sephardic business early modern style review

T H E J E W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Summer 2010) 483–503

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Sephardic Business: Early ModernAtlantic Style

J O N AT H A N S C H O R S C H

DAVIKEN STUDNICKI-GIZBERT. A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’sAtlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x � 242.

RICHARD L. KAGAN AND PHILIP D. MORGAN, EDS. Atlantic Diasporas: Jews,Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Baltimore,Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii � 307.

FRANCESCA TRIVELLATO. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Dias-pora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii � 470.

JACKIE RANSTON. Belisario: Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of aJamaican Artist Jamaica Old Masters Series 2. Kingston, Jamaica: MillsPress, 2008. Pp. xix � 409.

TIM BARRINGER, GILLIAN FORRESTER, AND BARBARO MARTINEZ-RUIZ,EDS. Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds.New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art/Yale University Press,2007). Pp. xix � 592.

JOSETTE CAPRILES GOLDISH. Once Jews: Stories of Caribbean Sephardim.Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009. Pp. xv � 334.

EDWARD KRITZLER. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation ofSwashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest forTreasure, Religious Freedom—and Revenge. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Pp.xi � 324.

It may be difficult for nonspecialists to appreciate the success of earlymodern Spanish and Portuguese Jews and conversos in the Atlanticworld region. Some 20,000 exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews and a

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2010)Copyright � 2010 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.All rights reserved.

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far greater number of conversos still in Catholic territories built up acommercial empire so triumphant that it supported communal life, some-times lavishly, in such far-flung locations as Hamburg, London, Kingston,and Recife. Their transnational commercial success, while it lasted, com-prises a doubly remarkable achievement, given, as Francesca Trivellatoof Yale reminds us, that no country ‘‘would have chartered an exclusivelySephardic commercial company, nor could Sephardic merchants raiseconsiderable capital among non-Jews to set up large-scale operations’’(Familiarity of Strangers, p. 68). Sephardic Amsterdam, built up fromnothing after 1595, like all of these communities, mostly by conversoswho became New Jews (Yosef Kaplan’s phrase), was an admired andrenowned ‘‘mother city’’ within but a few decades. On the ocean’s farside, until roughly 1800, the Sephardic communities of Suriname andCuracao outshone every other Jewish collective in the Western hemi-sphere. (Interaction of these New Jews with ‘‘old’’ Sephardim remainsa complex question.) Curacao’s Mikve Israel new synagogue building,inaugurated in 1732, could house a congregation of 400 men and 200women; so well off was the community that a membership contribution(finta) was introduced only in 1810. New Jews greatly helped revivify, ifnot reinvent in exile, the unique style of Spanish and Portuguese Juda-ism. Sephardic men in the post-Columbus Americas hunted manatees offthe coast of the Guianas, founded colonial settlements, captained hun-dreds of ships (many with Jewish names), ran sugar and coffee planta-tions, fought in local militias before such permission was granted inEurope, and constructed western outposts of Judaism which attractedgraduating rabbis from Amsterdam’s Ets Haim yeshiva well into the nine-teenth century. Something both exotic yet familiar exudes from the his-tory of these ‘‘clean-shaven Jews,’’ as they were referred to sometimes byAshkenazim. In nearly all of their homelands, Sephardim comprised both‘‘agents and victims of empire,’’ in Jonathan Israel’s already classic for-mulation.

The rich and sophisticated new works on western Sephardim and con-versos here reviewed indicate that the study of conversos/Sephardim hasfinally transcended its tendency to exoticize and romanticize its object.(This is less true of Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, to which Iwill return below.) These books also reflect the degree to which Jewishstudies has been able to escape its provincialism and frequent fixationon identity politics, becoming more of a full participant in contemporaryacademic currents. The quincentennial of 1492 may have produced sev-eral new treatments of Sephardic matters and instigated further anddeeper investigation, but the recent works under discussion reflect a

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whole new level of interest and analysis, both quantitatively and qualita-tively.1 Though most eschew an overarching view or totalizing analysis,these works, by both junior and senior scholars, come across as matureand sober, but also creative, intrepid, and unflinching. Rarely does theappearance of a slew of new books make one feel so excited. Before offer-ing a broader summation, I will briefly review each work, roughly in theorder of the periods they cover.

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert has produced a cohesive, thorough, andcompelling survey of the Portuguese communities of port cities aroundthe colonial Atlantic, both Catholic and Jewish (and in-between). Com-bining wonderfully straightforward writing with sophisticated analysis,this book makes a strong synthetic and original contribution. A Nationupon the Ocean Sea focuses on the mercantile activity that gave the Portu-guese nearly monopolic dominance in multiple segments of trade both inthe Spanish empire and between it and other colonial powers, some ofwhom were Spain’s enemies. The panoply of raw materials and manufac-tured goods Portuguese traders distributed was such that in the earlyseventeenth century they held no fewer than forty-three monopolies andtax collection assignments sanctioned by Iberian rulers. At times, Portu-guese financiers bankrolled much of the Spanish empire. A good portionof their trade entailed illicit commerce, and Studnicki-Gizbert finds thatSpanish accusations—that ‘‘the Portuguese,’’ while central to the empire’seconomy, simultaneously were ruining it—were not baseless. Inevitably,

1. I would be remiss not to mention additional recent studies: Jonathan I.Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires(1540–1740) (Leiden, 2002); Yosef Kaplan, Mi-Notzrim H. adashim le-YehudimH. adashim (Jerusalem, 2003); David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identi-ties in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia, 2004); Miriam Bod-ian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World(Bloomington, Ind., 2007); the essays in Jewish Social Studies 15.1 (2008), a specialissue devoted to Sephardic identities; Matt Goldish, Jewish Questions: Responsa onSephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, N.J., 2008), covering mostlyeastern Mediterranean Sephardim; the prolific work by relative newcomer TobiasGreen (England) on West Africa and relative unknown Jose Alberto Rodriguesda Silva Tavim (Portugal) on Morocco and India; Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jewsin America: A Diasporic History (New York, 2009), which time prevented me fromincluding here. Also worthwhile is David Graizbord, ‘‘Between Ethnicity, Com-merce, Religion, and ‘Race’: The Elusive Definition of an Early Modern ‘JewishAtlantic,’ ’’ in Theorizing the Iberian Atlantic, ed. H. Braun (Leiden, forthcoming);I thank the author for sharing an early draft with me. A parallel growth inSephardic memory work has also been transpiring recently; see Jonathan Schor-sch, ‘‘Disappearing Origins: Sephardic Autobiography Today,’’ Prooftexts 27.1(2007): 82–150.

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then, politics constitutes an important aspect of the author’s account.Religion, or, really, theopolitics, enters into the picture mostly in its finalchapter, which traces the unraveling of the Portuguese network causedby the decline of the Spanish empire’s fortunes, the Portuguese rebellionagainst Spanish rule, and the inquisitional prosecutions that sometimesfatally disrupted the Sephardic/converso network.

Studnicki-Gizbert’s work both portrays and explains the decentralizedyet coordinated, horizontal as well as vertical network of Portuguese mer-chants, providing a pioneering quantitative analysis of various aspects ofPortuguese trans-Atlantic trade. He conveys the significant novelty ofseventeenth-century Portuguese writings about political economy, whichturned commercial experience into reformist and at times radical propos-als, calling for a neutral sphere free of state and religious intrusion,including, in some cases, the loosening or rescinding of purity of bloodstatutes and permission for open trade between Jews and Christians.Studnicki-Gizbert limns the oft-cited ostentation of New Christian mer-chants, usually seen by critics as a mask for faking Catholic devotion,rather as patrons’ means of funneling monies back into the family andcommunity, as a mark of success that advertises reliability to clients, andas a proud sign of having transcended humble origins. Excess here—inspending, in finery, in philanthropy—stemmed not from crypto-Jewish-ness but from being a Portuguese of non-noble origin in a Spanish worldobsessed with nobility.

Gathering the papers from a 2005 colloquium and adding some newentries to round things out, the editors of Atlantic Diasporas offer a glimpseof several disciplines coming together in these ten chapters, revisitingand revising our understanding of the place of Sephardic (Spanish andPortuguese) Jews and New Christians in the formation of the Atlanticworld. Although they were victims of exclusion and discrimination, theynonetheless played an active role in European overseas expansion andearly colonialism, albeit in relatively small numbers. Atlantic Diasporasopens with a swift but thought-provoking overview by Jonathan Israelof the converso/Sephardic transoceanic trade networks and their shiftingpolitical contexts. Adam Sutcliffe then offers a matching sweep of theSephardic Atlantic, focusing more on cultural factors. The book thendivides into two main sections: one on mercantilism, the other on identityand religion.

The first section begins with Wim Klooster’s survey of several mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Sephardic merchants and their efforts atcolonial settlement building in various territories in the Americas. Mosthad already lived in the short-lived Jewish haven of Dutch Brazil (1630–


54). They won grants to create new communities in difficult and undevel-oped territories, found settlers in Europe (in some cases non-Jews),provisioned supplies, including slaves, and set sail. Though the majorityof these settlements failed due to hardship or opposition by colonialauthorities (who did not always agree with policies set by leaders over-seas), they led to the Sephardic communities of Curacao and Suriname.

Holly Snyder treats merchants, mostly Sephardic, operating within theEnglish colonial orbit, tracing their efforts to negotiate state regulation,which saw Jews as at best resident aliens, and to gain commercial privi-leges or rights of residence. Moving from the relatively anarchic seven-teenth century to the more ordered eighteenth century, Jewish merchantscontinued to face legal and attitudinal discrimination and hence feltgreater pressure than their Christian competitors to cultivate a strong andloyal customer base. Those who thrived in consumer retail trade, such asAaron Lopez of Newport, knew how to comport themselves with thenecessary social graces. They sold their customers the gentility andrespectability they sought and that to some degree could now be had forpurchase through goods like stylish textiles, Portuguese wine, tea, snuff,or spermaceti candles.

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert’s essay offers a comparative survey ofSephardic/converso trading networks of the Portuguese Nation, theNacao, alongside other Atlantic diasporic trading networks, such as thoseof the Huguenots, Basques, and Genoese. This sophisticated syntheticportrait shows that most of the particularities attributed to Jewish (or‘‘Jewish’’) commercial culture actually characterize all such tradingnetworks. Endogamy, intense family orientation, clannishness, lawstretching or breaking—often laid at the feet of Judaism or Jewishness—actually derived from structural determinants. Studnicki-Gizbert showsus once again how the remarkable Sephardic/converso trading diasporafeatured a tight overlap between social and economic relations in twosenses: people traded with family foremost, while cultural and religioushabits aided and paralleled commercial needs and structures.

In a similar manner, Francesca Trivellato challenges some of the stere-otyping and essentializations of Sephardic/converso trading networks.She argues against the notion that trading with relatives necessarilyengendered trust and cooperation (or entailed a ‘‘progressive’’ trait), call-ing attention to the internal divisions within Sephardic/converso tradingdiaspora, such as those that revolved around class, ethnicity, gender, orreligion. Among other problems, family businesses and networks oftencollapsed or descended into internal squabbling. Trivellato utilizes herexpertise regarding the Mediterranean commerce of Livornese Sephar-

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dim in probing for detailed but more nuanced ways of understanding thetricks of the Sephardic/converso trade.

The volume’s second main section covers identity and religion. BrunoFeitler takes us to northeast Brazil, conquered by the Dutch for nearlythree decades, a unique land where Portuguese New Christians livedunder Calvinists who tolerated open Judaism. With rich examples Feitleroutlines the complicated religious life of the colonists, able to explore andexperiment with an ‘‘enemy’’ faith, pressured to choose between faiths,sometimes uncertain how, with many ultimately choosing on the basis of‘‘sentimental bonds that tied them to local community groups and mate-rial concerns in lieu of racial identity and religious convictions’’ (p. 150).

Aviva Ben-Ur recounts the situation of slaves and freed individuals ofAfrican origin, particularly women, within the unique Sephardic planta-tion community of Suriname between the seventeenth and the nineteenthcenturies. Drawing on tantalizing bits in archival sources, she traces thecomplicated ways in which Eurafricans became a significant part of thelocal community, and the construction of the local meanings of Jewish-ness. Some slave or free women used their relationships with Sephardicplanters and the children they bore them as a means of upward mobility,while segments of the community adapted to local realities and welcomedthese initiates who among other things served to bolster the community’stenuous numbers.

Peter Mark and Jose da Silva Horta present an account of severalsmall communities along Africa’s Muslim West coast consisting of Portu-guese New Jews from Amsterdam who arrived in the early seventeenth-century. Enjoying the same protection that local Muslim leaders grantedall foreign merchants, these traders and opportunist-entrepreneurs prac-ticed their Judaism openly, attracted Portuguese New Christians to theirmidst, and converted some of the Africans they married and/or employedor fathered. These short-lived endeavors, showing signs of the pragma-tism that characterized merchant interlopers and intermediaries through-out world colonialization, reflected a bold assertiveness that sweptPortuguese Sephardim and conversos alike with the rise of the rebellionagainst Spain after 1580 and, less than two decades later, the founding ofSephardic Amsterdam.

The final episode pertains to the Portuguese converso Antonio deMontezinos, who claimed in the 1640s to have encountered in NuevaGranada (present day Colombia) Indians related to Israel’s lost ten tribes.As presented by Ronnie Perelis, Montezinos’s widely circulated narrativedescribes the solidification of his Jewish identity in the face of the parallelsuffering of Native Americans under the Spanish. His discovery/inven-


tion of Jewish Indians who will seek to overthrow both Spanish andother anti-Jewish oppression may be seen as projecting converso fearsand dreams onto the ‘‘new’’ world of the Americas, sympathetic butinstrumental.

A brief summation by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis highlightssome of the significant and recurring themes of the collected pieces. Theeditors fulfill their desire to ‘‘complicate prior historiographical notions ofthe early modern Jewish experience’’ (preface, p. vii). Though not aneasy place for beginners to access Sephardic/converso history, AtlanticDiasporas will inform even experts in a diversity of fields.

Francesca Trivellato’s book wields the latest in economic theory andeconomic history, diaspora studies, social network analysis, sociology,and anthropology, to investigate the long-distance trade of LivorneseSephardim. She provides a fine overview of a firm founded in 1704 bytwo Livornese merchants, Abraham Ergas and David Silvera. For half acentury the typically nonspecialized business imported cotton from theLevant, bartered coral in India for diamonds, and sold goods from theAmerican colonies. It was not the largest such business but one whoselarge extant documentation—seized in bankruptcy proceedings—allowsTrivellato to perform a superb autopsy, revealing the family ties as wellas shifting commercial and political currents in which the firm operated.

Trivellato’s is an important new addition to the literature in Englishon what was Western Europe’s second largest Sephardic (or Jewish)community. She documents with clarity and verve the extensive rightsand privileges granted to Jewish merchants and their families by theMedici in 1593, unparalleled elsewhere in Europe (even, later, in Amster-dam in some ways). She outlines the challenge to local Sephardic hegem-ony by Italian and North African Jews in the eighteenth century. Inso doing, Trivellato sheds light on the shaping of Sephardic commercialpractices, generally informal from the perspective of newly availableEuropean legal formations, by peculiarly Jewish/Sephardic kinship sys-tems. Central among their defining features: consanguineous marriage,lack of primogeniture, maintenance of significant contribution fromgroom’s family at wedding (dower), dowries of liquid rather than immov-able assets, the rare use of written contracts for establishing partnerships(given the family connections), and the nonsegregation of business andhousehold bookkeeping. An element of this Jewish network culture isthe use of herem (excommunication) to ensure honorable business prac-tices, and often to prevent anti-Semitic reactions (though western Seph-ardim routinely ignored halakhic prohibitions on charging interest). Butshe is clear to show how, despite some insular practices, Jewish networks

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were far from isolated by mapping the move to partnerships with non-Sephardim in the late eighteenth century, including a longstanding asso-ciation for exchanging coral for diamonds with Saraswati merchants inGoa via Italian merchants in Lisbon; the mutually beneficial cooperationbetween the Sephardim and France in Mediterranean trade, particularlyOttoman trade, after 1740, with the French providing a large commercialfleet and navy, diplomatic and legal protection, and sometimes theirnames, so that Sephardim could avoid the French ban on Jews andimport taxes on foreign merchants at Marseilles; the growing distancebetween Livornese Sephardim and their Jewish trading partners and rel-atives in Ottoman lands as the eighteenth century draws on. One limita-tion acknowledged by Trivellato is that historical records generally ignorethose who are not wealthy. Hence The Familiarity of Strangers focusesalmost exclusively on upper-class merchants.

Two new, sumptuously illustrated books treat Isaac Mendes Belisario(1794–1849), a Sephardic painter and engraver who lived in Jamaica andwho, in 1837/38, published three (of an originally planned twelve) shortfolios of lithographs depicting the island’s ‘‘colored’’ population, Sketchesof Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the NegroPopulation in the Island of Jamaica. Based on an exhibition spoking out fromBelisario’s lithographs, the first book, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica (ed.Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz), provides wide-ranging andtheoretically informed views of the intersection of the histories of AfricanAmericans, Jamaican Jews, and art. Only three of its eleven essays dealdirectly with Jewish subjects, but as an exploration of the meanings andcontexts of Belisario’s Sketches—hence, of at least one ‘‘Jewish’’ responseto the extremely racialized Atlantic world—the book will likely not besurpassed. Particularly outstanding is the essay by Kay Dian Kriz. Thesecond book on Belisario and his extended family, a crisply written andwell-researched, if sometimes meandering, ‘‘historical biography’’ byJackie Ranston, provides an inclusive and sympathetic discussion of Afri-can slaves and their descendants, and a scintillating glimpse of Sephardimin both England and colonial Jamaica.

Belisario’s maternal grandfather, Alexandre Lindo, was Jamaica’smost successful Jewish merchant (which included trading in slaves, someof whom worked his coffee plantation). His paternal grandfather, IsaacMendes Belisario, served as teacher and rabbi at London’s Sephardicsynagogue. His father, Abraham Mendes Belisario, worked in Jamaicawith and for Lindo and sold slaves on his own account. Later he managedseveral sugar plantations on Tortola (one of the British Virgin Islands),his experiences developing him into a staunch ameliorationist, though he


continued to own several plantations himself. The young Isaac studiedwith the English landscape painter Robert Hills and in his twenties exhib-ited with the non-Jewish artists of the Society of Painters in Oil andWater Colors and at London’s Royal Academy of Art. Artistic talentaside, Belisario was forced to clerk for his uncle on the London StockExchange, later becoming a broker himself. Returning to Jamaica in1834 (possibly due to his eventually fatal tuberculosis), just after theemancipation of the slaves, Belisario turned to portraiture, painting mem-bers of his own social class as well as landscapes of some of their estates.A year after producing his Sketches, Belisario returned to London andlived with his sister Lydia, who moved in literary circles, returning yetagain to Jamaica in time to produce lithographs of an enormous fire thatswept Kingston in 1843. Throughout his life Belisario evidently remainedunmarried and childless yet continued to be involved with the synagogueand organized religious life. His final work was a drawing of Isaac Lopez,cantor at Kingston’s Sephardic synagogue.

Belisario’s lithographs of colored people and their life revolved aroundthe Jonkonnu (John Canoe) celebration, a carnivalesque combination ofmasquerade, saturnalia, parade, and dance fusing African and Europeanfestive modalities. It was celebrated also by some whites. His illustrationsand accompanying narrative evince sincere ethnographic interest andhuman sympathy, with an epigram citing a line from Shakespeare’sOthello: ‘‘Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.’’ (Both workson Belisario reproduce the brief Sketches in their entirety.) About a thirdof the subscribers to Belisario’s folios were Jamaican Sephardim, indicat-ing that some forms of entertainment and knowledge were shared withina certain class across religious denominations.

Belisario’s sympathy was not unmitigated, however, particularly as hemoved away from the creatively colorful Jonkonnu celebrants, and schol-ars remain split about whether the Sketches reflect an artist empathizingwith ex-slaves as a Jew or as a white European gazing racially at ‘‘sav-ages.’’ The truth lies somewhere in between and in this the Sketches marka typical product of their period, or, as Gillian Forrester notes, Belisario’s‘‘predominantly reactionary’’ comments and ‘‘the contrasting radicalismof the visual component’’ seem to be at odds (Art and Emancipation, p.70). Belisario mentioned ‘‘the pertinacious adherence of Negroes, to Old-established customs’’ (Sketches, vol. 3, description of Chimneysweeper, inSketches of Character, p. 268), an intriguing comment from a Jew living ina Christian world. In a Lamarcianism typical of his era, Belisario noted(perhaps with an inner eye toward Jews) how younger Afro-Jamaicanssometimes looked different from their African parents or ancestors, an

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‘‘alteration [ . . . ] attributable perhaps to the degree of enlightenment,(however limited), consequent on a life of civilization, in lieu of one ofbarbarism’’ (ibid.). He remarked how the ‘‘horrors of rebellion’’ devas-tated the ‘‘once finely cultivated island’’ of St. Domingue, leading many‘‘respectable’’ families to flee, ‘‘followed by their faithful slaves [ . . . ]among whom were Africans, as well as Creoles—who to their credit, have[in their new lands, such as Jamaica], with few exceptions, strictly abidedby the compact then entered into, ‘viz’ that of fidelity to their Owners,and a rigid observance of the Laws of the Land so affording them protec-tion’’ (Sketches, vol. 2, description of French Set-Girls; Sketches of Charac-ter, 254). This may echo the traditional halakhic principle of dinad’malkhuta dina (the law of the land is the law), to which even slaves aresupposed to adhere.

Once Jews, by Josette Capriles Goldish, begins in the late eighteenthcentury, where the other texts leave off. Herself the product of two differ-ent Curacoan Sephardic families, Goldish offers a set of interlocking,essentially genealogical family histories set against the decline of Carib-bean Jewry during the nineteenth century and the slight revitalization inthe second half of the twentieth. Relying on a wide variety of publishedand unpublished works, Goldish tracks Sephardic migration from Curacaoto other Jewish communities in such places as St. Thomas, London, Chi-cago, and New York but also, surprisingly, to Catholic territories suchas Santo Domingo, Panama City, Coro (Venezuela), and Barranquilla(Colombia). This book is a labor of love; many chapters end with descrip-tions of the author meeting distant relatives. Goldish’s insider back-ground and possibly unthreatening approach (she is fond of toutingSephardic ‘‘contributions’’ to their host societies) led the usually protec-tive Curacoan community to grant this accomplished amateur historianaccess to community archives, rarely given to outsider academics.

Though the detail is often overwhelming and not always sorted into aclear narrative or analytic perspective, Once Jews delivers a compellingportrait of local Caribbean history. In Jewish settings we see reforminnovations, such as confirmations on St. Thomas by the 1840s, a mixed(though separated) choir in the Curacao synagogue by the 1860s (themen and women sang from separate enclosures), or an attempt to forestalldefections to the new Reform Temple Emanuel. A heavily JewishMasonic lodge existed on St. Thomas (as well as in Coro and Barran-quilla), collective annual donations were made to the Alliance IsraeliteUniverselle (even from Coro and Barranquilla), and intermarriage withAshkenazim as well as Christians and even conversions increased enor-mously. Numerous businessmen left Curacao for other Caribbean locales


for economic reasons. In Santo Domingo and Barranquilla, they appearto have been received reasonably openly. The concluding section containstwo chapters on gender and women—an appreciated focus. The compro-mises found by intermarried couples prove particularly fascinating: sonsraised as Jews, daughters as Catholics (drawing on Linda Rupert, Rootsof Our Future: A Commercial History of Curacao [1999], Goldish speculatesthat this may have been for business reasons); gravestones of Sephardimwho died in Catholic lands but never converted out of Judaism, designedwithout any Christian markings; a Catholic widow of a Sephardic manwho arranged a full Jewish funeral for him. Intimate relationships andseemingly harmonious coexistence between extended families containingmixed marriages and multiple religions abounded. Whether this ‘‘easy-going dual self-identity’’ (p. 160) constitutes mythmaking that suppressesanti-Judaism/anti-Jewishness or reflects a new Caribbean or even Ibe-rian multiculturalism remains unclear. At the same time, as evincedrecently in Spain , it is easy to romanticize Jewishness/Judaism once theJews have disappeared. Despite some views suggesting that CuracoanJewry was narrow and backward,2 many of the Catholics, according toGoldish, feel that ‘‘their Sephardic ancestry guaranteed that they werebrought up in homes where a moral life, liberal ideas, and education werevalued above all’’ (p. 262). It would be worth exploring the history andcauses that caused this liberal self-image. Goldish does not shy away fromdiscussing these new Jewish-Christian relationships, the reversions ofconvenience by Sephardim to Catholicism in Latin America, or the deedsof these Christian descendants of Sephardim (though she does tally num-bers and percentages of those who married Jews or Sephardim). In this,she shows more courage than many of her disciplinarily restricted profes-sional colleagues.

Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates is another work by an amateur historian. Writ-ten in lively narrative-driven prose and intended for a general audience,in some sense it too looks to the margins. Though it manages to producea rip-roaring tale of converso/Sephardic struggles against the Iberianpowers in the seventeenth century, the book is somewhat mistitled—evenas pirates, Jews played a marginal role. Furthermore, despite the praiselavished on it in some circles, the book is interpretatively obsolete andmarred by exaggerations, fancies, apocryphal tales, and outright errors.Unable to access sources in Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch, Kritzler hasused few archival resources and none beyond Jamaica and London. He

2. Chris Monaco, ‘‘Port Jews or a People of the Diaspora? A Critique of thePort Jew Concept,’’ Jewish Social Studies 15.2 (2009): 137–66.

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has been forced to rely on a motley collection of English-language publi-cations, all too often older material and/or written by amateur scholars(as, for example, such experts on Columbus as Simon Wiesenthal andWashington Irving), perhaps without realizing that many of its findingshave been superseded or corrected, as some of the works reviewed hereindicate. Moreover, many of Kritzler’s assertions remain disappointinglyunfootnoted. All in all, Jewish Pirates makes a useful object lesson.

Here Jews are the good guys, even when (justifiably) breaking thelaw. While others came to conquer, convert, get rich, or ‘‘collect a bevyof Indian women, the Jews came to escape persecution and settle a landbeyond the tentacles of the Inquisition’’ (p. viii), a dichotomy we knowto be inaccurate. Kritzler calls all New Christians Jews, irrespective oftheir actual religious loyalties , the obverse of the Inquisitions’ essentializ-ing; conveniently, most died with their ‘‘masquerade intact’’ (p. 43). Thisis a morality tale (in a nod to late Cold War politics, Spain and Portugalare called ‘‘the evil empire’’ [p. 130]). While Kritzler acknowledges NewChristian involvement in the slave trade, he minimizes Sephardic partici-pation in both slave trading and holding and his romanticism causes himto misrepresent the halakhah regarding slave holding.

The author’s failings unfortunately detract from what could have beena welcome contribution to the story of seventeenth-century crypto-Jew-ish/Sephardic intrepidity, ingenuity, and, most of all, resistance to Spainand Portugal. Given the degree to which scholarship has generally seenJews as passive victims, the breadth and depth of converso/Sephardicresistance to and warring against Spain cannot but astonish. While mak-ing full use of the weapons of the weak brought to our attention by theanthropologist James Scott—deceit, trickster tactics, passive noncompli-ance—conversos/Sephardim time and time again fought Spain directly,by commercial, political, and even military means, whether successfullyor not. Dutch Sephardim funded and armed Barbary Coast corsairs,while Jamaican Sephardim outfitted local privateers, informed them ofprospective targets—all Iberian, of course—and were first in line to sellthe booty.3 Newer studies tend to grant full agency to Sephardim, conver-sos somewhat less so, though nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryJewish scholars in Europe and the United States were also attracted tothe alleged attainments of Sephardic ‘‘manliness.’’

Kritzler returns to this mode. What survival ‘‘in the enemy world[required] was not deceit, but strength’’ (p. ix). A list of some of his

3. A footnote discusses the colonial Jews who owned or sponsored privateersagainst the British navy during the American Revolution (314, n. 73).


heroes includes Sinan, the Jewish pirate lieutenant of Barbarossa (knownof course for his humaneness); Samuel Palache, the ‘‘warrior rabbi’’ whohelped found Amsterdam’s Sephardic community, and his youngerbrother Joseph, who commanded a combined fleet of Barbary corsairsand Dutch pirates;4 Manuel Pimentel, alias Isaac ibn Jakar, praised byKing Henry IV of France as ‘‘king of gamblers’’; Bento Osorio, allegedleader of the Brotherhood of the Jews of Holland, ‘‘a clandestine groupdedicated to fighting the Inquisition’’ (p. 118)—which supposedly fieldeda trans-Atlantic network of spies and collected funds from conversos(known, it must be stated, only from the confessions of a handful of con-versos extracted by inquisitional torture); Moses Cohen Henriques, whoallegedly aided the Dutch in their attempted 1624 capture of Bahia andtheir successful conquest of northwest Brazil in 1630, definitely aidedthem in Piet Heyn’s 1628 capture of the Spanish silver flotilla, supposedlybought an island in the Recife harbor from which he and his Jewish crewattacked Portuguese and Spanish vessels, and later advised the pirateHenry Morgan (who as deputy governor of Jamaica signed his natural-ization papers); Antonio Carvajal, Simon de Caceres, and CampoeSabada (the ‘‘Jewish’’ pilot of pirate William Jackson), who helpedCromwell take Jamaica from the Spanish. Men like these ‘‘strode overcontinents and oceans. They braved new worlds, negotiated with kings,and robbed them as well’’ (p. 105).5 Dutch Sephardim, in particular,given unprecedented freedoms, grew up ‘‘unafraid’’ (p. 102), while theInquisitions ‘‘called and encouraged [these youths] to become a genera-tion of warriors for Zion’’ (p. 122).

This last phrase of Kritzler’s overheated depictions highlights what Isuggest may animate more scholarly literature on western Sephardim.Could the portrait of the courageous Sephardic pirate and his congenersderive at least some of its impetus from a post–Six Day War pride in orglorification of the State of Israel and the military prowess of Israeli‘‘New Jews’’? The influence may be unconscious, a formal exemplar

4. Regarding Palache, Kritzler relies heavily on the excellent study by Mer-cedes Garcıa-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Palache,a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, trans. M. Beagles (1999; Balti-more, Md., 2003). A comparison of the two works shows Kritzler to be guilty ofreturning to the very one-dimensionality Garcıa-Arenal and Wiegers sought toundo.

5. One woman earns entry to Kritzler’s pantheon, Marıa Fernandez de Carva-jal. Informed of an attempt to expel Jews from England after their admission byCromwell, she ‘‘summoned her coreligionists to her home to compose and sign apetition’’ asking King Charles II to permit their continued residence (p. 213).

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given content by a new reality, leading to increased focus on ‘‘toughJews.’’ I think for example of Elliott Horowitz’s book Reckless Rites(2006) on Jewish aggression inspired by Purim, or Derek Penslar’s cur-rent project on Jewish soldiers in Europe. In our example, Sephardimare once again taken to represent a different kind of Jew: Mediterranean,tan, active, healthy in body and spirit. Unlike the Sephardim of the east-ern Mediterranean, who (according to this narrative) succumbed to Mid-dle Eastern religiosity, softness, and lethargy, western Sephardim never‘‘gave in’’ to their surroundings, remained ‘‘men’’ in control of events.Kritzler presents merely an overwrought version of the sensibility thatoften expresses itself subtly in more sober scholarly works.

In addition to the strong active Jew so prominent here, the worksreviewed in this essay touch on other broader themes in Jewish scholar-ship. In her wonderful new book Plumes (2008) on Jews and ostrichfeathers, Sarah Abrevaya Stein mentions feeling unsettled that given thecalamities of modern Jewish history, her topic is ‘‘marginal—even frivo-lous’’ (p. x). Her fear reflects the sentiments expressed by many Judaicscholars in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth when itcame to ‘‘peripheries’’ such as Africa or the Americas. In some subtlyunsettling way, these new works reiterate a kind of reverse marginaliza-tion of the variety of ‘‘mainstream’’ concerns for intellectual and religioushistory that used to overshadow and dismiss what was deemed marginal.For some, the Atlantic world has served as an excuse to ignore the Euro-pean origins of many of its waves.

Many of the scholars provide what I will call an econocentric perspec-tive, from which the religious inclinations of individuals or communitiesmake little difference. What distinguishes the economic activities of ‘‘thePortuguese Nation’’ is precisely the seeming irrelevance of religion:openly professing Jews and ostensible Catholics of Jewish backgroundtraded with each other with few or no qualms. This perspective, longpracticed by Jonathan Israel and the many scholars who have followedhis lead, seeks to transcend nationalistic and religiously grounded debatesabout national loyalties and moral status, that is, whether New Christiansbetrayed the Iberian powers or Judaism. Reiterating inquisitional preju-dices, many Hispanic authors have seen New Christians as Jews seekingto destroy the Iberian states and their colonies. Hispanic scholars haveoften harnessed an econocentric view of New Christian–Jewish collusionto bolster or confirm their prejudices. Meanwhile, Jewish studies schol-ars have frequently shared this view from the opposite direction, seeingall New Christians as vengeful crypto-Jews while underplaying the obvi-


ous allegiance of many New Christians to their Hispanic lifestyle andeven to their Iberian homelands.

Despite its welcome sophistication and avoidance of such polemics,the new econocentric approach introduces another paradox, bifurcatingeconomics and culture (primarily religion), as if the former were notclosely linked with the latter. Let me be perfectly clear: it is not thatreligion is not discussed, but it is relegated to a mere secondary featureof economics, with no determinative role. As noted, Atlantic Diasporas sep-arates its coverage of mercantilism from its coverage of identity and reli-gion (despite the often composite contents of the essays themselves). Thisbifurcation is even more prominent in Studnicki-Gizbert’s A Nation uponthe Ocean Sea, which brilliantly treats the entirety of the Portuguese over-seas diaspora as one intertwined unit, for the most part regardless ofreligious orientation, therefore ignoring almost by methodological fiat anypresence of religiocultural confusion, ambivalence, or antagonism: ‘‘In theday-to-day concourse of trade,’’ he writes, ‘‘the division between OldChristian and New was meaningless. [ . . . ] Although culturally mixed,socially and economically the Portuguese bourgeoisie constituted a singleentity’’ (p. 25).6 Paradoxically, or due to already extensive coverage,Studnicki-Gizbert devotes little space to the Jewish communities of thePortuguese Nation. Questions that are not raised, much less resolved,might include the following: Did Sephardim trade with New Christiansbecause they saw them (or wanted to see them ) as crypto-Jews? Didmerchants from both communities simply care more about business orfamily matters than religion? How did rabbinic condemnations of NewChristians as turncoats against Judaism and halakhic boundary makingagainst them coexist or conflict with commercial or lay political interestsin maintaining connections? Did the essentially ethnic idea of nation(‘‘the Hebrew Portuguese Nation’’ or the like) shared by both Sephardimand New Christians mask deep internal fissures—why and how success-fully? To what degree did the Inquisitions intrude on or create divisionswithin A Nacao (The Nation) or between business partners? Why didconversos betray those they suspected of judaizing; contrarily, to whatdegree did internal economic dictates serve to construct and maintainSephardic–New Christian difference? Did critics lambasting ‘‘TheNation’’ aim at the Portuguese as such or as secret and treacherous Jewsor both? In short, despite connections and crossovers, the converso andSephardic Atlantic worlds diverged drastically from one another. Trivel-

6. These new studies remind me that we still have no adequate English-lan-guage survey of the New Christians.

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lato, dealing with an admittedly different scene, by intentionally thematiz-ing the relationship between Livornese Sephardic commercial andreligiocultural practices, generates the nuanced attentiveness capable ofaddressing these lacunae.

At times the econocentric view verges on becoming mere antiquarian-ism, focused excessively on facts and figures. An example of how muchis lost when one shortchanges narratological context is the case of NewChristian slave trading, which comes up in several of these books. Fromthe perspective of Jewish studies, intent as it often is on glorifying Jewishachievements, New Christian commercial success frequently becomes asource of pride. Yet for apologetic reasons Jewish studies scholars havetended to ignore or minimize New Christian control of the Iberian slavetrade and/or declared New Christians involved in such trade to have beenCatholics or merely of Jewish genealogical heritage. Iberian scholars,meanwhile, have tended to see New Christian slave trading as a Jewishendeavor and as proof that such evil activities stemmed from the Jews.For the new econocentric approach, none of these frames seems neces-sary to address.

The econocentric approach in studying Sephardim/conversos some-times suffers from ignorance of Hebrew and/or superficial Judaic knowl-edge.7 Essentially historical sociologists, many of these scholars rightfullyavoid identity-driven polemics but often sacrifice fullness of vision. Seph-ardim may appear worldly and relatively non-Jewish when little or noattention is devoted to the aspects of their lives that were shaped byHalakhah and steeped in synagogue life. When combined, for instance,with Yosef Kaplan’s dense body of work on western Sephardic communallife, the econocentric approach yields wonders; segregated from it, thedepiction becomes rather skewed.

While many cliches regarding western Sephardim are punctured inthese works, others are repeated. Adam Sutcliffe refers to Sephardic ‘‘cul-tural malleability’’ as a factor in their prominence as ‘‘cross-cultural bro-kers’’8 but I wonder whether this ‘‘cultural malleability’’ is perhaps amisnomer. As individuals, Sephardim showed great adaptability on manylevels, but as communities, they tended to be intensely conservative.Based on the literature on diasporic trading networks, Studnicki-Gizbert

7. See my review of Diasporas within a Diaspora for H-Atlantic, the H-Net Net-work on Atlantic History (http://www.h-net.org/�atlantic; May 2006).

8. ‘‘Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism,’’ in Kagan and Morgan, AtlanticDiasporas, 19. Elsewhere Sutcliffe lauds Sephardic ‘‘linguistic, cultural and reli-gious versatility’’ (p. 27), a somewhat different measure.


puts these levels into relationship: ‘‘The experiences of departure, disper-sion, and movement, which threatened to stretch the ties of communitypast the breaking point,’’ he writes, ‘‘instead motivated an intensificationof collective relations’’ (A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, pp. 77–78). The Seph-ardim were notoriously ‘‘Iberian’’ and conservatively so, regardless ofwhere they settled. If Sephardim in the Americas were forced to adaptby their new surroundings, this malleability may also be found in anynumber of other immigrant groups.

Sutcliffe asserts that the Sephardim of Curacao ‘‘far from sustaining achauvinistic Iberianism, have played a key role in the development of theisland’s cross-ethnic creole language, Papiamentu’’ (Atlantic Diasporas, p.25). Ben-Ur also sees knowledge on the part of Surinamese Sephardimof the local creole language as evidence of their having transcended insu-larity. These two characteristics are hardly mutually exclusive and, asChris Monaco persuasively argues in his recent essay, the Curacao com-munity was quite insular and backward-looking in some respects. Sutclif-fe’s assertion that the ‘‘functioning of the diaspora depended crucially onits intricate diversity, encompassing observant Jews, New Christians,and intermediary crypto-Jews of varied hues, and communities substan-tially integrated into Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other cul-tures’’ (Sutcliffe, Atlantic Diasporas, p. 27) is to my mind romanticoverstatement. The communities were in certain respects hardly inte-grated into their surroundings. The spoken and official written languageremained Iberian well into the nineteenth century, in some cases, whilesome of the differently hued individuals received scant welcome, to saythe least, and their ‘‘functions’’ were granted little or no consideration orrespect on any official level. Communities educated their children in strictethnic separation. In a recent work Ronald Schechter asserts that Seph-ardim in Bordeaux ‘‘were scarcely less separated from their Gentileneighbors than were their brethren in Alsace, Lorraine, and Metz.’’9

Studnicki-Gizbert notes that other trading diasporas in the Atlantic worldceased to be called ‘‘nations’’ by the eighteenth century, except for theSephardim (A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, p. 77). and Livornese Jewry, stillheavily Sephardic, resisted the dismantling of its corporate status andprivileges until the middle of the nineteenth century (Familiarity of Strang-ers, p. 97). When it comes to gender, a subject to which the new studiesdevote important attention, Sephardic conservativism prevailed, perhapsin reaction to female centrality in converso culture.

9. Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), 30.

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Part of the problem may be definitional. One matter entails a sociologyof the community that is attentive to divisions, classes, ‘‘interest groups.’’Another issue is defining the meaning of terms such as ‘‘acculturation.’’According to Trivellato, port cities and Atlantic colonies were ‘‘highlydiverse and yet [ . . . ] highly segregated,’’ and Livornese Sephardim were‘‘at once insular and cosmopolitan’’ (Familiarity of Strangers, pp. 73, 270).Trivellato cites Kenneth Stow’s term for the situation of the Jews ofRome: ‘‘conservative acculturation,’’ by which they endeavored to makethemselves acceptable to non-Jews while insisting on the preservationof their distinct identity (Familiarity of Strangers, p. 89). Sociologically,Sephardic governing elites manifested strong, sometimes even extremeauthority in some spheres (religion, communal organization, marriages),while nongoverning segments manifested greater flexibility toward religi-osity, racial inclusiveness, and cross-denominational interaction. Sephar-dic communities manifested extremely strong forms of group disciplineand disciplining of individuals (arguably a theological, political, and psy-chological reaction to the converso predicament), while individual Seph-ardim often showed interest in religious skepticism and later in radicalEnlightenment ideas. Sutcliffe expresses the matter well, suggesting that‘‘the transnational Jews had particularly weak political loyalties,’’ andthat the Sephardim ‘‘were exemplary nonpatriots’’ (Atlantic Diasporas, pp.28, 29). Yet Trivellato reminds us how ‘‘rather than solipsistic and antiau-thoritarian, Sephardic networks pursued the endorsement of institutionalpowers’’ (Familiarity of Strangers, p. 275) as a means of assuring commer-cial entree, and hopefully success. Hence I would argue that their politicalworldview moved between two poles: hating Spain/Portugal or longingfor it. Sephardic contraband commerce consequently served primarily asa weapon against Spain.

All in all, many political questions remain. Was Sephardic relegationof nearly all communal power to laypeople—and not rabbis—perhaps aresponse to extreme Catholic theocracy? Klooster, in Atlantic Diasporas,mentions that during the early seventeenth century, Joao da RochaPinto, alias Joseph Zecharia Cohen da Rocha, served in Amsterdam as‘‘consul of the Portuguese Nation’’ (p. 41). In early modern states all‘‘foreign nations’’ had consuls. Was this an elected position, and bywhom? What tasks did this position entail? To whom did the consulreport? Did he represent only the Jewish segment of the Nation or Cath-olics also? How long did such a position exist? Did it exist elsewhere?This ostensibly minor subject hints at much larger questions that eventhese works do not address. Business success, as Trivellato shows, ‘‘couldoccur as the unplanned result of the relatively autonomous and decentral-


ized operations of a constellation of individuals and small firms’’ (Famil-iarity of Strangers, p. 38). It would seem A Nacao functioned much thesame way politically. Religiously, a concentric circle spanned out fromthe most major cities to smaller communities. Politically, however, it isnot clear that Amsterdam ruled, in any significant manner. Do westernSephardim thus exemplify a working model for a stateless nation? Wasthis true only insofar as they were commercially successful? Did theabsence of centralized policymaking ultimately hinder Sephardic com-mercial success?

Jewish plantation owners in Suriname, Brazil, and Curacao suggest‘‘that circulation was occasionally tempered by stability and the emer-gence of Jewish communities rooted in the land’’ (Kagan and Morgan,preface, Atlantic Diasporas, p. xv). Jewish (Sephardic, really) landednessdeserves more attention. Unlike many colonists, Sephardim rarelybecome farmers. They became plantation owners. In the eighteenth cen-tury, wealthy Dutch, English, and French Sephardim lived off of incomefrom investments, bought estates, often in the American colonies. Whileone can find Jewish foremen on plantations, I have argued that Sephar-dim were attracted to land and slave owning precisely because of thestatus it gave them, a status first really available to them in the Americas,not only for economic reasons, as was true for many European Christianswho emigrated, but also because in so much of Europe Jews were by lawprohibited from such ownership.10

The semi-myth of converso endogamy is challenged by several of theauthors under discussion. Studnicki-Gizbert reminds readers that inCatholic territories, Portuguese conversos exhibited ‘‘high rates’’ of mar-riage with Old Christians (Atlantic Diasporas, p. 85). On the other hand,when Bruno Feitler says ‘‘many people’’ in Brazil under the Dutch(re)turned to Judaism, I would like to know how many? Dozens? Hun-dreds? Though he has added to the oft-cited examples usually proffered,I am not yet convinced that a significant proportion of Brazilian conver-sos cared to live as Jews, for whatever reasons. Given that there werethousands of New Christians in Brazil, constituting more than 10 percentof the total population, it would seem that the overwhelming majoritychose not to live as Jews. The same might be said regarding race. Ben-Ur’s essay as well as that of Mark and Horta show that local conditionspushed for close alliances, including marriage and/or concubinage, ofSephardim with local populations, without regard to blackness or race.The communities in which this took place were small, incipient, and tenu-

10. Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York, 2004), 291–92.

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ous. In Suriname, the number of nonwhites permitted to join the Jewishcommunity remained no more than a very small percentage of thoseowned and/or employed. Again identity-driven narratives continue tobuild our models.

These new works put Jewish particularities into perspective. Theinternational Sephardic organization for finding husbands for orphangirls and sponsoring their weddings, an endeavor central to maintainingthe cohesiveness of the Nacao and expanding its opportunities, has beenmuch discussed, by Miriam Bodian, among others. Similar institutionshad been used in medieval Spain as well as in Portuguese overseas coloni-zation as instruments of state (in the latter orphan girls were married offto settlers).11 Though put to ‘‘The Nation’s’’ purposes, there was littleuniquely Jewish about such organizations. While it is true that Sephar-dim and conversos both gained reputations for smuggling and piracy,notorious or romantic, depending on one’s perspective, and that this rep-utation bore all the burden of ‘‘the Jewish question’’ to critics and admir-ers alike, Studnicki-Gizbert reminds us that they shared their ‘‘intenseinvolvement in long-distance trade (both legal and extralegal)’’ with themany other Atlantic-world trading networks (Atlantic Diasporas, p. 77).Even the fascinating practice of converso merchants to bequeath theirwealth to nephews alongside sons (but always males) was commonamong Basque and Huguenot traders (Atlantic Diasporas, p. 93), perhapsa response, as Trivellato speculates, to ‘‘less than competent or even ill-intentioned sons’’ (Atlantic Diasporas, p. 106).

The multiplicity of perspectives in these books is refreshing, suggestiveof the material’s richness and how many ways it connects with othernarratives. Belisario handled in an art history/cultural studies volumerevolving around colonialism, the depiction of slavery, Atlantic world cul-tures—a volume that could be said to minimize emphasis on Jewish-ness—offers an important if perhaps bracing reminder that narrativesabout Jews are not the monopoly of ‘‘Jewish studies.’’ Hence these newstudies see western Sephardim as living in both Jewish and non-Jewishspheres, a healthy vantage point. Enlightened German Jews in the nine-teenth century used Sephardim as a means of critiquing Ashkenazic reli-gious extremism and cultural separatism—Sephardim ‘‘have neverformed the contrast to Christian society which was so striking in the

11. See, for example, Timothy Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonization in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford, Calif., 2002).


other family of Jews kept intentionally apart.’’12 For these German Jews,Sephardim were ‘‘marked by cultural openness, philosophic thinking, andan appreciation for the aesthetic.’’13 For many contemporary Jewish stud-ies scholars, reacting to the provincialism of Jewish studies, as well asanti-Judaism/Jewishness both latent and active, western Sephardimhardly differed from non-Jews: they were ‘‘normal’’ except for adheringto a different faith; they were marked by activism, fearlessness, self-suffi-ciency, resilience. The term ‘‘New Jews,’’ as the ex-conversos are some-times called in recent scholarship, now conjures not so much theologyand loyalty to Judaism as much as a sense of the hardy Sabra and theNew Jew whom Zionism was supposed to birth: New Jews long beforethe existence of the State of Israel.

Kritzler’s exaggerated portraits of pirates notwithstanding, these newstudies help refocus attention on what might be called the derring-do ofordinary individuals, the extraordinary efforts taken, often necessarily, tothrive, if not merely to survive.

12. Eduard Gans, quoted in Ismar Schorsch, ‘‘The Myth of SephardicSupremacy,’’ in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Han-over, N.H., 1994), 75.

13. Ibid., 71.

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