Journal Article

American Jewish Historians, Colonial Jews and Blacks, and the Limits of \Wissenschaft\: A Critical Review

Jonathan Schorsch

2000

Overview

A quite visible (though not universally admired) stream of new works in various fields of Jewish studies makes use of some of the new and fruitful approaches inspired by \"theory.\" Unfortunately, few cover the early colonial period.(11) In some ways, Jewish historiography has been from its outset a form of subaltern studies. Even before \"theory,\" Jewish historiography -- in part because of the rhizomatic and ever-mutating nature of its object of study -- had long understood the importance of environmental factors (i.e., other peoples and cultures). Most of these studies, however, took the dialogical history of Jewish identity in the Diaspora resolutely to mean only that dialogue between Jews and Christians, occasionally the dialogue between Jews and Muslims, but almost never with regard to any other group. In his classic work on Jews in the Renaissance, Cecil Roth was at least honest in prefacing his study with the statement that \"Of the two cultures with whose interaction this book deals...\"(12) This myopic perspective replays most ironically the allegations of Christian oppression of Jews as a bond of intimacy, a family quarrel. Here Jewish history is more Eurocentric than the Europeans (perhaps a common failing of converts and Creoles). This perspective has been most amusingly stated, and with characteristic aplomb, by the \"father\" of American Jewish history as an academic discipline, Jacob Rader Marcus, in the preface to his three-volume summation, The Colonial American Jew: \"The typical American Jew turned his buttocks to the frontier and the wilderness; the culture he knew and cherished was transatlantic, European.\"(13) Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's demarcation of \"Early Modern Jewish History\" also neatly exemplifies the Eurocentricity of the Jewish historiography of the period, which goes from \"the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492 to the emancipation of the Jews of France in 1790-1.\"(14) This liminal period, this threshold to the modern era, marks the crisis in a love story of sorts, but the spurned lover is taken back and all ends happily. Modern Jewish historiography seemingly must replay the courtship and wedding stories Jews told about their coming into the family of Europeans (stories whose bias the non-European cousins might dispute). The Jews were not \"automatically\" anything, certainly not \"white.\"(49) The \"unhealthy climate\" of the Caribbean, according to Cohen, controlled \"Jew and gentile alike. In that sense, environmental factors completely negated all possible impact norms may have had upon Jewish behavior\" (131). Whatever Cohen's cryptic and dubious sentence means, he continues just as cryptically: \"Demographic behavior alone, however, does not form the historic process of development. The fact that Jews responded demographically in a similar way to the environmental pressures as their Christian counterparts does not mean that in other aspects they behaved like them.\" Again, just what does Cohen mean here? \"Even in the comparatively tolerant West Indian society they were discriminated against, economically as well as socially. They were largely an urban population living off trade, while most of the general population was plantation-oriented\" (131). But was West Indian society really comparatively tolerant? Jamaica? Martinique? Tolerant to whom, one wants to ask.(50) Is it possible that Cohen's elliptical language reveals a subtext behind the seemingly dry and objective statistics? This is a subtext that wants things both ways: Jews had no choice but to adapt to the \"environment,\" hence owned and used slaves, but even so, never to the extent of the main body of cruel (non-Jewish) slaveowners. Cohen's excellent, useful collection of data, despite its flaws but also despite its awareness of the colonial context of its objects of study, reflects Jewish historiography's habit of masking racial attitudes behind quantification.(51) Because slaves had already been \"coming under particularly close scrutiny\" (123) in demographic historiography of the Caribbean, Cohen turned his attention to the neglected Jews but unfortunately without genuinely integrating their various histories. Peter Novick may be correct to note, as quoted at the beginning of my article, how \"those who wrote of blacks as subjects, were overwhelmingly Jewish,\" but this would seem to exclude those Jews who remained scholars of early modern Jewish history. Blacks, that is, could safely stand as subjects in their own right only if such subjectivity did not threaten certain conceptions of Jewish passivity and disempowerment.

• Publisher: Indiana University Press,Indiana University,Conference on Jewish Social Studies
• Subject: Academic disciplines / African American-Jewish relations / African Americans / African slaves / Africans / American Jews / Authors of Jewish histories / Bias / Black people / Blacks / Christianity / Christians / Colonial history / Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 / Colonialism / Consciousness / Courtship / Creole languages / Cultural factors / Cultural identity / Culture / Diaspora / Discrimination / Emancipation / Empowerment / Environmental aspects / Environmental factors / Ethnic identity / Ethnic relations / European cultural groups / Families & family life / Historians / Historiography / History / History and sciences of religions / Interfaith relations / International relations / Israel / Jewish Americans / Jewish culture / Jewish history / Jewish people / Jewish peoples / Jews / Jews, American / Judaic studies / Korn, Bertram Wallace / Language attitudes / Masking / Measurement / Minority & ethnic groups / Modern and contemporary Judaism / Muslims / Natural environment / Oppression / Passivity / Politics / Race / Race relations / Racial attitudes / Racial discrimination / Racial Relations / Racism / Relations / Relations with Jews / Relatives / Religions / Scrutiny / Slave ownership / Slave trade / Slavery / Slaves / Statistics / Subaltern identities / Subjectivity / U.S.A / United States history / United States history, 1600-1775 (Colonial period) / Urban population / Urban populations / Weddings / Wilderness / Wilderness areas