Manuscript by Isaac de Pinto

Issac de Pinto was born in Amsterdam and was a Dutch Jew of Portuguese origin. He became a merchant and a banker, and was one of the main investors in the Dutch East India Company. Pinto was also a scholar, and a philosophe whose interests included Jewish emancipation and National Debt. In the 1740s, Jewish merchants in the Netherlands were forbidden from selling clothes, gherkins or fish on the street. Pinto asked for these restrictions to be lifted. In return he gave money and loans to William IV of Orange for military purposes against the French. Despite his learning, Pinto didn't begin his career as a writer until the age of forty-five. Karl Marx later referred derisively to Pinto, whom he regarded as glorifying the Dutch financial system.