ABSTRACT
Adam Sutcliffe opened a 2009 essay on early modern Jewish historiography with the rhetorical question, ‘Are we all Atlanticists now?’1 One could certainly wonder whether this tongue-in-cheek query – a parody of the declarative way David Armitage opened a 2002 essay on historiographical frameworks for The British Atlantic World – was intended to poke a metaphorical sharp stick at the reader. For any assessment of work in the eld to date reveals that Jewish historians2 of the present moment, with a few rare exceptions, are hardly Atlanticists at all. A thorough reading of Sutcliffe’s piece nds him, in a pattern that has become all too typical among Jewish historians, sloughing off the potential contribution of a broad Atlantic paradigm for Jewish history in favor of a constrained Sephardic model of the early modern Atlantic. Indeed, Sutcliffe points to several ‘dangers’ that he believes the Atlantic paradigm may pose for Jewish historiography: that historians may simply replace old-fashioned nation-based Jewish historical writing with an equally limited binary division between the Atlantic and the non-Atlantic regions (‘the West’ and ‘the Rest,’ as he terms it), that historians will use an Atlanticist approach as a method of avoiding discussion of unsettling issues within particular national historiographies, and that the lack of a global context will only perpertuate a kind of peculiar orientalism within Atlantic Jewish historiography that juxtaposes romanticized notions of medieval Spain against a decisively Ashkenazi version of modernity.3 While these cautions are well-advised, it seems to me that they spring from a deeper unease, and constitute perhaps a self-re exive defense of Jewish historiography as it is presently practiced, against the suspicion that an Atlantic Jewish paradigm might undermine the very premises on which more traditional forms of Jewish history writing have relied for several generations now. The essay thus proves less provocative than Sutcliffe’s opening would lead the reader to suspect; Sutcliffe has instead crafted a historiographical apologetic for the sloth with which practitioners of Jewish history have approached the Atlantic paradigm.
