Jews and Blacks in the early modern Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, 1450--1800

The issue of Black-Jewish relations has generated a great deal of passion and controversy because of the perception that on it hinges, at least in part, the status and self-identity of the two involved minority groups. As the topic stemmed overwhelmingly from events in nineteenth- and twentieth-century intergroup relations in the urban United States, most scholarship has focused on that geographical and temporal provenance. One of the most explosive elements of the controversy involves the charges that Jews instigated anti-Black racism as well as the trade in Black African slaves.;In order to gain some perspective on these notions, this study explores the preceding period in the history of the enslavement of Black Africans, from the onset of Atlantic slavery through its firm establishment as the economic foundation of the Atlantic world. This study seeks to form a more nuanced, less ideologically motivated picture of the behavior and attitudes of Jews toward Blacks during this formative historical epoch and to compare them with those of the non-Jewish world. Using a wide variety of sources to investigate both social and textual realms, this study traces some of the transformations sparked by the movement from traditional domestic slavery east of the Atlantic to mass-production slavery west of the Atlantic.;Jewish behavior toward slaves participated in the conceptions and practices of the surrounding environments, differing very little, except quantitatively, on both sides of the Atlantic. Under more traditional forms of slavery, as in the Muslim world, Black slaves of Jews found no particular barriers to eventual assimilation into the Jewish community, if they so desired. Jews maintained most of the traditional practices regarding slaves and the requisite rituals for absorbing them. Within the racialized Atlantic slave system these traditional attitudes and practices faced quiet and explicit suppression from communal leaders. Some Jewish communities established their own version of the exclusionary caste system called into being by White slave-holding elites throughout the Atlantic world.;Discursive treatment of Blacks by Jews also evinced little difference from surrounding societies. Though mostly negative and denigrating, Jewish depictions of Blacks were rarely more than repetitions of classical tropes, seldom reaching the frequency, range and intensity of non-Jewish texts from Atlantic slave holding elites. Jews, though active participants in the slave societies in which they lived, produced a discourse concerning Blacks reflective of their limited political and administrative responsibility in maintaining the slave system.