From the perspective of early modern Jewry there existed two Atlantic worlds that were disconnected and linked at the same time.¹ The first comprised the Iberian, Catholic orbit, a sphere forbidden to Jews as Jews, but rich with New Christian or converso involvement. It spanned from the Iberian Peninsula to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa, Atlantic islands in Spanish and/or Portuguese possession, South America, Central America, the Spanish Caribbean and Spanish territories in what would later become the United States.² The second Jewish Atlantic world entailed a transnational network of openly Jewish communities that former conversos and Sephardim (hebraicized plural for Sephardic [Jew] in the singular) forged across Protestant metropoles and colonies, calling themselves mostly Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Portuguese Jews, Portuguese or simply A Nação (The Nation). Built around Amsterdam’s Sephardic communities, which were merged into the famous Kehilah Kedoshah Talmud Torah (Holy Congregation of Torah Study) in 1639,³ this network first expanded to Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) and the first open Jewish community founded in the Americas.⁴ Afterwards, it developed remarkably, ultimately spanning Sephardic communities from London to Western Africa, the so-called “Wild Coast” in the Guyanas, Curaçao in the Dutch, Jamaica and Barbados in the British, St. Thomas and St. Croix in the Danish Caribbean, as well as settlements on the east coast of North America, among them Nieuw Amsterdam (later New York), Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia. For a short time, French territories in the Caribbean were also open to Jewish settlers, but Jews were expelled from Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1685, and our knowledge about crypto-Jewish settlers in the aftermath of the expulsion is still limited.⁵ Both conversos and open Jews settled on Santo Domingo, which became St. Domingue after French conquest, though the history here is also convoluted.⁶ With regard to the French metropolitan context, the situation is ambivalent. Even though Jewish settlement in France was officially forbidden since the expulsions of the fourteenth century, it is well known that, due to the lack of an inquisitional court, “Portuguese” crypto-Jewish communities blossomed in Bordeaux and Bayonne, and scholars are more and more inclined to include French New Christian settlements in the “open Jewish Atlantic” in spite of their Catholic and legally rather restrictive contexts.⁷

Our concept of the Sephardic Atlantic includes both the Catholic and openly Jewish segments of this intertwined diaspora and set of networks, a stateless, territory-lacking quasi-empire of communities—“islands” in a sea of non-Jewish host countries.⁸ As a network of families and independent communities that spanned nation-states, empires, continents, and religions and hence characterized by an unusually high degree of complexity, Sephardim in the Atlantic world pose challenges to accepted historiographical fields and methods. Conversos, who fled Iberian lands and the Inquisitions, created a new and unique western Sephardic Judaism and Jewishness out of the remnants of Iberian precedents. Together with conversos from the Iberian Atlantic these Sephardim, called “New Jews” by Yosef Kaplan, played a dominant mercantile role in the region and in some countries and colonies enjoyed unprecedented privileges and rights. At the same time, Sephardic Jews in non-European settings were typical examples for what has been termed “colonized colonizers.” Some Sephardim willingly participated in colonial suppression and exploitation; they considered themselves part of the “white elite” and distanced themselves from subaltern traditions and cultures of knowledge even though some of them were also deeply influenced by those very same traditions and cultures. At the same time however, they suffered anti-Jewish prejudice and othering from all sides: Christian settlers, who considered Jews to be “not quite white,”⁹ or abolitionists and also slaves, who quickly came to create and internalize anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic narratives about a special and explicitly “Jewish” version of colonial violence and brutality.¹⁰

The Portuguese Jewish Nation, or A Nação (The Nation), wrested for itself collectively in the Dutch and English colonial orbit an extraordinarily high degree of autonomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which can be seen as part of a decolonization process of moving toward (national) independence. A later kind of Jewish decolonization has to do with the gradual move away from the “mother” communities back in Europe, such as Amsterdam or London, and the turn to local concerns and authority. In the early eighteenth century and thereafter, the fitful and gradual process of hemispheric decolonization itself contributed to the Jews’ gaining suffrage, though it is not clear to what degree Jews supported independence, while to some extent the process also pitted Jews against the emancipation of the slaves and the granting of rights to free people of color. Several of the chapters here trace the ways postcolonial-era collective memory and fictional treatments by and about Sephardim/conversos process which “side” Sephardim/conversos took, that of the colonizers or the indigenous and enslaved. By today, for many, Sephardic identity stands alongside other identities—Caribbean, African, queer—signifying in ways not “controlled” by the previously domineering Sephardic community governing bodies.

Despite their importance in colonial settings, Jews have long been ignored in major studies of colonial history, partly, as has been suggested, because they don’t exactly fit into colonial dichotomies and hence complicate narratives that have been dominant in early Postcolonial Studies.¹¹ In general terms, Postcolonial Studies tends to focus on the postindependence eras of the respective colonies and to neglect early modern examples and times. Scholars of the Enlightenment have even reproached postcolonial scholars by arguing that “many concepts drawn from postcolonial theory are parachuted into analyses of eighteenth-century texts without sufficient recognition of the perils of anachronism.”¹² Obviously, the Sephardic Atlantic as an early modern network with its pinnacle between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries is susceptible to similar criticism. Nonetheless, opting to eschew such a narrow historicist perspective, many postcolonial scholars do not restrict the term “postcolonial” to modern history, but rather use it in a broader sense, applied to any experience and culture “affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.”¹³ Furthermore, some scholars see the sibling field of decolonial thought, which emerged from South American scholarship, as “start[ing] with the earlier European incursions upon the lands that came to be known as the Americas from the fifteenth century onwards.”¹⁴

With regard to Jewish Studies, scholars have only hesitantly made use of recent methodological turns in postcolonial thought. On one hand, scholars of Sephardic history have responded quickly to the blossoming of Atlantic History since the 1990s,¹⁵ contributing and proposing new fields of research with regard to Jews and conversos in colonial settings, transnational networks, and solidarities as well as highly under-researched diasporas and communities in early modern Africa¹⁶ and the Caribbean.¹⁷ On the other hand, problematic relations between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies have long been an obstacle to judicious discussions about postcolonial approaches to Jewish Atlantic networks and communities.¹⁸ ...