Isaac de Pinto

Isaac de Pinto was a Dutch merchant and banker of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin who was one of the main investors in the Dutch East India Company, as well as a scholar and philosophe who concentrated on Jewish emancipation and national debt. Pinto published mainly in French and once in Portuguese. According to historian Richard Popkin, Pinto "was one of the very few Jews of the eighteenth century, before Moses Mendelssohn, able to operate and express himself in the mainstreams of European culture."