Jews in the Early Modern Atlantic: Crossing Boundaries, Keeping Faith

When writing about the early modern Atlantic, historians commonly approach their topic from the perspective of the modern nation-state. Jews allow us to see how a focus on nation-based Atlantics can sometimes obscure the actual experience of life in the early modern Atlantic. In what follows, this chapter focuses on Jewish deathways as a way to understand Jewish religious practice and identity in the New World. Dutch interest in the New World began in the 1590s as the Dutch were fighting for their independence from Spain. Other Jewish migrants from Recife found their way to English Caribbean colonies. The representation of the biblical Esther pleading her case before King Ahasuerus is "almost a line-for-line copy" of a woodcut from a Christian Latin Bible published in Lyon in 1562. Surinam's Creole cemetery holds the descendants of manumitted slaves Photograph by Rachel Frankel. As Surinam's Jewish mulattoes attest, the boundaries of the Hebrew Nation-like the boundaries of European nation-states-were permeable and contested.