Abraham Israel Pereyra

Abraham Israel Pereyra (Pereira) was a wealthy and prominent Jewish Portuguese merchant, who lived in Amsterdam from circa 1644 to his death in 1699.

Cecil Roth, following Kayserling, says Abraham Pereyra was born in Madrid "of Marrano parentage." The very famous founder of the Kabbalah modern academic field of historical studies in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem, following Roth, articulates his origins and importance in the following manner:

...a descendant of a family of marranos in Madrid and one of the wealthiest industrialists and merchant princes in Holland. Pereyra was much given to works of piety and devotion, and in 1659 he founded the yeshibah Hesed le-Abraham in Hebron.

Meyer Kayserling, who is actually the main secondary source for the rather scant extant biographical information on the subject, writes that his name before leaving Spain was Thomas Rodriguez Pereyra and that he was "persecuted by the Inquisition."

Cecil Roth, in his major biography of Menasseh ben Israel, then completes the picture writing that Abraham Pereyra had amassed a considerable fortune in business, and that escaping through Venice (also following Kayserling on this detail) he arrived in Amsterdam circa 1644, where he reunited with his younger brother Isaac Pereyra. He states, furthermore, that they had "succeeded in bringing with them from the Peninsula, unimpaired, the whole of their considerable fortune."

Herbert Bloom, a student of the famous Jewish social historian Salo W. Baron, based on primary sources/documents which he researched, states that in 1655 the two brothers, Abraham and Isaac Pereyra, petitioned the government of Amsterdam for permission to establish a sugar refinery in the city. Based on a Dutch economic research work from 1908 about the Amsterdam sugar trade of the 17th century, Bloom adds the following insight: "The Pereyras are described by their fellow Jews as merchants of wealth and influence, who occupied an important place on the Exchange [Bank].". The reference here is to the , the oldest stock exchange in the world, started by the Dutch East India Company/VOC in 1602.

From a different perspective, and at a later point in Pereyra's life, Scholem adds that circa 1674, the followers of Sabbatai Zevi in Amsterdam "used to meet in the house of their leader, Emanuel Benattar, the hazzan of the Portuguese Synagogue, and seem to have been unmolested by the Jewish authorities, possibly because they had the very pious and very wealthy Abraham Pereyra" as one of the prominent members in their group.

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Wikipedia