Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World

"This book offers the first in-depth treatment of Jewish images of and behavior toward Blacks during the period of peak Jewish involvement in Atlantic slaveholding. Based on a wide range of sources in several languages, many previously unexplored and unpublished in English, it addresses some basic scholarly questions : What do primary sources tell us about relations between early modern Blacks and Jews? What do Jewish sources, textual and archival, convey about Blacks? If Jews lived according to Jewish law, did Jewish behaviour toward their slaves take shape under its influence? What does the Jewish legal tradition say about slavery and behaviour toward slaves? Is there a connection between Jewish textual attitudes toward Blacks and Jewish behaviour toward them? If so, how do the two inform one another? Attempting to move beyond inter-ethnic polemics, this book constructs a cultural and social portrait of Jews - mostly Sephardic - amid a larger socio-economic context, one from which Jews differed little, their religious Otherness notwithstanding."--BOOK JACKET.