18. Taylor, The Western Design, 61.
19. C. A. Firth, ed., A Narrative by General Venables of His Expedition to the Island of Jamaica: with an Appendix of Papers Relating to the Expedition, Royal Historical Society (London, 1900). Venables’s report to Cromwell. Richard Hill, Jamaica’s foremost nineteenth-century historian, writes in Lights and Shadows of Jamaican History: Eight Chapters in the History of Jamaica (1508–1680) illustrating the settlement of the Jews on the island (1868), 35: “The family influence of Diego Columbus had rendered it very considerably Portuguese. Several Jewish families already here are progenitors of families still living and commenced the nucleus of Jewish influence so remarkable and so paramount in Jamaica at this day.”
20. Taylor, The Western Design, 63: When Duarte de Acosta, who was held by the English as a hostage, sent his slave with a message to his brother Gaspar, the slave was garroted as a spy. Acosta, “incensed” at the murder of his slave, went over to the English. Venables noted: “A good deal of information was obtained from Acosta.”
21. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56: De Caceres’s origins: born 1615 or 1623 in Amsterdam, died 1704 in England. He was the son of Moses de Casseres, one of the twelve founders of Neveh Shalom, and lived in Barbados from 1647 to 1654 and in Hamburg before he came to London. Maurice Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews in the Sephardic Century,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 24 (1970–73), 47: his family was from Caceres, in Spain, near the Portuguese border, where many Jews lived before the expulsion, on the same latitude as Toledo and Lisbon.
22. Lucien Wolf, “American Elements in the Resettlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 3 (1896–98), 97–98, Appendix VII.
23. Thomas Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, A Library of Universal Literature (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1800), Part 2, 428.
24. W. S. Samuel, “A List of Jews Endenzation and Naturalization 1609–1799,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 2 (1968–69), 113.
25. Lucien Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” Essays in Jewish History (1934), 103: “sends first authentic warning of treaty…the text of which he conveys ‘is kept very close’ but he obtained a copy for 20 [pounds].” Source—Birch: Thurloe Papers, v. 645. March 56, Blake sailed from England to blockade Cádiz. When the galleons arrived, he captured six of the eight ships and two million pieces of eight, and the following year burned or sank the Spanish fleet in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This ended all hope of sending an expedition to the West Indies in the fall to retake Jamaica.
26. Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” 112.
27. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56.
28. Interesting Tracts Relating to the Island of Jamaica which throw great light on the history of that island from its conquest down through the year 1702 (St. Jago de la Vega, 1702), 1–2: “A Proclamation of the Protector, Relating To Jamaica: we therefore,…[decree] that every planter or adventurer to that island shall be…free from paying any excise or custom for any…goods or necessaries which he or they shall transport to the island of Jamaica…for a space of ten years.”
29. Anita Libman Lebeson, Pilgrim People (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 48–49; Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 174–75.
30. Fraser, Cromwell, 566.
31. Ibid., 561; Bernard Martin, A History of Judaism, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 163.
32. Lucien Wolf, Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (London: Macmillan, 1901), 78–79: Text of Menasseh’s address to Cromwell. Along with fulfilling the Messianic requisite, Menasseh noted: “Profit is the most powerful motive all the world prefers before all things,” and stressed the wealth their return would create. There is no record of what they discussed when they met, but it is easy to imagine a lively volley of opinions on Scripture, prophecy, and trade. Menasseh, in addressing him, assumed “a most submissive and obsequious posture imaginable,” but was quick to remind the Protector of the fate of leaders who treated Jews harshly: “No monarch has ever brought suffering to Jews without eventually being heavily punished by God.”
33. D’Blossiers Tovey, Anglia Judaica: A History of the Jews in England (1738); retold by Elizabeth Pearl (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 143–44.
34. Wolf, “Crypto Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 64. London Jews petition Cromwelclass="underline" “to shelter himself from those tyrannical proceedings and enjoy those benefits and kindness which this commonwealth afforded to afflicted strangers as yr Highness hath bin pleased to show yourself on behalf of the Jews.”
35. Ibid., 65.
36. Ibid., 66.
37. Gilbert Burnet, Osmund Airy, ed., A History of My Own Time, vol. 1 (London: Company of Booksellers, 1725), 76.
38. Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters, vol. 22, 427–30.
39. Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq. Secretary, First to the Council of State to the Two Protectors Oliver and Richard Cromwell (London, 1742), vol. 4, 543–44: Sabada’s journal entry dated February 1, 1656.
40. State Papers of Thurloe #4, 602.
41. Wolf, “Crypto-Jews Under the Commonwealth,” 56.
42. Wolf, “American Elements in the Resettlement,” 96–97, Appendix VII, Invasion of Chile letter: Simon de Caceres’s scheme for the conquest of Chile. Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, vol. 3, 131; Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” 108–9.
43. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (London: Clarendon Press, 1964), 56.
44. Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews,” 47. Samuel Tolkowsky, They Took to the Sea (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), 245: In April 1661, the king of Denmark endorsed the Caceres brothers’ request to Charles II to live and trade in Barbados and Suriname.
45. Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 1540–1740, Brill Series in Jewish Studies (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2002), 298–99, quoting Simon De Vries, Historie van Barbaryen: From 1626, when the port city of Salé, Morocco, just north of Rabat, formed “a self-governing pirate republic,” the leaders and financial backers of the corsairs were “a small resident community of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam [who] divided between them the captured booty taken from Christians.” The States General, in a dispatch to Morocco’s sultan, identified two familiar names, Moses Cohen Henriques and Aaron Querido, as “prominent” traders who supplied arms and munitions to Salé. Other familiar figures were the sons of the Palache brothers, members of the Bueno Mesquita family, and Moses’s cousin, Benjamin Cohen Henriques, described in 1634 as Salé’s “pre-eminent resident Dutch Jewish merchant.” Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 73.
46. Richard Hill, Lights and Shadows of Jamaica History (Kingston, Jamaica: Ford & Gall, 1859), 37: “The Jewish families laid the foundation of the trade and traffic of Jamaica as soon as mercantile business became organized with the Freebooters. With the Jewish settlers, properly opens the connexion of the colony with the Buccaneers.”
Chapter Nine: The Golden Dream of Charles II