ABSTRACT
Samuel Pallache was certainly a colourful figure, a ‘man of three worlds: a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe’. He sometimes passed himself off as a commercial and diplomatic representative in the Low Countries of the sultan of Morocco, sometimes as an informant, intermediary and spy specializing in Moroccan affairs at the court of the Spanish king in Madrid. He even tried to settle permanently in Spain and convert to Catholicism, but had to leave the country in a headlong rush to avoid imprisonment by the Inquisition. Just how active he was in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam is a matter of dispute, but he was probably a member of the Portuguese congregation Neve Salom. His grave can be found in the Portuguese Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel near Amsterdam, where he was buried in 1616. The funeral procession was accompanied all the way out to the edge of The Hague by Maurice, Prince of Orange, so eager was he to pay his last respects.
