Business as Usual: The De Facto Royal Factory of the Portuguese Jewish Merchant Nation

This paper examines how the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jewish communities of the Dutch world functioned as unique manifestations of Portuguese merchant nations. Traditional approaches to these communities tie them to the broader Sephardic diaspora centered in the Mediterranean world. More recent scholarship has identified that this was a community with roots in Portugal’s “New Christian” merchant community that worked to integrate into Iberian trade networks over the course of the sixteenth century, but whose conversion to Judaism and Amsterdam’s policy towards merchant nations did preclude them from direct corporate patronage by Iberian monarchs. Despite abandoning Catholicism and settling in what was an enemy state of Spain until 1648 and Portugal until 1663, however, those merchants who embraced Judaism continued to serve as an extension of Iberian empire in the realms of the Protestant empires. Their institutional structures were designed to maintain not only abstract commercial and cultural ties to the Iberian world but direct integration in Iberian networks. Moreover the community’s leadership continued fostering relationships with Iberian royal authorities that allowed the community to essentially function as a de facto royal factory. Their history demonstrates how tenuous religious and political borders were even between entities that were supposedly antagonistic to one another. Continued patronage of the community by Iberian royal authorities suggests that antagonistic religious royal policies were more rhetorical than that of other Iberian authorities like the Inquisition. Likewise, although Dutch authorities came to identify the community as a Jewish one, Amsterdam’s notarial records reveal that Dutch relationships with this community were primarily commercial and political. Dutch authorities and merchants treated the Portuguese Jewish merchant nation as a highly-valued node of both Iberian trade networks and political authority that existed within their sphere of influence, despite their own anti-Iberian rhetoric that lasted until the mid-seventeenth century.