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How the Sephardic Caribbean Troubles Material Religion: A Tale of a Broken Cup

Mon, December 17, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 2 Ballroom

Abstract

Like other studies of material religion, studies of Jewish material culture explore the way Judaism, “happens materially, taking shape as embodied practices that configure the world’s mortals and others” (David Morgan, “The Material Culture of Lived Religions”).  Yet Jewish material culture still remains largely underrepresented in the larger field of material religion. In this paper, I explore some of the reasons why this may be through the lens of an early nineteenth-century tea cup depicting Jodensavanne, the Jewish plantation town in Suriname.  Made between 1800-1830 in an Old Paris Porcelain style and now housed in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, the cup defines Jewishness in cultural and geographic terms, rather than purely religious ones. Yet unlike anti-Semitic depictions of the colony, the cup presents Jews as white planter elites, capable of mastering European rituals of taste and civility. This message was crucial because between the 1790s and late 1820s when the cup was made, Sephardic Jews struggled to gain full rights in the colonies, often by appealing to Dutch fears of violence and the need for Jewish support in controlling Suriname’s enslaved and Maroon communities.  

In focusing on Jews’ cultural and racial identity as elites, the teacup showcases the way Sephardic Jews in the Caribbean “troubles” our analysis of Jewish items as examples of material religion. David Morgan and Sarah Promey have argued that the goal of studying the material culture of religion is not to see material culture as “ancillary to some Platonic reality called ‘religion,’” but rather to understand how objects “interact with intellectual, ritualistic, performative, and aural cultures to constitute religion” (“Introduction,” The Visual Culture of American Religions).  That is, the study of religion as embodied actions changes the primary stories we tell about religion itself.  Adding Jewish material culture to the study of material religion is a similarly radically gesture that troubles the way we define religious communities.

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