Jewish Culture and History Abstracts

Jewish Culture and History

Abstracts of articles in Issue 7.2

Special Issue: David Cesarani and Gemma Romain (eds.), Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism

Part II: Cosmopolitanism and Its Limits

Gemma Romain, Ethnicity, Identity and ‘Race’: The Port Jews of Nineteenth-Century Charleston
- This essay examines the identity of the port Jews of antebellum Charleston and the way in which their ethnicity was formulated. The Jewish community of Charleston has been characterised as the pre-eminent American community of the antebellum period – accepted into the elite of society and equally embracing of white Charlestonian culture. Utilising the concept of the port Jew, formulated by Dubin and Sorkin, I interrogate and discuss the accuracy of this description and also whether the particularities of Charleston’s port economy and society were reasons for this seeming cultural accord. I explore the local and transnational identities of the Jews of Charleston and also interrogate Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the city.
David Cesarani, The Jews of Bristol and Liverpool, 1750–1850: Port Jewish Communities in the Shadow of Slavery
- In the mid-nineteenth century the Jewish communities of Liverpool and Bristol were amongst the oldest, largest and best developed in England. They attracted Jewish settlers during a period of economic growth that was largely fuelled by the transatlantic slave trade. Yet historians of the Jews in Britain have hardly examined the interconnections between the slave trade and Jewish settlement. While Jews had little direct involvement in the slave trade, they were enmeshed in the local economy that was driven by it. Nevertheless, the fiercely commercial and utilitarian ethos of the slave-trading cities did not result in a favourable attitude to Jewish settlers. Mercantile interests could militate against the Jews, who were perceived as a source of competition. Contrary to the benign model of the port city this essay suggests that some mercantile centres may have been a dead end on the road to modernity while others may have fostered sectarianism.
Carlotta Ferrara Degli Uberti, The ‘Jewish Nation’ of Livorno: A Port Jewry on the Road to Emancipation
- The Letters Patent of 1591–93, known as Livornine, were aimed in the first place at Jews, and guaranteed, among other privileges, the right to profess their own religion, the possibility to acquire real estate without any limitations, and tax amenities for trading activities connected with the port. The Jewish Nation of Livorno took shape as a substantially independent administrative structure, with full legitimisation and strictly associated with the cosmopolitan environment created by the port. In the course of the nineteenth century the process of legal emancipation caused profound changes in the relationships between the Jewish Nation, the rest of the population and the state institutions.
Sakis Gekas, The Port Jews of Corfu and the ‘Blood Libel’ of 1891: A Tale of Many Centuries and of One Event
- The history of the Jews of Corfu has not been a particularly popular object of study and as a result the history of this community remains basically unknown. In an attempt to fill this gap but also engage with the debate on port Jews, this essay explores first the history of Jews during the ages and especially during the period of British rule in Corfu, the commercial centre of the Ionian State. The occupational classification of the Jews who became Greek citizens in 1864 aims at discerning the role of Jews in the port economy. Finally the essay also investigates the events of 1891, when a blood libel resulted in the first persecution of Jews in Greece. Economic factors, which led to the decline of Corfu as a port towards the end of the century, and the emergence of a local anti-semitism and an aggressive nationalism were the basic reasons for the outbreak of anti-semitic violence in 1891, a by and large unknown event of Greek history.
Nicholas J. Evans, The Port Jews of Libau, 1880–1914
- The Baltic port of Libau expanded rapidly during the end of the nineteenth century as the harbour, and the transport connections to it, were developed by Imperial Russia. Despite the constant erosion of the rights of the Jews living in this port, the influence the Jewish mercantile classes had in port commerce inflated their status in port life. The role played by the port Jews of this forgotten port city typified the fluidity of Jewish life at the end of the nineteenth century as Jews sought to migrate for religious, economic or political reasons. Such movement enabled the development of important business networks between Russian and North Seas ports. It is the role of port Jews of Libau that this essay discusses.
William Kenefick, Jewish and Catholic Irish Relations: The Glasgow Waterfront c.1880–1914
- Jewish immigration into Scotland was never large-scale, but before 1914 perhaps as many as 10,000 Jews had made Scotland their home. They were relatively new rivals, mainly from Russia, who settled largely in the Gorbals area, south of the river Clyde near the bustling inland port of Glasgow. There were also a great many Irish working along the Glasgow waterfront and living ‘cheek by jowl’ with the Jews in the Gorbals ‘Ghetto of commerce’. What type of relationship developed between the Irish and the new Jews? Was it marred by inter-ethnic conflict and communal violence, or do we see the development of a tolerant and pluralistic community? It is the type of community that developed from this intermingling and its relationship with the host society that is examined in this essay.
Milton Shain, Richard Mendelsohn and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Testing Cosmopolitan Tolerance: Port Jews in Cape Town During the Late Victorian and Edwardian Years
- The essay uses Cape Town in the late Victorian and Edwardian period to test the wider applicability of the Sorkin-Dubin ‘port Jew’ model, including the notion that port cities provide a peculiarly tolerant and welcoming environment, rooted in mercantile imperatives and cosmopolitanism. It argues that when one moves beyond the early modern European setting, the notion of the ‘port Jew’ becomes problematic. Modernity, it would seem, erodes the social space within which Sorkin and Dubin’s port Jew thrives. The close integration of modern port cities, like Cape Town, with society at large, including their hinterlands, might preclude them from acting as the distinctive shaper of cultural patterns and social types. Demonstrably, distinguishing between what is indigenous to Cape Town and what is imposed on it from without, is fraught with difficulty: the ‘port’ as a distinctive shaper of cultural patterns and social types becomes difficult to sustain. Cape Town’s cultural ethos in the late Victorian and Edwardian period cannot easily, if at all, be separated from developments well beyond its immediate locale. Modernity, it would seem, erodes the social space within which Sorkin and Dubin’s Port Jew thrives; that was unique to the self-contained port city of the early modern period. The close integration of modern port cities with society at large, including their hinterlands, precludes this.
Tony Kushner, From Atlantic Hotel to Atlantic Park: Anglo-America, Port Jews and the Invisible Transmigrant
- This essay argues that the concept of the port Jew needs to include, as an essential element, the centrality of movement. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, Jewish transmigrancy grew on a massive scale. This aspect of the Jewish experience has not received sufficient attention but its inclusion complicates the understanding of the port Jew in the modern era. The focus is on the British port of Southampton, whose growth into one of the major world maritime centres in the nineteenth century and beyond was partly stimulated by transmigrant trade. The experiences of the settled Jewish community in the town are contrasted to those of the transmigrants and the wider significance of Southampton in world and Jewish history is explored further through the issue of medical inspection of aliens. Ultimately, this essay points to the negative potential of ports in the Jewish experience, one that has to be considered alongside the potential benefits brought through cosmopolitanism.
Rainer Liedtke, An Island of Humanity in a Sea of Barbarism? Hamburg Jewry during the Nazi Period, 1933–45
- After the Second World War Hamburg has claimed that it has been a kind of enclave that had resisted the worst excesses of National Socialism. It has built up a popular image as a cosmopolitan and tolerant city which has always treated outsiders well. The investigation of anti-Jewish measures during the Nazi period reveals that the minority had been persecuted at least as vigorously as in other German cities, and in some instances more violently. This essay looks in particular at the developments during the November pogrom of 1938, the prosecution of Jews who had committed Rassenschande (defiling ‘German blood’ by having intimate contacts to non-Jews) and the expropriation of Jewish assets. It demonstrates that the elite that had run this port city for centuries used all opportunities to rid the city of ‘foreign’ elements and competitors. In Hamburg tolerance was based purely on economic utility.
Jonathan Goldstein, Singapore, Manila and Harbin as Reference Points for Asian ‘Port Jewish’ Identity

• Historian David Sorkin has argued that, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Atlantic and Mediterranean seaports, conditions of civic inclusion and economic and political equality enabled Jews to prosper, flourish intellectually and move toward full emancipation. Nearly simultaneously approximately 2,000 Jews settled in the British city/colony of Singapore while another 2,000 reached Manila in the American-occupied Philippines. Does the Sorkin thesis apply in an Asian context? In both Asian cities Jews enjoyed rights comparable to those of their Atlantic and Mediterranean seaport brethren and flourished commercially and intellectually. However, almost exactly the same phenomena can be observed in the same-sized Jewish community of Harbin, China, located 1,500 miles inland. Harbin was a major railroad hub, suggesting that the Sorkin thesis might be broadened to include all major trading and distribution centres and entrepôts which had civic inclusion and economic and political equality. His conditions and criteria would not exclusively apply to seaports.