Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

70 // DAVID BRION DAVIS
Jews such as Diego Dfas Querido, originally a native of Portugal, challenged the
WIC monopoly and chartered their own ships to transport slaves from Africa to
Brazil or the Spanish Caribbean. But the Jewish presence in Brazil was shortlived.
In the early 1650s, with the collapse of the Dutch occupation and the
impending return of the Portuguese, Jews faced the choice of emigration or death.
Most flocked back to Holland, bringing with them capital and new knowledge of
sugar cultivation, sugar refining, and slave trading. The next quarter-century
would mark the high point of Dutch Sephardi commercial success and involvement
with the slave system.
Some of the emigres from Brazil moved northwestward to the Caribbean,
where they were soon joined by Jewish and Marrano entrepreneurs from Holland,
some of whom had lived in Dutch Brazil. There were a number of reasons for the
upsurge of interest in the Caribbean. By the 1650s the British island of Barbados
had made a decisive conversion from tobacco to sugar, as African slaves and a new
class of large planters replaced a population of white indentured servants. In 1662
Spain awarded an asiento to the Dutch West Indian Company, seeking a non-
Portuguese source of African slaves for the Spanish Caribbean colonies. The main
asientista was the Protestant banker Balthazar Coymans, and Jews had little to do
with the WIC shipments of slaves from Africa. Still, in the 1670s Spain appointed
Baron Manuel de Belmonte as its agent in Amsterdam to procure slaves. And
it was in Curacao, which Marranos had helped establish in 165 1, that Jews found
their main outlet for selling slaves and Dutch manufactured goods along the
Spanish Main.
For a time Curasao became the great entrepot of the Caribbean, trading legally
and illegally with Barbados and other rising British and French colonies as well
as with the Spanish mainland. In the eighteenth century Jews made up about half
the white population of Curasao and seem to have been involved mainly in the
transshipment of commodities other than slaves to the Spanish colonies. The
mainland colonies never developed large plantation systems; their demand for
slaves declined abruptly in the eighteenth century, since they could not begin to
compete with colonies like Jamaica, St. Domingue, and Brazil, which imported
their labor directly from Africa. The one colony where a significant number of
Jews took up plantation agriculture was Suriname, or what later became Dutch
Guiana. The religious freedom of the Dutch colonies allowed Jews to establish
their own self-governing town, Joden Savanne (Jewish Savannah), in the interior
jungle. There in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the
Sephardim lived the life of sugar planters, extracting labor from African slaves in
one of the most deadly and oppressive environments in the New World. During
this period, however, Suriname never became a sugar-producing region on the
scale of Jamaica and St. Domingue.
"The significant point," as I've written in another place, 7 "is not that a few
Jewish slave dealers changed the course of history but that Jews found the threshold
of liberation in a region dependent on black slavery." Before turning to the