Jewish Diaspora (Atlantic History)

Introduction

Despite the existence of various academic works on Jews in or of various corners of the Atlantic, the study of Jews in the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlantic basin, consciously pursued as a subfield of research under the rubric of “Atlantic studies,” is still in its very early stages. Therefore, the boundaries of the subject of the present bibliography, a subject one may provisionally call the “Atlantic Jewish diaspora” and/or the “Jewish Atlantic,” are still vague. Unlike other fields and subfields, for instance, the “black Atlantic” and the “Iberian Atlantic,” this one does not have a name that specialists regularly employ or that would be readily recognizable to scholars outside of the small, relatively multidisciplinary subfield itself. The works listed below are mostly of two kinds: First, traditional studies of Jews and their diaspora, either focusing on or merely including Jews in the Atlantic basin. These works, several of which were published before the 1980s, have served to undergird works of the second kind. Many of these latter works have been published after the 1980s and are conscious responses to the emergence of Atlantic studies as a subfield and approach. Some works of this second type may thus be categorized as consciously “Atlanticist” in some way. The chronological focus of the literature is, in both cases, tilted heavily toward the early modern period. The concept of an “Atlantic Jewish diaspora,” such as it exists, owes its current momentum to at least three main factors: first, the development, especially since the 1990s, of the wider field of Atlantic studies, itself based on the concept of the Atlantic as a context of new and qualitatively (and quantitatively) unique exchanges and cultural formations. The second factor is the emergence of the field of Early Modern Jewish studies. This emergence, as David Ruderman has pointed out, was marked by the work of Jonathan Israel, whose research is of particular significance to Atlanticists. The third phenomenon is the seminal notion of the “Port Jew,” David Sorkin’s original designation of an early modern Jewish social type, usually a Sephardic or Italo-Jewish subject, whose economic, political, and social purviews were transoceanic, and thus, according to the concept’s proponents, typified a proto-modern—or at least nontraditional—and relatively cosmopolitan outlook favorable to acculturation.

General Overviews

There are as yet no comprehensive overviews of the subject of the “Jewish Atlantic” as such, though reliable regional surveys have been published. Comparative works are few. The list below brings together works that approach the Jewish Atlantic consciously as a discrete subject, or which have contributed to the definition of that subject in later work. Jonathan Israel’s work (Israel 1985, Israel 2009) consists of comprehensive and focused studies of the economic and political life of early modern Jews and Jewish-identified conversos. A foremost example of focused studies of this kind is Bernardini and Fiering 2001, which has the advantage of presenting articles by scholars grounded in Jewish history, as well as by those grounded in other fields. Nahon 1993 and Oliel-Grausz 1999 deepen the economic sociohistorical approach, fleshing out a conception of diaspora as a cultural network that transcended nation-states. Karp 2008, Ruderman 2010, and Sutcliffe 2009 complement this picture by introducing nuanced views of the symbolic and imaginary phenomena that this network generated.

Bernardini, Paolo, and Norman Fiering, eds. The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Brings together traditional state-centered historiography and new Atlanticist approaches. The latter include the chapters by James Homer Williams, on the Jewish struggle for rights and opportunities in Brazil, New Netherlands, and New York; Ernst Pijning, on judeoconverso sugar cultivators and traders in the Portuguese Atlantic from 1450–1800; and Pieter Emmer, on “The Jewish Moment” in two systems of European expansion in the Atlantic, 1580–1650.
Find this resource:
Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A pioneering work that presents the history of European Jewry during the early modern period as a distinct and coherent whole and thus may be said to inaugurate early modern Jewish studies as a subfield. Israel ties demographic, cultural, and social change to macroeconomic trends affecting (among others) the Atlantic and Mediterranean basins. In particular, Israel charts the intensification and decline of Jewish participation in European societies and in their world system(s).
Find this resource:
Israel, Jonathan I. “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypro-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1700. Edited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses mainly on the ways in which cultural factors, governmental policies, and geopolitical and economic shifts of power, permitted the rise of two intertwined Atlantic networks in the 1600s, the Jewish and the converso, and caused their fall by the early 1800s.
Find this resource:
Karp, Jonathan. The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511499081Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An intellectual history focusing on the West and the period 1630–1848. Proposes that imagining a specifically “Jewish” commerce served European writers and their audiences to abstract certain economic and related activities from the rest of economic life, thereby rendering these activities vehicles for the politically-safe expression of anxieties concerning commerce, economic modernity, and the prospects and consequences of Jewish emancipation.
Find this resource:
Nahon, Gérard. Métropoles et Périphéries Sepharades d’Occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jerusalem. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
While it is neither a single, continuous narrative overview, nor a work of “Atlantic studies,” this collection of articles explores the formation of communities and intercommunal relations among Jews from the 16th to the 18th centuries and hence affords (in the aggregate) a panoramic, arguably proto-Atlanticist, view of the early modern Jewish diaspora as it developed along key portions of the Atlantic and Mediterranean basins.
Find this resource:
Oliel-Grausz, Evelyne. “Relations et reseaux intercommunitaires dans la diaspora sefarade d’occident au XVIIIe siècle.” PhD diss., University of Paris, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Like Nahon’s Métropoles et Périphéries, provides a combination of microscopic and panoramic views of intercommunal bonds and has the advantage of forming a single and quite comprehensive study. The author focuses especially on Sephardic (here including judeoconverso) networks in the West and on the institutional mechanisms and channels of cultural and material transmission that articulated these networks. The result is an ambitious but laudably holistic social-institutional history.
Find this resource:
Ruderman, David. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This first comprehensive cultural history of early modern Jews includes chapters and subchapters of interest to the study of Atlantic Jews and conversos. This is not a work of Atlantic studies, yet it does draw from that field for its discussion of Western Sephardim. Places trends that other scholars tend to associate with the Atlantic in the context of Jewish History.
Find this resource:
Sutcliffe, Adam. “Jewish History in an Age of Mercantilism.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypro-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1700. Edited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Addresses the political and ideological underpinnings of studying conversos outside the historiographical framework of nation-states. Emphasizes that the elasticity of Jewish-converso trade networks makes “Jewish history” insufficient as a descriptive category. Presents conversos as a premodern trading nation whose identity was complex and whose viability declined as various conditions auguring modernity eroded the ethnic attachments of its members.
Find this resource:
Reference Works

The works listed below may provide building blocks and/or models for the future completion of a volume dealing with many aspects of the Jewish diaspora, but as such represent no unified “Atlanticist” field. The bibliography by Arbell, et al. 1999, is a judicious but still quite inclusive attempt to define a geographic and thematic subfield. Cohen, et al. 2002 provides cutting-edge summaries and analyses of the state of various subfields in Judaica without necessarily challenging current definitions of enduring (and some relatively new) topical subcategories in the study of Jews and Judaism. Erlich 2009 is intended as a user-friendly reference work for those interested in the sheer diasporic variety of Jewish life.

Arbell, Mordechai, Dennis Channing Landis, and Ann Phelps Barry, eds. Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the Caribbean and the Guianas: A Bibliography. Providence, RI: John Carter Brown Library, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Diverse documents organized by country or region. Serves as a fine companion to Arbell 2002 (cited under Economic and Political Activity).
Find this resource:
Cohen, Jeremy, Martin Goodman, and David Sorkin, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes bibliographic, “state of the subfield” surveys of possible interest to Atlanticists and students of diaspora. Of particular note are Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s chapter on Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries since 1492, and Ilan Stavans’s chapter “Other Diaspora Literatures since 1492.”
Find this resource:
Erlich, Mark Avrum. Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora. 3 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first volume on “origins, experiences, and culture” provides disciplinary, theoretical, and phenomenological surveys, some of them touching on the field of diaspora studies that may be of interest to Atlanticists. The other two volumes are devoted to regional studies (Volume 2 includes the Americas and Africa. Volume 3 includes Europe).
Find this resource:
Journals

No journal is devoted to the study of Jews in the Atlantic, yet Jewish History and American Jewish History have been especially sensitive to developments in the field. Several of the articles in that special issue are listed below. Journals that focus exclusively or largely on Western Sephardica and related subjects, such as Sefarad, Pe’amim, and Studia Rosenthaliana, have published numerous relevant studies, though an overtly “Atlanticist” outlook is seldom emphasized. The major Anglophone journals of Judaica, including the Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies, set the standard in what concerns historical and philological studies of Jewish diaspora cultures generally.

American Jewish History.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The fact that American Jewry began with the settlement of Sephardic “Port Jews” gives the study of early Jewish Americana, on which this journal partly specializes, a prominent place in Atlantic Studies.
Find this resource:
Jewish History.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Of particular note is Jewish History 20, 2 (June 2006), guest-edited by Lois Dubin, which is devoted to the theme of “Port Jews of the Atlantic.” The articles combine regional expertise with a theoretical self-consciousness and an awareness of Atlantic studies as a field.
Find this resource:
Jewish Quarterly Review.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This premier journal of Judaica has recently adopted a cutting-edge approach that leans heavily on cultural history and theoretical innovation, which may augur well for the integration of Atlanticist paradigms of cultural construction with Jewish studies.
Find this resource:
Jewish Social Studies.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A journal of social and cultural history, cultural anthropology, and literary studies. A recent issue was devoted to Sephardi identities and hence in part to the vicissitudes that attend to transoceanic identity building.
Find this resource:
Pe’amim.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses on the history and cultures of Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, East and West. The emphasis tends to fall on the East and on issues of interest to Israeli academics who do not subscribe to Atlanticist models, yet to the extent it touches on Western Sephardica the journal can be of special interest to scholars of the Atlantic who read Hebrew.
Find this resource:
Sefarad.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is perhaps the premier journal of Sephardica, especially Iberian Jewish studies and studies of New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula. Leans heavily in a medievalist direction.
Find this resource:
Studia Rosenthaliana.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Dedicated to Dutch Jewish history, and for that reason very useful to the study of Dutch Jewish (mostly Sephardi) participation in Atlantic trade during the Dutch “Golden Age,” namely the early modern heyday of mercantilism.
Find this resource:
Primary Sources

Printed primary sources on Jews in the Atlantic are too disparate, scattered, and insufficiently tied to any coherent field of study one might call the “Atlantic Jewish diaspora” to justify their extensive inclusion here. The list that follows merely provides a glimpse of a spectrum that traverses selected aspects of intellectual, cultural, economic, and social history. Wiznitzer 1954 and Emmanuel and Emmanuel 1970, and Ben-Ur 2009’s transcriptions of headstones from the jodensavanne, showcase detailed slivers of official communal histories from the Caribbean basin. Predictably, there is much information about local institutions and the local economy in the material collected, as well as a view of the unique challenges that attended to Jewish life in Jewishly “peripheral” places. Ben Israel 2004 is an eclectic treatise partly on the supposed relationship between South American Indians and the Jewish people, and it exemplifies some of the cultural lenses through which New Jews regarded the Americas.

Ben Israel, Menasseh. The Hope of Israel. Translated by Moses Wall. Edited by Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon. New York: Oxford University Press for The Littmann Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This treatise (c. 1650) was written in part to advocate the readmission of Jews to England. Ben Israel, a Portuguese converso-turned-Jew from Amsterdam, pursues the thesis that the settlement of Jews in all corners of the world is a necessary precondition for the inauguration of the messianic era. He incorporates then-current speculation that Amerindians were “Lost Tribes of Israel.”
Find this resource:
Ben-Ur, Aviva. Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Presents transcriptions of close to 1,600 epitaphs on tombstones found in the Jodensavanne of Suriname. The remnants show evidence of Jewish and African motifs. Thoroughly annotated and illustrated. An historiographical and formal analysis is found in Ben-Ur’s article, “Still Life: Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and West African Art and Form in Suriname’s Jewish Cemeteries.”American Jewish History 92, 1 (March 2004): 31–79.
Find this resource:
Emmanuel, Isaac S., and Suzanne A. Emmanuel. A History of the Jews in the Netherlands Antilles. 2 vols. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The second volume of this chronologically and geographically capacious communal history consists of documentary appendices. Much of the material focuses on Curação but goes well beyond, reaching at times into the Caribbean, Venezuela, the United States, Peru, etc. Many of the documents are lists of names collected by immigration authorities, tax, records, and some correspondence, wills, marriage records, and the like.
Find this resource:
Wiznitzer, Arnold, ed. The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World: Recife (Brazil). New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1954.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Congregational minute books of the Zur Israel congregation of Recife and the Kahal Kadosh Maguen Abraham of Mauritia. Published also in Portuguese as O livro de atas das congregações judaicas Zur Israel em Recife e Magen Abraham em Mauricia, Brasil: 1648–1653.
Find this resource:
Port Jews

“Port Jew” designates an early modern Jewish social type and an analytical alternative to the “Court Jew.” Port Jews’ purview was transoceanic. They are said to have represented a proto-modern—or at least nontraditional—and relatively cosmopolitan outlook favorable to acculturation. The “Port Jew” concept has lent itself to much debate, both as to its historicity and utility. Some of the debate has been conducted within the framework of Atlantic studies. Cesarani 2002, Dubin 1999, and Dubin 2002 argue for the concept’s expandability, while Sorkin 1999 and Sarna 2006 issue limiting sociological and cultural qualifications to it. Snyder 2009, and Trivellato 2009, for their part, deepen an understanding of the complex interplay of culture and economic in the life of Port Jews. Mark and Horta 2009 broadens the usual treatments by introducing readers to Port Jews in West Africa, as part of Kagan and Morgan 2009, a pioneering anthology which aggregates various current thematic concerns and diverse methodologies into an overall picture of an “Atlantic Jewish Diaspora.”

Cesarani, David. “The Forgotten Port Jews of London: Court Jews who were also Port Jews.” In Port Jews: Jewish communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Centers. Edited by David Cesarani. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Cesarani both expands and problematizes David Sorkin’s “Port Jew” model by discussing the mixed treatment that Jews received in London (here described as a “Port” because of its commercial profile and connection to other ports): the host city’s commercial pragmatism, he explains, could work against the Jewish presence as in favor of it.
Find this resource:
Dubin, Lois. The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An early, extended application of the “Port Jew” model. Explores Jewish integration in modern Europe by reconstructing the experience of the Jewish mercantile “nation” (nazione) in 18th-century Trieste. The focus is on the relationship between Trieste’s “Port Jews” and the Habsburgs’ mercantilist form of “enlightened” absolutism. Dubin shows that the merchants were open to acculturation, yet within the confines of a corporate political framework that granted toleration, not a revolutionary change (à la Bonaparte’s France) in civic status and communal structure.
Find this resource:
Dubin, Lois. “Researching Port Jews and Port Jewries: Trieste and Beyond.” In Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950. Edited by David Cesarani, 47–58. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reaffirms the utility of the “Port Jew” model and proposes its applicability in the study of entire Jewish communities—”Port Jewry”—not of merchant classes alone.
Find this resource:
Kagan, Richard, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Perhaps the first anthology published in English that places Atlanticist concerns, especially the notion of “Atlantic Jewish diasporas,” at the center of a collective analytical venture. Arguably, the cumulative effect of these essays does not favor the idea of a single, Judeo-Atlantic diaspora but rather of interlocking Sephardi and converso diasporas that also formed part of larger, non-Jewish constellations.
Find this resource:
Mark, Peter, and José Da Silva Horta. “Catholics, Jews and Muslims in Early Seventeenth-Century Guiné.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Edited by Richard Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Locates evidence of “situational and relational” idenitites among traders “of the nation” in the Petite Côte of western Africa. For example, the work relates show how the Jewish traders negotiated a secure place in the local economies by relating to their Muslim patrons as fellow non-Christians.
Find this resource:
Sarna, Jonathan. “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts.” Jewish History 20.2 (2006): 213–219.
DOI: 10.1007/s10835-005-9004-xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this brief yet pivotal contribution, Sarna shows that “Port Jews” in North America were deeply religious, traditional in their worship, and mystically inclined in their outlook. Thus, the essay cautions against a facile imputation of religious pragmatism, skepticism, and incipient secularism to “Port Jews.”
Find this resource:
Snyder, Holly. “English Markets, Jewish Merchants, and Atlantic Endeavors: Jews and the Making of British Transatlantic Commercial Culture, 1650–1800.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Edited by Richard Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines Judeo-Portuguese and other Jewish traders’ relationship to their Anglo-American clients. Snyder argues that the traders’ behavior and sensitivity to the clients’ cultural aspirations of gentility should be viewed as a matter of staking out commercial and social ground, not as part of the “founding” of a Jewish community in North America.
Find this resource:
Sorkin, David. “The Port Jew: Notes Toward a Social Type.” Journal of Jewish Studies 50.1(1999): 87–97.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Introduces the concept of the “Port Jew” as an analytical alternative and/or complement to the early modern “Court Jew,” another figure that scholarship has long proposed as its typical harbinger of Jewish modernity. As Sorkin describes them, Port Jews were acculturated, pragmatic actors with a wide, transoceanic purview who nonetheless lacked the highly intellectualized, modernist ideology of Haskalah (Jewish “Enlightenment”).
Find this resource:
Trivellato, Francesca. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A cultural and economic history of Sephardi merchants from Livorno. Scrutinizes the functioning of early modern trading networks in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Finds that informal, trust-building practices, and not the formation of modern legal frameworks for international commerce or the rise of social and political “toleration,” oiled the wheels of cross-cultural trade in the 1600s–1700s.
Find this resource:
Economic and Political Activity

Most research in the nascent subfield under discussion is still organized and presented in terms of discrete, narrowly defined geographical and topical foci (e.g., “The Jews of Port X”)—e.g., Arbell 2002, Liedke 2002, and Zink 1999. The present topical subdivision—which overlaps significantly with the others and does not present a comprehensive picture—reflects that. The works listed below are a sample of local and regional analyses focusing on economic and political history that together cover most major regions of the northern and southern Atlantic and the Caribbean, respectively, but hardly an analytical consensus, much less “schools” of thought. However, Brunelle 2003, a rich sliver of economic and social history, as well as Stucznski 2007, with its attention to conversos’ political discourse and behavior, and López Belinchón 2001, a meticulous reconstruction of political and economic relations in an era of inquisitorial persecution, and Zink 1999, which is aware of the intersection of legal and economic phenomena, would seem to complement Israel 1990, Israel 2002, and Studnicki-Gizbert 2007, which offer more panoramic views of economic (and to a lesser extent social) formation.

Arbell, Mordechai. The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas. Jerusalem: Gefen, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A fact-oriented, comprehensive narrative of settlement and institutional development by the foremost student of the subject. See also Arbell’s more in-depth studies, e.g., The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 2000).
Find this resource:
Brunelle, Gayle K. “Migration and Religious Identity: The Portuguese of Seventeenth-Century Rouen.” The Journal of Early Modern History 7.3–4 (November 2003): 283–311.
DOI: 10.1163/157006503772486900Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Trains an economic historian’s eye on questions of corporate identity, examining relations between Portuguese New Christian trading communities and individuals, and their local competitors in Rouen. The findings will presumably be incorporated in Brunelle’s forthcoming book (as of 2011), tentatively entitled “Negotiating Commerce, Negotiating Identity: Portuguese Merchants in Early Modern Northern France” (New York and Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill), which is a study of Portuguese merchants in France from 1572 to 1630.
Find this resource:
Israel, Jonathan I. Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy, and the Jews, 1585–1713. London and Ronceverte, WV: Hambledon, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Articles published from 1974–1987 explore the rivalry between two maritime powers, Habsburg Spain and the Netherlands. Presents a traditional “ships, guns, and ports” historiography devoid of theoretical ruminations on the Atlantic, yet partly focuses on the paradoxical roles that Jews and New Christians (whom the author largely assumes were secret Jews) played in the conflict throughout the Atlantic.
Find this resource:
Israel, Jonathan I. Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires, 1540–1740. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection that deepens Israel’s focus on the roles of Jews and New Christians in the transoceanic economies that he had begun to explore in Empires and Entrepots. Though his categories of identity—Jewish, crypto-Jewish, converso, marrano—beg for clarity and distinction, the discussions provide a stimulating view of the interweaving of economic and political history in the formation of trading communities in the Atlantic and elsewhere.
Find this resource:
Liedke, Rainer. “Germany’s Door to the World: A Haven for the Jews? Hamburg, 1590–1933.” In Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Centers. Edited by David Cesarani. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Liedke’s contribution to Cesarani’s important anthology confounds Lois Dubin’s thesis that in port cities, Jews’ commercial utility fostered their hosts’ toleration of them and ultimately permitted the Jews’ acculturation. Liedke shows that Hamburg’s Jews, an important element in the city’s economy, were discriminated against and therefore cultivated a strong sense of social separateness, even from neighboring eastern European Jews.
Find this resource:
López Belinchón, Bernardo. Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judíos sefardíes. Alcalá de Henares, Spain: Universidad de Alcalá, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A meticulously researched study that focuses on great judeoconverso asentistas (royal contractors) of the 17th century, their persecution by the Holy Office, and the wide social, political, and especially economic networks on which they built their pivotal positions.
Find this resource:
Stuczynski, Claude B. “New Christian Political Leadership in Times of Crisis: The Pardon Negotiations of 1605.” In Bar-Ilan Studies in History V: Leadership in Times of Crisis. Edited by Moisés Orfalí. Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Through a meticulous analysis of lobbying undertaken by wealthy Portuguese New Christians, Stuczynski sheds light on the often-forgotten political and corporate dimension of judeoconversos’ history and identity.
Find this resource:
Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken. A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Panoramic study of the apogee and decline of the Portuguese trading nation, comprising New and Old Christians, in the context of the transoceanic Habsburg economy. This is primarily an economic history, yet it shows how interrelated phenomena of maritime commerce and shared ethnicity rendered coherent a religiously diverse and labile social group that was crucial to the functioning of a burgeoning monarchical state: a group that nonetheless operated largely beyond that state’s formal institutions and mechanisms of control.
Find this resource:
Zink, Anne. “La comunidad judía de Bayona y su contexto.” El Olivo 49 (1999): 55–64.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Details and analyzes the legal and economic frameworks within which New Christians settled in the outskirts of Bayonne and were allowed relative freedom to embrace Judaism there.
Find this resource:
Ethnicity

The study of the cultural history of Atlantic-bound Jews and Jewish-Identified Christians is well developed. “New Christians” (a.k.a. judeoconversos and “Men of the Nation”) protagonized transatlantic trade in the 1500s and 1600s. Many adopted Judaism outside Ibero-Catholic domains. Despite problems of cultural definition, almost all relevant studies treat conversos as part of both the Sephardi segment of the Jewish diaspora (which is itself problematic), and as a key subset of larger trading diasporas, notably the Dutch and Iberian ones. The works below focus attention on questions of Jewish communal formation within these diasporas. Looking at the paradigmatic but still quite unique case of Amsterdam, Kaplan 1996 and Bodian 1997 highlight the New Christians’ multiple cultural attachments and flexibility, while Swetschinski 2000 finds relative constancy and discipline in their Jewishness. Graizbord 2004 and Graizbord 2006 pay attention to the psychological challenges of achieving social conformity, while Ben-Ur 2009 and Feitler 2003 look at the dynamics of defining Jewishness in racially and ethnically diverse social contexts.

Ben-Ur, Aviva. “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Edited by Richard Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores the complex relationships between slavery, religion, race, gender, and the construction of identity in the Jewish community of Suriname. The chapter explores how the community determined who was a Jew in light of the racially tiered and sexist socioeconomic context in which the community existed.
Find this resource:
Bodian, Miriam. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A history of communal and cultural formation in early modern Amsterdam. Brings into relief questions of identity, especially the judeoconversos-cum-Jews’ fraught relationship with Iberian cultures. The work is in some ways a vast expansion of Bodian’s important article, “‘Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994): 49–76, which focuses on the complex ethnic dimension of that population’s culture.
Find this resource:
Feitler, Bruno. Inquisition, juifs et noveaux-chrétiens au Brésil: Le Nordeste. XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Like the rest of Feitler’s work, this monograph is at the cusp of much recent research into the complex relations between Jews in Dutch Brazil and conversos in Portuguese Brazil. Does not, on the whole, essentialize identity and registers contradictions in the behavior and self-concepts of its Jewish and converso subjects.
Find this resource:
Graizbord, David L. Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores judeoconverso “cultural commuters” of the 17th century. Explains the social and psychological dimensions of the construction of Jewish and Christian identities among conversos in terms of these subjects’ place in the peninsular Habsburg economy and its transatlantic nodes and outlets. The works pays special attention to economic and social networks—in particular the Madrid-Bayonne trading axis.
Find this resource:
Graizbord, David L. “Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-Building in Seventeenth-Century Bayonne and Peyrehorade.” Journal of Social History 40.1 (Fall 2006): 147–180.
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2006.0081Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analyzes the formation of two “New Jewish” communities that were intimately tied to Atlantic commerce, approaching that formation not as a preordained outcome of their members’ preexisting attachment to Judaism but as a matter of ethnic bonds and of the local conditions of Portuguese settlement in southwestern France.
Find this resource:
Kaplan, Yosef. Judíos Nuevos en Amsterdam. Estudios sobre la historia social e intelectual del judaísmo sefardí en el siglo XVII. Barcelona: Gedisa, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of highly influential studies that probes the social and intellectual life of Amsterdam’s remarkably cosmopolitan yet officially conservative “New Jewish” community. The works form part of the backbone of many recent studies of the Western Sephardic Diaspora.
Find this resource:
Swetschinski, Daniel. Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A meticulous and multilayered communal history that emphasizes the relative conformity of Dutch Sephardim to normative Judaism (as against studies of deviance in the community, e.g., Spinoza, “Karaism,”and other forms of indiscipline), and does not call them “New Jews,” as Yosef Kaplan and many others do.
Find this resource:
Intellectual Culture

Works that focus on the ethnic culture of New Christians and “New Jews” are not neatly separable from those that focus on their intellectual history. Nevertheless, the works below focus on the latter to profitable effect, identifying key themes and values to which conversos gave expression via diverse testimonies, learned treatises, and belles-lettres (among other genres), in and outside the Iberian Peninsula, such as messianism, mercantilist thought, and racial theory (e.g., Kaplan, et al. 1989 on Menasseh ben Israel, and Perelis 2006 on Antonio de Montezinos, Schorsch 2004 and Schorsch 2009 on blacks, Amerindians, and Jews), freedom of conscience and dissident pietism (Bodian 2007 on crypto-Jewish martyrs), relativism, equivocation, and duality (Wachtel 2001, Wilkie 1996, and Wilke 1994), and Luso-Hispanic cultural attachments. The articles in Katz and Israel 1990 add to this mix, among other things, analyses of the Christian side of the porous philosophical and religious fence.

Bodian, Miriam. Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study includes analytical portraits of religiously radical New Christians and Old Christians in Iberia, Portuguese Brazil, and New Spain, and hence is of interest to students of comparative Atlantic history and religion.
Find this resource:
Kaplan, Yosef, Richard Popkin, and Henry Méchoulan, eds. Menasseh ben Israel and His World. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1989.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An indispensible collection for students of Menasseh ben Israel’s thought, and of the Sephardic community of Amsterdam. The collection’s tilt toward intellectual history is somewhat mitigated by considerations of ben Israel’s political and social context.
Find this resource:
Katz, David S. Katz, and Jonathan I. Israel, eds. Sceptics, Millenarians, and Jews. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An anthology with several essays that document and analyze radical currents—and conservative responses to them—in political and religious thought among New Jews and Protestants in Atlantic communities.
Find this resource:
Perelis, Ronnie. Marrano autobiography in its transatlantic context: Exile, Exploration and Spiritual Discovery. PhD diss., New York University, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the autobiographical narratives of the conversos Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo (b. 1567–d. 1596), Antonio de Montezinos (b. 1604–d. 1647), and Manoel Cardoso de Macedo (b. 1585–d. 1652). Perelis places these texts in the social and historical context of early modern colonial expansion, transatlantic trade, and crypto-Judaism in the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Argues for a definition of these texts as part of an Atlantic Jewish genre.
Find this resource:
Schorsch, Jonathan. Jews and Blacks in the early Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A one-of-a-kind, multilayered study tracing ideas of race and evidence of social relations between Jews, conversos, and blacks in such contexts as the slave trade, the formation of the Western Sephardi Diaspora, medieval and early modern Jewish lore and philosophy, the Enlightenment, and Jewish colonies in the Americas.
Find this resource:
Schorsch, Jonathan. Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century. Leiden, The Netherlands, and New York: E. J. Brill, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Makes extensive use of inquisitorial and other documents to break new ground in the exploration of interracial, interreligious, and interethnic relations. The book explores its subjects’s views of each other at the time of intense transatlantic exchange and the consolidation of colonial subcultures.
Find this resource:
Wachtel, Nathan. La foi du souvenir. Laberynthes marranes. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Traces a “subterranean history” of the Americas to the 20th century through portraits of crypto-Judaic and other conversos who existed in a New World economic and intellectual context Wachtel characterizes as propitious to modernity.
Find this resource:
Wilke, Carsten Lorenz. Jüdisch-christliches Doppelleben im Barock: Zur Biographie des Kaufmanns und Dichters Antonio Enríquez Gómez. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Skillfully contextualizes the life and work of a notorious 17th-century judeoconverso author, social critic, and inquisitorial defendant who fled to France but returned to Spain to live and work under a pseudonym. The work pays special attention to the transnational mercantile framework within which people such as Enríquez Gómez lived and negotiated their positions vis-à-vis Iberian Catholic culture.
Find this resource:
Wilke, Carsten Lorenz. “Conversion ou retour? La métamorphose du nouveau-chrétien en juif portugais dans l‘imaginaire sépharade du XVIIe siècle.” In Mémoires juives d‘Espagne et du Portugal. Edited by Esther Benbassa. Paris: Publisud, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores the motif of “return” to Judaism in the literature and thought of early modern Amsterdam’s Sephardic Jews. Wilke argues that the motif of conversion was more common in that literature, which reveals that the former conversos had once regarded themselves as genuine Christians and not as secret Jews.
Find this resource: