Introduction

The Revolutionary Potential of Atlantic Jewish History

AVIVA BEN-UR AND WIM KLOOSTER

This volume is organized around the notion of entanglement. It stresses the close ties between Jews and non-Jews across imperial boundaries and the connections between Jews and other ethnic groups in their own environments. It aims to revolutionize the study of Jews in early American history. For more than a century, a parochial and ahistorical approach has prevailed that privileges events, developments, and institutions in the United States.1 The standard narrative is linear and nationalistic and emphasizes U.S. exceptionalism. The long period prior to the foundation of the North American republic is presented in a trajectory that follows a route from the Spanish expulsion of 1492, the first synagogue in Brazil, and settlement in the Caribbean, to the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654.

This funnel vision not only reduces the colonial era to the status of prehistory, it also obscures the fundamentally connective nature of early American Jewish history. Just like in American history at large, what is needed is a broader, Atlantic approach. Networks, transimperial connections and comparisons, actors across boundaries, and interactions with a wide array of non-Jewish actors deserve a place in the limelight. A deeper understanding of early modern Jewish history in the New World can be accomplished by using the tools and insights of Atlantic history.

This book invites historians of the early modern world to look beyond the borders of the United States in studying the interactions of Jews with others. As it turns out, these interactions were not limited to North America or non-Atlantic Europe, but extended to numerous places across the Atlantic world. Analysis on an Atlantic scale is therefore required to do justice to the lives of these Jews.2 While some colleagues may prefer an even larger canvas, we believe that it would be a mistake to move from a North American scale to a global one. Although there were Jews who lived and worked in India—including two indigenous groups, a migrant group hailing mainly from Baghdad, and a few Anglo-Dutch colonies—their activities for the most part ran parallel to rather than intersected with Atlantic Jewish history. Moreover, since there were only episodic interactions between Atlantic and Asian Jews, a global Jewish history encompassing both world hemispheres would carry little self-justification.3 The Atlantic world being broad enough as it is, we do not see it as our task to be exhaustive in covering early modern Jewry. The ten essays in this volume constitute the first collective attempt to self-consciously reframe the study of colonial and early American Jewry within an Atlantic paradigm.

The volume opens with John M. Dixon’s chapter, which shows how the field of American Jewish history has ended up where it is today. Drawing on an array of scholarly conversations that challenge the national paradigm, many of them unearthed from arcane publications, Dixon argues that what has come to dominate the specialization is a linear and nationalistic metanarrative that celebrates American exceptionalism. Whereas late nineteenth-century scholars still conceived of the history of U.S. Jewry as part of a vaster world, a narrower conception that presented the United States as the culmination of Jewish civil and political freedom and commercial activity and prosperity gained the upper hand around the turn of the twentieth century. Dixon explains how writing about Jewish history in early America—by and large by practitioners who were themselves Jews—was purified of elements that were not North American. By the mid-twentieth century, demographic factors further worked against a more capacious view of the past, as most American Jews had been born in the United States at the same time that their community had become the largest Jewish population in the world. Instead of a more entangled vision, what historians continued to depict was a North American Jewish community marked by longevity and continuity.

Entanglement is prominently on display in Oren Okhovat’s chapter, which follows the trajectories of Portuguese Jews in the early Spanish Empire. These men used the opportunities presented by local Spanish officials to simultaneously serve the Spanish Crown and engage in contraband trade with other empires. When their influence began to wane, they shifted to Amsterdam, which gradually attracted (former) New Christians from Portuguese and Spanish territories as well as France and nearby Antwerp. Portuguese Jews thus played crucial roles as intermediaries in the Spanish Empire before contributing to Amsterdam’s commercial heyday. In this role, Portuguese Jews formed part of a broad trading network, which—like many other international trading networks—was characterized by religious diversity. Even after one branch of this network, headquartered in Amsterdam, evolved into a strictly Jewish community, Okhovat argues, it “continued to function as a de facto Iberian merchant nation.”

One sector in which Portuguese Jews were well represented was the sugar business, as has been documented for the period before 1630, when Brazilian sugar dominated the European markets.4 In her chapter, Yda Schreuder shows that Portuguese Jewish involvement in the international sugar trade continued in later decades, when Amsterdam connected Jewish and New Christian communities in Lisbon, Hamburg, London, Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica, and some French Caribbean colonies. The fall of Dutch Brazil and the sudden emergence of Barbados as the world’s premier sugar producer encouraged Portuguese Jews to adapt quickly. Many intertwined themselves with the English Empire by receiving English denization papers and moving to London and the English Caribbean.

Past historians have shown that the men of the Portuguese Nation who became Jews in places such as Amsterdam maintained close cultural and commercial ties not only with other Jews but also with Catholics, some of them even returning to the Catholic faith. Conversion was not a purely religious affair, even if many genuinely adopted the Jewish faith when presented with the opportunity. Material considerations were important as well. The migration of Portuguese Jews back and forth between Protestant and Catholic lands, which Yosef Kaplan and other scholars have presented as a movement between public and secret Jewish identities, arguably should not be understood in Jewish terms, but rather in terms of the Portuguese Empire and the mandates of its imperial commerce. In his chapter, by contrast, Victor Tiribás pushes back against the notion that religious identity was the product of pragmatic considerations. His analysis of the vicissitudes of four Jews who served as soldiers in the ranks of the Dutch West India Company’s army in the Americas tells a different story. What motivated them to face discrimination and defy death “was a deep sense of revenge against the tyranny of Catholics embodied in the Inquisition, their messianic expectations about the dispersion of the Jews across the globe, and the possibility of gaining prestige within the Jewish community itself. Willing to kill and die for Judaism, their religious commitment seems beyond doubt.” Whatever their motives were, they connected their fate to the Dutch, who had their own, partly religious, reasons to fight their Spanish “hereditary” enemies. While this handful of Jews was not necessarily representative of the broader, interimperial Jewish community, Tiribás’s case study is an important example of the ongoing relevance of micro-history to the emerging field of Atlantic Jewish history.

The next two chapters are focused on anglophone America. In her contribution, Toni Pitock writes about the Franks family, Ashkenazim who aided the expansion of Britain into the North American interior in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. Through backcountry trade, army contracting, and land speculation, various members of this prominent family demonstrated their allegiance and commitment to the expanding empire. In contrast to their dedication to the British Empire, the Frankses’ Jewishness is marginal and inconsequential, as Pitock shows. Their mercantile and class aspirations probably did not differ from those of the Christians with whom they traded. Their proximity to gentile colonists was underlined by the marriages that siblings David and Phila Franks entered into with Christians. Her argument challenges previous historiography, which continues to center the Jewishness of the Franks family and other North American coreligionists in their political entanglements and commercial pursuits.5

Holly Snyder’s ensuing chapter analyzes the well-known but complex case of Ezekiel Hart, who was refused by Lower Canada’s Legislative Assembly to take his seat in that body, not once, but twice (in 1807 and 1809), despite having been elected. His Jewishness ostensibly kept him out. But Snyder demonstrates that the outcome of the election was not purely an expression of attitudes about Jews and their status. In her telling, political allegiances and interpersonal alliances were also a significant force, making Jewishness a vulnerability, but not an initial deciding factor in disenfranchisement. Moreover, Snyder places the case in a broader perspective by framing it as part of the rights of Jews in English political thought and legal practice. The legal status of Jews in English territories, she shows, remained unclear until the Naturalization Act of 1740, which allowed Jews to be naturalized, and even then, the position of Jews remained ambiguous. Their situation was, however, not unique. Snyder reveals the parallels and links between Jews and Catholics in the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Snyder’s essay demonstrates that we should not solely look at Jews across the board, comparatively, but appreciate the idiosyncrasies of local history that made Jewishness arguably less consequential than existing scholarship would have it. The cases that tested Jewish enfranchisement throughout the colonies and in the metropole are so few and far between that the scholar must foreground the local situation.

If Snyder emphasizes the intertwined struggles of Catholics and Jews, Stanley Mirvis points to the remarkable connections on the island of Jamaica between the Jewish fight for rights and that of the free people of color. In urban environments, these groups—who were similarly disenfranchised—lived in the same neighborhoods and engaged in sexual relationships with each other, across a spectrum of what historians understand as mutually consenting, coerced, exploitative, and pragmatic. By the late eighteenth century, these relationships had given rise to a sizable group of Jews of color, to the extent that many Christians conflated Jews with free people of color. Colonial authorities approached the groups’ simultaneous campaigns for more privileges by weighing their cases against each other. This bred conflict between the groups, as each sought to be the first to achieve certain civil and political entitlements. The struggle for parity, Mirvis demonstrates, was intertwined rather than parallel, and this interrelation long preceded the better-known lobby for suffrage of the 1820s.6

The quest for equality is also discussed in Wim Klooster’s chapter, which makes a tour around the Atlantic world in order to retrieve Jewish thoughts and actions during the era of revolutions. While the scholarly literature discusses Jews as reacting to revolutionary changes, it largely ignores Jewish agency. The essay reveals that despite the ageold discriminatory laws against Jews everywhere, there was no generalized Jewish push for equality. Full individual equality meant the loss of Jewish self-rule, which many Jews felt would jeopardize the traditional Jewish way of life, centered around adherence to rabbinical culture. Others may have cherished autonomy because it was organized around the dispensation of charity to the numerous Jewish poor. On the other hand, there was no lack of Jews who fully submerged themselves in the ideas and politics of revolutionary regimes and to whom historians have paid scant attention.

As the age of revolutions left the British Caribbean largely untouched, slavery continued to underpin these colonies until its abolition by Parliament in 1833. In the Barbadian town of Bridgeport, slaves, free people of African descent, and poor white Christians dwelled in the same commercial district as Jews, most of whom struggled to eke out a living. In her chapter, Aviva Ben-Ur considers the sexual liaisons carried out within the framework of physical force, economic exploitation, or pragmatism. She shows that some Jews, notably the indigent synagogue functionaries involved in such relationships, incurred public condemnation by defying existing Jewish norms. Their wealthier coreligionists also engaged in extramarital sexual encounters, especially with women of African descent, but successfully shielded themselves from exposure until a communal rift forcefully exposed double standards within the Jewish community. Ben-Ur ends with a reflection on the relationships she brings to light, concluding that there was nothing uniquely Jewish about them. Thus, these cases are a rare opportunity to consider the sexual lives of the island’s underclass and the integration of Jews into the heart of slave society.

The final chapter, by Laura Newman Eckstein, takes a look at the readership of The Occident, a thriving Anglo-Jewish journal in the period before the American Civil War. Eckstein argues that by using local agents, the journal’s editor, Isaac Leeser, who immigrated in 1824, helped construct a communication network that connected Jews not only in the United States, but also across the Atlantic world. His concerns with Jewish communities in the Caribbean, evinced in his letters and sermons, suggest that he saw the fate of his community as bound up with theirs, reminding us that North American Jews were very aware of those living south of the border. They not only traded with them, but also exchanged letters and synagogue functionaries with them.7 Leeser’s adoption of the Portuguese Jewish rite, which included a distinctively Iberian pronunciation of Hebrew, is yet another indication of his immersion in the (by then waning) Atlantic Jewish world and stands in striking contrast to the national orientation of his younger rival, rabbi and journalist Isaac Mayer Wise, who arrived in the United States in 1846, just as Jewish emigration from central Europe was nearing its peak.8 Leeser is well known to scholars as the United States’ most important Jewish leader of the nineteenth century, but his awareness of and contacts with Caribbean Jews have so far remained largely unassessed. They do not fit the nationalistic metanarrative of American Jewish history to which John Dixon refers. It is time for that narrative to make way for a richer and more diverse understanding of the Jewish past, one that places Jews on the same plane as other historical actors.

One of the insights of an Atlantic approach is that across the Americas, hybrid societies were formed in the colonial era. In many places, the predominant character of the emergent culture may have been shaped by European settlers, but the distinctive regional nuances were formed by the interaction of all ethnic groups. Likewise, colonies belonging to different empires often enjoyed close ties. Discrete imperial spaces never existed, since mutual influence, commerce, boundary disputes, and wars were the norm. In border areas, but elsewhere, too, there was a constant interpenetration of colonial empires and the groups that inhabited them.9 While Atlantic history centers mobility and links, it makes ample room for local studies of cities, countries, and colonies positioned within its broader framework. Moreover, it is a complement to—not a replacement of—traditional imperial, national, and regional approaches, such as Latin American studies and American history.10

The temporal bookends of Atlantic Jewish history, 1500–ca. 1850, should align with its parent field. Yet Jews had a distinctive historical genealogy within the Atlantic world. A diasporic people with roots in the historic Land of Israel, Jews had already established a communal presence under Roman rule in the Iberian Peninsula by the turn of the fourth century CE.11 By the Middle Ages, they had also formed communities in England and France. A series of forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres in England, the Iberian Peninsula, and France, starting in 1290, rendered Europe’s Atlantic coast devoid of publicly professing Jews by the late fifteenth century. But Christians of Iberian Jewish origin, some of whom secretly retained Jewish practice or identity, constituted part of the Atlantic world from its advent and were intertwined through family and business ties, as well as through cultural commonality, with publicly professing Jews, who began to carve out new communities in France and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. On the North African coast, where indigenous Jews speaking Berber languages had already carved out numerous enclaves, small Jewish communities appeared in the seventeenth century under Spanish occupation. Slightly more than a thousand strong in their totality, all were expelled by 1707, including the few who had emerged on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Most of their trade relations were tied to Spain and the shores of the Mediterranean littoral. These communities, thus, did not play any major role within the Atlantic world.12

One might imagine that Atlantic Jewish history is simply Atlantic history with Jews and Iberian converts to Christianity tossed in. We propose that this not be the case. Rather, Atlantic Jewish history offers a conceptual reorientation by disengaging itself from conventional approaches to the Jewish past in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with their presumption of the centrality of Jewishness as a category of analysis. By contrast, Atlantic Jewish history conceives of Jews as a constitutive force of their environment, and thus, paradoxically, aims to shed more light on broader history than on the Jewish past per se. In parting from scholarly tradition, Atlantic Jewish history augurs a sea change for its parent field no less than for the study of the Jewish past. By definition focused on early modernity, Atlantic Jewish history also has the potential of transforming its sister fields of American Jewish and Latin American Jewish history, both of which are heavily weighted in favor of the late nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.

No scholarly conversation has yet developed as to what constitutes the Atlantic world in a Jewish key, nor how specialists should approach it and the prodigious primary sources it produced.13 Elsewhere, we have suggested that the presence of Jews and reputed crypto-Jews was too small and regionally confined to justify a distinctive periodization for Atlantic Jewish history.14 However, some broad conceptual and thematic parameters have already crystallized. Atlantic Jewish history should endeavor to combine obvious religious and economic approaches with less apparent ethnic, racial, linguistic, and political perspectives. According to this scheme, there are four elements that might serve as the bedrock of Atlantic Jewish history: the demographic and economic centrality of Caribbean Jewry among hemispheric American Jewish communities; Portuguese Jewish hegemony among Jews in the Atlantic world; slavery; and the triad of privileges, disabilities, and Jewish Emancipation. These broad terms remind us that in the Atlantic Jewish age, the American Jewish epicenter was in the insular and circum-Caribbean (not in colonial North America or the United States); for centuries most Atlantic Jews were of Iberian, rather than central or eastern European, origins; most hemispheric American Jews lived in slave societies, and starting in the 1800s, legal equality was gradually extended to Jews for the first time, replacing an earlier system predicated upon an ancien régime of dispensations and restrictions.

The essays herein gathered comprise the first edited volume to self-consciously demonstrate the revolutionary potential of Atlantic Jewish history. Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World aligns itself with a scholarly trajectory born at the dawn of the twenty-first century that saw the publication of three influential edited collections. Each, in its own way, has striven to innovate Jewish historiography. Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West (2001), coedited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, applied concepts such as “port Jews” and “diasporas” to the vast world westward of central Europe and underscored the circulation in this space of New Christians and Jews of Iberian origin. As its title hints, this volume was still pre-Atlantic, anchored in the history of European expansion, but was nevertheless anticipatory of a trend to come.15 Just under a decade later, Atlantic Diasporas (2009), coedited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, heralded the emerging field as “Atlantic Jewry” and sought to explore “the role of Jews and crypto-Jews in the Atlantic world.”16 Finally, The Sephardic Atlantic (2018), coedited by Sina Rauschenbach and Jonathan Schorsch, used postcolonial studies as an organizing principle, privileged Jews of Iberian descent, and like its predecessors admitted disciplines in addition to history, notably literary studies.17 Collectively, these three oft-cited volumes augur a burgeoning new area of study that has lifted some of the gravity of Jewish historiography away from Europe and the modern United States.

In contrast to the aforementioned collections, Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World is uncompromisingly Atlantic, tempering any approach that would give dominance to a European imperial perspective and holding at bay potentially limiting concepts like “Caribbean,” “Old World,” “New World,” “(Vast) Early America,” or “the Americas.”18 Rather than adopting Kagan and Morgan’s “Atlantic Jewry,” a term that allows for an interdisciplinary treatment of an ethno-religious group, the present volume underscores the importance of upholding the history of the Atlantic Jewish past. While studies on material culture and modern-day fiction related to the Jewish Atlantic world brush up against relevant themes, such as slavery and interimperial mobility, they are more concerned with contemporary memories, perspectives, or modes of literary analysis than with the past.

A handful of recent monographs have self-consciously adopted the Atlantic framework in ways that suggest the viability of the aforementioned parameters and its growing acceptability among specialists of the Jewish past. These include two volumes on Portuguese Jews in West Africa and Suriname, respectively, both of which incorporate “Atlantic World” into their subtitles, and a monograph on eighteenth-century Jamaican Jewry, which does the same on its very first page.19 All three books do so not as verbiage, but rather as an organizing principle, in recognition of the intense mobility, exchange, and interconnectedness that characterized the colonies in question. Additional monographs and a sourcebook with Atlantic Jewries at their center allude to the Atlantic world but do not always fully recognize that it was a system, rather than a region.20

The reception of the Atlantic paradigm by Jewish historians noticeably lags behind other affined specialties, including the study of religion, notably Christianity, and the history of Latin America.21 Undeniably, thinking and writing about the Atlantic Jewish past has been inherently fraught in multiple ways. First, the interdisciplinary nature of Jewish studies means that not all treatments have been grounded in methods of inquiry that are historically sound, even if they may reverberate strongly for scholars of literature, ethnic and racial studies, and critical race theory. Moreover, some practitioners working within a postmodern framework experience the historicist perspective as “narrow,” and therefore apply an understanding of postcolonial studies that encompasses everything from the onset of expansionism to the era of dismantled colonialism. This capacious rubric potentially layers the present over the early modern past and vitiates the concept of the Atlantic world.22 The application of multiple disciplinary ports of entry, whether literature, the study of ethnicity and race, material culture, or postmodernism, expands awareness of the Atlantic Jewish past among academics and the broader public, and undoubtedly enhances the impact of scholarly production. But disciplinary fluidity often shortchanges historical context, nuance, and depth. This is particularly true for works that presume certain ethical standards of human behavior that are both universal and timeless, posit a colonial world divided into victims and collaborators of imperial power, and insist that scholarship and activism cannot and should not be separated. Such approaches are in consonance with the pressures of our era and, increasingly, institutional demands, but they will not withstand the scrutiny of historicism, nor the passing of time. Their concern with the present diminishes their ability to take the past on its own terms.

Rather than advocate that scholars adhere to a pristine model of “Atlantic Jewish history” that upholds historicism and moral neutrality, a better solution would be to recognize an emerging trend of “Atlantic Jewish studies” that is a multidisciplinary spinoff of Jewish studies, applies contemporary standards of social justice as timeless and global, and whose temporal parameters unproblematically extend beyond the nineteenth century. As such, “Atlantic Jewish studies” is a field that takes shape around such concepts as Caribbean Jewry and early American Jewry and is separate from both the origins and concerns of Atlantic Jewish history. Its strengths lie not necessarily in enhancing understanding of the past, but rather in highlighting the legacies of the Atlantic Jewish world in contemporary literature, memory, and present-day social values.

The incorporation of social justice perspectives by writers of Atlantic Jewish history poses additional conundrums. Many writers make it a point to explicitly affirm a supposedly universal value system of equality and freedom, sprinkling their works with derogatory adjectives aimed at white slaveowners, the institution of slavery, and racialist legislation. Since the 1980s, a parallel leverage of ethical judgments has been deployed against Jews as historical actors and their present-day descendants, as the works of the Nation of Islam attest.23 Rauschen-bach and Schorsch refer to this latter manifestation as “the misuse of early modern Atlantic Sephardic-converso history by twentieth-century Afro-American scholarship,” which draws on “Afrocentric perspectives influenced by postcolonial thought” and often displays “an anti-Semitic orientation.”24 From another perspective, however, the publications of the Nation of Islam (a corporate author) are the result of ahistorical research methods, including the application of contemporary social justice values, leveraged with the intention to defame an entire group of people. This undertaking is arguably the flip side of nationalist writing used to praise a group of people or a political entity. The most significant problem is not the Nation of Islam’s output, but rather the fact that professional scholars—by engaging these writings in the first place—have responded to them as if they merit historiographical reflection.25 This is not to censure these scholars’ public responses, including condemnatory statements made in national publications and professional organizations, but rather to underscore that an anonymous, “vicious propaganda tract” should not be assessed using historical methods.26 Its rightful place is under the microscope of organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which rightfully categorize these works along with other “histories of hate.”27 Alternatively, scholars may legitimately analyze the text as they might The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that is, not by attempting to disprove the text’s central argument, but rather by assessing the work as a piece of influential antisemitica.28 From whichever direction it comes, the application of contemporary morals to Atlantic Jewish history makes living people personally liable for events of the past. It diminishes historicity by focusing on ethno-religious identity rather than overarching structures and human behavior.

Finally, the study of the Atlantic Jewish past demands a particular scholarly training or self-adaptation. Ideally, one must not only master historiographical methods, but also possess fluency in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, and Aramaic at the very least, not to mention paleographical skills to enable decipherment of seventeenth-century manuscripts in European languages and other sources produced in a variety of Semitic cursives.29 Atlantic Jewish history can surely be written relying solely on secondary sources, material culture, and printed primary sources. But its revolutionary potential can only be achieved through the discovery and analysis of prodigious collections of archival documents, located on four continents and in large part unmined.

Like its parent field, Atlantic Jewish history has generated a fair amount of skepticism. Critics of Atlanticists quip that the new branch of scholarship is at once “everything and nothing,” a passing fad with little revelatory or explanatory value. Or worse, that it constitutes the usual political, maritime, and economic history rebranded as something ostensibly new and more marketable. These naysayers fear an overemphasis on cities at the expense of rural regions (precisely the effect of applying the somewhat passé “port Jew” concept to the Americas) and the reinforcement of traditionalist narratives about Europe’s impact on the Americas. At the time of this writing, edited collections are still seeking to “probe the legitimacy” of an Atlantic framework, while the field of American Jewish history still largely clings to a national model. The aforementioned edited collections, Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, Atlantic Diasporas, and The Sephardic Atlantic, suggest that such skepticism is not justified for Atlantic Jewish history. The essays herein assembled seek to further expand on those revelatory adumbrations.

Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World undertakes to make a bold statement, both a reflection of the current research of its contributors and as an effort to stimulate debate and move an emerging specialty forward. One might suspect that a particularist, ethnoreligious framework has little to offer as a signpost for scholars dealing with the broader Atlantic world. On the contrary, as the contributions to this volume collectively suggest, the revisionism of Atlantic Jewish history as a method upends some of the assumptions regarding the racial and religious hierarchies that informed the Atlantic world and were transmuted within it. A case in point pertains to the aforementioned elements that undergird Atlantic Jewish history, particularly Portuguese cultural and institutional hegemony among Atlantic Jewries.

First, the facts. In Spain and Portugal, in 1391 and 1497, respectively, thousands of Jews converted to Christianity under duress of the Catholic Church and popular violence. In both kingdoms by the end of the fifteenth century, Judaism was no longer a legal religion. The Inquisition, established in Spain in 1478 and in Portugal in 1536, sought to extirpate the practice of secret Judaism and in its first decades specifically targeted New Christians of Jewish descent, apprehending, trying, sentencing, reconciling, and occasionally burning at the stake. Despite the 1501 ban against immigrants of Jewish and Muslim origin in Spanish America, periodically reissued through the next three centuries, and occasional, halfhearted immigration restrictions promulgated by the Portuguese Crown, Iberians of Semitic ancestry continuously settled in the Iberian New World. The Inquisition was permanently established in Peru in 1570, one year before Mexico City received a tribunal, and four decades before Cartagena de Indias (in what is today Colombia). With the assistance of local lay collaborators (familiares), the Inquisition also became active in Brazil in the 1590s.

Most scholars who have studied these forced Jewish converts and their descendants in the peninsula and elsewhere in the Atlantic world have argued that Jewish identity and practices persisted through the centuries and were the major driving force for fleeing the Iberian Peninsula.30 Others argue that the converts soon acculturated and that it was the Inquisition that through its targeted focus on people of Jewish origin (actual or not), stimulated faithful Christians to cultivate antinomian identity and practices. According to this view, most fully developed by Benzion Netanyahu and Antonio Saraiva, the Inquisition was primarily motivated by cupidity (since defendants were deprived of their wealth upon arrest) and functioned as a “marrano factory.”31 A third, more nuanced, position is offered by David L. Graizbord, who argues that those targeted by the Inquisition did not possess enduring doctrinal convictions and simply sought equanimity through the immediate approval of the local authorities of the territories in which they lived or through which they traveled on business. Their inner spiritual lives had less to do with religious conviction or ancestral fealty than with economic pragmatism and the yearning for social and religious stability.32

Graizbord thus far offers the most compelling assessment of the inner worlds of converted Jews and their legally Christian descendants, but his view has not been widely disseminated or accepted and the debate has thus reached an impasse. An Atlantic Jewish historical perspective helps to move the debate forward by underscoring two major flaws in the ongoing question “were they or were they not Judaizers?” First, the enduring dispute relies on the myth that New Christians were strictly endogamous. In fact, Jewish converts to Christianity did not refrain from sexually reproductive behavior with “Old Christians.” Aside from the birth of children outside of wedlock, mixed-status progeny were also produced through marital alliances encouraged by the state, in part a consequence of a law promulgated in Portugal in 1498 that specifically prohibited unions between New Christian couples.

The two populations—“Old” and “New” Christians—became progressively intertwined over the centuries, as inquisitorial trials demonstrate. In 1630, a group of fifty-three New Christians volunteered themselves before the Lisbon inquisitors to confess their Judaizing. The genealogical investigation that followed revealed that only 13 percent of the defendants were fully New Christian, that is, of presumably indivisible Jewish ancestry. The remainder fell along a spectrum that officials variably described as one-eighth, three-fourths, one-half, three-eighths, one-fourth, or “part” New Christian. At an auto-da-fé celebrated in Lisbon a few years later, nearly 80 percent of the ninety-six New Christians burned at the stake for secret Judaism were “part” New Christian. If one calculates that the rate of exogamy among New Christians hovered around 20 percent in each generation, the result would have been a gradual decrease in the proportion of Portuguese who were of “pure” Jewish descent, and a concurrent rise in the proportion of those of partial Jewish descent, however diluted. Robert Rowland, who discusses these cases, estimates that in Portugal by the eighteenth century, those of “pure” Jewish descent comprised nearly 4 percent of the New Christian population, while Christians descended by any degree from Jews represented 34 percent, and over half of the urban dwellers.33 In exile, too, publicly professing Portuguese Jewish communities in Amsterdam and Venice openly welcomed members whose parentage was only half “Hebrew.”34 If these cases are representative, as they surely are, the vast majority of the urban Portuguese population was of mixed ethno-religious origins as early as the seventeenth century.

The second conceptual flaw in the dominant historiography on New Christians relates to the presumed capacity of Judaism and Jewishness to prevail over competing identities and practices, which Bruno Feitler has critiqued as the notion of “Jewish indestructibility.”35 Scholars have uncritically accepted the ascribed New Christian identity of Portuguese men and women, which was imposed on them by inquisitors who presented them as Judaizers. Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano has convincingly shown that centuries-old false—and often rhetorical—characterizations of New Christians continue to plague historians today. One key assumption is that early modern individuals in the Iberian Peninsula possessed only one “primary and principal affiliation,” in this case, an affiliation with a secret Jewish community that supposedly trumped all other identities. Historians thus ignore the many additional identities that people had, as members of guilds and trades, as elite businessmen, or as migrants.36 They also overlook the open and dynamic construction of such identities, which allowed a significant role for individual free will. The specific context and conditions in which Iberians found themselves helped shape their religious identities.37

Scholars of inquisitorial history tend to fixate on secret Jewish survivals to the exclusion of all other manifestations of ethnoreligious persistence, notably those of the descendant Muslim population. But if one foregrounds demographics, this stance is simply untenable. Jews constituted only 2 percent of the late medieval Iberian Jewish population (between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand individuals), while Muslims, who also underwent several waves of forced conversions to Christianity and expulsions, vastly outnumbered both Jews and reputed crypto-Jews.38 By around 1100, more than 80 percent of the indigenous population of the Iberian Peninsula had converted to Islam.39 In the late fourteenth century, three centuries after the initiation of the Reconquista (the Christian reconquest of Muslim Iberia), two-thirds and one-third of the populations of Valencia and Aragon, respectively, were still Muslim, while 3 percent of Catalonia’s residents espoused Islam.40 The expulsion of the entire morisco population of Spain between 1609 and 1614, mandated by King Philip III, resulted in the ejection of some 350,000 forced converts to Christianity and their descendants, constituting the “largest removal of a civilian population in European history” until that time, even exceeding the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492.41 And yet, no monarch could have possibly eradicated a group whose contours had been so blurry both before and during their expulsion. Aside from a small number of Moriscos who had obtained exemptions, surreptitiously remained behind, or returned to the Iberian Peninsula undetected, there remained an innumerable population of Muslim heritage who after generations of conversion had been accepted as Old Christians.42

The obsession with lineage among early modern Iberians, along with the will to conceal certain progenitors, has often been misinterpreted as an awareness of Jewish ancestry. In reality, official genealogical investigations triggered by accusations of heresy or a person’s candidacy for noble status sought to uncover not Jewish ancestry solely, but either Jewish or Muslim ancestry. The following example illustrates this point. The lineage of the painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) came under public scrutiny in 1659, when King Philip IV of Spain informed him of his desire to grant the painter an honorary title of knighthood. The application process for admission to the Order of Santiago, initiated in 1658, obliged the artist to demonstrate not only his “purity of blood” (that is, the absence of Jewish or Muslim lineage) and that his family had been free of inquisitorial prosecution, but also that he was of noble descent and that none of his ancestors had been merchants or artisans. After the artist presented his genealogy to the Council of the Orders, official investigators spent several months gathering evidence on the candidate’s background, including about one hundred oral testimonies and various ecclesiastical and government documents, such as birth and taxation records.43 Historian Kevin Ingram has demonstrated through recently unearthed notarial documents that Velázquez lied about the identity of his paternal grandfather (who was apparently not Juan Velázquez, whose exemption from the meat tax implied nobility, but rather the merchant Juan Velázquez Moreno). He also misidentified his maternal grandmother, who was not Catalina Zayas, but Juana Mexía Aguilar. Ingram surmises that the investigators intentionally chose witnesses who were “disposed to corroborate the false genealogy.”44 He and a few other scholars argue that Velázquez was undoubtedly or probably of Jewish origin.45

This assertion rests on the same kind of evidence deployed by the seventeenth-century investigators: credulous supposition. While officials of the Council of the Orders seem to have slanted their investigation in accordance with the king’s desire to knight Velázquez, the goal of some contemporary historians, by contrast, seems to be a quest for crypto-Jewish background and cultural practices. “I am led to believe,” writes Ingram, “that Velázquez’s family originated not from northwest Portugal, as the artist claimed, but rather from Portugal’s eastern borderland, where according to one scholar the majority of the land’s conversos lived.”46 For Ingram, Velázquez’s literacy, his maternal grandfather’s occupation as a maker of gentlemen’s breeches, his occasional activity as a renter of property and moneylender, the occupation of his associates in the clothes trade and silversmithing, and the notarial profession of his friends from Seville are additional indicators of the painter’s Jewish ancestry.47 Another historian, Edgar Samuel, surmises that Velázquez was of Jewish ancestry because his parents chose most of their children’s names in a fixed order to honor grandparents, which Samuel claims is an ancient Jewish practice, and because a man with the same name as Velázquez’s father, Juan Rodriguez de Silva, was in 1596 condemned to death in absentia by the Mexican Inquisition for Judaizing.48 For both Ingram and Samuel, this chain of logic serves as a platform from which to argue that Velázquez’s converso background directly informed his artistic career. For Ingram, the artist’s “New Christian background” provided “potential creative impulses” for his art and infused into it a subtle, “non-conformist message,” while for Samuel, this lineage led Velázquez to paint for “New Christian clerical clients” and “might have increased his ambition to win approval and to attain success.”49

Yet no concrete evidence has surfaced that any of Velázquez’s ancestors were Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in 1391, 1497, or any other year. The confirmation that Velázquez actively obfuscated the true identities of his biological ancestors, as did many Iberians, does not reveal his precise motivation.50 The concoction and purchase of fictitious ancestors was a widespread phenomenon in medieval and early modern Spain, whose society constituted a cornucopia of ethnic groups and spiritual traditions, and where the two prevailing religions, Christianity and Islam, were engaged in a prolonged geopolitical struggle.51 The acquisition of membership in certain orders demanded not only limpieza de sangre, but also the absence of ancestors who had engaged in certain types of nonnoble labor. In other words, the efforts of candidates to verify a pure lineage was not only racial/religious, but also class based. Moreover, the application process Velázquez underwent to establish his noble lineage relied heavily on public reputation and hearsay. Such evidence, like birth and other municipal records, was not only falsifiable, but also frequently falsified in medieval and early modern Iberia as a means to an end.52 As Jane Gerber has recently demonstrated, the forging of ancestral documents in the peninsula was not necessarily connected to Christians’ desire to conceal their Jewish heritage. Indeed, it predated the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391.53

Related is the case of the father and three brothers of Santa Teresa de Ávila (1515–82). After municipal authorities in the parish of Majalbálago, a town near Ávila in Spain, demanded payment of one hundred maravedis in obligatory tribute in 1519, the four men filed a lawsuit to accredit their nobility and affirm that they were thus exempt from paying taxes. Their claim triggered a genealogical inquest, which turned up a paternal grandfather who had run afoul of the Inquisition in Toledo and subsequently relocated to Ávila. Locals in the latter town alleged that the Toledo-born children of this man were “conversos” descended patrilineally from Jews.54 On that basis, many scholars have affirmed that Santa Teresa was of (agnate) Jewish descent.55 The problem with this assessment goes beyond the “indivisible Jewishness” problem, namely the cognitive error that one quarter of Teresa’s ancestry determined her true essence. What is also key is that these genealogical inquiries were dependent on witnesses, reputation, and memory, rather than the kind of evidence that would historically verify unambiguous belonging in a publicly professing Jewish community, such as an old circumcision book or documentation of a Hebrew name, preserved from the era prior to mass Jewish conversion to Christianity.

The flimsiness on which allegations of converso status were based (and, in turn, some scholars’ assumption that allegations of converso lineage denoted Jewish ancestry) become ever more problematic in the context of the Atlantic world. Demographic complexity was magnified in the Americas, owing to the large presence of multiple indigenous and forcibly transported African populations. By overlooking these groups, studies that interrogate lingering crypto-Jewish praxis or identity—to the exclusion of other spiritual legacies in the Americas—implicitly downplay Indian and African cultures as ephemeral. Notably, this approach is entirely out of touch with the scholarly debate, now three quarters of a century old, on African survivals in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, and a more recent, parallel discussion on indigenous endurance in the Caribbean.56 In short, implicit assumptions about “indivisible Jewishness” and “indestructible Jewishness” ignore the fundamental processes characteristic of the Atlantic world, at whose heart lies the intensive interaction of people originating from four different continents. In such an interlinked environment, the conviction that a particular practice was the exclusive domain of one group is logically unsustainable.

Recent historians working within an Atlantic framework understand this point well. As María Elena Martínez has demonstrated for colonial Mexico, the results of ancestral investigations did not necessarily denote particular ethnoreligious origins, which were based largely on reputation, memory, and negotiation. Disagreements on whether officials should rely more on oral testimonies of reputation or written records, and how far back they should search into family trees, remained unresolved through the centuries.57 Martínez’s analysis shows that when a person’s ancestry was researched, the real discussion was not about actual origins, but rather access to a particular status or privilege. Not surprisingly, the motivation undergirding genealogical research also stimulated a burgeoning practice of falsifying or purchasing family trees, purity of blood certificates, and copies of baptismal and marriage records.58 These “genealogical fictions,” as Martínez characterizes them, were magnified in the Iberian Americas, but first emerged and continued on the peninsula. This is not to say that examiners of the heritage of inquisitorial defendants and nobility candidates in the Iberian Peninsula and abroad were uninterested in actual Jewish (or any other) lineage, but rather that the process of inquest was shaped by many other concerns.

Tamar Herzog’s research on Iberian and Iberian American citizenship, another implicitly Atlantic project, can also deepen our understanding of so-called New Christians. In Defining Nations, an analysis of early modern citizenship in the Iberian Peninsula and its American possessions, Herzog fixes precisely on the gap between theory and practice.59 She argues that the process of obtaining citizenship was focused less on legislation and more on the local reputation and behavior of foreign individuals and families and their degree of integration into a local community. Inspired by Herzog’s insights, we might go a step further and posit that inquisitorial and municipal investigations into allegedly Jewish lineage in both the Iberian metropole and its American colonies acted as a kind of citizenship qualification assessment, dependent not on (allegedly) verifiable Jewish ancestry alone, but more on “performance, reputation, local relations,” and “interests at stake,” and principally motivated not by the presence of actual Jewish lineage, but rather by whether or not the individual in question was deemed meritorious of privileges or, contrarily, deserving of punitive legal disabilities or taxation. The analyses of María Elena Martínez and Tamar Herzog offer compelling alternatives to a century-old historiographical paradigm that revolves around the assumption that verifiable Jewish ancestry, belief, or practices were the only matters at stake.60

In much professional writing on conversos, the guiding research question concerning the tenacity of cryptic Judaism has not fundamentally departed from the nationalist-idealist Jewish scholarship initiated by formative scholars like Cecil Roth and Yitzhak Baer who, beginning in the 1930s, imagined an indestructible Judaism and indivisible Jewishness. An Atlantic history approach proposes a more realistic understanding of this past, one that places persons of alleged or verified Jewish ancestry on the same plane as the rest of the population. If we have dwelled inordinately on the first century of Atlantic Jewish history, that is a reflection of the deep cognitive work that needs to be carried out for this foundational period. Similar types of foundational turns in thinking about the Atlantic Jewish past are warranted for later centuries as well. Collectively, the essays herein collated suggest some promising new directions.

Atlantic Jewish history is a practice, not a vision or recipe. It will write itself as increasing numbers of historians begin to embrace its methodology, which demands new, multilingual archival work, consideration of diachronic (continuous) sources, attention to an interconnected quadricontinental region, and the decentering of Jewishness. The essays herein gathered undertake to model participation in that historiographical practice, rather than to showcase sea-changing research. Moreover, Atlantic Jewish history seeks not to replace the national model with a regional one, nor disqualify local studies. But this new subfield of Atlantic history does aspire to conceive of the American Jewish past as part of a tightly interconnected region of four continents and to reorient the field away from the modern era, modern eastern European Ashkenazim, and the themes of survival and assimilation.

While previous American Jewish historians strove to demonstrate the contributions of Jews to what would become the United States, the contemporary field rejects that goal as apologetic, and instead strives to explore the “uniqueness” or “impact” of Jews and their communities. The main goal of Jewish history writ large and the Judaic studies archival collections that inform much of the writing on the Jewish past is by definition to illuminate the history of a specific ethnoreligious group.61 By contrast, Atlantic Jewish history takes for granted that certain aspects of Jewish lives and institutional life (such as the use of Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic and legal status as non-Christian) are distinctive. But that distinctiveness is not the end goal of historical inquiry about the Jewish past.

Recent calls by scholars to provisionally abandon a Jewish frame suggest that the field of Jewish history is ripe for such a paradigm shift. Anne Oravetz Albert urges scholars to understand New Christians who transitioned to public Judaism in Amsterdam as a variety of converts, rather than as “returnees” to Judaism. By examining their experience as conversion rather than return (and hence as “exceptional, problematic, and even miraculous”), Albert proposes that their embrace of public Judaism “can be subjected to analysis along the lines of gendered, legal, and political hegemony; of syncretism, acculturation, and colonization; and of determinative social and psychological factors . . . as one example of a wider phenomenon.”62

Even more provocatively, in an essay titled “Jewish History beyond the Jewish People,” Lila Corwin Berman pinpoints the first act of Jewish historiography—the identification of something or someone as Jewish—as the field’s very problem. Instead of posing a “foundational question,” Berman explains, the first act of the Jewish historian is to categorize their subject matter as Jewish, deploying an “ahistorical foundation for historical questions.”63 This act of categorization at the outset overlooks Jews as moving targets of intersectionality, who might alternately be approached—to cite examples meaningful to an Atlantic context—as among the general population of indigent migrants, colonial entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, merchants, slave traders, slaves, or women subject to sexual violence. Atlantic Jewish history is driven by the motivation to foreground entanglement, placing Jews on the same plane as other historical actors, as a means to shed light on broader society.