Through the person of the ex-converso David Nassy, “Regaining Jerusalem” asks how seventeenth-century Portuguese Jews could seek their own religious liberty at the same time they were enslaving Africans in the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Guyana coast. Living in Amsterdam by the 1630s, Nassy was part of the Jewish community in Dutch Brazil, and then in the 1660s led the Jewish settlement in Dutch Suriname. Nassy was moved in part by eschatological hopes shared with other ex-conversos freed from Catholic tyranny, in part by his interest in plants and geography, and in part by entrepreneurial desire for profit. Nassy and his fellow Jews distinguished their own biblical exodus out of slavery from the destiny of their African captives, incorporating their slaves into the patriarchal Abrahamic household. This paper describes patterns of Jewish culture on the sugar plantations and the varied reactions of African men and women to it.
