On February 4th, 1616, we remember the passing of Samuel Pallache, the Jewish merchant and pirate of Morocco, who avenged his people's misfortunes by seizing Spanish ships and plundering their wealth on behalf of the Moroccan Sultan. He is also known for establishing economic relations between Morocco and the Netherlands, among the first treaties to be signed between a European Christian kingdom and a Muslim country. Besides being a pirate, Pallache was also a devout Jew, having been the first ‘openly professing’ Jew to settle in Holland and even organizing a minyan in his own home for Yom Kippur. His family and descendants would go on to leave a valiant legacy of rabbis, scholars, ambassadors, and other prominent figures who left their mark on Jewish history to this day.Samuel Pallache was born in Fez, Morocco, circa 1550. Samuel’s father, Rabbi Isaac Pallache, was among the Jews exiled from Spain in 1492; prior to that, Isaac was a rabbi in Cordoba. “La Reconquista,” the Christian conquest of Granada and the unification of Spain, changed everything. Most of the Jews who were expelled settled in Morocco. with many venturing further east into the depths of the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Salonika. The Islamic governments mostly tolerated the Jews, who were accepted as dhmis (second-class citizens), so long as they respected Islam as the official state religion and paid a special tax.Samuel Pallache first arrived in the Netherlands somewhere in the 1590s, but when a Dutch delegation arrived in Morocco with the intention of forging a common alliance of trade and defense, Sultan Zidan Abu Maali sent Pallache as his special agent to interpret relations with the Dutch government in the Hague. On June 23, 1608, they signed an agreement of mutual assistance against Spain. On December 24, 1610, Morocco and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Friendship and Free Commerce. Through this agreement, Morocco obtained both ships and weapons that Samuel Pallache would use for “privateering,” also known as ‘pirating’. For reasons unknown, evidence suggests that Pallache actually served as sort of a rogue double agent; he would play both sides and pass state secrets from the Dutch and Moroccans to the Spaniards and vice versa (he was a pirate after all!). He eventually fell out of favor with the Sultan but continued pirating for years, selling the goods he captured from seized ships all along the coast of Morocco and even as far as England. He also continued working as a merchant between Morocco and the Netherlands, somehow convincing the Dutch Prince Maurice to grant him permission for his pirate activities. Pallache made his final voyage in 1614. After he captured a Portuguese ship and could not haul it into any Moroccan port, he decided to turn back around and make his way towards the Netherlands. As fate would have it, bad weather forced him to stop in an English port, where Pallache was arrested and imprisoned at the demand of the Spanish authorities. Prince Maurice came to his rescue and brought him back to the Netherlands, but Pallache had lost all of his wealth and, in the days that followed, fell sick. According to historical records, the first minyan in Amsterdam took place in 1596; author David Franco Mendes records that there were 16 worshippers present, the most prominent of all being Samuel Pallache himself. Mendes also notes that Pallache hosted this service in his own home on Yom Kippur.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. Samuel Pallache passed away at The Hague on February 4, 1616, and was interred in a nearby Portuguese Jewish cemetery. His brother and his three kids, David, Moses, and Isaac, survived him.Edward Kritzler mentions Samuel Pallache in his 2008 book, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, stating that Samuel continued his pirating activities well into his sixties. Samuel Pallache’s life and legacy are different, to say the least, and yet they demonstrate how particularly Jewish the habit is to “make lemonade out of life’s lemons.” While we do not encourage pirating in any way, we take pride in these little details of Jewish survival in a time of great darkness and antisemitism that was the Inquisition.