Arrr gevalt!

In honor of both International Talk Like a Pirate Day and Rosh Hashanah, this amazing item via Boing Boing:

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
A forthcoming, untitled book by historian Ed Kritzler argues that many of the “Spanish” pirates of the Caribbean were in fact Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who took to the seas to flee/avenge the Inquisition. […]

I’ve just finished volume two, “The Confusion,” of Neal Stephenson’s staggering, scholarly, swashbuckling historical romance, The Baroque Cycle. I highly recommend it so far, and I fully expect to recommend it even more highly when I’ve finished the third and final volume, “The System of the World.” More to the point, though, is that volume two features a character exactly like the one described in the Boing Boing post above — a Jewish pirate named Moseh de la Cruz, marauding across most of the globe (though not the Caribbean) in the 17th century with “Half-Cocked” Jack Shaftoe.

Drink up, me hearties, l’chayim!