Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur Stanley Mirvis Aviva Ben-Ur. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 392 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000258 Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society heralds the emancipation of the Caribbean experience from the margins of early American Jewish history. Aviva Ben-Ur is the leading voice in a chorus of scholars dedicated to contextualizing Jewish history within the methodological framework of Atlantic studies and "creating a paradigm for Jewish Atlantic history that combines comparison, connection, and localism" (255). She has more than succeeded in achieving this goal. Through a comprehensive investigation of archival sources, particularly the extensive Surinamese Jewish communal records at the National Archives of the Netherlands, Ben-Ur challenges some of the most canonical assumptions of Jewish history. These include religious tolerance as the primary motivation for early American migration, the Jewish desire for emancipation, and the Jewish trend to acculturate "upward." She demonstrates that these historiographic dogmas don't apply to Suriname. As much as it was entangled in the web of [End Page 461] the Atlantic world, Jewish life in Suriname was a singularity that defies categorization using traditional models. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society powerfully contributes to the legacy of Salo W. Baron's antilachrymose model of Jewish history. Ben-Ur reconsiders the ubiquity of premodern Jewish subalterity. In Suriname, Jews held an unparalleled degree of corporate autonomy and were empowered through their mastery over an enslaved majority. She further reminds us that by the end of the eighteenth century, Jews made up two-thirds of the non-African descendent population of Suriname. Among Ben-Ur's boldest antilachrymose rebukes is her challenge to the narrative of religious tolerance as the primary motivation behind Jewish migration. She attributes this persistent view to the skewed self-presentation of Suriname's Portuguese elites, like David Nassy, who portrayed themselves as belonging to a community of refugees empowered by the liberties of their colonial haven. They also sought to propagate an illusion of wealth (47). Ben-Ur demonstrates that Jews in Suriname were overwhelmingly poor, and it was poverty that brought them to the colony. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is informed by a trend in early modern Portuguese diaspora studies to deemphasize a traditional bom Judesmo approach—highlighting nobility, wealth, and restraint—and instead focusing on indigent and itinerate social welfare recipients. Ben-Ur characterizes Jodensavanne as a paupers' town (54) in defiance of the more standard depiction of the town's wealth and privilege—which might have been the case for only a few Sabbath vacationers from surrounding plantations (61). Instead, she recalibrates the discussion to focus on the mechanics of the despachado system bringing poor Jews to the colony (116–17). Rather than a proto-Zionist promised land, Ben-Ur's Jodensavanne is a nonheroic site of violence, dislocation, and poverty (74). The book's title alludes to the elusive concept of Jewish self-rule, one of the colony's most conspicuous singularities. Ben-Ur finds the closest Jewish parallel in early modern Livorno as well as makes local comparisons to Suriname's Maroon and Indian populations. Autonomy, however, was not synonymous with liberty. Ben-Ur argues that autonomy cast a shadow of tyranny in the way it mandated Jewishness (93) and empowered elite Portuguese over the poor, Ashkenazim, and Jews of color (110). Autonomy was not what all of the Jews of the colony wanted. Jewish autonomy in Suriname translated into a codification of Portuguese ethnic supremacy (62–63). Ben-Ur reexamines some of Jewish history's most sacred ideals about emancipation, the process of acquiring legal parity with white Christians, which occurred in Suriname in 1825. Whereas emancipation is typically portrayed as a Jewish aspiration, in Suriname Jewish leaders swam against the tides of change by clinging to their corporate autonomy (227). Furthermore, Ben-Ur argues that Surinamese emancipation was only a "legal fiction" (254). Emancipation simply transformed the legal definitions of Surinamese Jews from an incorporated ethnic group to a religious community. Analyses of acculturation and emancipation go hand...