The Merchant of Havana

Stephen Silverstein

Description

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association

As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.

Sujets

• Latin American Studies
• West Indies
• Jewish Studies
• Histoire
• Caribbean
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 27 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826521118
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE MERCHANT OF HAVANA

THE MERCHANT OF HAVANA
The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive
STEPHEN SILVERSTEIN
Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE
© 2016 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2016
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Frontispiece : Lithograph showing a sugar refinery plant in Cuba.
Title: Ingenio Acana propriedad del Señor Dn. J. Eusebio Alfonso // dibujado y litogrdo. por Edo. Laplante; litografia de L. Marquier. Illustration from Los ingenios : coleccion de vistas de los principales ingenios de azucar . . . de Cuba . . . / por Justo G. Cantero (Habana: Impreso en la litografia de L. Marquier, 1857)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2016030960
LC classification number HT1078 .S55 2016
Dewey class number 306.3/6209729109/034—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016030960
ISBN 978-0-8265-2109-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2111-8 (ebook)
For Alla and for my parents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Notional Jew: Judaizing the Merchant
2. Racial Prescriptions and Inscriptions in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841)
3. Racial Alchemy and Alejandro Tapia y Rivera’s La cuarterona (1867)
4. The Jewish Escape Hatch from Cuba Impossible: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882)
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
The Merchant of Havana began and, over several years, developed under the intelligent, patient guidance of Ruth Hill. She is the source of anything that may be worthwhile in this book.
I am deeply grateful to my teachers in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. Special thanks go to Fernando Operé, Gustavo Pellón, and Alison Weber. I found valuable support in Asher Biemann and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows of Jewish Studies program at the University of Virginia, which he organized. The Public Humanities Fellowship Program in South Atlantic Studies, sponsored jointly by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, provided a venue to calibrate several of my arguments. Research in Havana was made possible by a Charles Gordon Reid Fellowship from the University of Virginia, as well as by the generous assistance of Ana María González Marfud, Carlos Federico Martí Brenes, Ariel Camejo, and José Antonio Baujín Pérez at the University of Havana. I thank Jorge and Nardy León for their friendship and hospitality.
I have exceptionally supportive colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor University. Heidi Bostic’s counsel and encouragement have been invaluable, and a chapter of this study has benefitted from her insightful reading. Elizabeth Willingham graciously invited me to present some of my ideas at a conference panel she organized. Marian Ortuño provided smart critique of a portion of this book. My friends in the Spanish Division have been generous and kind: Frieda Blackwell, Rafa Climent Espino, Jan Evans, Guillermo García Corales, Baudelio Garza, Karol Hardin, Paul Larson, Fred Loa, Linda McManness, Alex McNair, Janet Norden, Manuel Ortuño, Marian Ortuño, Lilly Souza Fuertes, Mike Thomas, and Beth Willing ham. Adrienne Harris and Andy Wisely are real-life superheroes. Roberto Pesce and Serena Dal Pont have made life in the heart of Texas delightful and delicious, as has Stephen Pluháček. Robyn Driskell has advocated for me and supported my research. Two summer sabbaticals and a semester of research leave provided by Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences afforded me the time to complete this book.
The Latin American Jewish Studies Association has granted me several opportunities to develop my ideas in dialogue with a community of thoughtful peers. I am especially indebted to my tremendous colleagues Alan Astro, Naomi Lindstrom, and Darrell Lockhart. Rosa Perelmuter has hospitably encouraged my participation on two LAJSA conference panels that she organized. I am very fortunate to have David Foster as a mentor. During the National Endowment for the Humanities’ summer program “Jewish Buenos Aires” (which has sadly been eliminated along with all overseas NEH summer seminars) that Foster led, this project benefitted from his consultation and from that of Charles Heath II, Yitzhak Lewis, Matt Losada, and Yovanna Pineda.
It has been a pleasure to work with Eli Bortz on this book. I am grateful to him and to the editorial staff at Vanderbilt University Press. I wish to express my thanks to the anonymous readers; this is a better study thanks to their critiques.
Karen Stolley is an excellent colleague and considerate supporter of my work. I adjusted several of the ideas in this book thanks to a stimulating conference panel organized by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz. Tom Finnegan is an especially skilled editor. Tony Cella, Ashley Kerr, Andrea Meador Smith, Faith Harden, David Luis-Brown, and Gillian Price provided incisive readings of portions of this study. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Zach Ludington for his enthusiastic willingness to read the manuscript in its entirety and for his smart commentary.
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara passed away during the completion of this book. While our relationship was limited to the exchange of e-mail, this did not prevent him from responding to my queries with enthusiasm and humility.
A prior version of Chapter 3 was published in Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana , and parts of Chapter 4 were published in “The Cuban Anti-Antislavery Genre: Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s Co lección de artículos and the Policy of Buen Tratamiento ” in Revista Hispánica Moderna . I thank the editors of these journals for permitting me to reproduce those arguments here.
Lastly, my family has been essential to the writing of this book. Jack, Cayman, Eshu, Grandpa, Lee, How, Jess, Miles, and Skylar—thank you. This book is dedicated to my parents for their enduring support and to Алла, Благодарю тебя за то, что следуешь нашему плану.
THE MERCHANT OF HAVANA
Introduction
IN HIS TRAVEL MEMOIR Notes on Cuba (1844), John George F. Wurdemann, a South Carolina physician convalescing from tuberculosis on the island in the winter of 1843, discusses how “many [Cubans] would linger to look at the Inglesis , as they called us to our faces—when we were absent the term Judios (hudeos), Jews, was applied to us, a generic appellation given to all foreigners.” 1 Later, Wurdemann specifies further: “The term judio , jew, is also applied to foreigners, including Spaniards.” 2 Before we move to dismiss Wurdemann’s testimony as nothing but the product of his own paranoid imagination, even a cursory review of texts reveals that an anti-Semitic tropology was indeed pervasive in nineteenth-century Cuba. One highly significant example that goes a long way toward making this point is Esteban Pichardo y Tapia’s Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas (Provincial dictionary of Cuban words and expressions), the first American dictionary, published in 1836 and reissued throughout the century, which recommends this definition for Judío : “The demoralized or irreligious, impious person. The common people also demean foreigners by calling them Jews.” 3
The Judaized foreigners who invaded the creole imaginary did so in the wake of the island’s first sugar boom, which coincided with the rise of and contest over the framework of Spanish imperial liberalism and was stimulated by what Dale Tomich has described as “a new social-economic form on which an accelerated rhythm was imposed with the introduction of the railroad, the integration of the island’s sugar economy into the world-scale circuits of capital, and the expansion and intensification of slave labor.” 4 The forceful transfigurations occasioned by these and other historical circumstances exacerbated the antagonisms and contradictions of a society structured in racial, class-based, and colonial dominance. 5 Although certain segments benefited from the revolutionary realignment of Cuban political, commercial, and social organization, others experienced these processes with profound dread. 6 Notions regarding the emblem of society’s new order, the foreign-born merchant, dovetailed with the well-worn lexicon of Jewishness. Owing to the correspondence of these conceits, the figurative Jew emerged as an especially adaptable instrument in a series of “racial projects,” as sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant define them, produced by creoles in the face of modernity’s threatening forces and novel values. 7 In broad terms, the notoriously incongruous Jew personified the acute “cognitive dissonance” experienced by nineteenth-century creoles. 8 Further, the Jew was an unwilling textual surrogate for the licentious Spanish Catholic who had fathered children with black female slaves. Transracial sex, or mestizaje , was looked on with deep apprehension by many creoles because, like industrial capitalism and the global rebalancing of trade, it threatened to overturn the established order. To be sure, the discursive practice that looked to restore stability to colonial society and subjectivity through the metaphorical Jew was operative on multiple fronts.
At this point, a short proviso is in order. It must be recognized that actual religious convictions are irrelevant to the vitality of the tropes that aligned Cuba’s nineteenth-century merchants with conceptions of Jewishness. The perlocutionary effectiveness of anti-Semitism, as