Moses Curiel

Origins and early life

Moses Curiel, known to the chancelleries of Europe as Jerónimo Nunes da Costa, was born in Hamburg in 1620, the son of Jacob Curiel, the Marrano of Lisbon who lived there openly as a Jew and served as agent of the Portuguese crown; he was born and raised a Jew in the Portuguese community of Hamburg, the first of his line in a century to be so from the cradle, and this fiche has no more to establish.

Work and career

He settled in Amsterdam in the 1640s, and in 1645 King John IV of Portugal, at war with Spain for his independence, named him agent of the crown to the Dutch Republic, the office his father held in Hamburg — a post he kept under three kings for more than fifty years, until his death, and which made him, in the words of the Dutch historian who studied his career, the most durable diplomat of his age and the only openly Jewish one.

He bought the arms, ships and naval stores of the Portuguese navy and of the Brazil Company in the Dutch markets, negotiated the ransoms and the treaties, lodged the Portuguese ambassadors in his house on the Nieuwe Herengracht, and was knighted by John IV as cavaleiro fidalgo of the royal household, like his father; he was also one of the richest merchants of Amsterdam, a shipowner in the sugar trade of Brazil and the Portuguese trade of the Indies.

Within the Portuguese-Jewish community he was for decades a parnas, an elder of the congregation, one of the men who built the great synagogue of 1675 and who governed the community through its quarrels with Spinoza and its fever for Sabbatai Zevi. He died in Amsterdam in 1697 and was buried at Ouderkerk, in the cemetery of the Portuguese Jews.