Disaster, Race, and Rabbinic Authority: An Alternative Path of Jewish Integration in Early Twentieth-Century Jamaica

Abstract: This article investigates the writings of Jamaica's rabbi Abraham E. Dobrin amid heightened racial tensions following a devastating 1907 earthquake. It focuses on two specific incidents. First is Dobrin's reaction to a 1912 petition from a Black man to join Jamaica's Jewish community. Second is a 1914 public debate in which Dobrin radically advocated for a belief in Jewish racial homogeneity and superiority. Anchored to these two episodes, this article explores the larger contexts for both early twentieth-century Black Jewish identity and Jewish "race" theory. It argues that in the highly racialized climate of post-1907 Jamaica, the Jewish sense of racial singularity, even superiority, paralleled some of the emerging trends of Pan-Africanism in defiance of a liberal white minority as represented by Governor Sydney Olivier. This argument qualifies a widely held unidirectional model of Jewish assimilation in Jamaica to an elite white minority.