The Sephardic Atlantic: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Perspectives [1st ed.] 978-3-319-99195-5;978-3-319-99196-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-vii
Postcolonial Approaches to the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic (Sina Rauschenbach, Jonathan Schorsch)....Pages 1-20
Front Matter ....Pages 21-21
New Christian Slave Traders: A Literature Review and Research Agenda (Jonathan Schorsch)....Pages 23-55
A “Racial” Approach to the History of Early Afro-Portuguese Relationships? The Case of Senegambia and Cabo Verde in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (José da Silva Horta, Peter Mark)....Pages 57-84
Mediating Multiculturalism: Jews, Blacks, and Curaçao, 1825–1970 (Jessica V. Roitman)....Pages 85-111
Front Matter ....Pages 113-113
Galut and Empire: On the Way to Final Redemption (José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim)....Pages 115-142
Caspar Barlaeus, Dutch Expansion, and the Sephardic Community in the Atlantic World: A Note on the Intellectual History of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger)....Pages 143-158
The Empire Writes Back: David Nassy and Jewish Creole Historiography in Colonial Suriname (Sina Rauschenbach)....Pages 159-182
Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America’s First Intentional Jewish Community (Aviva Ben-Ur)....Pages 183-214
Becoming Imperial Citizens: Jews and Freemasonry in the British Caribbean (Early Nineteenth Century) (Jan C. Jansen)....Pages 215-244
Front Matter ....Pages 245-245
Christopher Columbus and Jamaican Jews: History into Memory (Ana Sobral)....Pages 247-275
Triangulating Memory: Sephardism in Caribbean Literature (Sarah Phillips Casteel)....Pages 277-298
Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue: An Eighteenth-Century Multicrosser in the Canadian Cultural Archive (Heather Hermant)....Pages 299-331
Judeo-Moroccan Traditions and the Age of European Expansionism in North Africa (Yigal S. Nizri)....Pages 333-360
Back Matter ....Pages 361-395

Citation preview

THE SEPHARDIC ATLANTIC COLONIAL HISTORIES AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES Edited by Sina Rauschenbach and Jonathan Schorsch

The Sephardic Atlantic

Sina Rauschenbach  •  Jonathan Schorsch Editors

The Sephardic Atlantic Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Perspectives

Editors Sina Rauschenbach University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany

Jonathan Schorsch University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany

ISBN 978-3-319-99195-5    ISBN 978-3-319-99196-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959118 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “A Memento Mori,” Benjamin Senior Godines, with permission from Jewish Museum London This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Postcolonial Approaches to the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic  1 Sina Rauschenbach and Jonathan Schorsch Part I Race and Blood  21 2 New Christian Slave Traders: A Literature Review and Research Agenda 23 Jonathan Schorsch 3 A “Racial” Approach to the History of Early Afro-­ Portuguese Relationships? The Case of Senegambia and Cabo Verde in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries 57 José da Silva Horta and Peter Mark 4 Mediating Multiculturalism: Jews, Blacks, and Curaçao, 1825–1970  85 Jessica V. Roitman

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CONTENTS

Part II Metropoles and Colonies 113 5 Galut and Empire: On the Way to Final Redemption115 José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim 6 Caspar Barlaeus, Dutch Expansion, and the Sephardic Community in the Atlantic World: A Note on the Intellectual History of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century143 Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger 7 The Empire Writes Back: David Nassy and Jewish Creole Historiography in Colonial Suriname159 Sina Rauschenbach 8 Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America’s First Intentional Jewish Community183 Aviva Ben-Ur 9 Becoming Imperial Citizens: Jews and Freemasonry in the British Caribbean (Early Nineteenth Century)215 Jan C. Jansen Part III History and Memory 245 10 Christopher Columbus and Jamaican Jews: History into Memory247 Ana Sobral 11 Triangulating Memory: Sephardism in Caribbean Literature277 Sarah Phillips Casteel

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12 Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue: An Eighteenth-­ Century Multicrosser in the Canadian Cultural Archive299 Heather Hermant 13 Judeo-Moroccan Traditions and the Age of European Expansionism in North Africa333 Yigal S. Nizri Notes on Contributors361 Place Index365 Name Index371 Subject Index389

CHAPTER 1

Postcolonial Approaches to the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic Sina Rauschenbach and Jonathan Schorsch

From the perspective of early modern Jewry there existed two Atlantic worlds that were disconnected and linked at the same time.1 The first comprised the Iberian, Catholic orbit, a sphere forbidden to Jews as Jews, but rich with

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).

S. Rauschenbach • J. Schorsch University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_1

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New Christian or converso involvement. It spanned from the Iberian Peninsula to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa, Atlantic islands in Spanish and/or Portuguese possession, South America, Central America, the Spanish Caribbean and Spanish territories in what would later become the United States.2 The second Jewish Atlantic world entailed a transnational network of openly Jewish communities that former conversos and Sephardim (hebraicized plural for Sephardic [Jew] in the singular) forged across Protestant metropoles and colonies, calling themselves mostly Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Portuguese Jews, Portuguese or simply A Nação (The Nation). Built around Amsterdam’s Sephardic communities, which were merged into the famous Kehilah Kedoshah Talmud Torah (Holy Congregation of Torah Study) in 1639,3 this network first expanded to Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) and the first open Jewish community founded in the Americas.4 Afterwards, it developed remarkably, ultimately spanning Sephardic c­ ommunities from

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).

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London to Western Africa, the ­so-­called “Wild Coast” in the Guyanas, Curaçao in the Dutch, Jamaica and Barbados in the British, St. Thomas and St. Croix in the Danish Caribbean, as well as settlements on the east coast of North America, among them Nieuw Amsterdam (later New York), Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia. For a short time, French territories in the Caribbean were also open to Jewish settlers, but Jews were expelled from Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1685, and our knowledge about crypto-­Jewish settlers in the aftermath of the expulsion is still limited.5 Both conversos and open Jews settled on Santo Domingo, which became St. Domingue after French conquest, though the history here is also c­ onvoluted.6 With regard to the French metropolitan context, the situation is ambivalent. Even though Jewish settlement in France was officially forbidden since the expulsions of the fourteenth century, it is well known that, due to the lack of an inquisitional court, “Portuguese” crypto-Jewish communities blossomed in Bordeaux and Bayonne, and scholars are more and more inclined to include French New Christian settlements in the “open Jewish Atlantic” in spite of their Catholic and legally rather restrictive contexts.7 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

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Our concept of the Sephardic Atlantic includes both the Catholic and openly Jewish segments of this intertwined diaspora and set of networks, a stateless, territory-lacking quasi-empire of communities—“islands” in a sea of non-Jewish host countries.8 As a network of families and independent communities that spanned nation-states, empires, continents, and religions and hence characterized by an unusually high degree of complexity, Sephardim in the Atlantic world pose challenges to accepted historiographical fields and methods. Conversos, who fled Iberian lands and the Inquisitions, created a new and unique western Sephardic Judaism and Jewishness out of the remnants of Iberian precedents. Together with conversos from the Iberian Atlantic these Sephardim, called “New Jews” by Yosef Kaplan, played a dominant mercantile role in the region and in some countries and colonies enjoyed unprecedented privileges and rights. At the same time, Sephardic Jews in non-European settings were typical examples for what has been termed “colonized colonizers.” Some Sephardim willingly participated in colonial suppression and exploitation; they considered themselves part of the “white elite” and distanced themselves from subaltern traditions and cultures of knowledge even though some of them were also deeply influenced by those very same traditions and cultures. At the same time however, they suffered anti-Jewish prejudice and othering from all sides: Christian settlers, who considered Jews to be “not quite white,”9 or abolitionists and also slaves, who quickly came to create and internalize anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic narratives about a special and explicitly “Jewish” version of colonial violence and brutality.10 (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 SudOuest, 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).

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The Portuguese Jewish Nation, or A Nação (The Nation), wrested for itself collectively in the Dutch and English colonial orbit an extraordinarily high degree of autonomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which can be seen as part of a decolonization process of moving toward (national) independence. A later kind of Jewish decolonization has to do with the gradual move away from the “mother” communities back in Europe,  such as Amsterdam or London, and the turn to local concerns and authority. In the early eighteenth century and thereafter, the fitful and gradual process of hemispheric decolonization itself contributed to the Jews’ gaining suffrage, though it is not clear to what degree Jews supported independence, while to some extent the process also pitted Jews against the emancipation of the slaves and the granting of rights to free people of color. Several of the chapters here trace the ways postcolonial-­era collective memory and fictional treatments by and about Sephardim/conversos process which “side” Sephardim/conversos  took, that of the colonizers or the indigenous and enslaved. By today, for many, Sephardic identity stands alongside other identities—Caribbean, African, queer—signifying in ways not “controlled” by the previously domineering Sephardic community governing bodies. Despite their importance in colonial settings, Jews have long been ignored in major studies of colonial history, partly, as has been suggested, because they don’t exactly fit into colonial dichotomies and hence complicate narratives that have been dominant in early Postcolonial Studies.11 In general terms, Postcolonial Studies tends to focus on the postindependence eras of the respective colonies and to neglect early modern examples and times. Scholars of the Enlightenment have even reproached postcolonial scholars by arguing that “many concepts drawn from postcolonial theory are parachuted into analyses of eighteenth-century texts without sufficient recognition of the perils of anachronism.”12 Obviously, the Sephardic

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.  GonzálezCasanovas, “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

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Atlantic as an early modern network with its pinnacle between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries is susceptible to similar criticism. Nonetheless, opting to eschew such a narrow historicist perspective, many postcolonial scholars do not restrict the term “postcolonial” to modern history, but rather use it in a broader sense, applied to any experience and culture “affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.”13 Furthermore, some scholars see the sibling field of decolonial thought, which emerged from South American scholarship, as “start[ing] with the earlier European incursions upon the lands that came to be known as the Americas from the fifteenth century onwards.”14 With regard to Jewish Studies, scholars have only hesitantly made use of recent methodological turns in postcolonial thought. On one hand, scholars of Sephardic history have responded quickly to the blossoming of Atlantic History since the 1990s,15 contributing and proposing new fields of research with regard to Jews and conversos in colonial settings, transnational networks, and solidarities as well as highly under-researched diasporas and communities in early modern Africa16 and the Caribbean.17 On the other hand, problematic relations between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies have long been an obstacle to judicious discussions about postcolonial approaches to Jewish Atlantic networks and communities.18 Among the various difficulties that explain these problematic relations, two are

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.

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especially prominent. One is the misuse of early modern Atlantic Sephardic-­ converso history by twentieth-century Afro-American scholarship, which, drawing on Afrocentric perspectives influenced by postcolonial thought, often evinced an anti-Semitic orientation.19 The second difficulty is related to different interpretations with regard to the ambivalent relationship between Zionism and Colonialism.20 However, Jewish Studies has undergone important changes over the last decades, and new and more globalized trends are clearly visible. Not only has Sephardic Studies become a blossoming and promising field in Departments of Jewish History and Thought worldwide, but it has also been challenged to include a growing interest in non-European Sephardic communities in America, Africa, or the Middle East, as well as the construction of “the Arab Jew” as a phenomenon of an “introverted colonialism” within twentieth-century Judaism.21 Finally, scholars have called for a new “imperial turn” in Jewish history, to question national paradigms and reconsider entanglements between “colonial Jews” and their ­supposed “European counterparts.”22 Even before, scholars in early modern Sephardic history have stressed the need to study Sephardic networks beyond imperial boundaries in times before modern nation-states come into existence.23 In addition, some scholars have wielded postcolonial

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. ReidPharr, “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).

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thought in an attempt to challenge its very tendency to marginalize or miscategorize Jews.24 As the world moves, possibly, past a first world/third world political orientation, toward a more north/south alignment, the place of non-­ Ashkenazic Jews becomes important again. This, intriguingly, places Sephardic Studies in an interesting position. In the face of Ashkenazic dominance (demographically, culturally, and in terms of production of knowledge), the field has generally endeavored to bolster Sephardic uniqueness and pride. Nonetheless, Sephardic Studies has lately seen an outpouring of theoretically-informed, critical works that wrestle anew, armed with new insights, with questions such as converso identity, the Sephardic commercial empire, Sephardic conservatism, and perceived self-importance. Our 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 perspective25 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, as already said, the Sephardic Atlantic as we understand the concept includes both the Iberian converso and the non-Iberian “open” Jewish Atlantic. Several factors convince us that for the period ending in the mid-nineteenth century, this notion of a Sephardic Atlantic holds advantages over the idea of a Jewish Atlantic. It is simply the case that the overwhelming majority of Jews involved in Atlantic-world activities were Sephardic, not Ashkenazic. Indeed, Sephardic leaders often insisted that newly-founded Atlantic communities be officially governed according to “Portuguese” Jewish norms and rites. Generally, therefore, the forms and 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.

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structures of the relevant Atlantic communities bore specifically Sephardic features: the use of Portuguese and Spanish internally; an overtly Iberian worldview, including the concept of Bom Judesmo;26 involvement in particular commercial fields reflecting centuries of Sephardic/converso experience, if not domination (slave trading, sugar, and other agricultural products, inter- and intra-colonial trade in the Atlantic world, etc.); a high degree of bidirectional interrelations and self-conscious connectedness between conversos (in this case frequently those with hidden Jewish loyalties) and Sephardim. For these reasons we rely on recent contributions that insist not only upon transimperial perspectives but also upon transreligious tendencies in early modern Western Sephardic entanglements.27 At the same time, the volume’s contributions don’t view Sephardic histories and cultures as isolated phenomena but locate their discussions in more general contexts of Jewish and non-Jewish experiences. As the coverage of some of the chapters in this volume moves past this early modern configuration, the perspective widens accordingly. Some of the chapters transcend the early modern period and also trace their topics well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. In most cases, the foreground of the late-modern material is the stretching forward chronologically of consequences of early modern phenomena, as well as the reaching backward of postcolonial memories or reconstructions of the colonial period. Obviously, this is especially important for the book’s last part where Sephardic history is reconsidered in the light of twentieth-­ century Sephardic and non-Sephardic, Jewish and non-Jewish, European, African, and American memory. But it is also true for some of the chapters in earlier parts which deal with topics other  than memory. At the same time, when going beyond the early modern period, we need to recognize that the Sephardic Atlantic underwent enormous changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shaped by both external and internal dynamics such as creolization, resistance to slavery, the Enlightenment, secularization, industrialization, the struggles for colonial independence, the collapse of the European empires, and the various forms of emancipation. The last comprises an exemplary phenomenon from a conceptual point of view in that it refers to both the end of slavery and the gaining of

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.”

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unmitigated Jewish citizenship, two different but related trajectories whose dynamics also differ in metropolitan and colonial contexts.28 The volume’s thirteen chapters are divided into three parts, combining case studies with theoretical reflections attending to material, socioeconomic and cultural concerns. The first part of the volume deals with race and blood in the early and late modern Sephardic Atlantic. The expansion of Europeans to other parts of the globe brought about significant continuities with and disruptions to prior social structures and human hierarchies both back in Europe and in the lands where Europeans newly found themselves, of which Sephardim and conversos were both victims and collaborators. In terms of blood, culture, and religion, all important markers inherited from the classical world and Judaism, along with phenomena that became increasingly important in the wake of the Reconquista, European expansion, and colonization, such as slavery and race, Sephardim and conversos occupied a frequently changing but always complicated in-between status. The chapters in this part explore questions regarding central postcolonial issues such as binarisms (especially black/white, but also savage/ civilized and other dichotomies), slavery, othering, hegemony, ambivalence, creolization, appropriation, and counter-discourse. In the second chapter, Jonathan Schorsch revisits the vexing question of New Christian slave traders. He offers an analysis of the often starkly contrasting scholarship on the topic, before proposing ways out of this impasse based on recent scholarly work that has, on the one hand, reconceptualized the early Portuguese experience in West Africa, as well as the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and, on the other hand, expanded knowledge about particular New Christian slave traders produced by  intrepid archival research. Moving beyond anti-Jewish prejudices or inclinations in the relevant Hispanic and Lusophone scholarship itself comprises a postcolonial effort. Still, while it is difficult to see New Christian slave traders as operating outside or against the colonial episteme, Schorsch questions whether we can read these individuals as subverters of dominant Iberian values, as Jewish Studies scholars often suggest regarding New Christians, or as abettors of the Iberian empires through their commercial endeavors. Instead, research on this subgroup of New Christian merchants corroborates the many calls to recognize the heterogeneous identities of New Christians. 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.

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In the third chapter, Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta question the historical adequacy of approaching “racism” in a global and longue durée perspective and instead call for case studies that distinguish between different cultural categories of domination and the relevant terms to refer to and describe those categories in their own contexts and languages. Their approach is based on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West African societies, which were not dominated by European powers. According to Mark and Horta, in these societies codes of color were not based on phenotypes but on lineage and religion. Some European merchants settling Senegambia and Cabo Verde quickly integrated into the societies that hosted them, including adopting local sociopolitical categories. In the case of Jewish traders of Portuguese origin in early seventeenth-century Senegambia, this adoption was mostly visible with regard to the construction of kinship via marriage and the raising of their Luso-African offspring within their Jewish communities. But Portuguese Jews also took on local forms of religious expression and they ended up adhering to multiple and contextually bound identities borrowed from the respective cultures and contexts that they had decided to share. In the fourth chapter, looking at nineteenth-century Curaçao, Jessica V. Roitman expands on the usual explorations of Sephardic Jews as playing a mediating role between the Afro-Curaçaoan majority and the tiny white Protestant, largely Dutch, elite, a role typically assigned to Jews. In keeping with the comparative turn in ethnic history, as well as with current discussions around transnationalism and decolonization, she looks at direct horizontal relationships between the two subaltern groups. Roitman gives examples of political alliances  between Sephardic Jews and Afro-­ Curaçaoans that reveal exogamous and mutual trust against then-­prevailing forms of conservatism, thus challenging scholarly assumptions about intercommunal distance and animosity. These surprising examples of collegiality and camaraderie, some of which even challenged the vertical relations of domination, are understood by Roitman as a reflection of Sephardic (and Afro-Curaçaoan) creolization and as a basis from which to challenge the prevailing “zero-sum” logic of competition between minority groups. The second part of the volume is focused on metropoles and colonies. Chapters in this part deal with power structures, challenges to colonial categories such as “center” and “periphery,” and questions of migration, mingling, heterogeneity, and hybridity within early modern colonial

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empires. Others continue recent debates about “Empire at the Periphery,”29 intercolonial transimperial networks or entanglements in the early modern Jewish and Christian Atlantic.30 On the one hand, they depart from the idea that metropolitan dynamics need to be read in light of colonial experiences as much as colonial experiences need to be understood in light of metropolitan discussions.31 On the other hand, they question the very dominance of studies on the vertical relationship between metropole and colony, opening space for horizontally-oriented research on relationships between colonies within or beyond the limits of empires from a minor perspective.32 In the fifth chapter, José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim reconsiders the relationship between Portuguese Jewish mimesis of Portuguese imperial ambitions and colonial messianism and their behavior vis-à-vis non-­ European others: Sephardim welcomed African slaves, who were f­ requently converted and assimilated into Sephardic families and communities. Yet, this inclusiveness was accompanied by an imperialistic insistence that the new communities of the Atlantic be governed solely according to the Portuguese (Jewish) religious rite. Tavim argues that while Sephardic Jews and conversos struggled against Christian oppression and marginalization, they shared or adopted aspects of the dominant culture’s colonialist and imperialist theopolitics that they thought served to help them bolster their own autonomy and lofty self-image and that they hoped ultimately would bring about complete Jewish decolonization: the end of their exile. Common narratives hold that religious tolerance in frontier societies was often more widespread than in metropolitan contexts. In the sixth chapter, Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger refers to the case of Dutch Northeast Brazil to question these narratives. According to Phaf-Rheinberger, Caspar Barlaeus, the famous Dutch philosopher, professor at the Amsterdam 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.

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Atheneum Illustre, and follower of a more “liberal” interpretation of Calvinism in the Netherlands, proves exactly the opposite attitude when it comes to his perception of Jewish life in Amsterdam and in Dutch Brazil. Whereas Barlaeus was in close contact with the Amsterdam Jewish community, he praised the Brazilian reign of Count Maurits of Nassau Siegen for the restriction of Jewish life in the colony. One of his arguments points to the “hypocrisy” of New Christian settlers whose multiple identities and transimperial activities inspired little trustworthiness. Phaf-Rheinberger reads this as an accusation of camouflage (a term from Jacques Lacan via Homi Bhabha), a result of New Christian ambivalent mimicry of the dominant and colonizing but internally variegated Old Christian culture. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives, the same ambivalent identities and transimperial activities of Sephardic Atlantic Jews still contribute to the rise of historical memories which differ strongly with regard to their interpretation of Jewish life in Northeast Brazil. At the same time, New Christian hybridity turns into a source of admiration and inspiration which is mostly visible in a number of recent historical novels on New Christian and Jewish settlers in Northeast Brazil and its Sephardic Atlantic context. In the seventh chapter, Sina Rauschenbach traces strategies of “writing back” in eighteenth-century Surinamese Jewish historiography. David de Isaac Cohen Nassy’s famous Essai historique sur la colonie de Suriname is analyzed as a Jewish and Creole response to histories of the colony written by European authors, histories that either neglect the importance of Jews and/or distort the picture of Suriname in an unfavorable perspective. Modifying Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of auto-ethnography, Rauschenbach characterizes Nassy’s Essai as an early modern Surinamese Jewish auto-historiography, stressing not only Nassy’s Jewish but also his continental and American perspective. In the final part, the scope is broadened and the discussion of Jewish-American historiography is supplemented by discussions of similar expressions of Jewish-Creole thought, challenging European mechanisms of control. “Creole” is used here in the Spanish American sense of the word Criollo, to refer to descendents of European immigrants born in the Americas. Several examples illustrate how Jewish Creole thought not only questions Christian strategies but also Jewish hierarchies and the dominance of metropolitan Jewish communities such as Amsterdam or London in the Sephardic diaspora. In the eighth chapter, Aviva Ben-Ur sheds new light on the Jewish community of eighteenth-century Savannah, Georgia, reading its archival sources through  a transimperial and Atlantic history approach. As against the

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c­ ommon narrative of a community built by Iberian exiles striving for religious freedom, Ben-Ur locates the driving forces for Jewish settlement in colonial Georgia in the needs, traditions, and interests of Sephardic communities in Amsterdam, London, and the larger Atlantic world. Her study is exemplary of new approaches to the Sephardic Atlantic and emphasizes our need to combine thinking in and beyond imperial terms, however ambivalent Jewish imperial belonging is. In the case of Savannah, the ambivalence of a community of Jews participating in British colonization projects and surpassing the very same imperial structures of which they form part is especially visible when it comes to poverty management. The Sephardic example and the question of transimperial connectedness also urge us to rethink our concepts of migration and/or settlement and to acknowledge an additional perspective beyond the common dichotomy of metropole and colony when it comes to Jews in settler societies, which are interconnected but sometimes too marginalized to profit from a centralized authority in Europe. In chapter nine, Jan C. Jansen provides a close, contrapuntal reading of early Jamaican Sephardic freemasonry that is carefully contextualized within larger Atlantic-world trends in the early nineteenth century. Participation in West Indian masonic life enabled elite Sephardic men to stage claims of their belonging to a heterogeneous yet coherent imperial community, at a time when legal equality of rights between them and other members of this community was not yet established. At the same time, the masonic network proved flexible enough to retain and refashion certain ties that went beyond the sphere of the British Empire and that were essential for the Sephardic diaspora’s position within the Atlantic world. Jansen shows that as the transnational Sephardic networks declined and Jamaican politics turned to the question of citizenship for subalterns such as Jews and free blacks, Sephardic male elites founded their own masonic lodges that allowed them to socialize with the right kinds of people and afforded them a platform in their fight for the vote and recognition in the colony. Sephardic agency and counter-discourse in this case was class-based and gendered and appropriated/shared the dominant anti-­ black attitude. The third part of the volume aims at contributing to the growing field of Memory Studies. Memory Studies are not only paramount in both in Postcolonial and Jewish Studies. They have also been at the center of the majority of interdisciplinary research done at the crossroads of both disciplines. Interestingly, however, interdisciplinary approaches until now have mostly been dedicated to the study of (Ashkenazic) Holocaust memory in

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comparative perspective.33 The authors of our volume show that memories of Sephardic pasts even contribute to a more varied and sophisticated picture of modern forms of remembering as a multidirectional and multilayered cultural practice.34 These memories are of special importance in the Caribbean, with the strong presence of the trauma of 1492  in both Sephardic and colonial history. In different contexts, they take different form. In any case, they are not necessarily identical with what has been studied as “Sephardism,” a modern and mostly Ashkenazic reliance on a glorious Iberian and Western European Jewish past as a means of othering “Eastern” Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany35 or as a construct of a linguistic continuity with a distant Iberian past among early Ashkenazic immigrants in nineteenth-century Latin America.36 In the tenth chapter, Ana Sobral analyzes the figure of Christopher Columbus in U.S. American and Caribbean memories as represented in two works by Steve Berry and Edward Kritzler. In both works, Columbus’ hidden connections with Iberian Jews and/or conversos are employed as a means of memory activism and the production of entangled memories in the (re-)construction of Caribbean histories and identities. On one hand, dismembered Jewish pasts are re-membered to promote a sense of agency, associating the “discovery of America” with the Jewish people and Jewish refugees and immigrants from Europe. On the other hand, Columbus serves as a mediating figure between Jewish Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean memories. As against anti-Semitic propaganda in twentieth-century Afro-American nationalist movements, Caribbean imaginaries celebrate Jews and “frontier outlaws” (pirates and Maroons)

 Goetschel and Quayson, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” 3.   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. 33 34

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as subcultures of resistance and as cracks within the European colonial enterprise. With this, they promote new forms of solidarity while celebrating a Jewish identity rooted (as if native) in the Americas, which seems to contradict Columbus’ depiction as a traveling figure whose identity is characterized by movement. Sarah Phillips Casteel continues in the eleventh chapter to discuss the intersection of memories of slavery, Sepharad, and the Holocaust in the twentieth-century Caribbean. What Sobral does with popular literary fiction, Casteel does for some of the most important works of Caribbean postcolonial literature. Based on Derek Walcott’s concept of “triangulation,” Casteel shows how, complementary to its European counterparts, Caribbean Sephardism focuses on 1492 to connect the traumatic memories of Iberian Jews, indigenous Americans, and African slaves and to serve as a vehicle for multidirectional memory in the twentieth-century Americas. Historical narratives praise the contribution of Jews to the growth of Caribbean colonies while at the same time complicating a black-­ white binary in past slavery and defamiliarizing the institution of slavery by recovery of Sephardic history. But at the same time these narratives use their Sephardic protagonists to reconnect the Old and the New World. Finally, African Caribbean authors highlight the Caribbean as a geographical region where expulsion memories and Holocaust memories interact and reshape one another. In this context, Sephardism assumes the role of a postcolonial counter-memory which challenges the European dominance in Memory Studies without tapping into the trap of competitive victimhood. In the twelfth chapter, Heather Hermant follows the fragmented story of a Sephardic girl/boy Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue, who arrived in New France in 1738, through various retellings of this “foundational” moment in Canadian literature and media. The pressure put upon Esther/ Jacques to convert to Christianity, their ultimately unknowable gender and unclear past and fate—all speak to religious, gender, and identity Marranism, which Hermant probes through Queer Theory, producing a multidimensional analysis of hiddenness and crossing in the face of colonial surveillance. The silences and gaps of this riveting tale of colonial realities appealed to postcolonial writers both Jewish and not. Hermant notes the way postcolonial retellings of Esther/Jacques’ story remember or position Sephardim/conversos in order to message stances in contemporary ethnic, religious, or political debates, often key moments in the evolution of Canadian identity and the Canadian polity. Some iterations of the

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story ponder the significance of Esther/Jacques’ life in terms of what it says about Jews and colonization, while the tale has often been deployed to think about belonging and nation. Many recountings of this episode reveal the afterlife of colonial tropes, though more recent versions mine this afterlife as a prooftext for disruptive readings of colonialism. Turning to a different scene of attempted empire-building, Yigal S. Nizri explores in the thirteenth and last chapter how some of the Jewish communities of Morocco remembered and commemorated the shocking and (in)famous defeat of the Portuguese by Moroccan forces in 1578. Communal histories saw this outcome as divine intervention, a new salvation of the local Jews—it is possible that had the Portuguese won, they would have forcibly converted all the local Jews just as they had in Portugal some 80 years earlier—and punishment of their former oppressors. Thus, some of the Moroccan Jews made out of this event a local Purim, celebrating it as a new version of the ancient holiday of deliverance from Persian oppression. The various scrolls describing this event present a postcolonial counter-discourse—avant la lettre—by Moroccan Jews in general, but more specifically by Sephardim who had escaped their internal colonization in Portugal. Legends relate that the local Jews treated the Portuguese captives from the failed military campaign with great kindness, providing a narrative of Jewish alterity in contrast to Portuguese oppressiveness, the latter being perhaps implicitly juxtaposed to “indigenous” Moroccan/Muslim hospitality. Overall, our contributors show the degree to which settler societies in the Sephardic Atlantic mirror broader settler societies and interact with and/or differ from them. The chapters in this volume suggest that in the Sephardic Atlantic, creolization (now in the broadest sense) was accompanied by and led to inter- and intracommunity heterogeneity, rather than hybridity. This conclusion parallels the similar turn in Postcolonial Studies away from the overly harmonizing notion of hybridity in favor of heterogeneity.37 Several of the chapters insist on attending to horizontal relations between socialpolitical-religious groups, rather than just attending to vertical relations between the dominant group and the others (Mark and Horta, Tavim, Roitman, Sobral and Casteel). This perspective reveals Sephardim and

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.

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c­ onversos to have had ambivalent, pluriform, and nuanced relations with other subaltern groups. Jewish difference remains contested in ways that question a monolithic colonial history or postcolonial trajectory. Some of our contributions (Mark and Horta, Tavim,  Roitman, Ben-Ur) insist on it, in moves that might be seen as postcolonial reinscriptions of Jews as resistors of dominant Portuguese or Dutch forms of Othering Africans and their descendants. Others (Sobral, Casteel, Hermant) find this difference in the ways Jews are invoked in postcolonial culture, for instance in the Caribbean, as a group that shared/shares with Afro-Americans (in the hemispheric sense) and Native Americans a history of being dominated and exploited. Still others find forms of colonial mimicry in the ways Jews adopted and/ or adapted attitudes and approaches of Christian Europeans to empire, commerce, colonization, or political advancement (Schorsch, Tavim, Phaf-Rheinberger, Jansen). Yet another group sees colonial Jews taking on by dint of geopolitical location subject positions similar to those of their fellow colonists, for instance, contesting metropolitan control and knowledge production (Rauschenbach). Some of the uncertainty around locating Jews in colonial history and postcolonial thinking has been fruitfully aided (but could be even further strengthened) through comparative ­analyses of other “marginal” European groups and colonizing powers, such as the Irish or Scandinavians.38 Finally, perhaps, the chapters in our volume reflect the inevitable drift that comes from translating one field into another. From its inception, Postcolonial Studies has borne an explicitly political and ethical agenda, seeking an emergence from the cave of social, political, economic, and religious domination, exploitation, and oppression. Originally it was “The West” that Postcolonial Studies identified as the originator and major perpetrator of colonialism. While “The West” remains a major focus of postcolonial critiques, even as the concept has been disaggregated by deconstruction and poststructuralism, these critiques have been applied to other manifestations of empire (for example, premodern Hindu India, 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).

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early Islam, the Ottoman empire, the Inca and Aztecs). Some scholars go as far as insisting that decolonial thinking comprises much more than merely an academic discipline, but rather “is a way of being, thinking, doing, and becoming in the world.”39 One major challenge for postcolonial readings of the Sephardic Atlantic remains the mapping of the complicated Sephardic/converso relationship to “The West,” a relationship in which Jewish Studies continues to be implicated. How does one pluralize the question of power without ignoring real power differentials? How can one adequately capture contradictory values and strategies in individuals and collectives? How do we address the question of and map the constellation of possibilities of scholars of a field determined by (ethnic, religious, national) identity being uncritical or critical of those they are studying, especially if the scholar belongs to the same group? How do we assess Jewish postcolonial thinking that sometimes seems overly intent on absolving Jews of the “colonial sins” attributed to them? Wielding postcolonial methodology within Jewish Studies queers “the Jewish Question” and the political and perspectival nature of scholarship, but returns us inevitably to both. A brief note regarding terminology and stylistic conventions  Differences in perspective and interpretation will be evident between the chapters. At a more local level, usage also varies between authors, for instance, regarding Whites, whites, “Whites” or “whites,” Maroons or maroons. In some places, we have chosen to honor these differences rather than attempt to enforce an arbitrary historiographical or hermeneutic unity. At the same time, converso and New Christian are generally used herein as synonyms. Their neutral sociological intention avoids labeling individuals’ or groups’ religious or national loyalties, unlike the more loaded terms marrano or crypto-Jew. Where interpretive consequences seemed insignificant, we have tried to unify spellings and formal references to bolster the coherence of the volume. Acknowledgments  First versions of most of the chapters in this volume were presented at the international conference “Colonial History—Sephardic Perspectives,” held at the Institute for Jewish and Religious Studies of the University of Potsdam in October, 2015. We thank the University of Potsdam and the Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg for their support and funding

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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of this conference. Wenke Papenhagen, Maria Seidel, and Tanja Zakrzewski helped in its organization. The University of Potsdam also paid for the editing of one of the chapters—done by Ekua Yankah—and for the rights to the image used on the cover. Robert Messer produced the first version of the Index. Nimrod Baratz, Viktoria Hellwig, Julian Holter, Robert Messer, Katja Wolgast, and Tanja Zakrzewski all helped finalize work on the Index. Philip Getz and Amy Invernizzi at Palgrave supervised the peer review process as well as the preparation of the final manuscript. They were always helpful and responsive, and it was a pleasure working with them. Potsdam, June 2018

PART I

Race and Blood

CHAPTER 2

New Christian Slave Traders: A Literature Review and Research Agenda Jonathan Schorsch

The topic of Portuguese New Christian Slave Traders has received intriguingly different treatments in Iberian and Jewish scholarship.1 In the former—work produced by Hispanic and Lusophone scholars who treat the history of the Iberian empires—most researchers until recently have considered the New Christians to have been secretly loyal Jews. Portuguese New Christian domination of early Iberian slave trading, generally until the middle of the seventeenth century, is perceived as a (nefarious) Jewish endeavor. This perspective has influenced or is, at least now, paralleled in Black nationalist thought in the United States and beyond. In much Jewish scholarship—by which I mean research produced by scholars who are Jewish, in departments of Jewish Studies and/or focusing on Jewish topics—general New Christian transatlantic mercantile skill, if not 1  Some of the material here appeared in my Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008). I thank my colleague Sina Rauschenbach for her very helpful comments on early drafts of this chapter. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

J. Schorsch University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_2

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­ omination, is connected to the commercial success of Sephardim, that is, d openly professing Jews, since members of the two groups frequently cooperated in trade, but slave trading goes mostly unmentioned or is minimized. A second rhetorical disparity accompanies this first one. Many works of Jewish scholarship—again, taking this as a matter of institutional affiliation and subject position—insist that the Portuguese New Christians, unlike their Spanish kin, remained fiercely loyal to Judaism, given the sudden and collective nature of their forced conversion in 1497, along with their being granted a general 40-year pardon for any religious transgressions. In this there is agreement with the perspective of Iberian research. Yet when it comes to treatment of Portuguese New Christian slave traders, almost all Jewish scholarship seeks to rebut allegations of their Jewishness. The narratological conflicts reflect some interesting socioeconomic and theopolitical factors. Until recently the work of scholars trained in Iberian national(istic) schools of thought, whether in Spain, Portugal, or their former colonies, reflects a dominant majority position, often seeking to defend past national and religious historical choices and behavior, consciously or unconsciously continuing a discourse that justified attacks on Jewishness and agglomerating charges of immorality (slave trading) to New Christians as Jews. Black nationalist thought, essentially a postcolonial discourse, on the one hand finds in Jews a safe substitute target for its attacks on the colonialist persecution that Africans and their descendants faced mostly from White Christians, since assimilation into White Western societies has always meant assimilation into Christianity. On the other hand, Black nationalist thought often seeks to undermine the claims of Jews to be a persecuted minority in a contest of competitive victimhood, insisting that Jews have become (or always were) part of the dominant White majority and socioeconomic overclass and shared in oppressing Blacks and other underclasses. Scholarship by Jews, meanwhile, presents an awkward dance between the assertion that Jews in the West comprise a postcolonial group, freed from over a millennium of denigration and persecution, the difficulty of acknowledging that Jews might have acted as oppressors, and the conflicting impulses to both acknowledge and minimize past Jewish colonialism amid the similarly challenging possibility of present Jewish belonging to the dominant White stratum and socioeconomic overclass. Responses to these narratological conflicts between what are essentially divergent national historiographies have left an unsatisfying gap. The ­ideological work producing the various perspectives, which are only general

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and not monolithic, can be traced fairly easily and I will not take the time here to conduct such an analysis. The narratological divergence is produced by and produces several interrelated tensions regarding (1) the problematics of identifying individuals in the historical sources as New Christians; (2) the question of the reliability of records from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions as guides to the identities and religious lives of New Christians; (3) whether the identity and religiosity of any particular individual or family can be deduced from Inquisition documentation; (4) the degree of New Christian involvement in slave trading; (5) the central issue of whether New Christian slave trading represents the theopolitical culpability of Jews or Catholic Iberians. In contrast to past attempts by Jewish scholars to respond to the theopolitical implications or allegations from Iberian and Black discourse, in order to attempt to resolve these narratological nationalist conflicts, I will suggest the helpfulness of a combination of high-level methodological theorizing and in-the-trenches positivist research. One requirement is in-­ depth investigation of the actual identities and loyalties of New Christian slave traders, a long-overdue task riddled with challenges, now made somewhat easier with recent research. Yet this investigation cannot be accomplished without the development of a still often lacking adequately “thick” theory of New Christian identity and inquisitional institutional sociology. The development of an adequately “thick” theory also has been put in reach by recent research, which additionally has just begun to bring into conversation Iberian and Jewish nationalist discourses that frequently ignore one another. Probably the best analysis to date of our subject remains Seymour Drescher’s essay in the seminal 2001 collection The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West.2 He notes that most Iberian researchers simply assume the equivalence of New Christian, crypto-Jew, and even Jew and judaizer (an Inquisition term for those who attempted to indoctrinate others into Judaism). But his methodology and conclusions seem general, evasive, and unsatisfactory. When discussing New Christians, Drescher sticks to external, abstract arguments. He points, for instance, to scholarly findings that New Christian merchants traded with Old Christians, even intermarried with them (particularly elite New Christians) or, perhaps 2  Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 439–70.

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most significantly, that the large majority of New Christians chose to assimilate into Christian society and opted not to return to Judaism even when given the chance. While I agree fully with this assessment and even commend Drescher for propounding it in the face of a cottage industry of scholars insisting on widespread crypto-Judaism, it is a general and statistical perspective that does not address the particular question at hand, which is whether New Christian slave traders had Jewish loyalties and therefore can be said to represent “Jewish” slave-trading. Furthermore, while it may be true that most New Christians avoided Judaism, Jewishness, and judaizing, many scholars conclude that the Portuguese New Christians in particular evinced fierce loyalty to Judaism. While heavy New Christian participation in the early slave trade remains the consensus among reputable scholars representing a variety of institutional and national backgrounds, the “Jewish” allegiances of these traders still needs in-depth study and until then remains more of polemical use than historical accuracy. Ironically, given the specificity and ideologically-charged nature of the questions under discussion, the investigation of Portuguese New Christian slave traders impacts on larger questions pertaining to the overall identity of the New Christian population, the institutional character of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, the development of the Atlantic slave trade and the nature of early modern Atlantic world Sephardic/New Christian behavior and attitudes. The wavering ambivalence represented by the New Christians for both Iberian and Jewish scholarship—are they Jewish or Catholic?—constitutes essentially an epistemological problem generated by confusion about sources that are always already multiply-layered, produced by ideological apparatuses and prone to scholarly readings that are themselves frequently ideological, yet provide a recurring point of convergence and contestation for these two fields. Portuguese converso slave traders offer an even more pointed case study for colonial and postcolonial studies as a refraction of the swirl of forces influencing analytical concepts such as empire, group identity, colonialism, intergroup relations, race, religion, ambivalence, dependence, dislocation, and hegemony. In what follows, I review some of the recent work on Portuguese New Christian slave traders produced since Drescher’s essay appeared. These works have pushed forward our knowledge of slave trading by Portuguese conversos. But even these important and informative analyses, based mostly in commercial history, social history, or cultural studies, show limits when it comes to their understanding of the Inquisitions, the ultimate evidentiary

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basis for our knowledge of New Christian lives. Since the Inquisitions represent one of the most telling institutional manifestations of Iberian Catholic attitudes toward New Christians and Judaism, and since they produced the sources on which researchers overwhelmingly rely for determining New Christian identities, I present some thoughts on how to conceptualize the Inquisitions and handle their documentation. Next, I offer a brief case study of one Portuguese New Christian slave trader, Manuel Baptista Peres, on whom several recent analyses  have focused. Finally, I wrap up with some thoughts about the implications of what has been learned so far and opportunities for the future.

Portuguese New Christian Slave Traders: A Gradually Changing Discourse A number of Hispanic and Lusophone scholars produced a body of literature that thrust the role of Portuguese New Christian slave trading to the fore, guided by the rise of economic history in the 1950s and the turn in the 1960s in social history to previously-neglected classes, including slaves and slavery. Of course, the repressive dictatorships of Franco in Spain (through 1975), Salazar in Portugal (until 1968) and the military in Brazil (1964–1985) and their enforced nationalism contributed heavily to the outlook of the historiography written under their shadow. Among the most important researchers both during and after this period  are figures such as Enriqueta Vila Vilar, José Gonçalves Salvador and Maria da Graça A.  Mateus Ventura.3 Their work, often based on intrepid archival research, remained mostly positivist. Vilar 3  Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispano-América y el comercio de esclavos: los asientos portugueses (Seville: E.E.H.A. and C.S.I.C., 1977); idem, “Los asientos portugueses y el contrabando de negros,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 30 (1973): 557–609; José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Cristãos-Novos e o comércio no Atlântico meridional (Com enfoque nas capitanias do sul 1530–1680) (São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1978); idem, Os Magnatas do tráfico negreiro (São Paulo, 1981); Maria da Graça A.  Mateus Ventura, Negreiros Portugueses na rota das Índias de Castela (1541–1556) (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1999). Many other related works exist, of course, including: João Medina and Isabel Castro Henriques, A rota dos escravos: Angola e a rede do comércio negreiro (Lisbon: Cegia, 1996); Nikolaus Böttcher, Aufstieg und Fall eines atlantischen Handelsimperiums: Portugiesische Kaufleute und Sklavenhändler in Cartagena de Indias von 1580 bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1995); Germán Peralta Rivera, Los mecanismos del comercio negrero (Lima: Kuntur Ed., 1990). Böttcher is a German scholar working in Latin American Studies.

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and Ventura in particular limited themselves to outlining commercial and political aspects of the slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of the Spanish and Portuguese empires between metropole and colonies. They focus on the workings of this trade and on Portuguese dominance within western Africa and the Spanish orbit. While their work is not overtly anti-Jewish like the infamous but influential 1966 study of “the Jews” in colonial Spanish America by L. García de Proodian,4 these authors, though freed from governmentally-instigated nationalism, still express a fundamental ambivalence toward Jewishness that reflects continued Iberian and Catholic attitudes. They never make clear how they know which slave traders were New Christian or how they know which of these had Jewish loyalties; do not really explore the relevant Inquisition materials; nor offer any analysis of why Inquisition evidence of Jewish practices or beliefs or judaizing is to be taken at face value. Neither do they make much effort to investigate the subjectivities of the individuals they discuss. Beginning in the 1990s, scholars, Iberian and beyond, influenced by sociology, colonial studies, theoretical approaches and cultural studies, have attempted to do better. I will focus on only two of the many researchers who have contributed to our knowledge of New Christian slave traders, both substantively and conceptually.5 In this section, I am not reading this newer research ideologically (though of course one could), but trying to position it as offering a sense of the current state of the art: reflexive, open to the reality of cultural mixing, internal contradictions, and multiple perspectives, and wary of national(ist) narratives. Because in the many studies I have mentioned and will mention so much attention has already been devoted to the general workings of the slave trade and the place of Portuguese New Christians in it, I will avoid dwelling on such matters.

4  L. García de Proodian, Los Judios en America: sus actividades en los Virreinatos de Nueva Castilla y Nueva Granada s. XVII (Madrid: Instituto Arias Montano and Seminario de Estudios Americanistas de la Universidad de Madrid, 1966). 5  Other significant contributions include António de Almeida Mendes, “Esclavages et traites ibériques entre Méditerranée et Antlantique (XVe–XVIIe siècles): Une histoire globale” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2007); Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlantico Sul (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2000); Maria Manuel Ferraz Torrão, “Tráfico de escravos entre a costa da Guiné e a América espanhola: articulação dos impérios ultramarinos Ibéricos num espaço atlântico” (PhD diss., Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga [Lisbon], 1999).

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In the last decade, Tobias Green has emerged as one of the most sophisticated scholars of the Atlantic world, focusing his learned and thoughtful scholarship on Cape Verde and the west coast of Africa. Sitting in a department of history, his research has mostly had an Africanist focus. English, of Jewish (even Sephardic) extraction, I review his work here because it reflects state-of-the-art multidisciplinarity and he intentionally works across national fields.6 His PhD dissertation from 2006 on New Christians in early Cape Verde offers much food for thought both in terms of insightful contextualization and theoretical consideration of his topic, and for his coverage of several individuals involved in the trading of slaves.7 In his important 2011 book, which incorporates much material from his dissertation, Green offers a masterful survey of the initial development of the Portuguese slave trade along the western African coast and coastal islands and focuses attention on the cultural background of New Christians in these regions.8 As a Portuguese colony, Cape Verde attracted Portuguese New Christians, who seem to have become a noticeable presence by the early sixteenth century. New Christian lançados on the African mainland (lançado means something like “one who launched himself” outward or toward a goal) forged alliances, often through marriage, with local rulers and elites, marriage alliances with outsider traders constituting a long-­ standing custom in Upper Guinea. These lançado intermediaries, often New Christians, we are told, developed and enabled local and regional trade that, on the one hand, continued the patterns that preceded the arrival of Europeans, but on the other hand transformed it into an international trade—including in slaves—driven by the needs of European powers. Hounded by the Inquisition and its craving for their supposed  wealth, New Christians also came to understand that “the ­contraband slave trade was an ideal opportunity to move their property out of reach of the Inquisition.”9 6  In his autobiographical account of magic in present-day West Africa, written before he entered academia, he writes that “Like my ancestors, some of these lançados [on the sixteenth-century West African coast] had been Sephardic Jews.” Toby Green, Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa (London: Phoenix, 2001), 20. 7  Tobias Green, “Masters of Difference: Creolization and the Jewish Presence in Cabo Verde, 1497–1672” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2006). 8  Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 9  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 217.

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Drawing on the work of Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta on Portuguese Sephardim in West Africa, Green contrasts “multicultural” attitudes and practices in the region with the strong-group-boundary approach of Europe, noting the absorption of locals into the three small and short-lived Sephardic communities that arose along the coast, as well as the syncretistic religiosity that developed there. New Christians and Sephardim, based on their historical experience, showed openness to the adoption of new cultures: “The willingness of Africans and [Sephardic] Jews [based in West Africa] to adopt the faiths of one another hints at a clear acceptance by each group of certain common values, and at a level of cultural respect—it is not a world of exclusion, prejudice and unmitigated exploitation.”10 Similar trends can be found among the New Christians in the region. On the one hand, therefore, it is argued by Green, Mark, and Horta, New Christians evinced a movement of approaching and embracing “the African Other.” On the other hand, New Christians, in this same “world,” worked in the slave trade, performing acts of intrusion and violence. Green is aware of this contradiction: “The apparent paradox is that this history of commercial and cultural mixing […] occurred at a time of the first stirrings of modern racism.”11 “The earliest steps towards mixed societies in the African Atlantic occurred within the prism of a trade in slaves,” as “the strongest impact in Western Africa” of the arrival of the Portuguese “was in exacerbating cycles of violence and political instability that had already emerged with Mandinka expansion and the trans-Saharan slave trade.”12 “The connections of lançados to African lineage heads was impossible to separate from the lançado trade in slaves.”13 When it comes to the subject positions of Caboverdean New Christians and lançados on the mainland, Green relies almost exclusively on Inquisition sources. He has no choice, since there is very little outside corroborating evidence. Green argues reasonably that, even if they are based on economic competition, “not all of [the accusations]” against these New Christians in the early or mid-sixteenth century “can have been entirely groundless,” though several pages later he concludes that by the 1550s 10  Tobias Green, “Equal Partners? Proselytising by Africans and Jews in the 17th Century Atlantic Diaspora,” Melilah 1 (2008): 4. 11  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 19. 12  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 70. 13  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 200.

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“a now familiar pattern emerged: the traditional scapegoat in Portugal— the Jew—was wheeled out by the Portuguese residents of Cabo Verde at the first sign of socioeconomic conflict.”14 Further, “the actual activities of a persecuted Other may be held to have little to do with attacks on them.” Rather, “these accusations of Jewishness fell along caste lines. Where black power [the rise of a local black and mixed-race class] was feared, [New Christian] corregedores were accused of Jewishness by white Portuguese. This points to the types of unconscious association between Jews and ‘other Others’ that became current across the Atlantic.”15 Still, Green feels  that many of the allegations raised against various New Christians bear a concreteness and detail that convinces. Green has provided a powerful investigation into the place of Portuguese New Christians in the early Atlantic slave trade, endeavoring to explain economically, politically, and culturally why they came to occupy a dominant role. He has made admirable efforts to investigate the religious leanings of the New Christians he discusses. Where they are extant, he has consulted Inquisition trial records. He attempts to piece together multiple trials pertaining to single families. And, insofar as it is possible, he builds case studies of particular individuals by relying on as many types of evidence as exist, always comparing the sources against one another. He pursues the questions of identity through the only credible method: thorough, if plodding analysis of available evidence for each case taken individually. Ana Hutz, working in Brazil, has produced a Master’s thesis (2008) and PhD dissertation (2014) that skillfully take up the attempt to study New Christian slave traders while acknowledging, addressing, and problematizing the theopolitical questions at stake.16 In the former work already, where her focus tends to be commercial and political history and econometric matters rather than cultural factors, she relies not just on the work of Salvador and Vila Vilar, as well as Spanish and Portuguese scholars on the Inquisitions and conversos, but also on Jewish historians and Jewish scholarship on the Inquisitions and conversos. This enables her to contextualize the relevant sociological, political, and religious conundrums that  Green, “Masters of Difference,” 82, 85.  Green, “Masters of Difference,” 86. 16  Ana Hutz, “Homens de nação e de negócio: redes comerciais no mundo Ibérico (1580–1640)” (PhD diss., University of São Paulo, 2014); idem, “Os cristãos novos portugueses no tráfico de escravos para a América Espanhola (1580–1640)” (MA Thesis, Unicamp, 2008). 14 15

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accompany exploration of New Christians. She does an admirable job introducing questions pertaining to Jewish, New Christian, and Hispanic identities into the discussion as questions and not as things whose answers can  be assumed. Through the work of scholars such as António José Saraiva and Benzion Netanyahu, Hutz expresses healthy skepticism regarding the inquisitional record and New Christian identity. She shows awareness of debates within the various historiographical streams over issues such as New Christian identity. Armed as well with training in historiographical studies of colonialism, Hutz adds a second critical perspectival grasp of the complexities of metropolitan-colonial politics, Atlantic commerce, and the slave trade.17 Providing summaries of several New Christian families and commercial networks involved in slave trading, drawing on a bit of original research in the archives (this is only a Masters’ thesis, after all), she has produced a probing survey that is sensitive to the multiple perspectives of the different “White” players involved. In her doctoral dissertation, Hutz is outwardly critical of earlier Hispanic and Lusophone scholarship in its essentializing attitude toward New Christians as Jews. She has incorporated wider and even more up-to-­date scholarship on New Christians and Sephardim. The focus of this study has become further weighted toward the “Jewish” perspective of its New Christian subject population, which is now essentially folded into Jewish history. Hutz assembles a solid survey of the varying scholarly perspectives regarding the Inquisition’s reliability as a source for the Jewishness of New Christians. She attempts to situate New Christian commercial networks within a comparative analysis, drawing on recent work to puncture some of the myths surrounding, for instance, the notion that these networks were determined only by family ties. Hutz concludes that what bound New Christian commercial family networks together was not religious identity or practice but external factors: inquisitorial persecution and the deeply resented statutes of blood purity, on the one hand, and a strongly inbred organizational structure, typical for the time, that it was hoped would protect the merchants and their families from inquisitional fury. She offers an expanded presentation of the extended family of António Fernandes d’Elvas, possibly the Atlantic world’s dominant slave trader from 1615 to 1623, and their commercial activity. Through the relevant sources that she could find she concludes that d’Elvas “was not, in any way, a judaizer [i.e., a crypto-Jew, J. S.]. It is not impossible that some member  Utilizing mostly Portuguese-language scholarship. She does not cite Green, for instance.

17

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of his family was one, but we have not found any indication of this in the material investigated.”18 What is important about Hutz’s work is her methodological carefulness, her realization that study of her topics cannot be done without accessing “Jewish” sources and perspectives on the New Christians, her effort to base assessment of her New Christian subjects’ identities  on direct evidence, and her self-conscious efforts to question national(ist) mythologies. That she has been trained entirely in Brazil, outside of Jewish Studies, makes her work doubly admirable. She and Green show how recent scholarship on the New Christians and Atlantic-world trade has aspired to replace easy binarisms with more accurate and analytically fruitful complexity and messiness.

Theorizing Converso Identity and the Inquisitions It seems obvious that different New Christians took different paths in life and took on a variety of identities and that this difference warrants analytical attention. Only recently, seemingly, have scholars allowed such sociological commonsense a place in guiding their conclusions. To my mind, the best efforts to identify and delineate the different kinds of New Christians were published by Thomas F. Glick and José Faur.19 It could well be that a detailed study of the identities of New Christian slavers would merely replicate the analytical intuition that some inclined toward Judaism or Jewishness, others toward Christianity, and others toward no particular religious orientation. But at least such a conclusion will have the support of concrete evidence. Positivist analysis of inquisitional matters inevitably confronts epistemological questions and many of the Jewish scholars under discussion raise these questions only in order to whittle away at the quantity and perhaps even possibility of New Christian slavers of Jewish allegiance. The Inquisition and Iberian societies, they argue, were riddled with anti-­Jewish biases and their allegations about Jewishness cannot be trusted. Some correctly point  Hutz, “Homens de nação e de negócio,” 212.  Thomas F. Glick, “On Converso and Marrano Ethnicity,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, ed. Benjamin R.  Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 74; José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 41; see also idem, “Four Classes of Conversos: A Typological Study,” Revue des Etudes Juives 149 (1990): 113–24. Also worthwhile are two recent studies: David Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity Among ‘Men of the Nation:’ Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 32–65;  Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, “Plural Identities: the Portuguese New Christians,” Jewish History 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 129–51. 18 19

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out that it is difficult to identify New Christians because despite the Inquisitions and limpieza de sangre/purity of blood statutes, bureaucrats, especially at the local level, often did not care whether one was an Old or New Christian. Many sorts of documentation thus never mention individuals’ Old or New Christian status.20 (Note that this argument goes directly against the preceding one.) As institutions, the Inquisitions operated in a rather suspect manner, as has been pointed out by many scholars. Their income came largely from confiscating the goods of those they accused, hardly a recipe for neutral proceedings (though typical of the time). Trials were largely instigated by denunciations, leaving ample room for personal enmity and self-interest, despite supposed safeguards against false testimony. Though technically prohibited, the testimony of slaves or servants was often accepted, clear motivations of revenge or liberation notwithstanding. Because the inquisitors demanded that those accused denounce others, many prisoners spun out denunciations in the hope of saving their skin. Yet another problem is that the set of New Christians accused and/or found guilty by the Inquisitions is self-­selective. Many New Christians escaped inquisitorial scrutiny for long periods of time, some forever. Does that mean they were not marranos or judaizers?21 Using inquisitorial evidence to prove the Jewish allegiance of a New Christian is therefore an exercise in circular reasoning. The problem with such arguments, as valid as they might be, is that the epistemological challenges of handling inquisitional evidence do not eliminate the reality that there were crypto-Jews  and judaizers. Unless one takes the most extreme position that crypto-Judaism in its entirety was a delusion and fabrication of Iberian theopolitics, one must still deal with the fact that some New Christians considered themselves Jews and behaved accordingly or flirted for a time or for extended periods with whatever they knew of Judaism. 20  For instance, Manuel Duarte, who brought slaves from Cape Verde to Cartagena in the early seventeenth century, was denounced in 1611 and then prosecuted by the colonial authorities in Cartagena as a foreigner, since he was Portuguese. Nowhere in the documentation is his status as an Old or New Christian mentioned. See Maria da Graça A.  Mateus Ventura, Portugueses no Peru ao tempo da união ibérica: Mobilidade, cumplicidades e vivências, 2 vols. in 3 pts. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2005), 1:140. 21  The history and meanings of these terms is too complex to discuss here. I use the terms marrano and crypto-Jew as synonyms that signal loyalty to Judaism/Jewishness in whatever sense. They are thus opposed to the term New Christian or converso, which leaves the question of religious/ethnic loyalty unresolved.

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Doubts such as these reflect the influence of what might be called the minimalist or skeptical school of thought regarding crypto-Judaism. Researchers including Netanyahu, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Ellis Rivkin, Herman P. Salomon, Eleazar Gutwirth, Norman Roth, and, perhaps most forcefully, António José Saraiva, feel that crypto-Judaism was minimal, limited to a few times and places, and mostly generated by the Inquisitions themselves.22 Another problem for Jewish scholars attempting to dismiss New Christian slave trading is the assumption that Portuguese New Christians were particularly fervently bound to Judaism or Jewishness. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi sums up this position forthrightly: In contrast to Spain it is argued that conversion in Portugal, being entirely and literally forced, overcame thousands of faithful Jews and not only the religiously weak, while at the same time it included some of the most tenacious elements from Spain itself. Moreover, after 1497 some four decades were to elapse before the introduction of the Portuguese Inquisition. This respite allowed the Conversos ample time to accommodate themselves to conditions and to create viable forms of crypto-Jewish life.23

This view has been often repeated and remains the scholarly consensus.24 There is of course truth to this position, which is to be found in numerous statements from a wide range of parties over the course of several centuries. Even the hypothesis that Portuguese New Christians were far more likely than Spanish New Christians to evince Jewish attitudes, beliefs, or 22  Ellis Rivkin, “How Jewish Were the New Christians?” Hispania Judaica 1 (1980): 104–15; António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians, 1536–1765, trans., revised and augmented by H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (Leiden: Brill, 2001), which is a translation and expansion of the 1985 edition of Saraiva’s Inquisição e cristãos-novos (1969); Herman Prins Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” Sefarad 67, no. 1 (Jan.–June 2007): 111–54. 23  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 5. 24  See, for example, Eva Alexandra Uchmany, “The Participation of New Christians and Crypto-Jews in the Conquest, Colonization, and Trade of Spanish America, 1521–1660,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 186: “the immense majority of the [converted] Portuguese Jews never abandoned their ancestral religion, but rather only changed their external identity.”

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practices does not yield the conclusion that any given Portuguese New Christian was a crypto-Jew, however. The findings of many scholars show that even among Portuguese New Christians, for instance in Brazil, the vast majority chose not to affiliate with Judaism or Jewishness even when they had the chance under Dutch rule. Some scholars suggest that initially the Spanish Inquisition responded to legitimate complaints about widespread Jewish beliefs and practices among New Christians. Having successfully stamped out such behavior through a long wave of trials, crypto-Judaism effectively evaporated. It arose again with the influx of Portuguese New Christians into Spain with the unification of the two kingdoms in 1580 and was again for the most part eliminated with another wave of trials in the mid-seventeenth century. In between these two waves and certainly afterward, denunciations and trials become standardized and debased. Some skeptics grant not even this authenticity to either crypto-Judaism or the Inquisition. Salomon points to the abysmal lack of judicial protocol in the earliest trials by the Spanish Inquisition, which acted on little more than the denunciations it received.25 Recent statistical surveys of trials and sentences make abundantly clear the ebb and flow of prosecution of particular crimes such as judaizing, witchcraft, Protestantism, and the like. Most impressive is the project begun by Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen to quantify all of the known cases conducted by the Spanish Inquisition.26 Statistical analysis has become a standard feature of a growing number of works on the Inquisitions, adding greatly to our knowledge of these institutions by offering objective data, however flawed and necessitating careful interpretation. In addition, a veritable boom in Inquisition studies has taken place since the 1970s in Hispanic lands and beyond, approaching the subject from a variety of disciplines and applying a range of analytical methodologies  Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” 123.  See Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, eds. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, in association with Charles Amiel (Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 100–29. The database is not without problems, some of them quite major. The fact that Contreras and Henningsen choose to begin at 1540, understandably, as records before then were not yet standardized, means that the earliest phase of the Inquisition’s operations, widely acknowledged to be aimed overwhelmingly at alleged crypto-Jews, does not get included in the statistical calculations, severely skewing them toward an undercounting of trials against New Christians. 25 26

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in a sophisticated manner that, subjective perspectives notwithstanding, leaves behind the overtly or blindly polemical and ideological research of the past.27 It is simply astonishing to me how few Jewish scholars know or make use of this work. In his 1995 study, Norman Roth sought to redress the dearth of sophisticated theorizing about the Inquisition as an institution, and the consequences of varying conclusions for the study of New Christians as well as Sephardim.28 The problems relating to the Inquisitions, their assumptions, methods, and procedures, and the reliability of their investigative determinations remain legion. Some have been mentioned already. Keeping secret the identities of the accusers and the circumstances of the alleged crime was a practice consistently controversial from the establishment of these institutions. In 1774 the Inquisitor General of the Portuguese Inquisition himself “condemned procedural flaws and iniquities inherent in the very fabric of the Inquisition, damning practices such as the […] secrecy about the identity of prosecution witnesses and the circumstances in which an alleged offense had been committed.”29 The inquisitional knowledge production that enabled denunciations might itself be suspect. Probably the overwhelming majority of accusations against alleged crypto-Jews after the Inquisition’s initial phase lasting into the 1520s or so are stock practices and customs likely known widely in the general population from no other source than the Edicts of Faith that the Inquisitions routinely promulgated through posting on church doors and other means of circulation.30 These and other 27  Within this already large body of literature I would include the massive three-volume collection of essays overseen by Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, eds., Historia de la inquisición: España y América, 3 vols.  (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000). The first volume is devoted to El conocimiento científico y el proceso histórico de la institución (1478–1834), the second to Las estructuras del santo oficio, and the third to Temas y problemas. 28  Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), “Appendix A: Critical Survey of the Literature,” 363–71. 29  Charles Amiel, “Archives of the Portuguese Inquisition: A Brief Survey,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, eds. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, in association with Charles Amiel (Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 83. 30  On this phenomenon, see Bárbara Santiago Medina, “La publicación de edictos como fuente de conflictos: el tribunal de la Inquisición de Barcelona,” Pedralbes 28 (2008): 707–22; Ignacio Villa Calleja, “La oportunidad previa al procedimiento: los edictos de fe

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problems have been noted by scholars such as Netanyahu, Ellis Rivkin, Saraiva, Henry Kamen, and Roth. To formulate it weakly, it is obvious that inquisitors treated both individuals and populations differently; for instance, meting out different punishments depending on the crime or class of the accused, using torture in varying proportions for individuals of different background and accused crimes, acquitting at different rates. Such questions can also be asked in a strong sense. Did the Inquisitions themselves function differently when it came to different racial/ethnic or religious groups? If so, to what degree was this difference generated by religion, race/ethnicity, or other socioeconomic factors and in what ways? Did such differences manifest themselves on the level of institutional procedure or the attitude of individual functionaries, even if unconscious? How do scholars understand these differences? What are the implications for Inquisition-related scholarship? Is it possible that Inquisition trial records are less reliable for some population groups than for others? Do the Inquisitions present a different hermeneutic object for different scholarly fields? Is it possible that the inquisitional machinery could be biased, predisposed to find guilt, or processually tainted when it came to alleged crypto-­ Jews but not when it came to, say, African slaves suspected of blasphemy? Even Contreras and Henningsen note that for the seventeenth-century Spanish Inquisition, Portuguese crypto-Jews “were the most coveted ‘clients,’ and their cases were always put first on the dockets of the courts.”31 Torture, for example, was most readily applied to suspected crypto-Jews, 75% of them in late seventeenth-century Spain, according to Henry Kamen, far higher than the 7% of those accused of all crimes put to torture by the Granada tribunal in the late sixteenth century and the 11% of all the accused tortured by the Seville tribunal in the early seventeenth.32 Irene Silverblatt thinks the statistics for frequent torture of alleged crypto-Jews in Peru were comparable.33 (It must be remembered that torture was not (siglos XV–XIX),” in Historia de la inquisición: España y América, eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 2:301–33. 31  Contreras and Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases,” 125. 32  Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 189. 33  Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 71.

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even allowed in cases of minor offenses.) Acquittal rates also varied widely. Between 1566 and 1609, the tribunal of Valencia absolved 2.5% of those accused and suspended the trials of 9%, while that of Galicia between 1560 and 1700 absolved 18.5% (suspensions here are not separated out). Overall figures from all of the Spanish tribunals, including the Americas, show a 3.5% rate of suspensions and a 2.7% rate of absolutions, rather low.34 Outright acquittal was rare, as “it meant admitting an error,” so suspension of sentences was more common (and also meant the trial could be reopened at any time).35 It is quite likely that the inquisitional tribunals at different times and in different places indeed differed in the manner in which they assessed the individual and collective human objects of their pursuit. That is, depending on specific local conditions and fears, judeoconversos might well have been perceived as inherently suspicious enough to be tried (and found guilty) almost automatically, while elsewhere the same could be said for Amerindian magical practitioners or shamans (despite the fact that the native Americans stood supposedly beyond the inquisitional jurisdiction). That the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid (the Suprema) repeatedly castigated the tribunals of Lima and Cartagena for flawed trial procedures during their pursuit of the so-called Great Conspiracy of marranos in the 1630s and 40s indicates that even the top body of the Spanish Inquisition saw many of these colonial cases as failing to meet internal standards. This is evident in the fact that in Cartagena, of 84 trials against alleged cryptoJews throughout the mid-seventeenth-­century wave against the supposed Grand Conspiracy, 11 of the accused were absolved (13.1%) and 14 of the cases suspended (16.7%), with the Suprema itself directly suspending one of the latter. This yields a shockingly high figure of 29.8% or nearly a third of the cases ending in unsuccessful prosecution, far higher than among those accused of other offenses.36 On the other hand, the Suprema never demanded the dismissal of the responsible officials or the closure of such clearly problematic tribunals. In Lima, the center, along with Cartagena and Mexico City, of the campaign against Portuguese (and other) alleged 34  Solange Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 208 (Table 4). 35  Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 198–99. 36  Fermina Álvarez, Alonso, La Inquisición en Cartagena de Indias durante el siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1999), 138–41. For other major heresies the rates were similarly high, while for alleged crimes of superstition and witchcraft the rate was slightly over 10%. See ibid., 161, 212.

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crypto-Jews in the Americas, 127 trials were conducted between 1622 and 1641, with another 10 carried out from 1642 through 1667.37 There, 1.44% of those accused of all offenses in seventeenth-century Lima were absolved and 13.25% received suspended sentences, the latter indicating the high degree of unprofessionalism involved in the running of these trials.38 One can only wonder whether the remaining trials really reflected anything like proper judicial methodology. Ultimately, in my opinion, researchers are confounded by a number of circular problems. The fact that crypto-Judaism existed cannot prove crypto-Jewishness in any particular case, yet the fact that most judeoconversos may have been innocent of observing Jewish rites or judaizing cannot prove innocence in any particular case. On the one hand, it seems obvious that a case-by-case approach sensitive to the various hermeneutical and epistemological difficulties affords the most fruitful methodology, avoiding generalizations of either extreme regarding the behavior of the accused as well as the accusers. At the same time, as Rivkin and Saraiva argue cogently (as summarized by Howard Adelman), the Inquisitions’ documents “must be considered, […] structurally, in light of the entire mechanism of this massive system.”39 In other words, to understand any particular case, its context and details, one must possess a theory about the Inquisitions’ purpose and methods; to construct a theory of the Inquisitions’ purpose and methods, one must possess knowledge of the workings of many particular cases, as well as of a vast documentary trail of institutional negotiations, disputes, and procedures. However, and here is the final hermeneutical circle, a theory that holds the Inquisitions to have been the “inventors” of the majority of cases of crypto-Judaism still cannot account for the possibility that any particular case might reflect authentic crypto-Judaism, while a theory positing that marranism was real and 37  P. Pérez Cantó, “La dinámica de las estructuras en el tribunal de Lima,” in Historia de la inquisición: España y América, eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 1:1181–82. 38  B. Escandell Bonet, “La peculiar estructura administrativa y funcional de la inquisición española en Indias,” in Historia de la inquisición: España y América, eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 2:662. I have not yet come across similar quantitative studies of the Portuguese Inquisition in Africa. 39  Howard Adelman, “Inquisitors and Historians and their Methods” (unpublished paper, June 1990), 30.

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widespread still cannot discount the possibility that in any given case the Inquisition artificially and unjustly produced the results it desired. Finally, one important understanding of how to read Inquisition trial records should be noted. Depositions by accusers and accused can be read fruitfully between the lines or against the grain when the contents being discussed do not pertain to the main theopolitical interest of the Inquisitors, that is, whether the accused is a crypto-Jew. When the contents relate to the direct inquiry of the inquisitors into the Jewishness of an accused individual or family, or ancillary accusations of economic crimes, I am much more skeptical about their veracity, because they have always already, in one way or another, come under the gravitational orbit of the Inquisitions’ built-in bias, such that witnesses already have internalized all of the pressures to denounce someone as Jewish or to tell the inquisitors what they think they want to hear. This is why I am comfortable using Inquisition records when it comes to side comments, such as racial attitudes of witnesses or remarks touching on gender, daily activities, etc., but not when it comes to perceptions of other people’s Jewish or Christian loyalties or religiosity. When it comes to religiosity, as I investigate cases tried by the Inquisitions, despite my admitted skepticism, I follow some very rough guidelines. If some of the following questions bear affirmative answers, I am more inclined to accept all or part of the “Jewish” activities alleged: Can we tell whether the charges from denouncers are run-of-the-mill, vague, or mere repetitions of the items listed in the Edicts of Faith? Does the evidence present significant and concrete details that reflect specific activities or beliefs? Do depositions from multiple witnesses corroborate one another on specific details and not just general charges? Is there any external corroborating evidence? Other scholars have adopted some of the same operating procedures.40

Manuel Baptista Peres: A Case Study Made Possible by Recent Research Research published over the past decade or so has in theory dramatically improved our ability to address the question of the religious and “national” inclinations of New Christian slave traders. Advances have come in two ways. First, as mentioned, a growing number of excellent studies of the 40  For instance, David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 14–16.

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Inquisitions as institutions have appeared, including quantitative analysis of trials, that greatly improve our understanding of how these entities functioned. Secondly, a growing number of case studies of specific New Christian slave traders have been published. By now, many records of trials conducted by the Portuguese Inquisition even have been digitized and posted online at the website of the Torre do Tombo (Lisbon).41 These developments make it easier to engage in the inescapable, if challenge-­ filled, work of assessing each personality and his/her trial based on the evidence available to us. It is no longer possible to put off conducting in-depth studies of New Christian slave traders themselves, as individuals and as a set of often interconnected groups. Much new research has emerged that makes such a study doable. The goal is not merely to scour Inquisition sources for proof of Jewishness or its lack. In other words, it is not merely religious orientation that is of interest. Given the scholarly emphasis on Portuguese marranism, however, it certainly is worth asking whether New Christian slavers of the early sixteenth century evince Jewish beliefs, practices, or allegiances. For the longue durée, we want to know whether proof exists that the slave trade served conversos as a means to escape the Inquisition and/ or the Iberian Peninsula. Did they generally flee, as has been repeatedly stated, aboard their own ships or those of other New Christian slavers to the African coast or coastal islands or to the Americas? Were these men bound to one another by ties beyond the family business and their trading partners and were such ties ethnic, loyalties to the Portuguese nation, or to New Christians as a group or to some form of Jewishness? Did they see themselves as acting for or against Spain or the Iberian world or Catholicism? Did these men manifest any kind of moral relativism or skepticism given their profession or, contrarily, was it conducted out of sincere religious conviction that the slaves were better off saved by Christian civilization? Are their mental worlds compartmentalized, without expressed thoughts regarding their buying and selling human beings for a living? Are anti-black sentiments to be found among the subjectivities that can be excavated through the available documentation? At least four scholars have published recent analyses of Manuel Baptista Peres, or Manuel Bautista Pérez in the Spanish, a Portuguese New Christian 41  Much other material similarly has been made available. The reproduction is beautifully done and the collections feature online search capacity. We have entered a whole new era of research possibilities. See http://digitarq.dgarq.gov.pt.

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merchant living in Peru. One of the region’s major actors in the internal slave trade, possibly the richest man in Lima, Peres was caught up in the Spanish Inquisition’s hemisphere-wide campaign against Portuguese merchants in the mid-1630s, at the height of the struggle between Portugal and Spain over the former’s independence and, perhaps of more importance, coinciding with the often successful Dutch efforts to compete with and defeat the Portuguese around the Atlantic. Arrested in 1636, he was burned at the stake in a spectacular 1639 Auto de fé. I review two of these new studies on Baptista Peres below. A third study makes use of the rich trove of letters and business-related documents seized from our merchant by the Inquisition to concern itself exclusively on expanding our understanding of the slave trade as a business. A fourth analysis uses the same correspondence to flesh out Baptista Peres’ personal life and sociocultural affiliations.42 For my part, here I will treat mostly the possible evidence regarding Baptista Peres’ inner life and religious inclinations. Thorough discussion of his career as a slave trader can be found in these four studies. A great deal of detail regarding Baptista Peres’ career and life is brought out by Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura in her magisterial treatment of colonial Peru’s Portuguese population.43 Her 2005 study is a model of thorough excavation of sources, such as personal and business letters, close attention to detail, skillful sleuthing, and well-applied statistical and econometric analysis. She is careful to avoid marking her subjects as New or Old Christians, except where relevant to the discussion at hand.44 Most of Ventura’s interest in Baptista Peres centers on his slave-trading business. Unlike in her first study of Portuguese slave traders, here she understands that she must discuss Baptista Peres’ subjectivity—and is able to do so because of the plethora of primary sources. From his business letters—“well written and well structured”—Ventura infers his “complex 42  Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 43  Ventura, Portugueses no Peru. 44  Though on occasion even Ventura lapses into assuming that inquisitional knowledgemaking is determinative. So, for instance, she talks about Gaspar dos Reis and Diogo da Veira, “Portuguese judaizers tried in Lima” (judaizantes portugueses processados em Lima) (1:151), when a more accurate description would have been something like “Portuguese tried as judaizers in Lima.”

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mental space, molded by an intense social life, a notorious economic affluence, the taste for reading and the embellishment of the house, integrity in business and a deep clairvoyance in the management of its business.”45 She cites Frederick P. Bowser’s conclusion that “Baptista Peres treated his blacks very well,” that is, his human merchandise, though she rightly notes that, as merchandise, good treatment helped ensure good sales and hence profits.46 Bowser had already cited a letter from our merchant in which he complained, regarding a 17% mortality rate of the slaves on one 1618 transatlantic ship journey, that this was “a punishment from God.”47 Should we assume that this divine punishment concerned the monetary loss he had suffered or the terrible personal suffering of numerous of his human cargo? Analysis of Baptista Peres’ subjectivity includes treating the Inquisition documents pertaining to her man. Yet her exploration of these materials remains disappointingly thin, occupying cumulatively a paragraph or two. When it comes to the religious question, it seems that Ventura tries to be even-handed. “When the Inquisition clamped down on the Portuguese, the enemies of Baptista Peres, or the forced informers, launched against him the gravest accusations of Judaism,” she writes, at least acknowledging that some of the denunciations stemmed from sources whose reliability was questionable.48 Indeed, he was accused of being the leader of the crypto-Jewish congregation in Lima, of participating in Jewish prayer services. Overall, however, Ventura assumes the credibility of the Inquisition documentation. Historian Jonathan Israel shares her view, calling Baptista Peres a “Portuguese Jewish merchant.”49 Ventura believes, for instance, that the Portuguese New Christians accused in Cartagena in the mid-­ 1630s of colluding with the Dutch West India Company to help take Pernambuco were likely in fact involved and she seems to accept that they were practicing crypto-Jews.50 Ventura quotes from letters of Baptista Peres  Ibid., 1:373.  Ibid., 1:381. Bowser had written that Bautista Pérez “was noted for the care he took with his cargoes.” Frederick P.  Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 50. 47  Bowser, African Slave in Peru, 50. 48  Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:361. 49  Jonathan I. Israel, “Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life and Colonization in Europe and the New World (16th–18th Centuries),” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1992), 2:383. 50  Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:298–300. 45 46

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that quite explicitly take the Portuguese and Spanish side when discussing Dutch piracy and Dutch advances on Pernambuco, yet she doesn’t discuss the text’s possible readings. Here is one such passage, written in 1630, the year the Dutch finally wrested Pernambuco from the Portuguese: […] he had with him a letter from the senhor captain Pedro Duarte in which he warns of the trouble of Spain, Dutch advances and the loss of Pernambuco that he is certain to feel, from the great harm it will entail for Spain as for the evil to the things of the Portuguese that are seen in these parts, which brings the thing to the point of saying that they gave the city to the enemy, may God remember his faithful and confuse such cruel enemies.51

Despite hints that Baptista Peres’ concern, like that of so many Portuguese overseas merchants, is for his own business—the risk to his slaving ships— the cruel enemy is Holland, unless one wants to read his words as calculated double-speak. Ventura tries to tie enigmatic references to various books in Baptista Peres’ letters to possibly crypto-Jewish texts. She cites a mention of a book along with the name Juan de Valverde, but this simply refers to the well-­ known Spanish medic and anatomist. A mention of a book of “the law in couplets” that begins “To you Lord God, we call with voices and cries,” leads Ventura to wonder whether this could be the same book of prayers that João Rodrigues da Silva in Mexico is denounced for using by Luis de Carvajal, undergoing torture, in 1596.52 This might indeed be a poetic version of Deuteronomy that Carvajal refers to as Flores sacadas de la sancta ley.53 Whatever it signifies, none of the 150 books in his library are listed as suspicious or prohibited.54 As prisoners in the Inquisition cells for five years, subjected to torture, neither Baptista Peres nor his brother-in-­ law and business partner Sebastão Duarte denounced anyone.55 Anthropologist Nathan Wachtel, who has turned his attention lately to the subject of crypto-Jews, devotes an entire chapter to Bautista Pérez. (As I cite his work, I will follow Wachtel’s usage of the Spanish version of the

 Ibid., 1:377.  Ibid., 1:383. 53  Ronnie Perelis, personal communication, October 2015. 54  Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:383. 55  Ibid., 1:373. 51 52

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name.)56 Relying heavily on his Inquisition trial documents, Wachtel delves deeply into the testimony of those accusing him, as well as to his responses. Wachtel winds up unconvinced by the allegations that Bautista Pérez observed and/or taught the Law of Moses. Even the Jesuit friar who wrote up the description of the Auto de fé, Fernando de Montesinos, could but describe the very Christian life of Bautista Pérez, though he shared the inquisitors’ doubts about its sincerity and sought out worrisome signs: He attended the festivals of the Holy Sacrament, hearing mass and sermons, principally if the history of the Old Testament was treated in them. He confessed and took communion, was a congregant, raised his children with sacerdotal instructors (but so fond of his nation that he wanted them to be baptized at the hands of Portuguese).57

Witnesses repeatedly confirm Bautista Pérez’s honorable Christian life. He spent long hours sometimes at the hospital, collected alms for those in need “and likewise this witness saw that this week when he had to serve at the said hospital the said Manuel Bautista heard two or three masses and always with the rosary in his hand.”58 “And for the festivals of the church [the witness] knows that he lent his jewels and prints and reliquaries and he remembers that […] he saw once at a feast a very fine holy christ,” that is, a crucifix, that Bautista Pérez provided.59 A letter to Sebastian Duarte, Bautista Pérez’s brother-in-law, shows that he “dispatched a steady stream of cured hams, olive oil, and other preserves to agents and shipmasters stranded in Puerto Belo” in Panama.60 Were these colleagues New Christians as well? Did he send hams in order to dissemble, because he did not care about Jewish dietary restrictions, because his colleagues were not crypto-Jews or because they were pretending to be good Christians? Witnesses testified regarding his conscientiousness and scruples. Frequently he was engaged with his business associates in his study, discussing or writing concerning business with them. Naturally this led to suspicions; most of his associates were Portuguese, many being accused 56  Nathan Wachtel, La foi du souvenir: Labyrinthes marranes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), ch. 3, 77–101. 57  Ibid., 398n26. 58  Ibid., 398n29. 59  Ibid., 398n30. 60  Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 57.

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eventually of being crypto-Jews. One witness reported that Bautista Pérez once spoke of “what might be if [in his house] occurred something that should not be of the Catholic faith and that these conversations in his house always aroused murmuring in the village.”61 Even light banter might lead to misunderstandings. One witness claimed that he met Bautista Pérez once in the street when the latter was out collecting alms. Asked to donate, the witness said that he had no silver on him, but would go get some and give it to Bautista Pérez. He replied, “Sir, even though His Honor observes the law of Moses it is good to give alms for in the law of Moses alms are given.”62 Was Bautista Pérez accusing the witness? Was the witness suggesting that Bautista Pérez included himself in the community of observers of the Law of Moses? As his imprisonment stretched on Bautista Pérez refused to denounce others. He said to another accused Portuguese: “Brother, it is evil to tell a thousand testimonies and say that which we did not do and condemn others and our loves.”63 Another time he comforted a compatriot, telling him to “have faith in god who will help us through his blood and death […] we die through the truth” and yet again: “God helps us by his death which for me there has not been a thing sweeter than it.”64 Wachtel’s final quote is a lengthy lament of Bautista Pérez’s to Jesus the Redeemer, the Queen of Heaven, Saint Mary, the Most Holy Virgin, and the Holy Mother Roman Catholic Church that “I want to die as a soldier of Jesus Christ.”65 Are statements like these merely efforts to dissemble and save himself? Was Baptista Peres really a good Christian? Was he persecuted merely because of his wealth? Did imprisonment and the fear of punishment, perhaps death, make him more Christian than he actually had been? From my perspective, other than the possible appearance of a verse Bible known to one other crypto-Jew, nothing in the accusations against Baptista Peres reflects anything that could not have been known about what crypto-Jews believed and did from the Edicts of the Faith or from common stereotype. Of course, he seems to have been devoted to Portuguese and/or New Christians as a distinct population that was meaningful to him, whether based on heritage, kinship, external discrimination, and/or a sense of Portuguese and/or New  Wachtel, Foi du souvenir, 399n37. My translation.  Ibid., 400n47. 63  Ibid., 401n57. 64  Ibid., 401n59. 65  Ibid., 401n60. 61 62

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Christian collectivity. Once again we are trapped in the hall of mirrors that is the Inquisition. But at least the basis for discussion of Baptista Peres’ identity can be drawn from reasoned arguments based on a simultaneous awareness of the systemic complexities of the Inquisitions and their cultural-political context, together with a conscientious excavation of the relevant details of his case from whatever sources we can obtain.

Toward a Better Understanding of (the) New Christian Slave Traders To conclude, the strides made in recent decades enable a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of Portuguese New Christians in the slave trade. Yet much more remains to be done. Many of the known New Christian slave traders have not been adequately treated or covered at all.66 Certainly, given that Baptista Peres was the wealthiest merchant in Peru, the documentary record concerning him is ample and his stature attracts the interest of scholars. Lesser figures will not have produced similarly-­ extensive paper trails. But many of the other individuals also had high profiles. The topic calls out for investigators who can find, handle, and interpret with the requisite array of skills not only early modern Spanish and Portuguese governmental, commercial, and financial records, such as documentation from lawsuits, shipping manifests, or personal business letters but also Inquisition sources as well as personal/familial materials. The search 66  On the Torres family, Fernando de Córdoba and his sons Diego de Torres and Alonso de Torres, who imported slaves to Málaga and then to the Spanish Caribbean in the 2nd and 3rd decades of the sixteenth century, see Manuel F. Fernandez Chaves and Rafael M. Pérez García, “La élite mercantil judeoconversa andaluza y la articulación de la trata negrera hacia las Indias de Castilla, ca. 1518–1560,” Hispania-Revista Espanola de Historia 76, no. 253 (2016): 391–95, 400–402. An essay by Jessica Roitman treats briefly the careers of the brothers Afonso, Rodrigo and Diogo Fidalgo, while devoting more attention to members of the Gramaxo family, particularly Jorge Fernandes Gramaxo of early seventeenth-century Cartagena; Jessica Vance Roitman, “Sephardic Journeys: Travel, Place and Conceptions of Identity,” Jewish History and Culture 11, nos. 1&2 (Summer/Autumn 2009): 209–28. Elsewhere Roitman looks at the business of Duarte Dias Henriques, who held the asiento for Angola from 1607 to 1615; Jessica Vance Roitman, “New Christians, Jews, and Amsterdam at the Crossroads of Expansion Systems,” in Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer, ed. Wim Klooster (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 126–30. Other studies include Rosendo Sampaio Garcia, “O portugues Duarte Lopes e o comercio espanhol de escravos negros,” Revista de Historia (Sao Paulo) 8 (1957): 375–85.

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can only be essayed by the most intrepid and persistent of explorers. What is needed is an attempt to construct studies attentive not only to culture as a whole, nor even to the sociology of the New Christian subculture, but to multiple microanalyses of often interlinked familial networks and, ideally, if possible, personal subjectivities. The data needs to be read—Green probably stands as one of the best exemplars—within and across institutions, trades, continents, disparate cultures, intense religious and national politics, several metropole-colony/homeland-diaspora loops, and a vast regional amalgam of local contexts. Knowledge of the converso experience and familiarity with normative Judaism and marranism are  central prerequisites; indeed, they are the main thing so many researchers on this topic have lacked. The first order of business is to determine whether New Christian status  can be verified for the individuals listed by scholars as such. Secondly, serious attempts must be made to inquire into these individuals’ political and religious orientations. But larger cultural questions remain to be determined. Amid other examples, we must contend with the significance of reports that some Portuguese  New Christian slave traders and their families in the Americas spoke Angolan and other African languages, as well as allegations that they were seen fondly by Afroiberians and were  fomenting rebellion among slaves.67 So, on the one hand we have impressions of alliance or a kind of intimacy between New Christians and Africans or Afro-Iberians, while on the other we have frequent intimations of the opposite, of New Christian exploitation, animosity, and denigration. Intriguingly, counter to the Inquisitions’ view of the Jewishness of Portuguese New Christian slave traders, one conversa of Mexico City complained about the disinterest of New Christian slave traders in preserving their tradition. Rafaela Enríquez, part of an extended family of accused crypto-Jews, is said to have criticized certain Portuguese captains of blacks (capitanes de negros) who are carrying on romances with Old Christian women, not marrying with girls of the Law [of Moses]. [Rafaela,] Inveighing [against them] that they were in a bad state and that they rendered the children that they had with their girlfriends lost, without teaching them the law, which is the goal for which observers [of the law] are married to each other.68 67  Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 1:221, ch. 6–7. On Curaçao, some scholars suggest, Papiamentu, the local creole tongue, developed as a medium of communication between Portuguese Sephardim and African slaves, as Jessica Roitman recalls in her chapter in this volume. 68  Testimony of an unnamed witness; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 364r; Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 1:150. It is unclear whether the term capitanes de negros refers to masters of slaves or actual ship captains.

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A thorough investigation of New Christian slave traders should be welcome for other reasons not yet noted. The topic forces scholars to bring into dialogue research and methodology from different fields: African, Iberian, and Jewish Studies. A fuller portrait of this demarcated class of individuals belonging to a single profession, many occupying an elite economic niche, will contribute to our understanding of New Christian merchants in particular and New Christian identity more generally. After all, useful studies of converso bankers and financiers have been produced.69 For example, does the evidence exist to tell us whether the motivations of New Christians in entering the slave trade were commercial or instrumental (i.e., looking for ways to escape Europe)? Repeating what many others have assumed, Green states that members of several New Christian families on Cape Verde and Upper Guinea in the mid-sixteenth century “saw it as a place of escape,” but cites no evidence from their Inquisition trials, even while he has mined them for much other information.70 From a different perspective, given the complex moral questions surrounding participation in the slave trade, the hope of gaining more insight into the personal perspective of slavers—rationalizations for engaging in this business, selective scruples, self-image, doubts—stands as a worthy goal. There are some studies of slavers from a cultural perspective, mostly treating later centuries, but none of serious methodological merit focus on the New Christian subgroup.71 Understanding how these men, if religious—whether Christian or Jewish—could buy and sell human beings while maintaining moral standards and spiritual aspirations in other areas of life might shed additional light on the early modern self.72 Were these 69  James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1640 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983). 70  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 165. 71  See, for example, Bruce Mouser, and Nancy Fox Mouser, The Case of the Reverend Peter Hartwig, Slave Trader or Misunderstood Idealist? Clash of Church Missionary Society/Imperial Objectives in Sierra Leone, 1804–1815 (Madison: African Studies Publications, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003); Bruce Mouser, “Women Slavers of Guinea-Conakry,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, eds. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 320–39. One exceptional piece looks at slave trading on late-sixteenthcentury Cabo Verde through the eyes of a Florentine merchant, Francesco Carletti, who himself participated. See Maria Manuel Ferraz Torrão and André Teixeira, “Negócios de escravos de um florentino em Cabo Verde: descrições e reflexões sobre a sociedade e o tráfico em finais do século XVI,” Nova Cidadania, 7, no. 27 (Jan.–Mar. 2006): 54–56, http://cvc.institutocamoes.pt/eaar/coloquio/comunicacoes/mmtorrao_ateixeira.pdf. 72  Carletti, mentioned in the previous note, wrote in his report about his world travels that “this trade seems to me inhuman and an indignity to the faith and to Christian piety. These

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men who cared very little about religion or ethics?  Were they convinced that Africans needed “real” religion, such as Christianity or Judaism? Scholars note that New Christians who wanted to live as Jews generally moved to northwest Europe or Ottoman lands. Were the earliest New Christian slavetraders Jews who had converted to Christianity willingly? Did the central principles in Iberian commercial and financial spheres of honor and reputation (keeping in mind, for example, the aspiration and practice of merchants marrying into the nobility) corroborate or conflict with the buying and selling of human beings? Honor and reputation seem to have reinforced class, family hierarchy, gender distinctions for merchants.73 It seems doubtful that such socially refractive intersubjectivities would have gone against dominant racial attitudes, even in the early sixteenth century. On the one hand, many New Christians in West Africa worked side by side with, intermarried with local elite and mercantile African partners. Green argues that New Christian participation in the early slave trade reflects their reaction to the persecution and violence they themselves had faced in Portugal, perhaps even a kind of transference of disappointment or callousness.74 This begs the question of what motivated the numerous Muslim slavers plying the trans-Sahara trading routes, the early Catholic Portuguese sailors or the non-New Christian Luso-Africans buying and selling slaves, etc. It is likely not too much of an exaggeration to say that most people in those days suffered horrific routine violence and lack of freedom. Within a few decades after the 1440s and the initial mass exportation of slaves under the Portuguese and their African allies, enslavement had become big business, however. “Natural” local wars and slave-­taking were intentionally exploited and stimulated. By 1500, hundreds of individuals were bought and shipped and sold annually; dozens on any given ship. European justifications of the slaves’ Christianization seem both genuine and post-facto and self-serving. We should not rule out the conclusion that the Portuguese New Christian slavers did not seem to be [Africans] differ from us in skin and fortune but have a soul like ours created by the divine creator.” Torrão and Teixeira, “Negócios de escravos de um florentino em Cabo Verde,” 10. But this likely genuine sentiment seems not to have prevented him from engaging in this inhuman and blasphemous business. 73  For examples, see Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 61–65, 84–88; Maria José Ferro Tavares, “Juristas e mercadores à conquista das honras: quatro processos de nobilitação quinhentistas,” Revista de História Económica e Social, 2nd ser., 4 (2002): 7–53; Bernardo José López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judíos sefardíes (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2001). 74  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 134.

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bothered by moral or theological qualms about earning a livelihood from enslaving human beings, however. Elsewhere  I have explored New Christian feelings about and relations with Africans in the Atlantic world and found a similar range of attitudes to those of the Catholic Iberian Atlantic.75 Especially before the Inquisition began operating in Portugal and in the decades afterward, some of these individuals and their families were likely crypto-Jews, perhaps even devout ones. Finally, despite many scholarly analyses of converso involvement in contraband trade, we have hardly begun to understand New Christian slave traders in light of the widespread inclination among Jewish scholars, to see New Christians, especially marranos, as agents of a kind of incipient postcolonial liberation, formulated in its most extreme form by Edward Kritzler’s wishful popular portrait of converso pirates as brave guerillas against Iberian tyranny.  Certainly, traces of New Christian textual skepticism or subversion regarding Portuguese and Spanish imperial triumphalism can be found. That some New Christians could operate in, even dominate, the trade in African slaves, that is, could have a hand in erecting and maintaining the colonial power of their own persecutors, of those who colonized them, challenges attempts to read them solely under the sign of “Jewish” resistance to empire. From one perspective, I am reminded of the way many Maroon communities in the Americas signed agreements with the Spanish colonial authorities in which they obtained their autonomy by assuring that they would return all future runaway slaves. It is plausible to think that many of the Portuguese New Christians who smuggled slaves, among other salable items, into the Spanish Americas saw themselves as pulling one over on, even mocking, the Spanish Crown. Even so, the effects of their self-interested actions bolstered their enemies’ empire. If they sought refuge in Western Africa from Portuguese Catholicism and, after the 1540s, the Inquisition, if they acted there in opposition to imperial Portugal, as Green and Mark/Horta argue, it is strange, for instance, that no indication exists that any New Christian tried to reconnect with or rescue the forcibly converted Jewish youth who had been sent ca. 1497 to São Tomé or their descendants. There were a few rumors of rebellious plots by Portuguese New Christian and Afro-Iberian slaves in Spanish colonies, with some slave traders themselves involved, but, if these reports are even true, these were rare exceptions.76 75  Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic. In ch. 3, I discuss ambivalent sentiments expressed by the physician and slave trader Blas de Paz Pinto, of Cartagena de las Indias, regarding slaves under his care. 76  Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions; Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic. On New Christian textual critical subjectivities, see Gabriel Mordoch, “New Christian Discourse and

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In the Atlantic as a whole, I see little evidence, some  West African exceptions aside, that New Christians of Jewish orientation regularly brought their grumetes (free African mariners, guides, translators, and commercial and political agents) or slaves into Judaism. Some conversos and open Sephardic Jews certainly did, and the work of Mark and Horta on the Sephardic communities in West Africa has greatly expanded our knowledge and changed our view, as does Tavim’s work in this volume on conversions.77 Initial openness gave way, rather quickly, however. Given the numbers of slaves New Christians/Sephardim handled across the Atlantic, it seems to me that only close companions, partners, and devoted slaves were incorporated into the family and its religion. Traditionally, one would have expected the incorporation of all slaves who desired entry, but, this was not desired by Jewish authorities in the Amsterdam metropole and in the Caribbean communities. The industrial level of slavery and the fact that some New Christians and Sephardim depended on trading or owning slaves also mitigated against the wholesale inclusion of Africans or slaves. This itself, combined with anti-black attitudes, may have been what generated the backlash against the continued inclusion of these Others. I am skeptical of some of the claims of conversion/incorporation that are cited, however; many are based on Inquisition denunciations, about which I may be more suspicious than my colleagues. If hundreds of New Christians swarmed areas in West Africa, often as lançados or active in the slave trade, I conclude, as we are forced to regarding the thousands in Brazil, that the majority of them were actually either loyal Catholics, indifferent to Judaism, or not willing to risk their lives by judaizing Africans or slaves. The “decentralized intermeshing” of Portuguese Atlantic merchants found by scholars such as Studnicki-Gizbert appears both impressive and thin. While “trading networks joining Tierra Firme to Lisbon, Seville, and West Africa” show a high degree of interconnectedness between merchants compared to other regional and local merchant networks of Early Modern Portuguese Oceanic Expansion: The Cases of Garcia da Orta, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão and Pedro de León Portocarrero” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017). 77  In my Swimming the Christian Atlantic, I trace a few such cases in other locations around the Atlantic world, though I assume more must have existed. See José Alberto Tavim’s contribution to this volume; Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta, “Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in Early Seventeenth-Century Guiné,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D.  Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 170–194, 293; Green, “Equal Partners?”

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Portuguese,78 the data still show that these traders’ strongest affiliations and loyalties were within their own commercial houses and networks and not between them. In other words, it remains unclear how cohesive a group these disparate, if intertwined, mercantile networks made up, especially when looking not vertically, up and down the supply chain, but horizontally, within the same business. Other than collaboration to exclude outsider merchants or to obtain government asientos, monopolies, evidence of collective negotiations with governments, policy-making or tactics, whether open or secret, remain noticeably limited, reflective of certain elite metropolitan individuals and family groups.79 It must be recalled, as much evidence shows, that many of these merchants competed against one another. Could they have been crypto-Jews without engaging in the usual clandestine crypto-Jewish networking with one another? If, on the other hand, New Christian merchants shared in the “Manueline imperial idea” that saw “the success of Portuguese discoveries and subsequent colonial wealth in Africa, India and Brazil” as “signs of the coming End of Times and of Portugal’s election by God to fulfill a major role in spreading the Gospel around the Globe,” as did other Portuguese, and did so in order “to be integrated into the Portuguese society and […] promoted within Old Christian elites,” as argued recently by Claude B. Stuczynski,80 and as reinforced by Tavim in this volume, then converso slave traders might have operated not as resistors of Iberian empire but as cravers of assimilation into it, as both partial generators and beneficiaries of it. This appealing argument goes against the understanding of New Christians as marginals intentionally seeking to subvert or de facto subverting Portuguese ideals. Of course, some New Christians likely belonged to each camp. In both cases, they constitute an interesting variety of the kind of “people in historical positions of marginality” that Joseph C. Miller contends have engaged in enslaving others, simultaneously successful and eternally vulnerable to attack.81 That New Christian slavers could act with the cutting-edge, industrial indifference of the time toward Black Africans must be weighed together  Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 104–105.  Informative parallel Dutch and English cases are explored by Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 80  Claude B.  Stuczynski, “Portuguese Conversos and the Manueline Imperial Idea: A Preliminary Study,” Anais de História de Além-mar 14 (2013): 45–61; see also Tavim, in this volume. 81  Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 19. 78 79

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with perceptions of a West African nonracial utopia allegedly fostered in part by the New Christian kin and compatriots of these New Christian slave traders.82 Scholars such as Green, Mark and Horta remind us that one of the main justifications for enslaving Africans in this period was their conversion to Christianity and, supposedly, that racialist thinking was not a component of this endeavor that was conducted first and foremost out of the profit motive. Looking through the names of the ships that carried the kidnapped or bought Africans away from Africa in the early sixteenth century one notes that, without exception, they comprise highly Christian ascriptions: Anunciada, Conceição, Santa Cruz, Santa Maria de Guadalupe, Santa Maria do Rosario, Santo Espirito, etc.83 Many of these ships were operated by conversos. Does all this show that these traders were devout Catholics? Were they just pretending to be? Did they have no control over the names bestowed by the Old Christian ship owners? Given that they and other New Christians and open Jews in West Africa were seemingly showing openness to Africans and African practices and bringing some Africans to Judaism, we have yet another form of the paradox to explore: What might New Christians with Jewish loyalties or anti-­Portuguese/Spanish sentiments have felt on funneling Africans into the Christian religion they themselves abhorred, into the Christian empires they hated? Since even a few open Jews, such as Diogo Dias Querido/Diogo Nunes Belmonte of Amsterdam, involved themselves in supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies in the early seventeenth century—in Belmonte’s case he owned ships operating from Angola—must we simply acknowledge, once again, that for many, business took precedence over religious-national loyalties?84 He converted a few of his close slaves to his religion, but how many more did he transport into servitude in and for the Iberian Atlantic empires?  As argued by Mark and Horta in this volume.  From a list of ships departing from Arguim, Guiné, for Lisbon between 1512 and 1520, in António de Almeida Mendes, “Portugal e o tráfico de escravos na primeira metade do século XVI,” Africana Studia (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto) 7 (2004): 29–30; see also the list of ships docking at Buenos Aires between 1601 and 1614, in Vila Vilar, “Asientos Portugueses,” 600–609 (Appendix). 84  His Hebrew name was Ya’akov Yisrael. His brother-in-law Aron Querido partnered with him in sponsoring several slaving ships and was also known as someone who converted at least some of his slaves or grumetes to Judaism. See Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 93; Green, “Equal Partners?,” esp. 1–2; Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 466, n. 21; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System, 1580–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 313. 82 83

CHAPTER 3

A “Racial” Approach to the History of Early Afro-Portuguese Relationships? The Case of Senegambia and Cabo Verde in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries José da Silva Horta and Peter Mark

Theoretical Framework Studies of “racism” in late medieval and early modern European society have, in many instances, been hampered by two major methodological flaws. These may be summarized as ahistoricity and resultant anachronism, combined with a teleological approach to the history of “racism.” Both of these problems have been analyzed by Max Hering Torres, whose work greatly influences our own conceptual framework. The tendency to approach the topic in a decontextualized and ahistorical manner has fostered the misconception that “racism” is a constant, if protean, characteris-

J. da Silva Horta School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Centre for History, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal P. Mark Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_3

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tic of European/Western societies. In fact, this tendency to conflate what have been, at different historical moments, very different phenomena flattens the history of contact between and among cultures and among people of diverse origins, distinctive religions, and varied physical appearance. The categories to which a given society assigns individuals and the supposed attributes ascribed to members of each category may vary widely, even though the terminology for these categories appears constant, thereby giving a misleading sense of continuity to these systems of domination. The apparent terminological similarity is treacherous; it fosters historical anachronism. Further complicating the historical study is the problem of multiple languages and their historical contexts: specific systems of categorization and domination may be denoted by terms that, in diverse languages, appear to be synonyms but whose associated and culturally contextualized constellations of ascribed meanings differ widely, both over time and across cultures. Together, these factors serve to elide the distinctions between what are, in reality, very different systems of categorization and domination. This process of elision, in turn, lends itself to an approach whereby either (a) racism is presented as a constant and, in many respects, an unchanging feature of Western society from at least the sixteenth century; or (b) the history of post-1500 European social history is seen as incorporating an ineluctable progression toward the articulation of modern “racism.” Hering  Torres calls for historians to consciously write histories, not of racism but of “racisms:” The conceptual and historical uniformity of racism is simply a teleological illusion. In this regard, it is advantageous to study racisms in the plural, in different time frames and social spheres.1

We argue that “racism,” even conceptualized in the plural, and a “racial” approach are not sufficient to explain the early Afro-Portuguese relationships in the historical setting selected in this chapter.

1  Max S. Hering Torres, “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2012), 32. The book of Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), is an attempt, to avoid a “perspective of linear and cumulative racism.” Ibid., 3. See the discussion below.

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Introduction The concepts of “race,” “race relations,” and “racism” are frequently presented to explain early relationships between Africans and Portuguese. Our research on two seventeenth-century Senegambian Jewish communities connected with the United Provinces, has engaged us in a dialogue with the historiography on the early modern relationship between “Blacks” and Jews. The results of this research were published in 2011.2 This work made clear to us the need to question a noncontextualized concept of “racism” in the early modern period, regarding Europe and the Atlantic World. Our research has also led us to question the use of modern concepts of “race” and “racism” to explain early Afro-Portuguese relationships, as other historians have used these concepts with reference to early modern Spain and Spanish America.3 We criticize an external approach to perceptions of “race” and “racism” toward Africans or people of African descent.4 Such an approach, which fails to engage local African social perceptions, has been emerging in the historiography of early Afro-Portuguese relationships.5 The presence of Luso-African Jewish communities in Senegambia in the early seventeenth century presents an ideal case study, one that also enables us to study the historical links between the Cabo Verde islands and Western Africa. In this chapter, we invert the mainstream external European perspective and stress the West African counterpart.

Toward a Contextualized Study of Sixteenth-­ Century African-European Relations Non-historicized concepts do not explain historical social processes. In his book Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century, Francisco Bethencourt argues that: “[racism] cannot be fully understood through 2  Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 3  For an approach to the core of this debate see Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg, “Editorial,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Zürich: Lit Verlag 2012), 1–8. 4  We originally formulated this criticism in the introduction to Mark and Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora, 18, and in the chapters sections of pages 78–81 and 188–195. 5  A recent example of this approach is Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), among other historians discussed below.

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the segmented study of short periods of time, specific regions, or well-­ known victims—for instance, black people or Jews.” We disagree with this methodological path. As historians we need to describe and analyze manifestations of “racism” precisely through specific historical settings. If one must acknowledge that the author surveys an impressive diversity of situations in time and space, it is not less true that the latter are reviewed under an assumption of a longue durée “racism.” The historical settings are mostly presented as specificities of an otherwise general and common invariant reality: “Racism attributes a single set of real and imaginary physical and/or mental features to precise ethnic groups, and believes these features to be transmitted from generation to generation. The ethnic groups are considered inferior or divergent from the norm represented by the reference group, thus justifying discrimination and segregation.”6 This definition of “racism” adds to the common assumption in the historiography of “race” another target of “prejudice”: “ethnic descent.” This formulation, which is widely used by historians of the colonial Americas, avoids the debate about whether “ethnicity” is a product or invention of the colonial period, namely, in Africa.7 Bethencourt focuses his analysis on the Western world. Hence, his “ethnic descent” is based on situations characterized by Western domination, in which the “ethnic” are minorities, including religious ones, or at least groups subordinated to Europeans or to people of European origin. This makes it impossible to apply his approach to regions not controlled by Europeans,8 such as Senegambia. The author  Bethencourt, Racisms, 7–8.  The starting point to this revision of essentialized conceptions of “ethnic” and “ethnicities” and the above-mentioned debate was Jean-Loup Amselle and Elikia M’Bokolo, eds., Au Coeur de l’Ethnie: Ethnies, Tribalisme et État en Afrique (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1985). In the 1999 edition, the authors added a new preface “Au coeur de l’ethnie revisité,” making a first assessment of this debate. A recent interpretation that contrasts with Amselle’s and M’Bokolo’s early positions may be found in Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” The Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 3–27. On the Western African context discussed in this chapter, see also three recent contributions:  Toby  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,  52–68;  José da Silva Horta, “‘Nações,’ marcadores identitários e complexidades da representação étnica nas escritas portuguesas de viagem: Guiné do Cabo Verde (séculos XVI e XVII),” Varia Historia, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 29, no. 51 (September–December 2013): 649–75, and Green, “Dimensions of Historical Ethnicity in the Guinea-Bissau Region,” in GuineaBissau: Micro-State to ‘Narco-State,’ eds. Patrick Chabal and Toby Green (London: Hurst & Company, 2016), 19–36. 8  Based on the contribution of Bruce S. Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Bethencourt gives an example of the presence of the “idea of race and racial hierarchy” in an African context, namely “the 6 7

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himself acknowledges the specificity of West Africa, for which he prefers to use the noun “lineages,” and other African regions where the colonial situation does not explain social relations with Europeans. Nevertheless, his conclusion to the perceptions of the latter is that “the criteria of classification were almost monopolized by degrees of skin color.”9 A different view on “race” is presented by Hering Torres and the other editors of Race and Blood in the Iberian World: “Racial constructs are not uniform or fixed and they rarely work alone. Rather, they are the products of particular cultural traditions and social context and are linked to other social relations, processes of exclusion, and systems of signification.”10 We agree with Hering Torres that methodologically it is not sufficient simply to reject the projection of a monolithic modern concept of race shaped in Europe during the Enlightenment, nor is it sufficient to make a comparative reconstitution of racisms, “recognizing that there have been previous manifestations of the idea of ‘race.’”11 The starting point for this “racialist” approach, together with the application of a “language of [the] Colonial,” specifically for the Portuguese overseas presence was Charles Boxer’s, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825, published in 1963. Despite subsequent criticism, this double core conceptualization, “race” and “colonial,” domiconflict between Tuareg and African ethnicities.” But a possible racialist approach in the Sahel is not enough to make it a rule, say, for West Africa, predating “the colonial inheritance.” Ibid., 7. Furthermore, if Hall maintains that “[…] racial ideas were an integral part of the intellectual tradition of the Sahel for many centuries before the arrival of Europeans” (Hall, History of Race, 25), he makes clear the absence in early West Africa under the influence of Islam of a pervasive idea of race based on skin color: he maintains that although “the ideas of race developed along the desert edge were color-coded (white, red, black), they were not based primarily on observable skin color but instead on arguments about Arab and Islamic lineage.” Ibid., 33. This seems to us a much more contextualized approach of “race.” Hall otherwise (ibid., 11) follows Benjamim Isaac’s precise definition of racism as “an attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities. It therefore attributes to those individuals and groups of people collective traits, physical, mental, and moral, which are constant and unalterable by human will, because they are caused by hereditary factors or external influences, such as climate and geography.” Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23. This is a narrow concept that Bethencourt mentions but does not follow. See Bethencourt, Racisms, 7. We will get back to Hall’s contribution in a subsequent section. 9  Bethencourt, Racisms, 198–199, 202, also 203. 10  Hering Torres, Martínez, and Nirenberg, “Editorial,” 2. 11  Hering Torres, “Purity of Blood: Problems of interpretation,” 13.

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nates Anglo-Saxon, but also Brazilian as well as some recent Portuguese historiography. Contextualizing the discourse of this polemical piece by Boxer half a century later, João de Pina-Cabral suggests that: Perhaps the solution does not lie even in the study of the evidence that points to racial prejudice and discrimination in Lusophone countries, or to the existence of a legal and religious system that favours assimilation as opposed to one that favours segregationism as in the United States.12

He then concludes: […] it is amply evident to me that the problem lies in our very dependence on the North American concept of “race” […] as the definitional axis. This furthers cross-cultural mis-reading rather than resolving it […].13

The misused concept of “race” is mostly associated with differentiation by skin color. An ongoing debate within recent scholarship on the early Portuguese and Spanish Empires questions the accuracy of a “racialist” approach around the discourse on and social impact of the notion of “purity of blood” (limpeza de sangue in Portuguese). Fernanda Olival clearly shows that throughout the peninsula in the early modern era, limpeza de sangue “did not target biological purity in any racial sense that would imply genetic characteristics.” Olival considers the problem to be “of an ideological-religious nature, with a powerful impact on social and political structures.”14 This position is supported by Maria Eugénia Chaves who makes her “efforts” (the word is hers) against the pervasive use of “race”15 and of a 12  This discussion goes back to Frank Tannenbaum’s comparative approach between modern racism and slavery in the United States and Latin America in his Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). 13  João de Pina-Cabral, “Charles Boxer and the Race Equivoque,” in Racism and the Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World, eds. Francisco Bethencourt and Adrian J. Pearce (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012), 99–112, 108. 14  Fernanda Olival, “Rigor e interesses: os estatutos de limpeza de sangue em Portugal,” Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 4 (2004): 152. The translation is ours. See also Olival, “Questões raciais? Questões étnico-religiosas? A limpeza de sangue e a exclusão social (Portugal e conquistas) nos séculos XVI a XVIII,” in Ciências sociais cruzadas entre Portugal e o Brasil: Trajetos e investigações no ICS, eds. Isabel Corrêa da Silva et al. (Lisbon, Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2015), 339–59. 15  Maria Eugénia Chaves, “Race and Caste: Other Words and Other Worlds,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2012), 39–58, here 56.

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“racial” approach in the historiography of early colonial Spanish America. As we will discuss below, this approach is confirmed by the case of the relationship between Jews and “Blacks” in the Low Countries. Fernanda Olival and João de Figueirôa-Rêgo acknowledge that the concept of “purity of blood” and classification by raça, in Portugal and the Portuguese overseas empire, were associated until the early seventeenth century with religion, including people of Jewish and Muslim descent but largely excluding “Gentios.”16 This classification was applied to Africans.17 Raça was also applied to people of slave origin up until the eighteenth century.18 Although this same association appears when skin color (or other physical features) was at stake, skin color did not, in general, constitute an insurmountable obstacle to social ascent.19 In the case of access to the Portuguese military Orders of Christ, Santiago and Avis, Francis Dutra states: “It was only when the African heritage was linked to slavery that there was a problem, because slavery meant manual labor and manual labor meant ‘lack of quality’ [falta de qualidade].”20 Furthermore, Dutra makes a very important distinction between “blood 16  The category gentios encompasses non-Christians who are also neither Muslims nor Jews. See the note below. 17  José da Silva Horta, “A Representação do africano na literatura de viagens, do Senegal à Serra Leoa (1453–1508),” Mare Liberum 2 (1991): 209–339. See also Horta, “A categoria de gentio em Diogo de Sá: funções e níveis de significação,” Clio: Revista do Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa, n. s. 10 (1st Semester 2004): 135–56. 18  João de Figueirôa-Rêgo and Fernanda Olival, “Cor da pele, distinções e cargos: Portugal e espaços atlânticos portugueses (séculos XVI a XVIII),” Tempo 16, no. 30 (2011): 137–38. Olival has recently developed this line of reasoning in “Questões raciais? Questões étnicoreligiosas?” According to Olival, in the extant documentary evidence concerning the access to the Order of Avis, in 1594 no word concerned gentio origin. The first document in which gentio ascent was included dates from 1615, regarding the Order of Christ and in subsequent documents of the 1630s. But as the author states, there was always, even in the eighteenth century, minor relevance given to “gentio blood” compared to Jewish and Muslim blood. See ibid., 351–52. See also Figueirôa-Rêgo, “A honra alheia por um fio”: Os estatutos de limpeza de sangue nos espaços de expressão ibérica (sécs. XVI–XVIII) (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and FCT, 2011), 606–607.  19  Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 138: “Como amplamente demonstra Francis A. Dutra, os negros e mulatos, o sangue de herança africana, se não tivesse notas de cristãnovo era considerado puro na Mesa da Consciência.” The former authors refer to Francis A. Dutra, “African Heritage and the Portuguese Military Orders in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Brazil: The Case of Maestre de Campo Domingos Rodrigues Carneiro,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 15, no. 2 (2006): 113–41. About social ascent in Cabo Verde see below. 20  Dutra, “Ser mulato em Portugal nos primórdios da época moderna,” Tempo 16, no. 30 (2011), accessed April 7, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1590/S1413-77042011000100005. The translation is ours.

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purity” and qualidade: “‘Lack of quality’ meant lacking the necessary nobility and included craftwork or manual labor (by the candidate, his parents, and the two pairs of grandparents) no matter what the racial background.”21 Hence, we can state that there was not any presumed intrinsic “racial” inferiority of people of African descent (nor was any imputed inferiority primarily associated with physical attributes). A “racialist” approach to Afro-Portuguese relationships in the West African Atlantic islands is not confirmed. The attitude of Iberian authorities toward skin color varied in time depending on the social context of the spaces in question.22 In sum, the concept of “purity of blood” was hardly applied, or was differently applied to the genealogy of people of African descent. The focus was on Jews and Muslims.23 The argument that we are making is parallel to that which Hering Torres argues in his study of limpieza de sangre: Research on Judeophobia is based on the assumption that anti-Jewish hatred in antiquity was of a pagan character, thus suggesting a medieval anti-­ Judaism of a Christian-theological character, eventually leading to a secularized anti-Semitism in the Modern Era.24

The problem with this reading of premodern history, both in the case of limpieza de sangre and with regard to presumed color prejudice, is the central issue of historical anachronism. As Hering Torres warns, research on the supposed “racist” meaning of limpieza de sangre

21  Dutra, “Ser mulato.” About the category of qualidade, see also Eduardo França Paiva, Dar nome ao novo: Uma história lexical da Ibero-América entre os séculos XVI e XVIII (as dinâmicas de mestiçagens e o mundo do trabalho) (Belo Horizonte: Autênctica, 2015), 125–36. On the relation between “quality” and “color,” see 158–61. 22  Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 144. 23  As Olival states, given the statutes concerning access to the military orders, “Por isso os reis de Portugal sempre dispensaram [of the proof of blood purity] os que possuíam alguma ascendência negra, mulata ou afim, mas teoricamente tinham de recorrer ao papa para dispensar os entraves da ascendência de judeus e mouros.” Olival, “Questões raciais? Questões étnico-religiosas?,” 351. 24  “La investigación sobre la judeofobia parte del supuesto de que el odio contra los judíos en la antiguedad era de carácter pagano, surgiendo así un antijudaísmo medieval de carácter Cristiano-teológico, para finalmente desembocar en un antisemitismo secularizado en la Era Contemporánea.” Max Hering Torres, “‘Limpieza de Sangre:’ ¿Racismo en la Edad Moderna?,” Tiempos Modernos 4, no. 9 (2003–04): 9.

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must necessarily be related to some corrective elements, given that in historical research an anachronistic theorem […] is not always able to capture the phenomena of the past […].25

The Nexus with Western Africa: Cabo Verde Context If perspectives in the Iberian metropole on the supposed connection between limpeza de sangue and “race” are weak, historians must exercise even greater caution in interpreting “race” in overseas contexts. We will focus on the axis Western Africa-Cabo Verde, which has epitomized this historiographical discussion of Afro-Portuguese relationships. If in colonial Brazil,—which is not the focus of this chapter—a dynamic system of Afro-Amerindian-European métissages categories eventually had profound consequences in social hierarchization,26 in the Cabo Verde archipelago, and also São Tomé and Príncipe, the local elites soon became mestizo and black,27 eliding their slave origins by way of marriage strategies.28 The his25  “[…] se debe necesariamente relacionar con algunos elementos correctivos, dado que en la investigación histórica un teorema anacrónico […] no siempre está en condiciones de captar los fenómenos del pasado.” Ibid. 26  See the contribution of Eduardo França Paiva, Dar nome ao novo, on the origins and construction of this taxonomy, its connection to slave labour and social value within an Ibero-American comparative approach. For a perspective of taxonomies as “ethnic” and “racial,” see Bethencourt, Racisms, 163 ff. 27  Iva Cabral, “Ribeira Grande: vida urbana, gente, mercancia, estagnação,” in História Geral de Cabo Verde, ed. Maria Emília Madeira Santos (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1995), 2:225–73, and mostly Cabral, A Primeira elite colonial atlântica: Dos “homens honrados brancos” de Santiago à “nobreza da terra,” finais do séc. XV—início do séc. XVII (Praia: Livraria Pedro Cardoso, 2015), 132 and passim. See also Toby Green, “Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in 17thCentury Cabo Verde,” History in Africa 36 (2009): 103–25. 28  See Arlindo Caldeira, “Mestiçagem, estratégias de casamento e propriedade feminina no arquipélago de S. Tomé e Príncipe nos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII,” Arquipélago: História, 2nd series, 11–12 (2007–08): 49–72. On this point, according to the evidence the author presents, we are are not in agreement with his interpretation regarding the “racial” or even “racist” foundations of marriage policies as a strategy of social ascent in S. Tomé. Caldeira describes this strategy as being literally “of whitening” (de branqueamento) or de desafricanização (57) and the associated discourse using “racist arguments” (argumentos racistas, 55). This “whitening” was mostly a sign of the local appropriation of criteria of social rank connected with distance or proximity to slavery in one’s genealogy. Similar marriages took place in Cabo Verde within the

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tory of an evolution from an original dichotomous, white-elite versus black-slave, exogenous elite in Santiago Island of the first half of the sixteenth century, to a second, endogenous, elite, within which color was not the relevant differentiation criterion, has been thoroughly developed by Iva Cabral29: […] in the second half of the sixteenth century, an endogenous elite composed mainly by filhos da terra (mulattoes and blacks), but also by some white reinóis [from the Portuguese kingdom] “naturalized,” i.e., incorporated through marriage into the oligarchic families of Santiago Island. To be accepted, these reinóis, unlike the homens honrados brancos [white honored men] of the sixteenth century, had to adapt to the customs, beliefs and even the language of the majority Creoles who controlled the society and economy of the island.30

As stated before, we follow a methodological criticism, stressing both the danger of anachronistic historical interpretations and progressive explanation schemes that propose a mono-“racist” phenomenon. Considering this line of thought, it does not seem acceptable to argue, as Toby Green does, that “[…] similar racial demographics in the eighteenth-­ century English Caribbean to sixteenth-century Cabo Verde produced analogous ideological contours there to those which had developed in the Iberian Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”31 In the latter generalization, Green is second, endogenous elite of the brancos da terra, but do not seem to have been relevant phenomena. See Iva Cabral, A Primeira elite, 174–75. When these marriages took place, the second elite might have followed the social concerns about slave “blood” of the first elite of Santiago, comprised of the homens honrados brancos, described by Cabral (166). Further, in São Tomé and Príncipe, the rejection of an African cultural inheritance remains to be demonstrated. In the case of Cabo Verde, this rejection is a late phenomenon. In part, it seems to date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a result of new dominant representations of Cabo Verdeans from archipelago outsiders. See Horta, “As tradições orais wolof de transmissão cabo-verdiana: a memória de Buumi Jeleen e dos Njaay na ilha de Santiago (séculos XV–XVIII), in Les Ruses de l’historien: Essais d’Afrique et d’ailleurs en hommage à Jean Boulègue, ed. François Xavier Fauvelle (Paris, Karthala, 2013), 31–46, and Danilo Santos, “Catolicismo cabo-verdiano: retratos da vida religiosa dos Cabo-verdianos nos textos portugueses (1784–1844),” Lusitania Sacra 25 (Janeiro–Junho 2012): 95–108. Santos, in his recent book, gives evidence of this change at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: A Imagem do cabo-verdiano nos textos portugueses (1784–1844) (Praia: Livraria Pedro Cardoso, 2017). See also Iva Cabral, A Primeira elite, 136: The reaction of the members of the endogenous elite against the outsider representatives of the Portuguese Crown on the island, criticism about the skin color of the elite and its supposed inherited gentilismo, is illustrated in a letter of 1756. 29  Cabral, A Primeira elite. 30  Ibid., 162. The translation is ours. 31  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 269.

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referring to the eighteenth century “by which time a system of racial differentiation had emerged which had derived from the sistema de castas developed in the Americas” in the two preceding centuries. Green does not offer sufficient context to assert that “the interconnection between Cabo Verde to the Atlantic World at this early period, and Cabo Verde’s focal place in the early trans-Atlantic slave trade” would be the ideological starting point of these subsequent changes.32 On Santiago Island, as Iva Cabral has shown, and also on São Tomé, the local category “Whites of the land” (brancos da terra) epitomizes the dissociation between social status and skin color33: Therefore, it can be said that in Santiago, from the end of the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century, the designation of “white” is generally synonymous with reinol, honored and therefore a member of the upper stratum of society. This is clear when, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the members of the endogenous elite of Santiago call themselves and are called brancos da terra [“Whites of the land”], although they are pardos and pretos [mestizo and black]. This is because being called “white” does not now indicate color but rather, social position—being branco da terra in Santiago in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries means, as in the sixteenth century, to be honored, powerful, owner of lands and slaves, to be able to elect and be elected […], in short: to be part of the nobility of the land. [Italics are ours.]

The author adds: This fact is a consequence of the slavery that from the beginning of the settlement stratifies, racially, Cabo Verdean society in clearly identifiable segments.34

Social differentiation and domination were indeed connected with slave or free status and, among the latter, wealth was based on trade and land owning. The local elite had struggled since the early sixteenth century for the ascent of mulatto and later black men,35 but we would not qualify as a  Ibid.  Arlindo Caldeira himself ackowledges that brancos da terra, referring to the eighteenthcentury elite, was not related with the color of the skin: “[…] tudo leva a crer, não tinha necessariamente a ver com a cor da pele.” Caldeira, “Mestiçagem,” 56. For Cabo Verde, see Cabral, A Primeira elite, passim. 34  Cabral, A Primeira elite, 128–29. See also, e.g., ibid., 235, and the Conclusion. 35  Ibid., e.g. 126–27. 32 33

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“racial stratification” the Cabo Verdean society which, in the second half of sixteenth century, resulted from the transformation described by Cabral. This situation is far from a rigid categorization corresponding to the degree of “racial” mixing. Very soon, indeed, there was a mestizo and black elite that occupied the most important social positions on Santiago Island.36 Furthermore, in the case of rules of limpeza de sangue, the local internal elite’s interpretation confirms a selective attitude. “Purity of blood” was applied to the population of New Christian descent, but not to African descent. Even the category of Old Christian could be the target of a specific interpretation within the sociohistorical context of the island which could transcend the lesser severity of purity of blood legislation concerning the gentios37 (non-Muslim, neither Jewish nor Christian). Fernão Rodrigues da Silva is a case in point. He writes a letter to the King of Portugal in 1655, in which he defines himself as “natural” and resident of Santiago, “one of the noblest of that island and Old Christian without rassa of infected nation [i.e. of New Christian descent],”38 and he is, in turn, defined by an anonymous observer as “mulatto of Cabo Verde.”39 In his analysis of the rise of the slave trade and the creolization process, in both Cabo Verde and the Western Africa, Toby Green conflates what he names “racial hierarchy” with “racism”40 or even “ideology of racism,”41 further presupposing that representations of what he calls “race” in Cabo Verde were equivalent to later processes of effective racialization. Evidence is lacking for this interpretation. As we will argue below, with concrete examples from the 1594 version of the Treatise of André Álvares de Almada—to Green the crucial source for a Cabo  Verdian and Western African discourse on “race” and slavery—we cannot generalize to all Senegambia any conception of “racial hierarchies.” Nor can we ascribe a widespread “racism” which would supposedly be common to “the slaving classes of the Atlantic World” in the sixteenth century, which the author 36  Ibid., e.g. 126–27, 166. We aknowledge Maria Manuel Torrão to have brought our attention to the relevance of Iva Cabral’s dissertation for the subject of this chapter. 37  Green, “Building Creole identity in the African Atlantic;” Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 137–38. 38  “[…] dos mais nobres daquella ilha e christão velho sem rassa de infecta nação,” Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), Cabo Verde, caixa 5, doc. 35, fl. (1). On this Cabo Verde elite interpretation of Old and New Christian, see Horta, “‘Nações’,” 660–61. 39  AHU, Cabo Verde, caixa 5, doc. 36, de c. 20 de Abril de 1656. 40  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 269 and 272. 41  Ibid., 73, 285.

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links with the birth of Creole societies in Cabo Verde and along the Upper Guinea Coast.42 To conclude this section, we address the problem of translation, particularly relevant when historians deal with categories that need to be contextualized. Once a scholarly text is translated, it takes on new subtleties of meaning, both explicit and implied, in its new language. An illustration of this problem may be found in António Mendes’ treatment of color. Mendes argues that in Creole Societies, in which he implicitly includes Cabo Verde, where many different ethnic groups, religions, and physical types coexisted, these cosmopolitan spaces of the African Atlantic were formed on the basis of a segregation in which ethnic groups occupied different neighborhoods of each urban space.43

The term “segregation” implies, in English, an imposed separation. In the context of both American society and British colonial society since about 1890, the system of enforced separation, based upon physical characteristics (phenotype), has been an inherent component of the term “segregation.” This was certainly not the case in sixteenth-century Cabo Verde. What in effect occurred in Greater Senegambia, was more often separation by profession—an important component of local identity. There existed a limited number of urban spaces. The largest conglomeration in either coastal “Guiné de Cabo Verde” or the Cabo Verde Islands, Ribeira Grande, had 5700 inhabitants in 1582.44 At the same time, in the predominantly rural societies of coastal Senegambia, mixture certainly did occur. The question of residential patterns is complex and deserves further study before historians can with confidence attribute a major role to Senegambian urban centers in the growth of segregation in the modern sense of the term. Furthermore, Mendes states that:  Ibid., 272–73.  António Mendes, “Slavery, Society, and the First Steps Towards an Atlantic Revolution in Western Africa (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries),” in Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa, ed. Toby Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012), 237–55, here 240. 44  The source is Francisco de Andrade, [“Relação das ilhas de Cabo Verde e da Guiné”], [Santiago], 26 de Janeiro de 1582, AGS, Guerra Antigua, leg. 122, doc. 180, in Monumenta missionaria africana: África Ocidental, 2nd series, vol. 3, ed. António Brásio (Lisboa: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1967), 97–107. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Maria Manuel Torrão for the accurate interpretation of the source figures. 42 43

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Traditional elites of the three “old worlds”—southern Europe, North Africa, and West Africa—were obsessed by the question of colour, which for them was capable of guaranteeing the perpetuity of a traditional social order. Thus the emergence of these Creole mixtures in the African Atlantic was accompanied by the development of genealogical obsessions among the Portuguese, Wolof, and Arab elites.45

We have here a different issue. Representations of color, and values associated with these representations, cannot be generalized to the three “worlds,” even less in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period the author is writing about. Furthermore, the question of genealogy in a specifically Western African context cannot be subsumed into the category of color, as we have already argued. An important factor that influenced early European attitudes toward Africans, and specifically toward African captives, was the fact that throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tens of thousands of European Christians were themselves held captive in Islamic North Africa. Although they could, in theory, be ransomed, the vast majority of them remained captive for life.46  Mendes, “Slavery,” 240–41.  It is often difficult to distinguish between “captive” and “slave.” Some scholars differentiate on the basis of whether the condition of unfreedom was temporary or permanent. This definition does not make allowance for widely varying treatment of the captives, nor for whatever expectations they themselves may have entertained of being liberated. Further, does being liberated in old age, after a long captivity of forced labor, necessarily change one’s previous status of unfreedom? This is why the Portuguese sources of the eighteenth century refer frequently to the Portuguese captives in North Africa (and Muslim captives in Iberia) as escravos. See for evidence, António Jorge Ferreira Alfonso, “Os Cativos portugueses nos Banhos Magrebinos (1769–1830): o Islão, o corso, a política e geostratégia no ocidente do Mediterrâneo” (PhD diss., University of Lisbon, 2016). Other scholars of North Africa define “captives” as those prisoners who were held primarily for their ransom value and “slaves” as those used primarily for their work value. This seems a more useful definition. Michel Fontenay, “Esclaves et/ou captifs: préciser les concepts,” in Le commerce des captifs: les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerranée, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, ed. Wolfgang Kaiser (Rome: École Française, 2008), 15–24, sustains a clear distinction between captives of the Mediterranean margins and Atlantic trade slaves, noirs, or of three types of servitude (from the Atlantic, North Africa, and the Mediterranean). On comparative North African enslavement of Europeans and the enslavement of Africans, see also Peter Mark, “‘Free, Unfree, Captive, Slave:’ António de Saldanha, a Late Sixteenth-Century Captive in Marrakesh,” in Piracy and Captivity in the Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. Mario Klarer (New York: Routledge, forthcoming, 2018). It would not be accurate to generalize to the Cabo Verdean context of the late sixteenth century “la logique d’asservissement 45 46

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The knowledge that one belongs to a population whose members might as easily find themselves captives as slave traders, has drawn little attention from historians of the West African slave trade. Yet this fact is significant. For it undoubtedly had an impact on how Portuguese merchants in West Africa viewed Africans. Succinctly stated, it is not possible logically to categorize an entire group as inferior on the basis of a ­characteristic—the possibility of becoming a slave—that one shares with members of that group.47 It is highly significant that during the first 150  years of Portuguese presence in coastal Senegambia, African elites rarely became captive in Cabo Verde. If they were captured, they, like European nobility held captive in North Africa, might reasonably hope to regain both their freedom and their accustomed social status. Narratives written by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese merchants and missionaries clearly show that deferential treatment could be extended to members of local Senegambian elites.48 The practice is alluded to by André Alvares de Almada (1594), André Donelha (1625), Manuel Álvares (ca. 1615) and Francisco de Lemos Coelho (in the 1684 version of his account).49 Royal (autrement aliénante parce qu’assortie d’une bonne dose de racisme) où seule comptait la valeur d’usage et où la notion de rachat […] était inexistante.” Fontenay, “Esclaves et/ou captifs,” 24. 47  Of course, attitudes do not necessarily always follow logic. 48  See José da Silva Horta, “Ensino e cristianização informais: do contexto luso-africano à primeira ‘escola’ jesuíta na Senegâmbia (Biguba, Buba—Guiné-Bissau, 1605–1606),” in Rumos e escrita da História: Estudos em homenagem a A. A. Marques de Almeida, ed. Maria de Fátima Reis (Lisbon: Colibri, 2007), 407–18; Horta “As tradições orais wolof;” Horta, “Trânsito de africanos: circulação de pessoas, de saberes e de experiências religiosas entre os Rios de Guiné e o Arquipélago de Cabo Verde (séculos XV–XVII),” Anos 90: Revista do Programa de pós-Graduação em História da Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, Portalegre 21, no. 40 (Dezembro de 2014): 23–49. 49  André Alvares de Almada, Tratado breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde, ed. António Brásio (Lisbon: LIAM, 1964) [Porto ms. 1594], 138–39; André Donelha, Descrição da Serra Leoa e dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde (1625), ed. A. Teixeira da Mota, notes P. E. H. Hair, trans. Léon Bourdon (Lisbon: Junta de Investigacões Científicas do Ultramar, 1977), 108/110, 130, 166; Manuel Álvares, Etiópia Menor e descripção géografica da Província da Serra Leoa [c. 1615], manuscript copy (eighteenth century), Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, Res. 3, E-7, fol. 30v–31r. See also Manuel Álvares, Ethiopia Minor, and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone (c. 1615), trans. and annotation P.  E. H.  Hair (Liverpool:  Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1990). Francisco de Lemos Coelho, “Discripção da Costa de Guiné e situação de todos os portos,e rios della; e roteyro para se poderem navegar todos seus rios,” BNP, Cód. 454, in Duas descrições seiscentistas da Guiné de Francisco de Lemos Coelho, ed. Damião Peres, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa

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or noble status could, in some circumstances, be more relevant than an African ancestry. Together, these and other factors discussed above, strongly suggest that a protoracial categorization of Africans did not constitute the ideological foundation of sixteenth- or early seventeenth-­ century slavery.

The Senegambian Context: a. Were “Race” and Color a Good Match? The difficulties inherent in translation are also apparent with regard to the Portuguese and English words raça and “race.” West African writers who were themselves of Luso-African origin, such as the Cabo Verdean born André Álvares de Almada, or whose life was connected with the archipelago, such as Francisco de Lemos Coelho, used the word raça. However, the term is here equivalent to casta or nação, both of which were used to denote and differentiate African societies and, in some cases, religions. In the case of “nation” (nação), in these authors’ accounts and in Cabo Verde born André Donelha, for instance, Wolof (Jalofos), the Fula (Fulas), Serer (Barbacins) or the Mandinka (Mandingas) among other peoples, were considered to be at the same level, in this categorial system, as the Portuguese, the French, the English, or the Dutch (Holandeses).50 The spaces they portrayed were not colonial. Hence, even if categories of raça, casta, or nação were useful for slave traders, they were not a mechanism for domination of local societies. This classification had no connotation of skin color. As one of us has written, “The characteristics that are too often mistakenly referred to in the historiography of African-Portuguese relations as ‘racial,’ or as ‘race,’ constitute a minor identity marker to describe the Portuguese nações; thus, it is hardly surprising that they are absent from among the topics that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors

da História, 1990), 96. See also Francisco de Lemos Coelho, Description of the Coast of Guinea (1684), trans. P.  E. H.  Hair (Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1985). 50  E.g. André Alvares de Almada, Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde, ed. António Brásio (Lisbon: Editorial LIAM, 1964), ch. 3, 29. On the category nação, e.g. André Donelha, Descrição da Serra Leoa e dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde (1625), ed. A. Teixeira da Mota, notes by P. E. H. Hair, French trans. Léon Bourdon (Lisbon: Junta de Investigacões Científicas do Ultramar, 1977), 102. On a further developed interpretation of the categories of raça, casta, and nação in the context of Senegambia see Horta, “‘Nações.’”

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purport to focus on.”51 This applies of course to the Treatise of Almada, whose awareness of the nuances of skin color52 did not imply that they were structural in his model of identifying “nations.” To the contrary, they were almost absent. Neither, as Green believes, were they a source of any kind of intrinsic judgment, even if we acknowledge that a link might have been made between black skin color and unfree status in a slave society such as late sixteenth-century Cabo Verde. We must bear in mind that the “mulatto” writer and trader André Álvares de Almada was the paradigm of the early stage of the endogenous elite of brancos da terra53 and its own, non-“racial,” meaning of branco. Furthermore, the local African cultures had their own perceptions of skin color. We find the term “white” (branco) in early European sources to classify groups of European descent or connected with European merchants, but not necessarily Europeans themselves. Rather, branco reflected profession, social and even cosmological status, rather than pigmentation. Linguistic evidence can be added as, in early European vocabularies of West African languages of the Atlantic and Mel families, the words for white color very frequently do not match with the terms for “White man” (homme blanc).54  Horta, “‘Nações,’” 158. The translation is ours.  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 227. In truth, awareness of nuances of skin color and other physical features was a very early fact in Portuguese representations of Africans. See Horta, “A Representação do africano na literatura de viagens.” See also a recent and thorough analysis of early European representations of African bodies in Vanessa Thomas, “Représentations européennes des corps africains au cours des premiers contacts sur les rives atlantiques (1341−1508)” (MA diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 2013). 53  Cabral, A Primeira elite, 129. 54  See the anonymous manuscript Dictionaire des langues, françoise, et negres dont on se sert dans la concession de la Compagnie Royale du Senegal: Sçauoir Guiolof, Foule, Mandingue, Saracolé, Seraire, Bagnon, Floupe, Papel, Bizagots, Nalous et Sapi […], Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Africain 4. Charles de Lespinay dates the information from the end of the seventeenth century, ca. 1685–1687, the time of the voyage of Michel Jajolet de La Courbe between the rivers Gambia and Geba. See Lespinay, “Un lexique Bagnon-Floupe de la fin du XVIIe siècle: apport à l’histoire du peuplement de la Casamance,” in Migrations anciennes et peuplement actuel des Côtes Guinéennes: Actes du colloque international de l’université de Lille 1, les 1er, 2 et 3 décembre 1997, ed. Gérald Gaillard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 193–213, esp. 193–95. A paleographical analysis confirms that the manuscript is from the end of the seventeenth century or early eighteenth century, matching with the title, which refers to one of the “royal companies” of Senegal, hence pre-1709. (The authors are grateful for the assistance of Bernardo de Sá Nogueira and Marc Smith.) Despite the long title, the extant dictionary ends at the Floup [Jola] language. For our purpose see fls. 4–4v., 30, 54, 74. See also the edition of M.  D’Avezac, “Vocabulaires Guiolof, Mandingue, Foule, Saracole, Séraire, Bagnon et Floupe, recueillis à la côte d’Afrique pour le service de l’ancienne Compagnie 51 52

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A short remark and an anecdote from the treatise of André Álvares de Almada confirm linguistic evidence and the nongeneralized connection between slavery and skin color in Senegambia: “When the Fulos from the interior see one of ours [dos nossos], they are astonished at his being white, even though they are not black, themselves.”55 According to Almada, light-skinned Fula from the inland Sahel showed great astonishment whenever they saw “white” traders (here the category included also mestizos like Almada himself) even if they had light skin color themselves; for they were not “black.” So the issue was not always, as Green states, that “Sahelian communities were accustomed to light-skinned outsider traders […] and had already incorporated them into their social framework.”56 Nevertheless, he adds Although it is likely that there was some familiarity with race as a marker of difference in the medieval Sahel, this was not generalised; according to Bruce Hall, “race” itself had a more cultural meaning than it developed in the subsequent Atlantic world.57

In fact, Hall goes even further. He illustrates the fierce opposition to a racial justification of slavery based in skin color by way of the treatise of Ahmad Bābā (written in 1615), whose argument long remained influential in the Sahel. The Muslim scholar articulates his intellectual opposition to any kind of differentiation of people of West Africa based on their “race but [rather] their qualities as free Muslims or nonbelievers.”58 Royale du Sénégal, et publiés par la première fois d’après un manuscrit de la bibliothèque,” in Mémoires de la Société Ethnologique, vol. 2,1 (Paris: Librarie Orientale de Mme Ve DondeyDupré, 1845), 205–67, esp. 214–15. To cover also Mel languages, see Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, Polyglotta Africana or a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages (London: Church Missionary House, 1854), repr. with presentations of David Dalby and P. E. H. Hair (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1963), 144–45. A further study of this linguistic evidence will be soon developed by José da Silva Horta. 55  “Estes Fulos deste sertão, vendo a um dos nossos, pasmam pelos verem brancos, sem embargo de eles não serem negros.” Almada, Tratado, 18, quoted from Almada, An Interim and Makeshift Edition of André Álvares de Almada’s Brief Treatise of the Rivers of Guinea, trans. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Department of History, Univ. of Liverpool, 1984), 18. We have revised the translation in italics. 56  Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 87. 57  Ibid. 58  Hall, History of Race, 54. See also ibid. 55, 67. According to Hall, “In North Africa between 1593 and 1608 [where he was forcely exiled], he found himself confronted with a

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The coeval involvement of Northern Senegambia in the Atlantic slave trade may have engendered justifications about why, in this context, Africans were being sold to Europeans. An anecdote reported by the Jesuit Father Baltasar Barreira, not by Almada or other Cabo Verdians, in the early seventeenth century is one of these stories. In a letter of ca. 1609, the Superior of the Guinea Coast Cabo Verde Mission reports an explanation of why brancos were the enslavers and pretos the enslaved, as expressed by a bexerim (Muslim dignitary), probably Wolof, in Porto d’Ale. One has to be cautious, as it seems that the story was probably heard indirectly, not from the Muslims he refers to, but likely recounted by a Portuguese informant of Father Barreira. The informant may have transformed what he narrated, though we cannot exclude the possibility that the conversation took place partly in Portuguese. This would have been consistent with the linguistic abilities of the polyglot religious dignitaries of the Petite Côte, a coastal region long frequented by traders of many European nations, as mentioned by Barreira himself. According to Barreira, the anecdote involved a Muslim and a bexerim, the chief bexerim there and the most renowned. The Muslim brought to the port some hides […], and then went in search of the bexerim. He told him that he had come, not so much to sell him the hides, as to discuss with him a problem [lit.: a doubt] he had, which was this. “Why are White men free and Black men their slaves and serve them?” Said the bexerim: “The reason is that God created the Whites first and then the Blacks, and he ordered the Blacks, because they came later, to serve their elder brothers.”59 much more racialized discourse—equating blackness and slavery—than he was evidently accustomed [to] in Timbuktu.” This discourse seems to be a rebuttal of what he considered to be false ideas held by North Africans about black people in the Sahel. See ibid., 52. 59  “[…] estando eu nelle passou entre hũ Mouro, e hũ Bexerim, o prinçipal, e de mais nome que aly auia. Troixe o Mouro ao porto algus coiros […], e indo em busca do Bexerim, disselhe que nã uiera tanto polos uender, como por tratar cõ elle hũa duuida que tinha, e era, porque razaõ os Brancos erã liures, e os pretos erã seus escrauos, e os seruiaõ; a razaõ hé, disse o Bixerim, porque Deos criou primeiro os Brancos e depois os Pretos, aos quais, por serẽ derradeiros, mandou que seruisse seus jrmaõs mayores.” Padre Baltasar Barreira, Carta annua do anno de 1609 [to the Jesuit Provincial of Portugal], Santiago, January 1, 1610 [fictitious date; events from 1609], Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Cartório dos Jesuítas, maço 68, no. 427, in Monumenta missionaria africana: África Ocidental, ed. António Brásio, 2nd series, 4:363–98, 384. The translation (with slight corrections in italics) is from P. E. H. Hair, ed., Jesuit Documents on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the Cape Verde Islands, 1585–1617, in English translation (Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, January 1989), doc. 31, 12.

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To our knowledge, this discourse is unique among primary sources that recount intellectual explanations of black/white color prevalent in West Africa.60 Quite to the contrary, in the Sahel, as Hall observes, the code of color was not based on complexion but on lineage.61 What eventually makes someone socially “black” is to have no genealogical connection with Arabic Muslim ancestors. The most important fact is that the bexerim’s explanation is presented not as “racial” but by reference to a cosmological explanation (concerning primogeniture in God’s creation of men). This may be a justification for slavery that is intended for Muslims but that reflects something far wider: the codification of degrees of spiritual power associated with “Whites” and “Blacks.”62 This description may not be simply derived from instances of enslavement by European traders. In southern Senegambia, the area early sources call Serra Leoa, we find a very different situation. A second anecdote recounted by Almada gives evidence of different conceptions of who could or could not be enslaved, and who was or was not “white.” A mid-­ sixteenth-­century encounter tells of a group of Manes, a Mande language-­ speaking people who had invaded coastal Sierra Leone. These Manes sought to purchase from Cabo Verdeans, as a slave, a man who was among them, playing a flute: Before the Manes saw our men [os nossos], one night they arrived beside a river in which one of our boats [a Cabo Verdean ship, profiting from the fact that Sapi peoples were fleeing from a Mane incursion] was lying. […] In this boat was a man who, during the night, played very ably on a flute. Hearing the flute, the enemies [the Manes] […] asked if they would sell him [the flute player]. Our men replied, yes, and asked how many slaves they would give for him. They replied, one hundred slaves, and they promised fifty immediately. Our men laughed at them, saying that this man was a White, and Whites did not sell each other. They were not like Blacks.63

60  The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Paulo Fernando Morais-Farias in the thorough research for these sources. 61  Hall, History of Race, 33. 62  A further interpretation of this passage will be developed by José da Silva Horta. 63  “E antes desta gente verem os nossos, vieram dar uma noite ao longo de um Rio, donde estava uma embarcação nossa […] e estava nesta embarcação um homem tangendo muito bem por uma flauta. E ouvindo os imigos a flauta […] perguntaram se o venderiam. Responderam que sim, e perguntaram quantos escravos dariam por ele. Responderam que cento. Prometeram logo cinquenta. Zombaram os nossos, dizendo que aquele era branco,

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This anecdote is meaningful for several reasons: (1) For the Manes, a Mande people, it was not obvious that enslavement should be connected to skin color. (2) The absence of clear frontiers between who could or could not be enslaved may have been part of the regional Senegambian setting. (3) Given the demographic social context of Santiago Island and mostly the composition of the endogenous, socially dominant group to whom slave traders belonged, it is likely that the Cabo Verdean man in question was a branco da terra, a mestizo or even a Cabo Verdean born African. Thus, in this episode the branco in question may well not have been “white” in skin color. The binomial between brancos and negros indeed existed in the accounts of Cabo Verdians such as Almada and Donelha, but it does not correspond to a simple division of people by phenotype. Negros were, of course, the Africans, as contrasted with Whites who comprised what the authors call “ours” (os nossos).64 These included, in the same group, basically the trade partners: Europeans, people of Luso-African descent and African-born individuals. All belonged to the group of the “Whites.” This flexible identity pattern was in part determined by local Western African criteria.65 We can go further by saying that neither racial categories based on skin color nor a social hierarchy based on “race” would have made sense, as a generally applicable rule, in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century coastal Senegambia. The “racialist” approach in historiography is again revealed to be misleading. Significantly, local African categories, in turn, determined the approach used by Portuguese moradores, as well as lançados,66 and e os brancos se não vendiam, porque não eram negros.” Almada, Tratado, 136, quoted from Almada, An Interim and Makeshift Edition, 30. 64  On the meaning of “ours” (os nossos), in this context, see José da Silva Horta, “Evidence for a Luso-African Identity in ‘Portuguese’ Accounts on ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’ (SixteenthSeventeenth Centuries),” History in Africa 27 (2000): 99–130 and mostly Horta, A “Guiné do Cabo Verde”: Produção Textual e Representações (1578–1684) (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and FCT, 2011), ch. 1.3. 65  This point has been developed in our previous contributions; see inter alia Horta, “Evidence;” Peter Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), and Horta, “Ser ‘Português’ em terras de africanos: vicissitudes da construção identitária na ‘Guiné do Cabo Verde’ (sécs. XVI–XVII),” in Nação e identidades: Portugal, os portugueses e os outros, eds. Hermenegildo Fernandes et  al. (Lisboa: Centro de História, Caleidoscópio, 2009), 261–73. 66  Lançados were Portuguese who had settled among African societies on the coast and who had assimilated culturally into local society, often adopting African religious rituals— such as bodily scarification—and becoming, in the process, more or less culturally “African.”

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Luso-Africans who lived on the Guinea Coast and in the Cabo Verde Islands. Viewed from the islands, the rivers of Guinea were part of the same “Cape-Verdean-Luso-African World”67 within which diverse people and ideas circulated and cultural common ground was built.

The Senegambian Context: b. Jews, Between “Black” and “White” This was the African scenario for the development of two Jewish communities of traders of Portuguese origin based in Northern Senegambia, along Senegal’s Petite Côte (Porto d’Ale and Joal) in the early seventeenth century. A third community, less well-documented, also existed in neighboring Rufisque.68 This interaction provided the context for the impact the Jewish merchants later had on their United Provinces counterparts (as we will see below). Just as happened with Christian lançados, Jewish merchants married African women, in formal or informal marriages, following patterns of alliance that were common in African societies. Their Luso-African offspring were raised in Judaism and accepted within the communities as members with equal rights. In this case, we believe there were earlier family ties. Evidence of these earlier marriages is provided by the fact that a few of the Portuguese Jews are described in contemporary Inquisition records as mulattos or Euro-Africans. We suspect that the Portuguese Jewish traders chose to settle in the villages of Joal and Porto d’Ale in part because some of them already had local maternal kin.69 The two Sephardic communities may be described as somewhere between transient and permanent.70 They flourished between about 1606 and 1620, with a constant coming and going of both Jewish traders and non-Jewish seamen mostly from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to the Petite Côte. A core community of Sephardim settled there during this period. Beyond 1620, a few remained permanently on the Petite Côte until the 67  Horta, “Evidence,” or Horta, “Ser ‘Português,’” 262–63 (reformulated table). See also, developed, Horta, A “Guiné do Cabo Verde,” ch. 1.2. 68  See Mark and Horta, Forgotten Diaspora. 69  For supplementary evidence see Mark and Horta, “Being both Free and Unfree: The Case of Selected Luso-Africans in 16th and 17th Century Western Africa: Sephardim in a Luso-African Context,” Anais de História de Além-Mar 14 (2013): 225–48. 70  Ibid., 239.

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early 1640s. An indeterminate number settled in Amsterdam’s rapidly growing Portuguese Jewish community. Some of them may have left their African wives and children behind in Senegambia, as was usual among other lançados. Documentary evidence exists, however, that a few returned to Amsterdam (and Rotterdam) accompanied by their families and together joined the city’s Sephardic community.71 The Senegambian historical experience played a role in the evolution of the Jewish communities, even after members returned to Amsterdam, and it characterizes the broader Afro-Portuguese relationship. This is the starting point to the discussion which follows. We argue for a history of representations built upon case studies and detailed empirical data, what one might term, to borrow from Clifford Geertz, the historical counterpart to anthropological “thick description.” On the basis of these microstudies, one may then draw comparisons and, from the resulting contrasts and similarities, make broader generalizations.72 Here again, we find much in common with the methodological approach of Hering Torres. We, too, argue for a focused and historically contextualized study of the manner in which societies categorized people and then either did or did not ascribe characteristics to members of the resultant groups, in a process that more often than not served the interests of marginalization or domination. Where Herring Torres and Bethencourt speak of “racisms” in the plural,73 we would argue that, especially for the formative period in European-African relations, ca. 1450–ca. 1650, the operative concept that the historian should keep in mind is that of categories of domination. If and when these categories become generalized and are applied to entire groups, that is the period when

71  To date, we have found no evidence, in the Amsterdam community, of adult male Jews who had been born in West Africa to African mothers. It does, however, appear that Moses de Mesquita, a prominent member of the Amsterdam community after his sojourn in Senegal, had either an African mother or grandmother. On Mesquita, see Mark and Horta, Forgotten Diaspora, 187–88. Mesquita later married a Jewish woman in Amsterdam; they had one or more children who, however, died in childhood and were buried in the Jewish cemetery. 72  F. Bethencourt takes the opposite approach: “The notion of race I will use in this book— prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory action—provides the basis for this long-term approach, enabling us to chart its different forms, continuities, discontinuities, and transformations.” Bethencourt, Racisms, 1. We argue, to the contrary, that one cannot proceed from the generalization to the specific without distorting the specific. 73  See, inter alia, Hering Torres, “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation,” 30–34.

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there begin to emerge what we may, retrospectively, call specific forms of “racism.”74 The specific historical situation of the early seventeenth-century Jewish merchant communities on Senegal’s Petite Côte enables us to study Afro-­ Portuguese relationships in fine detail. The success of locally implanted European (or Euro-African) communities that were dependent on broader, local African societies was directly connected to the level of social integration achieved by the exogamous community. That is to say, first, these Jews needed to establish kinship through marriage. The Senegambian Jews also needed to express their own religion within the locally accepted parameters of a combined Muslim/indigenous religious context. One day, in 1612, they successfully fended off a delegation sent by the vicar of Cacheu to the Buur Siin, the Sereer ruler of the Petite Côte, to arrest them. The Buur Siin was a Muslim and the Jews were very likely familiar with the Muslim practice of granting protected, or dhimmi, status to Jewish merchants established in the Dar-al-Islam. It is unclear from existing records whether he, or any of the uleema associated with his Court, was specifically familiar with this Muslim practice. As we state elsewhere, “a tradition of host-client hospitality […] was extended to the Portuguese [Jews].”75 In the local Senegambian context, this factor was more significant than dhimmi status. Certainly, in the context of the effort by the Portuguese legation from Cacheu to arrest them and remand them to the Inquisition, the Petite Côte Jews used all possible arguments, including religion and also age-grade identity, to establish common ground with the Buur Siin and his entourage. In presenting themselves to the ruler as circumcised, they establish themselves as adult males within the context of a local Sereer culture (as opposed, implicitly, to the uncircumcised Catholics).76 Parenthetically, by defining themselves as followers of Musa (Moses), they situate themselves within the orbit of the Islamic culture of the ruler, whom they successfully petition for protection against the Inquisition. By understanding this local religious context and then successfully expressing their own religious identity within 74  While the suggested terminology may appear cumbersome, it helps to avoid two problems. The first is prolepsis, that is, precisely the teleological approach that we are arguing against. Secondly, it enables the historian to not introduce yet another application of the already over-used term “racism.” 75  Mark and Horta, Forgotten Diaspora, 86. 76  Ibid.

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that context, the Portuguese Jews achieved an advantage over other nonindigenous merchants. A crucial dimension in the local integration of Jewish merchants was what we can conceptualize as a Western African (henceforth Senegambian) model of identity. This identity model framed relationships among members of different Senegambian societies, and it determined the patterns within which Portuguese, Cabo Verdean, and Luso-African traders had to represent their own identities. In Greater Senegambia, identity was contextually contingent. Individuals could and did maintain multiple identities which, not infrequently, might appear to us today to have been mutually contradictory. For example, a person could be, depending on the context, both slave and free, or Catholic and Muslim. Not infrequently, wealthy African merchants and members of the ruling elite emphasized their Christian identity when they were in the Cabo Verde Islands, but took on their Muslim identity when they were living in African communities on the mainland.77 The fact that color as phenotype was not, as a general rule, synonymous with color as a socially ascribed category within Senegambian societies in the early seventeenth century nor, at least in part, on Santiago Island, finds its explanation in this West African context. We have developed this subject elsewhere.78 Here, we emphasize the fact that the notion of identity in Senegambia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not only contextually contingent—it was flexible. This was the case for members of local African societies, as well as for the lançados—that is, Europeans, mostly Portuguese, who had settled on the coast and integrated themselves culturally into local societies. The Senegambian identity model also applied to their Eurafrican offspring by local women, as well as to the descendants of unions between African women and other European traders. All of these groups, part of coastal society, had identities defined by their occupation, by their languages, and material culture, as well as by the religions they practiced. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to be “Portuguese” or “White” in local terms, was not determined by physical appearance. Moreover, in

77  Mark and Horta, Forgotten Diaspora, 31; see also Donelha’s discussion of his meeting with the Mande merchant and (slave?/nobleman; Catholic?/Muslim) Gaspar Vaz, discussed by Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style, 19–22, and by Horta, “Evidence.” 78  Horta, “Evidence”; Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style; Horta, “Ser ‘Português’”; Mark and Horta, Forgotten Diaspora; Horta, A “Guiné do Cabo Verde.”

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Senegambia the term “white” applied to wealthy merchants regardless of the color of their skin. Portuguese Jews, as outsiders, had already developed a facility to live multiple identities, especially after the forced conversions of 1496/97. These Sephardic merchants were therefore readily able to adjust to local Senegambian models of contextually contingent, multiple identities. One example was the trader Joshua Israel who, when he wrote to the ruler of Busis (south of the Petite Côte in present day Guinea-Bissau) in 1612, to propose a trade alliance, used his other name, Luis Fernandes Duarte. The ruler’s nephew and chief trader was a faithful Catholic, at least in the eyes of the Jesuit missionaries. Hence, for Joshua Israel to develop this commercial relationship, it was useful to present himself as a Christian. From this case study we can see that common elements emerge, relating to a broader pattern of Luso-African relationships in Senegambia and to Sephardic practices worldwide. With regard to marriage, one finds a similar response by the Jewish community in eighteenth-century Suriname. There, as Aviva Ben-Ur has demonstrated,79 Jewish men frequently found wives among the local African servant population. In both cases, a world of European-born Jewish males needed “local” wives to reproduce their community. Both in Senegal and in Suriname, these practices entailed flexible application of Halakhah. Detailed and contextualized case studies of European–African relations before the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade diminish the risk of historical prolepsis. Clearly, a major transformation in attitudes occurred in mid-­ seventeenth-­century Amsterdam, as Jonathan Schorsch has rightly shown. We, nevertheless, would take issue with some of his terminology, when he writes: In the mid-seventeenth century, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam instituted a series of communal ordinances that reflected and constructed the desired “racial” transformation of the Jews by gradually excluding non-White Jews and non-White slaves from participation.80

79  Ben-Ur, Aviva, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mecantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 159–69. 80  Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 192.

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Chronologically later attitudes about “race,” while they may define, “a posteriori,” a historical process, do not establish intent at the beginning of that process. To avoid teleological history, 1600 should not be conflated with 1660, let alone with the eighteenth century. Indeed, early in the seventeenth century, as Miriam Bodian has demonstrated, the Amsterdam Jewish community accepted as members, individuals who had a Jewish father, but not mother.81 This is parallel to the practice in early seventeenth-­ century Senegambia, where the offspring of Jewish fathers and local African women were incorporated into the Jewish community. However, about 1650, complex historical factors (above all, the accelerating growth of the Atlantic slave trade) engendered developments that appear, retrospectively, as a unidirectional historical process. The end result was indeed the institution of racialist hierarchies and later, during the Enlightenment, of an undergirding and self-justifying philosophy of difference. But one should not impute intentionality to the earlier actors in what became that process. To the historical study of perceptions of “race” in early seventeenth-­century Amsterdam, we would add the role of identity perception in West Africa. This was the context in which some Luso-African Jewish families had developed their identity.

Concluding Commentary Senegambian culture, far from separating peoples, was based on intermixture. Individuals from different groups constantly comingled in every way: Portuguese lançados and Africans, Dutch-based Sephardic ivory traders and Serer women, Jolas and Manding, and of course Muslims and non-­Muslims. Individuals could be both Muslim and Christian (Gaspar Vaz, a former slave on Santiago Island but, both before and after, a Manding nobleman in the Gambia region); both Wolof and Jewish (the family of Manuel Peregrino, the son of the first spiritual leader of the Senegalese Jewish communities); both slave and free (a very important point); and both “black” and “white.” Skin color was not the central criterion of social differentiation. In Senegambia, skin color was not a generalized marker of inferior social or cultural status, nor was it such a marker in the Cabo Verde archipelago in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, where the 81  Miriam Bodian, “The ‘Portuguese’ Dowry Societies in Venice and Amsterdam,” Italia 6, no. 1–2 (1987): 30–61. The practice of the Jewish dowry societies in Amsterdam illustrates that Jewish/Sephardic identity could be inherited through the father.

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new, endogenous elite was mostly composed of mestizo and black men. As we have argued elsewhere, the Senegambian model of flexible and multiple identities and of hybrid or métisse society, was one of the social factors that influenced (and conceivably attracted) Portuguese Christian and Jewish merchants who settled and traded on the Upper Guinea Coast. We might even speak of the export to Europe of Senegambian societal norms. These norms were brought to the United Provinces by some of the Jews who returned there. In Amsterdam, they would of course be one of innumerable factors that gradually coalesced into more rigid identity norms by the second half of the century. In the final analysis, contextualizing is the only way to thoroughly address concepts of “race” in early modern Europe and the overseas empires, as well as in the West African societies. It was there that these concepts interacted and further evolved.

CHAPTER 4

Mediating Multiculturalism: Jews, Blacks, and Curaçao, 1825–1970 Jessica V. Roitman

Case studies of specific Jewish communities in European colonies abound, addressing religious practices, economic roles, and communal authority, among other topics. But we are still grappling with synthesizing what these many excellent colony-specific case studies tell us about what it meant for Jews to be part of colonial societies as a whole, as well as what it meant for a colonial society to have Jews deeply interwoven into its fabric. In European colonies from the British antipodes to French North Africa, Jewish economic, religious, and social life was transformed in important ways by the encounter with empire and colonialism. But in what ways were empires and their colonies transformed by Jews? In failing to tackle the issue of Jews in colonial society conceptually, historians studying Jews have missed essential dimensions of the modern colonial experience. This chapter will grapple with these larger issues surrounding Jews and colonialism.

J. V. Roitman Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_4

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It will do so by looking at the interaction and connections between the two main “minority” groups on the Dutch Antillean island of Curaçao— Afro-Curaçaoans and (Sephardic) Jews. These connections can be seen in the political, business, social, and charitable spheres, where Sephardic Jews played a mediating role between the Afro-Curaçaoan majority and the tiny white Protestant, largely Dutch, elite. Beyond mediation, however, which is a role typically ascribed to Jews, whether in the colonies or elsewhere, this chapter will describe and analyze the horizontal relationships between Afro-Curaçaoans and Jews themselves, with a focus on the realm of politics and governance, while also providing background and context on the history of Jewish-Afro-Curaçaoan relationships on the island.1 Moreover, in keeping with the comparative turn in ethnic history, as well as with current discussions around transnationalism and decolonization, this chapter will re-center the traditional framework of analysis as being between a minoritized and a dominant culture.2 In the context of this chapter, this means an approach foregrounding the interaction of the two largest demographic “minorities” on the island, which were, and are, Afro-­Curaçaoans and Jews. An approach foregrounding the interaction of the two largest demographic “minorities” on the island will bring to light intersecting histories that have been obscured by the traditional focus on groups in isolation or in terms of their interaction with the “dominant” culture, in this case, the Dutch white Protestant group. As James Clifford points out, “Transnational [diasporic] connections break the binary relations of ‘minority’ communities with ‘majority’ societies.”3 In light of this observation, a critical examination of the interactions between Sephardic Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans may serve as a basis from which to challenge the prevailing logic of competition between minority groups which, as Michael Rothberg puts it (in a different context), “takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for pre-eminence.”4 Indeed, there has been a presupposition on the part of many sociologists, anthropologists, and historians that “minorities” necessarily and continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical 1  For more on Jews as intermediaries in the Dutch West Indies, see Jessica Vance Roitman, “Portuguese Jews, Amerindians, and the Frontiers of Encounter in Colonial Suriname,” New West Indian Guide 88, no. 1–2 (2014): 18–52. 2  Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 3  James Clifford, Routes: Travels and Translations in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 255. 4  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3.

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r­ elationship of assimilation and opposition.5 As this chapter will show, one of the legacies of the colonial past, at least within the Dutch orbit, may well be that the “conflict model” of ethnic relations, is questionable. This is in line with the Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd’s idea that “Cultures designated as minorities have certain shared experiences by virtue of their similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture, which seeks to marginalize them all.”6 Moreover, these relations illustrate an important aspect of the role of Jews in colonial societies—their relationships with other groups—which helps us move conceptually beyond the focus on rights and privileges granted to Jews as a specially tolerated group, and into a fuller picture of how colonial societies actually functioned when Jews were incorporated into them.

Curaçao and Colonialism Curaçao is an excellent case study for delving into issues around race, religion, ethnicity, politics, and the legacies of colonialism in the Caribbean region and beyond. Curaçao is small population-wise and geographically. The population of Curaçao was 33,000 in 1920 and 150,000 today on an island of 444 sq km, falling well within the “small state” classification. This geographical and demographic smallness have meant that the population groups have been forced to be in contact with each other in a far more personalized and intimate way than in places with great numbers of people spread over a larger space, a fact that already affected ethno-­ religious relationships on the island in the eighteenth century, if not before.7 Moreover, Curaçao was, and is, unique in terms of the composition of its white “minority.” In almost all other Caribbean societies, excepting Suriname, whites were a relatively unified group who originated from the  Shih and Lionnet, Minor Transnationalism, 7.  Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse: What Is To Be Done?,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, eds. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1. 7  On the role of smallness, see Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977) and Wouter Veenendaal, Politics and Democracy in Microstates (London: Routledge, 2015). On the eighteenth century, see Jessica Vance Roitman and Aviva Ben-Ur, “Adultery Here and There: Crossing Sexual Boundaries in the Dutch Jewish Atlantic,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800, eds. Jessica Vance Roitman and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: Brill), 185–223 and Jessica Vance Roitman, “‘A Mass of Mestiezen, Castiezen, and Mulatten:’ Fear, Freedom, and People of Color in the Dutch Antilles, 1750–1850,” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 399–417. 5 6

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colonial power’s metropole. Therefore, there was a clear-cut racially-based hierarchy between whites, people of mixed descent, and the majority of African descent. Curaçao’s already small white population was divided among metropolitan Dutch, other Europeans, and (Sephardic) Jews, with Jews making up as much as one-third of the population during the formative eighteenth century (see Table 4.1, below). The small number of non-­ Dutch white Europeans was generally incorporated into the overarching metropolitan Dutch elite. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were mostly Dutch West India Company (WIC) officials such as the Swiss Isaac Faesch who served as Governor of the island from 1740 to 1758. In the nineteenth century, these non-Dutch whites were merchants or landowners. In any case, there were, therefore, two “intermediary” groups—the Sephardic Jews and the “colored” group—providing a unique example of ethnic and religious complexity. In most Caribbean societies, there was just one “intermediary” group, those of mixed race. The chronology of this chapter spans the entire history of Dutch governance of the island—from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth century. However, the discussion of the connections between Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans in the political sphere will focus on the late Table 4.1  Population of Jews in Curaçao compared to total population 1789 Population of Curaçao

Number of Jews

1902

1926

20,988 31,547 38,781 (of whom 12,864 slaves) 1095 839 548 (among a total of 3564 whites)

1950

1968

2009

102,206

141,393

141,766

600 (420 Sephardim, 180 Ashkenazim)

+/−740 (300 Sephardim, 450 Ashkenazim)

+/−225 (134 Sephardim, 103 Ashkenazim)

Sources: Figures for 1789 from General survey of Curaçao and dependent islands, Appendix no. 16; Report of private houses, National Archive of the Netherlands (hereafter NL-HaNA), Raad van Koloniën 120. For 1902: Jaap van Soest, Olie als Water: De Curacaose economie in de eerste helft van de twintigste eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg, 1977), 17. Population numbers in Curaçao after 1789: Central Bureau of Statics, Curaçao. Number of Jews in 1950: Israëlitische Almanak: Yearbook for the Jewish communities on Curaçao and Aruba (Willemstad, 1950/51). For 1968: Frances P. Karner, The Sephardics of Curaçao: A Study of Socio-Cultural Patterns in Flux (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969), 68. For 2009: Jeannette van Ditzhuijzen, A Shtetl Under the Sun: The Askenazic Community of Curaçao (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2011), 19

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nineteenth through mid-twentieth century. This is the period following the “emancipation” of the Jewish community in 1825, when Jews were granted equal privileges to non-Jewish whites, and the Trinta di Mei (May 30) strikes and subsequent social unrest in 1969 that indelibly changed the face of Curaçao. These dates bookend a relatively understudied period in Curaçaoan social history, with the majority of works being published on this period focusing on economic and legal history.8 This contrast is marked in comparison with the multitude of recent works of social history on the pre-nineteenth century.9 Jonathan Schorsch’s masterful and definitive study of the relationship between Blacks and Jews in the early modern period leaves off where this chapter begins.10 Schorsch touches on some aspects of the early nineteenth century, but his main focus, as the title of his work affirms, is the early modern period. Yet the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are important not only because they are relatively understudied, but because this is the period during which we see the transition from Jewish-Afro-Curaçaoan relationship dynamics based largely on ownership and the asymmetries intrinsic to slavery to two groups of “minorities” grappling with inexorable changes in 8  Rosemary Allen, Di ki manera? A Social History of Afro-Curaçaoans, 1863–1917 (Amsterdam: SWP, 2007); Margo Groenewoud, “‘And Children You Remain:’ Democracy and Belonging in Mid-20th Century Curaçao,” unpublished paper presented at the Association of Caribbean Historians Conference, Havana, Cuba, 2016; Armando Lampe, Kerk en maatschappij op Curaçao (Willemstad: Vicario Provincial, 1991), 17–60; Gert Oostindie, Het paradijs overzee: De “Nederlandse” Caraïben en Nederland (Leiden: KITLV, 2011); Jaap van Soest, Olie als Water: De Curaçaose economie in de eerste helft van de twintigste eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg, 1977); Jeroen Dekker, Curaçao Zonder/Met Shell: een bijdrage tot bestudering van demografische, economische en sociale processen in de periode 1900–1929 (Zutphen: Walburg, 1982); René Antonio Römer, Curaçao (San Juan, P.R.: UNICA, 1981); W. E. Renkema, Het Curaçaose plantagebedrijf in de negentiende eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg, 1981); Johan Hartog, Curaçao: van kolonie tot autonomie, na 1816, vol. 2 (Aruba: De Wit, 1961). 9  Han Jordaan, Slavernij & vrijheid op Curaçao: de dynamiek van een achttiende-eeuws Atlantisch handelsknooppunt (Zutphen: Walburg, 2013); Linda Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Jessica Vance Roitman, “‘A Flock of Wolves Instead of Sheep:’ The Dutch West India Company and Conflict Resolution in the Jewish Community of Curaçao in the 18th Century,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane Gerber (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 85–105; Roitman and Ben-Ur, “Adultery Here and There;” Nanette de Jong, Tambú: Curaçao’s African-Caribbean Ritual and the Politics of Memory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012). 10  Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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a colonial society, including the abolition of slavery, inclusion in governance, migration, both to and from the island, shifts in the economic structure, and the complex process of (post) colonial identifications.

Background During the Trinta di Mei strikes and subsequent riots that rocked the island of Curaçao in 1969, there was no aggression aimed at Sephardic Jews, yet the shops of Ashkenazic Jews such as Herman Tauber were destroyed. Stanley Brown, a leader of the protests, and Lionel Capriles, a prominent Sephardic businessman and scion of one of the island’s oldest families, claimed that there was no anti-Semitism involved in such attacks.11 Capriles stated that Sephardic Jews were spared by the largely Afro-­ Curaçaoan rioters because they were “not seen as Jews but rather as Curaçaoaners that are Jewish.” As the unrest was mounting, Capriles called his friend, Reggie Venloo, an Afro-Curaçaoan member of the labor union organizing the strikes, to try to forestall the violence. This vignette perfectly illustrates the major strands of this chapter: how the Sephardic Jews identified themselves and, in turn, were identified as Curaçaoan, the formal and informal connections between Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans, and the sorts of formal and informal mechanisms for “minority” group participation in (post)colonial societies. “Minority” and “majority” are relative terms on Curaçao. “Minority” refers not just to a statistical number. It also refers to categories of persons who hold few or no positions of social power. If power is associated with majority status and disempowerment with minority status, then Afro-­ Curaçaoans have traditionally been a minority, a position belied by their numerical majority and their influence on, indeed dominance of, the cultural identification as Curaçaoan, especially in the contemporary period. In the contemporary period, to be Curaçaoan, a Yu di Kòrsou (literally, a “child of Curaçao” in Papiamentu), one has to speak Papiamentu and, in many circles, be of Afro-Curaçaoan descent. The white Protestant community is a numerical minority but has long held disproportionate political and economic power. It is important not to essentialize any of the island’s population groups, however. Not all Sephardic Jews were wealthy, and communal charity was often necessary within the community. There was 11  Gert Oostindie, ed., Curaçao 30 mei 1969 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 17, 33.

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always a group of “lower” Protestants, mostly artisans and lower-­ranking military men, and, after 1915, employees of the Shell oil refinery which was built on the island. In the late nineteenth century, a small group of middleclass Afro-Curaçaoans, known as “coloreds,” emerged.12 This does not diminish the fact that Curaçao’s strong historical Jewish presence, and the Jews’ role as “in-betweens,” complicates typical “minority” and “majority” dichotomies on the island.13 Though the Jewish population has been statistically small, its economic and social prominence has belied its relatively limited size. In contrast, the white Protestants, though holding socially prominent positions conferred by their status as representatives of the ruling colonial power, have left a much less indelible imprint on the sociocultural life of Curaçao. Why? The first anthropologist of Curaçao, Harry Hoetink, describes preindustrial life on the island as highly stratified, a stratification that left a strong legacy, even after social changes brought about by increasing industrialization. According to Hoetink, white Protestants, Jews, and Afro-Curaçaoans lived in largely separate spheres. The Protestants, as a numerical minority surrounded by an Afro-Curaçaoan majority and an economically powerful Jewish community, were concerned with preserving their social status and power. They jealously guarded their position as government officials, plantation owners, and socioeconomic elites, which meant, in practice, not mixing with the other groups in society more than necessary, and certainly not marrying with these groups. They were such a small group, with so few marriage partners available, that they usually married “newcomers” from Europe, thus reinforcing their status as Dutch or European, rather than as creolized Curaçaoans.14 Though many families lived on the island for generations, most individual Europeans stayed only temporarily, hence their limited impact on the formation of Curaçaoan culture, defined as the shared set of values, beliefs, norms, attitudes, behaviors, and social structures that define reality and guide everyday interactions.15 In contrast, there has been a permanent Sephardic Jewish presence dating from the earliest days of Dutch settlement on the island in the mid-­ seventeenth century, and family names hardly changed even well into the  Allen, Di ki manera?; Groenewoud, “‘And Children You Remain,’” 7.  Harry Hoetink, Het patroon van de oude Curaçaose samenleving: een sociologische studie (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1958), 105. 14  Ibid., 45. 15  Christopher W. Moore and Peter Woodrow, “Mapping Cultures: Strategies for Effective Intercultural Negotiations,” Track Two 8, no. 1 (1998): 25–27. 12 13

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twentieth century.16 There were plans for (Sephardic) Jewish settlement on Curaçao from a quite early stage of its existence as a Dutch WIC possession.17 This was, in part, because Curaçao was somewhat different from other Caribbean colonies. The semi-arid climate meant that Curaçao developed an economy with far fewer plantations than other Caribbean islands, and those that existed there were not profitable. In fact, plantations on Curaçao were generally maintained to provide status rather than income.18 The economy was based on trade and transshipment. For instance, most slaves brought to Curaçao were intended to be sold on other islands in the Caribbean or on the South American mainland. Thus, there was a niche for Jewish merchants, most of whom traded with the nearby English and French colonies, but particularly with the Venezuelan and Colombian coasts.19 That being said, the original plan of the WIC was to have Jews as planters on Curaçao. In 1651, João de Yllan, at that time living in the Dutch Republic, was given a permit to settle with other Jews on the island. In 1652, Joseph Nunes de Fonseca was also given a permit for settlement.20 In the charters granted to both men, they were promised the “same freedoms as were given to the [Jewish] settlers in New Netherland,” meaning the freedom to practice their religion.21 Not much came of these early charters for settlement though, and the first group of any consequence, composed of 12 families, arrived on Curaçao in 1659. The 1659 charter, arranged by Isaac da Costa, has been lost.22 On the basis of other evidence, however, we can deduce that it contained the official recognition and support of the 16  Karner, The Sephardics of Curaçao, 12; Hoetink, Het patroon van de oude Curaçaose samenleving, 41. 17  The following three paragraphs first appeared in Roitman, “‘A Flock of Wolves Instead of Sheep,’” 87–88. 18  A. F. Paula, From Objective to Subjective Social Barriers: A Historico-Philosophical Analysis of Certain Negative Attitudes Among the Negroid Population of Curaçao (Curaçao: NP, 1972). 19  Wim Klooster, “The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 354–59. 20  Also known as David Cohen Nassy. 21  Quoted in Jacob Adriaan Schiltkamp, Bestuur en rechtspraak in de Nederlandse Antillen ten tijde van de West-Indische Compagnie (Willemstad, Curaçao: NP, 1973), 36. There were some restrictions. For instance, they were not allowed to work on Sundays in deference to the Christian Sabbath.  Though the reference is to New Netherland, the North American territory whose capital was New Amsterdam, no Jews were actually to be found there at the time. The intended reference could be to Dutch Brazil or even Suriname. 22  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam: The Place of Curaçao and the Caribbean in Early Modern Jewish History,” American Jewish History, 72, no. 2 (1982): 172–92.

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Jewish Curaçaoan community as an entity, permission to purchase slaves and build houses, and religious freedom. The WIC had entered into a contract with these Jews to provide land which they could settle and cultivate. However, agriculture never became a major enterprise for the Jews. The few who had been engaged in agriculture turned to trade by the early eighteenth century, in part because from 1711 to 1722 the island went through a disastrous drought. In any case, the Jewish community grew rapidly after its first members arrived in the 1650s, both through natural increase and the immigration of new families from the Netherlands and refugees from the French island of Martinique in 1685.23 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of Jewish families was up to about half that of the non-Jewish, and this ratio remained the same until at least 1789 (see Table 4.1).24 By 1746, the organized Sephardic population on Curaçao had probably reached its demographic peak, numbering around 2000 people.25 Of these, only a very few could be said to belong to the middle class.26 The Jewish ­population was divided between the wealthy, mostly large-scale merchants and international traders, as well as brokers of all sorts, on one side, and the poor, mainly small tradesmen, on the other.27 On Curaçao, class differences were clearly and externally visible, to the point of separate neighborhoods and synagogues.28 23  I.S.  Emmanuel, “Les juifs de la Martinique et leurs coreligionnairs d’Amsterdam au XVIIe siècle,” Revue des Etudes Juives 123 (1964): 511–16. 24  National Archive of the Netherlands (hereafter NL-HaNA), Nieuwe West-Indische Compagnie (NWIC) 594, fol. 132–39; NWIC 597, fol. 903–20, NWIC 600 and fol. 1010–25; Klooster, “Jews in Suriname and Curaçao,” 353. 25  Karner, The Sephardics of Curaçao, 29. 26  In 1659, the Amsterdam Sephardic community began “assisting” the migration of poorer Sephardim to Curaçao (as well as other colonies in the New World), which added to the lower-income population on the island. See for instance, Robert Cohen, “Passage to the New World: The Sephardi Poor of Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” in Neve Ya’akov: Jubilee Volume Presented to Dr. Jaap Meyer, eds. Lea Dasberg and Jonathan N. Cohen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1982), 31–42; Yosef Kaplan, An Alternatative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Bril, 2000), 85–6, 287; Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “A Study in Intercommunal Relations in the Sephardi Diaspora: London and Amsterdam in the Eighteenth Century,” in Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eight International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 51. 27  Yosef Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” American Jewish History 72, no. 2 (1982): 193–211, 206. 28  Ibid., 199.

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Be that as it may, the Jewish presence on the island was long-standing and stable, and this long-standing and stable presence helps explain why the Sephardic population has identified itself, and been identified with, local society more than most of the non-Jewish Europeans. This is the result of a sort of “asymmetrical cultural affinity” that emerged at the beginnings of the colonization of Curaçao. For instance, Papiamentu, the main marker of Curaçaoan identity to the present day, some scholars surmise, developed as a communications link between Portuguese Jews and enslaved Africans, allowing them to consolidate a common and distinct local identity vis-à-vis the Dutch elite.29 This, of course, meant that Sephardic Jews participated in the slave economy, including slaveholding and slave concubinage. In this, Sephardic Jews on Curaçao were little different than their non-­ Jewish colonial counterparts. On Curaçao, the enforced intimacy between slaves and their owners was particularly high. Willemstad, where most Jews lived, was a small, crowded city barely containing the 11,500 or so free and enslaved people who lived in it by the end of the eighteenth century, and, in fact, the population began to spill outside its walls.30 The city’s narrow alleyways and the urban nature of slavery meant that (Jewish) slave owners and their chattel were in constant contact.31 As Jonathan Schorsch notes, “Physically, commercially, sexually, and socially, slaves and owners shared, however unequally, the same world, expressing differing kinds of loyalty and enmity toward one another.”32 As Schorsch goes on to say, “Sexual relations between masters and slaves, which no doubt ranged from voluntary to coerced on the part of the slave women, often led to continued social and, at times, legal connections between the two parties and their offspring.”33 This was due, of course, to the fact that there were offspring, and, unlike the white Protestants, it was not uncommon for  Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 236–237.  Wim Klooster, “Curaçao as a Transit Center to the Spanish Main and the French West Indies,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800, eds. Jessica Vance Roitman and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 25, 51. Klooster estimates that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of Jewish families in Willemstad was nearly half that of white non-Jews. Based on WIC tax records, Klooster believes that by 1789 there were about 6000 free residents in Willemstad, which included free blacks and “coloreds”—most of whom were Catholics—as well as 2469 Protestants and 1095 Jews. See Wim Klooster, “Jews in Suriname and Curaçao,” 353, 355. 31  Roitman, “‘A Mass of Mestiezen, Castiezen, and Mulatten.’” 32  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 261. 33  Ibid. 29 30

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Sephardic men to recognize the children born of these unions, give them their last names, leave them legacies in their wills, and integrate them in family businesses, though always in subordinate positions.34 This chapter focuses mostly on Sephardic Jews. They long made up the majority of the Jewish community on the island. This began to change in the 1920s, when Ashkenazic Jews arrived in large numbers, generally fleeing the rising anti-Semitism in Europe.35 Ashkenazic Jews quickly achieved economic success at a time when Curaçao’s economy was booming due to the Shell oil refinery that moved to the island in 1915. The Ashkenazim become numerically and economically important as the twentieth century progressed.36 Despite this economic success, neither the Sephardim nor the rest of Curaçaoan society viewed them as completely belonging.37 In fact, in Curaçao, the word hudiu (Jew) was generally positively associated with aristocracy, wealth, and education, while polako, the term for Ashkenazim, was denigrating in intent.38 Ultimately, the influx in the 1920s and 1930s of these “unacculturated” Ashkenazic Jews, ­metropolitan-­led industrialization and modernization, combined with the social and political transformations in the 1960s, irrevocably changed Curaçao, leading, as Table 4.1 shows, to the dramatic decrease in the total Jewish population of the island.

Horizontal Relationships There has been a tendency to assume a binary model that presupposes that minorities necessarily and continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of opposition or assimilation.39 As Shih and Lin state, “The Foucauldian overemphasis on the capillary operation of power of the dominant contributed to this vertical model from which horizontal communication amongst minorities is made invisible.”40 Certainly, as we have seen, relationships of opposition and attempts to, in 34  Paula, From Objective to Subjective Social Barriers, 30; Eva Abraham-Van der Mark, “The Ashkenazi Jews of Curaçao, a Trading Minority,” New West Indian Guide 74, no. 3/4 (2000): 257–80. 35  Ditzhuijzen, A Shtetl Under the Sun, 19. 36  Abraham-Van der Mark, “The Ashkenazi Jews of Curaçao.” 37  Ditzhuijzen, A Shtetl Under the Sun, 198–209. 38  Abraham-Van der Mark, “The Ashkenazi Jews of Curaçao,” 269. 39  Shih and Lionnet, Minor Transnationalism, 56. 40  Ibid.

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some way, assimilate were the case for both Afro-Curaçaoans and Jews vis-­ à-­vis the “majority” white Dutch on the islands. And, as we have also seen, the asymmetries of power, particularly those embodied in slave-owning and its legacies, but also as merchants and consumers, and, by the end of the eighteenth century, as competitors in small-scale rural retailing and low-level governmental posts, meant that Afro-Curaçaoans often had a vertical and sometimes oppositional relationship with Jews on the island.41 However, not all these relationships were vertical and/or completely oppositional. Moreover, it was never the case that relationships were ever purely one or the other, nor is a horizontal relationship in one context mutually exclusive to a vertical relationship in another situation. Indeed, horizontal relations are frequently colored by the “vertical” relations. There is some limited evidence of marriage between white Jews and non-white Jews. The “mulatto,” Louis, married Ribca Touro in the mid-­ eighteenth century.42 Louis, who belonged to Benjamin Moreno Henriques, was manumitted on May 24, 1745, for which process supporting testimony was provided by his father-in-law, Isaac Touro.43 That Louis was, in some way, considered Jewish was exceptional in the Curaçaoan context. This is in contrast to Suriname, where enslaved and freed people of color were incorporated into some form of normative Judaism.44 Blacks  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 261.  T. van der Lee, Curaçaose Vrijbrieen, 1722–1863 (The Hague: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 1998), 47. 43  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 453, n. 68. 44  There is a wealth of information on the Jews of Suriname and their relationship with their (formerly) enslaved, as well as their modes and expressions of Judaism. See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus,” in New Essays in American Jewish History, eds. Pamela S. Nadell, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Lance J. Sussman (Cincinnati, Oh.: American Jewish Archives of Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2010), 79–94 and her “Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeenth-Century Suriname,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, no. 1 (2016):11–38; Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: KITLV, 2010); Rachel Frankel and Aviva Ben Ur, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2009) and their Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname: Essays (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2012); Aviva Ben Ur, “The Cultural Heritage of Eurafrican Sephardi Jews in Suriname,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 169–94; Aviva Ben Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Colonial Suriname,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns 41 42

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and mulattos probably attended the funerals of community leaders in the eighteenth century.45 When prayers were said on the island for rain in the eighteenth century, slaves appear to have been present as well.46 Enslaved females of early Curaçaoan Jews evidently slaughtered fowl for their masters, even without supervision. We can surmise this because a 1696 proclamation by the parnassim warned, “that such cannot be eaten unless a Jew accompanies the slave to the examiner’s house and delivers the fowl to the house of her masters.”47 Isaac S.  Emmanuel printed a photograph of a Curaçaoan Sephardic Jew’s gravestone depicting the deceased surrounded by his weeping family, a slave standing in the doorway of the room. According to Emmanuel, the slave “is about to perform a service,” probably meaning that he would either pour the water out of all vessels in the house, according to the folk custom, or wash the body in preparation for burial.48 As Schorsch notes, these practices, in which slaves obviously did at times participate, all comprise private functions.49 More public activities were strictly curtailed by the parnassim. Freed slaves apparently often had their family name determined by their soon-to-be former owners in the nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, the names given by the owners purposefully established some slight differentiation between the master’s name and that to be borne by the slave. Jesurun was altered to Zurun. Senior changed into Junior, and so on.50 This was the same practice in other parts of the Dutch Antilles. On Saba, for instance, freed slaves of the Leverock family became Levenstone. This practice was enshrined in law in the manumission regulation of 1832, when it was decreed that, “these freed people shall not

Hopkins University Press, 2009), 152–69; Aviva Ben Ur, “Peripheral Inclusion: Communal Belonging in Suriname’s Sephardic Community,” in Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-Modern World,” eds. Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 185–210; Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, ch. 8–10; and Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991). 45  Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of Curaçao: Curaçaon Jewry 1656–1957 (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1957), 310–13. 46  Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 1:66n18. 47  Ibid., 2:548. 48  Emmanuel, Precious Stones of Curaçao, 126, plate 71. 49  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 227. 50  J. Hartog, Curaçao: From Colonial Dependence to Autonomy (Aruba: De Wit, 1968), 183.

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have the family name of anyone living in the Colonies or their descendants, nor should the family name of the former master be given.”51 Even if they received the same surname, however, they generally remained outside normative Judaism.52 Freed and enslaved Afro-Curaçaoans asked not only well-off members of their own group, but also Sephardic friends or former masters, to sponsor the baptism of their children, which is intriguing and deserves far more study than it has yet received. Although this often had the purpose of generating a relationship through which the children and their families could receive aid, acceptance by Jews of the “giver” role could indicate sincere affection, as well as an understanding of the invoked social convention.53 Essentially, as Jonathan Schorsch remarks, “Despite the fact that slavery served as the nexus in which, overwhelmingly, Jews and Blacks met one another, it should not be imagined that this nexus constituted a monolithic entity.”54 Jews and Blacks both served in the civilian militia, though usually in different units from one another.55 Moreover, Jews and Blacks often engaged in commerce together. This is reported by many writers, both positively and negatively, on both local and transnational levels, especially in the British colonies.56 It was not only in the British colonies. For instance, the Sephardim of eighteenth-century Curaçao frequently traded with free people of color on Saint-Domingue.57

51  Gouvernementsblad 1832, no. 2, art. 22. For more on naming practices in the Dutch colonies, specifically Suriname, see Alex van Stipriaan, “What’s in a name? Slavernij en naamgeving in Suriname tijdens de 18e en 19de eeuw,” Oso: Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis 9, no. 1 (1990): 25–46. 52  Karner, Sephardics of Curaçao, 24. This seems to have only been the case for illegitimate children of Sephardic fathers. 53  Ibid., 23–24. 54  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 266–67. 55  NL-HaNA, Curaçao, Oude Archieven tot 1828, 1.05.12.01, inv. no. 237, June 21, 1821. In 1821, the militia was divided into five companies: “Caucasians, Jews, Mestizos, Mulattoes and Negroes, and Sailors of Whatever Color or Creed.” Jews were required to substitute men of other companies in recompense for these men serving for them on the Jewish Sabbath or on other Jewish holidays. 56  Ibid., 267, n. 70. 57  John D. Garrigus, “Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue,” The Americas 50, no. 2 (1992): 223–67; and his “The Curaçao Connection: Sephardic Networks and Saint-Domingue,” paper delivered at the conference on “The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West,” John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 1997.

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By the mid-nineteenth century, the Freemason lodge Igualdad (“Equality”) had Sephardic Jews, white Protestants, and middle-class Afro-Curaçaoans as members, as opposed to the other lodge, Vergenoeging (“Contentment”), which was entirely white and European.58 Private homes, such as that of prominent Sephardic businessman Elias Maduro, were places where Protestants and some elite people of color visited for cultural events in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.59 Sephardic men sometimes placed their sons born by Afro-Curaçaoan women in positions within their own firms, or the business enterprises of friends or relations, demonstrating the intersection of the social and business zones.60 These sorts of relationships focus on less oppositional and clearly vertical ways of interacting between Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans. These connections and relationships were bolstered by the historically closed nature of white Protestant society on the island—an exclusivity that only began to thaw in the late nineteenth century when wealthy Sephardic Jews and elite white Protestants began to mingle socially in a few limited spaces such as clubs and private homes.61 This exclusivity meant that Sephardic Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans often had more contact with each other than either had with the Protestant elite. This is not to romanticize these relationships or overemphasize the similarities. Sephardic Jews have historically held a preeminent economic position, lending them power and influence not available to enslaved or even free Afro-Curaçaoans. Relationships between Sephardic men and Afro-Curaçaoan women were asymmetrical and the children born of these relationships were almost always in an inferior position to any “legitimate” children. Yet Afro-Curaçaoans and (Sephardic) Jews had much in common, as well. In the political sphere, for instance, both Sephardic Jews and Afro-­ Curaçaoans were denied political power in the form of membership on the Island Council until 1844 for Jews, and the late nineteenth century for those of African descent. Both groups were judged to be unfit to vote for 58  J. M. R. Schrils, Een democratie in gevaar: een verslag van de situatie op Curaçao tot 1987 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1990), 61. 59  Max A. Scriwanek, Padre de los pobres (Willemstad: Maduro Holding, 2013), 12. 60  Eva Abraham-Van der Mark, “Marriage & Concubinage among the Sephardic Merchant Elite of Curaçao,” in Women and Change in the Caribbean, ed. Janet Momsen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 38–49. 61  Scriwanek, Padre de los pobres, 12; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:478–85.

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members of the Island Council. In fact, it is in the political sphere, as the next section will discuss, that Afro-Curaçaoans and Jewish cooperation and alliance is most clearly visible.

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows Jews in the Netherlands were accorded the same rights as Christians—so-­ called emancipation—in 1796, but the Jewish communities in the Dutch West Indian colonies had to wait until 1825. Though it was an “emancipation” of the community, it led to a restriction of their traditional rights, privileges, and autonomy. Moreover, this emancipation did not immediately lead to great changes in their position in the governance structure of the island. Sephardic Jews did not hold important government positions or form part of the Island Council (Koloniale Raad) or the Court of Justice until almost two decades after the initial decree. Around this time—the mid-1840s—they were offered promotions in the local militia and began to take a more prominent place in the local governance structure, generally as translators, interpreters, and clerks.62 However, ­ slowly but surely, Sephardic Jews were picked to serve on various government councils. They served in the Chamber of Commerce (making up half of its members by the end of the nineteenth century).63 Abraham Haim Senior was the first Jew to be appointed to serve on the Island Council in 1844.64 In contrast, as late as 1850, Catholics had no representation on this very important Island Council, which was composed of five Protestants and two Jews. This is likely because the majority of Catholics on the island were people of color, whether freed or still enslaved.65 They could not serve on the Island Council until the late nineteenth century. 62  Curaçaose Courant, August 17, 1844; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:337. 63  Abraham Mendes Chumaceiro, Zal het kiesrecht Curaçao tot het kannibalisme voeren? (Curaçao, SP: 1895), 66. The title and context of this publication is a good example of the fact that “horizontal” relations are so often infected by or inflected with the “vertical” relations with/against the dominant group. 64  Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:337. 65  The Dutch did not bequeath their Reformed religion to their enslaved people nor, in large part, to their descendants on Curaçao. Instead, they largely allowed Roman Catholic priests from the neighboring Spanish mainland to baptize and proselytize to the (formerly) enslaved. This policy left a legacy of racial religious segmentation on the island, with the vast majority of people of color being Catholic, and the majority of whites being Protestants, with

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The Island Council was a governing body but not an elected one. The Council’s members were appointed by the Governor. By the 1890s, there was some agitation on the island for direct local elections to be held for seats on the Council. This agitation caused a great deal of consternation among colonial officials, both on the island and in the Netherlands. Protestant historian and archivist of the Dutch Antilles, J. H. J. Hamelberg, wrote a forceful piece in which he argued against universal suffrage on Curaçao.66 Hamelberg believed that if universal suffrage were granted for the election of representatives to the Colonial Council, the administration of the colony would be jeopardized. In fact, it would not just be jeopardized, granting the people of Curaçao the vote would mean that “Curaçao would become a second Haiti,” with the concomitant violence, chaos, and supposed cannibalism that this implied.67 It was a Sephardic Jew, Abraham Mendes Chumaceiro, the son of Hakham Aron Chumaceiro, a prominent local lawyer and author of many political works about Curaçao and its governance, who defended Afro-­ Curaçaoans against Hamelberg’s charges of barbarity. He had previously written Is Curaçao te Koop? (Is Curaçao for Sale?) (The Hague, 1879), in which he opposed the proposed sale of Curaçao, and offered suggestions for its becoming self-supporting, However, it was Chumaceiro’s pamphlet, Zal het kiesrecht Curaçao tot het kannibalisme voeren? (Shall universal suffrage lead to cannibalism on Curaçao?), that would become his best known work. In it, he responds point by point to Hamelberg’s arguments against allowing the people of Curaçao to vote, thus allying the interests of AfroCuraçaoans with that of the Jews. This is because Hamelberg argued specifically not just against Afro-Curaçaoans, but also against Jews. Although Hamelberg was, in theory, against anyone on Curaçao receiving the right to vote, his arguments against the people of Curaçao receiving the vote were based on the fact that Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans comprised by far the majority of potential voters on the island. He did not think that either group contained suitable voters. Hamelberg believed that, no matter which way the vote was allocated—either allowing just Jews as whites to vote, or

the exception of (Sephardic) Jews, who belonged to one of the Jewish communities. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch territories in 1863. 66  J.H.J. Hamelberg, Het kiesrecht in Curaçao en de afscheiding van de eilanden boven den wind van de kolonie (S.l.: s.n., 1894) 67  Chumaceiro, Zal het kiesrecht, 11.

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allowing all males of whatever color to vote—neither Jews nor AfroCuraçaoans were capable of the responsibility incumbent upon voters. Hamelberg feared that if Jews, “the wealthiest of the population”68 were to be allowed to vote, they would attain a majority on the Council. This was to be feared “since the majority [of Jews] as merchants, people being what they are, will sacrifice the good of the colony to trade.”69 Furthermore, Jews had “neither bonds of blood nor of history with the motherland [the Netherlands].”70 According to Hamelberg, Jews had no loyalty to the Netherlands but, instead, to their own kin first and foremost.71 Therefore, as Jews and as merchants, their loyalty would not be to Curaçao but, rather, to their own interests.72 These concerns echo the familiar tropes of Jewish clannishness, statelessness, and loyalty to money above all else. Chumaceiro responded with similarly familiar defenses of Jewish loyalty to the Netherlands. Indeed, he spent nearly ten pages of the pamphlet defending the “Dutchness” of the Jews of Curaçao. He emphasized their long-standing connections to Amsterdam, and explored the minutiae of the history of the Jews in the Dutch Republic and Netherlands with explications of the various laws and proclamations about Jewish citizenship beginning in the seventeenth century. Chumaceiro also used the Dutch government’s defense of the Jews, most of whom were originally from Curaçao, who were driven out of Coro, Venezuela, in 1854, during what might be termed a pogrom, as evidence of the fact that legally and by sentiment, the Jews of Curaçao were Dutch.73 Asserting Jewish loyalty to a state is not particularly unique. But Chumaceiro also very specifically and in a quite detailed fashion set out the

 Hamelberg, Het kiesrecht in Curaçao, 2.  Ibid., 10–11. 70  Ibid., 3. 71  Ibid., 4. 72  Ibid., 4. 73  Chumaceiro, Zal het kiesrecht, 12–23. For more about the situation in Coro, see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:349–52; Isaac Emmanuel, The Jews of Coro, Venezuela (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1973); M. J. Bakkum, “De Curaçaos-Joodse gemeenschap van Coro, Venezuela, en de Pogrom van 1855” (MA thesis, Leiden University, 1993); Isidoro Aizenberg, “The 1855 Expulsion of the Curaçoan Jews from Coro, Venezuela,” American Jewish History 72, no. 4 (1983): 495–507 and his “ ‘Die or leave:’ An Anti-Jewish Riot in Nineteenth Century Venezuela,” American Jewish History 69, no. 4 (1980): 478–87. 68 69

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ways in which Jews were part of, and belonged in, Curaçao.74 He seems to have consciously chosen to move beyond the role of the Sephardic Jews in Curaçao’s mercantile and international trading sectors, as this was a fact used against the Jews by Hamelberg. Instead, Chumaceiro emphasized the Jews’ belonging by highlighting the ways in which they were like other people on the island. He wrote, “They have houses and plantations […] they have children that they wish to have a good education, so they see the importance of good education; they want for them and their children that the colony is clean and hygienic, and they will call for good sanitation.”75 Echoing his earlier arguments about Jewish loyalty to the Netherlands, Chumaceiro wrote: [The Jews] are as connected to Curaçao as any other (group) because, no matter where they go, they return to their beloved land of birth, and there share their wealth with family and countrymen (landgenooten), so why wouldn’t they do their best for the good interests of Curacao? If they were to elect men to the governing body, whose interests wouldn’t be represented?76

Thus, Chumaceiro asserted that Jews were deeply connected to the island, and that they contributed to its welfare and well-being. Furthermore, the author wanted to make sure that Jews on the island were not seen as a monolithic entity, perhaps in order to further distance them from Hamelberg’s assertion that all Jews were wealthy merchants. Therefore, he wrote, “Where is it written that all Jews think the same and would be the same in their actions? It’s not true that they would all vote for the same person.”77 Until this point, the debate between Hamelberg and Chumaceiro is an interesting historical footnote, but not particularly exceptional, as even Chumaceiro’s focus on local Jewish colonial belonging was seen nearly a century before in David Nassy’s Essai Historique sur la Colonie de Surinam.78 What makes it worthy of note is Chumaceiro’s vigorous  Chumaceiro, Zal het kiesrecht, 23–35.  Ibid., 40. 76  Ibid., 19. 77  Ibid., 23. 78  [David Nassy], Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam, 1788, trans. Simon Cohen, eds. Jacob R.  Marcus and Stanley F.  Chyet (Cincinnati, Oh.: American Jewish Archives; New York: KTAV, 1974). Although the names of other members of the Mahamad are given at the 74 75

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defense of Afro-Curaçaoans. Though he is not free from the occasional condescension so prevalent among white writers in the late nineteenth century, Chumaceiro is relatively unique in his belief that Afro-Curaçaoans were deserving of the vote, and that Hamelberg’s arguments against black suffrage were based on biases and unfounded stereotypes. Hamelberg wrote that if the vote were to be given to the Blacks (instead of just to the Jews, which was one option under consideration), “Then we’re worse off yet. Then it is Troy. No, then Curacao will become a second Haiti, where human sacrifice, animal behavior and cannibalism will occur.”79 To this Chumaceiro responded that Hamelberg had let himself be led astray by stereotypes of Blacks and, indeed, of the Haitian Revolution. Chumaceiro based his defense of the Afro-Curaçaoan population by arguing that they were far removed from the supposed barbarity of Africa, that the process of enslavement and emancipation had “civilized” them, and that most of the Afro-Curaçaoans were the descendants of emancipated slaves, rather than slaves who had only been freed at abolition in 1863. In this, Chumaceiro is referring to the quite high number of free people of color on Curaçao, which, in Chumaceiro’s thought, meant that they had had far longer to become “civilized.”80 Chumaceiro wrote that Hamelberg had not taken into account the fact that “The colored people on the island were the descendants of emancipated slaves, who had absorbed much of the surrounding civilization, that they were Christians, and were therefore hardly cannibals, and were as end of the opening epistle of the book, archival research by several scholars has definitively established that David de Isaac Cohen Nassy was the author. See Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, and Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus.” 79  Hamelberg, Het kiesrecht in Curaçao, 11. 80  Curaçao was known for the large number of free people of color, a population percentage that was considered dangerously high by the mid-eighteenth century. The Dutch colonial officials, as well as the white population of the Dutch colonies, often failed to differentiate between free people of color, and those that were still enslaved. They often grouped both groups together in their proclamations and ordinances. See Roitman, “‘A Mass of Mestiezen, Castiezen, and Mulatten;’” Harry Hoetink, “Surinam and Curaçao,” in Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, eds. David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 59–83; Wim Klooster, “Subordinate but Proud: Curaçao’s Free Blacks and Mulattoes in the Eighteenth Century,” New West Indian Guide 68, no. 3/4 (1994): 283–300; Jordaan, Slavernij and Vrijheid op Curaçao and his “Free Blacks and Coloreds, and the Administration of Justice in Eighteenth-Century Curaçao,” New West Indian Guide 84, no. 1–2 (2010): 63–86.

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though one of us,”81 meaning like whites. For instance, he argued that, “they had converted while slaves, had married and were no longer polygamous.”82 The crux of his argument was along these lines—that if Afro-Curaçaoans were given equal opportunities, they would be on an equal level to whites, and he bolstered his arguments by looking at “[…] the progress they have made since their liberation.”83 Chumaceiro used the yearly “Colonial Reports” (Kolonial Verslagen) sent by Dutch colonial territories to the Ministry of Colonies to show evidence that the (newly) freed slaves were doing very well, and that the fears that they would rise up against the whites were unfounded. For instance, he quoted extensively from the Report of 1874, which stated: The relationship between the slaves freed in 1863 and the rest of the population relieves us. The difference that existed shortly after the emancipation between freely born blacks and those who were enslaved has long disappeared in the interests of equality and the community, so from a moral as well as a societal perspective, the situation of the emancipated is favorable.84

Chumaceiro went on to note that in the Report from 1884, emancipated slaves were not even mentioned as a separate group anymore.85 Chumaceiro then wrote of his own experience on the island, and in these passages we can glimpse most clearly the sorts of horizontal, though by no means completely symmetrical, relationships between Afro-­ Curaçaoans and Jews. He described how he had lived for 40 years on the island, of which 25 were spent practicing as a lawyer at the Court of Curaçao (Hof van Justitie), and in this capacity had come into contact with all parts of the society of the island, including the Afro-Curaçaoans. Chumaceiro asserted that the “blacks and coloreds” had made great progress, especially considering how little the government had done for them, and how much remained to be done. In writing so, he implicitly criticized both the colonial government and that of The Netherlands for not doing more for the Afro-Curaçaoan population. It was, in fact, “amazing” (wonderbaar) how far the Afro-Curaçaoans had come. Chumaceiro argued  Chumaceiro, Zal het kiesrecht, 25.  Ibid., 26. 83  Ibid., 26–27. 84  Ibid., 39. 85  Ibid., 39. 81 82

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that, “The development of blacks cannot be compared to that of other races” due to the discrimination they had suffered.86 Chumaceiro used as an example the Roman Catholic Church, which, as was mentioned above, was predominantly Black, though most of the priests were white. In the districts outside Willemstad, the Church kept up schools that were, according to Chumaceiro: full of students, and where boys and girls get some education, though it is rather limited. Nevertheless, many, though not most, read, write, and do arithmetic. These schools get very little financing from the colonial coffers. And that’s all there is to help the blacks in the countryside develop, and this is where the majority of them live.87

Apparently, Chumaceiro had a fair amount of contact with these schools, and was sometimes an examiner, because he wrote: It is untrue to say that blacks are not as easily educated and not as able to make progress as whites. If they were to be placed in similar circumstances, in schools that were as good, if it were ensured that teachers gave them the same amount of attention, then everyone would be quite quickly convinced that the spirit of blacks and coloreds is not less than that of whites. The teacher must not be biased against the black student.88

In fact, Chumaceiro argued that he often saw black students who were as good as whites in answering their exam questions. “It was not rare that at such events [exams] our attention was drawn to a curly head, with pitch black skin, from whose eyes we could see spirit and intelligence glimmer, and who could give a good and correct answer to all the questions just like his lily white fellow student.”89 Lastly, Chumaceiro’s defense of Afro-Curaçaoan suffrage was based on countering Hamelberg’s evocation of the Haitian Revolution. Interestingly, Chumaceiro partially rejected the accepted interpretation of the Revolution,  Ibid., 39–40. It is remarkable how similar Chumaceiro’s rhetoric parallels the writing of European Christian reformers and Jews who wrote about “the Jews.” Christian Wilhelm Dohm and Moses Mendelssohn immediately come to mind. It would require more research to discover whether, or to what degree, he was familiar with Enlightenment-era literature about “the Jewish question.” 87  Ibid., 40. 88  Ibid., 41. 89  Ibid. 86

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asserting that, “Not everything we read about or that is said about Haiti is true. Those writing about it such as Sir Spencer wanted to make the Black Republic look as ‘black’ (bad) as possible, and therefore [he] exaggerated.”90 He then went on to contextualize the Haitian Revolution within the larger region, pointing out that “Revolutions are the norm rather than the exception throughout Central and South America,”91 thus, implicitly, drawing attention to Hamelberg’s racism by his singling out of the only revolution in the region led entirely by people of color. Chumaceiro also dismissed Hamelberg’s arguments by pointing out that although the islands are in the same region, “Haiti is much bigger than Curaçao, production is different, the history of maroons, and so forth is so different as to be incomparable.”92 Chumaceiro’s final salvo against Hamelberg’s charges was predicated upon what he saw as a faulty logic—that should the AfroCuraçaoans receive the vote on Curaçao, they would behave the same way as did the Haitians: Would the negroes of the future be so stupid as not to realize that should such excesses occur, punishment would immediately follow? Would they be so free of all understanding that they would not foresee that even should the Netherlands let them go unpunished, they could not for one moment enjoy their independence because without due process the nearby Republics would take them [Curaçao] over? No! The writer [Hamelberg] cannot have been in earnest. It was just a sensational tirade, made without deep thought about the subject. If the writer really believes in earnest that Curacao will become a second Haiti, then his bias against Curaçao is so exceedingly great, that we fear that his sickness is not to be cured, at least we declare ourselves incapable of curing such an illness and do not even want to try.93

Chumaceiro ended his defense of Afro-Curaçaoan suffrage by deftly emphasizing the unity of all the people of Curaçao—Jews, Blacks, and whites. For instance, he wrote extensively of the celebrations commemorating the 25th anniversary of the abolition of slavery on July 1, 1888. According to Chumaceiro, everyone on the island celebrated, “regardless of race or color or religion.”94 He also quite intentionally and specifically  Ibid., 27–28.  Ibid., 28–29. 92  Ibid., 30–31. 93  Ibid., 31. 94  Ibid., 42. 90 91

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bound Afro-Curaçaoans and Jews together by their use of Papiamentu, the local creole language by referring to it as “our beautiful language.”95 Though, ultimately, Chumaceiro’s efforts were in vain, and the right to vote was not granted until 1937 for property-holding men, and not universally granted to men and women across the board until 1948, he is still revered today on the island for his forward-thinking view on voting rights. In fact, at the opening of the first session of the Legislative Chamber in 1938, a tribute was paid to Chumaceiro’s memory. The Rabbi at the time, Isaac S. Emmanuel (who later became author of the definitive History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles), was asked to speak at this session, which emphasized the close identification of the Jewish community with the political life of the island, a point emphasized in 1941 when the leading newspaper of Curaçao, Amigoe di Curaçao, frankly stated that, “The modern Jewish community shall find fertile ground in the political life of Curaçao, as religion and politics are connected for the Jews, far more so than for the [black] Catholics.”96 This was a political life that, by that point, included Afro-Curaçaoans. This Jewish support for Afro-Curaçaoan suffrage continued once some voting rights were allowed in 1937. Sephardic Jews supported the National People’s Party (NVP) headed by Moises da Costa Gomez, himself of mixed Sephardic-Afro-Curaçaoan descent, when it was formed in 1946. This was a support shared by the Catholic rural population and the Afro-­Curaçaoan elite, but not by the white Protestants, who supported the Democratic Party. Prior to this, the Sephardim had supported the Catholic Party, along with the vast majority of Afro-Curaçaoans.97 When then Minister of Justice, Ramez Jorge Isa, was interviewed in 1965, he claimed that 95% of Jews voted for the NVP, a support he asserted developed  because “they put their own interests above that of the autonomy of Curaçao [which his

95  Ibid., 6. For more relationships between Blacks and Jews, see Robert Philipson, The Identity Question: Blacks and Jews in Europe and America (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); John 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, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 314–34; and Harvey Chisick, “On the Margins of the Enlightenment: Blacks and Jews,” The European Legacy 21, no. 2 (2016): 127–44. 96  Amigoe di Curaçao, November 27, 1941, 2. 97  Schrils, Een Democratie in gevaar, 126.

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Democratic Party {DP} supported].”98 Whatever the reason for the largescale Jewish support of the NVP, this support allied them firmly with the overwhelming majority of the Afro-Curaçaoan population. That the imperatives of political interests bring quite disparate groups into alliance is hardly a new observation, and that is not the point of this section. Rather, the point is that political participation and alliances between (Sephardic) Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans in the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century give us a glimpse of how minority participation has shaped the political processes of Curaçao. Jews and Afro-­Curaçaoans, comprising the majority of the population of the island during this chronology, though both defined to varying degrees as minorities, saw their interests as being aligned, as Chumaceiro’s pamphlet argues. This shared interest was concretely manifested in the membership of the NVP, which was overwhelmingly Sephardic Jewish and (black) Catholic. These political associations were quite formative for Curaçao as a whole, as it moved from a colonial dependency governed by a governor appointed from the metropolitan Netherlands to a semi-self-governing entity. Moreover, looking at this interaction in the political sphere helps move us beyond the framework of slavery. Although slavery and its repercussions are, without doubt, very important for understanding the foundations of Jewish-Afro-Curaçaoan relationships, to view these relationships only through this lens is to obscure the more complicated ways of understanding ethnic interactions, whether on Curaçao, or elsewhere in the post-­slavery colonial world.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at how individuals and groups created horizontal relationships between and across group lines in multiple zones of contact, some of which might have been oppositional, but many of which were also creative and cooperative. This shows that relationships between groups were inherently dynamic and fluid. Horizontal relationships were colored by vertical relations, and were not necessarily corrective of vertical ones. In light of these observations, the relationships between Jews and Afro-­Curaçaoans raise interesting challenges to prevailing narratives about how a “national” society is created, which, in general seem to be predicated upon the idea that various groups are ultimately incorporated into a dominant culture. In this 98  Amigoe de Curaçao, April 20, 1965, 1. Interestingly, when Isa was interviewed in 1998/1999, he claimed that there were many Jews who supported the DP and used as an example the fact that the Treasurer of the party was Jewish. See Oostindie, Curaçao, 55.

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sense, the case of Curaçao is also more broadly applicable. Societies worldwide are becoming ever more complex, with intensified migration changing their ethnic and religious composition. The United States, for instance, now has a majority of “minorities.” As this chapter has suggested, then, it could be that so-called minority groups are as much, or more, constitutive of the national culture than the dominant group, as has been the case on Curaçao.99 Moreover, this critical examination of the interactions between Sephardic Jews and Afro-Curaçaoans challenges the prevailing logic of competition between minority groups which “takes the form of a zero-­ sum struggle for pre-eminence.”100 Indeed, there is a presupposition that “minorities” necessarily and continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of assimilation and opposition.101 As this chapter has shown, the two majority minorities on Curaçao were not always, or even mostly, in opposition to each other, nor were they engaged in sustained attempts at assimilation into the white Protestant “majority,” whether because of internal or external barriers, or some combination of both. Moving beyond the specific case of Curaçao, looking at the horizontal relationships between Afro-Curaçaoans and Jews could lead us to also engage with larger discussions and conceptualizations of creolization in the Caribbean in all its iterations. With a few notable exceptions, the creolization theory has neglected the Jewish presence in the Caribbean despite its  long  history.102 Including Jews in conversations about creolization connects with recent discussions about the intersecting history of Blacks and Jews. This has been a US-based discussion, focusing on either alliances or conflicts between the groups. As this 99  This ties into a growing body of literature that looks at the (political) participation of minorities in the development of nations and nation-states. See Ina Baghdiantz McCabe et  al.,  eds., Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History (Oxford: Berg, 2005) and her The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530–1750) (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999); Jessica Vance Roitman, “Creating Confusion in the Colonies: Jews, Citizenship, and the Dutch and British Atlantics,” Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012): 55–90; and Cátia Antunes and Jessica Vance Roitman, “A War of Words: Sephardi Merchants, (Inter) National Incidents, and Litigation in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1640,” Jewish Culture and History 16, no. 1 (2015): 24–44. 100  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. 101  Shih and Lionnet, Minor Transnationalism, 7. 102  Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 3; Sidney Mintz, The Birth of AfricanAmerican Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Wieke Vink, Creole Jews.

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chapter has shown, this says little about the Caribbean, either in terms of creolization, or in terms of relationships between these groups. In general, colonial powers relied heavily upon binaries. These binaries have, by extension, shaped the terms in which historians and theorists wrote about colonialism.103 The place of Jews in colonial history does not fit neatly into such dichotomous frameworks, nor does the relationship between various minority groups such as Jews within colonial empires. Very often, as was the case on Curaçao, Jews were neither exactly masters nor victims of colonial exploitation, though they were rarely situated on the bottom rung of colonial hierarchies. New directions in the field of colonial history make Jews’ more complex, uncertain, and uneven relationship to colonialism of growing interest.104 Scholars have begun to appreciate the fluid, contested, and ever-­shifting nature of colonial boundaries and categories, and how “in-between” groups such as Jews offer crucial insight about the tensions and contradictions within colonial society more broadly.105 Anthropologist Ann Stoler dubs the history of indigenous whites in the Dutch East Indies a “minor history” for the way that their in-betweenness is at once nonrepresentative and deeply revealing. Along these lines, bringing Jews into the picture enables us to chart what we might call a “comparative minor history” of empires, through which historians utilize the periphery of the colonial experience to rethink the heart of imperial ideology and practice. In the process, we could address better the important question of how Jews’ experiences of empire either tracked alongside or diverged from those of non-Jews and what it meant for colonial societies, and the myriad groups that comprised them, to have Jews incorporated in them.106 103  There is a large body of postcolonial literature that has challenged this perspective. See, for instance, Stuart Hall’s “When Was the Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, eds. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 242–60; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jonathan Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 104  This paragraph is drawn from Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, “Introduction: Engaging Colonial History and Jewish History,” in Colonialism and the Jews, eds. Ethan B.  Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S.  Mandel (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2017), 1–25 105  On this point, see 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, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56, 6. 106  Katz, Leff, and Mandel, “Introduction.”

PART II

Metropoles and Colonies

CHAPTER 5

Galut and Empire: On the Way to Final Redemption José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim

In this chapter, I try to describe the complexity of the relationship between the Jewish minority and the Christian majority in Portugal in a way that goes beyond the underlying assumptions and concepts of a “linear” tolerance or acculturation applied to the past. As I show in the first part of this chapter, my own research reveals that since the Middle Ages, there has been a latent tension between the need to survive in the diaspora and the need to maintain a sense of identity, which often led to contradictory attitudes and feelings of reliance and reluctance in Iberian Jewish communities. Consequently, in the second part, I intend to prove that despite the traumatic events occurring in the late fifteenth century—the general expulsions from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1496), and the forced baptism of Jews in Portugal—the Iberian Jews and their converted descendants (especially in the sixteenth century) engaged in sometimes controversial and contradictory action and dialogue in order to justify their existence in the new circumstances of the Age of Discoveries and imperial expansion. We cannot interpret these lines of action and dialogue as a simple reflection J. A. R. da Silva Tavim Centre for History, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_5

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of an external circumstance: I try to show that all this activity was grounded within the religious framework of the ­community’s foundations, i.e., their teleological perceptions as the Elect People of God. In this context, it will be necessary to add a third part, describing how the Chosen People, particularly the Iberian Jews, took advantage of the discoveries in order to “achieve” the final redemption: the expansion of Sephardic minhag, providentially made possible by the discoveries (and with the participation of Jews and conversos), finally reveals to them that God and the Elect People were on the right track—Galut (exile or diaspora in Hebrew) and empire become synonymous for many Iberian Jews and to some conversos living in Portugal.

Prelude to Empire In his treatise on ethics, Iggeret ha-Musar (1415), the satirical writer Salomo Alami (i.e. ibn Lahmish) presents a dramatic image of the Jewish community of Lisbon. Alami argues that the cause of the persecution of Jews in Catalonia, Castile, and Aragon in 1391, as witnessed by him, is divine punishment for their religious and moral decay. He characterizes Lisbon, the society in which he lives in exile, in the same way. According to him, Lisbon’s rich Jews spend their fortune in a life of idle luxury, while being rather stingy toward their impoverished coreligionists. As the rich are always looking for tax exemptions, taxation falls heavily onto the less fortunate. This piercing portrait is extended to the majority of the community, when he reveals what goes on in the synagogue. Here, the members of the congregation chatter, the elderly snore, the ladies showcase their jewelry, while the free spirits exchange profane books brought from home, and the hazan merges the sacred hymns with songs about love and sex, in order to attract childish spirits and reckless youth.1 Despite all of Alami’s criticism of this “cultural crossover,” historian Carsten Wilke depicts the same Portuguese environment as an example of a deep interrelation between religious and profane knowledge, and points to David ben Yom Tov ibn Bilia as a good representative of this mixed culture, for his prolific and diversified productions which included theological 1  See Carsten L. Wilke, Histoire des Juifs Portugais (Paris: Chandeigne, 2007), 55–56 and 61; Salomo Alami, Igeret musar, trans. Adolf Jellinek (Leipzig: J.  Fischel, 1854), 27 and 10–11. Concerning Alami, see Yitzhak Baer, “A History of the Jews in Christian Spain,” 2 vols., (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), 2:239–243; and Azriel Shochat, “Alami, Solomon,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Cecil Roth et  al., (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1971), 2:501.

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dogma, morals, logic, astrology, and a treatise on the magical characteristics of snake skin, later translated into Latin by Christian scholars.2 There is nothing more symptomatic of Lisbon’s Jewish environment than the views expressed by the native physician, grammarian, and poet, Moses ben Shem Tov ibn Habib (1450–1520), whose Darkhe No’am (Routes of Delight), composed in 1486, praised and glorified the community. He considered it to be a cornerstone of the diaspora. Habib praises Lisbon’s community for its knowledge and observance of Jewish precepts, as well as for its lineages, prosperity, and glory.3 How can one reconcile this idyllic picture with the criticism made by Alami and other chroniclers, who interpret the drama of the expulsion as a divine punishment for the Chosen People’s deviance from their cultural core, their essence and reason for being,4 because of their attraction to the world of the goyim? It is relatively easy to explain such disparate views, particularly since Alami’s purpose was teleological in its content. He wanted to show how Jewish acculturation in the Iberian Peninsula had debased the divine specificity of their culture as the Chosen People. This tampering, which permeated their daily life and also the synagogue service, would certainly lead to a divine punishment like those recorded for posterity in the Bible. Conversely, Ibn Habib’s testimony praises the virtues of “acculturation” and attempts to show the excellence of Lisbon’s community, stressing a perfect link between the culture of the goyim and the preservation and development of their own culture. But was the close relationship between Jews and Christians “straightforwardly hierarchical” in the age of the early Portuguese discoveries? Elliot Horowitz suggests provocatively that not every Jew behaved as a passive victim, and probably some of the accusations made by the Church of sacrilegious acts committed by Jews were fed by widespread Jewish 2  On ibn Bilia see Meyer Kayserling, História dos Judeus em Portugal, trans. Gabriela Borchardt Corrêa da Silva and Anita Novinsky (São Paulo: Pioneira Editora, 1971), 59–60. 3  Darkhe No’am was published in Istanbul, between 1510 and 1514. See the reproduction of this text translated by Arie Schippers, in “Moses ibn Habib: Poet and Migrant,” Studia Rosenthaliana 35, no. 2 (2001): 174–175, who also wrote a biography of the author and is a scholar of his work. 4  See Abraham ben Jacob Saba, Zeror ha-Mor, edited in 1568. An extract is published in David Raphael, ed., The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles: An Anthology of Medieval Chronicles Relating to the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal (North Hollywood: Carmi House Press, 1992), 126–127; and Abraham bar Selomoh [de Terrutiel], Sefer ha-Qabbalah from 1510. An extract is published by Yolanda Moreno Koch, ed., Dos Crónicas hispanoebreas del siglo XV (Barcelona: Riopiedras Ediciones, 1992), 70.

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feelings and acts of revolt, dissatisfaction, and ethical and theological rejection of Christianity5—something quite visible in the virulent texts of anti-­Christian polemicists or in fragments of such texts, usually handwritten, that have come down to us.6 Some evidence proves that this kind of responsive activity is generally more extended than usually thought. Let us look at the case of Francisco Aires, a converso with roots in Spain, imprisoned in Évora’s Inquisition jails in the 1540s. Born in Medina del Campo and baptized in Lousã (Portugal), Aires belonged to the first generation of Jews baptized on Portuguese soil. Later he would settle in Trás-­ os-­Montes, a province in the northwestern corner of Portugal,7 and lived in Braganza as a landowner. The Inquisition accused him of spreading rumors that Jesus was a sorcerer and a conjuror, crucified on a cross made of wicker, as this was charm-proof material, or on a cabbage stalk. Aires also allegedly accused Jesus of having stolen the Temple’s flag banners (semíforos), of making small birds out of plaster and, more importantly, he denied Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and since he was a dead man all things associated with Christianity were “hot air” (cousas de vento).8 Actually, all of his ideas were taken from the Hebrew Toledot Yeshu: The theft of the flag banners and the use of God’s secret name—Shem ha-­ Meforash—enabled Jesus (Yeshu) to make miracles using wizardry with

5  Elliot Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 6  See Daniel Lasker, “Jewish-Christian Polemics in Light of the Expulsion from Spain,” Judaism 41, no. 2 (1992): 148–155; idem, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007); Ram BenShalom, “The Foundation of Christianity in the Historical Perceptions of Medieval Jewry as Expressed in Anonymous Various Elements on the Topic of Christian Faith, London, BL, MS Addit 27129, 88b–92a,” in Conflict and Religious Conversation in Latin Christendom: Studies in Honor of Ora Limor, eds. Israel Yuval and Ram Ben-Shalom (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2014), 221–52; Carsten L. Wilke, The Marrakesh Dialogues: A Gospel Critique and Jewish Apology from the Spanish Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 7  In that time, the Évora Inquisition had jurisdiction in Trás-os-Montes. See Elvira de Azevedo Mea, A Inquisição de Coimbra no século XVI: A instituição, os homens e a sociedade (Porto: Fundação Engenheiro António de Almeida, 1997), 67. 8  Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon) (ANTT), Inquisição de Évora, proc. 6117, fol. 3, 7v°, 15, 89v°–90v° and 160. See also José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “A ‘Fantastic’ Tale of the New Christians concerning the immigration of the Jews to Portugal,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 11 (2015): 166. On Francisco Aires see María José P. Ferro Tavares, “Judeus e conversos castelhanos em Portugal,” Anales de la Universidad de Alicante 6 (1987): 358.

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this magic name.9 We know that Toledot Yeshu existed at least since the tenth century, because there are fragments of this narrative in the Cairo Genizah written in Aramaic.10 We know of its use in Castile in the late fourteenth century in a polemical work by Semtob ibn Shaprut,11 as well as in Aragon, where some Jews successfully won back a former coreligionist who had converted to Christianity using extracts of the Toledot.12 We can assume that Aires may have had access to a Christian version of the Toledot Yeshu, since the Franciscan monk Alfonso de Espina copied Raimundus Martinus’ work Pugio Fidei adversus Mauros and Judaeos (1280), which included extracts of Toledot Yeshu,13 in his famous Fortalitium Fidei, published in 1470.14 This is only a hypothesis. However, Paola Tartakoff has proven that Toledot Yeshu circulated orally throughout Iberian Jewry.15 A similar pattern can be seen with the narrative describing the expulsion of the Jews from France, which formed part of the memory and the teleological speculation concerning the future of many Iberian Jews. Luis de

 In the Vienna, Strasbourg, and Wasengeil versions of the Toledot Yeshu, the Shem haMeforash was inscribed on a rock put inside of the Holy of the Holies. See L’Evangile du Ghetto ou comment les juifs se racontaient Jésus, ed. Jean-Pierre Osier (Paris: Berg International, 1984), 38–39, 71–72, 89–90. 10  See Peter Schäfer, “Introduction,” in Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, eds. Yaacov Deutsch, Michael Meerson, and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 3. 11  See Michael Sokoloff, “The Date and Provenance of the Aramaic Toledot Yeshu on the Basis of Aramaic Dialectology,” in Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, eds. Yaacov Deutsch, Michael Meerson, and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 13. 12  See Paola Tartakoff, “The Toledot Yeshu and Jewish-Christian Conflict in the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” in Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, eds. Yaacov Deutsch, Michael Meerson, and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 297–309. 13  See Yaacov Deutsch, “The Second Life of Jesus: Christian Reception of Toledot Yeshu,” in Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, eds. Yaacov Deutsch, Michael Meerson, and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 289. 14  On other works of the same author, see Alisa Meyuhas Ginio, La forteresse de la foi (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1998). 15  Tartakoff, “The Toledot,” 303. Concerning the figure of Jesus in Toledot Yeshu see also the excellent articles of Alexandra Cuffel, “Jesus, the Misguided Magician: The (Re-)emergence of the Toledot Yeshu in Medieval Iberia and its Retelling in Ibn Sahula’s Fables from the Distant Past,” Henoch 37, no. 1 (2015): 4–16, and Alexandra Cuffel, “Between Epic Entertainment and Polemical Exegesis: Jesus and Antihero,” in Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean, ed. Ryan Szpiech (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), ch. 10. I am indebted to Alexandra Cuffel for those references. 9

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Carvajal, a native of Trás-os-Montes also imprisoned by Évora’s Inquisition, told a version of it. This Carvajal was an ancestor of the renowned governor of Nuevo Léon, Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva (1539–1590), and of his namesake nephew.16 Luis de Carvajal was born to Álvaro and Catarina de Carvajal in Fermoselle, though he went to live in Sambade, on the Portuguese side of the border in Trás-os-Montes. He could speak Castilian even after a long sojourn in Portugal, since he replied “no more, no more” (no mas, no mas) to the Lawyer Manuel Álvares. Carvajal was about 58–60 years old in 1548 when he informed the Inquisitors of his circumcision, but had forgotten his Jewish name, as he was later baptized in Fermoselle by Father Miguel Gonzales,17 which meant his conversion in Spain before the expulsion in 1492.18 Carvajal made a sort of adaptation of the celebrated “History of Balaam and Josaphat” in his fantastic story of the expulsion of the Jews from France. Much has been written to prove the Indian origin of this narrative and its integration in a Christian context is fully understood given its original virtues and similarities with the teachings of Christ. Excerpts of the “History of Balaam and Josaphat” also entered into the Jewish universe, as Marie Campbell has proven, especially the crucial episode of the “Three Teachings of the Bird,” sometimes specified as a nightingale. This version is also present in Jewish Folklore with some variants, where it acquires its own idiosyncrasy, since here the bird communicated in the seventy tongues spoken by Adam/humankind.19 Abraham ben Hasdai of Barcelona ­translated this narrative from Arabic to Hebrew in the thirteenth century

16  See Alfonso Toro, Los Judíos en la Nueva España (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), 278; and Pedro Antonio Escalante Arce, “Apuntes sobre la inquisición mexicana y los judíos portugueses en el siglo XVII,” in Actas do IV Congresso das Academias da História Ibero-Americanas, ed. Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa de História, 1996), 400–401. 17  ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, proc. 8976, fol. 42–44. 18  See Luís Suárez, La Expulsión de los judíos de España (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992), 325–27 and 341–44; María José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, “Judeus e conversos castelhanos  em Portugal,”  Anales de la Universidad de Alicante: Historia Medieval 6 (1987): 341–468; François Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims in Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496–7) (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 122. 19  Campbell, Marie, “The Three Teachings of the Bird,” in Studies in Biblical and Jewish Folklore, eds. Raphael Patai, Francis Lee Utley, and Dov Noy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 97–107.

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with the title Ben ha-Melech veha-Nazir.20 Luis de Carvajal merged these traditions in his confession to the Inquisition. In it, Carvajal pictured Christ holding a cross in his hand and carrying a small bundle of wood on top of his head, while facing and talking to the King of France in the presence of his Jewish physician: I am here in a great penance given to me by God our Father. And I carry this small bundle of wood in my head with which I immolate myself twice a day for every evil committed to the Jews, for every evil committed by the gentiles to the people of the Jews for my sake.21

In this version, narrated in a Christian context within the Inquisition jail, Christ displays a saving behavior toward the Jews. But was it always like this? Does Carvajal attempt to ennoble the figure of the “Jewish” Jesus, often denigrated at the heart of Jewish Culture? These Jewish views reveal that the social and cultural acculturation of the Jews in the Christian Medieval universe, and particularly in the Iberian Peninsula, was not universal, especially considering that in both cultural universes defense of religious identity is characterized by the denial of other near and neighboring identities. In this prelude to the Portuguese overseas discoveries, we are dealing with people who, even though they took part in some of its activities, kept important principles of religious perseverance and wariness toward others—a different, more selective attitude to acculturation, as referred to by historian Kenneth Stow.22 Iberian Jews benefited from this acculturationist 20  See Abraham ben Hasdai, Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir (Barlaam and Josaphat), ed. A.  M. Habermann (Tel Aviv: Mahbarot le-sifrut be-siyu’a Mosad ha-Rav Kuk, 1950), 346–60. 21  “Ando por aqui em grande penitência que me deu Deus Nosso Senhor. E trago este feixinho de lenha na cabeça com o qual me queimo duas vezes cada dia por quanto mal se faz aos judeus. E por quanto mal fazem os gentios a esta gente dos judeus por amor de mim.” ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, proc. 8976, fol. 38–39v°. My translation. See also Tavim, “A ‘Fantastic’ Tale,” 154–55. 22  Kenneth Stow, Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Northampton: University of Washington Press, 2001). Catalina Cabán-Owen considers advisedly that “selective adaptation also suggests that acculturation occurs in some areas and not in others. For example, acculturation can occur in the educational arena with an exchange of knowledge and ideas, but not in the religious arena where unique rituals of each culture are maintained.” Catalina Cabán-Owen, A Study of the Acculturation: Experience of Puerto Rico Migrant Women: Manifestation and Meaning Making Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 7–8. An exemplary case in this sense is provided in the book authored

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position, because it allowed them to participate in the new socioeconomic enterprise, while keeping their religious and ideological universe idiosyncratic despite this symbiosis and cooperation. Though some of their practices resembled those of Iberian Christians, Iberian Jews always followed a line of activity deriving from the will and the need to maintain their own cultural universe, which explains their world view, performance, and conduct vis-à-vis other people and other Jews.

In the Beginning Was the Empire Let us return to the story on the expulsion of the Jews from France as narrated by Luis de Carvajal. He ends his narrative by saying that the Jews moved to “Spain” seven years after their expulsion from France, where they lived until the reign of D.  Fernando. Afterwards some moved to Portugal, while others chose Muslim countries, and a group stayed in Castile. Carvajal adds that Portugal meant “port of here (gá), port of salvation and port of remission,” where on one side lived the “Egyptians” (egyptores), that is the Castilians, and on the other was the traditional end of the world (Cape São Vicente is the southernmost point of Portugal). In other words, Portugal was seen as the end of the tribulations and hardships for the Children of Israel.23 Luis de Carvajal’s story seems clear regarding the desired New Christian integration, as Jesus appears to be an “intermediary” character with a positive image due to his sacrifice to atone for Christian misdeeds against the Jews. If the Spaniards were the Egyptians of the Old Testament, Portugal was the end of Western Europe to Carvajal, and appeared as a messianic destiny for the exiled. Carvajal’s exposition reveals a common sentiment for this time, as also seen in Samuel Usque’s book, Consolação às Tribulações de Israel, printed in 1553.24 But why did the destiny of the Jews after their by Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (Yale: Yale University Press, 1984). For the definition of “acculturation” in 1936, see Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herkovits, “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 38, no. 1 (1936): 149–52. For a modern perspective of the evolution of theories of acculturation, see Kevin M. Chun, Pamela Balls Organista, and Gerardo Marín, eds., Acculturation: Advances in Theory, Measurement, and Applied Research (Decade of Behavior) (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003). 23  ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, proc. 8976, fol. 39v°–40. 24  See Samuel Usque, Consolação às Tribulações de Israel, eds. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and José V. de Pina Martins, 2  vols. (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989), vol. 2,

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expulsions from France and Castile have to be Portugal according to Luis de Carvajal? The teleological discourse of Luis de Carvajal changes dramatically in the sequence of his trial, perhaps due to inquisitorial pressure, which led him to consider the figure of Jesus Christ to be near the image of Yeshu in the famous Toledot. For instance, Carvajal asked for an audience with the king in order to tell all the bishops that the Christian Law was false while the Mosaic Law was the only true one.25 And he also told the lawyer Manuel Álvares that Jesus Christ made a penance with a cross on his shoulders to atone for all the evil committed against the Jews.26 Luis de Carvajal was eventually pardoned by a letter from Pope Paul III, dated June 10, 1548,27 after confessing to his “heresy.” His family and name continued with his namesake governor in Spanish America and the latter’s “martyred” nephew.28 But did his final teleological dream not coincide with the dreams of many of his converso-fellows, to transform Catholic Portugal into a Jewish Portugal, especially when this westernmost part of Europe, in the midst of the age of building empires, was seen as a concrete and messianic step toward a Jewish adventure of global scale? Since he considered Portugal to be the end of the tribulations and hardships of the Children of Israel after their expulsion from other ­ European countries, this means that he believed that the Jews reached a new stage here, maybe one conducive to the discoveries he had known. We suspect the existence of a connection with the millenarianism characterizing the Portuguese Empire during the reigns of Kings D. Manuel

Dialogo Terceiro. For a modern French edition see Samuel Usque, Consolation aux tribulations d’Israël (1553), trans. Lúcia Liba Mucznik, ed. Carsten Wilke (Paris: Chandeigne, 2014). 25  ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, proc. 8976, fol. 14 and 41. 26  Ibid., fol. 41v°. 27  Ibid., fol. 94v°. 28  About those relatives see Martin Cohen, The Martyr: Luis de Carvajal: A Secret Jew in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 35. About branches of the Carvajal family see also Martin Cohen, “The Religion of Luís Rodriguez Carvajal,” American Jewish Archives 20 (1968): 33–62; Seymour Liebman, The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame and the Inquisition (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970); Eva Alexandra Uchmany, La vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España, 1580–1606 (México: Archivo General de la Nación, 1982); David Gitlitz, Secreto y engaño: La religión de los criptojudíos, trans. Maria Luísa Balseiro (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 2003); and Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), ch. 3.

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(1495–1521) and D.  João III (1521–1557), disregarding who was the messiah to the Christians and to the Jews. In both cases we can observe the insistence on a new time—a time of harmony and material abundance—as a sign of the beginning of a messianic age. Also in both cases the idea of the superiority of the Elect People—Jews and Portuguese alike—is based on the reality of its minuteness and humility—on what attracts divine favor as well as common loyalty to God. The idea of Portugal as the end of the tribulations and hardships for the Children of Israel seems to have a connection with the dream of a messianic Portuguese imperialism bringing about the unification of the world by the Portuguese, where D. Manuel is seen as the future universal Emperor.29 As António José Saraiva remarked, Padre António Vieira tried to harmonize different versions of the immigration of the Jews to the biblical Sepharad in his famous História do Futuro, written in the second half of the seventeenth century, to prove how this phenomenon benefited Christian realms: as among these migrants we can find the prophet Malaquias or Samuel, who became Pedro, the future bishop of Braga, later known as S.  Pedro de Rates, converted by Santiago. So, according to Vieira, the biblical prophecy in Obadiah (Abdias)—that the Children of Israel who migrated to Sepharad would conquer Austral territories—would apply to Israel and then to Portugal (in this sequence), as the Portuguese discovered and conquered these “southern lands.”30 We can ask if this idea of Vieira’s on the prophetic migration of Jews to Portugal is not, as we have seen in Carvajal, a common eschatological topic in the messianic circles of Jews (and conversos) and Christians in this age, with different patterns and purposes. Let us explore a little of the prophetic topic of Portugal as the Westernmost point in Europe. The famous shoemaker from Trancoso, Gonçalo Anes Bandarra (1500–1556), sought after by the New Christians,31 said in his prophetic Trovas: 29  See mostly Luís Filipe F.  R.  Thomaz, L’Idée imperiale manueline (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1990, offprint). 30  António José Saraiva, História e utopia: Estudos sobre Vieira, trans. Maria de Santa Cruz (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1992), 83–84. See Padre António Vieira, “História do Futuro (I) [ca. 1649],” in Padre António Vieira: Obras escolhidas, eds. António Sérgio and Hernâni Cidade, vol. 8 (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1953), 244–49. 31  See Maria José P. Ferro Tavares, “Características do messianismo judaico em Portugal,” in Estudos Orientais II: O Legado Cultural de Judeus e Mouros, ed. António Augusto Tavares (Lisbon: Instituto Oriental, 1991), 255–61.

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Strong name is that of Portugal, Such an excellent name, It is the King of the West Cape Leading over all. You have no equal King of so many merits There is no comparison, according to me From the West to the East.32

The position of Portugal can be considered peripheral at first sight, but becomes privileged in the Christian or Jewish prophetic mind, thus opening the way to millenarian speculations. The western end of Europe seems to mean mirus locus, far from disturbances, which facilitates the transition to a better stage of humanity. For example, a man with an important reputation during the Portuguese Restoration (1640), São Frei Gil (d. 1265)— one of the first Dominicans in Portugal, prophesied: Portugal, thanks to its kings, will wait for a long time and suffer in many ways. But God will be conducive and, unexpectedly, [Portugal] will be redeemed by someone not expected. […] Everything will be transformed. […] It will live again a Golden Age. Peace will reign everywhere. Blessed are those who will see it (this?).33

The redefinition of Portugal as a Jewish Kingdom—the same Kingdom considered the end of the tribulations and hardships for the Sons of Israel—in the metaphysical ideals of Luis de Carvajal seems to incorporate messianic topoi developed in the Christian milieu. The idealized “Jewish Portugal” is formally the neighbor of the mirus locus expressed by Christian Portuguese messianic ideals. But Luis de Carvajal’s “Portuguese dream” also reveals the powerful influence of the Iberian Jewish eschatology

32  “Forte nome é Portugal, / Um nome tão excelente, / É Rei do cabo poente, / Sobre todos principal. / Não se acha vosso igual / Rei de tal merecimento. / Não se acha, segundo sento, / Do Poente ao Oriental.” Profecias do Bandarra [1603 edition by D.  João de Castro], ed. Fernando Jorge Santos Costa (Trancoso: Trancoso Eventos, n.d.), 58. 33  “Portugal, por parte de seus reis, gemerá por muito tempo e padecerá de muitas maneiras. Mas Deus te será propício e, não esperadamente, será remido por um não Esperado. […] Tudo será transformado. […] Reviverá a Idade do Ouro. Por toda a parte reinará a Paz. Bem-aventurados os que virem isto.” José van den Basselaar, O Sebastianismo: História sumária (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1987), 43.

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and messianic hopes expressed by the well-known scholar D.  Isaac Abravanel.34 One of the most important issues on “the way to the final redemption” was the end of the Galut—the reunion of the Lost Tribes—and the establishment of the Fifth Empire as a universal empire. D.  Isaac Abravanel remarked that the fourth empire was still the Respublica Christiana in Rome, the papal capital. Yet according to Abravanel, its end was near, as shown in the struggle between the Dar al-Islam and the West. A Fifth Empire would be established with the coming of the Messiah and the recreation of the Monarchy of Israel. Conversely, to the Christians, as can be seen in Father António Vieira’s works, the Fifth Empire was the Universal Christian Empire, which in Vieira’s case was the Portuguese Empire.35 As I have stressed above, the agonistic ideal of Luis de Carvajal seems to be transformed throughout his trial: ultimately, his main objective is to transform Christian Portugal into a Jewish Portugal, but there is no sign of the Ten Tribes. Instead, this topic is present in the teleological discourse of another man imprisoned in the same jail as Carvajal: João Dias, a New Christian from a town in Alentejo called Odemira. According to his testimony, France expelled its Jews to Castile, which in turn expelled them to Portugal, and from here they went into exile in Flanders, where Dias expected the reunion of nine and a half of the Lost Jewish Tribes, to wait for the coming of the Messiah, and afterwards the Jews would rule the world. In his view Jesus was a simple messenger, because during his lifetime only two and a half Jewish tribes lived together, while the rest were in hiding.36 João Dias was well aware of the world around him, as com34  Among the many works about D. Isaac Abravanel, see Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society  of America, 1982); Jean-Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel: La mémoire et l’espérance (Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1992); Isaac Abravanel, Letters, ed. and trans.  Cedric-Cohen Skalli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007). 35  Besides Nethanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, 205–42; and Maria José P. Ferro Tavares, “Características do messianismo judaico em Portugal,” 248–53, see among others Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schoken Books, 1971); Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Maria Ana Travassos Valdez, Historical Interpretations of the “Fifth Empire”: Dynamics of Periodization from Daniel to António Vieira, S.J. (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 36  ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, proc. 6047, fol. 93–94 and 110. The question of the nine and a half tribes arises as the tribes that formed the (Northern) Kingdom of Israel were Reuben, Simon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulon, Ephraim, and half of the tribe of Manasseh. So it is assumed that in the times of Jesus only the tribes of Judah,

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merce and the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (1536) generated a migratory flux of New Christians to Flanders. Most of the conversos settled in Antwerp were connected with the Portuguese factory, as they hoped to be protected from the grip of the Holy Office.37 In the converso milieu of early modern Portugal, and also in the Jewish milieu abroad, the question of the reunion of the Ten Lost Tribes became, as Benzion Netanyahu has stressed, deeply connected with the issue of the discovery of new worlds, where it was increasingly thought that the Lost Tribes were hidden.38 In the prophetic dream of João Dias, New Christians running to Flanders met the Ten Tribes coming from the newly discovered countries, thus escaping from the Inquisition’s grip. This powerful topic “overflows” to the Christian milieu, as seen in the “Third Dream of Bandarra,” where he spoke of the hidden Ten Lost Tribes and of their reunion.39 This is also present in the eschatological thoughts of Father António Vieira, even if he incorporated it to create a Universal Kingdom of Christ. In his Esperanças de Portugal, the Jesuit uses the topic of the sudden reappearance of the Ten Tribes, which a Portuguese king—King John IV (1640–1656)—will present to the pope and to “the faith of Christ:” in fact, a sign of the quick concretization of a Universal Christian Kingdom, ruled by that resurrected king.40 Of course, the Inquisitors of Benjamin, and half of the tribe of Manasseh survived in the Judaea Roman Kingdom. See “Tribus Perdues, Dix,” in Dictionnaire Encyclopédique du Judaïsme, ed. Geoffrey Wigoder (Paris: Cerf, Robert Laffont, 1996), 1030–31. 37  See among others, J. A. Goris, Étude sue les colonies marchandes meridionales (Portugaises, Espagnoles, Italiennes) à Anvers, de 1488 à 1567: Contribution à l’histoire des débuts du capitalisme moderne (Leuven: Uystpruyst, 1925); José Gentil da Silva, Stratégie des affaires à Lisbonne entre 1595 et 1607: Lettres marchandes des Rodrigues d’Évora et Veiga (Paris: Centre des Recherches Historiques, 1956); Valentin Vasquez de Prada, Lettres marchandes d’Anvers (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960); Israel Salvator Révah, “Pour l’histoire des marranes à Anvers: Recensement de la nation portugaise de 1571 à 1666,” Revue des Études Juives 122 (1963): 123–74; Hermann Kellenbenz, “I Mendes, I Rodrigues, e I Ximenes nei loro rapporti commerciali con Venezia,” in Gli Ebrei e Venezia, secoli XIV–XVIII: Atti del Convegno internazionale organizzato dall’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano della Fondazione Giorgio Cini, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan: Edizioni Comunità, 1987), 153–56; and Aron di Leone Leoni, The Hebrew Portuguese Nations in Antwerp and London at the Time of Charles V and Henry VIII: New Documents and Interpretations (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2005). 38  Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, 229–30. 39  Profecias do Bandarra, 81–85. 40  Padre António Vieira, “Esperanças de Portugal, Quinto Império do Mundo” [1659], in Padre António Vieira, Obras escolhidas, eds. António Sérgio and Hernâni Resende, vol. 6 (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1952), 34–37.

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Coimbra who judged Vieira stressed in their sentence read on December 23, 1667 the heterodoxy of his proposition concerning the “Ten Tribes of Israel (Exodus XIII), which disappeared more than two thousand years ago without a trace […].”41 The “migration” of this eschatological topic to the messianic Portuguese agenda, with transformations enabling its insertion into a Christian teleology, also reveals how strong and generalized it was at the core of Iberian Jews’ agenda. An extraordinary letter whose authorship is attributed to the Jewish moneylender Davide di Dattilo da Tivoli by Cédric-Cohen Skalli and the late Michele Luzzati in their book Lucca 1493: Un sequestro di lettere ebraiche: Edizione e commento storico, contains a relationship between the topic of the Lost Tribes and the first discoveries. In the letter, probably written about 1496, David says that while in Siena with his brother-in-law—maybe Isaac da Vitale da Pisa—he was informed by him of the arrival in Lisbon of Spanish ships carrying some eighty Sons of Israel. We are dealing here with the arrival of Christopher Columbus from America in 1493, bearing aboard his ships some natives taken in Hispaniola. Columbus kidnapped around 10–25 natives and took them to Spain with him. The seven or eight natives that arrived in Spain alive caused a strong furor.42 Far from the real facts, this representative of the Jewish milieu tried to inscribe this event in the old patrimonial memory about the Lost Tribes. The seven or eight natives are transformed into eighty in the news reaching Davide di Dattilo da Tivoli in Italy; but more importantly, according to his story, they were described as being “Hebrews [of Judea] or Hebrews sons of Israel.” The question is whether they descended from Judah or the northern kingdom of Israel, that is, whether they were from the Lost Tribes or not. David insisted on the

41  “[…] os dez tribos de Israel (Êxod. XIII), que desapareceram há mais de dois mil anos, sem se saber deles,” in “Sentença que no Tribunal do Santo Ofício de Coimbra se leu ao padre António Vieira” [Coimbra, December 23, 1667],  in Padre António Vieira, Obras escolhidas, eds. António Sérgio and Hernâni Resende, vol. 6 (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1952), 183. 42  See among others, William D. Phillips and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, Portugal e o descobrimento Europeu da América: Cristóvão Colombo e os portugueses (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda, 1992); James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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truthfulness of the news, even if the Jews could live no more in Spain.43 But this news was probably transmitted by Jews allowed to enter Spain for business, or those who visited it in disguise; or by marranos exchanging correspondence with their Jewish relatives living outside the Iberian Peninsula.44 We can illustrate the “transmigration” of the old central topic of the Ten Tribes to the new early modern Jewish and converso context, enriched and adopted to the conjuncture of the European discoveries and expansion: a phenomenon whose nuances and complexity have been studied in relation to the political and (or) intellectual activities of such different men, separated in time and ideas, as David Reubeni45 or ­ Menasseh ben Israel.46

43  “[…] ebrei [of Judea] o ebrei figli di Israele.” Cédric-Cohen Skalli and Michele Luzati, Lucca 1493: Un sequestro di lettere ebraiche: Edizione e commento storico (Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Centro di Studi Ebraici, 2014), 189–90. I thank Cédric-Cohen Skalli for giving me a copy of this important work. 44  See among others Mercedes García-Arenal, “‘Un réconfort pour ceux qui sont dans l’atteinte:’ Prophétie et millénarisme dans la Péninsule Ibérique et au Maghreb (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 220, no. 4 (2003): 473–82; Bernardo López Belinchón, “Aventureros, negociantes y maestros dogmatizadores: Judíos norteafricanos y judeoconversos ibéricos en la España del siglo XVII,” in Entre el Islam y occidente: Los judíos magrebíes en la edad moderna, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal (Madrid: Casa de Velásquez, 2003), 69–99; Natalia Muchnik, “Des intrus en Pays d’Inquisition: présence et activités des juifs dans l’Espagne du XVIIe siècle,” Revue des études juives 164, nos. 1–2 (2005): 119–56; José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Juifs de Mafoma dans le Portugal catholique (XVe–XVIIe siècle),” in Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 2: Passages et contacts en Méditerranée, eds. Jocelyne Dahklya and Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013), 613–38; idem, “’Tempo de judeus e mouros:’ quadros das relações entre judeus e muçulmanos no horizonte português (séculos XVI–XVII),” Lusitania Sacra, 2nd ser. 27 (2013): 59–79. 45  See among others Ervin Birnbaum, “David Reubeni’s Indian origin,” Historia Judaica 20 (1958): 3–30; Miriam Eliav-Feldon, “Invented Identities: Credulity in the Age of Prophecy and Exploration,” Journal of Early Modern History 3, no. 3 (1992): 203–32; idem, “Portugal, Prester John and the Lost Tribes of Israel”, in Vasco da Gama: Homens, Viagens e Culturas: Actas do Congresso Internacional, ed. Joaquim Romero de Magalhães, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2001): 301–37; José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “David Reubeni: um ‘embaixador’ inusitado,” in João III e o Império: Actas do Congresso Internacional comemorativo do seu nascimento, eds. Roberto Carneiro and Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: CHAM, 2004), 683–715; Moti Benmelech, “History, Politics, and Messianism: David ha-Reuveni’s Origin and Mission,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 35, no. 1 (2011): 35–60. 46  This is a very prolific subject. See among others, Menasseh ben Israel, Espérance d’Israël, eds. and trans. Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon (Paris: Vrin, 1979); Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication

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What consequences did this phenomenon have in the age of the Iberian discoveries? If in the Middle Ages and on the eve of the discoveries, and also during its first stages, we found a “Jewish Cultural Agenda” adapted and improved in a “Theater of Acculturation” in a Christian context, what were its repercussions in terms of the Jewish cultural mainstream? And what consequences did this have in terms of contacts with other people, and of how these contacts were interpreted?

Proselytize or “Sephardize?” Let us for now forget about the Lost Tribes—a major controversy and topic of debate between Menasseh ben Israel, some English millenarian intellectuals, and other intellectuals—though we verified its immediate inclusion as a matter of paramount importance in the Jewish milieu at the dawn of the discoveries. Let us first look at facts pertaining to daily life that are not related to intellectual musings. In 1511, when the general expulsion of Jews was still fresh on everyone’s minds, Abraão Rute, the chief rabbi of Safi, a Moroccan coastal city conquered by the Portuguese in 1508, sent a detailed report to King D.  Manuel I on the town’s siege by some neighboring tribes. The Portuguese lifted the siege and Rabbi Abraham ended his letter writing: “[…] and Our Lord who helps and favors Your Highness, gave the victory to the Christians. Let Him be praised.”47 This type of comment, whereby Society of America, 1945); David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan and Richard H. Popkin, eds., Menasseh ben Israel and his World (Leiden: Brill, 1989); Richard H. Popkin, “Christian Jews and Jewish Christians in the 17th Century”, in Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, eds. Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 57–72; Lionel Ifrah, L’Aigle d’Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2001); Sina Rauschenbach, “Mediating Jewish Knowledge: Menasseh ben Israel and the Christian Respublica litteraria”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 4 (2012): 561–88. Concerning specifically the question of the Lost Tribes, António de Montesinos and Menasseh ben Israel, see Jonathan Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), vol. 2, ch. 9. 47  “[…] e Nuestro Señor que ayuda e favorece las cosas de V.A., dyo Victoria a los Cristanos. El sea loado,” Rabbi Abraão to King D.  Manuel I, Safi, January 3, 1511, in Les Sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: Première série: Dynastie Sa’adienne: Archives et bibliothèques du Portugal, eds. Pierre de Cénival, David Lopes and Robert Ricard, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Paul Geuthner, 1934), 281–83, and in As Gavetas da Torre do Tombo, ed. A. da Silva Rego, vol. 10 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1974), 104–106. On the context

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Jews praised the authorities that expelled them in 1496, seems even more paradoxical in other circumstances. The Portuguese recovered Recife, in Northeastern Brazil, from the Dutch, in 1654. One year later, Abraão Cohen, who had lived in Recife for 18  years but returned to Amsterdam, asked permission of the Portuguese authorities to sell his houses there, to collect his debts and to freight a ship to carry 1000 quintals of brazil-wood belonging to him, from Pernambuco to Holland.48 Abraão Cohen had been a prominent businessman in Recife, and in 1652, after the Dutch had taken back the hinterland occupied by Portuguese insurgents, he offered his services to the States General to supply 500–600,000 pounds of brazil-wood, horses, and cattle, and within a year he would provide 10,000 alqueires of flour, and 2000 alqueires of broad beans.49 What is interesting for us is the content of Abraão Cohen’s petition to the Portuguese authorities. In it, he reminded them of his eighteen-year sojourn in Recife, during which period he had always acted obligingly: […] the vassals of Your Majesty with much love and fidelity, begged for the liberty of many imprisoned in Recife, and helped them with alms and goods, assisted them in their businesses, which brought him the enmity of the Dutch, especially since he tried to ransom them, and acted many times as their guarantor until they were able to pay fully the ransom, by which he rendered a great service to His Majesty.50

see José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, Os judeus na expansão portuguesa em Marrocos durante o século XVI: Origens e actividades duma comunidade (Braga: Edições APPACDM Distrital de Braga, 1997), 206–208. 48  “Consultation of the Ultramarine Council on the petition of the Jew Abraão Cohen,” Lisbon, February 2, 1655, in Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon), Pernambuco, Papéis Avulsos, box. 6, doc. 522. See also A. Mendes de Gouveia, Relação abreviada de documentos do Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino relativos aos judeus no Brasil, 1639–1663 (Lisbon: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, 1962), 2. 49  On Abraão Cohen see José Antônio Gonsalves de Melo, Gente da nação: Cristãos-novos e judeus em Pernambuco, 1542–1654 (Recife: Editora Massangana, 1996), 372–73. 50  “[…] os vassalos de Vossa Magestade com muito amor e fidelidade, solicitando a liberdade de muitos que estiveram presos no Recife, e acudindo-lhes com suas esmolas e fazendas e assistindo-lhes a seus negócios, odiando-se por isso com os holandeses, principalmente por lhes procurar o resgate, e ficar por fiador de muitos até mandarem as quantias em que se comcertauão, no qual fez a Vossa Majestade muito particular serviço.” “Consultation of the Ultramarine Council on the petition of the Jew Abraão Cohen,” 2.

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One would think that this was a momentary strategy for Abraão Cohen, as he never declared publicly what he had written and never wanted others, especially his fellow Jews, to discover his petition. However, this same text was published enthusiastically in a panegyric commissioned to the famous Daniel Levi de Barrios in 1685: Abraham Cohen in far-away Brazil / was welcomed by Prince Mauritius [van Nassau-Siegen],  / prosperous and noble, and obtained [goods] from the King’s Empire / enjoyed the light in the ideal Palace. / Siege of Brazil the bellicose Luso / from nine years in continuum, which took place / in one thousand six hundred and forty, against the brave Dutch, / And in all with magnanimous greatness / the higher Abraham Coen sustained many / Jews and Christians alike, with his aid / in atrocious misery and need. / So, the Lords of the Supreme / Council of the Brazilian People, / saw from the faithful Cohen great mercy, / that the Divine King of the Soul is rewarding.51

Perhaps Abraão Cohen shared with Menasseh ben Israel the idea that, regardless of the notion of nation and religion, the Just are equal before God and would be saved, and all those who deserved it would enjoy the blissfulness of Israel.52 Cohen helped Jews and Christians alike for this

51  “Abraham Coen en el Brasil remoto / del Príncipe Mauricio [van Nassau-Siegen] halló el agrado, / prospero y noble, y oy del Rey Empireo / goça la luz en el ideal Palácio. / Cerco al Brasil el Luso belicoso / en nueve años contínuos, que empeçaron / en el de mil seiscientos y quarenta / y cinco, contra el Valeroso Holandio, / Y en todos com magnanima grandeza / el grande Abraham Coen sustentò a quantos / Judios y Cristianos, de su auxilio / en la miseria atroz, necesitaron. / Entonces los Señores del Supremo / Consejo sobre el Pueblo Brasiliano, / vieron del fiel Kohen la piedad grande, / que el Rey Divino en la Alma esta premiando.” Daniel Leví de Barrios, “Funebre poesia por el Fallecimiento de la bienaventurada Señora Doña Ribca Cahanet viuda del glorioso Varon Abraham Coen a 28 de Agosto de 1685 años, dirigela A sus muy Ilustres hijos los Señores Jacob Mosseh, Mordojay, y Ester Cohen,” in id., Metros Nobles (Amsterdam: Jacob van Velsen, 1675), 259–60, Ets Haim / Livraria Montezinos, Amsterdam, 2F10. Almost all these poems were published by M.  Kayserling, “The Earliest Rabbis and Jewish Writers of America,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 3 (1895): 13–20. 52  Menasseh ben Israel, De la resurrección de los muertos (Amsterdam, 1636), 100; idem, Piedra Gloriosa o de la estatua de Nabuchadnesar: Con muchas y diversas autoridades de la S. S., y antiguos sabios (Amsterdam, 1655), 246. On Menasseh ben Israel’s ideas see Harm den Boer, La Literatura sefardí de Amsterdam (Alcalá de Henares: Instituto de Estudios Sefardíes y Andalusíes, 1996), 177; Henry Méchoulan, “Menasseh ben Israel and the World of the Non-Jews”, in Menasseh ben Israel and his World, eds. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 83–97; idem, “Conséquences théologiques et

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reason. Besides an obvious opportunism in wishing to recover all his assets left behind in Pernambuco, which led him to write that he was hated by the Dutch for assisting the ransoming of captive Portuguese, it interests us to emphasize his use of “strong” words with a sentimental and symbolic meaning: he acted toward vassals of the Portuguese king with “love” and “fidelity.” And although more nuanced, the same eulogistic message is palpable in the writing of Daniel Levi de Barrios’, who signaled in his commissioned work that Cohen’s soul was rewarded by God for his universal goodness. We must ask: Is this a strategy to cooperate with the Portuguese Empire to fulfill the universal eschatological ideas held by Jews, in different ways? The attitude of Abraão Rute, rabbi of Safi, seems to be in line with this means of obtaining redemption. After all, he intends to lead the Jewish community of Safi, mostly of Iberian origin, by calling and getting the support of King Manuel of Portugal.53 His political strategy as leader of a community living in exile, under Portuguese tutelage, seems to be, first of all, to fulfill the destiny of the Iberian Jews in a new context: if it was not possible for the Iberian Jews to remain in Portugal, then their destiny would be to achieve a much larger plan, namely taking advantage of Portuguese imperial expansion. Concrete evidence that we deal here with behavior that surpasses the simplicity of an opportunistic character is the episode of his meeting with the famous David Reubeni in Tavira (in Algarve) in 1525. Reubeni was also known in Morocco, among the Muslims, as someone belonging to the “Land of the Tribes” (terra das tribos). After all, Reubeni reported that in his Kingdom of Habor there were “thirty myriad Jews,” and that his brother, King Solomon, ruled over the tribes of Reuben and Gad, and of half the tribe of Manasseh.54 Abraão Rute is known as Abraham Ruach in David Reubeni’s diary, which describes the visit to his house in Tavira. Reubeni was impressed with Abraão Rute’s humility, and remained in his house for eight days, though the host refused to sit with him at the same table, but allowed his servants to eat meals with politiques de l’espérance messianique, XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” in Menasseh ben Israel, La Pierre Glorieuse de Nabuchodonosor ou la fin de l’Histoire au XVIIe siècle, introduction and notes M. Hadas-Lebel and H. Méchoulan, trans. H. Knafou (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 52–53. 53  About Rabi Abraão Rute of Safi see Tavim, Os judeus, 202–10 and 405–406; and idem, “Abraão Benzamerro, ‘Judeu de Sinal,’ sem sinal, entre o Norte de África e o Reino de Portugal,” Mare Liberum 6 (1993): 125–26. 54  “David Reubeni[’s] Diary,” in Jewish Travelers in the Middle Ages, 19 Firsthand Accounts, ed. Elkan Nathan Adler (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 294–96.

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him.55 We can suspect the reason for Abraão Rute’s deference to David Reubeni, and also the content of their talks. David Reubeni wanted to be regarded as a man of war, but there is evidence in his diary that the conversos and the Jews looked on him as their savior messiah, who would fulfill their redemption. This was the reason for the new King D.  João III to press for his hasty departure from Portugal in 1526.56 We discover a specific Jewish agenda in Rabi Abraão Rute’s attitude of cooperative behavior and character, similar though different chronologically to the attitude of Abraão Cohen in Pernambuco. Rabi Abrão Rute seems to guide his action under the supposition that cooperation with the Christian discoveries would help to fulfill the Jewish messianic cultural conception of the Lost Tribes’ reunion, the conquest of the Holy Land and the coming of the messiah. Abraão Cohen’s behavior, guided by his benevolent universalism, reminds us of  how some traces of a “peaceful eschatology” of Menasseh ben Israel also has roots in the eschatological Jewish agenda concerning a harmonized New Age. What repercussions did this traditional Jewish agenda have when we try to evaluate the behavior of other Iberian Jews? Of course, it is always present, and to disregard this premise means to sometimes interpret the complex behavior of Iberian Jews as a simple reflex to the Christian context in which they are embedded.57 As David Graizbord considers lucidly, Judaism and Jewish life have largely, if not entirely, a public nature. Judaism implies a practical and public adherence to the law, whose definition inseparably ties society to religion and vice versa, something that is difficult to fit into modern conceptions of religion in Protestantism, which sees it as a phenomenon regarding the universe of individual attitudes of belief and faith. Jews have an understanding of culture founded in a form of “inclusive life,” based on the assumption of an ethnicity, whose members are protagonists of a community keeping a special relation with a “national” God. The main assumption of rabbinic teachings is the sanctification of all life, something hard to grasp in Christian epistemology. The destruction of the  Ibid., 313–14.  See Tavim, “David Reubeni;” and Maria José P.  Ferro Tavares, “Para o estudo dos judeus em Trás-os-Montes no século XVI.  A 1ª geração dos cristãos-novos,” Cultura— História e Filosofia 4 (1985): 390. 57   See David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8–9. 55 56

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Second Temple in 70 CE and the rabbinic reshaping of the religion in the diaspora transferred the main vector of holiness in the world from the priestly rituals to the behavior of all Jews. Therefore, individual movements of faith and salvation have a smaller weight against the salvation of the Chosen People as a whole (hathalat ha-ge’ulah—the principle of salvation, redemption, or final release, assumed collectively), in full and perfect coordination with the principles and plans established by its divine sovereign.58 But what consequences does this idiosyncrasy have when Iberian Jews contacted the Other in the context of their Diaspora and in the context of the Portuguese discoveries? Following David Graizbord’s ideas, without the notion of a Jewish “community,” with its people and institutions, the individual is unable to live the life of the Torah and to fulfill the purpose of his existence. Still according to Graizbord: “Halakhically, being Jewish has been a matter of matrilineal descent or rabbinic conversion since the days of the (pagan) Roman Empire.”59 Concerning the latter, we know that there was a more active Jewish proselytism in antiquity, mostly during the Hasmonean period (ca. 140–116 BCE), when a Jewish “expansion” led to the acceptance of more (ex)-gentile converts.60 Proselytism, with its socioreligious implications in behavior to influence and convince others, is not strictly necessary for  the existence of conversion. If in the Talmud and in the Midrashim the attitude toward proselytes is usually positive, there are strong proofs in the rabbinical sources to show that, frequently, authorities opposed proselytism on a daily basis. They were afraid that converts would become apostates, especially after Christianity and Islam had appeared, an attitude that could lead to an increased harshness toward Jewish communities. This was such a strong feeling that the position of many rabbis concerning marranos living on the Iberian Peninsula and in its overseas empires, or of those who migrated to live in Jewish communities abroad, was often of doubt and disagreement. The rabbis feared the eventual

58  See David Graizbord, “Who and What was a Jew? Some Considerations for the Historical Study of New Christians,” in Anais de História de Além-Mar 14 (2013): Os judeus e o comércio colonial (séculos XVI–XIX): Novas abordagens, ed. José Alberto Tavim, 15–44. See also Leora Batnizky, How Judaism became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 59  Graizbord, “Who and What,” 37. 60  See Luis H. Feldman, Jews and Gentiles in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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denunciation of people, commercial networks, and correspondence exchanged between Jews and New Christians, because there was proof of some marranos’ apostasy, after returning to their original homes and cultural milieus.61 Early modern Jews often had a different attitude toward the absorption of non-Jewish Others. In Muslim countries, there is some evidence that slaves became assimilated to the Jewish milieu of their masters, particularly women slaves who became mistresses of their Jewish masters, and had offspring with them.62 Haïm Zafrani studied such relations in Southern Morocco, mostly in Mogador, until the beginning of the twentieth century. Here the Jews owned Black slaves, mainly women, with names such as M’Barka or Ghalya. The Caïde (the local Muslim leader) offered the possibility to many of these women to become Jewish by adopting their masters’ way of life: “Elles adoptaient le mode de vie et les pratiques religieuses des familles au milieu desquelles elles vivaient.”63 This phenomenon takes us back to research conducted by Peter Mark and José Horta in Guiné do Cabo Verde, an observation of the social interaction between Portuguese Jews and the local African population.64 Also in Cochin India, far from the epicenter of the Sephardic milieu (despite some of the Cochin Jews being of Sephardic origin), the Paradesi (so called White Jews) and the Malabari (so called Black Jews) had “familial” local servants who adopted Jewish culture, as most of them were the children of Jewish masters and indigenous women: the meshushrarim (the “emancipated”). They lacked the same rights as the meyukhasim (“of good lineage”) until the

61  On this case, see mostly Morris S. Goodblat, Jewish Life in Turkey in the XVIth Century as Reflected in the Legal Writings of Samuel de Medina (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1952); and Dora Zsom, “The Return of the Conversos to Judaism in the Ottoman Empire and North-Africa,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 7 (2010): 335–47. Dora Zsom also came back to the fifteenth century concerning this question in her book Conversos in the Responsa of Sephardic Halakhic Authorities in the 15th Century (Piscataway: Georgias Press, 2014). 62  See Cecil Roth et  al., “Proselytes”, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Cecil Roth et  al. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1971), 13:1187. 63  Haïm Zafrani, Les Juifs du Maroc: Vie sociale, économique et religieuse: Études de taqqanot et responsa (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1972), 176n156. 64  Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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independence of India (1947), when young people of the two groups tried to follow in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi.65 Of course, we can stress the possible influence of Christian proselytism on New Christian attitudes concerning the Other found outside Europe. Miriam Bodian describes examples of Jewish martyrs “Dying for the Law of Moses” in Christian territories, as was the case with David de Castro Tartas in Brazil, whose intentional proselytizing behavior was very similar to the Christian martyrs in the Iberian Empire.66 But these are very isolated cases. Carsten Wilke compares the collective plan of repentance of the conversos described by Samuel Usque in Consolação às Tribulações de Israel in 1553 with the individual experience of adhesion without signs of repentance described by the author of the Diálogos en Marruecos in 1583, which shows the strategies of attracting New Christians to areas where it was possible to be openly Jewish. If in the first case collective repentance sublimated the conversion to Christianity, in the second example we can see the imposition of a model of conversion as a strict individual performance, fearing otherworldly damnation.67 In any case, if these different plans apply to models which fit within the Jewish mainstream of teshuva (repentance) or giyur (conversion), they took place in a context of kinship, not as a prediction aimed toward recruiting goyim or gentiles. As Daniel Sperber has stressed, Jewish antipathy to gentiles in Talmudic times came from different causes, such as their cruelty to Jews, a moral reprehension of their behavior and due to theological accusation of their refusal to accept the Torah. Therefore, this is not an implicit racial prejudice, which takes into account physical distinction, but rather a socioreligious interpretation considering their idolatry, their lax morals, and other defaults.68 So, it seems that the only reason for a Jew to approach the 65  See Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg, The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); J. B. Segal, A History of the Jews of Cochin (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993); and José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, Judeus e Cristãos-Novos de Cochim: História e memória (1500–1662) (Lisbon: APPACDM Distrital de Braga, 2003). 66  See Bodian, Dying. 67  See Carsten L.  Wilke, “Conversion Theology among Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Jews: Protestant and Islamic Subtexts,” in In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond: A History of Jews and Muslims (15th–17th Centuries), eds. José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros, and Lúcia Liba Mucznik (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 1:252–65. See also idem, The Marrakesh Dialogues. 68   See Daniel Sperber, “Gentile,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Cecil Roth et  al. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1971), 7:411. For the development of those topics, see the

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gentiles in terms of inclusion was their more suitable integration in a Jewish milieu, as is the case of the slave or the mistress. These people convert not because there was a proclivity to proselytism in their Jewish masters, lovers, or friends, but because proselytes felt included in the Jewish mainstream. This was, actually, a question of inclusion. Inclusion, however, meant to observe the Sephardic minhag (custom),69 as the meshushrarim of Cochin should also follow the complex local minhag, for example. Similarly, in Amsterdam, as Yosef Kaplan remarked, at least until the mid-seventeenth century, Blacks and Mulattoes could enter and stay in the Portuguese synagogue, or be buried in the Ouderkerk cemetery (though in a different plot from most of the Portuguese Jews) despite the existing discrimination; but not so the Ashkenazic or Tudesco Jews, who had a different minhag and social possibilities.70 The insistence on Sephardic minhag was such an important issue that the expelled Iberian Jews observed and sometimes imposed their particular minhag wherever they went, as happened in the Ottoman Empire and in Morocco, where they often lived apart from and had bitter quarrels with the local Jews (toshavim).71 contribution of Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Springfield: Behrman House, 1961). 69  Concerning the Sephardic minhag, see, for example, Rabbi Herbert C.  Dobrinsky, A Treasury of Sephardic Laws and Customs (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1986). 70  See Yosef Kaplan, “The Self-Definition of the Sephardic Jews of Western Europe and Their Relation to the Alien and the Stranger,” in Crisis and Creativity in The Sephardic World, 1391–1646, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 121–28. 71  For the Ottoman Empire see among others Arye Shmuelevitz, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Century: Administrative, Economic, Legal and Social Relations as Reflected in the Responsa (Leiden: Brill, 1984); Joseph Hacker, “The Sürgün System and Jewish Society in the Ottoman Empire during the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” in Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership, ed. Aron Rodrigue (Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1992), 9–65; idem, “The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth Century,” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1992), 2:109–33; Minna Rozen, A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453–1566 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Yaron Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans: Ottoman Jewish Society in the Seventeenth Century (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). Concerning Morocco and the disputes between megorashim (exiled) and toshavim (locals) see Zafrani, Les Juifs du Maroc; Tavim, Os judeus na expansão portuguesa, 88–92 and 118–23; as also David Corcos, Studies in the History of the Jews of Morocco (Jerusalem: Rubbin Mass, 1976); and Mariano Arribas Palau, “Comunidades israelitas bajo los primeros sa’dies,”

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So important was the idea that the Sephardic custom was the suitable minhag to materialize Jewish eschatological hopes, that when Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva visited the Jews of Cochin in 1668, as leader of a mission sent by the Mahamad of Amsterdam to contact officially and recognize their cultural idiosyncrasy, one fundamental issue present in their mission was the minhag.72 The mudaliar or chief of the Paradesi Cochin Jewry, David Rahabi [I], sent a letter to the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1676, ensuring that they followed the Sephardic rite.73 Amsterdam’s Mahamad was very concerned with the truthfulness of such a crucial matter, and so a group of coreligionists came to “observe” with their own eyes the local reality in Cochin. If the Portuguese entourage did not ostracize the Malabari Jews, they also recognized the close connection of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam with the Paradesi Jews of Cochin, whose leader, David Rahabi [I], had invited them. However, some particularities were difficult to explain, as for example the color differentiation of the Paradesis. For Mosseh, such difference lay in the climate as he assured to his “brothers” in Amsterdam: “[…] The color is that of the Mulattoes, which can be attributed undoubtedly to the climate, since they are totally separated from the Malabari [Jews].”74 As Mosseh’s entourage was interested in stressing the pure status of the Paradesi Jews, similar to that of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, he also wished to notice the validity of their Sephardic minhag. Mosseh probably answered to a questionnaire formulated “a priori” in Amsterdam, where matters of doctrine and cult were crucial. Apart from two gentile costumes—the women attended the synagogue with their heads uncovered and participated without wearing shoes—in general “our brothers” in Cochin (as Mosseh and the Hakham Isaac Aboab called the Paradesi Jews) had the same rituals and similar ceremonies. At the end of his report, in  Homenaje a Millàs Vallicrosa, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1954), 1:45–65. 72  See Tavim, Judeus e cristãos-novos de Cochim, 368–70. 73  See Walter Joseph Fischel, “The Exploration of the Jewish Antiquities of Cochin on the Malabar Coast,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 87, no. 3 (1967): 233; as also Barbara Johnson Hudson, “Shingli or Jewish Cranganor of the Cochin Jews of India, with an appendix on The Cochin Jews Chronicles” (Master diss., Smith College, 1975), 169–71. 74  “[…] a cor é amulatada, o que procede do clima certamente, visto estarem totalmente separados dos [judeus] Malabares.” Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva, Notícias dos judeos de Cochim, mandadas por Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva [Amsterdam 5447/1687]. Facsimile ed. by Moses Bensabat Amzalak (Lisbon: Oficinas do Museu Comercial, 1923), 7.

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in a kind of apotheotic finale, Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva remarked: “I asked them all these questions, though they follow our minhag, because I take care to collect information with the purpose to be sure.”75

Some Conclusions: Galut, Empire, and Redemption On December 1, 1600, the catechumen Jew Abraham Bendanan Serfatim from Ferrara,76 known later as the famous anti-Jewish polemist João Baptista d’Este, came to Évora’s Carthusian monastery to denounce some conversos and Jews (in some cases the same person). Among these he denounced Simão Fernandes Sam Tomé, who had been living with his family as a Jew in Pisa since the end of the sixteenth century. In the midst of this family there was a Black woman, who was also Jewish, and then João Baptista d’Este commented: “[…] It is very common among the Jews to buy Black men and women, and make them Jews, and he has seen some of these Black Jews in Pisa.”77 So, this is proof that we deal with an extensive phenomenon of Black Jews in the Sephardic Diaspora in Europe. As Jonathan Schorsch remarked, two reasons seem to explain the conversion of the slaves: above all, it was believed (by the masters) that Judaism would be better for them, and second, because of the need for the slave to be ritually accepted for the preparation of kosher food and drink.78 These reasons can be extended to the  “Todas estas Preguntas lhes fiz não obstante seguirem o nosso minhag porque sou muy amigo de informarme com fundamento para Caminhar sobre o seguro.” Paiva, Notícias, 8 and 13–15 (for the quotation). 76  The catechumen is a person receiving instruction from a catechist in the principles of the Christian religion with a view to baptism. On this character, see between others Idalina Resina Rodrigues, Literatura e anti-semitismo: Séculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon: Reprint Brotéria Review, 1997), 20–22, 27–28, and 36 [Brotéria 109 (1979): 41–56, 137–53]; José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad at the Mirror: Ruptures, Relations and Forms of Identity: A Theme Examined Through Three Cases,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 181–86; and David Graizbord, “Pauline Christianity and Jewish ‘Race:’ The Case of João Baptista d´Este,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), 61–79. 77  “[…] e que é muy ordinario entre os judeus comprarem negros, e negras, e fazerem-nos judeus, e tem visto em Pisa alguns destes negros, e negras, judeus,” in ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, livro 536 [of Reduzidos], fol. 294. 78  Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75. 75

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group of free Blacks (mistresses) and Mulattoes (children of masters and mistresses). We must remark, however, there was not an active policy of proselytism to convert them. Conversion was tactically and technically approved and supported by Jews as a “home affair,” to preserve, or help to preserve, their idiosyncratic culture. To cite Schorsch: “The halakha in practice among Sephardim in Western Europe and the colonies seems to have made this merely a circumcision performed upon voluntary conversion.”79 However, there are other assumptions in this matter of the slaves belonging to Jews. We must point out that, according to Jewish Law, a slave converted to Judaism cannot be sold to a gentile. But on the contrary, if the slave refuses to convert to Judaism, he should be sold to a gentile within a stipulated time.80 In fact, all these decisions support the ideology of identity preservation: the removal of the foreign element unless they convert and, in this case, to be fully Jewish, they ought to be fully free. The Mahamad of Amsterdam became stricter concerning the inclusion of presumably free Blacks and Mulattoes as of the middle of the seventeenth century, penalizing with herem (excommunication) those who circumcised or immersed them, and by deciding that Mulatto boys would not be admitted to study in the Sephardic yeshiva.81 But the inclusion of the converted in the Sephardic minhag reveals that some Iberian Jews were really active in the fulfillment of their eschatology, integrating them in the universalist projection of the Iberian discoveries. For the Iberian Jews, Jewish eschatology was fulfilled through the discoveries. If the inclusion of the “gentiles” was profitable to the fulfillment and imposition of their (true) minhag, why not support their conversion? The Sephardic “universal dream” to play the main role in the Jewish milieu eventually had some success: their minhag was imposed or adopted by other Jews, as happened with the Romaniot in the Ottoman Empire,82

 Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 178.  Cf. Bernard Lewis, Race et esclavage au Proche-Orient, trans. Rose Saint-James (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 19. 81  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 196–97. 82  See note 71. 79 80

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or the Baghdadi;83 and the Bene Israel also accepted the Sephardic minhag in some specific traditions.84 So, the converted Jews of Black or Mulatto origins were not really seen as members of the Ten Lost Tribes, and were progressively marginalized because of their tainted gentile origin. On the contrary, it is well known that famous intellectuals such as Menasseh ben Israel, Immanuel Aboab,85 D. Miguel [Daniel Levi] de Barrios,86 and others created a kind of heroic Universal History of the Jews, meaning the Jews of the Sephardic minhag, to show to the rulers and others the virtues of their nation—to paraphrase Manasseh, “the nobility and purity of their blood.”87 Acknowledgments  I am very grateful to Professor João Teles e Cunha and Dr.  Hugo Martins for their help in translating this text. I am also grateful to Professor Jonathan Schorsch, for his editorial comments and his additional efforts of harmonizing my English. Ekua Yankah did the final editing.

83  Concerning the Baghdadi Jews and the adoption of the Sephardic minhag see Rabbi Ezekiel N.  Musleah, On the Banks of the Ganga: The Sojourn of Jews in Calcutta (North Quincy: Christopher Publishing House, 1975); Joan G. Roland, “The Baghdadi Jews,” in The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities, ed. Orpa Slapak (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1995), 37–44; John Cooper and Judy Cooper, “The Life-cycle of the Baghdadi Jews of India,” in India’s Jewish Heritage: Ritual, Art & Life-Cycle, ed. Shalva Weil (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1986), 100–109. 84   See Yale M.  Needel, “Rethinking ‘Sephardic:’ Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Observances among the Jews of Bombay,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26, no. 2 (2008): 59–80. 85  Imanuel Aboab, Nomología o Discursos Legales, ed. Moisés Orfali (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2007). 86  D. Miguel de Barrios, Historia universal judaica (Amsterdam, 1684). 87  Menasseh ben Israel, “To His Highnesse the Lord Protector of the Common-Wealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland: The Humble Addresses of Menasseh ben Israel, a Divine, and Doctor of Physics, on Behalf of the Jewish Nation [1655],” in Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell: Being a Reprint of the Pamphlets Published by Menasseh ben Israel to Promote the Re-admission of the Jews to England 1649–1656, ed. Lucien Wolf (London: Macmillan Co. Limited, 1901), 81–98.

CHAPTER 6

Caspar Barlaeus, Dutch Expansion, and the Sephardic Community in the Atlantic World: A Note on the Intellectual History of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

“De Vrijdom ga sijn’ gang, / en vliegh, met volle seylen / Den Y-river wt en in.”1 (Freedom runs its course / flying, under full sails / out and into the Y-river.)

The lines of this satirical poem (hekeldicht) celebrate intellectual freedom in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. This wealthy commercial center with its harbor at the IJ, then an arm of the Southern Sea (today Lake IJssel) that opened onto the North Sea, welcomed the ships arriving from the East and West Indies with their riches and stories of overseas adventures and people. The author of this hekeldicht, Joost van den Vondel, 1   Rademaker, C.  S. M., “De vrijdom ga sijn’ gang,” in C.  L. Heesakkers, C.  S. M. Rademaker, and F. F. Blok, eds., Vossius en Barlaeus, twee helden die der dingen diept en steilt’ afpeilen: Het Athenaeum Illustre en zijn eerste hoogleraren (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1982), 12–22, 12.

I. Phaf-Rheinberger Independent Scholar, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_6

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was a poet and theater writer. He was part of an outstanding intellectual Dutch elite, among whose members were personalities such as Constantijn Huygens, Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, Hugo Grotius, and the two professors of the Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam, Gerardus Vossius and Caspar Barlaeus, who were known throughout Europe. These last two were appointed as the first professors for history and philosophy at this institution for higher education and gave their inauguration speeches on January 8 and 9, 1632, respectively, holding their positions until the end of their lives. In this chapter, I will discuss the limits of this freedom addressed by Vondel, using the example of Caspar Barlaeus and his relations with the Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam, and with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel in particular.2 These limits will also be probed with regard to the Sephardic community in Recife, in Dutch Brazil, where Jews could live their religion openly from 1634 to 1654.

Caspar van Baerle Caspar Barlaeus, born as Caspar van Baerle in Antwerp, can serve as a parameter for religious tolerance in the first half of the seventeenth century. His life coincided with the Eighty Years War of the Dutch against the Spanish Habsburg Empire. This war started as a revolt under the leadership of Willem of Orange in 1568, and thirteen years later, in 1581, the Republic of the Seven United Provinces of the Netherlands was established. After the fall of Antwerp in 1585, Barlaeus’ parents moved to Leiden. In that city, Barlaeus received his education in the Latin School and participated actively in the polemics between the Remonstrants, followers of Jacobus Arminius, and the Counter-Remonstrants, followers of Franciscus Gomarus. This theological debate reached its climax at the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619), during which, according to a famous painting by Pouwels Weyts of 1621, thirteen Arminian ministers under inquiry were seated in the center—Barlaeus among them—surrounded by a much more numerous audience of Gomarists. The outcome was that all Arminians were dismissed from their official functions and Barlaeus had to survive by giving private lessons and studying medicine in France, until he was appointed—together with his friend Gerardus Vossius—professor of 2   Caspar Barlaeus 1584–1648; Gerardus Vossius 1577–1649; Menasseh ben Israel 1604–1657. Menasseh’s “non-Jewish” name was Manoel Dias Soeiro.

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philosophy at the recently founded Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam, precursor of the city’s municipal university of today. It was here that Barlaeus became familiar with the “Portuguese Nation,” the Jewish community which, after the return of the Spanish Inquisition to Antwerp in 1585, had moved to other places. Until then, already since 1522, the people of Jewish descent, who had converted to Christianity, lived quite freely in this prosperous commercial environment, calling themselves the “Portuguese Nation.” Now, in 1585, half of Antwerp’s population left, among them also Barlaeus’ family. Some decades later, in Amsterdam, the “Portuguese Nation” started to denominate themselves officially as Sephardim, as people originating from the Iberian Peninsula who practiced the Jewish religion. When Barlaeus moved to Amsterdam in 1631, this Sephardic community was already a prominent presence, not only because of its economic activity but also because its unfamiliar habits and customs attracted attention in this cosmopolitan city. Barlaeus was an official poet in the service of the Dutch court at The Hague, writing poems about heroic events such as the conquest of the city of Salvador da Bahia from the Portuguese in 1624. He wrote in Latin, the intellectual language of Europe at that time. Today Barlaeus is predominantly known because of his Mercator Sapiens (The Wise Merchant),3 his inaugural speech at the Athenaeum Illustre in 1632. This treatise has not lost its timeliness, considering that Barlaeus addresses the merchant in a global trade framework and insists that he should always remember antiquity’s lessons about the morals of wise commerce. However, from a contemporary viewpoint, Barlaeus’ account of the government of Count Maurits van Nassau-Siegen in Northeast Brazil, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et  alibi nuper gestarum, sub praefectura illustrissimi Comiti I. Mauritii, published in Amsterdam in April 1647,4 seems to be at least as relevant. The volume came out with a set of remarkable illustrations, which were also reproduced in the only Dutch translation to date, published in 1923.5 The book was translated into Portuguese in Brazil in 3  Caspar Barlaeus, Mercator sapiens: Oratie gehouden bij de inwijding van de Illustere School te Amsterdam op 9 januari 1632, bilingual edition, Dutch trans. and introduction Sape van der Woude (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). To my knowledge, no English translation exists. 4  Caspar Barlaeus, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum, sub praefectura illustrissimi Comiti I. Mauritii (Amstelodami: Ioannis Blaeu, 1647). 5  Caspar van Baerle, Nederlandsch Brazilie onder het bewind van Johan Maurits, grave van Nassau, 1637–1644, trans. and notes S. P. L’Honoré Naber (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1923).

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19406 and came out in English in 2011 with a slightly different title, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644.7 Barlaeus, who was an extremely sensitive man, suffered from severe depressions called melancholy in the vocabulary of the medical science of that period.8 He lived in times of war and religious constraints, but also of expansive capitalism and great wealth, represented by the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1609) and the Dutch West India Company (founded in 1621). Being a victim of religious discrimination himself, he was highly attuned to  the difficulties of the Jewish community in this Calvinist republic. Barlaeus, as well as his colleague Vossius, had made a plea to appoint Menasseh ben Israel as the third professor at the Athenaeum Illustre, for Hebrew, but it turned out to be impossible to put this appointment into practice.9 After writing an epigraph for Menasseh’s book De Creatione Problemata (1635), Barlaeus was severely attacked by the representatives of the Reformed Church. His last sentence, “As I am a disciple of Christ, you will be a son of Abraham” (Sic ego Christiades, sic eris Abramides),10 upset public opinion. The specialist in seventeenth-century Latin, Frans Blok, remarks about this episode: This work appeared in the spring of 1635, and in the epigram the poet had addressed himself to the Jew Menasseh with the words: “Even though our views diverge, let us live as friends to the glory of God!” He had also praised the author’s piety. Two Calvinists of the circle surrounding Voetius, professor of theology at Utrecht, felt obliged to protest against such abominable heresy. From then on until 1637 they furiously wrote pamphlets attacking in 6  Gaspar Barléu, História dos feitos recentemente praticados durante oito anos no Brasil, trans. and notes Cláudio Brandão, preface and notes Mário G. Ferri (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo and Livraria Itatiaia Editora Ltda., 1974 [1940]). 7  Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644, trans., notes and introduction Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011). 8  Frans Felix Blok, Caspar Barlaeus: From the Correspondence of a Melancholic (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1976). 9  Sina Rauschenbach, Judentum für Christen: Vermittlung und Selbstbehauptung Menasseh ben Israels in den gelehrten Debatten des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 77–79; 114–19. 10  Frans Felix Blok, “Caspar Barlaeus, de filosoof van het Athenaeum Illustre,” in Vossius en Barlaeus, twee helden die der dingen diept en steilt’ afpeilen: Het Athenaeum Illustre en zijn eerste Hoogleraren (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1982), 24–32, 30–31. My translation.

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Barlaeus not only the obdurate Remonstrant and professor at the Athenaeum Illustre but also the friend of the Jews, who pretended in his poem that Jews revered the same God and thus could be pious or might be called friends! This controversy was a particularly unpleasant affair for Barlaeus because the Athenaeum was dragged into it: you could see what sort of a place it was, wrote his opponents, if it had people like Barlaeus teaching the young!11

This polemic, however, did not influence Menasseh’s respect for Barlaeus (or for Vossius) and he even commemorated him posthumously in his Vindiciae Judeorum, published in London 1656,12 one year before Menasseh died in Middelburg after having traveled to England to seek the readmission of the Jews to England from Lord Cromwell.

Barlaeus’ History of Brazil Considering this respectful relationship and Barlaeus’ verse line referring to the Jewish religion, the way in which he addresses the Jewish nation in his volume on the history of Dutch Brazil draws our attention. The fact that he wrote this book in only two years is not surprising. Like many Dutch citizens, he had already been interested in overseas trade and the history of the Americas before living in Amsterdam. Blok mentions that Barlaeus used to go to the harbor looking for the arrival of ships from afar to hear the latest news. Because of his good contacts with the court at The Hague, he was recommended to Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen to write the history of the Count’s service in the Dutch West India Company. Maurits had governed Northeast Brazil since 1637 and returned to the Netherlands in 1644, asking Barlaeus to accept this job and to use his private notes and library. Consequently, Barlaeus wrote the text for Johan Maurits’ volume, which featured costly illustrations and plates of maps, people, and natural history by important artists, planned as a present to other aristocratic courts in Europe to inform them about this military expedition and interesting regions of the world. In this history of Brazil, Barlaeus only mentions the Jewish community in Recife occasionally. He first remarks that Count Johan Maurits “considered matters of faith of the highest importance, even more so than those  Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 53–54.  Henri Méchoulan, “Menasseh and the World of the Non–Jews,” in Menasseh ben Israel and his World, eds. Yosef Kaplan, Richard Henry Popkin, and Henri Méchoulan (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 83–97; Rauschenbach, Judentum für Christen. 11 12

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matters of state that would illuminate the glory of his government.”13 The Count immediately appointed public preachers “of our faith” and consulted with them to ensure that the pagans, the Jews, and the Catholics each would be instructed according to their own needs: The Jews must give up their firmly rooted observance of the law of Moses that postulates the restoration of Jerusalem and be persuaded that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, is the promised Messiah who must be revered.14

This statement is out of place in comparison to what Barlaeus formulated in 1635 in his poem in Menasseh’s De Creatione Problemata. He goes on to mention that “Jews were permitted to hold their services and celebrate their feast days within a private space, but not in public areas”15 in Brazil. Barlaeus does not seem to mean this ironically and continues saying that: Most of the Jewish inhabitants came here from the Dutch Republic. Some, who were originally Portuguese, pretended to convert to Christianity during the Spanish king’s reign, but, freed from the fear of persecution under a more indulgent ruler, they now freely associate with the Jews. This proves clearly that such hypocrisy was the result of fear of persecution, induced by the worshippers of the purple rather than by God. They are quite audacious in the performance of their religion and its rites, so that the papists and our followers of the Reformed Church complained that they should be expelled or returned to the Republic, where they are allowed to have their synagogues. After they had been warned by the councilors, they lessened the public display of their cult of Moses and their Jewish rites.16

I have put Barlaeus’ sentence on hypocrisy in italics and will come back to this situation of camouflage later. He further remarks that, after a while, restrictions were imposed on them:

 Baerle, History of Brazil, 52.  Ibid., 53. 15  Ibid., 68. 16  Ibid., 128. My italics. In a note to this fragment, the translator makes the following observation: “This comment, an indirect reference to the pope and the Inquisition, […] is clearly the author’s, who was known for his dislike of the Catholic Church and its clergy.” Ibid., 343. It should be kept in mind that Barlaeus came from a Protestant refugee family which had migrated from Antwerp under the rule of the Catholic Habsburgs to the Netherlands. 13 14

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No new synagogues could be built. A Jew was not permitted to marry a Christian woman or to have a Christian concubine. No one could be converted from Christianity to Judaism, or be called from the freedom of the Scriptures to the burden of the Law of Moses, from the light to darkness. Jews were forbidden to curse the sacred name of Jesus Christ. A broker’s fee could not exceed a third part of the total. No one could be defrauded in commercial transactions. At the death of the parents, children born of a Jew and a Christian had to be given to the Christian relatives to be educated. If there were no Christian relatives, the children, if poor, were to be sent to an orphanage, or given to the care of the Secret Council if they were from a wealthy family.17

The difference between these relatively sparse remarks of Barlaeus on the position of the Jews in Dutch Brazil and the attention paid to them in the Brazilian standard work on Dutch Brazil, Tempo dos flamengos,18 written by the famous historian José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, is ­striking. Like Barlaeus, Mello describes the modernity of the new-built Dutch city Mauritsstad, with its dikes, bridges, a zoological and a botanical garden, a synagogue and a Protestant church. Dutch religious tolerance seems interesting to him in comparison to Olinda, the Portuguese capital of Pernambuco, full of Catholic churches and monasteries. Mello mentions that Olinda was also a favorite place for New Christians and quotes from the report of a Representative of the Santo Oficio—the Inquisitor Heitor Furtado de Mendonça—who visited Olinda and Recife in 1593, ­encountering numerous New Christians living there.19 Mendonça spoke about the existence of a synagogue or esnoga in the surroundings of Camaragibe. Mello also refers to the New Christian Ambrósio Fernandez Brandão (1555–1618), a rich plantation owner, who, after having been accused of Judaism in Portugal, moved to Brazil. He is the author of the humanist treatise Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil (Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil; 1618), only published by the Brazilian Academy  Ibid., 295–96.  José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do norte do Brasil [1947], pref. Gilberto Freyre (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2001). For a Dutch translation, see José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 1624–1654: De invloed van de Hollandse bezitting op het leven en de cultuur in Noord–Brazilië, trans. G. N. Visser, rev. B. N. Teensma (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2001). Mello consulted Barlaeus’ history in the original version of 1647 and reproduced some illustrations for his own book. 19  Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 238. 17 18

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of Letters in 1930, the first Portuguese document that testifies extensively to the attractions of the sugar plantation economy in Northeast Brazil.20 Like Brandão, many New Christians had migrated to this part of the world, which quickly became one of the world’s richest sugar plantation economies at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth century. The wealth in this corner of the Portuguese colony did not remain secret. Mello remarks that, in those years, the rumor made the rounds in Spain that the Jews were the real initiators of the Dutch initiative to conquer Brazil. It inspired Lope de Vega’s play El Brasil restituido (1625), about the Dutch invasion of Bahia in 1624 and its reconquest by the Portuguese in the following year. Lope’s character Bernardo, a New Christian from Salvador da Bahia, echoes the anti-Semitic public opinion of those years in Spain that Brazil was prosperous because of the affluence of New Christians, who were attracted to the Dutch, then at war with Spain already since 1568, because of their desire for freedom of religion. Bernardo says: Fearing that the Holy Office  /  would send a visitor, /  of whose serious harshness / we have sufficient proof, / those of our nation / who live in Brazil  /  consider the Christian religion  /  as practiced by despicable people, / because they excuse the prisons, / the expenses, the lawsuits, and the insults, / and see this yoke exempt / from so many obligations, / and so our families, who already / have come to such a miserable state / that they say that / God is angry with us,  /  have written to Holland / that they should get ready to bring their armada,  / from whom we have received the answer /  that it is already on its way, /  in the opinion that it will be better / to surrender ourselves to the Dutch, / than to suffer that the Portuguese / treat us with such harshness.21 20  Ambrósio Fernandez Brandão, Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil [1618], ed. João Capistrano de Abreu (Rio de Janeiro: Oficina industrial graphica, 1930). For the English version, see Ambrósio Fernandez Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, trans. and annotations Frederick Arthur Holden Hall, William F. Harrison, and Dorthy Winter Welker (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). 21  “Temiendo que el Santo Offício / envía un visitador, / de cuyo grave rigor / tenemos bastante indicio, / los que de nuestra nación / vivimos en el Brasil, / que tiene por gente vil / la Cristiana Religión, / por excusar las prisiones, / los gastos, pleitos y afrentas, / y ver este yugo exentas / de tantas obligaciones / nuestras familias, que ya / a tal miseria han llegado, / porque dicen que enojado / Dios con nosotros está, / havemos escrito a Holanda, / que con armada se apresta, /  de quien tenemos respuesta, /  que sobre sus águas anda, /  juzgando será major / entregarnos a holandeses, / que sufrir que portugueses / nos traten con tal rigor.” Lope de Vega, El Brasil restituido, eds. Elena Esperanza Haz Gomes and Elías Serra Martínez (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, 2010], 22. My translation. On the source for Lope’s

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Lope’s play was performed in the years that Spain and Portugal were united under the Habsburg Crown, from 1580 to 1640, and gave voice to the overall popular enthusiasm regarding the reconquest of Salvador da Bahia in both countries. New Christians were soldiers in the Portuguese-Spanish Brazilian army, whereas Sephardic Jews had often been in military service in the Dutch West India Company, like, for instance, Moisés Navarro. He arrived in Brazil as a cadet and became one of the richest men in the Dutch portion of the colony.22 In general, the Jewish community profited from the fact that they had a widespread international familial network and knew Portuguese, Spanish and Flemish (or Dutch), so that Moisés obtained the profession of broker as early as 1635. The community’s members served as intermediaries between the Portuguese-Brazilians and the Dutch because of their language skills and involvement in tax affairs. They consequently had quite a powerful position in Dutch Brazil, which fueled anti-­ Jewish feelings in the colony as a whole. It is difficult to know exactly how many Jewish people lived there, but they were quite visible. In the year 1638, 200 Jews arrived on two ships from Amsterdam and in 1641, Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca was sent to Recife, in this way improving his salary from 450 guilders a year in Amsterdam to 1600 guilders in Recife, to take charge of the newly inaugurated synagogue Kahal Zur Israel (Community of the Roque of Israel) in 1642. Hundreds of Sephardic (and other) Jews lived in the city during the Dutch regime and from a map of Recife, a watercolor by Johan Vingboons from around 1665, it can be deduced that a number of rich merchants lived in the Rua dos Judeus, the former Rua de Bode, which had an important central market function,23 constituting the gateway from Olinda and Mauritsstad to the harbor of Recife. Mello also points out that, after the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil, the Jews who left Brazil for other places in the Americas always remained proud of c­ omedy, see Diego Martínez Torón, “Valores informativos en el teatro de Lope de Vega: La fuente de ‘El Brasil restituido,’” in Lope de Vega y los orígenes del teatro español, ed. Manuel Criado de Val (Madrid: EDI-6, 1981), 151–60. 22  See José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da nação: Cristãos-novos e judeus em Pernambuco (Recife: Massangana, 1989), 494–95. 23  Ronaldo Vainfas describes Jewish life in de Jodenstraat, next to the harbor in Recife, in Jerúsalém colonial: Judéus portugueses no Brasil Holandês (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. José Olimpio, 2010), 102–106. See also Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, “The Jewish Congregation in Dutch Brazil,” in A Sefardic Pepper-Pot in the Caribbean, ed. Michael Studemund-Halévy (Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2016), 91–92.

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their Brazilian descent, as illustrated in the outstanding Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam, written by David Nassy in French in 1788. Nassy was a descendant of the Nassi family (both spellings of the name can be found) living in Dutch Brazil, which had moved to Barbados and then Suriname after the Portuguese reconquest in 1654.24

The Jewish Community Between Brazil and the Netherlands To have multiple identities was no exception in times of religious persecution and changing loyalties.25 David Nassi, for instance, mentioned as an inhabitant of Brazil in 1644, also used the names of Cristovão de Távora and José Nunes da Fonseca in the Portuguese colony. In O negócio do Brasil: Portugal, os Países Baixos e o Nordeste 1641–1669 (The Brazil Affair: Portugal, the Low Countries, and the Northeast),26 Evaldo Cabral do Mello refers to another interesting case, that of Gaspar Dias Ferreira. He was born in Portugal and already lived in Recife before the arrival of the Dutch. He then made friends with Governor Johan Maurits, whom he accompanied to Holland in 1644, leaving his family behind. The Portuguese ambassador at The Hague, Francisco da Sousa Coutinho, knew that he could not expect support from Johan Maurits in his negotiations with the Dutch government to buy Brazil back, but he had great confidence in Ferreira. He even advised the Portuguese king to give Ferreira back his possessions if Northeast Brazil became Portuguese again. Unfortunately for Coutinho, this relationship with Ferreira turned out to become quite complex. Without telling the ambassador, Ferreira naturalized as a Dutchman and sought the support of the Prince of Orange. Then, one year later, in May 1646, he was imprisoned on accusations of high treason. The Dutch had found proof that Ferreira had maintained 24  David Nassy, Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam, trans. Simon Cohen, eds. Jacob R.  Marcus and Stanley F.  Chyet (Cincinnati and New  York: American Jewish Archives, 1974). See also Natalie Zemon Davis, “Een Joodse arts en het achttiende–eeuwse Suriname,” in Joden in de Cariben, ed. Julie-Marthe Cohen (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2015), 159–73. 25  Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro, trans. Raphael Loewe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). 26  Evaldo Cabral do Mello, O negócio do Brasil: Portugal, os Países Baixos e o Nordeste 1641–1668 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks 1998); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, De Braziliaanse affaire: Portugal, de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en Noord–Oost Brazilië 1641–1669, trans. Catherine Barel, afterword Ernst van den Boogaart (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2005).

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contact with the revolt in Pernambuco against them, according to a letter on this matter in the possession of Frei Estevão de Jesus in Lisbon. The historian Marianne Wiesebron lists 14 letters from Ferreira written in Brazil and in Amsterdam to Johan Maurits of Nassau27 in those same years, found in the Dutch archives. Ferreira succeeded in escaping from prison in August 1649, obviously with the support of Johan Maurits, leaving a letter behind. Contemporary research still questions whether he was of Jewish or non-Jewish descent and there does not seem to exist a definitive document attesting to his identity.28 For Maria Cristina Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, however, there is no doubt. This Pernambucan author belongs to the regional elite, as her name already testifies, with a family tree going back to Jerônimo de Albuquerque (Lisbon 1510-Olinda 1584), a Portuguese colonial administrator in Brazil and the first owner of a sugar plantation. This contemporary female Albuquerque is a historian and psychiatrist as well as the author of historical novels. In her historical novel Príncipe e Corsário: Quase tudo que Gaspar Dias Ferreira escreveu sobre João Maurício de Nassau, o Brasileiro (Prince and Corsair: Almost Everything that Gaspar Dias Ferreira Wrote About  Johan Maurits of Nassau, the Brazilian),29 she recreates the personality of Ferreira as the secretary of Johan Maurits in Brazil, writing in the first-person singular. This fictional Ferreira maintains contact with Johan Maurits until his death in 1679. He is clearly a Sephardic Jew in the Dutch territories and Albuquerque recreates his memories of Johan Maurits in eight chapters, each titled with the name of a geographical place (Bergental, Pernambuco, The Hague, Mauritshuis, Porto Calvo, Cunhau, Lisbon, New Amsterdam). Albuquerque’s Ferreira is clearly fascinated by visual art and narrates that Johan Vermeer painted Johan Maurit’s portrait. He compares Vermeer’s painting with the works of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, two artists who accompanied the Count to Brazil, and imagines  the possibility that Rembrandt had traveled with him instead. 27  Marianne L. Wiesebron, ed., Brazilië in the Nederlandse archieven (1624–1654) (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 2004). 28  Mello for instance, in his hitherto unprecedented exact information on the Jewish citizens in Pernambuco, considers Ferreira a “curious figure,” about whom nothing is known before the arrival of the Dutch. Although it is obvious that he closely collaborates with Jewish merchants, even Mello does not consider him to be Jewish. See Mello, Gente da nação, 226–27 and 235. 29  Maria Cristina Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, Príncipe e corsário: Quase tudo que Gaspar Dias Ferreira escreveu sobre João Maurício de Nassau, o brasileiro (São Paulo: A Girafa, 2004).

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Ferreira relates his interest in art and also science to the Netherlands and Pernambuco, and he describes his efforts over forty years to write a biography of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, the former governor of Pernambuco he admires most and who, in his opinion, looks exactly like Matías de Albuquerque, his other hero.30 This identification of Johan Maurits with Matías de Albuquerque reveals an issue that is very much addressed in Pernambuco’s historical memory, in which Johan Maurits continues to be seen as one of the most capable governors of this state’s history, notwithstanding the fact that he was in the service of the Dutch West India Company. It explains that, for Albuquerque’s Ferreira, Johan Maurits is his best friend, notwithstanding that he knows of Ferreira’s disguised loyalty to the Portuguese king. Johan Maurits is aware of Ferreira’s double play while being a Dutch citizen and the author even makes him the most important informant for Barlaeus’ book on Brazil. Ferreira distinguishes Barlaeus’ History from his own book, characterizing his manuscript as a corollary that goes very much into the local details. Like Barlaeus, Ferreira also addresses Menasseh as “my rabbi,” although religion is not touched upon any further. Albuquerque’s historical fiction has to be seen in the long tradition of writing the history of Northeast Brazil, of which Gilberto Freyre’s ­Casa-grande e sensala,31 Mello’s standard work on Dutch Brazil (mentioned above), and Evaldo Cabral de Mello’s treatise on “The Business of Brazil”32 figure among the most prominent examples. Albuquerque’s Ferreira emphasizes that the Portuguese-Brazilians treated the Jewish population with care in their war against the Dutch. However, of course, this does not explain the silence around the Jewish presence in Pernambuco after 1654. Another author, Luize Valente, made a documentary about those silenced Jewish traditions in the sertão of Northeast Brazil today, and the testimonies of the interviewed people clearly state that their religion and customs were so unpopular that they could only practice them secretly,

30  Matías de Albuquerque (Olinda 1580–Lisbon 1647). Maria Cristina Cavalcanti de Alberquerque also published a historical novel, Matías, in 2012 on this historical personality and launched it with a lecture at the Museum of Pernambuco in Recife entitled “Matías, el magro” (Matías, the slender one). 31  Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1986). The Portuguese title of the first edition, published in 1933, is Casa-Grande e Senzala. 32  See note 26.

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often even without knowing their original Jewish meaning.33 In view of the fact that the former synagogue Kahal Zur Israel in the Rua de Bom Jesus, as the Rua dos Judeus is called today, was inaugurated again as a museum and historical archive in 2001, Valente also wrote a novel on these “hidden” Jewish traditions, which is already in its fourth edition.34 A double life, therefore, was more the rule than the exception for members of the “Portuguese Nation,” the Sephardic community, whose relatives still lived under Portuguese rule as “New Christians.” Barlaeus was very aware of this, of course. He was a public figure in Amsterdam, an outstanding professor who gave his public lectures every morning from 8 to 10 a.m. for a general audience, thus giving them the opportunity to be on time at the stock exchange—de Beurs—which opened at 10 a.m. Barlaeus loved to be invited to and attend public events. The members and activities of the Jewish community must have been a frequently discussed subject among his friends, not only familiar to him but also to his colleague and friend Vossius, who lived next door. They mention them occasionally in their intensive correspondence, often carried out with the same addressees, of which many letters have survived. Barlaeus understood that the interests of the merchants who traded with Brazil were closely linked to the expanding sugar plantation industry. New Christians had been involved in it since the fifteenth century, when sugar plantations flourished on the West African coast, the Canary Islands, Madeira, Cape Verde, and São Tomé.35 This last settlement has an interesting history in this respect because the Portuguese crown populated the island by sending large numbers of Jews, who had been sentenced by the Inquisition or who were young orphans. This is still kept as a myth in the Portuguese historical memory. Ana Cristina Silva, for instance, another author of historical novels, wrote A Dama Negra da Ilha dos Escravos36 33  Luize Valente and Elaine Eiger, A estrela oculta do sertão (The hidden star of the sertão [backlands]; 2005). This documentary was uploaded on YouTube in 2015. It mentions that the Jewish people were contemptuously addressed as marranos, anusim, forçados. 34  Luize Valente, O segredo do oratório (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2012). See PhafRheinberger, “The Jewish Congregation,” 91–97. 35  Leonor Freire Costa, “Portugal und der Atlantik: Die Rolle des Ozeans für die portugiesische Identität,” in Novos Mundos—Neue Welten: Portugal und das Zeitalter der Entdeckungen, eds. Michael Kraus and Hans Ottomeyer (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2017), 191–203. 36  Ana Cristina Silva, A Dama Negra da Ilha dos Escravos (Queluz de Baixo: Editorial Presença, 2009).

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(The Black Lady of the Slaves’ Island), about sixteenth-century São Tomé. The main fictional character—the Black Lady—descends from an African princess and a Jewish father, a rich plantation owner, and moves to Portugal, in which country due to her affluence she belongs to the aristocracy, in close contact with the Crown. From its beginnings in the fifteenth century, the sugar plantation economy implied slave labor, and African chiefs and kings negotiated this business with the Europeans. In this context, it is illustrative that Barlaeus reports on a Congolese delegation at The Hague, where he assisted in their showing their dances and customs for the stadtholder Frederik Wilhelm of Orange-Nassau: These envoys had strong, vigorous bodies, and black faces; they were very nimble in their movements and oiled their limbs to facilitate this. I saw with my own eyes as I watched their dances, which were marvelous to see, the way they leapt, the fearful flourishing of their swords, their eyes flashing as they pretended an attack on their enemy. We also witnessed a scene of the king sitting on his throne, maintaining an absolute silence as testimony of his majesty. Also, how foreign envoys, coming from afar, pay homage to the king according to the rituals of their country; they showed us their fawning behavior and pretended honor, which they reenacted to our great hilarity after bouts of drinking.37

Barlaeus had expressed his ethical doubts about slavery,38 but he did not systematically connect them with the transatlantic trade. Above all, he was a dedicated consumer of sugar himself, as he writes in an autobiographical note in his history of Brazil: The thought of sweet sugar makes my mouth water, so that I am about to spatter the pages with this sweet sap and compare the sugar known to the ancients with today’s kind.39

Sugar was still a delicacy in Barlaeus’ time and its trade a way to make a lot of money within a short time. When studying the dictionary of Jews who  Baerle, History of Brazil, 238  Ineke Phaf–Rheinberger, “Die Aktualität von Caspar Barlaeus in Amerika und Afrika,” in Sein Feld war die Welt: Johann Moritz von Nassau–Siegen (1604–1679). Von Siegen über die Niederlande und Brasilien nach Brandenburg, eds. Gerhard Brunn and Cornelius Neutsch (Münster: Waxmann, 2008), 145–59. 39  Baerle, History of Brazil, 70. 37 38

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were resident in Dutch Brazil from 1630 to 1654 at the end of Mello’s Gente da nação, it is evident that many of them were involved in the (slave) trade with West Africa, as were the Dutch Christians.40 Although Mello does not mention Jewish people who owned ships, he notes that they frequently worked as loaders, carriers, or transporters and bought the cargos at the harbor, which were then sold on the market. In short, from Barlaeus’ History of Brazil it becomes clear that he does not express the same respect for the Jewish religion as he did at an earlier stage of his life. We can only guess at the reasons. In the first place, Barlaeus’ History was meant to be a present to the European courts, which in general were not particularly sympathetic to successful Jewish communities. Secondly, as Ronaldo Vainfas writes in his Jerusalém colonial, the relationship of Johan Maurits with the Jewish community in Recife was merely a formal one.41 The Count was not explicitly interested in the Jewish religion or lifestyle. Third, but not least, we can assume that Barlaeus acted out of serious personal motives. He was traumatized because of the polemical discussion after the publication of his poem in Menasseh’s book, which almost cost him his position at the Athenaeum. After the History went to press in April 1647, he again suffered one of his repeatedly returning depressive periods, which strengthened his feelings of being persecuted and mistreated by general Protestant inclinations in the Netherlands. His fragile mood was attested by his strong reaction to the death of his long-time personal friend, the writer P.  C. Hooft, in May 1647 and his own supposed suicide on January 14, 1648. In his 16  years in Amsterdam, Barlaeus, the philosopher of the Athenaeum Illustre, had been “undoubtedly not out of touch with the world.”42 He was very much acquainted with the details of public opinion. His completely different views in two of his works reveal that addressing the Jewish community was a complicated matter for him. It also suggests that prevailing beliefs differed between Pernambuco and Amsterdam. It was questionable to make the Jewish community too prominent in Dutch Brazil because that would diminish the role of Christianity. Because of 40  Mello’s book provides the most complete information on the connections of the Jewish citizens of Pernambuco with the West African coast. See Mello, Gente da nação, 369–522. 41  Vainfas, Jerusalém colonial, 207–16. 42  Blok, “Caspar Barlaeus, de filosoof,” 28.

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that, Barlaeus can be seen as an example of what Sina Rauschenbach formulated regarding Menasseh ben Israel. In Amsterdam, it was not the case that “any knowledge was welcome to anyone […]. The origin of the person who communicated this knowledge always played a role instead.”43 Barlaeus, of course, wanted to be accepted by the Protestant community in the Dutch United Provinces but, at the same time, he experienced the self-imposed limitations of Vondel’s flying freedom in this glorious town, the foremost model of a global city in the seventeenth century.

43  “[…] dass allen jedes Wissen willkommen war […]. Stattdessen spielte die Herkunft desjenigen, der das Wissen vermittelte, immer eine Rolle.” Rauschenbach, Judentum für Christen, 284. My translation.

CHAPTER 7

The Empire Writes Back: David Nassy and Jewish Creole Historiography in Colonial Suriname Sina Rauschenbach

In 1781, Christian Wilhelm Dohm published his famous treatise Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civil Improvement of the Jews). Six years later, Dohm received a letter from a distant Jewish community, praising him for his reform program and wishing him luck for its success. Dohm, who until this point had been roundly criticized,1 responded with joy and hope: The approbation which you attest to me, gentlemen, from the other end of the world is all the more consoling to me. May you enjoy the good fortune of not knowing, other than through the traditions of your ancestors, the manner in which your community is being vitiated in Europe! Your situation furnishes a convincing proof of my thesis that the Jews are capable, like us, 1  One of Dohm’s critics who denied the Jews the capability to become true citizens was Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791). See Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 50–89.

S. Rauschenbach University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_7

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of being good citizens as soon as they are permitted to be. I could, perhaps, make good use hereof if you would be willing to communicate to me some details on the advantages which your wise and enlightened government accords you.2

The work that was written in response to Dohm’s entreaty, David de Isaac Cohen Nassy’s Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam, 1788),3 provides the basis for the following reflections on “writing back” and Jewish Creole thought in the eighteenth-­century Caribbean. Its author was a Surinamese Jewish pharmacist and planter.4 Its subject was history. However, even though the focus of this chapter is on historiography, any conclusions that are to be drawn are valid for a more general discussion of Jewish Creole thought in the early modern Sephardic Atlantic. Specifically, it will be shown that the concept of “writing back” which was mostly developed in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s famous book, published in 1989,5 is a helpful tool for a fresh interpretation of Jewish literature and Jewish Creole thought in early modern American settings. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s 2  Christian Wilhelm von Dohm to the Regents of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Suriname, January 29, 1787 in David Nassy, preface to his Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam (1788), trans. Simon Cohen, ed. Jacob R. Marcus and Stanley F. Chyet (Cincinnati: Publications of the American Jewish Archives, 1974), 13. For the original version, see David Nassy, preface to his Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo [Amsterdam], 1788), xxiii. In the following, where I do not quote, I refer to the French version and only give the respective page numbers of the English translation in brackets. Surinamese Jews learned of Dohm’s Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden via its French translation by Jean Bernoulli, entitled La reforme politique des juifs (1782). In 1786, a copy of that translation came to Suriname. See Nassy, preface to his Essai historique, viii–ix [6]. 3  Nassy, Essai historique. For an English translation, see Nassy, Historical Essay. 4  For the history of the Jews in colonial Suriname, see Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991), and, more recently Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: Brill, 2010), as well as Aviva Ben-Ur and Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2009 and 2012). 5  Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002 [1989]). Even though this book has received heavy criticism for its creation of “a grand theory of post-colonialism,” the notion of “writing back” is still prominent in Postcolonial Studies and clearly useful in welldefined and focused contexts. For a recent example, see John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London: Continuum, 2001), esp. 1–14. For a summary of the aforementioned criticism, see John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010 [2000]), 28–32, 32.

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The Empire Writes Back deals first and foremost with authors writing from within the European colonies attempting to reverse the power relations between the imperial center and the periphery. Nassy’s Essai historique also aimed at challenging power relations, and it was also written from the “periphery.” Nassy was an American-born settler and a Jew. He was neither European nor Christian. But the example of Nassy is not free from ambivalence because Nassy also wrote as a white Surinamese plantation owner in a country whose inhabitants were predominantly African slaves. Hence, it also serves to illustrate the case of Jewish settlers in colonial power relations and to confirm the increasingly accepted contention that dichotomous divisions between colonizers and the colonized need to be carefully reconsidered. The following chapter will be divided into six  sections. The sections “Jews in Colonial Suriname” and “Jewish Historiography in Colonial Suriname” are dedicated to a very short survey of the historical context and the setting of Nassy’s historiographical narrative. In the sections “About the Situation of the Jews” and “About the Situation of the Colony”, I will examine two different threads of narration in Nassy’s Essai historique. One focus will be on Nassy’s description of the Jews in the history of Suriname. Another focus will be on his challenges to “classical” European descriptions of the colony in general. Both foci will be summarized in the section “Writing Back.” In the last section, I will use the example of Nassy as a point of departure for a more general discussion and the development of new questions and perspectives with regard to Jewish Creole thought in the early modern Sephardic Atlantic.

Jews in Colonial Suriname In the eighteenth century, Dutch Caribbean colonies constituted the center of Jewish life in the Americas.6 Whereas open Jewish life continued to be forbidden and persecuted in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French 6  For a recent publication on Jewish Life in the Dutch Caribbean, see Julie-Marthe Cohen, ed., Joden in de Cariben: Vier eeuwen joodse geschiedenis in Suriname en Curaçao (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2015). See also the respective chapters in Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2002); Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2001); Günter Böhm, Los sefardíes en los dominios holandeses de América del Sur y del

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Americas, Dutch Caribbean colonies looked back over more than a century of blossoming Jewish settlement. After the fall of Dutch Brazil,7 only English Caribbean colonies, with Jamaica and Barbados at the forefront, had become similarly important destinations for Jewish settlement.8 One of the countries where Jews profited the most from European privileges and which attracted more Jewish migrants than any other Caribbean colony was what is today Suriname.9 Since the first Northern European powers arrived in the Guyanas, enterprising Jews who were willing to settle in this inhospitable region of South America were granted special rights. Those rights not only concerned certain well-known congregational autonomies, but also included initial tax exemptions, rights to trade and to ship goods, to possess estates and slaves, to take a special oath without Christian formulas, to decline civil and legal activities on Jewish holidays, and to participate in the citizens’ colonial administration and militia.10 In 1657, Sephardic Jews started to build up settlements and plantations in what are today Guyana and French Guyana. In the 1660s, due to English and French warfare in the region of Cayenne, some of them moved on and settled on land around the river Suriname. In 1682, Surinamese Sephardim Caribe, 1630—1750 (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1992); Jane Gerber, ed., The Jews in the Caribbean (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014); Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires, 1540–1740 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); 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). For Jewish life in colonial Suriname, see note 4. For a “classic” study regarding the Netherlands Antilles, see Isaac S. and Suzanne A.  Emmanuel, A History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970). 7  For the most recent book on the first 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 Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil, 1624–1654 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). For an earlier English monograph, see Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia University Press, 1960). 8  For Jewish settlements in the English Caribbean, see Arbell, The Jewish Nation, 191–260. More recently, see Stanley Mirvis, “Sephardic Family Life in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013), and Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831,” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000). 9  See note 5. 10  Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1:147. For a reprint of the privileges granted to Jewish settlers in Cayenne (1659) and the English Guyanas (1665), see Nassy, Essai historique, 2:113–25 [183–89].

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founded Savannah (in Christian descriptions: Jodensavanne), their first autonomous town in the Americas. Only a few decades later, Jewish settlers opened two additional synagogues in  the capital city Paramaribo. One important trait that all seventeenth-century Caribbean Jewish communities shared was that they were strongly linked to Amsterdam’s Kehilah Kedoshah Talmud Torah, which had become the most important congregation in the Western Sephardic Diaspora.11 Talmud Torah provided Caribbean Sephardic communities with their first Torah scrolls, their first rabbis, and their first model for rules and community ordinances. Furthermore, Dutch Jewish merchants profited from important family and business networks within  and across the borders of colonies and empires in the Atlantic world.12 Due to the high percentage of “New Jews” among the Sephardim,13 several of those networks not only connected American colonies and countries of open Jewish life but “Portuguese” (i.e. Sephardic) merchants also crossed lines between Spanish, Dutch, French, Danish, and English territories to trade with Christian merchants, to smuggle goods and to circumvent European laws and restrictions of trade.14 In 1735, Suriname counted around 700 Jews (among them around 400 Sephardim) who owned more than a quarter of the Surinamese plantations. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Jewish Surinamese population rose to around 1330 persons (two thirds Sephardim and one 11  For some of the most important monographs on the Sephardim in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Rena Fuks-Mansfeld, De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot 1795: Aspecten van een joodse minderheid in een hollandse stad (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989); and Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000). For some of the most important essays, see Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000). For a more general survey, see Johan C. H.  Blom, Rena G.  FuksMansfeld and Ivo Schöffer, eds., The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002 [1995]). 12  For Sephardic networks in the Atlantic world, see the contributions in Gerber, ed., The Jews in the Caribbean. For further titles, see note 75. 13  Yosef Kaplan, “Wayward New Christians and Stubborn New Jews: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity,” Jewish History 8, no. 1–2 (1994): 27–41. 14  Daniel Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in ‘Europe’s Other Sea:’ The Adventure of Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish History 72, no. 2 (1982): 212–40. See also 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), 117–19.

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third Ashkenazim) and 30% of the white people in the colony, outnumbered by more than five times as many slaves.15 At the end of the eighteenth century, the proportion of Jews among the Surinamese white population continued to rise, until it stabilized at a level of nearly 50%.16 However, at around the same time, Suriname’s plantation economy entered into a state of decline. Planters were not only constantly involved in fights against maroons,  runaway slaves, they also fell victim to financial cutbacks in Amsterdam, the stock market crash of the 1770s, increasing competition from the French Caribbean, shrinking markets in New England, and European warfare in the Americas. Surinamese Jewish planters additionally suffered from a threatening growth of hostility and anti-­Judaism from local governors, colonists, and slaves. Nostalgic memories of a past that had been irretrievably lost made their way into Surinamese Jewish collective memory. Laments over loss and decline combined with expressions of a continuous pride and self-awareness among Surinamese Jewish elites who were still some of the most privileged Jews in the pre-­emancipation world.17 One of the books where this phenomenon is most visible is David de Isaac Cohen Nassy’s Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam.

Jewish Historiography in Colonial Suriname David de Isaac Cohen Nassy was born in Savannah in 1747.18 In 1770, he became the owner of the coffee plantation Tulpenburg, but had to sell it in 1773 and from then on made his living from his work as a pharmacist as well as from administrative positions in the Surinamese Sephardic community. Due to financial problems, Nassy had to leave Jewish Savannah in 1786 and moved to Paramaribo. In Paramaribo, Nassy founded the Jewish literary society Docendo docemur and read Jean 15  Numbers are taken from Zvi Loker, “Les communautés séfarades en Guyane hollandaise (Surinam),” in Les Juifs d’Espagne: Histoire d’une diaspora, 1492–1991, ed. Henry Méchoulan (Paris: Levi, 1992), 646–52, 647. See also Vink, Creole Jews, 28. 16  Ibid. 17  Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 1. 18  For detailed biographical information about Nassy, see R.  Bijlsma, “David de Is. C. Nassy, Author of the Essai Historique sur Surinam,” in The Jewish Nation in Surinam: Historical Essays, ed. Robert Cohen (Amsterdam: Emmering, 1982), 65–74. For Nassy’s years in Philadelphia, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the slave Mattheus,” in New Essays in American Jewish History: Commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, OH: American Archives of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 2010), 79–93.

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Bernoulli’s French translation of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden.19 Only a few years later, after further financial setbacks and the death of his wife, he moved again and left Suriname. Between 1792 and 1795 and after having received his medical license in St. Thomas, he worked as a physician in Philadelphia and was officially accepted into the American Philosophical Society. Back in Suriname in 1796, he authored his famous Lettre politico-theologico-morale sur les Juifs (1798) as a reaction to ongoing debates about the emancipation of the Jews in the former Dutch and now Batavian Republic.20 A few years later, Nassy retired from his community positions and died in 1806. In his Essai historique, which was first published in Amsterdam in 1788,21 Nassy does not tire of emphasizing the singularity of Suriname and the extraordinary situation of the Jews in it. According to him, no history of Surinamese Jewry could be written without treating the history of Suriname, and no history of Suriname could be written without treating the  Jews.22 However, European authors tended to do exactly that when they set out to write about the country: “Dutch nationals” (les Nationaux Hollandois) and “foreigners” (Etrangers)23 either neglected the Jews or they drew faulty pictures. Both defects become clear once their findings are compared to archival sources.24 Among the authors whom Nassy criticizes are Jacques Nicolas Bellin (1703–1772) and Jan Jacob Hartsinck (1716–1779), who had written accounts about the Guyanas a few years before Nassy.25 But Nassy’s criticism  See note 2.  Sina Rauschenbach, “Patriots at the Periphery: David Nassy, the French Revolution and the Emancipation of the Dutch Jews,” in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardi Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 581–609. See also Sigmund Seeligman, “David Nassy of Suriname and his ‘Lettre politicotheologico-morale sur les Juifs,’” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 22 (1914): 25–38. 21  The indication on the front page that the Essai was printed in Paramaribo is incorrect. See Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough,’” 81–82. 22  Nassy, Essai historique 1:34–35 [1:36]. 23  Ibid., Préface, xiii [Preface, 8]. 24  Ibid., 1:46–47 [1:43]. For the importance of archival sources in Jewish Caribbean thought, see also Aviva Ben-Ur, “Archival Practices: The Creation of a Portuguese Jewish identity,” Kristòf: Revista Sosialkutural/Sociaalcultureel Tijdschrift 16, no. 2 (2015): 17–25. 25  See Jacques Nicolas Bellin, Description géographique de la Guyane (Paris: Stoupe, 1763), and Jan Jacob Hartsinck, Beschryving van Guiana, of de wilde kust in Zuid-America [1770] (Amsterdam: Semmering, 1974). 19 20

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also refers to the frontrunners of eighteenth-century European historiography: Voltaire and Raynal.26 In 1769, Voltaire had authored his six-volume Essai sur les mæurs et l’esprit des nations (Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations). Guillaume Thomas Raynal had been the presumed author of the voluminous Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies), which was first published in Paris in 1770 and continuously enlarged, updated, and modified until Raynal’s death in 1796.27 Nassy announces that his history of the colony will have “nothing in common”28 with the histories of the aforementioned authors. He redresses his two points of criticism, namely, the negligence of the importance of the Jews and the general distortion of the picture of Suriname. And he clarifies that both narrative threads are nevertheless indivisible and interconnected.

About the Situation of the Jews In scholarly literature, Nassy’s Essai historique is mostly discussed within the context of the European Enlightenment and the transfer of European ideals such as freedom, equality, and fraternity to the Americas.29 As a matter 26  See Nassy, Essai historique, 1:191. The English translation reads: “And in order to fulfil our purpose, we shall transcribe here the sketch which Monsieur de Raynal made in his Histoire Politique, and the authors whose works we have cited in this essay. In retracing what they wrote about the colony, we shall permit ourselves the liberty of suppressing, adding, recasting, and correcting what is there found to be exaggerated or defective, in accordance with the authority which truth devoid of all prejudice gives.” Nassy, Historical Essay, 1:121–22. 27  Today we know that the Histoire was in fact a joint project of several authors and that the most polemical passages of the edition of 1780 were written by Denis Diderot. But Nassy was of course unaware of that shared authorship because Raynal was the only author to sign the Histoire by name. For an updated list of contributors and a most recent summary of the state of research, see Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, introduction to Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes: Edition critique, ed. Anthony Stugnell et  al., vol. 1 (Paris: Centre International d’Étude du XIIIe Siècle, 2010), xxx–xxxiv. For a detailed analysis of the different versions and editions of the Histoire, see Hans Wolpe, Raynal et sa machine de guerre: L’Histoire des deux Indes et ses perfectionnements (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 28  Ibid., Préface, xiv [Preface, 8]. 29  For three examples, out of many, see Rena G.  Fuks-Mansfeld, “Enlightenment and Emancipation, c. 1750–1814,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. Johan C. H. Blom, Rena G. Fuks-Mansfeld and Ivo Schöffer, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Oxford:

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of fact, Nassy’s Essai historique is rather ambivalent regarding European Enlightenment values. On the one hand, Nassy indeed constantly refers to them. On the other hand, he makes clear that Europe is not only the continent that spreads the Enlightenment, but that it is also responsible for persecution, intolerance, and outdated structures. Interestingly, the last point concerns not only Christian societies but also Jewish communities, which Nassy considers to be equally regressive. The picture that Nassy paints of Europe has not gained much attention until now, but it is remarkable. Nassy begins the first part of his Essai historique with the well-known history of Iberian Jewry. Starting points are the expulsions and forced baptisms the Jews underwent on the Iberian Peninsula between 1492 and 1498. Afterward, Nassy continues with the histories and fates of Iberian conversos, their persecutions by the Spanish and the Portuguese Inquisitions, “purity of blood” and first refugee movements to the New World. None of these accounts is surprising and none of them differs from other contemporary reports. However, Nassy’s descriptions of open Jewish life in Northern Europe and the foundation of the first Jewish community in Amsterdam are colored by a new and surprisingly unfamiliar undertone. Readers expecting a eulogy for the unique freedom that Jews enjoyed in this city will only partly be satisfied. Admittedly, Nassy states that descriptions of seventeenth-century Amsterdam are usually characterized by narratives of religious freedom and the lucky situation of its Jews. But shortly afterward, Nassy himself puts this statement into perspective and emphasizes that even in Amsterdam religious freedom had always been limited by attacks from orthodox Calvinist theologians.30 Going even further, Nassy does not stop at criticizing Christian intolerance but he also detects intolerant traits among Amsterdam Jews. He first asks if obstacles built up by Dutch Christians against them—such as the prohibition against joining guilds or the limitation of permitted professions—“did not contribute greatly to the decadence of the Jews in Holland, and to the paucity of luminaries whom the community there was able to acquire The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002 [1995]), 164–91, 173; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1059; and Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, The ‘Air of Liberty:’ Narratives of the South Atlantic Past (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 65–68. For Nassy in the context of Dutch Jewish historiography, see note 60. For Nassy’s reliance on ideals of the European Enlightenment, see also his Lettre politico-theologico-morale. 30  Nassy, Essai historique, 1:6 [1:21].

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afterwards, in the midst of so much religious liberty.”31 Afterward and toward the end of the first part of his Essai historique, he argues that Dutch Sephardim had also been victims of their Iberian socialization. Specifically, they had imported many practices of intolerance, from which they had themselves suffered, to the Netherlands. As examples, Nassy uses Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza, both of whom had been banned by the Amsterdam Sephardic community in the seventeenth century, but who had, according to Nassy, already suffered persecutions, “before their atheism had been discovered.”32 Now there are plenty of indications that Amsterdam Jewry was in a state of economic decline during Nassy’s days and that this decline went along with a loss of authority and influence in the Sephardic Western Diaspora.33 But Nassy dates the decline of Amsterdam Sephardim back to their heyday in the seventeenth century, and he does so by adding a moral component. Firstly, he takes da Costa and Spinoza as victims of Sephardic intolerance. Secondly, he explains this intolerance by means of Iberian culture and Sephardic experience.34 At first sight his interpretation is surprising. (Even though Isaac de  Nassy, Essai historique, 1:7 [1:22].  Nassy, Essai historique, 1:157–58 [1:105]. Uriel da Costa had been banned by several Jewish congregations during the 1620s because of his heterodox views. In 1640, he committed suicide after a humiliating reconciliation ceremony in the Amsterdam synagogue. For a recent summary on da Costa and Spinoza, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 157–80. For more detailed information about da Costa, see Israel S. Révah, Uriel da Costa et les marranes de Porto: Cours au Collège de France (1966–1972), ed. Carsten Lorenz Wilke (Paris: Centre Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, 2004), as well as Uriel da Costa, Examination of Pharisaic Traditions / Exame das tradições phariseas: Facsimile of the Unique Copy in the Royal Library of Copenhagen: Supplemented by Semuel da Silva’s Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul / Tratado da immortalidade da alma, eds. and trans. Herman Prins Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 33  Fuks-Mansfeld speaks of a “loss of cultural predominance.” See her “Enlightenment and Emancipation,” 166. For similar statements, see ibid., 173 and 178. For the extremely high rate of poverty in eighteenth-century Jewish Amsterdam, see Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 61–76. 34  Today we know that Nassy’s explanation was not unjustified. For the internalization of Iberian values and prejudices by Sephardim, see, for example, Bodian, Hebrews; 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; Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215–16. For a general history of the Jewish rehabilitation of Spinoza, see Daniel B. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton: Princeton University 31 32

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Pinto, too, had stated in 1762 “that the Jews adopt so strongly the patriot spirit of the nations among which they live, that they push it farther even than the natives themselves,”35 de Pinto had used his statement to distinguish Iberian Jews positively from their Ashkenazic coreligionists and to emphasize the “purer morals” of the Sephardim.36 Only modern scholarship has turned to explaining Amsterdam Sephardic practices of exclusion as modes of appropriation of Iberian Old Christian patterns.37) However, after a careful reading of the Essai historique, it becomes clear that Nassy’s comments fit perfectly into a wider scheme and that his dissociation from Europe in fact aims to praise the American situation. According to Nassy, Suriname was close to being the most tolerant country in the world.38 In Suriname, “each one […] prays to God in his own manner, and each one […] does what seems to him most efficacious for the salvation of his soul.”39 Furthermore, in Suriname, Jewish and Christian planters alike had proven to be “true and useful colonists who ought to treat each other mutually as brothers.”40 Only with the decline of the colony had tolerance and coexistence become damaged. Nonetheless, the situation of the Jews in Suriname was still better than that of the most privileged Jews in Europe, and Surinamese Jews only struggled with actual conditions because they had been in such a special and extraordinary situation before. Nassy writes:

Press, 2012). For a most recent study of eighteenth-century Christian appraisals of Spinoza’s life and “virtuous atheism,” together with further bibliographical details, see Wiep van Bunge, “Spinoza’s Life: 1677–1802,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78, no. 2 (2017): 211–31. I am thankful to Wiep van Bunge for sharing his manuscript with me. 35  Isaac de Pinto, “Critical Reflections on the First Chapter of the Seventh Volume of M. Voltaire’s Works,” in Letters of Certain Jews to Monsieur Voltaire: Containing an Apology for their own People and for the Old Testament, trans. Philip Lefanu (Philadelphia: Herman Hooker, 1848), 33–53, 36. For the original French version, see Isaac de Pinto, Apologie pour la nation juive: Réflexions critiques sur le premier chapitre du VIIe tome des œuvres de M. Voltaire (Amsterdam: J. Joubert, 1762). 36  De Pinto, “Critical Reflections,” 38. 37  Yosef Kaplan, “Political Concepts in the World of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century: The Problem of Exclusion and the Boundaries of SelfIdentity,” in Menasseh ben Israel and his World, eds. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 45–62, 53. Kaplan refers mostly to the Sephardic appropriation of the Old Christian concept of “purity.” See also Bodian, Hebrews, 85–95. 38  Nassy, Essai historique, 2:27 [2:136]. 39  Ibid., 2:27 [2:136]. 40  Ibid., 1:68 [1:55–56].

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Our privileges would today certainly form the happiness of the Jews of France and of Germany, and perhaps even of those of Italy, without excepting [even] those who live under the rule of the beneficent Leopold [Grand Duke] of Tuscany. At the sight of the place, the scene, where their ancestors were persecuted because of the same religion which today tolerates them, they should consider themselves happy. But for the Jews of Surinam, [who, though] accustomed to seeing themselves esteemed, become poor after they have been rich, and, to complete their misfortune, [become] disdained and without any other resource than that which their industry affords them, they certainly do not find themselves in the same circumstances as their brethren in Europe.41

Already in their letter to Dohm, Nassy and the leaders of the Surinamese Jewish community stressed that they had absolutely “nothing in common” with European Jews and that they only acted as advocates for their coreligionists across the Atlantic.42 In his Essai historique, Nassy reconfirms this difference between Suriname and Europe, and he does not even refrain from mentioning Tuscany  as an example for European Jewish restrictions. Tuscany had been following one of the most tolerant Jewish policies in Europe since the late sixteenth century, and its Livornina probably served as the basis for the first privileges that were granted to Jews in the English and Dutch Guyanas, and thereby also Suriname.43 But for Nassy, perspectives of center and periphery were inverted. Old constellations of colonial power and colony lost their strict form, new ones prevailed. This is not restricted to his statements about the privileges of the Jews but is generally true for Nassy’s whole Essai historique.

About the Situation of the Colony Nassy’s Essai historique not only includes interesting remarks about Surinamese Jews but also about Suriname and the situation of the colony. Those remarks confirm what Wieke Vink has shown in her important book: Nassy was a Creole in the Latin American meaning of the term criollo. He was a (white) European born in the colonies, to be distinguished

 Ibid., 1:81 [1:61–62].  Ibid., Préface, x [Preface, 6]. 43  Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 1:147. 41 42

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from (white) Europeans born in Europe (in the Iberian case: peninsulares).44 This use of “Creole” is partly different from the use of “Creole” in “Creole languages,” because it does not necessarily refer to descendants of African slaves but also includes “white” cultures and people. In Spanish America, resistance against the privileges of peninsulares was a main motive for Creole identity-building and later struggles for independence.45 In a ­similar vein, Surinamese Jewish Creoles entirely identified with the Jewish and non-Jewish Suriname-born “white” population, with whom they shared experiences, problems, and thoughts. In Nassy’s Essai historique, this identification is omnipresent and impossible to miss. One good example is Nassy’s statement at the beginning of the second part that inhabitants of eighteenth-century colonies should be clearly distinguished from inhabitants of colonies in antiquity who had had fewer rights, little autonomy, and who had generally been “a class inferior to that of the inhabitants and the citizens of the mother country.”46 Another example is Nassy’s open vote for the strengthening of economic independence and for steps toward an American free trade agreement only a few pages later.47 Most important, however, is Nassy’s effort to paint his own Surinamese picture of the colonial plantation economy and to correct Europe’s picture 44  The use of the term “Creole” varies between different times and places. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2010 [2000]), 50–51. My use of “Creole” corresponds to the use of criollo in the Spanish Americas. For a similar use of “Creole” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica, see Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), xiv–xv. For a similar use in the field of Jewish Studies, see Vink, Creole Jews, 6–10. By contrast, Aviva Ben-Ur uses “Creolization” as “the fusion of European Jewish and black cultures and peoples.” See Aviva Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Colonial Suriname,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 152–69, 169. Nassy’s use of the term “Creole” encompasses both meanings: On the one hand, Nassy describes himself as a “Creole” (Essai historique 2:80 [2:164]) and hence clearly refers to the white Surinamese population. On the other hand, he uses “Creole” to refer to Surinamese descendants of African slaves. Ibid., 1:92 [1:68]. For my argument, the first use is decisive. 45  For a most famous reference to Creole identity in the context of Latin American independences, see Bolívar’s statement that “[…] no somos indios ni europeos, sino una especie media entre los legítimos propietarios del país y los usurpadores españoles: […] americanos por nacimiento y nuestros derechos los de Europa.” Simón Bolívar, Doctrina del libertador, ed. Manuel Pérez Vila (Caracas: Ayacucho, 1979 [1976]), 62. 46  Nassy, Essai historique 2:5 [2:125]. 47  Ibid., 2:43–44 [2:145].

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of a Suriname that is discredited by its brutal slavery.48 Time and again, Nassy describes the destructive influence of European crises and politics on the Surinamese plantation economy.49 He assumes the perspective of a Surinamese plantation owner to explain which damages were caused by “bad maroons” and their attacks from the hinterlands. He gives accounts of cooperation between “good Negroes” and their former owners,50 and he emphasizes that Jews are as adept at  good plantation economies as Christians, concluding that anti-Jewish arguments according to which more slaves escape from Jewish than from Christian plantations are not sustainable.51 Instead, Jews and Christians alike suffer from European colonialism on the one hand and maroon attacks on the other, and neither group is to blame for the difficult situation. In Nassy’s last argument Jewish and Creole narrative threads meet. In fact, abolitionist debates in the Dutch world were often connected to anti-­ Jewish defamation.52 Until today, this connection  makes it difficult to approach topics of Judaism and slavery in a neutral fashion.53 In Suriname, where a high proportion of plantations were owned by Jews, narratives of “brutal Jewish slave owners” spread and even entered discourses among 48  For Nassy and slavery, see Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough.’” Davis is the first scholar to discuss Nassy’s stay in Philadelphia and his confrontation with North-American abolitionist discourses in the aftermath of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Davis, too, stresses Nassy’s unbroken defense of slavery, however. See ibid., 87. Phaf-Rheinberger uses Nassy’s defense of slavery and colonialism to emphasize that there are indeed no postcolonial perspectives in Nassy’s writing. See Phaf-Reinberger, The ‘Air of Liberty,’ 60. This is what I would like to question by linking postcolonial thought to more than abolitionist perspectives. 49  For one important example, see Nassy, Essai historique 1:35–36 [1:36–37]. 50  Ibid., 1:92 and 1:125 [1:68 and 1:86]. 51  Ibid., 1:142–43 and 1:150 [1:96–97 and 1:100–101]. 52  For one of many examples, see Wolter Robert van Hoëvell. Van Hoëvell was a Dutch clerk in Batavia. In his Slaven en vrijen under de Nederlandsche wet, 2 vols. (Zaltbommel: Noman, 1854), he defended the emancipation of slaves in the Dutch colonies in Asia while at the same time attacking Jewish slave owners. See ibid., 1:80–81. For a critical discussion as well as for further examples, see Vink, Creole Jews, 118–20. 53  In the twentieth century, “Judaism and slavery” continued to be a hot topic in antiSemitic writing and thought, culminating in the publication of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1991) and its corresponding replies by Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), and Saul Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998). For two recent books whose authors try to overcome polemical discussions and to approach the still difficult subject in terms of postcolonial studies, see Schorsch, Jews and Blacks (for the early modern period) and Nicole Lapierre, Causes communes: Des juifs et des noirs (Paris: Stock, 2011) (for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries).

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freed and fugitive slaves.54 At the same time, Christian anti-Jewish discourses were bound up with social practices of “blackening.” As Jonathan Schorsch has convincingly argued, “early modern Jews were not automatically white,”55 but they were easily counted among black people, or they were at least considered to be of a special “white-but-Jewish” status.56 Nassy and other Jewish authors underline that Jewish plantation owners enjoyed the same rights as “white Christians” and that they had similar experiences. Moreover, according to Nassy, some Jews became known for their good ties to former slaves. One example is Nassy’s well-known story of an expeditionary corps commanded by a Jewish planter to capture escaped slaves in the Surinamese wild forest in 1761. In the middle of their expedition the Jewish slave owner and his soldiers decided to spend several days in a maroon village with which a peace treaty had been signed one year before. According to Nassy, the maroons of that village not only received their guests in a friendly manner, but they also enabled them to pray, to follow their Jewish dietary rules and to keep the Sabbath in peace.57 Nassy’s perspectives on Surinamese plantations and slaves are obviously self-interested and far from “objective.” But the story that Nassy tells is remarkable and it is most illuminating with regard to eighteenthcentury Surinamese Jewish historiography and thought. It not only connects Jewish and Christian settlers in the colony, it also leaves no doubt that the history of European settlers in the Caribbean would have been different had European colonial powers not continuously interfered, benefiting from their colonies, carrying their own conflicts across the Atlantic and leaving behind false accounts and distorted pictures.58 Nassy as a Surinamese Creole writes back. He demands attention, new  Vink, Creole Jews, 109–13.  Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 179. For a detailed discussion together with Jewish patterns of replies, see ibid., 166–216. 56  Vink, Creole Jews, 134. In a similar manner, Ben-Ur speaks about a “not quite ‘white’ status” of Surinamese Jews. 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 Libraries, 2014), 25–46, 40. 57  Nassy, Essai historique, 1:126–28 [1:86–88]. See also Vink, Creole Jews, 117–19. 58  For the distorted pictures, see Nassy, Essai historique, 1:46 [1:43]. 54 55

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perspectives, equal chances, and equal rights. Similarly, Nassy as a Jew stresses the benefit that a Christian-centered and anti-Jewish world gains from its Jewish citizens. He demands that this benefit should be laid open and that Surinamese Jews should finally be given the merits and the respect they deserve.

Writing Back Nassy’s text fits into postcolonial schemes of “writing back” in a striking manner. Firstly, Nassy’s starting point is a double silence on the part of European authors,59 in his case the silence about Suriname and the silence about the Jews’ share in the colony. Secondly, Nassy moves Suriname and the Jews into the “center” while Europe and the Christians are moved to the “periphery.” Thirdly, Nassy actively adopts European Enlightenment language and culture: Not only does he borrow classic Enlightenment narratives such as the ones of “progress,” “decline,” “benefit,” and “tolerance;” he also expresses his thought in terms of eighteenth-century historiography,60 or—in his own words—in terms of “literature,” an attitude that he declares to be clearly European and far removed from his own Creole environment.61 Fourthly, Nassy writes in French even though he admits that the language is not his own and even though he fears that his French might have a barbaric ring to European ears.62 Finally, Nassy explicitly attempts to complement canonical texts and to rewrite them from the double periphery of the Jew and the Surinamese settler. In the light of these considerations, it is surely no coincidence that Nassy starts the introduction to his Essai with Voltaire and Voltaire’s anti-­

59  For the importance of silence as a point of departure in postcolonial writing, see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 82. 60   For the importance of historiography in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Amsterdam, see Gérard Nahon, “The Portuguese Jewish Nation of Amsterdam as Reflected in the Memoirs of Abraham Haim Lopes Arias, 1752,” in Dutch Jews Perceived by Themselves and by Others, eds. Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 59–78. Nahon is also one of the few scholars who, in the ongoing debates about early modern Jewish historiography, refers to the Surinamese example and Nassy’s Essai historique. For bibliographical details about Nassy in the context of early modern Dutch historiography, see Leo and Rena Fuks, “Joodse geschiedschrijving in de republiek in de 17e en 18e eeuw,” Studia Rosenthaliana 6 (1972): 137–65. 61  Nassy, Essai historique, Préface, vii [Preface, 5]. See also ibid, 2:80 [2:164]. 62  Ibid., Préface, vii [Preface, 5].

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Jewish polemic.63 According to Nassy, Voltaire not only sinned with regard to the Jews, but also with regard to Suriname and the problematic picture he drew of the colony. In his Essai sur les mœurs, one of the most important Enlightenment historiographies, Voltaire only mentions Suriname in a short paragraph as an unimportant appendix to the general history of Dutch colonies in the Americas.64 In his Candide, published a few years after the Essai, Voltaire connects Suriname’s name to the picture of a mutilated slave and a brutal Dutch slave holder.65 Contrary to Voltaire, Raynal and his coauthors of the History of the two Indies devoted a longer passage of the 1770 and 1774 editions to Suriname, and they also dedicated a special paragraph to the extraordinary situation of the Jews, stressing that […] there is perhaps […] no empire on earth where this unfortunate community (the Jewish) is so well treated. Not only has it been granted the freedom of professing its religion, of having lands in full ownership, and of itself settling the differences that arise among its members; it enjoys also the right, common to all citizens, of participating in the general government, and of competing in the elections of the public magistrates. Such is the progress of the spirit of commerce that it silences all national or religious prejudices in the face of the general interest which should bind men together.66

But in the 1780 edition of his work, which underwent fundamental changes with regard to content and tone, the quoted passage was removed 63  Nassy, Essai historique, Introduction, xxv–xxvi [Introduction, 15]. For Voltaire and Judaism, see Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 231–46. One of the best known European Jewish replies to Voltaire’s antiJewish attacks is the already mentioned Apologie by Isaac de Pinto. See note 35. However, de Pinto did not defend the Jews as such but only the Sephardim, whom he declared to be clearly more “progressive” than Ashkenazim. Interestingly, Nassy’s Essai historique lacks similar comments about Ashkenazic Jews. 64  Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. M. Beuchot (Paris, 1829), 3:347. 65  Voltaire, “Candide, ou l’optimisme [1759],” in Œuvres de Voltaire, ed. M. Beuchot, vol. 33 (Paris: Lefèvre, 1829), ch. 9, 215–344, 251–57. For Nassy’s reference to and criticism of Candide, see his Essai historique 1:156–57 [1:104]. 66  See Raynal, Histoire philosophique (Amsterdam, 1770), 4:255, and Raynal, Histoire philosophique (Amsterdam, 1774), 4:360–361. I quote from the English translation in Nassy, Historical Essay, 2:139–40. For Nassy’s quotation of Raynal in the French version, see Essai historique, 2:34. Nassy owned two editions of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique: Den Haag, 1774 (7 vols. in 12°) and Amsterdam,  1775 (7 vols. in 8°). See the catalogue of Nassy’s library in Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 181–239, 218.

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and deleted.67 Furthermore, driven by their principal tendency to write a philosophically reflective and critical history of colonial expansion, Raynal and his coauthors also gave major importance to the tragic conditions of slaves and slave revolts in Suriname and the Surinamese plantation ­economy.68 Jacques Nicolas Bellin and Jan Jacob Hartsinck, for their part, did not speak about the Surinamese plantation economy in negative terms. However, according to Nassy, Bellin failed to give due regard to the Jewish contribution to Surinamese history, whereas Hartsinck tended to mention Jewish settlers with a clear anti-Jewish undertone.69 Nassy quotes all four texts at prominent places in his Essai historique, and he counters them with his own narrative: He organizes the first part of his Essai historique as a history of Suriname which seems to follow accounts like the ones of Voltaire, Raynal and his coauthors. But in Nassy’s case, the history of Suriname is integrated into the bigger history of the Iberian Jews 67  According to the sentence that follows Raynal’s comment about Surinamese Jews in the 1770, 1774, and 1780 editions, the missing passage should have been in Raynal, Histoire philosophique (Geneva, 1780), 6:404. Nassy, Historical Essay, 2:140, comments: “What, then, could have been the reason, what could have motivated Monsieur Raynal, to suppress this article, which refers particularly to the Jews, in the last edition of his work?” For the French version, see Essai historique, 2:35. In fact, Raynal and his coauthors, in the 1780 edition, not only removed the aforementioned passage but also changed large parts of the whole description of Suriname. Nassy’s comment refers to the 1781 edition. See his Essai historique, 2:35nǂ [2:242n12]. However, that edition is mostly identical with the 1780 edition. See Wolpe, Raynal et sa machine de guerre, 14. 68  Raynal, Histoire philosophique (Amsterdam: n.p., 1770), 4:264–67. Sankar Muthu has recently embedded the anti-slavery argument within a less known anti-imperialist argument of Enlightenment authors who criticize the general loss of civilization in Europeans abroad. According to Muthu, this argument is especially visible in Diderot’s contributions to the 1780 edition of Raynal’s Histoire. See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 72–121. However, Muthu’s reading of Diderot is clearly focused on European behavior toward non-European indigenous and enslaved peoples. He fails to discuss the case of Creoles, who were neither Europeans nor necessarily descendants of the aforementioned groups, and whose contribution to anti-imperialist discourse was obviously different. 69  For the respective comments about Jews, see Bellin, Description géographique, 161–62. Hartsinck mentions Surinamese Jewish plantation owners in several places of his book, but whereas his descriptions of synagogues in Paramaribo and Jewish Savannah are mostly neutral (see Hartsinck, Beschryving, 570–73), other comments of his are clearly anti-Jewish. For two examples, which Nassy contradicts in his later Essai historique, see Hartsinck’s complaints about disorder among Surinamese Jewry (ibid., 674–75), and his statements about the great number of runaway slaves from Jewish plantations (ibid., 756). For Nassy’s replies, see also note 72. For further details about Hartsinck, see Vink, Creole Jews, 116–17.

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and their post-expulsion Diaspora. Nassy’s second part follows not a chronological but a systematic  order and structurally resembles Bellin’s description of the Guyanas. However, here too, contents are changed and a special place is given to the Jews. One important example is the description of Savannah which Nassy positions at the center of an important chapter of his Essai.70 Another example is Nassy’s emphasis on Surinamese cultural achievements. This example not only counters Bellin’s interest in Surinamese flora and fauna, it also challenges European voices in the socalled Dispute of the New World and hence tendencies to discuss the supposed “lack of civilization” in American colonies.71 Finally, Nassy regularly refers to Hartsinck and his comments about disorder within Surinamese Jewish communities or about especially hard conditions of slaves belonging to Jewish owners, only to wield “modern” historiographical conventions against European writers themselves and to stress that those comments cannot be maintained in light of archival materials and “true facts.”72 In all cases,  Nassy counters European claims to the sovereignty of knowledge, and he provides what could be interpreted as an early Surinamese-Jewish “auto-historiography:” a Jewish history, written for a Christian audience, with the aspiration of interpreting and controlling Jewish-Surinamese history from a Jewish-Surinamese perspective.73 Reading Nassy’s Essai historique 70  Nassy, Essai historique, 2:49–62 [2:148–56]. Interestingly, the same chapter also consists of a description of the “character of the Creoles” (caractère des créoles). This confirms Vink’s description of “Jewishness and white Creoleness as largely overlapping identifications.” Vink, Creole Jews, 264. 71  For the title, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic (1750–1900), trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973 [1955]). For a recent study, see Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). For Bellin’s interest in Surinamese flora and fauna, see his final chapters “Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Poissons,” and “Description particulière de quelques Insectes & Plantes de Surinam,” that are very much based on Maria Sybilla Merian’s Metamorphosis insectarum surinamensium (1705). Nassy ends his second part with two chapters on “Literature in general, Literary Societies, Libraries, Etc.” and on “The Life Led in Surinam, Amusements, Theater, Etc.” Essai historique, 2:77–82 [2:163–66] and 2: 83–86 [2:166–68]. 72  For two examples, see Nassy, Essai historique, 1:46 and 75–76 [1:43 and 58]. For the respective comments in Hartsinck’s Beschryving, see note 69. 73  By speaking about “auto-historiography,” I rely on Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of “autoethnography.” See her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7–9. Jonathan Schorsch applies Pratt’s concept of “auto-ethnography” to Jewish narratives of Jewish whiteness that counter tendencies in anti-Jewish writings describing

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as an “auto-historiography” is not only useful to understand why the book might have received criticism in the Netherlands.74 It also helps to position Nassy’s argument in a broader context of Creole thought.

Conclusion The breakthrough of “entangled histories” has not only  inspired new works about transatlantic Sephardic business and family relations during early modern times.75 It has also contributed to important reflections about  Atlantic History with regard  to Jewish contexts and worlds.76 However, an Atlantic history of Jewish thought has not been written.77 Nassy is a good example for showing that such a history would not only have to address questions of postcolonial interest, such as the ones studied by eminent historians like  Natalie Davis, Jonathan Schorsch, or Wieke Vink—prime examples would be Nassy’s inner-American interaction with scholars and intellectuals in Philadelphia and the recently independent United States, Nassy’s perception of early American debates about slavery and abolitionism,78 his self-fashioning as a white planter among the great Jews as blacks or at least as non-whites. See his Jews and Blacks, 179–91. In this case, the notion of “writing back” is clearly involved. For further examples of Jewish historiography and “writing back,” see Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–22, and Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique 77 (1999): 61–85. 74  Until now, the reception of Nassy’s book has not yet been analyzed in detail, and the opinions of scholars in this respect differ. Natalie Zemon Davis mentions that the Essai was met with criticism in the Netherlands. See Davis, “Een Joodse arts in het achttiende-eeuwse Suriname,” in Joden in de Cariben: Vier eeuwen joodse geschiedenis in Suriname en Curaçao, ed. Julie-Marthe Cohen (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2015), 158–73, 164. Contrary to Davis, Phaf-Reinberger speaks about a good reception of Nassy’s text in the Netherlands and a bad reception in Suriname. See Phaf, Air of Liberty, 53. 75  See above all the works of Jonathan Israel, such as his Diasporas within a Diaspora. For two recent examples, see also Jessica Roitman, The Same but Different? Inter-Cultural Trade and the Sephardim, 1595–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), and 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). 76  See Kagan, ed., Atlantic Diasporas. For a recent claim to combine Atlantic History and Jewish History, see Ben-Ur, “Atlantic Jewish History.” 77  For a similar approach to the nineteenth-century Jewish Atlantic, see Arthur Kiron, “An Atlantic Jewish Republic of Letters?,” Jewish History 20, no. 2 (2006): 171–211. 78  Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough.’”

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majority of Surinamese non-white inhabitants,79 or his ambivalent stance toward “non-white” indigenous and African knowledge in the field of medicine and pharmacology.80 This history would also have to emphasize the phenomenon of Jewish Creole thought, which has received much less attention until now. This is all the more true as Jewish Creolization was obviously neither limited to eighteenth-century Suriname nor to the field of historiography. Recent research has shown that Creole patterns also influenced Jewish religious life in Suriname and other parts of the Dutch Caribbean and that they were directly connected to the difficult question of whose daily Jewish life was considered to be “authentic” and whose was not. In some cases, controversies led to schisms between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. In other cases, they caused ruptures within the Sephardic Diaspora.81 This is especially recognizable in the fact that from the eighteenth century onwards, American congregations began to question the authority of Amsterdam and instead oriented themselves toward regional traditions and toward Curaçao.82 As we know today, genuine scandals could arise when Amsterdam rabbis tried to homogenize local life in American congretations and to make it conform to Amsterdam guidelines. In the case of Suriname, Nassy refers to interventions from Amsterdam against a number of local holidays that were not based on Scriptural grounds and hence “not authentic.”83 In the case of Curaçao, R. Samuel Mendes Sola, who came from Amsterdam to the Caribbean in 1744, was openly opposed by members of his future congregation. In the end, quarrels about Mendes Sola even led to the 79  See, for example, Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 286, who stresses “the depth of the Historical Essay’s orientation to Whiteness.” 80  Davis, “Joodse arts.” 81  Vink, Creole Jews, esp. 171–72 and 196. 82  See Hilit Surowitz-Israel, “Religious Authority: A Perspective from the Americas,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 107–19. Wieke Vink speaks about “localization.” See Creole Jews, 9, 34, 98, 101, 188, 219, 222, 267. I am thankful to Aviva Ben-Ur for reminding me of Vink’s terminology. 83  Nassy speaks about “l’immensité des jours de fêtes, qui ne se trouvent point ordonnées dans les Livres saints” and the following intervention of the Amsterdam community to order things in the colony. See his Essai historique, 1:47. Unfortunately, the English translation is misleading because it omits Nassy’s decisive negativity speaking about “their great number of their days of festival, which are commanded in the Sacred Books” (Nassy, Historical Essay, 1:43).

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establishment of a new synagogue in Willemstad. At about the same time, Sephardim in Curaçao refused to accept modifications of the Sukkoth celebration that had been imposed by Amsterdam.84 In 1789, Sephardim in Curaçao boycotted the prohibition to shave between Passover and Shavuoth as an “inauthentic” statute that was imported from Amsterdam but seemed to be inappropriate and unsanitary for Caribbean contexts.85 Similar tendencies have been noted with regard to eighteenth-century Sephardic congregations in the English Caribbean.86 Recently, Joshua Hezekiah de Cordoba’s Reason and Faith (1788), a Jamaican examination of Spinoza and European Spinozism, has been analyzed in the context of American Jewish patterns of thought.87 But many sources still need to be explored and a lot of work needs to be done. In the broader context of early modern American history, an analysis of Nassy and other “Creole Jews” could open new possibilities for comparisons with non-Jewish Creole historiography and patriotism. Scholars such as Antonello Gerbi, David Brading, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have repeatedly hinted at the fact that Raynal’s Histoire, along with Buffon’s comments about animal species of the Americas and Cornelius de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1768), were among the main targets of American “patriots” in the already mentioned “Dispute of the New World.”88 Especially in Latin America, historiographies and descriptions of landscapes and peoples became forceful tools to counter European narratives about supposed American natural and cultural inferiority.  For details, see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, A History, 1:183–84.   See Surowitz-Israel, “Religious Authority,” 119, and Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 154–56. 86  See Gérard Nahon, “Amsterdam and the Portuguese Nação of the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 67–83, 75. 87  Stanley Mirvis, “Joshua Hezekiah Decordova and a Rabbinic Counter Enlightenment from Colonial Jamaica,” in Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Seltzer, eds. Brian M. Smollett and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 104–22. For Joshua Hezekiah de Cordoba’s book, see Reason and Faith, or, Philosophical Absurdities, Shewing the Necessity of Revelation: Intended to Promote Faithe among Infidels, and the Unbounded Exercise of Humanity among all Religious Men [1788] (Richmond, 1804). For one of the few earlier approaches to Cordoba’s life and work, see Bertram W. Korn, “The Haham DeCordova of Jamaica,” American Jewish Archives 18, no. 2 (1966): 141–54. 88  See Gerbi, The Dispute; David A.  Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge: Center of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1985 [1973]), and Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write. 84 85

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Central to a Creole discourse of “patriotic epistemology”89 was the argument that Europeans did not have the right to despise people born in the Americas nor to neglect their contributions to the histories and descriptions of the continent they inhabited. In some cases, this included a reappraisal of pre-colonial American societies and a reconstruction of a glorious past based on the cultural heyday of American indigenous societies, destroyed by European conquest and religious fanaticism.90 In other cases, Creole writers did not go as far as that,91 and Nassy clearly belonged to those Americans who traced the origins of Surinamese history to European settlers. But his fight for European recognition of Surinamese achievements fits perfectly into a larger context of early American patriotism,92 and, thanks to the catalogue of his library, we know that Nassy was not only interested in the interpretation of Surinamese history but that he also owned many books that were at the center of European-American controversies regarding “how to write the history of the New World.”93 Coming back finally to the introduction of this chapter, it is illuminating how limited our knowledge about Nassy’s and others’ correspondence with Christian Wilhelm von Dohm and European scholars and politicians remains.94 We do know about Christian European anti-Jewish discourses  Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write, esp. 204–65.  See Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write, 235–49. For “Neo-Aztecism” as one of the three “very themes which marked Creole patriotism” in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, see also Brading, Mexican Nationalism, 23. One of the most important examples is, without doubt, Francisco Xavier Clavijero’s Storia antica del Messico, written in Italian exile between 1780 and 1781. 91  Creole thought differed highly in different times and contexts, and references to indigenous cultures and civilizations were not always the same. For the examples of New Spain and Peru, see Brading, Mexican Nationalism, 22. 92  See Rauschenbach, “Patriots at the Periphery.” 93  Among those books, the most important ones were surely William Robertson’s History of America (1788) and Antonio de Solis y Ribadeneyra’s Historia de la conquista de México (1684). See the catalogue of Nassy’s library in Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 183 and 222. For Robertson, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write, 170–203. For Solis y Ribadeneyra in the context of the Dispute, see Beatriz de Alba-Koch, “Clavigero y la Historia de la Conquista de México de Solís,” in St. Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Missionary Enterprise: Assimilations Between Cultures, eds. Ignacio Arellano and Carlos Mata Induráin (Pamplona: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2012), 33–45. For Nassy’s patriotism, see Rauschenbach, “Patriots at the Periphery.” 94  It should be added that Dohm’s attitude is also ambivalent and that his civilizing project was equally shaped by colonial ideas and perceptions. See Jonathan M. Hess, “Sugar Island Jews? Jewish Colonialism and the Rhetoric of ‘Civic Improvement’ in Eighteenth-Century 89 90

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aiming at “orientalizing” Jews and stimulating their settlement in distant countries and colonies, among them the Caribbean.95 But other than the case of Dohm, we do not know about Caribbean Jews as models for Christian European thinkers.96 Therefore, further research about Creole Jews in the Caribbean and in the Americas will not only be promising for a history of knowledge and thought in the early modern Sephardic Atlantic. It will also contribute to a deeper understanding of “general” European history, Jewish and Christian alike, as well as to challenges of “conventional views of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in early modern history”97 from the perspective of Jewish Studies. Acknowledgments  This chapter was written after my inauguration lecture at the University of Potsdam. Several colleagues have read earlier versions and contributed to the improvement of the text and argument. I am especially thankful to Aviva Ben-Ur, Rudolf Schlögl, Ana Sobral, and Jonathan Schorsch for their illuminating comments. Maria Seidel provided the first English translation of the original lecture. Kyle Greenwood helped with earlier English versions of the text. Jonathan Schorsch has been a wonderful editor at the final stage of the publishing process.

Germany,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 92–100. See also Hess, Germans, Jews, 25–49. 95  According to Hess, such is the case of Johann David Michaelis, who proposed to reinforce European plantation economy by settling Jews in the Caribbean. See ibid., 53. 96  As for Jewish European thinkers, we are beginning to grasp the importance and impact Jewish life at the supposed “periphery” had on some of them. One important example is the discussion about Jewish military service in eighteenth-century Holland, where Jewish supporters of Jewish military service relied heavily on Caribbean examples. See Rauschenbach, “Patriots at the Periphery.” 97  Jane Gerber, introduction to The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 1–2.

CHAPTER 8

Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America’s First Intentional Jewish Community Aviva Ben-Ur

On July 11, 1733, 44 Jews arrived in the town of Savannah, in the British colony of Georgia, thereby creating the first intentional Jewish community in North America.1 Virtually ignored in most accounts of early Georgia, this statistically insignificant group of religious nonconformists receives lavish 1  The exact number varies in the sources but mostly ranges in the forties. See, for example, Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000), 46–47; AJA, Small Collections, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book, p. 26 (44); Malcolm H. Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52 (March 1963): 169–99, 176 (41); Abram Vossen Goodman, American Overture: Jewish Rights in Colonial Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 175 (43); George Fenwick Jones, “Sephardim and Ashkenazim: Jewish Settlers in Colonial Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly (henceforth TGHQ) 85, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 519–37, 520, 522, 524–25 (20, 39, 40, 43).

A. Ben-Ur University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_8

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attention in the annals of colonial American Jewish history, a testament to what Marc Bloch has allegorized as “the idolatry of origins” (l’idole des origines).2 Scholars have generally depicted these immigrants—most of whom 2  Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire; ou Métier d’historien (Paris: A. Colin, 1949), 5. In the first year of the town’s founding, nearly one sixth of the white population was Jewish. Harold E.  Davis, The Fledgling Province: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, 1733–1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 15. Other scholars argue that Jews constituted more than 25% of the settlement’s population: B. H. Levy, “The Early History of Georgia’s Jews,” in Forty Years of Diversity: Essays on Colonial Georgia, eds. Harvey H. Jackson and Phinizy Spalding (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984), 163–78, 167, misattributed to Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1:354. General treatments of early Savannah (which either fail to or scarcely mention Jews) include Hugh McCall, The History of Georgia: Containing Brief Sketches of the Most Remarkable Events Up to the Present Day (1784), 2 vols. (Savannah: William T.  Williams, 1811, 1816); William Bacon Stevens, A History of Georgia: From its First Discovery by Europeans to the Adoption of the Present Constitution in MDCCXCVIII, 2 vols. (New York: D.  Appleton and Co., 1847–1859); James Etheridge Callaway, The Early Settlement of Georgia (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1948); Trevor Richard Reese, Colonial Georgia: A Study in British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1963), William Harden, A History of Savannah and South Georgia, 2 vols. (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913); Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976); George Fenwick Jones, The Georgia Dutch: From the Rhine and Danube to the Savannah, 1733–1783 (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1970) and The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans Along the Savannah (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984); Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001); Paul M.  Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). On Jewish Savannah, see Charles Colcock Jones, “The Settlement of the Jews in Georgia,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (henceforth PAJHS) 1 (1893): 1–10; Leon Hühner, “The Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” PAJHS 10 (1902): 65–95 and “The Jews of Georgia from the Outbreak of the American Revolution to the Close of the 18th Century,” PAJHS 17 (1909): 89–108; W. Gunther Plaut, “Two Notes on the History of the Jews in America,” Hebrew Union College Annual 14 (1939): 575–85; Malcolm H. Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (March 1963): 169–99, “Errata: New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 4 (June 1963): 390, “The Sheftall Diaries: Vital Records of Savannah Jewry (1733–1808),” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (March 1965): 243–77, and “Growing up in Pioneer Savannah: The Unfinished Memoir of Levi Sheftall (1739–1809),” Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 3 (1975): 15–22; Marion Abrahams Levy, “Savannah’s Old Jewish Burial Ground,” TGHQ 34, no. 4 (December 1950): 265–70; Richard D.  Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro and the Settlement in Georgia,” in Migration and Settlement: Proceedings of the Anglo-American Jewish Historical Conference Held in London Jointly by the Jewish Historical Society of England

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were of Iberian origin—as free people indigenous to Portugal and Spain, as refugees from religious persecution, as largely ignorant of the British colony, and as either wealthy, or as relative newcomers to impoverishment.3 Their uncompromising goal, we are led to believe, was “an opportunity to create another kind of experience for themselves, out in the open, as Jews.”4 Yet, once we strip their experience of its American Jewish historiographical framework and replace it with an Atlantic perspective, an entirely different picture emerges.5 Atlantic History, a discipline that came of age and the American Jewish Historical Society, July 1970, ed. Aubrey Newman (London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1971), 63–100 and “Zipra Nunes’s Story,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram W.  Korn (Waltham, Mass: American Jewish Historical Society, 1976), 47–61; David T.  Morgan, “The Sheftalls of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62, no. 4 (June 1973): 348–61; B.  H. Levy, “Savannah’s Old Jewish Community Cemeteries,” TGHQ 66, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–20; Saul Jacob Rubin, Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry, 1733–1983 (Savannah: Congregation Mickve Israel, 1983); Levy, “The Early History of Georgia’s Jews;” Mark I. Greenberg, “Becoming Southern: The Jews of Savannah, Georgia, 1830–70,” American Jewish History 86, no. 1 (March 1998): 55–75, “Savannah’s Jewish Women and the Shaping of Ethnic and Gender Identity, 1830–1900,” TGHQ 82, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 751–74, “A ‘Haven of Benignity:’ Conflict and Cooperation Between Eighteenth Century Savannah Jews,” TGHQ 86, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 544–68; Holly Snyder, “A Tree With Two Different Fruits: The Jewish Encounter with German Pietists in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 58, no. 4 (October 2001): 855–82 and “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000); and Kylie Louise McCormick, “Father and Servant, Son and Slave: Judaism and Labor in Georgia, 1732–1809” (M.A. thesis, University of Nebraska, 2016). 3  Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 36–40; Paul Masserman and Max Baker, The Jews Come to America (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1932), 80, 82n5; Hühner, “The Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” 66; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:354 (“economic opportunity lined with […] religious freedom”). Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro.” Barnett does acknowledge the endemic poverty of the refugees. 4  Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 42. 5  For transnational or transimperial alternatives to the traditional narrative of American Jewish colonial history, see Robert Cohen, “Jewish Demography in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of London, the West Indies, and Early America” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1976), and Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991); Snyder, “A Sense of Place;” Judah Cohen, “Trading Freedoms? Exploring Colonial Jewish Merchanthood Between Europe and the Caribbean,” in American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience?, eds. Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), 47–63; Noah Gelfand, “A People Within and Without: International Jewish Commerce and Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Dutch Atlantic World” (PhD diss., New  York University, 2008); Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New

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in the 1990s, but has barely made inroads into the subfield of American Jewish History, studies the interactions and exchanges between people, commodities, ideas, diseases, and technology on the four continents of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa in the period extending from 1492 through roughly 1800.6 The people circulating within this orbit, whether on land or at sea, lived in an interconnected region with unifying characteristics. The Jewish dimensions of the Atlantic World require us to center not the flight from persecution, the sudden loss of wealth, or the quest for religious freedom, but rather Portuguese Jewish culture, slavery, poverty, and its tightly intertwined corollary, mobility. In this chapter, we will briefly review the standard narrative of Jewish Savannah and then explore how the application of a transimperial Atlantic History approach coupled with recently unearthed archival evidence appreciably changes our understanding of the town’s Jewish community.

Jews and the Colony of Georgia Founded in November of 1732, the new English colony north of Florida was governed from London by the “Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America,” a corporation instituted by royal charter. Its main purpose was to relocate the impoverished masses who clogged the streets of London, offer refuge to persecuted Protestant dissenters from Central Europe, and provide both groups with economic opportunities in a new land. The new settlement would also constitute a political barrier between South Carolina (founded in 1663) and Spanish-held Florida. No less important was its anticipated potential as an economic boon to the Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012); Barry Stiefel and David Rittenberg, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014); and Aviva Ben-Ur, “Atlantic Jewish History: A Conceptual Reorientation,” in Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History, 1555–1890: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica, ed. Arthur Kiron (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 25–46 and Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). 6  For standard overviews see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Deanult, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Philip D.  Morgan and Jack P.  Greene, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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­ etropole.7 The Georgia colony, it was hoped, “would become a buyer’s m market for raw materials and a seller’s market for manufactured goods.” These products, particularly flax for sailcloth, hemp for cables, and pitch, tar, and turpentine, would help sustain Britain as a newly emerging global imperial power.8 The metropole would no longer be reliant on silk imports from France, flax and linen from Russia, or wine from Madeira, as all would be produced in the recently founded British colony.9 The charter authorized the colony’s trustees to collect charitable donations from the British public and to administer the colony for twenty-one years, after which governance would be transferred to the Crown.10 In 1732, Portuguese Jewish leaders in London secured from the trustees a license to collect donations from among the Jews to support settlement in the newly chartered colony. Although they understood that the funds raised were intended to provision Christian immigrants, the Jewish leaders argued that Jews should also be permitted to participate as colonists, so long as the community raised its own money. The trustees opposed this idea adamantly, but the Jews sailed surreptitiously, perhaps calculating that the funds they raised from among their number justified the subterfuge.11 Here begins the familiar narrative that forms part of the standard account of American Jewish history for the colonial era. In 1733, a ship bearing forty-odd Jews, mostly of Iberian origin, arrived on the shores of Savannah. These Jews were “men of considerable property and initiative,” save for the Ashkenazim among them, who were “poor people who had gone to England to make a living.” Their arrival occasioned controversy among the trustees, who insisted they be recalled. However, Governor Oglethorpe chose to closely follow the Charter, which extended “liberty of conscience […] in the worship of God to all persons […] except papists.” Lawyers in Charleston, with whom he consulted, opined that there was no legal basis upon which to dispatch the Jews back to Britain, 7  Albert B. Saye, ed., Georgia’s Charter of 1732 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1942), 19. 8  Miles Lane, “Introduction: General Oglethorpe’s Georgia,” in General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743, ed. Miles Lane, 2 vols. (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1975), 1: xiii, xvi. 9  Ibid., xvi. 10  Trevor R. Reese, The Most Delightful Country of the Universe: Promotional Literature of the Colony of Georgia, 1717–1734 (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1972), vii. 11  Stern, “New Light on the Jewish settlement of Savannah,” 172–75, 177–79.

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and so the Jews remained.12 Among the new arrivals was Samuel Nunes (de) Ribeiro, a former New Christian who had worked as a physician in Portugal before fleeing inquisitorial persecution and relocating to London. His medical ministrations in Savannah halted an endemic pestilence among the settlers, providing Oglethorpe with another argument with which to mollify the trustees.13 Yet dwelling on the origins of Savannah’s Jewish community will not do, for precise starting points in history are usually hazy and, in any case, have less explanatory power than the social functions institutions perform at any given time.14 Reframing Jewish Savannah within an Atlantic context means  not only extending our examination to the early 1800s but also giving primacy to the overarching characteristics of the Jewish Atlantic World, where the epicenter of American Jewry was not in colonial North America or the U.S., but in Brazil and the Caribbean, where most Jews were of Iberian and not of Central or Eastern European origin, and where most hemispheric American Jews lived in slave societies.

Portuguese Primacy The bedrock of Atlantic Jewish communities was Portuguese in both language and cultural orientation. This fact requires some explanation since scholarly treatments continue to label early American Jews as “Sephardic,” a term the subjects themselves never used as a self-descriptor.15 After successive waves of expulsions of Jews from England in 1290, France in the 12  Lee J. Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1932), 94–95 (for quotes); Abram Vossen Goodman, American Overture: Jewish Rights in Colonial Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 168–81; Goodman, American Overture; 176; Hühner, “The Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” 66; and Masserman and Max Baker, The Jews Come to America, 80–82. 13  Goodman, American Overture, 178–79; Edward J. Cashin, ed., Setting Out to Begin a New World (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1995), 29–30 (James Oglethorpe to the trustees, letter of August 12, 1733). 14  For these ideas see Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, 6–7. 15  For recent critiques of the term “Sephardic” see Miriam Bodian, “Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: The Ambiguous Boundaries of Self-Definition,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (2008): 66–80, 72; Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), xii; Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare Among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 5.

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fourteenth century, Spain in 1492, and the Kingdom of Navarre in 1498, as well as a wholesale forced conversion in Portugal in 1497, the entire Atlantic coast of Europe was devoid of professing Jews. Only at the end of the sixteenth century did the region’s Jews begin to reconstitute themselves in cities where Judaism became legal: first in Amsterdam by the 1590s, and then in London in the 1650s. Around the same time, public or quasi-public Jewish communities had also sprouted in Middelburg and Antwerp, near the North Sea, and along France’s Atlantic coast in Bordeaux and Bayonne. The founders of these communities were primarily Portuguese New Christians, descendants of Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal in 1497. In Amsterdam and London, many opted to formally return to their ancestral Judaism, while others remained Catholic Christians, and still others wavered between the two faiths, whether for the expediency of international commerce with the Iberian Peninsula, where Judaism remained outlawed, or in quest of an immediate sense of community and spiritual equanimity.16 They called the newly founded synagogues of Europe “Spanish and Portuguese” congregations, usually spoke and wrote in Portuguese, and self-identified in shorthand as “Portuguese Jews.” A small proportion spoke primarily Spanish and identified as “Spanish Jews.” The nominal primacy congregations gave to that language in the phrase “Spanish and Portuguese” bespeaks the high status of Spanish as a literary language.17 Beginning in the 1630s, these former New Christians could consider the Americas as an additional prospect for settlement. Using Amsterdam and London as launching pads, hundreds set out for the Dutch colony of Brazil (1630–1654), while a sprinkling tried their luck in the Guyanas as early as the 1630s.18 By the 1650s, many also began heading toward the fellow Dutch colonies of Suriname and Curaçao, as well as to the rival settlements of the English Caribbean, especially the islands of Jamaica and Barbados.19 While most gainfully employed Atlantic Jews were involved in 16  David L.  Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 17  Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 92. 18  Dave Verdooner and Harmen Snel, Trouwen in Mokum: Jewish Marriage in Amsterdam, 1598–1811 (The Hague: Uitgeverij Warray, 1991), 1:37 (for Sara Castanho, who was born in “Guyana” in 1634 and wed David Montezinos in Amsterdam in 1651). 19  James A.  Williamson, English Colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon, 1604–1668 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 154; David Cohen Nassy, Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo: n. p., 1788), part 1, 20.

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commerce and petty trades, by the time Suriname transitioned to Dutch rule in 1667, Jewish immigrants there had already initiated what would become the largest Jewish agricultural settlement of its time, based primarily on the cultivation and processing of sugar.20 The draw of Jews to the British colony of Georgia, founded in 1732, was therefore a very late manifestation of Jewish colonization in the New World, one that benefitted from the hindsight of earlier Jewish settlements, whether mercantile or agrarian. The Lusitanian background of many of Georgia’s Jews served them well in the new colony. A number drew upon their work experience in Portugal or Brazil. The physician Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, who cured colonists of a yellow fever epidemic in 1733, had as a New Christian enjoyed access to university medical training, which was at the time closed to Jews in most of Europe.21 Soon after the first ships arrived, Governor Oglethorpe divided the settlement into “parties,” each one tasked with a different role in the erection of homes and buildings, and the cultivation of agricultural plots. In 1735, one Jew, raised in Brazil as a New Christian, instructed other settlers in the art of building homes and thatching roofs.22 Silk raising and wine production were also crafts in which some Portuguese Jewish immigrants excelled, owing to their origins in a southern Mediterranean clime.23 By 1737, Abraham de Leon (whose family 20  NAN, NPIGS, inv. nr. 416, Alfabetische staten van geborenen over 1662–1723 en 1723–1777; Robert Cohen, “The Misdated Ketubah: A Note on the Beginnings of the Suriname Jewish Community,” American Jewish Archives (April 1984): 13–15, 14–15. 21  James Edward Oglethorpe to trustees, August 12, 1733, in General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743, ed. Miles Lane, 2 vols. (Beehive Press: Savannah, 1975), 1:19–23; Goodman, American Overture, 188–89. For general lack of access of Jews to medical training in European universities see Richard Barnett, “Dr Jacob de Castro Sarmento and Sephardim in Medical Practice in 18th-Century London,” Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 27 (1978–1980): 84–120, 85, 97n17, 111, 113; Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 97 and Robert Jütte, “Contacts at the Bedside: Jewish Physicians and Their Christian Patients,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, eds. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137–50, 142. 22  Cashin, Setting Out to Begin a New World, 44 (account of Francis Moore, 1735). The New Christian background of this Jewish individual is my inference. 23  Hühner, “Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” 80, 89. The proclivity also extended to an Italian Jew, Joseph Ottolenghi, who converted to Christianity and whose parents had been engaged in the silk industry (91n5).

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name was often rendered as “de Lyon”) had gained fame among colonists for the flourishing vineyards he had planted just a few years before. These wineries originated in seedlings “which he received from Portugal for an Experiment.” Through Leon’s “Skill and Management in pruning,” each sapling had borne “very plentifully a most beautiful, large Grape, as big as a Man’s Thumb, almost pellucid, and Bunches exceeding big.” By his own testimony, Leon had drawn from “his Experience in being bred among the Vineyards in Portugal.”24 According to another contemporary account, the vineyards consisted of several different breeds, including Porto and Málaga. Leon nursed the ambition of recruiting vignerons from abroad and importing additional vines for sale to other freeholders “at moderate rates.”25 That same year, four miles southwest of Savannah, the Nunes family petitioned for nonswampy lands for the cultivation of vineyards. They, too, had apparently received vine seedlings from Portugal.26 Portuguese Jews had no monopoly over medicine. Nor, as a small minority of under one sixth of all the colonists, did they dominate locally over wine and silk production. Other colonists originating outside of Mediterranean lands could and did learn these trades and exhibited similar entrepreneurial skills.27 But their New Christian Iberian origins and ongoing commercial links to Portugal and Spain did poise Jews to contribute disproportionately to the colony in these respects. In both the correspondence going out from Georgia and its scholarly interpretation, the Jewishness of the settlers drew special attention to their by no means unique contributions.28 24  A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia, vol. 1 (London, 1742), 48–50; An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (London, 1741), 21–22; Cashin, Setting Out to Begin a New World (Journal of William Stephens, 1737), 61. The description of the mammoth grapes may be an allusion to the Israelite spies’ report on Canaan, as recounted in Numbers 13:23. 25  Patrick Tailfer, et  al., A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia, ed. Clarence L. Ver Steeg (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1960 [1741]), 62. 26  Ibid., 27, 150 (“having vines ready to transplant”). 27  For evidence of other local doctors see George Fenwick Jones and Paul Martin Peucher, “‘We Have Come to Georgia with Pure Intentions:’ Moravian Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg’s Letters from Savannah, 1735,” TGHQ 82, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 84–120, 93. For knowledge of silk culture among Swiss and Scottish immigrants see John Pitts Corry, “Racial Elements in Colonial Georgia,” TGHQ 20, no. 1 (March 1936): 30–40, 39–40; Savannah Unit, Federal Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration of Georgia, “Mulberry Grove in Colonial Times,” TGHQ 23, no. 3 (September 1939): 236–52, 239–40; and Lane, “Introduction,” xxvii. For such expertise among the Salzburgers see Jones, The Georgia Dutch, 221–23, and among the Amatis brothers of Savoy, Italy see Amos Aschbach Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 136. 28  For an early historiographical example of Jews as uniquely valuable see Stevens, History of Georgia, 1:103–104.

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Asserting Their Place The Jews of London were part of an interconnected world where business ventures, marriage alliances, and the transient poor served as vectors for news about Jews in other Atlantic locales. Word of the colonial enterprise of Georgia, widely disseminated through the sermons of Christian preachers and chapbooks, also reached the Portuguese Jewish community of London and its sister congregation in Amsterdam. A brief reference in April of 1732 to the new English colony “north [sic] of Carolina,” preserved in the minutes of London’s Mahamad (Portuguese Jewish governing board), suggests some confusion about the actual location of Georgia. Rather than conveying a deep ignorance of the region, as some scholars have suggested, this misunderstanding may originate in the fact that North and South Carolina had recently (in 1729) become separate royal colonies and the Charter incorporating the colony described Georgia as including “that part of South Carolina in America which lies from the most Northern Stream of a River there commonly called the Savannah […].”29 Documents from Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community, meanwhile, suggest that local leaders there were thoroughly versed in the propagandist literature aimed at recruiting Western and Central European immigrants for the new British colony.30 These documents, preserved in Amsterdam’s municipal archives and never before consulted in their entirety, include “Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America,” a four-page tract penned in 1732 by Benjamin Martyn. The author was a middle-class Englishman who became the trustees’ Secretary after a brief and unsuccessful career as a dramaturge.31 His account described Georgia as a fertile land sufficient to support the “useless Poor in England, and distressed Protestants in Europe.” It was pitched directly at the broad British public and appealed for donations to defray transportation costs for prospective immigrants, charity that would prevent their indenture, which 29  Saye, Georgia’s Charter of 1732, 10. Italics added; the origin of the confusion is my interpretation. 30  Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” 173. 31  SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, “Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America;” Reese, The Most Delightful Country of the Universe, xvi–xvii.

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Martyn likened to slavery.32 The trustees envisioned their new colony as primarily agricultural in nature, devoted to the cultivation and production of silk, wine, oil, dyes, and medicinal herbs for export to Britain, and as a white bulwark against indigenous incursions from its southern border. Georgia was agriculturally propitious, Martyn noted, for it shared a latitude with “Part of China, Persia, Palestine, and the Maderas.”33 Portuguese Jewish leaders of Amsterdam did more than just collect promotional literature on Georgia. They actively interpreted it. A few folios further within the same archival repository lies preserved an undated Portuguese summary of the Georgia immigration scheme. Despite their frequently weak knowledge of the English language, Amsterdam’s parnassim (the secular leaders of the Mahamad) accurately understood the immigration venture and immediately maneuvered to affirm their coreligionists’ eligibility as participants.34 The Portuguese document correctly noted that the only groups explicitly mentioned in the pamphlets were the Salzburgers and other “persecuted Protestants.” Although Jews were nowhere identified, the parnassim resolved to investigate whether their religious group should indeed be included among the category of “oppressed foreigners who wish to take refuge from persecution in that colony.” While this resolution was formulated as an inquiry (saber se, i.e., the parnassim would “investigate if […]”), the question had the power of a statement. Jews did count as oppressed foreigners, in the calculus of the parnassim. Implicitly, they were foreigners who constituted a Jewish variant of the Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution, who had paused in various Western European metropoles in search of permanent asylum.35

32  SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, “Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America,” p. 3. 33  Ibid. The tract is transcribed in Reese, The Most Delightful Country of the Universe, 69–73. 34  The summary does not specifically refer to Martyn’s tract, but more generally to the immigration scheme. The common lack of English knowledge among Portuguese Jewish leaders can be inferred from SAA, 334, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 66a, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, Antonio da Costa to David Mendes da Silva, October 17, 1732. 35  Lane, “Introduction,” xxii (for these metropoles as transit stations for persecuted Protestants).

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Their almost aggressive confidence about their rightful place in the immigration scheme comes to the fore in the discussion that immediately follows. Which strategy to select in order to participate in the colonial undertaking was the only real uncertainty with which to grapple. Should the parnassim raise a bulk amount for the transport of prospective Jewish settlers, or would the trustees prefer to receive specific amounts divided in accordance with the fares for adults versus children, £20 and £10, respectively? Would a Jewish spiritual leader be needed in the new colony? After all, the settlers could not govern themselves religiously without such a conductor. Who should cover the expenses of this leader? What was the precise number of Portuguese Jewish poor in a position to undertake this trip? Should the fundraising effort be directed solely at the yehidim (first-­ class, contributing members of the synagogue), or should the monies be drawn directly from the congregation’s charity coffer?36 The torrent of practical questions demonstrates that a sense of belonging within New World Protestant society was never a matter of doubt for Portuguese Jewish leaders. Raising pragmatic questions, whether these were directed at the trustees or at the Portuguese leadership itself, constituted an assertion of the Jewish right to participate. This self-assurance did not transpire in a vacuum. By 1732, open Jewish communities in the Americas had firmly established themselves in colonies stretching from the South American colony of Suriname to as far north as New York, which had come under English rule in 1664. That some of their poor lived not in London, but in Amsterdam, was for Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish leaders no bar against participation in a British colonization program. The constant circulation of the Portuguese Jewish poor through various Atlantic ports ensured that indigent Jews living in Amsterdam could easily be siphoned off to London for dispatch to the New World, a testament to the transimperial, nonterritorial nationalism of Portuguese Jews in the Atlantic World. In fact, Amsterdam’s parnassim reasoned, there was good cause to impose their transimperial understanding of the world on the colonial authorities. The Directors of the Societies of Suriname and neighboring Berbice, some parnassim argued, should be made aware of the British immigration proposition in order to encourage a parallel migration to Suriname. The parnassim should suggest that these Dutch corporations 36  SAA, 334, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 66a, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, “O Resumen do Papel adjunto.”

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provide 200 guilders for the transport of each Jewish family in Amsterdam finding itself in a position to settle in Suriname. It would be “more convenient” for Jews to settle in that Dutch colony, the leaders argued, for a Jewish community (huma kehilá) already existed there which could care for and govern the immigrants. In addition, redirecting some of the prospective migrants to Suriname would make the magistrate in the United Provinces aware of the zealousness of the Portuguese Jews for the Dutch colonies. Even if the mass dispatch of Jews to the Dutch colony did not transpire, the parnassim rationalized, their initiative would prevent their coreligionists from being exposed to the anti-Jewish calumny prevalent among English people, for the British would recognize in the Jews a general commitment to European colonization. For this reason, the parnassim argued, it would be good to communicate with the directors of the Society of Suriname, which governed the colony from Amsterdam, even before beginning negotiations with England.37 There is evidence from the Surinamese archives that the parallel plan, as devised by the Portuguese Jewish leaders of Amsterdam, was indeed communicated to the directors of the Society of Suriname. The two parties agreed to export 100 Portuguese Jewish families from Holland, totaling 500 individuals, and settle them on 25,000 acres of land.38 The parnassim of Suriname agreed to apportion the land, have it cleared through slave labor, and construct dwelling places in anticipation of the immigrants’ arrival.39 The immigration scheme to Suriname was abandoned that same year, probably due to a local financial crisis, but was relaunched in 1748.40 The serious intentions of the parties to implement the migration scheme

37  SAA, 334, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 66a, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, “O Resumen do Papel adjunto;” SAA, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, inv. nr. 1029 II, p. 784. 38  SAA, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, inv. nr. 1029 II, proposal of January 1733, pp. 778, 787, 794. The proposal was apparently the brainchild of David de Pinto. 39  NAN, NPIGS, inv nr. 25, The Directors of the Society of Suriname, Amsterdam, July 3, 1733, pp.  298–99; SAA, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, 1029 II, Parnassim & Gabay of kk de TT Amsterdam to Beraha VeSalom parnassim, June 19, 1734, p. 816. 40  A. J. A. Quintus Bosz, “Geschiedenis van het Fort Nieuw Amsterdam in het verdedigingsstelsel van Suriname,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 43 (1963–64): 103–48, 113; SAA, 5.2.11, Bemoeingen met andere Gemeenten, inv. nr. 1029, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, 1748, p. 710.

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shows the vital role Jews played as colonizers in frontier societies and the strong links between Jewish communities in the Atlantic World. The urgency to dispatch indigent Jewish families out of London had been intensifying since the early 1700s. Scores of planters and traders of suspected New Christian background streamed into London from Brazil and Portugal, particularly with the accession of João V to the Portuguese throne in 1706 and his reorganization of the Inquisition into a more scrutinizing institution.41 So commonplace were such refugee vessels that London’s Portuguese Jewish Mahamad resolved to expend up to £100 per freight arriving from Portugal.42 Starting in 1680, the Portuguese Jewish community of London grew at an average annual rate of 3%, so that by 1720, its population numbered 1050.43 Between 1720 and 1735, London’s Portuguese Jewish community doubled in size.44 According to one estimate, some 3000 souls were transported to London between 1701 and 1735 alone.45 The refugees were typically poor, having fled without their possessions, and it fell upon the congregation to pay for their passage. In return, the new arrivals had to agree to publicly adhere to Judaism, remarry according to Jewish law, undergo ritual circumcision if male, and practice dietary laws. The attempt to redeem the refugees came in the wake of an already strained budget.46 The influx caused such a heavy burden to the synagogue charity chest that in 1748 the Mahamad narrowed the pool of charity recipients, resolving not to dispense aid to any 41  TNAUK, SP 89/23, Part I, Henry Worsley to James Stanhope, October 20, 1714, pp. 97–98, 98; Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Exceptional and the Mundane: A Biographical Portrait of Rebecca Machado Phillips, 1746–1831,” in Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, eds. Jonathan D. Sarna and Pamela Nadell (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2001), 46–80, 47. 42   LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/02/005, Index to old orders and regulations of the Mahamad and the Elders, p. 9 (undated). 43  A. S. Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community, 1720–1733—Philip Carteret Webb’s Notebooks,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 21 (1962–1967): 39–63, 39. 44  Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 167–71, 168; Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 78–79; 81, 91–92. 45  Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 80. According to Diamond (Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community, 40), 1500 refugees arrived directly from Portugal between 1720 and 1733. 46  Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 167–71; Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 78–79, 81, 91–92 and Bevis Marks Records.

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Jews unless they had come directly from Spain and Portugal or had been resident within the British realm for five consecutive years.47 Thus, the founding of the colony of Georgia came as welcome news to communal leaders. On April 4, 1732, the parnassim and elders (former parnassim) of London’s Portuguese Jewish community convened and appointed three of their number to seek permission to bring a Jewish transport to Georgia, “on the same footing as the English,” but not at the expense of the communal charity chest. Instead, wealthy members of the Portuguese Jewish community would underwrite the expenses.48 By October of that year, Antonio da Costa, a Portuguese Jewish merchant of London, was busying himself soliciting a subscription list of Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam who would financially support the relocation from London to Georgia.49 The only surviving Portuguese Jewish minute book from the 1730s shows that on September 1, 1734 the elders of the Mahamad voted by majority to elect five leaders who would negotiate with the trustees of Georgia to allow the admission of Jews “under the same conditions as the English.” Those elected were Moseh da Costa, Daniel Jessurun Rodrigues, Jacob Israel Suasso, Binyamin Mendes da Costa, and Binymain Mendes Pacheco.50 The immigration of Jews to Savannah was not so much a surreptitious move on the part of the parnassim, as historians have argued, as it was a self-conscious attempt to take advantage of an interpretive uncertainty in the charter.51 By creatively expanding the trustees’ definition of religiously persecuted people, Portuguese Jewish leaders normalized Britain’s newest colonization scheme, bringing it in consonance with other British American colonial outposts where Judaism was a legal religion. By ­asserting 47  LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/04/001, Minute Book: the Elders, November 6, 1748, p. 70. 48  Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 83 (9 Nisan 5492). The Minute Book Barnett consulted is apparently no longer extant. 49  SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, Antonio da Costa to David Mendes da Silva, October 17, 1732. For discussion of this letter see Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “A Study in Intercommunal Relations in the Sephardi Diaspora: London and Amsterdam in the Eighteenth Century,” in Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 41–58, 51. 50  LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/04/001, Minute Book: the Elders, p. 4 (3 Elul 5494). 51  See, for example, Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 36–47; Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” 173.

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the rightful place of Jews in Britain’s newest American colony, the parnassim of London and Amsterdam implicitly identified their community as on par with Protestant immigrants.

The Ubiquity of Unfreedom: Indenture and Slavery Georgia was unique among the original thirteen colonies in that its administration until 1751 prohibited the introduction of African slaves.52 The motivation for this policy was not abolitionist but rather an expression of the fear that “Black Slaves or Negroes” were prone to revolt, particularly during war with a foreign power, and would threaten the “Increase of English and Christian Inhabitants.”53 The vast majority of immigrants who arrived in colonial British America were not free but rather indentured servants of European origin.54 Even in 1741, before the introduction of African slaves, some 20% of the white population of Georgia consisted of such servile laborers, a miserable, rebellious lot who came to occupy a social position just above enslaved Africans.55 Unfreedom was also familiar to the Jewish immigrants of Georgia. Most had arrived in London from Lisbon, where some 10% of the population was enslaved.56 Brazil, which had been the temporary abode of a number of the Savannah immigrants, was a slave society par excellence, whose economy depended on slave labor and would have collapsed without it.57 In London, Portuguese Jews would have become acquainted with 52  Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 1, 98 (for 1751). 53  Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia Compiled and Published Under Authority of the Legislature by Allen D. Candler (Atlanta: The Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1904), 1:50. 54  Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008 [2007]), 12, 14. 55  Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 138; Harold E. Davis, The Fledgling Province: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, 1733–1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 148. 56  Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 15. 57  Stuart B.  Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Gustavo Acioli Lopes, “Brazil’s Colonial Economy and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Supply and Demand,” in Networks and Trans-Cultural Exchange: Slave Trading in the South Atlantic, 1590–1867, eds. David Richardson and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 31–70.

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the institution of indenture, which did not exist, at least officially, in the Dutch Republic, as well as with slavery.58 English merchants residing in Andalusia had engaged in the slave trade since the 1480s and many transported Africans with them to England to work as domestics, where their presence steadily increased over the course of the sixteenth century.59 By the late sixteenth century, these “blackamoors” were present in significant numbers, and by the following century, between 14,000 and 15,000 unfree people of African origin lived in England.60 Most of them worked as domestics. English slave traders tended to convert them to Christianity.61 Although slave ownership among London’s Portuguese Jews is poorly documented, there is evidence that they tended to own more than one African domestic, in contrast to their Christian counterparts.62 Their consumption of slave labor found parallels in other European Jewish communities, such as those of Amsterdam and Antwerp.63 Unlike their counterparts in Amsterdam and Suriname, Jews of enslaved African ancestry are not explicitly denoted in the burial records or documented epitaphs of London’s Portuguese Jewish community. Their apparent absence from circumcision records raises questions about whether or not the males among them had been circumcised.64 However, some of the names listed in berith milah accounts are suggestive of slave origins, including Elizer, son of Vri [a possible rendering of “free”] Phaivas aCohen, and Selomo, son of “Princes.”65 A farcical illustration of a proposed Portuguese Jewish 58  William Moraley, The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, An Indentured Servant, eds. Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, 2nd ed. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 1–72; David W. Galenson, “British Servants and the Colonial Indenture System in the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of Southern History 44, no. 1 (February 1978): 41–66; James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776–1838 (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986). 59  Gustav Ungerer, The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2008), 11. 60  Ibid., 71; A. S. Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community, 1720–1733— Philip Carteret Webb’s Notebooks,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 21 (1962–1967): 39–63, 51. Their status in England hovered between servant and slave. 61  Ibid. 62  Ibid., 90, 92. For examples of slave ownership and the trade in slaves among London’s Portuguese Jews, see Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community,” 50, 52–53. 63  Ungerer, The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, 93–101. 64  LMA, LMA/4521/A/02/02/001, Circumcicoems feitas por o Sr. Is. Carriaõ De Pabia. 65  Ibid., p. 5 (unpaginated).

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infirmary in 1749 shows four indigents begging for assistance. Among them is a woman with skin visibly darker than every other human in the room (only a hovering diabolical creature shares her skin tone). Her speech bubble identifies her as a “Barbarisco.”66 Since the infirmary admitted only Portuguese Jews, and not Ashkenazim or non-Jews, it would seem that the illustration depicts a Portuguese Jewish woman of enslaved African origins, an indication that such individuals were recognizable figures in the community.67 This historical background allows us to reassess the social status and possibly also the ancestry of some of the Jewish passengers who arrived in Savannah in 1733. Among the first shipload of Jews were a few individuals explicitly identified as unfree people. The family record book of Benjamin Sheftall indicates that Sipra Nunis, elsewhere known as Zipporah Nunes Ribeiro, a refugee of the Inquisition, was accompanied by her “servt,” a male named “Shem Noah.” His forename, highly unusual for a Jew of any background, may indicate African origins, as Richard Barnett first suggested in 1971 when he commented that Noah was “possibly a negro.”68 Other unfree people, whose legal status likewise may have hovered in a gray area between slavery and servitude, arrived with Jews in Savannah in the 1730s and similarly bore no family names, a telltale sign of either indenture or enslavement. One “David” came from London in 1734 with Mrs. Delyon and her two daughters. Also bereft of a family name was “Abram,” who arrived as the servant of Mr. Dias, a “gentleman” of London.69 “Abram” evokes the identity of a non-Israelite, the name of the biblical Abraham before he sealed the covenant with God that transformed him into the earliest forefather of the Jewish people. The unusual first name or lack of family names among these individuals does not definitively settle their civil status or ancestry. Yet, whether they were in practice slaves or servants may not matter a great deal, considering that indentured servants in England were often treated as bona fide slaves and subjected to what one historian refers to as “ritualized subjection,” including the 66  “The Jerusalem Infirmary alias A Journey to the Valley of Jehosaphat,” reprinted in Barnett, “Dr Jacob de Castro Sarmento,” 84–120, 118. 67  Since the illustration depicts Portuguese Jewish leaders debating the delicate question about which groups would be admitted to the infirmary as charity recipients, the full communal belonging of this “Berberisca” is also implicitly put to question. 68  Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 84. 69  AJA, Small Collections, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book, July 11, 1733–April 23, 1818, pp. 25–26.

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bestowal of new names by their masters or mistresses.70 Such erasure of previous ethno-religious identity and natal familial ties, as Orlando Patterson has shown us, is one of the telltale markers of enslavement.71 While the number of Jews in Savannah and the extent of surviving records are too small to produce any scientific sample, it is safe to assume (in absence of decrees limiting Jewish ownership of slaves) that the town’s Jews owned slaves in equal proportion to their agrarian or mercantile Christian counterparts. As in Christian families, these slaves were part of the household and some, as the progeny of their masters, were in certain cases legitimized. Benjamin Sheftall, among the pioneers who arrived in Savannah in 1733, wrote a will in 1765  in which he bequeathed his “negro” Betty, along with her two sons Jack and Ben, to various family members. The fact that he owned only 150 acres at the time helps to explain his small number of human possessions.72 Moses Ribeiro, after marrying a lady bearing the last name Abrahams, with whom he had one son, also sired children with a “mulatto girl.” Their names, Robert, Alexander (a typical first name among Ashkenazic, but not Portuguese Jews), and Frances, suggest they were not raised in the Jewish faith. Ribeiro died a wealthy landowner and merchant in 1747.73 Similarly, Moses Nunes of Savannah, in his will of 1785, bequeathed his land and much of his specie to three of his sons and one daughter, whom he conceived in concubinage with his “mulatta Rose.”74 His public recognition of paternity and manumission of both mother and children is extremely unusual among masters of any background. But none of this behavior is a function of the ethnoreligious background of Jewish masters, pace Kylie Louise McCormick’s weakly argued assertion to the contrary.75 Bertram 70  Leonore Davidoff, “‘Mastered for Life:’ Servants and Wives in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, ed. Leonore Davidoff (New York: Routledge, 1995), 18–19; Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 12 (for quote). 71  Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 54. 72  AJA, Manuscript Collection No. 99, Bertram W. Korn Papers, Box 13, folder 1, will of Benjamin Sheftall, August 4, 1765. 73  Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 88. 74  AJA, Manuscript Collection No. 99, Bertram W. Korn Papers, Box 13, folder 1, will of Moses Nunes, October 14, 1785. 75  McCormick, “Father and Servant, Son and Slave.” McCormick asserts that there were “appreciable differences between the slaveholding of Jewish and non-Jewish people” (abstract), but provides no examples.

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Korn’s conclusion that the Jews in the Old South (1789–1865) accepted slavery “as a natural aspect of […] life” can without reservation be applied to the colonial period as well.76

Poverty and Migration At the time of Georgia’s founding, poverty was the major issue confronting Jewish communities of the Atlantic World. Human deprivation overwhelmed the Portuguese Jewish populations on either side of the ocean and indigents were thus central to the community. The administration of poor relief, earmarked for such basics as food, fuel, and clothing, was a “constant leitmotif” in congregational records.77 Effective poverty management was the organizing principle that brought the major Portuguese Jewish communities into existence. The communal bylaws of Portuguese Jews, including those of Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Hamburg, and London, all specify the need to cope with indigence as the initial instigator of the corporate merging or founding of their congregations in the seventeenth century.78 The elite response to poverty resulted in the creation of centralized governance, spawned the community’s basic institutions, and articulated the parameters of ethnoreligious belonging, with Jews of immediate Iberian origins, as we have seen, favored above other groups as charity recipients.79 An examination of tax registers shows how far out of reach prosperity was for most Portuguese Jews. Amsterdam, as the primary city from which Jews were dispatched to other locales, is representative. In the seventeenth 76  Bertram Wallace Korn, “Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789–1865,” PAJHS 50, no. 3 (1961): 151–201; 199–201. 77  Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, “Financing Poor Relief in the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Community in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture (1500–2000), eds. Jonathan I. Israel and R. Salverda (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 63–102, 67 (her observation of Amsterdam applies broadly). 78  Swetchinski,  Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 176, 186; Bernfeld, “Financing Poor Relief,” 72–73; Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1978), 10; Bodian, “The ‘Escamoth’ of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Community of London,” 13; Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 52. 79  The centrality of poverty in Atlantic Jewish communities is further detailed in Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

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century, more than one third of immigrants from Portugal to Amsterdam were destitute, and that ratio increased dramatically over the course of the following century.80 In mid-eighteenth century Amsterdam, there lived twice as many Portuguese Jewish families who were poor as were not.81 Perhaps as many as 1800 Portuguese Jews at the time depended on the charity coffers.82 By the close of that century, 54% and 87% of Portuguese and Ashkenazic Jews, respectively, subsisted on charity aid.83 While parallel figures for eighteenth-century London are unavailable, we do know that between 1720 and 1735, the city’s Portuguese Jewish community doubled in size.84 As we have seen, some 3000 souls were transported from Portugal to London between 1701 and 1735 alone, most of them indigent.85 Statistics for the following century are suggestive. In 1829, nearly half of all Portuguese Jews in the land (twelve hundred out of twenty-five hundred) were recipients of regular or occasional aid.86 The poverty rate was even greater within the city. In London in 1838, as much as 71% of Congregation Sa’ar aSamayim may have consisted of “congregators,” that is, synagogue affiliates too deprived to pay even the lowest annual tax of one pound per year.87 In both degree and extent, indigence within Jewish communities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century Europe greatly exceeded the pauperism in parallel non-Jewish populations.88 The effort to establish the first hemispheric American Jewish settlement—in Dutch Brazil—was in part a response to the utter destitution of

 Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 90.  Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 15. 82  Yosef Kaplan, “Deviance and Excommunication in the Portuguese Community of 18th Century Amsterdam,” in Dutch Jewish History, ed. Jozeph Michman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: The Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, 1993), 1:103–15, 107. 83  Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 19; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 157. 84  Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 167–71; Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 78–79, 81, 91–92. 85  Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 80. 86  Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California, 2002), 81. 87   Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Absorption of Outsiders in London’s Portuguese Jewish Community,” in The Sephardic Experience: East and West, eds. Federica Francesconi, Stanley Mirvis, and Brian M. Smollett (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 88  Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 67. 80 81

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a significant portion of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community.89 The launching of Jewish settlements in the Caribbean beginning in the 1650s and in Savannah in 1733 were all planned within a context of increasing desperation, which by the early eighteenth century had also spread to London. While many of London’s Portuguese Jews had fled the Iberian Peninsula in the wake of anti-converso persecution, their plight in London was not in the first place tied to their racial or religious nonconformity, but rather to indigence. Antonio da Costa, a London-based Portuguese Jewish merchant active in fundraising for the immigration scheme to Georgia, understood this well. In a private correspondence to a colleague in Amsterdam dated October 1732, da Costa hoped that the transport to the New World would provide “relief for the poor of our nation.”90 The exclusion of prospective Jewish immigrants from the welfare system of the new British colony was based on longstanding tradition. In the Dutch and British orbits, both metropolitan and colonial authorities organized the distribution of charity around the parish system, from which Jews, as non-Christians, were excluded, and presumed that Jews were responsible for financially supporting their own kind. Permission to settle in European cities or colonies was predicated on the requirement that the Jewish community be self-supporting. While any Protestant Christian foreigner was in principle eligible to receive Trustee charity, Jews were not.91 For example, in 1765 a group of French immigrants (probably Huguenot) received 14 pounds from the Commons House of Assembly to pay for the survey of a tract of land near the Great Ogeechee River, “by reason of their extreme poverty.”92 Similarly, poor farmers from Ulster received a grant of 200 pounds in the 1760s and ’70s to launch farms and cover the cost of migration.93 Jews could appeal for similar grants, but to maintain their poor could only turn to each other. 89  Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1957), 171; Jonathan Irvine Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-Seventeenth-Century (1643–1657),” in Menasseh ben Israel and His World, eds. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 138–63, 140–43, 146–47. 90  SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, Antonio da Costa to David Mendes da Silva, October 17, 1732, p. 1. The letter is torn and the word “relief” (alivio) is inferred. 91  Goodman, American Overture, 173 (for the colony of Georgia). 92  Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 20. 93  Ibid.

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Most migrants to Georgia after 1750 were indigent and often arrived from other British North American colonies. Legislation concerning poor relief, the transient poor, and vagabonds increased during the 1760s, a sure indication that destitution was a growing problem among the European colonists. To combat the influx of dependent indigents, the legislature passed a law in 1764 intending to curb the number of “idle and disorderly persons” entering Georgia. Those lacking any means of subsistence would be imprisoned for ninety days, while repeat offenders would be impressed into the British navy, measures similar to the ones taken to control poverty in the European metropoles.94 The poverty and transience of Savannah’s Jewish community mirrored the situation in the broader settler group, but for the most part were internally regulated. However, pauper management was arguably a more vexing problem for Atlantic Jewish communities. Because their leaders had no legal power to expel their constituents from a city or prevent them from entering, they instead relied on the despacho, a quintessentially Portuguese Jewish institution responsible for relocating Jewish indigents either voluntarily or through force.95 In larger Jewish communities, despacho funds typically came from the communal charity chest. The smaller communities of North America functioned in a more ad hoc manner, sometimes dipping into their synagogue funds, other times pooling the resources of Jewish leaders across colonial boundaries. Typically, there was a statute of limitations of three to ten years before Jewish migrants could return again and partake of charitable donations, a stipulation notoriously difficult to enforce. Recipients sometimes absconded with the funds without leaving the land or, more frequently, returned before their time was up, leading the parnassim to mandate dispatch to destinations further and further east.96 Even in the backwaters and tiny Jewish communities of North America, the despacho was applied without hesitation. For example, in 1734, New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel paid five pounds to Captain Cornelis

94  Ibid., 20–21; Ariadne Schmidt and Jeannette Kamp, “Excluding the Unwanted? Banishment in Early Modern Cities: Frankfurt am Main and Leiden in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” forthcoming. I thank the authors for permission to cite their work-in-progress. 95  B. H. Levy refers to the Portuguese Jewish “practice of diversion rather than retention of poor immigrants.” Levy, “The Early History of Georgia’s Jews,” 163–78, 165. 96  Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society.

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Van Horne “for passage for Jacob de Meza to Suriname.”97 That same year, the congregation paid 29.11.4 ¾ “For several passages to London & to the Islands […].”98 The case of Jacob Musqueto, who arrived in New York from St. Eustatius in 1768, shows how elites drew on their business acumen and regional networks to orchestrate the removal of their local poor. Musqueto, “an object of Charity,” threw himself upon the “Mercy of the Sedaka” of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and requested dispatch to Barbados. The communal leaders resolved to pay for his board while he remained in the city and to then send him to Philadelphia en route to Barbados. Meanwhile, they wrote a letter to Michael Gratz in Philadelphia asking him to collect sufficient funds among the “Yahudim” there to cover Musqueto’s expenses, promising to cover any shortfall of four pounds or below.99 Because Savannah’s Jewish community left behind no minutes from before the late eighteenth century, we do not know how or if they fit into this circuit of regulated movement. However, due to its extreme transience, it is likely that the community was only informally involved. The town’s Jewish community almost entirely dispersed during the War of Jenkins’ Ear starting in 1739. The Sheftalls are apparently the only Jewish family of the original settlers that remained behind. Savannah’s Jewish community was thereafter reconstituted, only to be dispersed once again during the American Revolutionary war. It did not again rise until after the evacuation of the British in 1783. Like other Jewish settlements in colonial and early America, the Jewish community of Savannah is a story with two or more beginnings.100 Perhaps, then, it is better to characterize Savannah and other colonial Jewish centers in North America in the same way as Zoltán Fejös describes Hungarian enclaves in Chicago: as “temporary recurring communities.”101

97   No author, “The Earliest Extant Minute Books of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, 1728–1786,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 1–82; 32. 98  Ibid. 99  J. J. L., ed., “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn: Shearith Israel in New York,” PAJHS Society 21 (1913): 83–171; 99. 100  The phrase comes from David Brener, The Jews of Lancaster: A Story with Two Beginnings (Lancaster, Pa., Lancaster County Historical Society, 1979). 101  Zoltán Fejös, “Hungarians in Chicago,” 242–43; 243, section within Inta Gale Carpenter, et al., “Reports of the ACLS-HAS Team Project,” Journal of Folklore Research 21, no. 2–3 (May–December 1984): 239–56.

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We do, however, have one source from Savannah that describes the early comings and goings of Jewish kinsmen. In 1733, a German Jewish immigrant named Benjamin Sheftall (1692–1765) began a record sometimes known as the Sheftall diaries. He wrote it in Hebrew and translated it into English at the request of his son Levi Sheftall. Only the English translation survives. As Jewish Savannah’s chronicler Saul Jacob Rubin notes, “No Jewish congregation in America has such a rich source to document its ‘birth’ moment and early development.”102 As we would expect, the diaries list births, marriages, and deaths. But what makes the source stand out is that most of the entries refer to mobility, rather than to local events; to Jews on the move, rather than to settlement. This record book thus provides strong indications that colonial American Jewish communities developed in a whirlwind of continuous migration, the same frenzy of movement that generally characterizes the Jewish Atlantic. Daniel Swetschinski’s observation that New Christians in Portugal were not only more mobile than other groups in the Peninsula, but also experienced migration as a “group rather than [as] an individual reality,”103 may also apply to Atlantic Jews as a whole. Specifically, between 1736 and 1807, the Sheftalls noted that 291 Jewish parties arrived in Savannah and 105 departed. Their ports of origin and destination ranged from London, the Bahamas, Curaçao, St. Croix, and Jamaica, to various colonial North American cities, particularly Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia.104 Save for Curaçao and St. Croix, Dutch and Danish islands respectively, all places of transit fell within the (former) British Empire. Sheftall often refers to the arrival of Jews without noting their places of origin. Most of the migrants are referred to as those who “came to live here […]” and then “went away,” or has “gone away, but has returned.” The diaries are not as detailed as we would like, but they are proof positive that a great many of these migrants were not unidirectional, but rather birds of passage who flew back and forth in many directions. Their fluctuations must have been guided by family or personal connections, or by the calculation of promising prospects, as one

 Rubin, Third to None, 3.  Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 97. 104  My calculation based on AJA, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book. This calculation is necessarily inexact as the number of family members listed is sometimes indicated as an estimate. The number of arrivals includes 44 individuals listed for July 11, 1733. 102 103

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observer indicated in 1739.105 But they could also have been rather aimless, as much of the migration regulated by Atlantic Jewish communities seems to have been, particularly among the poor. In the despacho system in operation in North America, for example, destinations were sometimes determined based on the availability of ships.106 This aimlessness was in part a function of the mandate of Jewish leaders to prevent the prolonged sojourn of visitors and temporary residents, to dissuade other such persons from arriving, to curb violence and criminality among the indigent, and to diminish the visibility of the Jewish poor to the Christian authorities.107 As such, it would make sense to apply to the study of Atlantic Jewry the divergent model of migration studies, where destinations are multiple, as opposed to the paradigm that has been dominant in Jewish migration studies, the convergent or linear model, where there is just one destination.108 Certainly, some of this movement was trade-oriented. Minis Minis, son of one of Savannah’s pioneering Jewish families, operated a small retail shop importing rum, sugar, candles, soap, butter, and other products from the North or the Caribbean.109 Trade opportunities overlapped with marital alliances. Levi Sheftall, another scion of the Jewish Savannah pioneers, married Sarah de la Motta, whose acquaintance he made while carrying out business in St. Croix.110 The meandering of these individuals and families are evidence of economic networks, which—as for most mercantile whites—overlapped with the forging of marriages in the Atlantic world.111 Both Portuguese and Ashkenazic Jews established these kinds of transregional and transatlantic networks, as the research of Elliott Ashkenazi and

105  In that year, three Jews “had received lately some Advice from their Friends in Jamaica inviting them to come thither; which they were pondering upon, and unresolved in […].” Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” 191. 106  J. J. L., ed., “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn: Shearith Israel in New York,” 128. This is also true for poor Jews circulating elsewhere in the Atlantic World. 107  Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 121, 212. 108  See Nancy L.  Green, “The Comparative Method and Poststructural Structuralism— New Perspectives for Migration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History 13, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 13–16, 20. 109  Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 98. 110  Ibid., 98–99. 111  Natalie Zacek, “‘A People So Subtle:’ Sephardic Jewish Pioneers of the English West Indies,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move¸ ed. Caroline A. Williams (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009), 97–112, 109.

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Toni Pitock has shown.112 Malcolm Stern suggests that these business networks fell along ethnic lines. That is, Portuguese Jews in the South tended to trade with Portuguese Jews stationed elsewhere in America or on Europe’s Atlantic coast. Likewise, the networks of Ashkenazic Jews generally involved only Ashkenazic partners, at least in the few cases known to us.113 The continual movement of these Jews challenges Eli Evans’ characterization of Southern Jewry as “provincial,” and his implicit regard for northeastern Jews as the cosmopolitans. We should note that only at the tail end of his book does Evans acknowledge that the “provincialism” of Southern Jewry in his view pertains specifically to the pre-Depression era, after which Jews from small towns began to abandon the South in favor of cities promising greater economic opportunity.114 Nevertheless, it is important to correct the impression that Evans’ book title unwittingly conveys. It would seem that Jewish communities throughout the early colonial era shared a cosmopolitanism that went hand in hand with transience. Theirs was not the cosmopolitanism “of the favored few,” but rather a broad experience of the world borne of material necessity and semicoerced migration.115 Poverty, then, endowed Jewish migrants with far-reaching practical knowledge of the Atlantic World, much as the region’s enslaved and free people of African descent, because of their own intense mobility, cultivated what Phillip Troutman calls “geopolitical literacy.”116 112  Toni Pitock, “Bringing Philadelphia into the Jewish Atlantic World,” paper presented at Port Cities, 1500–1800 conference, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, November 5–7, 2015; Elliott Ashkenazi, “Jewish Commercial Interests Between North and South: The Case of the Lehmans and the Seligmans,” American Jewish Archives 63, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1991): 25–39 and The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840–1870 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). 113  An exception is Asser Levy, a native of Vilna and tradesman in New Netherland who had dealings with Amsterdam merchant Abraham Cohen Henriquez. Noah L.  Gelfand, “A Transatlantic Approach to Understanding the Formation of a Jewish Community in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 89, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 375–95, 385. 114  Eli N.  Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 275, 292. 115   Vinay Dharwadker, “Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, eds. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011): 125–43, 137 (for the quote). 116  Phillip Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 203–33; Jessica

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Paradoxically, their intense mobility did not prevent Atlantic Jews from becoming rooted in a particular locale, whether institutionally or culturally. An excellent example comes from the Jewish community of Savannah. On September 20, 1795, the President (parnas) of Congregation Mikveh Israel discovered that two paying members, Samuel Benedix and Moses Simons, had spent the second day of the Jewish New Year in Benedix’s house, instead of at synagogue. Even more shocking, before breakfast, the two blew the traditional Hebrew call to repentance not on a ram’s horn, but on a conch shell.117 The use of the shell of a conch, a non-kosher animal that inhabits tropical climates, is striking. These shells were central to African American culture, being the implement used by the master or overseer to call enslaved laborers to the fields. In other contexts, the object was used as a musical instrument to entertain enslaved laborers on rare occasions of respite. In extreme and unusual situations, slaves blew the conch shell to transmit to fellow unfree people a coded call to arms. Such was the case in 1791, when insurrection broke out among slaves in St. Domingue. Bozales who arrived with knowledge of African military tactics initiated their ambushes with the “piercing blast” of the conch shell. These sounds, which terrified the local white population, became symbolic of the Haitian revolution.118 The year that Benedix and Simons violated the Day of Atonement was heavily punctuated by slave revolts, including those of Curaçao and Coro. According to David Geggus, 1795 surpasses all other years for the highest number of separate rebellions, a total of thirteen incidents, both multiclass and involving solely slaves, in locales stretching from Louisiana to Buenos Aires.119 If my linkage of the conch shell to Savannah’s Jewish ritual infraction is correct, the anecdote suggests that the town’s Jews, often synonymous in the popular mind with wandering, were in fact quite localized, or to use a term more apt to this particular

Vance Roitman, “‘A Mass of Mestiezen, Castiezen, and Mulatten:’ Contending with Color in the Netherlands Antilles, 1750–1850,” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 399–417, 407 (for the application of Troutman’s principle to free people of African descent). 117  Rubin, Third to None, 55. 118  Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Malden, Mass.: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 42. 119  David Patrick Geggus, “Slave Rebellion During the Age of Revolution,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolution, 1795–1800, eds. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV, 2011), 23–56, 23, 42.

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case, creolized.120 Also noteworthy is the fact that the two men were relative newcomers to Savannah, perhaps having originated or spent time in the Caribbean. Benedix settled in Savannah in 1790, while Moses Simons first arrived in 1783, left soon after, and obviously returned at some point.121 That the pair had come into possession of a conch shell is in itself unsurprising. Georgia in the last half of the eighteenth century was “adjusting to becoming a slave society in the fullest sense of the word.” By the 1770s, Savannah possessed the second largest slave market in North America, “a merchants’ town with a distinctly Caribbean flavor.”122 Unfree African immigrants would have joined a large cognate population consisting of unskilled laborers, domestics, skilled artisans, hucksters, sailors, workers living independently, and food vendors.123 Africans did not live apart, but rather were “distributed throughout households,” in attics, back rooms, or outbuildings on the “same property as their masters” or in same house. Savannah’s ratio of blacks to whites more closely approximated the larger towns of the Caribbean than it did Philadelphia and Boston. By 1763, many wharves were owned by traders with Caribbean interests.124 The Caribbean had become the “bread and butter” of the colony’s commerce. 49% of the total shipping tonnage leaving the port was destined for the Caribbean. Savannah was, in the words of Paul M. Pressly, a “‘Caribbean’ Town.”125 Savannah’s Jews, therefore, would have had plenty of opportunity to come into contact with people of the African diaspora. There are numerous indications that the two groups intersected on a daily basis. We have already noted that Savannah pioneer Benjamin Sheftall bequeathed slaves to various family members, and that both Moses Ribeiro and Moses Nunes publicly recognized the paternity of children they conceived with their respective “mulatto” concubines. The close relations such Jewish men forged with members of the enslaved community and their free descendants continued into the late eighteenth century. The First African Baptist Church was created in 1790 after free and enslaved 120  For one definition see Alex van Stipriaan, “An Unusual Parallel: Jews and Africans in Suriname in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Studia Rosenthaliana 31, no. 1–2 (1997): 74–93, 86. 121  AJA, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book, pp. 28, 19. 122  Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean, 72. 123  Ibid., 72. 124  Ibid., 73. 125  Ibid., 69.

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blacks petitioned for the right of assembly. Among their founders was a free butcher of color named Adam Sheftall, possibly the former property of Levi Sheftall, who also worked in that trade. Another Sheftall, Mordecai, had argued in favor of their petition to permit worship “between Sun Rise and Sun Set” on Sunday because he opined that “all men have a right to worship God in theire owne way.”126 As these examples further suggest, Savannah’s Jewish community was not simply in the town, but also of the town. Even when at variance with Jewish law, the ostensibly Caribbean influences Benedix and Simons incorporated into their Day of Atonement ritual did not result in permanent excommunication, thanks in part to the financial fragility of the congregation. In 1799, out of economic desperation, the congregation’s leaders repealed “all pains and penalties inflicted on Samuel Benedix and Moses Simons.”127 As in other Atlantic Jewish communities, and particularly for those of North America, the acute need for congregational members (and hence financial support) opened the doors to the meeting of peoples and ideas that constituted the Atlantic World.

Conclusions The response of the London and Amsterdam parnassim to the Georgian colonization project of 1732 is an excellent example of the transimperial nature of the Portuguese Jewish community. Imperial boundaries for Portuguese Jewish leaders existed only in so far as they had to negotiate them with secular Christian authorities. The Jewish colonization of Georgia is paradigmatic of the confidence with which Atlantic Jewry asserted its belonging in a white, Protestant Christian society that did not prefigure or anticipate the presence of Jews. This self-assurance was informed by transnational and transimperial connections, as well as by Jewish colonial precedents reaching back to the mid-seventeenth century. The lack of a centralized community facilitated the localization of Savannah’s Jews. Pervasive contact between people of African descent and whites of all classes helps to explain the presence among Jews of consorts and progeny of enslaved origins, who in London were known among 126  McCormick, “Father and Servant, Son and Slave,” 71; James M.  Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America: Constituted at Savannah (Philadelphia: J.  B. Lippincott Company, 1888), 49. 127  Rubin, Third to None, 56.

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Anglophones as “blackamoors” and in Savannah as “servants” or “mulattoes.”128 Both localism and the socioeconomic character of Savannah as a Caribbean town can also explain the provenance of the conch shell qua shofar. But even if framed within the longue durée, is it worth our while to focus so closely on Savannah’s Jews, or, for that matter, on other Jewish communities in what would become the U.S.  South? The town’s Jews, along with their coreligionists elsewhere in the region, have always comprised a tiny minority, both in real numbers and in proportion to the population as a whole. If we consider the largest Jewish communities of the region, we find that at the commencement of the Civil War there were 350 Jews living in Savannah, comprising 2.5% of the local white populace. Only that town, as well as Charleston and Atlanta, reached a population of 500 Jews during the Reconstruction period. Most other Jewish communities in the South never even achieved the one hundred mark. Moreover, the relative size of the Jewish community steadily decreased over time. Between 1860 and 1880, Jews comprised 1/5 of 1% of all inhabitants of Georgia and the Carolinas.129 Even when Jews reached more significant numbers during the Civil War era, their proportion within the broader population dropped. In 1860, in the future Confederate States of America, Jews numbered just 25,000, comprising less than 0.3% of the inhabitants.130 More importantly, the documents created or preserved by colonial and early Savannah Jewry and their Southern coreligionists are neither especially rich nor continuous. Savannah’s Jewish community, in particular, would not seem to merit separate treatment. The many hundreds of pages devoted to them, as an expression of the “idolatry of origins,” have contributed to the failure to comprehend this Jewish community within its proper framework. The historiography of Savannah’s colonial Jews, now over a century old, has primarily characterized them as recently impoverished Iberian exiles striving for religious freedom in a New World environment. Only in an Atlantic perspective can we appreciate how distorted this perspective can be. Far from persevering refugees making their way through and 128  Lockley, Lines in the Sand, 163 (for the pervasive contact between African Americans and whites of all classes). 129  Anton Hieke, Jewish Identity in the Reconstruction South: Ambivalence and Adaptation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 23. 130  Ibid., 1.

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t­aming the wilderness, Savannah’s Jews were quintessentially Atlantic Jews, representative of the centrality of Portuguese Jewish heritage, slavery, poverty, and migration. Their usually countenanced departure from certain Jewish norms is a testament to their statistically insignificant size, lack of centralized authority, and weak ties with the mother community. Why Savannah’s Jewry possessed that tendency can only be answered by investigating other Jewish communities that did not, communities that have left behind a much richer archival legacy. Acknowledgments  My thanks to Sina Rauschenbach for her invitation to contribute to this volume and to her and Jonathan Schorsch for their keen editorial insights. Portions of this chapter, which have been abbreviated due to space constraints, are drawn from my unpublished presentation, “South and Further South: American Jewry and the Atlantic World,” Margolis Lecture on the Jewish Experience in the American South, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Duke University (November 2015), researched while a Loewenstein-Wiener Fellow at the American Jewish Archives Marcus Center (2015–2016). I would like to thank Ruth von Bernuth, Yaakov Ariel, and Rachel Ariel for the invitation to speak at Duke University, and Executive Director Gary Zola, the (now retired) Senior Archivist Kevin Proffitt, Managing Editor of Publications Dana Herman, and their colleagues at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives for their assistance. I am also grateful to Honorary Archivist Miriam Rodrigues-Pereira for permission to consult the Portuguese Jewish collection at the London Metropolitan Archives, and the staff of the below-mentioned archives. Abbreviations are as follows: AJA (American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio); LMA (London Metropolitan Archives); NAN (Nationaal Archief Nederland); TNAUK (The National Archives of the United Kingdom); NPIGS (Nederlands Portugees-­ Israëlitische Gemeente, Suriname 1677–1906); SAA (Stadsarchief Amsterdam).

CHAPTER 9

Becoming Imperial Citizens: Jews and Freemasonry in the British Caribbean (Early Nineteenth Century) Jan C. Jansen

In January 1820, Joseph Glock (1791/3–ca. 1839), one of the most flamboyant figures in early-nineteenth-century international freemasonry, arrived in the British colony of Jamaica. Glock was on a self-appointed mission of disseminating and regulating French high degree freemasonry that would bring him to several West Indian islands and the United States. Immediately after his arrival in Kingston, he got in touch with the local masonic scene, and—as he did from other places—wrote of his concerns about the state of local masonic affairs  to Prince Augustus Frederick (1773–1843), Duke of Sussex and Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England, by then the highest authority for most of the masonic lodges in Jamaica.1 While his contempt for the local freemasons’ practices 1  Joseph Glock d’Obernay to the Duke of Sussex, January 7 and January 8, 1820, United Grand Lodge of England [UGLE], 1991 HC 14/E/9–10. On Glock and his itinerary, see A. C. F. Jackson, “Joseph Glock (alias Chevalier Joseph de Glock d’Obernay),” Ars Quatuor

J. C. Jansen German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_9

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and institutions did not differ much between Jamaica and other places, Glock was struck by the prominent place Jews held within Jamaican freemasonry. In Glock’s view, Jews dominated the existing masonic institutions there, stood in contact with other Jewish freemasons in the Americas, and refused to join the new masonic Consistory set up by him. After only a few days in Kingston, Glock was convinced that “in contempt of universal fraternity, the masonic power in this island has found itself in the hands of a Jewish clique, which only allows entry into their synagoguish temples [temples synagogiques] to those who are equally prepared to profane the holiness of our mysteries […].”2 To be sure, Glock’s claims were marked by exaggerations, a pronounced anti-Judaism, and his own hubris in styling himself the “apostle” that the “Grand Architect of the Universe”—the masonic conception of the deity—had sent to the island of Jamaica.3 Yet, these distortions notwithstanding, Glock’s amazement highlights an important aspect of social life in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Jamaica. Since the first half of the eighteenth century, freemasonry, that is, a specific organization of sociability, and its institutions had gradually found their way into colonial society. By the late eighteenth century, masonic lodges had become a significant feature of the white colonists’ social life in most of Jamaica’s urban and semiurban centers.4 Even if they were far from dominating them, both in terms of numbers and in terms of power, Jews—many of them from long-established and well-off Sephardic families—played a conspicuous role in Jamaica’s masonic sociability.5 Glock’s amazement may have stemmed from the fact that in many parts of Europe, including his native France, the place of Jews within freemasonry was not as great as

Coronatorum [AQC] 94 (1981): 43–60; Alain Bernheim, “Further Light on the Masonic World of Joseph Glock,” AQC 100 (1987): 33–60. I would like to thank the editors for their insightful comments and suggestions. Special thanks go to GHI interns Till Knobloch and particularly Sabine Hanke for their research assistance, and to Susan Snell at the library of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) for her important support during my research. 2  Joseph Glock d’Obernay to the Duke of Sussex, January 8, 1820, UGLE Library, 1991 HC 14/E/10. 3  Ibid. 4  For an overview, see Frederick William Seal-Coon, An Historical Account of Jamaican Freemasonry (Kingston: Golding Print. Service, 1976) and, most recently, Jackie Ranston, Masonic Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, vol. 1 (Hersham: Lewis Masonic, 2017). 5  Jacob A.P.M. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica (Kingston: Jamaica Times, 1941), 118–21.

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it appeared to him in Britain’s largest West Indian colony.6 His astonishment would have probably turned into open consternation if Glock had sailed to other places in the West Indies, such as Curaçao or Barbados, or, on the North  American continent, Rhode Island’s Newport or South Carolina’s Charleston, where Jews (again mainly Sephardic) played comparably prominent roles in local masonic life. In contrast to Glock’s perspective, the relevant scholarly literature does not find anything astonishing about the considerable Jewish involvement in freemasonry in the colonial Americas. Historians of early American Jewry and colonial freemasonry alike treat it as a well-established fact that Caribbean and early American Jews, particularly Sephardim, were among the major distinct social groups within the masonic lodges in North America and in the British and Dutch West Indies.7 While they all seem to agree on the importance of this connection, the explanations they provide remain sketchy and general. Even a book entirely devoted to exploring this relationship in North America in full detail does not see the need to explain why and how this relationship came about.8 A leitmotif running through this scholarship is the cosmopolitan nature and very flexible ideological framework of freemasonry that made the participation of Jews—in Europe as well as overseas—possible, in contrast to other societies.9 Yet, if

6  Still the most substantial survey on this is Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 7  See, for instance, Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew 1492–1776 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), vol. 3, 1168–72; Marcus, Early American Jewry (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1953), vol. 1, 99, 125, 187–90; vol. 2, 81, 151, 189, 193, 328, 476; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 98, 115–16; Andrade, Jews in Jamaica, 118–21; Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), vol. 1, 478; Laura A.  Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), 249–74; Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 76–78; David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 194–208; Aviston Downes, “Freemasonry in Barbados, 1740–1900: Issues of Ethnicity and Class in a Colonial Polity,” The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 53 (2007): 50–76. 8  Samuel Oppenheim, The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810 (New York: The American Jewish Historical Society, 1910). 9  See Katz’s often-cited description of freemasonry as harbinger of a more tolerant “neutral society.” Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 210, 214.

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we want to understand the dynamics and reasons behind the involvement—in some specific contexts considerable—of early American Jewry in the lodges, it does not suffice to state merely that it was possible. This chapter seeks to shed new light on this phenomenon by going beyond the existing general explanations. Drawing on evidence from predominantly Jewish lodges in the British West Indies in the early nineteenth century, I will examine the early American Jewish affinity for freemasonry in one specific setting and develop an argument about what may have been the driving forces behind the Jamaican Jews’ interest in freemasonry. In a few words, this argument runs as follows: the masonic lodges functioned as loci of a “transitory sociability”10 in a period of fundamental transformation for the Sephardic diaspora in the late-eighteenth- and early-­ nineteenth-­ century British Caribbean. With the gradual weakening or even dissolution of transimperial diasporic ties, aspiring Jews turned toward an institution that promised to support their ambition to become fully integrated into the British imperial sphere. Participation in West Indian masonic life enabled them to stage claims of their belonging to a heterogeneous, yet coherent imperial community, at a time when legal equality of rights between them and other members of this community was not yet established.11 At the same time, the masonic network proved flexible enough to retain and refashion certain ties that went beyond the sphere of the British Empire and that were essential for the Sephardic diaspora’s position within the Atlantic world. The chapter thus situates the connections between American Sephardim and masonic sociability more firmly in its colonial context. In the first place, I will place both the Sephardic diaspora and freemasonry in the historical context of the early modern imperial Atlantic. I will then provide an overview of the historical connections between freemasonry and the Jewish communities in the colonial Americas, before returning to my major example, the British colony of Jamaica around the time of Joseph Glock’s visit.

10  Eric Saunier, Révolution et sociabilité en Normandie au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: 6000 francs-maçons de 1740 à 1830 (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 1999), 39. 11  For a similar argument for the early-twentieth-century Ottoman context, see Michelle U.  Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1–19, 191–96.

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The Jewish Diaspora, Freemasonry, and the World of Empires In colonial studies, freemasons and Jews share a common fate. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, their position(s) and role(s) in the history of European expansion and in colonial societies outside of Europe (and North America) have ranked among the less studied aspects. In recent years, however, scholars of Jewish and colonial history have become more interested in both groups. Major edited volumes and monographs have shed new light on the role of the Jewish and converso/New Christian diasporas in different European overseas empires since the sixteenth century, especially in the Atlantic world.12 Likewise,  recent scholarship has discovered—even if on a smaller scale—the considerable yet overlooked colonial history of freemasonry.13 This paper is situated where the colonial histories of Jews and freemasons converge. It is thus necessary to briefly locate them in the history of the colonial empires in the Atlantic world. The Sephardic trading diaspora has often been characterized as “the widest-ranging in its operations and the longest-lasting in its general impact, on both culture and society and on the international trade system.”14 Its emergence in the New World reaches back into the sixteenth 12  The literature is by now immense. See especially the landmark publications such as Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800 (New York: Berghahn, 2001); Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Richard L.  Kagan and Philip D.  Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jonathan Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Jessica V. Roitman, The Same but Different? Inter-Cultural Trade and the Sephardim, 1595–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Stanley Mirvis, “Sephardic Family Life in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013). For a discussion of recent historiography, see also Jonathan Schorsch, “Sephardic Trade: Early Modern Atlantic Style,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 483–503. 13  See, in particular, Georges Odo, La franc-maçonnerie dans les colonies, 1738–1960 (Paris: EMDF, 2001); Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire; Jessica Harland-Jacobs, “Freemasonry and Colonialism,” in Handbook of Freemasonry, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Jan A.M. Snoek (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 439–60. 14  Jonathan Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism,

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century and was closely connected to the developments of European colonial expansion.15 From the early sixteenth century on, the Portuguese trading empire and the first boom of sugar production brought an increasing number of Portuguese converso (“New Christian”) merchants to Brazil. From the second half of the sixteenth century, an increasing number of converso merchants also settled in Spanish colonies throughout the Americas. The rise of the Dutch Republic and Great Britain as the new imperial powers in the Atlantic world  during the seventeenth century brought about a new period in the development of this trading diaspora. The more liberal Dutch and British colonies attracted Sephardic merchants (mainly via Amsterdam) and conversos from Iberian colonies (re)converting to Judaism. Recife, in Dutch-controlled Northern Brazil, became home to a thriving Jewish trading community in the first half of the seventeenth century. After the reoccupation of Northern Brazil by Portugal, Great Britain and the Netherlands competed for fugitive Sephardic Jews and conversos and their know-how in sugar production and trade. These colonies did not offer them full emancipation, to be sure, but the Dutch and British New World colonies, in particular, offered them legal situations that were less restricted than in many parts of Europe at that time.16 In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sephardim from Western Europe and former conversos from Iberian colonies settled throughout the New World, with Dutch Curaçao and Suriname, British Barbados and Jamaica, French Saint-Domingue, and later North America constituting major hubs.17

1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3. 15  For overviews, see Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora; Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2002). 16  For a detailed analysis of different legal situations within the Dutch Empire, see James Homer Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland and New York,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering  (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 369–93; in comparative perspective Jessica V.  Roitman, “Creating Confusion in the Colonies: Jews, Citizenship, and the Dutch and British Atlantics,” Itinerario 36 (2012): 55–90. 17  For the French West Indies, see 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, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and

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While they were also, in some places (e.g. Suriname), active in the agricultural plantation economy, American Jews were above all engaged in regional and overseas trade—legal and illegal. The Jewish communities made up one of the best-integrated trading diasporas in the early modern Atlantic world, based on tightly woven networks built out of kinship, religious, ethnic, and linguistic ties. These trading networks stretched across various imperial and state borders, which were, in the eyes of imperial authorities, both an asset and a source for continuous distrust. As historian Adam Sutcliffe puts it, the Sephardic ability to cross cultural borders, adapting to different environments while sustaining cohesion as a diasporic minority, […] made them of such key importance as economic intermediaries. […] [T]he early modern Sephardim were exemplary non-patriots, sustaining international commerce as well as their own complex cultural networks and identities, precisely because they remained aloof from theological divisions and political rivalries.18

Only in the course of the eighteenth century did these transimperial diasporic ties start to weaken, and local Jewish communities turned ­increasingly toward their economic, social, and political integration into their respective imperial states.19 It was in this period of transition for the Sephardic community that masonic lodges started to appear in the colonies of the Atlantic world, particularly in those colonies that also allowed for open Jewish life, the two forms of toleration likely being connected. Modern freemasonry took Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 287–313. Officially banned from the French colonies, there is evidence of Jewish presence in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, see Zvi Loker, “Were there Jewish Communities in Saint Domingue (Haiti)?,” Jewish Social Studies 45 (1983): 135–46; Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et Juifs au XVIIIe siècle: Le racisme au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Tallandier, 1984), 91–115; 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, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 314–32, esp. 316–20. For the two major cases in the British West Indies, Jamaica, and Barbados, see Stephen Alexander Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750 (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1984). 18  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: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 27–29. 19  See Leibman, Messianism, 301–5; Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews,” 17; Adam Sutcliffe, “Jewish History,” 29.

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shape institutionally in early-eighteenth-century England, even though some historical connections can be traced back to the stonemasons’ lodges and other associative forms in late medieval and early modern Europe.20 The freemasons were part of what historian Peter Clark has called the “associational revolution” of the eighteenth century, that is, a multitude of associations, learned societies, academies, clubs, and so on, that marked the so-called Age of Enlightenment.21 Freemasons organized themselves in so-called lodges, a term that stands for the group of members as well as for the venue of their meetings. These local lodges affiliated with so-called grand lodges, the first of which was the Grand Lodge of London established in 1717. Like other moral societies at this time, the freemasons strove for individual, characterological, and moral improvement in an associational setting. Principal values were tolerance and fraternity. Besides these more general features, six aspects are of particular importance for the context of this paper: First, freemasonry was a voluntary organization, that is, an association based on the principle of free and individual membership, whose existence depended neither on the church nor the state. Second, freemasonry was a society based on initiation by means of rites, symbols, passwords, and secret signs of identification. In that sense, freemasonry was a highly formalized and late element of a thriving early modern economy of secrets.22 Third, it was about h ­ omosocial organization, that is, lodges were organizations only open to men, at least in theory, even if in practice there were numerous overlaps with mixedgender spaces. Fourth, it was about fraternal organization, the construction of a “brotherhood,” that is, an organization based on kinship-­like bonds between its members, something cultural anthropologists have

20  On debates over the origins, see David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), ch. 1; Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, La République universelle des francs-maçons: De Newton à Metternich (Rennes: Editions Ouest-France, 1999), 23–52. 21  Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 471. 22  Daniel Jütte, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). For an excellent discussion of the functions of secrecy in masonic sociability, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Eliteanspruch und Geheimnis in den Geheimgesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Aufklärung und Geheimgesellschaften: Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmut Reinalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 63–86.

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termed “symbolic” or “fictive kinship.”23 Fifth, the inner life of the lodges obeyed certain rules that were partly in contradiction to the political and social structures surrounding them. Thus, all members—regardless of their rank in society—were considered equal brothers within the lodge; already during the eighteenth century, the lodges organized themselves along certain democratic principles. Sixth, finally, modern freemasonry has been characterized by a pronounced cosmopolitan attitude. Considering themselves a brotherhood of humanity, freemasons sought to ignore confessional, political, social, national, and continental boundaries. Parallel to its institutionalization in Europe, freemasonry expanded beyond the boundaries of the European continent, becoming one of the first non-religious institutionalized and stable networks with an intercontinental and global reach. The global spread of freemasonry was due to a variety of factors, including the migration of people, military expansion, and an active policy of expansion pursued by several European grand ­lodges.24 From the very beginning, the masonic expansion was also closely linked to European intercontinental empires. Empires provided more than just an infrastructure for the expansion of freemasonry, which was often brought to occupied territories by soldiers, administrators, and settlers. As historian Jessica Harland-Jacobs has argued for the context of the British Empire, the masonic brotherhood became an imperial institution par excellence. It provided an informal fraternal network that fulfilled various social, moral, emotional, spiritual, material, and ideological functions for different actors within local colonial societies and between the different colonies and the metropole: The ever-growing network of Masonic lodges helped men (and women) as they moved across the empire. It came to the assistance of downtrodden migrants, facilitated the careers of prominent proconsuls, and allowed businessmen and soldiers from the Dominions to feel “at home” in the

23  Mary Ann Clawson, “Fraternal Orders and Class Formation in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1985): 689; Nicholas Terpstra, “Deinstitutionalizing Confraternity Studies: Fraternalism and Social Capital in Cross-Cultural Contexts,” in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 264. 24  On the dynamics of masonic expansion, see Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, L’Autre et le frère: L’étranger et la franc-maçonnerie en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 19–212; Beaurepaire, L’Europe des francs-maçons XIIIe-XXIe siècle (Paris: Belin, 2002), 13–99; Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 21–63.

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metropole. Meanwhile, Masonic rhetoric and ceremonies conveyed the message that the diverse peoples of the empire could unite in their feelings of loyalty to the crown […].25

The masonic lodges thus functioned as a major institution for the shaping of genteel masculine subjectivities in the British imperial sphere (and probably also in other colonial contexts). At the same time, freemasonry remained a cosmopolitan and global movement, and a highly “plastic” institution, that also reached into the non-imperial world.26 While it was obviously of utmost importance for agents of colonial states, for example, it could also be subject to non-imperial or even subversive uses.27 It is this fundamental ambiguity, of it being a recognized institution of colonial society that was also part of a transimperial network, I would argue, that made it particularly attractive within the Sephardic community in the early-nineteenth-century British West Indies—and maybe beyond.

Jewish Freemasons in the Americas The participation of Jews in freemasonry is a complex issue fraught with the old anti-Semitic stereotype of a Judeo-masonic conspiracy.28 As already stated, freemasonry claimed to be a cosmopolitan brotherhood that ­transcended political, social, and religious boundaries. Yet, on the ground, masonic cosmopolitanism went hand in hand with highly exclusive membership practices. Freemasonry has been characterized as a mirror through which a group of chosen ones observes itself and tries to appear in its best light, by emphasizing the traits of its cohesion, in order to distinguish itself from the average of profane people; this mirror cannot, however, prevent their fears and the force of their social and cultural a priori from showing through.29

 Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 279–80.  On the “plasticity” of freemasonry, see Pierre Chevallier, La première profanation du temple maçonnique: Ou Louis XV et la fraternité 1737–1755 (Paris: Vrin, 1968), 34; Beaurepaire, République universelle, 24, 76, 167, 170. 27  Vahid Jalil Fozdar, “Constructing the ‘Brother:’ Freemasonry, Empire, and Nationalism in India, 1840–1925” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001), 375–76. 28  On the history of this stereotype, see Armin Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythus in der Weimarer Republik und im NS-Staat (Vienna: Braumüller, 1993). 29  Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Fraternité universelle et pratiques discriminatoire dans la Francmaçonnerie des Lumières,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 44 (1997): 195–212. 25 26

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Depending on the context, such exclusions were based on social, political, racial, national, and religious criteria. Already in the European context, various exclusions marked the boundaries of masonic sociability. By definition, women were excluded from the brotherhood, almost everywhere lower classes, and in some cases also Catholics or Jews. If we look more closely at the place of Jews within freemasonry, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe provides an unclear picture. Jewish participation, which can be traced back to the early 1730s, varied considerably from one context to another. To a certain extent, the willingness of the lodges to initiate and accept certain Jewish members reflected general social attitudes toward Jews. While British and Dutch lodges proved more open to them, they were shut out by many German lodges well into the nineteenth century, on the basis that a truly cosmopolitan freemason was in the end a Christian man.30 In other settings, such as in mid-eighteenth-century Bordeaux, aspiring local Jewish elites experienced the tension between the universalist discourse and exclusive practices of masonic lodges.31 In general, the masonic milieus proved relatively open toward Sephardic Jews of high social and economic standing, while masonic discourse tended to disqualify Ashkenazic Jews as a whole.32 In contrast to this muddled and contradictory picture, the New World seems to have provided a particularly fertile ground both for the expansion of freemasonry and for the participation of Jews in it. Everywhere that it was tolerated or even promoted by colonial authorities, masonic life thrived, particularly in North America, as well as in the British, French, and Dutch West Indies. Early on, that is, since the mid-eighteenth century, Jews started to enter the lodges and to hold important offices in masonic provincial or state hierarchies. The most conspicuous element of their presence within the brotherhood, however, was lodges that were mostly composed of Jews, even though such lodges were not formally closed to non-Jews. Such lodges were often composed of the leading

30  See Katz, Jews and Freemasons; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Brothers or Strangers? Jews and Freemasons in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” German History 18 (2000): 143–61; Jean-Philippe Schreiber, “Introduction: Judaïsme français et franc-maçonnerie,” Archives Juives 43, no. 2 (2010): 4–14. 31  Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ch. 4. 32  Beaurepaire, L’Autre et le frère, 565–66.

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­ gures of the local Jewish communities who were often also among the fi founders and central figures of the local synagogue.33 These “Jewish” lodges served as “meeting place[s] for Jews of different nationalities and backgrounds.”34 They sometimes adjusted their rituals and symbols to Judaism or put emphasis on masonic symbols that were in accordance with their faith, a possibility that one of the London grand lodges (the “Antients”) had promoted since the mid-1750s.35 The best-­ known example of “Jewish” lodges in the Atlantic context is King David Lodge, founded in 1769 in New York, and then transferred to Newport in 1780.36 The lodge became one of the most important social institutions for Newport’s Jews. At the end of the eighteenth century, between two thirds and five sixths of all adult Jewish men in Newport were members of the lodge. In the West Indies, we find numerous further “Jewish” lodges, namely one in Curaçao (established before 1774), one in Barbados (in Bridgetown, 1804), and two in Jamaica (in Kingston, 1797, and in Montego Bay, 1818).37 The affinity of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American Jewry for masonic sociability has not escaped historians of early American Jewry and of freemasonry in the Americas. While several authors have considered it a remarkable phenomenon, the explanations they provide remain strikingly vague and general, seeing it as an indicator of a more tolerant social environment and the eagerness of the Jewish communities to integrate themselves into their surrounding (colonial) societies.38 Recently, historian Laura A.  Leibman, in her survey of early American Jewish culture, has started to work on a more sophisticated explanation. While she also regards the masonic lodges as an entry point to genteel colonial society, she argues that freemasonry was the only established insti Leibman, Mysticism, 274–75.  Hackett, Religion, 196. 35  Leibman, Mysticism, 254. 36  Bernard Kusinitz, “Masonry and the Colonial Jews of Newport,” Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes 9 (1984): 183. 37  Emmanuel, Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, vol. 1, 478; Downes, “Freemasonry in Barbados,” 55; Seal-Coon, Jamaican Freemasonry, 11. 38  For example, William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 92, 96, 112–13, 123, 182; Hackett, Religion, 192; Faber, Time for Planting, 98; Karl Watson, “Shifting Identities: Religion, Race, and Creolization among the Sephardi Jews of Barbados, 1654–1900,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 210–11. 33 34

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tution that shared early American Jewish taste for a “poetics of secrecy:” “[O]nly the Masons provided an ability to [connect with men across social boundaries] while reclaiming Jewish men’s ties to secrecy and mysticism.”39 Secrecy certainly points to one of the keys that help understand Caribbean Jewish involvement in freemasonry. As historian Daniel Jütte has shown, the trade in secrets and secret knowledge constituted an important and dynamic market in early modern Europe.40 This “economy of secrets,” to borrow Jütte’s term, proved socially more open to Jews than other, more established fields of knowledge that were institutionalized at the universities and academies. If we consider, against this backdrop, the West Indian masonic lodges as elements of a larger Atlantic economy of secrets, we can give Leibman’s idea a slightly different spin. Instead of assuming a collective taste for secrecy, instilled by culture and historical experience, we can put emphasis on the intentional and conscious, if not strategic use of a dynamic transatlantic economy of secrets. Playing on their alleged expertise in practices of secrecy helped Caribbean Jews gain a prominent position in a central social organization of white colonial society. All these explanations point to important structural connections. Yet, referring to early American Jews regardless of their specific social, political, and cultural contexts, these explanations leave many important questions unanswered: How do we understand the various ebbs and flows in Jewish masonic involvement? Was the “cult of secrecy” equally pronounced across Jewish communities regardless of their specific composition and location? What forms of social exclusions shaped these Jewish lodges? If we want to obtain a more complex and dynamic picture, it is necessary to look more closely into specific contexts and carve out specificities and commonalities between Jewish and non-Jewish involvement in masonic sociability.

Becoming Imperial Citizens in the British West Indies In the following case study, I will try to shed some more light on this specific aspect of Jewish colonial existence—while also engaging in larger arguments about the historical connections between imperial freemasonry and Caribbean Jewry. I will look at the early-nineteenth-century British  Leibman, Mysticism, 249.  Jütte, Age of Secrecy.

39 40

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West Indies, and especially Jamaica, a case that figures less prominently in the relevant scholarship on Jewish colonial history than, for example, Newport or Curaçao, but which is by no means less important. Jamaica was, by the end of the eighteenth century, not only the largest but also the economically and politically most important colony of the British West Indies. It was home to the largest Jewish community in the British West Indies. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Jamaican (white) population bore the highest proportion of Jews throughout the British Empire. In 1720, Jews accounted for almost a fifth of the urban population of Kingston.41 At the end of the eighteenth century, the Jamaican Jewish community ranked third in size in the Caribbean, behind the Jewish hubs in the Dutch colonies of Curaçao and Suriname. A century later, at its very peak, it constituted the largest Jewish community in the region. Jamaica was also the major masonic center in the region. Between 1770 and 1840, at least 46 masonic lodges were established throughout the island, with Kingston being by far the most important hub.42 Barbados was the second most important masonic and Jewish center in the British West Indies with at least a dozen masonic lodges established there between 1770 and 1840.43 These British Caribbean lodges brought together an important portion of the white colonial elites, that is, plantation owners or their local agents, military and civil representatives from the metropole—including several governors-general—urban creoles, and merchants, including slave traders. Early on, Jewish names started to appear on the membership lists of masonic lodges in Jamaica and Barbados, yet Jews did not become as omnipresent as Joseph Glock’s allegations in 1820 would suggest. Their involvement became more obvious in the late eighteenth century, when the schism between two rival English grand lodges, the “Moderns” and the “Antients,” made itself felt in Jamaica and, as in other parts of the British Empire, this rivalry seems to have resulted in socially more open admission practices. One of Kingston’s first Antient lodges, “Union Lodge,” established in 1789, had a considerable number of Jewish mem-

41  On the numbers, see Mordechai Arbell, The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica (Kingston: Canoe Press, 2000), 36–37; Jane. S. Gerber, “Introduction,” in Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 6. 42  See the lists provided by Seal-Coon, Jamaican Freemasonry, 67–112; Ranston, Masonic Jamaica, 247–51. 43  On freemasonry in Barbados, see Downes, “Freemasonry in Barbados.”

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bers within the first years of its existence.44 In 1797, the so-called Friendly Lodge was founded in Kingston. Officially, Friendly Lodge was an offshoot of Union Lodge, and the request to found a new lodge was based on the simple reason that “we were in the Union Lodge too numerous.”45 Yet, looking at the group of petitioners at the origin of this lodge, it becomes clear that Friendly Lodge was obviously a Jewish masonic project. With the foundation of Friendly Lodge, Union Lodge’s formerly mixed Jewish-Christian members separated along religious-ethnic lines.46 Friendly Lodge’s founders, members, and officers were predominantly Jewish. Contemporaries also referred to it as “the Jewish lodge.”47 It quickly became a magnet for Jewish freemasons in Jamaica, attracting members from other lodges all over the island.48 A few years later, a predominantly Jewish lodge was also created in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1804, bearing the significant name of “Mount Horeb Lodge.”49 In 1818, in Montego Bay, in the western part of Jamaica, another Jewish masonic lodge was founded, also named “Friendly Lodge.”50 Similar to the situation in Kingston in 1797, the foundation of these two lodges complemented local masonic landscapes featuring predominantly Christian (Protestant) lodges. Only three years before Montego Bay’s Friendly Lodge was opened, for instance, another lodge with no Jewish founding member had been established, suggesting that local

44  Union Lodge, List of members, June 24, 1795, UGLE Library, Annual Returns, 1166 Union Lodge, SN1166/vii; Ranston, Masonic Jamaica, 127. For a survey of how the schism between “Antients” and “Moderns” played out in the British Empire, see Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 21–63. 45  Solomon Morales to Robert Leslie, Grand Lodge Secretary, June 17, 1797, UGLE Library, Lodge Files, SN1303, Provincial Grand Lodge no. 1, Kingston, Jamaica, no. 301 (1796–1816). See also Emmanuel X. Leon, History of the Friendly Lodge, No. 239, District No. 2 (Kingston: Mortimer DeSouza, 1898), 20. 46  George W.J. Palmer, Montego Bay: Its People and its Lodge: A History of the Friendly Lodge 383 Montego Bay Jamaica 1818–2000 (Jamaica: George W.J. Palmer, 2000), 63. 47  See Seal-Coon, Jamaican Freemasonry, 79. 48  UGLE, Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, pre-1813–62, UGLE Library; several new members had already been members of other Jamaican lodges—for example, D.N. Nunes (joining in 1815), Moses Morales (1816), Simon Adolphus (1816), or Jacob Joseph Adolphus (1820). 49  UGLE, Membership Register of Mount Horeb Lodge, Bridgetown, 1804, UGLE Library. 50  Palmer, Montego Bay, 63–65.

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Masons began to separate along religious lines.51 Both Jamaican Friendly Lodges, for which we have comprehensive membership records, had a minority of non-Jewish members and initiated some of them. But their main purpose in this period was to recruit and organize Jewish freemasons. The Kingston lodge especially functioned as a springboard for its members into masonic offices for the entire district during the first decades of the nineteenth century.52 Being the most conspicuous elements of Jewish masonic life, these lodges may serve us as a starting point for examining the relationship between imperial freemasonry and West Indian Sephardim. In the first place, we have to understand the very nature of such semi-­ segregation within the masonic brotherhood. Why were there Jewish lodges at all within an organization that claimed not to know distinctions based on confession? The establishment not only of specifically Jewish lodges but also of all sorts of other associations and clubs is a phenomenon well-known by historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Jewry. Some scholars have argued that the emergence of a Jewish ­associational subculture was primarily a reaction to their exclusion from non-­Jewish clubs and societies.53 Indeed, individualized admission procedures and ballotage could mask systematic discrimination based on religious affiliation. Other scholars have put more emphasis on Jewish agency in the creation of these parallel structures, conceiving such lodges and associations as a means for Jews to self-fashion their identities, while at the same time participating in larger polite society. In this sense, referring to early-­nineteenth-­century Germany, historian Simone Lässig has characterized Jewish bourgeois associations, including masonic lodges, as “particularly effective media” of Jewish self-“embourgeoisement,” as a “social training ground for the formation of a bourgeois habitus and the appropriation, later also the transfer, of a significant [social, cultural] capital.”54 In the absence of clear documentary evidence, we can only make assumptions about the driving forces behind the creation of predominantly Jewish lodges. In the case of Jamaica’s Friendly Lodges and Bridgetown’s Mount Horeb Lodge, I am more inclined toward the second position, stressing 51  UGLE, Membership Register of Cornwall Lodge, Montego Bay, 1813–36, UGLE Library. 52  See the list of officers provided by Seal-Coon, Jamaican Freemasonry, 11, 54–56. 53  For example, David Jan Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112–16. 54  Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 555–56.

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Jewish agency in their creation. The fact that Jews had access to other lodges, that freemasonry in Jamaica was not entirely closed toward them, and that Jews played prominent roles in the provincial masonic hierarchy, makes me believe that these new lodges were in fact elements of a decidedly Jewish masonic project. This project was part of a fundamental transformation that the Sephardic diaspora in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Caribbean experienced. This transformation can be characterized as a process of “becoming imperial citizens.” At this historical juncture, the idea of “citizens” played a pivotal role in the debates about the political and social status of West Indian Jews. Citizenship has been described as a core concept governing the relationship between the state and its residents, encompassing a broad array of political, economic, and social rights and statuses.55 While it has been generally identified with the advent of the modern nation-state, scholars have found such a broad notion of citizenship also highly useful in disentangling the various and complex statuses, forms of belonging and n ­ egotiation of power relations in colonial and imperial settings.56 In ways no different than in a nation-state, citizenship can designate a set of legal, political, social, economic, and cultural means of belonging to and participation in an imperial polity. Imperial citizenship was about setting power relations and hierarchies, yet it also provided the tools for claim-making and renegotiating power by colonial subjects-as-citizens.57 Imperial citizenship as an element of claim-making and self-fashioning among the populations of empire played out not only in the institutional sphere of the state, but also in less formalized settings such as newspapers, social clubs, and private schools—or masonic lodges.58

55  For an overview see Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 56  See the groundbreaking work by Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Treating different historical concepts of imperial citizenship, see Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 57  Over the past decades, this has been emphasized, particularly for the French imperial context, in studies by Frederick Cooper. For a broader picture, see his Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 58  Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Campos, Ottoman Brothers; Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC:

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Freemasonry’s role in these processes of self-fashioning in the case of West Indian Jews can be described on two levels: a more general one (that may apply to other contexts as well) and a more specifically Caribbean or British imperial one. Let me start with the more general argument. We have to consider that the Jewish community in Jamaica and Barbados— but also in other parts of the Atlantic—was essentially a trading diaspora. Both elements, their involvement in trade and their diasporic nature, explain to a certain extent the Jews’ inclination to freemasonry. Traders and merchants are generally one of the main protagonists in global freemasonry, using masonic connections to enhance, stabilize, or broaden their business networks over long distances.59 The same holds true for diasporas for which freemasonry provided a particularly flexible framework for the cultivation of diasporic bonds.60 In both cases, trust, familiarity, and reputation built through shared membership and fictive kinship are considered a major benefit of masonic sociability in a general context of uncertainty. As already mentioned, the Jewish communities established one of the best-integrated diasporic networks in the early modern Atlantic world. In the course of the eighteenth century, the tightly knit transimperial diasporic ties of kinship, religion, ethnicity, and language began to weaken. Religious confraternities, for example, that had linked Jewish diaspora communities across the Atlantic, declined in the course of the eighteenth century, as did charity activities across territorial borders.61 Local Sephardic communities turned increasingly toward their economic, social, and political integration into their respective imperial spheres—in the case of Jamaica and Barbados, the British Empire. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Sephardic Jews in Jamaica and Barbados began to regard London—and no longer Amsterdam—as their religious center.62

Duke University Press, 2010). On freemasonry and imperial citizenship in the late-nineteenth-century British Empire, see Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 240–81. 59  See, citing different cases, Stephen C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 198–219; Roger Burt, “Freemasonry and Business Networking during the Victorian Period,” The Economic History Review 56 (2003): 657–88. 60  Beaurepaire, L’Europe des francs-maçons, 13–42. 61  On the declining role of Jewish confraternities in Barbados, see Marcus, Colonial American Jew, vol. 2, 124. 62  Karl Watson, “The Sephardic Jews of Bridgetown,” in Beyond the Bridge: Lectures Commemorating Bridgetown’s 375th Anniversary, eds. Woodville K.  Marshall and Pedro

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It is no accident, I would argue, that in this period of transition, masonic sociability enjoyed great popularity among these communities. In the British case, the masonic lodges provided access to a highly respected and wide-ranging intra-imperial network. At the same time, the global masonic network proved flexible enough to complement, refashion, and partly replace preexisting diasporic ties beyond the British imperial realm. This may help us to understand the very particular membership patterns of Kingston’s Friendly Lodge. More than any other lodge in Kingston, this lodge was composed of merchants and other people involved in trade. The lodge linked a group of local retailers and ­merchants with overseas traders and mariners. Together, merchants, traders, and mariners made up more than three quarters of all members in the first decades of the nineteenth century.63 Even more noteworthy is the fact that more than half of Friendly Lodge’s members in the 1810s were nonresidents. While some of these absentee members were based in North America and Great Britain, the great majority came from Central and Southern Spanish America, especially the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada, the major region of Jamaican Sephardic trading activities.64 Most of these external members seem to have been trading partners. Friendly Lodge offered them a fast-­ track procedure, allowing them to obtain the masonic master’s degree within a few days of their being admitted to the lodge, something that would have normally required at least several months. The master’s degree made them eligible for a masonic certificate, a sort of a masonic passport, to initiate new masons, and to found new lodges in other places. In a similar manner, almost half of the new members admitted into Montego Bay’s

L.V.  Welch (St. Michael: Barbados Museum & Historical Society, 2005), 54; Marcus, Colonial American Jew, vol. 2, 137–38. 63  “A List of the Members of Friendly Lodge No. 324/438, Kingston, Dec. 1813–Dec. 1816,” UGLE Library, Annual Returns, Friendly Lodge, 1814–32, Box A17. Out of the 32 members, 21 (=66%) were merchants/traders and 4 (=13%) mariners; other professional groups were: 3 clerks (9%), 2 jewelers (6%), 1 planter and 1 administrator (3% each). The share of traders/merchants remained at a high level in the following years, with clerks and professionals becoming the second important groups. See, for example, “A List of the Members of Friendly Lodge No. 324/438, Kingston, March 21, 1821,” UGLE Library, Annual Returns, Friendly Lodge, 1814–32, Box A17. 64  The places of residence were: Panama (6 members), Cuba (3), Cartagena (1), Riohacha (1), Maracaibo (1), Santa Fe (2), St. Thomas (1). On the role of trade and smuggling with Spanish colonies, see Jackie Ranston, The Lindo Legacy (London: Toucan Books, 2000), 31.

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Friendly Lodge between 1818 and 1821 were nonresidents.65 To be sure, other lodges in Jamaica also included nonresidents from the Americas in their ranks; yet none of them came even close to the share of absentee members in the two Jewish lodges of the island. With the 1820s, recruitment became more Kingston-centered, but external members from Spanish America still made up a noticeable portion of Friendly Lodge’s members. These unique membership patterns suggest that freemasonry had become, at the turn of the eighteenth century, a new element of what historian Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert has termed “diasporic sociability”— that is, a set of social venues and contexts in which diasporic face-to-face relationships could be established and cultivated, a sort of social glue for a highly mobile, large-scale trading diaspora.66 Over the years, these geographically widespread membership patterns slowly decreased, with more and more members being recruited locally from the 1820s on—another sign, it seems, of the gradual process of becoming imperial citizens. In Barbados and Jamaica, this process also had a very political meaning. Until the early 1830s, Jews held an ambiguous position within the structures of Jamaican and Barbadian colonial society.67 They were clearly separated from the unfree majority of society (the slaves) and over most of the period they held a privileged legal status compared to the growing class of free people of color. At the same time, they remained a discriminated

65  “A General List of Initiations, Passings and Raisings of the Friendly Lodge no. 180, held at Montego Bay from its commencement in July 1818 to 31 December 1821 inclusive,” UGLE Library, Annual Returns, Friendly Lodge, 1818–28, Box A30; UGLE Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, Montego Bay, 1818–36, UGLE Library. A total of 12 out of the 27 new members with known residence were nonresidents. Their places of residence were: Grand Caymans (4), United States (3), Curaçao (2), Cuba (1), Cartagena (1), England (1). 66  Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Sea, 67; Studnicki-Gizbert, “La Nación among the Nations: Portuguese and Other Maritime Trading Diasporas in the Atlantic, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 98. 67  On the status and the political struggles for emancipation, see Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith Hurwitz, “The New World Sets an Example for the Old: The Jews of Jamaica and Political Rights 1661–1831,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55 (1965): 37–56; Holly Snyder, “Rules, Rights and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British Atlantic Port Towns, 1740–1831,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 147–70; and the essays in Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); in comparative perspective: Roitman, “Creating Confusion.”

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minority within the “white” population of the island, since they lacked political rights and were subject to several legal discriminations including higher tax rates. Political representation, in the British West Indies, was based on a system of a legislative assembly and a string of vestries, as part of the local structure of the Anglican Church. Even wealthy Jews, some of them among the richest individuals—and taxpayers—in the colonies, were not accepted as voters or members of the assemblies or the local vestries unless they converted. In 1819–20, members of the Caribbean Jewish communities launched fierce campaigns for their political emancipation within the British Empire. In 1820, the Barbadian Mahamad, the governing board of the congregation, was granted the right—equivalent to a vestry—to raise taxes, while Jamaican Jewish freeholders claimed voting rights during the 1820 Assembly elections. Even if the leadership of the congregation in the Kingston Mahamad was split over whether or not to support them and the Jamaican Supreme Court ruled against their cause in a spectacular trial in 1820–21, some Jamaican Jewish activists continued their fight.68 They proved successful a decade later, when in 1831 the Jamaican Jews were granted full political rights—more than two decades before this happened in the British metropole. Again, starting from Kingston’s Friendly Lodge, we can examine how the involvement in freemasonry interacted with this political process. If we look at the admission of new members into this lodge, we see that, coinciding with the launching of the campaign for political equality, the number of new members skyrocketed. Within the two years of 1820 and 1821, 61 new members enrolled in the lodge, which is almost the same as the total of new members during the two preceding decades (see Diagram 9.1).69 If we look more closely at the activities of certain prominent lodge members, the connection to politics becomes even more apparent. Thus, one of the founders of Bridgetown’s Mount Horeb Lodge was Abraham Rodrigues Brandon (1766–1831). Brandon, who by that time already had a prominent standing in Barbadian freemasonry, was the most important

68  A good documentation of the conflict with the congregation’s leadership and the trial is A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Jews in their Attempt to Establish their Right to the Elective Franchise in Jamaica, to which is Added a Correct Report of the Action Brought by Levi Hyman, Esq. Against Samuel Joseph Geoghegan, Esq., Returning Officer, for Refusing His Vote. In a Series of Letters, from a Gentleman of Kingston, to His Friend Off the Island (Belfast: A. MacKay, Jun., 1823). 69  UGLE, Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, pre-1813–62, UGLE Library.

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35 30 25 20 15 10 5 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838

0

Diagram 9.1  Friendly Lodge, Kingston: New Members 1804–1838. Source: UGLE, Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, pre-1813–62, UGLE Library

Jewish land and slave holder in Barbados, arguably the wealthiest and most influential member of the community.70 He was also the central figure behind the transformation of the Bridgetown congregation into a vestry in 1820. We find similar connections in Jamaica at roughly the same time: Moses Delgado (1789–1842), a Jewish merchant in Kingston, who was the undisputed leader of the struggle for political emancipation in the 1820s, joined Kingston’s Friendly Lodge in 1818, only two years before launching his campaign.71 In the period between 1820 and 1823, one of the peaks of political mobilization, he held leading offices in the lodge, first as Senior Warden, then as its Master. During his tenure as lodge master, a non-Jewish politician and journalist, Augustus Hardin Beaumont (1798–1838), was initiated. In the following years, Beaumont became Delgado’s main partner in the struggle for Jewish enfranchisement in Jamaica.72

70  On Brandon, see Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 86; Laura A. Leibman and Sam May, “Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation,” American Jewish History 99 (2015): 1–26, esp. 4, 8. 71  UGLE, Membership Register of Concord Lodge, Spanish Town, 1813–36, UGLE Library; on Delgado’s role, see Snyder, “Rules, Rights and Redemption,” 163. 72  On Beaumont, see William H.  Maehl, Jr., “Augustus Hardin Beaumont: AngloAmerican Radical (1798–1838),” International Review of Social History 14 (1969): 237–50.

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Few members of the community embodied the process of the Jews’ becoming imperial citizens as much as Delgado. Only weeks after the Emancipation Act had passed, Delgado was presented a silver plate from representatives of the “Jewish Nation,” in recognition of his successful political struggle. In his short address, Delgado emphasized “the inherent right of the natural-born subject to be capable of being elected to all the trusts and offices of the state without prejudice to the religion which ­governs his belief,” thus drawing a clear distinction between religious beliefs and the public sphere, a conviction he believed to share with “every enlightened man.” Significantly, that night Delgado addressed the ­members of the Jewish community as “my fellow citizens.”73 It may be tempting to see the role of freemasonry in this context as an agent of “secularization.” Yet, notwithstanding certain conflicts between the ­political activists and certain leading figures of the congregation, close connections existed between Delgado’s lodge and Jewish religious life, as many of Friendly Lodge’s members also played prominent roles in the congregation. And more than once, religious services were held in a lodge room when the synagogues were destroyed or under construction.74 Throughout the 1820s, Kingston’s Friendly Lodge constituted a meeting place for a younger generation of self-assertive Jews who sought British imperial citizenship. With the Mahamad being paralyzed by internal rifts over the question of political emancipation, the lodge became an alternative forum of political leadership in the community. It was thus no accident that many lodge members played a major role among the first generation of Jewish politicians in Jamaica. Hence, the committee honoring Delgado’s political activities in 1831 largely comprised his brethren from Friendly Lodge. Likewise, all of the five first Jews to be elected to the vestries in Jamaica in the early 1830s and many of the first Jewish members of the Jamaican House of Assembly had previously become members of one of the two Friendly lodges.75 Against this backdrop, freemasonry and

73  The text is reproduced in Ernest Henriques de Souza, Pictorial: Featuring Some Aspects of Jamaica’s Jewry and his Community Activities (Kingston: Author, 1986), 47. 74  Souza, Pictorial, 292. 75  The five members elected to the vestries in the early 1830s were: Alexandre Bravo, Jacob dePass, Jacob Alvarenga, Jacob Adolphus, Barnett Isaacs; members of Friendly Lodges among the first Jewish members of the Assembly were Alexandre Bravo, Robert Nunes, Jacob Adolphus, Barnett Isaacs, and Jacob dePass. On the prominent place of masons among the first postemancipation generation of Jewish politicians, see Ranston, Masonic Jamaica, 181.

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its internal democratic procedures served as a political “training ground” for a discriminated minority in search of political participation and ­equality—a function researchers have already detected in other settings such as the role of masonic lodges among aspiring middle-class African Americans in the United States.76

Class, Gender, and Race and the Embattled Boundaries of Emancipation Describing the lodges as a mere tool of emancipation would be highly simplistic, however. As Laura Leibman and Sam May have recently reminded us, the political emancipation of Jews in the British West Indies was a complicated and intricate process that was accompanied by various conflicts and exclusions along social, racial, and gender lines outside and within the Jewish community.77 Political emancipation in the British sphere was not a project of the Jewish community as a whole but of aspiring and generally well-off subgroups. Other members of the Jewish communities raised concerns or opposition against the struggle for emancipation, as they could not see a benefit from their community’s stronger political, legal, and administrative integration into the British Empire. Thus, the Barbadian Vestry Act in the 1820s encountered fierce resistance from certain groups who saw it as a means to consolidate existing power structures within the community: women, lower classes, and social outsiders. Likewise, the campaign for electoral rights in Jamaica sparked controversy among Jamaican Jews.78 Furthermore, we have to see the enfranchisement of Jamaican and Barbadian Jews as part of a much larger reconfiguration of social relations within West Indian colonial 76  For example, Stephen Kantrowitz, “‘Intended for the Better Government of Man:’ The Political History of African American Freemasonry in the Era of Emancipation,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 4 (2010): 1004, 1011–12, 1020, 1026. See also on this point on freemasonry in Colonial British American Jewry, Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD. diss., Brandeis University, 2000), 406–11, 438. 77  Leibman and May, “Making Jews.” See also Kay Dian Kriz, “Belisario’s ‘Kingston Cries’ and the Refinement of Jewish Identity in the Late 1830s,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 163–77. 78  These debates played out in the local press. See, in the early phase 1820–21, especially the Kingston Chronicle. For an overview, see A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Jews.

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s­ ociety in the era of emancipation. When the question of Jewish emancipation became a pressing political issue, the struggles around the emancipation of free people of color and the abolition of slavery were also coming to a head, and all these conflicts stood in relation with each other. How did the masonic lodges fit into these political struggles? When trying to answer this question, we have to bear in mind that masonic sociability did not just work inclusively, that is, by creating a shared space of interaction between a disenfranchised minority, such as the Jews, and the non-Jewish majority. Freemasonry was also highly exclusive. Notwithstanding its universalist and cosmopolitan underpinnings, the masonic brotherhood defined a clearly confined social space, from which large segments of society were excluded, either formally (by the constitutions of freemasonry) or de facto (by the practice of admission and non-­admission).79 These mechanisms of exclusion were couched in terms of individual character and civic virtue— categories that proved also central in the polemics around the extension and withholding of political rights in the early-nineteenth-century West Indies. The masonic lodges, in short, were an institution that fostered the status and respectability of those who sought imperial citizenship, while excluding others. Most obviously, as an agency of male subjectivities, women were excluded from this forum. The exclusive masculine nature of masonic sociability was particularly strong in British freemasonry, which did not know any forms of female membership as in French or Dutch freemasonry. The male character of masonic respectability and virtue resonated in the highly gendered debates about Jewish emancipation in the West Indies, whose supporters emphasized their conformity with British (Christian) gender norms and saw only men as being able to master the civility necessary to get involved in public matters.80 The proponents of Jewish emancipation in Jamaica thus continuously claimed voting rights as part of their rights as “men and citizens.”81

79  On the fundamental tension between universalism and particularism in freemasonry, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 13; Hoffmann, “Colonial Civil Society,” De Negentiende Eeuw 32 (2008): 143–47. 80  Leibman and May, “Making Jews,” 17–23. On the admission and non-admission of women in freemasonry, see Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 120–42. 81  See for example Royal Gazette (Kingston), May 13, 1820, and Kingston Chronicle, May 16, 1820, as reproduced in A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Jews, 13, 18.

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Another obvious parameter of exclusion in which masonic sociability and the struggles around Jewish enfranchisement interacted was class. High admission and membership fees as well as a politics of social respectability ensured that the members and the officers within the lodge were recruited from the higher fringes of society, and that the less well-off among the whites, Christian and Jewish alike, remained outside.82 The masonic lodges thus singled out those from the Jewish community who were the main winners of political emancipation, given the property requirements that still governed the voting rights granted in the 1820s and 1830s. Similarly, the masonic lodges in Barbados and Jamaica also excluded another aspiring social class that sought political emancipation: a growing wealthy class of free persons of color. To be sure, race was not a category relevant to the founders of European freemasonry, and there are some cases of blacks admitted to masonic lodges in the eighteenth century. These cases, however, were not numerous and occurred almost exclusively in the European metropoles. In the colonial West Indies—British, French, and Dutch—free people of color remained systematically excluded from official freemasonry.83 The non-admission of slaves was based on a passage in the founding document of English freemasonry, which defined the freemason as a “free-born man.” The colonial context transformed this into the exclusion of all people of African descent, notwithstanding their individual legal status. Skin color became, de facto, a central criterion of admission. Confronted with the growing socio-economic success and political aspirations among free people of color, under pressure from the rise of African American freemasonry in the United States and the formation of an independent national freemasonry in Haiti, these racialized admission practices among white masons in the British Caribbean hardened rather than softened in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Two cases in the early 1820s may serve as an example of this persistence. The first is the case of Lovelace Overton (or Oviton), a Barbadian

82  At the turn of the century, for example, the costs for being admitted to Montego Bay’s Friendly Lodge as a simple member (apprentice) alone amounted to roughly 4 months of the income of a skilled estate worker. See The By-Laws of the Friendly Lodge no. 383, Montego Bay, 1875, revised 1912 (Montego Bay: Warrington & Co., 1912), 46. 83  Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 215–20; Cécile Révauger, “Freemasonry in Barbados, Trinidad and Grenada: British or Homemade?,” Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism 1 (2010): 79–91, esp. 85–86.

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soldier in the British cavalry.84 In 1805, he became member of a lodge in Brighton. After his return to Barbados in 1823, the lodges denied him access. When he planned to found his own colored lodge—similar to what happened in late-eighteenth-century Boston among African Americans— there was an outcry among the lodges of the island. Outraged petitions were sent to the grand lodge in London, stating that such a step would “tend more materially to injure the Craft in the Western Hemisphere than any other event that could possibly take place.”85 Even the Irish lodges of the island, which had the reputation of being socially more open, joined in the chorus of outrage, on the basis of which the grand lodges decided to let the matter rest and to avoid any fundamental decision in this context; Overton was neither admitted to Barbadian lodges nor permitted to found his own “colored” lodge. The second case brings us back to Jamaica, where at the same time the colonial administration started to dismantle a set of free-colored associations in Kingston. Significantly, British administrators, some of whom were members of local masonic lodges, used anti-­masonic conspiracy theories to charge a group of politically engaged free men of color. These individuals, they argued, were no regular freemasons, officially recognized by British masonic authorities.86 Instead, they used masonic symbols illegally, which linked them to an alleged crypto-masonic conspiracy being organized out of the “black republic” of Haiti. Until well into the postemancipation period, masonic lodges considered themselves important pillars of West Indian white colonial society and its racial structure. This close link between freemasonry and whiteness was of major importance in the context of the emancipation period. In fact, since the early 1800s, the quest for political emancipation had

 On Overton, see Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Cécile Révauger, and Susan Snell, Art. “Oviton [Overton], Lovelace,” in Le monde maçonnique des lumières (Europe-Amérique et colonies): Dictionnaire prosopographique, eds. Charles Porset and Cécile Révauger (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013), vol. 3, 2137–39. 85  James Cummins, Albion Lodge, Bridgetown, to Thomas Harper, United Grand Lodge, January 8, 1823, UGLE HC 23/B/23. 86  Testimony by James Stewart Junes, November 21, 1823, Minutes of the Secret Committee of the House of Assembly, British National Archives, Colonial Office, CO 137/174, fol. 13–15. 84

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pitted Jamaican Jews and free people of color against each other.87 When, in 1812, a member of the Jamaican Assembly proposed equal rights for Jews and free people of color, he was violently attacked by three Jews, J. Da Silva, Jacob Adolphus, and Lawrence Spyers.88 Significantly, at least two of the attackers, Adolphus and Spyers, later found their way into Friendly Lodge. The context of free-colored emancipation even lessened the Assembly’s opposition against Jewish emancipation. With the ­emancipation of free people of color in preparation in London, influential Christian merchants and assemblymen issued petitions, in which they considered the political emancipation of the Jews as a way to bolster the ranks of the white population.89 In a tense situation of racialized competition, Kingston’s politicized Jewish men flocked to an institution of male civic respectability that was de facto closed to free people of color and that underpinned their own belonging to polite white colonial society.

Conclusions When Joseph Glock arrived in early 1820, Jamaican Jews’ involvement in freemasonry was in full swing. Kingston’s predominantly Jewish Friendly Lodge, under the leadership of Moses Delgado, was about to open its doors to dozens of new Jewish members—some of whom would later play important roles among the first generation of Jewish politicians in Jamaica beginning in the 1830s. We do not know to what extent Glock had insight

87  Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), 73; Hurwitz and Hurwitz, “The New World.” For an apparently less conflictive setting in neighboring French Saint-Domingue, see Garrigus, “New Christians.” For the broader historical and geographic context, see Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 88  Hurwitz and Hurwitz, “The New World,” 46. 89  See the bill “to entitle Jews, born within the legiance of the king, to the rights and privileges of other natural-born British subjects,” assented to on Dec. 22, 1826, in Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica, 1826: 190, 194, 230–31, 233, 284–85, 312; petition “on behalf of their white fellow-subjects professing the Jewish religion,” Dec. 4, 1827, Votes, 1827: 115–16; Royal Gazette (Kingston), Dec. 1–8, 1827. These tensions would, in the first post-emancipation decades, give way to a multitude of political collaborations on a local level, see Swithin Wilmot, “Jewish Politicians in Post-Slavery Jamaica: Electoral Politics in the Parish of St Dorothy, 1849–1860,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 261–78.

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into these processes, but his general misrepresentation and overstatement of the Jews’ position within Jamaican freemasonry suggests that he was too absorbed in his inner-masonic institutional power struggles to reflect on the larger social and political context of masonic sociability in early-­ nineteenth-­century Jamaica. The semi-segregation and relative concentration of Jewish freemasons in Kingston’s and Montego Bay’s Friendly Lodges and Bridgetown’s Mount Horeb Lodge during the first decades of the nineteenth century indicate that Jews did not seek to dominate West Indian freemasonry as a whole. Rather, these lodges attest to specific uses of masonic sociability by the Jewish communities, to a decidedly Jewish masonic project. This project was part of a larger process of the British Caribbean Jews’ becoming “imperial citizens,” of their quest to become fully integrated into the British imperial state. Thus, from 1820 on, Kingston’s Friendly Lodge, in particular, became a central forum and “training ground” for a politically engaged generation of Jamaican Jews who sought political emancipation and imperial citizenship. For them, belonging to a respected social institution of genteel white imperial manhood seemed to be particularly attractive at a time when the hitherto clear socio-political distinctions between Jewish men and free men of color were increasingly called into question. At the same time, freemasonry proved flexible and elastic enough to include and refashion particular diasporic ties within the British masonic imperial network. Thus, in the early 1800s, Jamaica’s Friendly Lodges remained particularly “extroverted” lodges, including a large number of absentee members outside of the British imperial realm and reshaping diasporic networks into bonds of masonic brotherhood. Even after emancipation and despite a diminishing Jewish presence in the West Indies, the two Friendly Lodges continued to maintain (up to the present day) a prominent role within Jamaica’s Jewish and masonic communities. In spite of a masonic reputation for secrecy, their members continued to highlight their leadership within and commitment to the Jamaican Jewish community. One of these occasions came on August 15, 1864, when the foundation stone of a new Hebrew Alms House in Kingston was laid.90 The public ceremony was marked by a major procession of Kingston’s masonic lodges under the leadership of Friendly Lodge.

90  For an account of the ceremony, see The Jamaica Tribune and Daily Adviser (Kingston), August 16, 1864.

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When the participants and attendees assembled around the site of the new building, Friendly Lodge’s Master handed over the trowel—and the presidency over the ceremony—to none other than Mrs. Delgado, widow of Moses Delgado, who had passed away in 1842. By giving her pride of place, Kingston’s Jewish lodge did more than honor the memory of one of its former masters. No less importantly, it also laid direct claim to the deceased’s political heritage as the champion of Jewish emancipation in Jamaica.

PART III

History and Memory

CHAPTER 10

Christopher Columbus and Jamaican Jews: History into Memory Ana Sobral

Caribbean Disruptions The Caribbean could be regarded as a space marked by disruption. The quintessential New World territory, where Christopher Columbus first landed on the momentous journey of 1492 that set off European transatlantic travels and the colonization of the Americas, the Caribbean suffered a series of upheavals, the consequences of which are still felt up to this day. The constitution of a distinct Caribbean experience is based on key historical events, such as Columbus’ travels; the near-extinction of the indigenous population after the arrival and settlement of Europeans (starting with the Spanish, in whose name Columbus had sailed); and the establishment of a plantation economy sustained by the transatlantic slave trade, which brought large numbers of Africans to the region.1 For Gordon Collier, it is this very accumulation of disruptive events that accounts for 1  This list of key “disruptive” events is based on Gordon Collier, “The Caribbean,” in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. Lars Eckstein (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 224–55. As an introduction to the literatures and cultures of the

A. Sobral University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_10

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the fact that “the literatures of the Caribbean draw almost obsessively on the past to account for the present.”2 With these general traits of the Caribbean in mind, this chapter will explore the depiction of Christopher Columbus as a close associate of Sephardic Jews and the resulting reframing of his westward journey— more specifically to Jamaica—as a conscious effort to find a new home for the Sephardim following their traumatic expulsion from Spain in 1492. This is in itself a remarkable reinterpretation of history that runs counter to the mostly negative portrayal of Columbus in Caribbean literatures and cultures as the initiator of the region’s history of violent disruptions.3 My discussion centers on two recent publications that fit into the category of “popular” literature, albeit from different angles: the thriller The Columbus Affair (2012), by American bestselling author Steve Berry, and the book, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom—and Revenge (2008), by American journalist and amateur historian Edward Kritzler, who emigrated to Jamaica. Kritzler’s title already reveals a mixture of historical fact and creative reading/writing. Both texts are closely interrelated, as Steve Berry based many of his ideas for The Columbus Affair on the historical account by Kritzler. While this relationship between the texts is in itself worth a closer look, my interest concerns chiefly the authors’ reappropriation of the Columbus figure to retell the history of Sephardic Jews in the New World.4 In spite of the label “history” attached to Kritzler’s account, his book is in fact Caribbean, Collier’s text foregrounds the common elements among the many different nations in the Caribbean. 2  Ibid., 224. 3   Notable examples include Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1986), in which the young protagonist relishes a picture of “Columbus in Chains” presenting “the usually triumphant” figure “brought so low” (80); Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Columbe” from the collection Middle Passages (New York: New Directions Books, 1992): “But did his vision / fashion, as he watched the shore, / the slaughter that his soldiers / furthered there?” (11); or the reggae song “You can’t blame the youth” by Peter Tosh from 1972, which creates a link between the criminal subculture of Jamaica’s “rude boys” and the European invasion of the Caribbean: “You teach the youth about Christopher Columbus / And you say he was a very great man […] All these great men were doin’ / Robbin’, a rapin’, kidnappin’ and killin’,” accessed February 16, 2018, https://genius.com/Peter-tosh-you-cant-blame-the-youth-lyrics. 4  It is worth highlighting that both texts collapse the important difference between practicing Sephardic Jews and conversos. As will be discussed below, this is a key aspect of the imaginative reinterpretation of history performed by these authors.

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profoundly imaginative and breaks the boundaries of historiographical fact. In this sense, both Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and The Columbus Affair can be read as important contributions to the imaginative representation of Caribbean Jews in the New World. Precisely the transition from history to memory is worth exploring in greater detail. What is the value of presenting Christopher Columbus as a key defender of the Sephardic Jewish community? How does this rereading of the history of the “discovery” of the New World affect our understanding of the Caribbean, and more specifically Jamaica? And whose memory is being articulated in these texts—for what purposes? These are some of the questions that I wish to address in greater detail.

The Work of Memory Memory studies offers valuable concepts and approaches to address the way history is appropriated and (re-)interpreted to suit the collective self-­ image of specific communities.5 In the words of Aleida Assmann: “History turns into memory when it is transformed into forms of shared knowledge and collective identification and participation. In such cases, ‘history in general’ is reconfigured into a particular and emotionally charged version of ‘our history’, absorbing it as part of a collective identity.”6 Memory studies highlight the malleability of memory. Certain elements from a community’s history will be foregrounded, celebrated, and remembered, while others may be excluded. The selection of historical events and figures worth remembering depends largely on the interests and aims of those granted power to organize collective ways of remembering (and

5  The notion of a community as a singular, unified entity is quite ambivalent, particularly when regarding the Caribbean, a region constituted by many different multicultural nations. Similarly, to speak of the Sephardic community in the New World in the singular is rather reductive. Nevertheless, both Kritzler and Berry tend to use such simplified notions of the Sephardim, the Caribbeans, the Jamaicans or the Maroons (in Berry’s case) as unified communities in the singular. I would argue that the work of memory, particularly in the literary imagination, is often an attempt to produce a sense of unity within plural communities, hence differences in experiences and histories tend to be collapsed. 6  Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, eds. Robert E.  Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 216. My emphasis.

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forgetting)—such as educational institutions, museums and memorials, and political and religious leaders.7 In his seminal text, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” the German scholar Jan Assmann advanced the following definition of cultural memory: The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society and each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity.8

Jan and Aleida Assmann essentially distinguish two modes of collective remembering: communicative and cultural memory. Whereas the first is based largely on everyday personal and social interactions and is particularly relevant for “biographic remembering” (e.g., of families), the latter constitutes a form of “foundational remembering” that is indispensable for the constitution of larger group identities such as nations or religious communities.9 In a later conceptualization of different forms of collective and mediated memory oriented toward larger groups, Aleida Assmann introduces a further distinction between political and cultural memory. Political memory is more specifically applied to ideology formation with the aim of constructing and sustaining group identities.10 As part of a 7  See Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 125–133. On the importance of forgetting, see Elena Esposito, “Social Forgetting: A System-Theory Approach,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 181–189. While there are specialized “bearers of cultural memory,” as Jan Assmann calls them (ibid. 131), it is important to note that memory practices may be contested by certain groups within a community or society. Aleida Assmann calls them “memory activists” (ibid., 220). 8  Assmann, “Collective Memory,” 132. 9  Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: C.H. Beck, 1992), 52–53. It should be noted here that the boundaries between these two forms of memory are not fixed. In the words of Astrid Erll, “Cultural Memory and communicative memory should be conceived as two modus operandi, modes of memory, possible horizons of reference to the past. […] This means that in a given historical context, the same event can become simultaneously an object of Cultural Memory and of the communicative memory.” Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31. 10  Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” 217.

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political project to promote social unity and the transmission of a specific cultural frame across generations, political memory is highly selective and is influenced by the prevailing power relations. Thus, for example, on the level of the nation, political memory will tend to select those moments of triumph and defeat from a nation’s history that can be incorporated into national narratives of heroism or martyrdom. Conversely, it will exclude “moments of shame and guilt” that may compromise a more positive self-­ image.11 Cultural memory, on the other hand, “privileges individual forms of participation such as reading, writing, learning, scrutinizing, criticizing, appreciating, and draws individuals into a wider historical horizon that is not only transgenerational but also transnational.”12 Thus, for example, literature and other “canonized works of art” fit into the category of cultural memory, as they reveal a more creative way of appropriating historical narratives that may run counter to a community’s dominant political memory.13 The understanding of memory as political is helpful within the postcolonial context, which has strongly foregrounded issues of power imbalance between colonizing and colonized cultures. Hence, a number of important questions regarding what is remembered, by whom, and how, have been raised, even though “anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkers have addressed the presence of the past without necessarily employing the term ‘memory.’”14 As Astrid Erll notes, “postcolonial studies have always been dealing with shared, entangled and contested pasts.”15 Through the work of memory activism, particular groups within colonized (and later postcolonial) societies advanced different interpretations of the historical past that have aimed at promoting a sense of agency within the colonized

 Ibid., 218.  Ibid., 221. 13  Ibid. The concepts of political and cultural memory should be regarded as permanently entangled: what may begin as a “scrutinizing, criticizing, appreciating” effort of dealing with historical narratives, archives, and remembering practices that fits into the broader realm of cultural memory can easily be taken up by certain collectives as a particularly relevant representation of their “exclusive” identity, thus turning it into a vehicle for political memory. 14  Michael Rothberg, “Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 359–79, 361. 15  Ibid., 64. 11 12

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group and culture, thus challenging the narratives and the practices of remembering that had been established by the colonizing culture.16 The Caribbean can be used here as an example. In a postcolonial context, the common past of the Caribbeans has been most visibly articulated through the Afro-Caribbean experience, as the majority of the population in many Caribbean nations claims some descent from slaves.17 In his introduction to the literatures of the Caribbean, Gordon Collier points out that what has defined Afro-Caribbeans most clearly against other collectivities was in fact the erasure of their identity during the Middle Passage, which was then reconstructed from bits and pieces in the New World, forming a syncretic culture.18 Hence, bringing fragments of their African identity together again has become part and parcel of the Afro-Caribbean experience, and writers especially are involved in a constant effort to “reassemble” and “re-member” the past.19 The work of memory plays, therefore, a crucial role in Caribbean culture.20 In this context, the contribution of imaginative writing is precisely to expand the boundaries of collective memory, to question and subvert what has been selected, and to foreground what has been excluded from certain shared narratives. This frame allows us to critically examine how the figure of Christopher Columbus himself is invested with different connotations by being presented in imaginative writing as a pivotal character in the Sephardic Jewish experience. In his influential study Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg argues that, rather than thinking about distinct collective 16  In his overview of the links between memory studies and postcolonial studies, Michael Rothberg foregrounds the works of the anti-colonial theorists Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, which all promote a “sense that memory constitutes one of the significant fronts in the struggle against empire.” Rothberg, “Remembering Back,” 365. 17  Countries with a majority of Afro-Caribbeans include Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Saint Lucia. 18  On the erasure of the identities and memories of African slaves, see also Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Books, 2009), especially ch. 1: “Dismembering Practices: Planting European Memory in Africa.” Ngugi focuses not only on the European colonization of the African continent but also on the constitution of the African diaspora in the New World. 19  Collier, “The Caribbean,” 229. 20  On the link between Caribbean literatures, history, and memory, see for example Lars Eckstein, Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006) as well as Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

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memories, we need to “consider memory […] as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.”21 The space of the Caribbean, where the literary imagination has so strongly focused on disruption and the fragmentation and reassemblage of Afro-Caribbean identities, offers a special opportunity also to reimagine the experiences of persecuted Jews. Indeed, I wish to suggest that some of the features generally associated with the Afro-Caribbean experience outlined above influence the way the Caribbean as an imagined space is articulated in Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and The Columbus Affair. Through processes of borrowing and adaptation, these two works rely on imagination to reinterpret not only Columbus’ own origins and motivations but also the history of Jewish people and their impact on the New World.

Columbus as Myth and Figure of Memory Before delving into a more detailed discussion on the depiction of Christopher Columbus and the Sephardic Jews in Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and The Columbus Affair, it is necessary to unfold some of the implications of the figure of Columbus from the perspective of memory studies. In The Myths That Made America, Heike Paul opens her examination with a chapter on Christopher Columbus as a founding father of sorts, associating the 1492 travels with something akin to the “Genesis” of the New World.22 The notion of “myth” is an important one in memory studies. Jan Assmann identified myths as essential carriers of a community’s collective memory. Myths are basically narratives that not only postulate a higher truth but also carry a formative and normative function.23 It is important to note that for Assmann, the factuality or fictionality of a narrative plays no role in it being turned into a myth: as soon as the past becomes solidified in a foundational story that gets internalized and repeated across generations, we can speak of myths. In her work, Heike Paul is especially interested in the foundational stories that constituted the Eurocentric discourse of the New World, more specifically, the ways in which white settler colonials in America imagined 21  Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 22  Heike Paul, The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2017). 23  Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis, 76.

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their new nation as distinct and unique. Columbus’s travels played a pivotal role. Paul writes: “The mythology of the ‘new world’ begins with the discourse of discovery and with powerful European projections that envision a new kind of paradise, a utopia somewhere across the Atlantic that alleviates the grievances of the ‘old world’ and that promises boundless earthly riches.”24 As we will see, this fundamental frame is important also for the way Columbus gets reimagined in the primary texts discussed in this chapter. As carrier of that sense of discovery and new beginning that became encapsulated in the Eurocentric understanding of the term “New World,” Columbus became what Assmann calls a “figure of memory.”25 Although Assmann uses this term to speak of all sorts of “cultural formations” that sustain the memory of past events (including texts, monuments, places, and all kinds of remembering practices), later scholars have taken it more literally to refer to individual historical or cultural figures whose memory becomes associated with “a whole package of experiences and values.”26 Thus, for example, Jesseka Batteau reflects about the processes whereby a literary author can “function as a figure of memory by representing a culturally relevant era or a particular social transformation,”27 while Ann Rigney famously examines how Sir Walter Scott as a figure of memory “helped articulate collective identity in Scotland, the British Isles, the United States, and the [British] Empire” at large.28 Rigney’s interpretation of Scott as a figure of memory that operates on a “multinational and transnational” level is particularly valuable for our understanding of the appropriation and reinterpretation of Columbus by very different groups and even nations. The importance of the concept of “figures of memory” is that they essentially carry more than an individual story—in Jesseka Batteau’s words, they come to “represent an era, ideology, or even a cultural transition.”29

 Paul, The Myths, 43.  Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 129. 26  Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 188. 27  Jesseka Batteau, “Literary Icons and the Religious Past in the Netherlands: Jan Wolkers and Gerard Reve,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin  and  New York: De Gruyter, 2009), 229–44, 232. Emphasis in the original. 28  Rigney, The Afterlives, 188. 29  Batteau, “Literary Icons,” 233. 24 25

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Paul traces the beginning of the Columbus myth to the biography The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son, Ferdinand, first published (in Italian) in 1571. It was here that Columbus was first presented as an actual “agent of discovery,”30 thus reframing what could essentially be regarded as a “failure”—the search for a westward passage to India, which Columbus never found—into an achievement of epic proportions. Ferdinand celebrated his father as the sole legitimate discoverer of the Americas, thereby initiating a narrative tradition that saw Columbus’ travels as an actual conscious task of finding a new world, rather than the accidental encounter with unknown spaces in a search for the already known. The actual transformation of Columbus into a hero, however, first took place in the United States, precisely as the nation was fighting for independence from the British Crown. The theme of discovery provided the ideal “foundational story” that befits myths as carriers of collective memories, and Columbus’ origins themselves fit the self-image of the burgeoning nation. Casting the Italian, who sailed for the Spanish Crown, as the actual “founding father” of the United States31 allowed Americans to effectively distance themselves from British culture. It was also around this time that Columbus was turned into a figure of memory, carrying all the newly articulated ideals of the young nation. In the words of Paul: Many public figures and writers gathered around Columbus as a historical persona to affirm North American independence, and they represented him as a figure of national consensus exemplifying American national virtues and an American national character avant la lettre […] In political culture, in public discussions of memorial practices and naming, in poetry, non-fiction, and the visual arts, Columbus figures as a patron and ancestor of those Americans who were demanding their independence from England and who later became citizens of the new republic.32

Here the potential of collective—and, in this case, both cultural and political—memory to select facts and events which suit a community’s self-­ constituting narrative becomes evident. In the specific case of the United States, this narrative was built on the celebration of individualism, revolution, and expansionism—with Columbus himself as a mythological  Paul, The Myths, 51  Ibid., 57. 32  Ibid., 53. 30 31

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embodiment of these values. As Paul notes, such reinterpretations and retellings of the events of Columbus’ travels chose to frame the admiral as a precursor to the United States’ own “westward expansion,” thus creating a higher justification and legitimizing the young nation’s expansionist project.33 An interesting shift in the public perception of Columbus in the United States took place in the nineteenth century, as waves of immigrants arrived in the new nation and claimed a stake in its collective identity. Paul remarks that the arrival of new immigrant groups from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe set off “a period of extreme xenophobia, racism, and nativism,”34 whereby especially Anglo-Saxon Americans opposed the notion that minority groups could regard themselves as full members of the imagined community of America. Within this context, several groups reappropriated the myth of Columbus as their own “foundational figure,” turning him from national to “ethnic hero.”35 Thus, for example, the Italian community in the United States highlighted Columbus’ Genovese origins, whereas the Catholic Irish community focused on his Catholic faith. For the purposes of this chapter, it is especially interesting to mention a Jewish-American reinterpretation of Columbus in the nineteenth century. Paul foregrounds the poem “1492” by Jewish-American author Emma Lazarus, which “acknowledges two momentous historical events that occurred in 1492: the Jewish expulsion from Spain under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and their support for Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic.”36 Precisely this conflation of events would inspire several other authors as well as historians to imagine America as a “haven for refugees,” chief among them the Jews themselves, and consequently Columbus as the very initiator of this search for a “new home.”37 In his article “Columbus & the Jews,” published in 1992 and marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World, the historian Jonathan D. Sarna provides an overview and summary of the efforts made since the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century to present the figure of Columbus as closely associated with the Jewish people or even as being Jewish himself.38 These efforts were not limited to the  Ibid., 57.  Ibid., 61. 35  Ibid., 63. 36  Ibid., 66. 37  Ibid., 67. 38  Jonathan D. Sarna, “Columbus & the Jews,” Commentary 94, no. 5 (1992): 38–41. 33 34

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United States but included also Spanish, German, and Austrian writers and scholars. Sarna singles out such works as Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries by the German Rabbi Meyer Kayserling (translated from the author’s manuscript by Charles Gross and originally published in English in 1891). Commissioned by a Jewish-American merchant, the work “explored a hitherto-unknown web of ties between Columbus and Jews or recent forced converts from Judaism (conversos)” in the form of financial and scientific support offered by the latter, all the while criticizing Columbus for his “lack of sympathy toward Jews.”39 Spanish scholar Don Garcia de la Riega’s paper “Colón, Español: Su origen y patria” (Columbus, Spaniard: His origins and fatherland) from 1892, on the other hand, famously stated that “Columbus was really a secret Jew,”40 thus starting a tradition of conjectures on this topic that was then made famous by the “great Spanish biographer of Columbus,” Salvador de Madariaga, with his book Vida del muy magnífico señor don Cristóbal Colón (Life of the very magnificent Sir Christopher Columbus) from 1940. German-Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann’s biography Christoph Columbus from 1929 included debatable descriptions of Columbus’ personality—his “soft-­ heartedness” and his “timidity”, for example—to argue that Columbus possessed traits “typical” of Jews.41 Finally, as late as the 1970s, Austrian-­ Jewish writer Simon Wiesenthal’s Segel der Hoffnung: Die geheime Mission des Christoph Columbus (Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus, 1972) reframed Columbus’ westward travel as one marked by “a secret purpose: to discover the lands settled and ruled by the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.”42 Considering the rampant anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in Europe as well as the United States, it is little surprise that Jewish scholars and authors in particular were invested in the aim of presenting the persecution-­ driven migration of Sephardic (and later also Ashkenazic) Jews to the New World since the sixteenth century in a far more positive light. As a figure of memory, Columbus could here unite the ideal qualities of discovery, heroism, and individualism already attributed to him in the New World’s Eurocentric memory with purported Jewish values and mores that the  Ibid., 39. Emphasis by Sarna.  Ibid. 41  Ibid., 40. 42  Ibid., 41. 39 40

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authors wished to celebrate in an attempt to improve the public image of Jews. Sarna sees precisely here an actual danger that is worth highlighting—and to which I shall turn below in my discussion of the primary texts by Kritzler and Berry: The thinly veiled message here is one, ironically, that anti-Semites have propounded for centuries: that no matter what loyalties a Jew may proclaim, and regardless of whether (like Columbus) he publicly and privately professes his devotion to the Church, he remains both at heart and in behavior a child of Israel. Many an innocent Spaniard was targeted by the Inquisition on precisely these grounds.43

That the image of Columbus as a Jew need not be framed in a positive light, however, is best illustrated by the Nation of Islam’s highly polemical publication The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, an unabashedly anti-Semitic tract that essentially blames Jewish people for the enslavement of African people. In a chapter unequivocally entitled “Columbus, the Slave-dealing Jew?” the authors of The Secret Relationship revive the assumption—largely based on conjecture and generally rejected by contemporary historians—that Columbus himself was Jewish and that his departure to the New World was mainly supported financially by Jews and not by the Spanish monarchy.44 Furthermore, they contend that the rise of the Spanish Inquisition was based on the fact that “slave dealing and slavery and its connection with Judaism and Jews was offensive to the Spanish reformers,”45 thus surprisingly turning the Inquisition into an instrument of justice. The Secret Relationship illustrates the way political memory can operate in its most extreme form: the reference to the figure of Columbus in this book does not reveal any particular historical facts about the admiral, his background, or the actual scientific, social, political, and cultural context of his travels. As such, Columbus has been completely decontextualized.46  Ibid.  The Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 1 (Historical Research Department of NOI, 1991), 12–13. 45  Ibid., 33–34. 46  The selectivity of memory is patent in this case. In his discussion of The Secret Relationship, Saul. S. Friedman calls it a “handbook of anti-history,” as the purported study basically distorts, exaggerates, and emends facts, misquotes sources (or uses quotes out of context), and relies also on “shaky sources” or no sources at all. Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New York: Transaction, 1999), 3. More importantly, The Secret Relationship 43 44

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Indeed, it is only because Columbus has been elevated to the status of a myth that it is valuable at all to include him in a stunningly long list of purported crimes committed by a single ethnic group. Here we see the formation of a negative foundational myth, with Columbus himself as the harbinger of death, bringing nothing less than a “Holocaust” to the New World.47 The Caribbean itself provides a fascinating field of study of the contested memory of Columbus, as Fabienne Viala illustrates.48 Taking the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World in 1992 as her starting point, Viala looks at the various framings of Columbus against the background of national memories in the different Caribbean nations, in order to “examine how the same historical heritage, epitomized by the figure of Columbus, was recycled by multiple national discourses and how historical memory was narrated, retold, and performed on the public cultural stages according to different national templates of memory.”49 The differences range from the “integration” of Columbus into the Hispanic Caribbean national narratives as a means of “reinforc[ing] the Hispanic component of their national myth”50 in contrast to surrounding serves as a textbook case of “competitive memory” as defined by Michael Rothberg (Multidirectional Memory, 5). Much of the book appropriates terms associated with the persecution of Jews, such as “pogrom” and “Holocaust,” to talk about the suffering of Native-Americans or Africans purportedly at the hands of Jews. 47  The spokesman of the Nation of Islam, Khalid Muhammad, actually appropriated the notion of “Holocaust” to argue that transatlantic slavery had in fact been a far more horrifying experience of victimhood which remained largely unacknowledged in the American public sphere. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 2. It is worth pointing out that Native-American memory activists also have interpreted Columbus’ arrival in the New World as a “Holocaust,” which eventually led to the annihilation of a large portion of the indigenous population. See Sarah Casteel, “Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37, no. 2: The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies (Summer 2012): 59–81, 59. As in the case of Muhammad, these Native American memory activists seem to suggest that only through the frame of the Nazi extermination of European Jews can the memory of suffering of other collectives be addressed in the first place. At the same time, both cases imply that the considerable devotion to the Holocaust in transnational remembering practices of the past decades has contributed to the marginalization (if not outright forgetting) of other, equally or even more important and tragic histories of victimization. 48  Fabienne Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism, and Commemorations in the Caribbean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 49  Ibid., 3. 50  Ibid., 231.

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non-­Hispanic Caribbean cultures, to Haiti’s total silencing of the history of discovery of the New World in 1992.51 Viala concludes that, as “the symbol of ongoing colonial exploitation,” Columbus came to carry different meanings to different nations, depending on their own histories of “collateral damages, enslavement and acculturation”52 and on their status within a globalized economy. This long list of appropriations of Columbus to articulate a particular version of history that suits different groups—sometimes placing themselves in opposing corners—emphasizes the peculiar position that Columbus occupies as a transnational figure of memory. On the one hand, his transformation into an ultimate representative of the European transatlantic expansion immediately links him to the histories of several communities: that of the European settlers who sailed across the ocean to start a new life in a “promised land;” that of the indigenous populations who suffered the violent consequences of the European arrival; that of the African populations eventually carried across the Atlantic to toil on European colonial plantations; and finally that of immigrant populations seeking refuge in the New World in the wake of famine crises, economic crises, wars, and ethnic persecution in Europe in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. As the prototypical traveler who first opened up the Atlantic to these mass migrations, Columbus can be ­associated positively or negatively with the ultimate existence of the New World as we know it. On the other hand, the blank spaces and ambiguities around his life, his motivations, and even his origins turn him into a sort of cipher that can be filled with different meaning depending on the loyalties and interests of the observer. Here we note an established tradition of de- and recontextualization of the figure of Columbus, which paradoxically makes him a perfect carrier of competitive memories as well as of Rothberg’s more positively connoted multidirectional memory. As Rothberg argues, “the borders of memory and identity are jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant. Memory’s anachronistic quality—its 51  Viala does highlight, however, that in 1986, when then-dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled the country, the population had “toppled the statue of Columbus in Port au Prince and [thrown] it into the sea” (16) in a symbolic gesture against the country’s long history of oppression which had found continuity in the corrupt elites. From that point onward, “Columbus was sentenced to historical oblivion” (16). 52  Ibid., 231.

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bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones.”53 In this sense, and rather ironically, the quintessential figure of memory of the New World is continually reappropriated and reactivated in order to build new memory worlds that suit communities that are themselves in permanent flux. It is an undeniable fact that the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean and the Americas is chronologically connected with the exodus of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. The coinciding year of the expulsion of Jews from the Spanish territory and the beginning of Columbus’ travels opens up space for the imaginative projection of a strong correlation between these two events.54 For the purpose of my analysis, it is especially important to highlight the violent and profoundly unsettling impact of Spain’s Royal Edict of Expulsion of the Jews in 1492. As Jane S. Gerber puts it, “Jewish life in the western hemisphere begins with a crisis precipitated by the Expulsion.”55 The choice of the term ­“crisis” is relevant for my discussion of the relationship between Columbus, the Caribbean Jews, and the wider Caribbean imaginary in Kritzler’s and Berry’s texts. Like the history of the Caribbean itself, the arrival of Jews in the territory is marked by disruption, and through this they can be potentially linked to other histories and memories of the Caribbean. Columbus, the transnational and multidirectional figure of memory, becomes the very link between these different experiences.

Re-membering Columbus’ Mission In line with the foundational myth of the New World discussed above, Edward Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean dedicates its first chapter to Columbus. It takes us back to fifteenth-century Spain and places the  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5.  It is well documented that a significant number of conversos and crypto-Jews emigrated to the New World, particularly Brazil and the Caribbean, starting with Brazil in the 1550s. Around the 1650s, practicing Jews started settling in Jamaica. See. Jane S.  Gerber, “Introduction,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 1–16; Jonathan Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World System 1500–1800,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L.  Kagan and Philip D.  Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3–17. 55  Gerber, “Introduction,” 2. My emphasis. 53 54

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reader square in the “royal quarters” where Columbus convenes with the Spanish king and queen in an attempt to convince them to financially support his westward journey to the Asian continent.56 His planned route is based on “maps and charts from the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto”57—thus immediately establishing a strong Jewish influence on the plot that will unfold, both within the chapter and historically. The year is 1492. The text infuses Columbus with all kinds of emotions: he is at first “confident,” later “angry and disgusted” at King Ferdinand’s refusal to grant support.58 Already here the boundaries between historical and fictional narrative become blurred, as Kritzler chooses to present Columbus as focalizer.59 At the most dramatic point of the chapter, Kritzler imagines a scene that finds no possible substantiation in the historical archives: “On the morning of March 31, 1492, Columbus was in his room in Santa Fe overlooking the main square when the sound of trumpets brought him to his balcony. Below, the town crier, flanked by mounted guards, read the expulsion order of the Inquisition: Jews had four months to leave.”60 Placed so closely next to each other, both events—Columbus’ search for benefactors for his travel and the expulsion of the Jews—become completely entangled. Imagining that Columbus was directly confronted with the expulsion order presupposes also an emotional reaction, one that the text chooses, however, not to explore further. Instead, Kritzler shifts the focalization to Jewish characters present at the court, chief among them the royal treasurer Luis de Santangel, a converso whom the author identifies as a “secret Jew.”61 In Kritzler’s account, it is Santangel who, deeply affected by the royal plans to evict all Jews from the territory, persuades King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to ultimately support Columbus. The motivations for 56  Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom—and Revenge (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 14. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. 59  I am using here the analytic term common in literary studies to identify the dominant perspective of a character in a narrative text that nevertheless features a third-person narrator who is not involved in the action. While Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean features a third-person narrator (as do all historical studies), the text strongly focuses on singular perspectives, such as that of Columbus in this chapter. We thus “see” the events through Columbus’ eyes, even if the “voice” of narration is purportedly that of the historian Kritzler. 60  Ibid., 16. 61  Ibid., 15.

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his efforts are presented in free indirect discourse: “Where would they go? India? China? Perhaps the explorer Columbus would discover a new land somewhere. Santangel and other secret Jews in the royal service hoped Columbus’s voyage would provide an answer.”62 Thus, Kritzler’s account, which in fact imagines the thoughts of historical characters, suggests that the mission of discovery—of a passage to Asia or even of new territories— was imparted on Columbus by Jewish people themselves. Using the techniques of narrative fiction, the author forfeits argumentation and rather foregrounds emotion, giving the plot all the more urgency. While Kritzler is careful not to cast Columbus undoubtedly as a Jew, he not only refers uncritically to ongoing speculation about the admiral’s origins—“Some even contend he was a Cabalist”63—but also actively promotes the idea of a strong bond: “Whatever his genealogy, he was in sympathy with the People of the Book, and they with him.”64 It is this very “sympathy” that ends up turning Columbus’ westward journey into a true mission.65 The chapter concludes: Columbus sailed with a hidden agenda: Along with his stated goal of gaining riches in the East, it was hoped he would acquire a new land where Sephardim could live free from the terrors of the Inquisition. The discoverer of the Indies didn’t rule long enough to make good his promise to provide a homeland for converted Jews, but for more than a century his heirs kept Jamaica off-limits to the hooded Inquisitors who were empowered to root out heresy in all Spanish territories.66

Kritzler’s imaginative historical account of Columbus’ journey to the New World creates the foundations of a narrative that pits good against evil, with Columbus himself unambiguously on the side of the good. The more basic materialist motivations usually attributed to the admiral67 are here reinterpreted as a mere subterfuge, to hide the more noble and  Ibid.  Ibid., 16. 64  Ibid., 27. My emphasis. 65  Kritzler is not alone in making this assumption. For a discussion of the depiction of Santangel as a supporter of Columbus for the cause of Spanish conversos, see Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America, third edition (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Publishing, 2010), 8. 66  Ibid. 67  On Columbus’ aim to find riches on his westward journey, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and 62 63

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pressing mission of finding a new “haven for Jews.”68 The island of Jamaica, which was indeed initially the possession of Columbus’ family,69 is depicted as a space that welcomes “Jewish refugees”70—the choice of term revealing a contemporary reading of forced migration. More importantly, Kritzler provides no evidence for Columbus’ purported “promise;” this is simply a logical consequence of the plot he has presented in the chapter. In the sequence of events imagined by the author, it is indeed plausible that Columbus, whatever his initial intentions when he entered the royal quarters with his maps, was inspired by his Jewish allies to reconsider his entire journey. Rather than merely seeking an oceanic passage to Asia, he set out on a conscious quest for a Jewish “homeland.”71 Significantly, the sequence of events is propelled by the very “crisis” or disruptive core event of the expulsion of the Jews. Without this, we are led to conclude, Columbus may have never sailed westward—and the New World may have remained undiscovered by the morally upright admiral. This imaginative re-membering of Columbus’ journey as a holy mission of sorts is enhanced in Steve Berry’s novel, which uses the freedom of imagination permitted to narrative fiction to take the plot suggested by Kritzler to the next level. A transnational thriller set largely in the present, The Columbus Affair opens with a prologue that pulls the reader into the past, more specifically to Columbus’ fourth journey to the Caribbean. The encounter with the historical figure of Columbus somewhere in Jamaica frames the narrative and gives an exotic and adventurous touch to the entire story. The novel follows a pattern of flashbacks, repeatedly intermingling plots from the present and from a historical past, whereby the latter strongly influences the reader’s perception of the present. In the prologue, the focalization is firmly fixed on Columbus, who leads a mysterious expedition in the “lush forest” of Jamaica involving three crates that are lowered into a cave.72 The contents of the crates are not revealed. The prologue presents a tired, disillusioned, and cautious Columbus who has spent years fighting for his right to retain the promises given by the Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York: Routledge, 1992). 68  Ibid., 25. 69  See n.a., “The Jews of Jamaica: A Historical View,” Caribbean Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March, 1967): 46–53. 70  Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, 22. 71  Ibid., 17. 72  Steve Berry, The Columbus Affair (London: Hodder, 2012), 3.

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Spanish crown upon his initial departure, chief among them the right to possess the lands he discovers on his journeys. Like Kritzler, the narrator of The Columbus Affair suggests that the admiral has all along had an aim that does not correspond to what he presented to the king and queen: “But unlike the deceitful Spanish monarchy, gold did not interest him. His purpose rose higher.”73 In the space of a few pages, Columbus orders the killing of the natives who carried the crates, as well as of a man who turns out to be an “agent from the Inquisition.”74 While the prologue gives hints of a secret identity harbored by Columbus—“you will never know my true name,”75 he tells the agent before killing him—there is no explicit reference to his Jewish origins. The mystery of his identity is, however, obliquely revealed in a passage that presupposes the reader’s knowledge of Jewish texts: He turned and finally studied where he stood, catching every detail that had been described. “You see, Admiral,” de Torres said. “It is as if God Himself directed us here.” His old friend was right. It did seem that way. Be as courageous as a leopard, as light as an eagle, as fast as a deer, as strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in heaven. Wise words.76

The italics are a direct quotation from Pirke Avot, or the “Ethics of the Fathers,” a compilation of moral reflections and guidelines that stem from the Mishnah, the first written rendition of the Oral Torah.77 As such, these are texts that every practicing Jew is confronted with from an early age. By choosing to link Columbus’ struggle with this intertextual reference, Berry first and foremost activates the knowledge of Jewish readers, or of those who have considerable experience with Jewish texts. Furthermore, the introduction of the supporting character, Luis de Torres, is equally significant, as this  Ibid., 7.  Ibid., 9. 75  Ibid. 76  Ibid., 10. 77  See Jacob Neusner, Torah from Our Sages: Pirke Avot: A New American Translation and Explanation (Dallas, Texas: Rossel Books, 1983), 167. I am grateful to Jonathan Schorsch for this information. 73 74

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is another historical figure who indeed sailed with Christopher Columbus on his first journey to the New World. De Torres was a converso, hired as a Hebrew interpreter on Columbus’ journey—a detail that Berry chooses to explore as part of his novel’s imaginative rendering of Columbus as a Jew.78 The prominence of his name and his role as Columbus’ right hand in the narrative may be intended as a further “hint” for readers who are fairly familiar with the details of Columbus’ first journey across the Atlantic. The novel thus uses the thriller’s generic convention of providing clues to the reader as a means of carrying the secret plot forward.79 The full implications of the fictional figure of Columbus are revealed only in Chapter 9, which provides another flashback (recognizable by the use of italics) to the moment of Columbus’ first journey. Here we find striking parallels to Kritzler’s text: Breaking with custom, Columbus had not waited to board just before the ships sailed. Instead he’d been present all day, personally supervising the final preparations. […] “Luis.” De Torres stepped close. “We must have all on board by 11:00 p.m.” He knew de Torres understood. After midnight, when it became August 3, 1492, the police, the militia, and the white-hooded Inquisitors would begin their sweep of houses. Jews had been outlawed from France in 1394 and in England since 1290. The edict expelling them from Spain had been signed by Ferdinand and Isabella on March 31. The church had insisted on the move and the king and queen had agreed. Four months had been given to either leave the country or convert to Christianity. Time ran out tonight. […] “So much depends on this journey,” he said to his friend. […] “Do you think,” de Torres asked, “that we will find what you seek?” Columbus stared out to the dark water and the ships, lit by torches, where men were busy at work. 78  For a very different interpretation of the role of de Torres as the first journey’s interpreter, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters, in which particularly de Torres’ value as interpreter of Arabic is highlighted—a language that would have been of much use, had Columbus indeed found a passage to Asia. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 29. 79  See Karen Seago, “Red Herrings and Other Misdirection in Translation,” in The Voices of Suspense and Their Translation in Thrillers, eds. Susanne M.  Cadera and Anita Pavic Pintaric (Amsterdam  and  New York: Rodopi, 2014), 209; Lars Ole Sauerberg, The Legal Thriller from Gardner to Grisham: See you in Court! (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45.

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The question was a good one. And there was but one answer. “We have no choice.”80

The sense of disruption caused by the Royal Edict of Expulsion is here fully explored. The ticking clock image implied by this passage creates an enormous sense of urgency, and casts Columbus himself in a completely different light from the one to which most American readers (the primary market target for the novel) are accustomed. Rather than the adventurous, scientifically enlightened, individualist discoverer of a new world, Columbus is presented as a deeply distressed member of a community of outcasts, who has been granted the holy mission of finding a safe haven for his people just before they face certain death.81 By providing a direct link between the Expulsion and Columbus’ journey of 1492, both Kritzler and Berry reinterpret Columbus’ intentions, turning the crossing of the Atlantic into a major moral undertaking and a true struggle for survival of an entire community. The way Columbus is cast in these texts as nothing short of a “Moses”82 gives his journey a unique biblical dimension.

“Outlaw Resistance:” Re-membering Jews in Jamaica Having reframed Columbus’ journey as a quest for refuge and a new homeland for the persecuted Sephardic Jews, both Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and The Columbus Affair then focus on imagining the Jewish settlements in the Caribbean, particularly on the island of Jamaica,83 as a  Ibid., 51–52.  It is interesting to note that this plot radically simplifies the Royal Edict: in reality, conversos such as Columbus (in Berry’s imagination) and de Torres would not have been forced to leave Spain at all. Only openly practicing Jews who refused conversion were punished with expulsion. For the sake of narrative drama, Berry totally eliminates the differences between Sephardic Jews and conversos. 82  Kritzler, Pirates, 22. 83  On the Jewish settlements in Jamaica, see Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2002), 225–60. Arbell points out that “New Christians” were welcomed in Jamaica by the descendants of Columbus in the 1520s in the hopes that they would develop “active commerce,” but crypto-Jews were discouraged from practicing their Jewish rituals openly (226). With the occupation of Jamaica by the English in 1655, the new authorities granted practicing Jews permission to settle on the island (229). 80 81

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special manifestation of the exceptionality of the Jewish experience and collective identity. Although the plots differ significantly from this point onward, it is notable that both authors imagine a strong link between Sephardic Jews and more established “icons of outlaw resistance” in the Caribbean.84 This linkage of parallel histories deserves critical attention, as it reveals the ways in which entangled memories are produced. According to Erin Mackie, “the Maroons and the pirates […] were the two most prominent early modern Caribbean subcultures and together constituted the two most serious threats to colonialism in the West Indies.”85 What made them so attractive, and indeed continues to provide immense fascination, was their refusal to participate in “the two central institutions of the colonial machine: plantation slavery and the vastly expanded merchant navy.”86 Mackie posits that pirates and Maroons revealed the cracks within the European colonial enterprise. As the very frontier of the colonial world at the time, the Caribbean represented a space in which the colonial powers experimented with forms of organization and exploitation of resources and people. Resistance to these forms foregrounded the very “instability” of the whole enterprise.87 In this way, then, pirates and Maroons also stood for an alternative to the dominant European colonial system in the Caribbean. It is precisely this aspect that both Kritzler and Berry explore. As the title of Kritzler’s book already announces, there is a conscious attempt not only to draw a parallel between Jews and pirates, but in fact to suggest that these identities were inextricably linked. As Jonathan Schorsch has remarked in his review of Kritzler, however, “the book is somewhat mistitled—even as pirates, Jews played a marginal role.”88 In reality, 84   Erin S.  Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures,” Cultural Critique 59, no. 1 (2005): 24–62, 28. 85  Ibid., 31. 86  Ibid., 32. This is, of course, a rather simplified version of far more complex histories. The Maroons were indeed able to constitute communities on the margins of the plantation system, but some Maroon communities also signed agreements with colonial authorities in which they gained autonomy and freedom by committing to hand over all future runaway slaves who came to them. See Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 42. However, as Mackie’s study of the cult of such figures as the Maroons suggests, these conflicting elements of their history do not fit the more positive depiction of Maroons in popular culture, and therefore are often left out. 87  Ibid. 88  Jonathan Schorsch, “Sephardic Business: Early Modern Atlantic Style,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 493.

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Kritzler’s account of the relationship between (predominantly) British pirates and the Jewish community in Jamaica is a bit more complex than the title of his book would suggest. In a chapter suggestively entitled “Buccaneer Island”89 Kritzler does not actually identify members of Jamaica’s Sephardic community as pirates themselves, but rather emphasizes the commercial links between the pirates and Jewish merchants, showing that the latter effectively supported piracy through trade, rather than directly participating in it. Nevertheless, Schorsch is right in pointing out the problem of the misleading title. Indeed, on a paratextual level, Kritzler’s book produces an inevitable association between Jewishness and piracy. The title and subtitle—with words such as “swashbuckling”, “treasure”, and “freedom”—and the cover image with warring ships and the prominent symbol of the skull and bones in the foreground, all highlight the adventurous notion of piracy as it is usually represented in popular culture. Even though the text itself is more careful about promoting such a narrow image of Jews as pirates, the framing of the book supports this extremely idealized image—one that, as Mackie points out, reveals a true “cultural fixation” with pirates “as objects of fascination, glamorization and […] nostalgia.”90 The gap between Kritzler’s text and paratext may indeed reveal the author’s and possibly the implied readership’s own nostalgia for a past that is imagined as unambiguously heroic. Similar to the reframing of Columbus’ journey as a mission imparted on the admiral by the persecuted Jews, Kritzler suggests that piracy itself was in fact more “ethical” than might appear at first glance: In “Port Royal, as merchants and shipowners, [Jews] used the buccaneers to wage a successful surrogate war on the lands of the Inquisition that effectively ended Spain’s hegemony in the New World, and in the process they reaped the rewards, both legal and financial.”91 In true pirate fashion, then, the Jamaican Jewish diaspora was successful in trumping Spanish colonial dominance, thus creating a safe(r) haven for themselves—and righting the wrongs committed by the Expulsion of 1492. 89  The term “buccaneer” is defined by the Merriam-Webster as “any of the freebooters preying on Spanish ships and settlements especially in 17th century West Indies,” accessed May 17, 2017, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buccaneer. Initially a term reserved for freebooters in the Caribbean, it eventually became interchangeable with the term “pirate” in the seventeenth century. See Jon Latimer, Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4. 90  Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 31. 91  Kritzler, Pirates, 255. My emphasis.

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Although it briefly includes Jewish pirate figures clearly inspired by Kritzler’s account, Berry’s The Columbus Affair chooses to focus mainly on that other icon of Caribbean outlaw resistance, the Maroon, as a strong associate in the secret mission initiated by the character of Christopher Columbus. Significantly, Mackie sees in the links between the figure of the pirate and the Maroon the very mark of memory dynamics: “The modern pirate is a figure of cultural myth, generated, in large part, in a New World Caribbean matrix he shares with the Maroon, and both figures serve as repositories of cultural memory and alternative historical possibility in a variety of traditions: popular, commercial, and academic; Euro-American and African-diasporic.”92 It is precisely as “repositories of cultural memory” that the Maroon communities are revisited in The Columbus Affair. Many passages are focalized through Jamaican characters, proud descendants of Maroons living in the Blue Mountains, who find themselves drawn to the search for a mysterious mine that is said to have belonged to Columbus. Indeed, the mine, which turns out to be placed squarely in Maroon territory, is the key space of the novel’s complex narrative. It features already in the prologue as the enigmatic space into which the three crates are lowered according to Columbus’ orders. The entire plot revolves around various characters’ search for the mine—spanning several spaces, from Israel and the United States to Vienna, Prague, Cuba, and finally Jamaica. When they all at last converge at the mine for one final confrontation, the many different narrative strands are woven together. As a transnational thriller, The Columbus Affair ends up unfolding an astonishingly complex, multiperspectival plot that merges several histories: the expulsion of the Sephardim as well as the persecution and murder of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews during World War II on the one hand, and the history of the original indigenous population of Jamaica, the Tainos, intermingled with the resistance of Maroon communities against slavery on the other. Jewish memory itself becomes the connecting link bringing all these histories together. The great “secret” harbored in Columbus’ mine in Jamaica turns out to be the treasure from the Jewish Temple, built by King Solomon in 957 BCE in Jerusalem, and raided by Babylonian invaders. Berry imagines the original objects from the First Temple—“the golden Table of Divine Presence, the silver trumpets, and a seven-branched menorah”93—to have  Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 35.  Berry, Columbus Affair, 167.

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made their way to the Iberian Peninsula upon the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, whence they would eventually be carried in secret to the New World by none other than Christopher Columbus. With the help of the Taino, Columbus reaches the mine that will finally serve as a hiding place for the treasure of the Jewish Temple against further depredations from anti-Semitic invaders. Under the protection of Maroons, the mine will remain out of reach to anyone but “the Levite” himself, presented in the novel as a hereditary function passed on since the time of Columbus to Jewish men whose mission it is to keep the treasure safe. A key passage in the novel reveals the close connection between Jews and Maroons: “And who are you?” “We are the keepers of this place.” “And what is this?” Sagan asked. “Sixty years ago,” Frank said, “we were asked by a friend to hold something of great value. He was a special man, someone who understood Maroons in a deep way. He was also a Jew. There is a deep connection between Maroon and Jew, always has been.” No one said anything. “Yankipong is our supreme being. Our god,” Frank said. “Maroons were handpicked by Yankipong to serve as a conduit of His divine power. We have always thought of ourselves as chosen.” “Like the Israelites,” Simon said. “Chosen by God. Singled out for divine favor.” Frank nodded. “We noticed the similarity long ago. Maroons were able to overcome what others deemed hopeless. Jews have done the same. We’d already found the treasure the man who came here spoke of, but when he told us how sacred it was, we regretted our violation of it. That’s another thing about Maroons. We’re respectful of others’ ways.” “You found the Temple treasure?” Simon asked. Frank nodded. “Long ago. It was brought here for safekeeping in the time of the Spanish by Columbus himself.”94

The Maroons thus emerge as the guardians of the Jewish Temple treasure, and it is because they share histories of suffering that the two communities are able to create a bond. The notion of “diaspora,” initially  Ibid., 329–330. My emphasis.

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applied to the Jewish people and later appropriated by African-American and Afro-Caribbean peoples to refer to their own forced migration from Africa to the New World, assumes here a connecting function. As diasporic communities, Maroons and Jews become allies. Additionally, considering the positive perception of Maroons as a subculture of resistance—as outlined by Mackie—we can conclude that the alliance imagined by Berry, and indeed the whole plot surrounding the complicated transportation of the Temple treasure across vast territories, serves to highlight the spirit of resistance of Jews themselves. Similar to Kritzler’s employment of the pirates, then, the juxtaposing of Maroon and Jewish memories fosters an alternative interpretation of the long history of persecution of Jews that casts them as heroes rather than—exclusively—as victims. Jamaica itself offers a particularly productive setting for this conflation of histories, as it has consistently featured in the Caribbean imaginary as a space in which alternative subcultures could—at least momentarily—prevail over a cruel system of exploitation and ethnic oppression. Placed on the “frontiers” of colonialism alongside the pirates and the Maroons, the Jewish people thus become part of an “alternative historical possibility.”95

Memory, Roots, and Routes In his famous study of transculturality as the result of population dispersion and cultural exchanges along the Atlantic coasts of Europe, Africa, and the New World, Paul Gilroy criticized the “continuing aspiration to acquire a supposedly authentic, natural, and stable ‘rooted’ identity,”96 arguing instead that we should focus on movement and exchange, fragmentation and transformation as more appropriate categories for reflection about culture and cultural identities. The Black Atlantic opposed the dominant interest “in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness,” and posited instead a focus on “identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes.”97 A quintessential travelling figure, Christopher Columbus could be said to represent the “route” as a productive source of (collective) identity. As  Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 35.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 30. 97  Ibid., 19. 95 96

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this analysis has shown, Columbus has been appropriated and reimagined by many different communities as a representation of their own memories of movement and exile. The case of recent imaginative retellings of Columbus’ voyage to the New World as a direct consequence of the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula highlights precisely the role of “movement and mediation” in the construction and sustaining of ­collective memories. In this sense, both Kritzler’s and Berry’s books seem to promote a more transcultural view of memory, and by weaving the history of the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean with famous subcultures such as pirates and Maroons, they attest to the very potential of “multidirectional memory” to promote “new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.”98 However, we need to think of memory also as a tool for the promotion of particular group identities to the detriment of others. From this point of view, the focus on roots rather than routes becomes of essence. As a Jewish-American journalist settled in Jamaica, Edward Kritzler clearly intended to shed a predominantly positive light on the Sephardim who emigrated to the New World. A selective attention to celebratory details can be seen in formulations such as this, close to the end of his book: “It is the history of Iberian Jews, disguised as Christians, who pioneered the New World as explorers, conquistadors, cowboys, and pirates, transformed sugar cultivation into an agro-industry that they introduced to the Caribbean, and created the first trade network spanning the seven seas.”99 Rather than highlighting processes of transculturation, passages such as this serve to emphasize the uniqueness of the Sephardic experience, placing Sephardic Jews at the center of several crucial historical developments that have profoundly influenced the world as we know it. Additionally, Kritzler’s congratulatory formulation obfuscates the very means whereby sugar cultivation was turned into an “agro-industry,” namely plantation slavery. By silencing this detail, the author reveals the selectivity of memory when used to uphold a specific group identity. From this point of view, Kritzler’s reinterpretation of Columbus’ mission serves not so much to celebrate the routes opened up by Columbus’ Jewish supporters but rather to root Columbus’ achievements in the efforts of a specific group. A similar tendency can be noted in Berry’s The Columbus Affair. Even though the novel noticeably plays with the very entanglement of different routes, both in old Europe (highlighting especially the parallels between  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5.  Kritzler, Pirates, 254.

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the Spanish Sephardim and the Ashkenazic Jewish communities of Vienna and Prague) and in the Caribbean (with a focus on the parallels between Jews and Maroons). At a first glance, then, the American best-selling author strongly promotes “multidirectional memory”, showing how similar experiences of persecution and oppression can lead to crucial acts of solidarity. And yet, one noticeable aspect of the novel is the celebration of the profound rootedness of identity. Thus, the protagonist of the novel starts out as an American Jew who has forfeited his Jewishness, only to end up discovering that he is in fact “the Levite” and thus has the vital function of protecting the Temple treasure. His journey from the United States via Europe to Jamaica reveals his inescapable fate: as a member of the repeatedly persecuted Jewish community, it is his duty to preserve the memory of his people in the form of the treasure. An acknowledgement of roots turns out to be essential for the survival of Jewish memory.100 Similarly, although the Maroons are shown to closely cooperate with Sephardic Jews, the Maroon characters in the novel are also constantly reminded of their unique group identity. It is because they must remain loyal to the codes of honor established by the Maroon community long ago that the modern-day Maroon characters end up helping the modern-day Jewish characters. While memories do not outright compete here, they do remain placed side by side in neatly separated spheres that sometimes meet but never truly mingle. This rather essentialist view of group identities may reflect the interests of readers of thrillers such as The Columbus Affair. As a highly commercial genre, the thriller is more concerned with confirming assumptions than with questioning or subverting them. In sum, I hope my analysis reveals the great malleability of memory, and the different ways in which groups can appropriate, decontextualize and recontextualize a specific historic event or figure (or both, as in the case of Columbus and the expulsion of Iberian Jews). At the same time, a careful reading of the ways in which both Pirates of the Caribbean and The Columbus Affair celebrate certain communities as fundamentally different and as sources of achievement reveals the more problematic tendencies of collective remembering processes. Indeed, memory seems to serve here as 100  It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Steve Berry is not Jewish, hence it would be difficult to read in his novel an “agenda” similar to that of Kritzler. He has specialized in intricate plots that weave historical details from different locations. Titles such as The Alexandria Link (2007), The Venetian Betrayal (2007) or The Paris Vendetta (2009) may be an indication of the scope of his narratives and his penchant for complicated, conspiracybased plots.

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a means not only of promoting recognition for the history of suffering of specific groups, but also of positing a sense of pure and authentic group identity that remains unchanged by the routes, fragmentations, and disruptions caused by history itself. It is this very lack of neutrality of memory that makes it an ongoing fascinating object of study.

CHAPTER 11

Triangulating Memory: Sephardism in Caribbean Literature Sarah Phillips Casteel

Recent efforts to bridge the gap between the fields of Jewish studies and postcolonial studies have centered on the circulation and reanimation of Holocaust memory in colonial settings.1 Scholars have recovered an early post-World War II moment in which anti-colonial theorists such as the Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire and his student Frantz Fanon drew analogies between European fascism and colonialism. Césaire in particular helped to establish an understanding of the Holocaust as the most extreme form of colonial violence—an analogical reading practice that subsequently became occluded by Jewish and postcolonial studies as they were institutionalized in the academy.2 The recent “colonial turn” in Holocaust studies, which draws inspiration from Césaire’s writing, has generated valuable new theoretical models of cultural memory, 1  This chapter draws from and expands on arguments contained in my book Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 2  See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

S. P. Casteel Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_11

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including “multidirectional memory” (Michael Rothberg) and “palimpsestic memory” (Max Silverman).3 By virtue of Césaire’s and Fanon’s centrality to this discussion, the Caribbean implicitly emerges as a key site from which to theorize intersections between Jewish and postcolonial studies. In this chapter, I want to make a more explicit claim for the Caribbean—and for contemporary Caribbean literature in particular—as a productive space in which to anchor a relational analysis of Jewish and (post)colonial experience. More specifically, I will argue for Caribbean literature as a medium of cultural memory that attests not only to the circulation of Holocaust memory in colonial settings but also to the resonance in this context of the Sephardic expulsion. While Rothberg importantly identifies the Holocaust as a node of multidirectional memory, I will show that in Caribbean literature, 1492 is an equally significant node of cross-cultural identification that warrants consideration alongside—and bears some advantages over—the more customary reference to the Holocaust. Registering the Caribbean’s deep and multilayered relationship to histories of Jewish refugee resettlement, contemporary Caribbean literature engages in a complex triangulation of memories of slavery, Sepharad, and the Holocaust. The overwhelming focus on the Holocaust both in the postcolonial-Jewish discussion and in the field of memory studies has obscured this practice of triangulation as well as the importance of Sepharad as a vehicle for multidirectional memory. In the introduction to their edited collection Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era, Daniela Flesler, Tabea Linhard and Adrián Pérez Melgosa discuss how Sephardic memory has been instrumentalized since the quincentenary of the Iberian expulsion to support a Spanish national and institutional programme to “officially reconnect Spain with the Jewish world” and “to disseminate celebratory narratives of the Spanish Jewish past.”4 Their analysis of the Jewish memory boom in Spain highlights some of the ironies and contradictions produced by the proliferation of heritage tourism and other forms of commemoration that are predicated on the absence of Jews from the national body. Flesler and her coeditors consider what 3  Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). 4   Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, “Introduction: Revisiting Spain in the Modern Era,” in Revisiting Spain in the Modern Era, eds. Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa (London: Routledge, 2013), 1.

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kinds of alliances this “symbolic ‘return to Sepharad’” may generate as well as how memory can be appropriated for both reactionary and progressive political agendas.5 In this chapter, I explore an alternative “return to Sepharad” that is contemporaneous with the Spanish memory boom but is articulated outside of the national institutions and state structures that memory studies scholars tend to address. The literary discourse of sephardism that I examine here emerges in Caribbean fiction and poetry published in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Moreover, instead of being premised on the absence of Jews from the national body, Caribbean literary sephardism draws inspiration from the long-standing presence of Sephardic Jewish communities in the Caribbean (though now greatly diminished in size) as well as the resulting Jewish bloodlines that run through contemporary Caribbean populations. For if the Spanish and Portuguese edicts of the 1490s drove Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, one consequence of the expulsions was the eventual resettlement of some Sephardim in the Dutch and British Caribbean, which lay beyond the reach of the Inquisition. In his forward to a biography of the nineteenthcentury Sephardic Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario, Jamaican scholar Rex Nettleford remarks: There is a saying that when the Jews and the Moors were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, in the late fifteenth century, Spain lost its intellect and its imagination. That loss was the Caribbean’s gain since much of the cultural diversity that remains the source of great art, great architecture and great literature was, as it were, transferred to the Americas where diverse cultures encountered each other on foreign soil and became the germ of a new civilization which was to redound to the benefit of all humankind over the past half a millenium.6

Nettleford’s philosephardic account of the Iberian expulsion as contributing to the cultural vitality of the Caribbean is consistent with the examples of Caribbean literary sephardism that I will survey here, which advance an identificatory reading of Sepharad that recognizes the h ­ istorical

 Ibid., 2.  Rex Nettleford, Foreword to Jackie Ranston, Belisario: Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist (Kingston: The Mill Press, 2008), xiii. 5 6

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c­ontributions of Sephardim to Caribbean creolization7 even as they explore tensions surrounding this population’s role in the development of New World slavery and colonialism. In identifying this particular strain of sephardism, my interest is not so much in history as it is in memory; my aim in analysing these texts is not to make a historical argument about the Jewish Caribbean but rather to understand what contemporary purpose is served by their literary invocation of Sepharad. The tendency of scholars of Caribbean creolization to neglect the Jewish historical presence makes its acknowledgment by contemporary Caribbean writers all the more striking. Indeed, in the context of the Sephardic Caribbean, creative writing is especially deserving of our attention because of its mnemonic function—its capacity to recover the memory of cross-cultural encounters and diasporic histories that have fallen between the cracks of academic disciplines. In contrast to the tendency of academic writing to divide and compartmentalize, literature allows the imagination freer reign and thereby remains open to what the literary critic Bryan Cheyette calls “metaphorical thinking,” which he contrasts with “disciplinary thinking.”8 Thus, alongside the valuable historiography of the early modern Jewish Caribbean that is currently emerging in the work of Jonathan Schorsch, Natalie Zemon Davis, Aviva Ben-Ur and others,9 it is worthwhile attending to imaginative recuperations of the Jewish Caribbean past in contemporary literature. Recovering the long history of Black-Jewish encounter in the colonial Caribbean, Caribbean 7  By “creolization,” I mean here the historical processes and cultural transactions through which, as a consequence of their participation in the plantation economy, including the practices of slaveholding and slave concubinage, Jews became integrated into the cultural, linguistic, and demographic matrix of Caribbean society. On the historical relationship of Jews to Caribbean creolization in Curaçao and Suriname respectively, see Linda M.  Rupert, “Trading Globally, Speaking Locally: Curaçao’s Sephardim in the Making of a Caribbean Creole,” in Jews and Port Cities 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism, eds. David Cesarani and Gemma Romain (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2006), 109–122, and Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010). 8  Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 6. 9  See, for example, Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Natalie Zemon Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus,” in New Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 2010), 79–94; Aviva Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 152–69.

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literary sephardism offers an alternative to the traditional isolation of the academic fields of Jewish and postcolonial studies as well as to the largely U.S.-focused discourse on “Black-Jewish relations.” In what follows, rather than offering an in-depth analysis of any single example of Caribbean literary sephardism, I will identify a pattern of cross-­ cultural identification with Sepharad that emerges across a number of works of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Caribbean poetry and historical fiction. These literary examples illustrate the appeal of Sepharad for Caribbean writers from several different language traditions (English, French, and Dutch) and illuminate the connective function of Sephardic memory in their work. While formally and thematically diverse, and while addressing a variety of historical and geographical settings, these texts participate in a common literary discourse of Caribbean sephardism. In the texts I examine, Sephardic protagonists serve as memory aides who help to unearth buried connections that decenter dominant historical narratives. These Sephardic characters can be understood as representing the claims of postcolonial countermemory against those of metropolitan accounts of History. In broader terms, Caribbean literary sephardism introduces a distinctive form of multidirectional memory in which memories of slavery and the Holocaust are triangulated with memories of the Sephardic expulsion. The practice of triangulation, an organizing concept for this chapter that I borrow from Derek Walcott’s long poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), resists the narratives of competitive victimhood that often attend Holocaust references, including comparisons between the Holocaust and African slavery. While competitive memory features in some Caribbean writing,10 and indeed is thematized by several of the texts under ­discussion, the practice of triangulation identified here works primarily to foreground the ways in which different diaspora cultures and memories mutually inform and reshape one another. 10  A sense of competition or resentment with respect to Jews is an element, for example, of Brathwaite’s poem “Miss Own,” Philip’s poem “St. Clair Avenue West,” and Clarke’s novel The Meeting Point. See Edward K.  Brathwaite, “Miss Own,” in The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry, eds. Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992) 21–23; M. NourbeSe Philip, “St. Clair Avenue West,” in Salmon Courage (Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace Publishers, 1991), n.pag.; Austin Clarke, The Meeting Point [1967] (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998). I argue in Calypso Jews, however, that on the whole Caribbean literature is less competitive in orientation than is the U.S. writing about Black– Jewish relations. Also relevant here is Cohen-Abady’s discussion of the relative absence of anti-Semitism in the Caribbean. See Florette Cohen-Abady, “Where Have All the Caribbean Jews Gone?,” in Anti-Semitism in North America, eds. Stephan K. Baum, Neil J. Kressel, Florette Cohen-Abady, and Steven Leonard Jacobs (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 196–209.

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Remembering Sepharad As I have argued elsewhere, “sephardism,” or the invocation of Sephardic historical experience, is a significant feature of postwar and contemporary Caribbean literature.11 Edna Aizenberg has defined sephardism as an “acculturative tool” through which Latin American Jews foregrounded a common Spanish inheritance with their host society.12 More relevant to the Caribbean examples I examine, however, is Dalia Kandiyoti’s theorization of sephardism as connecting histories rather than collapsing differences.13 The Caribbean texts that I examine exhibit this connective impulse. At the same time, they exemplify what Yael Halevi-Wise terms sephardism as “counterhistory,”14 harnessing Sephardic motifs to contest normative cultural and historical narratives. In Caribbean literature, sephardism helps to advance a revisionist reading of the past by exposing historical interconnections between Blacks and Jews as well as between periphery and center. Invocations of Sepharad in Caribbean literature reflect both the resonance of the Iberian expulsion for postslavery writers and the deep historical presence of Sephardim in the islands and Caribbean mainland. The multilayered story of Caribbean Jewry is a largely unfamiliar one to many because of the tendency to focus on the Ashkenazic experience in Europe and the United States. Yet, it has been a source of inspiration for contemporary Caribbean novelists and poets, many of whom have made significant use of the intersection of Black and Jewish diasporic cultures. As their writing registers, the history of Caribbean Jewry dates back to the earliest moments of New World colonialism, when the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s propelled Sephardic Jews and New Christians to resettle in the Americas. Jewish settlement in the Caribbean  See my Calypso Jews, ch. 1.  Edna Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and ArgentineJewish Writing (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002), 54. 13  Dalia Kandiyoti, “Sephardism in Latina Literature,” in Sephardism: Jewish-Spanish History in the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 236. 14  Yael Halevi-Wise, “Introduction: Through the Prism of Sepharad: Modern Nationalism, Literary History, and the Impact of the Sephardic Experience, in Sephardism: Jewish-Spanish History in the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 12. 11 12

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occurred over a period of more than 300 years, establishing itself in the seventeenth century and peaking in the latter half of the eighteenth century. As a result, Dutch and British Caribbean colonies such as Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica, and Barbados have had long-standing Jewish populations. In cultural terms, it is noteworthy that both Jamaica’s “first national painter,” Isaac Mendes Belisario, and a founding father of Impressionism, Camille Pissarro, were the products of nineteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean communities. The painter Camille Pissarro is the subject of St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott’s verse biography Tiepolo’s Hound. Walcott’s long poem represents a significant example of sephardism in Caribbean writing, specifying its engagement with Jewishness with reference to the Iberian expulsion as well as the history of Sephardic settlement in the Caribbean. In Walcott’s portrait of the Impressionist master, it is the unfixed and interstitial character of the Sephardic Caribbean, in particular its bridging of Old and New World cultures, that accounts for its appeal as a literary topos. Yet while  pursuing an analogy between post-Middle Passage and post-­ expulsion conditions of displacement, Walcott also signals the ambivalent positioning of Sephardim in the colonial history of the Caribbean. While ostensibly a verse biography of Pissarro, Tiepolo’s Hound in fact interweaves the life stories of two Caribbean subjects whose artistic formations it charts: the nineteenth-century painter (Pissarro) and the twentieth-­ century poet (Walcott). Pissarro, who straddles multiple identities and cultures, becomes associated in the poem with Walcott’s own divided consciousness. Born in St. Thomas in 1830 to Sephardic Jewish parents and a founding father of the Impressionist movement in France, Pissarro shares both Walcott’s island upbringing and artistic vocation. The two artists’ lives are intertwined in the poem, as Pissarro journeys to Paris to satisfy his “longing for the center” and Walcott searches for an elusive hound that he had once glimpsed in a painting. As Walcott emphasizes, he and the painter also have in common the experience of diaspora: “Our tribes were shaken like seeds from a sieve.”15 As a Jew of Portuguese ancestry and Caribbean birth who settles in the France of the Dreyfus Affair, Walcott’s Pissarro, much like other colonized subjects, experiences multiple forms of marginalization.  Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 24, 157.

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Tiepolo’s Hound contains repeated references to the Inquisition, the Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds in St. Thomas, and the Portuguese city of Braganza from which the Pissarro family hails, so that Pissarro’s family background becomes metonymic of a broader history of Sephardic resettlement in the Caribbean. At the same time, the poem reads Pissarro’s Sephardic Caribbean story against the legacies of the Middle Passage that haunt the speaker. The poem thus exhibits characteristic features of Caribbean sephardism, citing the Inquisition as a context for Sephardic migration to the Caribbean and returning to the scene of the Iberian expulsion while simultaneously situating these Sephardic motifs within a broader comparative and connective framework. Although strongly identificatory in its twinning of the poet and the painter and its reading of Pissarro as emblematic of the Caribbean artist, Tiepolo’s Hound also incorporates a critique of Pissarro’s colonial gaze, which abandons the Caribbean in favour of Europe, and which is limited by its failure to fully engage the historical condition of slavery. Yet while Walcott recognizes Pissarro’s privileged position within the colonial economy, this awareness does not detract from the role that sephardism plays in helping to reframe European art historical narratives and to explore the psychic condition of the Caribbean artist. To the contrary, the poem’s recovery of Pissarro’s Sephardic Caribbean origins affords Walcott an important opportunity to lay claim to a European artistic inheritance on behalf of the Caribbean. Tiepolo’s Hound advances this reinterpretation of the relationship between metropolitan and colonial cultural production not only by tracing Impressionism’s forgotten Caribbean roots but also through an emphasis on Pissarro’s (similarly forgotten) Sephardic heritage—an emphasis that promotes an aesthetics of reciprocity, intersectionality, and triangulation. The term “triangulation” appears in a passage about J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire (1838)—a painting whose theme is, fittingly, the decline of British naval power. The speaker recounts how Pissarro flees to London with Monet during the Franco-Prussian War. While in London, the two men tour the museums, their shared appreciation of The Fighting Téméraire drawing them closer together. As is typical of the poem, these scenes from Pissaro’s biography are interwoven with Walcott’s autobiographical recollections. Thus, the speaker (Walcott) describes how the same Turner painting is later copied by his father, an amateur artist:

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Triangulation: in his drawing room my father copies The Fighting Téméraire. He and Monet admire the radiant doom of the original; all three men revere the crusted barge, its funnel bannering fire, its torch guiding the great three-master on to sink in the infernal asphalt of an empire turning more spectral, like the mastodon.16

Here, Pissarro provides a crucial bridge between two artist figures, one European (Monet) and the other Caribbean (Walcott’s own father). With his Portuguese roots, Sephardic Caribbean upbringing and French painting career, Pissarro connects the nineteenth-century European artistic legacy of Monet and Turner to the twentieth-century St. Lucia of Walcott’s father. The principle of triangulation introduced in this passage suggests, not the unidirectional influence of the Old World on the New as in conventional models of colonial mimicry, but rather an unstable and dynamic reciprocity between Europe and the Caribbean. Discussing Tiepolo’s Hound, George Handley helpfully glosses the concept of triangulation as follows: Triangulation is a spatial order used in surveying to delimit a location by means of measuring its distance from two distinct spots. Triangulation not only confirms the distance by means of two witnesses, but it also implicitly and relationally places the three locations on a similar plane, allowing us to use any two of the points to determine the location of the third. No single location, then, exists without relation to the other two, and hence there is no center or margin, only relation.17

Embodying this principle of triangulation, which challenges a hierarchical understanding of the relationship between metropole and periphery, Pissarro functions in the poem as a mnemonic conduit to both Walcott’s autobiographical reflections and the forgotten colonial origins of European modernity.  Ibid., 76.  George B. Handley, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 322. 16 17

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In other Caribbean texts, Sephardic characters figure still more explicitly as the custodians and purveyors of memory. Haitian writer Myriam Chancy’s multiperspectival novel The Loneliness of Angels (2007), which investigates Caribbean spirituality against the backdrop of the 2004 coup, resituates Haiti within a global context by exploring its multiple ethnic and diasporic heritages. From among the novel’s diverse cast of characters, Ruth, who is of mixed Sephardic and African descent, is most closely associated with memory. A seer and radical journalist, Ruth has “a memory that paired the wanderings of her father’s people with the rolls of the drums of her mother’s people.”18 Yet the Sephardic memories that Ruth inherits from her crypto-Jewish father, while “imprinted on her cells,”19 are highly incomplete: It would take her many years to find out [what the word Jwif meant] and when she was old enough to learn, her father told her very little of his family’s past. It took her even longer to realize that what her father had to pass on was very little because very little had survived before him. Her father lived in a world made up of fragments of broken lives. He gathered the bits and pieces of those who had been made to travel far from their mother’s bosoms and made it all his own. It was in this way that he kept the memory of his father’s faith alive.20

The post-expulsion fragmentation of memory suffered by Sephardim such as Ruth’s father resonates with the still more violently broken and incomplete memories of the African slaves from whom Ruth is also descended. Doubly afflicted with diasporic memory loss, Ruth becomes the ­designated caretaker of the past, which she preserves through the photographs of a “kaleidoscope of multi-hued faces” that she displays on her “memory table.”21 The memory table, a recurring motif in Chancy’s novel, represents Ruth’s attempt to retain the memories of dispersed individuals— memories whose fragility is suggested by the decayed condition of the yellowed and bleached photographs.22 In The Loneliness of Angels, Sephardic motifs thus encourage reflection on the operations of memory

 Myriam Chancy, The Loneliness of Angels (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2010), 57.  Ibid., 15. 20  Ibid., 42. 21  Ibid., 15–16. 22  Ibid., 234. 18 19

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itself—on how, as Chancy puts it in her author’s note, “time and memory function in a non-linear fashion, interacting with each other non-­ chronologically in such a way as to inform lived experience both discretely and symbiotically.”23 Like Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s novel Free Enterprise (1993) features a Sephardic protagonist, Rachel DeSouza, whose defining characteristics are her solidarity with the oppressed and her powerful retention of memory. In Free Enterprise, Cliff retells the story of John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, reinterpreting the raid from a hemispheric American and feminist perspective as part of a transnational resistance movement against slavery in which women figured centrally. A key site in Cliff’s novel is the leper colony near New Orleans that is frequented after the failure of the raid by Annie Christmas, the light-skinned Jamaican comrade of the African American abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant. The leper colony is populated by a global cast of oppressed and displaced peoples, including a Hawaiian, a Tahitian, and a poor white Kentuckian. Together, they forge an alternative community on the basis of political solidarity rather than ethnic affiliation. The presence in the leper colony of Rachel DeSouza, a Surinamese descendant of marranos, in particular signals the intercultural and pluralistic orientation of the novel as well as its revisionist historical project. Rachel DeSouza makes two noteworthy appearances in Free Enterprise that help to authorize its unorthodox account of the raid on Harpers Ferry. In her first appearance, Rachel joins the storytelling circle at the leper colony and relates her story of resistance and survival. When it is her turn to speak, she recalls the trauma of the expulsion and her ancestors’ ocean crossing: Soon enough we had to leave Spain, under decree from Los Reyes Católicos, and as Colón set out at the behest of the same pair, so did we. […] They crossed in late summer, the time of sudden storms. Imagine the procession of little ships, coming along behind, some in terror, seasick, homesick, caught in the inexorable currents of the Atlantic.24

The intensity of Rachel’s postmemory of the expulsion is such that at the end of the novel, it transports her back to 1492. She witnesses in her dreams the trauma of the expulsion and has “this extraordinary memory  Ibid., 350.  Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise (New York: Plume, 1993), 60.

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of running. Running and running, and being chased. A common enough thing, I suppose, but I am running down a steep hill, toward a ship about to set sail. The ship raises the flag of Los Reyes Católicos. I must decide whether to board. I have no choice.” When Rachel recounts her inherited memories to Annie Christmas, Annie responds: “I think we carry more within us than we can ever imagine. If bone structure is passed on, why not memory?”25 For her part, Rachel urges Annie not to throw away her box of keepsakes: “Don’t be rash, old friend. I for one know about lost things. Don’t discard memory, or that which instigates it.”26 In these passages, Rachel DeSouza’s Sephardic presence signals the novel’s larger concern with the preservation of memory as a resource for cultural survival. As Erica Johnson notes, Free Enterprise reframes our historical understanding of the raid on Harpers Ferry by foregrounding its “adjacencies with Caribbean history” as well as its “global adjacencies.”27 If as Johnson argues, the novel’s “composition by way of fragments, of the cross-­ contamination of histories […], gives rise to an entire mode of addressing history,”28 this strategy of quilting together remnant histories and memories is notably advanced through the figure of the Sephardic Jew. A key means through which Cliff promotes a global and connective perspective on the struggle for Black emancipation is by referencing Sephardim as a founding people of the Caribbean and by repeatedly invoking the Iberian expulsion. As in Walcott’s imaginative reconstruction of the life of Camille Pissarro, in Cliff’s retelling of the raid on Harpers Ferry, Sephardic Caribbean references encourage a reexamination of dominant historical narratives and modes of memorialization.

Remembering Slavery Recent historical fiction about slavery has increasingly explored less familiar dimensions of the slavery past that complicate the black-white binary that structured the classic slave narratives. Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003), for example, addresses the history of Black slave owning in the United States, while Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014) stages  Ibid., 202.  Ibid., 186. 27  Erica Johnson, Caribbean Ghostwriting (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 46. 28  Ibid., 74. 25 26

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a series of encounters between its Moroccan slave protagonist and Indigenous peoples in the colonial Americas that raise questions about slaves’ complicity in the act of conquest.29 By introducing port and plantation Jews into their slavery fiction, Caribbean writers similarly defamiliarize the institution of slavery. The literary archaeologies of the slavery past that these writers undertake unearth stories not only of slaves’ experiences but also of the early modern Jewish merchants and planters whose traces may be found in the sand-floored synagogues and decaying Jewish cemeteries that are scattered across the Caribbean. Caribbean slavery fiction identifies a series of sites of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black-­ Jewish interdiasporic encounter in the Americas, often engaging in a form of architectural memorialization through descriptions of Caribbean synagogues and other sites of Jewish Caribbean memory. Thus, these postslavery texts chart not only the history of the Black Atlantic but also what has been termed the “Jewish Atlantic.”30 Critics have noted how Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s novel about the Salem Witch Trials, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), decenters the United States by foregrounding the trials’ historical relationship with the Caribbean, from which the slave Tituba, one of the first to be accused, is said to have originated. What has gone unremarked is the way in which—much as in Walcott’s and Cliff’s revisionist historical reconstructions—in I, Tituba, Condé’s insertion of a Sephardic Jew contributes to the novel’s hemispheric reframing of a well-known episode of U.S. national history. By introducing the character of Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, a tobacco merchant with ties to the Caribbean, Condé demonstrates her awareness of Barbados’ historical status as a center of Jewish life in the early modern Atlantic world—Caribbeanizing Jewish American history just as she foregrounds the Barbadian dimension of the Salem Witch Trials. Barbados and New England are linked in the novel by a plantation economy that circulates both slaves such as Tituba and port Jews such as Benjamin across its networks; neither these characters nor the Salem Witch Trials themselves, Condé suggests, is fully legible within a national framework. 29  Edward P.  Jones. The Known World (New York: Amistad, 2004); Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account (New York: Vintage, 2014). 30  See Richard L.  Kagan, and Philip D.  Morgan, preface to Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), xi.

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In Condé’s retelling of the Salem Witch Trials, Tituba becomes a slave as a consequence of her passion for John Indian, which in turn results in her relocation from Bridgetown, Barbados to Salem, Massachusetts, where she falls victim to the hysteria of the trials and is imprisoned. After a lengthy ordeal in which Tituba suffers all manner of indignity and deprivation, relief finally comes in the unexpected form of a hunchbacked, eggplant-­complexioned Jewish widower whose migratory family history echoes Tituba’s own transamerican journey from Barbados to New England: “Benjamin’s family had come from Portugal, where religious persecution had forced them to flee to Holland. From there, one branch of the family had tried for Brazil, Recife to be exact, but had to flee once again when the town was recaptured by the Portuguese. They then split into two clans, one settling in Curaçao, the other trying its luck in the American colonies.”31 By incorporating into her novel this potted history of Sephardic resettlement in the Americas, Condé calls attention to the overlapping trajectories of the African and Jewish diasporas. Benjamin’s privileged position as a colonial merchant and slave owner generates significant ambiguity and tension in the novel, especially surrounding his sexual relationship with Tituba. In a scene in which Tituba and Benjamin compare the sufferings of their peoples, the greater availability of Jewish recorded memory enables Benjamin to easily best Tituba in the calculus of competitive suffering. Yet Condé’s novel simultaneously affiliates Tituba and Benjamin on the basis of their common experience of persecution and associates Jewishness with a higher moral sensitivity. Condé depicts the Jewish slave owner as a benevolent (if imperfect) master who is eventually compelled by his ethical principles to liberate his slave. (Benjamin contrasts in this regard with the tyrannical Reverend Parris as well as the rapacious Barbadian planter Darnell.) Benjamin’s narrative is framed in religious terms of sin and redemption; his failure to grant Tituba her liberty is punished by God through the deaths of his children and the loss of his ships, for which he atones by freeing Tituba, thereby restoring his moral standing. While Condé’s novel recovers the memory of the transatlantic networks of port Jews who were instrumental to colonial trade, Surinamese writer Cynthia McLeod’s historical novel The Cost of Sugar (1987) features plantation Jews, in keeping with the distinctive patterns of Sephardic ­settlement 31  Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem [1986], trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Random House, 1992), 123.

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in the Dutch Caribbean colonies. Moreover, instead of reworking the slave narrative genre, McLeod chooses as a vehicle for her investigation of Jewish Surinamese creolization another dominant genre of slavery fiction: the plantation family saga. More specifically, McLeod models her novel on Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 plantation melodrama Gone With the Wind. The Cost of Sugar betrays the intertextual influence of Mitchell’s novel in its multigenerational, epoch-spanning narrative structure. The influence of the plantation epic genre is further evident in the commemorative and elegiac tone of McLeod’s novel, which honours the forgotten contributions of Sephardic Jews to the history of the colony. At the same time, McLeod deviates significantly from Mitchell’s model by recentering the plantation epic on Jewish experience, a repositioning of the genre that ultimately opens it up to an engagement with Black female subjectivity and to a celebration of Maroon (escaped slave) resistance. Set in the 1760s and 1770s, McLeod’s The Cost of Sugar tells the story of two Surinamese step-sisters of Portuguese Jewish descent against the backdrop of the renewed Maroon conflicts that followed the hundred years Maroon War. The 17-year-old Elza Fernandez is raised on a plantation by her widowed father Levi and the slave woman Ashana, Elza’s gentile mother having died during childbirth. Eventually Levi remarries, this time to a Jewish woman, who comes to live at the plantation with her daughter Sarith. Elza and Sarith become rivals when they vie for the affections of Rutger Le Chasseur, the highly placed agent of an Amsterdam merchant company. Alongside the stories of the Jewish characters, the novel also addresses the lives of their slaves, in particular Ashana, Ashana’s daughter Maisa, Rutger’s slave and receptionist Alex, and Sarith’s slave Mini-mini, who will eventually become the concubine of one of the Jewish protagonists. In addition, two non-Jewish characters, a Dutch mercenary soldier and Sarith’s lover Lieutenant Andersma, are introduced later in the novel, further diversifying its portrait of eighteenth-century Surinamese society and contributing to the theme of Maroon resistance that dominates the novel’s later chapters. In The Cost of Sugar, McLeod employs the archival and archaeological strategies of postslavery fiction not only to recover the memory of slavery and Maroon resistance but also to memorialize the Caribbean Jewish past. While McLeod does not shy away from confronting the more troubling aspects of this chapter of Jewish history, her novel ultimately calls for a recognition of the foundational role that Sephardic Jews played in establishing the colony of Suriname. The Cost of Sugar surveys a series of sites

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of Sephardic Caribbean memory, generating what Vivian Nun Halloran calls a “museum effect.”32 At the novel’s opening, we find the Surinamese Jewish community gathered in the Jewish agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Beracha Ve Shalom synagogue, which was consecrated in 1685, making it one of the oldest synagogues in the western hemisphere. Later in the novel, Elza travels once again to Jodensavanne to celebrate the synagogue’s 85th anniversary. The Cost of Sugar details the layout and design of the village of Jodensavanne and the town of Paramaribo while also mapping the location of various Jewish plantations and incorporating descriptions of the synagogue and other colonial architecture. This attention to architectural and topographical detail constitutes a literary counterpart to current preservationist efforts to document and restore Jewish cemeteries in the Caribbean.33 In another example of the museum effect, in the novel’s epilogue Elza’s dying grandmother bequeaths to her several heirlooms, including a set of porcelain and a tapestry that had accompanied the family from Portugal via Brazil to Suriname. By exhibiting these “artifacts,” the novel registers the sequence of geographical displacements that produced the Surinamese Sephardic community and at the same time evidences the foundational role of Jews in Suriname’s colonial history. The Jewish historical presence in Suriname is once again commemorated in the epilogue, in which a Kaddish is recited over the grave of Elza’s grandmother: “The murmur of voices greeted them. They were the voices of the men who were saying the Kaddish, standing there in the cemetery among the graves of their ancestors: the Portuguese Jews, the first colonists, who, after the British, had dared make Suriname their fatherland.”34 This final, elegiac scene, which takes place in a Jewish cemetery that is among the oldest in the hemisphere, once again exhibits an important site of Jewish Caribbean memory. 32  Halloran argues that Caribbean writing generates a “‘museum effect’ by exhibiting slavery through the use of quotations or vignettes” that function like “museum dioramas or exhibitions.” Vivian Halloran, Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 17. 33  Over the past ten years, architect Rachel Frankel has led annual volunteer expeditions to document the Jewish cemeteries in Jamaica. On Jewish cemeteries of the Caribbean, see Rachel Frankel and Aviva Ben-Ur, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2012); Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2013). 34  Cynthia McLeod, The Cost of Sugar [1987], trans. Gerald R.  Mettam (Paramaribo: Waterfront Press, 2010), 290.

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In The Cost of Sugar, this celebration of Jewish achievement coexists, however, with a second commemorative function—the recognition of the slaves’ and Maroons’ contributions to the evolution of the colony. The novel’s conclusion blends commemoration and critique as the heroine Elza comes to recognize the total dependency of the Jewish planters on their slaves. Combining these commemorative and critical functions, The Cost of Sugar evinces a distinctively Caribbean perspective on Black–Jewish relations in the colonial Americas. McLeod neither tabulates competing claims to victimhood nor succumbs to an apologist narrative of Jewish Atlantic history. Instead, she pursues a complex and multidirectional understanding of Caribbean Jewry as (in Jonathan Israel’s eloquent phrase) “both agents and victims of empire.”35 In so doing, McLeod opens up a greater space for Jewish subjectivity than we find in other Caribbean slavery fiction, which tends to rely on a typological strategy that reduces the Jewish characters to an ethical, discursive, or mnemonic function. This typological approach can at times produce a flattening effect and an ironic, self-conscious reinscription of stereotypes (both positive and negative). By contrast, rather than presenting an isolated Jewish type, The Cost of Sugar portrays a fully  fledged eighteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean community that exhibits a wide range of human behaviours and ethical perspectives available within the confines of its time.

Remembering the Holocaust In her study of the Spanish memorialization of “Jewish Spain,” Tabea Linhard identifies important linkages between Sephardic and Holocaust memory.36 Observing that sites of memory can sometimes “also conjure up other realms of memory of a more distant past,”37 Linhard reminds us that four and a half centuries after the Iberian expulsion, Spain served as a point of transit for refugees from the Nazis who were en route to Palestine and the Americas. During World War II, some such Jewish refugees, refused 35  Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World of Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 1. 36  On connections between Sephardic and Holocaust memory in Spain, see also Alejandro Baer, “The Voids of Sepharad: The Memory of the Holocaust in Spain,” in Revisiting Spain in the Modern Era, eds. Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa (London: Routledge, 2013), 124–47. 37  Tabea Alexa Linhard, Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 10.

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sanctuary in Europe, found safe haven in the Caribbean. Like Spain, then, the Caribbean emerges as a space in which the memories of two Jewish historical traumas—the Iberian expulsion and the Holocaust—interact with and reshape one another. They do so in ways that are specific to the memory cultures of the Caribbean and to the particular history of contact between African  and Jewish diasporic populations in that region dating back to the seventeenth century. Accordingly, one of the distinctive features of Caribbean literary sephardism is the frequency with which memories of Sepharad and the expulsion become overlayed with Holocaust memory. Cuban American writer Achy Obejas’ novel Days of Awe (2001), for example, intertwines a Holocaust refugee narrative with a Sephardic Caribbean plotline.38 In Days of Awe, a crypto-Jew of Sephardic ancestry works in the Havana flower shop of an elderly Polish survivor of Auschwitz. Layered together in Obejas’ consciousness and literary imagination are two stories: that of early modern Sephardic Jews’ attempt to make a homeland in the Caribbean in the aftermath of the Iberian expulsion and that of the Ashkenazic Jewish refugees from the Nazis who fled to Cuba and other islands in the late 1930s. Similarly, Michelle Cliff’s postslavery ­fiction is marked by a doubled awareness of both the Iberian expulsion and the Holocaust. Notably, while the most prominent Jewish references in Cliff’s first novel Abeng (1984) are to Anne Frank and the Holocaust, Abeng also invokes the Sephardic presence in the Caribbean, citing theories surrounding Columbus’ possibly Sephardic origins. As I discussed above, Cliff would subsequently develop this Sephardic theme in her third novel, Free Enterprise, by incorporating a Surinamese Jewish protagonist.39 This interpenetration of Sephardic and Holocaust memory in contemporary Caribbean literature underscores one of the central insights of memory studies scholarship: that cultural memory is the recollection of the past in the present. Thus, in her historical novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, which is set in the seventeenth century, Condé introduces jarringly anachronistic references to the Holocaust and other modern phenomena to alert the reader that memories of the past are always  Achy Obejas, Days of Awe (New York: Ballantine, 2001).  Free Enterprise also notably includes allusions to the Holocaust. See Annie Christmas’ anachronistic reference to the Nazi slogan “Arbeit macht frei” and the references to the numbering (“numericalization”) of the inmates of the leper colony, in Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise (New York: Plume, 1993), 202; 40; 58. 38 39

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reconstructed according to the concerns of the present. So too, Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s postmodern slavery novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999) proleptically references the Holocaust as part of its disruption of the conventions of realism.40 A Harlot’s Progress is set in eighteenth-­ century Britain and features a Jewish protagonist, Sampson Gideon, who was inspired by a prominent Sephardic English banker. Yet the novel incorporates prophetic allusions to a future time in which Jews “will be shot in the head and shovelled into pits” or “reserved as logs for the huge furnaces we will build.”41 Such Holocaust allusions signal the novel’s larger concern with the problem of aestheticizing suffering that both Holocaust and postslavery fiction confront. Proleptic references to the Holocaust similarly punctuate Book III of Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound, in which “one wrist broods / on its singed number” and “a smoking chimney predicts [Pissarro’s] origins.”42 Additional Holocaust images in the poem such as “a smoke wreath from the ovens” and “the yellow leaf of banishment” help to position Pissarro’s familial history of expulsion and contemporary experience of nineteenth-­century French anti-Semitism within a longer historical trajectory of Jewish suffering.43 As in Condé’s and Dabydeen’s texts, these Holocaust allusions self-reflexively signal both Walcott’s late twentieth-­ century positioning and the profound impact of the Holocaust on Caribbean writers of his and the subsequent generation. Indeed, for Walcott, “the deepest question of the twentieth century has to be the question of the Holocaust. I still think that there is no historical event equal to it.”44 Accordingly, elsewhere in Walcott’s writing, Holocaust references are still more persistent, as in his poem “North and South” (1981), which associates Virginia plantations with concentration camps through incendiary images of chimneys, ovens, smoke, and ash (stanzas 10–12). In “North and South,” the speaker contrasts the absence of 40  For a fuller discussion of Jewish themes in Dabydeen’s fiction, see Casteel, Calypso Jews (ch. 3) and Casteel, “David Dabydeen’s Hogarth: Blacks, Jews, and Postcolonial Ekphrasis,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, no. 1 (January 2016): 117–33. 41  David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress (London: Vintage, 2000), 253. 42  Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound, 104. 43  Ibid., 105–106. 44  Derek Walcott, “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” interview with J.P. White, Green Mountain Review 4, no.1 (Spring–Summer 1990): 14–37, repr. in Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 154.

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memorializations of the plantation with the relatively well-documented history of the Holocaust: “there is no memorial here to their Treblinka.”45 This line anticipates the aforementioned scene in Condé’s novel I, Tituba in which Benjamin and Tituba weigh the comparative misfortunes of their peoples, with Benjamin easily winning the contest because of the greater availability of Jewish recorded history. Yet even as writers such as Walcott and Condé occasionally invoke what Rothberg calls “competitive memory,” they do not tend to subscribe to its logic. Instead, supporting Rothberg’s theorization of multidirectional memory, Holocaust references in Caribbean literature illustrate the way in which for some Caribbean writers—particularly those who came of age during World War II or in the early postwar period when slavery was not part of public discourse—the Holocaust has served as a channel through to which to access the less well remembered atrocity of slavery.46 Combined with Sephardic motifs, Holocaust references in Caribbean literature further illustrate how Holocaust memory can serve as an impetus for a larger exploration of the Jewish Caribbean past. In an interview about The Cost of Sugar, McLeod explains that one of the inspirations for her novel of eighteenth-century Jewish plantation life was her childhood friendship with a Dutch Jewish girl whose family arrived in Suriname just before the outbreak of World War II.  She then goes on to proudly note the Surinamese protest in December 1942 against the treatment of European Jewry.47 Accounts such as McLeod’s suggest the need to better understand not only the relationship between memories of the Holocaust and slavery but also how the memories of these two atrocities can be triangulated with that of the Iberian expulsion.

45  Derek Walcott, “North and South,” in Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), 405–409, line 90. For another example of Walcott’s use of Holocaust imagery, see in the same collection (494) his poem “Midsummer XLI,” which references Dachau, Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. 46  See Casteel, Calypso Jews, ch. 5–7, for a fuller discussion of Holocaust imagery in Caribbean literature. 47  “Personal Interview with Ken Victor” (Paramaribo, July 20, 2013). McLeod’s childhood friendship with the Dutch Jewish girl is detailed in her autobiographical short story “Meeting with Judith,” trans. Cynthia McLeod (unpublished ms.).

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Conclusion While memory studies is only now undergoing a transnational and transcultural turn, since the 1980s, a Caribbean literary discourse of sephardism has foregrounded the extent to which memory travels across and among transnational diasporic circuits. Providing a significant example of what Astrid Erll calls “travelling memory,” Caribbean sephardism testifies that memory is constitutively both transnational and transcultural.48 In the works of Caribbean poetry and historical fiction surveyed here, sephardism functions as a mnemonic aide, helping submerged details of the past to resurface. In these texts, sephardism highlights historical interdependencies between center and periphery, facilitating the retrieval of forgotten Caribbean dimensions of major historical events and cultural developments such as the Salem witch trials, the raid on Harpers Ferry, and French Impressionism. The introduction of Sephardic motifs in such texts helps to advance a form of postcolonial countermemory that serves as a corrective to nationalist and Eurocentric historical narratives. The examples of Caribbean sephardism that I have discussed thus illustrate the appeal of Sepharad for contemporary Caribbean writers who seek to reinterpret the relationship between colony and metropole and to resituate the Caribbean within a global context. In so doing, these texts also reveal the interpenetration of Jewish and African diaspora memorial cultures in the Caribbean. Contemporary Caribbean writers’ interweaving of Black and Jewish memories reflects the extensive histories of cross-cultural encounter, often amid sharply asymmetrical relationships of power, that resulted in a pervasive Jewish cultural influence in the Caribbean as well as in the emergence of mulatto Jewish populations. The intermixing of populations and cultures that is the hallmark of Caribbean societies unsettles neat distinctions between Black and Jewish authorship as well as attendant charges of appropriation.49 48  Rejecting the container culture model that traditionally has informed memory studies in favour of anthropologist James Clifford’s “travelling cultures,” Erll emphasizes that memory is constituted through movement. Thus, in what she deems a “third phase” in the development of the field of memory studies, “memory studies should develop an interest in mnemonic itineraries.” See Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” in Transcultural Memory, ed. Rick Crownshaw (London: Routledge, 2014), 17, 19. 49  The biographies of a number of contemporary Caribbean authors, including Caryl Phillips, Cynthia McLeod, Achy Obejas, Myriam Chancy and Oscar Hijuelos, reflect this

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In Caribbean literary sephardism, the primary vehicle for the interpenetration of African and Jewish diasporic memories is 1492. The year 1492 emerges in the literary texts as a key node of multidirectional memory alongside the more expected reference point of the Holocaust. Caribbean literature thus suggests that memory may be still more layered and multifaceted than current models recognize. The triangulation of memories of the Middle Passage, the Iberian expulsion, and the Holocaust in contemporary Caribbean writing generates intricate forms of multidirectionality that extend beyond the abstract analogies between slavery and the Holocaust that have tended to organize discussions of postcolonial-Jewish memory and Black-Jewish relations. If Caribbean sephardism challenges memory studies’ traditional focus on European national memory cultures, then, it also suggests the need for memory studies to attend to forms of Jewish memorial culture that both precede and extend beyond post-­ Holocaust commemoration. Finally, the phenomenon of Caribbean literary sephardism illustrates that 1492 has certain advantages over the Holocaust as a literary topos. Rather than immediately necessitating a reply to exceptionalist objections to Holocaust analogies, the framework of 1492 inherently draws apparently disparate histories of Jewish and African diasporic displacement into profound and complex relation by virtue of its double resonance as the year of both the Sephardic expulsion and Columbus’ first voyage to the New World. Moreover, 1492 offers a way out of the impasse created by competitive memory by drawing attention to the overlapping trajectories of Jewish and African diaspora histories. By the same token, shifting focus from Holocaust memory to sephardism in Caribbean literature also complicates narratives of Jewish victimhood by recalling colonial Jews’ significant, if uneven, access to the privileges of whiteness in the colonial Caribbean.

presence of submerged Jewish lineages throughout the Caribbean. Myriam Chancy, for example, recounts in an interview that part of her motivation for writing The Loneliness of Angels was her own Spanish converso ancestry. See Myriam Chancy, “Chancy Wins an Inaugural Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award 2010,” interview by Ryan Varney, September, 2011, http://www.uc.edu/profiles/profile.asp?id=14235. Caribbean authors who more explicitly identify as Jewish include Anna Ruth Henriques and Aurora Levins Morales. See my Calypso Jews (ch. 1) for discussions of works by Henriques and Morales.

CHAPTER 12

Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue: An Eighteenth-Century Multicrosser in the Canadian Cultural Archive Heather Hermant

In 1738, a Jewish woman, Esther Brandeau, journeys from France to New France, passing as a Christian man, Jacques La Fargue.1 They2 become, allegedly, among the first Jews if not the first Jew in what we now know as Canada, at a time when Jews are at once barred from French colonies and 1  “Procès-verbal de l’interrogatoire d’Esther Brandeau, jeune juive […],” September 15, 1738, Série C11A, Correspondence générale, Fonds des Colonies, Archives nationales de France, ff. 129–130. Available in digital scan online at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca and in microfiche at National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. Hereafter ANF 1738a. 2  Uniquely, I refer to Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and use “s/he” and “they” pronouns. Though there was another male name used as well, La Fargue was the identity through which the whole tale became knowable to us. I allow the possibility that the masculinities performed by our historical figure may not have been exclusively ruses. I use “crossing” interchangeably with “passing,” conjuring the threat of outing as female and as Jew; as well as the Atlantic crossing and its intertwined histories. I avoid “cross-dressing,” though it figures in much scholarship, because it tends to an assumption of the ruse, and does not wholly capture shifts in behavioural repertoire that make possible Jewish to Christian and female to male passing.

H. Hermant New College, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_12

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active, like non-Jews, in Atlantic trade.3 There, before colonial authorities, s/he recounts having worked as a labourer in various trades on land and on sea across France for five years prior to embarking for Québec at La Rochelle, five years after having been sent from the Sephardic/converso community of Bayonne, France, to family in Amsterdam.4 The ship is purported to have wrecked before reaching that destination, our protagonist saved. Brandeau/La Fargue is said to be 20 years old when outed as female and Jewish at or en route to Québec—by whom and how, we do not know. S/he is held under house arrest at a convent-hospital in Québec City and various private houses for a year and is ultimately deported to France for refusing to convert to Christianity.5 It remains unknown whether s/he indeed returned to France, for they subsequently disappear from the archival record, as far as we know. The testimony they gave to a colonial official, along with correspondence between the colonial intendant, various officials in France and the king, and brief mention in the correspondence of a nun, together inscribe traces of a life-story that was a collision on colonial shores of multiple and simultaneous crossings.

 A Dutch Jewish trader was granted the territory of Labrador in 1697; in 1732 a Jew had been an apprentice with the Hudson’s Bay company; and there were possibly marrano traders in Québec during the colonial period according to Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), 14. In his recounting of the tale in 1926, Benjamin Sack writes of “two very strange occurrences” of the first Jews in Canada: the first, Brandeau; and the second, a Dutch Jew who converted in 1752, having also sailed to Québec. Benjamin G. Sack, “History of the Jews in Canada,” in The Jew in Canada: A Complete Record of Canadian Jewry From the Days of the French Régime to the Present Time, ed. Arthur Daniel Hart (Toronto and Montreal: Jewish Publications Limited, 1926), 3. 4  I prefer the term converso over marrano. Throughout this chapter, I use Sephardic/converso as a short hand for an umbrella including those from an Iberian Sephardic larger diasporic community regardless of degree of Jewish practice or self-identification. In the case of Brandeau, we do not have confirmation as to whether s/he was an openly practising Jew, a crypto-Jewish practitioner, a baptized Christian or not, or some or all of these at different times. I accept a degree of affiliation to Jewishness and with the Sephardic/converso network in the town of origin of Brandeau. Anne Zink argues that emigrants from the Iberian Peninsula to Bayonne were without doubt crypto-Judaizing New Christians. See Anne Zink, “Bayonne arrivées et départs au XVIIè siècle,” in 1492: L’Expulsion des juifs d’Espagne, ed. Roland Goetschel (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1995), 42. 5  I will briefly address later in the chapter what constitutes Jewishness, and how Jewishdescended people were perceived. 3

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Wendat Indigenous territory6 under colonial expansion is the setting for the unravelling of what had been until then a story of multiple successful passings: across geographies, gender, religion and/or ethnicity, class, language, and, possibly, age. The story too leaves open, through omission, the possibility of transgression of heterosexuality. Such simultaneous crossings along co-inscribing axes I term “multicrossing.”7 The story has not circulated much within histories of the Atlantic, including Sephardic Studies and American Studies, perhaps a reflection of the underrepresentation of Canada in these.8 Further, the story has been absent from histories of gender crossers. This chapter is part of a larger project of addressing such lacunae. It attends to the way the story is inscribed at the outset in 1738, and how it has traveled through the Canadian “cultural archive.”9 I am influenced in my analysis by the study of literary Sephardism and Marranism. Sephardism is the use of Sephardic/converso historical ­experience—and attendant themes of Otherness, passing, forced conversion, expulsion, and diasporic ­condition—as a literary or analytical device to think contemporary issues of nation and belonging for non-Sephardic populations and contexts. Marranism is the use of the Sephardic/converso experience “to promote a view of identity as syncretic and traceable only through stories.”10 6  The 1760 Treaty between the British and the Wendat currently governs the territory to which Brandeau arrived. It recognizes Wendat rights to traditional religious practice, movement, and commerce. It was not recognized by Canada until a 1984 Supreme Court ruling. See Gérald A.  Beaudoin, “Sioui Case” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, February 7, 2006, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sioui-case; R. V Sioui—The Attorney General of Quebec v. Régent Sioui, Conrad Sioui, Georges Sioui and Hugues Sioui, Supreme Court Judgements, 1 SCR 1025, 20628, 1990. 7  Heather Hermant, “Esther Brandeau / Jacques La Fargue: Performing a Reading of an Eighteenth Century Multicrosser” (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2017). 8   Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel, eds., Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Rachel Adams and Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Introduction: Canada and the Americas,” Comparative American Studies 3, no. 1 (2005): 5–13. 9  Edward Saïd, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994), xxiii, 59. 10  Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37, no. 2 (2012): 59–81, doi:10.1353/mel.2012.0031; Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Yael Halevi-Wise, ed., Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University

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What the study of literary Sephardism and Marranism points me to is the work the historical tale has been made to do. My project in what follows examines how in the Canadian context, an actual Sephardic/converso historical tale has been reiterated to particular ends. I argue that the Brandeau story has been of particular interest in Canada, in and beyond literary writing, in relation to sociopolitical struggles around national identity, belonging, and difference. Sometimes the story has been deployed metaphorically in relation to these struggles, sometimes it has been used to make particular arguments, and sometimes it has made an appearance coincident with particular moments of national struggle around these issues. In what follows I investigate how and why the story has circulated in Canada over the course of its emergence as a state. To the task, I bring a queer intersectional lens attentive to gender, religion, ethnicity, and the decolonial turn.11

Navigating Anachronism Deploying a queer intersectional lens forces a confrontation with the reality that we are speaking in the twenty-first century about life in the earlyto mid-eighteenth century. “Queer” and “intersectional” as ways of understanding subjecthood and identity are decidedly of our time. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to lay out the compelling contextual details of the eighteenth century that make clear the anachronism of working with the twenty-first-century analytical lenses identified earlier. I simply note an awareness of this anachronism, highlight some factors that made Brandeau/La Fargue’s adventures quite ordinary and possible; and make some comments to set up the chapter moving forward. In Brandeau/La Fargue’s time, migration was happening on a vast scale in France in the absence of a culture of documentation.12 Colonial Press, 2012); Dalia Kandiyoti, “Sephardism in Latina Literature,” in Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 235–55. 11  Queer, in my usage, should be understood not just as sexual minoritarian position but as anti-normative orientation, and as a relationship to temporality that troubles clear distinctions between past and present. See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) and Hermant, “Esther Brandeau / Jacques La Fargue,” 181–91. The decolonial here goes beyond decolonization as a process towards national independence, upon which I will elaborate in the closing section. 12  Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen Into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 46–48; David A. Bell, The

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economies offered avenues for transatlantic and inter-coastal European migrant labour. Sephardic/converso women fleeing from persecution in Iberia often travelled alone to Amsterdam, with or without children, sometimes following established family migration chains and often via the southwest French Jewish communities. This continued well into the eighteenth century.13 Gender passing could be construed as practically a tradition, when speaking of female to male crossing, and was often driven by economic necessity.14 We can also frame crypto-Judaic practice as constituting a longstanding “tradition” of passing. However, passings across gender and across religion are not necessarily “crypto” practices aimed at preserving some notion of an originary identity. What we do know is that few are the cases in the scholarly and historical record where gender crossing and religion crossing are simultaneous, and are taken up as such in analysis and representation. This makes the Brandeau/La Fargue case a valuable addition to the relevant scholarly literature. The few examples that we do have suggest that as religious contexts were passed through, identifications might be changed opportunistically; that some passers knew the repertoires of behaviour required to facilitate shifting religious identifications; and that religion could be a powerful mediating factor in the telling (or not telling) of a crossing tale. Finally, the paucity of cases of concurrent crossings does not mean that co-deployed crossings were themselves rare; frames of recording and of reading can considerably circumscribe a (multi)crossing life.15

Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7. 13  Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare Among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), 53–55. 14  Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Sylvie Steinberg, La Confusion des sexes: Le travestissement de la renaissance à la révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 183, 197; Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1989), 15. 15  See the case of Eleno/a De Céspedes, who is presented as crossing between female and male, Muslim and Christian, Black and white, in Israel Burshatin, “Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, eds. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 420–56, but who is merely a gender crosser, in Vern L.  Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 94–96.

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The Documentary Evidence: An Overview The story of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue is first recorded in a third-person voice collation of testimony written by the controller to the French colonial intendant of New France, Gilles Hocquart.16 Its three short handwritten pages read as follows: Today, September 15th, 1738, here before us, Marine Commissariat, in charge of the Navy Police at Quebec City appeared Esther Brandeau, aged about twenty years old, and who boarded at La Rochelle as a passenger in boys’ clothes under the name Jacques La Fargue on the ship St. Michel captained by the Sieur Salaberry, and who has declared to us to be named Esther Brandeau, daughter of David Brandeau, Jew by nation, merchant at St-Esprit, diocese of Daxe near Bayonne, and that she is Jewish by religion, and that it was five years ago that her father and mother boarded her at said location on a Dutch ship, captain Geoffroy, to send her to Amsterdam to one of her aunts and her brother, that the ship, having been lost on the sandbar of Bayonne in the moon of April or May, 1733, and that thankfully she was saved to land with one of the members of the crew, that she was pulled out by a widow residing in Biarritz, that fifteen days later she left for Bordeaux dressed as a man, where she embarked as a cook under the name Pierre Mausiette, on a boat commanded by Captain Bernard, destined for Nantes, that she returned on the same ship to Bordeaux, where she embarked once again in the same capacity on a Spanish ship, Captain Antonio, who was leaving for Nantes, and upon arrival in Nantes, she deserted and went to Rennes, where she placed herself as a boy with a certain Augustin, a clothes tailor, where she stayed six months, that from Rennes she went to Clissoy17 where she entered into the service of the Recollets as a domestic and to do errands, that she stayed three months in this convent, from which she left without notice to go to St-Malo, where she found refuge18 with a baker named Servanne who resided near the big gate, where she stayed five months contributing some services to the said Servanne, that she then went to Vitré to seek work, there she put herself at the service of the Sieur de la Chapelle, the aforementioned a Captain in the regiment of the Queen’s Infantry, that she served from ten to eleven months as a lackey, that she left this situation because her health would not permit her to continue to look  ANF 1738a. My translation.  This is probably Clisson, east of Nantes. 18  Instead of “c’est trouvé azile chez une boulangère,” which means “found refuge,” one could also read “c’est trouvé agile” which means “found themselves to be agile,” meaning “capable.” Choquette chooses “found asylum.” Choquette, Frenchmen, 138. 16 17

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after the said Sieur de la Chapelle who was always sick. The said demoiselle Esther, returning to Nantes, was taken for a thief a league from Noisel, arrested by the local police and taken to the prisons of said Noisel from which she was released after twenty-four hours because they realized that they were mistaken. She then went to La Rochelle, where having taken the name Jacques La Fargue, she embarked as a passenger on the ship St-Michel, upon which declaration we asked the said Esther Brandeau to tell us what reason she had had to so disguise her sex for five years, upon which she told us that having been saved from the shipwreck that occurred at Bayonne, she fell into the home of Catherine Churiau as it is said above, that she made her eat pork and other meats, the use of which is forbidden among Jews, and she vowed at that time not to return to her father and her mother, to enjoy the same freedom as Christians. Thus we have compiled this record and the said Esther Brandeau signed with us in Quebec and on the said dates. Collated by Varin.

This earliest record is the means through which Brandeau becomes knowable to us and feeds subsequent correspondence between authorities in New France and in France. The last of these communications is dated 1740.19 Concurrent with the time period of Brandeau’s stay in New France, there exists brief reference in a personal letter from the former Mother Superior of the convent-hospital where Brandeau was housed in Québec City to a friend back in France.20 This letter may contradict the intendant who would later report to the minister of the colony that Brandeau was outed in some capacity en route to New France.21 The intendant would also write that Brandeau was of the disposition of converting to Christianity, and that her biggest concern was that one of her parents might arrive the

19  “Le président du conseil de marine à M. Hocquart. A bien fait de renvoyer en France la nommée Esther Brandeau [and other topics],” May 2, 1740, Lettres envoyées, Canada, Série B, Fonds des Colonies, Archives Nationales de France, f. 39. Available in microfiche at National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. Hereafter ANF 1740b. 20  Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, “Lettres de Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, Supérieure Des Hospitalières de L’Hotel-Dieu de Québec,” Nova Francia (1926): 234. Also cited in Peter N.  Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada: A Cultural History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 62. 21  “Lettre de Hocquart au ministre [multiple topics, including] […] arrivée d’Esther Brandeau, jeune juive déguisée en garcon: son hébergement à l’Hôpital Général de Québec, sa bonne conduite, etc.,” October 26, 1738, Correspondence générale, Canada, Série C11A, Fonds des Colonies, Archives Nationales de France, ff. 124–26. Available in digital scan online at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca Hereafter ANF 1738b.

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following year.22 This was not mentioned in the record of testimony, though perhaps it was stated in a subsequent interrogation, which the intendant refers to in his correspondence, but which is unavailable to us.23 Intendant Hocquart says that Brandeau was outed as female on the ship where she was a passenger. However Duplessis, the mother superior mentioned earlier, writes that Brandeau arrived as a sailor, and had been suspected on the ship of being female but that she had refused to admit it, and that later she told the intendant that she was female.24 Duplessis’s letter also adds information not stated in the record of interrogation, nor in the correspondence between officials; she writes that Brandeau claimed that she had left her parents because she was not as well liked as her sister. This in turn contradicts the story given in the record of interrogation regarding whose choice it was that determined her departure from Bayonne. The testimony states that she was sent “by her parents” to Amsterdam, while Duplessis’ account suggests she left on her own initiative. Duplessis’ letter is the only source outside of documentation produced by bureaucrats, and the only account by a woman. Additional bits and pieces of the story are to be found within the colonial correspondence between the intendant and officials in France, but Duplessis’ letter in concert with Hocquart’s points to multiple versions of the story. In the days after this procès-verbal is recorded, the intendant writes a letter recounting Brandeau’s arrival on September 13, her transfer to the Québec General Hospital (the convent-hospital noted earlier), the promise of her conversion, and her purported fears of a parent’s potential arrival.25 The letter ends with a request for advice on whether he should permit her to return to France, whether or not she converts to Christianity (and, presumably, whether or not a parent arrives to fetch her). In reporting to the king on his information-gathering, the intendant also notes what he turns up through correspondence with an official in Brandeau’s hometown of Bayonne. This official speculates that Brandeau “may be the bastard daughter of David Brandon Jew of Bayonne who said […] that he  Ibid.  “Lettre de Hocquart au ministre [multiple topics, including]…détails concernant la jeune juive Esther Brandeau: sa légèreté, décision prise de la renvoyer en France, etc.,” September 27, 1739, Correspondence générale, Canada, Série C11A, Fonds des Colonies, Archives Nationales de France, ff. 134–36. Available in digital scan online at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca Hereafter 1739a. 24  Duplessis, Lettres. 25  ANF 1738b. 22 23

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also had eight other children living with him and that his other children died.”26 Hocquart recounts that her behaviour is flighty, that she is fickle and that as a consequence, “she could not adapt herself to any place neither at the Hospital nor at several other particular houses where I had placed her,” so much so that he reports that the concierge of the prisons had ultimately taken over the matter, though it is not clear whether Brandeau was actually housed in the prison proper. The intendant reports that while Brandeau’s conduct was not entirely bad, her attitude towards receiving religious instruction swung between engagement and resistance and it seems that because of this—that she did not seem willing to convert—he concludes that he has “no other choice but to send her back.” He arranges in correspondence with the king to place her on a ship to La Rochelle, once the king approves the ship owner’s request to be reimbursed for the cost of her passage by being indemnified of the requirement of transporting two indentured servants to New France on the ship’s next voyage. The procès-verbal and the correspondence among officials in New France and France will form the basis for retellings of the tale into the present day, and some retellings themselves in turn become the principal source material for subsequent iterations.

Co-inscribing of Gender and Jewishness in a 1738 Procès-Verbal Accounts of this story over time have almost exclusively assumed the stability of the female identity, and subsumed the male within it as a temporary mask. The original document refers to the questionee as female throughout. The “he” is presented as an act of mimicry: “dressed as a man,” “in boys’ clothes.” “She” is stable(d). Jewish difference, however, is convertible within that stable(d) “she.” How is Jewishness named? First, Brandeau’s father is identified as “Jewish by nation,” while she is named as “Jewish by religion.” This can be understood in several ways. The community from which Brandeau/La Fargue journeyed, Saint-Esprit, sits across the river from Bayonne, and was populated by exiles from Iberia from the 1500s onwards. The community was broadly known as les Portugais, or “Portuguese by nation,” and as la nation by the community

 ANF 1739a.

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itself in the sense of what we might term now an ethnic group.27 As of 1723, approximately five years after Brandeau’s birth, Jews were officially recognized as Jews in France by a lettre patente of King Louis XV.  In Brandeau’s time, the community of Saint-Esprit maintained a veneer of Catholicism but upheld Jewish practice along an uneven gradient; Graizbord shows that the process of re-Judaization of New Christians who arrived in Southwest France was “contingent, rather mundane, and anchored in the sense of kinship that the members of the group in question felt toward their fellows.”28 Jewish visitors to the French communities from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries noted the lack of religious knowledge and discipline among these Jews, including in Bayonne.29 In Saint-Esprit in Brandeau’s time, Jews and Christians lived alongside each other, but Jews were not permitted to do business, own property, or live in Bayonne proper, and were relegated to wholesale trade alone. In the record of interrogation, the naming of David Brandeau as a merchant and “Jewish by nation” may simply be a reflection of an understanding of Jews as of this particular diaspora. But why a naming of her as “Jewish by religion?” This may be intended to mean the same thing as “Jewish by nation.” But there may also be a particular strategy here, particularly given the failed efforts that were made to convert her to Christianity and the intendant’s query regarding whether to permit her to leave, whether or not she converted. If the difference is one of religion only, and this religion is convertible, and there is a shortage of women in the colony, then there may be motivation for underscoring Jewish difference as convertible religious difference. Intendant Hocquart writes to the minister, after Brandeau has been placed in the convent: “The chaplain of the hospital boasts of a future conversion.”30 This would make clear the importance of gender to this figuration of Jewishness; Jewish difference is 27  Gérard Nahon, “The Portuguese Nation of Saint-Esprit-Les-Bayonne: The American Dimension,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 255–67. 28  David 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, 148. 29  Graizbord, “Becoming Jewish,” 153; Gérard Nahon, Les Nations juives portugaises du Sud-Ouest de la France (1684–1791) (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Centro Cultural Português, 1981). 30  ANF 1738b, 126.

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convertible in the case of a so-called biological woman at a time when non-Catholics are barred from French colonies. What do we know about representations of Jews in France at the time? Ronald Schechter shows how French writers, politicians, administrators, and intellectuals over the century showed a veritable obsession with Jewish difference, despite Jews accounting for less than 0.2% of the overall population.31 Jewish difference was perceived and represented as an internal, moral, and intellectual corruption, viewed and expressed in terms we might anachronistically understand as racializing but which were cast through an understanding of changeability. Schechter draws a linkage between characteristics that were attached to women and those that were attached to Jews. He writes, “What was apparently best known about both ‘others’ was that they were unknowable.”32 They “contained the paradox of strangeness and familiarity.”33 Of the Jews in particular he writes, “their strangeness, their inscrutability, was among the features that made them so eminently recognizable.”34 He also notes that “the perceived characteristics of women appear in the feminization of Jewish men.”35 Importantly, Schechter notes that Jewish women do not factor at all in the representations he studies. Though Schechter writes that a pronounced preoccupation with “the Jewess” will not appear until the nineteenth century, and that the feminization of the Jewish male will not emerge until late in the eighteenth century, many of these characterizations appear in the original archival records pertaining to Brandeau/La Fargue. Colonial officials call her “flighty,” “obstinate,” “indecisive.” Given Schechter’s delineation of classic tropes of the Jew at the time, the way colonial authorities read Brandeau may represent an intersection or concurrence of tropes of the Jew with tropes of femininity. While at first glance, one might interpret the officials’ interpretations as driven by common perceptions of women more generally, given Schechter’s work, these representations can be seen as an instance in which Jewishness and gender are co-inscribed. 31  Ronald Schechter, “The Jewish Question in Eighteenth-Century France,” EighteenthCentury Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 84–91, doi:10.1353/ecs.1998.0064; Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 32  Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 239. 33  Ibid., 245. 34  Ibid., 8. 35  Ibid., 16.

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A Genealogy of Eruptions In the second half of the paper that follows, I will map some travels of the Brandeau/La Fargue story through the Canadian cultural archive.36 I will identify clusters of time in which the story appears and relate these to key concurrent developments in the consolidation of Canada as a state. I propose that a gender-attentive decolonial analytical orientation might entail reading the story’s circulation through this proposed coincidence, even as these eruptions of the story do not necessarily make explicit mention of a thematic relationship between contemporary sociopolitical developments and the attention given to the story. I suggest that we might characterize the eruptions of the story in each period as instances of “emergence,” “invitation,” “positioning,” and/or “editorializing,” and that the timing of the eruptions of the story reveals the work it has done over time in relation to preoccupations around nation and belonging in Canada.

The Emerging Nation I have found no official or public reference to the Brandeau/La Fargue story from the time of the last official correspondences pertaining to Brandeau’s fate, dating from 1740, for another 146  years.37 Against a backdrop of an emerging nation, Brandeau/La Fargue first appears again in 1886 when the story is included in a report in English by the newly appointed first state archivist of the Dominion of Canada, Douglas Brymner, on his study of colonial archives pertaining to Canada. Brymner worked on English language sources, and assistant archivist Joseph Marmette worked on holdings in Paris. In the report, Marmette singles out what he sees as remarkable stories of the early colonial period, and highlights Brandeau’s as one among these.38 Thus is Brandeau part of a 36  Edward Saïd argues that “the intellectual and aesthetic investment in overseas dominion” is made in “the great cultural archive.” Saïd, Culture and Imperialism, xxi. In addition to my own collection of materials, I draw on the Esther Brandeau dossiers at the Jewish Library, Montreal and the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives, Montreal (formerly known as the Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives, or CJC Archives when I was researching there). All print press clippings cited herein were found in these dossiers. This genealogy is not exhaustive. 37  ANF 1740b. 38  Douglas Brymner, Report on Canadian Archives, 1886, Being an Appendix to Report of the Minister of Agriculture (Ottawa: Maclean, Roger & Co., 1887), xxxi–xxxv, https:// archive.org/details/reportoncanadian1886publuoft.

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national effort to gather an official history (or rather, French and English imperial histories) of the new Dominion of Canada. The years of consolidating the Dominion in the late 1800s entailed disenfranchisement and resistance to determinations of who belonged in Canada and how. With Jews having been granted full rights with the Emancipation Act of 1832 and having elected a Member of Parliament in 1872, voting exclusions were now being directed against Indigenous and Asian populations.39 One more reference to the Brandeau story appears in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. In 1891, historian, archivist, and journalist Édouard Zotique Massicotte publishes an article in a Montreal weekly and in an historical journal.40 He simply transcribes the testimony. Massicotte’s publication is a step in moving beyond documents meant for bureaucrats to a francophone scholarly and general readership. I characterize this period in the Brandeau story’s first reappearance as “emergence,” the rediscovery of the story, coincident with a period of active consolidation of Canada as an exclusionary settler state. We do not see the story again until the 1920s.

Community History Within the Nation In 1924, a short article appears in Montreal’s main French language newspaper, La Presse, which reiterates the contents of the colonial archives in reference to Brandeau.41 In a 1926 English language publication entitled The Jew in Canada, by and for the Canadian Jewish community, the Brandeau story follows a recounting of earlier stories of purported 39  Prior to Dominion, Trois-Rivières Jewish merchant Ezekiel Hart thrice ran, twice was elected by a French Catholic population and twice was barred from taking his seat in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, a case in which his Jewishness was used as a means for francophone Assembly members to exclude a British sympathizer. Hart’s case “had sown the seeds for justice and equality,” leading to the 1831–32 Jewish Emancipation Act. See Denis Vaugeois, The First Jews in North America: The Extraordinary Story of the Hart Family, 1760–1860, trans. Käthe Roth (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012), 139. Vaugeois’ title is odd, since it is obvious that the Harts were not the first Jews on the continent. The choice may refer to the older Jewish history in which the author situates the Hart story, or to a kind of honorific bestowed on the family by contemporaries and/or extended by the author. I was not able to ascertain a more definitive explanation. 40  Édouard Zotique Massicotte, “Les Frasques d’Esther Brandeau,” Le Monde Illustré, May 30, 1891; and “La travestie sous le régime français,” Bulletin des recherches historiques 33, no. 1 (January 1930): 60–61. Also cited in Nathalie Ducharme, “Fortune critique d’Esther Brandeau, une aventurière en Nouvelle-France,” paper presented at the Congrès de l’ACFAS, Montreal, May 14, 2004), 3–4, http://er.uqam.ca/nobel/alaq/publications/pdf/DUCHARME_ Article_Brandeau_Nouvelle-France_Alaq.pdf. 41  “L’arrivée à Québec d’une juive déguisée en garçon,” La Presse, February 6, 1924.

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­ arranos who came to New France.42 Benjamin Sack, an amateur histom rian who will later publish the first history of Canadian Jewry, writes a historical introduction to the book.43 In Sack’s work, Richard Menkis detects “the intellectual steeplechase to prove longevity in the land,” an adherence to a trope of earliest presence common to minority historiographies; in this case, the “myth of profound Jewish roots in FrenchCanadian society.”44 Sack refers to “the tremendous role Jews have played” in French interests in the New World, and positions Jews at the earliest moments of colonization, asserting that his examples “establish beyond dispute that descendants of the Marranos, who had cast off their ancient Jewish heritage, were to be found in Canada.”45 That marranos are claimed as Jews in this argument, and that Brandeau herself may well have been conversa—we don’t know for sure—underscores the ambivalence of perception of who is Jewish, by Jews and non-Jews, across eras and between legislative decree and actual practice. In Sack’s rendering, Brandeau becomes another figure to bolster the early Jewish presence claim. Menkis characterizes Sack as an “integrationist apologetic” who was “one of the few to attempt to bridge the isolation between Jewish and non-Jewish Québécois.”46 In 1930, Pierre George Roy summarizes the Brandeau story in his history of Québec City under the Ancien Régime, citing Marmette’s contribution to the Brymner report of 1886.47 Here again the story appears within efforts to consolidate a French imperial history of the city to which Brandeau/La Fargue arrived. There is no underscoring of early Jewish presence here from a non-Jewish historian for a non-Jewish readership. 42  Arthur Daniel Hart, ed., The Jew in Canada: A Complete Record of Canadian Jewry From the Days of the French Régime to the Present Time (Toronto and Montreal: Jewish Publications Limited, 1926), v. 43  Sack, “History of the Jews in Canada.” Sack had planned a comprehensive study but was able to complete only the first volume. See Tulchinsky, Taking Root, viii–x, xiii. 44  Richard Menkis, “Historiography, Myth, and Group Relations: Jewish and Non-Jewish Quebecois on Jews and New France,” Canadian Ethnic Studies = Études Ethniques au Canada 23, no. 2 (1991): 28. 45  Sack, “History of the Jews in Canada,” 3. 46  Menkis, “Historiography, Myth,” 28–29. 47  Pierre Georges Roy, La Ville de Québec sous le régime français (Québec: Redempti Paradis, 1930), 147–48.

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In 1938, teacher, translator, and poet Isidore Goldstick publishes a piece in Yiddish in the New York City Jewish newspaper Der Tog, a piece which would subsequently be published in English in Canada in the 1940s, as “Hobo Girl or Adventuress: The Strange Story of Esther Brandeau, the First Jewish Arrival in Canada.”48 Goldstick had acquired a photostat of the original procès-verbal from the National Archives in Paris, and reproduces it in the article.49 He characterizes Brandeau as “a quaint combination of hobo and adventuress, renegade and Jewess” who “despite her lapses from her faith, rejected apostasy as the price of enjoying ‘the same liberty as the Christians.’”50 Unlike historian of Canadian Jewry Gerald Tulchinsky, who later posits the Brandeau story as “probably apocryphal,” Goldstick writes that “there is no reason for doubting her story.”51 Notably, Goldstick explicitly interprets the record. For instance, he proposes that Brandeau was driven by boredom, that “she craved a more complete break with her past life,” and that “[h]er restless, roving spirit kept driving her on.”52 Goldstick notes an incongruity between Brandeau’s passing as a Christian and her subsequent refusal to convert to Christianity in Québec. He concludes that the perplexing, incongruous conduct made perfect sense: “The martyrdom of her ancestors would live in her memory not as a tale of bygone days, but as something near and intimate.”53 In fact, he posits that her so-called disguise was “an atavistic manifestation—a reversion to her ancestors’ tradition, a flare-up of the Marrano in her.”54 Thus, he explicitly suggests that the entwined pass from Jewish to Christian was not so much a rejection of Jewishness in favour of the free life of a Christian as an expression of “allegiance to Jewishness” through the 48  Isidore Goldstick, “Esther Brandeau: Hobo-Girl or Adventuress? The Strange Story of Esther Brandeau, the First Jewish Arrival in Canada” [n.d.], Jewish Observer, 1943; Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 1945; “[Yiddish Version of ‘Esther Brandeau: Hobo-Girl or Adventuress?’],” Der Tog, August 20, 1938. The date of the English publication is unclear. The Montreal Jewish Library contains a copy upon which is handwritten “Jewish Observer, Vol. 2. No. 2, 1943.” The Canadian Jewish Congress Archives’ copy is not dated. The Goldstick family Fonds, Ottawa Jewish Archives, date publication to 1945 in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle. 49  Goldstick, “Esther Brandeau,” 12. 50  Ibid., 10–11. 51  Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 14; Goldstick, “Esther Brandeau,” 10–11. As do I, Goldstick highlights the distinction between Brandeau’s father being named “Jewish by nation” while she is named “Jewish by religion.” The highlight may have been the editor’s. 52  Goldstick, “Esther Brandeau,” 11. 53  Ibid. 54  Ibid.

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­ erformance of crypto-Judaism. Thus, Goldstick explicitly speculates visp à-vis the story, initially for a Yiddish-speaking audience and later for an English-­speaking Jewish readership. We will note that the focus is on the pass from Jewish to Christian, not on the pass from male to female. In 1926, Canada and other dominions of the British Empire are officially declared independent and equal in status, joined in allegiance to the British Crown. Domestically Canada is engaged in a continued struggle around whom it will allow to vote. Now, gender, ethnicity, and military contribution play key roles in these determinations. Internationally, Canada works to assert its autonomy. In the global context of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the timing of Goldstick’s theme of clinging to Jewishness, and Sack’s claims of longstanding Jewish presence in Canada are striking.

The Bill of Rights, Québec Separatism and the Canadian Jewish Bicentenary A small burst of attention is given to the story between 1959 and 1963, in Jewish newspapers, as we will see. In 1968, Québec historian Denis Vaugeois publishes Les Juifs et la Nouvelle-France.55 These dates are significant. Tulchinsky claims 1768 as the beginning of Jewish communal life in Canada with the founding of the first synagogue in Montreal, a Sephardic synagogue.56 The publication of Vaugeois’ book then falls on the 200th anniversary. But 1759 was also marked as a foundational moment of Canadian Jewry, when Jews arrived with the British army openly Jewish—the first time Jews could be so in the colony. France would lose New France to the British in 1759, officially ceding the territory in 1763. Thus, 1959 was marked as the “Bicentenary of Canadian Jewry” in some English and French language Jewish publications.57 These differences in foundational dates can be read as politically inflected, if one appreciates the difficulty in the francophone Québec context of tying an ethnic minority anniversary to the British conquest in 1759. Vaugeois’ book on the history of Jews in Québec arrives, then, at a less contentious 55  Denis Vaugeois, Les Juifs et la Nouvelle-France (Trois-Rivières: Les Éditions Boréal Express, 1968). 56  Tulchinsky, Taking Root, xviii. 57  “Jacques La Fargue Alias Esther Brandeau: First Jewish Woman in Canada,” The Flash, March 5, 1960.

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200th anniversary, even as he dates the first Jewish presence to the wake of the conquest. Here we get a sense of the politics of Jewish belonging and of telling this tale particularly in Québec. The year 1959 was not only considered by many to mark the bicentennial of Judaism in Canada; it also coincides with the introduction of the Bill of Rights. Adopted in 1960, it marks the first federal legal enshrining of protections of human rights and freedoms in Canada, the precursor to the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined in the Canadian constitution in 1982. The Bill of Rights was introduced to protect rights to equality and protection before the law; freedom of religion, speech, the press, and of assembly and association; and rights to counsel and fair hearing.58 Where we earlier saw social and political activities that aimed to bring about the Dominion of Canada in the late nineteenth century, and then we saw considerable back and forth on voting enfranchisement in the early part of the twentieth century, now we also see explicit talk of universal suffrage. Indigenous people are granted the right to vote, dismally late, in 1959. Non-Indigenous women had won the vote in 1918. In 1968, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women is established. Abortion laws are liberalized in 1969. English and French are recognized as Canada’s official languages also in 1969 and a federal policy of multiculturalism is introduced in 1971. Further, during the 1960s with the “Quiet Revolution,” Québec undergoes secularization and inscribes itself as a social democracy. During this period unrest begins over Québec’s special status as a francophone minority on the continent. In 1976, the sovereigntist provincial Parti Québécois is elected to power, reflecting a galvanization of support for independence. This period is also marked by an exodus of anglophone Jews from Montreal with the rise of orthodoxies around French language and culture. While iterations of the Brandeau story so far have been scribed by men, and those within the Jewish community have focused principally on the Jewish dimension, not the gender question, two women authors do tackle the story in this period of secularization and burgeoning women’s activism.

58  W. H. McConnell, “Canadian Bill of Rights,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, February 7, 2006, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-bill-of-rights.

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In 1959, Ruth Wisse’s “La première femme juive au Canada” appears in the francophone Bulletin du cercle Juif.59 Wisse is also likely the author of two almost identical iterations published in English in 1960 without attribution.60 Notably, Wisse’s story is positioned in the newspaper’s layout after a review of a popular novel of the day in which the emerging freedoms of secularization and sexual liberation are played out on the land and bodies of Inuit people in conflict with white settler society.61 In 1963, Betnesky, Gitelle Goldwater, also of Montreal, pitches a half-hour television adaptation to the national public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is subsequently rejected.62 The CBC only attends to the story in English in 2006, in a seven-minute radio short in English.63 Betnesky’s screenplay adapts original documents to dialogue. It opens with a somewhat improbable outing of Jacques La Fargue at a lively inn, witnessed coincidentally by the colonial intendant. A trial unfolds, featuring well-­ meaning bureaucrats and a fearful Esther, who begs to be allowed to stay. Wisse’s and Betnesky’s are attempts to, on the one hand, foreground the female Jewish story, and on the other, to mainstream the story via the national broadcaster. A more successful mainstreaming happens in 1969 when Esther Brandeau appears in the first volume of The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, a bilingual effort between the universities of Toronto and Laval, Québec.64 Author Gaston Tisdel recounts the information in the archival records, notes the trouble with verifying the only account available, contextualizes the story within the “Catholic orthodoxy” governing 59  Ruth R. Wisse, “La Premiere femme juive au Canada,” Bulletin Du Cercle Juif, October 1959, 4. 60  “Jacques La Fargue Alias Esther Brandeau,” Canadian Jewish Congress Bulletin, January 1959. The article is reprinted in The Flash, 1960. 61  Yves Thériault, Agaguk: Roman esquimau (Paris and Québec: Éditions Grasset, Institut Littéraire du Québec, 1958). 62  Gitelle Goldwater Betnesky, “Esther Brandeau: A Half-Hour Television Program, Adapted from ‘History of the Jew in Canada’ by B.J. Sack, Chapter 1, Page 6 to 9,” unpublished script, 1963–66, Brandeau dossier, CJC Archives, Montreal. 63  Bossé, Paul, “Esther Brandeau (7 min.),” Montreal, CBC Radio, 2007. Copy held in CJC Archives, Montreal. 64   Tisdel, Gaston, “Brandeau, Esther,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto:  University of Toronto and Université Laval, 1969), http://www.biographi.ca/ en/bio/brandeau_esther_2E.html. In 1960, Brandeau also appears in Joseph Rosenbloom, Biographical Dictionary of Early American Jews: Colonial Times through 1800 (Lexington: University Press Kentucky, 1960), 13, with several errors.

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New France at the time, and remarks upon the stir the episode caused among officials. He also claims Brandeau was hired as a ship’s boy on the vessel that brought Jacques La Fargue to Québec, though other interpreters have referred to Brandeau as a passenger.65 Tisdel claims Brandeau as the first Jewish person in Canada. We will recall that Wisse claims Brandeau as the first Jewish woman, while some later historians discount any claim to Brandeau’s firstness. Vaugeois most recently claims the Hart Family of Québec as the first Jews in New France and dates the beginnings of Jewish presence in Canada to 1760, dismissing Brandeau as “pitiful” and her 1738 arrival as hardly deserving of the claim of firstness “for serious scholars.”66 Tulchinsky doubts the very truth of the Brandeau story, calling it “probably apocryphal.”67 One might consider a gender dimension to Vaugeois’ dismissal and Tulchinsky’s doubt. We might think of many of the eruptions of the Brandeau/La Fargue story in the 1960s that I have identified earlier as examples of “positioning.” In three cases, Canadian Jewish authors recount the case, navigating the tensions inherent for Jews vis-à-vis the history of a French colony lost to the English, and the contemporary French context asserting itself in an anglophone continent. In the case of Brandeau’s entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, we might think of this newly inaugurated dictionary project as something akin to the appointment of a national archivist and the efforts that went into the Brymner Report in the 1880s: another stage in a national effort across languages to systematize a settler-­dominant history. Here we have a case simply of emergence, again: the historian’s commitment to collate and disseminate the contents of available records and to contextualize developments in the context of their time. At a time when rights and freedoms for ethnic minorities and for women are under intense discussion, one could say the Dictionary accomplishes something of the gesture that Betnesky attempted and failed at with the CBC, insofar as it entered the story into the mainstream through a national institution (as did the Brymner report in 1886).

 Tisdel, Dictionary, paragraph 3.  Vaugeois, The First Jews, 31. 67  Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 14. 65 66

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Emergence of Gender Attention and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms In the mid-1980s, articles appear again here and there, targeted to Jewish audiences and beyond. These iterations occur within a contemporary context of struggles and successes around gender rights; a failed federal attempt at integrating Québec demands into the Constitution; the creation of a federal Québec separatist party; repatriation of the Constitution from the British crown to Canada; and the enactment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which comes into effect in 1982. This signature of Canada as a progressive nation arrives 150 years after the Emancipation Act that entrenched equal rights for Jews.68 One of the first and most prominent Charter cases taken to the Supreme Court led to the legalization of abortion. It seems quite of the times that eruptions of the Brandeau/La Fargue story in the 1980s might, within themes of equality and freedom, particularly foreground gender equality in ways more explicit than Wisse’s and Betnesky’s renderings in 1959 and 1963. A 1983 article in The Globe and Mail draws attention to the publication of the first Canadian Jewish women’s “Who’s Who,” and notes the consistent absence of women from the pages of biographies published by the Canadian Jewish community. The article quotes the entry on Brandeau: “Clearly there are many hurdles yet to be overcome by Jewish women, both inside their own community and within Canadian society at large. In this difficult and challenging world Canadian Jewish women would do well to emulate Esther Brandeau. A little chutzpah couldn’t hurt.”69 This characterization departs from Wisse’s fearful and meek Esther and takes a step further from Goldstick’s characterization of Esther as a bored and bold adventuress. It leverages the story as a means to comment upon the role and representation of women within the Jewish community, and in Canada more broadly. So here we see the story being made to do work on the gender equality question, with less focus on the question of Jewish exclusion. The call for chutzpah comes a few years before a short article urging the making of a film about Brandeau, in which the author refers to Brandeau

68  The act was supported by elected francophone Catholics, because securing such rights for Jews meant gaining them also for Catholics under British Protestant rule. 69  “Listing Honors Jewish Women,” The Globe and Mail, December 19, 1983.

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as “Canada’s answer to Yentl.”70 There has indeed been mention of a potential film on another occasion; in 1983, a Canadian Jewish News article announces the making of a film about the story and the filmmakers’ ambitions of premiering it at Cannes Film Festival. I have found no trace of this film.71 When I corresponded with Naïm Kattan—purported scriptwriter of the film never made, celebrated Québec author and former head of the literature section of the Canada Council for the Arts—I learned that independent of the failed project, he had written a script in 1980 for the National Film Board of Canada.72 He said the project was deemed too expensive so was never made. Had the film been made, it would have introduced the story into the cultural landscape in a way not yet seen. It would have fulfilled, in a sense, Betnesky’s failed gesture when her TV treatment was rejected by the CBC in 1963. Kattan’s French language script was followed by a short fiction he published in a 1986 issue of Viewpoints, a bilingual newspaper of the Canadian Jewish Congress.73 Both merit detailed attention for how they treat Jewishness and gender in relation to the sociopolitical context. The film treatment presents a patient at a convent-hospital named Catherine who will not reveal her name. The victim of domestic violence, Catherine takes on the persona of Esther Brandeau when she comes across the story in the convent library’s archives, stealing its pages. She is also in possession of a journal written by Brandeau. No such journal exists in the archival record, but through it Kattan recuperates a first-person voice. The script blurs across eras so that we doubt the distinction between Catherine and Brandeau. Both Catherine and Esther are plagued by distrust and a desire to escape. Jewishness and a Jewish male elder helping Catherine to translate the journal become Catherine’s rescue from domestic violence on the one hand, and the restrictive environment of the convent/hospital on the other.

70  Thomas Schnurmacher, “Jewish History Book Will Tell of Our Answer to Yentl,” The Montreal Gazette, August 7, 1987. 71  Terry Brodie, “Immigrant’s Tale to Become Film,” The Canadian Jewish News, June 16, 1983, 21. 72  Naïm Kattan, “Esther Brandeau,” film script, National Film Board of Canada, Montreal, 1980; Email to author, November 6, 2013. Kattan was also editor of the journal in which Ruth Wisse’s Brandeau article appeared in 1959. 73  Naïm Kattan, “Mon Nom Est Esther,” Viewpoints: The Canadian Jewish Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1986): 2–4.

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Unlike the novels that have been based on the Brandeau story in more recent years, Kattan’s short story is delivered in the first-person voice. It engages complex questions of identity as the protagonist grapples with the experience not just of disguising herself as male, but of becoming male. His journeys around France become driven by a boredom that is subtly a boredom with masculinity and male worlds and yet a fascination with the female. Brandeau sets out to become male as a necessity, and eventually the female slips away. Previous eruptions of the story in the 1960s can be seen as principally about the Jewish experience. In his undertakings, Kattan centers Brandeau’s gendered experience as well, and pays attention to g ­ ender-­based violence. Even while his renderings are ultimately gender-­essentialist and, in the case of the film script, clichéd in the staging of a romantic possibility between a young woman and an older man, Jewish experience is taken as gendered. In this deployment of a tale of exile and expulsion, Jewishness becomes a route to escape not just the religious oppression of Catholicism and its hold on belonging, but a route to escape gender-based violence, as problematic as such an idealization of Jewishness might be.

Assimilation, Interculturality, and Rejection of the Colony In 2000, Pierre Lasry’s self-published, award-winning Esther: une juive en Nouvelle-France becomes the first of three novels based on the story.74 Esther: A Jewish Odyssey, the author’s English translation, comes out two years later.75 Deeply researched and rich in historically accurate detail, Lasry’s novel reads like a film treatment, not surprising since he has made a career in the film industry, principally at the National Film Board of Canada where the story had earlier been shelved. The novel traces the story from Iberian exile, going back generations. Lasry is alone in reverting to the Portuguese origins of the name Brandeau, using Brandão. Of the three novels published, his is steeped in the specificities of Sephardic/converso experience rather than a more generic Ashkenazic sensibility. The novel has received awards within Jewish circles but has not seen broad circulation. Two themes of interest are teshuvah, or return to 74  Pierre Lasry, Une Juive en Nouvelle-France (Montreal: Les Editions du CIDIHCA, 2000). 75  Pierre Lasry, Esther: A Jewish Odyssey (Montreal: Midbar Editions, 2002).

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Judaism and Jewish life, and the conflict around passing from Jewish to Christian. In Lasry’s rendering, teshuvah is entwined with rejection of the colony, which contrasts with iterations of the story that portray the New World as a place of opportunity more progressive than the Old World. Lasry seems to affirm the validity of Esther’s male experience through long passages using masculine pronouns without reminders of the ruse and of a core femininity. However, his Esther ultimately returns to France with the intention of marrying and returning to Jewish life. The return is to proper gender and Jewishness and to the so-called metropole, where this Jewish life is possible. I view Lasry’s novel as a counter-assimilationist text in which the assertion of Jewishness as difference coincides with his Esther’s departure from the colony, where to stay is to forfeit Jewishness. While the Old World dominant regime is also Christian, Jewishness is an option there. Contrary to this anti-assimilationist sensibility, anglophone children’s author Sharon McKay’s award-winning 2004 novel for young people, Esther, entwines gender equality with an interculturality that I see as assimilationist.76 Esther can be considered the major breakthrough of the story to a wide national anglophone readership in Canada. One might even say that McKay’s rendering has come to stand as the story, even as it is a work of historical fiction. The novel follows the record to stage Brandeau’s life from childhood in France through to Québec City and imagines into these details a very readable story about a girl seeking the freedoms of boys, and of Christians. McKay champions individual choice through girls’ rights and the merits of interculturality, at the expense of Esther’s possible masculinities and of access to Jewish community. Her Esther is made to live out a chosen Jewishness in isolation as a condition for accepting the colonial context. McKay tends to assimilate Sephardic/converso specificity into a “generic Jewishness” familiar perhaps to a mainstream non-Jewish North American audience. The freedom that McKay’s Esther embraces relies upon two heterosexual foundations: a humiliating failure at a romance with a studious Jewish boy in Bayonne prior to the ensuing adventure, and a subsequent encounter in which a non-Jewish male rescues the Jewish female and becomes the main accessory to her multicrossing success. So-called freedom is dictated by the dominant Christian, male, colonial world. In the  Sharon McKay, Esther (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2004).

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end, McKay’s Esther chooses the so-called New World over return to France, and ventures further forth in search of her rescuer. Esther’s departure/escape from Québec City is facilitated by the colonial intendant as he watches through a spy glass and does not intervene, softened by her mysterious allure—recall the trope of unknowability attached to Jewishness. In such a turn, McKay grants the intendant forgiveness as a collaborator, downplaying the violence of outing and attempted conversion; the New World bureaucrat becomes benevolent. Notably, unspeaking enslaved figures—African and Indigenous— appear briefly at a few critical moments in the novel. Bradford notes that the consequence of a struggle around representing the colonial reality in children’s literature is often production of an ambiguity about the colonial reality itself.77 For McKay, these figures serve to propel the narrative forward and underscore themes of freedom, equality, and interculturality before being displaced beyond the margins of the narrative. McKay’s use of the tale as a means of reflecting on themes of inclusion, exclusion, and difference here comes up against the realities of the Atlantic world and the pitfalls of an aim for “authentic” mapping of place and time in historical fiction as a genre. One could argue that a third-person voice telling confined to the era of the original story as is the norm for historical fiction, combined with voiceless African and Indigenous figures, disempowers, repeats violence even, despite producing an awareness of the colonial reality. Where Lasry and McKay make slavery and Indigenous colonization present, in Shelley Tepperman’s 2008 documentary claiming central Jewish presence in the construction of modern-day Québec City, neither slavery nor impacts of colonization of Indigenous peoples are addressed except through reference to “colonists” and through historian-interviewee Pierre Anctil noting a relationship between the early presence of Jews in the “New World” and the multiply decisive moment of 1492. The land to which the documentary claims longstanding and central Jewish presence becomes the story of the settlers who built there/here, not as already storied and peopled before settler arrival. This absence is of course not unique to this particular iteration of the Brandeau story.

77  Clare Bradford, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2007), 24.

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Tepperman’s documentary of the Jewish history of Québec City is entitled Les Juifs au Québec: une histoire à raconter.78 It is the first time we see Brandeau represented on screen. The documentary airs on Québec television in conjunction with Québec’s 400th anniversary. It covers Jewish contributions to social, political, and economic life since the initiation of the colony. Brandeau plays a secret narrational role, disguised as a contemporary young non-Jewish photographer who befriends an elderly Jewish antique store owner. Echoing Kattan’s screenplay, we have here again a male elder playing a key role. He claims to have been present at every significant event in Canadian Jewish history, and Canadian history for that matter, for hundreds of years. This fictional relationship is the yarn through which classic documentary tactics are woven—interviews, site visits, narration, visuals of documentary material. The documentary makes a case for a broad understanding of Jewishness. It seems to affirm the value of hybridity as no less a “Jewish” possibility, on a spectrum from total assimilation to orthodoxy. Interestingly, Esther’s gender crossing is almost entirely by-passed in the documentary. This is notable given how gender has played so centrally in the contentious reasonable accommodations debates in Québec in the early twenty-first century, in which expressions of minority religion and culture have been under the magnifying glass often pitted against sexual and gender liberation.79 These debates continue to this day and have been a key factor in several of the periods I have identified in which there are eruptions of the Brandeau story. Reasonable accommodations debates have included, for example, how and where Muslim women should be allowed to dress; whether Hasidic boys should be protected from seeing women in work-out wear; and whether Hasidic women should be given female examiners for driving tests. Tepperman’s documentary makes tongue-in-cheek reference to the reasonable accommodations debate 78  Shelley Tepperman, Les Juifs au Québec: Une histoire à raconter, video, 60 min (Montreal: Canal D and Productions Vélocité, 2008). 79  “Reasonable accommodation” ensures expression of rights and freedoms in the workplace. Bilge argues that gender and sexuality rights are pitted against religious rights as a xenophobic tool in such debates. When Jewish difference has factored in, it has sometimes indicated how religious orthodoxies have allied themselves against secularism, for example in cases centrally implicating gender. See Sirma Bilge, “Harvesting the Generous Crop of the Québécois Reasonable Accommodation Controversy,” in Global Perspectives on the Politics of Multiculturalism in the twenty-first Century: A Case Study Analysis, eds. Fethi Mansouri and Boulou Ebanda De B’béri (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2014), 65–89.

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when it was at its height; a provincial commission was called to deal with the conflict and released its report also in 2008.80 Tepperman re-stages the Jewish-to-Christian pass but does not re-stage the gender transgression, dissociating one pass from the other.

Feminist and Queer Immersions Amid the novels and the documentary, other explicitly feminist and queer appropriations of the story appear, some with explicitly educational intent for younger audiences as with McKay’s novel. Prominent in public discourse in this period from the late 1990s well into the current millennium are issues related to ethnicity and religion that characterized the reasonable accommodations debate, and the subsequent turn to culture as a nexus of racism post 9/11. In Canada, this period also saw a cascade of LGBT rights entrenchment, most recently in 2017 with the addition of gender identity or expression as protected in the Canadian Human Rights Act. In both Lasry’s and McKay’s renderings, the passing figure reverts to a core, originary gender and the presumed heterosexuality that comes with it, common at least in children’s literature featuring passing figures.81 A third novel entitled The Tale-Teller by Toronto poet and fiction writer Susan Glickman bypasses both the historical fiction genre and the trope of remarkable beauty so central to McKay’s rendering.82 Instead, Glickman’s Esther is remarkable for her strategic storytelling ability. Glickman believes that the procès-verbal is evidence of a storytelling tactic cleverly deployed as self-protection.83 In 2001, Brandeau appears in a children’s book called Canadian Girls Who Rocked the World, which features biographies of various figures over time, indicating the role of the story as a mentoring tool 80  Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future, a Time for Reconciliation: Report (Québec: Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accomodement reliées aux différences culturelles, 2008), http://www.deslibris.ca/ID/213926. 81  Victoria Flanagan, Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film (New York: Routledge, 2008). 82  Susan Glickman, The Tale-Teller: A Novel (Markham, Ontario: Cormorant Books, 2012), translated as Les aventures étranges et surprenantes d’Esther Brandeau: Roman (Montreal: Boréal, 2014). 83  Susan Glickman, “Old Interview about The Tale Teller with One of Natalee Caple’s Wonderful Students,” Susan Glickman (blog), March 8, 2016, http://www.susanglickman. com/2016/03/08/old-interview-about-the-tale-teller-with-one-of-natalee-caples-wonderfulstudents.

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for twenty-first-century girls.84 Likewise, in a 2008 graphic anthology for young people about famous women from history who passed as men, Brandeau is one among seven figures profiled.85 In national radio personality Bill Richardson’s entertaining non-­ fictional anthology Scorned and Beloved: Dead of Winter Meetings with Canadian Eccentrics, we find an early explicitly queer framing of Brandeau as Canada’s “foundational eccentric.”86 Richardson solves the mystery of Brandeau’s fate by delivering the protagonist into older age as a rabbi. He renders campy, comedic and hopeful the details from the historical records, writing for example: “I wonder if Esther might not have been teasing her tribunal with her ‘give me pork chops or give me death’ story […];” and “Hocquart and his cronies found her fickle and flighty, for sure, and finally they just gave up and packed her back across the Atlantic […] There is no record of what she wore as a going-away ensemble.”87 Contemporary art has also been a forum for circulation and reflection on the story. In 2003, Vancouver video artist Wendy Oberlander produces an installation called Translating Esther at a Jewish cultural institution in Toronto. This followed a small Purim celebration staging of the tale Oberlander created with Sarah Leavitt, in which the nuns are played by men in drag.88 Oberlander’s Purim play along with Richardson’s Brandeau anchor into specifically queer orientations. My own performance works anchor the story in a queer orientation as well, including a main-stage interdisciplinary theatre production entitled ribcage: this wide passage, performed in French as thorax: une cage en éclats;89 and a “one-to-one” performance entitled Aujourdhuy/This Day, 84  Tanya Lloyd Kyi, Canadian Girls Who Rocked the World (Toronto and Vancouver: Walrus Books, 2001). 85  Susan Hughes and Willow Dawson, No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure (Toronto and Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press, 2008). 86  Bill Richardson, Scorned & Beloved: Dead of Winter Meetings with Canadian Eccentrics (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1997). 87  Ibid., 23–24. 88  Wendy Oberlander, Translating Esther, Exhibition, Koffler Gallery, Toronto, March 20– May 4, 2003. On Translating Esther’s conceptual themes, see Betsy Warland, “World with Little Worlds: Catalogue Essay for ‘Translating Esther,’ Exhibition by Wendy Oberlander” (Toronto: The Koffler Gallery, 2003). The Purim play is noted in Nathalie Ducharme, “Fortune critique d’Esther Brandeau.” 89  Heather Hermant, ribcage: this wide passage, works-in-progress: PoetryProcessPerformance curated by Jill Battson, Drake Hotel, Toronto, March 6, 2007; Gibraltar Point International Artist Residency, Toronto Island, June 21, 2007; Tremors Festival, W2 Gallery, Vancouver,

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1738, first performed at Canada’s oldest LGBTQ theatre.90 Thorax and ribcage are more a semi-autobiographical meditation on the meaning of history, belonging and bearing witness than a staging of the tale per se. A loose through-line follows a poet and archivist as they enter and then become the story. The one-to-one performance stages the interrogation with one audience member at a time playing Gilles Hocquart, the colonial intendant. I play Brandeau/La Fargue. The information in the procès-­ verbal is delivered, translated to dialogue. Audience members encounter either a female or male presenting figure who slowly changes gender presentation. The work interrogates the archival record itself, while thwarting the assumption of the tantalizing ruse in stories of passing. The context of the staging of these works speaks to the queer orientation and way of reading that underpins them, even as neither ribcage/thorax nor Aujourdhuy are necessarily explicitly focused on nor argue for Brandeau/La Fargue as “queer” per se. Even as we do not know anything about the sexual or gender orientation of the historical figure themselves, and further knowing that the term “queer” as we know it is decidedly of our time, the queer positioning points to the connections between gender crossing, queer histories, and the place of Jewishness within colonial histories. Though the story features in one of the only Canadian LGBT histories that attends thoroughly to the time of New France, Brandeau physically enters the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives for the first time at a queer arts festival through a performance I created and co-direct/perform with Alvis Parsley, entitled queer slow dance with radical thought.91 Audience members withdraw items of import to LGBTTTIQ92 history from a library April 16–19, 2010; Mainstage theatre production dir. Diane Roberts, Montreal Arts Interculturels, Montreal, Québec, October 28–30, 2010, AKI Studio Theatre, Toronto, May 3–5, 2013 (including thorax: une cage en éclats, trans. Nadine Desrochers) and Firehall Arts Centre, Vancouver, March 3–8, 2015. 90  A one-to-one performance is a performance for one audience member at a time. See Heather Hermant, “Aujourdhuy, 15e Septembre 1738,” Rhubarb Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 519 Community Centre, Toronto, February 10–12, 2012. Subsequently renamed Aujourdhuy/This Day, 1738. 91  Hamish Copley, “Nuns, les Lesbiennes, and the Case of Esther Brandeau,” The Drummer’s Revenge, July 4, 2007, https://thedrummersrevenge.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/nuns-leslesbiennes-and-the-case-of-esther-brandeau/. Copley’s account contains errors, however. See Heather Hermant and Alvis Parsley, queer slow dance with radical thought: The CLGA Edition, CLGA unarchived, Rhubarb Festival, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Toronto, February 14–15, 2015. 92  Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Two-spirit, Intersex, Queer.

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catalogue. They receive a performer who takes them on a site-specific journey or slow dances with them while delivering verbatim the catalogue item. Excerpts from the archival records and their reiterations, and gesture drawn from ribcage and Aujourdhuy form the content of the Brandeau/ La Fargue catalogue item. Most of these aforementioned works move well beyond what I have called “emergence” and “invitation”—simply making known the story as it first circulated decades before—and beyond the juxtaposition effects of placing tellings of the story within, for instance, news publications dealing with specific subject matter in the public eye. The latter I called “positioning.” These more recent works represent poetic/artistic licence, something akin to editorializing, in which the tale itself serves as a vehicle for reflecting on broader questions of identity, belonging and rights to difference in Canada.

Reading the Multicrosser in an Age of Indigenous Resurgence and Homonationalism I have thus far identified clusters of eruption of Brandeau/La Fargue in the Canadian cultural archive. I argued that these clusters occur at key moments in the evolution of the Canadian nation. We moved from appearances of the story coinciding with establishment of the Dominion of Canada, restrictions to belonging in the emerging nation, the establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and more recently entrenchment of gender and sexuality rights. I characterize iterations of the story as instances of the story’s emergence, invitation, positioning, or editorializing. In his influential work Orientalism, Edward Saïd asks “whether there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer.”93 My analysis has been underpinned by an understanding that, indeed, the truth of any telling is entwined with the context and moment of its telling. I want to end by turning my attention to the current moment in Canada in relation to a decolonial turn in the academy. If this tale has often been deployed to think about belonging and nation, how does Indigenous reality factor in? The critical distinction to note here between decolonial scholarship and other approaches to analysing pre- and post-colonial ­contexts is  Edward W. Saïd, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 272.

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a recognition of how colonial dynamics outlive colonial occupation in postcolonial settler states like Canada. Decolonial practice confronts the circulation of colonialism by material, aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, and sociopolitical means and centers the resurgence of Indigenous peoples, which Simpson and Maldonado-Torres describe as a “flourishment” of cultural, spiritual, social, and political practices “from the inside” of Indigenous nations.94 Operations of gender and race in the colonial condition’s afterlife are critical nexes of analysis in the decolonial turn.95 In Canada, Indigenous resurgence becomes particularly prominent with the launch of the Idle No More movement in 2012, which has featured very visible grassroots political action around Indigenous sovereignty struggles. In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission wrapped up its investigation into state-sanctioned assimilation of Indigenous peoples through residential schools for Indigenous children, and in 2016, an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls was launched. How might reiterations of Brandeau/La Fargue moving forward, including in scholarly analysis, engage with this resurgence? I propose that we look to what I call the “queer disruptive potential” of the story in the complicated moment of the present. This moment includes an attendance in Jewish Canadian studies to the fraught ways in which Canadian Jews have aligned their stories of suffering with those of Indigenous peoples,96 which might encourage an inclination to read Brandeau primarily or exclusively as part and parcel of this history of shared suffering. From within queer scholarship Scott Lauria Morgensen has challenged the very aspiration of settler belonging in national contexts such as Canada and has advocated instead for an aspiration towards unsettling.97 Morgensen refers to the desire to belong on appropriated Indigenous land 94  Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (March 2007): 240–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548; Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2011), 16–17. 95  María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (October 2010): 742–59, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x. 96  David S.  Koffman, “Suffering & Sovereignty: Recent Canadian Jewish Interest in Indigenous Peoples and Issues,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes 25 (2017): 28–59. 97  Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 227.

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as a colonial desire. He advocates groundlessness as a tool for destabilizing a settler colonial imaginary, including the scholarly imaginary. Unsettling became, in fact, a prominent call from outside mainstream celebrations of Canada’s 150th birthday celebrations in July 2017. This prompts me to dwell on the claims to “earliest presence” argued in several iterations of the Brandeau/La Fargue story, and debates over the “firstness” of Esther Brandeau, argued by some, refuted by others. Even as the “earliest presence” argument, the “centrality” claim, and the “firstness” contentions have tended to be deployed within claims to Jewish belonging in the face of histories of exclusion, these are a part of a narrative of arrival and discovery. Arrival, discovery, and firstness are narratives anchored, in my estimation, in a colonial imaginary. If we look at the genealogy of eruptions of Brandeau/La Fargue that I have painted, the realities of the Atlantic world have been marginally present. Many foreground the religious conversion requirement for inclusion in the colony and emerging nation that saw the eventual eviction of Brandeau/La Fargue, and seek to highlight the conditionality of inclusion upon which the colony as precursor to nation was premised. Some then attempt to show the longstanding presence and contributions of Jews to that nation, despite efforts at exclusion. Others seek to affirm the value and centrality of interculturality to the project of the nation. More often than not, the fact that Brandeau/La Fargue’s movements and possibilities for accessing a male, Christian life were in large part enabled by colonial circuits— Atlantic and inter-coastal movement of goods and people—is not explicitly foregrounded. Rather, Jewish exclusion from New France has tended to be the central focus. From an Indigenous perspective, the nation itself, as it has been and continues to be is incompatible with resurgence, restitution, and reconciliation.98 Others still, like myself, have foregrounded the gender dimension and laid claim to Brandeau/La Fargue as, among other things, a “queer” story. Alongside Indigenous resurgence as a characteristic of our current historical moment is the entrenchment and slow globalization of LGBT rights. Lisa Duggan has identified this mainstreaming as “homonormativity,” where the homosexual is assimilated into the image of the heterosexual

98  Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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norm.99 As Smith, Morgensen, and Lugones have argued, settler colonialism is heteronormative, so resistance to it cannot be found in queer assimilation to heteronormative models of being in and of the nation. Further, homonormativity can align LGBT positionality with a nationalist anti-­ immigrant position that posits countries of origin of certain immigrants as backward and falling behind the progress represented by host nations with entrenched LGBT rights. Jasbir Puar calls this “homonationalism.”100 While theorized particularly through the U.S. and European contexts, in Canada, we saw it, for instance, in the discourse of the leadership race for the Conservative party in 2017, and we have seen it circulate in the reasonable accommodations debates. Thus, beyond the potential misunderstanding that to read Brandeau queerly is to assume their homosexuality, there is another danger in reading the Brandeau/La Fargue story for its queer resonances; a queer settler readerly position can simultaneously affirm queer rights to difference, while upholding settler colonialism and its subtle and explicit intention of removal and replacement of Indigenous peoples.101 Queers too can rally around the colonial conditions of the nation. Further, a queer stance can also be deployed in culturally racist, nationalist anti-immigrant arguments in places like Canada where LGBT rights have become entrenched.102 My proposal is that we instead place Brandeau within the colonial project while simultaneously recognizing the story’s details that suggest disruption. Leveraging the potential critical disruptive power of the tale can go beyond deployments of the tale that seek to reveal the gendered and racialized exclusionary processes of nation-building, towards contesting the very aspirations towards, and the terms of, contemporary national belonging that have been at the heart of interpretations and deployments of the Brandeau tale to date. The disruptive power of tale is in the multi99  Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 50. 100  Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 101  Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Queer Settler Colonialism in Canada and Israel: Articulating Two-Spirit and Palestinian Queer Critiques,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 2 (January 2012), 227, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648848. 102  Jin Haritaworn, “Women’s Rights, Gay Rights and Anti-Muslim Racism in Europe: Introduction,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, no. 1 (February 1, 2012): 73–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506811426384; Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

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crosser having been enabled by and evicted from the imperial terms of the encounter. It is in their arrival and being doubly outed. It is in the multicrosser’s resistance to total entrapment, their ultimate escape from the record, and perhaps in representations’ seeming failure to fully account for the multicrosser “as multicrosser” (most evident in iterations in which, for instance, the gender pass is subservient to or occluded by the pass from Jewish to Christian). Looking to an unsettled imaginary might enable us to better center the Wendat territory and its peoples in relation to the arrival and deportation of a would-be settler. Bridging a constellation of attentions can perhaps enable us to view colonial history from Sephardic perspectives in ways that make evident and unsettle the colonial dynamics still permeating a cultural archive always in the making.

CHAPTER 13

Judeo-Moroccan Traditions and the Age of European Expansionism in North Africa Yigal S. Nizri

In August 1578, at a high point of the Portuguese-Moroccan wars, King Dom Sebastian of Portugal (who reigned from 1557 to 1578) led a large army into Wadi al-Makhazin in the northwestern Moroccan interior, waging a “holy war” against the “infidels.” The ensuing “Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr” was a disaster for Portugal, a global power at the time.1 It had a great deal of significance for Moroccan history and memory as well. Mulay ‘Abd al-Malik, the Moroccan sultan, Mohammed al-Mutawakkil, his rival for the throne, the former Moroccan sultan and nephew of ‘Abd al-Malik, and Dom Sebastian all lost their lives on the battlefield. Hence, the event 1  al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr (“a grand castle” in Arabic; often called in European languages Alcazarquivir, Alcácer Quibir, Alcazar, Elksar) is a town located in northwest Morocco, 50 miles south of Tangier and approximately 20 miles from Larache on the Atlantic coast. The city, which dates back to the eighth century, became a refuge for Jewish and Muslim exiles from the Iberian Peninsula after June 1492. During the fifteenth century, Portugal had occupied and established several fortified outposts along the Moroccan coastline; among them were Ceuta (1415–1668), Tangier (1471–1661), Arzila (1471–1549), Ksar es-Seghir (1458–1550), Azamor (1513–1541), and Safi (1488–1541).

Y. S. Nizri University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_13

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became known popularly as the “Battle of the Three Kings,” also known as the “Battle of Wadi al-Makhazin,” in Muslim Maghribi sources.2 As a result, and quite unexpectedly, ‘Abd al-Malik’s brother, thirty-year-old Ahmad al-Mansur, became the ruling sultan on the battlefield, a Sa‘adi ruler who would bring Morocco to the forefront of world politics, diplomacy, and trade in the final quarter of the sixteenth century. As the young Portuguese king had no heirs, Portugal lost its political independence. In 1580, Philip II of Spain, a Spanish Habsburg monarch and son of a Portuguese princess, inherited the throne of Portugal and united both crowns under his command, a “unification” that lasted for 60 years. This battle had an impact on Jewish observers and references to it are found in Maghribi Hebrew chronicles from the period.3 Jews in Morocco at the time were not at the center of what could be seen as one of the most dramatic chapters in the early history of colonial expansions into North African lands. Had the Portuguese won the war, however, the Moroccan defeat would have had significant ramifications for the lives of local Jews, many of whom were bearers of the traumatic experiences of families that were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula only a few generations earlier.4 2  For a detailed analysis of the Iberian and Moroccan political climates that had led to the battle, see Mercedes García-Arenal, Ahmad al-Mansur: The Beginnings of Modern Morocco (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), 6–39. See also David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 48. On Sa‘adian Morocco (1554–1660) see Dahiru Yahya, Morocco in the Sixteenth Century: Problems and Patterns in African Foreign Policy (Essex: Longman House, 1981), and especially the chapter “The Reign of ‘Abd al-Malik and the Battle of al-Qaṣr alKabir, 1576–8,” 66–91. The study of sixteenth-century Morocco requires the larger context of the two dominant powers of the time, namely the Spanish Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks. For a useful “Mediterranean” framework of the peninsular expansions in North Africa, see Andrew Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century IberoAfrican Frontier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978). 3  Studies devoted specifically to the Jews of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr are rare. For a brief historical overview of Jewish life in Spanish Morocco, see Michel Abitbol, “Juifs ibériques, musulmans et chrétiens après l’expulsion: le cas nord-africain,” in Les Juifs d’Espagne: histoire d’une diaspora, 1492–1992, ed. Henry Méchoulan (Paris: Liana Levi, 1992), 519–22. See also Yoseph Bengio, “The Spanish-speaking Jews of Morocco,” in Jewish Communities in Spanish Morocco [Hebrew], ed. Elia Onne (Tel-Aviv: Beit Hatfutsot, 1983), n.p.; Yom Tov Assis, “The Jews of the Maghreb and Sepharad: A Case Study of Inter-Communal Cultural Relations through the Ages,” El Presente 2 (2008): 11–30; and David Corcos, “The Jews of Morocco from the Expulsion of Spain until the Middle of the 16th Century” [Hebrew], Sefunot 10 (1966): 55–111. 4  Less than two decades after Sephardic exiles had arrived in the Maghrib in 1492, they found themselves deeply affected by the Spanish Reconquista, now being “exported” overseas, to port cities of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

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Consequently, the Battle of the Three Kings was commemorated in the Moroccan Jewish calendar in the form of Purim katan (“minor Purim,” sometimes called “second Purim,” or “minor festival”) by generations to come. One of the basic Jewish rituals of remembrance, Purim, after which the special “minor Purim” was named, commemorates the story of the deliverance of the Jewish community in the ancient Persian empire (ruled by the Achaemenid dynasty in the fifth century BCE) from a political plot by Haman the Agagite. Vizier of Ahasuerus, King of Persia, identified as Xerxes the Great (519–465 BC), Haman sought to annihilate the Jews, as is told in the biblical Book of Esther (known in Hebrew as a scroll, Megillah). Purim is celebrated annually on the 14th and 15th of the Hebrew month of Adar as a result of a rabbinic taqqanah—legislative enactment not derived from a biblical commandment but instituted locally by the rabbis to be part of the Halakhah, the normative system of Jewish jurisprudence. “Minor Purims” were instituted in many Jewish communities to commemorate deliverance from danger or reversal or abrogation of a threat posed by a hostile government. In many instances, such events were written into a special scroll meant to be read annually in the synagogue. Such texts became in and of themselves objects of historical and scholarly interest. These calendrical interventions “were always local in character or, at most, they were observed over a certain geographic area, for all of them the original Purim served as a paradigm, and the new events were interpreted accordingly.”5 In short, the second or minor Purim serves two 5  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1982), 47. For halakhic legitimization of instituting a minor Purim in North African rabbinic literature, see Question #49 in Moses ben Isaac Alashkar (1466–1542), Shut Maharam Alshakar (Jerusalem, 1958), 183–86. A question sent from people of Lepanto (Spanish name of Naupactus, in west Greece) to Rabbi Alashkar who was staying in a nearby city, Patras, reveals hesitations as to the level of implementation of local Purim custom. According to local rabbis, this special day, which was ordained in the city of Lepanto, ought to travel with the city’s Jews to other cities as well. In other words, locality was not a geographical concept but a communal one, as local traditions were perceived to be obligatory not only on a local basis but to some extant were also binding elsewhere. See also Question #686b in Amram Aburabia’ (1892–1966), Shut Netivei Am, vol. 1. (Petah Tikva: published by the author’s family, 1964), 278. Alashkar’s words resonated with Rabbi Yosef Mashash (1892–1974). See “An Author’s Introduction” to the section “The Story of Purim of Mejaz,” in Yosef Mashash, Ner Mitzvah (Fez: Mas’uod Sharvit & ‘Emram Hazan, 1939), 59–67. Named after the Moroccan political dissident by the name of al-Jilali b. Mustafa, known as al-Majaz (the lazy), Purim del Mejaz, was yet another minor Purim in which the

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i­nterdependent “historical pulses,” as it were, the mythical and the historical, and the transregional and the local, which in the context of my discussion here can also be translated into Jewish and Maghribi histories, or “Judeo-Moroccan.” Moroccan and other episodes of “minor Purim” raise several questions. What are the halakhic parameters which governed and defined the possible interaction between political events, often considered “external” to what has been canonized and authorized by the rabbis as “intrinsically Jewish,” and forms of ritual, law, and bodily practices in post-medieval Jewish contexts? What were the specific ways in which certain Jewish individuals or communities understood, historicized, ritualized, vernacularized, and ultimately “scripturized” such events? Further, did such ritualization consolidate or weaken existing Jewish conceptions of history? Did such ritualization facilitate or impede change in the attitude toward the governing (non-Jewish) power? Can these new commemorations be viewed merely as a “reaction” to external threat, or rather as a practice that has more to do with dynamics that have been characterized, shaped, and codified within Jewish tradition itself? In recent decades, much scholarly attention has been given to these questions in various contexts. In the historiography of Maghribi Jewish history, such questions remain remarkably understudied. In the following pages, these questions will guide my discussion of Moroccan Jewish forms of memory.

From Divrei ha-Yamim to Special Days Rabbi Shemuel ben Sa‘adia Ibn Danan of Fez III (d. 1622), whose epithet “the Third” attests to the centrality of genealogy in the transmission of historical and jurisprudential knowledge and authority in the early modern Jewish Maghrib, wrote a summary of the events of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr from what can be seen as a Jewish perspective.6 His entry was later subsumed into the Jews of Meknes indicated the 16th of Adar a day of deliverance from al-Majaz’s failed rebellion in 1862. 6  Shemuel ben Sa‘adia (RaSHBaD) was a notable rabbinic figure of the Jewish community of Fez in the second half of the seventeenth century. His name appeared on more than 40 social, legal, and communal taqqanot, which formed the basic foundation of autonomous Jewish life in the post-expulsion generations. For an overall review and appraisal of his work, theology, and exegesis based on the little of what remained of his corpus, see Yisrael Maimaran, “Prakim behaguto shel Rabbi Shemuel ibn Danan,” in Mishpaḥat Ibn Danan: Elef Shenot Hisṭoryah, ed. Me’ir Abitbol (Jerusalem: Mekhon Bene Yiśakhar, Or ha-Ma‘arav,

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work Divrei ha-Yamim, a Hebrew and Arabic chronicle (written in Hebrew characters) of Jewish Fez complied over the course of three centuries by scholar-rabbis of the Ibn Danan family.7 This kind of historical writing was referred to by its authors using the Arabic word al-Tawarikh (histories or chronicles).8 The dual role of the Ibn Danans as both chroniclers and rabbis invites us to consider several interrelated questions: what is the affinity between the genre of historical writing, halakhic knowledge, and, ultimately, practice? Moreover, from the perspective of halakhic grammar, what constitutes an “event”? Finally, how does a “new” event enter the Jewish calendar and how does such inclusion affect our knowledge of local traditions? More broadly, these questions are pertinent to the ways in which halakhic traditions work.9 The event of 1578 was recorded in the Ibn Danan chronicle among various entries dealing with calamities and misfortunes that befell the Jewish community, such as acts of violence, exactions, epidemics, droughts, and famines.10 Susan Gilson Miller, who has shown how valuable this chronicle

2008), 175–248. See the introduction of the new edition of Sefer ha-Taqqanot (The book of communal ordinances), in Shalom Bar-Asher, ed., Sefer ha-Taqqanot: Yehude Sefarad vePortugal be-Maroqo (Jerusalem: Academon, 1990), 1–41. 7  One of the most notable Jewish families in Fez, the Ibn Danans hold historical records that date to at least the fourteenth century. Their chronicle covers events from 1438 to 1724. See Nahum Slouschz, “The History of Fez and its Writers, the Ibn Danan Family” [Hebrew], in Sura: Sefer Shana Yisraeli-Amerikai, ed. Samuel K.  Mirsky (New York and Jerusalem: Yeshiva University and Sura Institute, 1957–58), 165–91. 8  Meir Benayahu, Divrei ha-Yamim shel Fes: Gezirot u-Meoraot Yehudei Maroqo kefi Sherashmum Benei Mishpaḥat Ibn Danan le-Doroteihem [History of Fez: Misfortunes and Events of Moroccan Jewry as Recorded by the Ibn Danan Family and Descendants] (TelAviv: Hamakhon leḥaqer hatefutzot, [5]753/1993), 13. The comparative study of the historiographical similarities between the Hebrew Divrei ha-Yamim and the Arabic Tārı̄kh is rare. A recent study of the tensions between Islamic historiography and Iberian historiography (in the context of the Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean region in the sixteenth century) may offer an insight in that direction. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Tārı̄kh in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean World,” History and Theory 49, no. 4 (December 2010): 118–45. 9  The immediate connection between historical knowledge and halakhic knowledge was raised by Sa‘adia Ibn Danan (b. c. 1440, Granada; d. 1492, Oran) in his Judeo-Arabic chronicle-essay Seder ha-Dorot (The order of the generations). 10  Versions of this text were published in several languages as part of the Ibn Danan chronicle and in scholarly articles. On a visit to Morocco in 1947 Georges Vajda located a manuscript of the chronicle, which he edited and translated in 1948. See G. Vajda, ed., Un recueil de textes historiques judéo-marocains (Paris: Larose, 1951); a description of the battle appears on pages 15–17. Several Hebrew versions of the Ibn Danan texts were published (not as

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is, argues that “close attention to the text shifts our understanding away from reading it as a self-referential lament, to understanding it as a collective history in which actors saw themselves as instruments of divine intervention in human affairs.”11 With this insight in mind let us turn to the text itself, or more precisely, to the first printed version of part of it that was included in a siddur (prayer book) of the Fassi community (the toshavim community, a Hebrew term for “settlers” or “natives”), Ahavat ha-Kadmonim (love of the ancients), which was printed in Jerusalem in 1889.12 Albeit a liturgical work, this book, and the circumstances that enabled its publication, reflects a new kind of what may be called “print consciousness” among Moroccan Jews in the late nineteenth century.13 What is more, the very printing of the Ibn Danan text in this special siddur captures the emergence of Morocco as a coherent geographical-political unit. By 1889, when the Hebrew story of the Battle of the Three Kings from Divrei ha-Yamim, the chronicle of Ibn Danan, made its way to print as part of a prayer book, the textual testimony of the battle had been circulating for almost three centuries through copied manuscripts and oral transmission. It was most likely read, cited, or told annually in the local liturgical texts but as chronicles): first by Ya‘akov Moshe Toledano, a Palestinian-born Moroccan scholar in his Ner ha-Ma’arav (Jerusalem, 1911), 93–9; second and partially by David ‘Ovadiah in 1979; and a critical edition by Benayahu in 1993. See David ‘Ovadyah, Fas ve-Hakhameha, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Hotza’at Beit ‘Oved, 1979); Benayahu, Divrei haYamim. The relevant passages as a study source for the Battle of the Three Kings were printed by Haim Zeev Hirschberg, Toldot ha-Yehudim be-Afriḳah ha-Tzefonit, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Mosad Byaliḳ, 1965), 212–13, and appeared again in the English edition: Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 191–93. The complete Ibn Danan chronicle was reprinted recently by Benjamin Danan of the Association pour la Restauration de la Synagogue Danan de Fès. See “Sefer Divrei ha-Yamim shel Fes,” in Mishpaḥat Ibn Danan: Elef Shenot Hisṭoryah, ed. Me’ir Abitbol (Jerusalem: Mekhon Bene Yiśakhar, Or ha-Ma‘arav, 2008), 249–87. 11  Susan Gilson Miller, “The Mellah of Fez: Reflections on the Spatial Turn in Moroccan Jewish History,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, eds. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 101–18, 107. 12  Sefer Ahavat ha-Kadmonim (Jerusalem: Shmuel Zuckerman, 1889), 12b–13a. The book is labeled #636 in Shoshanna Halevy, Sifre Yerushalayim ha-Rishonim (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1975), the first indexical dictionary of Hebrew books printed in Jerusalem in the second half of the nineteenth century, 1841–1890. The printing house of Shmuel Halevy Zuckerman (b. Mezhyrich, 1857; d. Jerusalem, 1929) was located in the old city of Jerusalem for more than four decades. 13  Yigal S.  Nizri, “Maghribi Itineraries: Rabbi Raphael Aaron Ben-Shim’on,” in Nizri, “Sharifan Subjects, Rabbinic Texts: Moroccan Rabbinical Writing, 1860–1918” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014), 93–146.

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synagogue during the special prayer of the minor Purim. As we have observed, the Jewish remembering of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr in the form of a special Purim was not at all unique. Further, since the Middle Ages, the practice of writing historical-literary scrolls in the context of a ritualized commemoration day has taken place, particularly among Middle Eastern Jews.14 One major example of such a commemoration day took place earlier in the sixteenth century on the other side of North Africa, a festival that became known as the “Cairene Purim.” The Jewish community of Cairo had established the 28th of Adar 5284 (March 3, 1524) as a holiday, celebrated in the manner of Purim, to commemorate their deliverance from a series of violent events, which occurred during February 1524 as a result of the increased tensions between the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I and the newly appointed governor of Egypt, Ahmed Pasha. A special Judeo-Arabic scroll titled Megillat Pūrı̄m al-miṣriyyı̄n (The scroll of the Cairene Jewish community) was penned, and traces of this event and its meaning can be found in the work of Jewish historiographers throughout the early modern period.15 The key point that makes al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr special is the fact that the victory was not primarily “Jewish,” as some observers of this battle experienced it; indeed, the Sharifian State (Morocco) claimed the victory and framed it as Moroccan. “And on that very day three kings had died,” wrote Ibn Danan. One day versus three kings. Theologically, it was the victory of the oneness of God over the Christian concept of the trinity. Marked by the theologically

14  For a recent study of twelve North African piyyutim (liturgical poems), a literary form related to the aforementioned historical-literary scrolls, see Ephraim Hazan and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah, eds., Mi Khamokha, Who Is Like unto Thee: Local Piyyutim on Miraculous Deliverance in North African Jewish Communities [Hebrew] (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2012). The late Yosef Halevy has studied aspects of poetry of lament among Jewish writers (rabbis included) which were influenced by the political changes in the interwar period in the Mashriq. See Yosef Halevy, “The Reflection of Violent Incidents in Literature: Calamities in the Eye of Piyyutim and New Poetry in the Jewish East in Recent Generations” [Hebrew], in Be-Sod Yahid ve-Eda: Masoret hitḥaddesut u-Vesora ba-Sifrut haIvrit shel Bene ha-Mizraḥ [Tradition and Renewal in Hebrew Literature Written by Oriental Authors], ed. Yosef Halevy (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2003), 84–120. 15  Among them Samuel ibn Nachman, Eliyahu ben Elqana Kapsali, Solomon ibn Verga, Joseph ibn Yitzhak Sambari, David Conforte and Joseph ibn Joshua ha-Kohen. On the events leading up to “the Cairene Purim,” in and of itself a historiographical and textual “event,” see the chapter “The Purim of the Cairene Jewish Community,” in Benjamin H. Hary, Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic: With an Edition, Translation and Grammatical Study of the Cairene Purim Scroll (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1992), 115–28.

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driven justification of a holy war—of which both the Portuguese cruzada (crusade) and the Arabic jihad testify—the religious meaning alluded to in this battle should be noted, as the numeric metaphor was not lost on Muslim and Jewish observers. In his account of the events, the great Moroccan historian of the nineteenth-century Aḥmad b. Khalid al-Naṣiri cites the biographical dictionary of the sixteenth-century writer Ahmad Ibn al-Qadi (1553–1616), Durrat al-ḥijāl fi ghurrat asma’ al-rijal: “Look at the wisdom of Allah, the One, the invincible [who] exterminated three kings in one day […] and he constituted/established only one  — Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad I al-Mansur.” In that day, al-Nasiri adds, “the extermination of the three and the establishment of one are a clear sign of the abolition of the religion of the trinity [din al-Tathlith] and the victory of the religion of the oneness of God [al-Tawhid].”16 Such theological inferences constructed a larger political event as a Jewish one; the Jewish (and universal) God had emerged as the real victor.

Circulation and Narrative Aside from the story’s function as a part of prayer, and without any clear allusion to Purim, rabbinic authors with a keen eye to history were familiar with stories about al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr. It is possible that copies of the Ibn Danan text were in circulation among the late nineteenth-century network of the rabbinic elite in the geographical triangle of Fez–Sefrou–Meknes, although their availability cannot tell much about the scope of such circulation. The only clear indication that the chronicle enjoyed some circulation is a shortened version of the story about the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr that appeared in Kisse ha-Melakhim (seat of kings), a nineteenth-­century “world history” chronology by R. Raphael Moshe Elbaz17 of Sefrou. This book, which was first printed in Jerusalem only in 1985, is a historical

16  Aḥmad b. Khalid al-Naṣiri, Kitab al-istiqṣa li-akhbar duwal al-Maghrib al-aqṣa, vol. 5 (Casablanca: Dar al-Kittab, 1955), 84. 17  Son of Rabbi Samuel Elbaz (1790–1844), Raphael Moshe Elbaz (1823–1896), known as “the RaMa of Sefrou,” was a rabbi, jurist, and liturgical poet in Sefrou. With his father, Elbaz transcribed entire collections from manuscripts. For a detailed biography and bibliography, see David Ovadia, Ḳehilat Tzafaru [The Community of Sefrou], vol. 4, 66–74. To illustrate the investment of Elbaz in sixteenth-century texts, I shall note that he wrote a commentary (titled Yad RaMa) to the kitzur (Hebrew for “shortening” or “abridgment”) of the sixteenth-century legal code Sefer ha-Taqqanot (The book of ordinances) penned by Refael Berdugo (1747–1821) of Meknes.

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essay based on an archetypical-temporal model of the four monarchies, or world empires, which are described in dreams and visions in the biblical Book of Daniel.18 The omitting of the sentences from the original Ibn Danan text that deal with the special Purim may reflect a lack of interest in that tradition in the context of Elbaz’s historical essay. And yet, there is reason to suggest that this omission calls for interrogation as to the level of stability, validity, and popularity of such a tradition prior to the mid-­ nineteenth century. Outside of the Moroccan Jewish orbit, the historical episode of the Battle of the Three Kings, as an inter-imperial war, had left its marks on late sixteenth-century Jewish historiographers, who fostered a slightly different narrative of the event than Ibn Danan’s text. Two authors are worthy of consideration, David Gans (1541–1613), and Joseph ha-Kohen of Avignon (1496–1578). Gans, author of the popular Hebrew chronicle Zemah David (The offspring of David), which was first published in Prague in 1592, devoted one general sentence—in the world history section of his double-volume work—to the 1578 war, which he calls “the war by the great ocean, next to Barbaria.”19 This laconic description reflects a new mode of a codified classification of historic knowledge in Hebrew, but it does little to change our understanding of the intricacies of power dynamics among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. A more specific perspective on the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr, however, can be seen in an addition to the late sixteenth-century manuscript, ‘Emek ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears), a Hebrew chronicle of “Jewish sufferings” since the destruction of the second Temple to the time of the author, Joseph ha-Kohen of Avignon.20 Neither work mentions the impact of this battle on the Jews in Morocco and their local traditions. However, ‘Emek ha-Bakha attributes a 18  This edition of Kisse ha-Melakhim was included in David Ovadia, Ḳehilat Tzafaru [The Community of Sefrou], vol. 4. The bulk of Elbaz’s historical essay is devoted to the genealogy of Islam, and especially since the Muslim conquest of the Maghrib. Events are described according to both Hebrew and Islamic Hijri calendars. The section about the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr is taken almost entirely from the Ibn Danan chronicle. See David Ovadia, Ḳehilat Tzafaru, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: printed by the author, 1985), 80. 19  See David Gans, Zemah David, ed. Mordechai Breuer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), 410. 20  For the first edition, see Joseph ha-Kohen, ‘Emek ha-Bakha (Vienna: M. Letteris, 1852). For the French translation, see La vallée des pleurs, trans. Julien See (Paris, 1881). An English translation by Harry S. May was published in 1971. See Joseph Ha-Cohen, The Vale of Tears / Emek habacha: Joseph Hacohen and the Anonymous Corrector, trans. Harry S.  May (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).

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t­heologically charged significance to the event, presenting it as part of a divine plot of vengeance against the Portuguese nation, “for they have hurt His people and servants; on them, who accepted them at first with friendship and affection, but later treated them faithlessly by becoming their enemies.” The text is organized as an imaginary conversation between God and his heavenly hosts: In 1337 [1578] God sat on His throne to judge the peoples, and the Hosts of Heaven stood to His right and His left. Said he: “who will persuade King Sebastian, all his dukes and his servants, as well as the whole army of Portugal to invade a country that does not belong to them?” so that God’s ire could manifest itself on them, for they have hurt His people and servants; on them, who accepted them at first with friendship and affection, but later treated them faithlessly by becoming their enemies? Respected men have been burned by them, the countenances of the aged have not been spared, they expelled peaceful women from their well-apportioned homes, and when they gave birth to sons or daughters, they did not remain with them, but were torn from their beards to march as captives before the enemy. But now the days of vengeance have come to let this sinful generation feel God’s wrath.21

Such historical linkage to the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula eight decades earlier, which situates Jews (both “Portuguese” and “Moroccan”) and Muslims (“Moors”) as objects of Christian animosity, may help us to explain the name Purim de los Cristianos (Purim of the Christians) that was given to this battle by northern-Moroccan Jewish communities. The motive of divine vengeance that appears in ‘Emek ha-Bakha would have a specific resonance in writings that convey the “Judeo Iberian” perspective of the battle. I will return to this point later in my discussion about the resurfacing of the battle in mid-nineteenth-century scrolls. Despite the fact that the definitive victory in Wadi al-Makhazin was a Muslim victory, the crucial point here is that the focus on a trope of divine revenge against the Christians forms a Jewish historical perspective on the Muslim victory.22 In fact, unlike the account in ‘Emek ha-Bakha, the Ibn Danan text clearly invokes the notion of Muslim revenge against Christians: “[A]nd it was announced all over the empire that they [Mulay ‘Abd al-Malik along with a heavy battalion] are going to take revenge on Edom.” Thus, in what  Ha-Cohen, The Vale of Tears, 117–18.  The idea of a “Muslim revenge” appears quite frequently in modern scholarship. For an example, see “Hispano-Muslim arquebusiers gained a measure of revenge against their Christian enemies,” in Hess, The Forgotten Frontier, 98. 21 22

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can be seen as a shift in the historical coordinates, the Hebrew phrase “revenge on Edom,”23 a term which since the post-tannaitic period referred to Christian Rome and thence to Christendom in general, is now used to portray a Muslim jihad against the “Edomites” who managed to complete the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula in January 1492. In this regard, the homology between Jewish and Muslim settings vis-à-vis the Christian enemy places the Judeo-Moroccan commemoration of the battle in the larger context of the Muslim Sharifan state. The narrative circulation of divine revenge on behalf of the (Andalusian) Jews, which may have originated in ‘Emek ha-Bakha, reappeared and was maintained in writings that embraced a “Judeo-Iberian” perspective of the battle. And so, according to Nomologia o Discursos legales (Amsterdam, 1629), an essay written in Spanish by the Portuguese Jewish scholar Immanuel Aboab (d. 1628), the Portuguese nobility were made prisoners of Jews in Fez.24 In the wake of the war, these prisoners were taken to Fez to be sold in public auction as slaves. Aboab had heard that the captives had considered themselves somewhat fortunate to be purchased by descendants of those whom their ancestors had persecuted: God allowed that in the fourth generation almost all of the Portuguese nobility, [headed by] their king Dom Sebastian, came to Africa to be destroyed and captured at the very same place where their grandparents had cruelly and unjustly ordered the wretched Jews to disembark. It was there that the “flower” of Portugal [the elite] ended, and those who remained were brought to Fez, where they were sold as slaves at the herald’s cry in the squares inhabited by the Jewish descendants of those persecuted innocents. It pleased the Lord to exact that revenge on them. The sage David Fayon, a resident of Alcaçarquiuir, and a student of R.  Judah Aboab told me that those miserables could not find a greater comfort than being sold to the Jews [of Fez] as slaves, as they knew their natural piety. Be praised ever and always, our Lord, God of Israel who never has nor will abandon his people.25

23  Ezekiel 25:14, with relation to the (biblical) Edomites: “And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and according to my fury; and they shall know my vengeance, saith the Lord GOD.” 24  Fourteen thousand Portuguese, among them almost the entire Portuguese nobility, were taken captive by Ahmed Al-Mansur. During the 1580s, these captives were made the object of an entire ransom industry. After 1578, the Mellah of Fez was home to a particularly large number of Portuguese prisoners who stayed in the Mellah while the demands for their ransom were met. See García-Arenal, Ahmad al-Mansur, 71. 25  Immanuel Aboab, Nomologia, ó Discursos legales compuestos por el virtuoso Haham Rabbi Imanuel Aboab de buena memoria (Amsterdam, 1629), ch. 27, 308. The translation is mine. I am grateful to Ori Kleiner for his help with Spanish and Portuguese sources.

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Interestingly enough, the popularity of the historical linkage that places Jews and their “vengeful” God at the center of a narrative that deals with an event that took place on Muslim soil, and between Muslims and Christians, was quite dominant in modern historiography as well. For example, the description from Immanuel Aboab’s Nomologia was cited nearly verbatim (without mentioning Aboab) in the ninth volume  of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden, published in Leipzig in 1888, a year prior to the printing of the Moroccan Siddur in Jerusalem. At the end of his long account regarding the “expulsion of the Jews from Navarre and Portugal,” the most widely read nineteenth-century historian of the Jews wrote: Eighty years later, Manoel’s great-grandson, the adventurous king, Sebastian, led the flower of the Portuguese people to fresh conquests in Africa. In a single battle the power of Portugal was broken, her nobility slain, or cast into prison. The captives were carried to Fez, and there, in the slave-market, offered for sale to the descendants of the barbarously treated Portuguese Jews. The unhappy Portuguese nobles and knights were, however, glad to be bought by Jews, as they well knew the mild and humane nature of the followers of the “God of vengeance.”26

From Joseph ha-Kohen and Immanuel Aboab, to Heinrich Graetz and to some extent to Cecil Roth as well, the narrative of a battle between Christians and Muslims was shaped not necessarily according to a Judeo-­ Moroccan perspective, such as the one we find in Ibn Danan’s text, but according to a Judeo-Iberian perspective dominated by traumatic memories of expulsion and forced conversion. I will return to this point later in my discussion about the emergence of northern-Moroccan traditions of the special Purim in the nineteenth century.

26  The English translation is taken from Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894), ch. 12, 381. In a popular book by Cecil Roth, first published in London 1931, an entry devoted to August 4, under the title “Deliverance,” gives a short narrative based on Graetz, and ultimately Aboab’s Nomologia. See Cecil Roth, The Jewish Book of Days: A Day-by-day Almanac of Events from the Settlement of the Jews in Europe to the Balfour Declaration (New York: Hermon Press, 1966), 184–85. Roth nevertheless confused the Purims of 1578 (Purim de los Christianos) and 1844 (Purim de las Bombas).

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Nes, Ma‘aseh, and Event The circumstances that made possible the printing of the text of the Ibn Danan chronicle take us to Jerusalem in the late nineteenth century. Behind the printing of the Fassi Siddur in Jerusalem was the rabbi and entrepreneur Raphael Aaron Ben-Shim’on.27 As the editor of Ahavat ­ha-­Kadmonim, Ben-Shim’on framed al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr in the following way. In small letters in the first line, which provides orienting instructions to the prayers, we read: “[O]n the second day of Elul, after the reading of the Hallel prayer, read the following phrases of praise and acknowledgment for the miracle [nes] that had happened on that day.” Right after, in slightly larger letters, we read: “[Here is] the story [ma‘aseh] that has occurred for which we are marking Purim on the first day of Elul.” Despite the seemingly contradictory terms nes (“miracle”), which is often used to refer to a divine/miraculous intervention, and ma‘aseh (“story” and also “event”), which usually refers to historical and political events, here their juxtaposition appears complementary. A rather long chain of transmission precedes these headings, comparable to a Muslim isnād,28 detailing the transmission of a manuscript through three generations of the Ibn Danan family. We then get to the text of the chronicle Divrei ha-Yamim itself. The way in which the Portuguese crusade of 1578 was institutionalized in the Jewish calendar of the toshavim can be seen in the last and reflexive sentence of the text, which reads as follows: 27  Born in Salé, Morocco, on July 4, 1847, Ben-Shim’on moved to Ottoman Jerusalem in 1854, where he spent the next three decades of his life. In 1888 and 1890, he traveled back to Morocco on behalf of the Jewish Maghribi community of Jerusalem, which sent him on several fundraising missions to Europe and North Africa. In February 1890, he was called by Cairo’s Jewish community to serve as the chief rabbi (hakham bashi) of Cairo, a communal position he held from 1891 to 1921. In June 1921, after retiring from his position as the chief rabbi of Cairo, he moved back to Palestine. After a short period in Jerusalem, BenShim’on moved to Jaffa, a city in which a growing number of Moroccan Jewish families had been residing since the 1830s. He lived there until his death on October 24, 1928, and was buried in Jerusalem. Raphael Aaron Ben-Shim’on was a prominent figure in the formation of what can be viewed as a new phase of “print consciousness” among Jews in Morocco, as well as among Moroccan Jews in the Mashriq at the time. For his various textual and cultural activities in Morocco as well as the contours of his biographical standpoint as a “Maghribi” scholar outside of Morocco, see note 13. 28  From sanad, “support” in Arabic; the term isnād relates to the chain of authorized transmission attesting to the historical authenticity of a particular hadith of the Prophet.

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And the war was very intense on Elul 2, 5338 [August 5, 1578]. And therefore the rabbis have congregated and received upon themselves and their offspring to celebrate Purim and [to give] gifts to the poor since then and forever, until the coming of our righteous Messiah, may he appear speedily in our days. Amen, may it be so.29

With the rabbis’ decision, the historical account of the battle transforms into a calendrical event and a prayer, and is preserved as such. The literary framing of the event is also important for understanding the reasons for the commemorations of the battle. In his French edition of Ibn Danan’s chronicle, which was published in 1948, the great scholar George Vajda omitted some crucial elements of the textual (and ultimately historical) framing of the story. This is important material, however, that can shed light on the ways in which Ibn Danan understood the course of the momentous events. Of particular significance are the biblical references Ibn Danan employs in this framing. For example, the Hebrew year “to the creation [of the world]” HASLAV 5336 (1576), which relates to the situation two years prior to the battle, is replaced by the Hebrew word/code SHALVA (meaning “peace” and “serenity”), an anagram with an allusion to a verse in Psalm 122: “peace-within-your-palaces,” reflecting some sense of security of Jewish life under Moroccan rule. Similarly, in the following sentence, which resonates with Job 16:12, Ibn Danan relates, “[G]iven our many sins, the verse ‘I was at peace but he hath broken me asunder,’ has occurred to us.” Only after he presents this temporal locution does the author start with a more straightforward telling of the story: “[When] Mulay ‘Abdelmalek, Glory-to-the-sultan, came from the Algerian cities accompanied by a small battalion and some Turks.” His return to Morocco marked the beginning of a civil war between uncle and nephew that lasted for some two years. 29  This anecdote is rather interesting as Sebastian himself emerged from the battle as a Portuguese “Messiah,” becoming the core of a cult calling to restore Portuguese power and unity. See Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 176. The death, or disappearance, of the heirless young monarch Dom Sebastian in 1578, and the loss of political sovereignty of Portugal to Habsburg rule in 1580, led four impostors to claim, on different occasions (in 1584, 1585, 1595, and 1598), that they were the legendary Sebastian. Stories about the “Messiah” who merely had gone into hiding, in penance for having lost the battle, but who would return to help Portugal in its darkest time, bore clear messianic overtones, a cultural phenomenon that was called “Sebastianism.” See also the first chapter of Mary Elizabeth Brooks, A King for Portugal: The Madrigal Conspiracy, 1594–95 (Madison and Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).

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In addition to the invocation of biblical references, Ibn Danan points to a concrete local historical precedent. “And I saw my lord my father Abba Mari,” writes Ibn Danan, “crying on the eve of Passover as if it was the eve of the 9th of Av, lamenting the destruction that took place in the medina of Marrakech.” The destruction of the Jewish neighborhood of Marrakech was perceived and lamented through the lens of the destruction of Jerusalem.30 This parallelism between Jewish time and Maghribi time, which appears in Moroccan rabbinic literature throughout the early and modern periods, is a clue to understanding the notion of two “historical pulses” mentioned in the beginning of this chapter. The Ibn Danan text may be closer to the facts than was initially thought by modern scholars. Although it has rarely been mentioned in modern scholarship, aside from the Ibn Danan text there was another “Jewish” text, a testimony from the battlefield itself that corroborates and testifies to the details propounded by Ibn Danan. A special report made by the Jewish physician of Mulay ‘Abd al-Malik, the reigning Moroccan sultan at the time of the battle, was preserved in the British Archives (appearing in print first in 1903). A copy of the report, six and a half pages long, was preserved in English, although, as the source indicates, it was “probably translated from Italian.” The circumstances that brought about the report’s inclusion and preservation in the Elizabethan records are seemingly connected to the English expansion of international commercial activity at the time, as well as to the constant conflict between the English, Spanish, and Portuguese governments. “The copy of a letter,” said the document, was “written from the camp of the King of Moroccos, Mullie Molloque [Mulay ‘Abd al-Malik] by a Jew, physician to the said King; directed to his brother.” As the Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus pointed out, the actions of the Jewish physician who accompanied the sultan on the battlefield are “somewhat confirmed by the statement of Danon.”31 Indeed, Ibn Danan writes: “[A]nd despite 30  See ch. 4: “Réjouissances: 5538 – ‘Il a envoyé la délivrance a son peuple,’” in Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire: la glorieuse bataille des trois rois (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), 107–17, and especially her concept of “un double archétype” (109). The Ibn Danan text, according to Valensi, is characterized by motives and archetypes associated with “sacred history.” 31  Jacob Rader Marcus, “Notes on Sephardic Jewish History of the Sixteenth Century,” in Hebrew Union College Jubilee Volume, 1875–1925, ed. David Philipson (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1925), 391. In this article, Marcus transcribed the full text of the letter, along with a few other documents concerning the “sociological presentation of Jewish life” as reflected in the economic activities of the New Christians in the late sixteenth century.

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the death of Mulay ‘Abd al-Malik, we did not know how he died. Some of his servants have concealed the secret and said that he is still alive,” as happened on a much larger scale with Dom Sebastian. In the letter of the Jewish physician, we read: This victory was much furthered by the lack of knowledge of the King’s death, and we went with him further, with the banners and renegades of his guard, halberds and pikemen and others; and only the son of Mahomet Zarcon [Mohammed Zarqun, a Qaid from El Araich] and I, and Mussalya [a Muslim] knew of his death, and we went on and made them believe that the King’s pleasure was so, for every foot I would light from my horse feigning to speak with him. And so our men began to bring with them Christians, men and women, captives, and came where the King was; and we made them believe that he was asleep, and that neither we nor they should wake him.32

Days of Calamity and Days of Joy In 1896, seven years after Ahavat ha-Kadmonim was printed in Jerusalem, Saul Pinchas Rabbinowicz, a Lithuanian Jewish historian, included the “Moroccan Purim” of 1578 in a chronological glossary of fifty dates of commemoration marked in the Jewish calendar. He called these days “days of calamity and days of joy” (y’mei asson ve-y’mei sasson), which were observed by Jewish communities “mostly in Germany but also in Italy,

Of course, by “Danon,” Marcus is referring to Ibn Danan, whose text he encountered in Toledano’s Ner ha-Ma’arav (Jerusalem 1911), and not in Ahavat ha-Kadmonim. 32  Calendar of State Papers, Foreign series, Of the reign of Elizabeth, vol. 13: 1578–1579, ed. Arthur John Butler (London: Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1903), 167. The English translation is loaded with mistakes, some of which derived from misapprehension of the original Spanish of the text, or its Italian rendering. In the next decade, when the agents of the French Protectorate regime in Morocco were fully in power, the French official Henry de Castries (1850–1927) published the letter in Spanish (with elaborated footnotes in French), which may be the language in which it was originally written. See document CXIX: “Lettre d’un médecin juif à son frère,” in Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: Première série, Dynastie Saadienne Archives et Bibliothèques d’Angleterre, ed. Henry de Castries, vol. 3, pt. 1, ser. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1918), 312–21. Moroccan historian Mohammed Boukhalfa had published the letter in Arabic, at length. The translation was made by ‘Abd al-latif al khatib, the governor of Tetuan, who found it in the collection of Henri de Castries. According to Boukhalfa, “the tabib yahudi (Jewish physician) sent a report to his brother in Fez on the 16th of August 1578.” Mohammed Boukhalfa, Al-Tariq li-Ma‘arefat al-Qsar al-Kabir (Tetuan: n.p., 1972), 78–79.

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North Africa, Asia and Poland.”33 Placed in between the dates of the Battle of Copenhagen of 1807 and the Black Death in fourteenth-century Mainz, events that were of great consequence to local Jewish communities in Denmark and Germany, the Jewish Moroccan event is presented as follows: 2nd of Elul: a holiday to Moroccan Jews as they were saved from the Spaniards [sic] that were besieging the city in the year 1570 [1578]. This Purim is celebrated in Tetuan according to all the rules of Purim, and it is called Purim de los Cristianos [Purim of the Christians] and at Tangier this day is called Purim de las Bombas [Purim of the Bombs].34

Publishing such a glossary in 1896  in a Hebrew Almanac in Poland bore a symbolic meaning, as Jews in Eastern Europe marked the 800th anniversary commemoration of the Roman Catholic military expedition to the holy land known as the “First Crusade.” Thus, a political event that took place in the Maghrib was incorporated into the larger trajectory of Jewish history at a time when such global schemes had already been established by the critical activity of the nineteenth-century secular Wissenschaft des Judentums and Haskalah movements.35 The formation of these specific  Saul Pinchas Rabbinowicz, “Megillat Ta‘anit shel Galuyot” [Scroll of Fasting of Exiles], in Almanac Ahiasaf (Warsaw: Ahiasaf Publication Society, 1896–97), 131–42. The title is an allusion to Megillat Ta‘anit (Scroll of Fasting), a Pharisaic Aramaic chronicle dated to the first century CE, which enumerates 35 eventful days commemorating glorious deeds or joyful events in the life of ancient Jews. 34  The mistake in the date of the event (1570 instead of 1578) in Almanac Ahiasaf had led Ya‘akov Moshe Toledano to duplicate it in his Ner ha-Ma’arav (Jerusalem, 1911), 92. Despite this mistake, the ambiguity around the nature of the event and its tradition manifests a nineteenth-century awareness regarding the tradition of the 1578 battle. See the following section regarding the “Tanjawi texts.” 35  The “Moroccan” Purim made it into later Jewish glossaries. In the middle of the twentieth century, a prominent figure in the field of folklore in Israel, Yom Tov Lewinsky published a list of 90 “special Purims” throughout the Jewish world. See Lewinsky, Sefer ha-Mo‘adim: Parashat Mo‘adei Yisrael, ‘Erkam, Giluyeihem ve-Hashpa‘atam be-ḥaye ‘Am Yisrael uve-Sifruto mi-Yeme Kedem ve-’ad ha-Yom ha-zeh [The Book of Festivals: The Tale of Jewish Holidays, their Values, Discoveries and Influence in the Life of the Jewish People and its Literature from Ancient Times to the Present], vol. 6 (Tel-Aviv: Agudat ‘Oneg Shabat’ a. y. Devir, 1956), 297–322. Interestingly, the last Purim on this list, chronologically speaking, is  called “Purim Hitler,” which took place on 2 Kislev 5703 / November 11, 1942, in Casablanca, Morocco, when local Jews celebrated their relief only a few days after the Allies invaded Morocco on November 8, 1942. On Jewish Moroccan textual fashioning of those events, mostly in Judeo-Arabic, see “Qasidas, Haggada and Two Megillot from Morocco,” 33

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Judeo-Moroccan traditions during the second half of the nineteenth ­century was shaped in dialogue with the European discourse on calamities on the one hand and the Wissenschaft on the other.

“Purim of the Bombs:” The Battle of Isly and the Tanjawi Texts The name Purim de los Cristianos, which was used by northern-Moroccan Jews most likely only since the nineteenth century, is indeed linked to the 1578 Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr. However, what Saul Pinchas Rabbinowicz has called Purim de las Bombas had little to do with the Jewish ritualization of the late sixteenth-century event but rather to an event that took place in Tangier more than two and a half centuries later, five decades before Rabbinowicz’s Megillat Ta‘anit shel Galuyot was published.36 In the following section, I would like to view the memory of the battle of 1578 and the communal behavior, which had emerged as a reaction to it through another watershed battle that took place in 1844 on Moroccan land, the “Battle of Isly.” My sense of “conscious anachronism” allows me to view the ways in which the Ibn Danan text may have served as a prototype of sorts. In other words, it is only with the perception of the latter event that one can fully understand the meaning ascribed to the “first” event in the sixteenth century. In the summer of 1844, the French navy attacked the coastal towns of Tangier and Mogador and defeated the Moroccan army in a decisive battle near Isly River, northeast of Oujda. Following the Battle of Isly, European commercial penetration of Morocco intensified, further weakening the already declining capacity of the makhzan (Moroccan government) to rule. This battle has been crucial to the periodization of what would be

in Michal Saraf, Megillat Hitler be-Tzefon Afrika [The Hitler Scroll of North Africa: Moroccan and Tunisian Jewish Literature on the Fall of the Nazis] (Lod: Habermann Institute for Literary Research, 1988), 7–51. For a literary analysis, contextualization and translation of “Haggadah of Hitler,” see Avishai Bar-Asher, “How is this Night Different from the Night of Trente Neuf? The Haggadah of Hitler from Morrocco” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 114–15 (2008): 137–96. 36  By the late nineteenth century, the event was celebrated as “a Moroccan event,” not only by the Polish chronicler but also by Moroccan Jews themselves. By then, the battle and its commemoration had at least six, fairly “local” names: Purim dos Portugueses, Purim de los Cristianos, Purim de Tanger, Purim de Sebastian, Purim Edom, and Purim of Elul.

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labeled the “precolonial” period in the history of Morocco.37 As for the battle itself, what could have been seen as a minor incident in European history was actually a major cataclysm on the local level. Much like the event of 1578, and in what could be seen as a pattern of communal ­behavior, the Jewish community of Tangier established a special memorial day that was given the Spanish name Purim de las Bombas. They also kept a scroll, dated to 1848–1849, narrating how the French appeared at the port of Tangier on the seventh day of the Jewish month of Av. Interestingly enough, around the same time another Hebrew scroll solely devoted to the event of 1578, similar in length and style, appeared in Tangier.38 By the mid-nineteenth century, these two scrolls were lumped together as “special Purim scrolls” indicative of a particular northern-Moroccan Jewish culture, mainly that of Tangier (hence I call them “Tanjawi texts”). The popular name Purim de los Bombas that was given to this political event reflects certain artillery and technological advantages that can be associated with Napoleonic military campaigns in the decades prior to 1844 (bombas).39 The Hebrew scroll of 1844 itself employs a mixture of 37  See the chapter “Morocco and the West, 1860–1900” in Edmund Burke, Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 19–40. 38  The two full Hebrew texts were first published in an academic forum in 1935. See M. Ginsburger, “Deux pourims locaux,” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935): 445–50. A Spanish version of Purim de los Cristianos (of 1578) was made by Francisco Cantera Burgos, “El ‘Purim’ del Rey Don Sebastian,” Sefarad: Revista de estudios hebraicos, sefardíes y de Oriente Próximo 6 (1945): 219–25. The text was also translated into Portuguese. See José de Esaguy, O minuto vitorioso de Alcacer-Quibir: Batalha do Mohácen, 4 de Agôsto de 1578 (Lisbon: Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca, Agência Geral das Colónias, 1944). A French translation of both scrolls was made by Abraham Issac Laredo, “Les Purim de Tanger,” Hésperis 35 (1948): 193–203. Finally, an edited translation of the scroll of “Purim of the Bombs” (of 1844) was included as an appendix in Susan Gilson Miller, “Crisis and Community: The People of Tangier and the French Bombardment of 1844,” Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 4 (1991): 593–94. 39  It is possible to argue that the title “Purim of the Bombs” was nevertheless “borrowed” from other events that occurred prior to 1844, and in Italy. Cecil Roth dedicated a detailed study to the annual festive “local celebrations” by Jews during the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the French revolutionary wars and its subsequent events affected Italy. According to him, “the antiquity of the various communities, their long and chequered history, their keen historical sense, and their unique power of self-expression all combined to favour the institution” of a special Purim—two events occurred that bear similar names. Thus, escaping a mob scene during the siege over Fossano on the fourth day of Passover on April 26, 1796 / 18 Nisan 5556, Jews sought refuge in the local synagogue. A French shell that burst through the wall of the synagogue’s vestibule caused the assailants to run away, an

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terminologies pertaining to the new warfare on one hand, and the expressions found in biblical weeping prophecies on the other: Barely was this said when all of a sudden a great noise reached us, shaking and breaking. A sound of fear in our ears. We heard huge stones from the furnaces of iron, called bombas falling in front of our walls like sparks from a mad boiler, like sharp arrows of death.40

The usage of the Spanish term bombas, which appears in the scroll in Hebrew transliteration, suggests the localizing effects names have had on the ways in which Jewish communities in Morocco were organized. Other Hebrew descriptions of the battles of 1844 have employed different terminology.41 Susan Gilson Miller, who studied the particularities of the 1844 bombardment and its perception by local Moroccan civilians, points out that “the trauma it caused was such that it was written about, sung about, and woven into local mythology and lore.” These practices reflect a certain sense of historicity that is rooted in what she calls “local history.”42 Furthermore, claims Gilson Miller, this text exemplifies “the traditional relationship between Jews and the Muslim authority.” The Jewish political consciousness that emerges out of the 1844 scroll, she adds, is indicative of a pattern of behavior that would become more visible later in the nineescape that seemed a direct act of God. A golden Hebrew inscription in that synagogue proclaimed this event as the “Miracle of the Bomb.” A similar “deliverance” took place a few years later, on 5 Kislev 5560 / December 3, 1799 at Cuneo. While the city was besieged by the combined Austrian and Russian forces, a shell fell in the synagogue without exploding. The commemoration of this event became known as Purim della Bomba. See Cecil Roth, “Some Revolutionary Purims (1790–1801),” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935): 451–83. 40  An edited translation of the scroll of “Purim of the Bombs” was offered by Gilson Miller as an appendix to her study of the event. See Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 593–94. Compare with the description on page 490 in Jacob M. Toledano, “Ha-Yehudim be-Tangier” [The Jews of Tangier], Hebrew Union College Annual 8–9 (1931–1932): 481–92. 41  In a “Printer’s Introduction” to Berit Avot (Livorno, 1848), a collection of sermons and responsa by Abraham Coriat (d. 1845), a kabbalist and dayyan from Essaouira, Eliyahu Benamozegh, a nineteenth-century Moroccan Livornese rabbi, scholar, and publisher, references the bombardment of the port of Essaouira by the French in 1844, during which much of the literary corpus of Coriat was destroyed. Also, family ties played some role, as Benamozegh’s maternal uncle, Yehuda Coriat, was the father of Avraham Coriat. Another Hebrew source on the event was written in the Tetuani rabbi Yosef Ben Adhan’s “memories,” a supplement to Shufraya deYossef (Alexandria, 1897). 42  Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 587.

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teenth century with Morocco’s tumultuous confrontation with the European powers. Finally, she asserts that the Purim scroll of 1844 “offers insight into the Jewish experience at the deeper psychic level, suggesting how the crisis elicited a complex communal response having far-reaching social implications.”43 While these arguments are fully substantiated in Gilson Miller’s analysis, it is the implied contradiction between the “traditional relationship between Jews and the Muslim authority,” and a presumably new pattern of communal behavior that I would like to elaborate upon and call into question in this section. The very metaphor of a pattern—behavioral or textual—may suggest some connections between the Ibn Danan text and the two “new” scrolls. It is clear that both of the Tanjawi (i.e., of Tangier) Purim scrolls related to the events of 1578 and 1844 were in circulation from the mid-­ nineteenth century onward. However, their authorship and precise date remained questionable. This ambiguity may explain why their direct or implied connections to the Fassi text of the Ibn Danan chronicle, which was first available in print in Jerusalem in 1889 (in the liturgical form of Ahavat ha-Kadmonim), was never addressed.44 While some observers have mistakenly regarded the scroll related to 1578 as an authentic late sixteenth-century literary product,45 others have focused on each of the

 Ibid., 588.  The question of the scrolls’ authorship is not discussed in Gilson Miller’s analysis. Regarding the 1844 scroll she notes: “The scroll is two pages long and its author is unnamed. Most Jewish families in Tangier possess a copy, often handwritten and ornamented.” Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 596. Similarly, previous scholars had paid attention to circulation but not to authorship. Cantera Burgos, “El ‘Purim’ del Rey Don Sebastian,” 221, noted that as of 1937, it was rare to find any given Jewish family in Tangier who did not have a copy of the 1578 scroll: “que en 1937 comprobó que es rara la familia israelita de Tánger que no posea una copia de tal documento para celebrar todos los años el ‘Purim de Sebastian.’” Writing in Spanish, José de Esaguy testified that “[the] méguilá [can be found] […] in synagogues of Ceuta.” In his analysis of the period, Hirschberg mentions the bombardments of Tangier and Mogador, and adds: “Of course great suffering was also caused to its Jewish inhabitants. In memory of their miraculous escape, the Jews of Tangiers […] introduced a ‘Purim’ to be observed on the 21st of Ab.” However, there is no mention of the scrolls. See Hirschberg, A History, 2:305. 45   In a discussion about the “invention of tradition” of local Purims among the Mediterranean Jewish communities during the sixteenth century, Elliott Horowitz wrote: “[A]fter Sebastian was defeated and killed in the ‘Battle of the Tree Kings’ at Alcazaequebir, a local Purim […] was observed on the first of Ellul. On this occasion a specially written scroll was also read, as was customary in Cairo.” In addition, added Horowitz in a footnote, “for the Hebrew text of the scroll” one should go to M.  Ginsburger’s article “Deux pourims 43 44

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scrolls separately, or have compared the two scrolls with an implied assumption that they represent two distinct, but comparable historical perceptions of Jews’ relation to time, space, and authority. For example, Gilson Miller has treated the two textual representations of the 1578 and 1844 Purims as if they were products of different authors and perhaps even different times, and not as two texts that may bear similar characteristics and functionalities albeit related to different events.46 My reading of these scrolls seeks to entertain a few other possibilities in order to explain the relationship between them. I agree with Gilson Miller that the particular socio-textual elements are understandable, given the proximity in time and space to events that were a reality for the author of the supposedly later scroll. Is it possible, on the other hand, that both scrolls were written by the same author, and, accordingly, there are no “earlier” and “later” scrolls? What kind of story, other than the one about “a complex communal response” to political crisis, might they tell about the emergence and circulation of local traditions in the nineteenth century? Were the author(s) of those mid-nineteenth century scrolls aware of the traditional commemoration day of the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr not only through oral transmission but also from the chronicle of Ibn Danan, which was made public only later that century in Ahavat ha-Kadmonim? As stated, the authorship and precise date of these Purim scrolls remain questionable. However, a close reading of them makes it safe to assume that both texts were written around the same time and most likely by the same author (or at least within the same circle). Moreover, since the authorship of the 1844 account can be related to one of the known communal figures of Tangier at the time, Moshe Bengio, a rabbi and dayyan in Tangier from 1833 to 1853, it is possible that both Purim scrolls which relate to the locaux.” (See note 38.) It seems to me that the existence of a special Judeo-Arabic scroll in Cairo, Megillat pūrı̄m il-miṣriyyı̄n (around 1524), has led Horowitz to assume that a similar text was written and used in Morocco around 1578. However, as I hope to show here, there is no evidence of a written scroll in Morocco before the middle of the nineteenth century. See Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 305–306. Similarly, Lucette Valensi wrote about a material object that was apparently in communal circulation for many generations: “ce ‘rouleau’ qui rapportait l’histoire et que l’on se passa de main en main au fil des generations.” Although theoretically her distinction between the scarcity of the Ibn Danan chronicle and the availability of what she calls “la megillah du Pûrîm” is valid—given the different textual genres—such a scroll was apparently in use only more than two and a half centuries after the event of 1578. Valensi, Fables, 115. 46  Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 589–90.

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events of 1578 and 1844, were written by him.47 Nevertheless, we know only the names of the scribes who seem to have copied these scrolls from an older source written closer to the event of 1844. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, these texts were copied by Moïse Toledano, “a teacher in Tangier,” and later published in the original Hebrew in 1935 by the Alsace-born historian and rabbi, Moïse Ginsburger. In the twentieth century, copies of these texts were made by Abraham Moise Tanji of Tetuan.48 Both scrolls contain many biblical quotations, certainly showing a learned basis. However, in the text of 1578, the Spanish word for Baptism (Bautismo), referring to the fear of a mass forced conversion by Dom Sebastian of Portugal, is transliterated into Hebrew letters, as it would have been pronounced in Haketia, the spoken language of Jews in Northern Morocco, with a zayin as if it were a “z.” Someone familiar with standardized Spanish pronunciation would have used the letter samekh as it should be pronounced like an “s,” although the verb is bautizar. This idea might allow for Bengio, or even possibly Toledano, to be the author of this scroll too, as some of the older megurashim families from the imperial cities still spoke Judeo-Spanish.49 Abraham Issac Laredo (1895–1969), an active member of many communal organizations in Tangier and a frequent contributor of articles about Jewish issues, translated in 1948  the scrolls into French for the 47  Moshe Bengio, who had succeeded his father-in-law, Chief Rabbi Abraham Toledano when the community was reestablished, spent much time in forming the institutions of the reestablished community. See M.  Mitchell Serels, A History of the Jews of Tangier in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1991), 7, 265. See Toledano, “Ha-Yehudim,” 491, where the name Rabbi Moshe Bengio is mentioned. Burgos, “El ‘Purim’ del Rey Don Sebastian,” 221, also mentions the name Bengio; his translation (of the 1578 text) is based on a “copia que dice pertenecer a la familia Aarón Begió.” 48  According to Ginsburger, who in 1905 founded the Historical Society of Jews from Alsace and Lorraine (Gesellschaft für die Geschichte der Israeliten in Elsass-Lothringen) in Mulhouse, the texts, in manuscript form, were intended to be sent to the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle archives but eventually ended up in the Alsatian archive. See M. Ginsburger, “Deux pourims locaux,” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935): 445–50. A few years earlier, in 1932, the Hebrew Union College Annual published an article in Hebrew about the Jewish history of Tangier by Ya‘akov Moshe Toledano, a Palestinian-born Moroccan scholar (author of Ner ha-Ma’arav, Jerusalem 1911), then av bet din in Cairo, who among many other communal activities served in the rabbinical court of Tangier between 1926–1928. See Toledano, “Ha-Yehudim.” 49  Abraham Moise Tanji of Tetuan keeps the zayin transliteration. I thank Mitchell Serels for his valuable help on this transliteration and for providing me information about Abraham Moise Tanji.

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­ rofessional Moroccan periodical Hésperis. There he testified that all the p synagogues of Tangier possess “a (single) scroll of parchment (un phylactère de parchemin)” on which the two scrolls were written. These texts, he added, were recited publicly in the synagogue by the prayer leader during the morning service of each of these Purim days, on Av and Elul.50 In other words, they filled the same liturgical and communal function. Furthermore, a closer reading of the texts shows some indication that they come from the same author. The most interesting example is the usage of the exact Hebrew phrase borniyot gedolot to denote the greatness of both the French Naval force, and Dom Sebastian’s army.51 This Aramaic and Hebrew phrase is uncommon, and its repeated appearance in both scrolls may shed light on the texts’ authorship. The threat of a forced mass conversion by Dom Sebastian of Portugal, mentioned earlier, is the most important historical anecdote that the Tanjawi text adds to the story of Ibn Danan. Dom Sebastian, the Tanjawi scroll relates, had intended to either baptize all the Jews who were “sitting in the Maghrib” or kill those who would refuse to convert. The Jews of Morocco, the text states, were forewarned by “two Marranos that had arrived with the Portuguese army” about this plan.52 This anecdote about a threat of mass conversion conveys a valuable “Judeo-Iberian” perspective53 50  It is not uncommon, Laredo added, to find copies of these scrolls in the hands of some of the old families of the city: “A Tanger, toutes les synagogues possèdent un phylactère de parchemin sur lequel sont écrites ces deux meghilla-s. Chacune d’elles est donc lue le jour du purim qui lui correspond. L’officiant doit faire la lecture en public, pendant la prière du matin. Il n’est pas rare de trouver des copies de ces meghilla-s chez les vieilles familles de la ville.” Laredo, “Les Purim de Tanger,” 203. His article featured pictures of the two texts written by the same scribe. Other printed facsimiles of the manuscript can be found in Lucette Marques Toledano, “Deux Purim marocains,” in Mosaïques de notre mémoire: Les judéo-espagnols du Maroc, ed. Sarah Leibovici (Paris: Centre d’études Don Isaac Abravanel, 1982), 67–84. 51  The terms borni and borniyot appear twice in the Babylonian Talmud (e.g., Rosh Hashanah 23a) in reference to “a gallant ship,” which Rav defined as “this is a large borni.” In his commentary, based on the Old French, Rashi invokes the word dromont, a large medieval warship. These terms are most likely a Hebrew rendering of liburnian or liburna, a type of standard battle ship that was used by the Roman navy. The medieval lexicographer Nathan ben Jehiel of Rome, a contemporary of Rashi and the author of Sefer ha-‘Aruch, arrived at similar definitions. See Alexander Kohut, Aruch Completum, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1890), 195. 52  Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 47, briefly mentions this rather peculiar detail, and adds, “just as had been done to the whole of Portuguese Jewry in 1497.” 53  The “Judeo-Iberian” perspective of the battle requires further investigation. In his work on Marrano history and literature, the nineteenth-century German historian and rabbi

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on the battle that is nevertheless missing from the Ibn Danan text. Since the story taken from the chronicle of Ibn Danan was preserved and later printed in a liturgical book (Ahavat ha-Kadmonim) of the toshavim, Fassi Jews who did not originate in Spain or Portugal, to whom the adjective kadmonim (Hebrew for “ancient”) in the title of the prayer book is attributed, one can see two distinctive traditions at play.54 Similarly, decoding the acronym of the Hebrew dates in both texts—of Ibn Danan and the scroll—suffices to reveal and explain the different perspectives they bring. While the Ibn Danan text indicates the year 5338 by the Hebrew code HASLAV, the author of the later scroll turns this date into a Hebrew verb embedded in a phrase based on Psalm 111: “The year [in which] He has sent redemption unto his people.” From a later perspective, the “victory” over Sebastian could not have been but a story of a past event whose results were already known. Furthermore, this victory is presented as a Jewish victory over the Christian ruler on Moroccan land (or “lands”).55 While the 1578 story in the Ibn Danan chronicle places the Jews of Fez as a marginal group, a detail in a much larger geopolitical scheme (represented by the “three kings”), the scroll tells the story of “a miracle” that befalls all the Jews of Morocco. The Purim of Ibn Danan— of the Fassi community and Ahavat ha-Kadmonim—is a celebration of a Moroccan victory over external threat, of Islam over Christianity (nekama be-Edom). On the other hand, the Purim of the Tanjawi text tells the story of a Jewish victory over Christianity that happened to have taken place in Meyer Kayserling claimed that Dom Sebastian had financed his campaign against the “infidels” in Morocco largely with money taken from the geheimen Juden (the so-called Marranos or Conversos) who lived in Portugal. In exchange for protecting their property from being confiscated by the Inquisition and the right to emigrate, Dom Sebastian had extracted 225,000 ducats from those Jews. See Meyer Kayserling, Geschichte der Juden in Spanien und Portugal (Berlin: J. Springer, 1867), 159. E. W. Bovill wrote that it was the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who were forced to convert to Christianity) who paid this amount: “the Moriscoes were allowed to purchase for 225,000 ducats freedom from confiscation of goods as punishment for sinning against the inquisition.” He added, however, that the substantial cost of arms and equipment “were to be financed by borrowing from the Jews against an undertaking to repay in three years’ time with 92,000 quintals of pepper.” E. W. Bovill, The Battle of Alcazar: An Account of the Defeat of Don Sebastian of Portugal at El-Ksar el-Kebir (London: Batchworth Press, 1952), 62 and 66. 54  Mitchell Serels has called the Purim of 1578 a “uniquely Tangierian Jewish celebration.” Serels, A History of the Jews of Tangier, 12. 55  Both the chronicle and the scroll refer to Morocco in plural, artzot ha-Maghrib (the lands of the Maghrib), invoking most likely the Arabic form of Aradi al-Maghrib, which was common in Moroccan Muslim historiography.

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a Muslim land (“in the land of their enemies,” based on Leviticus 26:44). Theologically, it tells the story of a redemptive God who did not reject his people and did not violate his covenant with them.

Judeo-Moroccan Memory The text of Ibn Danan is not only a primary document of Moroccan Jewish memory but also of “general” Moroccan history, and perhaps even colonial history. Although there is no known Arabic contemporary account of the battle,56 it was recited, memorized, and repeated in poetry of celebration, an important Maghribi medium for disseminating information about the nasara (Christians). A key figure in this written genre of poetry was Ahmad Ibn al-Qadi (1553–1616), a prominent writer at the time of the new ruler Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur. Al-Qadi, who became intimately acquainted with Ahmad al-Mansur, was himself captured in 1586 by Christian pirates, but was ransomed by his master after eleven months. In gratitude, al-Qadi dedicated all his works to his royal benefactor. His long poem about the Battle of Wadi al-Makhazin provided the immediate listeners, as well as future generations of readers, with details about the course of battles, the causes, the tactics, and, finally, the glorious ascendancy of the Muslim warrior. Eventually, this poem, along with numerous other poems written in the court of al-Mansur, became the basis for the construction of national Moroccan memory.57 In terms of Maghribi ­historiography, a chapter about the Battle of Wadi al-Makhazin is included in the most important source for the history of the first of the Sharifan dynasties of Morocco, the chronicle of the Sa‘adi sultans of Morocco, Nuzhat al-ḥādı̄ bi-akhbār mulūk al-qarn al-ḥādı̄ (1724), by Moroccan historian and biographer Mohammed Al-Ifrani (1670–1745).58

56  European observations (mainly from the Peninsula) were also limited. See “Note on the Contemporary Account of the Battle of Alcazar,” in Bovill, The Battle, 187–88. 57  On al-Qadi see Nabil Matar, Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 3–28, 47–51. There might be a Portuguese equivalent to this, the epic Os Lusíadas (The Luisads, first published in 1572) by Luís Vaz de Camões (ca. 1524–1580). Eventually, poems written in the court of al-Mansur became the bases for the construction of national Moroccan memory just as Camões’s poetry became for Portugal. 58  I consulted the French translation: Nozhet-Elhâdi: Histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc (1151–1610) (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1888), 131–39.

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The memory of Wadi al-Makhazin was carried well into post-­ independence Morocco (since 1956). Major public sites like streets and squares virtually all over the state were given the name Wadi al-Makhazin. As the Moroccan postcolonial era was shaped by policies of nation-­ building, the government allocated the 4th of August as one of its official “national memorial days” (al-Dhikrayat al-Wataniyya), the only one among a list of 26 days that refers to an event that did not take place in the twentieth century (also labeled Commémoration de la Bataille d’Oued El Makhazen à Ksar Kbir, 4 aout, in French). The Borj-Nord Museum of Moroccan weaponry in Fez, housed in a fortress tower built in 1582 by Ahmad al-Mansur, exhibits a massive 12-ton cannon that was used during the 1578 battle, employing complimentary narratives of technological advantages and Muslim victory. In 2008, a cornerstone for a new special museum in the city of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr was laid for the 430th anniversary of the battle. This museum, named Museum of Resistance and of the Army of Liberation (Mathaf al-Muqawama wa-Jaysh al-Tahrir), was inaugurated in 2011. As the history of early modern Morocco has often been viewed through the lens of postcolonial national pride, public statements asserted the historical importance of the battle for the protection of Islam, the sacred religion, and the reinforcement of the Moroccan kingdom and its ability to obliterate the interests of invasive colonial ambitions. This chapter of Moroccan national history was not lost on Jews of postcolonial Morocco. A popular Judeo-Arabic history book printed in Casablanca in 1953, History of the Jews of Morocco in Arabic,59 includes a short description of the battle, without any mentioning of the special Purim. The “Jewish” component of the battle, however, appears to be the “benevolent treatment” of Portuguese captives by Jews, a narrative invocation of Immanuel Aboab’s Nomologia.60 In 1978, on the fourth centennial anniversary of the battle, the Casablanca-based Conseil des Communautés

59  Isaac D.  Abbou, Hisṭoryah del-Yahud del-Maroḳ bil-‘Arabiya (Casablanca: Yehudah Razon, 1953). The book is a Judeo-Arabic adaptation of the third part of Isaac D. Abbou, Musulmans andalous et judéo-espagnols (Casablanca: Antar, 1953). Isaac D.  Abbou (1896–1961) was a community leader in Casablanca. 60  The phrase “les traitèrent avec bienveillance” is taken from Isaac D. Abbou, Musulmans andalous et judéo-espagnols, 300, which itself is a reference to Jornada de Africa (Lisbon, 1607), an account written by Jeronimo de Mendoça, a Portuguese chronicler who himself was a captive in Morocco. Jeronimo de Mendoça described the Portuguese prisoners who were sent to the Mellah, writing that they were the luckiest of all the hostages because they were so well treated by the Jews, who “mourned a thousand times their banishment from Spain.” See García-Arenal, Ahmad al-Mansur, 71.

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Israélites du Maroc sent out letters to all the synagogues in the country, calling them, exceptionally, to include the Jewish event in the civic calendar by celebrating the special Purim on August 4 and 5. Written in both Arabic and French, the letter, which contained a narrative of the 1578 event, was meant to be read in the synagogues.61 Returning the subject to the realm of rabbinic texts, the Jewish memory of the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr further shows the historicity of rabbinic texts in the Maghrib and also demonstrates how their authors were in dialogue with their cultural environment. As we have seen, the Hebrew texts around the event, which was organized along the lines of a Muslim-­ Christian axis, had shifted with time and communal needs. The complications introduced into the story by the history of Iberian Jewry across the Gibraltar Strait “convert” the Muslim side almost seamlessly into a Jewish side. Furthermore, the fact that a scroll appears in the nineteenth century together with another scroll relating to a more recent event tells us more about how Jewish memory works. Not only did the nineteenth-century nes “remind” people of the sixteenth-century one, it also “reinforced” its validity, perhaps suggesting a pattern of a “cosmic” divine plan playing out through nissim (miracles) in the region in a longue durée style, and thereby adding a Jewish mystical dimension to the “this-worldly” Moroccan history.

 Valensi, Fables, 113–14.

61

Notes on Contributors

Aviva Ben-Ur  is professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches history. She is the author of Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming), Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (2009), and, with Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname: Essays (2012) and Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs (2009). Sarah  Phillips  Casteel  is Professor of English at Carleton University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. She is the author of two monographs, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (2007) and Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2016), which won a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Heather  Hermant  is an artist-scholar based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research and artistic practice engage the intersection of gender, queer histories, memory and performance. She teaches community engaged research at the University of Toronto.

© The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2

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José  da Silva  Horta is Associate Professor of African History at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, where he serves as deputy director of the UL Centre for History and as director of the African Studies Program. He was visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. His publications include The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (with Peter Mark, 2011, 2013), A “Guiné do Cabo Verde”: Produção Textual e Representações (1578–1684) (2011), and articles in international journals since 1991. Jan C. Jansen  is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.  His main research interests concern the comparative history of the European colonial empires and decolonization, with a ­particular focus on the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds since the eighteenth century. His books include Erobern und Erinnern: Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und französischer Kolonialismus in Algerien, 1830–1950 (2013), Decolonization: A Short History (with Jürgen Osterhammel, 2017), and Refugee Crises, 1945–2000: Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison (co-editor with Simone Lässig, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Peter  Mark  is “emeritus” Professor of African Art History at Wesleyan University. He is a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut (Halle) and Invited Cathedratic Professor of History at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon; managing editor of Mande Studies; and author of five books, including “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity. He has been a senior fellow at “Rework,” Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; Invited Professor at the École des Hautes Études, and Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow at the Johann Wolfgan Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. He works on West African sixteenth- to seventeenth-century history and on the history and methodology of pre-colonial African art. Yigal S. Nizri  is assistant professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His academic interests lie in cultures and histories of Jews of the Arabic-speaking lands and Mizrahi history in Israel. He is currently working on a monograph on the emergence of a Jewish Moroccan scribal culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of trans-Mediterranean Maghribi-Jewish diasporic networks.

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Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger  is an independent scholar, who has just finished a research project at the Institute for Asian and African Science, Humboldt University, Berlin. She specializes in Latin American, Caribbean, and African literature and sociology and has had teaching positions in Germany (Berlin), the United States (College Park, Maryland), and the Netherlands (Leiden). Her research focuses on a comparative approach to African and Latin American literatures and cultures. She is the author of The “Air of Liberty”: Narratives of the Global South (2008) and Modern Slavery and Water Spirituality: A Critical Debate in Africa and Latin America (2017), and the co-editor of two collected volumes. Sina Rauschenbach  is Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam. She has published in the field of medieval and early modern Jewish-Christian history of knowledge and thought, with a special interest in Iberian, Dutch, and Atlantic worlds. Her books include monographs on Joseph Albo and Menasseh ben Israel, as well as collected volumes on the history of knowledge (with Richard van Dülmen), public intellectuals avant la lettre (with Rainer Bayreuther et  al.), and the Castilian arbitristas (with Christian Windler). A collected volume on Sephardim and Ashkenazim in early modern Europe is under preparation. Jessica  V.  Roitman  is a Researcher in Caribbean History at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. Her teaching and research interests include Jewish and colonial history, migration, governance, and ethnic and minority relationships. She has published articles and books on the Atlantic World, Sephardic History, citizenship, and gender and colonialism. Jonathan Schorsch  holds the Chair of Jewish Religious and Intellectual History, University of Potsdam, Germany. He has authored Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (2004) and Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century (2009), along with various related essays. He was named the Gomez Scholar for 2018/19 by the Gomez Mill House Foundation, partially in support of his forthcoming essay, “Revisiting Portuguese Jewish Exploration and Colonization, ca. 1658: The Relation that Jeosua Nunez Netto and Joseph Pereira sent from the Beach of the Pauroma on the Wild Coast.”

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Ana Sobral  is Assistant Professor of Global Literatures in English at the University of Zürich. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial studies, cultural globalization, intermediality, narration through new media, and memory studies. She has published articles and book chapters on rap and poetry in the Global South, Islamic feminism, and the links between popular music, migration, and cosmopolitanism. José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim  is senior researcher and professor at the Centro de História, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, as well as a collaborator at the Research Center CIDEHUS, in Évora University, Portugal. He has published two books on Jews and the Portuguese Expansion: one on Jews and Portuguese Morocco (sixteenth century); and another one on Jews and conversos in Cochin (sixteenth to seventeenth century) (in Portuguese). He is the author of more than 60 articles and chapters published in seven languages. He also belongs to the Executive Board of the Society Sefarad and presided over the project “Portuguese Jewish Mediaeval Sources,” sponsored by the Rothschild Foundation (Évora, 2015–2017). Together with Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros, he is the editor of Hamsa: Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies.

Place Index1

A Alcaçarquiuir, 343 Algeria/Algerian, 334n4, 346 Amsterdam, 2, 2n3, 5, 12–14, 53, 55, 78–79, 79n71, 82–84, 83n81, 93n26, 102, 131, 138–139, 141, 143–155, 157–158, 163–165, 163n11, 167–169, 168n32, 168n33, 169n37, 174n60, 179–180, 179n83, 189, 192–195, 197–199, 202–204, 202n77, 209n113, 212, 220, 232, 291, 300, 303–304, 306 Andalusia/Andalusian, 199, 343 Antilles, Dutch, 86, 87n7, 97, 101 Antwerp, 127, 144, 145, 148n16, 189, 199 Arzila, 333n1 Atlanta, 213 Avignon, 341 Azamor, 333n1

1

B Bahamas, 207, 252n17 Barbados, 3, 152, 162, 189, 206, 217, 220, 221n17, 226, 228, 228n43, 240–241, 252n17 Bayonne, 3, 189, 300, 300n4, 304–308, 321 Berbice, 194 Bergental, 153 Bordeaux, 3, 189, 202, 225, 304 Boston, 211, 241 Braganza, 118, 284 Brazil/Brazilian, 27, 31, 33, 36, 53–54, 63, 65, 131–132, 137, 145–158, 188, 190, 196, 198, 220, 261n54, 290, 292 Dutch, 2, 2n4, 12–13, 92n21, 144, 162, 162n7, 189, 203 Bridgetown, 226, 229, 229n49, 230, 235–236, 241n85, 243, 290 Brighton, 241 Buenos Aires, 55n83, 210

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2

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PLACE INDEX

C Cabo Verde/Cabo Verdean/Cape Verde/Cape Verdean, 11, 29–31, 34n20, 50, 50n71, 57–84, 63n19, 65–66, 66n28, 67n33, 70n46, 136, 155 Cairo, 119, 339, 345n27, 353–354, 354n45, 355n48 Camaragibe, 149 Canada/Canadian, 16, 299, 301–302, 301n6, 310–321, 311n39, 323–330 Canary Islands, 155 Caribbean, 5–6, 6n17, 15–16, 18, 53, 87, 92, 110–111, 160, 162, 173, 179, 182, 182n95, 188, 204, 208, 211, 213, 247–248, 248n1, 249n5, 252–253, 252n17, 252n20, 259–261, 261n54, 264, 267–268, 269n89, 270, 272–274, 278–286, 280n7, 281n10, 288–289, 292–294, 292n32, 292n33, 297–298, 298n49 British/English, 66, 162, 162n8, 180, 189, 215–244, 279, 283 Danish, 3 Dutch, 3, 161–162, 161n6, 179, 279, 283, 291 French, 3, 164 Spanish, 2, 48n66 Cartagena, 34n20, 39, 44, 48n66, 233n64, 234n65 Casablanca, 349n35, 359, 359n59 Cayenne, 162, 162n10 Ceuta, 333n1, 353n44 Charleston, 3, 187, 207, 213, 217 Cochin, 136, 138, 139 Coimbra, 126n41, 128 Coro, 102, 102n73, 210 Cuba, 233n64, 234n65, 270, 294 Curaçao, 3, 11, 49n67, 85–111, 93n26, 100n65, 104n80, 179–180, 189, 207, 210, 217, 220, 226, 228, 234n65, 280n7, 283, 290

D Denmark, 349 E Empire British, 14, 207, 218, 223, 228, 229n44, 231–232, 232n58, 235, 238, 254, 314 Dutch, 220n16 Ottoman, 19, 138, 138n71, 141 Portuguese, 28, 63, 123, 126, 133, 220 Spanish, 28, 62, 144 England, 147, 187–188, 192, 195, 199, 199n60, 200, 222, 234n65, 255, 266 Essaouira, 352n41 Évora, 118, 118n7, 120, 140 F Fez/Fassi, 131n50, 336n6, 337, 337n7, 338, 340, 343–345, 343n24, 348n32, 353, 357, 359 Fossano, 351n39 France, 3, 119–123, 126, 144, 170, 187–189, 216, 266, 283, 299–300, 302, 305–309, 314, 320–322 G Galicia, 39 Georgia, 13–14, 183, 186–187, 190–193, 197–198, 202, 204–205, 204n91, 211–213 Germany, 15, 170, 230, 348–349 Gibraltar, 360 Granada, 38 Grand Caymans, 234n65 Great Britain, 220, 233 Guadeloupe, 3, 289

  PLACE INDEX 

Guinea, Upper, 29, 50, 69, 78, 82, 84 Guiné do Cabo Verde/Guiné de Cabo Verde, 69, 136 Guyanas, 3, 162, 165, 177, 189, 189n18 Dutch, 170 English, 162n10, 170 French, 162 H The Hague, 101, 145, 147, 152–153, 156 Haiti/Haitian, 3n5, 101, 104, 106–107, 172n48, 210, 240–241, 251n17, 260, 286 Hamburg, 202 Havana, 294 Holland, 45, 131, 150, 152, 167, 182n96, 195, 290 I Iberian Peninsula, 2, 42, 62, 117, 121, 129, 135, 145, 167, 189, 204, 207, 261, 271–272, 279, 282, 300n4, 333n1, 334, 342–343, 358n56 India, 18, 54, 136–137, 255, 263 Ireland/Irish, 18, 241, 256 Italy, 128, 170, 191n27, 256, 348, 351n39 J Jaffa, 345n27 Jamaica/Jamaican, 3, 14, 162, 171n44, 180, 189, 207, 208n105, 215–216, 218, 220–222, 222n17, 226–244, 247–249, 252n17, 261n54, 263–264, 267, 269–270, 272–274, 279, 283, 287, 292n33

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Jerusalem, 148, 270, 338, 340, 344, 345, 345n27, 347, 348, 353 Joal, 78 Jodensavanne, see Savannah K Kingston, 215–216, 226, 228–230, 233–237, 233n63, 241–244 Ksar es-Seghir, 333n1 L Labrador, 300n3 Larache, 333n1 La Rochelle, 300, 304, 305, 307 Leiden, 144 Lepanto, 335n5 Libya, 334n4 Lima, 39, 40, 43, 43n44, 44 Lisbon, 42, 53, 55n83, 116–117, 128, 153, 154n30, 198 London, 3, 5, 13–14, 147, 186–189, 192, 194, 196–200, 199n62, 202–204, 206–207, 212, 222, 226, 232, 241–242, 284 M Madeira, 155, 187 Málaga, 48n66, 191 Maracaibo, 233n64 Marrakech, 347 Martinique, 3, 93 Mauritsstad, 149, 151 Meknes, 335–336, 336n5, 340, 340n17 Mexico City, 39, 49 Middelburg, 147, 189 Mogador, 136, 350, 353n44 Montego Bay, 226, 229, 233, 234n65, 240n82, 243

368 

PLACE INDEX

Montréal/Montreal, 311, 313n48, 314–316 Morocco, 17, 133, 136, 138, 138n71, 333–334, 334n2, 337n10, 338–339, 341, 345n27, 346–347, 348n32, 349n35, 350–353, 354n45, 355–359, 357n53, 357n55 N Nantes, 304, 304n17, 305 The Netherlands/The Dutch Republic/United Provinces, 13, 59, 78, 84, 92–93, 100–103, 105, 107–109, 144, 147–148, 148n16, 152, 154, 157–158, 165, 168, 178, 178n74, 195, 199, 220, 308 New France/Nouvelle France, 16, 299, 304–305, 307, 312, 314, 317, 320, 326, 329 New Netherland, 92n21, 209n113 New Orleans, 287 Newport, 3, 217, 226, 228 New Spain, 181n90, 181n91 New York, 3, 9, 194, 205–207, 226, 313 Nieuw Amsterdam/New Amsterdam, 3, 92n21, 153 North America/North American, 3, 62, 92n21, 183–214, 217, 219, 220, 225, 233, 255, 321 O Olinda, 149, 151, 153, 154n30 Ouderkerk, 138 Oujda, 350 P Panama, 46, 233n64 Paramaribo, 163, 164, 165n21, 176n69, 292

Patras, 335n5 Pernambuco, 44–45, 131, 133–134, 149, 153–154, 153n28, 154n30, 157, 157n40 Peru, 38, 43, 48, 181n91 Petite Côte, 75, 78, 80, 82 Philadelphia, 3, 164n18, 165, 172n48, 178, 206–207, 211 Pisa, 140 Poland, 349 Port au Prince, 260n51 Porto d’Ale, 75, 78 Port Royal, 269 Portugal, 17, 24, 27, 31, 35, 43, 51, 54, 63, 64n23, 68, 116, 118, 120, 122–127, 133–134, 149, 151–152, 156, 185, 188–191, 196–197, 196n45, 203, 207, 220, 290, 292, 333–334, 333n1, 342–344, 346n29, 355–357, 357n53, 358n57 Prague, 270, 274, 341 Príncipe, 65, 65–66n28 Puerto Belo, 46 Q Al-Qaṣr al-Kabı̄r, 333, 333n1, 334n2, 334n3, 336, 339–341, 341n18, 345, 350, 354, 359–360 Québec, 300, 300n3, 304–306, 312–319, 321–323 R Recife, 131, 131n50, 144, 147, 149, 151–152, 151n23, 154n30, 157, 220, 290 Rennes, 304 Ribeira Grande, 69 Riohacha, 233n64 Rotterdam, 78, 79 Rufisque, 78

  PLACE INDEX 

S Safi, 130, 133, 133n53, 333n1 Sahel, 60–61, 61n8, 74–76, 75n58 St. Croix, 3, 207, 208 St. Domingue/Saint‐Domingue, 3, 98, 210, 220–221, 221n17, 242n87 St.‐Esprit/Saint‐Esprit, 304, 307–308 St. Eustatius, 206 St. Lucia/St. Lucian/Saint Lucia, 252n17, 283, 285 St-Malo, 304 St. Thomas, 3, 165, 233n64, 283, 284 Salem, 289–290, 294, 297 Salvador da Bahia, 145, 150, 151 Santa Fe, 233n64, 262 Santiago Island, 66–68, 77, 81, 83 Santo Domingo, 3 São Tomé, 52, 65–67, 66n28, 155–156 Savannah, Georgia, 3, 13–14, 183–214 Savannah/Jodensavanne, Suriname, 163, 164, 176n69, 177, 292 Sefrou, 340–341, 340n17 Senegal/Senegalese, 73n54, 78, 79n71, 80, 82–83 Senegambia, 11, 57, 59, 67–84 Seville, 38, 53 Sierra Leone, 76 South America/South American, 2, 6, 92, 107, 162, 186, 194, 233 Spain, 24, 27, 35, 36, 38, 42, 43, 45, 59, 115, 118, 120, 122, 128, 129, 150, 151, 185, 189, 191, 197, 248, 256, 261, 266, 267n81, 269, 278, 279, 287, 293, 293n36, 294, 334, 357 Suriname/Surinamese, 13, 82, 87, 92n21, 96, 96n44, 98n51, 103, 152, 159–182, 189–190, 194–195, 199, 206, 220–221, 228, 228n7, 283, 287, 290–292, 294, 296

369

T Tangier/Tangierian, 333n1, 349–351, 353–356, 353n44, 355n48, 357n54 Tetuan/Tetuani, 348n32, 349, 352n41, 355, 355n49 Toronto, 316, 324–325 Trás-os-Montes, 118, 118n7, 120 Tunisia/Tunisian, 334n4, 349–350, 350n35 Tuscany, 170 U USA/United States/U.S./US American, 2, 15, 23, 62, 62n12, 110, 178, 188, 213, 215, 234n65, 238, 240, 253–257, 270, 274, 281–282, 288–290, 330 Utrecht, 146 V Valencia, 39 Vienna, 119n9, 270, 274 Virginia, 295 W Wadi al-Makhazin, 333–334, 342, 358–359 Wendat, 301, 301n6, 331 West Africa/West African/Western Africa/Western African, 3, 10–11, 28–30, 29n6, 51–53, 55, 59–61, 60n7, 61n8, 64–65, 70–74, 76–77, 79n71, 81, 83–84, 155, 157, 157n40 West Indies British, 217–218, 220–221, 221n17, 224–225, 227–228, 235, 238, 240 Dutch, 86n1, 217, 225, 240 French, 220–221, 221n17, 225, 240 Willemstad, 94, 94n30, 106, 180

Name Index1

A Abbou, Isaac D., 139, 151, 359n59, 359n60 Abd al-Malik, Mulay, 333, 334, 342, 347, 348 Abernethy, David, 334n2 Abitbol, Me’ir, 336n6, 338n10 Abitbol, Michel, 334n3 Aboab, Immanuel, 142, 343–344, 343n25, 344n26, 359 Aboab, Isaac, 139, 151 Aboab, Judah R., 343 Abraham Haim (Senior), 100 Abrahams Levy, Marion, 184n2 Abraham-Van der Mark, Eva, 95n34, 95n36, 95n38, 99n60 Abravanel, Isaac D., 126, 126n34 Aburabia, Amram, 335n5 Adams, Julia, 54n79 Adams, Rachel, 301n8 Adelman, Howard, 40, 40n39 Adler, Elkan Nathan, 133n54 Adolphus, Jacob, 237n75, 242

1

Aires, Francisco, 118, 118n8, 119 Aizenberg, Edna, 15n36, 282, 282n12 Aizenberg, Isidoro, 102n73 Alami, Salomo, 116–117, 116n1 Alashkar, Moses ben Isaac, 335n5 Alberro, Solange, 39n34 Alfonso, António Jorge Ferreira, 70n46 Al-Jilali, Mustafa (al-Majaz), 335n5 Allen, Rosemary, 89n8 Al-Mansur, Ahmad, 334, 340, 343n24, 358–359, 358n57 Al-Mutawakkil, Mohammed, 333 Álvares, Manuel, 71, 71n49, 120, 123 Álvarez Alonso, Fermina, 39n36 Amiel, Charles, 36n26, 37n29 Amselle, Jean-Loup, 60n7 Anctil, Pierre, 322 Andrade, Jacob A. P. M., 216n5, 217n7 Antunes, Cátia, 110n99 Arbell, Mordechai, 3n5, 161n6, 162n8, 220n15, 220n17, 228n41, 267n83 Arellano, Ignacio, 181n93

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2

371

372 

NAME INDEX

Arminius, Jacobus, 144 Arribas Palau, Mariano, 138n71 Ashcroft, Bill, 6n13, 160, 160n5, 171n44 Ashkenazi, Elliott, 208, 209n112 Assis, Yom Tov, 334n3 Assmann, Aleida, 249–250, 249n6, 250n7, 250n10 Assmann, Jan, 250, 250n7, 250n8, 250n9, 253–254, 253n23, 254n25 Attias, Jean-Christophe, 126n34 Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, 215 Axtell, James, 128n42 B Baer, Alejandro, 293n36 Baer, William, 295n44 Baer, Yitzhak, 116n1 Baker, Max, 185n3, 188n12 Balseiro, Maria Luísa, 123n28 Bandarra, Gonçalo Anes, 124 Banerjee, Sukanya, 231n58 Bar-Asher, Avishai, 350n35 Bar-Asher, Shalom, 337n6 Barel, Catherine, 152n26 Barlaeus, Caspar/Van Baerle, Caspar/ Barléu, Gaspar, 12–13, 143–158, 146n6 Barnett, Richard D., 184n2, 185n3, 190n21, 196n44, 196n45, 196n46, 197n48, 200, 200n66, 200n68, 201n73, 203n84, 203n85 Barringer, Tim, 234n67, 238n77 Bar Selomoh (de Terrutiel), Abraham, 117n4 Bartolovich, Crystal, 18n38 Batnizky, Leora, 135n58 Batteau, Jesseka, 254, 254n27, 254n29 Battson, Jill, 325n89

Baum, Stephan K., 281n10 Beaudoin, Gérald A., 301n6 Beaurepaire, Pierre-Yves, 222n20, 223n24, 224n26, 224n29, 225n32, 232n60 Beinart, Haim, 44n49, 138n71 Belisario, Isaac Mendes, 279, 283 Bell, David A., 302n12 Bellin, Jacques Nicolas, 165, 165n25, 176–177, 176n69, 177n71 Ben Adhan, Yosef, 352n41 Benamozegh, Eliyahu, 352n41 Benayahu, Meir, 337n8, 338n10 Bendanan Serfatim, Abraham, 140 Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi, 346n29 Benedix, Samuel, 210–212 Bengio, Moshe, 354, 355, 355n47 Bengio, Yoseph, 334n3 Ben Hasdai, Abraham, 120, 121n20 Ben Israel, Menasseh, 129–130, 129n46, 132, 132n52, 142, 142n87, 144, 144n2, 146, 158 Ben Jacob Saba, Abraham, 117n4 Ben Jehiel, Nathan, 356n51 Ben Khalid al-Naṣiri, Aḥmad, 340, 340n16 Benmelech, Moti, 129n45 Ben-Naeh, Yaron, 138n71 Bensabat Amzalak, Moses, 139n74 Ben-Shalom, Ram, 118n6 Ben Shem Tov ibn Habib, Moses, 117 Ben-Shim’on, Raphael Aaron, 345, 345n27 Ben-Ur, Aviva, 1n1, 4n9, 13–14, 18, 82, 82n79, 87n7, 89n9, 160n4, 166n24, 171n44, 173n56, 178n76, 179n82, 186n5, 196n41, 202n79, 203n87, 205n96, 280, 280n9, 292n33 Ben Yom Tov ibn Bilia, David, 116 Berdugo, Refael, 340n17

  NAME INDEX 

Bernardini, Paolo, 2n2, 6n15, 25n2, 35n24, 92n19, 108n95, 161n6, 219n12, 220n16, 220–221n17, 308n27 Bernheim, Alain, 216n1 Bernoulli, Jacob, 160n2 Bernoulli, Jean, 164 Berry, Steve, 15, 248, 249n5, 258, 261, 264–268, 267n81, 270, 272, 273, 274n100 Bethencourt, Francisco, 58n1, 59–60, 61n8, 61n9, 62n13, 65n26, 79, 79n72 Betnesky, Gitelle Goldwater, 316–319, 316n62 Beuchot, M., 175n64, 175n65 Bhabha, Homi, 13 Bhambra, Gurminder K., 6n14 Biale, David, 9n26, 168n34 Bijlsma, R., 164n18 Bilge, Sirma, 323n79 Birnbaum, Ervin, 129n45 Black, Christopher, 223n23 Blackmore, Josiah, 303n15 Bloch, Marc, 184, 184n2, 188n14 Blok, Frans Felix, 143n1, 146–147, 146n8, 146n10, 147n11, 157n42 Blom, Johan C. H., 163n11, 166n29 Bodian, Miriam, 2n3, 83, 83n81, 123n28, 137, 137n66, 163n11, 168n34, 169n37, 188n15, 189n17, 202n78, 203n83 Bogdan, Henrik, 219n13 Böhm, Günter, 161n6 Bolívar, Simón, 171n45 Böttcher, Nikolaus, 27n3 Bouchard, Gérard, 324n80 Boukhalfa, Mohammed, 348n32 Bovill, E. W., 357n53, 358n56 Bowser, Frederick P., 44, 44n46, 44n47 Boxer, Charles, 61, 62 Boyajian, James C., 50n69 Boyarin, Jonathan, 8n24

373

Bradford, Clare, 322, 322n77 Brading, David A., 180, 180n88, 181n90, 181n91 Brandão, Ambrósio Fernandez, 149, 150, 320 Brandão, Cláudio, 146n6 Brandeau, Esther, 16, 299–331 Brásio, António, 69n44, 71n49, 72n50, 75n59 Brasz, Chaya, 93n26, 174n60, 197n49 Brathwaite, Edward K., 171n44, 248n3, 281n10 Brauch, Julia, 338n11 Braun, Harald E., 1n1 Bregoli, Francesca, 190n21 Brener, David, 206n100 Breuer, Mordechai, 341n19 Britt, Brian, 97n44 Brodie, Terry, 319n71 Broeck, Sabine, 19n39 Brooks, Mary Elizabeth, 346n29 Brown, Stanley, 90 Brown, Stewart, 281n10 Brunn, Gerhard, 156n38 Brymner, Douglas, 310, 310n38, 312, 317 Bullock, Stephen C., 232n59 Bullough, Bonnie, 303n15 Bullough, Vern L., 303n15 Burke, Edmund, 351n37 Burshatin, Israel, 303n15 Burt, Roger, 232n59 Butel, Paul, 4n7 Butler, Arthur John, 348n32 C Cabán-Owen, Catalina, 121n22 Cabral, Amilcar, 252n16 Cabral, Iva, 65n27, 66–68, 66n28, 66n29, 67n33, 67n34, 68n36, 73n53 Cabral, João de Pina, 62, 62n13

374 

NAME INDEX

Cadera, Susanne M., 266n79 Caldeira, Arlindo, 65n28, 67n33 Callaway, James Etheridge, 184n2 Camões Luís Vaz de, 358n57 Campbell, Marie, 120, 120n19 Campos, Michelle U., 218n11, 231n58 Candler, Allen D., 198n53 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 177n71, 180, 180n88, 181n89, 181n90, 181n93 Cantera Burgos, Francisco, 351n38, 353n44 Capriles, Lionel, 90 Carey, Daniel, 5n12, 6n12 Carletti, Francesco, 50n71, 50n72 Carneiro, Roberto, 129n45 Carpenter, Inta Gale, 206n101 Cashin, Edward J., 188n13, 190n22, 191n24 Casteel, Sarah Phillips, 6n18, 16–18, 110n102, 259n47, 295n40, 296n46, 301n8, 301n10 Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, Maria Cristina, 153–154, 153n29, 154n30 Cavignac, Jean, 3n7 Césaire, Aimé, 252n16, 277–278, 277n2 Cesarani, David, 280n7 Chabal, Patrick, 60n7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 111n103 Chambers, Iain, 111n103 Chancy, Myriam, 286–287, 286n18–22, 297–298n49 Chaves, Maria Eugénia, 62, 62n15 Chevallier, Pierre, 224n26 Cheyette, Bryan, 280, 280n8 Chisick, Harvey, 108n95 Choquette, Leslie, 302n12, 304n18 Chumaceiro, Abraham Mendes, 100n63, 101–109, 101n67, 102n73, 103n74, 105n81, 106n86

Chyet, Stanley F., 103n78, 152n24, 160n2 Cidade, Hernâni, 124n30 Clark, Peter, 222, 222n21 Clarke, Austin, 281n10 Clavijero, Francisco Xavier, 181n90 Clawson, Mary Ann, 223n23 Cleary, Joe, 18n38 Cliff, Michelle, 287–289, 287n24, 294n39 Clifford, James, 79, 86, 86n3, 297n48 Coelho, Francisco de Lemos, 71–72, 71–72n49 Cohen-Abady, Florette, 281n10 Cohen, Abraão, 131–134 Cohen, David W., 104n80 Cohen, Jonathan N., 93n26 Cohen, Judah, 185n5 Cohen, Julia Phillips, 231n58 Cohen, Julie-Marthe, 6n17, 152n24, 161n6, 178n74 Cohen, Martin, 123n28 Cohen, Robert, 93n26, 97n44, 104n78, 160n4, 164n17, 164n18, 175n66, 180n85, 181n93, 185n5, 190n20, 203n83 Cohen, Simon, 103n78, 152n24, 160n2 Colcock Jones, Charles, 184n2 Coleman, Kenneth, 184n2, 198n55 Collier, Gordon, 247, 247–248n1, 252, 252n19 Columbus, Christopher, 15, 16, 128, 247, 252–267, 269–274, 287, 294, 298 Condé, Maryse, 289–290, 290n31, 294–296 Conforte, David, 339n15 Contreras, Jaime, 36, 36n26, 38, 38n31 Cooper, Frederick, 12n31, 111n105, 231n57 Cooper, John, 142n83 Cooper, Judy, 142n83

  NAME INDEX 

Copley, Hamish, 326n91 Corcos, David, 138n71, 334n3 Coriat, Abraham, 352n41 Coriat, Yehuda, 352n41 Costa, Fernando Jorge Santos, 125n32 Coulthard, Glen Sean, 329n98 Coutinho, Francisco da Sousa, 152 Cozzi, Gaetano, 127n37 Criado de Val, Manuel, 151n21 Crownshaw, Rick, 297n48 Cuffel, Alexandra, 97n44, 119n15 Curti, Lidia, 111n103 Czaplicka, John, 250n7 D Dabydeen, David, 294–295, 295n40, 295n41 Da Costa, Antonio, 193n34, 197, 197n49, 204, 204n90 Da Costa, Isaac, 92 Da Costa, Moseh, 197 Da Costa, Uriel, 168, 168n32 Dahklya, Jocelyne, 129n44 Dalby, David, 74n54 Da Mota, André Teixeira, 50n71, 51n72, 71n49, 72n50 Danan, Benjamin, 338n10 Dasberg, Lea, 93n26 Da Silva, Fernão Rodrigues, 68 Da Silva, Filipa Ribeiro, 55n84, 198n57 Da Silva, Gabriela Borchardt Corrêa, 117n2 Da Silva, Isabel Corrêa, 62n14 Da Silva, J., 242 Da Silva, José Gentil, 127n37 D’Avezac, M., 73n54 Davidoff, Leonore, 201n70 Davis, Harold E., 184n2, 198n55 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 96n44, 104n78, 152n24, 164n18, 165n21, 172n48, 178, 178n74, 178n78, 179n80, 280, 280n9

375

Dawson, Willow, 325n85 De Alba-Koch, Beatriz, 181n93 De Albuquerque, Jerônimo, 153 De Albuquerque, Matías, 154, 154n30 De Alencastro, Luiz Felipe, 28n5 De Almada, André Alvares, 68, 71–74, 71n49, 72n50, 74n55 De Andrade, Francisco, 69n44 Deanult, Patricia L., 186n6 De Barrios, Daniel Levi (Miguel D.), 132–133, 132n51, 142, 142n86 De Carvajal, Luis, 45, 119–126, 123n28 De Carvajal y de la Cueva, Luis, 120 De Castries, Henry, 348n32 De Castro, D. João, 125n32 De Cénival, Pierre, 130n47 De Céspedes, Eleno/a, 303n15 De Córdoba, Fernando, 48n66 De Cordoba, Joshua Hezekiah, 180, 180n87 De Esaguy, José, 351n38, 353n44 De Espina, Alfonso, 119 De Figueirôa-Rêgo, João, 63, 63n18, 63n19, 64n22, 68n37 De Fonseca, Isaac Aboab, 151 De Gouveia, A. Mendes, 131n48 De Jesus, Estevão, 153 Dekker, Jeroen, 89n8 Dekker, Rudolf M., 303n14 De la Motta, Sarah, 208 De Leon, Abraham, 190 De Lespinay, Charles, 73n54 Delgado, Moses, 236–237, 236n71, 242, 244 De Madariaga, Salvador, 257 De Magalhães, Joaquim Romero, 129n45 De Matos, Artur Teodoro, 129n45 De/do Mello, Evaldo Cabral, 152, 152n26, 154 De Mello, José Antônio Gonsalves, 149, 149n18, 151n22 De Mendoça, Jeronimo, 359n60

376 

NAME INDEX

De Mendonça, Heitor Furtado, 149 De Mesquita, Moses, 79n71 De Meza, Jacob, 206 Den Boer, Harm, 132n52 De Paiva, Mosseh Pereyra, 139–140, 139n74 De Pauw, Cornelius, 180 De Pinto, David, 195n38 De Pinto, Isaac, 168–169, 169n35, 169n36, 175n63 De Santangel, Luis, 262 De Solis y Ribadeneyra, Antonio, 181n93 De Souza, Ernest Henriques, 237n73 Desrochers, Nadine, 326n89 D’Este, João Baptista, 140 De Távora, Cristovão, 152 De Torres, Alonso, 48n66 De Torres, Diego, 48n66 De Torres, Luis, 265–266, 266n78, 267n81 Deutsch, Nathaniel, 7n19 Deutsch, Yaacov, 119n10, 119n11, 119n12, 119n13 De Vega, Lope, 150, 150–151n21 De Yllan, João, 92 Dharwadker, Vinay, 209n115 Diamond, A. S., 196n43, 196n45, 199n60, 199n62 Dian Kriz, Kay, 238n77 Dias, João, 126, 127 Di Dattilo da Tivoli, Davide, 128 Diderot, Denis, 166n27, 176n68 Di Leone Leoni, Aron, 127n37 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 302n11 do Mello, Evaldo Cabral, 152–158 Dobrinsky, Herbert C., 138n69 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm (von), 106n86, 159, 159n1, 160, 160n2, 165, 170, 181, 181n94, 182 Donelha, André, 71–72, 71n49, 72n50, 77, 81n77

Downes, Aviston, 217n7, 226n37, 228n43 Drescher, Seymour, 25–26, 25n2, 55n84 Duarte, Manuel, 34n20 Ducharme, Nathalie, 311n40, 325n88 Duggan, Lisa, 329, 330n99 Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, Marie-­ Andrée, 305n20, 306, 306n24 Dutra, Francis A., 63, 63n19, 63n20, 64n21 E Ebanda De B’béri, Boulou, 323n79 Eckhout, Albert, 153 Eckstein, Lars, 247n1, 252n20 Efron, John M., 15n35 Elbaz, Raphael Moshe of Sefrou, 340, 340n17, 341, 341n18 Elbaz, Rabbi Samuel, 340n17 Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, 129n45 Elkin, Judith Laikin, 263n65 Emmanuel, Isaac S., 93n23, 97, 97n45–48, 99n61, 100n62, 100n64, 102n73, 108, 162n6, 180n84, 204n89, 217n7, 226n37 Emmanuel, Suzanne A., 97n46, 99n61, 100n62, 100n64, 102n73, 162n6, 180n84, 217n7 Endelman, Todd M., 196n44, 196n46, 203n84, 203n86 Enriquez, Rafaela, 49 Erll, Astrid, 250n7, 250n9, 251, 254n27, 297, 297n48 Escalante Arce, Pedro Antonio, 120n16 Escandell Bonet, Bartolomé, 37n27, 38n30, 40n37, 40n38 Ettinger, Amos Aschbach, 191n27 Evans, Eli N., 209, 209n114

  NAME INDEX 

F Faber, Eli, 172n53, 217n7, 226n38, 236n70 Faesch, Isaac, 88 Fahrmeir, Andreas, 231n55 Fanon, Frantz, 252n16, 277–278 Faur, José, 33, 33n19 Fauvelle, François Xavier, 66n28 Fayon, David, 343 Fejös, Zoltán, 206, 206n101 Feldman, Luis H., 135n60 Fenwick Jones, George, 183n1, 184n2, 191n27 Fermina Álvarez, Alonso, 39n36 Fernandes d’Elvas, Antonio, 32 Fernandes, Hermenegildo, 77n65 Fernandez Chaves, Manuel F., 48n66 Ferreira, Gaspar Dias, 152–154, 153n28 Ferri, Marío G., 146n6 Festa, Lynn, 5n12, 6n12 Fidalgo, Afonso, 48n66 Fidalgo, Diogo, 48n66 Fidalgo, Rodrigo, 48n66 Fiering, Norman, 2n2, 3n5, 3n6, 3n7, 6n15, 25n2, 35n24, 92n19, 108n95, 161n6, 219n12, 220n16, 221n17, 308n27 Fischel, Walter Joseph, 139n73 Flanagan, Victoria, 324n81 Flesler, Daniela, 278, 278n4, 293n36 Fontenay, Michel, 70n46, 71n46 Forrester, Gillian, 234n67, 238n77 Fox Mouser, Nancy, 50n71 Fozdar, Vahid Jalil, 224n27 Frank, Anne, 294 Frankel, Rachel, 96n44, 160n4, 292n33 Frederik Wilhelm of Orange-Nassau, 156 Freedman, Jonathan, 301n10 Freire Costa, Leonor, 155n35

377

Freyre, Gilberto, 149n18, 154, 154n31 Friedman, Saul S., 172n53, 258n46 Fuks-Mansfeld, Rena, 163n11, 166n29, 168n33 G Gaillard, Gérald, 73n54 Gampel, Benjamin R., 33n19, 138n70 Gans, David, 341, 341n19 García-Arenal, Mercedes, 129n44, 334n2, 343n24, 359n60 Garcia de la Riega, Celso, 257 García de Proodian, Lucía, 28, 28n4 Garcia, Rosendo Sampaio, 48n66 Garrigus, John D., 3n6, 98n57, 108n95, 221n17, 242n87 Geggus, David Patrick, 210, 210n119 Gelfand, Noah, 185n5, 209n113 Gerber, Jane S., 6n17, 89n9, 96n44, 162n6, 163n12, 179n82, 180n86, 182n97, 226n38, 228n41, 261, 261n54, 261n55 Gerbi, Antonello, 177n71, 180, 180n88 Gilroy, Paul, 272, 272n96 Gilson Miller, Susan, 337, 338n11, 351n38, 352–354, 352n40, 352n42, 353n44, 354n46 Ginsburger, Moise, 351n38, 353n45, 355, 355n48 Gitlitz, David, 123n28 Gleadle, Kathryn, 201n70 Glickman, Susan, 324, 324n82, 324n83 Glick, Thomas F., 33, 33n19 Glock, Joseph, 215–218, 228, 242 Goetschel, Roland, 300n4 Goetschel, Willi, 6n18, 7n21, 15n33 Goldberg, David Theo, 17n37 Goldberg, Ellen S., 137n65

378 

NAME INDEX

Goldstick, Isidore, 313–314, 313n48–51, 318 Gomarus, Franciscus, 144 Gonzales, Miguel, 120 González-Casanovas, Roberto J., 5n11 Goodblat, Morris, S., 136n61 Goodin, Robert E., 249n6 Goodman, Abram Vossen, 183n1, 188n12 Goris, J. A., 127n37 Gorman, Daniel, 231n56 Graetz, Heinrich, 344, 344n26 Graizbord, David L., 1n1, 3n7, 9n27, 33n19, 41n40, 134, 135n58, 135n59, 140n76, 189n16, 308, 308n28, 308n29 Gramaxo, Jorge Fernandes, 48n66 Gratz, Michael, 206 Gravestock, Pamela, 223n23 Greenberg, Mark I., 185n2 Greenblatt, Stephen, 263n67 Greene, Jack P., 8n25, 104n80, 186n6 Green, Nancy L., 208n108 Green, Tobias/Toby, 2n2, 29–31, 29n6–9, 49–52, 50n70, 51n74, 53n77, 55, 55n84, 59n5, 60n7, 65n27, 66–68, 66n31, 68n37, 68n40, 69n43, 73–74, 73n52, 74n56 Griffiths, Gareth, 6n13, 160, 160n5, 170n44 Groenewoud, Margo, 89n8, 91n12 Gross, Charles, 257 Grotius, Hugo, 144 Gutwirth, Eleazar, 35 H Hacker, Joseph, 138n71 Hackett, David G., 217n7, 226n34, 226n38 Hadas-Lebel, Mireille, 133n52 Hair, P. E. H., 71n49, 72n49, 72n50, 74n54, 74n55, 75n59

Ha-Kohen/ha‐Cohen, Joseph, 339n15, 341, 341n20, 342n21, 344 Halevi Wise, Yael, 15n36, 282, 282n13, 282n14, 301–302n10 Halevy, Shoshanna, 338n12 Halevy, Yosef, 339n14 Hall, Bruce S., 60–61, 61n8, 74, 74n58, 76, 76n61 Halloran, Vivian, 292, 292n32 Hall, Stuart, 111n103 Halpern, Nikki, 2n2 Hamelberg, J. H. J., 101–104, 106, 107 Handley, George B., 285, 285n17 Harden, William, 184n2 Hardin Beaumont, Augustus, 236, 236n72 Hardtwig, Wolfgang, 222n22 Haritaworn, Jin, 330n102 Harland-Jacobs, Jessica, 217n7, 219n13, 223, 223n24, 224n25, 229n44, 232n58, 240n83, 241n84 Harrison, William F., 150n20 Hart, Arthur Daniel, 300n3, 312n42 Hart, Ezekiel, 311n39 Hartog, Johan, 89n8, 97n50 Hartsinck, Jan Jacob, 165, 165n25, 176, 176n69, 177, 177n72 Hary, Benjamin H., 339n15 Hazan, Ephraim, 339n14 Haz Gomes, Elena Esperanza, 150n21 Heesakkers, C. L., 143n1 Henningsen, Gustav, 36, 36n26, 37n29, 38, 38n31 Henriques, Anna Ruth, 298n49 Henriques, Duarte Dias, 48n66 Henriques, Isabel Castro, 27n3 Henriquez, Abraham Cohen, 209n113 Hering Torres, Max Sebastián, 57–58, 58n1, 59n3, 61, 61n10, 61n11, 62n15, 64, 64n24, 79, 79n73, 140n76

  NAME INDEX 

Herkovits, Melville J., 122n22 Hermant, Heather, 16, 18, 301n7, 302n11, 325n89, 326n90, 326n91 Heschel, Susannah, 178n73 Hess, Andrew, 334n2, 342n22 Hess, Jonathan, 159n1, 181–182n94, 182n95 Heuman, Gad, 242n87 Heywood, Linda M., 55n84 Hieke, Anton, 213n129 Hijuelos, Oscar, 297n49 Hirschberg, Haim Zeev, 338n10, 353n44 Hitin-Mashiah, Rachel, 339n14 Hocquart, Gilles, 304, 305n19, 305n21, 306–308, 306n23, 325–326 Hoetink, Harry, 91, 91n13, 92n16, 104n80 Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, 225n30, 239n79 Holden Hall, Frederick Arthur, 150n20 Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon, 144, 157 Horowitz, Elliott, 117, 118n5, 353–354n45 Horta, José da Silva, 6n16, 11, 17–18, 30, 52–53, 53n77, 55, 55n82, 59n2, 59n4, 60n7, 63n17, 66n28, 68n38, 71n48, 72n50, 73n51, 73n52, 77n64, 77n65, 78n67–69, 79n71, 80n75, 81n77, 81n78, 136, 136n64 Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia, 190n21 Huggan, Graham, 251n14 Hughes, Susan, 325n85 Hühner, Leon, 184n2, 185n3, 188n12, 190n23 Hulme, Peter, 263n67, 266n78 Hurwitz, Edith, 234n67, 242n87, 242n88 Hurwitz, Samuel J., 234n67, 242n87, 242n88

379

Hutcheson, Gregory S., 303n15 Hutz, Ana, 31–33, 31n16, 33n18 Huygens, Constantijn, 144 I Ibn al-Qadi, Ahmad, 340, 358, 358n57 Ibn Danan, Sa‘adia, 336–342, 344–347, 348n31, 350–351, 353–354, 356–358 Ibn Danan, Shemuel ben Sa‘adia of Fez III, 336, 336n6, 337n7 Ibn Nachman, Samuel, 339n15 Ibn Shaprut, Semtob, 119 Ibn Verga, Solomon, 339n15 Ibn Yitzhak Sambari, Joseph, 339n15 Idel, Moshe, 126n35 Ifrah, Lionel, 130n46 Isaac, Benjamin, 61n8 Isa, Ramez Jorge, 108, 109n98 Israel, Jonathan I., 2n2, 2n4, 6n15, 7n23, 44, 44n49, 162n6, 162n7, 167n29, 178n75, 202n77, 204n89, 219n12, 219n14, 220n15, 220n19, 261n54, 293, 293n35 J Jackson, A. C. F., 215n1 Jackson, Harvey H., 184n2 Jacob, Margaret C., 222n20, 225n31, 239n80 Jacobs, Steven Leonard, 281n10 JanMohamed, Abdul, 87, 87n6 Jansen, Jan, 14, 18 Jellinek, Adolf, 116n1 Jessurun Rodrigues, Daniel, 197 Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, 132, 132n51, 145, 147, 152–154, 156n38 John III/João III, King of Portugal, 124, 129n45, 134

380 

NAME INDEX

Johnson, Erica, 288, 288n27 Johnson Hudson, Barbara, 139n73 Johnson, Walter, 209n116 John V/João V, King of Portugal, 196 Jones, Edward P., 288, 289n29 Jordaan, Han, 89n9, 104n80 Jordan, Don, 198n54 Junker, Carsten, 19n39 Jütte, Daniel, 222n22, 227, 227n40 Jütte, Robert, 190n21 K Kagan, Richard L., 6n15, 8n25, 53n77, 82n79, 96n44, 162n6, 171n44, 178n76, 219n12, 220n14, 221n18, 234n66, 261n54, 280n9, 289n30 Kaiser, Wolfgang, 70n46, 129n44 Kamen, Henry, 38, 38n32, 39n35 Kamp, Jeannette, 205n94 Kandiyoti, Dalia, 282, 282n13, 302n10 Kantrowitz, Stephen, 238n76 Kaplan, Yosef, 2n3, 4, 9n26, 93n26, 93n27, 130n46, 132n52, 138, 138n70, 147n12, 152n25, 163n11, 163n13, 165n20, 168n34, 169n37, 174n60, 197n49, 203n82, 204n89 Kapsali, Eliyahu, 339n15 Karner, Frances P., 88, 92n16, 93n25, 98n52 Kattan, Naïm, 319–320, 319n72, 319n73, 323 Katz, David, 130n46 Katz, Ethan B., 5n11, 7n20, 7n22, 111n104, 111n106 Katz, Jacob, 138n68, 217n6, 225n30 Katz, Nathan, 137n65 Kayserling, Meyer, 117n2, 132n51, 257, 357n53 Kellenbenz, Herrmann, 127n37

Kiron, Arthur, 1n1, 173n56, 178n77, 186n5 Klarer, Mario, 70n46 Kleiner, Ori, 343n25 Klein, Martin A., 50n71 Klepp, Susan E., 199n58 Klooster, Wim, 48n66, 92n19, 93n24, 94n30, 104n80 Knafou, H., 133n52 Koelle, Sigismund Wilhelm, 74n54 Koffman, David, S., 328n96 Koot, Christian, 12n29, 163n14 Korn, Bertram W., 180n87, 185n2, 201–202, 201n72, 201n74, 202n76 Kraus, Michael, 155n35 Kressel, Neil J., 281n10 Kritzler, Edward, 15, 52, 248, 249n5, 258, 261–270, 262n56, 262n59, 263n65, 264n70, 267n82, 269n91, 272–274, 273n99 Kusinitz, Bernard, 226n36 L Lacan, Jacques, 13 Laird, Heather, 18n38 Lalami, Laila, 288, 289n29 Lampe, Armando, 89n8 Lane, Miles, 187n8, 190n21, 191n27, 193n35 Lapierre, Nicole, 172n53 Laredo, Abraham Issac, 351n38, 355, 356n50 Lasker, Daniel, 118n6 Lasry, Pierre, 320–322, 320n74, 320n75, 324 Lässig, Simone, 230, 230n54 Latimer, Jon, 269n89 Lazarus, Emma, 256 Lazarus, Neil, 18n38 Leavitt, Sarah, 325

  NAME INDEX 

Leclerc, Georges-Louis, Compte de Buffon, 180 Lefanu, Philip, 169n35 Lehmann, Hartmut, 190n21 Leibman, Laura Arnold, 2n3, 10n28, 185n5, 217n7, 221n19, 226–227, 226n33, 226n35, 227n39, 236n70, 238, 238n77, 239n80, 292n33 Leibovici, Sarah, 356n50 Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 170 Levie Bernfeld, Tirtsah, 168n33, 188n15, 202n77, 303n13 Levinger, Lee J., 188n12 Levy, Asser, 209n113 Levy, B. H., 184n2, 185n2, 205n95 Lewinsky, Yom Tov, 349n35 Lewis, Bernard, 141n80 Liebman, Seymour B., 3n5, 123n28 Lijphart, Arend, 87n7 Linhard, Tabea Alexa, 278, 278n4, 293, 293n36, 293n37 Linton, Ralph, 122n22 Lionnet, Francoise, 12n32, 86n2, 87n5, 95n39, 110n101 Lipphardt, Anna, 338n11 Lloyd, David, 87, 87n6 Lloyd Kyi, Tanya, 325n84 Lockley, Timothy James, 184n2, 204n92, 213n128 Loewe, Raphael, 152n25 Loker, Zvi, 3n5, 3n6, 164n15, 221n17 Lopes, David, 130n47 Lopes de Barros, Maria Filomena, 137n67 López, Bernardo José, 51n73 López Belinchón, Bernardo, 129n44 Lugones, María, 328n95, 330 Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, 166n27 Luzzati, Michele, 128

381

M Mackie, Erin S., 268–270, 268n84, 268n86, 269n90, 270n92, 272, 272n95 Maduro, Elias, 99 Maehl, William H. Jr., 236n72 Maimaran, Yisrael, 336n6 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 328n94 Malino, Frances, 3n7, 4n7, 202n78 Mandel, Maud S., 5n11, 7n20, 7n22, 111n104, 111n106 Mansouri, Fethi, 323n79 Manuel I, King of Portugal, 130, 130n47 Marcus, Ivan G., 122n22 Marcus, Jacob Rader, 103n78, 152n24, 160n2, 162n10, 170n43, 184–185n2, 185n3, 217n7, 232n61, 233n62, 347–348, 348n31 Mark, Peter, 6n16, 11, 17–18, 30, 52–53, 53n77, 55, 59n2, 59n4, 70n46, 77n65, 78n68, 78n69, 79n71, 80n75, 81n77, 81n78, 136, 136n64 Marmette, Joseph, 310, 312 Marques, Alfredo Pinheiro, 128n42 Marques Toledano, Lucette, 356n50 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco, 35 Martínez, María Elena, 58n1, 59n3, 61n10, 62n15, 140n76 Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro, 234n67, 238n77 Martínez Torón, Diego, 151n21 Martinus, Raimundus, 119 Martyn, Benjamin, 192, 193, 193n34 Marzagalli, Silvia, 3n7 Mashash, Rabbi Yosef, 335n5 Masserman, Paul, 185n3, 188n12 Mata Induráin, Carlos, 181n93 Matar, Nabil, 358n57

382 

NAME INDEX

May, Harry S., 341n20 May, Sam, 10n28, 236n70, 238, 238n77, 239n80 M’Bokolo, Elikia, 60n7 McCabe, Ina Baghdiantz, 110n99 McCall, Hugh, 184n2 McConnell, W. H., 315n58 McCormick, Kylie Louise, 185n2, 201, 201n75, 212n126 McDonald, Ian, 281n10 McKay, Sharon, 321–322, 321n76, 324 McLeod, Cynthia, 290–291, 292n34, 293, 296, 296n47, 297n49 McLeod, John, 160n5 Mea, Elvira de Azevedo, 118n7 Méchoulan, Henry, 129–130n46, 132–133n52, 147n12, 164n15, 169n37, 204n89, 334n3 Medina, João, 27n3 Meerson, Michael, 119n10, 119n11, 119n12, 119n13 Mendelssohn, Moses, 106n86 Mendes, António, 69, 69n43, 70n45 Mendes, António de Almeida, 28n5, 55n83 Mendes da Costa, Binyamin, 197 Mendes da Silva, David, 193n34, 197n47, 204n90 Mendes Pacheco, Binyamin, 197 Mendes Sola, Samuel, 179 Menkis, Richard, 6n7, 312, 312n44, 312n46 Merian, Maria Sybilla, 177n71 Mettam, Gerald R., 292n34 Meyuhas Ginio, Alisa, 119n14 Michaelis, Johann David, 159n1, 182n95 Mignolo, Walter, 19n39 Miles, William F. S., 3n5 Miller, Joseph C., 1n1, 54, 54n81 Minchin, Susie, 43n42 Minis, Minis, 208 Mintz, Sidney, 110n102 Mirsky, Samuel K., 337n7

Mirvis, Stanley, 162n8, 180n87, 203n87, 219n12 Mitchell, Margaret, 291 Momsen, Janet, 99n60 Monet, Claude, 284–285 Moogk, Peter N., 305n20 Moore, Christopher W., 91n15 Morais-Farias, Paulo Fernando, 76n60 Morales, Aurora Levins, 298n49 Moraley, William, 199n58 Moreno Koch, Yolanda, 117n4 Morgan, David T., 185n2 Morgan, Philip D., 8n25, 53n77, 82n79, 96n44, 186n6, 219n12, 220n14, 221n18, 234n66, 261n54, 280n9, 289n30 Morgensen, Scott Lauria, 328, 328n97, 330, 330n101 Moses Leff, Lisa, 5n11, 7n20, 7n22, 111n104, 111n106 Mouser, Bruce, 50n71 Moyle, Jeremy, 177n71 Muchnik, Natalia, 129n44 Mucznik, Lúcia Liba, 123n24, 137n67 Muhammad, Khalid, 259n47 Muñoz, José Esteban, 302n11 Musleah, Ezekiel N., 142n83 Musqueto, Jacob, 206 Muthu, Sankar, 176n68 N Naber, S. P. L’Honoré, 145n5 Nadell, Pamela S., 96n44, 196n41 Nadler, Steven, 168n32 Nahon, Gérard, 3n7, 129n46, 174n60, 180n86, 308n27, 308n29 Nassi, David (Brazil), 152 Nassy, David, 13, 92n20, 96n44, 103, 103–104n78, 152, 152n24, 159–182, 189n19, 280n9 Naum, Magdalena, 18n38

  NAME INDEX 

Navarro, Moisés, 151 Needel, Yale M., 142n84 Netanyahu, Benzion, 32, 35, 38, 126n34, 127 Nettleford, Rex, 279, 279n6 Neusner, Jacob, 265n77 Neutsch, Cornelius, 156n38 Newman, Aubrey, 185n2 Newson, Linda A., 43n42 Nirenberg, David, 58n1, 59n3, 61n10, 62n15, 140n76 Nizri, Yigal S., 17, 338n13 Nocke, Alexandra, 338n11 Nogueira, Bernardo de Sá, 73n54 Nordin, Jonas M., 18n38 NourbeSe Philip, M., 281n10 Nowicka, Magdalena, 209n115 Noy, Dov, 120n19 Nunes Belmonte, Diogo, 55 Nunes da Fonseca, José (Brazil), 152 Nunes de Fonseca, Joseph (Curação), 92 Nunes (de) Ribeiro, Samuel, 184n2, 184n3, 188, 190, 196n44, 196n45, 196n46, 197n48, 200n68, 201n73, 203n84, 203n85 Nunis, Sipra, 200 Nünning, Ansgar, 250n7 O Obejas, Achy, 294, 294n38, 297n49 Oberlander, Wendy, 325, 325n88 Odo, Georges, 219n13 Oglethorpe, James, 187–188, 187n8, 188n13, 190, 190n21, 191n27 Oliel-Grausz, Evelyne, 93n26, 197n49 Olival, Fernanda, 62–63, 62n14, 63n18, 63n19, 64n22, 64n23, 68n37 Onne, Elia, 334n3 Oostindie, Gert, 87n7, 89n8, 90n11, 94n30, 109n98, 210n119

383

Oppenheim, Samuel, 217n8 Osier, Jean-Pierre, 119n9 Ottolenghi, Joseph, 190n23 Ottomeyer, Hans, 155n35 ‘Ovadiah/‘Ovadyah, David, 338n10 Overton/Oviton, Lovelace, 240–241, 241n84 P Paiva, Eduardo França, 64n21, 65n26 Palmer, George W. J., 229n46, 229n50 Parsley, Alvis, 326, 326n91 Pasha, Ahmed, 339 Patai, Raphael, 120n19 Patterson, Orlando, 201, 201n71 Paula, A. F., 92n18, 95n34 Paul, Heike, 253–256, 253n22 Pavic Pintaric, Anita, 266n79 Pearce, Adrian J., 62n13 Pencak, William, 226n38 Peralta Rivera, Germán, 27n3 Perelis, Ronnie, 4n8, 45n53 Peres, Damião, 71n49 Peres, Manuel Bautista/Pérez, Manuel Bautista, 27, 41–48, 44n46 Pérez Cantó, P., 40n37 Pérez García, Rafael M., 48n66 Peréz Melgosa, Adrián, 278, 278n4, 293n36 Pérez Villanueva, Joaquín, 37n27, 38n30, 40n37, 40n38 Peucher, Paul Martin, 191n27 Pfahl-Traughber, Armin, 224n28 Phaf-Rheinberger, Ineke, 12–13, 18, 151n23, 155n34, 156n38, 167n29, 172n48, 178n74 Philcox, Richard, 290n31 Philip II, King of Spain, 334 Philipson, David, 347n31 Philipson, Robert, 108n95

384 

NAME INDEX

Phillips, Carla Rahn, 128n42 Phillips, Caryl, 297n49 Phillips, William D., 128n42 Pissarro, Camille, 283–285, 288, 295 Pitock, Toni, 209, 209n112 Pitts Corry, John, 191n27 Plaut, W. Gunther, 184n2 Pluchon, Pierre, 221n17 Pomerans, Arnold J., 163n11, 166n29 Popkin, Jeremy, D., 210n118 Popkin, Richard H., 130n46, 132n52, 147n12, 169n37, 204n89 Porset, Charles, 241n84 Post, Frans, 153 Pratt, Marie Louise, 13, 177n73 Pressly, Paul M., 184n2, 208n109, 211, 211n122 Puar, Jasbir K., 330, 330n100 Putnam, Samuel, 154n31 Q Quayson, Ato, 6n18, 7n21, 15n33 Quintus Bosz, A. J. A., 195n40 R Rabbinowicz, Saul Pinchas, 348, 349n33, 350 Rademaker, C. S. M., 143n1 Rahabi, David I, 139 Ranston, Jackie, 216n4, 228n42, 229n44, 233n64, 237n75, 279n6 Raphael, David, 117n4 Rauschenbach, Sina, 1n1, 13, 18, 130n46, 146n9, 147n12, 158, 158n43, 165n20, 181n92, 181n93, 182n96 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas, 166, 166n26, 166n27, 175–176, 175n66, 176n67, 176n68, 180 Ray, Sangeeta, 17n37

Reese, Trevor R., 184n2, 187n10, 192n31, 193n33 Redfield, Robert, 122n22 Rego, A. da Silva, 130n47 Reinalter, Helmut, 222n22 Reis, Maria de Fátima, 71n48 Rembrandt, 153 Renkema, W.E., 89n8 Resende, Hernâni, 127n40, 128n41 Reubeni/Reuveni, David, 129, 129n45, 133–134, 133n54, 134n56 Révah, Israel S., 127n37, 168n32 Révauger, Cécile, 240n83, 241n84 Ricard, Robert, 130n47 Richardson, Bill, 325, 325n86 Richardson, David, 198n57 Rigney, Ann, 254, 254n26, 254n27, 254n28 Rivkin, Ellis, 35, 35n22, 38, 40 Roberts, Diane, 326n89 Robertson, Claire C., 50n71 Robertson, William, 181n93 Rodrigue, Aron, 138n71 Rodrigues Brandon, Abraham, 235 Rodrigues, Idalina Resina, 140n76 Roitman, Jessica V., 7n23, 11, 12n30, 17–18, 48n66, 49n67, 86n1, 87n7, 89n9, 92n17, 94n30, 94n31, 104n80, 110n99, 178n75, 210n116, 219n12, 220n16, 234n67 Roland, Joan G., 142n83 Romain, Gemma, 280n7 Römer, René Antonio, 89n8 Rosenbloom, Joseph, 316n64 Rothberg, Michael, 15n34, 86, 86n2, 86n4, 110n100, 251n14, 252, 252n16, 253n21, 259n46, 259n47, 260, 261n53, 273n98, 278, 278n3, 296 Roth, Cecil, 38, 116n1, 129n46, 136n62, 137n68, 344, 344n26, 351–352n39

  NAME INDEX 

Roth, Norman, 35, 37, 37n28 Rovisco, Maria, 209n115 Roy, Pierre Georges, 312, 312n47 Rozen, Minna, 138n71 Rubin, Saul Jacob, 185n2, 207, 207n102, 210n117, 212n127 Ruderman, David, 134n57 Ruggiero, Kristin, 3n5 Rupert, Linda M., 89n9, 94n29, 280n7 Rute, Rabbi Abraão, 130, 133, 133n53, 134 S Sack, Benjamin, 300n3, 312, 312n43, 312n45, 314, 316n62 Saïd, Edward, 301n9, 310n36, 327, 327n93 Saint-James, Rose, 141n80 Salomon, Herman Prins, 35–36, 35n22, 36n25, 168n32 Salvador, José Gonçalves, 27, 27n3, 31 Salverda, Reinier, 202n77 Sam Tomé, Simão Fernandes, 140 Santiago Medina, Bárbara, 37n30 Santos, Danilo, 66n28 Santos, Maria Emília Madeira, 65n27 Saraf, Michal, 350n35 Saraiva, António José, 32, 35, 35n22, 38, 40, 124, 124n30 Sarna, Jonathan D., 96n44, 196n41, 256–258, 256n38 Sassoon, I. S. D., 35n22, 168n32 Sauerberg, Lars Ole, 266n79 Saunier, Eric, 218n10 Saye, Albert B., 187n7, 192n29 Schäfer, Peter, 119n10, 119n11, 119n12, 119n13 Schapkow, Carsten S., 15n35 Schechter, Ronald, 309, 309n31, 309n32

385

Schiltkamp, Jacob Adriaan, 92n21 Schippers, Arie, 117n3 Schmidt, Ariadne, 205n94 Schnurmacher, Thomas, 319n70 Schöffer, Ivo, 163n11, 166n29 Scholem, Gershom, 126n35 Schorsch, Jonathan, 1n1, 2n2, 4n9, 7n19, 10, 18, 49n67, 49n68, 52n75, 52n76, 55n84, 82, 82n80, 89, 89n10, 94, 94n32, 96n41, 96n43, 97–98, 97n44, 97n49, 98n54, 111n103, 130n46, 140–141, 140n78, 141n79, 141n81, 172n53, 173, 173n55, 178, 179n79, 219n12, 242n87, 268–269, 268n88, 280, 280n9 Schreiber, Jean-Philippe, 225n30 Schrils, J. M. R., 99n58, 108n97 Schwartz, Stuart B., 2n4, 162n7, 168n34, 198n57 Schwarz, Henry, 17n37 Scott, Sir Walter, 254 Scriwanek, Max A., 99n59, 99n61 Seago, Karen, 266n79 Seal-Coon, Frederick William, 216n4, 226n37, 228n42, 229n47, 230n52 Sebastian, King of Portugal, 333, 342–344, 346n29, 348, 355, 356, 357n53 See, Julien, 341n20 Seeligman, Sigmund, 165n20 Segal, J. B., 137n65 Serels, M. Mitchell, 355n47, 355n49, 357n54 Sérgio, António, 124n30, 127n40, 128n41 Serra Martínez, Elías, 150n21 Serrão, Joaquim Veríssimo, 120n16 Sheftall, Adam, 212 Sheftall, Benjamin, 200–201, 207, 211

386 

NAME INDEX

Sheftall, Levi, 184n2, 207, 208, 212 Sheftall, Mordecai, 212 Shih, Shu-mei, 12n32, 86n2, 87n5, 95, 95n39, 110n101 Shmuelevitz, Arye, 138n71 Shochat, Azriel, 116n1 Siemerling, Winfried, 301n8 Silva, Ana Cristina, 155, 155n36 Silverblatt, Irene, 2n2, 38, 38n33, 52n76 Silverman, Max, 15n34, 278, 278n3 Simms, James M., 212n126 Simons, Moses, 210–212 Simpson, Leanne, 328, 328n94 Skalli, Cédric-Cohen, 126n34, 128, 129n43 Slabodsky, Santiago, 8n24 Slouschz, Nahum, 337n7 Smith, Billy G., 199n58, 330 Smith, Marc, 73n54 Smollett, Brian M., 180n87, 203n87 Snel, Harmen, 189n18 Snell, Susan, 241n84 Snoek, Jan A.M., 219n13 Snyder, Holly, 162n8, 183n1, 185n2, 185n3, 185n4, 185n5, 197n51, 234n67, 236n71, 238n76 Sobral, Ana, 15–18 Sokoloff, Michael, 119n11 Sorkin, David Jan, 4n7, 230n53 Spalding, Phinizy, 184n2 Spear, Thomas, 60n7 Sperber, Daniel, 137, 137n68 Spinoza, Baruch, 168, 168n32, 168n34, 180 Spyers, Lawrence, 242 Steinberg, Sylvie, 303n14 Stern, Malcolm H., 183n1, 184n2, 187n11, 192n30, 197n51, 208n105, 209 Stevenson, David, 222n20 Stevens, William Bacon, 184n2, 191n28

Stiefel, Barry, 186n5 Stoler, Ann Laura, 12n31, 111, 111n105 Stow, Kenneth, 121, 121n22 Stuczynski, Claude B., 54, 54n80 Studemund-Halévy, Michael, 151n23 Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, 7n23, 12n30, 43n42, 46n60, 51n73, 53, 54n78, 178n75, 219n12, 234, 234n66 Stugnell, Anthony, 166n27 Suasso, Jacob Israel, 197 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 337n8 Suleyman I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, 339 Surowitz-Israel, Hilit, 179n82, 180n85 Sussman, Lance J., 96n44 Sutcliffe, Adam, 8n25, 175n63, 221, 221n18, 221n19 Swetschinski, Daniel M., 2n3, 163n11, 163n14, 188n15, 203n80, 207 Szpiech, Ryan, 119n15 T Tailfer, Patrick, 191n25 Tanji, Abraham Moise, 355, 355n49 Tannenbaum, Frank, 62n12, 198n56 Tartakoff, Paola, 119, 119n12, 119n15 Tartas, David de Castro, 137 Tauber, Herman, 90 Tavim, José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva, 2n2, 12, 17–18, 53–54, 53n77, 54n80, 118n8, 121n21, 129n44, 129n45, 131n47, 133n53, 134n56, 135n58, 137n65, 137n67, 138n71, 138n72, 140n76 Taylor, Charles, 324n80 Tedeschi, John, 36n26, 37n29 Teensma, B. N., 149n18 Tepperman, Shelley, 322–324, 323n78 Terpstra, Nicholas, 223n23

  NAME INDEX 

Thériault, Yves, 316n61 Thieme, John, 160n5 Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa, 252n18 Thomas, Vanessa, 73n52 Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R., 124n29 Thompson, Elizabeth, 231n56 Thornton, John K., 55n84 Tiffin, Helen, 6n13, 160, 160n5, 171n44 Tilly, Charles, 249n6 Tisdel, Gaston, 316, 316n64, 317n65 Toledano, Abraham, 355n47 Toledano, Moïse, 355 Toledano, Ya‘akov Moshe, 338n10, 348n31, 349n34, 352n40, 355n48 Toro, Alfonso, 120n16 Torrão, Maria Manuel Ferraz, 28n5, 50n71, 51n72, 68n36, 69n44 Tosh, Peter, 248n3 Trivellato, Francesca, 7n23 Troutman, Phillip, 209, 209–210n116 Tulchinsky, Gerald, 300n3, 312n43, 313–314, 313n51, 314n56, 317, 317n67 Turner, J. M. W., 284, 285 U Uchmany, Eva Alexandra, 35n24, 123n28 Ungerer, Gustav, 199n59, 199n63 Usque, Samuel, 122, 122–123n24, 137 Utley, Francis Lee, 120n19 V Vainfas, Ronaldo, 2n4, 151n23, 157 Vajda, George, 337n10, 346 Valdez, Maria Ana Travassos, 126n35 Valensi, Lucette, 347n30, 354n45, 360n61 Valente, Luize, 154, 155, 155n33, 155n34

387

Van Berckel‐Ebeling Koning, Blanche T., 146n7 Van Bunge, Wiep, 169n34 Van den Basselaar, José, 125n33 Van den Boogaart, Ernst, 152n26 Van den Vondel, Joost, 143–144, 158 Van de Pol, Lotte, 303n14 Van der Lee, T., 96n42 Van der Woude, Sape, 145n3 Van Ditzhuijzen, Jeannette, 88, 95n35 Van Hoëvell, Wolter Robert, 172n52 Van Horne, Cornelis, 205–206 Van Soest, Jaap, 88, 89n8 Van Stipriaan, Alex, 98n51, 211n120 Varney, Ryan, 298n49 Vasquez de Prada, Valentin, 127n37 Vaugeois, Denis, 311n39, 314, 317, 317n66 Veenendaal, Wouter, 87n7 Venloo, Reggie, 90 Ventura, Maria da Graça A. Mateus, 27, 27n3, 28, 34n20, 43–45, 43n43, 43n44, 44n50, 45n54 Verdooner, Dave, 189n18 Vermeer, Johan, 153 Viala, Fabienne, 259, 260, 260n51 Vieira, António, 124, 124n30, 126–128, 127n40, 128n41 Vila Vilar, Enriqueta, 27, 27n3, 31, 55n83 Villa Calleja, Ignacio, 37n30 Vingboons, Johan, 151 Vink, Wieke, 4n10, 96n44, 110n102, 160n4, 164n15, 170, 171n44, 172n52, 173n54, 173n56, 173n57, 176n68, 177n70, 178, 179n81, 179n82, 280n7 Visser, G. N., 149n18 Voetius, Gisbertus, 146 Vollendorf, Lisa, 1n1 Voltaire, 166, 169n35, 174–176 Vossius, Gerardus, 144, 146–147, 155

388 

NAME INDEX

W Wachtel, Nathan, 2n2, 45–47 Walcott, Derek, 16, 281, 283–285, 288–289, 295–296 Walsh, Michael, 198n54 Walvin, James, 199n58 Warland, Betsy, 325n88 Wassermann, Jakob, 257 Watson, Karl, 226n38 Weil, Shalva, 142n83 Weiner, Gordon M., 130n46 Wekker, Gloria, 330n102 Weyts, Pouwels, 144 Wheelwright, Julie, 303n14 Wiesebron, Marianne L., 153 Wiese, Christian, 180n87, 185n5 Wigoder, Geoffrey, 127n36 Wilhelm, Cornelia, 185n5 Wilke, Carsten L., 116, 118n6, 123n24, 137, 168n32 Williams, Caroline A., 208n111 Williams, James Homer, 220n16 Williamson, James A., 189n19 Wilmot, Swithin, 242n89 Wilson-Tagoe, Nana, 252n20

Winter Welker, Dorthy, 150n20 Wisse, Ruth R., 316–318, 319n72 Wiznitzer, Arnold, 162n7 Wolf, Lucien, 142n87 Wolpe, Hans, 166n27, 176n67 Wood, Betty, 198n52 Woodrow, Peter, 91n15 Y Yahya, Dahiru, 334n2 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 35, 92n22, 122n24, 335n5, 356n52 Z Zacek, Natalie, 208n111 Zacuto, Abraham, 262 Zafrani, Haïm, 136, 138n71 Zink, Anne, 300n4 Zotique Massicotte, Édouard, 311 Zsom, Dora, 136n61 Zucker, George K., 15n36 Zuckerman, Shmuel Halevy, 338n12

Subject Index1

A Afro-Caribbean, 15, 252–253, 272 Afro-Curaçaoan, 11, 86, 88–91, 89n8, 96, 98–102, 108–110 Anti-Judaism, 64, 164, 216 Anti-Semitism/Anti-Semitic, 4, 7, 15, 64, 90, 95, 150, 172n53, 224, 257–258, 271, 281n10, 295 Appropriation, 10, 65n28, 169, 230, 248, 254, 260 Ashkenazic Jews, see Jews/Jewish, Ashkenazic Assimilation, 24, 54, 62, 87, 95, 110, 320–324, 328, 330 Atlantic African, 30, 64, 69–70 Black, 272, 289 Iberian, 1n1, 4, 52, 55, 66 Jewish, 2–3, 6, 8, 178n77, 188, 207, 289, 293 Sephardic, 1–19, 160–161, 182

1

Atlantic world, 1–19, 26, 29, 32–33, 52, 53n77, 59, 67–68, 74, 143, 163, 163n12, 186, 188, 194, 196, 202, 208–209, 208n105, 212, 218–221, 232, 289, 322, 329 Auto-ethnography, 13, 177n73 Autonomy, 5, 12, 52, 100, 108, 171, 268n56, 314 B Battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir/Battle of the Three Kings/Battle of Wadi al-Makhazin, 333–360 Battle of Isly, 350 Battle of the Three Kings, see Battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir Battle of Wadi al-Makhazin, see Battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir Bill of Rights, 314–317 Black Atlantic, see Atlantic, Black

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2018 S. Rauschenbach, J. Schorsch (eds.), The Sephardic Atlantic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2

389

390 

SUBJECT INDEX

Black/Blacks, 10, 14, 16, 23–25, 31, 42, 44, 49, 53–54, 59–60, 60n8, 63, 65–68, 73–76, 78–111, 136, 138, 140–142, 156, 171n44, 173, 178n73, 198–199, 211–212, 240–241, 258, 272, 280–282, 288–289, 291, 293, 297–298, 303n15 Black nationalist thought, 23–24 Blacks and Jews, see Jews and Blacks Blood purity, see Purity of blood Bom Judesmo, 9 Brotherhood, 222–225, 230, 239, 243 C Camouflage, 13, 15 Captive, 17, 70–71, 70n46, 133, 342–344, 348, 359, 359n60 Caribbean, Jewish, 15, 165n24, 280, 289, 292, 296 Casta, 67, 72, 72n50 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 315, 318–320, 327 Christian/Christianity, 4, 12–13, 16, 18, 24, 26, 33, 41–42, 46–48, 50–51, 50n72, 55, 64, 68, 70, 78, 81–84, 92n21, 100, 104, 106n86, 115, 117–128, 130, 132, 134–135, 137, 140, 140n76, 145, 148–150, 157, 161–163, 167, 169, 169n34, 172–174, 177, 178n73, 181–182, 187, 189, 190n23, 192, 198–199, 201, 204, 208, 212, 225, 229, 239–240, 242, 266, 273, 282, 299–300, 300n4, 303, 303n15, 305–306, 308, 313–314, 321, 324, 329, 331, 339, 341–344, 342n22, 344n26, 348–349, 357–358, 357n53, 360 New, 2–3, 10, 13, 19, 23–55, 34n20, 34n21, 36n26, 52n76, 68, 68n38, 122, 124, 126–127,

136–137, 149–151, 155, 188–191, 190n22, 196, 207, 219–220, 267n83, 282, 300n4, 308, 347n31 (see also Converso/ conversa) Old, 13, 25, 34, 34n20, 43, 49, 54–55, 68, 68n38, 169, 169n37 Class/classification, 14, 24, 27, 31, 38, 50–51, 61, 63, 68, 72, 91, 93, 99, 171, 192, 194, 210, 212, 213n128, 225, 234, 238–242, 301 Colonialism/colonial, 4–7, 7n20, 9–12, 14–19, 24, 26, 28, 32, 34n20, 39, 43, 52, 54, 60, 60n7, 61, 61n8, 63, 65, 69, 72, 85, 87–91, 94, 101, 103, 104n80, 105–106, 109, 111, 153, 159–182, 184, 185n5, 187–188, 192, 194, 197–198, 202, 204–207, 209, 212–213, 216–220, 223–228, 231, 234, 238, 238n76, 240–242, 251, 252n16, 253, 260, 268–269, 268n86, 272, 277–278, 280, 282–285, 289–290, 292–293, 298, 300–302, 300n2, 304, 306, 309–311, 316, 321–322, 326–331, 334, 358–359 Color, skin, 5, 11, 61–64, 61n8, 66–67, 66n28, 72–74, 76–77, 81–83, 88, 91, 96, 98–100, 102, 104–107, 139, 212, 234, 239–243 Communautés Israélites du Maroc, Conseil, 359 Conversion Jews, 16–17, 24, 35, 51–53, 55, 82, 115, 119, 120, 124, 137, 145, 148, 189, 190n23, 235, 257, 263, 266, 267n81, 300–301, 300n3, 305–308, 313, 322, 329, 344, 355–356 (see also Converso/conversa)

  SUBJECT INDEX 

slaves, 12, 53, 55, 55n84, 105, 138, 140–142, 199 Converso/conversa, 1–20, 26, 31, 33, 34n21, 35, 39–40, 42, 49, 50, 52–55, 116, 118, 123–124, 127, 129, 134, 137, 140, 167, 204, 219–220, 261n54, 262–263, 266, 267n81, 298n49, 300–302, 312, 320–321, 357n53 See also Christian/Christianity, New Cosmopolitanism, 209, 224 Counter-discourse, 10, 14, 17 Counter-memory, 16 Creole/creolization, 9–11, 13, 17, 66, 68–70, 91, 108, 110–111, 159–182, 211, 228, 280, 280n7, 291 Cross-dressing, 299n2 Crossing/multicrossing, 16, 299–331 Crypto-Jews/crypto-Jewish/crypto-­ Judaism/crypto-Judaic, 3, 19, 25–26, 32, 34–41, 34n21, 36n26, 44–47, 49, 52, 54, 261n54, 267n83, 286, 294, 300n4, 303, 314 Cultural archive, 299–331 D Decolonization/decolonial, 5–6, 11–12, 19, 86, 302, 302n11, 310, 327–328 Despacho, 205, 208 Dhimmi, 80 Diaspora/diasporas galut, 4, 6, 49, 115–142, 177, 211, 219–224, 232, 234, 252n18, 269, 271, 273, 281, 283, 290, 297–298, 308 Sephardic, 13–14, 140, 163, 168, 179, 218, 231 Discoveries, Iberian, 130, 141

391

Dispute of the New World, 177, 180 Dissenters, religion, 186 Domination, categories of, 11, 79 E Emancipation, 5, 9, 89, 100, 104–105, 164–165, 172n52, 220, 234n67, 235–244, 288 Emancipation Act, 237, 311, 311n39, 318 Enfranchisement, 236, 238, 240, 315 Enlightenment, 5, 9, 61, 83, 106n86, 166–167, 174–175, 176n68, 222 Escravos, see Slave/slaves Ethnicity, 38, 60, 87, 134, 232, 301–302, 314, 324 Exile, Iberian, 14, 213, 320 Expulsion, Jews, 3, 115, 117, 119–120, 122–123, 130, 167, 177, 188, 248, 256, 261–262, 264, 267, 267n81, 269–270, 273–274, 278–279, 281–296, 298, 320, 342, 344 F Falta de qualidade, see Lack of quality Freemasonry/freemasons, 14, 99, 215–244 Free people of color, 5, 98, 104, 104n80, 234, 239–242 Fula, 72, 74 G Galut, see Diaspora/diasporas Gender, 16, 51, 222, 238–239, 307–309, 314–317, 319–321, 326–331, 328n79 Genealogy, 64, 65n28, 70, 263, 310, 310n36, 329, 336, 341n18 Genizah, 119

392 

SUBJECT INDEX

H Habsburgs, Spanish, 144, 151, 334, 334n2 Halakhah, 82, 335 Haskalah, 349 Heterogeneity, 11, 17 Heteronormative, 330 Historiography, 13, 27, 59–60, 62–63, 72, 77, 159–182, 213, 219n12, 280, 336, 337n8, 339, 341, 344, 357n55, 358 Holocaust, 14, 16, 259, 259n46, 259n47, 277–278, 281, 293–296, 293n36, 294n39, 296n45, 296n46, 298 Homonationalism, 327–331 Homosexuality, 330 Hybridity, 11, 13, 17, 323 I Identity/identities converso, 8, 10, 27, 33–41, 49 multiple, 11, 13, 81, 82, 84, 152, 283 national, 302 Imagined community, 256 Imperial citizens, 215–244 Imperial freemasonry, see Freemasonry/freemasons, imperial Indigenous, 5, 16, 17, 80, 111, 136, 176n68, 179, 181, 181n91, 193, 247, 259n47, 260, 270, 289, 301, 311, 315, 322, 327–331 Industrialization, 9, 91, 95 Inquisition, 4, 10, 25–46, 36n26, 40n38, 48–50, 52–53, 78, 80, 118, 118n7, 120–121, 127, 145, 148n16, 155, 167, 196, 200, 258, 262–263, 265, 269, 279, 284, 357n53 Intellectual history, 143–158

Interculturality, 320–324, 329 Intermixture, 83 Intersectional/intersectionality, 284, 302 J Jewish Atlantic, see Atlantic, Jewish Jewry, Canadian, 312–314 Jews and Blacks, 59, 98, 110, 280–282, 281n10, 289, 293, 298 Jews and Maroons, 271–274 Jews/Jewish Ashkenazic, 8, 14–15, 88, 90, 95, 138, 164, 169, 175n63, 179, 187, 200–201, 203, 208–209, 225, 257, 270, 274, 282, 294, 320 Atlantic, 13, 188–189, 202n79, 205, 207–208, 210, 212, 214 Caribbean, 15–16, 163, 182, 227, 235, 243, 249, 261, 282, 291, 293 Malabari, 136, 139 Paradesi, 136, 139 Portuguese, 2, 5, 8, 11–12, 35n24, 44, 78–79, 81–82, 94, 136, 138–139, 160n2, 186–187, 189–205, 193n34, 200n67, 205n95, 209, 212, 214, 291–292, 343–344, 356n52 Senegambian, 59, 78–83 Sephardic, 2, 4–5, 8–13, 16–17, 29n6, 30, 53, 86, 88, 90–92, 93n26, 94–95, 97, 99–101, 101–102n65, 103, 109–110, 144, 151, 153, 162–163, 163n11, 168, 168n34, 169, 175, 175n63, 179–180, 217–218, 220–221, 225, 230, 232, 248–249, 248n4, 249n5, 252–253, 261, 263, 267–268, 267n81, 270, 273–280, 282–283, 286, 288–289, 291, 294

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Judaizing/Judaizer, 25–26, 28, 32, 34, 36, 40, 43n44, 53, 308 Judeo-Arabic, 337n9, 339, 349n35, 354n45, 359 Judeo-Moroccan, 333–360 L Lack of quality/falta de qualidade, 63–64 Lançados, 29–30, 29n6, 53, 77–79, 77n66, 81, 83 Language, Angolan, 49 LGBT, 324, 326, 329–330 Limpeza de sangue, see Purity of blood Limpieza de sangre, see Purity of blood Lost Tribes, 126–128, 130, 134, 142 M Mahamad, 103n78, 139, 141, 192–193, 196–197, 235, 237 Mandinka/Mandingas, 30, 72 Manes, 76–77 Maroon, 15, 19, 52, 107, 164, 172–173, 249n5, 268, 268n86, 270–274, 291, 293 See also Jews and Maroons Marranism, 16, 40, 42, 49, 301–302 Marrano/marranos, 19, 34, 34n21, 39, 52, 129, 135–136, 155n33, 287, 300, 312–313, 356, 357n53 Memory collective, 5, 164, 249–250, 251n13, 252–253, 255, 273–274 cultural, 250–251, 250n9, 255, 270, 277–278, 294 Jewish, 9, 270, 274, 278, 291, 298, 336, 358, 360

393

multidirectional, 15n34, 16, 252, 259n46, 259n47, 260–261, 273–274, 277–278, 281, 293, 298 political, 250–251, 251n13, 258 Sephardic, 9, 119, 278, 281, 286 Memory Studies, 14, 16, 249, 252n16, 253, 278–279, 294, 297–298, 297n48 Merchants, 10–11, 25, 32, 43–45, 48, 50–51, 50n71, 53–54, 71, 73, 78, 80–82, 81n77, 84, 88, 92–93, 96, 102–103, 145, 151, 153n28, 155, 163, 197, 199, 201, 204, 209n113, 211, 220, 228, 232–233, 233n63, 236, 242, 257, 268–269, 289–291, 304, 311 Messianism, 12 Middle Passage, 248n3, 252, 283–284, 298 Migration, 11, 14, 90, 93, 93n26, 110, 124, 128, 193–195, 197, 202–212, 214, 223, 257, 260, 264, 272, 284, 302–303 Mimicry, 13, 18, 285, 307 Minhag, 116, 138–142, 138n69 Minority/minorities, 24, 60, 86–87, 89–91, 95, 109–111, 110n99, 115, 213, 221, 230, 235, 238–239, 256, 312, 314–315, 317, 323 Morisco, 357n53 Multiculturalism, 85–111, 315 Muslim, 17, 51, 63–64, 63n16, 63n18, 68, 70n46, 74–76, 80–81, 81n77, 83, 122, 133, 136, 303n15, 323, 333–334, 340–345, 348, 352–353, 357n53, 357n55, 358–360 Myth, 32, 155, 253–261, 270, 312

394 

SUBJECT INDEX

N Nação, see Portuguese Nation Nation-building, 330 Networks trading, 32, 53, 221, 232 New Christian, see Christian/ Christianity, New O Old Christian, see Christian/ Christianity, Old Oppression, 12, 17–18, 260n51, 272, 274, 320 Oral Torah, 265 Othering, 4, 10, 15, 18 Otherness, 301 Outing, 299, 316, 322 P Papiamentu, 49n67, 90, 94, 108 Parnassim, 97, 192n31, 193–195, 193n32, 197–198, 197n49, 205, 212 Passing, 299, 301, 303, 313, 321, 324, 326 Piracy, 15, 45, 52, 248–249, 253, 261, 267–270, 272–274, 358 Port Jews, 289–290 Portuguese Jews, see Jews/Jewish, Portuguese Portuguese Nation/Nação, 5, 42, 72, 145, 155, 157, 307, 342 Postcolonial Studies, 5, 6, 8, 17–18, 26, 160n5, 172n53, 251, 252n16, 277–278, 281 Postmemory, 287 Postslavery, 282, 289, 291, 294–295 Poverty, 14, 185n3, 186, 202–212, 202n79, 214 Protestants, 2, 11, 36, 86, 90–91, 94, 94n30, 99–101, 100n65, 108,

110, 134, 148n16, 149, 157–158, 186, 192–194, 193n35, 198, 204, 212, 229, 318n68 Purim, 17, 325, 335–336, 339–342, 344–346, 348–360 Purity of blood/Blood purity/Limpeza de sangue/Limpieza de sangue, 32, 34, 62–65, 68, 167 Q Queer, 5, 16, 302, 324–330 R Raça, see Race, concept Race, concept, 10, 26, 38, 61, 74, 79n72, 87–88, 106–107, 240, 328 Racism, 11, 30, 57–62, 68, 79–80, 107, 256, 324 Re-membering, 15, 252, 261–272 S Secrecy, 37, 222n20, 227, 243 Secularization, 9, 237, 315–316 Sepharad/Sefarad, 16, 124, 278–282, 294, 297 Sephardic Atlantic, see Atlantic, Sephardic Sephardim, see Jews/Jewish, Sephardic Sephardism, 15–16, 279–284, 294, 297–298, 301–302 Sereer, 80 Slave/slaves/escravos, 4–5, 28n5, 31n16, 48n66, 50n71, 51n72, 55n83, 63, 65–67, 70n46, 76n63, 81, 83, 94, 97, 104, 138, 140–141, 156, 172–173, 175–176, 188, 195, 198–199, 210–211, 236, 280, 288–291, 303n15

  SUBJECT INDEX 

status, 12, 67, 73, 92, 199n60, 234, 240 trading (see Trade/traders, slaves) Slavery, 9–10, 16, 27, 53, 62n12, 63, 65, 67–68, 72, 74–76, 89–90, 94, 98, 101, 107, 109, 156, 172, 176n68, 178, 186, 193, 199–200, 202, 214, 239, 258–259n47, 268, 270, 273, 278, 280–282, 284, 287–289, 291, 292n32, 293, 295–296, 298, 322 Sociability, 216, 218, 222n22, 225–227, 232–234, 239, 240, 243 T Taino, 270, 271 Ten Tribes, see Lost Tribes Toshavim, 138, 338, 345, 357 Trade/traders Jewish, 162–163, 199n62, 208–209, 219, 227, 232, 273, 308 slaves, 10, 23–32, 35, 41, 43, 48–55, 67–68, 72–75, 77, 82–83, 156, 228, 247 Transcultural/transculturality, 272–273, 297 Transnationalism, 11, 86

395

Triangulation, 16, 278, 281, 284, 285, 298 Trinta di Mei, 89, 90 V Victimhood, 16, 24, 259n47, 281, 293, 298 W White, 4, 10, 16, 19, 24, 31–32, 61, 66–67, 73–77, 81–83, 86–91, 94, 96, 99–101, 104–108, 110–111, 136, 161, 164, 170–171, 173, 177–179, 184, 193, 198, 208, 210–213, 216, 227–228, 235, 240–243, 253, 287–288, 303n15, 316 Whiteness/whitening, 65n28, 177n73, 179n79, 241, 298 Whites of the land/brancos de terra, 65–67, 73, 77 Wolof, 66n28, 70, 71n48, 72, 75, 83 Women, 49, 78, 81, 83, 94, 99, 108, 136, 139–140, 223, 225, 238–239, 287, 303, 308–309, 315, 317–318, 323, 325, 328, 342, 348 Writing back, 13, 160–161, 174, 178n73