Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes how racialist thinking was complicated in Suriname by a Portuguese Jewish ethos centered on language (Portuguese and Spanish), religion (Judaism), and historical consciousness of a common Jewish past, an ethos that extended Jewish communal belonging to Eurafrican Jews.

Paper long abstract:

Portuguese Jews established an autonomous community in Suriname in the 1650s, sanctioned and recognized by successive English and Dutch colonial authorities until its official disintegration in the early 1800s. This autonomy, together with their legal status as both white and free, allowed Jews to own both land and slaves. This autonomy also enabled Jews to gradually open the doors of their community to enslaved and manumitted individuals of Eurafrican and (to a lesser extent) African ancestry, who were accepted as bona fide Jews, albeit of second tier status.

The uninterrupted, diachronic records of the Jewish communal authorities (the Mahamad)—never before systematically examined—allow us to trace the redefinition of "Jew" in Suriname through time and to gauge the process by which Jews of Eurafrican ancestry (sometimes with the aid of their white family members) fought for first-tier status in the Jewish community and struggled to transmit their Jewish identity to the next generation. The influence of the "mother community" of Amsterdam (through both migration and Jewish communal legislation) and possible connections of Suriname's early Jewish community to Senegambia (through migration of seventeenth-century Eurafrican Jewish families) indicate that the self-image of Suriname's Jews was constructed in a dynamic, trans-Atlantic context. The institution of slavery and its social consequences took center stage in the construction of this new Jewish and Eurafrican identity.