Prof. Jessica Roitman
About
j.v.roitman@vu.nl
Prof. Jessica Roitman is a Professor of Jewish Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, specializing in the social and cultural networks of the Sephardic diaspora.
Her research focuses on mobility, trade, and inter-ethnic connections in the early modern Atlantic and Caribbean worlds.
Recently, her work has expanded to explore the interactions between Sephardic Jews and enslaved peoples of color in the 18th-century Caribbean, as well as the intersections between Jewish travelers in the Indian Ocean.
Roitman’s scholarship emphasizes how Sephardic communities negotiated identity through transoceanic commerce and ritual practice, bridging the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
Lecture Abstract:
This paper examines how Jewish mobility and presence were narrated across the Indian Ocean world from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Drawing on travel accounts by Jews and on descriptions of Jewish communities by European observers—particularly Dutch and British travelers—it explores how Jews figured within the textual and commercial circuits that connected South and West Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic. Focusing on the Jewish community of Cochin as a nodal point, the paper considers both the internal narratives of travel and belonging articulated in Jewish correspondence and the external portrayals produced within imperial and missionary literatures. A central case study is a set of late eighteenth-century letters exchanged between the Cochin community and their counterparts in New York, revealing a transoceanic consciousness that linked Jewish lives across the Indian and Atlantic worlds. Reading these letters alongside VOC travelogues and colonial ethnographies, the paper argues that Jews were not peripheral to oceanic exchange but integral to its moral and narrative geography. By tracing how Jewish presence was imagined—by both insiders and outsiders—it seeks to illuminate the multiple scales of connection that constituted the Indian Ocean as a Jewish as well as imperial space. Ultimately, the paper reconsiders how early modern and colonial archives register mobility and minority belonging, proposing that Jewish travelers and the stories told about them help us reframe the Indian Ocean as a site of entangled religious and narrative worlds.