Jewish Piracy, Privateering, and the Sephardic Resistance to Empire
In 1492, the Spanish crown expelled its most accomplished navigators, cartographers, and maritime merchants, and created its most dangerous enemies. Maritime Resistance and the Sephardic Diaspora traces three millennia of Jewish engagement with the sea, from the Hasmonean harbour masters of ancient Joppa to the pirate captains of the Caribbean golden age, revealing how a community stripped of its homeland transformed the ocean into an instrument of resistance against the empires that persecuted it.
At the heart of this history stand figures of extraordinary consequence. Sinan Reis, born to Spanish exiles in Smyrna, rose to command the Ottoman fleet that defeated the assembled naval power of Catholic Europe at the Battle of Preveza in 1538. Samuel Pallache, rabbi and privateer, negotiated the first alliance between a Muslim state and a Christian power against Spain, before standing trial for piracy in a London court. Moses Cohen Henriques organised the greatest maritime heist in early modern history, seizing eleven and a half million guilders of Spanish silver from the Bay of Matanzas in 1628.
Drawing on Ottoman imperial archives, Dutch West India Company records, Caribbean colonial documents, and the remarkable funerary evidence of the Sephardic cemeteries, this book recovers a hidden dimension of Jewish history: the story of a people who refused to disappear, who carried their faith and their fury to sea, and who left their mark on the Atlantic world in ways the empires that persecuted them could never have predicted.
