Abstract
In this chapter, Ana Sobral analyzes the figure of Christopher Columbus in U.S. American and Caribbean memories as represented in a historical novel by Steve Berry and a work between fiction and nonfiction by Edward Kritzler. In both books, Columbus’ hidden connections with Iberian Jews and/or conversos are employed as a means of memory activism and producing entangled memories in the (re-)construction of Caribbean histories and identities. On the one hand, dis-membered Jewish pasts are re-membered to promote a sense of agency, associating the “discovery of America” with the Jewish people and Jewish refugees and immigrants from Europe. On the other hand, Columbus serves as a mediating figure between Jewish Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean memories. As against anti-Semitic propaganda in twentieth-century Afro-American nationalist movements, Caribbean imaginaries celebrate Jews and “frontier outlaws” (pirates and Maroons) as subcultures of resistance and as cracks within the European colonial enterprise. With this, they promote new forms of solidarity while celebrating a Jewish identity rooted (as if native) in the Americas, which seems to contradict Columbus’ depiction as a traveling figure whose identity is characterized by movement.
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Notes
- 1.
This list of key “disruptive” events is based on Gordon Collier, “The Caribbean,” in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. Lars Eckstein (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 224–55. As an introduction to the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, Collier’s text foregrounds the common elements among the many different nations in the Caribbean.
- 2.
Ibid., 224.
- 3.
Notable examples include Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1986), in which the young protagonist relishes a picture of “Columbus in Chains” presenting “the usually triumphant” figure “brought so low” (80); Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Columbe” from the collection Middle Passages (New York: New Directions Books, 1992): “But did his vision / fashion, as he watched the shore, / the slaughter that his soldiers / furthered there?” (11); or the reggae song “You can’t blame the youth” by Peter Tosh from 1972, which creates a link between the criminal subculture of Jamaica’s “rude boys” and the European invasion of the Caribbean: “You teach the youth about Christopher Columbus / And you say he was a very great man […] All these great men were doin’ / Robbin’, a rapin’, kidnappin’ and killin’,” accessed February 16, 2018, https://genius.com/Peter-tosh-you-cant-blame-the-youth-lyrics.
- 4.
It is worth highlighting that both texts collapse the important difference between practicing Sephardic Jews and conversos . As will be discussed below, this is a key aspect of the imaginative reinterpretation of history performed by these authors.
- 5.
The notion of a community as a singular, unified entity is quite ambivalent, particularly when regarding the Caribbean, a region constituted by many different multicultural nations. Similarly, to speak of the Sephardic community in the New World in the singular is rather reductive. Nevertheless, both Kritzler and Berry tend to use such simplified notions of the Sephardim, the Caribbeans, the Jamaicans or the Maroons (in Berry’s case) as unified communities in the singular. I would argue that the work of memory, particularly in the literary imagination, is often an attempt to produce a sense of unity within plural communities, hence differences in experiences and histories tend to be collapsed.
- 6.
Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, eds. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 216. My emphasis.
- 7.
See Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 125–133. On the importance of forgetting, see Elena Esposito , “Social Forgetting : A System-Theory Approach,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 181–189. While there are specialized “bearers of cultural memory,” as Jan Assmann calls them (ibid. 131), it is important to note that memory practices may be contested by certain groups within a community or society. Aleida Assmann calls them “memory activists” (ibid., 220).
- 8.
Assmann, “Collective Memory,” 132.
- 9.
Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: C.H. Beck, 1992), 52–53. It should be noted here that the boundaries between these two forms of memory are not fixed. In the words of Astrid Erll, “Cultural Memory and communicative memory should be conceived as two modus operandi, modes of memory, possible horizons of reference to the past. […] This means that in a given historical context, the same event can become simultaneously an object of Cultural Memory and of the communicative memory.” Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31.
- 10.
Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” 217.
- 11.
Ibid., 218.
- 12.
Ibid., 221.
- 13.
Ibid. The concepts of political and cultural memory should be regarded as permanently entangled: what may begin as a “scrutinizing, criticizing, appreciating” effort of dealing with historical narratives, archives, and remembering practices that fits into the broader realm of cultural memory can easily be taken up by certain collectives as a particularly relevant representation of their “exclusive” identity, thus turning it into a vehicle for political memory.
- 14.
Michael Rothberg, “Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 359–79, 361.
- 15.
Ibid., 64.
- 16.
In his overview of the links between memory studies and postcolonial studies, Michael Rothberg foregrounds the works of the anti-colonial theorists Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, which all promote a “sense that memory constitutes one of the significant fronts in the struggle against empire.” Rothberg, “Remembering Back,” 365.
- 17.
Countries with a majority of Afro-Caribbeans include Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Saint Lucia.
- 18.
On the erasure of the identities and memories of African slaves, see also Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Books, 2009), especially ch. 1: “Dismembering Practices: Planting European Memory in Africa.” Ngugi focuses not only on the European colonization of the African continent but also on the constitution of the African diaspora in the New World.
- 19.
Collier, “The Caribbean,” 229.
- 20.
On the link between Caribbean literatures, history , and memory , see for example Lars Eckstein , Re-membering the Black Atlantic : On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006) as well as Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).
- 21.
Michael Rothberg , Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3.
- 22.
Heike Paul, The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2017).
- 23.
Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis, 76.
- 24.
Paul, The Myths, 43.
- 25.
Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 129.
- 26.
Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 188.
- 27.
Jesseka Batteau, “Literary Icons and the Religious Past in the Netherlands: Jan Wolkers and Gerard Reve,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), 229–44, 232. Emphasis in the original.
- 28.
Rigney, The Afterlives, 188.
- 29.
Batteau, “Literary Icons,” 233.
- 30.
Paul, The Myths, 51
- 31.
Ibid., 57.
- 32.
Ibid., 53.
- 33.
Ibid., 57.
- 34.
Ibid., 61.
- 35.
Ibid., 63.
- 36.
Ibid., 66.
- 37.
Ibid., 67.
- 38.
Jonathan D. Sarna, “Columbus & the Jews,” Commentary 94, no. 5 (1992): 38–41.
- 39.
Ibid., 39. Emphasis by Sarna.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Ibid., 40.
- 42.
Ibid., 41.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
The Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 1 (Historical Research Department of NOI, 1991), 12–13.
- 45.
Ibid., 33–34.
- 46.
The selectivity of memory is patent in this case. In his discussion of The Secret Relationship, Saul. S. Friedman calls it a “handbook of anti-history,” as the purported study basically distorts, exaggerates, and emends facts, misquotes sources (or uses quotes out of context), and relies also on “shaky sources” or no sources at all. Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New York: Transaction, 1999), 3. More importantly, The Secret Relationship serves as a textbook case of “competitive memory” as defined by Michael Rothberg (Multidirectional Memory, 5). Much of the book appropriates terms associated with the persecution of Jews, such as “pogrom” and “Holocaust,” to talk about the suffering of Native-Americans or Africans purportedly at the hands of Jews.
- 47.
The spokesman of the Nation of Islam, Khalid Muhammad, actually appropriated the notion of “Holocaust” to argue that transatlantic slavery had in fact been a far more horrifying experience of victimhood which remained largely unacknowledged in the American public sphere. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 2. It is worth pointing out that Native-American memory activists also have interpreted Columbus’ arrival in the New World as a “Holocaust,” which eventually led to the annihilation of a large portion of the indigenous population. See Sarah Casteel, “Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37, no. 2: The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies (Summer 2012): 59–81, 59. As in the case of Muhammad , these Native American memory activists seem to suggest that only through the frame of the Nazi extermination of European Jews can the memory of suffering of other collectives be addressed in the first place. At the same time, both cases imply that the considerable devotion to the Holocaust in transnational remembering practices of the past decades has contributed to the marginalization (if not outright forgetting) of other, equally or even more important and tragic histories of victimization.
- 48.
Fabienne Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism, and Commemorations in the Caribbean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 49.
Ibid., 3.
- 50.
Ibid., 231.
- 51.
Viala does highlight, however, that in 1986, when then-dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled the country, the population had “toppled the statue of Columbus in Port au Prince and [thrown] it into the sea” (16) in a symbolic gesture against the country’s long history of oppression which had found continuity in the corrupt elites. From that point onward, “Columbus was sentenced to historical oblivion” (16).
- 52.
Ibid., 231.
- 53.
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5.
- 54.
It is well documented that a significant number of conversos and crypto-Jews emigrated to the New World, particularly Brazil and the Caribbean, starting with Brazil in the 1550s. Around the 1650s, practicing Jews started settling in Jamaica . See. Jane S. Gerber, “Introduction,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 1–16; Jonathan Israel, “Jews and Crypto -Jews in the Atlantic World System 1500–1800,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3–17.
- 55.
Gerber, “Introduction,” 2. My emphasis.
- 56.
Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom—and Revenge (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 14.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
I am using here the analytic term common in literary studies to identify the dominant perspective of a character in a narrative text that nevertheless features a third-person narrator who is not involved in the action. While Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean features a third-person narrator (as do all historical studies), the text strongly focuses on singular perspectives, such as that of Columbus in this chapter. We thus “see” the events through Columbus’ eyes, even if the “voice” of narration is purportedly that of the historian Kritzler.
- 60.
Ibid., 16.
- 61.
Ibid., 15.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid., 16.
- 64.
Ibid., 27. My emphasis.
- 65.
Kritzler is not alone in making this assumption. For a discussion of the depiction of Santangel as a supporter of Columbus for the cause of Spanish conversos , see Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America, third edition (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Publishing, 2010), 8.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
On Columbus’ aim to find riches on his westward journey, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 68.
Ibid., 25.
- 69.
See n.a., “The Jews of Jamaica: A Historical View,” Caribbean Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March, 1967): 46–53.
- 70.
Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, 22.
- 71.
Ibid., 17.
- 72.
Steve Berry, The Columbus Affair (London: Hodder, 2012), 3.
- 73.
Ibid., 7.
- 74.
Ibid., 9.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Ibid., 10.
- 77.
See Jacob Neusner, Torah from Our Sages: Pirke Avot: A New American Translation and Explanation (Dallas, Texas: Rossel Books, 1983), 167. I am grateful to Jonathan Schorsch for this information.
- 78.
For a very different interpretation of the role of de Torres as the first journey’s interpreter, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters , in which particularly de Torres’ value as interpreter of Arabic is highlighted—a language that would have been of much use, had Columbus indeed found a passage to Asia. Hulme , Colonial Encounters, 29.
- 79.
See Karen Seago, “Red Herrings and Other Misdirection in Translation,” in The Voices of Suspense and Their Translation in Thrillers, eds. Susanne M. Cadera and Anita Pavic Pintaric (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 209; Lars Ole Sauerberg, The Legal Thriller from Gardner to Grisham: See you in Court! (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45.
- 80.
Ibid., 51–52.
- 81.
It is interesting to note that this plot radically simplifies the Royal Edict: in reality, conversos such as Columbus (in Berry’s imagination) and de Torres would not have been forced to leave Spain at all. Only openly practicing Jews who refused conversion were punished with expulsion . For the sake of narrative drama, Berry totally eliminates the differences between Sephardic Jews and conversos .
- 82.
Kritzler, Pirates, 22.
- 83.
On the Jewish settlements in Jamaica, see Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish- Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2002), 225–60. Arbell points out that “New Christians” were welcomed in Jamaica by the descendants of Columbus in the 1520s in the hopes that they would develop “active commerce,” but crypto-Jews were discouraged from practicing their Jewish rituals openly (226). With the occupation of Jamaica by the English in 1655, the new authorities granted practicing Jews permission to settle on the island (229).
- 84.
Erin S. Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures,” Cultural Critique 59, no. 1 (2005): 24–62, 28.
- 85.
Ibid., 31.
- 86.
Ibid., 32. This is, of course, a rather simplified version of far more complex histories. The Maroons were indeed able to constitute communities on the margins of the plantation system, but some Maroon communities also signed agreements with colonial authorities in which they gained autonomy and freedom by committing to hand over all future runaway slaves who came to them. See Mackie , “Welcome the Outlaw,” 42. However, as Mackie’s study of the cult of such figures as the Maroons suggests, these conflicting elements of their history do not fit the more positive depiction of Maroons in popular culture, and therefore are often left out.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Jonathan Schorsch, “Sephardic Business: Early Modern Atlantic Style,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 493.
- 89.
The term “buccaneer” is defined by the Merriam-Webster as “any of the freebooters preying on Spanish ships and settlements especially in 17th century West Indies,” accessed May 17, 2017, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buccaneer. Initially a term reserved for freebooters in the Caribbean, it eventually became interchangeable with the term “pirate” in the seventeenth century. See Jon Latimer, Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4.
- 90.
Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 31.
- 91.
Kritzler, Pirates, 255. My emphasis.
- 92.
Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 35.
- 93.
Berry, Columbus Affair, 167.
- 94.
Ibid., 329–330. My emphasis.
- 95.
Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw,” 35.
- 96.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 30.
- 97.
Ibid., 19.
- 98.
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5.
- 99.
Kritzler, Pirates, 254.
- 100.
It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Steve Berry is not Jewish, hence it would be difficult to read in his novel an “agenda” similar to that of Kritzler . He has specialized in intricate plots that weave historical details from different locations. Titles such as The Alexandria Link (2007), The Venetian Betrayal (2007) or The Paris Vendetta (2009) may be an indication of the scope of his narratives and his penchant for complicated, conspiracy-based plots.
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Sobral, A. (2018). Christopher Columbus and Jamaican Jews: History into Memory. In: Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (eds) The Sephardic Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_10
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