Calypso Jews

Sephardic Jews have been in the Caribbean since the beginning of the European encounter in the Americas.Legend has it that conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) were part of Columbus's crew.Jews traveled to Dutch Brazil and helped develop the sugar refining technology that would transform the Atlantic world.When the Portuguese recaptured the Dutch colony in Brazil, Jews went to Protestant islands like Barbados for fear of the Inquisition.By 1665, Barbados was the richest colony in the Anglophone world.In her new book, Sarah Phillips Casteel has assembled a landmark survey across cultures and languages of this long history in Caribbean literature.She takes as her epigram Paul Gilroy's question: "Why does it remain so difficult for so many people to accept the knotted intersection of histories?"The question remains timely.Gilroy's 1993 classic The Black Atlantic, was perhaps the point from which such discussions were renewed in the modern Anglophone academy.Gilroy himself would no doubt point to his mentor, the late Stuart Hall, who directed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in Britain, where Gilroy earned his Ph.D. Casteel mentions that Hall is "reported" to have had Jewish ancestry, but there is no doubt about it.His mother was Jewish and, as Hall remembers her in John Akomfrah's lovely film The Stuart Hall Project, quite the matriarch.Casteel sets up a contrast between, on the one hand, Hall's criticism of the artist Isaac Belisario for erasing the "unspeakable institutional violence of the slave regime" and on the other, Rex Nettleford's more forgiving assessment of him as part of the "textured reality of the Jamaican persona" (pp.32-33).She wants to see this contradiction as inherent to Caribbean Jewishness, although, strangely, Belisario's actual work remains little discussed.Later Casteel picks up on Derek Walcott's witty suggestion that the Caribbean-born Jewish artist Camille Pissarro prompted Cézanne to brighten his "dingy palette."A quick look at both artists' work would show that neither was doing very dazzling work at the time.It may seem like a small point but Casteel uses it to support the concept of "triangulation" (p.87), in which sephardism adds a third term to the Caribbean/European relation.That triangulation certainly exists, but it is perhaps more in the contemporary imagination than the historical record.As Casteel notes in conclusion, for some of these writers, mostly based in Britain, this maneuver has been "a means of defining their difference from American Blackness" (p.273).Oddly, in this way Europe ends up

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