-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/jewsslavesandt heslavetrade.htm <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/jewsslav esandtheslavetrade.htm">Books & Reading: Chapter One</A> ----- Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade Setting the Record Straight By Eli Faber New York University. 366 pp. $27.95 Chapter One: England's Jewish Merchants and the Slave Trade Search online merchants for this book. Find Local Bookstores After an exile from England that had lasted almost four centuries, Europe's Jewish inhabitants learned in the middle of the 1650s that they could once again reside in that nation. Expelled in 1290, they had been forbidden to return until Oliver Cromwell's government quietly gave them permission to reenter the country after receiving a delegation sent by the Jewish community of Amsterdam to argue the case for readmission. Although a handful of Jews had previously entered and taken up residence in England during the 1630s, their presence was illegal until Cromwell gave the nod to Jewish settlement in 1656, thereby inaugurating what is known in Anglo-Jewish history as the Resettlement. Whether prompted by economic calculation or by the Puritan belief that the conversion of the Jews would precede the advent of the millennium, the government disregarded opposition among the merchants of the City of London and unofficially assented to the return of the Jews. By 1663, approximately 220 of them resided in London. Some, in flight from the Inquisition, came directly to England from Spain and Portugal. Others originated in the Canary Islands, France, and the German port of Hamburg, while still others came from Holland, a center of Jewish settlement dating only to the end of the previous century. Virtually all traced their origins to the Iberian Peninsula, as descendants of the thousands of Jews who had remained in Spain and Portugal after those nations had expelled their Jewish populations, Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497. Jews who decided to remain after the expulsions could do so only if they accepted Christianity. Those who stayed and converted comprised a distinct social group in the two Iberian nations called the New Christians, a category first created in Spain at the end of the previous century following a wave of massacres and forced conversions in 1391. The New Christian label proved to be a term of opprobrium that passed from one generation to the next. Because many New Christians prospered as merchants, achieved eminence in the professions and in public office, or served as tax collectors, they frequently became targets of vilification. More terribly, many were accused of secretly adhering to Judaism and of transmitting it to their children. To root out the heresy of crypto-Judaism, the Office of the Holy Inquisition periodically unleashed fierce campaigns in both Spain and Portugal during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Arrest as a New Christian automatically meant the loss of one's property and, frequently, torture by the Inquisition as it sought to extract confessions. Some went mad in the Holy Office's dungeons, while hundreds were delivered after their examinations to the civil authorities for a public death by burning at the stake. The objects of public obloquy and of Inquisitional terror, New Christians in the 1590s began to emigrate from Spain and Portugal (combined under a single crown at that juncture) to the Netherlands, then in the midst of its eighty-year rebellion against Spanish rule. Once safe in Holland, many New Christians reverted to Judaism. A thriving Jewish community consequently established itself in Amsterdam. Before long it grew to be Europe's largest, expanding from approximately two hundred individuals in 1609 to about two thousand at midcentury. While Holland's rigid Calvinist clergy opposed the Jews, Amsterdam's civil authorities were tolerant toward them. Although they were barred from retail trade and the artisan crafts, had to wait almost fifty years for the right to worship publicly in Amsterdam, and even longer to settle in many of Holland's towns, the prevailing atmosphere in their new home proved to be one of mildness and benevolence. It was from the Jewish community in Holland that the Resettlement in England began. Coping at midcentury with a surge in Jewish refugees from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the German states, and Poland, the leaders of Amsterdam Jewish community dispatched an emissary to London to propose to Oliver Cromwell that Jews be permitted to settle in England. The Resettlement was the result of his mission. As descendants of Jews who had originated on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews of the Resettlement in England belonged largely to the Sephardic branch of Judaism, one of the two major subdivisions of the Jewish people. Members of the other branch, the Ashkenazim, originated in central and eastern Europe, and they too contributed to the Resettlement, although in much smaller numbers. Pushed by poverty and by persecution, Ashkenazim had begun to migrate westward before 1648 from Lithuania and Poland to the German states, to the lands of the Hapsburg monarchy, and to the Netherlands. The numbers on the move increased at midcentury because of war, growing oppression, and deadly Cossack assaults. Ashkenazim reached England for certain by the middle of the 1680s and at first worshiped together with the Sephardim in their congregation. By 1690, however, traditional rivalries triumphed, and the Ashkenazim separated from the Sephardim and established their own congregation. Combined, the two groups in 1695 numbered between 751 and 853, roughly 70 percent of them Sephardim and 30 percent Ashkenazim. Despite the community's small size and the poverty in which many of its members lived, the Jews of the Resettlement claimed that they contributed significantly to England's international commerce. When a proposal to impose a special tax on them surfaced in 1689, they drew up a petition for submission to Parliament in which they protested against discriminatory taxation by arguing that the English nation benefited from their mercantile activities. They "drive a considerable Trade," the petitioners wrote, with Jewish merchants responsible for "exporting great Quantities of the Woolen manufactures of this Nation, and importing vast Quantities of Gold and Silver, and other Foreign Staple Merchandizes, which do greatly Enrich the Nation, and encrease the Revenue of the Customs. ..." Moreover, they had eliminated the Portuguese as a factor in the diamond trade with India: The Market for Diamonds in the East Indies was formerly at Goa (belonging to the Portugueze) and by the means and industry of the Jews the Market hath been brought to the English Factories, and by that means England has in a manner the sole management of that precious Commodity, and all Foreigners bring their Monies into this Kingdom to purchase the said Diamonds. While underscoring their contributions to the country's commercial life, the petitioners pointed out that not all of England's Jews were successful merchants. If one-quarter had accumulated "Moderate Estates," another quarter had only "very indifferent Estates." The remainder, workers, consisted in part of "indigent poor people." The latter did not burden the English, for, as the petitioners were careful to point out, the Jewish community provided them with support and assistance. At virtually the same moment that Jews received permission to resettle in England, the English government undertook to carve out a place for Britain in the slave trade as part of a policy to supplant Holland in international commerce. Openly challenging the Dutch in Africa, England established a series of forts along the coasts of West Africa during the early 1660s, and in 1663 dispatched a military force to capture the fortifications and trading posts held by the Netherlanders. Dutch counterattacks undid the initial successes of the British, in turn precipitating the second of the three Anglo-Dutch Wars the two nations fought between 1652 and 1674. England relied not only on military action but also on its merchants to achieve its goals. In 1660, four years after the Resettlement commenced, Britain chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. Obtaining gold was initially its primary purpose, but in 1663 the slave trade became one of the Company's aims when the government revised its charter. It subsequently delivered slaves to Barbados and contracted to supply slaves to Spain's colonies. By 1669, however, it was clear that the Company's finances were in disarray, and plans to salvage it gave way to the creation of a new company. Continuing to count on private capital, the government established a successor by chartering the Royal African Company in 1672, endowing it with a monopoly to all commerce between England and the western parts of Africa, including the slave trade. Although the new company proved incapable of earning profits on a sustained basis, plunging toward bankruptcy by the early 1700s, it did succeed in penetrating the slave trade, transporting in excess of an estimated ninety thousand slaves to the Caribbean between 1673 and 1711. Because many of them were merchants who resided in the City of London, the country's commercial and financial center, where they participated in international commerce, the Jews of the Resettlement might well have been regarded as likely to invest in the two slave-trading companies, although in the Iberian Peninsula, the region where many of them (or their ancestors) had originated, they had barely participated in the enslavement of Africans. As Salo Wittmayer Baron wrote of New Christians in Spain and Portugal who were accused of surreptitious adherence to Judaism, We rarely hear of Negro slaves in the households of secret Judaizers. The inquisitorial records frequently offer the testimony of servants from the defendants' households, but these witnesses evidently were for the most part free Spanish or Portuguese proletarians. Nor did the great Marrano international traders appear to have played an independent role in the growing slave trade.... Occasional references like that to the purchase of a boatload of slaves by Manuel Rodriguez Lamego (a brother of the Rouen Jewish leader) are too rare to be typical. Jewish law had certainly not precluded their involvement (no more than Christian theology precluded the involvement of non-Jews), nor would it have prevented their descendants who were now in England from investing in it. Biblical, Talmudic, and medieval Jewish law, the latter in the instance of Moses Maimonides, recognized slavery by prescribing regulations applicable to slaves and their owners. Shulhan Arukh, the definitive work of Jewish law compiled by Joseph Caro in the sixteenth century and accepted by the seventeenth century throughout the Jewish world as fully authoritative, recognized the existence of slavery and listed the rules that were to govern relations between slaves and masters. Furthermore, a variety of contemporary developments in which Jews in Holland and in the Americas participated in the enslavement of Africans also existed, serving as precedents for the Jews of the Resettlement. Such precedents included New Christians from Portugal who reverted to Judaism when they settled in Holland during the 1590s. Some brought slaves to Amsterdam and tried to sell them prior to 1596, the year in which the city's authorities decided to bar the development of a slave market. Others must have owned slaves thereafter, for the city's Sephardic congregation made provision for the burial of servants and slaves in its cemetery in a regulation adopted in 1614. Between 1608 and 1621, a handful of ships chartered by Jewish merchants in Amsterdam transported slaves from West Africa to the Americas. And during the second half of the seventeenth century, Sephardic merchants in the Netherlands played a part in the transit of slaves to Spain's colonies, although the scope of their involvement is unknown. Overseas, Jewish settlers became involved in slavery in Holland's colonies, beginning in Brazil. Seized by the Dutch West India Company from Portugal in 1630, Brazil attracted Jewish settlers in relatively substantial numbers. By the middle of the 1640s, approximately fifteen hundred Jewish inhabitants resided in the areas of northeastern Brazil controlled by the Dutch, where they established two congregations and employed the first rabbi in the Americas. Their numbers began to decline in 1645 when the Portuguese colonists rose in rebellion, raising the specter of renewed control by Portugal and the return of the Inquisition. Nine years later, in 1654, a Portuguese expeditionary force recaptured Recife, forcing the Dutch to abandon Brazil. When the Dutch left, the remaining Jewish population, approximately 650 in number, also departed, some returning to Holland and others emigrating to the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam or to the English one at Barbados. While in Brazil between 1630 and 1654, a few of the Jewish settlers acquired sugar plantations and mills, and it is entirely reasonable to assume that they consequently employed slave labor. However, their contributions to the sugar industry were far more significant when it came to providing capital, exporting sugar, and advancing credit for slaves. As creditors, according to the historian of the Brazilian Jewish community, "they dominated the slave trade." To be sure, all slave imports from Africa were in the hands of the Dutch West India Company, which under the terms of its charter held the monopoly to the slave trade. But the Company sold the slaves it transported to Brazil at auctions where Jewish purchasers predominated, purchasing slaves and then selling them to plantation owners and others on credit. For the brief time that they resided in Brazil, therefore, Jewish settlers were an essential part of the fabric of the slave trade, although the actual number of slaves they might have purchased and then sold as middlemen amounted to a minute fraction of the huge number of Africans brought to Brazil over the course of more than three centuries. Their communal regulations acknowledged their participation in slavery. The taxes the Jewish community imposed on its members included a levy of five soldos for each slave purchased from the Dutch West India Company. The regulations even made provision for slaves who converted to Judaism. (Later records of the Portuguese Inquisition suggest that conversions probably did occur.) The community decreed that they must first be freed before undergoing circumcision, in order to make it impossible for an owner to sell a slave who had converted. As the congregational minutes stated, A slave shall not be circumcised without first having been freed by his master, so that the master shall not be able to sell him from the moment the slave will have bound himself [to Judaism]. Despite the Dutch debacle in Brazil in 1654, interest in settling in the northeastern part of South America remained high among Holland's Jews. In 1657, a group among them obtained a charter from the Zeeland Chamber of the Dutch West India Company permitting them to settle on the Wild Coast, a region defined as lying on the mainland between one and ten degrees north of the equator. The charter presumed that the settlers would use slaves to work the lands distributed to them by the new colony's commander, for it offered tax abatements as an inducement to settle, with the greatest reductions in rates going to settlers who established plantations with slaves: The settlers shall be free from all taxes, customs, duties or any other similar fee for the space of seven years; those who establish a plantation of sugar with fifty negroes shall have twelve years of the same freedom; those who will establish a plantation of oxen, with thirty negroes, nine years, and if it be less, accordingly.... Moreover, the charter modified the Dutch West India Company's monopoly rights in the slave trade by permitting settlers to send their own vessels from Holland to Africa, to acquire slaves there, transport them to the Wild Coast, and reship them elsewhere, subject only to a payment for each slave to the Company. Efforts to establish a colony at Essequibo, the site apparently chosen under the charter issued by the Zeeland Chamber, faltered and quickly failed, but a Jewish presence did take root almost simultaneously on the nearby island of Cayenne. The Dutch seized Cayenne in 1656 or 1657, a French possession vulnerable to attack because of incessant internal bickering. In 1659, the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company issued a charter to David Nassy, formerly a Jewish settler in Brazil, authorizing him to establish a colony there. Under Nassy's leadership, a fairly large Jewish colony arose on Cayenne, with slightly more than 150 settlers emigrating to it from as far away as Italy. Like the earlier charter for the Wild Coast, Cayenne's made provision for s laves, with leeway for the settlers to engage in a piratical slave trade: In regard to the slave trade, the aforesaid colonists, insofar as the need of the colony may [require], shall have such rights as are granted by the Council of the Nineteen. Their accommodations at all times shall be estimated as those allowed to the colony in [nearby] Essequebo under the Chamber of Zeeland.... They shall also be provided by the Company with such a number of slaves as shall from time to time be needed there ... but the slaves who are captured by the colonists on the sea may be brought into the colony, and they may transport them to any place that they see fit, on payment of a tax.... David Nassy's tenure as a colonial entrepreneur did not last long. In 1664, the French reconquered Cayenne, forcing its Jewish population out. Jews had been present in nearby Suriname as early as 1652, and it was to that destination that Nassy led his fellow colonists and their slaves. The colony was then in British hands, but in 1667 the Dutch acquired it in exchange for New Netherland, which the English had seized in 1664 and renamed New York. With the advent of the Dutch, some of Suriname's Jews left for Jamaica in 1677, preferring to live under the British flag. Ten Jewish families with 322 slaves reportedly did so, with individual holdings that ranged from a low of 2 to a high of 74, or an average of 32.2 per family. The names of the 10 who were willing to remove to Jamaica with their slaves had been reported to the English government in 1675, along with the name of a Jewish emigrant who actually did depart from Suriname that year for Jamaica with 33 slaves in tow. The name of another Surinamese Jewish slaveowner was also known in England, but his 15 slaves were transported to Jamaica by a Christian family. It was in Suriname, nonetheless, that a Jewish presence on the South American mainland at last took permanent form. In 1669, the Dutch governor confirmed the privileges that Jewish settlers had enjoyed under the English, including permission for them and their slaves to work on Sunday. An all-Jewish town, Joden Savane, began to rise in 1682, and only three years later the new community erected a large brick synagogue. By 1690, Jews also resided in the town of Paramaribo. Around that year, 92 families and approximately 50 single men comprised the colony's Jewish population, estimated at between 560 and 575 individuals. Those who settled in Paramaribo turned to commerce, while others elsewhere turned to agriculture, relying, as we have already seen, on slave labor. Suriname's Jewish population therefore comprised another precedent for English Jews. An even larger Jewish community than that in Suriname had already been established on the island of Curacao, a Dutch possession since 1634, and its members, too, utilized slave labor. The first dozen Jews to attempt settlement on Curacao did so in 1651, and at least one of them arrived with a slave. Inasmuch as this initial effort did not succeed for long, the establishment of a permanent Jewish community on the island did not occur until the end of the decade, when approximately seventy individuals emigrated to the colony from Amsterdam, including several who had fled from Brazil in 1654. The privileges granted to them by the Dutch West India Company included the right to purchase slaves, along with a directive to the colony's governor to sell them horses, land, and slaves. For approximately fifteen years, however, the Company sold them only sickly slaves, not permitting them to acquire healthy ones until 1674. The most relevant precedent of all for Jewish merchants in London who may have contemplated investing in England's new slave-trading companies was the Jewish community in Amsterdam. There, the Dutch West India Company offered the opportunity to purchase stock in a slave-trading enterprise. When the Company was established in 1621 to challenge Spanish and Portuguese hegemony in the Atlantic, its charter empowered it to attack Spanish shipping, control the Caribbean salt trade, undertake military conquest of Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the western hemisphere, establish and administer new colonies there, and to monopolize the slave trade. During the 1620s, the Company consequently sent out privateering expeditions, established the colony of New Netherland with its headquarters at New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, and attacked Brazil in 1624 in its first attempt to seize it from the Portuguese. The Company did not, however, enter the slave trade during its formative decade. It began to do so after its successful effort in 1630 to seize northeastern Brazil, followed in turn in 1637 by the capture of Elmina, a major slaving station in Africa. Brazil's settlers required slave labor from Africa in order to produce the great sugar crops that the colony exported to Europe. The Company's rule in Brazil lasted for twenty-four years, during which time it invoked its monopoly power over the slave trade to supply the colony with more than 26,000 Africans. After its expulsion from Brazil in 1654, the Company subsequently turned to supplying slaves to its colonies at New Netherland and Curacao. While New Netherland took few slaves, Curacao, seized from Spain by the Company in 1634, developed into a major entrepot in the seventeenth-century slave trade. Too arid for significant agriculture, it became a way station for the supply of slaves to the Spanish mainland. The Company transported at least 24,555 slaves to Curacao between 1658 and 1674, accounting for approximately 55 percent of the slaves it delivered to the western hemisphere during those years. Because of setbacks in its other enterprises--the transfer of its privateering functions to another organization in the early 1640s, the loss of certain trading monopolies, the loss of Brazil, the conquest of New Netherland by the English in 1664--the slave trade emerged as the Dutch West India Company's primary underpinning. Few of Holland's Jews, however, invested in the Company. When chartered in 1621, Amsterdam residents purchased stock in it in the amount of 3 million florins; of this, the 18 Jews who participated invested 36,000 florins, or 1.2 percent. The percentage of stock owned by Jews thereafter is unknown, but the number who invested is. They remained a distinctly small presence. In 1656, when the Company had already been deeply committed to the slave trade for at least twenty years, 7 out of 167 of the stockholders, or 4 percent, were Jewish, rising to 11 out of 169, or 6.5 percent, in 1658. In 1671, Jewish investors numbered 10, or 5 percent of the Company's 192 shareholders. Three years later, 11 of the Company's "main participants," or 10 percent of all such shareholders, were Jewish. The 11 Jewish investors comprised substantially less than 1 percent of Amsterdam's Jews, who in 1674 are thought to have numbered approximately 7,500. Deposits in the Amsterdam Exchange Bank reveal that an appreciably greater number of Holland's Jewish inhabitants did have capital and therefore could have invested in the Dutch West India Company. The Bank, an indicator of economic activity for twentieth-century historians, provided evidence of financial stature to seventeenth-century contemporaries. "To acquire prestige as a merchant or man of affairs in Amsterdam," according to Violet Barbour, "it was almost indispensable to have an account in the bank. The list of depositors is in the nature of a roll-call of Amsterdam capitalists." During the 1620s, when 18 Jews invested in the Dutch West India Company, Jewish depositors in the Exchange Bank ranged between 76 and 114. In the 1650s, when between 7 and 11 Jewish investors owned Dutch West India Company stock, the number with assets in the Exchange Bank fluctuated between 197 and 243. And in 1674, when 11 Jews invested in the Dutch West India Company, 265 deposited funds in the Exchange Bank. Such, then, were the precedents and contemporary developments that served to inform the community of the Resettlement about involvement by Jews in slavery and the slave trade. Would they, however, choose to invest in the companies that England established as it sought to carve out a presence in the slave trade? Unlike the charter of the Levant Company, a corporation that traded in the eastern Mediterranean, the charter of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa did not prohibit Jews from purchasing its stock. The Levant Company limited membership to the nobility, to gentlemen who had never been apprenticed or otherwise employed in commerce, and to the freemen of London. The Jews of the Resettlement did not qualify on any of these grounds, for they clearly did not belong to the nobility or the gentry, while admission to freemanship in the City required a Christian oath and Communion in the Anglican church. In contrast, the 1660 charter of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa authorized the transfer of shares by the original stockholders "to any other person." Under the slightly altered name of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa, its revised charter in 1663 permitted shareholders to transfer stock "to any person or persons whatsoever. Jewish investors, however, did not elect to invest in the Company, whose stockholders numbered 32 in 1660, twice as many in 1663, and 112 in 1667. Members of the royal house, the nobility, and the City's merchant community figured in the roster of shareholders. Not a single Jewish individual was among those who acquired stock. Nor were Jewish investors among the early stockholders of the Royal African Company, the corporation that replaced the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa at the end of 1671. The new corporation's charter, issued in 1672, did not preclude participation by them; in this it was identical to the revised charter of 1663 of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa, which had permitted the transfer of stock "to any person or persons whatsoever." Nonetheless, the list of shareholders on July 1, 1674, two and a half years into the Company's existence, reveals that London's Jews continued to shun investment in the African slave trade. At that point, the Company's 203 shareholders held stock valued at 111,600 [pounds sterlin g], in amounts that ranged from the high of 4,000 [pounds sterling] subscribed by Robert Vyner and the 3,000 [pounds sterling] subscribed by the King, to the low of 100 [pounds sterling] invested by each of fifteen individuals. But the investors did not include any Jews. Two years later, when the Company paid a return to its investors on September 21, 1676, a total of 194 individuals received dividends. Transfers of stock had occurred during the intervening two years, but Jewish investors had still not shown any interest in acquiring Royal African Company stock and therefore were not among the recipients of the dividends that were paid out. The stock-transaction records for the subsequent fourteen years reveal that Jewish investors continued to refrain from investing any of their capital in the Royal African Company. The Company's books disclose, for example, that on January 4, 1677, Humphrey Edwin sold his stock to Benjamin Coles for 300 [pounds sterling]; that on April 25, 1681, "the Right honble George Earle Berkeley of Berkeley" purchased part of Richard Nicholl's stock for 300 [pounds sterling]; and that John Bull, a frequent dabbler in Royal African Company shares, sold 1,000 [pounds sterling] of his stock to Thomas Heatly on October 2, 1684. Women, too, purchased shares, as when the Earl of Berkeley sold part of his holdings to Widow Priscilla Baylie on September 22, 1687 and another part on January 11, 1688. A year later, on January 10, 1689, from exile in France, the deposed King James II divested himself of his holdings in the Company, valued at 3,000 [pounds sterling]. But for nearly the first full twenty years of the Company's existence, no Jewish investors stepped forward to acquire shares. It was not a lack of financial resources that inhibited them, for members of London's Jewish community possessed sufficient capital for investment during the Royal African Company's first two decades. Fourteen accordingly purchased shares in the East India Company, well before the first investment by a Jewish businessman in the Royal African Company. Nor was it as if the Royal African Company could not attract the interest of the investing public. Few opportunities for investment existed in late-seventeenth-century England, where joint-stock companies were few in number, small in size, and did not seek much capital. The East India Company, the largest by far, did not offer new shares between 1657 and 1693, preferring instead to take loans when it needed additional funds. Perhaps these limitations on the acquisition of shares in corporations help explain why trading in Royal African Company stock was brisk from the Company's inception. Of the 111,100 [pounds sterling] initially subscribed at the end of 1671, 18,700 [pounds sterling] worth of stock, approximately one-sixth of all outstanding shares, changed h ands in 1672. An average of 16,291 [pounds sterling] of stock changed hands annually over the course of the next eighteen years, ranging from a low of 9,250 [pounds sterling] in 1685 to a high of 24,500 [pounds sterling] in 1675. And during the first seven months of 1691, Royal African Company stock transfers skyrocketed to 82,350 [pounds sterling]. It was during this last period of heightened activity in the Company's stock, a period of increased activity in stock trading in general, that a Jewish investor joined the ranks of the Royal African Company's shareholders for the first time. On May 26, 1691, Alvaro Da Costa purchased 500 [pounds sterling] worth of its stock. Born in Lisbon, Da Costa had arrived in England in the early 1660s as a refugee from the Portuguese Inquisition. Fashioning a career as a merchant, Da Costa became one of the small Jewish community's leading importers and exporters, sending woolen cloth abroad and importing, among other items, bullion, olive oil, indigo, and wine. An act of Parliament in 1667 made him England's first naturalized subject of the Jewish faith. Naturalization required that he take an oath as a Christian and receive Communion, but Da Costa appears to have floated between Christianity and Judaism, a not unfamiliar course of action for a refugee from the Inquisition who maintained trading ties with the Iberian Peninsula. It was a strategy followed by others as well, for this was an era in which agents of the Inquisition spied on Sephardic merchants. The latter consequently often employed aliases, including Da Costa, who used the Hebrew name of Jacob within the synagogue and Alvaro outside. As Alvaro, he never submitted to circumcision, but as Jacob he was buried in London's Sephardic cemetery, while all his children married Jews and lived openly as members of the Jewish community. Da Costa had the wherewithal to invest in the Royal African Company well before 1691. That he possessed both the capital and the inclination to take risks is evident from the records of the East India Company. In contrast to his late entry into the Royal African Company, waiting twenty years before he bought any of its stock, Da Costa acquired shares in the East India Company within several years of his arrival in England. Presenting evidence of his naturalization by act of Parliament, he purchased 1,000 [pounds sterling] worth of East India Company stock in 1668. In 1674 he invested another 1,200 [pounds sterling], and in 1675 1,800 [pounds sterling]. Between 1675 and 1678, when the East India Company's records referred to him as "an adventurer in the General Joint Stock," Da Costa sold off 2,700 [pounds sterling] of his shares. Clearly, therefore, Da Costa could have invested in the Royal African Company long before he did so. Subsequent to his initial investment in the Company, Da Costa acquired additional stock during the late spring and summer of 1691. Three other Jewish investors soon followed his lead, purchasing shares during the summer. Other members of the Jewish community later followed suit, and by April 20, 1693 the Company had 11 Jewish shareholders. Eight invested as individuals, 2 did so in partnership, and the remaining shareholder was the estate of a deceased individual who had purchased stock prior to his death. As a group, they comprised a small minority within the Company, which had a total of 301 shareholders and a general stock valued at 438,850 [pounds sterling]. The 11 Jewish newcomers amounted to 3.6 percent of the whole, and their 19,500 [pounds sterling] in holdings to 4.4 percent of all outstanding shares. After 1693, their presence in the Company continued to increase, rising by March 1699 to 29 shareholders out of 423, or 6.8 percent, whose holdings were worth 135,000 [pounds sterling], or 12.2 percent of the entire stock. Between 1691 and 1701, the number of Jewish investors who all told acquired Royal African Company stock totaled 31, with possibly 1 more. The 31 investors represented roughly 10 percent of the Jewish households of England, which were comprised in 1695 of approximately 185 families and 114 single lodgers. But while 31 members of the Jewish community joined the ranks of the slave-trading company's stockholders during the 1690s, most English Jews with capital to invest did not. A total of 80 members of England's Jewish community invested in various enterprises during the decade; the 31 who bought shares in the Royal African Company therefore comprised a minority of 38.7 percent of their number. At least 73 Jewish investors acquired shares in the Bank of England, more than twice as many as the 31 who invested in the Royal African Company. The number who acquired Bank stock may have been even higher, with perhaps as many as 10 additional investors. ©Copyright 1998 Eli Faber --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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