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  • Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic world, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur
  • Gert Oostindie
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic world, 1651–1825 By Aviva Ben-Ur. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

In 1954, Israel Goldstein, an American rabbi and Zionist, visited Suriname, at the time still a Dutch colony. This visit was part of a tour in South America and the Caribbean to inform diasporic Jewish communities of a New York–based initiative to celebrate three centuries of Jewish history in North America. He later reported his worries about the continuity of Jewish life in the Caribbean—he considered intermarriage and assimilation major threats. His encounters with Jews in Suriname were apparently particularly worrying for him. As he later wrote: "A glance at some of these descendants of the early Jewish settlers is enough to make one realize that there has been a good deal of marriage with the native population."

This anecdote in Aviva Ben-Ur's monograph Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society (166) says a lot about Goldstein's preoccupations and most likely also about his ignorance of the particular history of the Jews of Suriname. Fortunately, Ben-Ur has chosen an altogether different approach, narrating the fascinating history of the Jews of Suriname as a story of both exceptional autonomy by all standards and gradual integration in a quintessential Caribbean plantation colony, where enslaved Africans and their descendants made up over 90 percent of the overall population. From the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Jews made up between one- to two-thirds of the population classified as "White." This was unique both in absolute and relative figures. Just to give an idea, by the late eighteenth century the number of Jews in Suriname (ca. 1,400) was only slightly lower than in the much more populated British North American colonies (1,500), and clearly higher than in all British Caribbean colonies taken together. The only colony that had a comparable Jewish community was Curaçao, not incidentally also a Dutch colony.

The first account of the history in Suriname and particularly of the Jewish contributions to the colony, Essai historique sur la Colonie de Suriname, was published as early as 1788 by a leading intellectual from its Portuguese Jewish community, David Cohen de Nassy. Since then, there has not been a dearth of studies discussing Jewish history in Suriname, whether as a central theme or in passing. In this fascinating book, Ben-Ur brings together all that has been written before, but she does much more than that. On the basis of extensive archival research, she succeeds in presenting not only the definitive history of the Portuguese Jews of Suriname up to the early nineteenth century, but also a very thoughtful analysis of how a specific White Caribbean community, out of necessity, creolized over time.

This creolization was firstly a demographic phenomenon, provoked by the dearth of White Jewish women and the "accessibility"—for want of a better word to describe the violent nature of that relation—of enslaved African women. By the later eighteenth century, a good part of the Jewish community of Suriname consisted of people of color, accepted as Jewish by suppressing a key element of rabbinical Judaism, being matrilineal descent. This is truly a unique feature in the history of the Jewry of Suriname, and Ben-Ur provides us with a great deal of archival evidence to support this. At the same time she does not ignore how this history runs very much parallel to the social history of other plantation colonies in the sense that the inescapable emergence of intermediate "Mixed-race" groups provoked resentment, anxiety and all too often oppressive reactions in the White community. In this particular case, there was a clear and mainly successful policy of the White Jewish elite to relegate their Colored coreligionists to the back—literally so in the synagogue. This in turn arose resentment among the Colored Jewish group which, quite typically in the Age of Revolutions, they did not hesitate to articulate publicly, addressing both the Jewish regents and the colonial government.

This brings us at another dimension...

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