The Sephardic Atlantic

Catalog description

This course will explore the social, economic, cultural and religious activities of Jews, Conversos and Crypto-Jews within the early modern Atlantic world. Instead of focusing on one specific national or geographic zone, this course looks at the vast and complex networks linking and cutting across European centers of power and the quickly evolving areas of American and African trade and colonization. We will chart the structures and mechanism through which Iberian Conversos developed global business enterprises and maintained close family connections across political and religious lines. Following the lead of Jonathan Israel and others, it can be argued that the social and economic networks of these cosmopolitan merchants was intimately connected to the complex forms of Jewish and crypto-Jewish religious activities that developed throughout the Atlantic world of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The interplay between social and economic issues and the forms of religious practice, identity and interiority is at the center of our study of the Sephardic Atlantic.