YES, so i recently wrote a paper about jewish pirates and merchants for a thesis and used a shit ton of archive information and secondary sources (which are detailed below).
As we know, Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Some remained behind, known as conversos, who managed to hide their Judaism and remain behind. Others went into Calvinist Holland, but a majority of them went to Brazil, which was Portuguese-owned. The Jews there were known as marranos (pigs), but they were the first group to begin harvesting and collecting sugar by themselves. The marranos grew to have nearly 200 sugar plantations that they worked themselves— they traded with the Dutch, primarily. Sugar was hella expensive and Spain was hella jealous.Once the Iberian peninsula split (~1640s), Spain came in and took the land for themselves, either massacring or otherwise coercing the Jews to give up their Jewishness. They were kind of out of options, because Holland was engaged in war with Portugal and England was still not super friendly to the Jews, so they moved to the Caribbean.
Jews had been on Jamaica since about 1510, though they called themselves Portugals. They managed to get together a plea for England to get into Jamaica before Spain took it over, so Cromwell sent the English.
During the time in-between, Jews (Moses Cohen being the most famous Jewish pirate) roamed the seas with other “Brethren of the Coast”s. Because the Iberian diaspora had sent them all across the Old and New World, they had vast intelligence networks. Jewish merchants in Jamaica knew when ships in Spain were leaving, what they were carrying, and where they were going. Jewish pirates took revenge on the Spanish and, unlike the English, release the slaves from their bonds and either kept them on or took them to Haiti.
Jews are the best don’t let anyone fucking tell you otherwise.
Regarding the Jewry, Hereby Expelled from Spain, 1492. trans. Aaron Marx, coll. Jacob Rader, The Jew in the Medieval World (Cincinatti: Hebrew Union College Text), 1999.
Amsterdam Jewry’s Successful Intercession for their Immigrants and Businessmen, January 1625, trans. Jacob Marcus, coll. The Jew in the Medieval World.
Blacker, Irwin. Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1596-1600. Vol 3.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661-1668. (National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England), 7/24/1667.
Taylor, John. Taylor’s History of his Life and Travels in America and other parts, with An Account with the most remarkable Transactions which Annuaille happened in his daies (1688), trans. John Robertson.
Ockley, Simon. The History of the Present Jews throughout the World, 1791, coll. Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World.
Secondary Sources
Davis, David. Inhuman Bondage (Oxford University Press: New York), 2006.
Finkelstein, Norman. The Other 1492: Jewish Settlement in the New World, (iUniverse: Nebraska), 2000.
Glitz, David. The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, (UONMP: Albuquerque), 2002.
Holzgerg, Carol. Minorities and Power in a Black Society: The Jewish Community of Jamaica, (Lanham: North-South Publishing), 1987.
Kritzler, Edward. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, (Anchor Books: New York), 2008.
Selzer, Michael. Kike! A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford University Press: New York), 1972.
Taylor, S.A.G. The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and Jamaican Historical Society), 1969.
Tolkowsky, Samuel. They Took to the Sea, (London: Thomas Yoseloff), 1964.
Zahedieh, Nuala. The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade 1655-1692 (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 1978.
I feel like I should mention that Jack Sparrow canonly does a lot of the stuff listed above, and I am now claiming him as Jewish.
Nice followup to last week’s post about Victorian Era nipple rings! Thanks to Sarah for sending it in!
Princess post will be up Wednesday – it’s all done, just didn’t want to wreck posting schedule. Next week will be a text entry, and probably the one after that too. Based on feedback, shooting for a 2:1 text:comic post ratio.
Apparently when Burr was a very young teen (we’re talking 13-15) he was being mentored by a man named Paterson, who was a grown adult man (24-26). Paterson had been in the same college club as Burr and, upon graduating, had decided to stick around and remain part of this club, while the other members grew younger and younger. Burr, at this point was the clubs, and (possibly?) the college’s youngest student. Paterson was very friendly with Burr and very free with advice. He was also very free with sexually suggestive talk, commenting extensively on Burr’s feminine traits (he’s literally 13) and using extremely thin metaphors to talk about masturbation, specifically likening it to writing to the (13-year old) Burr. In her biography, Isenberg uses this as an example of the young Burr’s precociousness and the spirit of platonic camaraderie at Princeton.
Personally, I don’t know how anyone can look at a 24 year old man engaging in this sort of dialogue with a 13 year old boy and draw such a sunny conclusion. Boys typically had not reached puberty until around 15 or 16 in the eighteenth century, so it is highly unlikely that Burr would have been even physically matured enough to make this sort of relationship acceptable, much less mental/emotional maturity. The fact that Isenberg completely ignores the possibility that this could have been an abuse situation strikes me as irresponsible. It’s especially irresponsible considering that, later in life, Burr assumed the role of the older mentor figure binding much younger men to him with both warm friendship and, it seems, sexually suggestive gestures and conversations.
It really is a shame that Isenberg is so determined to prove that her darling did nothing wrong that she can’t even look deeply at episodes in his life which may have been harmful, toxic, or traumatic to him. Another example of this is that she takes his frequent running away from home as a sign that he was eager to impress his family and, again, operating above his age (I don’t understand why this is so important to her), whereas it is much more likely that for a child in his situation, frequent attempts to run away from home, always ending in his uncle forcing him to unwillingly return, that this was a sign of poorly coping with a series of traumatic events, a failure to adjust well to a new environment, an attempt to extricate himself from a toxic environment, or some combination thereof.
Instead of humanizing him, she misses real opportunities to do so and decides instead against the evidence to pain him as a (frankly obnoxious) special snowflake.
Literally everyone deserves better here.
Yeah. Ignoring the age difference (or rather, Burr’s young age and the power imbalance) here bothers me a lot. The masturbation reference / feminine qualities letter was written to Burr when he was sixteen, but that’s still ridiculously young, and we need to remember that Paterson had already known Burr for years.
that thing about Burr’s childhood is weird – Isenberg’s not the only author who has some really dismissive opinions about it. Lomask for example offers some half-baked insight why Burr could have been ‘an unruly child’, but at the same time hints that Burr may have wanted to simply present himself as such (’lmao i was such a horrible brat’). Lomask also rejects the idea that Timothy Edwards could have been too harsh on Burr / Burr could have hated him, based on the evidence that they got along when Burr was adult. Because that proves everything, apparently.
I hate how unwilling historians are to discuss possibilities of same-gender-attraction, mental illness, disability, or abuse. They act like these are slanders they need to defend their subject from.
Burr’s running away could have indicated any number of things. He was, essentially, a foster child, and very young children who wind up in that situation often develop a whole slew of difficulties, including attachment issues. It could be indicative of the mental/emotional scar-tissue that was left behind when he lost his parents and grandparents and was uprooted at such a young age to go live with a different family in what sounds like a very overstimulating environment that would have been very difficult on a child in that situation. Instead she takes it as a sign of independence which just makes no sense? I don’t know, the way she dealt with his childhood was frankly just terrible.
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The way that women were controlled in the 19th century was the total absence of public lavatories for women… if you were a woman in that age and you couldn’t really go around without paying a visit, you couldn’t go very far from home. Isn’t that an extraordinary thought? It’s like mind control, it is.
Mark Gatiss interview about TAB Sherlock 11th Nov ‘15 (x)
we probably lost a lot of medical knowledge during the witch hunts because of how many mid wives were persecuted, and how men took over the field of medicine. I bet a few hundred years ago a mid wife might actually have some kind of knowledge about conditions that affect women exclusively which we still haven’t bothered to research in our modern society.
how many got killed cuz of witch hunts seems like youd have to kill a lot
“It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.
Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves.” (pg 129-130) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin
“The witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment—it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both.” (pg 139-140) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin
“The magic of the witches was an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge of telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion, hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew the medicinal nature of herbs and developed formulae for using them. The women who were faithful to the pagan cults developed the science of organic medicine, using vegetation, before there was any notion of the profession of medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous physician of the Middle Ages, claimed that everything he knew he had learned from “the good women.” (pg 140)
Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin
****************get the PDF here *********************
Bolded sections are by me. Honestly I don’t think I need to explain much. We lost some of the most important women in the world, who were the pioneers of medicine for a “curse of eve”. Basically saying if you relieve another woman’s pain we’re going to call you a witch and kill you “in the name of god” because having a child is punishment upon women and relieving their pain is illegal because this book written by men told me so.
Also check out the part where men can’t be witches because jesus and his “phallic divinity” “preserve the male sex”.
People give birth on their back because doctors wanted better access to the vagina. This position actually restricts the size of the pelvic outlet, decreases blood flow, and restricts movement. Prior to the 1700s, the preferred birthing position in western cultures was squatting/upright. What happened in the 1600s? Witch hunts/trials.
“It is said that the first woman to give birth lying down was the mistress of Louis XIV.
The French king wanted to watch his child being born and instructed his mistress’s doctor to have her lie down, while he hid behind a screen. The doctor realized that it was also a lot easier for him to oversee the birth, rather than having to kneel or squat under the woman, and so from then on he requested that all of the women he attended gave birth in bed, lying down. As this was then deemed the ‘posh’ thing to do it soon became the ‘normal’ birthing position. But it has never been the ‘natural’ position.”
So basically, men made birth more convenient for them and really difficult for women. Yaaaay.
