Jews and Blacks (Atlantic History)

Introduction

Relations between Jews and blacks holds inherent interest for scholars of the Atlantic world. Defining the terms themselves remains fraught with complications, however (i.e., black, sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, people of color, Afroiberian, African American?) and the experience of these groups in the Atlantic world likewise attests to the complexities and ambiguities of the region’s history (i.e., tensions between blacks and mulattos or between slaves and free blacks; should Judeoconversos be considered Jews? what about syncretistic black Jews? how do we categorize those who are both black and Jewish?). Beyond historical parallels as subaltern groups in the Euro-American sphere of influence, the question of how Jews and blacks (the latter term is used merely as the most efficient shorthand) related to one another—one group non-Christian but considered monotheistic and white, the other increasingly Christianized but seen as nonwhite and of pagan origin—gained significance with recent transformations in scholarship connected to identity politics, ethnicity, and postcolonial thought. Until the 18th century, more plausibly the 19th, with the rise of Old Testament–oriented Protestantism among blacks in the Caribbean and the United States and the growing awareness among Jews of the perceived parallel experience of blacks under slavery, blacks and Jews held no sense of anything particularly special about their relationship. Clearly conditions changed dramatically over the course of five centuries since the beginning of European expansion into Africa and the expansion of European commercial activities spanning four continents. Black Africans, the diverse population of the larger part of an entire continent, were not subaltern at home, and, even under rising colonialism, they were certainly not dominated in the way slaves in the Americas were subjugated. Jews, a relatively tiny group of immigrants in Christian lands who were numerically small but laden with disproportionate significance due to the rise of Christianity, faced legal and social discrimination in the medieval and Early Modern periods; however, with gradual emancipation beginning in the 18th century, they faced fewer instances of legal exclusion. The exception is Jews in Dutch territories, who found a relatively hospitable and oppression-free climate as early as the 17th century. In European territories Jews were frequently massacred, expelled, and discriminated against as religious “others,” and they were exploited economically. However, after the medieval period they also participated in real and significant ways as tolerated members of white society. Kidnapped or captured Africans, on the other hand, despite some few exceptions, made up the overwhelming majority of the slave population throughout the Americas, living often in a state of near total lack of freedom. This disparity was lessened somewhat for manumitted individual slaves and in the post-emancipation world of the 19th century, though legal discrimination against people of color continued far longer than against Jews. The above examples are merely selective; it is impossible here to cover all the shifting nuances of the pertinent historical situation. This article is not a treatment of the vast and mostly independent histories of blacks or Jews in the Atlantic world but of the intersection of these two sets of peoples. The field of Jewish-black relations can be divided roughly into several periods: ancient and medieval precedents, colonization during the Early Modern period, and slavery, abolition, and post-emancipation. Given the often marginal place occupied by this topic in several vast fields of scholarly literature, works listed in this article include only those that directly address the intersection of the Jewish and black experiences. Most such works emphasize 20th-century topics, putting them beyond the scope of this article Researchers wishing to dig deeper will have to follow the textual trail via the bibliographies found in the listed works, leading ultimately back to the archival sources, many of which could use further scrutiny or remain surprisingly unexamined. Because the bibliographic project of which this article is a part focuses on the Atlantic world, coverage of important subjects, such as Judaism and the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the black Jews of Cochin, and the experience of the Ethiopian Jews and black Hebrews in the State of Israel, has perforce been excluded.

General Overviews

No published work covers the whole field, certainly not in its transoceanic historical scope. Brackman 1977, a still unpublished dissertation, constitutes the first effort to offer an overview of the topic from ancient times to modernity. Bracey and Meier 1993 offers a synopsis of aspects of the topic pertaining to the United States, almost exclusively in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it needs greater review as of the time of writing. Though not necessarily meant as an overview, Lapierre 2011 brings to the subject possibly the most ambitious and theoretically informed conceptual sweep, taking in parallel often cross-pollinated meditations by late modern Jewish and black thinkers and artists on slavery, the Holocaust, subaltern identity, and collective redemption.

Bracey, John, and August Meier. “Towards a Research Agenda on Blacks and Jews in United States History.” Journal of American Ethnic History 12.3 (Spring 1993): 60–67.
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Though somewhat dated and limited in scope to the United States, the substantive and methodological questions posed here remain highly relevant.
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Brackman, Harold D. “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black-Jewish Relations through 1900.” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1977.
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The first comprehensive attempt to provide a global treatment, but without access to the wealth of extant primary sources when it comes to matters beyond the United States.
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Lapierre, Nicole. Causes communes: Des juifs et des noirs. Paris: Stock, 2011.
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Using a variety of thinkers such as Fanon, Said, Paul Gilroy and Deleuze and Guattari, Lapierre considers, from a heavily Francophone perspective, Jews and blacks as colonized peoples and postcolonial self-reinventors. Treats many theorists and portraitists of Jewish and black identity, such as Cesaire, Memmi, André Schwarz-Bart, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and their cross-fertilization.
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Reference Works

Davis 1984, a bibliography, though by now seriously dated, remains the only reference work covering the topic.

Davis, Lenwood G. Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, 1752–1984: A Selected Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984.
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Lacks the in-depth coverage of more recent studies and obviously limited to a small corner of the Atlantic world.
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Anthologies and Exhibits

Because the very notion of a black-Jewish relationship emerged mostly from intergroup contacts and tensions in the urban world of the 20th-century United States (Bracey and Meier 1993, cited under General Overviews; Davis 1994, cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Slave Trading) pertinent collections and commemorations concern themselves almost exclusively with the experience in that country. Sponsored mostly by Jewish organizations and authored mainly by Jewish scholars, these efforts, often apologetic (which is not necessarily a problem in and of itself), aim to contextualize Jewish interactions with blacks within the larger picture of Atlantic world slavery and racism. Peck 1987 marks the earliest such attempt. Salzman 1992 emerged out of an exhibit that toured the United States and comes replete with visual images and commentary. Both collections were sponsored by major Jewish institutions. Salzman and West 1997, a work in which the entries provide a more comprehensive historical scope than Salzman 1992, features the co-editorial presence of Cornell West and does a better job of balancing the coverage from both Jewish and African-American perspectives. Likewise, Adams and Bracey 1999, which includes a number of primary documents, allows readers to form their own views alongside (or despite) the authors of the essays within the volume. The editors’ provenance in the last two volumes reflect a maturation and growing political sophistication in coverage of the topic after the often heated exchanges of the early 1990s, moving away from purely partisan treatments, often biased, even if unintentionally so.

Adams, Maurianne, and John Bracey, eds. Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
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A thorough and thoughtful compendium of analytical essays and reprinted primary documents, mostly treating 20th-century issues. Still, the editors included a number of valuable documents and essays dealing with slavery, emancipation, and the Reconstruction era.
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Peck, Abraham J., ed. Blacks and Jews: The American Experience, 1654–1987. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1987.
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Exhibition catalogue from an exhibit sponsored by the American Jewish Archives on the campus of the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, December 1987 through September 1988.
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Salzman, Jack, ed. Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews. New York: George Braziller, 1992.
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Well-illustrated catalogue from a 1992 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, for the most part covering 20th-century matters. A few of the essays concern the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Salzman, Jack, and Cornel West, eds. Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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The first eight essays—some new, some reprinted material (including a synopsis of Diner 1977 [cited under Post-emancipation: United States] and a full version of Davis 1994 [cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Slave Trading])—treat in roughly chronological order phenomena predating and leading up to the mid-20th century.
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Racialist Discourse and Legislation

Jews and blacks both suffered from varying forms of discrimination, marginalization, exploitation, and persecution at the hands of white, Christian Europe, and both Jews and blacks found themselves thrown into diasporic conditions, most of them unable to return to their homelands. Both Jews and blacks faced denigration and exclusion based on biology, culture, and religion, and they were frequently lumped together as problematic “others” by Europeans, both in discourse in general and in legislation, such as the Iberian “purity of blood” statutes or the French Code Noir. Yet, as subaltern groups, Jews shared the dominant anti-black discourse of Muslim and Christian cultures, while Christianized blacks sometimes saw Jews as socioeconomic competitors and picked up prevailing anti-Jewish prejudices. Jewish and black self-consciousness reflected similar internalization of the dominant prejudices. The subject here is divided into early and late periods. Though not all of the works limit themselves to the one or the other, they are placed according to their main emphasis.

Early Modern

A growing body of scholarship presents and analyzes parallels and differences between attitudes toward, and treatment of, blacks and Jews in European societies. Braude 1997 traces the mostly literary reception history of the curse of Ham supposedly found in the Hebrew Bible, one of the frequently cited supports for the legitimacy of slavery across the major monotheistic cultures well into the 19th century. With theoretical sophistication and insightful reading of her sources, the author of Silverblatt 2006 offers a glimpse of the swirl of theo-political constructions of blackness/Africanness and Jewishness in the Spanish colonies of South America, mostly but not only at the hands of the Inquisition. Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula and Mexico, Martínez 2008 provides the first but, more importantly, a thorough, informed, and sophisticated overview of the historical relations and discursive parallels between the anti-Jewish “blood purity” statutes of Spain and Portugal and their colonies and the anti-black caste system of Atlantic world slave societies. More studies also focus on direct interaction of Jews and blacks and their mutual imagining of one another. Schorsch 2004 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America) details continuities and transformations in Jewish perceptions and treatment of blacks and slaves from the Old World to the New World, from medieval religious texts and law to secular attitudes and civil law. Among other topics, the study surveys the exclusion of nonwhites from communal participation in Sephardic centers such as Amsterdam, Suriname, and Curaçao beginning in the 17th century. Earle 2005 dissects religious plays written by a Portuguese mulatto and their mostly negative take on Jews and Judaism, a form of religious acculturation by an author from a marginalized group. The same phenomenon is depicted in Ivory 1979 in the work of a Spanish playwright of African background a century later. Green 2009, one of a number of essays by an important rising scholar (see Green 2007 and Green 2008, both cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Africa), offers a case study of the intersection of religious, racial, and class identities around the West African coast that bring together the lives and experiences of New Christians and Africans.

Braude, Benjamin. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.” William and Mary Quarterly 3d series, 54.1 (January 1997): 103–142.
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Important elucidation of the manner in which shifting medieval identifications of Noah’s sons and their geographical provenance turned into a rigid racialist European justification for cultural condescension and enslavement. The confused early medieval notion of Ham’s being cursed with blackness and/or servitude underwent a similar trajectory. The use of these tropes in literature defending slavery is not covered.
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Earle, T. F. “Black Africans versus Jews: Religious and Racial Tension in a Portuguese Saint’s Play.” In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Edited by T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, 345–360. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Analysis of four plays said to be written by Alonso Álvares, a mulatto playwright in 16th-century Portugal (much of his biography remains speculative), an author in whose works Jews, Judaism, and New Christians/Judeoconversos are cast as religiously misguided and as threats to the Christian body politic.
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Green, Tobias. “Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cabo Verde.” History in Africa 36.1 (2009): 103–125.
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Case study looking at the career of the New Christian/Judeoconverso João Rodrigues Freire in the context of how purity of blood notions were incorporating the question of skin color at the same time that the matter of the baptism of slaves and linguistic factors took on increasing importance in the complex that made up a distinctly Caboverdean Creole identity.
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Ivory, Annette. “Juan Latino: The Struggle of Blacks, Jews, and Moors in Golden Age Spain.” Hispania 62.4 (1979): 613–618.
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Looks at the divergent portrayals in a revisionist 17th-century Spanish play by Diego Jiménez de Inciso of the newly glorified 16th-century black scholar Juan Latino, a former slave risen to nobility, in contrast to the Jewish (and Muslim) characters, depicted as enemies of Catholicism and as racists.
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Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
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Sophisticated and important analysis of how the religiously oriented anti-Judeoconverso (and anti-Morisco) purity of blood regulations of the Iberian Peninsula morphed into the more explicitly racialist anti-black (and anti-Native American) caste system of the colonies.
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Silverblatt, Irene. “Colonial Conspiracies.” Ethnohistory 53.2 (Spring 2006): 259–280.
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Nuanced account of imperial Spanish anxieties in the 17th century regarding mostly imagined rebellious alliances between persecuted New Christians/Judeoconversos and black slaves (and Native Americans).
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Enlightenment and Late Modern

Singham 1994 brings into contiguity Revolutionary-era French thinking about nonwhites and Jews, showing the ambivalent acceptance granted, with some reluctance, by Revolutionary thinkers and leaders to these groups. Dealing with the Haskala or Jewish Enlightenment, Idelson-Shein 2010 shows how Jewish thinkers adopted general European attitudes toward blacks but also modified them by offering frequently more sympathetic stances in light of their own persecution and marginalization. Van Stipriaan 1997 offers a concise and thought-provoking analysis of differences and parallels between Jews and blacks in Suriname, one of the harshest New World slave environments. Philipson 2000 brings the discussion of discriminatory tropes and legislation into the 19th century, discussing their internalization by blacks and Jews.

Idelson-Shein, Iris. “‘Blessed Is the Changer of Beings’: Uses and Representations of ‘the Exotic’ in the Jewish Enlightenment.” PhD diss., Tel-Aviv University, 2010.
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The third section of this sophisticated study discusses the many translations into Hebrew and Yiddish by Jewish Enlightenment figures of general books that raise issues of race. The author compares the translations to their sources to identify Jewish-specific attitudes and looks at how Jewish thinkers acculturated into the hegemonic discourse on race.
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Philipson, Robert. The Identity Question: Blacks and Jews in Europe and America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
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A transatlantic exploration of the historical parallels and overlapping diasporic consciousness of Jews and blacks grounded mostly in literature and in cultural and political ideology. The first section treats 18th-century matters.
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Singham, Shanti Marie. “‘Betwixt Cattle and Men’: Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” In The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789. Edited by Dale van Kley, 114–153. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
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Study showing how revolutionary discourse linked Jews to the question of religion and to economics, blacks to colonial economic well-being and racial otherness, and women to political participation’s dangers, at times conflating the interests of the three groups but also arraying them against one another. Those few parties seeking equality for all three wielded similar rhetorical strategies.
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van Stipriaan, Alex. “An Unusual Parallel: Jews and Africans in Suriname in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Studia Rosenthaliana 31.1/2 (1997): 74–93.
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Comparison of the histories of the Sephardic Jewish settlers and African slaves in the colony, from immigration to employment, social and legal status, and the gaining of rights. Conditions for Jews clearly were better and full acceptance came much earlier, though manumission of individuals and emancipation of all slaves brought about more similarity in their marginalized status.
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Atlantic World Slavery

The mass industrial enslavement and exploitation of black Africans began with the Portuguese forays to West Africa in the 15th century. Until the termination of the slave trade in the 19th century upward of twelve million Africans were forcibly taken and shipped abroad, their involuntary labor literally building and sustaining the European-dominated agricultural and urban societies of the Americas. Despite their marginalization and denigration, Jews, as monotheists and perceived cultured almost-whites, participated here and there in the slave system run by European Christians. Not all of the works listed here treat slavery directly, but as the institution infected nearly all social and political structures during its existence, the category heading functions chronologically to apply to the era preceding the waves of emancipation in the early 19th century.

Slave Trading

Economic tensions between urban blacks and Jews in the 1960s, along with renewed black nationalism, launched the charge that Jews were the main force behind the slave trade. Scholarly responses such as Davis 1994, Friedman 1997, Faber 1998, Drescher 2001 have solidly rebutted this notion. Davis 1984 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America) offers a learned analysis by one of the most prominent investigators of Western slavery of the paradoxes of the minimal but real Jewish involvement in Atlantic world slavery. Faber 1998, more successfully than Friedman 1997, scours the primary sources to convincingly quantify actual Jewish participation in slave trading and slavery in the English Caribbean colonies. Drescher 2001 offers an updated overview of the question and, written by an expert in the economics of slavery and the matter of abolition, lends a sophistication and sense of political context to the debate. Drescher also tackles, for the first time in English-language literature, the question of New Christian slave trading. Before the 1960s, the proportionally minimal participation of Jewish slave traders remained discursively lost in the sea of slave trading conducted by Christians. Of course, some Jews did function as transatlantic slavers, while Jews often participated heavily in the reselling of slaves within particular colonies, such as Dutch Brazil, Curaçao, and Suriname. Portuguese Judeoconversos, called New Christians, were heavily involved in Iberian slave trading in the 16th and 17th centuries. Vila Vilar 1977 provides the first systematic study of this activity. Ventura 1999 and Newson and Minchin 2007 update the findings of Vila Vilar 1977 with more focused case studies and a wealth of detail. All three of these analyses bring to light important archival material, but Vila Vilar 1977 remains mired in (unspoken?) anti-Jewish prejudice. The study perpetuates the way Iberian Christians deflected attention from their own culpability by considering any descendants of Jews, no matter how long the family had been Christian, to be Jewish. This is one of the important interventions of Drescher 2001. The religious loyalties of most of these New Christian slave traders remains obscure. Green 2009 (cited under Racialist Discourse and Legislation: Early Modern), and Green 2007 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Africa) have begun to address this issue.

Davis, David Brion. “The Slave Trade and the Jews.” New York Review of Books (22 December 1994): 14–16.
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Concise and solid dismantling of accusations that Jews played the main role in the slave trade, as argued by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam in The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: Latimer Associates, 1991).
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Drescher, Seymour. “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. Edited by Paolo Bernadini and Norman Fiering, 439–470. New York: Berghahn, 2001.
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Drawing on secondary scholarship, such as Davis 1984 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America) and Faber 1998, the author produces a concise synopsis of the quantitative question, agreeing that Jewish participation was minimal. Also offers an important intervention in the debate, opening up analytical discussion beyond numerical assessment, for instance, of the religious identity of New Christian slavers.
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Faber, Eli. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
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A heavily quantitative analysis of the British colonial sphere, arguing that Jewish slave trading was minimal, far less than their proportion of the population. Contains extensive appendixes and notes drawn from archival materials.
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Friedman, Saul S. Jews and the American Slave Trade. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1997.
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An attempt to rebut charges from black nationalists, highlighting Jewish noninvolvement and antislavery sentiments.
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Newson, Linda A., and Susie Minchin. From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish America in the Early Seventeenth Century. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
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Detailed study of the methods of slave traders and the conditions of slaves, based on the private papers of the New Christian slave trader Manuel Bautista Pérez. No analysis is offered of Pérez’s religious loyalties nor of his mixed New and Old Christian network of associates, though he was prosecuted and executed by the Inquisition as an alleged Judaizer.
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Ventura, Maria da Graça A. Mateus. Negreiros portugueses na rota das Índias de Castela, 1541–1556. Lisbon: Edições Colibri/Instituto de Cultura Ibero-Atlântica, 1999.
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In-depth study of the beginnings of the slave trade to Spanish colonies, run to a large extent by Portuguese contractors working for the Spanish Crown, with a focus on the slaver Manuel Caldeira. Steeped in archival sources, data heavy and quantitative, but makes no effort to determine the subjects’ actual religious identities.
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Vila Vilar, Enriqueta. Hispanoamerica y el comercio de esclavos: Los asientos portugueses. Seville, Spain: EEHA, 1977.
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A comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the workings of the slave trade developed by Portuguese slave traders serving the Spanish Crown, spanning Africa, Madeira, and the Azores to Cartagena, Buenos Aires, and Mexico. Using a plethora of primary sources, the author examines the asentistas and offers a social, economic, and cultural profile, though without assessment of their Jewishness.
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Africa

The western African littoral served as a European testing ground for many of the features that became ubiquitous in the slave and caste systems of the Americas. Commercial infiltration by European merchants combined with African cultural pluralism to produce a new class of mixed-race individuals and Eurafrican cultural syncretisms. While relations at first were perhaps relatively equalized and harmonious, they manifested an increasing disrespect and imbalance of power. The work of a handful of recent scholars using a cultural studies approach has shed much light on the active commercial presence of New Christians/Judeoconversos up and down the West African coast, engaged in slave trading in league with Eurafrican kin or partners, becoming residents, and often immersing themselves in local ways. Mark and Horta 2011 reveals significant new information about a handful of small communities of New Christian/Sephardic merchants on the West African coast and their openness to acculturation. Through close attention to textual sources and historical context, Green 2009 (cited under Racialist Discourse and Legislation: Early Modern, Green 2008, and Green 2007 show, along with Mark and Horta 2011, how New Christians/Judeoconversos, persecuted as disloyal Christians on the Iberian Peninsula, found economic opportunity and greater religious freedom in Africa. Garfield 1994 explores the slightly different setting of São Tomé, where forcibly converted Jews had arrived as migrants coerced there by the Portuguese king and where they quickly lost any traces of their former Jewish identity.

Garfield, Robert. “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora: The Jews of São Tomé Island, 1492–1654.” In The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After. Edited by Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson, 73–87. New York: Garland, 1994.
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The descendants of Jews forced to the island mixed with the local population (and other Portuguese arrivals) to form a mulatto elite of planters and slave traders. Despite the title, the author considers them victims of politically motivated accusations of Judaizing, in which the alleged retention of their Jewishness was conflated by opponents into a cultural threat alongside African otherness.
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Green, Tobias. “Masters of Difference: Creolization and the Jewish Presence in Cabo Verde, 1497–1672.” PhD diss. University of Birmingham, 2007.
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Important analysis, steeped in the primary sources, arguing that the double identity of New Christians/Judeconversos enabled them to thrive in Cape Verde, as slave traders, among other things, where Africans became the new subalterns.
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Green, Tobias. “Equal Partners? Proselytising by Africans and Jews in the 17th Century Atlantic Diaspora.” Melilah 1 (2008): 1–12.
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Treats mutual proselytizing of Africans and Jews in West Africa and the larger Atlantic world, arguing that a degree of equality, especially in West Africa, permitted such unabashed mutual outreach and religious conversion. This counterintuitive receptivity to the “other” should help revise common perceptions of the early Atlantic world as a sphere of only hostility and naked power.
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Mark, Peter, and José da Silva Horta. The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Deft interdisciplinary history, based on primary sources, challenging views of the formation of the Atlantic world, arguing for strong Jewish openness to intermarriage with local African women, inclusion of mixed-race individuals, cultural interchanges, and religious syncretism by early modern New Christian/Judeoconverso and openly Jewish mercantile communities along coastal Senegambia. Emphasis on material culture.
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Caribbean, Central and South America

Various New World communities of New Christians/Judeoconversos and open Jews participated to varying degrees in the slave system, as merchants owning a few slaves, as plantation masters, as militiamen fighting runaway slaves or maroons, and as citizens upholding racialized policies. Wolff and Wolff 1987 and Ribemboim 1995 treat Portuguese Brazil and openly Jewish communities in Dutch Brazil. Aspects of the New Christian/Judeoconverso relationship to blacks and slaves in 17th-century Mexico are treated in Schorsch 2009. Snyder 2000, Davis 1984, and Faber 1998 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Slave Trading) discuss Barbados and Jamaica. Pluchon 1984 is a wide-ranging study that looks at the French colonial orbit. A number of studies treat Suriname, where Jews made up about a third of the white population, and for a time the Jewish communities there comprised the richest Jewish communities of the entire Western Hemisphere. Suriname witnessed the most extensive intersection of practicing Jews with slavery, as from the 17th century onward Sephardic Jews there ended up owning around a quarter of the plantations. Cohen 1991 (cited under Blacks Adopting Traditional Judaism) is the first work in recent times to give serious consideration to the subject. Schorsch 2004 delves further into the subject with additional archival material. Intriguing new analyses of gender and community formation are offered in Ben-Ur 2009 (cited under Blacks Adopting Traditional Judaism) (and in other studies not included here). The outstanding scholar Natalie Zemon Davis has turned to Suriname in recent years and in Davis 2010 uncovers with typical skill aspects of involvement with slavery of the prominent Nassy family of Suriname. Vink 2010 is probably the most important contribution to the subject of Suriname. Curaçao, the location of another prominent Jewish community, receives coverage in Davis 1984 and Schorsch 2004.

Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
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Chapter 6, “Jews and the Children of Strangers,” outlines the connection of Jews to slavery from the medieval period through abolition in what probably remains the best global overview, however brief.
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Davis, Natalie Zemon. “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus.” In New Essays in American Jewish History Commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives. Edited by Pamela S. Nadell, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Lance J. Sussman, 79–94. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 2010.
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Sensitive case study of incidents in the lives of a prominent Surinamese Sephardic Jew and his slaves, whom he manumits on a journey to Philadelphia, hotbed of Quaker abolitionism. Davis connects the complex, nuanced, and evolving personal attitudes of her subjects regarding slavery and race to larger changes circulating in the Atlantic world.
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Pluchon, Pierre. Nègres et juifs au XVIIIe siècle: Le racisme au siècle des Lumières. Paris: Tallandier, 1984.
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Covers the controversy in the 1770s of Isaac Mendès France and the three slaves he brought with him from Saint-Domingue, the involvement of Sephardic merchants of Bordeaux and landowners of Saint-Domingue in slavery and their attitude toward blacks/slaves, as well as the philosophical and political “othering” of blacks/slaves and Jews, and France’s eventual legislative accommodation of them.
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Ribemboim, José Alexandre. Senhores de engenho: Judeus em Pernambuco colonial, 1542–1654. 2d ed. Recife, Brazil: 20–20 Comunicação e Editora, 1995.
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The only survey dedicated to both Judeoconverso and openly Jewish sugar planters in the sugar-growing capital of Portuguese and Dutch Brazil, but lacking reference to primary sources as well as footnotes.
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Schorsch, Jonathan. Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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This remains the most comprehensive treatment of its topic, delving into the archival record mostly ignored by the polemical literature. Explores changes in Jewish attitudes and behavior toward slaves as slavery becomes increasingly dependent on Africans and compares the theoretical requirements of Jewish law regarding slaves with changing realities into the late 18th century.
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Schorsch, Jonathan. Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009.
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Investigation of numerous case studies, heavily based on Inquisition records, mostly concerning Judeoconversos, as well as some material on openly identified Jews, and their relations with blacks, mulattos, and Native Americans. Looks at religious, racial, and class tensions and bonds involving Christian slaves and Judeoconversos, slaves who took on (crypto) Judaism, and Judeoconverso images of blacks.
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Snyder, Holly. “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831.” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000.
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See chapter 6, “The Horse of a Different Colour: Jews, Race and Social Distinction in British America.” Mining primary sources with a keen sense for both local and global political realities, the author excavates questions relating to Jews as slave owners and members of a barely tolerated minority seeking acceptance as whites through a contrast to the population of slaves and people of color.
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Vink, Wieke. Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV, 2010.
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Theoretically and politically astute, this is a welcome intervention into the conversation about the Jews, slavery, and race in Suriname. Beyond giving the fullest coverage regarding colored Jews to date, Vink corrects many previous misconceptions, adds important new information, and includes the colony’s Ashkenazic Jews in her compelling portrait.
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Wolff, Egon, and Frieda Wolff. Judeus, judaizantes e seus escravos. Rio de Janeiro, 1987.
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A pioneering study, mostly based on sources dealing with the Inquisition and other archival sources, offering data regarding many cases, but lacking analytical depth.
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United States

Brackman 1977 (cited under General Overviews), Davis 1984 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America), and Friedman 1997 and Faber 1998 (both cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Slave Trading) show that the scholarly consensus is that Jews participated in the slave system in the American South. Korn 1961 is the earliest serious treatment of this subject, though valuable now mostly for its rich citation of primary sources. In Newport, Rhode Island, some Jews also participated in the trade in slaves and owned slaves, a subject given well-contextualized coverage in Rotenberg 1992, though also discussed in Davis 1984, Friedman 1997, and Faber 1998. Many southern Jews supported slavery in the 19th century, for both ideological and pragmatic reasons, including the prominent Judah P. Benjamin, a slave owner and senator, who is treated in rewarding detail in Evans 1988. Yahalom 2000 (cited under Jews and Abolition) treats opposition to abolitionism on the part of Jewish thinkers and leaders.

Evans, Eli. Judah P. Benjamin: Jewish Confederate. New York: Free Press, 1988.
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In-depth portrait of this Jewish slave owner from a prominent New Orleans Jewish family, who became a senator from Louisiana and eventually one of the highest leaders of the Confederacy.
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Korn, Bertram. Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789–1865. Elkins Park, PA: Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, 1961.
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Excellent survey of primary sources, the first of its kind, delineating Jewish involvement as owners and traders of slaves, merchants interacting with slaves and free blacks, and defenders and critics of slavery, notwithstanding the author’s lack of an informed overview of Atlantic slavery as a system.
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Rotenberg, Joshua. “Black-Jewish Relations in Eighteenth-Century Newport.” Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes 11.2 (1992): 117–171.
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An admirable investigation, based on the author’s undergraduate honor’s thesis, synthesizing a wide variety of secondary and primary sources. Compares the disenfranchisement of Newport’s sizeable black and Jewish populations and treats their interactions with one another, which reflect the greater exclusion of blacks. Jewish attitudes and behavior cannot really be distinguished from those of other whites.
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Jews and Abolition

Even if they opposed slavery most Jews in the Americas and Europe feared to raise objections about the injustices of slavery due to their own tenuous position in predominantly Christian societies. Yahalom 2000 looks at the way some traditional Jews in the United States opposed abolitionism out of religious conservatism. On the other hand, as Wolpe 2012 discusses, some progressive Jews affiliated with the Haskala, particularly in Europe, sympathized with the antislavery movement. A few Jews on both sides of the Atlantic felt strongly enough to involve themselves in the abolitionist movement as supporters or activists. Kohler 1897, possibly the earliest investigation, outlines the general outline of Jewish participation. The only other survey of Jews and abolition is the introduction by Whiteman found in Pickard 1995. A number of later case studies add to the portrait. Berson 1994 treats the radical activist Ernestine Louise Rose. Rose, like the better-known August Bondi, an associate of John Brown, seems to have attached little importance to her Jewish background. A fascinating case study of Moses Levy is offered in Monaco 2005. Levy at one point tried to establish a sugar plantation in Florida for oppressed Russian Jews. He also published in London in 1828 a plan for the gradual abolition of slavery that far surpassed those offered by almost all of his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic in advocating racial intermixing as the solution to the problem of race in America. Further material and analysis of the question of Jews and abolition can be found in Davis 1984 and Snyder 2000 (both cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America) as well as Drescher 2001 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Slave Trading). Pickard 1995 consists of a reprint of a 19th-century slave narrative whose protagonist was helped to freedom by two Jewish brothers. Two valuable new studies by Sokolow and Ruchames in Sarna and Mendelsohn 2010 provide an up-to-date survey of Jews active in antebellum abolitionism (Sokolow) and some reflections on the ambivalent place of the Jew in abolitionist thought (Ruchames). From another vantage point, prominent historian of slavery David Brion Davis, in the final volume of his trilogy that treats the era of emancipation (Davis 2014), devotes much attention to the significance of the Exodus narrative for black abolitionists.

Berson, Robin Kadison. “Ernestine Louise Rose: Abolitionist, Women’s Rights Activist, Free Thinker.” In Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History. By Robin Kadison Berson, 265–276. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.
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Exploration of this Russian-born radical, a rabbi’s daughter, who agitated against slavery after emigrating to the United States in 1836. She delivered lectures opposing slavery even in the South.
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Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Knopf, 2014.
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Davis devotes considerable attention to the impact of the Exodus story on the formulation of African American abolitionist ideology. He also carefully details the various uses of the biblical narrative in responses to African-American colonization movements in the Atlantic world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Kohler, Max J. “The Jews and the American Anti-slavery Movement.” Papers of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1897): 137–155.
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See also “The Jews and the American Anti-slavery Movement [Pt.] II,” Papers of the American Jewish Historical Society 9 (1901): 45–53. The foundational study on which almost everyone has since drawn. Offers an excellent survey, filled with references to primary sources. Still useful, despite the slight romanticizing that typified ethnic scholarship from this formative era of modern historiography.
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Monaco, Chris. Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
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A revealing exploration of this idiosyncratic reform-minded Jew with abolitionist leanings. Morocco-born Levy, raised in Gibraltar, launched his business career in the West Indies and published anonymously in 1828 in England one of the most radical antislavery tracts ever, something his upwardly mobile son, David Yulee, hid from the public.
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Pickard, Kate E. R. The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: The Narrative of Peter and Vina Still after Forty Years of Slavery. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
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The slave Peter Still was freed with the help of two Jewish brothers in this memoir of slavery first published in 1856. An introduction by Maxwell Whiteman, from the 1970 reprint, surveys the involvement of Jews in the abolitionist movement, providing an excellent (if now outdated) bibliographic guide in his notes.
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Sarna, Jonathan D., and Adam D. Mendelsohn, eds. Jews and the Civil War: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
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Features two essays on Jews and abolition. The first, by Jayme A. Sokolow, provides a new overview of Jews involved in antebellum abolitionism, while the second, by Louis Ruchames, considers the complex place of the Jew in the thought of abolitionists.
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Wolpe, Rebecca. “From Slavery to Freedom: Abolitionist Expressions in Maskilic Sea Adventures.” AJS Review 36.1 (2012): 43–70.
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009412000025Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analysis of anti-slavery sentiments in the thought of Jewish Enlightenment figures in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Yahalom, Shlomith. “Jews and Slavery in the American Civil War in Light of the Theological Debate over the Holy Scriptures [Hebrew].” Zion 65.2 (2000): 163–203.
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Important and unsentimental analysis of the debates regarding slavery among Jewish leaders and thinkers. Yahalom traces the divide between Orthodox voices, who understood the Bible to permit slavery and suspected abolitionism as a dangerous Protestant innovation, and Reformers, who had internalized modern humanist perspectives, including a critical stance toward religious tradition.
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Post-emancipation

With the end of slavery as a legally protected system over the course of the 19th century and the emancipation of Jews from legal discrimination, relations between Jews and people of color transformed into class and cultural tensions: competition or alliance over citizenship and economic well-being, debates over different forms of marginalization, and complaints by some blacks about Jewish exploitation.

Global

While the works cited here sometimes treat the period before the final emancipation of the slaves, they focus on those individuals or groups who had escaped slavery or on the period of the gradual demise of slavery as a system. Garrigus 2001 recounts the way in which some free people of color on St. Domingue used the strategies Jews had wielded in fighting for citizenship and legal equality in the era of the French Revolution. The Jamaican career, productions, and context of early-19th-century Sephardic engraver Isaac Mendes Belisario make up the subject of Barringer, et al. 2007 and Ranston 2008. The former anthology takes a wide, interdisciplinary perspective, while the latter hews to a narrower biographical and local history approach. Treating England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Romain 2006 shows how the shared outsider status of Jews and blacks, however different, generated hostility in the host culture and led to a heightened interest in one another. Disparities, usually Jews’ easier access into mainstream acceptance, meant the perpetuation of exploitative advantages. Thus, Abraham-Van der Mark 1993 offers a unique analysis of the colored mistresses of Sephardic merchant men on Curaçao. Finally, Spitzer 1989 produces an illuminating work of comparative analysis, looking at the ways three families—one West African, one Brazilian mulatto, and one European Jewish—attempted to assimilate into the dominant white European Christian culture.

Abraham-Van der Mark, Eva. “Marriage and Concubinage among the Sephardic Merchant Elite of Curaçao.” In Women and Change in the Caribbean. Edited by Janet Momsen, 38–49. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
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Though dealing with matters up to the 1980s, this short but groundbreaking and insightful ethnographic essay represents the first study of the practices of Sephardic concubinage, often with women of color, and changing community attitudes toward them.
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Barringer, Tim, Gillian Forrester, and Barbara Martinez-Ruiz, eds. Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Center for British Art/Yale University Press, 2007.
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Voluminous and abundantly illustrated anthology of essays on Belisario, a Sephardic engraver who produced a sympathetic visual depiction of Jamaica’s colored population in the 1830s. In total, an impressively interdisciplinary and dialogical exposition of a micro case study’s expansive Afro-Caribbean and Jewish contexts, based on a 2007 exhibition.
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Garrigus, John D. “‘New Christians’/‘New Whites’: Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–1789.” In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. Edited by Paolo Bernadini and Norman Fiering, 314–332. New York: Berghahn, 2001.
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Suggests that the colony’s free people of color emulated the strategies of their Sephardic fellow residents in fighting for legal rights, as each group sought to overcome religious and racial discrimination. In the other direction, some prominent Sephardic families supported citizenship for free people of color.
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Ranston, Jackie. Belisario: Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist. Kingston, Jamaica: Mill, 2008.
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Another hefty and lavishly illustrated study, this one focused more on Belisario and the local Jamaican Jewish context.
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Romain, Gemma. Connecting Histories: A Comparative Exploration of African-Caribbean and Jewish History and Memory in Modern Britain. London: Kegan Paul, 2006.
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Investigation, based on autobiographies, of the similar yet different immigration experiences, particularly in regard to hostility and exclusion from the new society, diasporic consciousness, and collective (re)construction of experience. Responses to anti-Semitic demonstrations and race riots of the 1910s receive solid coverage.
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Spitzer, Leo. Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in Austria, Brazil, West Africa, 1780–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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Reissued under a slightly different title in 1999, Spitzer’s study presents three cases of families struggling to assimilate to dominant European values and societies over generations. A West African family, a family of mulattos in Brazil, and an Austrian Jewish family try various strategies to fit in: religious conversion, “whitening,” and acculturation.
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The United States

African-American thinkers, Jews, and non-Jewish whites frequently dwelled on the connections, imagined or otherwise, between Jews and blacks. Though opinions varied, generally blacks saw Jews not only positively as fellow sufferers of white (Christian) supremacism who had done much to overcome their persecution and, therefore, served as models for emulation, but also negatively as part of the white establishment that took advantage of the lack of power of blacks and as competitors in suffering, whose claims to persecution served as a distraction from the often sacralized persecutory election of blacks. Shankman 1975 reveals that American blacks at the end of the 19th century and the onset of the 20th keenly followed the treatment of Jews in eastern Europe, especially the pogroms, an interest also discussed in Foner 1975, a wider if too-brief study of black opinions about Jews with respect to specific episodes in the same era. Weisbord 1985 tracks black interest in Zionism as a Jewish response to oppression. Looking at Pan-Africanism, Hill in Washington 1989 lays out black admiration of, and aspiration for, Jewish cultural self-confidence, social cohesiveness, and economic strength. Washington’s anthology stands as an early example of a thoughtful black response to the overwhelmingly Jewish literature on Jews and blacks. Diner 1977 finds blacks prior to World War II expecting Jews to form part of a natural alliance against white dominance. Jewish authors regarded black suffering and disenfranchisement largely with empathy, though not always without patronizing condescension. Looking at the decades leading up to World War II, Diner 1977 shows how Jewish writers and thinkers were eager to obtain positive black recognition. Webb 1999 reveals how southern blacks earlier in the century were torn in their opinions about Jews and Judaism. Bauman and Kalin 1997, looking at southern rabbis and the civil rights movement, raises an excellent case in point. Lewis 1984 explores the way political strategies circulated between black and Jewish intellectuals in the fight against racism and anti-Semitism in the decades of rising nativism and intolerance.

Bauman, Mark K., and Berkly Kalin, eds. The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.
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Part 1, “Genesis,” offers three essays treating the pre–World War II period and the thought and work of rabbis in New Orleans, Alabama, and Memphis.
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Diner, Hasia R. In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977.
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Argues that Jews genuinely empathized with black suffering but also saw common league with blacks as necessary for self-protection against anti-Jewish attitudes. Thoroughly researched, chapters cover issues such as the image of blacks in both the Yiddish-language and English-language Jewish press, Jews as comrades in, and philanthropists of, black causes, and Jews and blacks in labor union activism.
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Foner, Philip S. “Black-Jewish Relations in the Opening Years of the Twentieth Century.” Phylon 36.4 (Winter 1975): 359–367.
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Argues for an initial generally positive attitude toward Jews in the black press, with Jews seen as sharing a similar second-class status and frequently cited as models for emulation in terms of economic and political self-sufficiency and success. This attitude changed at the beginning of the 20th century, as Jews were seen as indifferent to black suffering.
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Lewis, David Levering. “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s.” Journal of American History 71 (December 1984): 543–564.
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Traces the parallel fears of public agitation and nationalist radicalism that led leading accommodationists of both groups to come together in their fight against white racism and anti-Semitism.
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Shankman, Arnold. “Brothers across the Sea: Afro-Americans on the Persecution of Russian Jews, 1881–1917.” Jewish Social Studies 37.2 (1975): 114–121.
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Shows that African Americans closely followed developments, such as the pogroms, for the most part sympathetically, even reacting with public activism in the hope that gains elsewhere would help them end their own persecution. They well understood the parallels between government-condoned anti-Semitism in Russia and government-condoned racism in the United States.
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Washington, Joseph, ed. Jews in Black Perspectives: A Dialogue. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989.
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The first chapter offers a comparison of the African and Jewish diasporas by John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, while the third chapter by Robert A. Hill looks at Jews and the enigma of the Pan-African Congress of 1919.
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Webb, Clive. “Jewish Merchants and Black Customers in the Age of Jim Crow.” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999): 55–80.
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Delineates a complicated relationship in which Jewish peddlers extended credit to rural blacks and Jewish merchants in towns welcomed blacks to their shops and hired black salespeople out of economic self-interest, but also generally acted within the limits of racist laws out of fear of retribution. Black attitudes toward Jewish merchants reflected this ambivalence back.
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Weisbord, Robert G., ed. Israel in the Black American Perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.
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The second chapter treats black views of Zionism up to the founding of the State of Israel, treating major figures such as E. W. Blyden, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
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Jews and Judaism in West Africa

Black Africans have claimed Jewish origins at least since the 18th-century writings of Equiano Olaudah, who linked his Igbo people with the ancient Israelites. The idea of Jewish influence on West African religions and cultures, as well as West African peoples’ descent from Jews, has emerged frequently in the discourse of both Africans and European outsiders. Williams 1930, an unreliable but enthusiastic speculative act of desire, remains a kind of cult classic, especially for the Afrocentric audience. Bruder 2008 represents one of the first serious full-length scholarly efforts to cover the same terrain. Parfitt 2013 constitutes a more recent endeavor. Parfitt describes how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Both Bruder and Parfitt make great strides in a field all too often riddled by myth-making from all sides.

Bruder, Edith. The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333565.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Savvy account of the 20th-century explosion of indigenous groups taking on Judaism or claiming Jewish roots. Chapters 5 through 7 provide a critical overview of colonial-era constructions of African-Jewish links by both outsiders and locals into the early 20th century, while chapter 8 delves into historical narratives of Jewish existence south of the Sahara.
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Parfitt, Tudor. Black Jews in Africa and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
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Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only Jews were cast as black, but also black Africans were cast as Jews, the author reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses.
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Williams, Joseph J. Hebrewisms of West Africa. New York: Dial Press, 1930.
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Traces the Jewish presence and influence throughout much of the region, arguing that the Ashanti and other cultures derive in part from ancient Judaic elements by means of Ethiopia, Egypt, the Jewish diaspora, and possibly the ten lost tribes. The book’s scattershot, amateur armchair historical and anthropological methodology has received much criticism (for example, the author had never visited Africa).
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African-American Judaisms

Throughout the Western Hemisphere many blacks have claimed Jewish identity, originating either from ancient times, from the spread of Judaism to Africa, or by being born to Jewish slave owners in the Atlantic world. After the abolition of slavery some few blacks adopted some aspects of Judaism, while others flocked to Black Hebrewism or Israelitism, marginal phenomena from the perspective of African-American religion. Still, black Hebrew congregations flourished in northern cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. The various forms of these phenomena reflect an original American syncretism of black Christianity and Judaism, one not accepted as authentic by the traditional Jewish institutional world. Black Hebrews and Israelites tend to insist that they are the “true” Jews and the only legitimate heirs to the ancient biblical religion, whose originators were black and/or African. Brotz 1964, one of the earliest studies to focus on black Judaism, ferrets out valuable information but remains stuck in the dismissive mind-set of traditional Jews. Despite being based on firsthand research, the analysis often must be taken with a grain of salt, as the author remained ignorant of a great deal of the history of his subject. Wynia 1994 investigates from a more internal perspective William Saunders Crowdy and his syncretistic movement. Landing 2002, also based heavily in primary sources, offers a useful encyclopedic historical survey, even if lacking in interpretive power. Gold 2003 revisits the Harlem group studied in Brotz 1964, but with a sophisticated and critical approach. Dorman 2013 updates and expands the exploration in Wynia 1994 to include other groups, contextualizing them with a keen sense of the relevant theoretical and political terrains. Based on many previously unstudied primary sources, Dorman argues that the cluster of black Israelite groups see themselves as descendants of the black biblical Israelites. Parfitt 2013 (cited under Jews and Judaism in West Africa) also discusses African-American Hebrewism. Killingray and Henderson 1999 presents a study of an underprivileged and troubled Baltimore man who reinvented himself as a tribal African and African Jew. He and his autobiography, which appeared in the late 1920s, garnered much attention. He made much of his Jewishness but failed to convince traditional Jews. His tale reflects a frequent narrative, from that time and after, of personal reinvention by means of collective identity issues, a complex psychological and socioeconomic phenomenon that Killingray and Henderson argue should be viewed sympathetically.

Brotz, Howard M. The Black Jews of Harlem: Negro Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Negro Leadership. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964.
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This study, among the first on the subject, focuses on the Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living God, a group with Garveyite leanings. Though offering a detailed study of their history and practices, in part based on his own field research, the author considers their “Judaism” skeptically, as a nationalist ploy for self-confidence and escape from racism.
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Dorman, Jacob S. Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
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The author sensitively traces the history of shifting black Israelite ideas and practices, not brought from Africa but developed out of the Protestant milieu of the West Indies and the United States, coalescing in the career of William Saunders Crowdy, his Church of God and Saints of Christ movement, and Garveyite rabbis Arnold Josiah Ford and Wentworth Arthur Matthews.
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Gold, Roberta S. “The Black Jews of Harlem: Representation, Identity, and Race, 1920–1939.” American Quarterly 55.2 (2003): 179–225.
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Analysis of the differing coverage offered by the African-American and Jewish press, the latter worried about the negative consequences of being linked to blacks during a period when Jews stood on the cusp of social acceptance. Drawn primarily from contemporary journals.
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Killingray, David, and Willie Henderson. “Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola and the Making of An African Savage’s Own Story.” In Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Edited by Bernth Lindfors, 228–265. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
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Solid account of Joseph Howard Lee, an African American who reinvented himself as a tribal African and African Jew. Attracted much attention, though neither he nor his story, published in Scribner’s in the late 1920s and later as a book, gained acceptance from traditional Jews, despite his fighting in Palestine. He eventually converted to Catholicism.
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Landing, James E. Black Judaism: Story of an American Movement. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2002.
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The most extensive treatment, much of which deals with topics centered on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Well-researched with primary sources utilized where possible, the neutral, positivistic perspective is for the most part internal to the communities under discussion rather than dependent on the work of white Jewish researchers. Contains an excellent, lengthy annotated bibliography of sources.
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Wynia, Elly M. The Church of God and the Saints of Christ: The Rise of Black Jews. New York: Garland, 1994.
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The first comprehensive study, though slim, using previously unknown primary materials to trace Black Hebrewism to the 19th-century figure of William Saunders Crowdy and the syncretistic Christian-Jewish sect he founded.
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Blacks Adopting Traditional Judaism

Despite varied origins, a number of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic adopted traditional Judaism to one degree or another. Mark and Horta 2011 discusses the inclusion of West Africans in Jewish communities there in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some of these individuals moved from there to Amsterdam, where they faced an ambivalent inclusion from the authorities, as treated in Schorsch 2004 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America). Wolff and Wolff 1987 and Schorsch 2009 (both cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America) trace similar adoption in the Iberian sphere, where some Afroiberians, slaves, and former slaves identified with, and took on, crypto-Judaism. A subgroup of “colored” Jews, children of Sephardic slave owners and their slave women, developed within the 18th-century Surinamese Sephardic community. Facing discrimination from the Jewish authorities there, they eventually sought and obtained congregational autonomy, though this was not permitted to last long. Cohen 1991 is the first work to study this community. Ben-Ur 2009 and, importantly, Vink 2010 (cited under Atlantic World Slavery: Caribbean, Central and South America) build on Cohen’s work, giving us a much fuller picture. Ben-Ur focuses on the manumitted mulatto children of Sephardic slave owners with their black slave women, the women themselves, and the inclusion of both in the Jewish community, willed by all parties. In the United States, as well, some blacks found traditional Judaism attractive. Melnick 1980 provides a brief case study of one enigmatic 19th-century episode, a former slave who insisted that he was Jewish by descent from the biblical Rechabites and who became a devoted member of the local synagogue. Lester 1988, written by a black activist, offers a frank personal narrative of Lester’s own move to Judaism, touching frequently on larger issues of the meanings of blackness, marginality, faith, and belonging.

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 L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, 152–169. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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Despite changes from the 18th to the 19th centuries, the author argues that the prevalence of interracial relationships, mixed-race individuals, and linguistic syncretism reflects community pragmatism in this uniquely harsh colonial situation, the empowerment of Eurafrican women, and Jewish openness, challenging common views of Jewish racism and the strict hierarchical segregation of Atlantic slavery.
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Cohen, Robert. “The Community Environment (II).” In Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, 145–174. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1991.
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The first English-language book devoted to the Jews in Surinam, it contains the first extended English-language discussion of the “colored” Jews born to Sephardic planters by their slave women, the Sephardic community’s discriminatory legislation against them, and the reaction of colored Jews. Unfortunately, next to no attention is paid to larger questions regarding Jewish slave owning in the colony.
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Lester, Julius. Lovesong: Becoming a Jew. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
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Lyrical memoir about activist and author Lester’s discovery of Judaism, conversion, and early life as a Jew, filled with compelling meditations about religion and community, marginality within Euro-American modernity, and the individual search for place and identity.
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Melnick, Ralph. “Billy Simons: The Black Jew of Charleston.” American Jewish Archives 32 (1980): 3–8.
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Account of a man, born c. 1780 in Madagascar, sold into slavery to the United States, who worked as a newspaper carrier. He was admitted as a member of Charleston’s Kahal Kodesh Beth Elohim, despite the congregation’s constitution forbidding the acceptance of “colored” proselytes.
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Cultural Interchange

Contact inevitably brought Jews and blacks into each other’s orbits, generating mutual influence. As minorities experiencing the United States and its discriminatory system simultaneously, Jews and blacks found great interest in each other’s cultures, a phenomenon that has not abated since the 19th century. Intellectuals and artists of all kinds drew on the other group’s experience and cultural creations for self-understanding and expansion of expressive capacities. Some went so far as to adopt aspects of the other group’s identity to one degree or another (see Killingray and Henderson 1999, cited under African-American Judaisms, and, in the other direction, the reissue of jazz musician and hepcat Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow’s memoir from 1946, Really the Blues, with Bernard Wolfe [New York: Citadel Underground, 2001]). Music in particular brought Jews and blacks together, though Jewish entrepreneurship and ownership in the music industry was sometimes resented by African Americans as exploitative. Séjour 2002 is a play on Iberian Jewish themes written by a colored 19th-century playwright, originally from New Orleans, who worked in France. A work read as an act of appropriation and exploitation, Rogin 1996 studies white and Jewish entertainers who used blackface in their acts. Frank 2001 analyzes Melville Herskovits and other Jewish anthropologists whose scholarship sought to oppose racism. In Karp 2008 readers will find a depiction of Jewish Tin Pan Alley musicians admiring, emulating, and cooperating with their black counterparts. Melnick 1999 and, more recently, Stratton 2009, look at a wider range of Jewish borrowing from black musical performers and styles. These last three works all evince sophistication, caution, and nuance in their evaluation of their subject, which is to be welcomed. Heyd 1999 offers a treatment of Jews and blacks wielding one another’s experience in the visual arts prior to World War II. Tackling a rarely discussed subject, Edgcomb 1993 builds a well-told survey about Jewish professors, refugees from the Nazis, who found new institutional homes in historical black colleges, where instructors, students, and colleagues faced often difficult lessons in home-grown racism and anti-Semitism.

Edgcomb, Gabrielle Simon. From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1993.
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Portrait of a little-known episode, the eager welcome given to Jewish professors, refugees from the Nazis, at historically black colleges, a reception of mutual benefit to both parties, and the symbiotic learning experiences about racism and anti-Semitism that followed.
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Frank, Gelya. “Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas: Race, Culture and Modern Anthropology.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 8.2 (2001): 173–209.
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2001.9962690Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Frank argues that scholars have overlooked Jews as anti-racist thinkers. Here she offers a rich example from the career of a major Jewish anthropologist whose empathetic interest in African-American matters throughout the Western Hemisphere helped reorient the field.
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Heyd, Milly. Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
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Though ranging chronologically throughout the 20th century, in the first few chapters the author presents numerous instances of mutual interest and emulation in the visual arts prior to World War II. Illustrated.
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Karp, Jonathan. “Of Maestros and Minstrels: American Jewish Composers between Black Vernacular and European Art Music.” In The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times. Edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp, 57–77. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
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Account of Jewish Tin Pan Alley composers turning “primitive” black musical idioms into both popular and modernist “art.” Genuinely attracted to black musical forms, Jewish composers followed strategies that sought to respond to anti-Semitic pressures as well as market opportunities, the composers becoming students, partners, and competitors of black musicians.
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Melnick, Jeffrey. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
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Proceeding mostly chronologically, with heavy emphasis on the pre–World War II era, Melnick recounts in this sophisticated analysis the ways Jews used black music as a means to access artistic success while claiming that they bore special empathy as members of a similarly oppressed people. Feminized Jewish men made use of black music as a way to make themselves more masculine.
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Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
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The first five chapters provide roughly chronological coverage through Al Jolson and the advent of talking pictures. Rogin argues that Jewish blackface performers during this period of strong anti-Semitism used blackface to “Americanize” or “whiten” their denigrated immigrant status.
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Séjour, Victor. The Jew of Seville. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
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An 1844 verse drama, originally in French, treating the rise and fall of a Spanish Jew in the era of the Inquisition by the Louisiana-born colored playwright Victor Séjour (b. 1817–d. 1874), who provocatively uses the episode to compare and link medieval and modern religious-racial discriminatory apparatuses.
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Stratton, Jon. Jews, Race and Popular Music. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
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Chapter 1 treats Jewish singers in the 1930s taking up torch songs, a style considered black (though in fact its history was quite one of miscegenation). These Jewish singers, seen as exotic and uncivil, positioned themselves as white by commandeering this “black” style.