Article ID: CBB401667588

Botánica Sephardica (2022)

unapi

This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería, Espiritismo, Curanderismo, Òrìṣà worship and other ethnomedical and spiritual systems. Yet this botánica was owned by an Eastern Mediterranean Jew from the Ottoman/Italian island of Rhodes, and it integrated Sephardic and Mediterranean histories and sources of inspiration. Extraordinarily, this history stands for a greater whole. Jews were pioneering spiritual merchants in the United States. Restoring their history requires journeying globally, beginning with Ottomans’ fidelity to herbalism; tracing émigré Sephardic Jews’ uneven dialogue with Black African men and women in colonial Central and Southern Africa; and delving into the commercial, spiritual, and racial interplay furthered by Jewish-owned pharmacies and botánicas in New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and by Jewish spiritual merchants and their Caribbean, Latinx, and Black patrons. All this introduces an unexpected Jewish and Mediterranean history to the botánica, and an unexpectedly multifarious spiritual, mercantile, and racial dimension to Jewish history.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB401667588/

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Authors & Contributors
Dominic Green
Hart, Robbie
Henriet, Benoît
Rotman, Youval
Dan Tsahor
Rachel S. A. Pear
Concepts
Science and religion
Judaism
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Pharmacy
Spirituality
Science and culture
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
Early modern
Ancient
Places
China
New York City (New York, U.S.)
United States
Europe
Atlantic world
Congo
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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