A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe

Chapter 1: From Fez to Madrid

CHAPTER 1 From Fez to Madrid Muley Sidan, king of Morocco, aggrieved that King Philip III of Spain would not return to him the Arabic books taken from him by the Spaniards off a ship [sailing] from the port of Zafi to that of Santa Cruz, sent Samuel Pallache as his ambassador to the States of the United Provinces to prepare pirate ships, of which Joseph Pallache, brother of the ambassador, was made commander, [to be used] against Spanish coasts and vessels. The said ambassador of Morocco had the best of a martial engagement with the Spanish ambassador when their carriages met on a street of the Hague, capital of Holland. Then Ambassador Pallache died in the year 1616. Maurice, prince of Orange, and the nobility of the Hague accompanied his corpse, which was interred in the burial ground of the Jews of Amsterdam. —Miguel de Barrios, Historia universal judayca This paragraph by Miguel de Barrios, also known as Daniel Levi de Barrios , a distinguished Jewish writer born in Spain in the early seventeenth century, is the first known reference to the brothers Samuel and Joseph Pallache in a historical work. Barrios lived in Amsterdam half a century after the Pallaches and published numerous verse and prose writings there. His books have been widely used by historians as source material, and they continue to be cited even today, but Barrios’s general unreliability has now been established beyond all doubt.1 Thus the Historia universal presents both Samuel and Joseph Pallache as leading members of the Amsterdam Jewish community in the year 5357/1597, adding that Samuel’s house was used for prayer meetings, a claim Barrios repeated in his Triumpho del govierno popular judayco (Triumph of Jewish Popular Government), where he lists sixteen leading Jewish citizens, one of whom was “Semuel Payache , with the merit that his house was frequented for prayer.”2 This is misleading, however, because the Pallaches did not even arrive in Amsterdam until 1608, and it is unlikely that they were ever prominent members of the Jewish community.3 For all its unreliability, Barrios’s outline of Samuel Pallache’s career contains the seeds of a romantic and heroic biographical legend, and his imaginative rendering laid the basis for further mythic versions of Pallache ’s life. In the brief passage quoted from the Historia universal, Pallache is firstly shown being sent to Holland as the Moroccan ambassador by Sultan Muley Zaydan on a mission especially dear to his master: a bid to recover books stolen by Spaniards from the sultan’s private library while it was being transported by sea. Later, Samuel and his brother Joseph work together with the States General, the government of the Dutch Republic, to fit out ships for a revenge attack on Spain. Then, in an encounter in their carriages on the streets of the Dutch capital, Pallache succeeds in defying and humiliating the Spanish ambassador. Pallache is presented throughout as a close and esteemed friend of both Maurice of Nassau and Muley Zaydan, and after his death, the body of this distinguished figure is accompanied by leading members of the States General to the Jewish cemetery of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, a beautiful baroque cemetery near Amsterdam immortalized by the painter Jacob van Ruysdael, where Samuel Pallache’s grave can still be found today. Barrios’s sketch has served as a basic design upon which modern writers have continued to elaborate.4 Pallache has been portrayed as an important political figure in both Morocco and the Netherlands, where he is also supposed to have played a leading religious role in the Jewish community . He is invariably described as a noble, pious, and prominent Jew who never balked at confronting the Spaniards. According to this conventional view, Pallache’s career was driven mainly by anti-Spanish motives , which united the Dutch and the Moroccans, and also by the personal rancor felt by descendants of those who had suffered expulsion from Spain, the land of Inquisition. This legend has prospered to such an extent, and been so embellished in secondary sources, that it comes as a shock to discover that it originates entirely in this one short paragraph from the Historia universal. Of course, other convenient textual evidence has been produced for the purpose of bolstering Barrios’s original claims. But the problem is that the whole leg2 a man of three worlds end is based on very shaky...