A Historia do Novo Israel
- Thread starter Mirza Khan
- Start date
As was often the case when colonies changed hands, the first major event in Dutch Brazil would be the Great Renaming. The colony itself had been named Mauritsland (Maurice-land)-supposedly after Maurice of Nassau, though many noted that the governor who picked out the name happened to be called Johann Maurice. Several translations would circulate in Portuguese, with the somewhat cumbersum Terra de Mauricio eventually being cut down to Mauricia. The second major event would be population transfer-what became Mauricia had experienced a few small revolts against Dutch rule, and as a consequence the Dutch expelled all non-Jewish Portuguese from the colony. Many would go north, to still-Portuguese Brazil, but a sizable number went to the city of Buenos Aires, refounded by Spain a few years previously, where they swamped the small Spanish-speaking population. As late as the 1740's, a Spanish governor in Buenos Aires would complain in his diary about having to take along a Portuguese translator when visiting his subjects, and traces of Portuguese are audible even today in the city's Spanish.
The exodus of Portuguese was made up for by an influx of Jews. Over half the free population of Dutch northern Brazil had been Jewish, and with the end of the war virtually all of them went south. Over the next few centuries, Mauricia would become a haven for Jews from all over the Spanish empire who wished to live free of persecution, and though most Sephardim in Europe preferred to go to the Ottoman Empire, a notable number would find their way to Mauricia.
The Great Renaming would trickle down to Mauricia's districts and villages too, as the Dutch swept the Portuguese Captaincies away. The Dutch established the colonial capital in Rio de Janiero, which they renamed Orangestad. Dutchmen soon became a majority in the city-both from the West Indes Company's colonial bureaucracy, and because of Dutch immigrants attracted by the city's status as capital and main port. The West Indes Company also got into the habit of paying its (mostly German) mercenary soldiers with land grants, many of which were given in Orangestad's vicinity. The German veterans easily assimilated into the city's Dutch population.
Orangestad soon became Mauricia's economic center, however, and this meant that there would always be a large Jewish element in the city. Its first synagogue, Beth Shalom, had been built only four years after the city's capture, and it would not be the city's last major Jewish institution. In 1673, a group of well-off Jewish merchants put together enough money to found Orangestad Hebrew School, as a place to give their children an education without sending them to Dutch Calvinist-run institutions. Although it started off as a school for boys, the Hebrew School soon became a meeting place for Orangestad's-and eventually Mauricia's-preimenent Jewish scholars, and would eventually evolve into the famous Hebrew University of Mauricia.
The other major Dutch-inhabited city in Mauricia was Willemstad. The fate of Sao Fernando [Vitoria, Espirito Santo. See last post.] was perhaps symbolic of the Dutch-Portuguese war's violence, and, when a Dutch governor arrived in 1657 to take command of what was left of the city, he found only grass-grown ruins and about 500 people in what was once a thriving town. The Dutch governor quickly set about rebuilding the fortress, and around it, he and his successors would construct a city that could have been taken from Holland and dropped in South America. The buildings-especially older ones-were predominantly in Dutch architectural styles, and most of the people for the new city were drawn from the Netherlands and Germany. Unlike Orangestad, whose status as capital and economic fulcrum of Mauricia would, in time, all but obliterate the Dutch element, Willemstad-eventually Vilemstad-would retain a Dutch-speaking majority until around 1900, and identifiable Dutch-speaking neighborhoods into the 1960's.
Below Orangestad, the Dutch had renamed Sao Vicente-capital of the most successful Captaincy of the Portuguese era-Frederikstad. Very few Dutchmen settled here, though, and the town soon became Cidade de Frederico to its inhabitants. Slightly inland was the village of Piratininga, a poor, mostly Jewish place the Dutch didn't even bother to rechristen, but which would soon become a center for exploration further inland.
Indeed, outside of Orangestad and Willemstad, only a scattering of Dutchmen would settle in Mauricia, leaving the countryside to the Jews. By the time of the Dutch capture, the Portuguese inquisition had all but eliminated Jewish culture in many areas, and people often had little conception of Judaism beyond knowing that they were only concerned with the Old Testament of the Bible. In the years following the Dutch takeover, however, Judaism would experience a massive revival, enabled largely by the Sephardic establishment in Amsterdam. Sephardic traders soon immigrated to the new Dutch possessions, and reported to their synagogues at home the abysmal state of religious life in countryside. As a result, a stream of Rabbis from Amsterdam would criss-cross the Maurician countryside, founding synagogues and yeshivas and again imparting the fundamentals of Judaism into eager students. Within twenty years from the start of Dutch rule, virtually every country town in Mauricia would have a synagogue (often a former Catholic church), and Purim, Hanukkah, and Yom Kipur would at last be celebrated again. The Dutch Sephardic influence would ensure that, though Mauricia's Jews didn't speak Ladino, the liturgy in their Synagogues was almost exactly the same as in Ladino ones.
The exodus of Portuguese was made up for by an influx of Jews. Over half the free population of Dutch northern Brazil had been Jewish, and with the end of the war virtually all of them went south. Over the next few centuries, Mauricia would become a haven for Jews from all over the Spanish empire who wished to live free of persecution, and though most Sephardim in Europe preferred to go to the Ottoman Empire, a notable number would find their way to Mauricia.
The Great Renaming would trickle down to Mauricia's districts and villages too, as the Dutch swept the Portuguese Captaincies away. The Dutch established the colonial capital in Rio de Janiero, which they renamed Orangestad. Dutchmen soon became a majority in the city-both from the West Indes Company's colonial bureaucracy, and because of Dutch immigrants attracted by the city's status as capital and main port. The West Indes Company also got into the habit of paying its (mostly German) mercenary soldiers with land grants, many of which were given in Orangestad's vicinity. The German veterans easily assimilated into the city's Dutch population.
Orangestad soon became Mauricia's economic center, however, and this meant that there would always be a large Jewish element in the city. Its first synagogue, Beth Shalom, had been built only four years after the city's capture, and it would not be the city's last major Jewish institution. In 1673, a group of well-off Jewish merchants put together enough money to found Orangestad Hebrew School, as a place to give their children an education without sending them to Dutch Calvinist-run institutions. Although it started off as a school for boys, the Hebrew School soon became a meeting place for Orangestad's-and eventually Mauricia's-preimenent Jewish scholars, and would eventually evolve into the famous Hebrew University of Mauricia.
The other major Dutch-inhabited city in Mauricia was Willemstad. The fate of Sao Fernando [Vitoria, Espirito Santo. See last post.] was perhaps symbolic of the Dutch-Portuguese war's violence, and, when a Dutch governor arrived in 1657 to take command of what was left of the city, he found only grass-grown ruins and about 500 people in what was once a thriving town. The Dutch governor quickly set about rebuilding the fortress, and around it, he and his successors would construct a city that could have been taken from Holland and dropped in South America. The buildings-especially older ones-were predominantly in Dutch architectural styles, and most of the people for the new city were drawn from the Netherlands and Germany. Unlike Orangestad, whose status as capital and economic fulcrum of Mauricia would, in time, all but obliterate the Dutch element, Willemstad-eventually Vilemstad-would retain a Dutch-speaking majority until around 1900, and identifiable Dutch-speaking neighborhoods into the 1960's.
Below Orangestad, the Dutch had renamed Sao Vicente-capital of the most successful Captaincy of the Portuguese era-Frederikstad. Very few Dutchmen settled here, though, and the town soon became Cidade de Frederico to its inhabitants. Slightly inland was the village of Piratininga, a poor, mostly Jewish place the Dutch didn't even bother to rechristen, but which would soon become a center for exploration further inland.
Indeed, outside of Orangestad and Willemstad, only a scattering of Dutchmen would settle in Mauricia, leaving the countryside to the Jews. By the time of the Dutch capture, the Portuguese inquisition had all but eliminated Jewish culture in many areas, and people often had little conception of Judaism beyond knowing that they were only concerned with the Old Testament of the Bible. In the years following the Dutch takeover, however, Judaism would experience a massive revival, enabled largely by the Sephardic establishment in Amsterdam. Sephardic traders soon immigrated to the new Dutch possessions, and reported to their synagogues at home the abysmal state of religious life in countryside. As a result, a stream of Rabbis from Amsterdam would criss-cross the Maurician countryside, founding synagogues and yeshivas and again imparting the fundamentals of Judaism into eager students. Within twenty years from the start of Dutch rule, virtually every country town in Mauricia would have a synagogue (often a former Catholic church), and Purim, Hanukkah, and Yom Kipur would at last be celebrated again. The Dutch Sephardic influence would ensure that, though Mauricia's Jews didn't speak Ladino, the liturgy in their Synagogues was almost exactly the same as in Ladino ones.
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At the time of their expulsion from Portugal, the ancestors of the Mauricians already spoke a distinctive Jewish dialect of Portuguese, and isolation from Portugal would only deepen the differences. After the Dutch conquest, the Maurician Jews were quite reluctant to identify themselves or their language as "Portuguese", and at any rate, influences from Ladino and Dutch, combined with simple linguistic divergence, would render their speech barely intelligible to someone from Lisbon. At first, many communities simply called themselves "Jews" and left it at that, but over time, many would come to use the term Marrano for both themselves and their language, and this name would become predominant later as other groups of Jews arrived.
Converted
Using my Ring of Fire and 1632 knowledge, would populations of 'converted' Jews in Spain, the Ottoman Empire and other places be able to provide trade and intelligence for the emerging state?
Using my Ring of Fire and 1632 knowledge, would populations of 'converted' Jews in Spain, the Ottoman Empire and other places be able to provide trade and intelligence for the emerging state?
As a fellow 1632 lover I kind of like the idea, but, as I hope I've established in the previous posts, Mauricia is currently a colony, with a Dutch elite and mostly Portuguese-Jewish (TTL called Marrano) population. I'll go more into how the Dutch run Mauricia in future posts, but suffice it to say that it won't have an independent foreign policy or intelligence service anytime soon.
Of course, when Mauricia does become independent, its status as the world's only Jewish-majority country will have a number of effects, but that's for the future.
Thanks to everyone who commented, btw!
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As the Dutch West India company settled into Mauricia, one thing above all others occupied their minds-making the new territory turn a profit. After all, Dutch involvement in South America had been initially driven by envy of the massive windfall the Portuguese had gotten out of Pernambuco, and its loss still smarted. And so, in its first few decades of rule, the WIC set about trying to recreate Pernambuco in Mauricia.
The raw materials, however, were not initially promising. The former great landowners of Mauricia-Christian Portuguese-had been exiled, and their land lay vacant or inhabited by squatters. Most of the Jewish population were small farmers and lacked the capital for such enterprises. Thus, the WIC aggressively recruited rich Dutchmen from back home who did. While a not insignificant number of the new investors were Jews, most were rich Dutch merchants hoping to make a quick profit. Showered with tales of endless sugar profits, lured by promises of tax exemptions, and committing to only sale their produce to the WIC (who would then resell it in Europe at jacked-up prices), the WIC's investors gradually began to aquire land-often on the ruins of plantations abandoned by the Portuguese a few years previously.
The next problem for the WIC's plan was labor. Thanks to the Inquisition and its sentences of indentured servitude, a good portion of Mauricia's Marranos had experience working on sugar plantations-experience that left them determined to never go near one again. The labor problem, however, wasn't unique to Mauricia, and the Dutch turned to the same solution that had been used everywhere else in the Americas-the slave trade. Many of the slaves would come from Africa, but African slaves were expensive, especially for people (like the Dutch) who had few colonies there. So, as the new sugar plantations began to come online, the Dutch would turn to a source closer at hand.
Even before the Dutch, Portuguese Brazil had had a tradition of bandeirantes-frontiersmen who led expeditions (sometimes years long) into the trackless jungle, looking for slaves and gold. And Mauricia's Marrano population was well-placed to revive the practice. Many farmers (especially on the edges of the frontier) had good relations with local Indian tribes, and intermarriage between them an Indians was not unheard of. Under Portuguese rule, many Marranos had had the need to hide out in the wilderness, and though the majority of the anti-Portuguese bandit leaders had been caught, some still survived, and still maintained their contacts among the Indians-contacts that were happy to lead them through the wilderness and point them in the direction of their hated enemy tribes. And thus, the era of the Bandeirantes began.
The Bandeirante has become a staple of historic Maurician memory. A rough, restless frontiersman-often with an Indian mother or wife to teach him the ways of the forest-he would disappear into the jungle for months at a time, and emerge with a bounty of slaves or gemstones. The most illustrious of these men-Alexandre de Torres, David da Silva, Moses Cabral, the Dutchman Paulus van der Steen-are still the subject of children's stories in Mauricia today. And they would have far-reaching effects. At the beginning of the Bandeirante era, settlement in Mauricia largely hugged the coast, with the interior largely a blank space on maps. The Bandeirante expeditions would help to fill that blank space. Returned Bandeirantes brought back reports of an area they called "The Highlands" (As Terras Altas in Portuguese, De Hooglanden in Dutch*), which had a pleasant climate, more temperate and conducive to farming than the coasts. And (much more interesting to the WIC), the Bandeirantes brought back reports of gold and diamonds-indeed, the Terras Altas would turn out to be a region of great mineral wealth. The WIC tried to follow up on these reports, though it did so in a rather disorganized and haphazard way. However, it offered rewards for discoveries of gold and diamonds, and, from about the 1710's onward, treasure hunting would replace slaving as the primary object of Bandeirante expeditions. Meanwhile, beginning roughly around the 1680's, and increasing in the following decades, a small but growing stream of Jewish farmers would begin moving westward. Reports of gold filtered into the Netherlands and across Europe-but the WIC's chronic capital problems largely prevented it from building the infrastructure necessary to support a gold rush. Many of the new fortune-seekers, confronted with a wilderness, would return home-though a few would strike it rich, and a few more would settle down next to the emerging Marrano farming communities-forming a small but distinctive Dutch presence that continues in As Terras Altas to this day.
On the coast, meanwhile, the WIC's efforts to recreate Pernambuco would leave their own stamp. While their were some Marrano plantation owners, most Marranos would be left out of the sugar economy (except in indirect roles, like Bandeirantes). After an initial period of chaos, most plantations would come to be owned by a rather small class of Dutchmen, the wealthiest of whom (the so-called "Seven Families", that each owned multiple plantations and hundreds of slaves) would have a very outsized influence on Maurician politics. Life in plantations was brutal, and the mortality rate among slaves was perhaps the highest in the New World. Initially, slaves came from Indian and African backgrounds in about equal measure, but by the end of the 18th century, Africans would predominate. Among the plantation slaves, a new creole language began to emerge-Negerhollands (Black Dutch**). A mixture of Dutch and West African-with bits of Maurician Indian languages and Marrano thrown in-Negerhollands would become the Lingua Franca of the sugar plantations, and its speakers very quickly outnumbered those of actual Dutch.
Meanwhile, despite all its hopes, the Dutch West Indies company would never get as much money out of the sugar plantations as it had hoped. Mauricia still had to compete with its inspiration in Brazil, and both in turn competed with sugar operations in the Caribbean, which were closer to Europe and thus able to export at much lower prices. At the WIC's urging, the Dutch Republic implemented a number of protective tariffs that effectively prohibited the importation of sugar from outside the Dutch empire. This quickly became the only market Maurician sugar could compete in. In the early 18th century, the WIC shifted its focus to its more profitable Caribbean sugar islands, and Mauricia as a whole hovered in and out of the red. Usually, the WIC focused only on its plantations on the coast-and when it got reports from Bandeirantes about gold in the interior, its efforts at building roads and other infrastructure were hampered by the difficulties of managing such a project from Amsterdam, combined with the inevitable corruption. The WIC was reluctant to invest in something that might take ten or twenty years to produce results, as building a road through the jungle to a gold mine would. And thus, settlement of the Maurician highlands was accomplished largely by bands of Marrano pioneers, acting with minimal government support. When they did find gold or diamonds, the WIC's habit of jumping on the discovery to demand a sizable cut produced a great deal of resentment. Its onerous trade restrictions-which effectively banned imports from anywhere but the Netherands-didn't help in this department. And thus, Mauricia passed into the early part of the 18th century largely undeveloped, its progress the result of its people much more than its managers. This would have reprecussions later on.
*And Minas Gerais and western Sao Paulo states IOTL
**The OTL Virgin Islands had a Dutch creole with this name, which is where I got it from. That wiki page has a text sample, and I imagine TTL Negerhollands would sound slightly similar, since it comes from some of the same sources.
The raw materials, however, were not initially promising. The former great landowners of Mauricia-Christian Portuguese-had been exiled, and their land lay vacant or inhabited by squatters. Most of the Jewish population were small farmers and lacked the capital for such enterprises. Thus, the WIC aggressively recruited rich Dutchmen from back home who did. While a not insignificant number of the new investors were Jews, most were rich Dutch merchants hoping to make a quick profit. Showered with tales of endless sugar profits, lured by promises of tax exemptions, and committing to only sale their produce to the WIC (who would then resell it in Europe at jacked-up prices), the WIC's investors gradually began to aquire land-often on the ruins of plantations abandoned by the Portuguese a few years previously.
The next problem for the WIC's plan was labor. Thanks to the Inquisition and its sentences of indentured servitude, a good portion of Mauricia's Marranos had experience working on sugar plantations-experience that left them determined to never go near one again. The labor problem, however, wasn't unique to Mauricia, and the Dutch turned to the same solution that had been used everywhere else in the Americas-the slave trade. Many of the slaves would come from Africa, but African slaves were expensive, especially for people (like the Dutch) who had few colonies there. So, as the new sugar plantations began to come online, the Dutch would turn to a source closer at hand.
Even before the Dutch, Portuguese Brazil had had a tradition of bandeirantes-frontiersmen who led expeditions (sometimes years long) into the trackless jungle, looking for slaves and gold. And Mauricia's Marrano population was well-placed to revive the practice. Many farmers (especially on the edges of the frontier) had good relations with local Indian tribes, and intermarriage between them an Indians was not unheard of. Under Portuguese rule, many Marranos had had the need to hide out in the wilderness, and though the majority of the anti-Portuguese bandit leaders had been caught, some still survived, and still maintained their contacts among the Indians-contacts that were happy to lead them through the wilderness and point them in the direction of their hated enemy tribes. And thus, the era of the Bandeirantes began.
The Bandeirante has become a staple of historic Maurician memory. A rough, restless frontiersman-often with an Indian mother or wife to teach him the ways of the forest-he would disappear into the jungle for months at a time, and emerge with a bounty of slaves or gemstones. The most illustrious of these men-Alexandre de Torres, David da Silva, Moses Cabral, the Dutchman Paulus van der Steen-are still the subject of children's stories in Mauricia today. And they would have far-reaching effects. At the beginning of the Bandeirante era, settlement in Mauricia largely hugged the coast, with the interior largely a blank space on maps. The Bandeirante expeditions would help to fill that blank space. Returned Bandeirantes brought back reports of an area they called "The Highlands" (As Terras Altas in Portuguese, De Hooglanden in Dutch*), which had a pleasant climate, more temperate and conducive to farming than the coasts. And (much more interesting to the WIC), the Bandeirantes brought back reports of gold and diamonds-indeed, the Terras Altas would turn out to be a region of great mineral wealth. The WIC tried to follow up on these reports, though it did so in a rather disorganized and haphazard way. However, it offered rewards for discoveries of gold and diamonds, and, from about the 1710's onward, treasure hunting would replace slaving as the primary object of Bandeirante expeditions. Meanwhile, beginning roughly around the 1680's, and increasing in the following decades, a small but growing stream of Jewish farmers would begin moving westward. Reports of gold filtered into the Netherlands and across Europe-but the WIC's chronic capital problems largely prevented it from building the infrastructure necessary to support a gold rush. Many of the new fortune-seekers, confronted with a wilderness, would return home-though a few would strike it rich, and a few more would settle down next to the emerging Marrano farming communities-forming a small but distinctive Dutch presence that continues in As Terras Altas to this day.
On the coast, meanwhile, the WIC's efforts to recreate Pernambuco would leave their own stamp. While their were some Marrano plantation owners, most Marranos would be left out of the sugar economy (except in indirect roles, like Bandeirantes). After an initial period of chaos, most plantations would come to be owned by a rather small class of Dutchmen, the wealthiest of whom (the so-called "Seven Families", that each owned multiple plantations and hundreds of slaves) would have a very outsized influence on Maurician politics. Life in plantations was brutal, and the mortality rate among slaves was perhaps the highest in the New World. Initially, slaves came from Indian and African backgrounds in about equal measure, but by the end of the 18th century, Africans would predominate. Among the plantation slaves, a new creole language began to emerge-Negerhollands (Black Dutch**). A mixture of Dutch and West African-with bits of Maurician Indian languages and Marrano thrown in-Negerhollands would become the Lingua Franca of the sugar plantations, and its speakers very quickly outnumbered those of actual Dutch.
Meanwhile, despite all its hopes, the Dutch West Indies company would never get as much money out of the sugar plantations as it had hoped. Mauricia still had to compete with its inspiration in Brazil, and both in turn competed with sugar operations in the Caribbean, which were closer to Europe and thus able to export at much lower prices. At the WIC's urging, the Dutch Republic implemented a number of protective tariffs that effectively prohibited the importation of sugar from outside the Dutch empire. This quickly became the only market Maurician sugar could compete in. In the early 18th century, the WIC shifted its focus to its more profitable Caribbean sugar islands, and Mauricia as a whole hovered in and out of the red. Usually, the WIC focused only on its plantations on the coast-and when it got reports from Bandeirantes about gold in the interior, its efforts at building roads and other infrastructure were hampered by the difficulties of managing such a project from Amsterdam, combined with the inevitable corruption. The WIC was reluctant to invest in something that might take ten or twenty years to produce results, as building a road through the jungle to a gold mine would. And thus, settlement of the Maurician highlands was accomplished largely by bands of Marrano pioneers, acting with minimal government support. When they did find gold or diamonds, the WIC's habit of jumping on the discovery to demand a sizable cut produced a great deal of resentment. Its onerous trade restrictions-which effectively banned imports from anywhere but the Netherands-didn't help in this department. And thus, Mauricia passed into the early part of the 18th century largely undeveloped, its progress the result of its people much more than its managers. This would have reprecussions later on.
*And Minas Gerais and western Sao Paulo states IOTL
**The OTL Virgin Islands had a Dutch creole with this name, which is where I got it from. That wiki page has a text sample, and I imagine TTL Negerhollands would sound slightly similar, since it comes from some of the same sources.
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As Maurician settlement began to push west, it moved south as well, across the great grasslands that separated Mauricia from its southern neighbor, the Spanish colony of Argentina. Here, herding often proved much more practical than farming, leading the Marrano settlers to abandon their plows in favor of cattle and horses. And thus, Dom David and the Bandeirante would be joined by another stock character in Maurician history-the Gaucho.
While Marrano cowboys appear in Dutch records since the late 17th century, the major wave of settlement began with the founding of the city of Nieuwpoort, better known by its Marrano name of Porto Novo*, by the Dutch in 1732. Lying in an area known as the Banda Oriental that the Spanish claimed for themselves, Porto Novo represented a direct challenge to Spain. And while it was largely unpopulated, the Banda Oriental was not entirely empty-herdsmen from Argentina had begun, slowly but surely, to move into the area. At the time, the majority of Argentinians descended from Christian Portuguese expelled from Mauricia after its conquest by the Dutch, and while they had gradually taken up Spanish, this process was slow and certainly not complete among the Banda Oriental's rural cowboys. And while the Marranos had started off as Portuguese, since the Dutch conquest Mauricia's religious establishment had been dominated by Ladino-speaking rabbis, and the colony as a whole had become a prime destination for Sephardic Jewish refugees from Spanish America, who together had swung the Marrano language somewhat away from its origins. Thus, the Marranos now pouring into the Banda Oriental, speaking a heavily Spanish-influenced Portuguese, would meet the speakers of a heavily Portuguese-influenced Spanish, and the two would have little difficulty understanding one another.
But where language united, religion and history created an unbridgable chasm. Argentinian gauchos had been raised on tales of lost Brazil, stolen by the heretic Dutch along with a bunch of Jews, who had dared defile Catholic churches with their profane rites, and sent God's true people off to a strange land with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Jewish Gauchos, meanwhile, had heard equally vehement stories of the persecution their grandfathers had endured at the hands of the Inquisition, and now, armed with horses, bows, and increasingly guns, many saw a chance at revenge. And thus, when the two groups collided on the Banda Oriental in the 1730's, the meeting was anything but friendly.
Almost immediately upon its founding, Porto Novo had to be garrisoned with German mercenaries to stop the endless Argentine Gaucho raids determined to burn it down. And as Marrano Gauchos settled in the plains around the town and expanded outward, they and their Argentine counterparts begun an endless low-level war that would last, in one form or another, until the century's end. The fighting would create legions of heros and villains on both sides, and the legends of the Gauchos would be retold through the generations and form a major base for Maurcia's literary tradition.
Perhaps the most renowned of Mauricia's Kosher cowboys was a man named Solomon dos Campos. Born in Piratininga, Solomon was the younger son of a cattle farmer who, the legends said, had learned to ride a horse before he could walk. Coming to Porto Novo as a young man, Solomon soon faced tragedy-the young wife he'd bought from home was killed in an Argentine raid. Fueled by a hatred that was now much more than ancestral, Solomon proved a charismatic leader and by the end of his life owned over a hundred cattle, most of them stolen from unfortunate Argentinians. The stories said he was born “without an ounce of cowardence”, and he certainly was willing to lead raids into Argentine territory almost until the end of his life-including one in 1753 that famously came within a dozen miles of Buenos Aires, and burned down scores of Spanish plantations along the way. And from one of them would come the other essential character of the Solomon dos Campos legend-his second wife, Esther.
Historians can say very little for sure about Esther, other than that she was Solomon's wife and was originally taken in a raid. Gauchos-Christian and Jewish-were mostly illiterate, their heroic deeds remembered in tales that grew taller with every telling. And the story that would form around Solomon and Esther-and go on to inspire countless Maurician romances, novels, and more than one movie-was certainly a giant.
Esther, according to the most common version of the story, was actually a Marrano, taken from a Marrano Gaucho family in an Argentine raid as a toddler. Sold as a slave (a quite common fate for Jewish captives of Catholic Spain), she grew up to be a woman of great beauty and was bought by an alcoholic Argentine rancher who kept her as his servant and concubine, often beating her in his drunken rages. Esther's master and his family, the story goes, often spoke of Solomon and the Jewish Gaucho raiders with fear and hatred, and Esther would secretly listen, desperately hoping that they would come her way. And one night, they did-smashing through the fences before anyone noticed, riding down the master as he stumbled drunkenly out of the door, and putting the whole place to the torch before carting away all the surviving cattle and prisoners. Being led to a wagon with a group of sobbing Catholic girls, Esther broke away from the other prisoners-only to run to Solomon and fall down at his feet, pleading. Tearfully, she told him that she had not been born Catholic but Marrano, and of her earliest years growing up in a Jewish family, only to be snatched away to a lifetime of abuse in Argentina. “But they always talked about you, Solomon!”, she said. “And I always hoped you'd come here and save me from this place, and take me back home! I'll do anything-I'll be your wife if you want! They say you have no woman-It would be so wonderful to be your woman! Take me!” And she threw herself down at Solomon's feet and cried into his boots, as the old ranch house burned in the background. As the tale went, Solomon reached down, grabbed Esther's chin, and lifted it up so that she was looking into his face. “Are you sure about this, woman?”, he said.
“Yes!”, replied Esther.
“Well then,” said Solomon, as he turned to his men who stood watching the scene. “You heard the woman. Somebody go get the rabbi right now!”
Esther, the stories went on, soon learned to ride a horse and fire a musket, and insisted on going on raids with her husband, where she became “as ferocious as any man.” But it would prove to be her undoing-some years after their marriage, Esther, Solomon, and their party were riding back from a raid, pursued by Argentinians, when Esther's horse tripped in a hole and she was thrown off. Solomon and his men wheeled around to help her-but the Argentinians got their first and took Esther captive. Determined not to let his wife fall victim again, Solomon and his men turned around and chased the party back into Argentina-and just as they were about to catch up with them, were met with the sight of Esther's body, lying in the grass. Solomon, the story went, would never be with another woman till the end of his days.
While the story of Esther is most famous, in the 20th century, an Argentine folklorist would turn up another legend that strangely parallels it-the story of Rodrigo**. Rodrigo, so the tale goes, was a rancher at the edge of the Banda Oriental who had inherited his land from his father. Unfortunately, the silver spoon had gone to Rodrigo's head and he grew up to be an arrogant bully, the terror of his entire household and not the least his wife, Maria. One night, a group of Jewish gauchos burned down Rodrigo's farm, took his cattle and his wife, and bashed him in the head with a pistol, leaving him for dead in a ditch. But Rodrigo lived, and grew to regret how he had treated those around him. Turning first to alcohol but then to religion, he began to join Gaucho raids into Maurician territory, hoping, so the Argentine tale-teller said, to be a modern-day Crusader, redeeming himself in the battle against the infidel Jews of America. And eventually, Rodrigo found what he'd most desired-his raiding party stumbled upon a Marrano camp, overpowered it and massacred the men, and among the women prisoners was none other than Maria. Laughing and crying with joy, Rodrigo grabbed his wife in a tight embrace before leading her away. “You're safe, Maria!”, he said. “I've spend all these years searching for you-and now, God has finally let us be together again! As soon as we get back to Montevideo we shall have the happiest celebration God's earth has ever seen!”
“You shall be happy, perhaps.”, said Maria. “I have no reason to be. For these few, joyous years, God has let me be with a man I loved, and who loved me, stood by me, protected me, and gave me more happiness than I had ever known in life, until you cowardly slew him tonight.”
“You traitorous whore!” roared Rodrigo. “If you love that infidel bastard so much, you can join him in Hell!” And, filled with rage, he snatched his pistol from his belt and fired it straight into Maria's heart.
In 1768, a treaty would fix the boundary between Spanish Argentina and Dutch Mauricia some ways south of Porto Novo. But the gaucho raids-and the generational hatred they engendered-would continue into the next century, until lines of regulars and field artillery met and clashed on the same bloody ground. But that is a story for another day.
*Porto Alegre, Brazil
**Unfortunately, the following is not wholly my own idea-Sara Hoyt had a similar story on her blog a couple years ago, which she said came from medieval Portugal and was about a Christian woman taken by the Moors. I liked it too much not to steal.
While Marrano cowboys appear in Dutch records since the late 17th century, the major wave of settlement began with the founding of the city of Nieuwpoort, better known by its Marrano name of Porto Novo*, by the Dutch in 1732. Lying in an area known as the Banda Oriental that the Spanish claimed for themselves, Porto Novo represented a direct challenge to Spain. And while it was largely unpopulated, the Banda Oriental was not entirely empty-herdsmen from Argentina had begun, slowly but surely, to move into the area. At the time, the majority of Argentinians descended from Christian Portuguese expelled from Mauricia after its conquest by the Dutch, and while they had gradually taken up Spanish, this process was slow and certainly not complete among the Banda Oriental's rural cowboys. And while the Marranos had started off as Portuguese, since the Dutch conquest Mauricia's religious establishment had been dominated by Ladino-speaking rabbis, and the colony as a whole had become a prime destination for Sephardic Jewish refugees from Spanish America, who together had swung the Marrano language somewhat away from its origins. Thus, the Marranos now pouring into the Banda Oriental, speaking a heavily Spanish-influenced Portuguese, would meet the speakers of a heavily Portuguese-influenced Spanish, and the two would have little difficulty understanding one another.
But where language united, religion and history created an unbridgable chasm. Argentinian gauchos had been raised on tales of lost Brazil, stolen by the heretic Dutch along with a bunch of Jews, who had dared defile Catholic churches with their profane rites, and sent God's true people off to a strange land with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Jewish Gauchos, meanwhile, had heard equally vehement stories of the persecution their grandfathers had endured at the hands of the Inquisition, and now, armed with horses, bows, and increasingly guns, many saw a chance at revenge. And thus, when the two groups collided on the Banda Oriental in the 1730's, the meeting was anything but friendly.
Almost immediately upon its founding, Porto Novo had to be garrisoned with German mercenaries to stop the endless Argentine Gaucho raids determined to burn it down. And as Marrano Gauchos settled in the plains around the town and expanded outward, they and their Argentine counterparts begun an endless low-level war that would last, in one form or another, until the century's end. The fighting would create legions of heros and villains on both sides, and the legends of the Gauchos would be retold through the generations and form a major base for Maurcia's literary tradition.
Perhaps the most renowned of Mauricia's Kosher cowboys was a man named Solomon dos Campos. Born in Piratininga, Solomon was the younger son of a cattle farmer who, the legends said, had learned to ride a horse before he could walk. Coming to Porto Novo as a young man, Solomon soon faced tragedy-the young wife he'd bought from home was killed in an Argentine raid. Fueled by a hatred that was now much more than ancestral, Solomon proved a charismatic leader and by the end of his life owned over a hundred cattle, most of them stolen from unfortunate Argentinians. The stories said he was born “without an ounce of cowardence”, and he certainly was willing to lead raids into Argentine territory almost until the end of his life-including one in 1753 that famously came within a dozen miles of Buenos Aires, and burned down scores of Spanish plantations along the way. And from one of them would come the other essential character of the Solomon dos Campos legend-his second wife, Esther.
Historians can say very little for sure about Esther, other than that she was Solomon's wife and was originally taken in a raid. Gauchos-Christian and Jewish-were mostly illiterate, their heroic deeds remembered in tales that grew taller with every telling. And the story that would form around Solomon and Esther-and go on to inspire countless Maurician romances, novels, and more than one movie-was certainly a giant.
Esther, according to the most common version of the story, was actually a Marrano, taken from a Marrano Gaucho family in an Argentine raid as a toddler. Sold as a slave (a quite common fate for Jewish captives of Catholic Spain), she grew up to be a woman of great beauty and was bought by an alcoholic Argentine rancher who kept her as his servant and concubine, often beating her in his drunken rages. Esther's master and his family, the story goes, often spoke of Solomon and the Jewish Gaucho raiders with fear and hatred, and Esther would secretly listen, desperately hoping that they would come her way. And one night, they did-smashing through the fences before anyone noticed, riding down the master as he stumbled drunkenly out of the door, and putting the whole place to the torch before carting away all the surviving cattle and prisoners. Being led to a wagon with a group of sobbing Catholic girls, Esther broke away from the other prisoners-only to run to Solomon and fall down at his feet, pleading. Tearfully, she told him that she had not been born Catholic but Marrano, and of her earliest years growing up in a Jewish family, only to be snatched away to a lifetime of abuse in Argentina. “But they always talked about you, Solomon!”, she said. “And I always hoped you'd come here and save me from this place, and take me back home! I'll do anything-I'll be your wife if you want! They say you have no woman-It would be so wonderful to be your woman! Take me!” And she threw herself down at Solomon's feet and cried into his boots, as the old ranch house burned in the background. As the tale went, Solomon reached down, grabbed Esther's chin, and lifted it up so that she was looking into his face. “Are you sure about this, woman?”, he said.
“Yes!”, replied Esther.
“Well then,” said Solomon, as he turned to his men who stood watching the scene. “You heard the woman. Somebody go get the rabbi right now!”
Esther, the stories went on, soon learned to ride a horse and fire a musket, and insisted on going on raids with her husband, where she became “as ferocious as any man.” But it would prove to be her undoing-some years after their marriage, Esther, Solomon, and their party were riding back from a raid, pursued by Argentinians, when Esther's horse tripped in a hole and she was thrown off. Solomon and his men wheeled around to help her-but the Argentinians got their first and took Esther captive. Determined not to let his wife fall victim again, Solomon and his men turned around and chased the party back into Argentina-and just as they were about to catch up with them, were met with the sight of Esther's body, lying in the grass. Solomon, the story went, would never be with another woman till the end of his days.
While the story of Esther is most famous, in the 20th century, an Argentine folklorist would turn up another legend that strangely parallels it-the story of Rodrigo**. Rodrigo, so the tale goes, was a rancher at the edge of the Banda Oriental who had inherited his land from his father. Unfortunately, the silver spoon had gone to Rodrigo's head and he grew up to be an arrogant bully, the terror of his entire household and not the least his wife, Maria. One night, a group of Jewish gauchos burned down Rodrigo's farm, took his cattle and his wife, and bashed him in the head with a pistol, leaving him for dead in a ditch. But Rodrigo lived, and grew to regret how he had treated those around him. Turning first to alcohol but then to religion, he began to join Gaucho raids into Maurician territory, hoping, so the Argentine tale-teller said, to be a modern-day Crusader, redeeming himself in the battle against the infidel Jews of America. And eventually, Rodrigo found what he'd most desired-his raiding party stumbled upon a Marrano camp, overpowered it and massacred the men, and among the women prisoners was none other than Maria. Laughing and crying with joy, Rodrigo grabbed his wife in a tight embrace before leading her away. “You're safe, Maria!”, he said. “I've spend all these years searching for you-and now, God has finally let us be together again! As soon as we get back to Montevideo we shall have the happiest celebration God's earth has ever seen!”
“You shall be happy, perhaps.”, said Maria. “I have no reason to be. For these few, joyous years, God has let me be with a man I loved, and who loved me, stood by me, protected me, and gave me more happiness than I had ever known in life, until you cowardly slew him tonight.”
“You traitorous whore!” roared Rodrigo. “If you love that infidel bastard so much, you can join him in Hell!” And, filled with rage, he snatched his pistol from his belt and fired it straight into Maria's heart.
In 1768, a treaty would fix the boundary between Spanish Argentina and Dutch Mauricia some ways south of Porto Novo. But the gaucho raids-and the generational hatred they engendered-would continue into the next century, until lines of regulars and field artillery met and clashed on the same bloody ground. But that is a story for another day.
*Porto Alegre, Brazil
**Unfortunately, the following is not wholly my own idea-Sara Hoyt had a similar story on her blog a couple years ago, which she said came from medieval Portugal and was about a Christian woman taken by the Moors. I liked it too much not to steal.
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Fixed. Thanks!There's a small typo, it should be Bandeirante.
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Keep it up, Mirza!
just found this..enjoying it. One thing, the liturgy would be in Hebrew, not Ladino any more than liturgy was in Yiddish among the Ashkenazim. All of the sacred texts and prayers were in Hebrew (mostly) or Aramaic. There might be an interval where all but the simplest/most common prayers would be in Ladino due to lack of knowledge among the Marranos, but as soon as there was any reconnection with Europe that would cease. I wonder if the Jews will use Hebrew characters for Ladino, as they did OTL or they will use Latin characters as time goes on.
I'm not Jewish, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that Sephadic and Ashkenazi Synagogues used slightly differnt liturgies, even if bit used Hebrew. I was saying that Mauricia's synagogues used the same rite as the rest of the Sephardic world. And yes, the Portuguese inquisition mostly suceeded in destroying Mauricia's Rabbincal tradition, and it had to be revived by Sephardic Rabbis from the Netherlands. By 1700 though, the majority of Rabbis would be native born again.
Marrano is a different language from Ladino-it has a Portuguese rather than Spanish base, albeit with a good deal of Ladino influence from the above-mentioned Ladino-speaking Rabbis plus Sephardic refugees from Spanish America. It also has a notable amount of Dutch vocabulary as well. Its written in the Hebrew alphabet-Orangestad had the Western Hemisphere's first Hebrew printing press.
Along with its Marranos, Mauricia had had an Ashkenazic Jewish population almost since the beginning of the Dutch period-a “German Synagogue” appears in Orangestad's tax records in 1651, and in the following decades a number of Ashkenazim from the Netherlands and even northern Germany would immigrate there, attracted by a what was probably the most tolerant place for Jews in Christendom. Largely craftsmen, merchants, and other urban professionals, they were content to leave Mauricia's countryside to the Marranos and the great slave-worked sugar plantations, but left such a stamp on its cities that, in 1703, traveler Erik van Houten would note that “the German-Jewish jargon [ie, Yiddish]...is the second language of all the towns in this country after Dutch...even in Orangestad I felt one could hardly do business without picking up at least a little of it.” But it was not until the mid-18th century that the Yiddish-speaking community would truly come into its own.
The catalyst, it turned out, would be the gold and diamonds of Mauricia's highlands. Jewish merchants in Orangestad passed word of these discoveries onto their friends in Amsterdam, and gradually, the city's jewelers and diamond-cutters would begin financing mining expeditions into Maurcia's interior, following a trail blazed by the earlier, and much more haphazard, migrations of the Bandeirantes and Marrano farmers. Like earlier attempts to penetrate the interior, these efforts would be hampered by poor infrastructure until the 1740's, when a group of mostly Jewish investors provided the necessary capital and prodding for the West Indes Company to finally finish its long-delayed road into the interior. Completed in 1748, the “Company Road” would terminated at the newly founded city of Guldenberg*, quickly dubbed by Marranos “Vila Rica”, the Rich Town. Growing seemingly overnight, the city soon became host to an extravagantly wealthy community of Dutch and Askenazi gold and diamond merchants, and within ten years after its founding, Guldenberg's main square would feature an Ashkenzai-rite synagogue, and Dutch Calvinist church, both richly decorated with gold filigrees. The Marrano farmers who kept the town fed worshiped in much less opulent places, and even lower than them were the slaves, many imported from the failing sugar plantations on the coast, who did most of the mining. Just a few blocks away though, most of the streets were unpaved, and bars, taverns, and lawlessness abounded. Indian attacks were common enough that a law required every citizen of Guldenburg to be armed.
From Guldenberg, the Company Road wound through the jungle to its eastern terminus at the village of Piratininga**, which, from its earlier impovershed state, became known as the “Gateway to the West”, the last stop of the diamond and gold caravans before the quick trip to the coastal ports, and last refuge for travelers wishing to brave the still wild interior. The wisest course for such people was to join the guarded caravans that left once a week-away from the city, the Company Road often became the Company Goat-path, and a solitary traveler had little defense against the bandits and Indians who still lived in the road's vicinity. This was doubly true for people attempting to come back-diamonds and gold could be cut or melted down, then sold in Orangestad to people who cared little about the fate of their original owners.
Indeed, misrule and lawlessness were the main complaints of the latter Company period-while Jews controlled much of the diamond and gold trades, all but the lowest-level posts in the West Indes Company administration were barred to them, and higher-level posts barred to Maurician Dutchman as well. As the wealth from the mining trade increased, WIC bureaucrats increasingly saw Mauricia as a way to get rich. “Mauritslander***” would come to have the same meaning in Dutch as “Nabob” in English, and in 1776, diamond merchant Abraham Goldstein would speak for many when he griped in his diary that “from Guldenberg to Piratininga to Frederikstad...one meets official after official, all demanding their cut, their bribe, their little piece of our hard-won gems...they have never touched a shovel or pan, never stepped outside their offices and customs booths, but I have no doubt that they will bring home more money from this land than we will.” But, things were about to change...
*Ouro Preto, Minas Gerias
**Sao Paulo. See earlier posts
***The Dutch name for Mauricia is Mauritsland. See earlier posts
The catalyst, it turned out, would be the gold and diamonds of Mauricia's highlands. Jewish merchants in Orangestad passed word of these discoveries onto their friends in Amsterdam, and gradually, the city's jewelers and diamond-cutters would begin financing mining expeditions into Maurcia's interior, following a trail blazed by the earlier, and much more haphazard, migrations of the Bandeirantes and Marrano farmers. Like earlier attempts to penetrate the interior, these efforts would be hampered by poor infrastructure until the 1740's, when a group of mostly Jewish investors provided the necessary capital and prodding for the West Indes Company to finally finish its long-delayed road into the interior. Completed in 1748, the “Company Road” would terminated at the newly founded city of Guldenberg*, quickly dubbed by Marranos “Vila Rica”, the Rich Town. Growing seemingly overnight, the city soon became host to an extravagantly wealthy community of Dutch and Askenazi gold and diamond merchants, and within ten years after its founding, Guldenberg's main square would feature an Ashkenzai-rite synagogue, and Dutch Calvinist church, both richly decorated with gold filigrees. The Marrano farmers who kept the town fed worshiped in much less opulent places, and even lower than them were the slaves, many imported from the failing sugar plantations on the coast, who did most of the mining. Just a few blocks away though, most of the streets were unpaved, and bars, taverns, and lawlessness abounded. Indian attacks were common enough that a law required every citizen of Guldenburg to be armed.
From Guldenberg, the Company Road wound through the jungle to its eastern terminus at the village of Piratininga**, which, from its earlier impovershed state, became known as the “Gateway to the West”, the last stop of the diamond and gold caravans before the quick trip to the coastal ports, and last refuge for travelers wishing to brave the still wild interior. The wisest course for such people was to join the guarded caravans that left once a week-away from the city, the Company Road often became the Company Goat-path, and a solitary traveler had little defense against the bandits and Indians who still lived in the road's vicinity. This was doubly true for people attempting to come back-diamonds and gold could be cut or melted down, then sold in Orangestad to people who cared little about the fate of their original owners.
Indeed, misrule and lawlessness were the main complaints of the latter Company period-while Jews controlled much of the diamond and gold trades, all but the lowest-level posts in the West Indes Company administration were barred to them, and higher-level posts barred to Maurician Dutchman as well. As the wealth from the mining trade increased, WIC bureaucrats increasingly saw Mauricia as a way to get rich. “Mauritslander***” would come to have the same meaning in Dutch as “Nabob” in English, and in 1776, diamond merchant Abraham Goldstein would speak for many when he griped in his diary that “from Guldenberg to Piratininga to Frederikstad...one meets official after official, all demanding their cut, their bribe, their little piece of our hard-won gems...they have never touched a shovel or pan, never stepped outside their offices and customs booths, but I have no doubt that they will bring home more money from this land than we will.” But, things were about to change...
*Ouro Preto, Minas Gerias
**Sao Paulo. See earlier posts
***The Dutch name for Mauricia is Mauritsland. See earlier posts
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Ashkenazic and Sephardic liturgies, as well as some other customs, are somewhat different but both are in Hebrew. Both use the same root sacred texts in Hebrew, and the commentaries (Talmud and others) primarily in Aramaic and Hebrew. Yiddish, Ladino, and Marrano are languages of everyday life. Sermons, for example, would be in Ladino, Marrano, or Yiddish depending on the congregation. FYI sefard is Hebrew for Spain, ashkenaz is Germany, hence the division between "southern" Jews and "northern" Jews.
BTW I would imagine Marrano may also be written in Latin characters, as by necessity the (minority) non-Jewish population will have a fair fluency but will want to write it amongst themselves in Latin characters. I expect by the time of the most recent post you will see kosher butchers well established, matzoh available for Passover and other aspects of a Jewish community that had to be foregone under Portuguese rule.
BTW I would imagine Marrano may also be written in Latin characters, as by necessity the (minority) non-Jewish population will have a fair fluency but will want to write it amongst themselves in Latin characters. I expect by the time of the most recent post you will see kosher butchers well established, matzoh available for Passover and other aspects of a Jewish community that had to be foregone under Portuguese rule.
Throughout the gold boom, resentment among the rural Marranos-a majority of Mauricia's populace. Shut out of the colony's newfound riches and made to content themselves with growing grain for the miners, merchants, and slaves around them, the increasingly resentful Marrano populace was primed for an explosion. And in 1778, it came.
Moses del Castillo had started out life in an ordinary way-the fifth of six children born to a farmer near Orangestad. But Benjamin del Castillo was poor, and his farm small-certainly not large enough to have six workable farms carved out of it. And thus, as they grew up, Benjamin gravely told Moses and his other younger children that they would have to leave and seek their fortunes out west.
Moses would later tell his followers how he'd been shocked at his first sight of Orangestad. And not just its size-to a poor, pious farmboy, whose main education had been reading the Torah in his local synagogue, the looseness of city life, the multitude of strange tongues, the omnipresence of the cross that had featured so prominently in the horror stories his mom had scared him with*-it was too much. Moses bolted-first to Piratininga, before joining one of the caravans out to Guldenberg, where he'd heard there was plenty of land for the taking. And thus, the pious, naive farmboy, who a year ago had never seen a city in his life, found himself in the roughest town in Mauricia-a place of bars, prostitutes, and licentiousness, where hardly a night passed without someone dying in a drunken brawl, and where people attended worship in extravagantly gilt buildings on Saturday or Sunday, and committed every sin imaginable the other six days of the week. Penniless, and shocked by the depravity around him, Moses did the only thing he could-spent his last money on a gold pan and hoped for the best.
And indeed, after some fruitless months searching, Moses found the whitish-yellow lump he'd been seeking-not a big nugget by any means, but enough to buy an ax, some seeds, and some farm tools. Moses de Castillo found a suitable plot of land in a small Marrano farming village called Colina Rochosa, a few days ride outside Guldenberg. But that fall, as his first crop of wheat was getting ready for harvest, a flood wiped it out, along with half of Colina Rochosa's farms. And Moses, always painfully religious and somewhat unbalanced, snapped.
In the days after the flood, as he prayed to God in agony over what had happened, Moses del Castillo began to hear voices answer back. The voices claimed to be God himself and his angels, and told Moses that this was meant to be-that all his life had prepared Moses for his role as the Messiah, who would throw off Dutch rule and build a new Israel and a new Jerusalem in this land that God had given to the Jews. Excited, Moses began to tell the townspeople about his new destiny-and although most scoffed, and the Rabbi condemned him, a few believed. Moses began to preach in other farm villages, gathering followers. Gradually, he worked his way towards Guldenberg itself, where people had to deal, day in and day out, with cheating diamond merchants and corrupt Company Nabobs. The end of Gentile rule was at hand, Moses preached. The old order, with its slaves and sin and corruption, would be swept away. The churches of Guldenberg and Orangestad would be pulled down, the Gentiles driven out, and a New Jerusalem built. From there, Jewish armies would sail across the sea, to subjegate the Gentile realms and retake the Holy Land. “...and then the Old Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem will rule the Earth together, and there will be no more pain, no more war, no more sin, and the world shall bend knee to the True God.” Over the next year, Moses del Castillo built up an army among the underclass of the Terras Altas. The authorities in Guldenberg got word of his preaching and put out a warrant for his arrest, but never caught him and never comprehended the true scale of what was going on.
And then, on the night of May 8th, 1778, after a few bribes to unsuspecting guards, Moses' followers swept into Guldenberg and ran through the streets. The garrison, its morale sapped by Company mismanagement, was taken completely by surprise. Many would die in their beds as Moses' followers climbed over the barracks walls. The same fate met many diamond merchants, Jew and Gentile. Still others caught wind of what was happening and barracaded themselves in their houses, only to be burned out. Guldenberg's church and synagogue, symbols of Gentile oppression and servile, worldly Jewish aquiescence, went up flames. The next morning, Moses del Castillo read the new Law in the smoking town square. Slaves were freed, thieves were hung, prostitutes stripped and paraded naked through the streets. An unfortunate group of Dutch merchants were imprisoned and forcibly circumcized. Guldenberg, city of sin and vanity, was no more. In its place was Neve Yerushalayim, capital of the Kingdom of God.
Of course, not everyone was thrilled with this development. The Rabbis of Guldenberg, and all of the Terras Altas, universally opposed the false Messiah. Several of the more outspoken ones soon hung, and the rest went into hiding. Much of the traditionally pious people of the Terras Altas were gravely offended, and refused to have anything to do with Moses del Castillo and his New Israel. Over the next few days, hundreds of people fled Guldenberg, clogging the Company Road and hacking their way through the jungle to Piratininga. As word spread, several other uprisings of the overtaxed erupted throughout Mauricia, and in the Terras Altas, the slaves in the company-owned mines rose against their masters, threw off their chains, and ran into the jungle. Among the Marranos, some-mostly young and hotheaded-went to “Neve Yershalayim” to join the new “Messiah”, while others, perhaps more levelheaded, hunkered down or fled to the rainforest themselves to wait things out. Moses, meanwhile, began to plan his next move. Gathering a ragtag army, armed with a deficit of weapons and an excess of fanaticism, Moses started down the Company Road towards Piratininga.
But it was a rainy spring, all of Moses' appeals to the Heavens nonwithstanding. The Company Road, always tricky in the best of times, was a now a river of mud, and Moses army bogged down. Harried by bandits and even the occaisional Indian, the army moved only slowly, and Piratininga had plenty of warning as to what was coming. Sufficiently shocked by the fall of Guldenberg, the Company crushed the sympathy revolts in short order, then prepared to meet the main threat. And thus, when the starving, mud-covered “Army of Neve Israel” emerged from the jungle and gazed upon the walls of Piratininga, it was met with a force of eight thousand German mercenaries, taken from garrisons all over Maurcia and supplemented by several times that number of irregular militia, many of them Jewish. The result was never in doubt-within an hour, the broken remains of Moses del Castillo's revolt were fleeing back into the jungle, and del Castillo himself lay dead in a pool of blood and mud.
Several weeks later, after a long, muddy journey down the Company Road, the Company's army stumbled into Guldenberg, only to find that word of their arrival had preceeded them. The remains of Moses del Castillo's army, upon learning of their leader's death, had grabbed all the gold and gems they could carry before knocking down the city's walls, setting it on fire, and fleeing into the forest. The Company commander raised Holland's orange-white-blue above the smoldering ruin and declared the war over.
But of course, things were far from over. The gold and diamond mines, central to the West Indes Company's ability to make any money out of Mauricia, were largely destroyed. Even when the mine survived, virtually all of the slaves that ran them had taken the opportunity to escape, and the company simply didn't have enough troops to hunt them all down. And plus, the fall, even for a few months, of what had been one of the major gems in the faltering Dutch empire did not make the Company look good. Willem V, Stadholder-general of the Dutch Republic, was angry. Determined to find out what had happened, he convened an inquiry into the circumstances of the rebellion and the Company's management of Mauricia in general, and soon shocking stories of corruption and graft came out. Cheated diamond merchants, overtaxed villages, underpaid workers, stolen public funds-it seemed the tale of the Company Nabobs' misdeeds would never end. And at the end of it all, when a delegation from Orangestad arrived and petitioned the Stadholder to end Company rule, he was not in much mood to refuse. All of the West Indes' Company's owners escaped jail or any other punishment-in exchange for turning Maurcia over to Willem V, who declared that from then on, the Stadhouderskolonie Mauritsland would be the personal property of the holders of that office-and since the office of Stadholder-general was now hereditary, that meant Willem V and his descendents. It was the dawn of a new era.
*While this will change, pretty much all of Mauricia's urban centers are majority Dutch Christian, albeit with large Jewish communities. The countryside is overwhelmingly dominated by two groups of people-Marranos, and slaves on Company owned plantations or mines. And the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the countryside.
Moses del Castillo had started out life in an ordinary way-the fifth of six children born to a farmer near Orangestad. But Benjamin del Castillo was poor, and his farm small-certainly not large enough to have six workable farms carved out of it. And thus, as they grew up, Benjamin gravely told Moses and his other younger children that they would have to leave and seek their fortunes out west.
Moses would later tell his followers how he'd been shocked at his first sight of Orangestad. And not just its size-to a poor, pious farmboy, whose main education had been reading the Torah in his local synagogue, the looseness of city life, the multitude of strange tongues, the omnipresence of the cross that had featured so prominently in the horror stories his mom had scared him with*-it was too much. Moses bolted-first to Piratininga, before joining one of the caravans out to Guldenberg, where he'd heard there was plenty of land for the taking. And thus, the pious, naive farmboy, who a year ago had never seen a city in his life, found himself in the roughest town in Mauricia-a place of bars, prostitutes, and licentiousness, where hardly a night passed without someone dying in a drunken brawl, and where people attended worship in extravagantly gilt buildings on Saturday or Sunday, and committed every sin imaginable the other six days of the week. Penniless, and shocked by the depravity around him, Moses did the only thing he could-spent his last money on a gold pan and hoped for the best.
And indeed, after some fruitless months searching, Moses found the whitish-yellow lump he'd been seeking-not a big nugget by any means, but enough to buy an ax, some seeds, and some farm tools. Moses de Castillo found a suitable plot of land in a small Marrano farming village called Colina Rochosa, a few days ride outside Guldenberg. But that fall, as his first crop of wheat was getting ready for harvest, a flood wiped it out, along with half of Colina Rochosa's farms. And Moses, always painfully religious and somewhat unbalanced, snapped.
In the days after the flood, as he prayed to God in agony over what had happened, Moses del Castillo began to hear voices answer back. The voices claimed to be God himself and his angels, and told Moses that this was meant to be-that all his life had prepared Moses for his role as the Messiah, who would throw off Dutch rule and build a new Israel and a new Jerusalem in this land that God had given to the Jews. Excited, Moses began to tell the townspeople about his new destiny-and although most scoffed, and the Rabbi condemned him, a few believed. Moses began to preach in other farm villages, gathering followers. Gradually, he worked his way towards Guldenberg itself, where people had to deal, day in and day out, with cheating diamond merchants and corrupt Company Nabobs. The end of Gentile rule was at hand, Moses preached. The old order, with its slaves and sin and corruption, would be swept away. The churches of Guldenberg and Orangestad would be pulled down, the Gentiles driven out, and a New Jerusalem built. From there, Jewish armies would sail across the sea, to subjegate the Gentile realms and retake the Holy Land. “...and then the Old Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem will rule the Earth together, and there will be no more pain, no more war, no more sin, and the world shall bend knee to the True God.” Over the next year, Moses del Castillo built up an army among the underclass of the Terras Altas. The authorities in Guldenberg got word of his preaching and put out a warrant for his arrest, but never caught him and never comprehended the true scale of what was going on.
And then, on the night of May 8th, 1778, after a few bribes to unsuspecting guards, Moses' followers swept into Guldenberg and ran through the streets. The garrison, its morale sapped by Company mismanagement, was taken completely by surprise. Many would die in their beds as Moses' followers climbed over the barracks walls. The same fate met many diamond merchants, Jew and Gentile. Still others caught wind of what was happening and barracaded themselves in their houses, only to be burned out. Guldenberg's church and synagogue, symbols of Gentile oppression and servile, worldly Jewish aquiescence, went up flames. The next morning, Moses del Castillo read the new Law in the smoking town square. Slaves were freed, thieves were hung, prostitutes stripped and paraded naked through the streets. An unfortunate group of Dutch merchants were imprisoned and forcibly circumcized. Guldenberg, city of sin and vanity, was no more. In its place was Neve Yerushalayim, capital of the Kingdom of God.
Of course, not everyone was thrilled with this development. The Rabbis of Guldenberg, and all of the Terras Altas, universally opposed the false Messiah. Several of the more outspoken ones soon hung, and the rest went into hiding. Much of the traditionally pious people of the Terras Altas were gravely offended, and refused to have anything to do with Moses del Castillo and his New Israel. Over the next few days, hundreds of people fled Guldenberg, clogging the Company Road and hacking their way through the jungle to Piratininga. As word spread, several other uprisings of the overtaxed erupted throughout Mauricia, and in the Terras Altas, the slaves in the company-owned mines rose against their masters, threw off their chains, and ran into the jungle. Among the Marranos, some-mostly young and hotheaded-went to “Neve Yershalayim” to join the new “Messiah”, while others, perhaps more levelheaded, hunkered down or fled to the rainforest themselves to wait things out. Moses, meanwhile, began to plan his next move. Gathering a ragtag army, armed with a deficit of weapons and an excess of fanaticism, Moses started down the Company Road towards Piratininga.
But it was a rainy spring, all of Moses' appeals to the Heavens nonwithstanding. The Company Road, always tricky in the best of times, was a now a river of mud, and Moses army bogged down. Harried by bandits and even the occaisional Indian, the army moved only slowly, and Piratininga had plenty of warning as to what was coming. Sufficiently shocked by the fall of Guldenberg, the Company crushed the sympathy revolts in short order, then prepared to meet the main threat. And thus, when the starving, mud-covered “Army of Neve Israel” emerged from the jungle and gazed upon the walls of Piratininga, it was met with a force of eight thousand German mercenaries, taken from garrisons all over Maurcia and supplemented by several times that number of irregular militia, many of them Jewish. The result was never in doubt-within an hour, the broken remains of Moses del Castillo's revolt were fleeing back into the jungle, and del Castillo himself lay dead in a pool of blood and mud.
Several weeks later, after a long, muddy journey down the Company Road, the Company's army stumbled into Guldenberg, only to find that word of their arrival had preceeded them. The remains of Moses del Castillo's army, upon learning of their leader's death, had grabbed all the gold and gems they could carry before knocking down the city's walls, setting it on fire, and fleeing into the forest. The Company commander raised Holland's orange-white-blue above the smoldering ruin and declared the war over.
But of course, things were far from over. The gold and diamond mines, central to the West Indes Company's ability to make any money out of Mauricia, were largely destroyed. Even when the mine survived, virtually all of the slaves that ran them had taken the opportunity to escape, and the company simply didn't have enough troops to hunt them all down. And plus, the fall, even for a few months, of what had been one of the major gems in the faltering Dutch empire did not make the Company look good. Willem V, Stadholder-general of the Dutch Republic, was angry. Determined to find out what had happened, he convened an inquiry into the circumstances of the rebellion and the Company's management of Mauricia in general, and soon shocking stories of corruption and graft came out. Cheated diamond merchants, overtaxed villages, underpaid workers, stolen public funds-it seemed the tale of the Company Nabobs' misdeeds would never end. And at the end of it all, when a delegation from Orangestad arrived and petitioned the Stadholder to end Company rule, he was not in much mood to refuse. All of the West Indes' Company's owners escaped jail or any other punishment-in exchange for turning Maurcia over to Willem V, who declared that from then on, the Stadhouderskolonie Mauritsland would be the personal property of the holders of that office-and since the office of Stadholder-general was now hereditary, that meant Willem V and his descendents. It was the dawn of a new era.
*While this will change, pretty much all of Mauricia's urban centers are majority Dutch Christian, albeit with large Jewish communities. The countryside is overwhelmingly dominated by two groups of people-Marranos, and slaves on Company owned plantations or mines. And the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the countryside.
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Thanks! And yes, Mauricia has passover, Kosher meat, the Jewish holidays, and all the other marks of a Jewish place.
Good updates, Mirza!
Found a couple of typos:
Found a couple of typos:
It should be Minas Gerais.
It should be São Paulo.