To Trade Is to Thrive
The Sephardic Moment in Amsterdam’s Atlantic and Caribbean Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century
YDA SCHREUDER
In the seventeenth century, Sephardim in the Atlantic world were the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who acknowledged their converso or crypto-Jewish origins in the context of the Portuguese Nation. They had a shared history of persecution, conversion to Christianity, and/or forced exile from Spain and Portugal. This experience was deeply rooted and formed the basis of cultural traditions that had a lasting impact on Sephardic communities in the Caribbean. At the same time—as members of the Portuguese Nation—Sephardic merchants were often transient and readily shifted alliances when circumstances necessitated or when trading opportunities occurred.1 The experience of many wealthy Amsterdam Sephardic merchants engaged in the Atlantic sugar trade illustrates the dynamics of the trading networks in the westward expansion of sugar cultivation in the seventeenth century.2 For much of the century, the center of activity for most Sephardic sugar merchants was Amsterdam, which connected Jewish and converso or crypto-Jewish communities in Lisbon, Hamburg, London, Brazil, Barbados, and Jamaica as well as similar communities in the French colonies.3
Historians have introduced the term “Port Jew” to denote Jewish merchants as members of trading communities, transmitting news and purveying goods and services along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Mediterranean and Caribbean world.4 Wim Klooster describes the first stage in the establishment of Port Jews in the Americas in terms of cross-Atlantic trade that occurred between Portuguese converso merchants in Brazil and Portuguese merchants in Antwerp during the last few decades of the sixteenth century in what Jonathan Israel refers to as the first phase of Dutch Sephardi activity when Portuguese Brazil delivered an increasing amount of sugar to western Europe.5 The second phase began after the unification of Portugal with Spain in 1580, when many converso merchants moved to Spain and set up business with Spanish American and Portuguese merchants, and their agents settled in Panama, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Cartagena. The third phase began with the blockades and embargoes on Antwerp imposed by the Dutch Republic at the end of the sixteenth century during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) with Spain, at which time many converso merchants from Portugal and Antwerp left and settled in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and other ports along Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, where they began to profess Judaism openly. During all three phases, New Christian (converso or crypto-Jewish) and Sephardic merchants extended their networks and incorporated more trading partners.
The Dutch Republic emerged as a mercantile core of the Atlantic world and Amsterdam as the commercial center in the Atlantic sugar trade in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It was at that time that Sephardic merchants began to establish themselves as part of the trading regime in the Caribbean region, transferring their trade networks from Brazil in the second quarter of the seventeenth century to the English sugar colony of Barbados, and to Jamaica and the French colony of Martinique in the second half of the century. Being in the vanguard of the emerging sugar production and trade in the Caribbean region and as merchants of the Portuguese Nation in the broader Atlantic world, Sephardic merchants established themselves by bridging the imperial divides of the seventeenth century. It is from this perspective that I will present the multifaceted trade relationships that developed along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean and discuss the imperial alignments and realignments in political-economic terms and in historical-spatial context. More often than not, being and becoming “entangled” played itself out against the rivalry and competition between the imperial powers that affected the development and expansion of sugar colonies in the Caribbean region, which in turn influenced the trade patterns of Sephardic merchant groups.
Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century were an integral part of the merchant network referred to as the Portuguese Nation initially based in Lisbon, Oporto, and smaller port cities along Portugal’s Atlantic coast.6 Family and kin contacts with New Christian (converso or crypto-Jewish) merchants who had initially engaged in trade along the West Coast of Africa and the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé formed the core of the trade network as they engaged in the trade of slaves and sugar.7 When sugar cultivation expanded to Portuguese Brazil, New Christian merchants extended their network of contacts across the Atlantic, and when the Dutch captured and then colonized Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil in 1630, Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants became an integral part of the Atlantic sugar trade network.8 In the course of the seventeenth century these merchants became importers of Atlantic colonial staple goods, foremost sugar but also tobacco, cacao, ginger, indigo, brazilwood, and various other products that were warehoused and processed in Amsterdam and then distributed throughout northwestern Europe. The merchant network of the Portuguese Nation, including New Christian and Jewish merchants, extended by mid-century to Danzig in the Baltic, Hamburg in north Germany, and London, Bordeaux, and various other port cities in western Europe and the Mediterranean. Merchants engaged in trade via these networks often maintained contact with each other and were able, thereby, to take advantage of various trade opportunities as they presented themselves.9
As Amsterdam developed into a major sugar trade, processing, and distribution center and as sugar colonies developed and succeeded each other as leading production centers, the Portuguese merchant networks in the Atlantic trading world transformed repeatedly, and members of the community migrated and relocated frequently, each time reconnecting with other members of the trade network. Several new Jewish communities were established in the Greater Caribbean in the 1650s and 1660s, most of them offshoots of the Brazil-Amsterdam Sephardic merchant community.10 Jane Gerber characterizes the “Western Sephardi Diaspora,” also referred to as the “Portuguese Jewish Diaspora,” as a highly mobile merchant community that showcased great flexibility and adaptability in a shifting imperial world.11 Often, Sephardic merchants continued to trade within the orbit of the Portuguese Nation and kept their trading relationships with Portugal and Spain intact while at the same time freely interacting with the Dutch Republic and port cities along Europe’s Atlantic seaboard. Over time, the Atlantic-oriented Portuguese Jewish merchant communities in the Caribbean region developed their own communities through creolization and became more rooted and interconnected. They shared a common cause, but their cultural roots within the Atlantic world and Amsterdam in particular remained intact.12
Sephardic merchants in the Atlantic sugar trade were important, if not crucial, to Amsterdam’s expanding sugar market and greatly contributed to Amsterdam’s prosperity.13 As source material for the study of Amsterdam’s staple trade I used freight records and protocols in the Notarial Archives in the Amsterdam City Archives.14 Since the sugar trade was conducted by private merchants either with Dutch Brazil (1630–54) under the auspices of the West India Company or with Barbados and other islands in the Caribbean under British or French colonial rule, freight contracts were drawn up with a notary public in Amsterdam. Merchants and shipping companies or ship masters usually drew up a contract in which they described freight cargo and terms of agreements. The contract might include routes to be sailed, goods to be delivered, and return cargo to be taken on board as well as instructions to deliver within a specified period of time. Loan and insurance arrangements were usually part of the contract. When disputes arose, specific protocols were filed to address the issue and call the guilty party to order. The freight records for the Atlantic and Caribbean sugar trade in the notary public records range in time from 1645 until 1699.15
As opposed to the French and the English, the Dutch did not actively pursue colonization in the Caribbean region after they lost control over Brazil by mid-century, but they were heavily engaged in Atlantic colonial commerce, trading, again, both autonomously and under the auspices of the West India Company.16 Merchants based in the Dutch Republic, including Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants, often engaged in the supply and carrying trade between the French and English colonies and western Europe, delivering supplies to those Caribbean colonies and carrying colonial goods back to Amsterdam. When France and England introduced trade and navigation laws to protect their colonial interest, the relationship changed and became more hostile.17 Meanwhile, in Amsterdam’s staple and distribution market, sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, and spices were among the most profitable trade goods, and sugar in particular created great wealth in which Sephardic merchants shared.18
The “Sephardic Moment” in the Atlantic sugar trade occurred, I contend, during the period of Dutch rule in Brazil from 1630 until 1654 and the sugar boom years in Barbados from the late 1640s until the early 1670s.19 The economic prosperity of Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam grew significantly in the middle and the second half of the seventeenth century when they also engaged in sugar refining and in the sugar reexport trade.20 Amsterdam’s sugar-processing industry had expanded rapidly in the course of the seventeenth century as records show. Twenty refineries were in production in the Dutch Republic in 1620, forty in 1650, and sixty-six, of which fifty were located in Amsterdam, in 1660. In terms of production, the industry seems to have peaked by the mid-1660s.21 During the last quarter of the century, when the French sugar colonies developed but retained and processed their own sugar, and Jamaica replaced Barbados as the major sugar supply source for the English market and the commission trade was introduced, the role of Sephardic merchants in the sugar trade was reduced and network merchants reoriented themselves toward intercolonial trade via transit ports such as Willemstad (Curaçao), Oranjestad (Saint Eustatius), and Port Royal (Jamaica). Meanwhile, Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants turned their attention to financing and marketing and became engaged in commodity brokerage and in the London sugar reexport trade.22
The Sephardic Moment in Brazil
From the late sixteenth century onward New Christian and Portuguese Jews alongside Dutch merchants were residing and conducting business in Portuguese Brazil. They served as traders and as refiners of sugar and other colonial products when Brazil was still firmly under Portuguese rule. From the records it is not clear if Amsterdam’s Portuguese merchants engaged in the sugar trade with Brazil were Sephardim or New Christians, since New Christian merchants in Amsterdam (re)converted to Judaism during the first decades of the century. Jessica Roitman has concluded that the difference between ethnic and religious identification was flexible and that the boundaries blurred when members of the Portuguese Nation shifted alliances as business prospects and opportunities dictated.23 What is clear from the records is that there were close ties between the emerging Sephardic merchant community in Amsterdam and Brazil’s New Christian sugar merchant network.24
New Christian merchants had lived in Brazil from the early days of Portuguese colonization, when sugarcane was introduced from Madeira and São Tomé. Some of the most detailed source materials for research on New Christian and Sephardic sugar merchants in Brazil are the records of the earliest Jewish community in Brazil collected by Arnold Wiznitzer.25 He posited that soon after discovery in 1500, New Christians were listed among the settlers of Brazil and that crypto-Jews were in charge of customs collection.26 Some New Christians suspected of practicing the Jewish faith were sent to Brazil from Portugal shortly after the colonial administration was established in the 1530s. With the unification of Portugal and Spain in 1580, some New Christians in Brazil were persecuted, and the Holy Office in Bahia reported that there were many “persons of the Nation” in the province who professed Catholicism but secretly observed Jewish rites and customs. A visitation by the Holy Office in Pernambuco between 1593 and 1595 uncovered that a synagogue on the plantation of one of the suspects was the center of activity among Judaizers in Pernambuco.27
Suspicions about Judaizing among “Men of the Nation” and collaboration with Jewish merchants abroad threatened the position of New Christians, which led to a further harshening of conditions in Portugal, from where a new exodus of conversos occurred in the late sixteenth century. Many moved to Brazil, while others relocated to the periphery of the Habsburg realm in northwestern Europe where they settled in Rouen or Antwerp, or further afield in Amsterdam and Hamburg.28 Close personal and family connections between Portuguese merchants meant that numerous Portuguese New Christians were either related to or had associations with members of the Portuguese merchant community abroad, some of whom lived openly as Jews. Thus, association with Jewish merchants abroad jeopardized the New Christian merchants’ existence in Spain and Portugal but also offered opportunities to seek refuge and trade with members of the Portuguese Nation elsewhere, including Jewish communities.
Visitations of the Holy Office in Bahia in 1618 and 1619 led to an assortment of accusations and denunciations that revealed contacts between Brazil, Antwerp, and Amsterdam Portuguese merchant families. For about twenty-five years, New Christians and crypto-Jews of Brazil and Antwerp and openly professing Portuguese Jewish merchants from Amsterdam had been in contact with each other through trade. They played the leading role in organizing the export of sugar from Brazil, and through their family and business connections with New Christian merchants in Portugal, the Amsterdam Sephardic merchant families thrived.29 By 1618, crypto-Jews were no longer called New Christians in the records of the Holy Office in Bahia but were referred to as members of the Hebrew Nation; the same term was used in Amsterdam to denote Sephardic immigrants of the Portuguese Nation.30 As Wiznitzer noted, the denunciations of New Christians were replete with references to Flanders and Amsterdam and the people who lived there and emigrated to and from Brazil.31
The estimate is that Amsterdam imported more than half of Brazil’s sugar by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century and that most of the sugar exported to Europe was transported in Dutch ships. Trade with Antwerp and Hamburg was linked to Amsterdam through Portuguese merchant networks, and together the three ports likely absorbed at least 75 percent of Europe’s Brazilian sugar imports during the relatively open trade era of 1609–21, when a truce was observed during the Eighty Years’ War. In fact, the value of the Brazil trade (most of which was sugar) is estimated to have been one-half or perhaps three-quarters of the total annual commerce of the Dutch Republic at that time.32
After 1621, when the truce ended and Spanish and Portuguese trade embargoes were again imposed on Dutch shipping, the sugar trade was severely interrupted, but most of the sugar, legally or illegally, still ended up being transported to Amsterdam via the merchant networks that were now well established between Brazil, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic. Contraband trade thrived under the conditions of attacks at sea and port embargoes. Merchants exchanging goods via their trade networks changed shipping routes and chose to sail under a different flag as circumstances dictated or allowed.33 Jonathan Israel maintains that it was with the advent of Brazilian sugar entering the European markets via Lisbon and Amsterdam that a significant Portuguese Atlantic merchant network was established. In fact, he argues that the sugar trade cemented the emerging Sephardic merchant community in Amsterdam.34 The sugar trade with Brazil generated a large pool of crypto-Jewish and Sephardic merchants engaged in and orientated toward Atlantic commerce, and when the Dutch took control of Pernambuco in 1630, this merchant community was instrumental in generating the most profitable trade for Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic.35
To undermine the Habsburg Empire, but also to protect and expand its interest in the sugar trade when war resumed in 1621, the Dutch founded the West India Company (WIC) and shortly thereafter captured Salvador da Bahia (1624) in Brazil in order to more firmly secure the sugar trade, which was jeopardized by Spanish trade embargoes.36 After the short-lived Dutch occupation of Salvador, the WIC captured Pernambuco in 1630.
The Dutch occupation of Pernambuco proved to be quite profitable for Sephardic merchants from Amsterdam and Portuguese merchants in Brazil during Dutch colonial rule (1630–54).37 For a while the sugar industry and trade were disrupted as many engenhos and sugar mills were destroyed and abandoned by Portuguese planter-settlers at the start of Dutch occupation and the WIC confiscated many mills and other properties that were subsequently sold to Dutch investors. The situation stabilized when the WIC appointed Johan Maurits of Nassau as governor of the colony in 1637. During the years of his administration from 1637 until 1644, Jews were guaranteed religious freedom and private merchants were offered commercial opportunities, and in 1639, the Dutch authorities agreed to Johan Maurits’s proposals to allow the supply and sugar trade with Brazil to be conducted by shareholders of the West India Company.38 This encouraged Sephardic merchants from Amsterdam to exchange goods in Brazil for sugar. Combined with the promise of religious toleration, this measure set in motion a new wave of immigration to Dutch Brazil that included many Portuguese Jews.39 In the next few years Sephardic merchants played an increasingly important role in the supply and sugar trade to and from Brazil, as money lenders for slave purchases, financiers for sugar mill owners, owners of engenhos, and tax farmers.
Estimates are that perhaps more than a thousand Sephardic merchants made the crossing to northeast Brazil from the Dutch Republic in the decade after 1635. Many of them were well-to-do, but there were poor immigrants among them as well.40 During this period, private merchants—many of them Portuguese Jews—accounted for more than two-thirds of the value of trade, while the WIC accounted for the remainder.41 The colony rapidly expanded its sugar cultivation, and the high point of sugar production and export from Dutch Brazil occurred during the decade of the mid-1630s to the mid-1640s.42 In order to facilitate the expansion, the WIC extended credit and loans to planters and mill owners while conducting the slave trade with the Guinea Coast and Angola on its own account. This allowed the planters to acquire slaves and more land and make investments in sugar cultivation. We do not know the exact extent of Jewish participation in business activities under the auspices of the WIC as most of the archival records were destroyed, but incidental evidence suggests that the participation rate was significant.43 It was in this climate of prosperity and mutual dependency between the Sephardic community and the WIC that the Dutch authorities allowed Jewish religious practices to be openly conducted in Dutch Brazil. The first synagogue in the Americas was established in Recife in Pernambuco, and the first rabbi appointed in 1639.44
The WIC lost some of its monopolies but retained those in the slave trade and the trade in arms, ammunition, and dyewood (brazilwood). According to the best estimate a total of twenty-six thousand slaves from West Africa were traded by the WIC between 1631 and 1651.45 Slaves were sold on credit in Brazil with payment due in sugar at the next harvest. To avoid incurring bad debts, the WIC’s board of directors ruled in 1644 that slaves could only be traded for cash. This ruling made it more difficult for Portuguese planters to expand sugar cultivation but opened up opportunities for Jewish merchants who as middlemen bought slaves at greatly reduced prices in cash and then sold them on credit to plantation owners.
Most of the sugar plantations continued to be owned and operated by Portuguese planters, mill owners, and managers. In 1645, the planters revolted against Dutch rule. Consequently, both sugar exports and slave imports dropped precipitously in one year.46 As the rebellion was the beginning of the end of Dutch rule in Brazil, Sephardic merchants began to leave the colony, either returning to Amsterdam or moving to ports in the Caribbean region where they established new network connections or reinforced those already in place.47 By the early 1650s, the Sephardic population of Dutch Brazil had been reduced to around 650, and at the time of the Dutch surrender in 1654 it is estimated that only a few hundred were still residing in Brazil. That year the last group of Sephardic merchant families left Brazil on three voyages with different destinations, but most returned to Amsterdam. Later on, several Jews relocated to islands and coastal areas in the Caribbean region and found their way to newly established Dutch colonies including Nova Zeelandia in Western Guyana, the Dutch colony of Curaçao, and the island of Cayenne. In addition, Portuguese Jews migrated to the English colonies of Suriname (which later became a Dutch colony) and Barbados.
In summary, during the seven years of Johan Maurits’s rule, Jewish immigration to Brazil had reached its peak and Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants had increased their economic power considerably.48 Meanwhile, the Sephardic community in Brazil had established its own synagogues and had appointed rabbis from the Amsterdam congregation to serve their community. The community had also established important merchant networks connecting Amsterdam and Brazil, and Jewish merchants had become active participants in the WIC whereupon they were granted trade privileges. In addition, they held most of the tax farming licenses with the Dutch authorities and conducted a large share of the private supply and sugar trade. In other words, they were well established in Brazil and for that they were also envied.
Both the West India Company and Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchant community continued to play a role in sugar cultivation and trade in the Caribbean and Atlantic world. Several Sephardic merchant families established themselves in the English colonies, including Barbados, Suriname, and later Jamaica, where many remained engaged in the sugar trade.49 Some Sephardic families followed leaders like David Cohen Nassi who founded new colonies under Dutch rule in the 1650s and 1660s. These colonies were mostly short-lived or occupied by other European powers as in the case of Cayenne, which became a French colony in 1664. Dutch authorities supported the efforts to establish new colonies and aided Sephardic merchants in their recruitment efforts in whichever way they could. Meanwhile, some Amsterdam Sephardic merchants began to trade alongside other merchants from Amsterdam in the supply and carrying trade with Barbados and Jamaica in the 1650s and 1660s.
The Sephardic Moment in Barbados and Other English Colonies
In the mid-seventeenth century, Barbados’s rather diverse small-scale plantation economy based on tobacco and cotton changed to a much larger-scale and more specialized sugar plantation economy based on slave labor.50 Englishmen and Frenchmen had settled several small islands in the eastern Caribbean region in the 1620s, and by the late 1640s, they were making significant investments in developing plantation economies. Barbados, founded as an English colony in 1627, engaged not only merchants from England but also Dutch merchants who provided the island with supplies and carried colonial produce to market in Amsterdam. In fact, Dutch merchants conducted a good deal of the carrying trade for the island, including tobacco, during the early decades of settlement and, if Richard Ligon is to be believed, Dutch merchants were instrumental in introducing sugar cultivation to the island during the mid-century.51 Although the “Myth of the Dutch” is now mostly discarded and actual active Dutch involvement in introducing sugar to Barbados is not evident, freight records in the Notarial Archives of Amsterdam’s Stadsarchief show a pattern of trade with Barbados in the 1650s that illustrates the sugar trade conducted with the island that involved Sephardic merchants from Amsterdam.52 The earliest written records referring to Jewish merchants resident in Barbados date from 1654, when a request was made to the Council of Barbados endorsed by the Dutch WIC to admit Jews from Brazil.53 It is conceivable that some Amsterdam Sephardic immigrants who had come from Brazil resided in Barbados before 1654.
Sugarcane had been introduced to Barbados in 1637, but until the mid-1640s, tobacco and cotton were still the primary export staple goods. During the 1640s these crops began to lose their appeal when a glut on the European market caused by the cultivation of tobacco and cotton grown in the English colonies in North America forced prices to drop. After 1645, when prices on the Amsterdam sugar market increased due to the downturn in production in Brazil, sugar as a plantation crop began to take hold in Barbados. Sugar production boomed in Barbados from the mid-1640s to mid-1650s, when the crop became the main source of wealth for English planters on the island.54 At the same time, the Dutch West India Company sent slaves to market in Barbados. Slaves purchased at the West Coast of Africa, but undeliverable in Brazil due to the planters’ uprising in 1645, were brought to the Lesser Antilles and Barbados, where they were sold on lenient credit terms.55 From 1653 onward when the WIC was on the brink of bankruptcy, the company also allowed private merchants to sell slaves in the English and French Caribbean islands, and freight records indicate that Sephardic merchants on Barbados took part in the enterprise, but how many or how frequently slave deliveries were made by Dutch or Sephardic merchants remains unclear. As Barbados’s planters experimented with sugar cultivation in the 1640s, it is likely that various elements of Brazil’s sugar plantation complex were transferred to Barbados with the help of Dutch and Sephardic merchants.56 The interests of Dutch and Sephardic merchants and Barbadian planters matched; planters depended on Dutch provisions, and Amsterdam’s Dutch and Sephardic merchants needed new commodity supplies for the growing sugar market in Europe and new markets for slaves when Brazil was lost.
The success in the supply and carrying trade of the Dutch and Sephardic merchants led to an attempt to curtail Dutch trade by implementing the First Trade and Navigation Act in 1651. The act dictated that all colonial staple goods be shipped to England in vessels owned and manned by Englishmen or English colonial merchants and that European goods could only be transported by English ships or those of the country where the goods were produced. This greatly reduced commercial opportunities for Dutch merchants as Amsterdam was a staple port and warehoused more than just the goods originating from the Dutch Republic. For Sephardic merchants the situation was different as they stood prepared to transfer their residency and business to the English colonies and, in effect, change their orbit of operations to London or Bristol and other port cities in Europe. Initially, the Trade and Navigation Acts were ignored, and the Dutch supply and carrying trade continued as planters preferred to trade with Dutch merchants and extended their welcome to Sephardic merchants who had begun to arrive from Brazil and Amsterdam.57 During the years 1653–58, merchants were able to circumvent the Trade and Navigation Act as the Cromwellian Protectorate tried to implement his Western Design for the development of English colonies in the Caribbean by engaging Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants. Subsequent acts imposed in 1660 and 1663 had more effect and eventually made merchants based in the Dutch Republic cut their close ties to Barbados.58 Subsequently, Dutch merchants turned their attention to the French colonies in the Caribbean, but after the French imposed their trade ordinances in 1664 and 1673, much the same happened. All along and of increasing importance to the Amsterdam sugar market was the separate supply that emerged from Sephardic merchants engaged in the intercolonial trade and the reexport trade from London. Eventually, the Amsterdam sugar market succumbed to mercantilist pressures, and toward the end of the seventeenth century, the city’s European sugar trade share had declined.59
Although the Dutch and Sephardic merchants linked to the Amsterdam staple market were disadvantaged by the passing of the 1651 Trade and Navigation Act, the impact was initially fairly limited as the English depended on the existing Atlantic trading network. But fairly soon, Oliver Cromwell realized that he had to tap into the Sephardic merchant network in order to carry out his plan for developing Barbados as a sugar colony as part of his Western Design. At the conclusion of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54) a concerted effort between Cromwell, as Lord Protector, and Menasseh ben Israel, as leader of the Amsterdam Sephardic community, was undertaken to accommodate the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community’s desire to establish residency in the English colonies. Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchant population had increased in number after the return from Brazil and sought to expand commercial opportunities. In 1655, Cromwell invited Menasseh to address Whitehall (House of Parliament) with the request to allow Jews to be admitted as legal residents of England and by extension the English colonies.60 Even though official admission by Parliament was denied after a special conference at Whitehall had been held, Cromwell proceeded with his own plan and assured London’s crypto-Jewish merchants that they could conduct religious services in the privacy of their homes and that they would receive his personal protection as residents and merchants of London.61 Over time, Sephardim who settled in London included merchants and commodity brokers engaged in trade with the Canary Islands, Barbados, and Jamaica, and some were involved in the sugar reexport trade with Amsterdam.62
Meanwhile, a growing number of Sephardic merchants from Brazil had relocated to Caribbean colonies, including Barbados.63 Thus, over time, pressure mounted to extend English citizen rights or denizen rights to Jewish merchants in the colonies in order to allow them to conduct trade legally under the dictates of Trade and Navigation Acts. These merchants included Sephardim from Dutch Brazil who had first returned to Amsterdam and thereafter settled in the English and French colonies.64 Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants remained actively involved in the Atlantic sugar business throughout the 1650s and 1660s, now also trading with both the French and English colonies. During Cromwell’s reign in the 1650s, many English Royalist merchants had collaborated with the Dutch Republic in commercial enterprise and viewed the role of Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants as crucial in the Atlantic sugar trade.65 In this relationship, the limitations and restrictions of the Trade and Navigation Acts were considered inconvenient but not an obstacle to trade as prominent merchants in London, among them crypto-Jewish merchants, requested denization papers for Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants in order to help develop the sugar trade with the English colonies and supply the London market. With the restoration of royal rule in England in 1660, this strategy continued, and most of the denization requests granted to Amsterdam and Barbados merchants were issued during the decade of the 1660s.66 Of the 190 grants of endenization made to Jews in the English colonies between 1660 and 1700, seventy-two were issued to residents of Barbados or to Jews of London or Jamaica who had previously settled in Barbados.67 The fee for applying for and obtaining endenization papers was substantial and thus likely not sought by poor immigrant merchants. Many of the well-to-do merchant families who obtained endenization letters lived or had contacts in London and other British colonies. From biographical information contained in the records it is evident that the Sephardic community comprised very few planters and that most Jewish freehold and lease-hold properties were merchant properties in Bridgetown.68
The Sephardic Moment in the Atlantic Sugar Trade
In the discussion of Jewish trade in the Atlantic world in the seventeenth century, Pieter Emmer and Seymour Drescher have referred to the start of a second Atlantic system in which the Spanish and Portuguese were replaced by the English and the French as the major colonial powers.69 In their opinion, the Sephardic Moment or Jewish Moment ended with the arrival and expansion of the second Atlantic system when the sheer volume of colonial trade demanded metropolitan trading companies to deliver the goods, and mercantilist policies dictated commercial relationships. In this transition, Pieter Emmer called the Sephardic merchants the “midwives” of the second European expansion system, spawning the transition but then being cast aside.70 Drescher contends that in the Dutch realm the Sephardim played a more durable role in the slave trade. He calls the Jewish merchants the “pegs and nails,” although not the “architects and master builders” in a world controlled by mercantilist principles.71 In light of the discussion so far this would seem a reasonable assessment, but I contend that the Sephardic merchant network sustained the sugar trade centered on Amsterdam for an extended period of time in the second half of the seventeenth century. The city’s fifty refineries in 1660 (and sixteen more in Rotterdam and Middelburg) processed more than half of all the refined sugar consumed in Europe at the time, and we know from the record that among the refiners were several converso and Sephardic merchants, some of whom had migrated to Amsterdam from Portugal or Spain or relocated to Amsterdam from Brazil.72 This group included leading merchants and bankers with familiar names like de Pinto, Pereira, Suasso, da Costa, Teixeira, Henriques, and de Mezquita (among others), and many of these family names reappear in the records of Barbados and Jamaica. Many of the families had a financial interest in the sugar trade and processing industry and were well integrated into Amsterdam’s financial establishment, which benefited the Atlantic sugar trade, including the sugar reexport trade from London to Amsterdam and the trade from Curaçao and Saint Eustatius. In fact, Amsterdam remained the main staple port for sugar and other commodities from the Caribbean region for distribution to the European market.73
After the fall of Dutch Brazil, Sephardic merchants formed new nodes and networks in the Atlantic by requesting and receiving denization papers and taking up residency in the English colonies and in London.74 Meanwhile, Amsterdam’s sugar trade and refining capacity increased significantly and experienced its boom years in the 1660s.75 Obviously, the Dutch sugar trade continued after Dutch Brazil was lost, and Amsterdam remained the primary processing and distribution center for the European market for a good part of the seventeenth century.76 As noted, among Amsterdam’s sugar merchants and refiners in the mid-seventeenth century were several converso merchants who had migrated to Amsterdam in the 1640s and 1650s and had traded sugar with Lisbon and Oporto prior to transferring their business to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam they aligned themselves with the Sephardic merchant community. The new arrivals included immigrants from Castile, where the Inquisition had once again become active in pursuing New Christian Portuguese merchants. These men were drawn to Amsterdam as new business opportunities occurred after a peace settlement was signed in 1648 between the Dutch Republic and Spain, ending the Eighty Years’ War. With the new impulse of capital, which was much needed after the collapse of Dutch Brazil, the Amsterdam Sephardic community experienced another economic boom that facilitated a reorientation. Although Dutch sugar refiners had tried to prevent members of the Portuguese or Hebrew Nation from entering the processing industry, at least four sugar refineries were operated by Sephardic merchants in the late 1650s. None stayed in the refining business for very long, and all but one of the Jewish sugar refiners had sold their business by the end of the 1660s.77 We assume that they foresaw that the more stringent English Trade and Navigation Acts of the 1660s and the French Navigation Act of 1664 would lead to a decline in the supply trade of raw sugar to the Amsterdam market.
Still, the intriguing question remains why the Amsterdam sugar refining capacity increased after 1650 and peaked in the 1660s when import of sugar from Dutch Brazil had declined and halted and Suriname had not begun to produce for the Dutch market yet. Beyond the scope of this chapter but worthy to be studied in the future is the role French sugar colonies played in the sugar trade with Amsterdam. It is well known that the Dutch engaged in trade with the French colonies and that Sephardic merchants residing in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne engaged in the sugar trade in the 1660s.78 In the meantime, Barbados experienced its sugar boom years, and the first wave of Jewish immigration to the English colony occurred in the 1650s. Thus, the Sephardic Moment extended during the decade of transition and western expansion of the Atlantic sugar trade from Dutch Brazil to the English and French colonies. During the sugar boom years in Barbados from the late 1640s until the1670s and for some time thereafter, English merchant elites engaged in partnerships with members of the Portuguese Nation and leaders of Amsterdam’s Sephardic congregation to transplant the sugar trade network centered on Sephardic merchants and facilitated their integration into the English sugar market by requesting and granting denization for Jewish residents. During the last quarter of the century, when the French sugar colonies developed but retained and processed their own sugar, and when Jamaica replaced Barbados as the major sugar supply source for the English market and implemented the commission trade system, the role of Sephardic merchants in the Caribbean sugar trade was reduced. Sephardic network merchants then began to reorient themselves toward Caribbean intercolonial trade conducted via transit ports. Meanwhile, Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants turned their attention to financing and marketing and became engaged in commodity brokerage and the London reexport trade. Their days in the sugar business were now behind them.
I thank our editors for their insightful and very useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.