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Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century pp 31–75Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Development of the Sephardic Jewish Sugar Trade Network

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Abstract

By 1650, Brazil was the largest producer of sugar in the Atlantic and Caribbean region and an offspring of the plantation-slave system of sugar production introduced by the Portuguese on Madeira and São Tomé. The Brazilian sugar production system developed swiftly during the early seventeenth century when Amsterdam became the main center of sugar refining and distribution for the European market. From 1630 to 1654, Northeast Brazil came under Dutch colonial rule during which the Sephardic merchant community gained a most prominent position in the sugar trade establishing a foothold in the Caribbean region when sugar production expanded to include French and English colonies. Dutch rule ended in 1654, at which time Sephardic merchants migrated to nearby emerging Caribbean sugar colonies or returned to Amsterdam.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, volume 1 (Chapman and Hall, London, 1949–50); Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Carnell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1970), pp. 96–97. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Elisabeth Sifton Books, Viking, New York, 1985), J.H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 1989), pp. 31–83; Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2004), Christopher Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550–1630 (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2008), Daniel Strum, The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands, 1595–1630 (Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2013), and Tsugitaka Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2015).

  2. 2.

    Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, London, 2016), Chapter 2, pp. 33–73.

  3. 3.

    Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) p. 20. See Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015) pp. 16–17, for a detail discussion about the origin and spread of sugar cultivation and production. Sugar cultivation refers to cultivating the sugar plant, while sugar production refers to cultivation, processing, and trade.

  4. 4.

    Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Five plants that transformed mankind (Harper and Row, New York, 1985). See also Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 19–30.

  5. 5.

    Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983), pp. 77–102; Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam, pp. 18–19. The first report of sugar production in Persia came from Arab geographical accounts which refer to Khuzestan as the major sugar producing area and in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq.

  6. 6.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 33–34; Deerr, The History of Sugar (1949–50), pp. 68–70; Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985), pp. 23–30. See also Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015), Chapter 3.

  7. 7.

    Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015), pp. 51–73. Columbus is known to have introduced puri to Haiti from the Canary Islands in 1494, and thus, as a New World crop, sugarcane is of rather recent date.

  8. 8.

    Of the total number of 65 sugar refineries in al-Fustat in the early thirteenth century, 7 were owned by the sultan, 21 by amirs or local rulers, and 13 by merchants. (See Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015), pp. 74–75.)

  9. 9.

    The Cairo Geniza documents refer to a collection of documents found at the Geniza of Ben Ezra Synagogue as well as discarded documents buried in the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo and a number of related texts bought in the Cairo antiquities market in the later nineteenth century and date from 870 AD to as late as 1880.

  10. 10.

    The cataloging, classifying, investigating, and publishing of the documents were done by S.D. Gotein. His main work, A Mediterranean Society, in six volumes, was completed between 1967 and 1993. A separate publication, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton University Press) appeared in 1973. According to Goitein, sugar factories near the sugar fields were managed in partnership sharing in profits and losses and trade was conducted with other merchants overseas from Egypt to the Maghreb along the coast of North Africa. See for a more detailed description, Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015), p. 65, pp. 74–77.

  11. 11.

    Sugar production and trade depended on capital investment since the second half of fifteenth century, and almost all the sugar estates in Andalusia and the Algarve, as well as the Atlantic Islands, were financed by Venetian and Genoese traders. Granada became the main distribution center for sugar in Western Europe with the investment of Italian merchants in the early fifteenth century. See William D. Phillips Jr., “Sugar in Iberia,” in Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons (2004), pp. 27–41; Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015).

  12. 12.

    Jonathan I. Israel, Empires and Entrepots: Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (Hambledon Press, London, 1990), pp. 422–423, p. 427. See also Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (Yale University Press, New Haven, London, 2009), pp. 112–113, pp. 205–208.

  13. 13.

    Hobhouse, Seeds of Change (1985), pp. 44–46.

  14. 14.

    Jason W. Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 23, no. 3, 2000, pp. 409–433.

  15. 15.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 16–17.

  16. 16.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 39–40.

  17. 17.

    Donald J. Harreld, “Atlantic Sugar and Antwerp’s Trade with Germany in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 7, nos. 1–2, 2003, pp. 148–163.

  18. 18.

    Matthew Edel, “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition,” Caribbean Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 1969, pp. 24–44; p. 27. The first refinery in Amsterdam was built in 1577, one year after Antwerp was first attacked by Spanish forces. By 1620, Amsterdam had more than 20 refineries.

  19. 19.

    Ebert, Between Empires (2008), Chapter 3, pp. 39–59.

  20. 20.

    Alberto Vieira, “The Sugar Economy and the Canaries, 1450–1650,” Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons (2004), pp. 42–84.

  21. 21.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 50–55;

  22. 22.

    Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 1985), pp. 7–15. Flemish investors had purchased land and developed plantations early on. See J.G. Everaert, “The Flemish Sugar Connection: Vlamingen in de Atlantische suiker economie,” Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis, vol. 84, 2001, pp. 257–264. Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy,” 2000, pp. 416–17. Annual sugar output increased from about 80 tons to over 1000 tons between 1456 and 1494. See also Jeroen Puttevils, Merchants and Trading in the Sixteenth Century: The Golden Age of Antwerp (Routledge, London, New York, 2015), p. 39.

  23. 23.

    Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy,” 2000, p. 417. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), Figure 4.2, p. 51.

  24. 24.

    Sato, Sugar in The Social Life of Medieval Islam (2015). Although we have no direct evidence of a Sephardic sugar trade network extending from Italy to Portugal, we assume that through multiple trade relations between, for instance Livorno and Lisbon, Jewish sugar merchants also participated. Sephardic merchants in the seventeenth century in Amsterdam maintained close relationship with Livorno Jewish merchants. See Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers (2009), pp. 210–214, and pp. 215–218.

  25. 25.

    In 1575, there were at least 28 sugar refineries in operation in Antwerp. See Puttevils, Merchants and Trading in the Sixteenth Century (2015), p. 39.

  26. 26.

    Harreld, “Atlantic Sugar and Antwerp’s Trade,” 2003.

  27. 27.

    Harreld, “Atlantic Sugar and Antwerp’s Trade,” 2003, pp. 151–155.

  28. 28.

    H. van der Wee, “Structural changes in European long-distance trade, and particularly in the re-export trade from south to north, 1350–1750,” in J.D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World 1350–1750 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), pp. 14–33.

  29. 29.

    Alfons Thijs, “De geschiedenis van de suikernijverheid te Antwerpen (16de-19de eeuw): een terreinverkenning,” Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis, 62, nos. 1–2, 1979, pp. 23–50; Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy,” 2000, p. 416. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Ebert, Between Empires (2008); Jeroen Puttevils, “‘Eating the bread out of their mouth’: Antwerp’s export trade and generalized institutions, 1544–5,” Economic History Review, vol. 68, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1339–1364. Puttevils documents that in the mid-sixteenth century, sugar and spices, bought and sold as transit goods, were the second largest category of goods exported from Antwerp after woolen and textile products. Most of the sugar was exported to Northern Germany and the Baltics. Iberian merchants were the fourth largest merchant group after merchants from the Low Countries, Germany, and France, and most of the sugar, in transit, was sold to German and Low Country merchants.

  30. 30.

    Ernst Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators,” Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West (2001), pp. 485–500; Jonathan Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800,” Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001), pp. 3–17. See also Mordehay Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlement in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Gefen Publishing House Ltd., London, 2002).

  31. 31.

    Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators,” p. 487. Cecil Roth maintained that Menasseh Ben Israel was born on Madeira.

  32. 32.

    Schwartz, Sugar Planters in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), pp. 266–267, comments on the claim that in the early seventeenth century, most of the Brazilian engenhos were owned by New Christians but that this was exaggerated. Of 150 New Christians mentioned in Inquisition records from Bahia between 1620 and 1660, about 20 percent were mill owners or sugarcane farmers. See also Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (Columbia University Press, New York, 1960), who suggests that members of the Noronha group of New Christians, who were given the first Donatario in Brazil in the early sixteenth century, had introduced the sugarcane from Madeira and São Tomé to Brazil (p. 9). The same source also suggests that Duarte Coelho, a New Christian and recipient of a Donatario in Pernambuco, brought skilled workmen and trained foremen from Madeira and São Tomé to Brazil and that most of them were New Christians and Jews who tried to escape the increased activities of the Inquisition on Madeira and São Tomé (p. 10).

  33. 33.

    Hobhouse, Seeds of Change (1985), pp. 54–55; See, in particular, Sidney Greenfield, “Madeira and the Beginnings of New World Sugar Cane Cultivation and Plantation Slavery,” in Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (Academy of Sciences, New York, 1977).

  34. 34.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 58–61.

  35. 35.

    By the mid-sixteenth century, São Tomé sugar accounted for 59 percent of all of Antwerp’s sugar imports. See Harreld, “Atlantic Sugar and Antwerp’s Trade,” 2003, p. 151. See also Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), Figure 4.2, p. 51.

  36. 36.

    In 1493, the Portuguese crown had sent some 2000 Jewish children to São Tomé in the hope and expectation that separation from the parents would assure a Christian rather than Jewish upbringing. The children were forcibly removed from their parents, hastily baptized, and then sent to the Portuguese island colony. See Moshe Liba (editor), Jewish Child Slaves in São Tomé (New Zealand Jewish Chronicle Publications, Wellington, 2003).

  37. 37.

    Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea (2007), pp. 22–23; Robert Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora: The Jews of the São Tomé Island,” in Raymond P. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson (eds.), The Expulsion of the Jews 1492 and After (New York, 1994), pp. 73–87. Within a year, only 600 of the 2000 children remained alive.

  38. 38.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 58–61; C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (Hutchinson, London, 1969).

  39. 39.

    Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, 1470–1655 (University of Michigan Microfilms, Ann Arbor, 1971).

  40. 40.

    Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550–1670,” in Schwartz (ed.) Tropical Babylons (2004), pp. 158–200; p. 161. In 1570, around 60 engenhos were in operation; by 1585 the number had increased to 120 and to 192 in 1612. By 1629, on the eve of Dutch capture, the colony had 346 engenhos.

  41. 41.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 70–77.

  42. 42.

    Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian labor and new world plantations: European demands and Indian responses in northeast Brazil,” American Historical Review, 83, 1978, pp. 43–79.

  43. 43.

    Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (1989), pp. 73–79.

  44. 44.

    Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy,” 2000, pp. 409–433.

  45. 45.

    J.W. IJzerman, ed. “Amsterdamsche bevrachtings contracten, 1519–1602, Deel 1, De vaart op Spanje en Portugual,” in Economisch-Historiesch Jaarboek, 17, (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1931), pp. 163–291.

  46. 46.

    Christopher Ebert, “Dutch Trade with Brazil before the Dutch West India Company, 1587–1621,” in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2013), pp. 49–75; 52–57.

  47. 47.

    Everaert, “The Flemish Sugar Connection,” 2001, pp. 257–264.

  48. 48.

    Ebert, “Dutch Trade with Brazil,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2013), pp. 57–60.

  49. 49.

    See Jonathan I. Israel, “The Changing Role of the Dutch Sephardim in International Trade, 1595–1715,” in J. Michman (ed.), Dutch Jewish History. Proceedings of the Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Jerusalem, 1984), pp. 31–51, and, Wim Klooster, “Sephardic Migration and the Growth of European Long-Distance Trade,” Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–132.

  50. 50.

    Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam (London, 2000), p. 106; In Jessica Roitman, The Same but Different? Inter-cultural Trade and the Sephardim, 1595–1640 (Brill, Leiden, 2011), we follow three elite Portuguese merchants in Amsterdam during the early part of the seventeenth century. The three merchants were well but differently connected in trade network encompassing New Christians, Sephardim, Dutch, and Flemish merchants, born in Portugal but living most of their lives abroad, in Brazil, Antwerp, and Amsterdam where they may or may not change their religious identity but where they associate with Dutch merchants quite openly. Different trade partnerships develop which included to a greater or a lesser extent merchants from other nations.

  51. 51.

    James C. Boyajian, “New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade, 1550–1750: Two Centuries of Development of the Atlantic Economy,” Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (eds.), The Jews, and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800 (European Expansion and Global Interaction, vol. 2, New York, Oxford, 2001), pp. 471–84. Herbert I. Bloom, “A Study of Brazilian Jewish History, 1623–54, based chiefly upon the findings of the late Samuel Oppenheim,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 33, 1934, pp. 43–125. The sum of evidence from various sources gives a total of 59 mills being owned and operated by New Christians by 1630 on the eve of Dutch occupation. Another nine mills belonged to Sephardic owners in Brazil around 1645 during the Dutch occupation and colonization.

  52. 52.

    Arnold Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (American Jewish Historical Society, New York, 1954). See also Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960).

  53. 53.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 6–7.

  54. 54.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), p. 6.

  55. 55.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 8–10.

  56. 56.

    The Inquisition in Portugal was installed in 1538.

  57. 57.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), p. 32.

  58. 58.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 12–32.

  59. 59.

    See Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea (2007), pp. 157–158.

  60. 60.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 36–42; Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in early modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1997).

  61. 61.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), p. 40.

  62. 62.

    Two Rabbis from Amsterdam Menasseh ben Israel and Isaac Aboab de Fonseca—had direct links with Brazil. Menasseh ben Israel had been born in Madeira in 1610 from where the family moved to Amsterdam during the years of Truce (1609–1621); see Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel, Rabbi, Printer and Diplomat (Philadelphia, 1934). In the 1630s and 1640s, Menasseh had been involved in trade with Dutch Brazil, where his brother, Ephyriam Soeiro, had established himself as a sugar merchant. Isaac Aboab de Fonseca was born in Portugal in 1605 as Simao da Fonseca. His parents were Marranos and moved to Amsterdam in 1612 where they reconverted to Judaism. In 1623, he was appointed Rabbi for Beth Israel in Amsterdam. In 1642, he moved to Brazil and became Rabbi at Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue in Recife, Pernambuco.

  63. 63.

    Wim Klooster, “An Overview of Dutch Trade with the Americas,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 365–383; pp. 368–370. According to a report submitted by a Dutch visitor to Brazil (Ottsen, “Journael van de reis naar Zuid-Amerika, 98–106,” Deductie), sent to the States General’s Office in the Hague in 1622, one-half or two-third of all the vessels engaged in the sugar trade with Brazil were Dutch vessels and an approximate same share of sugar traded was traded by Amsterdam Dutch and Sephardic merchants who had factors in Portugal. See Ebert, Between Empires, (2008), p. 50, for the quote of the report. Ebert (2008), pp. 70–75, sheds some doubts on the report and states that the Notarial Records or at least the collection indexed and analyzed by Koen and published in Studia Rosenthaliana (1967–2001) composed of freight records of Portuguese Jews are biased.

  64. 64.

    Klooster, “An Overview of Dutch Trade with the Americas,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), p. 369.

  65. 65.

    Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (KITLV Press, Leiden, 1998), p. 35. Ebert, Between Empires (2008), pp. 12–16.

  66. 66.

    Koen et al., “Notarial Records,” II, no. 2, 1968, see Boyajian, “New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade,” Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe (2001), p. 476, and, Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800 (Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford, 2001), pp. 439–470.

  67. 67.

    Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2003), pp. 85–90. See also Odette Vlessing, “Samuel Pallache: Earliest History of Amsterdam Portuguese Jews,” in Dutch Jewish History, vol. 3 (The Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, Jerusalem, 1993).

  68. 68.

    Jonathan Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800,” in Kagan and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas (2009), pp. 8–11; Odette Vlessing, “The Economic Influence of the Portuguese Jews on the Dutch Golden Age,” in Ilruolo Economica delle Minoranza in Europa, secc. XIII–XV, 2000, pp. 303–324; see also Jonathan I. Israel, Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy, and the Jews, 1585–1713 (The Hambledon Press, London, 1996), pp. 417–447.

  69. 69.

    C. Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange (Ashgate, Aldershot UK and Burlington VT, 2006).

  70. 70.

    Catia Antunes, “The Commercial Relationship between Amsterdam and the Portuguese Salt-Exporting Ports: Aveiro and Setubal, 1580–1715,” in The Articulation of Portuguese Salt with Worldwide Routes: Past and New Consumption Trends (University of Porto, Porto, 2008) pp. 161–181.

  71. 71.

    Ebert, Between Empires (2008), Chapter 3, pp. 39–45.

  72. 72.

    Ebert, Between Empires (2008), Chapter 4, pp. 61–83.

  73. 73.

    Miriam Bodian, “The Formation of the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora,” in Jane Gerber (ed.), The Jews in the Caribbean (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), pp. 17–27.

  74. 74.

    James C. Boyajian, “New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade,” Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe (2001), pp. 471–484. Boyajian (p. 473) gives as example Manuel Dias Henriques arriving in Amsterdam during the early seventeenth-century initial phase of establishing the community, and his cousin Miguel Dias de Santiago, who had settled in Antwerp. Both had experience in the sugar trade of Brazil between 1595 and 1619, and they established direct trade relationships with their kinsmen in Brazil to arrange for shipments of sugar from Brazil directly to Amsterdam. Several other merchants in Amsterdam developed direct trade relationships in the early seventeenth century; see Koen et al., “Notarial Records,” III, no. 1, 1969.

  75. 75.

    James C. Boyajian, “New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade,” Chapter 22, pp. 471–484; Ernst Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators and Traders in the Portuguese Atlantic, 1450–1800,” Chapter 23, pp. 484–490; and Pieter Emmer, “The Jewish Moment and the Two Expansion Systems in the Atlantic, 1580–1650,” Chapter 24, pp. 491–515, in Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West (2001).

  76. 76.

    Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550–1670,” in Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons (2004), pp. 158–200; 173–175.

  77. 77.

    James C. Boyajian, “New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade, 1550–1750: Two Centuries of Development of the Atlantic Economy,” Chapter 22, pp. 471–484; Ernst Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators and Traders in the Portuguese Atlantic, 1450–1800,” Chapter 23, pp. 484–490; and Pieter Emmer, “The Jewish Moment and the Two Expansion Systems in the Atlantic, 1580–1650, Chapter 24, pp. 491–515, in Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West (2001).

  78. 78.

    J. Matterne, “Antwerpen als verdeel en veredelings centrum van specerijen en suiker van the late 15e eeuw to the 17e eeuw” in Europe aan tafel: een verkenning van onze eet en tafel cultuur (Antwerpen, 1988), pp. 48–61.

  79. 79.

    Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market (2006), pp. 100–138.

  80. 80.

    Vlessing, “The Economic Influence of the Portuguese Jews on the Dutch Golden Age,” 2000, 303–324, based on her research published in 1995, The Portuguese-Jewish Merchant Community in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam, in C. Lesger, and L. Noordegraaf (eds.), Entrepreneurs in Early Modern Times: Merchants and Industrialists within the Orbit of the Dutch Staple Market (the Hague, 1995), pp. 223–243. See also Jonathan I. Israel, “The Economic Contribution of Dutch Sephardi Jewry to Holland’s Golden Age, 1595–1713,” in Israel, Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (The Hambledon Press, London, 1990), Chapter 15, pp. 417–447.

  81. 81.

    Ebert, Between Empires (2008), pp. 46–51; Jonathan Israel, “Spain, The Spanish Embargoes, and the Struggle for the Mastery of World Trade, 1585–1660,” in Israel, Empires and Entrepots (1990), Chapter 8, pp. 189–212; pp. 197–201. Some of the trade was diverted to the smaller northern coastal ports Aveiro and Viana, where evading the embargoes was easiest.

  82. 82.

    Israel recognizes that the international political scene had a great influence on the structure and character of Sephardic merchants’ strategies in dealing with trade opportunities. He divides the period from 1595 to 1648 into three distinct periods: 1595–1608, the phase of economic warfare in the Eighty Years’ War ; 1609–1621, the years of Truce with Spain; and, 1621–1648, with the resumption of war with Spain and colonial strive with Portugal over control of Brazil. I will maintain this periodization for the purpose of the discussion of sugar trade.

  83. 83.

    Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market (2006), Chapter 4, pp. 139–180.

  84. 84.

    Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans (2000), among others referred to above.

  85. 85.

    Vlessing, “The Economic Influence of the Portuguese Jews,” in Lesger and Noordegraaf (eds.), Entrepreneurs in Early Modern Times (1995), p. 304.

  86. 86.

    Vlessing, “The Economic Influence of the Portuguese Jews,” in Lesger and Noordegraaf (eds.), Entrepreneurs in Early Modern Times (1995), 304, footnote 7.

  87. 87.

    In 1622, another sugar cargo was seized and resolved in a similar way. See also Odette Vlessing, “New Light on the Earliest History of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jews,” in J. Michman (ed.), Dutch Jewish History (Jerusalem, 1993), pp. 43–75.

  88. 88.

    See also Israel, “The Economic Contribution of the Dutch Sephardi Jewry,” in Israel, Empires and Entrepots (1990), p. 421. Israel, in Dutch Primacy (1989), marks the period from 1595 when the first Crypto-Jews (Marranos) settled in Amsterdam until 1648 (the end of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain) as the period of the heydays of Jewish commerce.

  89. 89.

    For a detailed description and analysis of the Notarial Archives, see Chap. 4.

  90. 90.

    E.M. Koen, “The Earliest Sources Relating to the Portuguese Jews in the City Archives of Amsterdam up to 1620,” Studia Rosenthaliana , vol. IV, 1970, pp. 25–42. Israel, in Dutch Primacy (1989), marks the period from 1595 when the first Crypto -Jews (Marranos) settled in Amsterdam until 1648 (the end of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain) as the period of the heydays of commerce.

  91. 91.

    See Roitman, The Same but Different (2011) for a detailed biography on Manuel Rodrigues Vega, pp. 40–43. Roitman maintains that many Portuguese merchants who participated in trade in Amsterdam were New Christian and that among the prominent merchant families some did and others did not reconvert to Judaism. The biographies of other prominent Portuguese merchants in Amsterdam demonstrate that it was not only religious practice that defined the Sephardim in Amsterdam, but that many of the early migrants settling in Amsterdam foremost identified with the Portuguese community through ethnic identity. See also David Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity among ‘Men of the Nation’: Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, vol. 15, no. 1, Fall 2008, pp. 32–65.

  92. 92.

    Dutch merchants referring to merchants from the Low Countries, which may include Flemish merchants before the embargoes imposed on Antwerp at the end of the sixteenth century take effect. By the end of the sixteenth century, trade with Flanders ports and Antwerp becomes problematic and Dutch merchants are primarily merchants from among port cities in the Dutch Republic and Southern Netherlands merchants who had relocated to Amsterdam. See Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market (2006).

  93. 93.

    Roitman, The Same but Different (2011).

  94. 94.

    Roitman, The Same but Different (2011), pp. 247–251.

  95. 95.

    Roitman, The Same but Different (2011), pp. 23, 247–255.

  96. 96.

    Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market (2006), pp. 152–72.

  97. 97.

    Roitman, The Same but Different (2011), p. 23, pp. 43–47, and, pp. 251–255.

  98. 98.

    Roitman, The Same but Different (2011), pp. 23, 47–51, and 251–255.

  99. 99.

    Wim Klooster, “An Overview of Dutch Trade with the Americas, 1600–1800,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 365–383; p. 369.

  100. 100.

    For a brief overview, see Bruno Feitler, “Jews and New Christians in Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654,” in Kagan and Morgan (eds.) Atlantic Diasporas (2009), pp. 123–151. See also Henk den Heijer, “The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 77–112. The Charter of the Dutch West India Company (dated June 3, 1621) makes it very clear that trade protection is the primary purpose of establishing the trade company. The opening paragraph reads: “Be it known, that we knowing the prosperity of these countries (i.e. the Dutch Republic ), and the welfare of their inhabitants depends principally on navigation and trade, which in all former times by the said Countries were carried on happily, and with a great blessing to all countries and kingdoms; and desiring that the aforesaid inhabitants should not only be preserved in their former navigation, traffic, and trade, but also that their trade may be increased as much as possible in special conformity to the treaties, alliances, leagues, and covenants for traffic and navigation formerly made with other princes, republics and people, which we give them to understand must be in all parts punctually kept and adhered to.”

  101. 101.

    Ebert, “Dutch trade with Brazil,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 49–75, and Willem Klooster, “An Overview of Dutch Trade with the Americas,” in the same volume, pp. 368–370.

  102. 102.

    Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1969), p. 33.

  103. 103.

    J.F. Jameson, Willem Usselincx, Founder of the Dutch and Swedish West India Company (New York, 1887). Usselincx had initially considered making Brazil into a settlement colony but this did not happen for various reasons; the most important being that the WIC was erected as a military arm of the Dutch Republic in the context of the Eighty Years’ War . Usselincx had regarded colonies primarily as suppliers of raw materials for the mother country and in mercantile terms as exclusive export markets for manufactured products. He therefore advised that no colonial industries or crafts should be allowed to develop and urged emigration of agricultural workers rather than skilled workmen and artisans. He suggested that Germany and the Baltic States could perhaps supply the farm workers necessary for settlement of Brazil.

  104. 104.

    The quote derived from Arnold Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (American Jewish Historical Society, New York, 1954), pp. 1–2.

  105. 105.

    Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself,” in Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons (2004), pp. 166–169.

  106. 106.

    Jonathan I. Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2007).

  107. 107.

    Wiznitzer , Jews in Colonial Brazil, 1960, pp. 73–81. In 1638, Manoel Mendes de Crasto led a group of 200 Jews on two boats from Amsterdam to Recife. From the records it appears that the expedition was prepared well in advance and that as early as 1636 the Dutch authorities were aware of Mendes plans to found a colony in Brazil of the Hebrew Nation.

  108. 108.

    See Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth Century America (Cornell University Press, Rochester, 2009), p. 200.

  109. 109.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, (1960), p. 81.

  110. 110.

    Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators and Traders,” in Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe (2001), pp. 485–500; pp. 491–492.

  111. 111.

    Meanwhile and in part because of military adventures along the West Coast of Africa in the early 1640s, the WIC had lost money and motivation after the Eighty Years’ War ended in 1648 and peace with Spain was restored. Consequently, the WIC ceased to be effective in managing affairs in Dutch Brazil.

  112. 112.

    See Figure 6.1, “Sugar Exports and Slave Imports, Dutch Brazil, 1630–1651,” in Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself,” in Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons (2004), p. 169.

  113. 113.

    C.R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1957), pp. 148–49.

  114. 114.

    Establishing exact figures on resident populations of Dutch Brazil has proven difficult. See Miriam Bodian, “The Formation of the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora,” in Jane Gerber, The Jews in the Caribbean, p. 25, footnote 29.

  115. 115.

    Wim Klooster, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: the Founders of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America,” in Kagan and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas, pp. 35–36.

  116. 116.

    Apparently, most of the records were destroyed during the reorganization of the Company in 1674; however, a substantial number of documents dating from 1630 to 1654, particularly the Brazilian records of the Zeeland chamber, were preserved; see Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, Appendix IV, Bibliographic Note, pp. 291–293. Eighteen Jews of Amsterdam had subscribed 36,100 guilders by 1623; the total sum subscribed to the company in 1628 was 7108, 106 guilders according to Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam (1937), pp. 126–127. See also Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), p. 48.

  117. 117.

    From the list of “participants,” for the years 1623–1626, Amsterdam Jews subscribed 36,100 guilders to the original capital of the company but that began to decline after 1654. See Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam (1937), pp. 126–127. Subscriber lists dating from 1656, 1658, and 1671 show a fairly low rate of participation which never exceeded 10 percent of the total. On the other hand, the number of Jewish depositors with the Amsterdam Exchange Bank increased (see Jonathan I. Israel, “the Economic Contribution of Dutch Sephardi Jewry to Holland’s Golden Age, 1595–1713,” in Israel, Empires and Entrepots (The Hambledon Press, London 1990), pp. 417–447; Table 14, p. 422). In a grant of privileges issued to the Jews by the WIC to settle in New Amsterdam, Menasseh ben Israel—the Amsterdam Rabbi who helped the returning Jews from Brazil in 1654 to resettle in London, Barbados, and New Amsterdam—argued that in view of the great fortune which they have invested in the Company, they should be given the right to settle in the new colony.

  118. 118.

    As noted, Usselinx envisioned settlement colonies but the military arm of the WIC prevailed.

  119. 119.

    Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (1957), p. 84.

  120. 120.

    Schwartz, Tropical Babylons (1989), p. 169.

  121. 121.

    Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (1957), pp. 159–203.

  122. 122.

    David Grant Smith, “Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of the Brazil Company, 1649,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 54, no. 2, May 1974, pp. 233–259.

  123. 123.

    Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (1957), p. 156. Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Van Gorcum, Assen, Maastricht, 1985). Chapters 11 and 12 have details on expenses, income, and losses of Dutch enterprises in Brazil.

  124. 124.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 99–100.

  125. 125.

    Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (1957), pp. 241–243.

  126. 126.

    Wim Klooster, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs,” in Kagan and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas (2009), pp. 34–36.

  127. 127.

    In 1657, 27 Jews, among other passengers aboard a Dutch vessel, were captured on their way to Barbados by an Irish privateer in the Spanish service. Later, reportedly, an estimate of 30 Jewish families of “Dutch extraction from Brazil” were living on the island. See Klooster, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs,” in Kagan and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas (2009), pp. 37–38.

  128. 128.

    Quote: Israel, “The Economic Contribution,” in Israel, Empires and Entrepots (1990), p. 417.

  129. 129.

    I have written about the influence of Dutch colonial trade and the role of the Sephardic Jewish community in establishing Barbados as a sugar colony in an earlier published paper: Yda Schreuder, “The Influence of the Dutch Colonial Trade on Barbados in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Vol. xlviii, 2002, pp. 43–63.

  130. 130.

    Klooster, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs,” in Kagan and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas (2009), pp. 44–49.

  131. 131.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 90–91.

  132. 132.

    Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960); Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (1954).

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

    Yda Schreuder

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Schreuder, Y. (2019). The Development of the Sephardic Jewish Sugar Trade Network. In: Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97061-5_2

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