The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World
"A fascinating and richly documented study of identity negotiation among Portuguese New Christian merchants who settled in seventeenth-century Senegambia. These men married or cohabited with women from African elites, maintained contacts with the Sephardim of Amsterdam, traded across multiple boundaries (behaving when necessary as Catholics), and lived openly as Jews." - Miriam Bodian, University of Texas at Austin"In this richly textured study, Mark and Horta show how a forgotten diaspora of Sephardic Jews from Lisbon connected three continents and laid the foundation for the emergence of a dynamic Atlantic world. Theirs is a history of the intimacy of Jewish-Muslim relations, the flexible nature of Jewish identity and practice in an African setting, and the ways that Judaism influenced African spirituality. This is a story that had to be told." - Walter Hawthorne, Michigan State University and author of From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2010)"This is a superb piece of detective work. Mark and Horta trace the history of several Jewish communities in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Senegambia and use it to cast light on the history of the Jewish Diaspora, on West African commerce, and on the construction of race in the early modern world." - Martin Klein, University of Toronto"This is a triumph of historical reconstruction, and is due in large part to the meticulous thoroughness with which the authors have read and interpreted the documents they have found, and the deep knowledge they have of the sources." - Tobias O. Green, University of Birmingham, H-Net"Highly recommended." - C. Higgs, University of Tennessee, Knoxville;   Choice