Swimming the Christian Atlantic (2 vols)
Swimming the Christian Atlantic (2 vols)

Author: Jonathan Schorsch

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009-09-30

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 9047442458

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Scholarship on the formation of the Atlantic world through contributions from Europe, Africa and the Americas has grown in recent decades. The results offer new understandings of the transformations in ethnic and religious identity faced by peoples from all the surrounding continents. Long used by scholars of Jewish studies, records from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions have become an important source for historians of Africans and Amerindians in the Iberian colonial orbit. Using these and other materials, this book explores race, religion and politics among three newly and incompletely Christianized groups in the seventeenth century: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians. This fresh cross-cultural analysis brings these differing trajectories into dialogue.

The Sephardic Atlantic
The Sephardic Atlantic

Author: Sina Rauschenbach

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 3319991965

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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.

Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century
Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century

Author: Yda Schreuder

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-23

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 3319970615

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This book surveys the role of Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants in the westward expansion of sugar production and trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. It offers an historical-geographic perspective, linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the “Portuguese Nation,” conducting trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil. Examining the “Myth of the Dutch,” the “Sephardic Moment,” and the impact of the British Navigation Acts, Yda Schreuder focuses attention on Barbados and Jamaica and demonstrates how Amsterdam remained Europe’s primary sugar refining center through most of the seventeenth century and how Sephardic merchants played a significant role in sustaining the sugar trade.

Judaism for Christians
Judaism for Christians

Author: Sina Rauschenbach

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-10-16

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1498572979

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Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) was one of the best-known rabbis in early modern Europe. In the course of his life he became an important Jewish interlocutor for Christian scholars interested in Hebrew studies and negotiated with Oliver Cromwell and Parliament the return of the Jews to England. Born to a family of former conversos, Menasseh was versed in Christian theology and astutely used this knowledge to adapt the content and tone of his publications to the interests and needs of his Christian readers. Judaism for Christians: Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) is the first extensive study to systematically focus on key titles in Menasseh’s Latin works and discuss the success and failure of his strategies of translation in the larger context of early modern Christian Hebraism. Rauschenbach also examines the mistranslation of his books by Christian scholars, who were not yet ready to share Menasseh’s vision of an Abrahamic theology and of a republic of letters whose members were not divided by denomination. Ultimately, Menasseh’s plans to use Jewish knowledge as an entrée billet for Jews into Christian societies proved to be illusory, as Christian readers understood him instead as a Jewish witness for “Christian truths.” Menasseh’s Jewish coreligionists disapproved of what they perceived to be his dangerous involvement in Christian debates, providing non-Jews with delicate information. It was only a century after his death that Menasseh became a model for new generations of Jewish scholars.

Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities
Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities

Author: Yosef Kaplan

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-02-11

Total Pages: 654

ISBN-13: 9004392483

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From the sixteenth century on, hundreds of Portuguese New Christians began to flow to Venice and Livorno in Italy, and to Amsterdam and Hamburg in northwest Europe. In those cities and later in London, Bordeaux, and Bayonne as well, Iberian conversos established their own Jewish communities, openly adhering to Judaism. Despite the features these communities shared with other confessional groups in exile, what set them apart was very significant. In contrast to other European confessional communities, whose religious affiliation was uninterrupted, the Western Sephardic Jews came to Judaism after a separation of generations from the religion of their ancestors. In this edited volume, several experts in the field detail the religious and cultural changes that occurred in the Early Modern Western Sephardic communities. "Highly recommended for all academic and Jewish libraries." - David B Levy, Touro College, NYC, in: Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews 1.2 (2019)

Comparative and Global Framing of Enslavement
Comparative and Global Framing of Enslavement

Author: Stephan Conermann

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-09-04

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 3111296911

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The study of enslavement has become urgent over the last two decades. Social scientists, legal scholars, human rights activists, and historians, who study forms of enslavement in both modern and historical societies, have sought - and often achieved - common conceptual grounds, thus forging a new perspective that comprises historical and contemporary forms of slavery. What could certainly be termed a turn in the study of slavery has also intensified awareness of enslavement as a global phenomenon, inviting a comparative, trans-regional approach across time-space divides. Though different aspects of enslavement in different societies and eras are discussed, each of the volume's three parts contributes to, and has benefitted from, a global perspective of enslavement. The chapters in Part One propose to structure the global examination of the theoretical, ideological, and methodological aspects of the "global," "local," and "glocal." Part Two, "Regional and Trans-regional Perspectives of the Global," presents, through analyses of historical case studies, the link between connectivity and mobility as a fundamental aspect of the globalization of enslavement. Finally, Part Three deals with personal points of view regarding the global, local, and glocal. Grosso modo, the contributors do not only present their case studies, but attempt to demonstrate what insights and added-value explanations they gain from positioning their work vis-à-vis a broader "big picture."

African American Religions, 1500–2000
African American Religions, 1500–2000

Author: Sylvester A. Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-08-06

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0521198534

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A rich account of the long history of Black religion from the dawn of Western colonialism to the rise of the national security paradigm.

Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese
Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese

Author: Ruth Fine

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-10-24

Total Pages: 686

ISBN-13: 3110563797

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This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.

Jewish Books and their Readers
Jewish Books and their Readers

Author: Scott Mandelbrote

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-23

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9004318151

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Jewish Books and their Readers discusses the transformative effect of the circulation and readership of sacred and secular texts written by Jews on Christian as well as Jewish readers in early modern Europe. Its twelve essays challenge traditional paradigms of Christian Hebraism and undermine simplistic visions of the unchanging nature of Jewish cultural life.They ask what constituted a ‘Jewish’ book: how it was presented, disseminated, and understood within both Jewish and Christian environments (and how its meanings were contested), and what effect such understanding had on contemporary views of Jews and their intellectual heritage. They demonstrate how the involvement of Christians in the production and dissemination of Jewish books played a role in the shaping of the intellectual life of Jews and Christians. Contributors are: Michela Andreatta, Andrew Berns, Theodor Dunkelgrün, Federica Francesconi, Anthony Grafton Alessandro Guetta, William Horbury, Yosef Kaplan, Scott Mandelbrote, Piet van Boxel, Joanna Weinberg Benjamin Williams.

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

Author: Erin Kathleen Rowe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-12-12

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1108421210

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This is the untold story of how black saints - and the slaves who venerated them - transformed the early modern church. It speaks to race, the Atlantic slave trade, and global Christianity, and provides new ways of thinking about blackness, holiness, and cultural authority.