Isaac de Pinto (10 April 1717 – 13 August 1787) was a
Dutch merchant and banker of Portuguese
Sephardic Jewish
Sephardic (or Sephardi) Jews (, ; lad, Djudíos Sefardíes), also ''Sepharadim'' , Modern Hebrew: ''Sfaradim'', Tiberian: Səp̄āraddîm, also , ''Ye'hude Sepharad'', lit. "The Jews of Spain", es, Judíos sefardíes (or ), pt, Judeus sefar ...
origin who was one of the main
investors in the
Dutch East India Company, as well as a
scholar and
philosophe
The ''philosophes'' () were the intellectuals of the 18th-century Enlightenment.Kishlansky, Mark, ''et al.'' ''A Brief History of Western Civilization: The Unfinished Legacy, volume II: Since 1555.'' (5th ed. 2007). Few were primarily philosopher ...
who concentrated on
Jewish emancipation and
national debt
A country's gross government debt (also called public debt, or sovereign debt) is the financial liabilities of the government sector. Changes in government debt over time reflect primarily borrowing due to past government deficits. A deficit oc ...
. Pinto published mainly in French and once in Portuguese. According to historian Richard Popkin, Pinto "was one of the very few Jews of the eighteenth century, before
Moses Mendelssohn, able to operate and express himself in the mainstreams of European culture."
Life
Pinto had his
brit milah
The ''brit milah'' ( he, בְּרִית מִילָה ''bərīṯ mīlā'', ; Ashkenazi Hebrew, Ashkenazi pronunciation: , "Covenant (religion), covenant of circumcision"; Yiddish pronunciation: ''bris'' ) is Religion and circumcision, the cerem ...
on 18 April 1717; this likely means he was born on 10 April and received his
Bar Mitzvah in 1730. On 29 December 1734, the 17-year-old Pinto was married to Rachel Nuñes Henriques; the couple never had any children. In 1748, Pinto helped
William IV of Orange, sending or lending him money to defeat the French at
Bergen op Zoom. In return he asked for the removal of measures against
Jewish merchants forbidding them to sell clothes,
gherkins or fish on the street. He proposed opening the
guilds
A guild ( ) is an association of artisans and merchants who oversee the practice of their craft/trade in a particular area. The earliest types of guild formed as organizations of tradesmen belonging to a professional association. They sometimes ...
to Jews, and sending the poorest to
Surinam Surinam may refer to:
* Surinam (Dutch colony) (1667–1954), Dutch plantation colony in Guiana, South America
* Surinam (English colony) (1650–1667), English short-lived colony in South America
* Surinam, alternative spelling for Suriname
...
. In 1750, he was appointed president of the
Dutch East India Company by the
stadtholder
In the Low Countries, ''stadtholder'' ( nl, stadhouder ) was an office of steward, designated a medieval official and then a national leader. The ''stadtholder'' was the replacement of the duke or count of a province during the Burgundian and H ...
. In 1755 he was visited by
Frederick the Great, travelling incognito through the Netherlands; together they visited
Gerrit Braamcamp.
Pinto was a man of broad learning, but he did not begin to write until nearly forty-five, when he acquired a reputation by defending his co-religionists against Voltaire. In 1762, he published his ''Essai sur le Luxe'' at Amsterdam. In the same year, Pinto published ''Apologie pour la Nation Juive, ou Réflexions Critiques'' and sent a manuscript copy of this work directly to
Voltaire.
Antoine Guenée
Antoine Guenée (23 November 1717 – 27 November 1803) was a French priest and Christian apologist, born at Étampes.
He wrote, besides various apologetic works, ''Lettres de Quelques Juifs Portugais, Allemands et Polonais, à M. de Voltaire' ...
reproduced the ''Apologie'' at the head of his ''Lettres de Quelques Juifs Portugais, Allemands et Polonais, à M. de Voltaire''.
In 1761, Isaac and his brother Aron went
bankrupt, potentially as a result of raising loans of around 6 million guilders for the British government in either 1759 or 1761; his brother sold his house on
Nieuwe Herengracht. Pinto moved to Paris, where he met with
James Cockburn,
Lord Hertford,
Mattheus Lestevenon,
David Hume John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford and
Denis Diderot. Then he moved to The Hague and lived in a mansion at
Lange Voorhout; he and his family were invited to the palace when the young
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his sister
Nannerl performed. In 1767, he went to London, meeting with
Lord Bute and receiving a pension for his advice on the
Treaty of Paris (1763), as the British had gained influence over the French in India through his suggestion. In 1768, Pinto sent a letter to Diderot on ''Du Jeu de Cartes''. His ''Traité de la Circulation et du Crédit'', in which he convinced many people that England was not on the verge of bankruptcy, was published in Amsterdam in 1771.
Pinto opposed
Raynal after the publication of Raynal's book on global colonization ''L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes'' (The Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies). He disagreed with Hume, Vivant de Mezague and
Mirabeau. His treatise was twice reprinted, besides being translated into English by
Philip Francis (politician)
Sir Philip Francis GCB (22 October 1740 – 23 December 1818) was an Irish-born British politician and pamphleteer, thought to be the author of the ''Letters'' of Junius, and the chief antagonist of Warren Hastings. His accusations against t ...
and into German by
Carl August von Struensee, the Prussian minister of finance. His ''Précis des Arguments Contre les Matérialistes'' was published at The Hague in 1774. He seems also to have had
Jean-Paul Marat
Jean-Paul Marat (; born Mara; 24 May 1743 – 13 July 1793) was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the ''sans-culottes'', a radical ...
pushed from the stairs and ordered to leave his house.
[J.S. Wijler (1923) Isaac de Pinto, Sa vie et ses oeuvres, p. 20] In 1776, he wrote against the
American Revolution; he did, however, approve of the
Boston Tea Party. Around 1780, he wrote against an alliance of the Dutch Republic with France, although this alliance was later realized in the
Treaty of Fontainebleau (1785).
Legacy
Various authors, both contemporary and later, commented on Pinto's writings. One of them,
Karl Marx, derisively referred to Pinto - whom he regarded as a major exponent of the free-market liberalism he criticized - as the "
Pindar of the Amsterdam stock exchange" for his glorification of the Dutch financial system.
References
Sources
*
* Didot, Nouvelle Biographie Générale, p. 282;
* Barbier, Dictionnaire des Anonymes;
* Dictionnaire d'Economie Politicale, ii.;
*
Quérard Quérard may refer to:
* Estelle Quérard
*Joseph-Marie Quérard
Joseph Marie Quérard (25 December 1797 – 3 December 1865) was a French bibliographer.
He was born at Rennes, where he was apprenticed to a bookseller. Sent abroad on business ...
, La France Littéraire, in Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung, 1787, No. 273.
* Nijenhuis, I.J.A.(1992) Een joodse "philosophe". Isaac de Pinto (1717-1787) en de ontwikkeling van de politieke economie in de Europese Verlichting.
External links
Pinto manuscript held at the University of London
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pinto, Isaac
1717 births
1787 deaths
Dutch Sephardi Jews
18th-century Sephardi Jews
Jewish Dutch writers
Jewish merchants
Businesspeople from Amsterdam
Dutch East India Company people from Amsterdam
Dutch people of Portuguese descent