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Occasionally one comes across a book, which is unexpected, delights and inspires. Surinam, known as the 'Jewish Savannah', where a vibrant Jewish community was granted full and equal rights two hundred years before the Jews of other communities in the region. St Eustatius, where the economically successful Jewish community was plundered during the British occupation in 1781. Curacao, named the 'Mother of Jewish communities in the New World', where a prosperous Jewish community comprised nearly half of Curacao's non-slave population and was the center of Jewish life in the region. For all their economic and local political power, the Jews were little more than pawns in the 200-year struggle f...
Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.
The appearance of religious toleration combined with the intensification of the search for theological truth led to a unique phenomenon in early modern Europe: Jewish Christians and Christian Jews. These essays will demonstrate that the cross-fertilization of these two religions, which for so long had a tradition of hostility towards each other, not only affected developments within the two groups but in many ways foreshadowed the emergence of the Enlightenment and the evolution of modern religious freedom.
Colonial Brazil provides a continuous history of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil from the beginnings of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
This book studies the rich repository of Latin American Jewish literature, exploring the issues of vanishing traditions along with the subject of assimilation and acculturation. It places in sharp relief the Jewish contribution to the Latin American literary boom. An important aspect of this study is an examination of the contributions of women authors to this field. It studies Jewish life in communities that are little known in either the Jewish or non-Jewish world, worlds unique within the diaspora experience. The book contains critical essays by internationally renowned scholars, along with in-depth interviews with major writers. Contributors include Regina Igel, Florinda Goldberg, Robert DiAntonio, Leonardo Senkman, Naomi Lindstrom, David Foster, Edna Aizenberg, Nora Glickman, Lois Bara, Judith Morganroth Schneider, Murray Baumgarten, Flor Schiminovich, Sandra Cypess, Edward Friedman, Ilan Stavans, Jacobo Sefarmi, and Mario A. Rojas.
An in-depth look at the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica and their connections to broader European and Atlantic trade networks Based on last wills and testaments composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815, this book explores the social and familial experiences of one of the most critical yet understudied nodes of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Stanley Mirvis examines how Jamaica’s Jews put down roots as traders, planters, pen keepers, physicians, fishermen, and metalworkers, and reveals how their presence shaped the colony as much as settlement in the tropical West Indies transformed the lives of the island’s Jews.
A lively collection of sixteen essays on the many ways American Jews have imagined and constructed communities
This wide-ranging narrative explores the role that Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews played in settling and building the Atlantic world between 1500 and 1800. Through the interwoven themes of markets, politics, religion, culture, and identity, the essays here demonstrate that the world of Atlantic Jewry, most often typified by Port Jews involved in mercantile pursuits, was more complex than commonly depicted. The first section discusses the diaspora in relation to maritime systems, commerce, and culture on the Atlantic and includes an overview of Jewish history on both sides of the ocean. The second section provides an in-depth look at Jewish mercantilism, from settlements in Dutch America to...
The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employe...
History is an important, dangerous, and fragile subject. Historical thought can be censored in widely diverging political and historiographical contexts, as historians are well aware. Yet the problems of censorship, often thought to be obvious, are rarely studied. Filling a significant void, this guide supplies information on the censorship of historical thought and the fate of persecuted historians in over 130 countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and from 1945 to 2000. With each entry providing a chronological overview of cases and giving a full listing of sources, the book is the first systematic effort to overview the repression of historical thought. Aiming to encompass all countries i...