Go back far enough and there they are.

Abraham ben Vidal, Cádiz, 1491, leaving one king’s suspicion for another man’s harbor.

Moses de Fonseca, Oran, 1568, keeping two books and lying in both.

Isaac Nunes Alvares, Salé, 1633, not a pirate exactly, no. A “maritime investor.” This is what families call it when the rope is clean and someone else does the screaming.

Isaac Cohen de Mercado, Charleston, 1764. Respectable by then. Respectability is what happens when money survives longer than memory. Sugar, tobacco, rice, credit, introductions. He wore good linen and spoke softly. The worst men often do.

Solomon Pinhas, Mobile, 1821. Alabama at last. The Gulf open and brown and guilty. He kept accounts. He knew freight. He knew customs. He knew what could be said aloud and what belonged in the back of the book.

Then me.

A harmless little wreck of the bloodline. No ship. No warehouse. No plantation. No letters of marque. No noble exile. No wicked romance. Just a man online, watching the same industry make the same excuses with better lighting.

They were incredibly Jewish. But not the clean kind men like to imagine after the money has been laundered by centuries. Not the harmless kind. Not the soft old-world kind with a prayer book, a candle, a grandmother’s soup, and a grave tended by decent descendants. No. They were the port kind. The brokerage kind. The salt-water kind. The kind with God on Saturday and invoices on Monday. They knew the Psalms. They knew the rates. They knew which governor could be bought, which captain could be used, which cousin in Livorno could make a bad cargo become a clean remittance by winter.

They stole. They ransacked. They insured the men who ransacked. They financed the ships. They blessed the voyage. They denied the voyage. They wrote it down in a hand so small it looked almost innocent.

Bastards. Merchants, they called themselves. The word did a lot of work. It wore a good coat. It had references. It could sit at dinner. It could build a synagogue. It could endow a school. It could say, with wet eyes and dry hands, that life was difficult then and trade was trade and history was complicated.

History is always complicated when the dead made money.

The sea was theirs. So was the ledger. So was the quill pen. So was the margin. So was the little locked room where the real book sat behind the clean book. They did not need crowns. They had credit. They did not need flags. They had ports. They did not need swords. They had signatures. And that was worse.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875544&forum_id=2#49948305)