This book presents a fascinating and important study of several communities in West Africa where Portuguese conversos and Portuguese Jews from the Netherlands lived and traded in the early seventeenth century. Joal, Porto d'Ale, and Rufisque, ports under Wolof or Wolof-Serer control in coastal Senegambia, as well as Cacheu, further south, comprised thriving commercial beachheads of trade between Europe and West Africa; they were established and run for the most part by a network of still-Christian conversos and practicing Jews often linked by family ties. Some of the traders may have derived from New Christians inhabiting Guinea and supposedly practicing Judaism there in the late sixteenth century. The public Judaism of these traders and settlers, reported with concern by numerous Catholic individuals, was protected for a while by local kings, in particular the rulers of the Muslim Wolof state of Baol and the Wolof-Serer state of Sine, who prevented persecution or prosecution by Portuguese authorities. Whether Catholic, Jewish, or indifferent to religion, these traders, with Dutch connections via the local Dutch Sephardic Jews, posed a serious threat to the trade monopoly the Portuguese sought to maintain.
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.
An important but somewhat tangential story, the active trade in blade weapons between New Christians and Sephardic Jews and West Africans, occupies chapter 4. Chapter 5 discusses some Luso-African ivory carvings that reflect the Portuguese presence, including one spoon whose handle ends in a pointing hand that the authors speculate may have served as a yad used for reading from the Torah. The authors bring to light the life and career of Moisés de Mesquita / Antonio Lopez de Mesquita, a mulatto merchant (said to be from Oporto, Portugal) who ultimately settled in Amsterdam, becoming an active and high-ranking member of the Sephardic community there. The authors also reveal important information regarding the clandestine slave trading of the New Christian João Soeiro, in charge of Guinea trade from his headquarters in Cape Verde from 1609 to 1614. The almost completely unknown story of these trader-settlers and their communities brings exciting revision to our developing sense of the early Sephardic Atlantic world and must be added to the innovative findings of scholars such as Tobias Green, José Alberto Tavim, and Aviva Ben-Ur.
The material brought to light by the authors furthers our sense of converso / Sephardic mercantile adventurousness and willingness to take risks. It also corroborates an understanding of the newly-established Sephardic communities, Amsterdam in particular, as rather activist and extroverted, openly assertive of Jewish rights and anti-Christian polemic. 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. As was the case elsewhere where they were able, some of those with Jewish loyalties went so far as to criticize Christianity openly. The authors skillfully situate the activities and behavior of their subjects within the world of early West African contact with European traders and the cultural mixing and shifting identities and loyalties it engendered, as well as within larger trends in the Sephardic diaspora. Personal ethnic or religious identities in West Africa were often fluid or multiple, attribution to groups (“Portuguese,” “white”) contextual rather than essentialized. In contrast to stereotype, Senegambian hosts and New Christian / Sephardic settlers “spoke a very similar language of identity,” one that lubricated coexistence in matters ranging “from commercial agreements to marriage” (57).
These were tiny communities, as were almost all such mercantile outposts in the incipient overseas colonies, numbering at their peak perhaps twenty households. Beginning in the 1620s, many of the Jews returned to Amsterdam, having made enough money through trade to do so. The possibility of living openly in the region as a Jew seems to have diminished by the 1630s, due to new, more pro-Portuguese rulers, meaning that the life span of these communities comprised some few decades at most (active Portuguese investigation of these communities commenced only in 1610).
The population of these communities was bolstered by Africans and Euro-African offspring from marriages of convenience into which some of the traders entered, ideally with daughters of rulers or with wealthy women traders, but we have no sense of how many individuals made up this group. Mark and Horta argue cogently for an initial converso / Sephardic openness to Africans in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 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 inclusion of locals in Jewish communal and ritual life, together with the willingness of traders to accommodate to local practices in order to advance business, led to the creation of a kind of Jewish-West African creole society, one that became increasingly African as the century developed and the non-African merchants returned to Amsterdam.
The authors have done a tremendous job finding and contextualizing material, yet their analysis stretches what is ultimately thin documentation. The corrective highlighting of the existence and lives of Afro-Sephardic individuals in the Sephardic Atlantic makes readers rethink assumptions about early modern and Atlantic-world communal boundary-making and self-understanding. (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. The authors further want to argue that the Judaism of the settler-traders influenced local African beliefs and practices, but offer next to no evidence; their proposed “influence” is nearly entirely hypothetical.
Greater attentiveness to the dialectical nature of questions of race, to synchronic and diachronic dynamics and tensions, within communities and between colonial outpost and metropole, would have sharpened the book's conclusions and reduced, to my mind, some of the allegedly unrecognized Jewish exceptionalism claimed by Mark and Horta. On every level Sephardic parallels with the behavior of Christian traders and colonialists could not be more apparent. I disagree that one cannot call the increasingly exclusionary behavior and legislation in this milieu “racial,” a term Mark and Horta want to reserve for the Enlightenment era's so-called scientific racism. They themselves call the Iberian “purity of blood” system racial, in the sense that it categorized a varying complex of biological descent and cultural status, and I see no reason not to apply the same understanding to the developing caste system, however improvised and provisional its unfolding.
In terms of religious identity, the authors consistently and confusingly call their subjects Jewish, even if they are conversos, and even if many of the examples the authors themselves produce seem to indicate continued situational self-appellation. They highlight fluid identity in West Africa but seem to deny it in Europe, within the Jewish communities made up of New Jews, as Yosef Kaplan brilliantly calls them. Even regarding Africa, the authors never clarify whether the communities being discussed are completely Jewish or inhabited by both conversos and those living openly as Jews. Their terminological choices are essentially a political decision, one which I greet with some hesitation. Almost all of the documentation adduced by the authors regarding behavior and attitudes of New Christians / Jews derives from Catholic sources virulently hostile to Jews and Judaism. Can such sources really be considered credible? Scholars continue to debate these knotty matters and I wish Mark and Horta — who repeatedly state that such-and-such “is clear” or frequently characterize as “fact” items raised only in denunciations to inquisitors — had maintained more cognizance of uncertainties, ambiguities, and blurred boundaries.
Despite my differences and quibbles, Forgotten Diaspora skillfully improves our portrait of a vibrant swath of colonial-era Sephardic history and culture.
