Port Jew
The Port Jew concept was formulated by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin in the late 1990s as a social type that describes Jews who were involved in the seafaring and maritime economy of Europe, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Helen Fry suggests that they could be considered to have been "the earliest modern Jews."[1]
The concept of the "Port Jew" has been suggested as an "alternate path to modernity" that was distinct from the European Haskalah. Port Jews are described as the product of what is characterized as the "liberal environment" of port towns and cities.[2]
David Sorkin restricts his definition of the "port Jew" to apply only to a very specific group of Sephardi and Italian-Jewish merchants who were participants in the Mediterranean and transatlantic economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[3]
Origins
According to Helen Fry, Port Jews often arrived as "refugees from the Inquisition" and the expulsion of Jews from Iberia. They were allowed to settle in port cities as merchants granted permission to trade in ports such as Amsterdam, London, Trieste and Hamburg. Fry notes that their connections with the Jewish Diaspora and their expertise in maritime trade made them of particular interest to the mercantilist governments of Europe.[1] Lois Dubin describes Port Jews as Jewish merchants who were "valued for their engagement in the international maritime trade upon which such cities thrived".[4] Sorkin and others have characterized the socio-cultural profile of these men as marked by a flexibility towards religion and a "reluctant cosmopolitanism that was alien to both traditional and "enlightened" Jewish identities."
Expanded to include Ashkenazi merchants
Dubin has proposed that the concept of the "port Jew" be expanded to describe "port Jewry" which she describes as a particular type of Jewish community that existed in European maritime ports and combined maritime commerce with European and Jewish culture. This expanded definition would encompass Ashkenazi as well as Sephardi merchants living in other European ports such as Hamburg, Southampton, Portsmouth, and Odessa.
Sources
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- Dubin, Lois. The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999
- Cesarani, David ed. Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950. London: Frank Cass, 2002
- Cesarani, David and Romain, Gemma eds. Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006
- Monaco, C. S. “Port Jews or a People of the Diaspora? A Critique of the Port Jew Concept,” In Jewish Social Studies Vol. 15, no. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 137–66
