Atlantic Commerce and Pragmatic Tolerance
Portuguese Jewish Participation in the Spanish Navíos de Registro System in the Seventeenth Century
OREN OKHOVAT
This chapter explores how Portuguese Jewish merchants participated in transimperial commercial networks during the second half of the seventeenth century, not only as intermediaries but as equal partners in an increasingly liberalized Atlantic economic system. The observations made here build on earlier studies of Portuguese Jews as Iberian intermediaries to explore how Portuguese Jewish merchants functioned not only as cultural or religious go-betweens but as integral members of a European culture of international commerce and colonialism. Economic historians have explored how Portuguese Jewish merchants functioned as intermediaries between the Sephardic diaspora and Christian European merchants and state actors.1 Cul tural and religious historians have considered how Iberian precedents impacted the way that Portuguese Jews organized their community in Dutch realms.2 This scholarship has examined how the community’s leaders sought to present themselves as culturally European, even as they remained anxious about their status as religious others in the Dutch Republic.
More recent studies have shown that Portuguese Jewish communities across the Dutch Atlantic were diverse, with many impoverished members, and governed by a merchant elite firmly rooted in the wider Iberian merchant diaspora.3 This chapter specifically seeks to advance the study of Portuguese Jewish merchants, who also composed the community’s leadership. It argues that Portuguese Jewish merchants sought to present themselves as culturally European because they were deeply embedded in early modern imperial systems as fully European actors.4 This approach departs from previous studies by seeking to use the case of Portuguese Jewish merchants not only for the study of a unique Jewish community but to examine the way that early modern empires functioned. In particular their integration into Spanish commercial networks and imperial institutions suggests that even religious decrees prohibiting the participation of non-Catholics and those of “impure blood” (New Christians and Moriscos) in Spanish state- and empire-building were subordinate to the immediate economic needs of both the Crown and colonial actors.5 Studying the social impact of Portuguese Jewish merchant activity in Spanish imperial networks can therefore further illuminate our understanding of early modern policies of tolerance (or intolerance) in relation to individual acts of toleration.6
The Inquisition remained strong throughout the early modern period and vehemently prosecuted baptized individuals suspected of practicing any form of Islam, Judaism, or Protestant religion.7 Nevertheless, as Stuart Schwartz has demonstrated, plural religious ideas held sway across the early modern Iberian Atlantic world due to a long history of forced conversions that incorporated a variety of ideas into a nominally uniform Iberian Catholic empire. As a result, the intolerance of inquisitors and high church officials often clashed with popular notions of religious pluralism in the Iberian Atlantic, leading to pragmatic toleration on the local level that disregarded state or church policies.8 The present chapter expands upon Schwartz’s analysis to demonstrate how the toleration of others by Spanish and Portuguese actors was further entangled with pragmatic economic decision-making that broke down political and social barriers across imperial divides. Tolerance is not the same as acceptance, but when driven by mutually beneficial commercial interest it resulted in dynamic and cosmopolitan spaces. This was especially true in the Caribbean where imperial control sometimes wavered and where local actors made decisions based on local necessity.
European merchants of a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds partnered to advance overseas commercial ventures, and European imperial governments fostered interimperial relationships for the same reason. The extent to which Portuguese Jewish merchants remained integral participants in Spanish imperial culture can be examined through their roles in a Spanish institution that became quintessential to the seventeenth-century Atlantic economy: the navíos de registro (registry ships) licensing system. This system was established by the Spanish Crown to sell royal permits to private merchants who could ship supplies and goods to Spanish American ports off the official galleon route. It also permitted license holders to fund their voyages by purchasing goods in Spanish America to sell in Cádiz. This essay proposes that the cosmopolitan nature of this institution helped to create an Atlantic culture of pragmatic toleration that fostered the emergence of regional, and often clandestine, transimperial markets in the Caribbean. Although designed as a monopolistic institution, it became defined by often clandestine private trade enterprises that at times undermined Spanish imperial prerogatives but also offered solutions to logistical issues, particularly given the economic and political turmoil that plagued Iberian imperial metropoles in mid-century.
As Jack P. Greene has argued, in the early modern period, in contrast to the later centralized state empires of the nineteenth century, European monarchies were forced to negotiate authority with local officials in American colonies because of vast physical distances and the Crown’s lack of familiarity with realities on the ground. Colonial officials often took legal matters into their own hands and reevaluated royal decrees to suit local needs, frequently in consort with the residents of a colony.9 J. H. Elliott has further emphasized that the Spanish monarchy under the Habsburgs was an extended patchwork of subject territories spread across great distances, each with a set of laws and customs rooted in various cultural settings that the monarch was “sworn to protect.”10 The Spanish Empire was thus constructed to support what historians have recently called a “polycentric monarchy”—a system whereby the monarch shared power with local political elites and royal administrators who maintained a degree of autonomy, sometimes substantial, to make pragmatic decisions within their jurisdiction. This led to the creation of multiple centers of authority across the Spanish Empire that interacted and participated in the creation and circulation of ideas and models of authority and thus the making of empire. Although the system could become unstable, it was tied together by a culture of loyalty to the king and the Catholic Church. Competition for royal favor between various branches of the Spanish imperial bureaucracy was therefore encouraged to maintain loyalty and cohesion.11
The navíos de registro system inadvertently allowed a broad array of non-Spanish and non-Catholic merchants to access Spanish markets on both sides of the Atlantic, essentially eroding mercantilist policies and religious restrictions. It nevertheless followed the Spanish monarchy’s pattern of imperial rule, which often acted pragmatically to maintain imperial priorities even at the cost of absolute royal authority and religious uniformity. People from diverse economic classes were required to make this system function, including nonmerchant residents of the Spanish Caribbean, from indigenous laborers to royal governors. Portuguese Jews and Dutch Protestants also participated as equal partners, highlighting the extent to which pragmatism dominated the function of the Spanish Empire.
Economic Pragmatism and the Entangled Atlantic World
When the Spanish Crown continued to patronize individuals that the Inquisition identified as having “impure blood” (i.e., New Christians) along with openly Jewish merchants over the course of the seventeenth century it was acting on pragmatic considerations for the expansion of imperial interests overseas. The Crown also turned a blind eye to Dutch contraband trade with Spanish American ports despite its own mercantilist rhetoric denouncing both non-Catholics and non-Spanish participation in Spanish trade networks. Contradictions between idealistic rhetoric and popular practice further explain how Portuguese Jews and other non-Catholics were able to build such extensive extralegal trading relationships with Spaniards across the Atlantic World despite obvious religious and political differences.
At the highest echelons of government, King Philip IV of Spain and his procommerce prime minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, favored pragmatic economic relationships at the expense of religious precedents that permitted only Old Christians to participate in royal institutions when they began courting Portuguese banking families, many of them New Christians, to serve as royal financiers in Madrid in the early 1620s. Unlike the Genoese, the Portuguese bankers had been subjects of the Habsburg Crown and thus could be considered insiders. Royal authorities regularly overlooked any degree of New Christian heritage that many of the Portuguese banking families had. The bankers themselves actively sought to conceal their New Christian ancestors by purchasing certificates of “purity of blood,” bribing their way into military orders, marrying their children into the Spanish nobility, and grooming second sons to become religious and lay priests. At the same time, however, these families apparently saw no conflict in continuing to use their openly Jewish relatives and acquaintances in Amsterdam as correspondents. The Crown took notice that its principal financiers expanded their operations into what was enemy territory, since the Dutch Republic would remain at war with Spain until 1648.12
Rumors that the Portuguese correspondents in Amsterdam were openly apostatizing from the Catholic Church were set aside in the quest to tap into Dutch markets. As merchant nations from across Europe were flocking to Amsterdam at the end of the sixteenth century, the Castilian merchants who had been active in both Bruges and Antwerp were restricted from continuing to do so due to the ongoing war. This was not true for the Portuguese New Christian merchants who embraced Judaism, as they were capable of bypassing the commercial restrictions that other Catholic Iberian merchant groups faced. Rather than shun them for their apostacy, the Crown apparently began to take advantage of the opportunities of this potential foothold. The relationship that the later Spanish Habsburgs built with the Portuguese Jewish nation reflects the pragmatism that defined their imperial policies overseas.
This pragmatism was in evidence even after the Count-Duke of Olivares fell from grace after Portugal and Catalonia rebelled against Habsburg rule in 1640. Philip IV, and subsequently the regency governments of his son Charles II, continued to patronize Portuguese Jews living in Dutch territories. As New Christians, Portuguese Jewish merchants had been Habsburg subjects under the Iberian Union. Spanish royal patronage thus offered them opportunities to continue operating in the Spanish networks they were already familiar with, even though some Portuguese Jewish merchants focused on supporting the new Braganza dynasty in Portugal where they retained interests. For all intents and purposes, the Portuguese Jewish nation in Amsterdam functioned as both a Portuguese and Spanish merchant nation.
Iberian royal patronage manifested in the appointment of Portuguese Jews as royal agents, starting with Duarte Nunes da Costa (Jacob Curiel) and his son Jeronimo (Mosseh Curiel) as agents of the Portuguese Crown in Hamburg (1644) and Amsterdam (1645), respectively. In 1666 Manuel Belmonte (Ishac Nunes Belmonte) began regular correspondence with various Spanish royal agents, principal among them Juan José de Austria who was Philip IV’s illegitimate son and later regent for his brother, Charles II.13 Belmonte essentially functioned as a Spanish factor in Amsterdam even though he was not officially named a residente of the Crown until 1679. Manuel not only reported regularly to Spanish royal officials on political developments in the Netherlands but also was instrumental in securing slave asiento contracts for the Coymans merchant house in the 1680s and actively worked to realize the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).14
The appointment of Jewish royal agents by the Iberian Crowns coincided with increasing Iberian royal interests in expanding trade with the Dutch Republic as Spain made peace with its former territories in 1648, followed by Portugal in 1661. Dutch merchants also started taking advantage of Spanish networks after peace was signed in 1648, allowing them to compete with their Flemish counterparts who had been part of Iberian Atlantic trade networks since the fourteenth century. By 1668 Spain and Portugal made peace with one another, and regular trade between Portuguese residing in the Dutch Atlantic and the Spanish and Portuguese Empires resumed. By this time the Dutch had become a leading maritime power in the Atlantic, actively undermining both Spanish and Portuguese trade monopolies in Africa and the Americas.
Ironically, this dominance was coupled with widespread territorial loss in the Atlantic. In 1654 the Dutch lost their colony in northeastern Brazil to Luso-Brazilian insurgents. Most of their efforts to gain a territorial foothold in Spanish America, mainly in Chile and Peru, had also failed. These failures left them with only their Caribbean possessions and the large North American colony of New Netherland with its capital, New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island. Suriname was conquered after the loss of New Netherland in 1664. In Africa, the West India Company (WIC) founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, but in 1648 the Portuguese retook Luanda in Angola, which the Dutch had held since 1641. They managed to hold on to the castle at Elmina on the African Gold Coast, which they captured in 1637 and retained until 1871.
FIGURE 2.1. Manuel Belmonte’s house in Amsterdam. Print by Romeyn de Hooghe, 1693–ca. 1695. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
The WIC had been created in 1621 to wage war on the Iberians. After Curaçao was captured in 1634 it became a base from which to raid the nearby Spanish mainland. Following peace with Spain in 1648, however, this strategy and the WIC itself essentially became obsolete. The company had tried its best to retain its role as a disruptor of Iberian Atlantic profits by restricting Dutch Atlantic trade only to areas not colonized by Spain and Portugal. Despite these efforts Dutch illicit trade with Spanish and Portuguese America had proved too difficult to control; by 1657 even WIC administrators in Curaçao engaged in it. By 1674 the WIC had collapsed and was reborn as a company focused on Atlantic trade, especially out of Curaçao, and on administering the remaining Dutch American colonies and the African trading posts.15
The fate of Dutch Atlantic trade, however, was not tied to the WIC, and in fact the Amsterdam chamber of the company typically favored supporting free trade over company monopolies. Private Dutch traders were also very familiar with Atlantic transit routes through their long history of participation in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French networks, and smuggling accounted for many Dutch American trading ventures.16 The only successful monopoly that the WIC was able to maintain after 1633 was the transfer of slaves from the Slave Coast and the Loango coastal area to the Caribbean.17 In 1675, a year after the WIC was reorganized into a more trade-focused company, it designated Curaçao as a free port. The colony’s inhabitants prospered from intercolonial trade, which became legal under Dutch law but remained illicit for non-Dutch imperial territories.18
The watershed moment of 1675 was the culmination of years of effort on the part of Dutch merchants to integrate into broader Atlantic markets, especially Spanish ones after 1648.19 Despite initial protests from WIC directors, Portuguese Jewish merchants also used Curaçao as a base for expanding family company interests to Spanish America, often in cooperation with Dutch and Spanish business partners. Most of these ventures involved extralegal mechanisms using correspondents in Spain and Spanish America. As Spanish American markets expanded, new opportunities emerged that allowed the direct participation of a variety of Atlantic traders and entrepreneurs. One of the principal avenues through which this was possible was via the navíos de registro system.20
The Navíos de Registro Trade
Dutch manipulation of the navíos de registro trade in cooperation with Spanish accomplices became so widespread by the 1660s that the second Spanish ambassador to The Hague, Don Esteban de Gamarra, was tasked by the Council of Castile to begin compiling intelligence reports on illegal Dutch operations in the Indies in 1663. His spy operation uncovered dozens of registro trade ventures undertaken in the course of hundreds of voyages between 1663 and 1667 that were used to trade contraband.21 As an Iberian diaspora community, and one with longstanding ties to Iberian merchants and the Spanish Crown, the Portuguese Jews were in a prime position to take advantage of the trail that Dutch merchants had blazed into the Spanish Atlantic through the registro trade. To understand the role of Portuguese Jewish merchants in Dutch contraband operations it is necessary to know how the Dutch were able to manipulate the registros.
Contraband trade with the Spanish Indies had become so widespread by the time the 1648 Peace of Münster was signed that even the Crown was forced to find ways to benefit from it rather than either ignoring its ubiquity or outlawing illegal ventures. Zacharias Moutoukias has demonstrated how the Crown financed elements of its military and administrative apparatus in the Río de la Plata through illegal commerce. Buenos Aires was established as the principal port of the region for one reason: the export of the Crown’s most coveted commodity for the duration of the colonial period, silver. With a growing number of rival European colonies in the Caribbean, whence silver had previously been exported via Panama, the Crown sought to secure Buenos Aires for the export of Potosí silver. In order to pay for the salaries and supplies of a garrison and administrative-military structure the Crown created the situado, which was an annual subsidy that the royal treasury of Potosí was ordered to make by remitting coined silver to merchant-suppliers and high officials in Buenos Aires.22
The exponential growth of contraband in the Río de la Plata region over the course of the seventeenth century correlates with the establishment of an imperial apparatus to oversee the situado there. Buenos Aires was one of many ports lying off the official route for Spain’s armed treasure fleet convoys known as the Carrera de Indias. Although notoriously unreliable, their purpose was to escort supplies and precious cargo to and from Spain and key ports in the Spanish Caribbean (Santo Domingo, Cartagena de Indias, Veracruz, and Havana). Supplying regions lying outside of the official carrera route therefore proved logistically difficult to regulate and protect. During the Iberian Union (1580–1640), the Crown tried to remedy this for Buenos Aires by permitting direct trade with Portuguese Brazil and Guinea.23 After Portuguese independence in 1640 the Crown began promoting the sale of licencias, or royal permits to private merchants to trade with ports off the carrera (galleon) route and to supplement uncompleted carrera voyages. The merchant ships participating in this trade came to be known as the navíos de registro (registry ships) and slowly began to dominate imperial trade in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Moutoukias found that the silver coins of the situado rarely made it into the pockets of soldiers, but rather went mostly to merchant-suppliers contracted by a registro license and to some high officials who in turn supplied the garrison with provisions and paid them on credit. This created a situation whereby merchants and high local officials supplied basic commodities through the navíos de registro system to a relatively isolated port on the south Atlantic American coast. In order to supply and support this regime properly, the Crown was forced to ignore unsanctioned commercial activities in the Río de la Plata, where individuals seeking riches in the Indies otherwise had little to gain from participation in the limited royal supply trades under a royal license. Those who purchased a license entered into an asiento (contract) with the Crown that calculated the value of the license based on the tonnage being shipped as well as the rendering of extra services to the Crown, such as the transportation of officials and soldiers or the shipment of arms and supplies to the Indies.24
The dispatch of navíos de registro was a royal prerogative, meaning that it was a privilege maintained at the pleasure of the Crown despite complaints by officials who argued that they harmed royal monopolies. Private merchants also complained that since the registro trade was highly regulated as a royal prerogative, it harmed the expansion of private markets. The Crown itself enjoyed its benefits and could manipulate the system at will. The registro trade quickly became associated with smuggling as license holders regularly underreported the tonnage of their cargo. Rather than abandoning the system, however, the Crown merely increased the cost of licenses and fines for violations. It essentially turned a blind eye to contraband so long as fines were paid to the royal treasury. This loophole opened an avenue for a semi-illegal free trade to the Indies that simultaneously alleviated the Crown’s fear of losing its monopoly in the Indies trade and solved the Crown’s supply issues to far-off yet important regions such as the Río de la Plata.25
This shift in practice created a new avenue by which Portuguese Jewish merchants could reinforce their roles as imperial go-betweens after the financial influence of the Portuguese bankers in Madrid waned. The licenses to enter into a royal contract were usually sold publicly to the highest bidder in Seville, although private shipowners sometimes solicited them through an agent at court in Madrid. Portuguese Jews retained associates not only in Seville and Cádiz but also in Madrid, and their relationship with old Lisbon- and Porto-based private enterprises that tied the Iberian Peninsula to West Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean still functioned.26 Most of the commercial activities of Dutch Portuguese Jews involved trade with Portugal and its colonies in the period 1595–1648. From 1648 onward, however, there was a sudden shift among the community toward markets in Spain and Morocco.27 Even Jeronimo Nunes da Costa (Mosseh Curiel), agent of the Portuguese Crown in Amsterdam, retained correspondents in San Sebastián and Alicante.28 The navíos de registro trade was a critical factor in the shifting participation of Portuguese Jews in Spanish imperial trade networks.
At the same time, the registro trade was also becoming associated with Dutch merchants more generally. After the Peace of Münster of 1648, prominent Dutch merchant companies wasted no time incorporating both Seville and Cádiz into their trade networks, raising important questions about the presence of Protestants at the heart of the Spanish imperial system.29 Dutch trade out of Cádiz became so important that in 1661 the Crown abolished the oppressive almirantazgo tax that imposed hefty fees on northern European, and specifically Dutch, ships trading with the Iberian Peninsula.30 Even with this victory, however, participation of merchants based out of the United Provinces in the Indies trade was still legally limited.
It is no wonder, then, that the second half of the seventeenth century saw a massive increase in the number of pardons and fines (indultos) issued for the violations committed by license holders or their associates trading with the Indies, generally through the navíos de registro system. A survey of the fines issued between 1601 and 1728 reveals that only seven were issued between 1601 and 1647. This does not indicate an absence of contraband trade, since the Crown had been fighting to maintain its monopolies in the Indies from at least the mid-sixteenth century, if not earlier.31 These early indultos were mostly issued to royal officials who committed financial violations. The only fine issued in 1647, for example, was for a captain of the galleon fleet who “forgot” to pay his taxes in New Spain during the fleet’s visit there.32
In the first decade after the Peace of Münster there was a gradual but exponential growth in the number of indultos issued for license violations, or for sailing without a license at all. In 1650 a single indulto was issued for an English-Spanish smuggling operation that operated between England and Santo Domingo in the 1640s.33 From then until 1659, twenty-five pardons were issued for license violations or the embezzlement of funds compared to the seven issued over the previous forty-six years. The value of the fines collected in the indultos for this decade alone equaled about 174,376 pesos. Between 1660 and 1665 there were twice as many indultos, totaling fifty. Although the data for the total value of contraband cargo are incomplete, the fees and punishments for participating in contraband trade with the Indies seem lenient at first glance. Between 1650 and 1699 only one person was imprisoned, and one royal official was banned from holding office for four years. The highest fee for license violation was for 27,852 pesos in 1650; the next highest was for 18,000 pesos in 1654. Most fees fell between 450 pesos and 6,000 pesos, mostly for license violations, with one case in which a full pardon was offered without a fee.34
Compared to the value of some of the cargo, however, one wonders if the risk for illegal trading ventures was worth the investment. However, as Moutoukias found for Buenos Aires, cargoes were generally underre-ported, and the ratio of cargo value to fees in the records can be deceiving. Moutoukias gives the example of a captain Ignacio Maleo, who in 1663 transported two hundred infantrymen, forty tons of arms, the oidores and the president of the Audiencia of Buenos Aires, and the governor of Chile under a legal navío de registro license. In total he paid 15,000 pesos for his permit and declared that he carried merchandise worth 43,500 pesos.35 Moutoukias argues that 15,000 pesos for the permit was too high in relation to the supposed value of the commercial operation, demonstrating that it was through Maleo’s illegal transactions, which he did not report to the Crown, that he made his true profit. It was also highly likely that royal officials adjusted fees for possible contraband tonnage.
The practice of underreporting cargo value was quite common for both licensed and unlicensed ships and remained one of the arguments against the continuation of the registro trade. In light of the volume of indultos issued by the Council of the Indies and signed by the king throughout the seventeenth century, the Crown clearly saw value in ignoring contraband as long as it benefited financially and logistically. One Juan de Pantaleón, for example, was apparently welcomed with open arms upon arriving in Cartagena de Indias in May 1657 with a cargo of wine and lamp oil without a license. The galleon fleet had not made it to the port for three consecutive years, and the port authorities were desperate to receive a fresh shipment of wine for celebrations and oil for lamps. They consulted the attorney general of the city about allowing Pantaleón to sell his cargo without a license. He in turn proposed to the town’s cabildo that a request for a license be made to Pedro Zapata, governor and captain general of Cartagena. The governor agreed to request both a license and a pardon for Pantaleón. The Council of the Indies, for its part, ruled that the cargo was small enough that it did not compete with official supply lines. Since it was owned by a natural of Cas-tile and the journey was undertaken “without malice,” it was judged to pose no threat to the royal monopoly. Furthermore, the council argued, if ships such as these were refused entry, they could be seized by “English enemies and others that infest those coasts,” or they could simply find another port where they could sell their merchandise clandestinely.36
For the Crown Pantaleón’s journey, and others like his, offered logistical relief at a time when it was stretched thin financially. Not only was Spain at war with England in 1657, but it was preparing to reinvade Portugal and fighting a war against France in the Spanish Netherlands. The war with the English had begun with their capture of Jamaica, which created panic in the Caribbean and established a new base from which the English could harass the heart of the Spanish Empire. A single ship supplying necessary commodities to one of Spanish America’s principal ports was of little consequence during such a tumultuous time, even if it was smuggling in more goods than anticipated.
Informal Trade Networks as Spaces of Sociocultural, Religious, and Political Entanglement
Both Zacharias Moutoukias and Wim Klooster have demonstrated the extent to which the navíos de registro trade became synonymous with contraband trade in Atlantic networks, particularly in relation to Dutch contraband in Spanish networks. Klooster’s work presents smuggling as a relationship between people who were legally not supposed to be in contact with one another. Although he calls those who initiated smuggling “interlopers,” he also recognizes the importance of the relationships they built with locals in the places where they made exchanges, which had long-term implications for commercial and social trends.37 Local demand was a driving force behind the construction of private informal trade networks, but the actual act of trade could not be sustained without a system of trust to secure exchanges.
The navíos de registro provided the basis for such a system, and the turmoil that the Spanish Crown faced in the 1650s offered a window of opportunity to expand it into a complex vehicle for clandestine private international trade. To function, this system required the coordination of Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and other “interloping” merchants active in Europe, the Atlantic islands, West Africa, and the Americas. Portuguese Jewish merchants, who continued to function as a de facto Iberian merchant nation, were in an ideal position to take advantage of such a system and to serve as a fulcrum for potential collaborations between various commercial actors. Such intricate arrangements, however, required the cooperation of a broad group of actors who made it possible to bypass the registration of ships and cargo in Seville or Cádiz and to access ports in the Indies.
An excellent example of how Portuguese Jews helped coordinate and execute registro voyages can be seen in a 1664 expedition headed by the Dutch merchant Jacobus Alexander Beni (who used the alias Diego). Beni and his business partner Balthasar Besalaar were Dutch associates attached to the Grillos’ trading house established in Cádiz. The city, like Seville and Lisbon, was a rather cosmopolitan space as a variety of merchants attached to Spanish institutions congregated in what became Spain’s central port for importing American colonial goods by the mid-seventeenth century. Only Spanish merchants were legally allowed to purchase royal contracts, but this did not stop foreign investors and merchants from organizing contraband trade under the guise of a legal license. Beni and Besalaar thus partnered with two Spanish vecinos of Sanlúcar, another major port near Cádiz, in 1664 to carry out just such a venture.
These Spaniards were Francisco de Orejón and his friend Antonio Rodriguez Lodeño, who had worked with Beni and Besalaar since the 1650s. The venture in 1664 was organized after Orejón was appointed governor and captain-general of Havana, a post he would hold from 1664 until 1670.38 The Spanish-Dutch associates conceived a plan to use the governorship to set up a regional trade network to export goods directly from Cuba to northern Europe. To accomplish this, they partnered with merchants resident in the Dutch Republic and in France who would fund the venture and supply goods to be sold throughout the Caribbean. These included the company of Francisco Cañete in Spanish Antwerp and the company of a French merchant resident in Amsterdam named Guillaume Belin de la Garde. It also included two Portuguese Jewish merchants whose role went beyond that of mere investors. They would be crucial to organizing the final stages of the venture using their correspondents and agents located in the principal European ports where Beni would eventually bring his Caribbean goods to sell.39
The first of these Portuguese Jewish partners was Balthasar Álvares Nogueira, who traded under the Dutch alias of Alberto Dirksen den Jonghen.40 Since Beni’s plan was to sell the bulk of his goods in France, Álvares Nogeuira’s partnership was of great value. He had contacts in France and the French Caribbean where he conducted regular trade, sometimes in partnership with the Portuguese Jewish aristocracy like Abraam Pereyra, Antonio Lopes Suasso, and Jeronimo Nunes da Costa.41 Beni’s French contacts were undoubtedly important too, but Álvares Nogueira had access to the chain of Portuguese merchant communities located along the French Atlantic and in Martinique as well as to Portuguese Jewish merchants in Amsterdam who traded in French networks.42 He also retained contacts in Cádiz, where his wealthy and influential relative Jacob Rodrigues Isidro resided. He was the son of Manuel Rodrigues Isidro, who used the alias Manuel Dirksen and collected payment from Álvares Nogueira’s creditors in Hamburg when he and his sons resided there as Jews in the 1650s.43 Álvares Nogueira, in short, offered Beni access to the extended international network of the Jewish and New Christian Portuguese merchant nation.
The other Portuguese Jewish partner was Diego Mendes de Brito, who had lived in Bayonne before arriving in Amsterdam, used the alias Jacques Alberto, and traded in both French and Spanish Atlantic networks.44 In his intelligence report Ambassador Gamarra referred to a “French associate” of the group named Jacques Alberto who was in Cádiz when Beni arrived from France, whom he suspected of carrying out the final sale of goods there. Gamarra notes that this Alberto was a relative of the merchants in France who outfitted Beni for the final leg of his journey.45 Mendes de Brito would have had no trouble passing as a French merchant since he spoke French and regularly used a French alias for trade. It is very likely that he and Álvares Nogueira placed Beni in contact with family members or associates in one of the several Portuguese trading settlements there before Beni first embarked on his journey.
In June 1664 the group loaded three ships in Rotterdam with 6,000 florins (about 3,000 pesos) worth of Dutch goods and had the Spaniard Lodeño acquire a license to sail them directly to the island of Trinidad in the southern Caribbean, then part of the Venezuelan province of Guayana.46 Lodeño sold the goods of one ship in Trinidad in exchange for cacao and then returned with the cargo to Cádiz, where Besalaar was to sell the cacao and use the proceeds to buy olive oil in Mallorca to sell in Holland. Beni, who sailed with Lodeño out of Rotterdam, took the other two ships along the coast of Venezuela to sell its cargo from Cumaná to Maracaibo and then stopped at Curaçao. There he sold the contents of one ship to the factors of the Grillo slave asiento, who paid for them in silver that Beni remitted to Amsterdam on the ship San Jacob. Beni then sailed the remaining ship to Havana where his friend and associate, the governor and captain-general Francisco de Orejón, organized a royal license for Beni to continue trading regionally. From Havana he sailed to Campeche, in Yucatán, where he loaded his ship with various goods. Upon completing his business along the Campeche coast, he returned to Havana where he organized the last leg of his voyage. Because of the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War, sailing directly to Holland with a large cargo under a Dutch flag would have been extremely risky. He therefore hired a smaller ship to remit eighty cueros (cases) of Campeche dyewood directly to Holland from Havana.47 A direct shipment of Spanish American products from Havana to Holland was an extreme breach of Spanish mercantilist policies, but evidently it was possible because the highest government official in Havana himself found it beneficial to support an extralegal trading expedition with agents across various imperial and religious boundaries.
With his larger ship Beni organized another voyage from Havana to La Guaira, on the coast near Caracas. He kept most of his cargo from Yucatán for continued regional trade, which included 400 crates of tobacco, 3,500 more quintals of Campeche dyewood, 4,000 cowhide sacks of cochineal (a prized dye derived from an insect native to Mexico), and an undisclosed amount of American silver. Beni thus found it as profitable to sell his goods in regional markets as he did in European ones. In Caracas he negotiated a deal with a Spaniard there to remit another four hundred crates of tobacco, seemingly on credit, to Balthasar Besalaar in Cádiz but that Beni would instead take to La Rochelle in France.48 There he met one of the association’s agents, Godefrois de Belaronda, who, together with a group of local merchants possibly tied to the Portuguese Jewish merchant Balthasar Álvares Nogueira, purchased Beni’s remaining Caribbean merchandise and refitted his ship for a new voyage back to the Caribbean.49
All that remained to complete the journey was for Beni to return to Cádiz to fulfill his registro license obligations. These required the licensed vessel to return to Spain with goods from the American territories to which their license permitted them to sail. Since the original license was for a voyage to the Venezuelan coast the group needed to return with Venezuelan goods. Beni, however, sold all his Venezuelan goods in France, undoubtedly for a larger profit since normally French merchants would have to import such goods through Cádiz or organize a similar clandestine voyage to the Caribbean.
The Portuguese Jewish partners, Balthasar Álvares Nogueira (Alberto Dirksen) and Diego Mendes de Brito (Jacques Alberto), played a critical role in resolving this issue. Beni could have returned to Cádiz with Venezuelan goods, or with products similar enough that they could pass as being Venezuelan. He therefore returned to Amsterdam from France where he loaded his ship with barley purchased by Belin de la Garde. He then embarked for Lisbon where the barley was sold in exchange for Brazilian tobacco. This final leg of the journey was undoubtedly organized by Álvares Nogueira and Mendes de Brito. The pair had extensive contacts with experience in smuggling contraband between Portugal and Andalusia and who would have been able to help sell a cargo of Brazilian tobacco as Venezuelan tobacco.
Álvares Nogueira, for example, counted among his creditors the brothers Simão and Luis Rodrigues da Sousa and Francisco Lopes de Azevedo (Abraham Farrar). The former were major importers to Amsterdam of sugar from Oporto and olive oil from Andalusia during this time, and the latter had extensive contacts in both Faro in the Algarve and in Cádiz. Faro became an important port during Portugal’s long war for independence (1640–68) as it was used to bypass Spanish blockades on Lisbon and Oporto. Dutch ships were often used by Portuguese merchants to smuggle Portuguese and Spanish products, including American silver, in and out of Cádiz. Lopes de Azevedo was one of these merchants and occasionally partnered with Jeronimo Nunes da Costa, agent of the Portuguese Crown in Amsterdam, to acquire Andalusian and Spanish American goods for Portuguese and Dutch markets.50
Álvares Nogueira also occasionally worked with Jeronimo Nunes da Costa, who was not only an agent of the Portuguese Crown but also the principal factor of the General Company for the Commerce of Brazil (Brazil Company) in Amsterdam. This was a joint-stock company modeled on the WIC that organized convoys to protect ships carrying goods from Brazil to Portugal and held certain trade monopolies itself.51 With Nunes da Costa’s aid alone Álvares Nogueira and Mendes de Brito would have been able to secure contacts in Lisbon to purchase Beni’s grain and to sell him Brazilian tobacco.
Mendes de Brito (Jacques Alberto) was reportedly the one who sold the tobacco in Cádiz, most likely by securing bribes or false papers with the aid of relatives and associates there. This venture, after all, was not the first in which he and Álvares Nogueira partnered with his relative living in Andalusia, Fernando Dias de Brito, to execute joint Dutch-Portuguese trade deals in Cádiz and other Andalusian ports like Málaga.52 He likely also received aid from Álvares Nogueira’s associates or kinsmen, like the wealthy Rodrigues Isidro family that had returned to Cádiz from the Jewish community in Hamburg in the 1660s. The ruse apparently worked, and the profits were subsequently used to send the goods Beni loaded in La Rochelle to the Canaries. He acquired a new registro license in the island of La Palma after Francisco de Orejón again requested luxury Canary wine to be delivered to Havana under a royal license. The request, of course, was made so that a new round of voyages could be made along the route described above, from the Canary Islands to Venezuela, presumably with a stop at Curaçao, and from there to Havana, the Campeche coast, and then back to Europe.53
In this multicultural and transimperial network, Álvares Nogueira, under the alias of Alberto Dirksen, and Diego Mendes de Brito, under the alias of Jacques Alberto, exemplify how Portuguese Jews became integral to the private trade ventures that increasingly defined transatlantic commerce in the second half of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese war of independence and the Spanish financial crisis of the 1640s forced both the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies to liberalize their foreign trading policies. The provisions of the Peace of Münster in 1648 underscored this by requiring Philip IV of Spain to recognize the right of Jews living under Dutch rule to access Spanish ports.54 The treaty, of course, did not mean that Jews (or Protestants) could trade freely in Spanish ports but rather that all merchants of the Dutch Republic were protected under its articles. As a result, after 1657 some Portuguese Jews began to present themselves as “Netherlanders” and to use Dutch aliases in official business transactions with Spain and Spanish America, whether as investors in Amsterdam or Curaçao or on the less frequent occasion that they themselves traveled to Spanish ports. In either case they became equal partners in commercial associations that cannot be definitively described as either Spanish or Dutch, but rather operated multinationally and globally.
Portuguese Jewish merchants increased their reliance on Iberian correspondents who were not family members or close associates throughout the Atlantic world. Francesca Trivellato has observed this among the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, emphasizing that successful business ventures required trust that was not automatically present among kin but that could be constructed among nonkin business associates to secure mutually beneficial interests.55 Other scholars have corroborated the extent to which Portuguese Jewish merchants trading in Dutch Atlantic networks worked closely together with non-Jewish and non-Iberian business partners in the early modern period.56 Nonkin business associates did not replace kin networks, which remained crucial to Portuguese Atlantic trade in the second half of the seventeenth century across religious and political boundaries. They did, however, help to expand Portuguese trade interests and reinforced already-existing Portuguese Jewish participation in European imperialist ventures.57
By observing economic patterns and commercial enterprises it becomes apparent that Jewish heritage did not prevent the formation of working relationships between (Jewish) Iberians in Dutch lands and (Catholic) Iberians in Spanish or Portuguese ones. All evidence suggests that aside from the Inquisition, which continued to forcefully prosecute people suspected of practicing Judaism, Islam, or any Protestant religion, there was a trend toward tolerating non-Catholics and non-Iberians in the early modern Iberian world for the sake of imperial expansion and commerce. Apart from the growing connections between Portuguese Jewish merchants and a broad stratum of Iberians, this can be especially observed in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic trading centers, as is evident in the active Dutch trading community in the central imperial port of Cádiz or the English one in Lisbon.
Toward a Commercial Approach to Jewish Entanglement with the Atlantic World
The navíos de registro system offers a case study for the way in which imperial systems were manipulated by intercultural groups of traders to engage in widespread private trade. This was done with little regard for royal interests. However, in the case of the navíos de registro, the Spanish Crown found ways to profit off contraband by essentially “selling” pardons. Both the Portuguese and the Spanish Crowns saw the value of investing in foreign agents. They were already familiar with the Portuguese merchant diaspora, which had traditionally served as an intermediary for royal and private trade in the Low Countries. This included the Portuguese merchant nation that embraced Judaism in Amsterdam, which was well established in what remained Europe’s entrepôt throughout the seventeenth century. Both Crowns were willing to overlook the fact that the community was Jewish and that many of its members were considered apostates by the Catholic Church.
Classic studies of how this community remained tied to the Iberian world have focused heavily on the cultural and religious ties of Portuguese Jews to their past as New Christians. Such studies have contributed much to our understanding of Portuguese Jewish religious thought and of the anxieties that leaders in Amsterdam felt for most of the seventeenth century with regard, on one hand, to their community—composed largely of recent migrants and converts from Iberian lands—and, on the other, to Dutch authorities whose hostility to anything Iberian influenced Portuguese Jewish attitudes when constructing their community at the start of the century.58 Yet these studies leave many questions to be answered.
How can we explain the fact that communal leaders themselves maintained regular correspondence with partners or agents in Lisbon, Seville, and other Iberian trade centers? Jeronimo Nunes da Costa (Mosseh Curiel), for example, despite his role as agent of the Portuguese Crown and his extensive ties to Portuguese agents across the Atlantic world, held thirteen high-profile leadership positions within various communal institutions between 1655 and 1696, the year before his death.59 Antonio Lopes Suasso (Ishac Israel Suasso) rivaled Nunes da Costa in wealth, contacts, and influence to the point of being ennobled as the Baron de Avernas-le-Gras by the regency council of Charles II in 1676 for his services provisioning the Spanish Army of Flanders.60 Lopes Suasso, who was the highest taxpayer after Nunes da Costa in the 1660s, also held various influential leadership positions within the Jewish community between 1654 and 1672, including that of gabay in 1656–57.61 Manuel Belmonte, whose wealth and ties to the Spanish monarchy eventually rivaled the wealth and influence of Nunes da Costa and Lopes Suasso, also held important communal positions, including that of gabay, between 1697 and 1703, two years before his death.62 Furthermore, both Belmonte and Nunes da Costa were elected in 1681 by the Mahamad as “deputies of the nation” to represent the Jewish community in front of the Amsterdam City Council, the States General in The Hague, and elsewhere for “general cases of the nation.”63
It is true that communal leaders maintained a rhetoric of orthodox religiosity and painted the community as a haven for victims of the Inquisition.64 This was, however, also a community constructed by merchants and molded in their image of the world. In 1681 the community records were still being kept in Portuguese, and even the “deputies of the nation” were charged with acting as procuradores of the Jewish community, a term used by both Portuguese merchants and royal agents to refer to business correspondents abroad.65 The records left to us by this Jewish community were written by individuals who saw their world through a mercantile lens. In order to understand the religious and social rhetoric that permeates these records (i.e., in order to understand this Jewish community) we must contextualize them within the commercial and economic world that influenced their authors. This was a thoroughly Atlantic Iberian diaspora community, albeit a unique one that embraced Judaism as its confessional framework.
The case of the Portuguese Jews problematizes any dichotomy of New Christian and Jewish, or Jewish or Christian categories of identification. It also problematizes the idea that Iberian royal restrictions or prerogatives were fully guided by religious considerations. This is demonstrated in the Jewish (or non-Catholic) activity prevalent within Iberian networks over the course of the seventeenth century, and the shifting attitudes that royal officials had toward the expansion of commerce. Studying Portuguese Jewish participation in Spanish imperial networks not only expands our understanding of how Jewish communities functioned in the early modern period, but also highlights the openness of Spanish and Spanish American merchants and others involved in Atlantic commerce to building working and long-term relationships with non-Iberians and non-Catholics.