A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, A Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe.

This transnational story, told on two continents, of a stateless Fez-born merchant who died in The Hague after a long career of adventure and intrigue could only have been written by co-authors of different countries—in this case, a Spaniard and a Dutchman—commanding between them no less than six research languages. The three worlds of the title—Islam, Judaism and Christianity—should more properly divide into four, since the mutual antagonism of Protestant Holland and England and Catholic Spain flared into the Thirty Years’ War just two years after Pallache’s death in 1616. Seldom has one man’s life, featuring repeated crossings of both the Strait of Gibraltar and the English Channel as if they were inconsequential barriers to travel rather than boundaries between worlds, embodied such a macrocosm of history and culture.