Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination

This pattern of Jewish historical and cultural influence, which recurs in other parts of the Caribbean with varying degrees of intensity, has been obscured by the methodological nationalism of historians of colonial Jewish America, who until recently tended to neglect the vital links among Jewish communities across the hemisphere and to underplay the significance of early modern Caribbean Jewish communities as centers of religious, cultural, and economic Jewish life in the New World. The general orientation of Jewish studies along Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic axes has further contributed to the marginalization of Caribbean Jewish history. And yet this history is crucial to understanding the appearance of Jewish characters and themes in postwar Caribbean literature. The four chapters that make up part 1 of this study suggest that a specific awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past underlies the persistent presence of Jews in Caribbean literature. The imaginary Jews in the texts that I examine in these chapters recall the members of historical Caribbean Jewish communities whose names they often carry.³

Accordingly, I read this body of Caribbean fiction, drama, and poetry not only in the literary contexts of postslavery writing and what John Docker calls “1492 literature” but also in relation to the emerging historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. This historical scholarship draws attention to the presence of Jews at the founding moments of a number of Caribbean colonies and to their role as “key participants in the effort to expand European empires into the western hemisphere and the broader Atlantic world” (Kagan and Morgan ix). More so than any of the other trading diasporas, Sephardic networks spanned both rival colonial powers and the Protestant/Catholic divide (Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews” 4). Atlantic Jewry drew upon their complex familial, religious, and economic networks in their work as traders and brokers of the colonial economy and, less frequently, landowners and slaveholders. Thus Edward Long wrote in his History of Jamaica (1774) that the Jews’ “knowledge of foreign languages and intercourse with their brethren, dispersed over the Spanish and West Indian colonies, have contributed greatly to extend trade and increase the wealth of the island” (quoted in Arbell, The Jewish Nation 232). The presence of Jews in the colonial Caribbean that Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Cynthia McLeod, and other contemporary Caribbean writers register was also linked to their expertise in technologies of sugar production. When, for example, some of the Dutch Jews who were forced to leave Brazil after the Portuguese reconquest in 1654 relocated to Martinique, they brought with them techniques for the crystallization and whitening of sugar cane (Miles 140).⁴ As a result of the varied roles that Sephardim played as brokers, merchants, and planters, they constituted a significant demographic in the colonial period, making up roughly one third of the European populations of Suriname and Curaçao (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 58–59).

Ultimately, Jewish Atlantic scholarship reveals the Caribbean as a contradictory space of both unusual freedom and renewed oppression for early modern Sephardim. The Caribbean figures somewhat paradoxically in Jewish history both as a site of religious liberty that afforded a unique degree of cultural continuity and as one of exclusion in which Old World prejudicial practices were reproduced and sometimes intensified. Most famously, the 1685 Code noir of Louis XIV, the document that defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonies, expelled Jews from the French islands in its first article.⁵ Jews were also prohibited from the Spanish colonies, where the Inquisition established itself in 1570 to stem the tide of New Christian settlement. Inquisition records document that secret Jews were discovered and put on trial in Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and Jamaica (Ezratty 8). In the seventeenth century, the entrance of the Western European powers into the Caribbean colonial theater opened up the Caribbean to overtly practicing Jews. Yet the British islands, while more permissive of a Jewish presence, imposed special taxes on Jews and placed limitations on Jewish political participation, landownership, and slaveholding, and Jews struggled to obtain full enfranchisement and civil rights (Loker 34–38). In some cases, as historian Holly Snyder suggests with regard to Jamaica, Jews faced greater restrictions in the colony than in the metropole (151). By the same token, however, the Caribbean was also a space of privilege for Jews and at times of an unusual degree of Jewish territoriality. Most notably, in the eighteenth-century self-governed Jewish agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne in Suriname in which McLeod’s historical novel is set, Jews enjoyed significant autonomy and exceptional liberties under both British and Dutch rule. These liberties included religious freedom, landownership, and the freedom to trade and plant as well as to administer their own court of justice (Ben-Ur and Frankel 21). Yet, even in the relatively tolerant Dutch colony of Suriname, Jews saw the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment and the curtailment of their civil rights during an economic crisis in the late eighteenth century when it was proposed that they should be enclosed in a ghetto.

The contradictions and ambivalences of Sephardic Caribbean history are neatly illustrated by two contrasting responses by contemporary Caribbean/diaspora intellectuals to the work of the nineteenth-century Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario. In his “Afterword” to Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, a handsome volume published by the Yale Center for British Art to coincide with its 2007 exhibition of Belisario’s work, Stuart Hall questions whether Belisario’s representations of Jamaican subjects can be properly understood as diasporic. Hall concedes that “as a Jew in a British slave colony, Belisario must have known something of that de-centeredness, that double-consciousness, which constitutes the ground of the diasporic,” and he takes care to note that Belisario, a member of a minority population, did not form part of the plantocracy, but rather the merchant and professional class. Nevertheless, Hall laments that Belisario’s “unruffled, settled” picturesque plantation paintings do not fully engage “the critical process of dialogism” (179–80) that he associates with diasporic aesthetics. Even Belisario’s more convention-defying series Sketches of Character (1837–38) ultimately contains rather than explores the subversive power of the Jonkonnu carnival that it depicts and fails to directly reference the several centuries of slavery that informed the performance. Thus, in Hall’s analysis, at the heart of Belisario’s work lies an erasure: “the question of the African presence and the unspeakable institutional violence of a slave regime” (180).

Hall’s reading of Belisario stands in marked contrast to that advanced by the eminent Jamaican scholar Rex Nettleford in his “Foreword” to another lavishly illustrated volume that was published in Jamaica a year after the Yale catalogue, Jackie Ranston’s Belisario. Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist (2008). While Hall worries about Belisario’s failure to address the injustices of slavery, Nettleford’s unequivocally celebratory essay portrays Belisario as choosing art over the “business pedigree of his forebears” (xiv). Indeed, Nettleford seems less troubled than Hall by the contradictions that inhere in Belisario’s biography and, more broadly, in Sephardic Caribbean history. Nettleford notes that Belisario’s parents and grandparents were involved in the slave trade, as “was considered normal in their time” (xv), but adds that “the story does not end there” (xiii), for Belisario’s father went to considerable efforts to draw attention to the abuses of slavery through the publication of his report on the trial of a Tortola planter accused of murdering his slave. Moreover, in Nettleford’s reading, Belisario’s Jewishness attunes him to the role of the creative imagination, for he “would have known about the great struggles of his own people to attain and guard their identity as a condition of survival” (xv). Nettleford endorses Ranston’s suggestion that Belisario’s interpretation of the slaves’ Jonkonnu masquerade may have been informed by his familiarity with the Jewish holiday of Purim, which celebrates the survival of an oppressed people. Most strikingly, Nettleford claims Belisario as a Jamaican national figure who emblematizes the creolized character of Jamaican society and its capacity to harness the power of the imagination: “That he was Jewish and not African or Christian European merely speaks to the textured reality of the Jamaican persona which is multi-layered, multi-faceted and multicultural but integrated in the subliminal unity manifested more than ever in the products of the collective and individual creative imagination. This makes Isaac Mendes Belisario’s story the story of all Jamaica, indeed of all the Caribbean and the Americas—indeed of all humankind” (xvi).

Hall’s and Nettleford’s diverging readings of Belisario’s oeuvre speak to the ambiguous position that Caribbean Jews occupied in the colonial power structure between the Christian European plantocracy on the one hand and the slave, free Black, and free colored classes on the other. When we set the two essays side by side, what emerges are the contradictions that inhere in the history of Caribbean Jewry itself, contradictions Jewish historians have tended to downplay for reasons that Jonathan Schorsch in particular has examined (“American Jewish Historians”). I would argue that it is precisely these ambiguities that account for the appeal of Sephardic themes for Caribbean writers. In the texts that I discuss, the introduction of Sephardic Caribbean motifs destabilize racial binaries and disrupt linear, monovocal structures in favor of prismatic narrative forms that engage a broad spectrum of histories. Chapter 1 examines Walcott’s nuanced portrayal of the Sephardic Caribbean painter Camille Pissarro as a figure of both identification and betrayal, while chapter 2 considers Chancy’s and Cliff’s more idealized presentations of crypto-Jews as emblems of cultural survival. In chapters 3 and 4, the introduction of port and plantation Jews unsettles the master/slave opposition, putting pressure on the generic conventions of the slave narrative and the plantation epic. Yet, while in the neoslave narratives discussed in chapter 3, Condé’s and Dabydeen’s port Jews serve as allies of the slave and as a conduit to emancipation, in chapter 4 McLeod’s plantation Jews prove a more ambivalent subject for literary representation.