Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (review)

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation (Berkeley, 2000), this book discusses black-Jewish relations from about 1450 to about 1800, the era, as Schorsch points out, of the rise of national identities in Europe and also of colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The main themes of the book are what the author calls the "invention" of Jewish whiteness, Jewish discourse about blacks (compared with Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant discourses), and the everyday life of slaves owned by Jews in Europe, Brazil, Curação, Jamaica, and Surinam.

In some respects this book is extremely impressive. In the first place, it is based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in nine languages—Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. Geographically it ranges from Europe to the Americas and within Europe from Lisbon to Amsterdam. Research has been carried out in archives in the United States as well as Europe and the Caribbean. Schorsch combines interests in intellectual and social history, but he also has something of interest to say about topics as arcane (to most early modern historians at least) as the sociology of Jewish law and the representation of the language of blacks in sixteenth-century Spanish plays. The bibliography includes works of anthropology (by such writers as Johannes Fabian, Sidney Mintz, Sherry Ortner) and studies of ancient and medieval history (Moses Finley, Valerie Flint) as well as books and articles on the history of the Early Modern period.

As far as I am able to check, the information about Jews and blacks presented here is accurate, but the same cannot always be said when the author moves outside his fields. Bandello, a Lombard cleric, is described for some reason as "a court writer from the area of Genoa" (p. 129). "A Cardinal Boromio" (p. 124) is surely a reference to the famous Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, just as "Mission" disguises the well-known travel writer François Maximilen Misson and "John Francis" the equally well-known traveler Gian Francesco Gemelli Careri. A woodcut reproduced on p. 132 is described as an "etching."

Readers should be warned that Jews and Blacks is not the work of synthesis that one might have expected. Of its 529 pages (excluding the index), only 303 are text: the remaining 226 pages are made up of notes, bibliography, glossary, and appendices. The ten chapters do not present a developing argument; they are in effect a series of essays on topics as disparate as "Moshe's Kushite Wife" or "The Religious Life of Slaves Belonging to Jews: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch and English Colonies." The chapters themselves fragment into mini-essays on topics such as "the dwindling circumcision of slaves in the West" or "mimicry within the leisured classes." The author himself seems to agree with critics when he describes his work diasarmingly as a "cornucopia of microhistories" and refers to "the plethora of textual examples" (p. 13).

Making a postmodern virtue of necessity, Schorsch's "(In) Conclusion" notes the fragmentation of the sources and renounces any attempt to connect his microstudies. Readers who come to the book with large questions in mind will find it frustrating. On the other hand, if they would like to find out whether Jews were allowed to own uncircumcised slaves or whether blacks were allowed to join the guild of cobblers in Valencia, they will be rewarded. Jews and Blacks is a mine of information, some of it difficult to obtain elsewhere, but it leaves its readers to do most of the work of quarrying.