Abstract
This essay explores facets of the Sephardic racial imagination. Early Modern Catholic Iberian discourse generally scorned Jews and linked them, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, with denigrated Africans, or Blacks. Marginalized and often persecuted, conversos and Sephardim of the sixteenth through the eighteenth century resorted to hegemonic discourse about Blacks to construct their own identity. Central to Sephardic discourse about Blacks was its redemptive logic. In both Iberian Catholic and northwest-European Protestant colonial spheres, conversos and Sephardim sought through anti-Blackness to identity themselves (and hopefully for others to identify them) as members of the dominant White culture and ruling class, their religious otherness aside.
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Some of the material presented here comes from Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, for which I gratefully acknowledge the help of Hazel Gold, Viviana Grieco and Julia R. Lieberman. In order to convey the meaning of the often overwrought Baroque style of the Spanish originals, my translations are of necessity sometimes rather loose. I would also like to thank Yosef Kaplan, Lisa Moses Leff, Julia R. Lieberman and Kenneth Stow for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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Schorsch, J. Blacks, Jews and the racial imagination in the writings of Sephardim in the long seventeenth century. Jew History 19, 109–135 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-005-4360-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-005-4360-0