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  • Prosecuting the Persecutor: Contracts, Sugar, Jews, and Inquisitors, 1580–1640
  • Cátia Antunes

Jewish merchants living in Spain fear the Inquisition so, that they have decided to bring to a halt the use of notebooks, keeping their businesses solely based on loose papers, and even those, they refuse to sign except with a secret marking. When they leave for France, Flanders, Holland, or Italy, they shred their remaining books, notes, and papers, carrying with them only easily movable goods.

—Isaac Mendes, Joseph Franco Nunes, and Cristovão Mendes

The concerns expressed by Isaac Mendes, Joseph Franco Nunes, and Cristovão Mendes in 1653 Amsterdam1 about the Inquisition show the fear merchants and businessmen of New Christian descent had and the dangers they encountered when living within the Spanish domains, which between 1580 and 1640 included Portugal and the Portuguese empire overseas.2

Mendes, Nunes, and Mendes’s statement was not a vain attempt to garner sympathy on the part of the merchant community in Amsterdam. As refugees from Iberia, they knew well the dangers and risks associated with conducting business with Iberian family members, business partners, or correspondents.

The general fear associated with the Inquisitorial persecution of New Christian merchants, their families, and their assets seems to have reached the Diaspora in Europe and overseas. Looking at the above statement we can see a clear feeling of powerlessness on the part of the persecuted as well as very little ground on which to deal or negotiate with the persecutor.3

Nevertheless, not all members of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam seem to have felt as powerless before the Iberian Inquisitors as the quote might lead us to believe. In fact, in the period between 1580 and 1640, there were 183 cases brought before the notaries of Amsterdam, in which members of the Amsterdam [End Page 221] Sephardic community tried to retrieve their assets, or the assets of their partners, from the Iberian Inquisitions. These cases raise three fundamental questions. First, why would a Jewish businessman or his representative dare to risk life and wealth to claim the return of his assets from one of the most violent early modern institutions? Second, why would a well-established institution, with significant mechanisms of violence, respect a contract signed in a foreign country in a region of the world often at odds with its own king? Finally, how can historians explain the premises that led Portuguese Jewish businessmen in Amsterdam to think that they could face singlehandedly the Iberian Inquisitions having as their only weapon a juridical contract between themselves and their representatives?

To try to answer some of these questions, I will present here—using as primary sources a body of notarial contracts from the municipal archives of Amsterdam—a case study surrounding particular events that took place in 1618. These events led to a fierce dispute between merchants of the Portuguese Sephardic community in Amsterdam and the Chief Inquisitor of the Inquisition court of Coimbra, a section of the Portuguese Inquisition.

The Setting

In August 1618, the harbor of Oporto, a Northwestern Portuguese town, was overwhelmed with foreign ships trying to unload and load their products. Among those waiting to dispatch their cargoes and return home were four Dutch skippers, Cornelis Jansse, from Hoorn; Jan Martsz, from Schellinkhout; and Cornelis Belten and Claes Willems Gort, from Amsterdam. What they all had in common is that they had been sailing from Brazil with full cargoes of colonial products, especially sugar. Some of that sugar had been bought on consignment by merchants in Oporto, who had already been paid by their correspondents or partners in Amsterdam.4

According to Claes Willems Gort’s account, members of the Inquisition visited the harbor at its busiest moment and arrested several people.5 Besides taking some merchants to prison, the officers of the Inquisition also went onboard the Dutch ships and confiscated all the boxes of sugar originally destined or marked to be handled by the men they had arrested a moment before. This Inquisitorial purge left at least six well-known and respected merchants from Oporto under arrest, as [End Page 222] well as their families and assets, including at least 83 boxes of...

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