Calypso Jews, by Sarah Phillips Casteel

SARAH PHILLI PS CA STEEL

�al�s� Je�s JEWISHNESS IN THE

CARIBBEAN L I T E RA RY

I M AG I N AT I O N

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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”

T

owards 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

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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

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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

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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

F ig u r e 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.

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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 Shumei 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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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to couch its analysis in binary pairs such as “alliances and arguments,” “bridges and boundaries,” “coalition and conflict.” As Itzkovitz notes, the repeated invocation of these binaries reinforces the basic opposition of the categories of “Black” and “Jew” themselves, terms that are presented as stable and neatly separable (3).

This rhetorical oppositionality of “Black” and “Jew” also signals the relationship of competition between rival ethnic groups that U.S.-based discussions of Black-Jewish relations frequently assume. Indeed, the Blacks-and-Jews discussion tends to follow a logic of competition in which “the interaction of different collective memories . . . takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence” (Rothberg 3). Emily Miller Budick, for example, portrays Black and Jewish writing in the United States as engaged in a “mutually self-constructing cultural competition” in which “each shadows the cultural strategies of the other, their defenses and rebuttals becoming displacements and appropriations of each other’s cultural materials” (57).14 It is such a climate of interethnic competition that informs cultural contestations surrounding the role of Jews in the slave trade as well as the United States Holocaust Museum’s fraught relationship to the National Museum of the American Indian.

Scharfman’s essay illustrates how the mode of reading fostered by the Black-Jewish relations industry can be at odds with Caribbean approaches to Black-Jewish themes. So too does Jewish American writer Debra Spark’s work of popular fiction The Ghost of Bridgetown, which projects U.S. Black-Jewish dynamics onto a Caribbean setting. Spark’s novel revolves around a dispute between a Barbados museum and the Bridgetown synagogue regarding who has the right of ownership to a menorah that had been fashioned by a slave during the colonial era. The novel’s heroine is delegated with the task of repatriating the menorah to the island from a synagogue in Massachusetts and confronts the moral dilemma of “whether to give it to the blacks or give it to the Jews” (8).

Published in 2001, The Ghost of Bridgetown responds more obviously to the Black-Jewish tensions of the 1990s U.S. than to the history of Barbadian Jewry—as is signaled by its references to Crown Heights and Louis Farrakhan and larger emphasis on ethnic competition. Barbados, an important site of Sephardic Jewish New World settlement, provides

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a convenient and exotic backdrop against which the author stages an imported U.S. Black-Jewish conflict.

By contrast, a 1998 special issue of the Martinican journal Portulan advances a distinctively Caribbean perspective on Black-Jewish relations. After devoting the journal’s inaugural issue to the topic of “Négritude? Antillanité? Créolité?,” the editors of Portulan decided to give their second issue a comparative focus. Entitled “Mémoire juive, mémoire nègre: Deux figures du destin,” the issue addresses a number of points of contact between Black and Jewish histories and poetics, including the struggle for Black and Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century France, the relationship between Zionism and the pan-Africanist movement, and a comparison of the poetry of Aimé Césaire and Paul Celan as haunted by the collective tragedies of their peoples. In contrast to the U.S. discussion of Blacks and Jews, which has largely been “a story told

by Jews about interracial relations” (Melnick 4), the contributors to the Portulan special issue are predominantly Martinican and Guadeloupean scholars. Moreover, while in the United States “contemporary literature has portrayed not the potential for a Black-Jewish alliance or, conversely, the tragic cost of its brutal conflicts but rather its implosion or strange irrelevance” (Sundquist 483), the Portulan issue suggests the continuing relevance and fertility of the Black-Jewish analogy. In his introduction to the issue, to “illustrate and justify the pertinence of the analogy” (11), Guadeloupean critic Roger Toumson quotes the Code noir of 1685, which simultaneously expelled Jews from the French colonies and established slavery’s legal framework. Thus the Portulan issue represents a specifically Antillean articulation, albeit one that is necessarily engaged with European and North American contexts.

I would argue that, in what could be considered a “fourth wave” of Black-Jewish relations scholarship, the United States needs to be decentered in discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics.15 Accordingly, this study identifies anglophone and francophone Caribbean literature as key sites of analysis. The Dutch and Spanish Caribbean also figure significantly in my discussion, but for reasons of practicality and scope, I am unable to engage them as fully as they deserve and hope that other scholars will address these areas in greater depth, perhaps in conjunction with the growing body of scholarship on Jewish Latin American

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literature. Moreover, given the globally dispersed character of Caribbean literary production, the distinctive manifestations of Black-Jewish relations across a variety of diasporic sites (including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and other locations that are beyond the reach of this study) also need to be taken into account.16 To decenter the United States is not, however, to suggest that Caribbean writers are divorced from the American scene; to the contrary, some of the texts discussed here such as Condé’s Moi, Tituba and Cynthia McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? were directly inspired by diasporic encounters that took place in the U.S. Instead, such a reframing reveals Caribbean writers' complex relationship to the U.S. discourses about interracial relations that they both reference and challenge. For while these writers’ invocation of the Black-Jewish theme affiliates their writing with the U.S. context and engages a U.S. readership, their distinctive treatment of this theme simultaneously serves as a means of marking their distance from U.S. articulations of race.17

The “Calling of the Blood” The Caribbean setting helps us to take some distance from the BlackJewish relations industry in part by challenging the binary formulations of identity that tend to underpin it. Anthropologist Katya Azoulay observes that the U.S. Blacks-and-Jews discussion makes little space for thinking about mixed race subjects. In Black, Jewish and Interracial, she notes that “the significant body of literature on the interaction between and comparison of Jews and Blacks . . . in the United States focuses attention on either alliances or conflicts between the two groups. As a result, the dimension of personal relationships that crossed these boundaries has been obscured” (9). By contrast, the Caribbean/diaspora writing examined here registers the historical fact that as a consequence of their participation in the plantation economy, including in slaveholding and slave concubinage, Jews became part of the matrix of Caribbean creolization. Moreover, I argue that literary representations of the historical phenomenon of Jewish Caribbean creolization exert pressure on generic conventions that rely on these same racial binaries.

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Attesting to the pervasiveness of Jewish ancestry in some parts of the Caribbean, Surinamese writer Cynthia McLeod remarks that “every Surinamese has Jewish blood. . . . Shake a family tree, and a Jew falls out” (quoted in Rovner). The story of one Jamaican’s rediscovery of his Jewish roots, related by Jewish Jamaican community historians Marilyn Delavante and Anthony Alberga, illustrates this phenomenon: Tony MacFarlane was born in Jamaica in 1937. He grew up like the majority of country kids, attending school and visiting relatives. He writes, “I rarely heard the word “Jew” up to age nine years, but my grandmother Agatha Mendes, whom I heard was a Jewess, lived in Spanish Town where I visited her occasionally, and met my Andrade cousins who were also Jews.” . . . In 1958, while on a bus from New York to Hamilton, he happened to sit beside a man named Irwin Goldstein. “What kind of name is that?” he asked him. “He told me he was a Jew and I told him that I had two Jewish grandmothers, one named Miss Levy from the parish of St Mary, and the other was a Mendes.” They spoke about Judaism and this gave Tony the urge to explore his Jewish roots.

(111)

MacFarlane subsequently traced his family tree back to David Pereira Mendes, a Sephardic Jew who arrived in Jamaica in 1786 and whose grandson fathered MacFarlane’s grandmother as an “outside child” (112).

Following these discoveries, MacFarlane converted to Judaism and became a mohel (ritual circumciser). The experience that MacFarlane recounts is far from an isolated one. Rather, other Afro-Caribbeans similarly have described a “calling of the blood” that led them to reclaim their Jewish heritage.18 The biographies of a number of the authors that I discuss, including Phillips, McLeod, Obejas, Myriam Chancy, and Oscar Hijuelos, reflect this presence of submerged Jewish lineages throughout the Caribbean.19 Chancy, for example, explains in an interview how her family history inspired her to incorporate Jewish motifs into her novel The Loneliness of Angels:

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I’ve written several books about the Caribbean and about Haiti in particular; this is my third novel and my fifth book. It hasn’t changed me particularly but I sense from responses to the work that it has changed others’ perceptions of the Caribbean and of Haiti, especially with regard to finding commonality across difference. One reader . . . told me that he found that a truly original part of the novel had to do with delving into the Jewish legacies in Haiti, something I was interested in because my maternal grandfather’s family is said to have been descended partly from Spanish conversos (Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity after 1492). For the novel, I focused more so on the Syrian Jewish heritage still in evidence in Haiti, essentially to make the point that nothing is as it seems there and that the culture is more complex than might be assumed.

I would imagine that most readers would find these inter-cultural aspects of Haiti, as depicted in the novel, worth discovering. (“Chancy Wins”)

In the Hispanic Caribbean context, Jewish lineage is particularly difficult to trace because the reach of the Spanish Inquisition extended into the Caribbean. Nonetheless, in an interview with the Jerusalem Report, Hijuelos recounts how shortly after deciding to fictionalize the life of the Cuban composer Moíses Simons, who was persecuted by the Nazis during World War II, he was told by a cousin that his own family “probably have Jewish ancestors going back”: “The name Hijuelos is a hard one to track down. And there’s a whole side of my family that looks very Semitic. I was intrigued by the idea [that] I could have some Sephardi blood, even if it’s centuries old. A converso, somewhere, generations back. My cousin got me thinking about identity and how one is defined by a name, by an appearance. As Carlos Fuentes once said, there’s not a Spaniard walking around without these roots” (quoted in Freedman, “With Truth on His Side” 46).

My point in citing such interviews is not to fetishize these purported biographical details or to promote a biologist mode of interpretation but rather to illustrate the authors’ awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past and of the status of Jewishness as one constituent of Caribbean creolization. As is indicated in Chancy’s statement, it is also to signal

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the relationship of this awareness to their understanding of the complex sense of identity that characterizes Caribbean societies. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Caribbean Jewishness is its elasticity and coexistence with other religious and ethnic identities. In his account of multiracial Jewishness, the Jamaican philosopher Lewis Gordon, founder of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, describes his “Caribbean understanding of Judaism” (7) in which, against a background of profound mixture, “one’s family identity has much room for different religious affiliations. This attitude is a way of life on most of the islands with a strong black identity” (4). McLeod recalls of her own Surinamese childhood, for example, that it was considered normal to be raised Protestant while simultaneously observing the Passover ritual of asking the four questions (Personal interview). Similarly, anthropologist Ruth Behar describes how a flexible form of Jewishness developed among Cuba’s Jews, who “today loo[k] a lot like the rest of Cuba: a mix of white, black, and everything in between. Most members of the community are descendents of the uncounted Jews who married non-Jewish Cubans and were lost to the Jewish community in the period before the Revolution” (27).

This biographical background of Caribbean Jewish creolization also has implications for how we delimit the categories of Black and Jewish writing. The persistence of an identitarian logic, a belief in the separability of identities, is exposed by a series of authorship controversies connected to Caribbean-Jewish intersections, including the charges of appropriation leveled at the Holocaust fiction of Phillips and Hijuelos, the mixed response to the awarding of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize to Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002), and the confusion surrounding the attribution of authorship to Simone and André Schwarz-Bart’s La mulâtresse Solitude (1972).20 This logic has little relevance to the material I examine in Calypso Jews, which tends to confound sharp distinctions between Black and Jewish literature. Indeed, while I initially conceived of this study as a dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish authored texts, I quickly realized that such a structure would be ill-suited to the Caribbean context, where such an opposition is difficult to uphold. Similarly, the distinction between real Jews and metaphorical “jews” that organizes some analyses of Jewishness and

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postcolonial writing also is called into question by the Caribbean setting, which problematizes how we define who is a real Jew. Thus while I make reference in the chapters that follow to Jewish-identified Caribbean/diaspora artists and writers such as Anna Ruth Henriques and Aurora Levins Morales, Calypso Jews also challenges the Manichaean and identitarian logic that underpins some Blacks-and-Jews and comparative diasporas discussion. / / /

In the Caribbean/diaspora writing considered in this study, the invocation of Jewish historical experience helps to advance a larger project of rethinking master narratives of race and empire and the literary conventions these narratives support. This impetus is reflected in the texts’ formal construction and treatment of genre as well as in their metafictional concern with the politics of representation. While some of the texts reward formal analysis more than others, across the chapters I am concerned with the pressures placed on generic and narrative conventions by the polyphonic understanding of history that Caribbean Jewish motifs promote. The chapters that follow address a series of genres, including the neoslave narrative, the plantation family saga, and the Holocaust diary, in order to show how Caribbean Jewish themes help to unsettle these established literary forms. In the works I examine, the fragmented, multifaceted identities and memories that are emblematized by such historical formations as the Jewish Atlantic and the calypso shtetl encourage the splintering of narrative perspective. These texts’ thematic engagement with multiple diasporas tends to favor the elaboration of dialogic rather than monologic forms. In some cases Jewish Caribbean historical conjunctions inspire the emergence of new literary subgenres such as the Jewish plantation epic and Black Holocaust fiction; in others they foster a broader resistance to generic categorization. Finally, in a number of the texts the presence of the figure of the Jew signals a preoccupation with literary representation, canonicity, and authorship that is also announced through the incorporation of scenes of reading and writing. Thus if the historical phenomenon of Caribbean Jewishness is appealing to Caribbean/diaspora writers because of the way in which it

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disrupts dominant interpretive frameworks and racial binaries, their literary representations of this historical phenomenon amplify still further its disruptive power.

Calypso Jews is divided into two halves, each of which addresses a traumatic moment in Jewish history that has become a key reference point for postwar Caribbean writers. The first half of the book considers Caribbean writers’ invocations of the 1492 expulsion and its aftermath as an instance of literary sephardism—a phenomenon that has been discussed in relation to Latin American and Latino writing but that has not previously been identified in the context of Caribbean literature. Chapter 1, “Sephardism in Caribbean Literature,” examines the allure of Sepharad (over the Ashkenazi colonial presence) for Caribbean/diaspora writers. In particular, I consider the identificatory impulse that propels the sephardism of Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound, a verse biography of the Sephardic Caribbean artist Camille Pissarro. Walcott’s long poem exemplifies the connective orientation and prismatic narrative structure that tend to accompany Sephardic motifs in Caribbean literature. In Tiepolo’s Hound and other instances of Caribbean literary sephardism, the double resonance of 1492 inspires the construction of multicentered narratives that express the connectedness of diverse histories. Chapter 2, “Marranism and Creolization,” continues this investigation of Caribbean sephardism and its relationship to literary form by examining the presentation of the Marrano or crypto-Jew in Myriam Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels and Michelle Cliff ’s Free Enterprise. Chancy’s and Cliff ’s novels locate Jewishness within the matrix of Caribbean creolization while advancing a romantic reading of the Marrano as a figure of religious fealty and cultural survival. In their novels, the pluralist reading of identity and history that is signaled by the Marrano’s presence requires a fragmentation of linear narrative.

Drawing inspiration from recent efforts by historians to reframe Jewish history in Atlanticist terms, chapter 3, “Port Jews in Slavery Fiction,” highlights another instance of Caribbean sephardism, identifying a recurring plot about the figure of the Sephardic port Jew in Caribbean slavery literature. Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress follow a remarkably

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consistent script in which the port Jew functions as a conduit to the slave protagonist’s emancipation. In Condé’s and Dabydeen’s novels the slave narrative’s central opposition between white master and Black slave is disrupted by the ambivalent presence of the Jew, whose insertion into the genre encourages its broader reconfiguration. Moreover in these novels, the Jew as sign crucially draws attention to discursive regimes (both textual and visual) that govern representations of racialized Others. Chapter 4, “Plantation Jews in Slavery Fiction,” turns from the neoslave narrative to a contrasting genre of slavery literature: the plantation family saga. This chapter considers the figure of the plantation Jew as depicted in Hoe duur was de suiker?, Cynthia McLeod’s portrait of eighteenth-century Jewish planter society in Suriname. As is signaled by her choice of genre, McLeod’s historical novel complicates the largely sympathetic depictions of port Jews discussed in chapter 3 by more deeply implicating Jews in the plantation economy. At the same time, McLeod challenges the ideological underpinnings of the plantation epic by incorporating both Jewish and Black perspectives into her multicentered narrative. This chapter also compares McLeod’s Jewish plantation family saga to those of two U.S. writers, Matthew Lopez and Alan Cheuse. As with the references to Black Canadian writing that I introduce elsewhere in this study, here the examination of U.S. texts alongside the Caribbean material promotes a hemispheric perspective on Black-Jewish literary narrative while simultaneously underscoring the specificity of the Caribbean treatments.

The second half of Calypso Jews addresses Holocaust memory, a more conventional focus of comparative diasporas scholarship. Yet, departing from other analyses of the relationship of the Holocaust and slavery, the texts that I discuss treat Black and Jewish experience, not as discrete terms in an analogy between historical traumas, but as contiguous and intersecting. Chapter 5, “Calypso Jews,” brings into focus a recurring motif in Caribbean writing: the Holocaust refugee. European Jewish refugees from the Nazis figure prominently in John Hearne’s Land of the Living and Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter, both of which recall the historical influx of these refugees into Trinidad, Jamaica, and other Caribbean locations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but alternately foreground or

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elide the ambivalences that attended this little-known episode of Holocaust history. I argue that the troubling presence of Holocaust refugees in these novels is thematic of tensions surrounding the narration of the Black subjects who stand at the center of each text. In this chapter I contextualize Hearne’s and Kincaid’s novels by referencing calypsos of the period as well as memoirs of refugee Jews who found safe haven in the Caribbean. Chapter 6, “Between Camps,” considers Caribbean Holocaust narratives that unfold against European or North American rather than Caribbean backdrops. This chapter illustrates how the Holocaust not only functions as a surrogate for the memory of slavery in Caribbean writing, as in M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry and fiction, but also has become the focus of a new subgenre of Black Holocaust fiction. Paralleling the literary archaeologies undertaken by postslavery fiction, Michèle Maillet’s L’étoile noire and other works recover the lost histories of Black victims of the Nazis. Maillet’s novel demonstrates that not only slavery and Holocaust memory but also the literary genres that they have inspired can bear a palimpsestic relationship to one another.

Finally, chapter 7, “Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank,” concludes my investigation of the creolization of Holocaust memory by considering intertextual references to Anne Frank in Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood. In Cliff ’s and Phillips’s novels, scenes of reading and writing and allusions to Frank’s Diary establish a crucial link between the Holocaust and the act of literary representation itself. Yet, bringing my discussion full circle, I suggest that Cliff ’s and Phillips’s identification with Frank as a writer figure is complicated by their awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past.

A brief note on style and terminology. Throughout this book, I capitalize terms such as “Black,” “Jewish,” “Creole,” “Indigenous,” and “Marrano” that refer to groupings of human subjects. My intention in doing so is not to reify these categories but rather to rehabilitate and accord dignity to terms that carry with them a heavy history of discrimination and dehumanization. In addition, throughout this study I use the term “Caribbean/diaspora” as a shorthand to refer collectively to both those writers raised in the islands and Caribbean mainland and to those raised in the diaspora. My aim here is not to obscure important differences between Caribbean and diasporic cultural and intellectual formations

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but rather to suggest certain continuities between the responses to Jewishness that developed in each of these settings. By emphasizing Caribbean diaspora writers’ connections to more localized archipelagic intellectual traditions, Calypso Jews complements and provides a counterweight to studies that foreground metropolitan contexts of multicultural and postcolonial literary production.