Review of "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean" by Edward Kritzler

Something of a disappointment...turns out there weren't all that many Jewish pirates, and not really enough to fill a whole book. This might have made quite a good magazine article, but it's padded out with a lot of background about Spanish Jews and crypto-Jews, the expulsion, the Inquisition in the Old World and the New, Columbus and his voyages, and so on. There are really only a few Jewish pirates, plus a few merchants who financed other pirates. Felt a bit of a struggle to finish this; I'd started reading it because of the pirate chapter in The Many-Headed Hydra, which is a much better book. Occasionally I found references to Jewish history that didn't seem to be quite right, which made me wonder about some of the other stuff that I was less familiar with.