The ten essays that make up this wide-ranging volume offer a set of case studies and broader historiographic surveys of Jewish and Converso trading “nations” operating in the early modern Atlantic. Following the recent trend to see maritime regions as places of cultural interaction and exchange, these authors provide a window onto a diverse and fascinating world that challenges a host of popular notions concerning the nature of religiously determined communities. The book is divided into three sections that deal with historical context, mercantilism, and cultural and religious identity. Collectively, they underscore the singular capacity of Sephardic merchant networks to cut across rival empires, and highlight the way in which the bonds forged by these communities held important cross-cultural and political dimensions.

As Jonathan Israel proved long ago in his Age of Mercantilism, a pioneering work that is summarized in his essay presented here, economic concerns played a central role in the organization of early modern Jewish and Converso life and are essential to our understanding of Jewish history during this period. The rest of the section devoted to mercantilism adds greater texture to the portrait of these Converso and Jewish networks by setting them against the backdrop of other trading diasporas that were bound together by a mix of shared cultural, religious, and economic interests. In the section addressing the question of religious culture, the authors nicely emphasize the hybrid and fluid nature of Jewish and Converso communities in the Americas. But perhaps of even greater value are the vignettes and intimate portraits that bring us into closer contact with these people and the dynamic communities they constructed.

These essays also raise a number of questions for further study on this complex subject beyond those signaled by Natalie Zemon Davis in her short but astute epilogue. A fundamental aim of the book is to broaden and re-orient the narrative of Jewish history by expanding beyond Europe and the Mediterranean to include both the Jews and Conversos in their West African and New World contexts. However, it remains unclear whether these Atlantic communities were ever really integrated into the intellectual and cultural developments of “old world” Judaism, or actually a parallel phenomenon. Thus, when it is observed that a certain Converso treatise found a ready readership among Christian millenarians, but was generally ignored by contemporary Jews, it begs the question: What does this tell us about the relationship of early modern Conversos to Judaism? To what degree did the diasporic networks treated here transcend economic self-interest to establish communities with significant religious bonds? As with the older scholarly interest in Court Jews, the more recent focus on Port Jews displayed here remains committed to defining Jews in relationship to their host societies, rather than to any internal religious, cultural, or political traditions.

There is a problem here. While it is undeniably useful to point out the complex and hybrid character of religious culture in this age, such observations still assume coherent, essential poles between which hybridity can take place. In other words, the importance of grey areas is predicated on the acknowledgement of the existence of black and white areas that are being mixed. Our fascination with hybridity, with those grey areas, can lead us to abandon efforts to try to gain a deeper understanding of Atlantic Judaism and Christianity themselves, especially in the area of communal organization. We are treated to thoughtful discussions of how these people were viewed by the wider Christian world in which they lived and a fair degree of insight into how they viewed themselves. Yet, between Christian persecution and Converso self-fashioning there is relatively little space dedicated to how they were viewed by normative Jewish society of the day. Finally, though the scope of the volume is ostensibly from 1500 to 1800, its focus is mostly the latter half of that period, and its contributors have their eyes fixed quite firmly on the modern era and its historiography. There is, however, little space devoted to how these trading diasporas connect, either historically or historiographically, to the medieval period. These observations are less of a comment on the limit of these essays than a confirmation of the depth and complexity of their subject matter.