Book Reviews: The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World

• Published in: AJS review 2013, Vol.37 (2), p.411
• Main Author: Schorsch, Jonathan
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age of Enlightenment; Christianity; Christians; Diaspora; Jewish life & ethics; Jewish people; Judaism; Religion
• ISSN: 0364-0094; 1475-4541
• DOI: 10.1017/S0364009413000408

Hoping to correct scholarly misimpressions, the authors, specialists in the early modern Portuguese empire and West Africa, argue that (1) Sephardic Jews, through the diasporas that conversionary and Inquisitional oppression forced them to establish, helped create the Portuguese Atlantic world; (2) the Jews and New Christians of the West African communities under discussion traded mainly in non-human goods, such as ivory, hides, weapons, and iron; (3) these Jewish and New Christian merchants and settlers converted and married locals, influenced local Africans, and helped forge a distinctive, in some ways syncretic religious life; and (4) the broader cultural syncretism brought about by the European presence in West Africa resulted at least in part from Sephardic patterns of social and commercial behavior that reflected a flexible identity generated by the needs of survival. Some of the Jewish merchants pressed local Muslim rulers to allow them rights to trade and reside in their territories with arguments about the similarities between Judaism, Islam, and African traditions: all, unlike Christianity, entailed ritual law. The authors assert that Sephardic Jews with experience in Senegambia "brought aspects of Luso-African identity construction with them back to Amsterdam" (57) and offer the plausible suggestion that some of the original trader-settlers were the mulatto offspring of conversos / Sephardic Jews and African women in Portugal, returning to a place where their maternal family connections provided them socio-economic advantage. (The authors rightly correct some omissions and misconceptions from my book, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World.) As with Aviva Ben-Ur's essay on Surinamese Afro-Jewish women on which they rely, however, Mark and Horta disappointingly seem to dismiss the exclusionary reaction to non-whites and/or former slaves of Jews in Amsterdam, Suriname and Curaçao, as if it were not part of the very history they depict.