Or else I’m a Jew | a series of abstractions

Jews were nowhere and everywhere in early modern England. The depictions of Jews in well-known Elizabethan plays like William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta coincided with a centuries-long expulsion of the Jews from England (ca. 1290–1656). It is unlikely that England was ever fully without Jews, however, and after the expulsions from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1496) a number of crypto-Jewish communities established themselves throughout the country. 

Little is recorded about most of the individuals from these communities, with a few notable exceptions—most remarkably Roderigo Lopez, a converso who was convicted of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth in 1594. Given so few Jewish people in sight, what social conditions and spores in the cultural imagination gave rise to characters like Shylock and Barabas?

During my Artist Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (September 2024–January 2025) I asked questions like: From what remains, what can be understood about the lives and experiences of the Jews living in a country that defined its identity, to a certain extent, by their absence? How do works like Merchant of Venice and Jew of Malta sit at the intersection between art and the social, between the imagined and the real? To what, and for whose, purposes were characters like Shylock and Barabas put?  

Before my arrival, I planned to make a series of textile artworks in response to these questions. During my fellowship, I decided these works would specifically take the form of quilts. The medium, to me, felt like the right visual language to bear the expansive weight of these histories. 

Throughout my practice as a writer and a visual artist, I have been committed to unraveling the complex constructions of cultural belonging and home in the Jewish diaspora, from stories to jokes to the clothes on one’s back and the food on one’s table. Often drawing on historical research, my work usually focuses on Eastern European Jewish histories, which are largely Ashkenazi. English Jewish history is a more Sephardic history during the early modern period, due to the influence of the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions on the English Jewish population. Its cultural and historical contexts were new terrain for me; and yet, they felt familiar, since the New Zealand Jewish context in which I was raised is a modern offshoot of British Jewish history. 

I began my research in the Folger’s Open Stacks, grounding my understanding of the topic in the secondary scholarship. From there, I dove into the Folger’s relevant primary resources, including documents on English theologian Hugh Broughton’s attempts at engagement with early modern Jewish communities, and accounts of the pre-expulsion Jewish communities of England in Holinshed’s Chronicles. I also sought out inspiration for my quilts in Folger collection items like a zograscope toy theatre with a rotating background scene, various embroidered bindings, and early modern visions of the apocalypse. These varied items provided the theoretical, technical, and aesthetic foundations of my planned quilts. 

Since my fellowship, I have returned to my studio in New Zealand to refine and execute the quilts I planned at the Folger. All the quilts in the series will be embroidered with words, phrases, and sketches in colors that blend into their backgrounds. They will all have a text embroidered on their border, encircling the quilt proper. This design references incantation bowls—ancient apotropaics where a demon would be drawn in the center of the bowl and a spell written in circles around it, trapping it. 

Rather than a didactic telling of these histories, I decided early on that the quilts will be abstractions or oblique figurative references to the history that inspired them, offering the shapes of the feelings that formed during my extended interaction with the source materials. After completing the quilts, I plan to create a series of accompanying texts that will offer a deeper dive into the historical context for those wishing to understand more about the layers of meaning encoded in the artworks.

A series of sketches towards one of planned quilts. Images courtesy of the artist. 

Immersing myself in the question of how Jewish people and practices came to be represented in the texts and materials of early English culture, I found myself increasingly engaged by the contemporary implications. Through the particular lens of these histories, I came to look with fresh eyes at the different ways that Jews have sought to survive and find a place for ourselves in diaspora throughout time, the ways in which these approaches push and pull with the dominant culture of any given place, and the shaky paradigms of supremacy on which all nationalisms rest. 

During my Artist Fellowship period, I was also part of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship’s 2024–25 cohort. One of the cohort’s key preoccupations has surrounded what Jewish collectivity has and might look like, which stayed at the top of my mind as I dove into the Folger’s collections. These concurrent conversations led me to become particularly interested in British cultures of silence and their intersections with converso cultures of secrecy. 

What this fellowship period left me with is hard to put into words, but it glows, it radiates, sometimes it nauseates. It’s a series of lonely echoes of circumstance and fear. I found in the archive a maze, a dark place where I was looking for people who didn’t want to be found, a place of monoliths and their violent outcomes. I left it even more viscerally aware of the failures of both Zionism and assimilation to satisfy a Jewish sense of place in this world. Despite the amount of pain the archive contained, I also emerged with a great deal of hope for the future: visions through the fog of a third way forward, of collectivities based on solidarity rather than fear, pride rather than shame, noise rather than silence.