The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800 (review)

The essays in this magnificent and much-needed volume stem from a 1997 conference at the John Carter Brown Library. The story of the mutual influence between the colonial Americas and Jewish thinkers, merchants, and settlers is recounted here more comprehensively than ever before, beautifully complementing and in some respects superseding the earlier foundations laid by scholars such as Jacob Rader Marcus and Salo Wittmayer Baron. Many facets of this history are covered by prominent specialists in economic, social, political, and Jewish history, in anthropology and geography, providing an appropriately fractal view rather than a single, linear narrative. The disparate sections into which the anthology is divided confirm the wisdom of this strategy. Opening the book is a section on ideas and representations of America in European and Jewish discourse; next come essays treating conversos in Spanish and then Portuguese colonial territories; a fourth section covers France and its Caribbean holdings; a fifth is devoted to Dutch America; the sixth batch of essays examines Jews, New Christians and international trade; the final section's single essay discusses the Jews of British America. Somewhat disappointingly, despite the frequent contiguity of the various entries, the only attempt at synthesis comes at the beginning, in Paolo Bernardini's introductory essay, with the result that the anthology remains very much a collection of conference papers.

The collection far surpasses co-editor Norman Fiering's hope that its contents be "useful and suggestive," in no small part due to conceptual standards long set by the scholarship produced by the John Carter Brown Library. Thus the contributors' transcendence of "filiopietism and parochialism" in approaching their subject is particularly laudable (p. xiii). Admirable methodological care is taken to avoid separating European and American history and to refrain from segregating the histories of North and South America. A perhaps unintended but judicious balance has been maintained between economic and socio-cultural history. More open to question is the decision to "include also the thousands of Christians who were descended from Jews [...] for the precise reason that despite their conversion [...] and regardless of their actual practices, these people continued to be commonly regarded as 'Jewish'" (p. xiii). Though the inclusion of their riveting history enables a vast widening of the volume's subject matter, this reader is not convinced about the soundness of including as Jews a population the majority of whose members did not consider themselves Jewish. Ironically, such inclusion reiterates on the one hand the anti-Jewish discourse that unjustifiably tarred this entire population with the label of "Jews" and on the other hand the romantic rhetoric of Jewish scholarship (and pseudo-scholarship) which sees in the same population consistent secret loyalty to and martyrdom for Judaism. Even the outstanding essays devoted to New Christians by experts Robert Rowland, Solange Alberro, Eva Alexandra Uchmany and Günter Böhm do little more than assert—of course by means of Inquisition materials—the Jewishness of those caught by the Inquisition. More perspicaciously, Anita Novinsky restates Ellis Rivkin's thesis that the "negotiable" religious identity of most of the New Christians shows that they were "crypto-individualists" more than anything else (p. 217).

This quibble notwithstanding, this collection will prove highly valuable for readers limited to English-language materials, as the editors made great efforts to include the generally lesser-known Jewish history of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch realms. Furthermore, the quality of the entries results in a volume remarkably free of errors, factual or interpretive. Given the plethora of contributions, it is impossible to summarize here the many important and fresh findings awaiting the reader. Fascinating and important episodes, many little known, have been brought to light or provided better illumination. Benjamin Schmidt presents a novel and much-needed reading of Menasseh ben Israel's Hope of Israel against...