Sephardic Business: Early Modern Atlantic Style

Abstract

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal',) AtfontL· Diaspora and the CrL)L) of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. ? + 242.Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds. AtlantL· Diasporas: Jem, Converjo,), and Crypto-Jewj in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii + 307.Francesca Trivellato. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and C roo -Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 470.Jackie Ranston. Belisario: Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist Jamaica Old Masters Series 2. Kingston, Jamaica: Mills Press, 2008. Pp. xix + 409.Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, EDS. Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art/Yale University Press, 2007). Pp. xix + 592.Josette Capriles Goldish. Once Jew?: Stories of Caribbean Sephardim. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009. Pp. xv + 334.Edward Kritzler. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jewj Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom - and Revenge. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Pp. xi + 324.It may be difficult for nonspecialists to appreciate the success of early modern Spanish and Portuguese Jews and conversos in the Atlantic world region. Some 20,000 exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews and a far greater number of conversos still in Catholic territories built up a commercial empire so triumphant that it supported communal life, sometimes lavishly, in such far-flung locations as Hamburg, London, Kingston, and Recife. Their transnational commercial success, while it lasted, comprises a doubly remarkable achievement, given, as Francesca Trivellato of Yale reminds us, that no country would have chartered an exclusively Sephardic commercial company, nor could Sephardic merchants raise considerable capital among non-Jews to set up large-scale operations Familiarity of Stranger*), p. 68). Sephardic Amsterdam, built up from nothing after 1595, like all of these communities, mostly by conversos who became New Jews (Yosef Kaplan's phrase), was an admired and renowned mother city within but a few decades. On the ocean's far side, until roughly 1800, the Sephardic communities of Suriname and Curacao outshone every other Jewish collective in the Western hemisphere. (Interaction of these New Jews with old Sephardim remains a complex question.) Curacao's Mikve Israel new synagogue building, inaugurated in 1732, could house a congregation of 400 men and 200 women; so well off was the community that a membership contribution (finta) was introduced only in 1810. New Jews greatly helped revivify, if not reinvent in exile, the unique style of Spanish and Portuguese Judaism. Sephardic men in the post-Columbus Americas hunted manatees off the coast of the Guianas, founded colonial settlements, captained hundreds of ships (many with Jewish names), ran sugar and coffee plantations, fought in local militias before such permission was granted in Europe, and constructed western outposts of Judaism which attracted graduating rabbis from Amsterdam's Ets Haim yeshiva well into the nineteenth century. Something both exotic yet familiar exudes from the history of these clean-shaven Jews, as they were referred to sometimes by Ashkenazim. In nearly all ol their homelands, Sephardim comprised both agents and victims of empire, in Jonathan Israel's already classic formulation.The rich and sophisticated new works on western Sephardim and conversos here reviewed indicate that the study of conversos/Sephardim has finally transcended its tendency to exoticize and romanticize its object. (This is less true of Kritzler's Jewiah Pirate*) of the Caribbean, to which I will return below. …