The Jewish Atlantic: 1492-1850

Catalog description

Who were the Jews that first settled in the Americas and around the Atlantic? How did their experiences intersect with processes of colonization, empire-building, racialization, and the formation of an interconnected Atlantic World? How did they maintain trans-national bonds with other Jews around the world? This course will explore these and many other questions by reconstructing the rise of the Sephardi Diaspora following the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, their settlement patterns across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, their global economic activities, and the dynamic ways they mapped onto religious, political, and racial schema of the period. (HIST-HPE, HIST-HTR)