Abstract
Despite their importance in colonial settings, Jews have long been ignored in major studies of colonial history. Postcolonial Studies, on the other hand, tends to focus on the postindependence eras of the respective colonies and to neglect early modern examples. At the same time, scholars in Jewish Studies have only hesitantly made use of recent methodological turns in postcolonial thought. This volume aims to contribute to the growing field of the early modern Jewish Atlantic while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. As a consequence, it is not our main interest to discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of the general concept of Atlantic history from a Jewish perspective, but to use the Jewish Atlantic as a testing ground for the application of postcolonial approaches to early modern Jewish history and thought. The volume’s concentration on the Sephardic Atlantic is due to the prominent role of Sephardim in Atlantic history prior to the late modern period. However, the Sephardic Atlantic as we understand the concept includes both the Iberian converso and the non-Iberian “open” Jewish Atlantic. For these reasons we rely on recent contributions that insist not only upon trans-imperial perspectives but also upon trans-religious tendencies in early modern Western Sephardic entanglements. At the same time, the volume’s contributions do not view Sephardic histories and cultures as isolated phenomena, but locate their discussions in more general contexts of Jewish and non-Jewish experiences. Topically, contributions focus on discussions about race and blood, metropoles and colonies, as well as history and memory.
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Notes
- 1.
For recent surveys and discussions, see Aviva Ben-Ur, “Atlantic Jewish History: A Conceptual Reorientation,” in Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History, 1550–1890: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica: A Companion Volume to an Exhibition Held in the Goldstein Family Gallery of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, ed. Arthur Kiron (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 25–46; Ben-Ur, “Jewish Communities,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, eds. Joseph C. Miller et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 263–67; David L. Graizbord, “Between Ethnicity, Commerce, Religion, and Race: The Elusive Definition of an Early Modern Jewish Atlantic,” in Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic, eds. Harald E. Braun and Lisa Vollendorf (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 117–40, and Sina Rauschenbach, “Jüdischer Atlantik,” in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online, ed. Friedrich Jaeger, first published online 2016, accessed January 25, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1163/2352-0248_edn_a6036000. For the Iberian Atlantic, see Jonathan Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
- 2.
Among a vast literature: Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires, 1540–1740 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), ch. 6–12; Nathan Wachtel, The Faith of Remembrance: Marrano Labyrinths, trans. Nikki Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic; José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “A World in Motion: Jews, Conversos and the Portuguese and Dutch Empires,” in Conversos, marrani e nuove comunità ebraiche in età moderna (Florence: Giuntina, 2015), 159–72; Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 4–5; Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2004), ch. 6: “New Christians and New World Fears.”
- 3.
For some of the most important English-language monographs, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000). For a compilation of some of the most important essays, see Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000). For Amsterdam’s dominance in the seventeenth-century Sephardic Atlantic, see Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” American Jewish History 72, no. 2 (1982): 193–211. The dependence of Atlantic communities on Amsterdam can also be seen in the architecture of the respective synagogues. See Laura A. Leibman, “Sephardic Sacred Space in Colonial America,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 13–41.
- 4.
For the most recent book on Jews in Dutch Brazil, see Ronaldo Vainfas, Jerusalém colonial: Judeus portugueses no Brasil holandês (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2010). For a recent overview in English, see Jonathan I. Israel and Stuart Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2007).
- 5.
William F. S. Miles, “Caribbean Hybridity and the Jews of Martinique,” in The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory, ed. Kristin Ruggiero (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 139–62; Mordechai Arbell, “Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cayenne) and the ‘Black Code,’” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, eds. Paolo Bernadini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 287–313; Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, Institute for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, 1991); Seymour B. Liebman, “Anti-Semitism in Martinique in the 17th Century,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 10, no. 4 (1969): 40–47.
- 6.
John D. Garrigus, “‘New Christians’/‘New Whites:’ Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–1789,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, eds. Paolo Bernadini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 314–32; Zvi Loker, “Were There Jewish Communities in Saint Domingue (Haiti)?” Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 2 (1983): 135–46.
- 7.
David L. Graizbord, “Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-Building in Seventeenth-Century Bayonne and Peyrehorade,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 1 (2006): 147–80; Gérard Nahon, Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jérusalem (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1993); Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1978); Jean Cavignac, “L’immigration des Juifs portugais à Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de Pau et de Béarn (1987): 125–38; Silvia Marzagalli, “Atlantic Trade and Sephardic Merchants in Eighteenth-Century France: The Case of Bordeaux,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, eds. Paolo Bernadini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 268–86; Richard Menkis, “Patriarchs and Patricians: The Gradis Family of Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux,” in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, eds. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 11–45; Paul Butel, “Contribution à l’étude des négociants juifs portugais de Bordeaux et de Bayonne: le cas de la maison Azavedo,” in Bayonne sa region: Actes du 35e Congrès de la Fédération historique du Sud-Ouest (Bayonne: Fédération Historique du Sud-Ouest, 1983), 219–41.
- 8.
As far as the authors can tell, the first use of the term “Sephardic Atlantic” is Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, ch. 1. There, however, he links the Sephardic Atlantic with the converso Atlantic, while using the former name only for the openly Jewish segment. Ronnie Perelis, Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), next picks up the term “Sephardic Atlantic,” seemingly intending the two segments as a composite.
- 9.
Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 179. See also Ben-Ur, “Atlantic Jewish History,” 40.
- 10.
Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
- 11.
Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, “Introduction,” in Colonialism and the Jews, eds. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 1–25, 10–15. An exception is Roberto J. González-Casanovas, “Mixed Views of Jews and Conversos in Brazil 1630–1654: From Colonial to Postcolonial Discourses of Convivencia,” in Reconfiguring Brazil: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Roberto J. González-Casanovas (Auckland: University of Auckland, 2012), 1–14.
- 12.
For instance, Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey, “Some Answers to the Question: ‘What is Postcolonial Enlightenment?’,” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–33, 23.
- 13.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London, 2002 [1989]), 2.
- 14.
Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues,” Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 115–121, 115.
- 15.
See Bernardini and Fiering, The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West; Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora; and Richard L. Kagan, ed., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
- 16.
José da Silva Horta and Peter Mark, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 17.
For recent studies of Sephardic settlements in the Caribbean, see Jane Gerber, ed., The Jews in the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Julie-Marthe Cohen, ed., Joden in de Cariben: Vier Eeuwen Joodse Geschiedenis in Suriname en Curaçao (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2015).
- 18.
For two recent complaints, see Willi Goetschel and Ato Quayson, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3 (2016): 1–9, 3, and Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 9.
- 19.
See Jonathan Schorsch, “American Jewish Historians, Colonial Jews and Blacks, and the Limits of ‘Wissenschaft:’ A Critical Review, Jewish Social Studies N.S. 6, no. 2 (2000): 102–32; Nathaniel Deutsch, “The Proximate Other: The Nation of Islam and Judaism,” in Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, eds. Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 91–117; Robert F. Reid-Pharr, “Speaking through Anti-Semitism: the Nation of Islam and the Poetics of Black (Counter) Modernity,” Social Text 49 (1996): 133–47.
- 20.
For some of the most recent discussions, see the last section of Katz, Leff, and Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews, 273–340. In their introduction, Katz, Leff, and Mandel describe the colonial history of Zionism as one of the main reasons for the “missed encounter between Colonial History and Jewish History.” Ibid., 15.
- 21.
Goetschel and Quayson, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” 6.
- 22.
Katz, Leff, and Mandel, “Introduction.” Katz, Leff, and Mandel’s volume does not look beyond the modern period and francophone Jews.
- 23.
See, for example, Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora; Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crises of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jessica Vance Roitman, The Same but Different? Inter-Cultural Trade and the Sephardim, 1595–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). For the Mediterranean, see Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 24.
Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- 25.
For a survey of recent discussions with regard to the general concept of Atlantic History, see Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For Atlantic History and Jewish Studies, see Adam Sutcliffe, “Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), 18–30.
- 26.
Yosef Kaplan, “Bom Judesmo: the Western Sephardic Diaspora,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 639–69.
- 27.
Graizbord, “Between Ethnicity, Commerce, Religion, and Race.”
- 28.
Laura Arnold Leibman and Sam May, “Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation,” American Jewish History 99, no. 1 (2015): 1–26.
- 29.
Christian Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
- 30.
Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation; Roitman, The Same but Different?
- 31.
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.
- 32.
Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “Thinking Through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, eds. in Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–23, 2.
- 33.
Goetschel and Quayson, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” 3.
- 34.
For multidirectional memory, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). For the multilayered perspective, see Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
- 35.
John M. Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Carsten S. Schapkow, Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Age of Emancipation (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016 [2011]).
- 36.
Yael Halevi Wise, ed., Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Edna Aizenberg, “The Allure of Sepharad,” in Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture, ed. George K. Zucker (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 157–63.
- 37.
For instance, David Theo Goldberg, “Heterogeneity and Hybridity: Colonial Legacy, Postcolonial Heresy,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 72–86.
- 38.
Heather Laird, “European Postcolonial Studies and Ireland: Towards a Conversation amongst the Colonized of Europe,” Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 4 (2015): 384–96; Joe Cleary, “Misplaced Ideas? Locating and Dislocating Ireland in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,” in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 101–24; Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin, eds., Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena (New York: Springer, 2013).
- 39.
Walter Mignolo, “Further Thoughts on (De)Coloniality,” in Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, eds. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), 21–53, 33.
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Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (2018). Postcolonial Approaches to the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic. In: Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (eds) The Sephardic Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_1
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