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The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean
Occasionally one comes across a book, which is unexpected, delights and inspires. Surinam, known as the 'Jewish Savannah', where a vibrant Jewish community was granted full and equal rights two hundred years before the Jews of other communities in the region. St Eustatius, where the economically successful Jewish community was plundered during the British occupation in 1781. Curacao, named the 'Mother of Jewish communities in the New World', where a prosperous Jewish community comprised nearly half of Curacao's non-slave population and was the center of Jewish life in the region. For all their economic and local political power, the Jews were little more than pawns in the 200-year struggle f...
The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800
Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.
Jews in Colonial Brazil
Relates the history of Portuguese Conversos who settled in Brazil at the beginning of the 16th century, after they had been forced to convert in Portugal in 1497. States that most of them continued to maintain Jewish customs secretly in Brazil, as they had in Portugal. Ch. 2 (p. 12-42) describe the activities of the Inquisition in Brazil between 1591-1618, due to the intensification of these activities after the unification of Portugal and Spain in 1580. The Inquisition was never formally introduced in Brazil, but about 1580 the Bishop of Bahia acquired Inquisitorial authority which permitted him to prepare judicial proceedings against heretics and to hand over violators of the law to the court of the Inquisition in Lisbon. Pp. 143-167 describe cases of persecution endured by specific Conversos between 1654-1822, until Brazil's independence from Portugal.
Imagining the American Jewish Community
A lively collection of sixteen essays on the many ways American Jews have imagined and constructed communities
Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century
This book surveys the role of Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants in the westward expansion of sugar production and trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. It offers an historical-geographic perspective, linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the “Portuguese Nation,” conducting trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil. Examining the “Myth of the Dutch,” the “Sephardic Moment,” and the impact of the British Navigation Acts, Yda Schreuder focuses attention on Barbados and Jamaica and demonstrates how Amsterdam remained Europe’s primary sugar refining center through most of the seventeenth century and how Sephardic merchants played a significant role in sustaining the sugar trade.
The Same but Different?
Using cutting-edge theory regarding trade networks and diaspora, this study challenges the historiographical argument that the Sephardim, and indeed, a variety of religio-ethnic groups, achieved their commercial success by relying on geographically dispersed family members and fellow ethnics. The book’s findings challenge the reigning understanding that commercial success stemmed from endogamous business relationships and socio-cultural insularity. The book demonstrates that the most successful Sephardic merchants of early seventeenth century Amsterdam built their fortunes not thanks to familial or diasporic connections, but through “loose ties,” economic networks comprised of non-Sephardim. Focusing on three of the most prominent Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam, and a random sampling of other Sephardi merchants, the book reveals a multi-ethnic and multi-religious trade network of non-Jewish merchants.
Iberian New Christians and Their Descendants
This ground-breaking volume explores the relatively new academic field of Bnei Anousim studies (also referred to as descendants of New Christians, Conversos, or Marranos), whose Jewish ancestors in Iberia were forcibly converted to Catholicism from 1391 through to the fifteenth century. Chronologically, this book focuses on the eighteenth century, a later period of Inquisition activity marked by the Portuguese Inquisition’s relentless attacks against the Jewish “heresy” and the resultant mass exodus of New Christians from Portugal to Brazil. Several chapters concern the contemporary phenomenon of descendants of these New Christians seeking their Jewish roots. However, among a population that has retained almost no memory of their origins, how authentic are their Jewish roots? After the passage of hundreds of years, how much of what they perceive as “Jewish” is truly a lost Sefardi heritage? This volume addresses these questions from the perspectives of history, demography, genealogy, anthropology, and genetics.
Portuguese Jews and New Christians in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822
The diaspora of Portuguese Jews and New Christians, known as Gente da Nação (People of the Nation), is considered the largest European diaspora of the early modern period. Portuguese Jews not only founded the first congregations and synagogues in Brazil (Recife and Olinda), but when they left Brazil they played an imperative role in establishing the first Jewish communities in Suriname, throughout the Caribbean, and in North America. Portuguese Jews and New Christians and their descendants were deeply involved in the colonial enterprise in Brazil. They were among the New World’s first sugarcane-industry experts, skilled laborers, merchants, rabbis, calligraphists, playwrights, poets, writers, pharmacists, medical doctors, real estate brokers, and geographers—a fact that remains largely unknown in most public and academic spheres. Drawing on nearly twenty thousand digitized dossiers of the Portuguese Inquisition, this volume offers a comprehensive, critical overview informed by both relatively inaccessible secondary sources and a significant body of primary sources.
The Jewish Holidays
The events surrounding the holidays molded the foundation of the Jews as a nation and are related to their continuity and survival as Jews throughout history. In The Jewish Holidays: A Journey through History, author Larry Domnitch contends that there is a cyclical nature to the events of Jewish history. He writes, "The events that make up the themes of the Jewish holidays did not occur in a vacuum but have recurred throughout history. The actual Israelite exodus from Egypt, or the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai as celebrated on Shavuot, may have occurred once, but in a sense the themes conveyed by those momentous events have been repeated over the centuries. This book attempts to give the reader an appreciation of the cyclical nature of Jewish history and a greater appreciation of the holidays and their relevance throughout Jewish history."
Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas
Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as "creoles" who moved from the Old World to the New World, this collection of eighteen original
