Disaster, Race, and Rabbinic Authority: An Alternative Path of Jewish Integration in Early Twentieth-Century Jamaica
This article investigates the writings of Jamaica's rabbi Abraham E. Dobrin amid heightened racial tensions following a devastating 1907 earthquake. It focuses on two specific incidents. First is Dobrin's reaction to a 1912 petition from a Black man to join Jamaica's Jewish community....
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2024
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2024, Volume: 48, Issue: 2, Pages: 308-332 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Rabbi
/ Dobrin, Family
/ Jamaica
/ Racism
|
| RelBib Classification: | BH Judaism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article investigates the writings of Jamaica's rabbi Abraham E. Dobrin amid heightened racial tensions following a devastating 1907 earthquake. It focuses on two specific incidents. First is Dobrin's reaction to a 1912 petition from a Black man to join Jamaica's Jewish community. Second is a 1914 public debate in which Dobrin radically advocated for a belief in Jewish racial homogeneity and superiority. Anchored to these two episodes, this article explores the larger contexts for both early twentieth-century Black Jewish identity and Jewish "race" theory. It argues that in the highly racialized climate of post-1907 Jamaica, the Jewish sense of racial singularity, even superiority, paralleled some of the emerging trends of Pan-Africanism in defiance of a liberal white minority as represented by Governor Sydney Olivier. This argument qualifies a widely held unidirectional model of Jewish assimilation in Jamaica to an elite white minority. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2024.a946699 |
