The Pallache: Moroccan-Jewish Diplomats in 17th Century Dutch Court Records

A talk by Professor Gerard Wiegers.
Two cases before the Court of Holland (Hof van Holland) around 1612 shed an interesting light on the role of Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands in general, and on the Pallache family in particular. The cases deal with tensions within the Pallache family, whose heads, Samuel and Joseph, acted as the first agents of the Sultan of Morocco in the Dutch Republic. Eyewitness evidence by a whole range of people, from both inside and outside the household and by important figures in the Dutch Republic allow us to reconstruct the entanglements of Mediterranean lives of refugees in general and those of Moroccan Muslims, Iberian Moriscos, Converts to Islam and Sephardic Jews in The Hague and Amsterdam in particular. The cases will be dealt with in the revised new Hebrew edition of the book on Samuel Pallache by Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers to be published in Jerusalem in the second half of 2021.
Gerard Wiegers (PhD Leiden University 1991) is Full Professor of History of Religions and the Comparative Study of Religion in the Department of History at the University of Amsterdam. His research concentrates on the relations between Islam and other religions in Europe and the Muslim West, and the history of Islamic and Jewish minorities. He is a member of the editorial boards of a number of books series in the field, such as the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World (MEMIW).
#Pallache #moroccan #sefardi