Jacob Curiel

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Jacob Curiel , also Duarte Nunes da Costa (born September 26, 1587 in Lisbon , † April 3, 1664 in Hamburg ) was a Portuguese merchant , community leader and resident .

Life

The Curiel families, who lived in Hamburg and Amsterdam , descended from the noble Jeronimo de Saldanha from Portugal . This had a son named Fernão Lourenço (1494-1532), who acted in Coimbra as a representative of the merchants and whose great-grandson Jacob Curiel was. Together with his mother and other relatives, Jacob Curiel escaped the Inquisition. The escape took them via Saint-Jean-de-Luz to Italy, where Jacob Curiel bought an elaborately designed medieval Bible in Pisa from the Rosilho family from Fez in 1608 . Curiel's son Jerônimo gave these to Josef Athias from Amsterdam in 1667 , who printed the well-known " Biblia Hebraica ". In 1621 Curiel went to Amsterdam and one year later bought a magnificent building in the Jodenbreestraat. He then lived briefly in Glückstadt and moved to Hamburg in 1627.

In Hamburg, Curiel served as resident of the Spanish and later the Portuguese royal family. From 1636 to 1639 he supplied the Spanish silver fleet in Andalusia and the army stationed in the southern Netherlands with weapons, gunpowder and ammunition. He also acted as a banker and postal agent for Duarte de Bragança, whose brother John later rose to be King of Portugal. Curiel was committed to de Bragança until his death in 1649 in a prison in Milan . After the Portuguese achieved independence during the War of Restoration , Curiel supported their struggles against the Spanish crown.

In June 1641, the Portuguese king Curiel raised to the nobility. He also declared him the unofficial diplomatic agent in northern Germany. Curiel supplied the Portuguese with weapons and ammunition and materials necessary to build ships, including masts, ropes and pitch. When the king or diplomat stayed in Northern Europe, he made large loans available to them on several occasions, including in 1648 as part of the peace conference in Osnabrück. He dispatched three large, armed ships to Portugal for the fleet of the General Society of Brazil Trade. He also convinced Jakob von Kurland to invest in society. As head of the company's German trading branch, he received not only an agent's salary but also a large income from 1649. After the end of the Thirty Years' War he recruited 2,500 German soldiers who were no longer needed to help the Portuguese defend their national borders against Spain. He also took care of the transport of the troops.

Curiel himself did not take part in state-political negotiations. At important events such as the negotiations on the Peace of Westphalia , he received high-ranking Portuguese diplomats and provided them with accommodation. He also provided him with the means and money needed for trips, informed them about current developments and delivered news. Since, in addition to Spanish and Portuguese residents, there were also imperial representatives, French, English, Swedes, Danes and Poles in Hamburg, and post and newspaper traffic intersected, Curiel had ideal conditions for collecting information. The Biblioteca da Ajuda keeps several letters in which Curiel or one of the sons described developments in politics and diplomacy in Northern Europe. This included wars, peace agreements and family affairs.

Curiel had two sons named Manuel (Immanuel) and Jorge (Jerônimo), who also worked from Hamburg for the Brazilian Trade Society. They mostly recruited gunners, ship doctors and other specialist personnel who traveled with the ship convoy. In doing so, they should have benefited from their good knowledge of Northern European trade and developments in politics and economics. A letter in the Lisbon archive shows that Curiel had knowledge of the smuggling business of Hamburg and Dutch merchants in Elmina and Guinea . (It is probably the Danish West India Company .) The sons later worked as official representatives in Hamburg and at the end of the 1660s tried to sell Brazilian products, especially Brazilian wood, in Northern Europe. They exported masts, powder, ammunition and grain to Portugal. (Jeronimo probably moved to Amsterdam in 1642 and was appointed agent of the Portuguese crown in 1645. He became known there as Moses Curiel.

Before 1640 Curiel acted as a banker and postal agent for Dom Duartes and for several years as a chargé d'affaires of the Portuguese crown in Germany. Since 1645 he had an official agent title and was allowed to deliver weapons to the royal family. Since he succeeded in making it possible to sell goods from Hamburg in Portugal in the 1640s, the Hanseatic City Council exempted him from all city taxes for life.

Curiel, whom Otto Sperling described as “a Jew, but a reasonable one”, had lived in a representative house on Krayenkamp since 1647. As a Jew in Hamburg he was forbidden from owning property, he leased the new building, in which he lived until his death, from a Christian. Christina of Sweden , whom Curiel had repeatedly housed there, bought it in 1668 for 17,000 thalers. Curiel also acquired two houses on Dreckwall in 1647. In 1652 he was one of the founding members of the Bet Israel Congregation.

The grave of Jacob Curiel, who died in 1664, is in the Portuguese part of the Altona Jewish cemetery .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ISRAEL, JONATHAN I. "DUARTE NUNES DA COSTA (JACOB CURIEL), OF HAMBURG, SEPHARDI NOBLEMAN AND COMMUNAL LEADER (1585-1664)." Studia Rosenthaliana 21, no. 1 (1987): 14-34. Accessed August 14, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/41481641.
  2. ↑ ISRAEL, JONATHAN I. (1984). "TO AMSTERDAM JEWISH MERCHANT OF THE GOLDEN AGE: JERONIMO NUNES DA COSTA (1620-1697), AGENT OF PORTUGAL IN THE DUTCH REPUBLIC". Studia Rosenthaliana. 18 (1): 21-40. ISSN 0039-3347. JSTOR 41442146.
personal data
SURNAME Curiel, Jacob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Costa, Duarte Nunes there
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese merchant, community leader and resident
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1587
PLACE OF BIRTH Lisbon
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 1664
Place of death Hamburg