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“T HE S PANISH LEVEL of appearance is high,” observed V. S. Pritchett in his volume The Spanish Temper . “Indeed, a certain regularity of feature, boldness of nose, and brilliance appear to have been standardized. The amount of Jewish blood is, one would think, high.” It is more than high. In the fifteenth century, the quarter-million Jews among Spain's four million inhabitants could not have avoided a “deep racial infiltration” (in Pritchett's words). Consciousness of that osmosis, possibly as much as the growing animosity of the “native” urban middle class, persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that this infidel minority was expendable. Initially, the Jews had been driven only from Andalusia. In 1492, the edict of their banishment was extended to the entire Spanish realm.
In earlier years, to escape persecution and intimidation, Jews had undergone baptism by the thousands. Yet it was precisely from the ranks of these conversos that men of Jewish birth later ascended to the most exalted echelons of state and church. Not a few became patrons of Christopher Columbus. Among them were Bishop Diego de Deza; Juan Cabrero, King Ferdinand's chamberlain; Alfonso de la Cabelleria, vice-chancellor of Aragon, whose brother and sister had been burned at the stake as marranos , or secretly professing Jews; and Luis de Santangel, grandson of a converso and member of a leading merchant banking family. It was Santangel, keeper of the privy purse and comptroller general of Aragon, who induced Isabella to give the Italian explorer his chance. Folklore notwithstanding, the queen hardly was obliged to pawn her jewels to finance the expedition. Santangel saw to that. In anticipation of a swift payoff for Spanish rule in the Indies, the comptroller general advanced Columbus a substantial part of the initial capital. There were yet additional sources of Jewish funds. It was on April 20, 1492, the day Columbus received authorization to equip his fleet, that King Ferdinand publicly announced the expulsion of the Jews and confiscation of their remaining property. Only a fraction of the booty could be assessed or collected before Columbus departed. By the time of his second journey, however, in 1493, the government had appropriated and auctioned off for the royal treasury important quantities of Jewish real estate and chattels, gold and silver utensils and jewels, Torah mantles and silk table covers. The loot exceeded 6 million maravedis. This time Columbus departed in style.
Among the ninety-odd men who sailed in the first expedition were several probable marranos, among them Alfonso de la Calle, the second mate; Maestro Bernal, the physician; Rodrigo Sanchez, the comptroller; Luis de Torres, the interpreter. Torres actually remained in the New World. Settling in Cuba, where he believed himself safe from the Inquisition, he set a precedent for other baptized Jews. Among those who followed were at least a hundred who almost certainly observed their ancestral religion in secret. Indeed, the emigration of Jewish converts did not go unremarked, or unsuspected. In 1518, the Crown forbade converso settlement in the Spanish colonies altogether. A year later it authorized the Church to transplant the Inquisition to overseas territories. Yet by then the ban worked only fitfully. With the Spanish “temper” rather too thoroughly Judaized, thousands of additional Sephardim—Jews of Iberian ancestry—continued to make their way to the New World. Many earned their livelihoods as they had in Europe, as merchants and artisans, importers and exporters, physicians and engineers, even as high officials in the colonial administration.
Moreover, with immigration to New Spain quickening in the latter sixteenth century, the largest numbers of Sephardim no longer came directly from the homeland. In the aftermath of the 1492 expulsion decree, Portugal became the initial sanctuary for some one hundred fifty thousand of the Jewish exiles. Five years later, the Portuguese monarch ordered them forcibly converted, and many Jews accepted this fate. Perhaps thirty or forty thousand remained, ostensibly as baptized Christians. The departing majority joined other thousands of Jews who earlier had fled Spain for refuge elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. Even the converts who stayed on lived under a cloud, distrusted as marranos. The suspicion was justified. Thousands of Portuguese New Christians almost certainly were secretly professing Jews. Among these, too, many were desperate to achieve a fresh lease on life in the New World. On Pedro Alvares Cabral's expedition of discovery to Brazil in 1500, the converso Gaspar de Gama served as interpreter. The converso Fernão de Noronha became Brazil's first governor, in 1502. He was joined by other conversos in such numbers that commercial enterprise in Brazil remained extensively in Sephardic hands for the ensuing two decades.
Thus, by the mid-seventeenth century, it was essentially Sephardim in the provinces of Bahía and Pernambuco who owned and operated the largest numbers of Brazil's sugar refineries. Even then, however, for all their dynamism and financial success, the quality of their lives was less than enviable. As New Christians, they were under continual surveillance. Each year twenty or thirty of them were arrested as suspected marranos and deported to Lisbon for trial by the Inquisition. Their children were dispatched to exile in disease-ridden African islands. “Oh, it is indeed time that the Lord would right the wrongs of Israel,” lamented Solomon ben Verga in chronicling these episodes, “[for this] persecution was one of the most barbarous and fiendish our people has ever endured.” Whatever their opportunity for economic gain, the Sephardim of Latin America were a timorous community, never certain when they might be denounced and stripped of their property, their freedom, their children—their lives. Their hope for a renewed future in the New World would always remain precarious under the rule of hairshirt Catholic monarchies.
By this time, however, other alternatives existed. The Netherlands was preeminent among them. Since winning their independence from Spain in 1561, the Protestant Dutch had opened their borders to refugees from Catholic oppression. In 1593, the first shipload of Portuguese marranos was allowed refuge in Amsterdam, and by the end of the seventeenth century a solid Jewish community was established there. If the Jewish newcomers were not initially awarded full civil equality, they were permitted at least to reside in physical security, and to practice their religion in their own synagogues. Whatever their own Reformed Church's Calvinist intolerance, the Dutch were first and foremost mercantilists. They sensed the potential usefulness of Jewish traders and financiers. By 1612 there were ten “Jew brokers” among the three hundred members of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Accordingly, by 1621 a handful of Sephardim became organizers and important shareholders of the Dutch West India Company. Undergirded in economic security, Holland's Sephardic Jewry within fifty years developed into the principal focus of European Jewish intellectual and spiritual life, a “Dutch Jerusalem” that functioned as mentor for Sephardic Jews, professing or secret, in Western Europe and the New World alike.
That influence overseas followed in the wake of the Dutch West India Company. Established as early as 1620, the great shipping and trading corporation soon had its vessels preying on Spanish and Portuguese commerce, occupying Caribbean islands, claiming a share of Brazil's sugar and redwood traffic. In 1630, finally, the Dutch laid siege to Recife, capital of the Brazilian province of Pernambuco and the world's single largest source of refined sugar. To weaken resistance, they pledged civil equality for all of Pernambuco's inhabitants, “whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews.” Recife's crypto-Jews were listening. Eagerly they welcomed and heartily many cooperated with the triumphant Dutch expeditionary force. Indeed, the prospect of better times under the Netherlands flag not only lured Recife's marranos out of hiding but attracted Jews from Amsterdam itself, from England, from the Ottoman Balkans, from Central and Eastern Europe. Together in Recife, they proceeded to organize the first openly proclaimed Jewish congregation in the New World, to bring over an Amsterdam rabbi, to construct a synagogue and a kosher abattoir, to open Hebrew schools for their children. By mid-century, Jews, numbering perhaps fifteen hundred souls, a third of Recife's white population, enjoyed fuller rights in Dutch Brazil than they did in Holland itself.
The idyll did not last. As early as 1645, Portugal launched a reconquest expedition, and for nearly a decade Recife endured a crisis of siege and hunger. In January 1654, the colony surrendered. General Francisco Barreto de Menenzes, the Portuguese commander, was an enlightened man. His surprisingly generous terms included a full pardon to all who had engaged in “rebellion” against the Crown of Portugal, including the Jews, with an assurance of respectful treatment if they stayed on. But the promise was meaningless for the Sephardim. Many had been marranos, and General Barreto was under orders to introduce the Inquisition in Pernambuco. “In matters subject to the Holy Inquisition I cannot interfere,” he regretfully informed Recife's Sephardim. Within three months of the Portuguese reconquest, the entirety of Recife's Jewish population departed. Fourteen of their sixteen refugee vessels sailed for the Netherlands.
For the remaining two shiploads, the Dutch West Indies appeared a useful alternative. Sephardic families already had made their appearance in the Windward Islands and in the Leeward Islands of Saint Eustatius, Saba, and Saint Martin, in Aruba and Curaçao. Indeed, Curaçao, a substantial naval base and commercial entrepôt, soon became the hub of Jewish settlement in the Netherlands Antilles. By 1715 its Jewish population of importers, plantation owners, and slave traders numbered perhaps two thousand, a third of Curaçao's white population and the single largest identified Jewish community in the Western Hemisphere. Enjoying the solicitude of the powerful mother congregation in Amsterdam, Curaçao's Sephardim eventually would help nurture yet another fledgling Jewish settlement in the Dutch New World.