Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur (review)

Aviva Ben-Ur's brilliant new history of Suriname's Portuguese Jews not only illuminates the colonial formation of a major Atlantic Jewish community but also maps important new methodological and conceptual directions for the nascent field of Caribbean Jewish studies. Within the Jewish Caribbean, the Surinamese community is a particularly rich subject for the historian because of the unique legal status it enjoyed—one that is reflected in its abundant records. While the exceptionality of Surinamese Jewry has long been recognized, Ben-Ur recasts the terms of that uniqueness, pointing not only to the community's territorial and legal autonomy but also its inclusion of Eurafricans. Only in Suriname did Eurafrican Jews "emerg[e] as a distinct and separate class" with cultural and institutional independence (261). Moreover, Ben-Ur reframes the exceptionality of the famed Jewish agricultural village of Jodensavanne ("the Jews' Savannah"), which she presents less as a haven of religious freedom than a frontier settlement that contained Jewish difference while advancing the interests of empire.

Historical scholarship on Caribbean Jewry has grown steadily over the past two decades, often positioning itself against Jewish historiographies that relegate the Caribbean to the margins. In a sign of the field's maturation, Ben-Ur instead largely presents her study as a corrective to previous Caribbean Jewish scholarship. She argues that such scholarship's focus on Jewish identity and perspectives has tended to marginalize enslaved peoples or construct them as passive observers of Jewish life. By contrast, Ben-Ur adopts an Atlantic history model in which the story of Surinamese Jewry becomes inseparable from that of enslaved peoples. With its emphasis on contact and exchange, the Atlantic history lens enables Ben-Ur to attend to the voices of the silenced and to explore the implications of Surinamese Jewish history for the study of Africans in the Americas.

This paradigm shift is reflected in the book's structure, which devotes two chapters to Eurafrican Jews and a third to enslaved people. Ben-Ur reminds us that Suriname's status as one of the largest slave societies in the Americas was the fundamental condition of the Jews' presence there. The opening chapter debunks the idealized image of Jodensavanne as a "new Jerusalem" that can be traced back to Surinamese Jewish historian David Nassy's Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (1788). While Nassy described Jodensavanne as a peaceful haven, Ben-Ur emphasizes that the majority of Jodensavanne's inhabitants were enslaved Africans whose labor sustained the village. Situated on the frontier, Jodensavanne "serve[d] as a human bulwark against Indian and Maroon attacks" and later as a military outpost (77). Its synagogue square was the designated site for the violent punishment of enslaved people. The central paradox, captured in the book's title, is that Jewish autonomy in Suriname was bound up with the unfreedom of enslaved Africans. The second chapter further nuances previous accounts of Surinamese Jewish autonomy by examining internal and external challenges to Jewish communal authority, while the third chapter addresses Portuguese Jewish rootedness in Suriname. Ben-Ur shows how Jewishness became "nearly synonymous with settler society" through the community's longevity, demographic presence, and deepening interaction with the African-descended population (136).

The subsequent two chapters are devoted to the Eurafrican Jewish population that resulted from sexual exploitation of enslaved women and slave concubinage. Eurafrican children were routinely converted to Judaism and sometimes manumitted and inherited by their Jewish owners, practices that enabled Judaism to survive in Suriname. As Eurafrican Jews grew in number and status, they became increasingly activist, forming their own society, Darhe Jesarim. While Darhe Jesarim's quest for ritual equality has previously been documented, Ben-Ur resituates this episode as part of a larger struggle of free people of color to obtain rights. She further makes the case that Judaism needs to be recognized as a significant religious presence in the lives of...