Port Jews in the Atlantic: further thoughts

Abstract

Port Jews extended the boundaries of the Jewish world and re imagined its contours. Pushing beyond harbors long familiar to Jewish merchants, they daringly crossed over into the New World, establishing Jewish communities around the Caribbean and up and down the Atlantic coast. The new map of the Jewish world, high lighting frontiers once unknown to Jews, was captured in words by Menasseh ben Israel in his The Hope of Israel (1650): "The Lord has promised that he will gather the two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, out of the four quarters of the world... Whence you may gather that for the fulfilling of that, they must be scattered through all the corners of the world... And this appears now to be done, when our synagogues are found in America."1 Historians have been studying port Jews for barely a decade. Originally, they focused on Europe, where port Jews vie with court Jews as harbingers of Jewish modernity. But recently, the scope of their interest has enlarged to encompass the Atlantic world, following port Jews as they began to populate the entrep?ts of the Atlantic and beyond, reaching as far as the Indian Ocean.2 In fact, Lois Dubin called attention to Atlantic Jewry a few years back, and David Sorkin recognized the "New World ports of Jamaica, Surinam, Recife and Newr Amsterdam" in his formulation of the port Jew as a social type.3 The essays by Wim Klooster, Holly Snyder and Arthur Kiron in this issue of Jewish History, like Jonathan Schorsch's discussion of Sephardic port Jews and race, bring port Jews squarely to the Americas.4 The study of port Jews thus raises the tantalizing prospect of a new Jewish history, re-imagined in global or trans-national terms. The essays by Wim Klooster, Holly Snyder and Arthur Kiron do more than engage the port Jews of the New World. They also open up substantive themes and challenging questions, in some cases drawn from the emerging study of Atlantic history, that students of port Jewry will want to address. In this concluding comment, my aim is to build upon these essays by focusing on the Port Jews of colonial North America.