Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

By Sarah Phillips Casteel

With what may seem surprising frequency, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish Caribbean experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the arrival of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s to the flight of European Jewish refugees to Trinidad and elsewhere in the 1930s. Examining this historical migration through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel conducts the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies, Calypso Jews enriches crosscultural investigations of Caribbean creolization. Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Proposing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive inter-diasporic relationship refracted through the creative innovations of two resilient cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231540575

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CALYPSO JEWS

LITERATURE NOW

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LITERATURE NOW

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MATTHEW HART, DAVID JAMES, AND REBECCA L. WALKOWITZ, SERIES EDITORS

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.

Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York     Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54057-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Casteel, Sarah Phillips, 1974-

Calypso Jews : Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination / Sarah Phillips Casteel.

      pages cm. — (Literature now)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17440-4 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54057-5 (e-book)

1. Caribbean literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean literature (French)—History and criticism. 3. Jews in literature. 4. Jews—Caribbean Area—Identity. I. Title.

PR9205.05.C39 2016

810.9'9729—dc23

2015017753

Cover and book design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: Isaac Mendes Belisario, Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy, plate 6, Belisario, I.M. Sketches of character, in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica. Kingston: published by the artist, 1837–[1838], lithograph, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection.

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

For James, and in memory of Avie and Harry Phillips

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: 1492

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1.   SEPHARDISM IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE: DEREK WALCOTT’S PISSARRO

2.   MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION: MYRIAM CHANCY AND MICHELLE CLIFF

3.   PORT JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION: MARYSE CONDÉ AND DAVID DABYDEEN

4.   PLANTATION JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION: CYNTHIA MCLEOD’S JODENSAVANNE

PART 2: HOLOCAUSTS

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5.   CALYPSO JEWS: JOHN HEARNE AND JAMAICA KINCAID

6.   BETWEEN CAMPS: M. NOURBESE PHILIP AND MICHÈLE MAILLET

7.   WRITING UNDER THE SIGN OF ANNE FRANK: MICHELLE CLIFF AND CARYL PHILLIPS

CONCLUSION

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has brought me into contact with a truly wonderful group of scholars in North America, Europe, and the Caribbean whose work in related areas has greatly enriched my own. I am grateful to Dalia Kandiyoti for her steady encouragement and for her inspiring scholarship and to Rachel Rubinstein and Jennifer Glaser, who showed me how it was possible to do Jewish studies differently. In addition, a number of colleagues offered valuable insights and advice and shared work that helped me to advance the research, including Judah Cohen, Stef Craps, Natalie Zemon Davis, Audra Diptee, Christine Duff, Shai Fierst, Rachel Frankel, Ainsley Cohen Henriques, Aliesha Hosein, Heidi Kaufman, Bénédicte Ledent, Tony MacFarlane, Joanna Newman, Jessica Roitman, Allan Ryan, Winfried Siemerling, Hyacinth Simpson, Barry Stiefel, Patrick Taylor, and David Trotman. I also thank Sailaja Sastry, who patiently read parts of the manuscript with her keen editorial eye.

I would like to express my gratitude to Janelle Duke at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Julie-Marthe Cohen at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and Michele Russel-Capriles, president of the Jewish Cultural Historical Museum of Curaçao, for their patient assistance with my queries. Also in Curaçao, Gigi Scheper offered an illuminating tour of Jewish heritage sites—thanks as well to Christine and Sarah for tagging along with me to all those cemeteries! In Suriname Cynthia McLeod graciously answered the questions that Ken Victor put to her on my behalf when family commitments prevented me from being there in person. Many thanks to Ken for all of his help.

I owe additional thanks to Anna Ruth Henriques, Caryl Phillips, John Biggins, and NourbeSe Philip for generously allowing me to reproduce artwork, photography, and poetry. The poem St. Claire Avenue West from Salmon Courage by M. NourbeSe Philip is quoted by permission of the author. I also thank Valentine Mitchell for allowing me to reprint in revised form my article Calypso Jews: Holocaust Refugees in the Caribbean Literary Imagination, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2013): 1–26. The calypsos Jews in the West Indies, I Don’t Want Any Syrians Again, and The Persecuted Jews are in the public domain.

I am deeply grateful to Tony Kushner, Shirli Gilbert, and James Jordan at the University of Southampton for so warmly welcoming me into their discussions of postcoloniality and Jewishness in Cape Town and London. I also thank the members of the 2011 Posen summer seminar, and especially the organizers Rachel Rubinstein and Naomi Seidman, for their invaluable feedback. My thanks go as well to the participants in a workshop on Sephardic literary studies and comparative methodologies that I co-organized with Dalia Kandiyoti at CUNY in 2012 and to Jane Gerber for sponsoring the workshop. At a late stage in the project, crucial support and encouragement were offered by Bryan Cheyette, Jonathan Freedman, Michael Rothberg, and Rob Nixon, who continues to astonish me with his kindness and generosity.

I was fortunate over the course of writing this book to have the help of several very talented research assistants, Ebony Magnus, Gabrielle Etcheverry, and Sarah Waisvisz, whose enthusiasm and diligence helped me to keep going with the project when my own energy was flagging. I am also grateful to Aliesha Hosein for her help with all matters Trinidadian and to Ebony for sharing with me the story of her Jamaican grandmother, Eleanor Ann Levy, who had difficulty finding an apartment in 1950s Toronto because of her Jewish-sounding surname.

At Carleton I am blessed to be surrounded by warm and supportive colleagues, including Brian Johnson, Julie Murray, Franny Nudelman, and Jan Schroeder among many others. In particular, Ming Tiampo and Catherine Khordoc have offered a rare combination of friendship, intellectual companionship, and professional collaboration that has sustained me over the years. The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the Migration and Diaspora Studies Initiative at Carleton have provided a vital institutional context for my research. I also thank the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton, the Government of Ontario, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research awards and other financial assistance that made the completion of this book possible.

I am very grateful to the series editors, Rebecca Walkowitz and David James, for their support for the book; to Philip Leventhal, at Columbia University Press, for guiding the manuscript through the editorial process so expertly and so thoughtfully; and to Susan Pensak for her superb editing. I also owe a great debt to the two anonymous readers for the press, whose exceptionally astute and generous commentaries pushed me to refine a number of key points in my argument.

Finally, I thank my husband James for his unfailing support, patience, understanding, and good humor, and my children Harry, Isaac, and Miriam, for giving me much needed perspective. I am also indebted to my parents, Ruth and Mark Phillips, for offering so many different forms of assistance that they are simply too numerous to list here. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents, Avie and Harry Phillips—colonial Jews and lovers of literature whose lives were shaped by the struggle against racism in their native South Africa.

INTRODUCTION

Why does it remain so difficult for so many people to accept the knotted intersection of histories…?

—Paul Gilroy, Afterword, Modernity, Culture and the Jew

Towards the end of Achy Obejas’s novel Days of Awe (2001), the narrator relates four theories regarding how the Jews first came to Cuba. The first theory speculates that New World Indigenous populations are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The second posits somewhat less fancifully that Sephardic Conversos arrived on Columbus’s ships, hiding behind baptisms and crucifixes but Jews nonetheless (333). The third points to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the fourth scene of Jewish relocation to the Americas invoked by Obejas’s narrator is that of a great wave of more sophisticated European refugees from Nazism…who’d arrive with enough money to pay Cuban immigration officials’ exorbitant bribes (334). Indeed, in the late 1930s, hundreds of European Jews sought refuge not only in Cuba but in other parts of the Caribbean including Trinidad, where they established a calypso shtetl and dubbed themselves the Calypso Jews. Although this moniker suggests an ironic juxtaposition of two very distinct worlds, Jews in fact had long been a part of Caribbean society. As Obejas signals in Days of Awe , the arrival of the Ashkenazi refugees from the Nazis was predated by several centuries by an older Jewish presence—that of the Sephardim who had resettled in the Caribbean in the aftermath of the 1490s expulsions from Spain and Portugal.

This multilayered Caribbean Jewish story remains a largely unfamiliar one to many because of the tendency to focus on the Ashkenazi experience in Europe and the United States. Yet it has been a source of inspiration for Caribbean/diaspora novelists and poets,¹ a number of whom have made significant use of the intersection of Black and Jewish cultures in their work. Postwar Caribbean writing recalls both the Iberian expulsion and the Holocaust, regularly invoking the second and fourth scenes of Jewish arrival in the islands identified by Obejas’s narrator. In Calypso Jews I examine how Caribbean/diaspora writers register this historical presence of Jews in the region and, in so doing, articulate a distinctive discourse on Black-Jewish relations that unsettles dominant narratives of slavery, empire, and race. I contextualize Caribbean literary representations of Jewishness with reference to the specific histories of contact and entanglement—both material and symbolic—between Black and Jewish diaspora cultures in the Atlantic world. These histories, which reflect two of the greatest traumas of Jewish experience, extend from the postexpulsion resettlement of early modern Sephardim in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century to the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis to Trinidad and other Caribbean island and mainland locales in the late 1930s. Accordingly, Calypso Jews identifies not only the Holocaust but also 1492 as nodes of interdiasporic comparison with Black historical experience and with the anguish of the Middle Passage in particular.

Caribbean literary invocations of the Sephardic expulsion and the Holocaust merit consideration for what they can tell us not only about representations of Jewishness in postcolonial writing but also about the shifting preoccupations and vocabularies of Caribbean poetics. In particular, they reveal the centrality of analogical thought in the intellectual formation and self-definition of Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during World War II and in the decades immediately following. These writers, whose adolescences were shaped by an awareness of the war, invoke calamitous moments of Jewish history as part of a larger effort to confront slavery and its legacies. In so doing, they probe what Paul Gilroy describes as the knotted intersection of histories, deepening their investigation of Caribbean creolization in all its many iterations. While creolization theory has neglected the Jewish presence in the Caribbean, the fiction, drama, and poetry considered in this study recognize Jews as significant participants in historical processes of creolization. This recognition contributes to a Caribbean literary discourse on Black-Jewish relations that, while not without its tensions and ambivalences, favors an identificatory mode of comparing histories of trauma.

As the texts examined in the first half of this study recall, the story of Caribbean Jewry dates back to the earliest moments of New World colonialism, when the expulsions from the Iberian peninsula in the 1490s propelled some Sephardic Jews and Conversos to resettle in the Americas. Jewish settlement in the Caribbean occurred over a period of more than three hundred years, establishing itself in the seventeenth century and peaking in the latter half of the eighteenth century. As a result, Dutch and British Caribbean colonies such as Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica, and Barbados have had significant and long-standing Jewish populations. In cultural terms, it is noteworthy that both Jamaica’s first national painter, Isaac Mendes Belisario, and a founding father of impressionism, the St. Thomas-born Camille Pissarro, were the products of nineteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean communities.

The dispersal of early modern Sephardim across Atlantic familial, trade and religious networks was followed by successive waves of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish emigration to the Caribbean. In Cuba, for example, the early modern Conversos who made their way to the island while the Inquisition still held sway were succeeded in the late nineteenth century by Jewish American expatriates and then at the turn of the twentieth century by Turkish Jews seeking to avoid conscription in the Turkish army. These were followed a couple of decades later by Eastern European Jews, especially Poles, with the result that Jews in Cuba became known as polacos (Behar 4–5; 7). In the 1930s, as I will discuss in the second half of this study, with most other doors closed to them, boatloads of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe arrived in Trinidad, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Curaçao, and elsewhere. The postwar period saw still further migrations. In the 1970s, for example, Jews who left Algeria after the War of Liberation reinvigorated the dwindling Jewish community in Martinique, an island whose earliest settlers had included Jews (Miles 140, 145). One of the legacies of this lengthy and varied Jewish historical presence in the Caribbean is that one finds today small surviving Jewish communities, synagogues, and cemeteries scattered throughout the archipelago as well as on the Caribbean mainland. Further traces of this history are detectable in the Jewish surnames that are borne by some Afro-Caribbeans—the Jamaican British writer Andrea Levy is a prime example.

Thus, in the aftermath of 1492 and the displacement of multiple populations that ensued, Black and Jewish diaspora histories became entangled with one another across the Caribbean region. In the early modern period in particular, Black and Jewish trajectories converged as the New World colonial economy circulated both African slaves and members of the Sephardic Jewish trading diaspora across its networks. With their linguistic, technical, and commercial skills, Sephardic Jews played a key role as cultural and economic brokers of empire. And yet, despite both the historical depth and geographical breadth of these diasporic encounters, the question of Black-Jewish relations and their literary representation has rarely been broached outside a twentieth-century U.S. framework. Discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics largely have been centered on the United States and have tended to be inflected by the persistent political tensions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. As a result, the larger terrain of Black-Jewish dynamics in the Americas and the purchase of Jewishness on the Caribbean literary imagination in particular have been neglected. Calypso Jews traces a postwar Caribbean intellectual tradition of engaging with Jewishness and Jewish history in order to identify and account for its distinctive character. It is my contention that this tradition cannot be interpreted through the lens of Black-Jewish relations in the United States, and especially not through a paradigm that Michael Rothberg calls competitive memory. Instead, I argue that it is informed by an awareness of the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the Caribbean as well as more recent moments of Caribbean-Jewish encounter. In the texts that I discuss, this historical awareness complicates master narratives of race and empire and promotes the reconfiguration of literary genres that are underpinned by these same narratives. Relatedly, in many of these texts, the presence of the figure of the Jew signals a concern with the politics of representation.

FIGURE 0.1. Interior of Mikvé Emmanuel Synagogue, Willemstad, Curaçao showing the sand floor that is the architectural hallmark of Caribbean synagogues. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.

At first glance, depictions of Jews and Jewish history in postwar Caribbean literature may seem a rather obscure topic of investigation. Yet, just as the story of Caribbean Jewry has emerged in recent historiography as central, rather than peripheral, to the study of Jewish American history, so too in the literary field, the strikingly persistent presence of Jewishness in Caribbean writing merits attention.² As the chapters that follow demonstrate, Jewish characters and themes figure prominently in the work of a number of major postwar Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora authors, surfacing repeatedly across the oeuvres of Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Derek Walcott among others. Additionally, Caribbean/diaspora theorists ranging from Edward Wilmot Blyden and Aimé Césaire to Paul Gilroy have drawn inspiration from Jewish intellectual traditions and encounters with modernity. It bears emphasizing that, in identifying this pattern of cross-cultural engagement, the purpose of my study is not to weigh the merits of the Black-Jewish (or slavery-Holocaust) analogy but rather to consider why Caribbean/diaspora writers of a particular generation and historical moment introduce this analogy into their work. My strategy throughout Calypso Jews is to read the literary texts, many of which mimic genres of historical testimony such as the slave narrative and the Holocaust diary, against the historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. This strategy reveals the extent to which the Black-Jewish analogy in Caribbean literature draws on a long history of interdiasporic encounter to promote the reformulation of racial and literary discourses.

In his powerful recent call for more analogical thinking rather than less, Bryan Cheyette is careful to acknowledge the attendant risk that the objects of racial discourse, who were mere figurative beings in relation to this discourse, might once again descend into metaphor (Diasporas xiv). The fear of being reduced to metaphor can produce what Cheyette calls an anxiety of appropriation (Diasporas xiv) on the part of Blacks and Jews alike. In Calypso Jews I remain attentive to these concerns and to the tendency of Holocaust analogies in particular to overwhelm their terms of comparison. Yet I show that for Caribbean writers Holocaust references are more often productive than they are anxiety inducing and that 1492 analogies are still less likely to engender such anxieties. I further demonstrate that, for its part, the Jew does not simply function in Caribbean literature as a deracinated figure of postmodern displacement or as a manifestation of Jewish chic (Cheng 107). Neither is Jewishness an empty metaphor in the texts I examine, a litmus test for the multicultural condition that relies on an ahistorical and superficial understanding of Jewish experience, as Sander Gilman has charged of some postcolonial and multicultural fiction that incorporates Jewish themes (Multiculturalism, chapter 9).³ Instead, I argue that Jewish references appear in Caribbean literature not only for allegorical reasons but also for important historical and biographical ones.

More specifically, I suggest that Sephardic and Holocaust motifs are favored by Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during World War II and in the early postwar period. My argument thus is historically situated and most directly concerns the experience of a particular generation of writers who were able to access certain kinds of educational opportunities during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The presence of Jewish themes in the work of these writers reflects both the profound impact of the war and the deep immersion in European literary and artistic traditions required by their colonial or European educations. Accordingly, in the case of some of the writers I discuss, references to Jewish experience go hand in hand with an orientation toward European cultural influences that has led to a mixed critical reception. At the same time, I argue that the introduction of Jewish themes in Caribbean literature is also indicative of a historical awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past and of Jewishness as a constituent element of Caribbean creolization.

For the most part, the Jewish-themed works of Caribbean literature that I discuss were published in the last two decades of the twentieth century, an important period in the public memorialization of both the Holocaust and the Middle Passage. Also commemorated during this period was the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the New World as well as the Iberian expulsion. Finally, the quincentenary celebrations coincided in the early 1990s with the height of Black-Jewish tensions in the United States. The body of literature considered in this study reflects the convergence of all these factors—factors that help to account for why, whereas African American sympathy toward Jews peaked in the early and mid twentieth century, Caribbean/diaspora writers exhibit a rising interest in Jewish experience that carries through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s.⁴ In broader terms, the emergence of this predominantly identificatory Caribbean literary discourse about Jewishness supports historian Jonathan Karp’s view that more study is needed of the neglected phenomenon of philosemitism both in general and within Black discourse.⁵

COMPARATIVE TURNS

Diaspora studies is a framework that invites comparative approaches, encouraging us to consider discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference (Edwards 64). Indeed, to trace the evolution of the field of diaspora studies is to chart how the diaspora concept travels from Jewish to Black discourse and beyond. My examination of Jewishness in Caribbean literature draws inspiration from this intercultural history of the diaspora concept (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic 211) as well as from the broader comparative turn in ethnic and diaspora studies—a disciplinary reorientation that has helped to bring to light intersecting histories that were obscured by more traditional frameworks of analysis. Conventionally, as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shi observe, we have tended to read vertically rather than laterally, to study the center and the margin while neglecting the relationships among different margins (2).⁶ Rather than looking at diasporas in isolation or solely in terms of their interaction with the host culture, however, scholars are increasingly emphasizing the interethnic and relational dimensions of literary and cultural discourse.⁷ Departing from the more standard focus on relations between minoritized and dominant cultures, a comparative diasporas or comparative racializations approach trains its sights on interdiasporic contact zones in order to brin[g] submerged or displaced relationalities into view and revea[l] these relationalities as the starting point for a fuller understanding of racialization as a comparative process (Shih 1350). As Rothberg observes, new kinds of comparative endeavours such as these require both the construction of alternative archives and a reconceptualization of the act of comparison itself (18–19).

In tandem with these broader methodological and disciplinary shifts, Jewish studies is beginning to open itself up to comparative approaches.⁸ Simultaneously, Jewish and Holocaust studies scholars including Rothberg, Cheyette, and Jonathan Boyarin have begun to seek a dialogue with postcolonial studies.⁹ A number of critics have lately lamented the lack of contact between postcolonial and Jewish studies, a state of affairs whose root cause Cheyette traces back to the reliance on a monolithic notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition in the work of one of the founders of postcolonial studies, Edward Said (Cheyette, Neither Black Nor White 31).¹⁰ Other critics have complained more specifically of postcolonial studies’ lack of engagement with the Holocaust—a resistance, it must be said, that until recently has been reinforced by Jewish studies’ own insularity and investment in exceptionalist arguments (see Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing 83). Indeed, postcolonial studies and Jewish studies as they have been institutionalized in the American academy have had little to say to one another.

As the novels, drama, and poetry discussed in Calypso Jews attest, in making this recent turn toward the comparative, literary studies, sociology, and historiography have lagged behind imaginative works, which have more readily and consistently registered intersections between the histories of colonialism, antisemitism, and fascism. For as Max Silverman remarks, Cultural practitioners…are not bound by the same constraints as historians and sociologists (Interconnected Histories 418). Instead, postwar artists continued to explore such relationalities well after theorists had abandoned the kind of analogical thinking that informs Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955). Moreover, Silverman suggests that

artistic works may be more suited than historical or sociological methods to making visible the complex interaction of times and sites at play in memory, as a fundamental feature of imaginative (poetic) works is to overlay meaning in intertextual space and blur the frontiers between the conscious and the unconscious, the present and past, and the personal and the collective. Correspondences, substitutions and transformations—the very substance of the literary imagination—open up an alternative history…which challenges the compartmentalized narratives that we habitually receive.

(Palimpsestic Memory 29)

Silverman’s observations are borne out not only by the French and francophone films and fiction he discusses but also by the body of Caribbean literature that I consider in this study. Caribbean imaginative literature opens up a space for the exploration of historical and cultural relationalities that have been obscured by academic discourse, serving as a corrective to what Cheyette calls disciplinary thinking by bringing suppressed knowledge to the surface. Moreover, as theorists of diaspora have argued, figurative language is central to the articulation of diasporic subjectivities. For these reasons, it is important to give the subject of Caribbean Jewishness not only the historical and empiricist treatment that it has received thus far by scholars of the Jewish Atlantic but also a literary analysis.

Among those few critics who have sought to identify connections between colonial racism and antisemitism, Gilroy, with his ongoing interest in unexpected convergences (Afterword 290), is one of the most inspirational for the present study. Gilroy’s well known (but largely unheeded) call toward the end of The Black Atlantic for a fuller acknowledgment of Black diasporic intellectual engagements with Jewish thought is not an isolated gesture but instead reverberates across his corpus. In his afterword to Cheyette’s and Marcus’ Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew,’ for example, Gilroy remarks that there are barriers on all sides to comparative thinking: This…approach to complex culture cannot be expected to please nationalists or apostles of purity whatever their ethnic backgrounds…. It may not fit straightforwardly into the settled, orthodox patterns that govern our cultural criticism and historiography (287). And yet, in an elegant image, Gilroy insists on the necessity of such an undertaking:

These narratives disturb the sediment over which the streams of modernity have flowed. What was transparent becomes murky. Previously unseen patterns of motion are revealed. It becomes possible to seek answers to what ought to have been obvious questions. What was the impact of Disraeli’s thought on the nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals who adapted his theories to their own needs? How many of the ordinary men and women who became Hitler’s willing executioners had previously served in the German colonial forces or had other experiences of Germany’s blood-soaked imperial adventures? What did Leopold Senghor…mean when he spoke of Nazism as having brought him to his senses?

(288)

I want to suggest that it is not an accident that this call for comparative thinking about colonial racism and antisemitism should come from a British intellectual who is also one of the leading thinkers of the Caribbean diaspora. Neither is it a coincidence that Gilroy’s plea in The Black Atlantic for a greater recognition of the intercultural history of the diaspora paradigm has found its most prominent response to date in the work of another Black Briton of Caribbean descent, the novelist Caryl Phillips. Although both Gilroy’s and Phillips’ engagements with Jewishness have been much cited, neither has been located within a larger Caribbean/diaspora intellectual and literary tradition of reading Jewishness in identificatory terms. Instead, the Caribbean literary and cultural context has remained largely absent from discussions of Jewish/postcolonial intersections. And yet, as Calypso Jews will show, the Caribbean offers a rich staging ground for an exercise in comparative diaspora and Black-Jewish analysis.

At the same time, refocussing the Blacks-and-Jews discussion on the Caribbean rather than the United States also highlights the particularities of the European sites of Black-Jewish diasporic encounter that form the backdrop to several of the texts I examine. Gemma Romain notes of the British case, for example, that the size of the Jewish and Black communities in the USA and Britain are considerably different, as was the nature of the struggles for equality between the groups in the two countries (Connecting Histories 218). She suggests that while the dialogues in Britain are broadly similar to those in the U.S., It is important to stress that many of these issues, particularly that relating to Farrakhan, have not been as significant in Britain as in the United States and that Black-Jewish relations are rarely at the forefront of peoples’ memories and everyday life experiences (220). Indeed, I would argue that the predominantly noncompetitive orientation of the Caribbean/diaspora (including Black British) writers considered here reflects their distance from cultural contestations between African Americans and Jewish Americans. Phillips comments in his essay In the Ghetto (1987) that One of the aspects of black America that I have never been able to comprehend fully is the virulent anti-Semitism that seems to permeate much black thought. While still a student, I remember being surprised by Harold Cruse’s words: ‘The problem here is that the American Jew has a very thin skin, and believes that he is preternaturally free of all sin in his relationship with other peoples’ (The European Tribe 52–53). My intention in drawing attention to such comments is not to romanticize Caribbean race relations or to hold up the Caribbean as a racial utopia but rather to point to the way in which some Caribbean/diaspora writers of a particular generation and intellectual formation have defined their distinctive literary sensibility in part by rejecting divisive American race politics, including African American antisemitism.

The tonal difference of Caribbean literary representations of Jewishness stems in part from the fact that they are based not only—or even primarily—on a sense of parallelism between histories of trauma but rather on an awareness of the intersecting character of these histories.¹¹ Instead of treating Black and Jewish experience as discrete terms in an analogy between disparate historical experiences, the texts discussed in the chapters that follow foreground areas of overlap between these diasporic histories and the ways in which they converged in the Caribbean at a series of key moments. The first of these is 1492, a date that carries a double resonance in many of the texts I examine as marking not only the onset of European colonization but also the beginning of a wave of expulsions of Jews from the Iberian peninsula that propelled the relocation of many Sephardic Jews and Conversos to the New World. This double resonance of 1492 is signaled by the prayer book of the Kingston, Jamaica United Congregation of Israelites, which opens with a joint dedication to the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, 1492–1992 (United Congregation of Israelites, dedication page).

Accordingly, I argue for the value of bringing attention to 1492 alongside the Holocaust as a connective node between Black and Jewish histories. Discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics both within and beyond the U.S. context have focused overwhelmingly on Holocaust references. I am interested not only in the compelling question posed by some scholars of the relationship of Holocaust memory to slavery and colonialism but also in how the ground of comparison shifts when the postcolonial-Jewish analogy is not routed exclusively through the Holocaust. Rothberg’s distinction between competitive and multidirectional memory is a richly productive one for this study, and I want to suggest that taking some distance from the Holocaust frame of reference opens up still greater possibilities for multidirectional memory in Caribbean literature even as it also complicates notions of Black-Jewish affiliation. Although Holocaust analogies are a significant feature of postslavery writing, controversies such as that surrounding Toni Morrison’s dedication of Beloved to Sixty Million and More illustrate the difficulty of advancing comparative perspectives in a climate characterized by competitive memory. By identifying 1492 alongside the Holocaust as a node of interdiasporic comparison, Calypso Jews uncovers alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation. In particular, this approach reveals how Caribbean writers’ invocations of 1492 and the profoundly destabilizing figure of the port Jew encourage a pluralistic and connective perspective on histories of trauma that disrupts racial binaries and fractures linear narrative.

THE BLACK-JEWISH RELATIONS INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES

In an essay dedicated to the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, Jewish American critic Ronnie Scharfman stages a Black-Jewish dialogue, one that strikingly illustrates the disjuncture between U.S. and Caribbean readings of Black-Jewish relations. The essay opens with Scharfman taking Condé to Brooklyn to see the site of the Crown Heights riots, an excursion that is also an autobiographical voyage into Scharfman’s own childhood. Crown Heights proves to be the journey’s point of departure rather than its end point, for Scharfman’s reflections on her Brooklyn childhood eventually lead her to recall her father’s Southern roots as well her husband’s experience of the U.S. South during the 1960s. It is on a trip to the South that Scharfman makes a shocking discovery, one so disturbing that she can convey it only by shifting into the third-person voice and enclosing this portion of the narrative in quotation marks. While researching her husband’s family history in an archive in Woodville, Mississippi, Scharfman comes across a document detailing the transfer of ownership of a slave between two Jewish families. This revelation of Jewish slaveholding runs contrary to Scharfman’s understanding of Jewish American identity, so much so that she suffers a kind of trauma: The shock and shame I felt on reading that statement of transfer, in all its lack of human affect, took the form of an unwanted, and unwonted, sense of complicity, then remorse, over a century after the fact (460). Scharfman ultimately is able to recover and atone for the horrifying discovery only by relating the details of her husband’s civil rights activist past.¹²

Alongside these autobiographical reflections, Scharfman celebrates Condé’s resistance to dogmatic essentialisms (458), her valorization of métissage, reciprocity, and surprising new alliances (462) such as that which develops between the slave Tituba and the Sephardic merchant Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo in her novel Moi, Tituba, sorciére…noire de Salem. What Scharfman describes as Condé’s poetics of shifting, freely chosen reidentifications (464) and ability to und[o] stifling dichotomies (462) seems incompatible, however, with the strict victim/perpetrator binary that structures Scharfman’s essay. It is because Scharfman, a self-described liberal Northerner and a progressive Jew (459), understands Jews as victims rather than victimizers that she is so profoundly shaken by the discovery of Jewish slaveholding.¹³ And yet this revelation can hardly be surprising for her Caribbean interlocutor, who comes from a region of the world in which Jews occupied an ambiguous position as both agents and victims of empire in historian Jonathan Israel’s phrase (Diasporas 1). By reading Condé’s cross-cultural poetics against a distinctively U.S. national narrative of Black-Jewish relations invested in notions of alliance and betrayal, Scharfman’s essay exposes the disconnect between these two perspectives.

Scharfman’s essay, with its geographical movement between Crown Heights, Brooklyn and the U.S. South, and its thematic counterpoint between Jewish civil rights activism and Jewish slaveholding, incorporates several of the touchstones of what Daniel Itzkovitz has described as the ‘Black Jewish relations’ industry (Race and Jews 3). The U.S.-based Blacks-and-Jews discussion is arguably the most prominent and long-standing example of comparative diasporas work. Yet as a model it is limited in several ways. It is framed in narrowly national terms, focusing on a series of key moments in the history of relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans, including the 1915 lynching of the Atlanta Jewish businessman Leo Frank, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Crown Heights riots in 1991, and the Nation of Islam’s publication of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, also in 1991. As these dates suggest, it is a framework that is confined temporally to the twentieth century. Finally, the Blacks-and-Jews discussion tends to couch its analysis in binary pairs such as alliances and arguments, bridges and boundaries, coalition and conflict. As Itzkovitz notes, the repeated invocation