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Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Stanley Mirvis, "The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2020)
Description: Stanley Mirvis' The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition (Yale University Press, 2020) offers an in-depth look at the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica and their connections to broader European and Atlantic trade networks. Based on last wills and testaments composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815, this book explores the social and familial experiences of one of the most critical yet understudied nodes of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Stanley Mirvis examines how Jamaica's Jews worked as traders, planters, pen keepers, physicians, fishermen, and metalworkers, and reveals how they remained both rooted in local Jamaican con...