3 - Encountering Native Origins

Summary

This chapter discusses cultural, historical, and literary encounters toward a consideration of disciplinary encounters. It introduces and discusses early modern materials in which Jewish imaginings of indigenous others are framed by Sephardic diasporic histories and identities and by the popularity of ten tribist theories. The chapter argues that Jewish projections, representations, and fantasies of Indianness often assumed distinct expression within it, precisely because of Jews' vexed place within Christian Europe. It concentrates on Jews, who, in the process of imagining their own possessive relationship to the continent, would adopt and adapt myth of the Jewish origins of the New World. Jewish fantasies of indigenization offered further ways to explore the collision between Jewish tribalism and modern, Enlightenment universalism. The chapter suggests that literary Jewish-indigenous encounters tell less about Jewish or Native identities and histories and more about the disruptive and even transformative possibility both might pose to the superintending ideological structures within which they operate.