Caribbean Jewish studies of the colonial era: state of the field

Caribbean Jewish studies of the colonial era: state of the field hilit surowitz-israel Years ago, at a conference, I was excitedly sharing an eighteenth-century Peri Ets Haim responsum that had recently been accessed but had not yet been catalogued.Dated 1767, the responsum was sent to Amsterdam from the Caribbean and involved a dispute over an enslaved child. 1 The document was fascinating, and the question it posed was revealing.The responsum brought to the fore the dehumanizing and inhumane system of African chattel slavery and the Americas' slave economy, of which Jews were a part.Understood within its cultural context and period, it demonstrated the religious and legal concerns of some Jews in the colonial Americas.However, the first question I was asked about Jews in the Caribbean islands during the early modern period was posed facetiously: "Well, they weren't really Jewish, were they?"This specifically Jewish religious text, written in Hebrew in correspondence with the centre of western Sephardi Jewish life during the period, was not compelling enough to prove the presence of robust Jewish life in the Americas.The prevailing sense, reflected in this exchange and the questions that followed, was that Jews in the early modern Caribbean were merchants and opportunists -lone rangers on Europe's colonial frontier.Also, part of the exchange was the discomfort in the acknowledgment of Jews as active participants in plantation economies.This exchange took place nearly two decades ago, and the field of Jews in the Caribbean has grown tremendously since then.This growth is reflected by the quantity of scholarship that has focused on the Jews of the Atlantic world and the Caribbean, and the broader discourse within the fields of Jewish studies and history on these particular groups of people in these spaces of significant transition, violence, and creativity.The history of Caribbean Jews has developed from a small ethno-insider curiosity to a vibrant interdisciplinary and critically engaged historical subfield.Since the last decade of the twentieth century, the focus on non-1 David ben Refael Meldolah, Peri Ets Haim (Amsterdam: John Carter Brown Library, 1767), 10-80.130 hilit surowitz-israel Ashkenazi narratives in American Jewish history has grown alongside the field of Atlantic history.In step with broader historical trends, new approaches have expanded to consider the Americas holistically and to reflect a non-teleologically written perspective that does not necessarily place New York City at the centre of modern American Jewish history.Jewish historiography has dallied with both colonial and post-colonial historiography, considerations of centre-periphery studies, diaspora theory, and Atlantic history.These larger historiographical trends that decentred empire or worked to incorporate lesser-known histories of marginalized communities, which also encompassed the greater inclusion of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish histories, gave rise to the abundance of scholarship on early modern Amsterdam's Sephardi community. 2This scholarship is significant for the consideration of the field of Caribbean Jewish studies, as Amsterdam, an early modern centre of Sephardi Jewish life and European colonial expansion to the Americas, became central to Jewish presence in the early modern Caribbean.In his 2007 exploration of the allure and mythologization of seventeenth-century Sephardi Amsterdam, Adam Sutcliffe noted that the number of Jewish individuals in this time and space would soon "be outnumbered by the accumulated conference papers and essays devoted to them." 3 The same could be said for the scholarship, largely produced over the past two decades, on the Jews of the Caribbean.Sutcliffe's analysis points to scholarly fascination with "modernity" and Jewish participation therein as the catalyst for this intrigue.Similarly, the attraction to the Jews of the Atlantic world also lies in the appeal of a particular type of modernity and an interest in cosmopolitanism. 4 Additionally, the Caribbean's seeming exoticism and spaces of Jewish autonomy provide great allure for scholars of Jewish history.Just as Amsterdam's early modern Sephardim are mythologized, so have the Caribbean's Jews and Jewish spaces.