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

Much recent scholarly work on early modern Sephardim and conversos avoids facile definitions of Jewish identity and Jewish community as primordial, integral, and static. Atlantic Diasporas is a major contribution to this trend, which locates “flexible, hybrid societies in the peripheries” of emerging, early modern nation-states, yet, in this case, at the cusp of global economic and cultural phenomena (vii). The contributions combine sophisticated analyses of culture with excellent archival research, integrating both with the burgeoning field of Atlantic Studies.

Part I of the anthology analyzes the larger contexts and cultural problematique of Jewish and converso activities in the global mercantile economy. Jonathan Israel describes the emergence of a complex system comprising two interlocking (sub-) diasporas—the Jewish and the converso. His analysis focuses mainly on the ways in which cultural factors, governmental policies, and geopolitical and economic shifts of power, permitted the rise of these networks in the 1600s, and caused their fall by the early 1800s. Adam Sutcliffe’s lucid contribution is attentive not only to the complexity of conversos’ identities, but to the political and ideological underpinnings of studying these identities outside of the framework of a traditional historiography that focuses on the experience of Jews within nation-states. Sutcliffe notes that the sheer elasticity of Jewish–converso trade networks renders problematic the very notion of “Jewish history.” He sees conversos not as harbingers of modernity—hence not as “Port Jews” in the classic sense—but as a quintessentially premodern trading nation whose viability declined toward the 1700s as various conditions auguring modernity eroded the ethnic attachments of its members.

The chapters in Part II explicate the mercantile activities of Jews and conversos in the Atlantic. Through an analysis of records concerning three New Christian-cum-Jewish traders in the New World, Wim Klooster delivers a vivid and well-researched description of the socioeconomic networks that animated openly Jewish settlements in Dutch-controlled territories of South America. The level of detail presented here is very high, engaging, and the material covers many levels of analysis, from the macroeconomic to the political, to the religious, familial, and so on. Holly Snyder’s treatment of Jewish merchants’ place in British transatlantic trade from 1650 to 1800 argues that, by defining themselves and seeking to acquire legal privileges as a trading nation and by absorbing their clients’ Anglophone culture of gentility, Jews and conversos were not trying to assert a religious and/or Anglicized social identity. Nor did they seek to lay claim to civil “rights” per se or to become the “founding fathers” of Jewish communities in North America, for nationhood was principally “a means of demarcating economic turf” (51). Negotiating a stable and materially promising place as a discrete mercantile group within the boundaries of the British imperial economy was the driving objective.

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert’s contribution spells out the often divergent strategies and behaviors, ranging from endogamy to rites of mutual recognition, to gossip, to philanthropy, to patterned urban settlement, to confraternal work, to cohabitation, to collaboration with outsiders, that shaped the life of conversos and others “of The Nation” (os da nação/ los de la nación) as self-conscious members of a religiously diverse, trust-based ethnomercantile collective. By showing that this outcome was obtained under conditions of constant motion, and hence instability, the analysis suggests that adaptability and variety were keys to success. For its part, Francesca Trivellato’s pensive chapter questions a scholarly assumption of trust and coordination among members of trading nations, proposing a realistic view that accounts for considerable evidence of fragmentation and distrust within those same constellations. Ethnic cooperation, Trivellato argues, was not built upon an automatic solidarity between kinsmen, but upon rational calculations and “specific safeguards, developed within particular interpersonal networks and in concert with exogenous market and legal infrastructures” (119).

Part III explores the complexities of identity among...