Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society heralds the emancipation of the Caribbean experience from the margins of early American Jewish history. Aviva Ben-Ur is the leading voice in a chorus of scholars dedicated to contextualizing Jewish history within the methodological framework of Atlantic studies and “creating a paradigm for Jewish Atlantic history that combines comparison, connection, and localism” (255). She has more than succeeded in achieving this goal.
Through a comprehensive investigation of archival sources, particularly the extensive Surinamese Jewish communal records at the National Archives of the Netherlands, Ben-Ur challenges some of the most canonical assumptions of Jewish history. These include religious tolerance as the primary motivation for early American migration, the Jewish desire for emancipation, and the Jewish trend to acculturate “upward.” She demonstrates that these historiographic dogmas don't apply to Suriname. As much as it was entangled in the web of the Atlantic world, Jewish life in Suriname was a singularity that defies categorization using traditional models.
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society powerfully contributes to the legacy of Salo W. Baron's antilachrymose model of Jewish history. Ben-Ur reconsiders the ubiquity of premodern Jewish subalterity. In Suriname, Jews held an unparalleled degree of corporate autonomy and were empowered through their mastery over an enslaved majority. She further reminds us that by the end of the eighteenth century, Jews made up two-thirds of the non-African descendent population of Suriname.
Among Ben-Ur's boldest antilachrymose rebukes is her challenge to the narrative of religious tolerance as the primary motivation behind Jewish migration. She attributes this persistent view to the skewed self-presentation of Suriname's Portuguese elites, like David Nassy, who portrayed themselves as belonging to a community of refugees empowered by the liberties of their colonial haven. They also sought to propagate an illusion of wealth (47). Ben-Ur demonstrates that Jews in Suriname were overwhelmingly poor, and it was poverty that brought them to the colony.
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is informed by a trend in early modern Portuguese diaspora studies to deemphasize a traditional bom Judesmo approach—highlighting nobility, wealth, and restraint—and instead focusing on indigent and itinerate social welfare recipients. Ben-Ur characterizes Jodensavanne as a paupers’ town (54) in defiance of the more standard depiction of the town's wealth and privilege—which might have been the case for only a few Sabbath vacationers from surrounding plantations (61). Instead, she recalibrates the discussion to focus on the mechanics of the despachado system bringing poor Jews to the colony (116–17). Rather than a proto-Zionist promised land, Ben-Ur's Jodensavanne is a nonheroic site of violence, dislocation, and poverty (74).
The book's title alludes to the elusive concept of Jewish self-rule, one of the colony's most conspicuous singularities. Ben-Ur finds the closest Jewish parallel in early modern Livorno as well as makes local comparisons to Suriname's Maroon and Indian populations. Autonomy, however, was not synonymous with liberty. Ben-Ur argues that autonomy cast a shadow of tyranny in the way it mandated Jewishness (93) and empowered elite Portuguese over the poor, Ashkenazim, and Jews of color (110). Autonomy was not what all of the Jews of the colony wanted. Jewish autonomy in Suriname translated into a codification of Portuguese ethnic supremacy (62–63).
Ben-Ur reexamines some of Jewish history's most sacred ideals about emancipation, the process of acquiring legal parity with white Christians, which occurred in Suriname in 1825. Whereas emancipation is typically portrayed as a Jewish aspiration, in Suriname Jewish leaders swam against the tides of change by clinging to their corporate autonomy (227). Furthermore, Ben-Ur argues that Surinamese emancipation was only a “legal fiction” (254). Emancipation simply transformed the legal definitions of Surinamese Jews from an incorporated ethnic group to a religious community.
Analyses of acculturation and emancipation go hand in hand. In a Germano-centric model, historians point to an almost-universal tendency for Jews to acculturate “upwards,” that is, to adopt the cultural identity of an empowered white Protestant majority. Ben-Ur intriguingly introduces an alternative model for the Atlantic world, what she calls “integration from the bottom” (239). In Suriname, according to Ben-Ur, Jewish acculturation was a “narrative of descent,” as the community became increasingly indistinguishable from free people of color over the course of the nineteenth century (240).
Surinamese communal records are exceptionally explicit about Jews of color. This is perhaps the most little- or misunderstood aspect of Jewish corporatism. Ben-Ur resists the tendency to assign binary labels to the communal place of Jews of color—such as “absorbed” or “rejected”—but rather employs the almost paradoxical phrase “peripheral inclusion” to illustrate the complexity of the issue. Her discussion of Jews of color is built upon the fact that they were a much larger portion of the Jewish community than previously thought (155).
Ben-Ur argues that previous scholarship has artificially grafted halakhic principles onto the definitions of Jewishness among people of color (154). Jewishness in a slave society was highly fluid, with a much stronger patriarchal dimension, at least in the colony's early years (148). Rather than anachronistically determining who belonged based on halakhic values, Ben-Ur makes a case that the Jews of the colonial Americas inhabited “alternative forms of community” (187).
With this “alternative forms of community” model, Ben-Ur provides a fresh perspective on the much-discussed, but little-understood, controversy over the mixed-race Jewish confraternity Darhe Jessarim and its bid for independence in 1790. Rather than a decisive rupture of the status quo, Ben-Ur places the events of 1790 on a continuum of earlier “spontaneous disruptions” (172). She further explains that the Portuguese regents’ harsh reaction to this movement was a zealous attempt to guard the standards of their corporate authority rather than a bluntly racialized discrimination (178).
As a work of Atlantic studies, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is sensitive to fluid identities and cultural hybridities. Ben-Ur's most poignant example of Atlantic cultural hybridity is her discussion of raucous Purim festivities. As a prelude to her “integration from the bottom” concept, and her larger disengagement from a bom Judesmo model, she describes the boisterous Jewish practice of Purim, in part, through masquerading as sailors, soldiers, Indians, and Maroons.
Ben-Ur identifies points of “cultural convergence” (202) between Jews and people with African ancestry by demonstrating Purim's similarity with Afro-Creole festivities and its popularity among the enslaved and free people of color: “Purim in Suriname … had become an Afro-Creole festival” (213). This is a beautiful illustration of Atlantic cultural entanglement and pan-African agency. In the best tradition of Atlantic studies, Ben-Ur characterizes the enslaved as participants in Creole cultural exchange rather than the passive recipients of a dominant culture, in this case, Judaism (202). She has gone further than any previous scholar in framing Judaism as an Atlantic religion.
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society sets a new standard in scholarship for early American Jewish history. Exceptionally well grounded in archival sources yet solidly framed within theoretical frameworks, it problematizes Jewish subalterity archetypes and the triumphalism of early American Jewish history. Clearing a path toward understanding Jewish creolization, it is a model of transdisciplinarity, blending equal expertise in Jewish and Atlantic studies. Lastly, it is a highly effective communal history of the Jews in Suriname.
