Jacob Curiel

Origins and early life

Jacob Curiel was born Duarte Nunes da Costa in Lisbon in 1587, into a family of Marranos whose line the Jewish Virtual Library traces from the Curiels of Ávila in Castile, forced to the font in the conversion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497 and pursued for generations by the Inquisition of Coimbra, which tried several of his relatives; he was a Jew by descent who chose, when he could, to be a Jew by profession, and this fiche records that choice as the basis of his presence here.

Work and career

A merchant of Lisbon, he left Portugal around 1609 for Tuscany, where the Medici let the Portuguese New Christians live as Jews in Pisa and Livorno, then for Amsterdam, and finally, in 1627, for Hamburg, where he settled as Jacob Curiel, a member and elder of the Portuguese-Jewish community of the city. The paradox of his life came in 1640, when Portugal threw off the Spanish crown: the new king, John IV, needed ships, arms, grain and credit for his war of independence, and the man who could find them in the Hanseatic port was a Jew whom his own Inquisition would have burned — so the king made him the official agent of the Portuguese crown in Hamburg, and in 1644 a knight of the royal household, cavaleiro fidalgo, with a pension and a coat of arms, the first openly professing Jew to hold a diplomatic post for a Catholic monarchy.

He bought and armed the ships, negotiated with the Hansa and the Danes, and financed the fleet that broke the Spanish blockade; his son Moses, as Jerónimo Nunes da Costa, held the same office in Amsterdam for half a century. He died in Hamburg in 1665, and was buried in the Portuguese cemetery at Altona.