In this meticulously researched study, Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta focus on Portuguese Sephardi communities established in the towns of Joal and Porto d'Ale in the Petite Côte region of Senegambia in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Far from the Iberian mainland and the Inquisition, some of these merchants and settlers lived openly as Jews and formed part of a larger Sephardi network that connected West Africa with the Atlantic world. Especially important in the construction of a Jewish identity in West Africa were their ties to the growing Jewish community of Amsterdam, where many Iberian New Christians had, since the 1590s, openly practiced Judaism. Through marriage, conversion, and the assimilation of Africans into their communities, a Luso-African culture influenced by Judaism developed which formed a prototype for subsequent Eurafrican communities elsewhere in Africa and in South America.

West Africa has been nearly ignored in the larger narrative of the role played by New Christians and Sephardi Jews in the making of the Atlantic world, except in the controversial and discredited accusations that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Mark and Horta do not directly engage in this controversy, but do assess the ownership and trade of slaves by Jews and New Christians. While estimating that the slave trade from Upper Guinea was higher than previous scholars have claimed, Jewish participation in the trade seemed to be marginal and was perhaps more connected to the trans-Saharan rather than the trans-Atlantic trade. While Jews may have been involved in this trade, reference made by the authors to ‘Jewish slave networks of the Sahara’ (p. 174), and the role played by Jews in controlling the trans-Saharan slave trade is not based on reliable evidence. Other goods, they argue, were more important than slaves; in particular, they shed light on the blade weapons trade to which a chapter is devoted. Sephardi merchants entered into the West African sword trade, the authors speculate, because of the development of the armaments industry in Morocco under Ahmad al-Mansur and the increased demand for weapons south of the Sahara that resulted from the Moroccan conquest of the Songhai Empire. The convergence of Sephardi merchants and their commercial network in the Netherlands, Portugal, and Morocco with New Christian in Lisbon and Jewish artisans in Fez producing weapons, facilitated the trans-Saharan weapons’ trade. Another chapter is devoted to ivory, which not only assesses the importance of the trade, but also analyzing ivory carvings as both material evidence of the weapons trade and, somewhat less convincingly, as cultural artifacts of crypto-Jewish practices of Jews in West Africa. The one artifact presented as evidence is an ivory spoon with an extended index finger, which the authors speculate could have served as a Jewish Torah pointer that may have been disguised, the hand gesture recalling a Catholic benediction. Yet no connection to Jewish trade and religious practices in Senegambia is clearly established since the provenance of the Luso-African ivory artifacts is often unknown.

While Mark and Horta contribute greatly to understanding how Sephardi and New Christian trade networks between West Africa, Iberia, the Netherlands, and Brazil functioned, a large part of the book is devoted to questions of religious, cultural, and racial identity of the West African communities, mainly based on interpreting records of the Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews of the Petite Côte lived in a society where cultural and religious identity was fluid and where outsiders were accepted and assimilated. The Jews, like other Portuguese settlers (lançados), were dependent on the protection of the mainly Muslim Wolof and Sereer elite and were integrated into the African communities. The authors speculate that Jews were attracted to a region that was ‘nominally’ controlled by Muslim rulers and far from the Inquisition in much the same way that Iberian Jews settled in Morocco and the Ottoman empire, where they were accepted as dhimmis and guaranteed protection in accordance to Islamic law. In Senegambia their relations with their Muslim hosts developed in a manner distinguishing them from Christian traders. Yet this argument is problematic: in comparison to Morocco and the Ottoman Empires where Portuguese Jews, in the wake of the expulsion and mass conversion of 1497, joined existing Jewish communities where they would have been defined as dhimmis, it seems implausible that Jews (or Christians) lived as dhimmis defined by shari‘a law in the polities of Senegambia, where religious syncretism seemed to have been the norm. The attraction of New Christians and Jews to the region, over a century after the mass expulsion from the Iberian Penensula, was likely motivated primarily by commercial opportunity, in much the same manner that New Christians moved across the Atlantic to the Americas, openly practicing Judaism when residing in colonies controlled by the Netherlands. While the Inquisition records may reflect a newly assertive Jewish identity, the contention that this new attitude caused them to initiate a discourse with local Muslim rulers on the commonalities between Islam and Judaism in order to maintain their political protection is questionable, except in the eyes of the Inquisition which may have been alarmed that Portuguese Jews were converting Africans to Judaism. In addition to invaluable incidental information about Senegambia and its traders, what the Inquisition records also reveal is not so much the nature of Muslim-Jewish relations, but rather the far reach of the Inquisition, its preoccupation with Islam, the association of Jews with Muslims, and the competition between Old and New Christians or between New Christians and Jews that played out in the Atlantic world. As Mark and Horta themselves indicate, the documents of the period often conflate New Christians and Jews (gentes da nação), accusing both of Jewish religious practice, which suggests that the impact of Jews and Judaism in African society may have been exaggerated in Inquisition records, and more limited in the making of a Luso-African identity than the authors claim.

In a more convincing revision of previous scholarship, this study demonstrates how Africans were integrated in the Sephardi community in Guinea and Cape Verde Islands and how Luso-African Jews were accepted as members of the Amsterdam Jewish community in the early seventeenth century. It was by a gradual process in that Eurafrican Jews were excluded by communal regulations, as racial hierarchies developed.

By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Jewish communities of the Petite Côte were disappearing, either returning to Amsterdam or assimilating into the local culture. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Sephardi communities of Senegambia and their relatively small numbers, this path-breaking book has persuasively demonstrated the importance of West African Jews for understanding the early modern Atlantic world.