Nação legal consciousness and its contribution to the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic debate on slavery and the slave trade

In the seventeenth century, some conversos living throughout Western Europe, who had been either trained in the School of Salamanca or influenced by it, came to the Dutch Republic in search of religious freedom, where they reverted to the open practice of the Jewish tradition. A select few of them became scholars of rabbinic jurisprudence, while retaining their knowledge of Christian theology. As residents and foreigners in the Dutch Republic, rabbis and philosophers synthesized Greek philosophy, Iberian Roman law, rabbinic reasoning, and Jewish and Christian philosophy, in light of the socioeconomic context of the Dutch Republic, to produce literature on behalf of reverted Jews. At the bedrock of Nação legal consciousness lies the jurisprudence of the Nação in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The main focus of this research project is on the pressing issue: How did the Nação in seventeenth-century Amsterdam contribute to the legal-political discussions of ius naturae et gentium in the Amsterdam-Dutch Republic debate on slavery and the slave trade? While many have undertaken research on the development of the ius naturae et gentium, the contribution of the Sephardim in Amsterdam is insufficiently researched. The aim of this dissertation is to add to the discussion by examining the seventeenth-century Portuguese Hebrew Nation in the Dutch Republic and its colonies, whose ideas of servitus, dominium and libertas were central to the justification of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade, as participants in, and contributors to the law of nature and nations. The goal is to reveal how the Nação in seventeenth-century Amsterdam participates in and contributes to the thinking, reasoning, and arguing about slavery and the slave trade, via the language, concepts, and notions of the time, which was dominated by the language of ius naturae et gentium.