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

In large measure, "the Jew" is a forgotten subject in early modern history, and the Atlantic a suspect one. Yet deep mines of material on each subject lie ready for investigation. Atlantic Diasporas pairs them, excavating them both supremely well, and making clear just how important they were to the period.

Jewish diaspora was not new in the early modern era. Expelled from England, France, and German principalities between 1200 and 1500, Ashkenazi Jews moved east into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. In the west, the expulsions of Jews from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497, and repressions of crypto-Jews (marranos) and New Christians (conversos) on both sides of the Atlantic, gave rise to a displaced and relocated collective from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The collective was comprised of the global commercial and social networks that the diaspora created, which had the ability "to link all the seaborne empires, to connect communities across oceans, and to span the Protestant/Catholic divide" (4). This capacity was a unique economic, cultural, and political phenomenon, as the preface by Kagan and Morgan, ten essays by an array of specialists, and an epilogue by Natalie Zemon Davis show.

Most of the Atlantic Jews, having originated in Iberia or the Maghreb, possessed a common ethnicity and background. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert observes, "Flight, exile, and movement were all foundational experiences." Atlantic Jewish merchants in particular were "profoundly marked by the experiences of travel and displacement, and that from an early age" (80). Most of them settled permanently in northern Europe, western Africa, or the Americas. To cope with the dislocation, to maintain a connection with those left behind, and to earn a livelihood, they banded together—inhabiting multi-family dwellings, clustering in barrios, marrying within the clan, and choosing astutely the godparents of their children. Their status depended on time and place. Indeed, as Holly Snyder shows in one of the volume's richest chapters, they "successfully managed to circumvent legal restrictions on Jewish enterprise and skillfully crossed imperial boundaries in order to cultivate trading relationships" (xii). In the Anglo-Atlantic world, attitudes toward Jewish trading "quickly shifted from generally neutral towards . . . sharply negative" after 1660 (54). Even so, the traders became chameleons, savvily adapting "to variable markets under varied kinds of authority" (63). During the eighteenth century in particular, they took "special care to retain the confidence of their consumers" (73).

Yet much also divided Atlantic Jews. They held no common occupation, instead performing multiple roles. Some were "port Jews," working in overseas finance, shipping, and trade, as Wim Klooster carefully details, whereas others were "plantation Jews," managing sugar estates and supervising slave laborers. In fact, the "Nation" was not even exclusively Jewish, its membership including "New Christians, Christians who converted to Judaism, Jews who converted to Christianity but retained old family ties, together with the mulatto offspring of Jewish slave owners," as well as people who migrated to Africa or the Americas, or who lived in the Americas and (re)migrated to Europe (xi).

How to define a Jew became the diachronic question vexing early modern Atlantic Jewry—whether of Amsterdam, Lisbon, Senegal, Recife, Suriname, or New York. Multifaceted identity, nearly all authors suggest, was typical. "Religious identities cannot be attributed exclusively to spiritual considerations but instead owed much to sentimental, social, and economic factors," and the nonspiritual factors, in particular, were constantly in flux (150). Senegal's or Suriname's Jews, who, like other Europeans, frequently intermixed with Africans sexually, apparently recalibrated "their definitions of communal belonging," moving from tracing Jewishness through the father (as they did originally and in the countryside) to tracing it through the mother (as they did later and in the city, in accordance with rabbinical laws) (164–165). Group cohesion, even when it was achieved, was always tenuous; witness the continual intra-community squabbles...