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Meet Don Samuel Pallache of Morocco.
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On February 4, 1616, Don Samuel Pallache, a rabbi, a pirate, ship captain, ambassador, spy, and double agent passed away.
Samuel Pallache of Morocco was one of several Jewish pirates who avenged his peoples’ misfortunes by seizing Spanish ships, plundering their wealth, and playing saboteurs to the hated Spanish crown. Besides being a pirate, Samuel was also a devout Jew and rabbi, having been the first “openly professing” Jew to settle in Holland and even organizing a minyan in his own home for Yom Kippur.
Samuel Pallache’s father was a prominent rabbi named Isaac Pallache. “La Reconquista,” (The Christian conquest of Granada and unification of Spain), changed everything. Most of the Jews who were expelled settled in Morocco, many venturing further east into the depths of the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Salonika in particular. Samuel Pallache first arrived in the Netherlands somewhere in the 1590s, when a Dutch delegation arrived in Morocco with the intention of forging a common alliance of trade and defense.
On December 24th, 1610 Morocco and the Netherlands signed The Treaty of Friendship and Free Commerce, among the first treaties to be signed between a European Christian kingdom and a Muslim country. Through this, Morocco obtained both ships and weapons that Samuel Pallache would use for “privateering,” also known as pirating.
His fleet of sailors operated under Moroccan flag, but were paid by the Dutch, fighting the Spanish with kosher food and a synagogue on each ship.
Pallache made his final voyage in 1614, when he captured a Portuguese ship and could not haul it into any Moroccan port, so he decided to turn back around and make towards the Netherlands. Bad weather forced him to stop in an English port, where he was arrested and imprisoned at the demand of the Spanish ambassador.
On February 4th, 1616, Samuel Pallache died in The Hague and was buried in a local Portuguese Jewish cemetery. His relatives and descendants went on to become prominent members of the Sephardic Jewish communities of Holland, Morocco, and even parts of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Nineteenth century Grand Rabbis, Abraham Palacci, Haim Palachi, and Rahamim Nissim Palacci are all said to be among Samuel’s descendants.
