Synopses & Reviews
Going beyond inter-ethnic polemics, this book describes the ways Jews imagined and treated Blacks during the first three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Jonathan Schorsch uses many previously unexamined sources to reveal the scope of Jewish anti-Blackness in Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam and the Caribbean. His study concludes that Jewish attitudes and behavior remained barely distinguishable from general European trends, less intense, although hardly benign.
Review
"...superb..." Itinerario"A work of immense scholarship and elegant writing--encyclopedic in scope." --Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Synopsis
An in-depth treatment of Jewish images of and behavior toward Blacks.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction. 2. Abravanelâs ambivalent Africans; 3. Jews and their slaves: theory and reality; 4. Blacks in Jewish society East of the Atlantic; 5. Mosheâs Kushite wife; 6. Imagining Kushites; 7. Explorations in the cross-cultural genealogy of the curse of ham; 8. Inventing Jewish whiteness in the seventeenth-century western Sephardic diaspora, Part One; 9. Inventing Jewish whiteness in the seventeenth-century western Sephardic diaspora, Part Two; 10. The religious life of slaves belonging to Jews in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and English colonies; 11. Into the Enlightenment: Jews and Blacks in the long eighteenth century; 12. Conclusion; 13. Appendices.