Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Jews in the Slave Trade \\ 69
ed of harboring covert "Judaizing" tendencies, they were often eager to leave
Portugal for safer locations, farther removed from the scrutiny of the Inquisition.
The Marranos who moved to Brazil took with them the technical skills of artisans,
foremen, and merchants, and played a leading part in developing the sugar
export industry. Other Marranos, who sailed with Portuguese expeditions to the
Kongo Kingdom and Angola, became expert at contracting for cargoes of slave
labor. There can be no doubt that these New Christians played an important part
in transforming Portugal into Europe's major supplier of slave-grown sugar. But
as I have already indicated, the question then arises: To what extent were the
Marranos Jews? This matter has been hotly debated, especially since a few of them
were able to recover their religious heritage in Holland or in Dutch Brazil. Yet
given the extent of intermarriage and loss of Jewish identity, most Marranos were
"Jewish" only in their vulnerability to suspicion, persecution, and anti-Semitic
fantasies of conspiracy.
Such fears were greatly stimulated by the leadership which Marranos and professing
Jews took in marketing Portuguese East Indian spices and then sugar
throughout northern Europe, especially after they became allied with the rebellious
Dutch and heretical Protestants. The history of the Dutch Sephardi communities,
including their fluctuating economic fortunes, depended in large measure
on the Hollanders' relations with Spain, which from 1580 to 1640 controlled
Portugal and its many colonies. Under pressure of Dutch attacks on the Flemish
coast, many Marranos migrated around the turn of the seventeenth century from
Antwerp, long the headquarters of sugar refining, to Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
Although the Dutch barred professing Jews from many trades and occupations—
it was apparently not until 1655 that two Jewish merchants received permission
from the Amsterdam government to establish a sugar refinery—the Netherlands
presented a climate of relative religious toleration that encouraged the founding
of synagogues and the revival of a small Jewish religious community. The Twelve
Years' Truce with Spain, from 1608 to 1621, helped the Dutch Sephardi merchants
expand various branches of trade with the Iberian Peninsula, Brazil, and
Africa. Their knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as the intricacies of
international finance, gave them a particular advantage in procuring and marketing
sugar.
Even though Jewish merchants suffered from the resumption of the war with
Spain and from the expansion across Europe of the Thirty Years' War, they
retained temporary control of sugar and its distribution, which should not be confused
with control of the Dutch slave trade. 6 This involvement with sugar was
largely the result of the Dutch conquest of northeastern Brazil in the early 1630s.
By 1639 Jews constituted a substantial proportion of the white civilian population
of Recife and owned about 6 percent of the sugar mills in Dutch Brazil.
Jewish merchants bought a large share of the slaves transported by the Dutch
West India Company and then retailed them to Portuguese planters on credit,
arousing complaints of high prices and high interest rates. A few Amsterdam