Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

Chapter 5 turns to the law in action and the politics of litigation involving adjudication and interpretations of the law. The chapter opens with an examination of the Council of the Indies’ initial judgment in September 1784 on the plaintiffs’ case. Based on a narrow reading of slave law and on pro-slavery policies, the ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ controversial claim to collective freedom and to the criteria of freedom presented by the plaintiffs’ brief but allowed hearings to determine ambiguous cases and stipulated the criteria to be utilized by colonial courts in those cases. The ruling gave way to a cascade of hearings and legal actions in lower-level colonial courts and to a conflict of interpretation over the imperial ruling. Ordinary enslaved and fugitive cobreros dispersed throughout the island became direct participants in the judicial arena at this point as they directly engaged in the politics of litigation for freedom in colonial courts. The chapter shows the way imperial and colonial authorities centralized and controlled judicial outcomes but also the room for maneuvering available in some cases.

Once Christian Europe’s most paradigmatic internal Other, Jews are now mostly seen as a well-integrated and successful religious minority group. For centuries, Jews faced political, social, and legal exclusion. Now, politicians proudly invoke the West’s shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Compared to the past, public expressions of antisemitism have become increasingly taboo. Jews have seemingly moved from being paradigmatic outsiders to accepted insiders. Despite this undoubted success, there are still moments when this position can become suddenly unsettled. There are not only the terrible attacks on Jewish life, such as the synagogue shootings in Halle in 2019 and a year earlier in Pittsburgh, the still alarming rates of antisemitic violence, the groups of white supremacists chanting in the streets that Jews will not replace them, or the flourishing antisemitic conspiracy theories in the online and offline worlds. Uneasiness with Jews and Judaism also still manifests in less extreme and less overtly hostile ways in the midst of society on the terrain of liberal law.

This chapter is the first of two that examine the legal encounter with Jewishness in public space by focussing on the Orthodox practice of the eruv. The eruv is a distinctly Orthodox practice and fault lines here do not run simply between Jews and non-Jews but also between different Jews. In the modern secular legal arena, questions of non-establishment and the boundaries of religious freedom serve as the dominant legal frames, turning the eruv into a matter of excessive religiosity to be contained by law. Yet underneath the lofty language of constitutional separation often lurk concerns about national and local identity as well as sovereignty and ownership. Moreover, while circumcision has often galvanised Jews of different denominations, the eruv exposes internal Jewish rifts about Jewish identity and difference in contemporary societies. Indeed, some Jews themselves have not shied away from mobilising the authority of secular law to enforce their vision of what they consider the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness today.

Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.

Based on discursive analysis, Chapter 3 focuses on the briefs produced in Madrid and the colony to mount the plaintiffs’ case for collective freedom. It examines the meanings of freedom in the Spanish Atlantic and the battery of legal tools, including the rarified one of prescription, deployed in the plaintiffs’ memorials to buttress their case of wrongful enslavement and collective freedom. The case entered unchartered terrain with the claim that belonging to a pueblo constituted a way of enacting and producing freedom collectively, an innovative claim based on notions of corporate belonging in the Spanish Atlantic world especially related to municipal bodies such as pueblos. The chapter parses a distinction between civil and political freedom made in some briefs. Civil freedom was understood in opposition to slavery as personal freedoms that free subjects could enjoy as royal vassals even in the context of colonialism and royal absolutism. Political freedom depended on municipal belonging, the space in which limited self-rule and citizenship could be locally enacted in an absolute monarchy. The chapter draws out the possible normative implications of this claim for Afro descendants at large who, at most, could only enjoy civil freedom rights in the empire.

This chapter comprehensively lays out all the possible ways that artificial intelligence (AI) might interact with Jewish sources as their relationship develops over the next many years. It divides the scope of the relationship into three parts. First, it engages with questions of moral agency and their potential interactions with Jewish law, and suggests that this path, while enticing, may not be particularly fruitful. Second, it suggests that Jewish historical sources generally distinguish human value from human uniqueness, and that there is therefore quite a bit of room to think of an AI as a person, if we so choose, without damaging the value of human beings. Finally, it considers how Jewish thought might respond to AI as a new height of human innovation, and how the human–AI relationship shares many characteristics with the God–human relationship as imagined in Jewish sources.

This chapter explores the interplay between Christian ambivalence and the law from the late Middle Ages to the period of emancipation. I begin my discussion by exploring how theological arguments about Jewish inferiority and difference entered both canon law and secular laws during the late medieval period, turning Christian supersessionism into Christian domination in the sociolegal realm. I also consider the increasing racialisation of Jewish difference through the purity of blood doctrine that solidified boundaries between Jews and Christians in Spain at a time when large numbers of Jews had converted to Christianity. Focusing on the crucial period of Jewish emancipation, I then trace how Christian ambivalence further seeped into the secular legal imagination, shaping ideas about what constitutes a proper ‘religion’ in the modern secular nation state. Throughout this chapter, I explore some of the shifting dynamics of conversion and assimilation and their intersections with the racialisation of Jewish difference, which cast doubt on the possibility of Jewish equality.

In 2012, a German district court in the city of Cologne decided that male circumcision for non-therapeutical reasons amounted to criminal assault that could not be justified by parental consent. Over a period of several months, between the decision and the drafting of the amending legislation, the German public and academy became embroiled in a remarkably heated and emotional debate about the future of the practice. But this time, the resentment did not just appear in the notorious online world but became woven into medical and legal arguments against circumcision. Even though critics of circumcision were eager to stress that their concerns were children’s rights alone, the Cologne debate sent a signal to Germany’s Jews that the law could easily turn them into strangers again. Through a close reading of this legal controversy, this chapter examines how contemporary secular legal responses to religious infant male circumcision reproduce Christian ambivalence and rely on a supersessionary logic that renders Jews as stuck in a backward past, while constituting the majoritarian secularised Christian culture as a superior locus of equality and progress.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

This is the first of two chapters concerned with the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision. In this chapter, I trace the history of circumcision as a trope for Jewish difference in European Christian thought and consider its symbolic role in debates about the legal equality of Jews. Christian thinkers spent much time pondering Jewish circumcision and what it told them about the supposedly ‘carnal’, particularistic, and anachronistic nature of Jews. Apart from constituting a trope for what differentiated Jews from Christians, the bodily sign eventually also became enmeshed in discussions about the possibility of Jewish emancipation where it offered a site to debate the fitness of Jews to become citizens. However, regardless of how much Christians disdained circumcision, they mostly respected the Jewish right to circumcise and due to a curious twist of history, some Christian societies eventually even embraced circumcision themselves. More recently, circumcision has emerged as a human rights issue and I explore the role of Christian ambivalence in contemporary calls for a ban on the practice in the name of children’s rights and gender equality.

The chapter examines the distinctiveness of this composite freedom suit; the unorthodox Afro descendant community that took it to the highest imperial tribunal in Madrid; and the larger historical context that triggered the legal action in the early 1780s. It lays out the significance of the notions of “collective freedom” and “natives of a pueblo” deriving from colonial customary practices and from political, social, and juridical discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world here reworked into novel proposals that challenged the approaching tsunami of slavery expansion in Cuba and the Atlantic world amid the Age of Revolutions, and it even presented a colonial alternative to slave-based plantation and extractive regimes. Linkages are made between the local, colonial, and imperial levels in which legal and political mobilizations unfolded. The chapter also surveys the various historiographies of slavery, race, Afro descendants, Indians, and law, politics and society that intersect in this study and discusses the sources and archives on which the study is based.

Originally established by “we the people,” as its preamble majestically states, the Constitution belongs to us all. But Americans increasingly treat it as the property of one political faction or the other. In keeping with their own preferences, conservatives interpret the Constitution to protect religion, limit gun control, and obstruct administrative governance while allowing state-level regulation of moral questions like abortion. Progressives see a mirror-image constitution that advances social justice, confers broad federal power, and allows flexible administrative regulation while at the same time limiting state and local police authority and guaranteeing sexual and reproductive autonomy. As national politics have grown ever more divided and polarized, preventing either side from implementing its goals through federal legislation, both coalitions have dreamed of capturing the courts and implementing their vision instead through constitutional interpretation. A document that should be a source of unity and shared commitments has become a vehicle for extending political conflict.

The cobreros entered the Age of Revolutions in 1780 in a calamitous position but emerged in 1800 in a stronger one with an edict recognizing their freedom and their pueblo. Although they retained their formal civil freedom, the limited political freedoms they obtained were eroded during the first decades of the nineteenth century given wider colonial and global changes. Yet the cobreros continued using the courts invoking the Freedom Edict of 1800, but how the local identity of natives of El Cobre continued to be mobilized or how it changed in subsequent generations with the arrival of other settlers and the globalization of El Cobre remains uncertain. After summarizing the main findings and arguments of the study, the book concludes with a reflection on the significance of the category of local nativeness for racial colonial subjects and the political uses and rights claimed for this category in changing historical contexts in the past and its reemergence in various Latin American nations in the twenty-first century.