Philosophy and World Religions Research Colloquium, Hilit Surowitz-Israel, “‘Son de Estraña Naturaleza’: Race, Nation, and Circumcision”

​This talk will examine the question of race within the context of ritual circumcision and a series of exclusionary Portuguese Jewish communal religious bylaws formulated in the early modern Dutch Atlantic World. Scholars have tended to interpret these bylaws as expressions of growing Jewish racism forged by the racial realities of the Americas. However, I will argue that this elementary racial hypothesis is deficient as it does not offer an adequate account of the language of the bylaws, particularly that these bylaws also excluded “white” but non-Sephardic Jews from aspects of communal Jewish life. Instead, I propose that alongside emerging categories of race in the Americas, the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish exclusion of Black slaves, Eurafricans, and Ashkenazi Jews is best understood through the prism of ethnoreligious identity and a shift that occurred in the Spanish conception of naturaleza (“nativeness”) in the ‘New World’ colonies.​