ABSTRACT
In the 1830s, Belgian artist Pierre Jacques Benoit travelled to the Dutch colony of Suriname. As Wieke Vink notes, Benoit's presentation of Jews is at best ambivalent. Rather than including Judaism as one of a variety of white religious practices, Benoit always places Jews in the context of other 'non-white' peoples and visually draws analogies between them and people of African descent, Amerindians, and monkeys. Born in Suriname in 1747, David de Isaac Cohen Nassy was descended from some of the colony's earliest seventeenth-century Jewish settlers. English dramatist, Richard Cumberland, wrote and staged his comedy The Jew in London in 1794. Unlike earlier English plays, Cumberland portrayed Sheva, a Jewish moneylender, as the benevolent hero of the comedy. The centrality of English publications to the American literary scene was even commented on by Benjamin Franklin who remarked in his autobiography that 'those who lov'd reading were oblig'd to send for their books from England'.
