Rothschild Lecture Tells of Black Jewish Social Climbers

The fascinating and mysterious world of the Jews of the Caribbean of 200 years ago forms the backdrop for this year’s Rothschild lecture, which each year brings a distinguished scholar to the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.

This year’s guest lecturer was Laura Arnold Leibman who has written a fascinating study of two 19th-century Jews who began their lives on the Caribbean island of Barbados as the poor, Christian children of slaves.

How they became wealthy and Jewish in the years following the American revolution is the subject of her study of Jewish life, “Once We Were Slaves – The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family.”

The book had its roots in an encounter with a wealthy New York Jewish grandee who was surprised to learn of the tangled tale of sex, slavery, immigration and Judaism that gave rise to her fabled family tree.

Laura Leibman’s book is the story of how Sarah Brandon Moses and her brother, Isaac Lopez Brandon, were born enslaved on the tropical island in the late 18th century. They were the children of a Black Christian concubine of a wealthy Portuguese Sephardic Jew, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon. By the time he died, he had become the wealthiest Jew on the island of Barbados. Unlike many men of the time, rather than passing on his fortune to nieces and nephews, he saw to it that his multiracial children were provided for when he died.

Leibman spent 10 years piecing together the story of how they converted to Judaism, passed as white and made their way from the Caribbean and South America to London, Philadelphia, and eventually, through marriage and good fortune, came into great wealth in post-colonial New York City.

Leibman told her Emory audience that the story of the brother and sister, Sarah and Isaac, as they make their way up the social ladder from Barbados to the lofty status of privileged Jews in the New World, is a “story of how race functioned in the early Atlantic world” of the time “and particularly for Jews in the early Atlantic world.”

“They had gone over the course of their lives from being considered people of color to being considered white,” Leibman pointed out. “They did so in a way that is really different than how most people have talked about racial transitions during this time period.”

What made this possible, Leibman emphasizes, had much to do with how race was understood and recognized. And they were also fortunate to have had a slave-owning Jewish father who treated them much differently than most such children were treated at the time.

When they were able, the brother and sister moved to Suriname in South America, which was at the time, one of the wealthiest communities in the New World. It was also a place where the two could convert, without much difficulty to Judaism and be considered a part of the Jews of Portuguese descent. Her book and the lecture describes in some detail the Jewish societies of these pioneering Jews. They owed much to the immigration of their forefathers from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century to Amsterdam and the colonial ambitions of the Dutch.

These Portuguese would be particularly important for Sarah who would eventually make her way to London, where she would gain a proper education for a young woman that would lead to her successful marriage.

Leibman also feels it’s important to stress that despite all the advantages the two had they are not isolated examples of how multiracial Jews made their lives in the Americas of old.

“For a lot of historians, people have talked about multiracial Jews as something that’s been a fairly recent phenomenon, something that’s happened maybe after the 1970s. The Brandons are part of a much larger history in the Americas. There are many people in the communities they lived in who also had similar paths and also had African ancestry or other ethnic ancestry.”

She also pointed out that there are many people like the ones she encountered who were not particular noted, but they led really interesting lives. They provide good models, she believes, for people who are interested in doing the history of their family.

Liebman’s success as a scholar and a writer with a writing style that draws you into her tales has earned her four National Jewish Book Awards. She has also served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies; and she is the Leonard O. Milberg professor of Jewish studies at Princeton University.