A people within and without: International Jewish commerce and community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Dutch Atlantic world

This dissertation examines how Jews organized their communal and religious affairs, conducted business, maintained intercolonial and transnational networks, and acted as international intermediaries in bridging imperial boundaries in the Atlantic world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It does this through an exploration of five colonial locations---Recife in Brazil, Curacao, New Netherland (later New York), Suriname, and Newport, Rhode Island---and argues that kin-based Jewish commercial networks played a significant role in Europe's expansion in the Americas and were a formative component in the development of an Atlantic system of private commercial exchange. Expanding upon recent scholarship on early modern Jewish mercantile activities, the dissertation is the first to compare these five colonial settlements together in one study and is unique in emphasizing the inseparable nature of organizing commercial networks and founding Jewish communities in the New World---a double project---that was at the heart of the Jewish colonizing efforts in the Dutch Atlantic. Thus, the leading merchants of Recife, Curacao, and Newport were also the most influential members of the synagogues in their communities.;The central argument of "A People Within and Without" is that through their commercial connections and cultural skills, Jews were able to make themselves invaluable agents to the forces of European imperial expansion. As a result, Jews, who were a people free from attachment to any one nation, took advantage of the liminal Atlantic world of developing national empires to secure both economic and religious privileges in the Americas---privileges that were often closed to them in Europe. Yet, the dissertation details how, like other marginalized groups, Jews had to strive often to maintain their privileges and overcome episodic attempts to proscribe or limit their commercial and religious practices.;Finally, in studying the commercial and communal orientation of Jews in places like Curacao, New York and Newport the dissertation complicates the traditional national narratives of colonization and illustrates the transnational connections that existed between North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Europe and thus offers a more realistic view of how the Atlantic world actually operated during the early modern period.