Book Notes: Empires and Entrepôts - the Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews (1585-1713), Jonathan I. Israel

<plain_text><page sequence="1">Empires and Entrepots - the Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews (1585-1713), Jonathan I. Israel (The Hambledon Press, 1990). This is a volume of essays on the three themes in which Professor Israel has specialized as a historian: Dutch, Spanish and Jewish history in the 17th century, and the interaction between them. In the first half of the century Spain and the United Provinces were locked in a world-wide power struggle. In the second half, they worked amicably together. Throughout the period Portuguese New Christians and Sephardi Jewish refugees played an important role. The essays in this volume which are of Jewish interest have mostly appeared before in Studia Rosenthaliana: that on the career of Manuel Lopez Pereira, that about Duarte Nunes da Costa (alias Jacob Curiel) of Hamburg and the important essay on 'Spain and the Dutch Sephardim'. However, the essays on 'The Portuguese in seventeenth-century Mexico' and the very important one on 'The Economic Contribution of Dutch Sephardi Jewry to Holland's Golden Age' appeared in specialist European historical periodicals, which are much less accessible to the English Jewish reader. Three of the chapters concerning the Spanish-Dutch conflict have not been published before. As always with Professor Israel's books, this one is researched in depth, full of new historical detail and interest, and well worth reading. Edgar Samuel 271</page></plain_text>