While well-written, certainly not as exciting as the packaging would suggest. Nevertheless, it's a new presentation of an old story: a group of people are ostracized and forced into lines of work that no one else wants to do and then are further persecuted because they have the audacity to be goo...
I really wanted to like this book. And, to a certain degree, I did. But I didn't enjoy it. It's interesting, if not entertaining, but it's not a terrifically written assessment of history. My first problem is the title. You pick up a book called Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and immediately ima...
Perusing an early index of Sephardic names, I came across an obscure reference to a land deed assigned to Abraham Cohen. It was dated February 7, 1671—seven years after the king banished Cohen “off Our said Island never to reside or trade there again.”1 The date didn’t make sense; was the deed mi...