Creole Jews

This volume, produced for the Caribbean Series published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Leiden, one of the most distinguished scholarly bodies in the Netherlands, contributes to a larger body of work on Dutch colonialism in both the East and West Indies. Viewed within that framework, the book does an admirable job of outlining the Jewish experience in Dutch Suriname from the colonial period to the late twentieth century, with particular regard to its social etiology.That context, however, is a small one in the schema of both Caribbean and Jewish history, and the book has difficulty in speaking to broader outlines of those historiographies. It might have sketched out Suriname’s roots as an English colony, but largely neglects Suriname’s founding and its transfer to Dutch rule under the 1667 Treaty of Breda. Sparing use of some comparative data from other colonies with Jewish populations, from the Anglo-Caribbean as well as the Netherlands Antilles, would have been useful to provide context to the reader but is also missing. There is no meaningful discussion of Jewish culture either in the transatlantic diaspora or as it existed in the Netherlands. Given these lacunae, the volume suffers from a myopia that works to forestall the reader from seeing linkages between Jews in Suriname and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the Jewish diaspora, and the Dutch overseas empire, as these evolved over the centuries. Ignoring these themes does not diminish the achievements of the volume, but it does make it difficult for the reader to place the book into the context of imperial contests for Caribbean land and commerce, and of the Jewish diaspora in the New World setting. Caribbean historians will be left wanting a stronger sense of these connections.Caribbean scholars may find themselves equally disappointed by Vink’s superficial reading of the race question. Grounding her discussion of racial issues on the premise that race trumped class as a divisive force, Vink asserts that Jews were racially “white” and that public assertions to the contrary were just convenient anti-Semitic expressions by European and Surinamese Christians. This tells us nothing new, though it substantially oversimplifies the complex nature of race in the Caribbean context and underplays the subtle role played by class, religion, and gender distinctions in complicating what race meant and how its boundaries were socially defined. Anecdotes that Vink cites in support of her discussion would lend themselves to a more complex reading than she provides.Scholars who approach this book with background in Jewish historiography will be particularly put off by Vink’s method of assigning categories to Jewish identity. Her frequent use of the term “Halakhic Jew” is one example. This term is not generally employed in Jewish scholarship, and the book does not provide a definition of it. Inserting the term without defining it leaves the reader to guess at its meaning, rendering it imprecise and open to interpretation. Meanwhile, some terminology important for understanding governance functions within the colonial synagogue (e.g., “parnass,” “shammas”) is missing, while other terms are described in ways that impose a consonance to Christian governance (the “Mahamad” is defined at xiii as “Jewish church council”). Vink says that she has adopted this terminology because it was used in “official” records (p. 33 n. 8), but does not attempt to distinguish whether the terms were employed by agreement with the Jewish community or imposed by Christian officials for the sake of their own convenience. Without sensitive handling, use of Christian terminology to describe Jewish practices, as applied consistently throughout the volume, tends to obliterate any sense of Jewish religiosity in the world that Vink is describing. Again, it’s not that Vink’s descriptions are wrong but that her use of such terminology does not jibe with how these topics are discussed in the arena of historiography on Judaism. Knowledgeable historians of religion will find her conflation of the colonial synagogue with church procedures jarring and ham-handed.What does it mean to say a community is “on the verge of ending” (p. 11)? This seems a backhanded way of noting that Surinamese Jewry is in decline, but it doesn’t signify its disappearance. That suggestion is belied by the long-term survival of Jewish life in Suriname despite waning numbers. Jewish communities are renowned for geographical oscillations, as captured in Gerald Gamm’s comparative study of Jewish and Catholic mobility in Boston. Vink’s unstudied perspective may well serve to provoke discussion among historians, but it also highlights the author’s lack of understanding of basic Jewish cultural practices. An examination of her bibliography suggests general lack of familiarity with important strands of recent scholarship in early modern Jewish history, and this may help to explain the disconnect. What it mostly indicates is that Vink remains an outsider to the inner workings of the diaspora culture she seeks to explain

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Creole language · Diaspora · Empire · Ethnology · Genealogy · Judaism · Portuguese · Sociology · Anthropology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

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