The Sephardic Atlantic

This volume contributes to the growing field of Early Modern Jewish Atlantic History, while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is a collection of substantive, sophisticated and variegated essays, combining case studies with theoretical reflections, organized into three sections: race and blood, metropoles and colonies, and history and memory. Twelve chapters treat converso slave traders, race and early Afro-Portuguese relations in West Africa, Sephardim and people of color in nineteenth-century Curaçao, Portuguese converso/Sephardic imperialist behavior, Caspar Barlaeus' attitude toward Jews in the Sephardic Atlantic, Jewish-Creole historiography in eighteenth-century Suriname, Savannah's eighteenth-century Sephardic community in an Altantic setting, Freemasonry and Sephardim in the British Empire, the figure of Columbus in popular literature about the Caribbean, key works of Caribbean postcolonial literature on Sephardim, the holocaust, slavery and race, Canadian Jewish identity in the reception history of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and Moroccan-Jewish memories of a sixteenth-century Portuguese military defeat.

Jonathan Schorsch is Professor of Jewish Religious and Intellectual History at the Universität Potsdam and founder of the Jewish Activism Summer School, Germany. Sina Rauschenbach is Chair of Religious Studies and Jewish Thought the Universität Potsdam and founder of the Jewish Activism Summer School, Germany.

1. Postcolonial Approaches to the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic.- 2. New Christian Slave-Traders: A Literature Review and Research Agenda.- 3. A "Racial" Approach to the History of Early Afro-Portuguese Relationships? The Case of Senegambia and Cabo Verde in the Late 16th and Early 17th Century.- 4. Mediating Multiculturalism: Jews, Blacks, and Curaçao, 1825-1970.- 5. Galut and Empire: On the Way to Final Redemption.- 6. Caspar Barlaeus, Dutch Expansion, and the Sephardic Community in the Atlantic World: A Note on the Intellectual History of Amsterdam in the 17th Century.- 7. The Empire Writes Back: David Nassy and Jewish Creole Historiography in Colonial Surinam.- 8. Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America's First Intentional Jewish Community.- 9. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Jews and Freemasonry in the British Caribbean (Early 19th Century).- 10. Christopher Columbus and Jamaican Jews: History into Memory.- 11. Triangulating Memory: Sephardism in Caribbean Literature.- 12.Esther Brandeau / Jacques La Fargue: An Eighteenth-Century Multicrosser in the Canadian Cultural Archive.- 13. Judeo-Moroccan Traditions and the Age of European Expansionism in North Africa.