Jewish Culture and History

Abstracts of articles in Issue 4.2

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Special Issue: Port Jews . Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, Edited by: David Cesarani

• Port Jews: Concepts, Cases and Questions by David Cesarani
  • Jews are commonly thought of as a pre-eminently earthbound and urban people, a stereotype that is not wholly charitable nor entirely unfounded. Yet the sea has played a curious, often un-remarked, role in Jewish history – particularly in the modern era. Thanks to new research and new approaches, the sea and the port cities that circumscribe it may assume a pivotal position in the great debate among Jewish historians about the dawning and the course of modern Jewish history.
  Fields of Tension: Development Dynamics at the Port-City Interface by Brian Hoyle
  • Although there is no single, simple model of the port city, the idea of the cityport is derived from the frequently close but often tense relationships between port functions and coastal urban development, both spatially and over time. This essay explores the cityport concept from a geographical perspective, outlines factors involved in cityport origins, growth and development, introduces models of port-city linkages and the cityport interface, and debates dimensions, perceptions and interpretations of change, using a range of case-studies. Conclusions emphasise factors involved in the continuing transformation of the cityport interface over time but question the continuing interdependence between port activities and urban phenomena.
  Port Jews and The Three Regions of Emancipation by David Sorkin
  • Current conceptions of emancipation are inadequate since they tend to be geographically exclusive and chronologically truncated as well as to presume a bipartite east–west divide. A more inclusive understanding of emancipation requires defining a range of statuses (toleration, civil inclusion, partial emancipation, full emancipation) as well as fashioning a tripartite model (west, central and eastern Europe). The notion of the Port Jew is integral to the status of civil inclusion and the ‘west’ European experience of emancipation.
  Researching Port Jews and Port Jewries: Trieste and Beyond by Lois Dubin
  • This article traces the development of the concept of port Jews, stressing its value for the comparative study of communities (port Jewries) as well as social types (port Jews). Focusing on the eighteenth-century Habsburg Free Port of Trieste and its Jewish community engaged in international maritime commerce, it emphasizes utility as a key factor in the perception of a port Jewry and analyses constructions of utility in Enlightenment, reforming absolutist and Haskalah discourses. Further, it argues that comparative study of port Jews and Jewries facilitates analysis of the respective roles of economics, society, and culture in Jewish history.
  Portmanteau Jews: Sephardim and Race in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Jonathan Schorsch
  • Using both texts and examples of social practice from various Atlantic communities, especially Amsterdam, this essay traces some of the ways in which individual Sephardim and the Sephardic collective wielded the social status of whiteness in the seventeenth century in order to navigate their ambiguous insider/outsider position as Jews or suspected Jews in a Christian milieu. Sephardic identity was shaped in part by Iberian racism and many (ex-)conversos found anti-blackness useful in enabling them to see themselves (and be seen) as part of the dominant culture and class, as whites, regardless of their religious otherness.
  Germany’s Door to the World: A Haven for the Jews? Hamburg , 1590–1933 by Rainer Liedtke
  • Hamburg, Germany’s dominant port city for centuries, also contained one of the largest, richest and culturally most productive Jewish communities of the German-speaking lands. The supposedly cosmopolitan and open environment of this major German entrepot provided a stable legal framework which protected the economic interests for all minorities but failed to deconstruct social and political barriers that prevented Jews from participating fully in the city’s formation. At the centre of the investigation is the question of how Jewish–non-Jewish interactions developed between the settlement of the first members of the minority in the late sixteenth century and the onset of the Nazi period.
  A Tale of Two British Port Jewish Communities: Southampton and Portsmouth Compared by Tony Kushner
  • This article explores the neglected histories of Portsmouth and Southampton Jewry, arguing that the concept of Port Jews needs to be extended chronologically, geographically and with a less elitist focus. While context with regard to location and era is crucial, it argues that Port Jews across the ages have something in common – the importance of place. Ports have experienced a greater cosmopolitanism than other urban settlements, producing particular forms of the expression of Jewishness, blurring categories of local, national and global. In Portsmouth and Southampton it produced positive and negative results for their Jewish minorities, encouraging freedom and restraint. They attempted to achieve balance between local loyalty and diaspora connections, producing fascinating and multi-layered identities, further complicated in the case of Southampton through the presence of transmigrants, a marginalised but highly significant feature of modern and especially European Jewish history.
  The Forgotten Port Jews of London: Court Jews Who Were Also Port Jews by David Cesarani
  • The Jews of London are neglected in histories of the city and the port, yet the development of the Jewish community since the readmission was shaped by its connections with both the court and the port. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the crown protected Jews from rival mercantile interests during conflicts which challenge the assumption that ports were automatically cosmopolitan, benign places for Jewish settlement. Jews occupied a precarious, marginal position in the city’s maritime economy. Later, economic and social change interacted with Jewish mass migration to foster a negative image of the Jew as port dweller.
  Port Jewry of Salonika: Between Neo-colonialism and Nation-state by Mark Levene
  • Can the Port Jew model be applied to communities temporally and geographically distinct from that of an Atlantic-orientated mercantilism? This essay argues that it can with regard to late nineteenth century Salonika. But it also seeks to show the model's problematic down-side. Salonika's new status emerged under the aegis of a neo-colonialism, the culmination of which was the bid for international free-port status in 1912. Salonika Jewry thereby found itself at odds with the town's other ethnic communities and with competing external national interests. In microcosm, a diasporic embrace of an emerging world economy came face to face with its other reality, the nation-state.
  Greeks and Jews in Salonika and Odessa: Inter-ethnic Relations in Cosmopolitan Port Cities by Maria Vassilikou
  • Greek-Jewish relations in Salonika and Odessa are a classic case study of inter-ethnic relations within the cosmopolitan environment of a port city. Both communities were part of a far-flung trading diaspora and shared characteristics of internal cohesion. However, historians have tended to concentrate on the differences and conflicts between the two groups. This article suggests that both communities were internally fissured and that strong ties existed between different strata across the ethnic-religious divide. In business, welfare, and political activities Jews and Greeks commingled and offered a model of integration informed by a self-conscious cosmopolitanism.
  A Port, Not a Shtetl: Reflections on the Distinctiveness of Odessa by John D Klier
  • This article emphasises the unique aspects of Odessa and their influence on the history of East European Jewry. These included the city's newness (founded in 1798) and openness to settlers of any ethnic or religious background. The numerous economic opportunities – so different from the shtetl economy of the Jewish heartland in the Pale of Settlement – attracted Jewish settlers from both the Russian and Austrian Empires. Given its unique characteristics, the city played a major role in the development of Jewish culture, but primarily those contributions marked by novelty and innovation. These included the ideologies of Zionism and Jewish varieties of socialism, as well as a modern Jewish press in Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, and the modern Yiddish stage. The economic dynamism of Odessa gave rise to socio-economic differentiation in the Jewish community which was far different from that of the towns of the Pale of Settlement.
  The Sorkin and Golab Theses and their Applicability to South, Southeast, and East Asian Port Jewry by Jonathan Goldstein
  • The experiences of the larger Far Eastern Jewish seaport communities tend to validate David Sorkin’s thesis that Jews in seaport cities enjoyed distinct opportunities for economic advancement and political and intellectual emancipation. Conversely, the Jews of Harbin, China, 1500 miles inland, also enjoyed these types of progress, calling into question the applicability of Sorkin thesis in a Far Eastern context. All of the above-mentioned communities conform to immigration historian Caroline Golab’s thesis that institutional and political development depends on length of residence, with long-term immigrants developing institutions more extensively than transitory migrants. Additional research on Jews in smaller Far Eastern seaports is needed to further test the Sorkin/Golab hypotheses.
  Conclusion: Future Research on Port Jews by David Cesarani

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