I was psyched to read Edward Kritzler's
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a generation of swashbuckling Jews carved out an empire in the New World in their quest for treasure, religious freedom—and Revenge. (Yes, that is the actual title, capitalization and all.)
Unfortunately, there are three major flaws in the book:
1) It's terribly written, with dull prose and too much (questionable) genealogy.
2) It's racist as all fuck.
3) There are only a few pirates and absolutely no swashbuckling.
Kritzler is super-excited about Jews. Apparently, in the period from 1492-1675, there were Jews everywhere. As you know, Bob, the Spanish Inquisition and various persecution campaigns across Europe forced many Jews to convert to Christianity. Some of them, naturally, continued to secretly practice. Accordingly, there's quite a lot of ambiguity around who was secretly a Jew, who
had been a Jew but sincerely converted to Christianity, and who was actually Christian but denounced by his or her neighbour and confessed to being a Jew under torture or the threat of being burnt on the stake. Kritzler comes to the conclusion that anyone halfway cool was secretly Jewish, including, quite possibly, Christopher Columbus.
I'm not buying it. Clearly, Kritzler likes Columbus a lot, such that he glosses over his various crimes against humanity because he was "tolerant." (Note: "Tolerance," in the context of this book, means tolerance towards Jews and possibly Calvinists, depending on whether Calvinists were getting along with Jews at the time. It does not refer to tolerance of anyone else.) At any rate, Kritzler also thinks that Columbus had Jewish ancestry, which a) who cares? and b) citation needed. He also, at one point, suggests that
Cromwell (yes,
that Cromwell), may have been a Hebe:
In late November 1654, as they were about to embark for England, one of Cromwell's secret intelligencers and a possible relation, Daniel Cohen Hendriques, told them not to bother...
Wait, what? Cromwell was not Jewish. I don't care how much you like him. Where are you getting this?
Shelomo Alfassa has
a run-down of various other questionable assertions, bad math, and bizarre inaccuracies. The weirdest one isn't mentioned, though, which is the following:
Zur Israel [a synagogue in Brazil] funded a number of charitable programs: a ransom committee for captured brethren; dowries for poor unmarried women in Holland desiring a mate in Brazil; a fund that sent money to Israel; and another that served as a bank of last resort for debts to Christians.
Wait, what? He's talking about the 1640s, not the 1940s. There was not Israel in the 1640s.
Anyway, there were a few Jewish pirates, and that was kind of interesting, but most of what he's talking about in his book is Jewish participation in the rape and plunder of the Americas (only he calls it "discovery" and "settlement") and Jewish funding of trade and privateering. What's particularly loathsome in his history of this time period is the near-complete erasure of indigenous and slave populations. He talks quite a bit about the persecution of Jews, particularly in the Spanish Inquisition (though he balances these horror stories with lavish descriptions of just how wealthy all of the Jews were), but he clearly does not give a fuck for people who were enslaved to create that wealth.
Case in point:
In the previous five years, Jamaica had been a burial ground for fully three-quarters of the nearly twelve thousand men, women, children, and slaves who had come to the island.
Wait, what? They had robot slaves in the 1660s, apparently, because I can't conceive of a slave who is not either a man, woman, or child. That, or we're just not counting them as people.
The thing is, the Jews that Kritzler is writing about are kind of awful people. There were a lot of awful people back then, and the history of piracy is in part interesting because we like reading about awful people, but Kritzler employs a very strange sort of morality. It's a morality that, if you grew up Jewish, you will immediately recognize. It's the old joke that in every Jewish household, all discussions boil down to: "Is it good for the Jews?" In this book, if the Jews are doing it, it's daring, adventurous, and clever. This includes killing and enslaving people. It'd be one thing if Kritzler dryly reported events without any attempt at bringing a modern, humanist lens to the story, but he
does moralize. It's just a highly selective moralizing. Jews are a persecuted, long-suffering race. Meanwhile, the indigenous population of the Americas are "hostile natives" who get their hands chopped off, are forced to work in minds, are slaughtered by war and disease, and get no editorializing whatsoever.
In terms of Jewish participation in the slave trade, we get a long discussion about how Jews ruled the sugar industry, and the sugar industry was all about slavery, and then a little explanation excusing Jewish participation:
While the Arabs controlled the East African slave trade, the West African trade was essentially a European-African enterprise—Africans sold Africans to Europeans to serve other Europeans. The Jews' role in the commercial process shows them to be neither better nor worse than others in an era where the morality of slavery was a nonissue. Color was not a criterion: Whites also bought and sold other whites, and Africans enslaved Africans.
I guess that makes it okay, then. (Needless to say, the morality of persecuting Jews was also a nonissue, but the author devotes a great many pages to condemning
that.)
There's also some stuff that's just plain weird. Technically, "People of the Book," "followers of the Law of Moses," "chosen people," "Hebrews," and "Israelites" are all kind of synonyms for "Jew," but not ones you would tend to run across in a trade history book. At one point, there's a discussion of the difficult choice of conversion, and the phrase "many chose mammon." I
guess that's a reasonable way to describe an easy out where you have something to gain, but to me, it smacks of dogwhistle.
Ultimately, Jewish pirates are awesome because they invented capitalism. Yes, the author does pretty much make this argument, and it sits uncomfortably with me, as I don't think capitalism is really our fault. There's a particularly squicksome passage right at the end:
Menasseh ben Israel, in his appeal to Cromwell, quoted Amos 9:9: "I will sift the house of Israel among all the nations as corn is sifted in a sieve," and cemented his argument with an economic promise: Welcome us and we will make you rich. Today, centuries later, it is this promise of entrepreneurial wealth that still protects the People of the Book in an indifferent and often hostile world.
Dear author: Please shut up before I delete your bank account and kick you out of the International Zionist Banking Conspiracy. Are you
trying to get us all killed?
The thing is, I don't think that the author is aiming to be political here. It's just that he's got "is it good for the Jews?" so deeply embedded in his psyche that
anything, even the genocide of a population that hadn't even
heard of Jews, let alone persecuted them, is justifiable if it means that the Jews can have a homeland. And that sort of thinking, in a book published in a modern context, is by necessity political, and not good for the Jews or for anyone else.
Also, there is no swashbuckling, and the cover promises swashbuckling.
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symbioid, a heartbreaking article about the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
