Isaac de Pinto

Isaac de Pinto (Amsterdam, 10 April 1717 – 13 August 1787 in the Hague) was a Dutch Jew of Portuguese origin, a merchant/banker, one of the main investors in the Dutch East India Company, a scholar, philosophe and a pre-Keynesian, who concentrated on Jewish emancipation and National Debt. "He 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."

Isaac had his Brit milah on 18 April 1717; this likely means he was born on 10 April and received his Bar Mitzvah in 1730. The 17-year old Pinto married on 29 December 1734 to Rachel Nuñes Henriques; the couple never had any children. In 1748 Pinto helped stadholder prince William IV of Orange, sending or lending him money to defeat the French at Bergen op Zoom. In return he asked for uplifting measures against Jewish merchants forbidding them to sell clothes, gherkins or fish on the street. He proposed to open the guilds for the Jews and to send the poorest to Surinam. In 1750 he was appointed by the prince as the president of the Dutch East India Company.

Pinto was a man of broad learning, but 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 appeared his Apologie pour la Nation Juive, ou Réflexions Critiques. The author sent a manuscript copy of this work to Voltaire. Antoine Guenée reproduced the Apologie at the head of his Lettres de Quelques Juifs Portugais, Allemands et Polonais, à M. de Voltaire.

...
Wikipedia