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The Centrality of Slavery: Jews in the Atlantic World

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In 1778, Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado of Suriname, a Dutch colony in South America, took justice into his own hands. Three years earlier, Prado had been convicted of verbally insulting the sexual virtue of various Jewish women. One of these was Ribca de la Parra, widow of Selomoh de la Parra, described variably as a “white woman” and “a noted lady … from a family so esteemed.” The detail of her racial identity was no aside, for Prado was a Eurafrican Jew, the direct descendant of a white Portuguese Jew and his enslaved African concubine. Although Eurafrican Jews in the colony were considered bonafide Jews as well as members of the Jewish community, local ordinances assigned such individuals a second-class status. These manumitted and freeborn people of African ancestry were held to the strict obligation of behaving “humbly,” in the words of the Jewish court, and of recognizing the “prodigious difference” between them and their white coreligionists. By gossiping about Ribca de la Parra’s sexual behavior, Prado had violated that unwritten law, or so claimed a number of Jewish witnesses, both Eurafrican and white. The court ruled to banish Prado forever from Jodensavanne (“Jews’ savannah”), a village located some 30 miles south of the colony’s capital city of Paramaribo. But in 1778, Prado returned to the village armed and dangerous, determined to have the last say. 1

The story of Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado reminds us that ancient slavery and its latter-day expressions are part and parcel of Jewish history

Suriname was home to a Jewish population without parallel in the early modern world. Founded by Portuguese Jews in the 1660s, the community was organized primarily around agricultural endeavors, rather than commerce, and for a long time constituted the largest Jewish settlement in the Americas in early modernity, peaking at nearly 1,500 individuals by the late eighteenth century, at which time it was only slightly outnumbered by U.S. Jewry. While the majority of its members barely eked out a living, it was the planters who created for the community a reputation of wealth and helped justify to colonial authorities the continued presence of Jews. These leaders, like their counterparts in Western Europe’s metropoles, grappled with the problem of endemic poverty among their people, who were barred by law from settling in the realms of France, Spain, and Portugal, and in some parts of the Protestant Atlantic World as well. With the notable exception of North Africa, the Jewries of the Atlantic World, an interconnected region encompassing the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, were entirely new, reconstituted or founded after centuries of forced conversion to Christianity, massacres, and expulsion in England, the Iberian Peninsula, and France.

Illustration of Jodensavanne, ca. 1829, by Pierre Jacques Benoit (1782-1854).

The few places in western Europe that permitted open Judaism, including Amsterdam, banned Jews from entering various guilds and professions, severely limiting or altogether eliminating their prospects of economic survival. The Portuguese Inquisition’s intensifying racial and religious persecution stimulated a stream of refugees, reputed to be insincere Christians. Many of them formally adopted Judaism in Amsterdam and London, the two European cities that served as major springboards for Jewish settlement in the Americas. The establishment of Dutch rule in Brazil from 1630 to 1654, and of an English and Dutch presence in Barbados, Jamaica, Curaçao, and Suriname starting in the 1650s, allowed Portuguese Jewish leaders in Amsterdam and London to extend to the Americas their frantic search for new settlements that would accommodate their poor. In Suriname, as in most of the colonies founded in the torrid zone of the Americas, the slave labor of forced migrants from West Africa would serve as the underpinning of the economy. From 1668 to the 1830s, between 213,000 and 250,000 Africans were introduced into the colony, and for much of that period over 90 percent of Suriname’s residents were both enslaved and of African origin.2

In the early 1660s, while Suriname was still under English rule, Jewish leaders had successfully petitioned local authorities for special privileges, including the freedom to practice their religion, operate their own schools, govern themselves by a Jewish tribunal, hold title to an entire village, and most importantly for our story, own human beings as property. The earliest surviving evidence of enslaved children born to Portuguese Jews and converted to the father’s religion dates to that decade. Although the conversion of such minors to Judaism also manifested intermittently elsewhere, namely in Amsterdam, Brazil, Barbados, and Africa’s Senegambian coast, nowhere else in the vast territory of the Atlantic World did there emerge a sustained group of Eurafrican Jews sufficiently large and sufficiently politically organized to assert their own corporate identity and lobby for equal rights. This unusual group of Jews testifies to the flexibility of rabbinical law as practiced in the region. Their very existence contradicts popular understanding that diasporic halakha discouraged the transmission of Jewish status through the father. But the Surinamese Jewish past also speaks to broader themes, disclosing aspects of the African diaspora, slavery, and religion little known to scholars of the Atlantic World.

Although in some ways unprecedented, Surinamese Jewish life was largely grounded in ancient traditions. This is readily discernible in the names Jews gave to their agricultural estates. These properties, most of them sugar, coffee, and cacao plantations located along the Suriname River, were purposefully situated in the environs of Jodensavanne, the administrative headquarters of the colony’s Jews. By the 1720s, dozens of manors owned by Portuguese Jews had sprung up north and south of the Jewish village. A map of 1737 identifies 72 Jewish-owned estates, many of them bearing biblical names, such as Mahanaim, Sucot, Gosen, Carmel, Petah Enaim, Kayam, and Rama.3 These toponyms suggest that Suriname’s early Portuguese Jewish planters viewed their agricultural undertaking as a link to biblical ancestors, who communicated directly with God and received His blessings of plenty. Mahanaim, for example, was the land the sons of Jacob found to be the best in Egypt, suitable for both crops and livestock, after famine forced them out of the Land of Israel (Genesis 46:28–34, 47:1–6). Mount Carmel, located in the northern Kingdom of Israel, is described as a place of beauty and fertility (Isaiah 35:2). Sucot, meaning “tabernacles,” is the harvest feast commemorating the exodus from Egypt and God’s bounty as well as a city bordering Egypt and the Promised Land (Leviticus 23:42–43; Exodus 12:37). 

“Hebrew prayer upon purchasing a slave,” from Orden de Bendiciones (Amsterdam: Albertus Magnus, 5547 [1687-1688].”
Moreover, the conversion of enslaved children to Judaism was also inspired by ancient rabbinical law that both recognized and countenanced the institution of slavery. Surinamese Jews had recourse to prayer books, published in Amsterdam, that mandated the recitation of certain prayers upon the purchase of slaves. The “Order of Prayers” (Orden de Bendiciones) is the earliest known Jewish prayer book that mentions slave regulations. Published in Amsterdam in the Hebrew year coinciding with 1686/1687, it contains a special formula used in the purchase of slaves (bendición de quando compran siervos). It probably refers to an intermediary conversion, without conferring full Jewish status, that made it ritually permissible for slaves to prepare kosher food and drink. Michael Studemund-Halévy argues that the Hebrew locution of the prayer—avadim, the same word that in the Hebrew Bible denotes the unfree Israelites who labored under the pharaohs of ancient Egypt—confirms that slaves, rather than domestic servants, were the prospective converts. 4

A successor, “Covenant of Isaac” (Sefer Berith Yishak), published in the same city in 1767/1768, includes instructions for the full conversion of slaves to Judaism, which required ceremonial wine, Hebrew prayers, circumcision for males, and ritual immersion for both sexes. Instructions for welcoming slaves into the bosom of Judaism are preceded by the explanation that this ceremony was practiced “when the Temple [still] stood.” While the use of Sefer Berith Yishak in Suriname has not yet been explicitly verified, the appendix at the back of the book, listing the names of ritual circumcisers, includes seven living in Suriname. The circumcisers are listed according to their city of residence, all within the Atlantic orbit. In Europe, these include Amsterdam, The Hague, Naarden, London, Hamburg, and Bayonne. Suriname and Curaçao, a Dutch island whose Jewish community rivaled that of Suriname in both size and economic importance, are the only Caribbean locations.5

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the group classified in the community as “mulatto Jews” steadily grew in size and economic importance, although the majority remained impoverished

We know about the experiences of enslaved converts to Judaism thanks to thousands of pages of surviving communal minutes. Diligently recorded by members of the community’s planter class, these records show that Eurafrican Jews were permitted, like Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado, to serve as the directors of plantations, and even to inherit and purchase property. At the same time, they were banned from participating in the honorary functions of the synagogue, from forming part of a minyan (prayer quorum requiring ten adult Jewish males), restricted to sitting on the “mourners bench” or in the back row of the ladies’ section, and for burial  relegated to the margins of the cemetery.6 As the aforementioned court case suggests, deprecatory treatment extended to the meting out of justice.

But Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado would have none of it. Although it took him three years, he returned to Jodensavanne in 1778 brandishing a sword and accompanied by two pistol-bearing slaves. When the communal beadle ordered him to leave the village, Prado answered that he had come to carry out some business affairs and would leave when finished. He then proclaimed that he was well known by the Surinamese governor as a homem de bem, a Portuguese term that implies good behavior, wealth, philanthropy, and political power all at once. At that point, reportedly without incitement, Prado began marching through the streets of Jodensavanne, shouting that the Jewish judges who had presided over his case in 1775 had been biased, and that if any one of them had the courage, Prado would fight him. Prado then attacked the next official he encountered, the community’s treasurer, who happened to be passing by. The official immediately summoned a patrol to arrest Prado and detain him in the dreaded Zeeland Fort in the capital city of Paramaribo. 7

Prado’s tumultuous visit to Jodensavanne was arguably motivated not by the desire to carry out business but rather to rectify perceived injustice. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the group classified in the community as “mulatto Jews” steadily grew in size and economic importance, although the majority remained impoverished. Between 1778 and 1835, some 7 percent of the Jewish community was officially of African origin.8 If we take into account the communal “whitening” clause, by which Eurafricans who married whites for two consecutive generations retrieved the family’s former racial and first-class status, it is likely that the majority of Suriname’s Jewish community by the early 1800s was of African slave origin, however attenuated.9 Along with free people with roots in slavery throughout the urban Atlantic, Eurafrican Jews in Suriname increased exponentially in size over the eighteenth century, becoming indispensable to the local economy, and growing sufficiently confident to assert their entitlement to equal treatment before the law.

The outcome of Prado’s small-scale mutiny is recounted and analyzed in my forthcoming book. If it were not for the proclivity of literate members of the community to record their experiences in the colony, their commitment to preserving those accounts, and—above all—the activism of individuals like Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado, we would know very little of Suriname’s Eurafrican Jewish community, and almost nothing about the past from their point of view. The story of Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado reminds us that ancient slavery and its latter-day expressions are part and parcel of Jewish history. In the Hebrew Bible, the very first law that Moses presented before the Israelites who had fled slavery in ancient Egypt was the injunction that a master set his Hebrew slaves free in the seventh year of service (Exodus 21:1). Over the generations, most rabbis discussed and interpreted the verse as a theoretical exercise, and not as a reflection on labor practices in their own communities. The case of Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado attests to a prodigious archive that captures the lived reality of slavery and its aftermath, affirming the centrality of unfreedom and poverty to Jewish communities of the Atlantic World.

Excerpted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Copyright © 2019 Aviva Ben-Ur.

Note: The Latin-scripted Hebrew orthography in this essay reflects the usage of exilic Iberian Jews in the Atlantic World. This distinctive spelling is very different from both Arabic-inflected and modern Israeli Hebrew and should not be mistaken as a transcription or pronunciation error. All translations from foreign languages are the author’s.

Due to the variable nature of our posts and the wide spectrum of ideas exchanged, we feel it is important to clarify that the thoughts and opinions shared in posts and articles reflect the opinions of the author and are not representative of our contributors as a whole.

Ruth Declares her Loyalty to Naomi

Border Crossings: A Tale of Two Converts

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The Tora enjoins the Israelites upon their entrance into the Land of Israel to love the stranger—36 times.1 Moses gives the people a historical context to this commandment, he reminds them to love or in some instances to not oppress the stranger “for you were a stranger in the land of Egypt.”2

This thread of commandment and of memory weaved throughout the Tora argues that the memory of displacement, disenfranchisement, and oppression should inspire an attitude of care and concern for those on the margins of society, those without the socio-economic networks that would protect them in times of need and the family networks that would give emotional and physical protection from the vagaries of life. In Biblical times this stranger—the Ger—was a foreigner who found their way to the land of Israel and sought shelter among the people of Israel. The Tora does not define the religious status of this foreigner, instead it focuses on the responsibility of those on the inside, of those firmly rooted within the social matrix of power and security, to make space for this stranger. Those who are rooted are enjoined both to not harm the strangers, and to go one step further and to actually love them.3

I want to stop and consider the ways this powerful moral injunction, which is grounded in an appeal to the past, to the foundational nation-building experience of slavery and redemption, enlightens, inspires and complicates the experience of those who seek entrance into the community. History can only go so far in helping us understand the present. And yet, how else do we understand the pedigree of our ideas? Through historical analysis we can see that things are both more similar and more different than we assume—to make the familiar strange and the strange more familiar.

I want to use the example of two pre-modern converts to Judaism to think about the ways that outsiders can find their way into the heart of a new community. In doing so I hope to explore the ways that bonds of faith can complicate and break through barriers of blood and tribe. In both cases we have people whose ethnic origins are not only foreign but often considered hostile to the community they desire to integrate into. Both individuals had to leave the comfort and familiarity of their homes and the privilege of their class to follow their search for religious truth and forge a new sense of belonging.

The foundational narrative of the righteous convert is threaded with kindness, self-sacrifice and transcends blood-lines, allowing for an outsider to be the mother of the nation’s redemption

In this way they follow in the footsteps of the prototypical “righteous convert,” Ruth. Ruth’s Moabite origin placed her on the short list of nations with whom the Israelites were enjoined to avoid. In fact it is the case of Ruth that establishes the rabbinic ruling that the prohibition against allowing Moabites to enter into the Congregation of Israel applies only to Moabite men, not women. She leaves the comfort of her homeland, her family and all that was familiar to follow her widowed mother-in-law, who had nothing to offer her, to a land she did not know and to live at the behest of people who would at best look at her with suspicion. Ruth is well aware that her mother-in-law cannot provide children to wed or money or land to provide for her needs. Her decision to follow Naomi is not based on “anything of this world.” She declares in Ruth 1:16-17:

וַתֹּ֤אמֶר רוּת֙ אַל־תִּפְגְּעִי־בִ֔י לְעָזְבֵ֖ךְ לָשׁ֣וּב מֵאַחֲרָ֑יִךְ כִּ֠י אֶל־אֲשֶׁ֨ר תֵּלְכִ֜י אֵלֵ֗ךְ וּבַאֲשֶׁ֤ר תָּלִ֙ינִי֙ אָלִ֔ין עַמֵּ֣ךְ עַמִּ֔י וֵאלֹהַ֖יִךְ אֱלֹהָֽי׃ בַּאֲשֶׁ֤ר תָּמ֙וּתִי֙ אָמ֔וּת וְשָׁ֖ם אֶקָּבֵ֑ר כֹּה֩ יַעֲשֶׂ֨ה ייי לִי֙ וְכֹ֣ה יֹסִ֔יף כִּ֣י הַמָּ֔וֶת יַפְרִ֖יד בֵּינִ֥י וּבֵינֵֽךְ׃

But Ruth replied, “Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the LORD do to me if anything but death parts me from you.”

Ruth Declares her Loyalty to Naomi
Ruth Declares her Loyalty to Naomi; Pieter Lastman, 1614

For Ruth her connection to Naomi is inextricable from her willingness to embrace Naomi’s nation and to make her God her own. It is hard to detangle Ruth’s religious motivation from her attachment to Naomi. The book of Ruth does not have her call out to the God of Israel or receive prophecy or brave martyrdom; it is her selfless dedication to her mother-in-law that is a key factor that brings her to the attention of her eventual “redeemer,” Boaz. Boaz takes her as a wife and restores her and Naomi’s fortunes. More fundamentally, the narrative ends with a genealogy which begins with Ruth the Moabite, a stranger with a checkered past, but ends with David the King of Israel and the root of the Messiah. So the foundational narrative of the righteous convert is threaded with kindness, self-sacrifice and transcends blood-lines, allowing for an outsider to be the mother of the nation’s redemption.

Despite the focus on caring for the stranger, and even the celebration of the righteous convert in the story of Ruth, there are many factors that dampened and complicated the Jewish embrace of the stranger in the pre-modern period. In the diaspora, Jews were a tolerated minority whose tolerance was partially based on their respect for the religious hegemony of their hosts. So there would be no conversion of Christians in the lands of Christendom and no conversion of Muslims in the lands of Islam. To be involved with any part of such a conversion was punishable by death. These laws developed with the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century and were in force up to the modern age.

Another complicating factor facing the would-be convert lies at the heart of Judaism’s identity as both a national and a religious community. You are born into Judaism and yet Judaism is a set of ideas, beliefs and most importantly actions.Anyone who embraces those ideas and deeds can join, regardless of their ethnic or national origin. Conversion is a fundamental avenue of entry and thus the tribe, where bonds are formed through blood and family and a shared past, paradoxically can always be expanded to include members who do not share any of those tribal bonds.

The Jews are referred to as the Children of Israel- the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel and yet what does it mean to be a child of Israel? Is it in the blood or is there something else that makes up Israelite paternity?

The 12th-century Andalusian-Egyptian polymath, Maimonides received a query from a convert named Obadiya who felt that because he could not trace his lineage back to the forefathers of the Jewish people he could not invoke their names in his prayers. We know a little about this intrepid religious searcher from documents uncovered in the Cairo Geniza. 4

Maimonides tells Obadiya the convert that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are his fathers because he follows their teachings. Obadiya left his family and home behind in search of religious truth just like Abraham who left behind all that was familiar to follow God’s voice. Maimonides identifies the convert’s commitment to the right ideals and sacrifice on behalf of those ideals as the mark of inclusion in the group. By discounting the power of blood, Maimonides welcomes this outsider in.

He writes:

שֶׁנִּכְנַסְתָּ תַּחַת כַּנְפֵי הַשְּׁכִינָה וְנִלְוֵיתָ עַל ייי אֵין כָּאן הֶפְרֵשׂ בֵּינֵינוּ וּבֵינְךָ, וְכָל הַנָּסִים שֶׁנַּעֲשׂוּ כְּאִלּוּ לָנוּ וּלְךָ נַעֲשׂוּ. הֲרֵי הוּא אוֹמֵר בִּישַׁעְיָהוּ [נ:ו] וְאַל־יֹאמַ֣ר בֶּן־הַנֵּכָ֗ר הַנִּלְוָ֤ה אֶל־יְהוָה֙ לֵאמֹ֔ר הַבְדֵּ֧ל יַבְדִּילַ֛נִי יְהוָ֖ה מֵעַ֣ל עַמּ֑וֹ אֵין שָׁם הֶפְרֵשׁ כְּלָל בֵּינֵינוּ וּבֵינֶיךָ לְכֹל דָּבָר. וּוַדַּאי יֵשׁ לְךְ לְבָרֵךְ ‘אֲשֶׁר בָּחַר בָּנוּ’ וַ’אֲשֶׁר נָתַן לָנוּ’ וַ’אֲשֶׁר הִבְדִּלֵנוּ,’ שֶׁכְּבָר בָּחַר בְּךָ הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא, וְהִבְדִּלְךָ מִן הָאֻמּוֹת, וְנָתַן לְךָ הַתּוֹרָה.

Because since you have come under the wings of the Divine Presence and confessed the Lord, no difference exists between you and us, and all miracles done to us have been done as it were to us and to you. Thus is said in the Book of Isaiah, “Neither let the son of the stranger, that has joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, ‘The Lord has utterly separated me from His people’” (Is. 56:3). There is no difference whatever between you and us. You shall certainly say the blessing, “Who has chosen us,” “Who has given us,” and “Who has separated us”: for the Creator, may He be extolled, has indeed chosen you and separated you from the nations and given you the Tora.

Belief in the One God, sacrifice, and commitment to Divine Law is what secures Obadiya the convert’s place within his new community. His foreignness, his gentile blood, is no longer relevant because he has embraced the ideals of his new community and thus has forged his place within their fold. Maimonides is unable to provide a robust family network for this foreigner but he can assure him a spiritual space among his religious brethren.

How can it be that I—who descend from such vicious Jew-haters have a place beneath the wings of the Divine Presence?

In the early modern period we find another example of an outsider, tormented by the weight of his foreign blood, with all that it conjures up in the racially charged Atlantic world of the 17th century. Manuel Cardoso de Macedo was born into a well-to-do Old Christian 5 family in the Azores and through a surprising series of religious transformations—he first embraces Calvinism while living in England and then discovers Judaism during his time in the prisons of the Lisbon Inquisition—he found his way to the Jewish community of Amsterdam where after a formal conversion he lived out the rest of his life as a devout Jew.6

Cardoso de Macedo adopts the Jewish name of Abraham Pelegrino Guer—Abraham the convert, the pilgrim, the wanderer. He wrote an eloquent spiritual autobiography about his religious journey that he begins with a fundamental question: How can it be that I—who descend from such vicious Jew-haters have a place beneath the wings of the Divine Presence?7

He talks about how deeply his father and his whole Portuguese society sought to destroy all vestiges of Judaism. He says that for his father “there would not be enough wood to burn all of the Jews”! Confronted with the weight of his blood, Cardoso seeks to retrace his steps towards the Law of Moses and the people of Israel in his autobiography and somehow write his way into the Jewish fold.

Cardoso focuses on two essential features of his religious journey and his decision to convert: his commitment to the truth and his self-sacrifice on behalf of his new coreligionists. His story begins in England where his father sent him to study and apprentice with some of his mercantile partners in the textile and dyestuffs trade. There the teenage Cardoso is fascinated by the variety of Christian sects and decides to explore them. He goes to London and buys “seven books of seven different sects and resolved to see which one was closest to reason.” He settles on Calvinism. While in England he is quite brash about his new religious commitment; when he meets fellow Spanish and Portuguese expatriates he does nothing to hide his rejection of the Catholic faith and slowly word makes it back to the Bishop of his town in the Azores. On a return trip home he is interrogated about his heretical dabbling and he declares to the Bishop: “I am a Calvinist and a Calvinist I will die, unless you can show me my errors through reason.” Intellectual curiosity and bravery are hallmarks of his religious quest.

His defiance gets him sent to the prisons of the Lisbon Inquisition where he, by chance, meets a New Christian, Henrique Dias Milão, who was accused of a full list of Judaizing heresies. Cardoso, whose Protestant heresy was all about the centrality of the Bible, is shocked to actually meet someone who (was at least accused) of practicing the laws of the Holy Bible. This threw into doubt his faith in Calvinism—he realized that if the Bible was central then certainly the laws of the Bible should be practiced. He resolves to learn more about Judaism.

He is penanced at the Auto da Fe of April 5, 1609 and then sent to a reform school along with other penanced heretics. There he seeks out other Conversos who were accused of secretly practicing Judaism and furtively seeks to learn more about Judaism from his fellow heretics. However, this is not only an intellectual quest. In discovering information about Judaism he becomes close to Jews of flesh and blood, and grows connected to their plight. He tells the reader that he “began to feel affection for the Nation.” He helps organize an escape for some of the Dias Milão family. The plan was foiled and all were arrested but Cardoso would not turn on his Converso accomplices. He withstood the abuse of the inquisitors and shielded his co-conspirators from further persecution. He made a second attempt at escape and eventually, together with a group of Conversos, made it to the religious liberty of Hamburg where he finished his process of conversion within the embrace of the small Sephardic community.

But his travails were not over. He finds work with a son of his former cellmate, a member of the Dias Milão Family in the port of Danzig, helping to manage the family’s sugar refinery. The family was accused of ritually murdering one of their Christian servants and a riot was forming against them. Cardoso urged his bosses to flee and that he would stay behind to watch over the property. Cardoso was beaten by the angry mob and then thrown into prison after the house was ransacked. He declares that he would take a month in the Inquisition over a day in that terrible prison. He leaves prison with a limp that he will live with the rest of his life. He makes it to Amsterdam and becomes part of the growing Sephardic community in that bustling center of trade. And it is there, in the security of Amsterdam, that he writes his autobiography, which if read carefully reveals a portrait of a religious searcher who found the truth but who is left uneasy about his place within the community of the faithful. He rehearses his acts of sacrifice on behalf of the Nation to convince himself and his readers that despite his past, despite the legacy of Jew-hatred he inherited from his father, he belongs with the Children of Israel.

Manuel Cardoso de Macedo's La vida del buenaventurado Abraham
Manuel Cardoso de Macedo’s La vida del buenaventurado Abraham

He ends his journey by invoking the same words of Isaiah (56:6-8) that Maimonides used in his letter to Obadiya over four hundred years before. Cardoso ends his narrative by calling out to the “children of the strangers”—the outcasts of society—who find their way to God’s law:

Y hijos de los estranhos, los ajuntados a A[donay], para servirlo y p[a]r[a] amar a nombre de A[donay], p[a]ra ser a Elle por siervos, todo guardando Sabat, de abiltarlo travantes en my firmamento, traer-los-hé en monte de my santidad, y alegrar-los-hé en caza de my orasión, y sus alsasiones y sacrifisios por voluntad sobre my ara, que my caza caza de oración será llamada; dicho de A[donay] Dios a todos los pueblos apanhan enpujados de Israel, aun apanharé a él a sus empujados.

And children of the strangers, those who join unto A[donay], in order to serve Him and in order to love the name of A[donay], in order to be His servants, guarding the Sabbath from profaning it, holding fast to my covenant, Lo I will bring them to my holy mountain, and I will rejoice with them in my house of prayer, . . . For my house will be called a house of prayer; so says A[donay] God, to all of the nations, the oppressed of Israel will be gathered, I will still gather unto Him his oppressed ones.8

In this remarkable document we can see Manuel Cardoso transform himself into Abraham Pelegrino Ger, a stranger but one who can find his place on God’s mountain. Cardoso uses his autobiography as a way to write himself into the Jewish people. He showcases his passion for religious truth, his investigation of multiple religious paths, his sacrifice for his beliefs and his suffering on behalf of other Jews whom he shielded from Inquisitorial persecution and other assaults. He earns his place within the community because his heart was pure, his commitment was strong and his dedication to his new community was tested by sacrifice. He overcomes the powerful barriers of family and blood that organized both his original community of Catholic Portugal and the Sephardic community of Amsterdam. He integrates himself into his chosen community by his acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of fellow Jews and by his devotion to Judaism. By emphasizing his commitment to the ideals of Judaism and to the welfare of his adopted community, Cardoso, like Maimonides and like Ruth, discounts the power of blood, and claims a space for himself based on what he can share with his fellow Jews; this allows him to transcend his past and the weight of his blood.

Mutatis mutandis. . .

Obadiya and Cardoso found their way to cosmopolitan centers of global trade—12th century Cairo and 17th century Amsterdam—where people from all over the world came and went with their shipments of goods, and which allowed for a degree of anonymity, freedom of movement and self-expression. Neither of these spiritual wanderers had to contend with being considered “undocumented,” let alone “illegal” people, but they did have to find their place within tightly knit communities based on strong family ties and ethnic solidarity. The experience of these two individuals cannot be translated seamlessly into policy for a modern nation-state; rather, their examples serve to highlight an ethical and psychological dimension. In both cases, we can see that bonds of blood, family networks, and the psychic weight of ethnic identities are real; often enough they are felt more strongly by the outsider trying to enter than those already situated securely within the ethnic matrix. The outsider asks, “Can I ever fully be part of the new community?” The community where the stranger has sought refuge, however, has to stretch itself beyond their comfort to let this person in, to see them as one of their own and to ease their doubts.

Cardoso and Maimonides uphold Abraham, the first Jew, as the model for the ideal convert with his mixture of personal sacrifice, courage, and devotion to the truth. However, the Rabbis of the Talmud turn to Ruth as their model for the process of conversion. For example, a convert is supposed to be discouraged from joining the Jewish people, just like Naomi discouraged Ruth. In this exegetical model, perhaps we can draw another lesson for welcoming outsiders. Not only can outsiders become integral members of the community, perhaps they, like Ruth can bring with them the unexpected promise of redemption.

Due to the variable nature of our posts and the wide spectrum of ideas exchanged, we feel it is important to clarify that the thoughts and opinions shared in posts and articles reflect the opinions of the author and are not representative of our contributors as a whole.

Pissarro two women chatting

Sephardism in Caribbean Literature

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…fleeing the Inquisition
a Sephardic merchant, bag locked in one elbow,
crouched by a Lisbon dock, and in that position

was reborn in the New World: Lima; Curaçao.1

The topic of Black-Jewish relations and their literary representation has rarely been addressed outside of a twentieth-century U.S. framework.2 Despite both the geographical breadth and historical depth of Black-Jewish encounters, discussions of their literary representation largely have been centered on the United States and have tended to be inflected by persistent political tensions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. As a result, the broader terrain of Black-Jewish relations in the Americas, and the purchase of Jewishness on the Caribbean literary imagination in particular, have been neglected. Drawing inspiration from historical scholarship on the Jewish Atlantic and the hemispheric turn in American studies, my research explores how the field of Jewish American literary studies can be expanded to engage Caribbean spaces. Reorienting the field towards the Caribbean encourages much needed dialogue between Jewish and postcolonial studies. Moreover, such a reframing draws attention to the Sephardic presence in the Caribbean, thereby correcting an overemphasis on Ashkenazi experience in Jewish studies.

Consider Caribbean literary evocations of both the Holocaust and the Sephardic expulsion as well as how the memories of these two cataclysms sometimes become intertwined in Caribbean literature with that of a third historical trauma, transatlantic slavery.

While some scholars have identified the Holocaust as a site of “multidirectional memory” that can bridge the gap between Jewish and postcolonial studies, I argue that 1492 warrants consideration alongside the Holocaust as a key node of inter-diasporic comparison and identification.3 In the larger book from which this essay is drawn, I consider Caribbean literary evocations of both the Holocaust and the Sephardic expulsion as well as how the memories of these two cataclysms sometimes become intertwined in Caribbean literature with that of a third historical trauma, transatlantic slavery. Sephardism—by which I mean referencing Sephardic historical experience in an affiliative and identificatory manner—is a significant feature of postwar and contemporary Caribbean literature. Caribbean literary sephardism attests to the resonance of the Sephardic expulsion for postslavery writers concerned with concealed identities and questions of cultural resilience. Moreover, Caribbean writers’ introduction of Sephardic motifs reflects their awareness of the historical presence of Sephardim in the islands and on the Caribbean mainland.

A rich historical analysis of the early modern Sephardic Caribbean is currently emerging in the work of Jonathan Schorsch, Natalie Zemon Davis, Aviva Ben-Ur and others.4 Yet it is worth noting that these historians’ valuable recovery of a neglected chapter of Jewish history was anticipated by a body of imaginative literature that registers the historical entanglement of Black and Jewish identities in the Caribbean. While academic disciplines tend to divide and compartmentalize, creative writing allows the imagination freer reign and thereby has proven more open to what Bryan Cheyette calls “metaphorical thinking,” which he contrasts with “disciplinary thinking.” Cheyette explains that “the disciplinary thinking of the academy…confines different histories of diaspora to separate spheres,” whereas metaphorical thinking sees “similarities in dissimilarities.”5 Accordingly, I argue that imaginative literature has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of Caribbean Jewishness, which is located at the juncture of African and Jewish diasporic histories.

This essay will briefly illustrate the phenomenon of Caribbean literary sephardism with reference to St. Lucian poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), a verse biography of the Sephardic Caribbean painter Camille Pissarro.6 Other key examples of Caribbean literary sephardism that I discuss elsewhere include Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993), Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), Jewish Jamaican visual artist and poet Anna Ruth Henriques’ The Book of Mechtilde (1997), and Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod’s plantation novel The Cost of Sugar (1987).7 These literary texts illustrate how moving beyond a narrowly national U.S. framework as well as more customary references to the Holocaust and to Ashkenazi experience makes it possible to identify alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation.

* * *

Nidhe Israel Synagogue (dating from 1654, rebuilt 1833) with adjacent cemetery, Bridgetown, Barbados. Photograph by Sarah Phillips Casteel.

The multilayered story of Caribbean Jewry is a largely unfamiliar one to many because of the tendency to focus on Ashkenazi experience in Europe and the United States. Yet it has been a source of inspiration for Caribbean novelists and poets, many of whom have made significant use of the intersection of Black and Jewish diasporic cultures. As a number of works of Caribbean literature signal, 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 some Sephardic Jews and New Christians to resettle in the Americas. Jewish settlement in the Caribbean occurred over a period of more than three hundred 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 significant and longstanding Jewish populations. In cultural terms, it is noteworthy that both Jamaica’s “first national painter,” Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795-1849), and a founding father of Impressionism, the St. Thomas-born artist Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), were the products of nineteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean communities.

Pissarro is the subject of Derek Walcott’s long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, a significant example of Caribbean literary sephardism that references the Iberian expulsion as well as the history of Sephardic settlement in the Caribbean. In the poem, in a striking instance of Caribbean identification with Sephardic Jewishness, Pissarro serves as a double for the St. Lucian poet. Born in St. Thomas in 1830 as Jacob Abraham Pizarro 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 men’s lives become intertwined in the poem, as Pissarro journeys to Paris to satisfy his “longing for the centre” and Walcott searches for an elusive hound that he had once glimpsed in a painting.8

Although Walcott’s Pissarro eventually abandons the faith of his forefathers along with his bourgeois colonial family’s life of commerce, Sephardic Jewishness remains a dominant theme of the poem. There are reminders throughout Tiepolo’s Hound of Pissarro’s Sephardic roots and the traumatic history that attends them, as when the poet’s visit to Spain leads him to recall “far Braganza/ from which the Pissarros sailed for paradise.”9 With its repeated references to the Inquisition, the Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, and the Portuguese city of Braganza from which the Pissarro family hails, Tiepolo’s Hound locates Pissarro’s story within a broader history of Sephardic exile and resettlement in the Caribbean.

At the same time as recalling the Inquisition, the poem reads Pissarro’s Sephardic Caribbean story against the legacies of the Middle Passage that haunt the speaker, a stand-in for Walcott who is as much the focus of the poem as is Pissarro. Indeed, while ostensibly devoted to Pissarro, Tiepolo’s Hound in fact intertwines the biographies of two subjects whose artistic formations it charts: the nineteenth-century Jewish painter and the twentieth-century St. Lucian poet. The poem stages a Black-Jewish dialogue, one that is informed by a strongly empathetic and identificatory perspective as well as a poetics of reciprocity. Tiepolo’s Hound 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 Expulsion while simultaneously situating these Sephardic motifs within a broader comparative and connective framework. Invoking 1492 as the meeting point of diverse histories, Tiepolo’s Hound elaborates a capacious and intricately webbed structure that challenges the perspective of linear historical narrative.

The imbalance between artist and subject foregrounds the power differential between Sephardic Jews and Afro-Caribbeans in colonial St. Thomas.

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. Once he has taken his place among the Impressionists, Pissarro remains an outsider even among “the Academy’s outcasts.”10 As Walcott emphasizes, he and the Jewish painter also have in common the experience of diaspora: “Our tribes were shaken like seeds from a sieve.”11 Part way through Tiepolo’s Hound, however, tensions emerge around the Black-Jewish analogy as Walcott begins to back away from the comparison between himself and Pissarro. Walcott admits that he “shifts [Pissarro’s] biography as he shifted houses/ in his landscapes” so that what he offers the reader is an “inexact and blurred biography.”12 Moreover, whereas earlier in the poem he had presented Pissarro’s departure from the Caribbean as inducing a terrible homesickness, he later suggests that this too may have been a fabrication. These self-reflexive moments call attention to the act of comparison itself and raise questions about the limits of analogies between Black and Jewish experience—especially in a colonial Caribbean context in which relations of power between Blacks and Jews were sharply asymmetrical.

Camille Pissarro, “Two Women Chatting By the Sea, St. Thomas” (1856). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

Such questions become still more pressing in a passage at the end of Tiepolo’s Hound in which Walcott imagines himself and the artist working side by side, writing and drawing one another. The poet then metamorphoses into one of the recently liberated slaves depicted in Pissarro’s early drawings of St. Thomas. No longer identifying with Pissarro as a fellow artist, the poet now casts himself in the role of one of Pissarro’s subjects. Whereas earlier in the poem, the analogy between painter and poet had tended to align the two men on an equal plane, here, the imbalance between artist and subject foregrounds the power differential between Sephardic Jews and Afro-Caribbeans in colonial St. Thomas.

Thus although strongly identificatory in its twinning of the poet and the painter and reading of Pissarro as emblematic of the Caribbean artist, Tiepolo’s Hound also incorporates a critique of Pissarro’s colonial Jewish gaze, which abandons St. Thomas in favor of France, and which is limited by its failure to fully engage the injustices of slavery. Yet while Walcott recognizes Pissarro’s privileged position within the colonial economy, this awareness does not detract from sephardism’s function in the poem as a vehicle for reframing European art history and exploring the psychic condition of the Caribbean artist. To the contrary, Pissarro’s Sephardic Caribbean story 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 culture not only by tracing Impressionism’s Caribbean roots but also through an emphasis on Pissarro’s Sephardic heritage, which promotes an aesthetics of reciprocity, intersectionality, and triangulation. The term “triangulation” appears in a passage about a Turner painting that Pissarro and Monet view in London and that is later copied by Walcott’s father Warwick:

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.13

Here, Pissarro provides a crucial bridge between Walcott’s St. Lucian father and the French Impressionist painter Monet. With his Portuguese roots, Sephardic Caribbean upbringing, and French career, Pissarro connects the early-twentieth-century Caribbean of Warwick Walcott to the nineteenth-century European artistic legacy of Monet and Turner. The principle of triangulation embodied by Pissarro 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.

* * *

Camille Pissarro, “A Creek in St. Thomas (Virgin Islands)” (1856). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

In her essay “The Allure of Sepharad” Edna Aizenberg asks, what is “the recurring pull of Sephardic ancestry, language, and history? … Throughout the centuries, many have wanted to become Sephardized, attached to the legacy of Iberian Jewry. Nothing similar has happened in the Ashkenazi world.”14 Aizenberg documents the appeal that Sephardic motifs have held for Ashkenazi Jewish writers in Latin America, whose appropriations of Sephardic history generate a “neo-Sephardic” literary tradition. She defines sephardism as an assimilationist strategy through which Latin American Jews foregrounded a common Spanish inheritance with their host society. More relevant to Walcott’s poem and other instances of Caribbean sephardism, however, is Dalia Kandiyoti’s alternative theorization of sephardism as connecting histories rather than collapsing differences. In Kandiyoti’s analysis of Latino/a writing, sephardism works “not to collapse or create supposedly stable formations—like ‘Jews’ and ‘Hispanics’—but rather to posit Jewish, Sephardic, Latin American and diaspora Latina/o identities as historically connected.”15 Similarly, Walcott’s poem Tiepolo’s Hound entwines various cultural histories without erasing their differences. As I have shown, Walcott’s attention to the Pissarro family’s bourgeois colonial affluence and to the artist’s complicity in the colonial gaze generates a slippery and unstable form of comparison.

Moreover, Tiepolo’s Hound not only illustrates sephardism’s connective orientation but also exemplifies what Yael Halevi-Wise terms sephardism as “counterhistory,” harnessing Sephardic motifs to contest normative cultural and historical narratives.16 In contrast to mainstream art historical narratives that locate the origins of Impressionism firmly in France, Walcott foregrounds both Pissarro’s Jewishness and his Caribbean roots. By suggesting that Pissarro injected a Sephardic Caribbean sensibility and aesthetic into his artworks and the school of painting that he helped to establish, Walcott reverses standard assumptions about colonial-metropolitan lines of influence and draws attention to the colonial origins of European modernity. Pissarro’s straddling of multiple cultures, identities, and geographies thus is critical to the poem’s reframing of Eurocentric narratives of art history.

Attending to Sephardic motifs in Caribbean fiction, drama, and poetry opens up a new window onto constructions of Jewishness in postcolonial literature that departs from the more standard emphasis on Holocaust analogies. In particular, examples of Caribbean literary sephardism such as Walcott’s suggest that 1492 holds 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 Black 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. 1492 thus offers a way out of the impasse created by what Michael Rothberg terms “competitive memory” by drawing attention to the overlapping trajectories of Jewish and Black diasporic histories.17

Due to the variable nature of our posts and the wide spectrum of ideas exchanged, we feel it is important to clarify that the thoughts and opinions shared in posts and articles reflect the opinions of the author and are not representative of our contributors as a whole.

Home is Where the Heart is

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There is an interesting relationship between the Qorban Pesaḥ (pascal sacrifice) and the Bayiṯ (house) in the Tora. Among the laws regarding qorban pesaḥ, we find that there must be one lamb per bayiṯ, the Israelites must mark their battim (houses) with the lamb’s blood, the lamb must be eaten in the bayiṯ, and it cannot be taken out of the bayith. There is not a significant focus on the bayiṯ earlier in the Tora and it merits examining the connection between the two.

There is an earlier mention of bayiṯ in the Tora in an often-overlooked passage of a well-known incident. The midwives, who disobey Pharaoh’s decree to kill all newborn male Israelites, are rewarded with an enigmatic passage in Shemoṯ 1:20-21:

וַיֵּ֥יטֶב אֱ־לֹהִ֖ים לַֽמְיַלְּדֹ֑ת וַיִּ֧רֶב הָעָ֛ם וַיַּֽעַצְמ֖וּ מְאֹֽד׃ וַיְהִ֕י כִּֽי־יָרְא֥וּ הַֽמְיַלְּדֹ֖ת אֶת־הָֽאֱ־לֹהִ֑ים וַיַּ֥עַשׂ לָהֶ֖ם בָּתִּֽים׃

And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and increased greatly. And because the midwives feared God, he established houses for them.

This passage raises two questions: Does the passage really mean that God built for them houses to live in? Moreover, why is this the reward they receive for defying Pharaoh’s decree?

In addition to the meaning of house, the trilateral root בית (BYT) can signify a corporation or collection of individuals. The Targum Onqelos translates the word bayiṯ in Shemoṯ 12:46 as ḥabura (corporation), from the root HBR, meaning to connect. Secondarily, H. Yona ibn Janah explains in his Sepher haShorashim that the trilateral root בית (BYT) can also mean penimiṯ (from within). 1

        These meanings can help us understand the introduction of the bayiṯ and its significance with respect to the midwives and the qorban pesaḥ. Prior to Yaʿaqoḇ, the generations from Adam through Abraham were described as toledoṯ (generations) of parents and offspring. Beginning with Abraham and culminating with Yaʿaqoḇ we see the development of a family and a household. Sepher Shemoṯ, on the other hand, opens with ish uBeṯo baʾu (man and his house came) a clear identification of a beṯ aḇoṯ (households). For the Israelites, the bayiṯ became the fundamental political institution by functioning as a powerful unit. It was no longer simply parents and children, but rather a ḥabura (corporation) by which, as Abarbanel explains, values can be transmitted from the parents to the children. 2

Additionally, it has the secondary benefit of being able to look penimiṯ (inwards) to sustain itself. Even when the outside world is corrupt, Israelites have always looked to the bayiṯ to maintain its values. A perfect example of this is in the story of Ḥanukka, where fundamental national institutions, the beṯ haMiqdash and priesthood were defiled, and to celebrate our ability to overcome that corruption we kindle lights in our own homes as a sign to the outside world (ner ish uBeṯo – one light per household). As long as we have our most fundamental political institution- the family bayiṯ (household) — we can persevere.

Going back to the midwives, the explanation becomes clear. They refused the order of the ruler of Egypt! In spite of the tyranny they faced, they were able to overcome their surroundings. It is therefore fitting that battim were established for them 3 in the sense of having an institution where they can reinforce these values of justice and liberty.

During Pesaḥ, we celebrate our freedom from slavery and oppression and express ourselves using the bayiṯ. In the midst of Egypt with all its surrounding corruption, 4 we rely on our bayiṯ. With the qorban pesaḥ, we physically marked our homes and then we ate in our homes together. Through this, God pasaḥ (protected) our homes, and by extension — our values. Therefore, on Pesaḥ night now, we gather in our homes, eat together, and retell the story of the Exodus to our children, instilling in them the values they need to survive in external environments. Whenever the external environment becomes unjust or tyrannical, it will be ʿAm Yisraʾel’s values that promote the message of justice and liberty.

Moʿaḏim leSimḥa

 

Due to the variable nature of our posts and the wide spectrum of ideas exchanged, we feel it is important to clarify that the thoughts and opinions shared in posts and articles reflect the opinions of the author and are not representative of our contributors as a whole.