Cecil Roth, following Kayserling, says Abraham Pereyra was born in
Madrid "of
Marrano parentage." The respected founder of the modern academic field of historical studies on the
Kabbalah in
Jerusalem,
Gershom Scholem, following
Avraham Ya'ari, articulated his origins and importance in the following manner: :..."a descendant of a family of marranos in Madrid and one of the wealthiest industrialists and merchant princes in Holland. Pereyra was much given to works of piety and devotion, and in 1659 he founded the
yeshibah Hesed le-Abraham' in
Hebron."
Meyer Kayserling, who is actually the main secondary source for the rather scant extant biographical information on the subject, writes that his name before leaving Spain was Thomas Rodriguez Pereyra and that he was "persecuted by the Inquisition." Cecil Roth, in his major biography of
Menasseh ben Israel, then completes the picture writing that Abraham Pereyra had amassed a considerable fortune in business, and that escaping through Venice (also following Kayserling on this detail) he arrived in Amsterdam
circa 1644, where he reunited with his younger brother
Isaac Pereyra (Isaac Israel Pereyra). He states, furthermore, that they had "succeeded in bringing with them from the Peninsula, unimpaired, the whole of their considerable fortune." Herbert Bloom, a student of the famous Jewish social historian
Salo W. Baron, based on primary sources/documents which he researched, states that in 1655 the two brothers, Abraham and Isaac Pereyra, petitioned the government of Amsterdam for permission to establish a sugar refinery in the city. Based on a Dutch economic research work from 1908 about the Amsterdam sugar trade of the 17th century, Bloom adds the following insight: "The Pereyras are described by their fellow Jews as merchants of wealth and influence, who occupied an important place on the Exchange [Bank].". The reference here is to the
Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the oldest stock exchange in the world, started by the
Dutch East India Company/
VOC in 1602. From a different perspective, and at a later point in Pereyra's life, Scholem adds that
circa 1674, the followers of
Sabbatai Zevi in Amsterdam "used to meet in the house of their leader, Emanuel Benattar, the
hazzan of the Portuguese Synagogue, and seem to have been unmolested by the Jewish authorities, possibly because they had the very pious and very wealthy Abraham Pereyra" as one of the prominent members in their group. ==Financing Portuguese Jewish community religious institutions==