Carnival in the Caribbean

Purim commemorates the ancient story of Jewish survival in Persia and is still celebrated today with community gatherings each spring. Around the world, these celebrations merge into local customs. In the Caribbean, where Jewish communities began settling int he late seventeenth century, Purim celebrations grew into vibrant festivals marked by music, masquerade and shared public celebration.In this lecture, Dr. Aviva Ben-Ur explores how Purim in the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Curaçao and Suriname evolved into a two-week celebration that brought together Jewish and non-Jewish communities and saw free and enslaved people celebrating together.Using Purim as a lens, Dr. Ben-Ur will trace the rich and complex history of the Caribbean's Jewish communities and their deep connection with the region's broader African-diaspora cultures, revealing how a single holiday created opportunity for cultural exchange, shared festivity and intertwined histories.

About the Speaker:

Aviva Ben-Ur is Professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A historian specializing in Atlantic Jewish history, slavery studies, and the Ottoman diaspora, she is the author of Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Her current book project, “Britain’s First Turks: Being Ottoman at the End of Empire,” focuses on the migratory experiences of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the United Kingdom, capital of the world’s Oriental carpet trade during the first half of the twentieth century.

This event is part of the Bruce Greenberg Lecture Series, which explores Jewish history and culture in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

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