Call for Papers: The Jewish Atlantic World, March 2011

In June 2006, the journal Jewish History offered a special issue on the port Jews of the Atlantic. As a result, there's a call for panelists and papers on the topic for a March 2011 conference.

Editor Lois Dubin noted that the concept of port Jews identified the role and experience of Jewish merchants who lived in Mediterranean and Atlantic port cities in early modern Europe. The issue's authors followed these merchants across the Atlantic to the North and South American colonies. The trans-Atlantic leap demonstrates the life and times of colonial American Jews.

They rarely stayed in one place, and traveled between ports on both sides of the ocean, as they married and traded with Jews of other key towns.

This transnational world of early American Jews is the focus of a call for panelists/papers is being made for "The Jewish Atlantic World," at the seventh biennial conference of the Society of Early Americanists, set for Philadelphia, March 3-5, 2011.

For more information on the conference, click here.

According to the announcement: "Proposed papers may explore, but are not limited to, such issues as trade, slavery, race, messianism, mysticism, everyday life, politics, gender, education, gravestones, the synagogue, or the arts."

A broad disciplinary range is sought, and submissions are welcome from literary scholars, archeologists, art historians, historians, and scholars of religious studies. Comparative studies of Jews and other colonists are also welcome.

Send one-page abstracts for consideration - by September 20 - to Reed College's Laura Leibman.

Tracing the Tribe reminds those interested that such topics may also be of interest to the program committee of the 31st IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Washington, DC; August 2011). The call for papers for DC 2011 is set for the near future.