Spanish colonial society was divided into a caste system based on race and religion. Slaves comprised the lowest caste, leading some to seek power through African magic. Meanwhile, children of Jewish fathers and African women tried to gain social status by embracing Judaism-but in the process they risked retribution from the Spanish Inquisition, whose tribunals zealously prosecuted the perceived threat to the colonies from multicultural witchcraft and from alleged secret Jews. The Spanish authorities and the Inquisition were aware that the lower castes were in close social and sexual contact with one another, and that many of their subjects were of mixed race. This book explores the question of how free and enslaved Africans and secret Jews interacted in daily life. It focuses on two stories that exemplify the sexual, religious and commercial contacts between the castes; their worldwide underground networks from Europe to Africa, from South American to Asia; and the intertwined religious and magical practices of secret Jews, Africans and others. The Inquisition, with its reliance on denunciation and torture, had only limited control over the daily lives of different castes, from slaves to merchants and highest ranks of nobility. The two tales also illustrate the perils tied to religious identity and practice in the colonies. One, set in 17th-century Cartagena de Indias, features a biracial surgeon famed for his magic powers. To bargain for his freedom, he denounced his wealthier colleague for secretly practicing Judaism. The colleague was arrested and confessed under torture. The second story involves Esperanza Rodriguez, a biracial Mexican woman tried by the Inquisition in the 1640s for secretly practicing Judaism. In Seville, Rodriguez had been a slave of a New Christian (converted Jewish) woman, who was connected to the highest strata of Spanish aristocracy and who introduced Rodriguez to Judaism before freeing her. Rodriguez accepted Judaism in order to close the social gap that separated her from her former owner. She mixed with other African people who created their own circle of converted Africans, and she traveled with her family from Seville to Cuba, Mexico and Cartagena. But she was eventually caught by the Inquisition and tortured into confessing her religion. Many of the New Christians and freed Africans lived adventurous lives, traveled between continents and were connected to worldwide underground circles, which had significant influence in the development of the colonial world. This book tells their story for the first time.

The 16th and 17th-century Iberian Atlantic was a turbulent world of adventurers, transatlantic slave trade, forced conversion to Catholicism, and underground societies. Africans and converted Jews were persecuted by the Inquisition. This book draws on protocols of the inquisition to create a panorama of the lives of free and enslaved people from Europe and Africa to Central and South America, including Conversos and freed Africans who were business partners and rivals, some involved in clandestine relations between dominated groups."

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. Focusing on the work of Michael Pollan, Jonathan Schorsch questions the modernist, materialist, and rationalist worldview of many foodies and discusses their lack of attention to culture, tradition, and religion.

Spanish colonial society was divided into a caste system based on race and religion. Slaves comprised the lowest caste, leading some to seek power through African magic. Meanwhile, children of Jewish fathers and African women tried to gain social status by embracing Judaism-but in the process they risked retribution from the Spanish Inquisition, whose tribunals zealously prosecuted the perceived threat to the colonies from multicultural witchcraft and from alleged secret Jews. The Spanish authorities and the Inquisition were aware that the lower castes were in close social and sexual contact with one another, and that many of their subjects were of mixed race. This book explores the question of how free and enslaved Africans and secret Jews interacted in daily life. It focuses on two stories that exemplify the sexual, religious and commercial contacts between the castes; their worldwide underground networks from Europe to Africa, from South American to Asia; and the intertwined religious and magical practices of secret Jews, Africans and others. The Inquisition, with its reliance on denunciation and torture, had only limited control over the daily lives of different castes, from slaves to merchants and highest ranks of nobility. The two tales also illustrate the perils tied to religious identity and practice in the colonies. One, set in 17th-century Cartagena de Indias, features a biracial surgeon famed for his magic powers. To bargain for his freedom, he denounced his wealthier colleague for secretly practicing Judaism. The colleague was arrested and confessed under torture. The second story involves Esperanza Rodriguez, a biracial Mexican woman tried by the Inquisition in the 1640s for secretly practicing Judaism. In Seville, Rodriguez had been a slave of a New Christian (converted Jewish) woman, who was connected to the highest strata of Spanish aristocracy and who introduced Rodriguez to Judaism before freeing her. Rodriguez accepted Judaism in order to close the social gap that separated her from her former owner. She mixed with other African people who created their own circle of converted Africans, and she traveled with her family from Seville to Cuba, Mexico and Cartagena. But she was eventually caught by the Inquisition and tortured into confessing her religion. Many of the New Christians and freed Africans lived adventurous lives, traveled between continents and were connected to worldwide underground circles, which had significant influence in the development of the colonial world. This book tells their story for the first time.

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. Focusing on the work of Michael Pollan, Jonathan Schorsch questions the modernist, materialist, and rationalist worldview of many foodies and discusses their lack of attention to culture, tradition, and religion.

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.

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.

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 Curacao, 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.