Between Ethnicity, Commerce, Religion, and Race: The Elusive Definition of an Early Modern Jewish Atlantic

Abstract

Responding to academics' fascination with the role of the nacao in the Iberian Atlantic, this chapter provides an overview of a few key problems inherent in the definition of the Judeo-Portuguese and Judeo-Spanish as an object of inquiry within the rubric of Atlantic Studies. While acknowledging the usefulness of the paradigm of Atlantic Community in describing aspects of the nacao' s character and functioning as a group, the author's discussion concentrates on ways in which the variable interplay of ethnicity, religion, the construct of race, and economic behaviour in the lives of of the Nation challenges totalising models of these subjects' Jewishness and Ibero-Atlanticity and argues for a more nuanced approach to and judeoconverso identity, and hence, to the notion of a Jewish Ibero-Atlantic, that students of Atlantic and Studies have only recently begun to chart. Keywords: ethnicity; Ibero-Atlantic; judeoconverso ; Men of the Nation; nacao ; religion