Introduction: Port Jews in the Atlantic world Jewish history

Abstract

In recent years, port Jews have become increasingly familiar figures in modern European Jewish history. The term 'port Jews' was introduced to highlight the distinctive role and experience of Jewish merchants who lived in dynamic Mediterranean and Atlantic port cities in early modern Europe, cities such as Livorno, Trieste, Amsterdam, London, and Bordeaux. Perceived in their day as acculturated and useful agents, purveyors and facilitators of international maritime com merce, they benefited from relatively favorable civil-legal status and trod a particular road to modernity.1 This issue of Jewish History proposes to take port Jews across the Atlantic Ocean and make them familiar figures in the Jewish history of the Americas as well. Several scholars have located port Jews beyond the early modern centers of western and central Europe, with some extending the geographic and chronological parameters of their discussions to include cities such as Odessa, Singapore, and Cape Town, and the experiences of Jews in port cities during the era of mass migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries.2 The following articles broaden consideration of port Jews in a way that is crucial to the early modern period itself. Initial studies of port Jews focused on the processes by which these Jews became rooted in a local milieu and integrated into the civic realm, in effect seeing them as resident subjects or citizens in the making, on the road toward legal equality. But, as I have argued elsewhere, routes are as important as roots in the study of merchant communities, and therefore, more attention should be paid to the actual movement of port Jews and their far-flung human, commercial, and cultural networks.3 For the early modern period, there is one vital pattern of movement and exchange that scholars of port Jews must address: Just as early modern