Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World

Description

This offers the first in-depth treatment of Jewish images of and behavior toward Blacks during the peak Jewish involvement in Atlantic slave-holding. Based on a wide-range of sources in several languages, it addresses some basic scholarly questions: What do primary sources tell us about relations between early modern Blacks and Jews? What do Jewish sources 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? This book constructs a cultural and social portrait of Jews living between 1450 and 1800 by placing them amid a larger socio-economic context, one from which Jews differed little, their religious Otherness notwithstanding.

Jonathan Schorsch is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the Religion Department of Columbia University. He has published articles in American Jewish History, European Judaism, and Jewish Culture and History, among other academic journals and is also the Jewish Book Editor for Tikkun magazine.

"...superb..." -Itinerario "A work of immense scholarship and elegant writing--encyclopedic in scope." -Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies "The study as a whole is an important contribution to research and should be read by all thsoe interested in understanding the formation of the modern Jewish mentality." -Abraham Melamed, University of Haifa "Schorsch has written an imposing and illuminating[...]book on an important and often polemically cahrged subject. Ideally, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World will be a major contribution to that yet-to-be-written history of the origins and development of European racism." -April G. Shelford, American University, American Jewish History