Laura Arnold Leibman
ONCE WE WERE SLAVES: THE EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY OF A MULTIRACIAL JEWISH FAMILY
New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, ISBN: 978-0197530474
Reviewed by Michael T. Miller1
Beginning in eighteenth century Barbados where Sarah Esther Lopez-Gill’s two children were born into enslavement, Once We Were Slaves follows one extended family of multiracial Jews as they negotiate the Jewish world, trying to find acceptance and integration. Leibman takes us from Barbados, through their travels to Suriname, Philadelphia, London, and finally New York where their past was far enough behind them to allow them full status in the community.
Sarah and Isaac were born to an enslaved woman, Sarah Esther Lopez-Gill. Their father was a Jewish man, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon. The family who enslaved their mother, and them, the Lopezes, was also Jewish. However, Sarah was baptized as Anglican, a maternal choice that Leibman argues was intended to provide her a possibility of marriage otherwise denied to her: the absence of maternal Jewish descent meant that she could not be married in the synagogue. By the time Sarah and her brother died, however, they had entered the upper echelons of the Jewish community in New York and Philadelphia, respectively. Sarah had married into a wealthy and respected family.
Once We Were Slaves highlights the many frustrations and difficult choices that people of color, even free and wealthy ones, had to make in order to obtain the same rights that whites naturally had. In fact, it was only because of a couple of unusual acts of kindness in the wills of two Jewish families, and one Christian, that Sarah and Isaac were able to find freedom and self-determination for themselves and their descendants. Their father, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, left the majority of his wealth to them, and the Lopezes and Gills willed them money and/or their liberty. By 1828, their father was “the most influential Jew in Barbados” (p. 1) and very wealthy. He accepted the children, Sarah and Isaac, as his own and they took his surname, but he never married their mother, despite their thirty-five year relationship. Leibman notes that such relationships were not equal, and perhaps not even voluntary. Much of the time they served to protect the enslaved from being prostituted, as many enslaved women were under the guise of being hired for more respectable labor.
Although their father had requested equal treatment for Sarah and Isaac, the siblings were not accorded full rights in the synagogue because of their mother. This led to their relocation to Suriname in 1811, a chapter which offers further insight into Aviva Ben-Ur’s recent work on the multiracial Jewish community there, including the persecution of the large number of multiracial Jews therein.2 If Brandon had married their mother, the children would have been accepted as white Jews, but because he chose not to, their status was not so simple.
One of the main agendas of the text is to show how arbitrary and fluid definitions of race were during this time; individuals’ assigned race changed depending on their location, their wealth, and other factors such as whether or not their parents were married. By the time of the 1820 census, Jews were categorized as white by default, unless obviously bearing African descent. One can almost sense the younger Sarah Gill’s trepidation, however, when Leibman writes, “If the census taker labelled Sarah and Joshua’s children ‘colored,’ that status could affect their access to jobs, education, housing, voting rights, and economic opportunities that white Jews took for granted” (p. 130). In the on-going debates about race, Blackness, and Judaism, the text is another significant contribution to acknowledging the longstanding racial diversity of American Judaism. It is also a frank admission of one way through which this diversity came about: the sexual abuse of both enslaved and free Black women by white men. The experiences of enslaved people in these times are painful to read, but it is important to understand what happened. The modern reckoning with slavery and the ability to talk more openly about it, has come none too soon; the acceptance of the subject within Jewish Studies is also difficult but necessary. Understanding the multiracial nature of many American Jewish communities in previous centuries, and the significance for modern race discourse, must incorporate acknowledgement of the serial sexual abuse of enslaved women who were mothers and grandmothers to children who became “white” Jews.
Leibman’s text does not flinch from admitting the sufferings of enslaved and free blacks within the Barbados Jewish community, while not appearing to justify it by comparison with the treatment in Christian society. One event which may be worth retelling here, is when in 1819 a petition to transform the synagogue into a vestry, and therefore enable those Jews who owned property a new raft of rights including the vote, was submitted to Barbados’ Anglican authorities. The unwelcome financial impact this would have on non-land-owning Jews was piqued by the realization that wealthy Jews of Color (JOC) such as Isaac Lopez Brandon could gain privileges beyond what those poor white Jews ever would. A group formed to prevent the petition being accepted. This unpleasant incident is interesting for a number of reasons. Though the Anglicans appear to have been initially in favor, the Jewish opponents’ initial reliance on antisemitic tropes to derail the petition led the Anglicans to express outrage at this presumption of intolerance. A subsequent attempt to evoke the Anglicans’ racism by highlighting the insult to white privilege if Jews of Color like Isaac would gain voting rights was successful.
The Anglicans were above antisemitism, but not above anti-Black racism, unlike the middle strata of Jews who were willing to rely on any and either. The plays of color and religion are intriguing here. Although most JOCs were the community's most disadvantaged, those who did manage to rise into the upper echelons of society provoked resentment from the poor whites of the community for challenging their one privilege. And yet, when first queried the Jewish community had stated that they made no distinction in terms of religious membership between white and mixed race Jews, a position which “underscores the ways in which Judaism resisted the island’s racial order before ultimately adapting to meet it” (p. 101). While one can understand the financial motive for opposing the petition, the attempt to arouse the prejudices of the most powerful against the community and its members demonstrates how minorities can damage each other and themselves. Sadly, this dynamic resonates with other periods of both Black and Jewish history, when the few who attain prominence become targeted both internally and externally.
There are intriguing though unremarked parallels between the Sephardic Jews’ plight under the inquisition and their conversion to Christianity prior to fleeing to the Americas and the family’s attempts to navigate the American world. They try in vain to find a way into the Jewish community, and once they finally succeed, in Philadelphia and New York, their African heritage appears to be forgotten as they assimilate into white Jewish society. In fact, a large part of Sarah and Isaac’s eventual acceptance can be attributed to their wealth. Leibman writes that, “In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, race was remarkably fluid for wealthy, racially ambiguous people such as Sarah and Isaac,” (pp. 178-9). She notes that Isaac’s inheritance and his mother’s money afforded them certain opportunities in liberal Philadelphia that were still closed to them in Barbados (p. 123).
The implications of the study of Black Jewish history, discussed in the book’s epilogue, can be encapsulated by the fact that one Brandon descendant in 1920s New York was unable to imagine that she had African ancestors. Several congregations existed in nearby in Harlem which asserted their own Black Jewish identity. These congregations are still judged as not Jewish in any way. An attempt to begin reappraising their background and the non-acceptance may be one of the most significant effects of the current fascination with multiracial Atlantic Jewish communities. Leibman does not mention, however, the fact that many of that generation of New York’s “Black Jews” travelled from the Caribbean during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In other words, they very possibly did have authentic Jewish heritage, albeit one not accepted by the white Jewish establishment. Liebman briefly touches on a second important case, that of Lucy Marks. Marks was enslaved by a Jewish family in Philadelphia and faithfully observed their faith herself. The family successfully requested that she be buried in the Jewish cemetery. This outcome was infrequent around the Americas, but it demonstrates some of the complexity of recognized Jewish identity which is dependent on the vicissitudes of particular congregations.3
Leibman’s book is rich in detail, demonstrating an excellent command of research and just how much can be reconstructed about lives centuries ago. It is also in large part a history told via objects which the individuals left: a chair, a hymnal, and at the center is the 3x2” miniature of Sarah, her skin lightened by the artist in accord with fashion of the time, so much as to make her appear completely European. The reader will learn much about the lives, concerns, and occupations of the early Sephardim who lived in the Caribbean. It also contains family trees, which are useful for navigating through the many similarly named individuals the covered by book.
1 Michael T Miller (Polish Academy of Sciences) works in Jewish Mysticism/Philosophy, and Black Jewish Studies. He has published several articles on the African Hebrew Israelite community and is currently completing a monograph on their spiritual leader, Ben Ammi.
2 Aviva Ben Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
3 See Walter R. Isaac for more on this subject. Beyond Ontological Jewishness: A Philosophical Reflection on the Study of African American Jews and the Social Problems of the Jewish and Human Sciences (unpublished PhD dissertation, Temple University 2012).