When Amsterdam Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel argued in The Hope of Israel (1650) that the indigenous peoples of the Americas might descend from the lost tribes, he bound the New World into a redemptive geography in which discovery, dispersion, and messianic hope formed part of a single divine design. This talk explores the religious imagination of the early modern Sephardic diaspora and its entanglement with the Atlantic and Caribbean worlds from Amsterdam to the colonial communities of Curaçao and Suriname  as a case study in something often forgotten: that religious ideas and beliefs were themselves driving forces in the history of early colonialism, not merely its ornament.

Millenarian and messianic expectation shaped how Jews imagined settlement, mobility, and belonging in unfamiliar lands, and the messianic upheaval surrounding the so-called "false Messiah", Sabbatai Zevi, in 1665–66 rippled through the same Atlantic networks that carried goods, people, and print. That imagination was also, at times, articulated outward: figures like Menasseh addressed a Christian millenarian audience, particularly Cromwellian England, in part to win support for Jewish causes, which serves as a reminder that Jewish and Christian redemptive hopes were legible to one another. Drawing on my published work on the Sephardic diaspora alongside the scholarship of others, I ask what it means to take this religious imagination seriously as a historical force.