The Expansion of tolerance

debts – which tended to have the unwelcome effect of depressing the value
of WIC shares on the Amsterdam stock exchange – was something the
Company was simply in no position to contemplate. The Company lacked
sufficient funds even to finance its own trading operations at a satisfactory
level and felt compelled to draw in private commercial finance. 10
Consequently, there was probably no alternative to the strategy which was in
fact adopted, of encouraging Portuguese Jewish emigrants from Amsterdam
(and other places in western Europe, including Livorno), in most cases
drawing on the capital resources of fathers, brothers, and cousins remaining
in Holland, to settle in sizeable numbers in and around Recife; and allowing
them to become the main brokers and intermediaries supplying the cash,
credit, and supplies needed to get the region’s sugar production in full flow
again. 11 For only the Sephardic Jews of Holland were both Portuguese and
Dutch-speaking, and combined these skills with an expert knowledge of the
sugar industry, and of the Dutch market as well as resources of capital.
While the WIC retained its monopoly over the importing of black slaves
shipped from West Africa, and over the export of Brazilwood, a red
dyewood much utilized in the textile industry in the Low Countries and
elsewhere, its straightened circumstances induced the Company to turn over
to the Jews most of the business of supplying goods, slaves, and credit; and
to the planters within the colony the corresponding business of buying up
the raw sugar in the hinterland. While only a very few of the Jews who
settled in Brazil themselves acquired plantations or sugar mills, by the late
1630s many of those based in Recife, Frederikstad, Mauricia and elsewhere
where the Dutch had fortified bases regularly travelled into the interior to do
business with the planters. Increasingly, and in contrast to Amsterdam and
other Dutch cities where they were then permitted to reside, Jews were also
allowed to own shops and engage in general retail trade. The result was the
emergence of a new kind of Sephardic Jewish society, one based on a wide
range of trade and finance linked to tropical agriculture and a slave economy.
By 1644, when the Jewish community in Dutch Brazil reached its zenith,
there were some 1,450 Jews in the colony, comprising a large proportion of
its civilian non-Catholic white population. 12
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