Lessons on Exile and Colonialism from a 16th-Century Jew

• In Event: Lessons from the Archives: Early Modern Sephardi Diaspora

Abstract

Joseph Ha-Kohen was the second European Jews to write about the Americas. (The first was Abraham Farisol, but there is no evidence that Ha-Kohen had seen his work.) The son of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, he lived in Genoa for most of his life, except for two periods during which the Jews were expelled from Genoa’s Republic, the first from 1516 to 1538 and the second from 1567 to his death in 1575. Joseph Ha-Kohen was a medical doctor, historian and prolific writer. In his two books on the Americas, the Book of New India and the Book of Fernando Cortés, both in Hebrew, Ha-Kohen dealt with the discovery, conquest, and subjugation of the New World. The books were never printed, but Joseph hand-wrote nine versions of the books between 1557 and 1568.
Although Ha-Kohen’s books are often referred to as translations of Francisco do Gómara’s (who was Cortès’ secretary) books on the same topics, they were in fact complex amalgamations of translation and political criticism of Gómara’s work. For example, when Gómara accused “Indians” of idolatry, Joseph ha-Kohen wrote that “they themselves [the Spaniards] also believe in statues and idols.” To Gómara’s description of the Spaniards’ violent, forced conversions of Indians (because they were idolaters), Ha-Kohen added “remember the cruelty of the Catholic Kings against the Jews.” And whereas Gómara wrote that the Spaniards brought syphilis from the Indies to Europe, Ha-Kohen correctly explained that it was European conquerors who brought this and a number of other diseases to the Americas.
Using four surviving autographed manuscripts located in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and New York, this paper will discuss first how Jews—a European population, but oppressed by Spain—assessed Spanish conquest and colonial violence; and second, how Joseph’s writings reveal a man who over many years deepened his reflection on the Jews’ condition as repeated exiles and the new realities of empire and colonial regimes that were coming to dominate his world.

Author

• Flora Cassen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill