Jonathan Schorsch – författare

This book offers the first in-depth treatment of Jewish images of and behavior toward Blacks during the period of peak Jewish involvement in Atlantic slave-holding. Based on a wide-range of sources in several languages, many previously unexplored and unpublished in English, it addresses some basic scholarly questions: What do primary sources tell us about relations between early modern Blacks and Jews? What do Jewish sources, textual and archival, convey about Blacks? If Jews lived according to Jewish law, did Jewish behavior toward their slaves take shape under its influence? What does the Jewish legal tradition say about slavery and behavior toward slaves? Is there a connection between Jewish textual attitudes toward Blacks and Jewish behavior toward them? If so, how do the two inform one another? Attempting to move beyond inter-ethnic polemics, this book constructs a cultural and social portrait of Jews - mostly Sephardic - amid a larger socio-economic context, one from which Jews differed little, their religious otherness notwithstanding.

This book offers the first in-depth treatment of Jewish images of and behavior toward Blacks during the period of peak Jewish involvement in Atlantic slave-holding. Based on a wide-range of sources in several languages, many previously unexplored and unpublished in English, it addresses some basic scholarly questions: What do primary sources tell us about relations between early modern Blacks and Jews? What do Jewish sources, textual and archival, convey about Blacks? If Jews lived according to Jewish law, did Jewish behavior toward their slaves take shape under its influence? What does the Jewish legal tradition say about slavery and behavior toward slaves? Is there a connection between Jewish textual attitudes toward Blacks and Jewish behavior toward them? If so, how do the two inform one another? Attempting to move beyond inter-ethnic polemics, this book constructs a cultural and social portrait of Jews - mostly Sephardic - amid a larger socio-economic context, one from which Jews differed little, their religious otherness notwithstanding.

This volume contributes to the growing field of Early Modern Jewish Atlantic History, while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is a collection of substantive, sophisticated and variegated essays, combining case studies with theoretical reflections, organized into three sections: race and blood, metropoles and colonies, and history and memory. Twelve chapters treat converso slave traders, race and early Afro-Portuguese relations in West Africa, Sephardim and people of color in nineteenth-century Curaçao, Portuguese converso/Sephardic imperialist behavior, Caspar Barlaeus’ attitude toward Jews in the Sephardic Atlantic, Jewish-Creole historiography in eighteenth-century Suriname, Savannah’s eighteenth-century Sephardic community in an Altantic setting, Freemasonry and Sephardim in the British Empire, the figure of Columbus in popular literature about the Caribbean, key works of Caribbean postcolonial literature on Sephardim, the holocaust, slavery and race, Canadian Jewish identity in the reception history of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and Moroccan-Jewish memories of a sixteenth-century Portuguese military defeat.

This book explores the cultural and religious politics of the contemporary food movement, starting from the example of Jewish foodies, their zeal for pig (forbidden by Jewish law), and their talk about why ignoring traditional precepts around food is desirable.

This book explores the cultural and religious politics of the contemporary food movement, starting from the example of Jewish foodies, their zeal for pig (forbidden by Jewish law), and their talk about why ignoring traditional precepts around food is desirable.