Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur (review)

Aviva Ben-Ur’s Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 is a robust historical study of Suriname’s Jews during the colonial period. Her work, novel in its depth and methodology, adds to a growing body of scholarship on Caribbean Jews.1 Ben-Ur traces the settlement of Jews in Suriname, the establishment of the famed Jodensavanne (Jewish Savannah), and the political and social changes that the community experienced over nearly two centuries. What sets Ben-Ur’s monograph apart is her commitment to situating Jews as part of the story of the Americas. Furthermore, her focus on the community of Eurafrican Jews—who were “a distinct and separate class” (261), unlike in any other American colony—is innovative and compelling in itself and also powerfully deepens her narrative of Jewish rootedness and creolization. Suriname is an unusually rich site of inquiry in Jewish history for several reasons. Jews there were distinctive in their record keeping as “the only ethnic group outside of the nominally Dutch Reformed Protestant government who created serial records that stretch across the entire period of slavery and beyond” (16–17). Additionally, Jews constituted “one-third, and in the first half of the nineteenth century up to one-half to two-thirds, of the white population” (17), a density of Jewish population that was unusual in Europe and unique in the Americas. Finally, the Jews of colonial Suriname “were exceptional among their Atlantic coreligionists in that they admitted a significant number of Eurafricans (and, to a lesser extent, Africans) into their community and regarded them as bona fide Jews” (17).