January 2010 Melilah Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953) 5(1):1-14 DOI:10.31826/mjj-2010-050102
Equal partners? Proselytising by Africans and Jews in the 17th century Atlantic diaspora
Tobias Green Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham.
(excerpts)
Abstract: This paper examines the processes by which Africans proselytised Sephardic Jews on the coast of West Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries and were in their turn proselytised by Jews both in West Africa and elsewhere in the Atlantic world in the early modern era. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published sources, it shows that these activities were far from unusual in the Atlantic world at the time, and are evidence of a world of receptivity and understanding that belies traditional interpretations of Atlantic history. Analysing the conditions which produced the atmosphere in which such mutual conversions could occur, the paper argues that a relatively equitable balance of power was central to this process. Personal knowledge and human experience were crucial in breaking down cultural barriers in a way which permitted conversion; however, the wider economic forces which facilitated these exchanges were themselves distorting power relations, helping to shape Atlantic history on its more familiar, and intolerant, path.
The Atlantic Sephardic diaspora is one which remains unfamiliar to some historians of the early modern period. Only recently, indeed, has it become a focus of study for mainstream historiography.1 Yet this was, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, a diaspora which was almost of equal import to the trajectory of Sephardic Jews as that in the Ottoman Empire. Retaining a variable degree of Judaism beneath the cloak of an enforced Christian faith, these Sephardic New Christians became important players on both sides of the Atlantic world: in Madeira, Cabo Verde and São Tomé, and in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.In the vast geographical space which was occupied by this diaspora, there has now been a reasonable amount of research and publication devoted to the Sephardic New Christians of the American sphere.2 Only recently, however, has there been any sustained research and publication on the question of the activity of the diaspora in Africa. Here, landmark new research by Mark and Horta, Mendes and Green has uncovered a group of Sephardim living and trading on the petite cote of Senegal in the first three decades of the 17th century (Mark/Horta 2004; Mendes 2004; Green 2005; 2008)
This research has been very revealing. The Sephardim in question originated from Amsterdam, and belonged to that group of New Christians who had sought religious sanctuary in the Dutch United Provinces and returned to their ancestral faith. Their presence in Senegambia was related to the trade in wax and hides in which the region specialised in these years (Green 2005: 172–3). The community grew to be quite sizeable in the second decade of the 17th century, running its own prayer meetings with the help of Torahs imported from Europe, and having ritual butchers who killed meat according to the laws of kashrut (Mark/Horta 2004: 247, 251). However, following a disastrous trading expedition in 1612 led by the community’s leader, Jacob Peregrino, the Sephardic community in Senegal fell into a long decline from which it never recovered (Green 2005: 180–182)
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The conversion of a Jewish master’s slaves to Judaism was in fact far from unknown in Amsterdam, and, later, in the Sephardic colony of Suriname (Arbell 2002: 108). The congregational records of the 1640s reveal several interdictions regarding the participation of African members of the congregation in synagogal services (GAA, Portuguese Jewish Archives, Book 19, folios 173, 224, 281). This is evidence both of a reasonable African contingent in the congregation, and of a hardening of the inclusiveness which had characterised the congregation in its early years, a hardening which itself was probably the corollary of an increasingly racialised discourse as the 17th century unfolded.At the same time, moreover, as Africans were being converted to Jews in Amsterdam (and elsewhere), an analogous process was occurring in reverse on the West African coast. Sephardim who had taken up residence in Senegambia, and second and third generation Sephardic New Christians residing here and on the Guinea Coast, increasingly adopted elements of African religion.6 This was indeed a long-standing process, since as long ago as 1546 an accusation had been made to the Portuguese inquisitorial tribunal of Évora that the New Christians who lived on the African coast were adopting elements of African religious practice (A. Teixeira da Mota 1978: 8).7 This paper seeks to build on this evidence of a mutual receptivity of Sephardim and the peoples of this part of West Africa towards the religious practices of one another.
This is a subject which has recently entered the mainstream of Atlantic historiography following Jonathan Schorsch’s magisterial book, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Schorsch 2004). Schorsch’s analysis reveals the diversity of attitudes of Sephardim towards Africans and African-descended peoples in the Atlantic world, ranging from outright racism to co-operation and conversion.
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