Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (review)

In 1642, the Venetian rabbi and scholar Leon Modena (1574–1648) received the last news he heard directly from his son Isaac, who had emigrated to Brazil. By his own report, Isaac had become a rich merchant possessing more than "four thousand reals, as well as Black slaves" (125).¹ This father-son exchange encapsulates two important points of Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World: 1) the emergence of an American way of life for Jews where, "as unpolitically correct as it might appear to us now, the de facto rule of several Caribbean Jewish communities over populations of Blacks in some cases far larger than their own numbers stands as a historically unique dismantling of Jewish powerlessness" (303); 2) the paucity of comment that the rise of African slavery in the New World elicited from Jewish intellectual and religious leaders. Ultimately, Schorsch suggests, however "other" Jewish communities were in Europe, Jews were thoroughly "European" in their attitudes toward and participation in African enslavement.

Schorsch builds on the efforts of many scholars—indeed, his notes and bibliography attest to a thorough mastery of the relevant literature—and his study reflects current "whiteness" studies.He offers a cultural history of Jewish perceptions of and relations with "Blacks" that is theoretically informed by authors such as Stephen Greenblatt and David Nirenburg and whose principal (but not sole) interpretive tool is discourse analysis. He limits his treatment largely to Sephardic Jews and to the Atlantic world, with illuminating side trips into the Mediterranean and India. His timeframe of the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment marks the transition from European slavery as a largely domestic institution, which was confined mostly to the Mediterranean, affected comparatively few lives, and did not exclusively enslave one human group, to "industrial slavery," which implicated all European nations of the Atlantic fringe and forced millions from Africa to work in the market-oriented agricultural regime of the New World. This transnational experience eventually defined "European white" and "African black" identities.

Schorsch establishes a "baseline" of Jewish attitudes towards blacks in Chapter One by analyzing the fifteenth-century writings of Isaac Abravanel. In Chapter Two he analyzes the legal restrictions, Jewish and non-Jewish, on Jewish slaveholding before industrial slavery and examines its social reality. In Chapter Three he discusses social interactions between Jews and blacks in the Mediterranean and in Europe. Chapters Four, Five, and Six are detailed discussions of Jewish exegesis of the biblical passages concerning Moses's Cushite wife and the curse of Ham, including comparisons with Islamic and Christian interpretations. In Chapters Seven and Eight Schorsch explores "the invention of Jewish Whiteness" in Amsterdam, the Atlantic World, and Cochin, India. In Chapter Nine he examines the practices of circumcision, conversion, naming, and manumission in the New World to determine just how "Jewish" slaves belonging to Jews actually became. His final chapter brings his narrative to the Enlightenment, indicating the divide between Atlantic and Mediterranean Jewish images of blacks and stressing the similarity between the former and contemporary non-Jewish images.

Schorsch's marshalling of sources is one of his account's most impressive features: biblical exegesis, responsa, and the halakic tradition that regulated relationships between Jews and their slaves, cemetery rosters, names of African slaves held by Jews, even Ladino songs. However diverse his evidence, his interpretations tend to the same conclusion: in the early modern world there was no distinctively Jewish attitude toward Africans and African slavery. For example, no tradition of biblical exegesis—much less a consensus of exegetes—directly or consistently associated "blackness," "Africa," negative assessments of African civilization and Africans' capacities, and enslavement. (This does not mean, of course, that Jews generally expressed very positive views of Africa and Africans.) When such conceptual linkages do appear, Schorsch argues that they evidence a complex cultural alchemy that must not be reduced to the irresistible influence of a dominant culture:

The aspects of limpieza de sangre or of the sistema de...