Born in Amsterdam into a wealthy family of mercantile Jewish-Portuguese origins in 1771, Isaac de Pinto was a scholar and became widely known for his reflections on economic matters. He was one of the main investors in the Dutch East India Company and advised the stadholder William IV of Orange on financial matters, helping to arrange funding for the Dutch armies in their defeat of the defeat of the French at Bergen op Zoom. He defended the Jews against political attack, notably by Voltaire, in his Apologie pour la Nation Juive, ou Réflexions Critiques (1762), which he sent in manuscript as a reply to Voltaire and for which he received his thanks. In the same year he published in Amsterdam an influential commentary on the …