ceremonies.75

Like his brother, Jacob ascended the institutional hierarchy of the Jewish community of Amsterdam soon after his military service. In 1641, he was elected treasurer of the brotherhood for rescuing Jewish captives; a year later, Jacob was promoted to director.76 But the overcrowded community and the union of the three congregations of Amsterdam in the Talmud Torah in 1639 may have imposed certain limits on institutional and social ascension. Moreover, people like Jacob Cohen Henriques and Moisés Cohen Henriques may have acquired a taste for war and expected to have more commercial opportunities in the Americas.

Trading Violence

The flow of civilians to Dutch Brazil increased significantly from 1635 onward, driven by military triumphs that swept away what remained of Luso-Brazilian resistance and the WIC’s aggressive recruitment of new settlers.77 Spanish and Portuguese Jews migrated en masse. It is estimated that in ten years the Jewish population of Dutch Brazil increased to between 1,000 and 1,450 people, almost equaling the Jewish population in Amsterdam or in Livorno during the same period.78

Among the first to request permission to embark for the colony were several of the Peixotos’ relatives, including their father-in-law and the wife of Moisés Cohen Peixoto.79 This woman, unnamed in the document, was not Ester, whom Moisés had married in 1623, but her sister Rachel. Moisés’s younger brother, Joshua, had died in one of the bloody battles in the hinterlands of northern Brazil in 1634 or 1635, and thus Rachel was crossing the Atlantic to perform a levirate marriage.80

Even in peaceful times, founding a Jewish community in the New World was no easy task. In the Americas, Jews were required to put down roots in a setting that was very different from the Mediterranean region or northern Europe. Dutch Brazil stands out as a unique case in the history of the diaspora for several reasons, starting with the vastness of the occupied territory. The colony was much larger than Suriname, Cayenne, New Amsterdam, or the Caribbean islands. In addition, most residents of Brazil were Catholic and spoke Portuguese, like many Jews of Iberian origin. It was difficult to maintain a strict, normative Judaism in Dutch Brazil. The immense distances between rural settlements and close contact with Catholic residents made room for the proliferation of informal synagogues in the hinterlands, where the practice of a more flexible Judaism to attract New Christians was generally accepted.81 One of these synagogues met in the home of Captain Moisés Cohen Peixoto.

Moisés settled with his family in Paraíba. Still serving in the army, Peixoto’s stipend allowed him a more comfortable life than he had had in Livorno and Amsterdam. He lived in a house with “a big living room” and could permit himself to have books (rarities in those frontier lands).82 Various testimonies confirm that since 1637 an improvised synagogue met in Peixoto’s house. The group who attended Sabbath services included his comrades from the army, such as Moisés Navarro, who had participated in the Dutch invasion of Pernambuco in 1630. Intellectuals like the former priest Isaac Nunes, the poet Elias Machorro, and the polyglot and later martyr Isaac de Castro Tartas also attended.83 Even New Christians considering conversion to Judaism came to the improvised Sabbaths at Peixoto’s home.

Although it had no formal status, the Jewish community in Paraíba was numerous and reputable enough to call itself the Casa de David.84 The choice of such a suggestive name reveals the congregants’ messianic expectations about the New World. By calling their congregation the “House of David,” Peixoto and his comrades indicated that they viewed their settlement in those remote lands as helping to disperse Jews across the globe, conditio sine qua non to the coming of the Messiah: a descendant from David’s lineage destined to found the fifth monarchy, and whom the Iberian Jews meaningfully referred to as a “captain.”85

Informally, Peixoto was considered the community’s chief rabbi. Seeking to increase the number of congregants, he adapted the liturgy and admitted uncircumcised men to services. There was no Torah scroll, and the prayers took two hours, with “each person reading his own book of the said Law of Moses.” The New Christians used “a book in Portuguese language since they did not know how to read Hebrew like the others.” At the end Peixoto asked each congregant to contribute “alms for the poor Jews of Holland,” which were sometimes offered in kind, in the form of sugar.86

The activities of the Paraíba Jewish community drew the attention of the Dutch authorities, who in 1638 sent the inspector Johannes Marischal to warn them that they were practicing their rites too publicly, offending the sensibility of Christians.87 The Dutch guaranteed “freedom of conscience,” which was quite different from “freedom of worship.”88 And yet, Peixoto and his group seem to have left the doors and windows open while they prayed and sang out loud. It is reported that they gathered in front of the house to speak about Judaism and entered in religious disputations with people on the streets, scandalizing the passersby.89 Marischal, himself known as an “example of impiety,” must have used excessive violence to suppress their meetings.90 To the great shock of Protestant ministers, Peixoto’s congregation attacked the inspector and shooed him out of the city.91 The community eventually submitted a formal protest to the High Council against the uncivil treatment that they received.92

In many instances, the Paraíba congregation also defied Catholic authorities. In January 1637, the bishop of Bahia and former inquisitor in Lisbon, Dom Pedro da Silva e Sampaio, reported with horror the rumors that “in Paraíba [the Jews] publicly promise to take me in their hands and to drag me through the streets, and to tear me to pieces, out of hatred of the Holy Office.”93 On another occasion, Isaac de Castro Tartas quarreled with Catholic priests, agreeing with Protestant residents that they could not bear a cross in the city because that was “superstition.”94 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that during the General Assembly of August 27, 1640, the delegates of Paraíba petitioned the High Council—though without success—for the exile of the Jews from their province.95 Four years later, the boldness of Peixoto and his comrades was still aggravating the local authorities, for they expressly ordered that the synagogue be removed to the city’s outskirts, where worshipers could not disturb Christians.96

Meanwhile, a more institutionalized form of Jewish community was starting to develop in Pernambuco. Around 1636 the local Jewry had already established in Recife Sur Israel, the first official congregation in the Americas. Rapid demographic growth and the high cost of living in the city compelled many Jews to move to the island of Antônio Vaz, where by 1637 they founded a second congregation: Magen Abraham. In the following years, the community created all the administrative apparatus necessary for the consolidation of Judaism in Dutch Brazil: they elected a Mahamad, erected a synagogue, purchased land for the Jewish cemetery, and even instituted branches of the brotherhood for rescuing captives and of the dowry society, whose first president was the soldier Moisés Navarro, a friend of Captain Peixoto.97

Moisés and Jacob Cohen Henriques arrived in Pernambuco around 1642 or 1643, at the height of the slave trade in Dutch Brazil. For decades, the question of whether or not Calvinist settlements in the New World should be based on enslaved labor had been an object of fierce dispute among theologians, jurists, and directors of the WIC.98 The opponents of these commercial practices were definitely defeated when the Dutch authorities realized both the profitability of the slave trade and the impossibility of keeping a plantation economy in full swing without recourse to forced labor.99 In 1637, the Dutch first conquered Elmina, in Guinea, but it was only with the capture of Luanda a few years later that the traffic took off. The WIC soon developed its own guidelines for profiting from the trade. To avoid suffering shortfalls when planters who purchased slaves on credit defaulted on their obligations, after 1642 the company (which held a monopoly on the slave trade to Dutch Brazil) stopped extending credit and began to accept exclusively cash payments. Specie was a rarity in Dutch Brazil. The announcement of this new policy favored Moisés Cohen Peixoto, the brothers Cohen Henriques, and other merchants. In 1643, Peixoto and Moisés Cohen Henriques became tax farmers, purchasing the right to collect twenty-five thousand and twenty-four thousand guilders respectively.100 Their friend, the soldier Moisés Navarro, became such a prosperous tax farmer, slave trader, and planter that he was able to purchase a large sugar mill. However, this level of wealth was exceptional.

The conquest of Luanda and the decision of the WIC to sell enslaved men and women exclusively for cash resulted in a precipitous drop in the price of one “piece” (peça).101 If at the end of the 1630s the Jews were beginning to purchase slaves from the company, by the early 1640s they were heavily invested in this commerce. Benefitting from the WIC’s cash-only policy, Jews’ purchases of slaves rose to 63 percent of the company’s total sales in 1643, or approximately 2,500 African men, women, and children.102

Peixoto purchased slaves in Pernambuco for the first time in February 1642: five Africans embarked in Guinea on the vessel Nassau, together valued at 2,640 guilders.103 During 1644 he bid on a total of twenty-nine slaves, mostly from Angola, this time disbursing 3,802 guilders.104 He participated in a massive auction in January of that year, in which in only two days the WIC sold no less than 1,152 Africans (a number roughly equivalent to half of Recife’s free civilian population, or to the entire Jewish population in Dutch Brazil).

But Peixoto’s investments look modest when compared to those of the Cohen Henriques family. Between 1643 and 1645, Moisés and Jacob purchased at least 114 slaves for 20,048 guilders.105 In some cases it is possible to deduce from the very low price of each “piece” that they bought children or elderly and disabled people. Their youngest brother, David Cohen Henriques, who had arrived in the colony in 1637 to learn the family business, acquired 107 slaves for 20,277 guilders in the period 1644–45.106 Like many other Jews, Peixoto and the Cohen Henriques probably resold their slaves on credit for a higher price and at interest to those planters who lacked the cash to participate in the WIC auctions.107 Jewish slaveowners put their human property to work as domestic servants, or as porters and shop workers in urban contexts. It was also a common practice for Jews to lease their slaves to work for Catholic settlers in their sugar mills.108

By purchasing Africans and renting out their labor, the Jews of Dutch Brazil were underwriting a brutal branch of the Atlantic slave trade. When the WIC first began transporting slaves in earnest in the 1630s and 1640s, it lacked the practical knowledge of Portuguese captains. Dutch slave ships saw a much higher rate of mortality during the Middle Passage (around 20 percent and 30 percent), and many of these deaths, reportedly, were related to captains’ ignorance and failure to ensure that enough potable water, food supplies, and space were allotted for captives during voyages.109

In spite of this incredible waste of human life, from the perspective of those who bought slaves in Brazil, the commerce was very profitable. Given the Jewish community’s high level of involvement in the local traffic and demand for slaves, the Mahamad issued a special tax on these transactions: “Blacks that [Jews] buy from the Company [the owner] will pay five soldos for each piece.”110 On more than one occasion, the Dutch local authorities, recognizing the economic importance of the Jews to this business, suspended public auctions scheduled on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.111 It was not a coincidence, therefore, that the slave market of Recife was located in the Jewish street (Jodenstraat), a scene captured by the brush of Zacharias Wagener.

FIGURE 4.2. “On the appointed day [of the auction], these poor people, half dead from hunger and thirst, are taken one by one, as if pigs or sheep leaving the pen, to be counted better.” Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch, plate 106 (ca. 1641) (Kupferstich-Kabinett, Ca 226a). Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch, ed. Dante Martins Teixeira, trans. Álvaro Bragança Júnior (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1997), 195.

With the outbreak of an insurrection led by Luso-Brazilian residents of the colony in 1645, many Jews left Pernambuco, fearful that the defeat of the Dutch would bring back the old ghosts of the Inquisition. Those fit for military service who were unable or unwilling to leave were automatically enrolled in the militia. According to estimates, in Recife and on the island of Antônio Vaz alone there were 350 Jewish soldiers, who made up half of the local defensive force.112

Moisés Cohen Peixoto, Moisés Cohen Henriques, and Jacob Cohen Henriques remained until the final phase of the war, in 1654, but the sources do not mention the role they played in it. Given their previous experience, we can assume they were engaged in active combat and had relatively prominent positions. In November 1645, a soldier recorded in his diary that a ship departed from Recife “with forty Jews, commanded by a Jewish captain. They went North, and in Itamaracá they will be reinforced by some Indians.”113 It is possible that the anonymous captain was one of our characters. A more concrete trace of their service may be that a certain “Captain Cohen” complained to the governor of Bahia about the Portuguese rebels’ treatment of Jewish prisoners.114

As a matter of fact, the Pernambuco insurrection followed the same pattern as the Dutch conquest, with both parties systematically breaking diplomatic agreements and descending into a vicious cycle of executions. The news was circulated that the Portuguese rebels were summarily executing and extraditing Jews to Lisbon, even though as subjects of the Dutch Republic since 1645 they were exempt from inquisitorial persecution and due proper treatment as prisoners of war.115 One eyewitness, Johan Nieuhof, confirmed that this was why “the Jews, more than anyone else, were in a desperate situation and, therefore, preferred to die sword in hand than face their fate under the Portuguese yoke: the flames.”116

Despite the war, Jewish institutional life in Dutch Brazil continued to develop. In 1648, the Sur Israel renewed its bylaws (ascamot) and mandated that all Jews living in Recife and the state of Brazil be automatically inscribed in the congregation and obliged to pay taxes, “whether they attended in Paraíba or in any other part.”117 Moreover, no other congregation was allow to exist, and whoever disobeyed the order would be “punished with all rigor and separated from the Nation as a disturber of peace and the general good.”118 The decision, motivated by doctrinal quarrels and economic hardship, dissolved what may have remained of Moisés Cohen Peixoto’s authority as the informal rabbi of the disruptive Casa de David in Paraíba. The centralization of power, however, benefited Jacob Cohen Henriques, who finally reached the top of the Jewish oligarchy with his election to the Mahamad for the term 1651–52.119

But the relentless advance of the Portuguese rebels finally constrained the WIC’s army to surrender on January 27, 1654, crushing the last hopes of the Jews to remain in Pernambuco. Moisés Cohen Henriques apparently fled to one of the Caribbean islands, while his brother Jacob returned to Amsterdam. Jacob then participated in the collection of money for resettling other refugees from Brazil who, having abandoned or lost everything, constantly arrived in Holland in conditions of extreme poverty.120 One of them was Captain Moisés Cohen Peixoto, who would live thereafter on the community’s alms.121

In 1655, both Jacob Cohen Henriques and Moisés Cohen Peixoto contributed sonnets to the Elogios que zelozos dedicaron a la felice memoria de Abraham Nuñez Bernal, a powerful celebration of two Judaizing martyrs burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition that year.122 Cohen Henriques and Cohen Peixoto signed their poems using their respective military ranks of “lieutenant” and “captain,” underlining the social prestige that such positions conferred within the Jewish community.123

The sonnets of Cohen Henriques and Cohen Peixoto each drew an analogy between the figures of the martyr and the soldier: both were distinguished by constancy in the face of the enemy and by the desire for an honorable death. While Peixoto praised the “boldness” and “heroic zeal” of the martyrs, Cohen Henriques devoted some lines to a moral reflection:

Suffering and victory strengthen,

he who dedicates his soul to the defense of serious matters.

If triumphs are signs of valor,

it is also a sign of valor to die.124

In this sense, the battle of the martyrs burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition and that of the Jewish soldiers who helped take control of Dutch Brazil were two fronts of the same war against Catholic tyranny. As Jacob Cohen Henriques wrote himself, it was better to burn alive challenging the Holy Office than to die “like a simple butterfly.”125

This case study of the Cohen Peixoto and the Cohen Henriques brothers has shown the importance of reconsidering within Jewish studies the theme of colonial violence—both physical and symbolic—of which Jews in the early modern period were victims as well as agents. As we saw throughout this essay, the four soldiers risked their lives in the Atlantic as part of the Babylonian, multiconfessional army of the WIC, where they confronted prejudice and barriers to military promotion. To mitigate these challenges, Jewish soldiers traveled in groups and allied themselves with other marginalized fighters such as Indigenous Americans and Africans. In contrast to the European and Mediterranean centers of the diaspora, the Americas offered Jews an entirely new environment. Ongoing wars against the Iberian empires provided occasions to seek vengeance for Catholic persecution. Due to the immensity of the colonial territory, Jews could sometimes afford to disrespect and attack Dutch authorities or strive with Protestant theologians without fearing severe reprisals. Brazil, finally, opened to Jewish settlers unique economic opportunities based on the traffic and labor of enslaved Africans.

The discrimination, limited careers, and bloody battles in the corners of the Americas, heretofore examined, call into question the idea that the formation of religious identity in the early modern period was a pragmatic and circumstantial choice. From the close analysis of the four soldiers’ lives it has emerged that economic gain was only one of the reasons why Jewish men joined the WIC army—when it was a factor at all. In general, what animated the Cohen Peixoto and the Cohen Henriques brothers in that dangerous enterprise was a deep sense of revenge against the tyranny of Catholics embodied in the Inquisition, their messianic expectations about the dispersion of the Jews across the globe, and the possibility of gaining prestige within the Jewish community itself. Willing to kill and die for Judaism, their religious commitment seems beyond doubt.

Still neglected by scholarship, soldiers—men who knew how to wield swords and guns as well as pens, books, and bills of exchange—were as important a category within the Jewish diaspora as merchants and rabbis. They brought a measure of security and stability to the burgeoning Jewish communities in the Americas, and coreligionists’ public recognition of their courage elevated soldiers to positions of both institutional and religious leadership with the return of peace. The trajectories of the four soldiers in this essay ultimately show how military service was constitutive of Jewish identity in the early modern period, especially in the nascent communities in the Atlantic world.

I thank Wim Klooster and Aviva Ben-Ur for their invaluable comments, and also Lucia Furquim Xavier, who helped me decipher some notarial documents in Dutch. I thank Mallory Hope for her careful revision and suggestions. I am finally indebted to Ton Tielen and the anonymous peer reviewers. All translations of documents are mine, unless otherwise indicated.