Jean Lafitte the Jewish Pirate

[Graydog]

Jewish Pirates

If you don't want to go to the link. Here's the article:

The Jewish Journal

By Adam Wills

There's no arrr-guing that pirates are in.

As of last weekend, Disney had plundered $1 billion worldwide with "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," and International Talk Like a Pirate Day -- that's Sept. 19, for you landlubbers -- has gone from an inside joke between two friends to a mock holiday celebrated in more than 40 countries.

Yet tales of Jewish piracy, which stretch back thousands of years, aren't in the public's consciousness, and Hollywood even has been known to remove a pirate's Jewish background. As a result, we're stuck with portrayals of pirates as wayward English seamen on a murderous rampage.

But now a forthcoming book hopes to change that image by focusing on Ladino-speaking Jews whose piracy grew out of the Inquisition. "The Jewish pirates were Sephardic. Once they were kicked out of Spain [in 1492], the more adventurous Jews went to the New World," said Ed Kritzler, whose yet-untitled book on Jewish pirates will be published by Doubleday in spring 2007.

Jewish piracy has been around since well before the Barbary pirates first preyed on ships during the Crusades. In the time of the Second Temple, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus records that Hyrcanus accussed Aristobulus of "acts of piracy at sea."

Kritzler has studied pirates for 40 years, and said that the public is fascinated with them because they're "rugged individuals in a world of conformity. They carved their own identity, independent of the rules and strictures of society."

But determining the exact number of Jewish pirates is difficult, Kritzler said, because many of them traveled as Conversos, or converts to Christianity, and practiced their Judaism in secret.

While some Jews, like Samuel Pallache, took up piracy in part to help make a better life for expelled Spanish Jews, Kritzler said others were motivated by revenge for the Inquisition.

One such pirate was Moses Cohen Henriques, who helped plan one of history's largest heists against Spain. In 1628, Henriques set sail with Dutch West India Co. Admiral Piet Hein, whose own hatred of Spain was fueled by four years spent as a galley slave aboard a Spanish ship. Henriques and Hein boarded Spanish ships off Cuba and seized shipments of New World gold and silver worth in today's dollars about the same as Disney's total box office for "Dead Man's Chest."

Henriques set up his own pirate island off the coast of Brazil afterward, and even though his role in the raid was disclosed during the Spanish Inquisition, he was never caught, Kritzler told The Journal.

Another Sephardic pirate played a pivotal role in American history. In the book "Jews on the Frontier" (Rachelle Simon, 1991), Rabbi I. Harold Sharfman recounts the tale of Sephardic Jewish pirate Jean Lafitte, whose Conversos grandmother and mother fled Spain for France in 1765, after his maternal grandfather was put to death by the Inquisition for "Judaizing."

Referred to as The Corsair, Lafitte went on to establish a pirate kingdom in the swamps of New Orleans, and led more than 1,000 men during the War of 1812. After being run out of New Orleans in 1817, Lafitte re-established his kingdom on the island of Galveston, Texas, which was known as Campeche. During Mexico's fight for independence, revolutionaries encouraged Lafitte to attack Spanish ships and keep the booty.

But in the 1958 film "The Buccaneer," starring Yul Brynner as Lafitte, any mention of the pirate's Jewish heritage was stripped away.

[TheBlackFox]

I was baptized a Lutheran but since then I've never been in a Lutheran church. What makes someone think that their religious heritage means anything when they consider a life of crime? (Outside of Black Bart Roberts, of course)

Look at the Jewish Mafia (the purple gang) of prohibition in Detroit. . . I'm not sure Canadian Whiskey was kosher. Neither the "Yiddish Black Hand" of NYC. Hell, even today the Israeli Abergil crime family is head of the ecstasy drug trade in most of America. . . . and I think they all ate bacon at some point.

LOL

There have been a lot of Jewish pirates. . .which should be no surprise since pirates usually are made up of the down-trodden, the spit-upon, the folks deemed "not worthy" by society (in those days). I've read that a lot of Morocco's Jewish minorities joined up with Barbary pirates as soon as they could get out of the house!

Hey. . . . this might make for a fascinating article. . . . watch out for the Winter Pyrates Way. . .you might just read more about it!

[Rumba Rue]

I told Jamaica Rose (Christine Lampe) about this a couple of years ago and she questioned how was it known that he was Jewish?

Anyone who can find that information would be helpful. Just trying to get some proof as opposed to someone's fanciful ideas so Jamaica can be convinced.

[Quartermaster James]

Well, if I follow that article correctly, Lafitte's maternal grandmother was Jewish, therefore his mother would have been Jewish, and so would he.

Since by tradition, Jewish status is inherited and follows the maternal lineage, someone who is maternally descended from a Jew, even if totally unaware of their Jewish heritage, or even if a practitioner of another religion, is from a traditional Jewish legal perspective still a Jew. - Wikipedia article on Ashkenazi Jews

P.S.: Yes, I understand Lafitte was Sephardic. This distinction does not matter for the question at hand.

Edited October 20, 2008 by Quartermaster James

[Lady Cassandra Seahawke]

However, there was much misinformation about Lafitte. For instance his name, as with other pirates was in question. He gave several spellings of the name the one written in his own hand as Laffite and he gave his birthplace as

But, where Jean (and Pierre) Lafitte were born — and when — as well as many other personal facts, continue to remain a mystery almost 200 years later. "We know some of the deeds they performed," says Robert Tallant in The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans. "We know all the important ones. We know many details of their character. Yet we do not really know...where they came from before they appeared in New Orleans."

Testimonies from those who knew Jean Lafitte and who have recorded what he himself said about his background all differ. Most tend to agree he was born between 1778-1780. As to his place of origin, depending upon the source, the Lafittes were natives of either France, Spain, St. Dominique, Haiti, or elsewhere. He had told some associates that he had fought with Napoleon's army; others that he was the son of French aristocrats who died on the guillotine; yet others that he was a refugee from Spanish rule in the Caribbean isles. All these variations point to a man who, for reasons of his own, seemed to purposely create and sustain a mystique.

The nearest that one might come to determining Lafitte's history would be by examining the credence of those variables that have come to light. For instance, as pertaining to his birthplace, there are a few identified documents existing today that state, in his own hand, a homeland; they range from Bayonne, Brest, Marseilles and St. Malo in France; Orduna in Spain, and, says Ramsay, "one curious work, published in 1825, (which) gave Westchester, New York, as Jean's place of birth".

Even the surname Lafitte mandates some investigation. The name was and is common in French-speaking areas of the world. Of the variance of places Jean Lafitte hinted as a location of ancestry, perhaps the one that has a semblance of truth was the French-controlled St. Dominique, from where, records indicate, Lafitte families did migrate to Louisiana in the latter half of the 1700s. On those records are the surnames Lafitte, Lafette. La Fite and other similarities. However, confusing the issue more so is the fact that Jean habitually signed his name spelled Laffite (two Fs, one T). Author Stanley Clisby Arthur in Old New Orleans points to several bills of sale extant today that support this. This particular version is novel and, therefore, almost his own invention probably employed to protect his real familial name. But, because the spelling he chose was overlooked by historians, and he is known in the books by the more orthodox Lafitte, this report will not break the tradition.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangste.../lafitte/1.html

You can read the rest of the article by clicking in the above link...interesting...