Description
The most recent Pew Research Center survey, already nearly five years old, asserts that a little over 8% of American Jews would describe themselves as “Jews of Color”. This study occasioned controversy within the Jewish community, as doubts were cast upon its methodologies and, more generally, about what this small but growing minority meant for American Judaism.Yet, as this talk will illustrate, discussions of race, belonging, and who is – or isn’t – Jewish are nothing new, especially in the Americas. One early 17th century description of the nascent “New” Jewish community in Amsterdam noted that “Almost all of their servants are slaves and Moors”. What to do with these ‘servants’ or slaves in life and death was a topic of secular law, as documented in notarial acts. Not surprisingly, it was also a topic of religious debate, as well. Regulations and communal minutes in the “Western” Sephardi diaspora show that they grappled with issues of race and belonging almost from the inception of these communities.
These discussions became even more pronounced and urgent within the context of European colonial expansion in the Americas. In Curacao, Surinam, Jamaica, and Barbados, where around 1/3rd to a half of the white population were Jewish by the mid-18th century, questions of race went hand-in-hand with the development of the colonies built with the labor of enslaved black Africans. In Suriname, an estimated 10% of Jews in the latter part of the18th century were of African descent.
This is far more than an interesting historical footnote. Jews became “white” in the colonial contexts in which they found themselves. The discussions around the intersection of race and belonging, of who was a Jew, had far reaching implications for Jewish self-fashioning in the Americas. And not just in the Americas. Jewish involvement in colonialism also influenced Jewish emancipation and political participation in Europe, an influence that has been obscured by a focus on (Ashkenazi) European Jewish histories. Thus, this talk will also “de-center” Europe in the main currents driving modern Jewish history
| Period | 31 Mar 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Irgoen Olei Holland, Israel |
| Degree of Recognition | International |