[2] David Sorkin restricts his definition of the "port Jew" to apply only to a very specific group of Sephardi and Italian-Jewish merchants who were participants in the Mediterranean and transatlantic economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Fry notes that their connections with the Jewish diaspora and their expertise in maritime trade made them of particular interest to the mercantilist governments of Europe.
[1] Lois Dubin describes Port Jews as Jewish merchants who were "valued for their engagement in the international maritime trade upon which such cities thrived".
[4] Sorkin and others have characterized the socio-cultural profile of these men as marked by a flexibility towards religion and a "reluctant cosmopolitanism that was alien to both traditional and "enlightened" Jewish identities."
This expanded definition would encompass Ashkenazi as well as Sephardi merchants living in other European ports such as Hamburg, Southampton, Portsmouth, and Odessa.