Jewish Diaspora
- LAST REVIEWED: 21 November 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 August 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0114
- LAST REVIEWED: 21 November 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 August 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0114
Introduction
Despite the existence of various academic works on Jews in or of various corners of the Atlantic, the study of Jews in the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlantic basin, consciously pursued as a subfield of research under the rubric of “Atlantic studies,” is still in its very early stages. Therefore, the boundaries of the subject of the present bibliography, a subject one may provisionally call the “Atlantic Jewish diaspora” and/or the “Jewish Atlantic,” are still vague. Unlike other fields and subfields, for instance, the “black Atlantic” and the “Iberian Atlantic,” this one does not have a name that specialists regularly employ or that would be readily recognizable to scholars outside of the small, relatively multidisciplinary subfield itself. The works listed below are mostly of two kinds: First, traditional studies of Jews and their diaspora, either focusing on or merely including Jews in the Atlantic basin. These works, several of which were published before the 1980s, have served to undergird works of the second kind. Many of these latter works have been published after the 1980s and are conscious responses to the emergence of Atlantic studies as a subfield and approach. Some works of this second type may thus be categorized as consciously “Atlanticist” in some way. The chronological focus of the literature is, in both cases, tilted heavily toward the early modern period. The concept of an “Atlantic Jewish diaspora,” such as it exists, owes its current momentum to at least three main factors: first, the development, especially since the 1990s, of the wider field of Atlantic studies, itself based on the concept of the Atlantic as a context of new and qualitatively (and quantitatively) unique exchanges and cultural formations. The second factor is the emergence of the field of Early Modern Jewish studies. This emergence, as David Ruderman has pointed out, was marked by the work of Jonathan Israel, whose research is of particular significance to Atlanticists. The third phenomenon is the seminal notion of the “Port Jew,” David Sorkin’s original designation of an early modern Jewish social type, usually a Sephardic or Italo-Jewish subject, whose economic, political, and social purviews were transoceanic, and thus, according to the concept’s proponents, typified a proto-modern—or at least nontraditional—and relatively cosmopolitan outlook favorable to acculturation.
General Overviews
There are as yet no comprehensive overviews of the subject of the “Jewish Atlantic” as such, though reliable regional surveys have been published. Comparative works are few. The list below brings together works that approach the Jewish Atlantic consciously as a discrete subject, or which have contributed to the definition of that subject in later work. Jonathan Israel’s work (Israel 1985, Israel 2009) consists of comprehensive and focused studies of the economic and political life of early modern Jews and Jewish-identified conversos. A foremost example of focused studies of this kind is Bernardini and Fiering 2001, which has the advantage of presenting articles by scholars grounded in Jewish history, as well as by those grounded in other fields. Nahon 1993 and Oliel-Grausz 1999 deepen the economic sociohistorical approach, fleshing out a conception of diaspora as a cultural network that transcended nation-states. Karp 2008, Ruderman 2010, and Sutcliffe 2009 complement this picture by introducing nuanced views of the symbolic and imaginary phenomena that this network generated.
Bernardini, Paolo, and Norman Fiering, eds. The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001.
Brings together traditional state-centered historiography and new Atlanticist approaches. The latter include the chapters by James Homer Williams, on the Jewish struggle for rights and opportunities in Brazil, New Netherlands, and New York; Ernst Pijning, on judeoconverso sugar cultivators and traders in the Portuguese Atlantic from 1450–1800; and Pieter Emmer, on “The Jewish Moment” in two systems of European expansion in the Atlantic, 1580–1650.
Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
A pioneering work that presents the history of European Jewry during the early modern period as a distinct and coherent whole and thus may be said to inaugurate early modern Jewish studies as a subfield. Israel ties demographic, cultural, and social change to macroeconomic trends affecting (among others) the Atlantic and Mediterranean basins. In particular, Israel charts the intensification and decline of Jewish participation in European societies and in their world system(s).
Israel, Jonathan I. “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypro-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1700. Edited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Focuses mainly on the ways in which cultural factors, governmental policies, and geopolitical and economic shifts of power, permitted the rise of two intertwined Atlantic networks in the 1600s, the Jewish and the converso, and caused their fall by the early 1800s.
Karp, Jonathan. The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
An intellectual history focusing on the West and the period 1630–1848. Proposes that imagining a specifically “Jewish” commerce served European writers and their audiences to abstract certain economic and related activities from the rest of economic life, thereby rendering these activities vehicles for the politically-safe expression of anxieties concerning commerce, economic modernity, and the prospects and consequences of Jewish emancipation.
Nahon, Gérard. Métropoles et Périphéries Sepharades d’Occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jerusalem. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1993.
While it is neither a single, continuous narrative overview, nor a work of “Atlantic studies,” this collection of articles explores the formation of communities and intercommunal relations among Jews from the 16th to the 18th centuries and hence affords (in the aggregate) a panoramic, arguably proto-Atlanticist, view of the early modern Jewish diaspora as it developed along key portions of the Atlantic and Mediterranean basins.
Oliel-Grausz, Evelyne. “Relations et reseaux intercommunitaires dans la diaspora sefarade d’occident au XVIIIe siècle.” PhD diss., University of Paris, 1999.
Like Nahon’s Métropoles et Périphéries, provides a combination of microscopic and panoramic views of intercommunal bonds and has the advantage of forming a single and quite comprehensive study. The author focuses especially on Sephardic (here including judeoconverso) networks in the West and on the institutional mechanisms and channels of cultural and material transmission that articulated these networks. The result is an ambitious but laudably holistic social-institutional history.
Ruderman, David. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
This first comprehensive cultural history of early modern Jews includes chapters and subchapters of interest to the study of Atlantic Jews and conversos. This is not a work of Atlantic studies, yet it does draw from that field for its discussion of Western Sephardim. Places trends that other scholars tend to associate with the Atlantic in the context of Jewish History.
Sutcliffe, Adam. “Jewish History in an Age of Mercantilism.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypro-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1700. Edited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Addresses the political and ideological underpinnings of studying conversos outside the historiographical framework of nation-states. Emphasizes that the elasticity of Jewish-converso trade networks makes “Jewish history” insufficient as a descriptive category. Presents conversos as a premodern trading nation whose identity was complex and whose viability declined as various conditions auguring modernity eroded the ethnic attachments of its members.
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Article
- Abolition of Slavery
- Abolitionism and Africa
- Africa and the Atlantic World
- African American Religions
- African Religion and Culture
- African Retailers and Small Artisans in the Atlantic World
- Age of Atlantic Revolutions, The
- Alexander von Humboldt and Transatlantic Studies
- America, Pre-Contact
- American Revolution, The
- Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery
- Argentina
- Army, British
- Arsenals
- Art and Artists
- Atlantic Biographies
- Atlantic Creoles
- Atlantic History and Hemispheric History
- Atlantic Migration
- Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries
- Atlantic Trade and the British Economy
- Atlantic Trade and the European Economy
- Bacon's Rebellion
- Baltic Sea
- Baptists
- Barbados in the Atlantic World
- Barbary States
- Benguela
- Black Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Bolívar, Simón
- Borderlands
- Brazil
- Britain and Empire, 1685-1730
- British Atlantic Architectures
- British Atlantic World
- Buenos Aires in the Atlantic World
- Cabato, Giovanni (John Cabot)
- Cannibalism
- Capitalism
- Captain John Smith
- Captivity
- Captivity in Africa
- Captivity in North America
- Caribbean, The
- Cartier, Jacques
- Castas
- Catholicism
- Cattle in the Atlantic World
- Central Europe and the Atlantic World
- Charleston
- Chartered Companies, British and Dutch
- Cherokee
- Childhood
- Chinese Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World
- Chocolate
- Church and Slavery
- Cities and Urbanization in Portuguese America
- Citizenship in the Atlantic World
- Class and Social Structure
- Climate
- Clothing
- Coastal/Coastwide Trade
- Cod in the Atlantic World
- Coffee
- Colonial Governance in Spanish America
- Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Colonization, Ideologies of
- Colonization of English America
- Communications in the Atlantic World
- Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- Confraternities
- Constitutions
- Continental America
- Cook, Captain James
- Cotton
- Credit and Debt
- Creek Indians in the Atlantic World, The
- Creolization
- Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World
- Crowds in the Atlantic World
- Cuba
- Currency
- Death in the Atlantic World
- Demography of the Atlantic World
- Diaspora, Jewish
- Diaspora, The Acadian
- Disease in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas
- Dreams and Dreaming
- Dutch Atlantic World
- Dutch Brazil
- Dutch Caribbean and Guianas, The
- Early Modern France
- Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Economy of British America, The
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Elites
- Emancipation
- Emotions
- Empire and State Formation
- Enlightenment, The
- Environment and the Natural World
- Ethnicity
- Europe and Africa
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Northern
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Western
- European, Javanese and African and Indentured Servitude in...
- Evangelicalism and Conversion
- Female Slave Owners
- Feminism
- First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil
- Fiscality
- Fiscal-Military State
- Food
- Forts, Fortresses, and Fortifications
- France and Empire
- France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean
- France and the British Isles from 1640 to 1789
- Free People of Color
- Free Ports in the Atlantic World
- French Army and the Atlantic World, The
- French Atlantic World
- French Emancipation
- French Revolution, The
- Gardens
- Gender in Iberian America
- Gender in North America
- Gender in the Atlantic World
- Gender in the Caribbean
- George Montagu Dunk, Second Earl of Halifax
- Georgia in the Atlantic World
- Germans in the Atlantic World
- Giovanni da Verrazzano, Explorer
- Glasgow
- Glorious Revolution
- Godparents and Godparenting
- Great Awakening
- Green Atlantic: the Irish in the Atlantic World
- Guianas, The
- Haitian Revolution, The
- Hanoverian Britain
- Havana in the Atlantic World
- Hinterlands of the Atlantic World
- Histories and Historiographies of the Atlantic World
- Honor
- Huguenots
- Hunger and Food Shortages
- Iberian Atlantic World, 1600-1800
- Iberian Empires, 1600-1800
- Iberian Inquisitions
- Idea of Atlantic History, The
- Impact of the French Revolution on the Caribbean, The
- Indentured Servitude
- Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World, Indian
- India, The Atlantic Ocean and
- Indigenous Knowledge
- Insurance
- Internal Slave Migrations in the Americas
- Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World
- Ireland and the Atlantic World
- Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)
- Islam and the Atlantic World
- Itinerant Traders, Peddlers, and Hawkers
- Jamaica in the Atlantic World
- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jesuits
- Jews and Blacks
- Labor Systems
- Land and Propert in the Atlantic World
- Language, State, and Empire
- Languages, Caribbean Creole
- Latin American Independence
- Law and Slavery
- Legal Culture
- Leisure in the British Atlantic World
- Letters and Letter Writing
- Lima
- Literature and Culture
- Literature of the British Caribbean
- Literature, Slavery and Colonization
- Liverpool in The Atlantic World 1500-1833
- Louverture, Toussaint
- Loyalism
- Lutherans
- Mahogany
- Manumission
- Maps in the Atlantic World
- Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Markets in the Atlantic World
- Maroons and Marronage
- Marriage and Family in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture of Slavery in the British Atlantic
- Medicine in the Atlantic World
- Mennonites
- Mental Disorder in the Atlantic World
- Mercantilism
- Merchants in the Atlantic World
- Merchants' Networks
- Mestizos
- Mexico
- Migrations and Diasporas
- Minas Gerais
- Miners
- Mining, Gold, and Silver
- Missionaries
- Missionaries, Native American
- Money and Banking in the Atlantic Economy
- Monroe, James
- Moravians
- Morris, Gouverneur
- Music and Music Making
- Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World
- Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History
- Nation, Nationhood, and Nationalism
- Native American Histories in North America
- Native American Networks
- Native American Religions
- Native Americans and Africans
- Native Americans and the American Revolution
- Native Americans and the Atlantic World
- Native Americans in Cities
- Native Americans in Europe
- Native North American Women
- Native Peoples of Brazil
- Natural History
- Networks for Migrations and Mobility
- Networks of Science and Scientists
- New England in the Atlantic World
- New France and Louisiana
- New York City
- News
- Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
- Nineteenth-Century France
- North Africa and the Atlantic World
- Northern New Spain
- Novel in the Age of Revolution, The
- Oceanic History
- Oceans
- Pacific, The
- Paine, Thomas
- Papacy and the Atlantic World
- Paris
- People of African Descent in Early Modern Europe
- Peru
- Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World
- Philadelphia
- Philanthropy
- Piracy
- Plantations in the Atlantic World
- Plants
- Political Participation in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic...
- Polygamy and Bigamy
- Port Cities, British
- Port Cities, British American
- Port Cities, French
- Port Cities, French American
- Port Cities, Iberian
- Ports, African
- Portugal and Brazile in the Age of Revolutions
- Portugal, Early Modern
- Portuguese Atlantic World
- Poverty in the Early Modern English Atlantic
- Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages
- Pregnancy and Reproduction
- Print Culture in the British Atlantic
- Proprietary Colonies
- Protestantism
- Puritanism
- Quakers
- Quebec and the Atlantic World, 1760–1867
- Quilombos
- Race and Racism
- Race, The Idea of
- Reconstruction, Democracy, and United States Imperialism
- Red Atlantic
- Refugees, Saint-Domingue
- Religion
- Religion and Colonization
- Religion in the British Civil Wars
- Religious Border-Crossing
- Religious Networks
- Representations of Slavery
- Republicanism
- Rice in the Atlantic World
- Rio de Janeiro
- Rum
- Rumor
- Russia and North America
- Sailors
- Saint Domingue
- Saint-Louis, Senegal
- Salvador da Bahia
- Scandinavian Chartered Companies
- Science, History of
- Scotland and the Atlantic World
- Second-Hand Trade
- Settlement and Region in British America, 1607-1763
- Seven Years' War, The
- Seville
- Sex and Sexuality in the Atlantic World
- Shakers
- Shakespeare and the Atlantic World
- Ships and Shipping
- Signares
- Silk
- Slave Codes
- Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic
- Slave Owners In The British Atlantic
- Slave Rebellions
- Slave Resistance in the Atlantic World
- Slave Trade and Natural Science, The
- Slave Trade, The Atlantic
- Slavery and Empire
- Slavery and Fear
- Slavery and Gender
- Slavery and the Family
- Slavery, Atlantic
- Slavery, Health, and Medicine
- Slavery in Africa
- Slavery in Brazil
- Slavery in British America
- Slavery in British and American Literature
- Slavery in Danish America
- Slavery in Dutch America and the West Indies
- Slavery in New England
- Slavery in North America, The Growth and Decline of
- Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa
- Slavery in the French Atlantic World
- Slavery, Native American
- Slavery, Public Memory and Heritage of
- Slavery, The Origins of
- Slavery, Urban
- Smuggling
- São Paulo
- Sociability in the British Atlantic
- Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts...
- Soldiers
- South Atlantic
- South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos South Atlantic Creole A...
- South Carolina
- Sovereignty and the Law
- Spain, Early Modern
- Spanish America After Independence, 1825-1900
- Spanish American Port Cities
- Spanish Colonization to 1650
- Subjecthood in the Atlantic World
- Sugar in the Atlantic World
- Technology, Inventing, and Patenting
- Textiles in the Atlantic World
- Texts, Printing, and the Book
- The American West
- The French Lesser Antilles
- The Fur Trade
- Theater
- Time(scapes) in the Atlantic World
- Tobacco
- Toleration in the Atlantic World
- Transatlantic Political Economy
- Tudor and Stuart Britain in the Wider World, 1485-1685
- Universities
- USA and Empire in the 19th Century
- Venezuela and the Atlantic World
- Violence
- Visual Art and Representation
- War and Trade
- War of 1812
- War of the Spanish Succession
- Warfare
- Warfare in Spanish America
- Warfare in 17th-Century North America
- Warfare, Medicine, and Disease in the Atlantic World
- Weavers
- West Indian Economic Decline
- Whitefield, George
- Whiteness in the Atlantic World
- Wine
- Witchcraft in the Atlantic World
- Women and the Law
- Women Prophets