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Yo ho ho and a bottle of schnapps By Danny Paller Tags: Haaretz books, Israel books  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, by Edward Kritzler, Doubleday, 324 pages, $26 Picking up journalist-historian Edward Kritzler's "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean" felt timely. With Somali pirates terrorizing the seas and Jewish bandits like Bernard Madoff terrorizing Wall Street, some historical perspective surely couldn't hurt. But what sort of book would this be - Disney with a twist, or a work of serious scholarship? And was there really a Jewish sub-species I had missed out on in Sunday school - circumcised Barbados buccaneers who shouted "Yo ho ho and a bottle of schnapps" and who never plundered on Shabbos? Advertisement The answer to the first question is, a bit of both. Kritzler is well-read, and the volume closes with no less than 45 pages of footnotes. Nevertheless, Kritzler is prone to making rather self-assured statements - such as his claim, in chapter one, that Christopher Columbus' hidden agenda was to "acquire a new land where Sephardim could live free from the terrors of the Inquisition" - without clear sources to substantiate them. His specialty is portraiture, but he is more Norman Rockwell than Rembrandt - and, given the subject matter, that suited me just fine. The answer to the second question is, not as much as I'd hoped. Doubleday knows how to give its books sexy titles, but in Kritzler's rogues' gallery - replete with secret Jews who sailed with Columbus, Jewish sugar brokers involved in the slave trade, Jews who spied for Oliver Cromwell and the like - there aren't actually all that many pirates in sight, and only very few spotted in Caribbean waters. Kritzler is a storyteller, and the story he tells is about the tangled and colorful Sephardi web that stretched from Fez to Amsterdam to Jamaica in the two centuries following the expulsion of Jews from Spain. The book reads something like a literary "Forrest Gump," with Jews - sometimes overt ones, but usually covert - playing the title role. There we are, advising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to accept Columbus' terms. There we are again, negotiating a peace treaty between the sultan of Morocco and the prince of the Netherlands. And again, giving Cromwell the information he needs to conquer Spanish forces in the New World. Wending his way from Spain to Jamaica, where he has lived since moving there from New York in 1967, Kritzler introduces us to some unforgettable characters. Take Samuel Palache, the "pirate rabbi," who grew up in the mid-1500s in a Moroccan ghetto, learning Torah and Talmud in a school run by his father. Soon he and his brother took to venturing at night past the locked Jewish quarter gates to participate in raids on merchant ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. (This adds a whole other dimension to the term "moonlighting.") After years of "derring-do and profit," the sultan tapped Palache to be his special trade representative. Palache later resettled in the Dutch town of Middleburg, and engaged in shuttle diplomacy between the Netherlands and Morocco that helped solidify an alliance between the two countries. Palache led the first known Jewish worship service in the Netherlands, and in his 70s was elected president of the country's first synagogue, Neveh Shalom, in Amsterdam. But in 1613, as a spritely septuagenarian, he took leave of his post to command one final pirate mission - quite a successful one - against Spanish ships off the Barbary coast. Growing up, I had a rabbi who rode a motorcycle. Some years later, I learned about Resh Lakish, the Talmudic sage who reputedly was a bandit and gladiator before he settled down to a life of study. But for sheer biographical dissonance, the pirate rabbi trumps them both. Nuggets of pirate gold The book's most gripping portrait - if less obscure and non-swashbuckling - is of Uriel da Costa, whose story Kritzler includes to explain why some conversos (secret Jews) felt the need to travel beyond northern Europe and all the way to the untamed New World to seek religious freedom. Da Costa was a Portuguese converso who studied for the priesthood before moving to Amsterdam and finding his way back to Judaism. But the Judaism he favored was an Old Testament-based pre-rabbinic brand, and Da Costa was soon in open conflict with the local community over matters of Jewish law. In 1625 he was excommunicated - a reality that proved so painful for him that seven years later he asked to be reconciled. Quoting from Da Costa's autobiography, Kritzler details the ceremony: how Da Costa entered the synagogue and was stripped to the waist, whipped 39 times by the cantor and ritually stepped on by all the congregants as they passed to the street. In a tragic denouement, Da Costa committed suicide some eight years later. Sprinkled here and there throughout the book, like tiny nuggets of pirate gold, are authentic details of Jewish life. On Palache's pirate raids, for example, he always brought along a chef to prepare him kosher meals. And the executive committee of the Zur Israel congregation in Brazil prohibited gambling on Friday afternoons so men wouldn't show up late for Shabbat dinner, and "imposed a whopping fifty-florin fine on any member caught bathing with a Christian woman in the mikvah." Conversos' letters and documents often held up Queen Esther - a secret Jew, and one who risked her life for her people - as their role model. So what connects the dots in "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean"? If anything, it is this thesis: that beyond the Iberian Jews' desire to land on their feet - even to prosper, religiously and economically - in their various post-exilic settings, they were driven by a powerful desire for revenge. In his introduction, Kritzler describes the Sephardi diaspora as "a global tribe of inside traders, bonded by heritage, language, and a hatred for Spain." He reports that wealthy Jewish merchants of mid-17th century Port Royal, Jamaica - that rum-soaked, brothel-filled Sodom and Gomorrah of the New World - faithfully outfitted the pirate chief Henry Morgan as he conducted "five years of nonstop plundering" against Spanish vessels and towns. He documents the forwarding of intelligence and funds from conversos in Brazil to the clandestine Brotherhood of the Jews of Holland, an Amsterdam-based Jewish defense organization, in order to purchase arms for the war effort against Spain. Would this thesis stand up to serious scrutiny by scholars? Many years ago I heard a lecture by Joseph Dan, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, in which he eloquently depicted the trauma caused the Jews by their expulsion from Spain. Following the golden centuries of Jewish life on the Iberian peninsula, the expulsion was an unfathomable cataclysm, which left Jews not only geographically scattered but spiritually shattered. In their faith-based worldview, the "center could not hold." Dan went on to describe Lurianic kabbala, which developed in Safed in the 16th century, as a unique response to this crisis: Through the notion of shvirat hakeilim - the breaking of the primordial vessels and subsequent scattering of hidden light throughout the world, whose sparks must be gathered through devotional piety and religious acts - this brand of Jewish mysticism offered many Jews a new way of coming to terms with brokenness and a powerful means of healing. Kritzler suggests that a response of a very different nature - namely, to get back at the bastards - was another powerful Jewish motive in the centuries that followed the expulsion. While revenge is a dramatic idea - and it looks great splashed in bold letters on the front cover of a book - it is a deeply elusive historical concept. If I can dare to be contemporary for a moment, when Israeli soldiers become overly aggressive at checkpoints, or Jewish settlers shoot at Palestinians in Hebron, is that simply a function of Israeli-Palestinian tensions, or are there latent Jewish desires for revenge - against not only suicide bombers but Nazis, Cossacks, even the ancient Amalekites - bubbling to the surface? Go know. Revenge, after all, is a tough hook on which to hang broad swaths of history. Unquestionably, some conversos and overt Jews did what they could to strike back at the Spanish establishment, but "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean" often turns a complex story of survival and adaptation into yet another Disney cartoon. Which leads us to how Kritzler - wearing his journalist's cap more than his historian's - begins and ends his story. Apparently, Columbus acquired a stash of gold from the Veragua Indians of Panama, and - legend has it - had it hidden somewhere in Jamaica. Kritzler hints in his prologue that two Jews dug up "Columbus' lost gold mine," and in his epilogue he makes his case that in the 1670s the Dutch brothers Abraham Cohen and Moses Cohen Henriques found, and fought over, the treasure. Kritzler even refers the reader to original documents posted on his Web site. When I checked out the Web site, there were clips of Kritzler being interviewed on the History Channel, and then, before my eyes, those same clips morphed into Japanese pornography. Aha, I said: I don't know about the gold, but I have come face to face with real pirates on the Information Superhighway. Danny Paller, a Jerusalem resident, is designing the content for a new Jewish museum and writes for the musical stage. His most recent musical is about two 18th-century women pirates. Bookmark to del.icio.us   From the bunker Hamas says Gaza won't break, victory over Israel is near. Banned Israel bans Arab parties from running in upcoming elections.

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