Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (review)

This is a work of immense scholarship and elegant writing—encyclopedic in scope—which challenges even the most careful reader, drawing upon the fields of cultural history, anthropology, historical ethnography, and literary studies to discuss (mostly) the Atlantic world system and (almost exclusively) Sephardic Jews. On one page (64), Schorsch refers to "halakhic model" and "tosefot biblical commentators," and this is not even particularly a book for scholars of rabbinic Judaism. Fortunately, a glossary is provided, and doubtless readers who are not familiar with "the minutiae of Jewish history and historiography" (p. 4) will find themselves with one finger placed on pp. 337–38.

My own scholarly research and writing (American Jewry) begins after the closing date of this study (1800), but a study of the European, Mediterranean, and Caribbean worlds recasts the story of the first Jewish arrivals to North America into a far more continuous, complicated, and multi-faceted narrative. I learned an immense amount about the discourse concerning Jews and Blacks in the Mediterranean and Europe, especially the Sephardic diaspora, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Renaissance and Baroque) and about the invention of Jewish Whiteness, especially in Amsterdam. Perhaps the best way to indicate the joys that await the patient reader of this difficult book is to share (in the words of the author) precisely what I found most interesting (with the obvious caveat that the reality varied from epoch to epoch, from slave to slave, and from one community to another).

Under Catholicism, Jewish participation in the trading of slaves was minimal, but Jews in the Dutch and English colonies participated in the slave economy as they pleased. Nothing in Jewish law or tradition prohibited the owning of slaves; servants and slaves populated Jewish households and communities just as they did among other social groups. The conditions and obligations of Black slaves or servants in Mediterranean and European Jewish homes differed hardly at all from those of Blacks in non-Jewish homes and cultures. Jewish slaveholding in the Americas bore few Jewish particulars, but was virtually identical to slaveholding among surrounding non-Jews. Black women slaves ritually purified themselves for illicit sex with their Jewish masters. Many former slaves became religiously absorbed members of the Jewish community, although the attitude towards them remained ambivalent. Slaves served well-off Jews in the kitchen, laundry room, and stable, and as doorkeepers, nursemaids for children, attendants of adults, and valets, porters, and waiters. Even when numerous, their presence (e.g., place of burial and thus the possible erasure of markers between the worthy and the unworthy) generated worry about the possible mixing of Blacks/Blackness and Jews/Whiteness, whether in Jewish or non-Jewish discourse. Jews found the category of (Sephardic Jewish) Whiteness, which arose in this period (and an accompanying "racial" vocabulary), useful for including themselves in the dominant culture as Whites in a manner they could not as non-Christians. The evolution, in Amsterdam (and beyond—international anti-Black thought), of exclusionary practices, gradually excluding Black Jews and Black slaves from participation in Judaic life (e.g., no circumcised Negro Jew could be called to the Torah), is sad to read but thoroughly documented and carefully analyzed. It was nothing less than a pigmentocracy (a term coined by a Chilean scholar in 1944), throughout the Iberian, Dutch, English, and French worlds. The slave policies of the Caribbean communities (e.g., anti-Black attitudes) followed those of Amsterdam in letter and spirit. When Ashkenazic authors began a discourse about Blacks (eighteenth century), they merely borrowed rabbinic discourse of the past.

I found the study of the Sephardic Jewish slaveholders of Surinam and Curacao the most fascinating part of the book, but most of all, I learned I must change my presentation on racism in a course on the Shoah—where I had linked racism and the Enlightenment (late eighteenth century)—now that I know it began in a set of European and colonial (including Jewish, albeit from Catholic models) legal...