Sephardic Merchants Research Articles

Pathfinders: Recovering the Legacy of Sephardic Merchants in Ottoman-Ruled Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Sephardic Jewish legacy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in Sarajevo, is in dire need of rehabilitation and preservation as the current Jewish population is in rapid decline. The main objective for the research note is to highlight the importance of diverse representation and overall cultural inclusivity. It also exposes the need for divergence in historical research and materials. This note includes information on historical and textual tradition, records, and means and sources for further study on Ottoman Jewish history in the Balkans. The resources encompass vast archival repositories from both Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, incorporate combined archaeological evidence, and draw on documentation written in several different languages, one of which – Judeo-Spanish – is rapidly disappearing from use. This kind of approach encourages historians to expand their field of research and promotes new ways to overcome sparseness of primary sources.

Book review of:] Yda Schreuder, Amsterdam’s Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century

Book review of:] Yda Schreuder, Amsterdam’s Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century

Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800 Ana Schaposchnik Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800. Edited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 328 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). The presence of New Christian, Converso, and Crypto-Jewish networks in the 1500-1800s has been widely studied. Themes such as genealogy, family histories, religious identities and experiences, and so forth have received the attention of many scholars who looked at their presence in Europe, Africa, and the New World colonies. This book is innovative because it explores the topic by combining two lines of inquiry: Atlantic history and port Jews. Atlantic Jews, therefore, are now the focus of an analysis that poses broad questions, crosses imperial [End Page 855] boundaries, enlarges comparative frameworks, and provides context for specific microhistories. The book is divided into three parts: part 1 is about contexts, part 2 is about mercantilism, and part 3 is about identity and religion. These three parts are not separate compartments, since crucial themes such as the identity of these early modern Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews, and their social location within these Atlantic contexts are present throughout the volume. Primary sources used in this volume are as varied as topics and articles and reflect to some extent the multiple paths of this diaspora (archives located in Amsterdam, London, Lima, Seville, Lisbon). In part 1, Jonathan Israel and Adam Sutcliffe provide the broad imperial contexts within which this diaspora lived until the eighteenth century and also remark on "its intricate diversity encompassing observant Jews, New Christians, and intermediary crypto-Jews of varied hues, and communities substantially integrated into Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other cultures" (p. 27). In addition to their Jewish ancestry and potential religious affiliation (which was indeed more flexible than previous scholarship had assumed) what did these Sephardim have in common? According to this author, the Sephardim could maintain their trading and familial networks because of their pragmatism and their lack of concern regarding theological and political rivalries (in their host communities). Several questions that emerge after reading these two essays are directly or indirectly addressed in the remaining parts of the book. For example, was the Sephardic diaspora similar to other diasporas? How did the members of this diaspora interact with local populations? In parts 2 and 3 of the book the reader can fully appreciate how innovative this volume's approach is. Here we see the connection between Atlantic port Jews in Dutch Brazil and in Suriname and Curaçao (Klooster) and how these communities incorporated new generations in a society that depended on slavery (Ben-Ur). We also see comparisons between diasporas. For example, Snyder explores how naturalization (endenization) opened the door for the presence of Jewish merchants in British American ports and to what extent they were different from trading diasporic networks. Studnicki-Gizbert compares the Portuguese Sephardic merchants with other trading diasporas across the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Assuming that these networks "were simultaneously the products and creators of the Atlantic world" (Studnicki-Gizbert, p. 78), this author studies how cultural and economic activities interact within a diasporic framework. At the domestic level, the pattern that emerges is that of a diaspora composed mainly of single men who migrated following commercial routes. [End Page 856] As a whole, this volume is a very important contribution to our understanding of a very complex diaspora that defies simplistic generalizations. As Natalie Zemon Davis says in the epilogue, this book demonstrates that Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews simultaneously reproduced European patterns, and developed new ones across continents and oceans. Ana Schaposchnik DePaul University Copyright © 2011 University of Hawai'i Press

Family Firms in Hyderabad: Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari Patterns of Adoption, Marriage, and Inheritance

Scholars are looking again at banking and mercantile families in India's early modern history, responding to the challenge issued by Claude Markovits in the epilogue of his 2008 volume,Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs, to “return the merchant to South Asian history.” Some of the underlying assumptions and questions being asked are old and some are new. My own longstanding assumption, upon which this article relies, has been that bankers and merchants played multiple and important roles with respect to states in South Asia, and that their relations with non-kin officials and other political actors determined their success or failure and sometimes the success or failure of a state, most notably, the Mughal state. Questions are again being raised about “trust,” assumed to be a leading attribute of and asset to financial networks (especially in long-distance trade diasporas), and the notion so commonly put forward by scholars to explain the success of Hindu banking and mercantile communities. Recent work by Francesca Trivellato has found that membership in the Sephardic trade diaspora facilitated but did not guarantee trust or cooperation: the Sephardic merchants relied on non-Jewish as well as Jewish agents and networks of information, and evolving legal norms guided their business activities.

Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800 (review)

This wide-ranging narrative explores the role that Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews played in settling and building the Atlantic world between 1500 and 1800. Through the interwoven themes of markets, politics, religion, culture, and identity, the essays here demonstrate that the world of Atlantic Jewry, most often typified by Port Jews involved in mercantile pursuits, was more complex than commonly depicted. The first section discusses the diaspora in relation to maritime systems, commerce, and culture on the Atlantic and includes an overview of Jewish history on both sides of the ocean. The second section provides an in-depth look at Jewish mercantilism, from settlements in Dutch America to involvement in building British, Portuguese, and other trading cultures to the dispersal of Sephardic merchants. In the third section, the chapter authors assess the roles of identity and religion in settling the Atlantic, looking closely at religious conversion; slavery; relationships among Jews, Christians, and Muslims; and the legacy of the lost tribes of Israel. A concluding commentary elucidates the fluidity of identity and boundaries in the formation of the Atlantic world. Featuring chapters by Jonathan Israel, Natalie Zemon Davis, Aviva Ben-Ur, Holly Snyder, and other prominent Jewish historians, this collection opens new avenues of inquiry into the Jewish diaspora and integrates Jewish trade and settlements into the broader narrative of Atlantic exploration.

Sephardic Business: Early Modern Atlantic Style

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. …

Sephardic journeys: Travel, Place and Conceptions of Identity

This essay will discuss two kinds of journeys—one actual and one metaphorical. The journeys made by Sephardic merchants between Europe, West Africa and the Spanish American colonies will be examined, along with the concept of journeying itself within the context of the early modern world. What will also be discussed is the manner in which two specific Sephardic merchant families originally from Portugal—the Fidalgo and the Gramaxo—acted and reacted to the stigmatising factor of Jewish ancestry. One family made a journey towards the open practice of Judaism while the other journeyed away from their Jewish ancestry and toward incorporation into the Catholic Christian elite. The factors that led to these very different responses to issues of cultural and religious identity will be explored.

Contraband Trade and the Shaping of Colonial Societies in Curaçao and Tierra Firme

In 1729, an enslaved woman named Juana Isabel Curazao fled the island of Curaçao, a small Dutch entrepôt in the southern Caribbean, and made her way across calm waters to the northern coast of the nearby Spanish American mainland (present-day Venezuela), just forty miles down-current and downwind. After ostensibly converting to Catholicism Juana Isabel obtained her freedom and acquired a small plot of land in Curiepe, a town of free blacks which the Spanish had founded in 1721 to protect the coast from the incursions of English, French, and Dutch privateers. Juana Isabel planted cacao trees, hoping to profit from Europe's growing taste for chocolate. Defying Spanish colonial law that prohibited trade with foreigners, thousands of people like Juana Isabel surreptitiously sold cacao pods to Curaçaoan traders, usually small-scale Sephardic Jewish merchants or seafarers of African descent. The traders smuggled sacks of the pods back to Curaçao, where enslaved dockworkers loaded them onto large ocean-going vessels and shipped them to Dutch processing firms across the Atlantic. A generation later, in 1765, Juana Isabel's niece and heir, a free black woman named Ana María Mohele, began a long legal battle to retain the grove, which by then had grown into a 1,000-tree plantation. Spanish colonial authorities challenged Ana Maria's ownership of the land, claiming that her aunt's manumission and property grant both were invalid. Nevertheless, they only confiscated half the property, and allowed Ana Maria to keep the rest.

Letter to the Editor

IV Letter to the Editor For the ftrst time, after having investigated and published for more than fifty years on the history of the Jews in South America, I feel obligated to rectify a book review, not because ofthe opinion which the commentator ofmy book had, but because his comments have erroneous arguments that can only confuse the reader of this journal. In his review (Fall 1996 issue, Vol. 15, No.1) Norman Roth suggests that my study should have begun in the year 1600. Why? The title ofmy bookis "The Sephardim in the Dutch Colonies of South America" and not "The Sephardim in South America." Jewish life on the continent only started in 1630, in the Dutch colonies, and this year 1630 is also accepted by the person who knows most about the history of the Jews in Colonial Dutch Brazil, Jose Antonio Gonsalves de Mello. The reviewer also asks why I didn't use Hermann Kellenbenz's book, "As re1ayoes economicas entre 0 Brasil e a Alemania na epoca colonial." For two reasons. As the title of the book indicates , Kellenbenz refers to the relations between Brazil and Germany, and therefore does not have much to do with the Sephardim in the Dutch Colonies, the topic of my investigation. The second reason is that Kellenbenz has been able to offer very little new material, after his well-known'"Sephardim an der unterim Elbe" (Wiesbaden, 1958). Indeed, in SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 April 1945, he had destroyed, by superior orders of the Nazi party, all the files and irreplaceable documents he had collected since 1939 for the "Reichinstitut fUr die Geschichte des Neuen Deutschland," under the direction of one of the worst Nazis and antisemites, Walter Frank. Frank had requested him to investigate the Jewish fmanciers and bankers of Hamburg. Kellenbenz was only able to save from this destruction his doctoral thesis, which he naturally rewrote, eliminating his venomous anti- .semitic commentaries, which, however, can still be felt when carefully reading the book. The antecedents of the Nazi and antisemitic Kellenbenz came to light only in 1966, when Helmut Heiber published an investigation on Walter Frank and his ominous Institute (Stuttgart, 1966, p. 456). After that, Norman Roth reproaches me "that he has ignored Joseph da Costa of Amsterdam, who from 1617 was already trading with Brazil, where he ftnally went and became parnas of the Zur Israel congregation in Recife." This is very strange information, as Joseph da Costa, the parnas elected in Recife, 15 September 1951, declared in Amsterdam , 15 January 1644, at the offtce of Notary J. J. Van de Ven (Gementelijke Archiefdienst van Amsterdam, No.-Arch. 1.065, fo1. 221 v/212), before boarding a ship to Brazil, that at that moment he was 25 years old. That means that he was born in 1619; therefore, it is very difficult to believe that he could have been "already trading with Brazil in 1617"!. Norman Roth goes on to say that Joseph da Costa "was one of the Sephardim who went from Recife to New Amsterdam (later New York), which is ignored." Please, I was not writing the history of all the Sephardim who went from Recife to ''New Amsterdam." Also, Joseph da Costa did not travel from Recife to New Amsterdam, but it seems that he traveled first to Surinam with his brother David (Isaac da Costa, "Noble Families among the Sephardic Jews," London: Oxford University Press, p. 115). From there he emigrated again, this time to New Amsterdam. He is mentioned there for the first time in August 1655, and it seems that he was not there before that date, as he does not appear among those that signed a "Petition," which many Sephardim signed in July 1655 (Samuel Oppenheim: "Early History of the Jews of New York, 16541664 ," AJHS, N. 18, 1909, p. 16). Norman Roth goes on to say that it is not understood from my book "the importance of the role of the Sephardic merchants in the sugar trade," and I quote, "in Barbados, not discussed in the book." It is true that I do not analyze the case of Barbados, but my investigation refers to the Dutch...