The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition 9780300252033, 030025203X

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The Jews of Eighteenth-­Century Jamaica

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The Jews of Eighteenth-­Century Jamaica A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition S ta n le y M irvis

   New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund and from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2020 by Stanley Mirvis. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Caslon type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950419 ISBN 978-­0-­300-­23881-­5 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface / vii Names, Dates, Spelling, and Method / xi Acknowledgments / xiii intr od uct ion

A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition / 1 c h ap ter 1

The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 21 c h ap ter 2

The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 47 c h ap ter 3

The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 65 c h ap ter 4

The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 89 c h ap ter 5

Jewish Communal Life: The Men, Women, and Children of the Nation / 125 c h ap ter 6

The Ethnic Identity of Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 154

c h ap ter 7

The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 174 c onclus ion / 196

Appendix: Excerpts from the Wills of Selected Jamaican Jews / 199 Notes / 237 Index / 279

Preface

This is a book about contradictions. Jamaica’s Jews simultaneously belonged to two parallel yet contradictory worlds: they were part of a politically transcendent Atlantic Diaspora while also embedded in a Caribbean English colony. They were socially autonomous from the Metropole, yet were also colonial dependents. The town of Port Royal was a place of pluralism and religious tolerance, yet its Jewish population faced severe discrimination. The Jews of Jamaica existed within the colony’s racialized social hierarchy on the level of free people of color, yet from the perspective of the enslaved, they were no different from other White settlers. The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica preserved and perpetuated their ethnic homogeneity through their extreme rates of endogamous marriage, yet many men lived in blended Creole families with women of color. Thus, while they were enmeshed ideologically, ethnically, religiously, and in every other way in the fabric of a trans-­Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, they were at the same time rooted in their local ­context. The synchronicity of these contradictions, and many more, defined the character of Jamaica’s Jews in their distinctive community. Their hybridity embodies the essence of the early modern Atlantic World: the accelerated contact and blending of ethnicities and cultures from across four continents, made possible by European colonization of the Americas, forced migration of enslaved Africans, and the displacement of indigenous populations. In a word, this hybridity is described in the Caribbean context as “creolization.” The principal goal of this book is to vii

define the eighteenth-­century Jamaican Jewish path to Creole identity in its local context, yet at the same time to appreciate the ways Jamaican Jews transcended that local context as but a single part of a wider Diaspora. A microhistorical focus on a single node of a larger network helps us to better understand the interaction between dispersed yet interconnected communities. This book focuses on the more durable, and more definitive, relationships between peripheral satellite communities, rather than the unilateral patronage of Metropole to colonial communities. It paints an inverted picture of diaspora where periphery becomes center and center becomes periphery. I will show, for example, how the peripheral community of Bayonne in France played a more definitive and more enduring role in the development of Jamaica’s Caribbean Jewish community than did the central Metropole of Amsterdam. By inverting the center-­periphery model of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, a clearer picture emerges of the eighteenth century whereby a Diaspora that has been perceived to be in decline becomes one in transition. Centralizing this small community of Jews also helps to define new parameters for the study of colonial Jamaican history. Jews were neither White nor Black. Their racial ambiguity complicated the efforts of elite White Jamaican planters and lawmakers to reduce their society into easily defined racial categories. Jews were critical to the economic prosperity of the island yet spurned for that very same success. They were also often both planters and merchants and therefore did not easily conform to the preconceived social and economic divisions of the island. Furthermore, this study of Jews is an urban history of a colony with a largely rural population. This book is a case study of a single type of source, last wills and testaments. It pushes the boundaries of Jewish social history through the use of these notarial documents rather than internal Jewish communal records. Yet, wills contain contradicviii / Preface

tions of their own. They are deeply personal documents that are entirely communal in both their composition and execution. A single will in isolation reveals little, but when read together as communal documents, wills provide critical insights into both the diasporic and local lives of testators and their beneficiaries. Wills represent the confluence of an individual with his or her household, that household with a larger community, and the interaction of a community with a broader Diaspora.

Preface / ix

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Names, Dates, Spelling, and Method

Eighteenth-­century wills contain a great deal of variation in the spelling of names in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Often the names of testators, along with the names of their beneficiaries, were reproduced by notaries with multiple variations within the same document. These names frequently disagree with how they appear on tombstones or other textual sources. Therefore, rather than stay faithful to these often arbitrary variations as they appear in the sources, I have, in most cases, standardized the names of Jamaica’s Portuguese Jews to simplify the social historical process of cataloging and analyzing hundreds of documents that represent thousands of individuals. I have privileged the Portuguese rendering of “s” in place of “z”—as in Gomes, Lopes, and Sanches—as the Portuguese inflection is more common in the sources themselves. In some cases, where the name of the individual is well established in other literature, such as the name of the poet Daniel Israel López Laguna, I have kept the widely used spelling. I have generally not included Spanish accents and diacritics. Similarly, I have chosen to standardize “da” or “de” in conformity with the most frequent usage in wills—for example, De Castro, Depass, and Da Silva. In cases where there are multiple spelling variations of a name, I likewise prefer the most frequent usage—­Furtado in place of Feurtado or Gutteres in place of Guttieres/z. In the Appendix, I have attempted to offer a faithful rendering of the wills as they appear in the original notarial drafts by preserving the spelling variations. I have in most cases transliterated xi

Hebrew terms in conformity to modern Israeli pronunciation, although there are multiple variations in the sources themselves. The wills under investigation here have all gone through the process of probate. Therefore, the documents available to us are removed from the testator’s own hand, recorded by notaries after the settlement of the estate, sometimes long after the death of the testator. Consequently, there are two dates associated with each will: the date of composition, that is, the date when the testator signed the will in the presence of witnesses, and the date of probate. For the sake of historical accuracy, I always describe a will in the text according to the date of its composition. But, I always cite wills according to their date of probate so that they can be easily located and verified in the catalog at the Island Record Office (IRO) in Jamaica. At the heart of this book is an analysis of 450 wills. These texts represent all the available Jewish wills from the IRO, along with a few others probated in England. Although the collection of Jamaican Jewish wills at the National Archives of England (TNA) is extensive, I have determined that only seven were probated there and not also in Jamaica. I have therefore not given the TNA citations for those wills that were probated in both places. Similarly, the collection of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati (AJA) contains at least 123 typescript wills from Jamaica. While I have consulted these copies, I provide only the citations for the originals found at the IRO. I have chosen to depart from the heavily quantitative and statistical analyses found in similar social historical studies. At times I rely on numerical evidence derived from wills. However, I have chosen to provide more narrative, rather than statistical, renderings of my sources with the aim of preserving the human voices of the testators. I have therefore left out graphs, tables, and charts in an effort to offer a more intimate story of the Jews of eighteenth-­century Jamaica as told through their wills.

xii / Names, Dates, Spelling, and Method

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a number of people and organizations that contributed to the completion of this project. This book was made possible by a fellowship from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (fp7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement [295352] at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “A Diaspora in Transition: Cultural and Religious Changes in Western Se­ phardic Communities.” I am grateful to Prof. Yosef Kaplan for hosting me at the Hebrew University and supporting my work, as well as for his priceless mentorship. I am grateful to the editorial and design team at Yale University Press for seeing this book through to production. I’m particularly grateful to Adina Berk, acquisitions editor, and Eva Skewes, editorial assistant, for championing this project. Thank you to Jeffrey Schier for managing production and to Harry Haskell, who vastly improved this text. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of the anonymous readers. And, thank you to Eric W. Baumgartner, senior vice president of Hirschl & Adler Galleries, and Alexandra Guenther-­Calhoun, owner, for permission to use the cover image. This book would not exist without the help of a number of gifted archivists at the American Jewish Archives, the British Library, the National Archives of England, the London Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives of Jamaica, and the National Library of Jamaica. I would particularly like to thank Elisa Ho at the American Jewish Archives, Marsha Vassel at the Jamaica Archives, and Bernadette Worrell at the National Library of Jamaica. I am most indebted to my friends at the xiii

Island Record Office and Registrar General’s Department of Jamaica. They have walked with me on this journey since the beginning and have countenanced my cumbersome requests with good humor and kindness. I would like to thank specifically Deidre English Gosse (CEO), Michelle Williams, Steve Campbell, and Mario Reynolds, who made the reproduction of wills possible and for making me feel like part of an extended family. Thank you to my dear friends in Jamaica for graciously supporting me in numerous ways: Marjorie Henriques, Geoff and Randi Lewis, Marvin and Rosalie Goodman, Nancy and Israel Pinchas, Norma Haddad, Stephen Henriques, and Edward Kritzler ‫ז״ל‬. Thank you to Richard Henriquez for helping to fund the reproduction of wills. I am most indebted to my friend, mentor, and role model Ainsley Henriques, the true embodiment of everything wonderful about Caribbean Jewry. This book would not have been possible without his warm hospitality, extensive knowledge, tireless fund-raising, and most of all his friendship. I dedicate this book to him. I would like to acknowledge the mentorship of a number of teachers and colleagues who have all played an indispensable role in the development and completion of this project and have been a consistent source of support and inspiration. First and foremost, my mentor, advisor, and champion Jane S. Gerber, who nurtured this project from its very inception. I would also like to thank Elisheva Carlebach, Robert Seltzer, Eli Faber, David Sorkin, Matt Goldish, Herman Bennett, Steven Fine, Miriam Bodian, Renée Levine Melammed, Claude Stuczynski, Judah M. Cohen, Jonathan Schorsch, Aviva Ben-­Ur, Rachel Frankel, James Robertson, Swithin Wilmot, Wyatt Gallery, Mordechai Arbell ‫ז״ל‬, Hilit Surowitz-­ Israel, Laura Arnold Leibman, Ronnie Perelis, Joshua Teplitsky, Brian M. Smollett, David Sclar, Federica Francesconi, Vikas Rathee, Ilan Veldman, Avi Aronsky, Stuart Schwarzbard, James Nelson Novoa, xiv / Acknowledgments

Yocheved Beeri, Alex Kerner, Mauricio Dimant, Aliza Moreno, Einat Davidi, Nourit Melcer-­Padon, Ioram Melcer, and Jenia Yudkevich. Thank you to my wonderful colleagues at Arizona State University who greatly helped to improve an early version of the manuscript and supported me in the final stages of its completion: Hava Tirosh-­Samuelson, Joel Gereboff, Laurie Manchester, Francoise Mirguet, Tim Langille, Lisa Kaplan, and Catherine O’Donnell. And, thank you to my family, especially my wife, Raḥel, who has been a constant source of support.

Acknowledgments / xv

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The Jews of Eighteenth-­Century Jamaica

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Introduction

A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition

During the eighteenth century, Jamaica hosted the largest population of Jews in the English Atlantic World outside of London. The community was small. At its height, it only reached around a thousand individuals. But, while the Jamaican Jewish community never matched the populations of other Portuguese Jewish Atlantic settlements such as Amsterdam or Curaçao, it played an essential role in the broader diasporic network of New Jews, New Christians, and Old Christians known as a nação (the Portuguese nation). The Jews of this Atlantic Diaspora were the first, second, or third generation of their families to have embraced their ancestral faith after having lived as conversos (New Christians with Jewish ancestry) in Portugal, Spain, and South America—some families for as long as two centuries. In English Jamaica, these “New Jews” put down roots as traders, planters, livestock farmers (pen keepers), physicians, writers, fishermen, entertainers, and metalworkers. Their presence on the island helped to shape the colony’s cultural and social evolution just as much as life in the tropical West Indies had a transformative impact on the island’s Jews. Jamaica’s Jews perpetuated their cultural distinctiveness through their spoken Portuguese, their practice of Jewish rituals, their concentration in towns, and their exclusive marriage patterns. Although eighteenth-­century Jamaica is noted for its ethnic and religious diversity—albeit a heavily hierarchical and deeply racialized diversity—these cultural markers made Jews 1

a conspicuous minority. They ultimately overcame these differences, becoming embedded in the social landscape of their island home. They contributed to the colonial trade in sugar, cotton, coffee, livestock, and slaves, sometimes disproportionately to their numbers. Some became sugar planters and pen keepers. Though they were excluded from participating in the island’s governance, they frequently lobbied the colonial Assembly for greater civic equality. While the island’s Portuguese Jews married almost exclusively among themselves, their close contact with the enslaved also enabled many to live within non– legally recognized, blended Creole families of color. Placing such a small community under a microhistorical lens allows us to reshape our map of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Magnification reveals not only the local transformations brought on by living in a tropical slave society, but also Jamaican Jewry’s collective contribution to and interconnectivity with the rest of the Diaspora. By intensifying our focus on just one node of a larger network, the division between center and periphery or Metropole and colony—defined not only by population size but also by religious authority as well as financial and political patronage—takes on new meaning. Ultimately, the goal of this book is to enrich our understanding of the entire eighteenth-­century Portuguese Atlantic through the study of single individuals and, through those individuals, to bring into sharper relief a whole community and an entire Diaspora. Jamaica appears trivial on our historical map of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora for more reasons than just its small population and its distance from the metropolitan authority of Amsterdam. The perceived inconsequentiality of Jewish Jamaica is largely the result of limited source material. Successive di­ sasters visited the island during the colonial era, particularly a major fire in Kingston in 1882 followed by a devastating earthquake in January of 1907 that destroyed the city’s major synagogues along with the records kept within them. The earliest 2 / Introduction

extant communal minutes from colonial Jamaica begin in 1912, during the rebuilding process following the earthquake.1 No internal Jewish records—minute books, tax ledgers, sermons, or internal copies of intercommunal letters—have survived from the eighteenth century. Jamaica’s late eighteenth-­century Jewish population was competitive with that of colonial Dutch Suriname, but the island appears trifling by comparison in the existing scholarship by virtue of Suriname’s rich documentary legacy.2 Even the significantly smaller English settlement of Barbados provides more fodder for researchers because communal minutes have survived from the late eighteenth century.3 This study therefore aims to capitalize on one of the only abundantly available sources left by eighteenth-­century Jamaican Jews: their wills. In doing so, this book is more than just an exhibition of an underappreciated exotic Jewish community of the West Indies, but also an investigation into the use of wills as a source of Jewish social history in the absence of internal Jewish records. The consensus of previous studies of wills, both historical and anthropological, is that during the early modern period these documents were too impersonal to yield conclusions about a testator’s personal beliefs or religious convictions.4 The study of single wills in isolation provides limited insight into the lives of testators. This book therefore interrogates wills as a consolidated body of sources. It approaches the study of wills not in relation to any specific individual, or as a genealogical endeavor, but as a community at large through a comprehensive survey of all the available wills composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815 found at the Island Record Office in Jamaica. With the exception of a few wills that are too damaged to be consulted, and possibly some wills of Jamaican Jews probated in other places, this sample of 450 represents every available Jewish will from long eighteenth-­century Jamaica.

Introduction / 3

The Will-­Making Process: The Individual and the Household Wills are one of the most personal documents left by propertied eighteenth-­century men and women in the Western world. Testators made their wills, often the last document of their lives, with a self-­consciousness of their posterity. The very act of making and paying for a will is in itself an expression of individualism. Through the instrument of a will, individuals exercised their “testamentary freedom” to bypass the local conventions of intestacy, which may have privileged one beneficiary over another, and to instead promote their own designs for the posthumous distribution of their estates. Probating a will allowed testators to ensure that their estates would be divided more equally between their children regardless of their birth order or to include more distant “collateral kin” than would have been the case had they died intestate. This testamentary freedom almost always worked in favor of beneficiaries, but the reverse could also be true.5 And, inasmuch as wills are intended to dispose and distribute property, they were often just as much intended to solidify the spiritual standing of a dying man or woman by leaving this world with a house in order. Ritualized will making played a crucial role in the early modern ars moriendi, or the art of dying well, perceived as a reconciliation with one’s legacy at the moment of death.6 In contradiction to this undeniable intimacy and self-­ determination of wills, they are also documents far removed from the voice of the testators themselves. Eighteenth-­century wills are highly standardized and conform to preestablished formulae. Unlike “ethical wills,” eighteenth-­century probate wills are entirely inexplicit with regard to a testator’s personal experiences, beliefs, or spiritual vision for the future.7 And, while some researchers have attempted to use wills as a measure of popular or personal piety, they are simply too formulaic to extract any 4 / Introduction

real sense of a testator’s personal beliefs, life experiences, or religious convictions.8 While wills may be self-­actualized texts, they are not ego-­documents or autobiographical expressions.9 Will making, and the process of probate in general, was a communal process. Composing and probating a will required the participation of beneficiaries, executors, witnesses, notaries, solicitors, and sometimes also law courts. A single will reveals more about a network of people than about the testator him- or herself, thereby defying classification as either a personal or a communal document. During the eighteenth century, wills grew increasingly impersonal as the process of will making became more professionalized. All the wills under investigation here went through the process of probate, placing us at the mercy of scribal accuracy. While government notaries were careful to preserve the original language of any given will—even to note the page breaks and the signature placement of the original draft—wills in the testator’s own hand, with the testator’s own signature, are no longer extant from eighteenth-­century Jamaica. The professionalization of probate in the eighteenth century meant that ecclesiastical authorities seldom if ever participated in the composition of wills, as was common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This deconfessionalization also applies to the testators themselves to a large extent. By the eighteenth century, will making was seen as an act of fiscal responsibility, in contrast to the early Protestant notion that it was an act of piety, a sign of grace, or in itself an act of salvation. In the absence of Jewish communal documents from Jamaica, it is unknown if Jamaica’s Jews alternatively filed wills internally with the Jewish community as they did in other parts of the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora.10 Despite the clear deconfessionalization of wills, some of their religious features were remarkably durable. Eighteenth-­century wills continued to include a “religious preamble” with nearly Introduction / 5

identical language to those from sixteenth-­century England.11 The only major differences between the religious preambles of Jewish wills and Christian wills are the absence of references to Christ, donations to synagogues rather than churches, and the time frame for distribution of charity. Jewish religious preambles from Jamaica often begin with a declaration of sound mind, a bequest of the soul to God, and a request for burial among “Brethren of the Hebrew Nation.” They include a standard donation to one or more of the three major Jamaican synagogues (Kingston, Port Royal, and St. Jago de la Vega) and a request for the distribution of charity based on traditionally defined periods of mourning—at the time of death, after a month, and after a year—along with a customary request for the recital of a memorial prayer on either the first Yom Kippur or Hoshannah Rabbah (a holiday associated with the Festival of Booths, Sukkot) after the testator’s death. After a testator drafted his or her will, and signed it in the pre­ sence of witnesses, the document was not copied into the probate record by notaries until after the testator’s death and the settlement of his or her debts. The probate process could take decades, especially in cases when testators made wills preemptively before embarking on sea journeys.12 On average, however, a will was probated within a year of a testator’s death. The process of will making is best described in the probate record itself. The will of the thirty-­four-­year-­old unmarried and childless St. Jago de la Vega merchant Moses Massias provides an important behind-­ the-­scenes glimpse into the process.13 Massias signed a notarial draft of his will in November of 1765, with which he intended to financially support his siblings and their children—all residents of Jamaica—as well as to manumit an enslaved girl named Present. Moses Massias died later that month.14 For undisclosed reasons, his brother contested the authenticity of the will. Moses Massias’s two Jewish executors—Jacob de Moses Deleon and Jacob Martins—then 6 / Introduction

enlisted the help of a non-­Jewish solicitor ( Jews could not practice law in Jamaica) to argue, on their behalf, for the authenticity of the signed draft. This solicitor made his case before a probate court in April of 1766, five months after the death of the testator. In his deposition he described the process by which Moses Massias composed his will. Fearing his death to be imminent, Moses Massias came to the St. Jago de la Vega home of his friend and executor Jacob de Moses Deleon in late October of 1764. He brought with him several sheets of paper containing preliminary notes or “certain minutes” outlining his wishes for disposing his property and assets. With Deleon’s help, he “prepared and reduced into writing the said last will and testament.” It is possible that Moses Massias was either illiterate or alternatively preferred to make a will in English rather than his native Portuguese.15 Later that day the will was “read to him [Moses Massias] in the presence of several of his relations and friends. . . . And the said Moses Massias was fully informed knew and understood the contents of the said will . . . and approved of the same.” Moses Massias lived for a full year after drafting and approving his will. On November 8, 1765, in the presence of two Jewish witnesses, he signed what, according to his executors, was the very same document that had been read publicly a year earlier. The two witnesses likewise signed the document. The probate process whereby Moses Massias’s debts were settled and his property inventoried began after his death on October 25, 1765, and took nearly a year to complete. With the estate settled, notaries copied the will into the public record on September 29, 1766. This is the version available to us. Certainly, Moses Massias’s will-­making and probate process reflects the experiences of many if not most other testators discussed here. Jamaican Jewish testators, like their non-­Jewish counterparts, included monetary, material, and human bequests in their wills. Apart from slaves, the most common type of chattel bequeathed Introduction / 7

to beneficiaries are carriages, horses, bed linens, kitchen utensils, furniture, diamond and pearl jewelry, silver plates, spoons, and jugs, along with gold shoe buckles and watches. In some cases these material objects were personalized family heirlooms. The Port Royal merchant Moses Touro—the father of the Newport, Rhode Island, ḥazan (cantor and communal functionary) and British loyalist Isaac Touro—bequeathed in his will of May 1722 a large number of silver objects to his grandsons, including silver plates, a salver, a cup, and silverware, all engraved with images of bulls and cows symbolic of their family name.16 Moses Touro was not alone in the use of wills for the transference of family heirlooms. Sometimes these heirlooms were also ritual items. Torah scrolls and their silver ornaments are the most common type of ritual object found in eighteenth-­century Jewish wills. Other ritual items include unspecified “Hebrew books” and prayer books. These objects form a bridge between private and public piety, as they were bequeathed within families, yet were mostly intended for public use. In one case, the testator Moses Adolphus, one of the founders of the Ashkenazi “English and German” community in St. Jago de la Vega, in addition to a looking glass and other gold and silver objects, bequeathed to his grandniece in December of 1795 a silver Sabbath lamp that had once belonged to his mother.17 In some rare cases, expressions of sentimentality are attached to the bequest of material objects or financial assets. In 1738, Isaac Pereira Brandon of Kingston bequeathed 500 Jamaican pounds to his son Jacob, the lone survivor of three sons, “as a token of my paternal affection to him.”18 In February of 1792, Sarah Riz of Kingston gave to her brother in law a gold medallion that she “wore in memory” of her deceased sister.19 Sarah further left to her nephew several gold sleeve buttons with the hope that they would remind him of her. To her niece she left a miniature portrait set in gold so “that she will take great care of it and wear it . . . in remembrance of me and . . . [as a token of ] 8 / Introduction

my love for her . . . and respect which she had . . . for the person whose resemblance it is.” While these examples suggest some traces of sentimentality, wills are not a reliable basis upon which to determine degrees of familial affection. However, some testators do explain why they bequeathed smaller amounts or less valuable objects to certain individuals and more to others. In most cases, they do this by commenting that the beneficiary had already received inheritance at the time of marriage or through the will of a grandparent. In only one explicit instance is the amount given an attempt to shame the recipient. The Bordeaux-­born Kingston slave trader Alexandre Lindo drafted a will in November of 1805 in which he earmarked generous sums for his other fifteen children but bequeathed only a single shilling to his son Aaron.20 Alexandre included Aaron in his will in order to rebuke and disgrace him: “having by his undutiful behavior and gross misconduct on more than one instance . . . increased my displeasure and alienated my affections and . . . proved himself unworthy of being remembered in this my will except to his shame I do hereby bequeath to him the sum of one shilling and no more.” A more common scenario where traces of family discord echo in wills are cases when a testator anticipated tensions between his or her beneficiaries and preempted conflict by appointing an adjunct executor from among his or her extended family or network of friends to act as a third-­party arbitrator. In April of 1723, for example, the Kingston merchant Benjamin Pereira made stipulations in his will for the maintenance and support of his wife and six sons.21 He gave the interest of an investment along with the rents he earned from a residential property to his wife, Rachael, to help educate and maintain his three minor sons for as long as they remained unmarried, on the condition that they “dwell in the same house with her and pay to her a due filial respect and obedience.” In the event of her death, he appointed his three adult sons as the guardians of his three minor sons. But, Introduction / 9

in that instance, anticipating disagreements between them, he also nominated his son in law Isaac Furtado to act as an arbitrator to mediate any conflicts “in a friendly and amicable manner.” Jamaica’s Jews: The Household and the Community Jamaican Jews probated around three wills a year on average between 1673 and 1815: the long eighteenth century. Portuguese Jews composed 93 percent of these wills. Ashkenazim with German origins, North African or Ottoman Sephardim, and Italian Jews made up the remaining 7 percent. Six percent of wills were composed and probated in either Spanish or Portuguese, the latest in 1777, while the rest were made in, or translated into, English. The eighteenth century was the period of greatest Portuguese Jewish prosperity and Jewish communal dominance on the island. Jews did not settle in Jamaica until after the English conquest in 1655 and a community did not emerge until the 1670s. The earliest known Jewish will, that of David Gomes, is dated to October of 1673.22 As a result of having so few Jews, and of being a relatively young population, the next will did not appear on record until 1680. It was not until after 1720 when a significant number of Jewish wills, five to ten a year, began to be probated in Jamaica. Although Jews in Jamaica were not emancipated until 1831— when they received the right to vote as a result of extensive and expensive lobbying on both sides of the Atlantic starting in 1826—by 1815, the economic and social profile of the island’s Jews had already changed significantly. The American Revolutionary War had altered the balance of power in the Atlantic, relegating the West Indies to a marginal role in trans-­Atlantic trade.23 By the 1780s, both popular attitudes and governmental policies in Great Britain had shifted dramatically against the brutality of the West Indian slave economy.24 Jamaica—­ 10 / Introduction

especially the west coast—never fully recovered from a series of devastating hurricanes during the 1780s. And the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 marked the beginning of the end of Jamaica’s plantation economy. Furthermore, the conflict between Great Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars decimated Atlantic trade routes, giving rise to a new regional superpower, the United States. The Jewish population of Jamaica continued to grow and enjoy much greater civic equality over the course of the nineteenth century, but its overall wealth and mercantile activity, characteristic of the eighteenth century, had substantially diminished. Ashkenazim established an independent communal presence on the island during the 1780s.25 Starting in the late nineteenth century, Jews fleeing the Ottoman Empire emerged as one of the most recognizable groups of Jews on the island, a trend that greatly intensified after the collapse of the empire in the early twentieth century. Thus by 1815, while their majority persisted, the Portuguese-­dominated period of Jamaican Jewish history had begun its decline. The year 1815 thus marks the end of our long century and the period from which I have collected wills. Previous historians have flirted with Portuguese Jewish, colonial American, and specifically West Indian last wills and testaments as a source of Jewish social history.26 The earliest generation of researchers of the colonial Jewish experience, the founding members of the American Jewish Historical Society (1892) and the chronicler of Jamaican Jewish history, Jacob Andrade, made note of the historical importance of wills.27 However, their efforts did not go beyond impressionistic attempts to distill portions of their content. The historian Jacob Rader Marcus made the first serious effort to collect and make meaning of West Indian Jewish wills. In 1954, in celebration of the tercentennial of the first Jewish settlement in New York, the American Jewish Archives (AJA) in Cincinnati, Ohio, sponsored an expedition to the West Indies Introduction / 11

to explore local archives for traces of the colonial Jewish community.28 Marcus and his team were aided at the time by the rabbi in Kingston, Henry P. Silverman, an avid collector of Judaica and chronicler of local Jewish history.29 Their expedition took them to Spanish Town (also known as St. Jago de la Vega), where they selectively copied wills up to the year 1798, 123 wills in total. Marcus himself made extensive—if only anecdotal— use of these wills in his three-­volume masterpiece The Colonial American Jew.30 Perhaps more important, Marcus’s expedition and his collection of copied typescript wills kept at the AJA inspired the next generation of researchers to also explore these sources, though his students still did not go beyond superficial descriptions of their content.31 In the following decade, the historian Leo Hershkowitz continued to explore the social-­historical value of Jewish last wills and testaments through his transcriptions and annotations of wills from colonial New York.32 His extensive archival efforts revealed the extent to which any single will can serve as the basis upon which to build biographical profiles, lead to other sources, and draw connections between families and transdiasporic communities. The 1980s and 1990s brought a short rebirth of interest in wills as sources of social history among early modernists and colonial American historians alike. At that time, some researchers renewed attempts to draw attention to the potential of West Indian wills as a source of Jewish social history.33 Although wills are an extraordinary source of genealogical information, they are extremely limited as a source of social history. In the eighteenth century, as today, the vast majority of people disposed their estates through intestacy rather than through wills. It has been estimated that on average no more than a quarter of those with enough property to merit a will actually made them in the eighteenth century.34 That seems to be a true reflection of Jamaica’s eighteenth-­century Jewish community, for whom wills exist for less than half of the potential 12 / Introduction

will-­making population.35 It is possible that some Jews filed their wills with the Jewish community and are now lost. Will making in general was somewhat rare as it required not only foresight of the immediacy of death but also the means by which to pay for the cost of probate including the administrative stamps. While there are those in the probate record with very modest estates or only single beneficiaries, by the act of having made a will they belong to a propertied and literate elite: a will-­making elite. Individuals who self-­proved wills (what today might be called a holographic will) or those who left inheritances to their families through alternative channels—either by establishing trusts or through granting gifts—are completely obscured by the study of probate wills. If the first goal of social history is to equalize the experiences of all people in any given society, the limits of that democratization through the study of wills must therefore be fully acknowledged. The Portuguese Jewish Atlantic: Community and Diaspora Jamaican Jewish probate wills reveal critical connections among the trans-­Atlantic communities of the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. While the vast majority of beneficiaries in Jamaican Jewish wills lived alongside testators on the island, beneficiaries were also found in London, Amsterdam, southern France, other Caribbean islands, and among the conversos of the Spanish Americas and Iberia. Jamaica’s Jews were thus but one node among many in a global network. Wills help to uncover the confluence of the individual with his or her household, the interaction of a household with a larger community, and the place of the Jamaican community within an entire diaspora. In order to fully understand the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica we must first understand their European origins. In the spring of 1497, Manuel I of Portugal converted the kingdom’s Jews, Introduction / 13

including thousands of exiles from Spain, to Catholicism en masse. He thus rid Portugal of Judaism without expelling the Jews. After the Spanish crown’s annexation of Portugal in 1580, these Portuguese conversos often crossed into Spain and then slowly trickled over the Pyrenees border with France, seeking to transition into their ancestral Judaism in a movement sometimes referred to as “rejudaization.”36 Some of these conversos with Jewish ambitions had been from Catholic families—with varying degrees of commitment—since the time of the Portuguese mass conversion, or even earlier in Spain.37 In an ironic twist of history, France had expelled Jews over the course of the fourteenth century, making it possible for Iberian conversos to settle there nominally as Catholic merchants (marchands portugais). In southern France, where Jewish missionaries actively facilitated the rejudaization process, Judeo-­conversos openly practiced Judaism during the seventeenth century, even before they were given the same settlement rights as openly professing Jews in 1723.38 The cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne became incubators for New Jewish faith. As we will see, many of Jamaica’s most prominent founding members had actualized their transition from Crypto- to Rabbinic Judaism in Bayonne. From France, or from the Catholic Lowlands (Belgium), those seeking to live openly as Jews found their way to Calvinist Amsterdam, which had declared its independence from Spanish imperial rule and Spanish Catholicism in 1579. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam emerged as the central community of the entire Portuguese Jewish Diaspora by virtue of the strength of its communal organization, the wealth of its prominent yeḥidim (full taxpaying members), the quality of its primary and rabbinic academy ‘Eẓ Ḥayim, and the caliber of both its visiting and homegrown rabbis, some of whom were former conversos themselves.39 Peripheries of Portuguese Jewish settlement also developed in London, Hamburg, Livorno, and throughout the Americas. 14 / Introduction

These Portuguese Jewish settlements are often referred to collectively as the “Western Sephardi Diaspora,” to distinguish them from Spanish-­speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa or an “Eastern Sephardi Diaspora.” These distinctions are largely an academic projection on the past, as “West” and “East” are not mutually exclusive categories, nor are they hermetically sealed entities. Many former Portuguese conversos made their way to Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, where they embraced Judaism.40 Likewise, the Amsterdam community leaned on the expertise of Eastern Sephardi founders in their efforts to build a Jewish community in a place without medieval precedent.41 As we will see, many of the rabbis serving in the West, such as Joshua Hezekiah Decordova in Jamaica, identified as Ottoman Sephardim. Still, there are character distinctions between these two Sephardi Diasporas that reflect divergent historical, cultural, and sociological responses to exile. While there is a great degree of overlap—­ geographically, culturally, and experientially—between the “Western” and “Eastern” Sephardi Diasporas, they nonetheless represent distinctive responses to the trauma of 1492. Unlike the megorashim ( Jews exiled from Spain in 1492) of the Mediterranean and Ottoman Empire, all Western Sephardim of the Atlantic and Italy belonged to multigenerational converso families and had all experienced a process of transition into Rabbinic Judaism. This reality is rooted in the unique circumstances of the Portuguese mass conversion in 1497. This abrupt conversion was followed by a forty-­year amnesty from investigation by the Inquisition—achieved through converso collective bargaining—which created the conditions for true Crypto-­Judaism to survive and flourish. Thus Crypto-­Judaism was a largely Portuguese phenomenon that only spread throughout Iberia when the Spanish monarchy annexed Portugal in 1580. Western Sephardi communities during the eighteenth century used no Ladino (Castilian written in Hebrew characters), Introduction / 15

and very little Hebrew. Rather, Portuguese was the dominant language of both rabbinic and communal discourse. Unlike the Jews of the Ottoman East, they never referred to themselves as “Sephardim,” that is, Spaniards, but as “Gentlemen of a Portuguese Nation,” along with other ethnically charged nomenclatures.42 Portuguese Jewish identity was rooted in their converso past and can perhaps be best described as a sense of internalized limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), a racialized social and legal ideology that had excluded conversos from Iberian society. Portuguese New Jews—openly Jewish former conversos—­ internalized this ethnocentric view as a way to make sense of the continuity of their Jewish heritage. While as conversos they had been spiritually cut off from Judaism, their perceived blood purity meant that they had never been cut off ethnically from the Jewish people. At times, as we will see, this internalized limpieza de sangre even engendered a sense of ethnic supremacy among Portuguese Jews. For these reasons, I prefer to describe the Jews of Jamaica as part of a Portuguese Diaspora rather than a Western Sephardi Diaspora, and I generally avoid using the term “Sephardi” to describe them. Diasporic and Local: The Contradiction of Jamaican Jewish Creolization During the eighteenth century, colonial Jamaican Jews were part of a Diaspora in transition that struggled to come to terms with changing demographics and shifting notions of identity. By the 1730s, most Portuguese New Jewish settlements, including Amsterdam, London, and North American communities, had Ashkenazi, Yiddish-­speaking majorities. Furthermore, during the eighteenth century, the growing legitimacy of “companionate marriage”—marriages motivated by affection—coupled with a sharp decline in both personal and communal wealth threatened the very core of ethnically defined Portuguese Jewish identity. 16 / Introduction

As a result of these various demographic, economic, and identity crises, the eighteenth-­century Portuguese Jewish Atlantic, with Amsterdam at its center, was described by one historian as a “picture . . . of slow eclipse.”43 The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica, and throughout the Caribbean, defy this characterization. Unlike Jews in Europe and North America, Jamaican Jews sustained their Portuguese majorities well into the nineteenth century. While metropolitan Jewish Amsterdam may have been in demographic and economic decline over the course of the eighteenth century, many of Amsterdam’s peripheral satellite communities, and the connections between them, remained strong. Jamaica, like Curaçao, even came to have regional influence of its own independence of Amsterdam.44 As we will see, the relationship between Jamaica and Bayonne, for instance, was so consistently strong throughout the eighteenth century that when taken together these two peripheries in many ways take the place of the declining Metropole of Amsterdam. In other words, if the prevailing model of Portuguese Atlantic Diaspora is inverted with periphery as center and center as periphery, then the picture of an eighteenth-­ century demographic, ideological, and economic “eclipse” begins to itself disappear. Shifting our focus away from Amsterdam also allows us to appreciate the evolution of local communities independent from a transnational diaspora. The localized study of Jamaica reveals the extent to which Jews became embedded in the political, social, and cultural landscape of their colony, further qualifying an overly binary model of metropolitan patron and colonial dependency. A microhistorical focus on Jamaica deepens as well as problematizes an Atlantic studies approach to Jewish history.45 Jamaica’s Jews embodied the supranational affiliations that transcended the real or imagined borders of imperial maritime entities. However, Jamaica’s Jews were just as much entrenched in Jamaica, particularly in their efforts to combat civic disabilities Introduction / 17

and their entanglements with the enslaved. But while they defied an Atlantic model in their embedded local identity, they simultaneously embodied it in their cultural hybridity. They were at one and the same time Iberian, Jewish, and English, as is clearly demonstrated on their multilingual tombstones. I refer to this local embeddedness in Jamaica as “creolization,” a term with a multiplicity of meanings. In Caribbean studies, creolization has come to mean the process by which both African and European inhabitants become “indigenized” through adaptation to life in multiethnic colonial societies that includes the blending of linguistic, religious, and racial attributes.46 I use the term “Creole” in a variety of ways, in some cases referring simply to individuals born on the island, and at other times referring to individuals with blended racial or cultural identities. In its broadest usage within this study, Creole refers even to political concerns that were distinct from those of European communities and ultimately helped to inform a sense of local Jamaican Jewish identity. This book is not strictly a study of Jewish creolization, partially because the sources at its heart, wills, provide almost no indication of linguistic, religious, or other types of cultural hybridities. Nevertheless, I take it for granted that such cultural blending did occur among the Jews of eighteenth-­century Jamaica, as it did in similar colonies. Other forms of noncultural creolization—political and racial—are very much central to this study. However, this book is more concerned with the tension inherent in two parallel yet contradictory historical realities: being at one and the same time diasporic and localized, both embedded and transcendent. With the primary goal of exploring the interaction of these competing realities, the first four chapters place Jews both within and without long eighteenth-­century Jamaican society. Chapter 1 investigates Jewish paths of migration to the religiously and ethnically plural pioneer community of Port Royal. 18 / Introduction

Through the lives of some of its most prominent members, this chapter places the small Jewish community of Port Royal in a broader pan-­Atlantic context. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of Port Royal’s Jewish community and the difficulties they faced around the time of the city’s destruction in 1692. Through a description of Jewish commercial and political activity, this chapter helps to situate Jews more firmly in the context of their local colony. Chapter 3 moves beyond the well-­known mercantile activity of colonial Jews to describe Jewish plantocracy. Through wills and other notarial sources, this chapter explores the limited yet conspicuous Jewish involvement in planting and “industrialized” slave ownership during the mid-­eighteenth century that further distanced them from the concerns of their metropolitan counterparts in either Amsterdam or London. Chapter 4 discusses the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Jamaica’s Jews struggled to define themselves—and be defined—within a rigidly hierarchical and highly racialized Jamaican society. It furthers our understanding of Jamaican Jewry as it evolved independently from a larger diasporic network of communities. The last three chapters focus on Portuguese Jewish communal and family life. Wills offer one of the most compelling sources for understanding eighteenth-­century familial belonging: the inclusion of extended kin, kin beyond confessional boundaries (that is, conversos), and the place of children of color within the Jewish family. These chapters help to advance recent studies of family life that have become central to our understanding of the early modern Portuguese Diaspora.47 It has been argued that the trading success of this Diaspora, nação, rested on its network of religiously and politically transcendent households, even if familial belonging alone did not necessarily determine trust among potential trading partners.48 Chapter 5 examines the interaction between the Jewish family and the Jewish community through testamentary expressions Introduction / 19

of public piety. It explores how the process of rejudaization— the transition from New Christian to New Jew—manifested in the communal experiences of Jamaican Jewish men, women, and children. Chapter 6 investigates Portuguese Jewish ethnic identity in Jamaica. Wills reveal that Jamaican Jewish marriages were almost exclusively endogamous and, as in the rest of the Diaspora, decidedly consanguine. These marriage patterns illustrate the self-­perception of Jamaica’s Portuguese Jews as belonging to a larger, ethnically distinct, trans-­Atlantic Diaspora. Chapter 7 moves beyond diasporic identity to again place Jamaica’s Jews within their West Indian context. Despite their deep commitment to endogamous marriage—at the exclusion of marriage with non-­Jews and even Ashkenazim—Jamaican Jews accommodated life in a tropical slave society. While not legally recognized, a significant number of Jamaican Jewish men, both married and unmarried, lived in blended families with women of color and their children. While this phenomenon is not unique to Jamaica, the prevalence of these families and the openness with which they were acknowledged in Jamaican probate wills provide a particularly fruitful case study of the community’s broader process of creolization.

20 / Introduction

1 The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) The English captured Jamaica in May of 1655 after a failed messianic attempt to wrest Hispaniola from the Spanish.1 Within a decade, the English turned the neglected tip of a sand bar surrounding Kingston harbor into one of the most vibrant and profitable trading towns of the early modern Atlantic World. More than a trading hub, Port Royal was notable for its religiously and ethnically diverse population that included more than a hundred Jews by the time of its destruction by earthquake and tsunami in June of 1692. Most of the pioneer Jews of Port Royal were former conversos, and the most prominent among them had actualized their embrace of Rabbinic Judaism in the liminal space of French Bayonne. Many had previously participated in the settlement of Dutch Brazil. A few came directly from Europe, and it is possible that some early Jamaican Jews had been conversos living on the island under the Spanish. No matter where they came from, or how embedded they became in the fabric of Jamaican Creole society, they always remained part of a larger Diaspora. Dutch Brazil: Planting the Seeds of New World Jewry The Jews of colonial Brazil were the seed community for all New World Jewry. Conversos made up more than half of those punitively exiled to Portuguese Brazil during the sixteenth century, most of whom were women.2 Other New Christian migrants had been sugar planters on the Portuguese possession of Madeira who endeavored to ply their trade in Amazonian 21

soil.3 To some conversos, it seemed that Brazil, far across the “Ocean Sea,” might offer some protection, or at least distance, from the gaze of the Lisbon Inquisition. Some were reported to have practiced semi-­open Crypto-­Judaism on their isolated plantations.4 But even the Atlantic Ocean could not deter the long arm of the Lisbon Holy Office, to which suspected judaizers were sent for prosecution.5 In 1629, during a Dutch war to capture Pernambuco from the Portuguese, the States-­General declared that in the West India Company’s possession of Pernambuco, “the liberty of Spaniards, Portuguese and natives, whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews will be respected.”6 Through this policy of religious tolerance, the Dutch hoped to attract Jewish merchants from Amsterdam, as well as to lure conversos away from Portuguese territory in Brazil. The Dutch victory in the sugar-­rich province of Pernambuco offered a unique opportunity to those conversos who hoped to actualize their ancestral Judaism. The Dutch presence in Brazil gave rise to an unprecedentedly rapid rejudaization movement.7 Unlike in northwestern Europe, where those embracing Judaism fled from Iberia to lands tolerant of Judaism (terras de libertad), in Brazil, the terras de libertad came to them. The Dutch occupation of Pernambuco dramatically accelerated contact between two strands of the trans-­Atlantic nação: Crypto-­Jews and New Jews. Following the capture of Pernambuco in 1630, the Dutch made further attempts to attract New and Old Christian settlement by redistributing abandoned Portuguese plantations to Catholic settlers.8 However, the Jews of Pernambuco did not immediately gravitate toward direct plantation ownership. While the New Christians of colonial Brazil were heavily involved in sugar planting, it is estimated that Jews owned only around 6 percent of the Dutch Brazilian engenhos (sugar refining plantations) but played a more prominent role as “brokers and exporters of sugar.”9 22 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

In Recife, the port-­city capital of Pernambuco, Jews from Amsterdam, joined by former Brazilian conversos, formed one of the largest Jewish communities of the Atlantic World. By 1640, as many as 1,500 Jews inhabited Pernambuco. Recife’s Ẓur Israel community was modeled on that of Amsterdam, with a rotating Mahamad (ma‘amad, communal board) empowered to issue ordinances and excommunications, establish rates of taxation, and build a synagogue. In order to facilitate ritual life, and to aid in the conversion and integration of conversos, the Recife Mahamad imported two of Amsterdam’s most elite homegrown rabbis: Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, often referred to as “the first rabbi of the New World,” and Moses Raphael de Aguilar, both deeply experienced in the methods of guiding conversos to Rabbinic Judaism.10 Recife’s regents (parnasim) and rabbis (ḥakhamim) addressed the unprecedented realities of living as “New Jews” in the “New World.” Isaac Aboab de Fonseca first acknowledged the novelty of subequatorial Jewish life in a letter to the ḥakham Ḥayim Shabtai of Salonika, inquiring about the proper time to recite the prayer for rain, traditionally offered during the winter months of the Northern Hemisphere.11 More pressing were the new social realities of “industrialized” slave ownership in the Americas that far outstripped the scale of African slavery in Europe. Taking liberties with rabbinic tradition, the Recife Mahamad in 1649 became the first Jewish community in the world to require that male slaves be manumitted before being circumcised, and seemingly, only if such slaves chose circumcision.12 The Jewish population of Recife diminished dramatically following a tempestuous Portuguese planter’s revolt in 1645. After nearly a decade of Amazonian skirmishes and naval sieges, the Portuguese finally seized Pernambuco at the end of January 1654. In return for Dutch native allies and African slaves, the Portuguese offered a three-­month grace period to former conversos to vacate the colony with their property intact. Most of The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 23

the Brazilian Jewish refugees fled to Amsterdam, from where many would again cross the Atlantic.13 The most prominent and well-­established members of the earliest Jewish community in Jamaica had first been settlers of Dutch Brazil. Prospectors and Pioneers: Early Jewish Migration to Jamaica The English capture of Jamaica occurred in May of 1655, eight months too late to accommodate Jews fleeing Brazil. One wave of refugees, possibly in an attempt to reach French Martinique, sailed from Brazil on board the Dutch vessel Valk.14 When the ship was blown off course, Spanish officials detained the passengers in Jamaica, threatening them with inquisitorial investigation. The leaders of the Amsterdam Jewish community interceded with the Spanish Crown on their behalf to secure their release. Among those liberated from captivity in Jamaica were twenty-­three Jewish refugees who famously made their way— possibly via Cuba—on board the Dutch vessel Saint Catherine to New Amsterdam (New York), where they became the mythic forefathers of North American Jewry.15 It is possible that the first Jews in Jamaica had been Portuguese conversos living under Spanish colonial rule who openly embraced Judaism following the English conquest. Spanish conquistadors took possession of Jamaica in 1509 with the hopes of discovering alluvial gold.16 While they never found gold, they found a thriving indigenous population. The Spanish encomienda system—practiced throughout the Americas—sanctioned the enslavement of Amerindians in an attempt to convert them to Catholicism. In time, the island of Jamaica, along with its native inhabitants, was begrudgingly granted to the descendants of Christopher Columbus, who exercised their prerogative to nominate a governor for approval by the Spanish regional authority in Hispaniola. 24 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

Jamaica was more useful to the Spanish as a place to breed cattle rather than conduct shipping. Spanish tanners and cattle farmers remained largely confined to the north coast, where settlers produced hides and meats. As the native population of laborers rapidly diminished through exposure to unfamiliar pathogens, the Spanish replaced them with Portuguese indentured servants and African slaves. A number of charters granted to Jamaican hacendistas during the sixteenth century explicitly called for the use of Portuguese field hands.17 Some of these Portuguese laborers were very likely New Christians. In the Spanish Americas “Portuguese” was largely synonymous with “judaizer,” despite the presence of Old Christians and sincerely Catholic New Christians within the nação.18 Some of these Portuguese inhabitants are also known to have remained on the island after 1655, and even supported the British conquest.19 Among them may have been Jamaica’s first Jews. However, evidence of active judaizing in Spanish Jamaica is scant. Sixteenth-­century Jamaica may have been an attractive place for New Christian settlement whether sincerely Catholic or Crypto-­Jewish. The surveillance of the Lima and Mexican Inquisitions, both established in the early 1570s, did not extend to the Caribbean. This void enabled the conditions whereby judaizing, Protestantism, and other “heresies” could be harbored with relative impunity throughout the Caribbean. By the turn of the seventeenth century, complaints from local clerics of rampant heresy in Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica reached Madrid. The Crown responded in 1610 by instituting a third American tribunal on the coast of modern-­day Columbia.20 The Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias was established to supervise the Catholic inhabitants of the Caribbean region, including what is today Columbia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola.21 Jamaica too fell within the scope of its authority. The Holy Office in Cartagena had even indicted the The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 25

chief abbot of Jamaica in 1648 for his free granting of baptisms and reconciliations to suspected heretics.22 But Jamaica was not a principal concern of the Cartagena tribunal. Only thirteen individuals from Jamaica appear to have been denounced by the Inquisition for criminal offenses, heretical pronouncements, or sorcery, but seemingly none for judaizing.23 However, most of the records of the Cartagena Inquisition are now lost. It is more than likely that some accused judaizers from Jamaica ended up in a Cartagena prison cell. The former New Christian Jacob Jeosua Bueno Enriques is the earliest known Jew to appear on record in English Jamaica.24 Enriques petitioned the restored Crown in 1661 for a license to exploit copper mines made known to him through the testimony of a Spanish prisoner. In return for finding copper, Enriques asked for a land grant, patents of naturalization for himself and two brothers, and the free practice of Judaism. Little else is known about Enriques except that the English residents of Jamaica referred to him as “the French Jew” (el Iudio franses).25 Enriques likely had earlier embraced Judaism in the territories of southwestern France. It is symbolically important that the first Jew in Jamaica was known as a “French Jew.” This identification casts a long shadow over the entirety of the eighteenth century, as Jews in Jamaica never lost their deep connections to French territories throughout the pre-­emancipation era. On the heels of Enriques, other Jewish prospectors made attempts to petition Jamaican officials for citizenship in return for finding precious metals. The “gold-­finding Jew” Abram Israel de Pisa submitted a similar petition four years after Enriques.26 The peripatetic de Pisa had previously resided in Italy, Amsterdam, and Brazil before arriving in Jamaica, from where he later traveled on to Barbados and London.27 But instead of discovering gold, he “really found and cured some little vanilla and pimenta.” At least six other Jewish prospectors petitioned for similar rights around the same time, becoming a source of irritation to the 26 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

Crown. One of these Jewish prospectors, Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita, was banished from Jamaica in 1665, likely for his fraudulent attempts to leverage the discovery of Spanish gold mines for naturalization.28 It was not unusual for Jewish metal workers, prospectors, and alchemists to be among the first to arrive at new American destinations. The very first openly identifying Jew thought to have arrived in the Western Hemisphere was the Ashkenazi miner and mineralogist Joachim Gans, recruited by Walter Raleigh in 1584 to search for minerals in Roanoke.29 It is possible that another small group of Jews arrived in Jamaica directly from London’s nascent Portuguese Jewish community in 1663.30 The arrival of these Jews suggests a more direct path of migration to Jamaica from the then peripheral community of London rather than via the Metropole of Amsterdam or other Dutch American settlements. London’s Jewish community dispatched at least five poor individuals to Jamaica before 1692.31 The London community similarly included some returnees from Jamaica. But, London did not become a significant source of Jewish migration to Jamaica, either voluntarily or as despachados (poor travel-­grant recipients), until the mid-­ eighteenth century. The next wave of Jewish migration to Jamaica resulted from the Dutch acquisition of Suriname in 1667.32 Suriname had been under English rule since 1651, when the governor of Barbados, Francis Willoughby, transplanted Caribbean settlers, including some Jews, to help develop the colony’s rural farmlands. After Suriname came into Dutch hands, some Jews chose to remain within the English sphere of influence and relocated to Barbados and Jamaica. As many as ten Jewish families, with more than 300 slaves, relocated to Jamaica from Suriname.33 In July of 1675, the Board of Trade in London was still offering incentives to former inhabitants of Willoughbyland to abandon their plantations in Suriname for the English West Indies.34 The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 27

The last significant wave of Jewish arrivals to Jamaica before 1692 came from the French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and to a lesser extent Saint Domingue.35 Martinique, especially, had been an attractive destination for Jewish refugees from Brazil because of its burgeoning sugar industry. But, as in France itself, Jewish settlement in the French Caribbean was unofficial. In practice, Jews were living openly as Jews in southern France and the French Caribbean, but were only given settlement rights as Catholic Portuguese merchants. Under the pragmatic mercantilist ministry of Jean-­Baptiste Colbert, the French colonial authorities turned a blind eye to Jewish presence in both southern France as well as French American possessions. In 1685, however, French colonial authorities, under Jesuit influence, implemented the Code Noir, a law code intended to regulate slavery in France’s American colonies. The very first article of this law code decreed the expulsion of Jews. In fact, Jews had already been banished from Martinique two years earlier as a result of mercantile tensions. While some Jews managed to stay on French islands, most relocated to the Dutch and English Caribbean. There is some reason to think that this wave of Jewish migrants to Jamaica may have as much as doubled the Jewish population of Port Royal (discussed below). The Pluralism of Port Royal It took more than a decade for the English to defeat the defiant Spanish and their Maroon (autonomous former slaves) allies in Jamaica. With the conquest complete, the English transformed the area surrounding Kingston harbor—totally neglected by the Spanish—into one of the most profitable trading ports in the Atlantic World.36 Port Royal provided the ideal foundation upon which to anchor the American side of England’s Atlantic trading empire. Its location enabled the traffic of goods through28 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

out the Caribbean and Spanish South America, as the naturally protected harbor could sustain naval, merchant, and privateering fleets year-­round, and early inhabitants spoke of the healthy climate. While Barbados may have produced more sugar than Jamaica during the seventeenth century, Port Royal’s harbor could sustain twice as many ships.37 Despite these advantages, Port Royal also presented a number of challenges to long-­term settlement. The town had no indigenous source of freshwater. Potable water was ferried from across the harbor at a high cost to residents. The Port Royal diet similarly consisted largely of imported foodstuffs from England, North America, and other parts of the Caribbean. But despite these drawbacks, Port Royal’s White population—settlers and indentured servants alike—grew prodigiously between 1655 and 1692. According to the Port Royal census of 1680, instituted by the privateer turned governor Henry Morgan, the town was home to slightly over 2,000 European settlers and more than 800 slaves, making Port Royal one of the most densely populated urban spaces in the English Atlantic.38 Under the English, Port Royal grew into a model of port-­ city ethnic and religious diversity. The adventurer John Taylor included in his description of the town’s inhabitants Africans, Indians, English, Scotts Irish, and “also . . . many Jewes, very wealthy merchants haveing free commerce with our English factory.”39 Religious tolerance had indeed been among Jamaica’s earliest founding principles. In 1661, the governor of Jamaica, Thomas Hickman-­Windsor (1661–63), secured privileges from the Crown granting citizenship to anyone born of English parents in Jamaica, including Protestant dissenters.40 Such religious tolerance was the rule rather than the exception in early modern port cities.41 But, the religious tolerance of port cities was a top-­down process, a mercantile rather than ethical consideration. Indeed, in 1662 the Jamaican Assembly, representing local interests, sought to prevent the implementation of Crown-­ The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 29

approved religious tolerance. In the end, just as with the extension of settlement rights to Jews in Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg, the Jewish benefit to the economic health of the city outweighed the religious objections to their enfranchisement.42 In 1670, Charles II instructed the incoming Jamaican governor Sir Thomas Lynch (1671–74)—a pragmatic defender of the Jews—to officially extend religious tolerance in Jamaica to include non-­Protestants.43 By 1680, Jews, Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Huguenots had all built houses of worship along the streets of Port Royal. John Taylor wrote that in Port Royal there could be found in addition to Protestant churches “a Romish chappel . . . [and] a Jewe’s sinagog; all which sects live quietly and peaceably one among another, faithfully serving together in arms for the defence of the island.”44 Citizenship was available to Port Royal’s Jews, and other foreigners, in two main ways.45 Jews in England could apply for an act of naturalization from Parliament. This act was difficult and time-­consuming to obtain, and extremely expensive. Instead, most of Port Royal’s Jewish traders preferred denization, a status obtainable on the island with an oath of allegiance and a smaller fee. Denizens could trade freely, own land, and arbitrate disputes in court. However, unlike Englishmen born in Jamaica, or those naturalized by an act of Parliament, the status of denizen was not transferred in perpetuity to one’s children. Denizens also paid higher import tariffs. Whether naturalized or denizens, Jews, like Catholics and free people of color, were excluded from civic life. Jews could not serve on juries, vote in elections, practice law, join the officer corps, or sit in the House of Assembly or on the Governor’s Council, even if they had been naturalized by Parliament. Compulsory militia service was the most concrete entry point for Jews into Jamaican society. Every free male between the ages of fifteen and sixty—regardless of religion or ethnicity—was required to serve six weeks in the militia under penalty of lashes.46 30 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

The Jews’ participation in the defense of the island earned them the universal respect of non-­Jewish observers. In 1695, a year after a French invasion of Jamaica in which the Jews participated in the island’s defense, there were as many as eighty Jewish militiamen—in essence, nearly every eligible Jewish male in Jamaica.47 Population figures for pre-­1692 Port Royal’s Jewish community are far from exact, but there is some basis for informed conjecture. In December of 1671, Gov. Lynch, while defending the Jews of Jamaica, reported that only twenty-­nine Jews lived on the island.48 At least thirteen of those Jews possessed patents of denization, while the remaining sixteen resided on the island by virtue of their associations with Jewish denizens. Yet, only around eight Jews applied for land grants in pre-­1692 Port Royal.49 According to the 1680 census, Jews made up less than 4 percent of households in the city.50 There appear to have been only around seventy-­five individual Jews in Port Royal at the time. Had the census been taken six years later, after the implementation of the Code Noir in 1685 and the resultant migration to the British West Indies, the numbers of Jews would no doubt have been higher. It is possible that migrants from the French Caribbean doubled the size of the early Jamaican Jewish community. In 1703, a Jewish lobbyist in England, on behalf of the Jews in Jamaica, reported that the island had eighty Jewish families, though “not above twelve of any considerable subsistence.”51 Eighty families—possibly as many as 400 Jews—was an exaggeration. It is a safe assumption that at the time of the earthquake in 1692, there were between 100 and 250 Jews residing in Port Royal. But, despite their humble demographics, by 1680 Port Royal’s Jewish population was a greater segment of the White population than that of Barbados—where Jews never constituted more than 1.5 percent of the White population before 1700—making it the most prominent community of Jews in the The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 31

English Americas at the time.52 By comparison, Suriname likely had more than 500 Jews by 1690.53 The Jewish minority of Port Royal was conspicuously different, even in a town renowned for its diversity. Like Quakers, Jews were religiously divergent from the Anglican Church of England, and like Huguenots they were alien by virtue of their foreign heritage. However, unlike these two Protestant minorities, Jews never married into the families of established Anglicans, denying them access to high military and civic orders.54 The Jews also clustered together in Port Royal’s Middle Precinct, where the modest synagogue mentioned by Taylor likely stood.55 It is possible that a deed from 1677, “for the purchase of the Jews of Port Royal, a lot of land,” obtained by three prominent members of the community, was for the purpose of erecting a synagogue.56 In death too, Jews were self-­segregated. A cemetery is the first necessity in establishing Jewish communal life. Port Royal’s Jews first began to ferry their dead to Hunt’s Bay, across the harbor on the Liguanea Plain (today a suburb of sprawling Kingston), in the early 1670s, although they did not secure a deed for the property until 1736.57 The earliest legible tombstone, marking the grave of one Abraham Gabay, is dated April of 1672.58 The legible tombstones of Hunt’s Bay reveal that at least forty-­ eight Jews were buried at the site before 1692.59 It was their spoken Portuguese that perhaps most accentuated Jewish difference in Jamaica, at least in the eyes of English residents. In his unpublished history of Jamaica, written in the 1740s, the chronicler James Knight described the island’s Jews as “mostly portoguez, and among themselves speak no other language.”60 And, as will be further described below, there were also distinct enclaves within Jamaica’s Jewish community— “Diasporas within Diasporas”—particularly among those that had actualized their Judaism in Bayonne. Although small in

32 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

number, Jamaica’s earliest Jewish community did not lack for spiritual leadership, nor was it devoid of cultural creativity. A Year in Port Royal: The Ḥakham Josiah Pardo Josiah Pardo, the first rabbi in Jamaica, died after serving for less than a year. He was a rabbinic figure of some distinction. Josiah’s grandfather, the scholar and merchant Joseph Pardo (1561–1619), belonged to a family of Spanish exiles who had fled to the Ottoman Empire following the 1492 expulsion. In 1589, Joseph left the Jewish metropolis of Salonika to serve the Portuguese Jewish community of Venice. His family, including his ten-­year-­old son David, accompanied him to Venice and from there to the nascent Portuguese settlement of Amsterdam several years later. By 1618, Joseph’s youngest son, David, had been appointed as ḥakham of Beth Israel, one of three Jewish communities in Amsterdam at the time. David’s son Josiah—the future ḥakham of Jamaica—was born around 1626. In 1639, when Josiah was around thirteen, his father, David, joined with the eminent rabbis Saul Levi Morteira, Menasseh ben Israel, and Isaac Aboab de Fonseca to form the rabbinic board of the newly consolidated community of Amsterdam: K[ehilah] K[edushah] Talmud Torah.61 David Pardo was one of the main architects of the merger and later also joined families with the principal rabbi of the community, Saul Levi Morteira, through the marriage of his son Josiah to Morteira’s daughter Sara. In the shadow of his prominent father and father in law, Josiah struggled to carve out his own rabbinic identity in Amsterdam. He seemed never to have achieved a high level of communal influence and stagnated on the lower rungs of the rabbinate. In 1648, at twenty-­two, Josiah found opportunity for advancement

The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 33

in the significantly smaller community of Rotterdam, where he became a lecturer and head of the social welfare confraternity gemilut ḥasadim. There he continued to struggle to eke out a living. But, while in Rotterdam, Josiah gained a reputation as a captivating preacher. On one occasion, he delivered a celebrated sermon in the synagogue to an audience that included a number of prominent Christian clergy.62 He returned to Amsterdam in 1670 to become the head of the poor-­relief confraternity there. It was perhaps his inability to rise above more than a supporting role in his native Amsterdam, despite his twenty-­two years of rabbinic experience, that compelled Josiah to cross the Atlantic for greener pastures. His decision to try his luck in the Americas may have also been the result of a personal financial crisis. He sailed to Curaçao in 1674 with his family at age forty-­ eight. His journey across the Atlantic was a difficult one. Josiah and his family were seriously underprepared for the long ocean journey. He made it only as far as Texel Island, a short distance from Amsterdam, before running short of provisions, necessitating a letter to his patrons in Amsterdam for assistance.63 In Curaçao, the seasoned rabbi wasted little time in building a smaller version of Amsterdam in the Caribbean. He founded the local branch of ‘Eẓ Ḥayim academy for Bible and Talmud instruction of the island’s Jewish youth and convinced the local government to enclose portions of Willemstad to enable the town’s Jews to carry on Sabbath (‘eruv).64 He became a bulwark of religious life by overseeing the building of the island’s first synagogue, deliberated on halakhic (legal) matters, and counseled the Mahamad in their appointment of ritual functionaries. In Curaçao Josiah finally obtained the rabbinic prestige that had eluded him in saturated Amsterdam. After nearly a decade of service, around the age of sixty, he left Curaçao for Jamaica in 1683. This move was possibly the result of a conflict with the Mahamad, or it may have been simply a personal decision to join his family living in Port Royal. There 34 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

are no surviving documents from his time in Jamaica. It is assumed that Josiah attempted to implement similar projects in Jamaica as he had so energetically carried out in Curaçao. But he died before he could see any of those endeavors bear fruit. Josiah Pardo died in August of 1684, less than a year after his arrival in Jamaica. He was buried at Hunt’s Bay Cemetery, where a tombstone inscription reads: “Arab R Yosiau Pa[r]d[o],” dated August 27, 1684.65 This is clearly the tombstone of the ḥakham. The family name is somewhat obscured by the passage of time, but the bottom Hebrew inscription from 2 Kings 22:2 refers to the death of King Josiah, who “walked in the way of David his father.” The choice of this passage to honor the ḥakham is clear; it praises the merits of a biblical figure with the same name as the deceased, and “David his father” was similarly meant as an allusion to R. David Pardo of Amsterdam. Although Josiah’s time in Jamaica was cut short, his religious legacy in the Caribbean cannot be dismissed. He was the first Amsterdam-­trained ḥakham to serve an American community outside of Brazil. He was instrumental in laying the foundations for the educational, confraternal, and ritualistic requirements of Jewish life in a region entirely devoid of Jewish communal precedents. He also left an influential family legacy in the region. His son Saul helped to establish the Jewish community of New York. Another of his sons, David, went on to officiate in the Jewish community of Jodensavanne in Suriname until his death in 1717.66 After Pardo, Jamaica’s Jews did not employ another ‘Ez Ḥayim–­trained ḥakham for seventy years. During that time, functionaries and learned laymen filled the vacuum of religious leadership. Given Pardo’s short time on the island, it would seem pre-­1692 Port Royal might have been a place largely devoid of Jewish intellectual life. However, the former converso Baroque poet Daniel Israel López Laguna certainly helped to fill the void of intellectual creativity. The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 35

“Today in Jamaica in Song”: Daniel Israel López Laguna’s Espejo fiel de vidas The process of rejudaization gave rise to new forms of literary expression.67 This New Jewish literary movement, in all its forms, aimed to reach former conversos in their native languages and expose them to rabbinic thought and practice. The Ferrara Bible of 1553 offered former conversos access to a Bible translation free of Christological interpretation. The Spanish Baroque poems of Miguel Levi de Barrios and others synthesized New Jewish and converso literary expressions. Halakhic primers in both Spanish and Portuguese, such as Isaac Athias’s Thesouro de preceptos (Treasury of Precepts, Amsterdam, 1649), a Spanish work describing the 613 biblical commandments, and Menasseh ben Israel’s Thesouro dos dinim (Treasury of Laws, Amsterdam, 1647), a compendium of laws and practices, helped to expose New Jews to the basics of Rabbinic Judaism in the Portuguese language. Not only did this “rejudaization literature” reach Jamaica, it was also produced there. Daniel Israel López Laguna’s Espejo fiel de vidas (Faithful Mirror of Life, London, 1720), a paraphrased translation of Psalms composed mostly in Jamaica, offered former conversos a suitably Jewish version of the biblical text and was also an exercise in Golden Age Baroque Spanish poetry.68 Laguna informed his readers that he intentionally modeled his Espejo on similar types of literature that he likely encountered in Jamaica, including Jacob Judah Leon Templo’s Las Alabanças de santitad (The Praise of Holiness, Amsterdam, 1671), an earlier Spanish rendering of Psalms, and probably also Menasseh ben Israel’s Conciliador (Conciliator, Amsterdam, 1632), a widely circulated dialectic work intended to reconcile discordant passages of the Bible.69 As indicated in its title, Laguna’s Espejo fit yet another model of rejudaization literature, as it was a work of spiritual autobiography very much like the writings of other conversos who 36 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

reflected upon their lives and their trajectories toward the Law of Moses while languishing in inquisitorial prisons.70 The overtly autobiographical content of Laguna’s Espejo was confined to his opening sonnet and its many poetic and acrostic approbations, although several of the translated Psalms themselves also hold crypto-­autobiographical allusions to the horrors of the Inquisition. Laguna was born in Portugal and, like so many other early inhabitants of Jamaica, transitioned to Rabbinic Judaism along with his parents in Bayonne as a child. It was common practice for “Portuguese merchants” who adopted Judaism in the French border regions to frequently cross the Pyrenees back into Spain, where they would confront the Inquisition.71 This appears to be the case with Laguna, who enrolled in a Spanish university to study medicine after his conversion to Judaism. While at university, Laguna came under the suspicion of the Holy Office for Judaizing, for which he was imprisoned and tortured. Having survived his encounter with the Spanish Inquisition, he journeyed to Jamaica sometime shortly before 1692 to live out the rest of his days as a Jew. In his Espejo, he explained how his literary achievement was brought to light in Jamaica after having been conceived in prison: “I escaped the inquisition / today in Jamaica in Song / The Psalms give to my harp / the desires, first born in my prison cell / I have now fulfilled.”72 It has been suggested that Laguna’s formulation Oy Yamayca en can sion may have been a veiled reference to Jamaica as a spiritual—almost messianic—haven. The Spanish phrase is a double entendre that can be understood to mean Jamaica in “song” (cansion) or be read as an allusion to the Hebrew word Ẓion, a word loaded with spiritual meaning. Laguna arrived in Jamaica and settled in Port Royal along with others who had rejudaized in Bayonne. He composed the bulk of the Espejo in Kingston and later traveled to London to have it published in 1720. In London, he benefited from the paThe Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 37

tronage of the wealthy and learned Mordechai Nunes Almeyda, who also enlisted his broader familial network in support of the work. Among the twenty-­two poetic praises and approbations to Laguna’s Espejo was also one from the leading ḥakham of London at the time, David Nieto. Three women, Almeyda’s mother and sisters, also contributed celebratory sonnets to the book’s front matter. It came as a surprise to some of Laguna’s patrons that such a literary achievement could have been composed in such an unlikely place as Jamaica. One of his patrons, Jacob Henriques Pimentel, flippantly expressed a dismissive attitude toward the Caribbean periphery. In a sardonic approbation of Laguna’s Espejo, while graphically criticizing similar works, Pimentel wrote that “God desired to help him [Laguna] with his influence for the greater glory of His name to have the dark shadows of the Blacks serve as greater contrast to the light and clarity of this Divine Mirror.”73 Pimentel found it amusing that an enlightened work of Baroque Spanish literature had come to light in a seemingly uncultured space, inhabited by African slaves, such as Jamaica. Laguna appeared not to have shared that sentiment. Following the printing of Espejo, he returned to Jamaica, where he died in 1723. He never severed his ties to Europe. In his Spanish will, translated into English by notaries for the probated version on record, Laguna bequeathed substantial residential property in Kingston to his wife, Rebecca, and three sons, and also supported family in Bayonne. He provided an estimated four-­ pound annuity to his “orphan and blind” sister in Bayonne along with an orphaned cousin from the rents of one of his Kingston residential properties. Daniel Israel López Laguna’s literary achievement in Jamaica was not an exception to what was otherwise an uncultured backwater. While there is no evidence to suggest that Jews in Jamaica supported the publication of the work, except that some of his 38 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

London patrons had family living there, his Espejo is representative of Jamaica’s connectedness to broader trans-­Atlantic cultural trends. Espejo intertwines Jamaica in the broad literary fabric of the Portuguese Jewish Atlantic and shows that former conversos living on the frontiers of rabbinic authority had the same literary needs, to aid their transitions into Judaism, as did those living in Amsterdam, London, or Livorno. Laguna was part of an internal Jewish enclave in Jamaica of those former conversos who had embraced Judaism in Bayonne. The merchant planters David Baruh Alvares and his son Abraham were perhaps the most prominent figures of Laguna’s Bayonne cohort in Port Royal. Profiling Port Royal’s Jews: The Alvares Family David Baruh Alvares, his son Abraham, and their families were among the leading Jewish pioneers of Port Royal and the largest Jewish household of the town (see Appendix, I).74 While they were in many ways exceptional, their lives are also representative of experiences shared by many early Jamaican Jews. They were former conversos who had embraced Judaism in Bayonne. They had been among the Jewish settlers of Brazil, from where they were exiled in 1654. And, both David’s and Abraham’s lives came to an end around 1692 as a result of the destruction of the city they knew as their home. Their families, however, continued to live in Jamaica for another century. David was born as the converso Martim, likely in Spain, and actualized his identity as a Jew in Bayonne.75 He, along with his older brothers Pedro and Luis, were among the formerly New Christian Jewish residents of Pernambuco during the 1640s.76 During this period in his life, David may have been involved in the importation of African slaves to Brazil.77 Like so many other Brazilian Jews, David relocated to Amsterdam following The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 39

the 1654 expulsion, where he married his niece, Rachel Narbaes, in 1675. David came to Jamaica as early as October of 1677, and a year later he took the oath of allegiance to become a free denizen.78 By 1680, David was the patriarch of the largest Jewish household on the island. It included his wife/niece Rachel, two sisters—Sara Narbaes (who lived in David’s home) and Esther de Aguilar, along with their children—two grown sons, Abraham and Jacob, and four married daughters: Rica Gonsales, Judica Nunes, Ester de Castro, and Sara Lopes Torres. David’s household also included at least six domestic slaves: three women, one of whom was born into their possession, and three men, one of whom died before the 1680 census.79 David Alvares was joint owner of a ship referred to in his will as “Joseh” ( Joseph), bequeathed to his younger son, Jacob. Joseph’s captain, Jan Bruks, was likely Dutch. If that was indeed the case, David may have been following the example of other Jewish traders in the English Atlantic of playing hard and fast with the Navigation Acts, prohibiting the use of non-­English captains.80 If David continued his involvement in the slave trade, as he is suspected to have done in Brazil, it is possible that Joseph carried human cargo. David also owned some plantation land. He was listed among twelve Jewish planters of Jamaica in a petition submitted to the Crown in August of 1692.81 David’s eldest son, Abraham, took the oath of allegiance six years after his father in November of 1684.82 Like his father, Abraham also owned plantation property. Two months after his denization, Abraham registered a land patent for a fifty-­acre plantation that included both pasture and woodland in Vere (now part of Clarendon Parish).83 He arranged in his will for the liquidation of this property, including its enslaved “Plantation Negroes.” Abraham appears also to have been more imbedded in non-­Jewish Jamaican society than his father. The three witnesses to Abraham’s will were all non-­Jews. 40 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

David died in November of 1692, five months after the devastation of Port Royal, and was interred at Hunt’s Bay Cemetery.84 He likely died as a result of malaria in the wake of the tsunami that left extensive breeding pools for deadly mosquitoes. Abraham’s death, just three months after his father in February of 1693, was also likely an indirect result of the earthquake. Four years after the death of her husband, David’s wife Rachel took the oath of allegiance in November of 1696, likely so that she could settle his outstanding affairs through arbitration and pursue a more public role as a widow.85 She continued to reside in Jamaica for another twenty-­seven years, alongside the family of her younger son Jacob, until her death on Purim of 1720.86 David’s tombstone, like those of most of his Jamaican Jewish counterparts, includes three epitaphs—English, Hebrew, and Spanish—portraying him as a man of three worlds: English, Jewish, and Iberian. His Hebrew epitaph remembered him as “dear, sagacious, honorable, and venerable” (ha-­yakar zaken nikhbad u-­nesu’a[ ]panim). His tombstone also included some notable iconographic features.87 Crossbones appear on the top corners, and the face of a cherub is found on the bottom center. The cherub and the crossbones are common early modern iconographic motifs found on both Jewish and non-­Jewish tombstones alike. The presence of two pickax-­and-­shovel symbols is significantly more curious. This symbol appears on only one other legible tombstone at Hunt’s Bay, marking the grave of Moses de Lucena, also from 1692.88 Though rather uncommon for Portuguese Jews, this image in various forms is found on tombstones throughout the early modern Atlantic World, and may carry no other meaning than a representation of the act of burial itself. However, given the pervasiveness of this symbol in later Freemasonry, it is possible that David may have had some association with early nonoperative forms of esoteric proto-­ Freemasonry.89 He may have even been among the suspected The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 41

group of seventeenth-­century West Indian Jewish “Freemasons” who have been implicated in bringing the esoteric brotherhood to North America.90 If indeed this symbol implies some connection with a mystical or esoteric worldview, then it sheds crucial light on the cultural lives of Jews in pre-­1692 Jamaica, implying some level of engagement with pervasive early modern forms of mysticism or even Messianism.91 One possible clue as to the nature of David’s suspected esotericism is found in John Taylor’s description of an elaborate public festival held in Port Royal in December of 1687, celebrating the arrival of the duke of Albemarle as the new governor of Jamaica.92 Taylor described two days of celebratory artillery fire, streets lined with spectators, streaming banners, waving flags, soldiers ceremonially volleying fire, and bonfires that burned throughout the night. One of the crowning events of this public spectacle was the presentation of an elaborate “chaire of state” to the new governor in Port Royal’s St. Paul’s Church by “the Spanish factor [trading agent], Seigniora [sic] San Jago and Senior Alverious a Jew, merchant on Port Royall.” This is probably referring to David Baruh Alvares. Taylor reported that the chair was “cover’d in azur velvet, richly bost, fringed and embroider’d with gold in curious work with nine steps of assent, with golden lions like Solomon’s throne all covered with rich embroideries.”93 In light of David’s tombstone iconography, Taylor’s reference to Solomon’s throne is striking. Though anachronistic, the later Royal Arch branch of Freemasonry, with which that symbol is most associated, dedicated itself to preserving what it believed to be the building secrets and hidden meanings of Solomon’s Temple.94 The choice to model the “chair of state” after the throne in Solomon’s Temple may have therefore been more than an arbitrary aesthetic consideration and is highly suggestive of David’s suspected mysticism. A less speculative conclusion derived from Taylor’s remarks 42 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

about Alvares’s participation in this ceremonial performance of state is that a Jew clearly played a central role in the political exchange between the Spanish and English in Jamaica. Jamaica’s Assembly allowed only a single Spanish trade agent to represent the interests of the Castilian Crown on the island.95 It is thus likely that Iberian Jews served as cultural, linguistic, or even political intermediaries between the Spanish and English Atlantic empires in the Caribbean, as they frequently did in Western Europe. This serves as an important counterbalance to the much more spotlighted role of West Indian Jews in the subversive contraband trade between the two Atlantic empires. Port Royal’s Bayonne Jewish Cohort Both David and Abraham Alvares maintained economic, familial, and religious ties to Bayonne long after settling in Jamaica. In David’s 1687 will, he requested that alms be sent to Bayonne on the first ship leaving for France after his death.96 His son Abraham made similar provisions in his 1693 will.97 Abraham also helped to finance the marriages of the daughters of Isaac de Mercado, a Bayonne communal functionary. It is possible that De Mercado may have played a role in Abraham’s transition to Rabbinic Judaism in Bayonne. David and Abraham are more than representative of the strong early ties between Bayonne and Jamaica. Of the twelve Jewish planters named in the aforementioned Jewish petition to the Crown in 1692, only five can be positively identified as testators of surviving wills.98 Of those five wills, only three diasporic connections are mentioned: one to London and two to Bayonne.99 In terms of familial connections across the Atlantic, France, as we will see in Chapter 4, was on a par with Amsterdam in the first half of the long eighteenth century. More than just an important link in the chain of migration to Jamaica, the Jews of Bayonne who settled in the New World formed an enThe Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 43

clave within an enclave. Their familial connections are clustered around clans such as the Alvareses. Jews with known ties to Bayonne were more likely to be found within each other’s networks. They were attached to each other’s estates as guardians, executors, or beneficiaries. A case in point is Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, a fellow Bayonne Jew, who appeared in both David’s and Abraham’s wills. Cardoso was also among the leading figures of Jamaican Jewry. He signed the deed to purchase land for the synagogue in 1677 and in later years led multiple Jewish envoys to the floor of the Assembly to lobby against a discriminatory Jewish tax. David Baruh Alvares appointed him as a quasi-­executor and requested that he assist his wife and son in the administration of his estate—seemingly to offset a potential tension he anticipated between them—and Cardoso also served as a witness to the will. Abraham Alvares likewise appointed Cardoso as a joint executor of his estate and empowered him to not only dispose of his plantation property, but to also oversee the distribution of the proceeds among the poor Jews of Jamaica. In his own 1725 will, Moses Yeshurun Cardoso included a nephew, niece, and cousin among his beneficiaries in Bayonne.100 Isaac Lopes Torres, a fellow Bayonne Jew and a relative of the Alvares family, was among the witnesses to his will. Cardoso lived in Jamaica along with his sister, his wife Rebecca, and three children. Moses’s son Jacob Yeshurun Cardoso continued the family ties to both Port Royal and to Bayonne as late as 1751.101 At that time, Jacob still resided in Port Royal and supported its Jewish institutions, while the vast majority of Jamaican Jewry had moved to either Kingston or St. Jago de la Vega. Jacob also remitted inheritance to Bayonne for the support of two cousins living there. There were several other Bayonne Jewish interlocutors with the Alvares and Yeshurun Cardoso families. The testator David Nunes was seemingly a diamond trader, with economic and 44 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

family ties to London. At the time he drafted his Spanish will in 1714, he maintained residential properties in both Port Royal and Bayonne.102 Moses Yeshurun Cardoso and David Alvares’s youngest son, Jacob, served among his Bayonne-­Jamaican executors. Moses Mendes Quixano, who married into the Alvares family and had his own family ties to Bayonne, also served as a witness to David Nunes’s will.103 Another member of David’s and Abraham’s Bayonne cohort was Diego Luis Gonsales, a major real estate investor in Jamaica. He bequeathed in his will no fewer than seventeen residential properties, along with a storehouse in Port Royal, divided between his three sons and wife.104 In addition to his family networks in and around Port Royal, he supported his brother in Bayonne with a forty-­pound lifetime annuity. This Bayonne cohort thus included among its members some of the most prominent Jews of the town, including David Baruh Alvares, the patriarch of the largest household and possible Spanish diplomat; Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, the leader of the Jewish envoy to the Assembly; Diego Luis Gonsales, the leading Jewish real estate mogul; and Daniel Israel López Laguna, the famous poet. The prominence of the Bayonne cohort in Port Royal suggests that Jewish communal life in Jamaica took shape just as much in the periphery of Bayonne as it did in London or the Metropole of Amsterdam. Conclusion Before its destruction in 1692, Port Royal was distinguished by its cosmopolitanism and religious pluralism. The small Jewish community found a haven where they could openly practice Judaism and also participate freely in the town’s networks of trade. Port Royal’s Jews did not follow any one single path of migration but rather came in waves corresponding to the political vicissitudes of proximal Caribbean colonies. Port Royal offers a case The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) / 45

study of how peripheral satellites of a diaspora—­including Brazil, Suriname, Martinique, Barbados, and Bayonne—­interacted with one another, independently of the Metropole, in the development of their respective populations. Seventeenth-­century Portuguese Jews maintained a supranational trading nation that transcended not only imperial borders but also confessional boundaries. The nação was a global trading community that included Old Christians and New Christians (sincere and insincere) along with New Jews. It was therefore common to find stories such as that of David Baruh Alvares, who migrated from Spain to Bayonne, to Brazil, to Amsterdam, and finally to Jamaica, where he died. His travels are emblematic of the experiences of Jamaica’s earliest inhabitants and place Port Royal within the broader Atlantic context of the Portuguese Diaspora. And, Port Royal’s pluralism and diversity supported the conditions whereby families like the Alvareses could both thrive in mercantile pursuits as well as invest in Jamaica’s plantation economy.

46 / The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92)

2 The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) When Port Royal was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami on June 7, 1692, Portuguese Jews were the town’s most successful trading community. They prospered on the clandestine trade with the Spanish and Dutch while also investing in the island’s agriculture. But Jewish trading success came at a high cost. The colonial government’s policy of religious tolerance did not trickle down to a popular level. Struggling to compete in limited markets, made even scarcer by successive Navigation Acts, non-­Jewish merchants resorted to libelous anti-­Jewish petitions in the years leading up to the town’s destruction. The devastation of the earthquake only amplified these anti-­ Jewish positions. The earthquake inaugurated a nearly fifty-­ year period wherein Jews were the victims of prejudicial taxation. This Jewish tax made it clear that while Jews belonged to a people beyond borders, their everyday lives were dictated by the political climate of the colony in which they lived. While Jews enjoyed settlement rights and the free practice of their religion, they also faced some of the most hostile discrimination seen anywhere in the Atlantic World. Despite this discrimination, the pluralism of Port Royal empowered Jews to mount one of the most energetic lobbying campaigns against civic disabilities in premodern Jewish history. Port Royal’s Jewish Merchants Jewish merchants of Port Royal formed a critical part of a global Portuguese commercial system with ties to India, Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, and Western Europe. The Portu47

guese Jews’ ability to trade within family networks—rooted in households sustained through endogamous marriage—enabled this global nexus to transcend both political and confessional borders.1 Familiarity between Jewish and converso kin helped facilitate clandestine trade between the Spanish, English, and Dutch Americas.2 It is important to note that familial or ethnic affiliations did not necessarily produce trust or define the nature of trading networks.3 But, these ties did give Portuguese Jews an edge over their non-­Jewish competitors. Jamaican colonial authorities largely turned a blind eye to Jewish contraband trade with the Spanish Americas.4 The 1713 Asiento, by which the English obtained a monopoly—formerly belonging to the French—to ship slaves to the Spanish Americas, in return for bullion, helped to facilitate Jewish contact with Spanish traders. Clandestine trade brought unsanctioned slaves and European finished goods to South America, Cuba, and Hispaniola, in return for bullion and silver coins. Jewish kinship networks and Jewish fluency in Iberian languages ideally suited them for this furtive trade with the Spanish Americas. Jews also thrived in the covert trade with the Dutch Americas, brazenly flouting the protectionist English Navigation Acts mandating that only English ships, owned by naturalized subjects and with crews three-­quarters English, could carry English goods.5 Since Amsterdam served as the mother community for the entire Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, and many colonial American Jews at one point passed through the Metropole, or through Dutch Curaçao, the English and the Spanish alike often used the term “Hollander” interchangeably with “Jew.”6 Empowered by these transnational networks, Port Royal’s Jews contributed to the colony’s trade economy disproportionately to the size of their population. According to one estimate, “Jewish merchants generally possessed about three times as much wealth as Anglo merchants.”7 Largely because of this ostenta-

48 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

tious success, Jewish trading activity aroused controversy and ignited the ire of Port Royal’s non-­Jewish merchant community. These anti-­Jewish sentiments may suggest that Jews were traders to the exclusion of all other economic pursuits. Port Royal’s Jews were largely focused on trans-­Atlantic trade, but not exclusively so. Even though 36 percent of all male Jewish testators were referred to as “merchants” in their wills, this is a highly generalized term. Those identified as “merchants” were international traders just as much as humble street peddlers. Many of those “merchants” also owned plantation property, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Jamaica’s trading Jews also contributed to the domestic economy. Jewish retailers supplied European luxury goods to Jamaican settlers, and Jews were among some of the most active distributors, “jobbers,” of slaves in Port Royal.8 The testamentary record portrays a community with a variety of occupations. Including both testators and beneficiaries, Jewish wills refer to merchants, shopkeepers, planters, peddlers (“hucksters”), fishermen, silversmiths, coppersmiths, goldsmiths, distillers, bookkeepers, housekeepers, tailors, religious functionaries, dance teachers, physicians, and surgeons. Late seventeenth-­century Jamaica has been described as a politically divided society. One historian has written that “between 1655 and 1689 there were two Jamaicas: the agricultural colony and the buccaneers’ rendezvous.”9 In this view, the Crown, the Board of Trade, and the governor played tug of war with the Jamaican Assembly whether to privilege the interests of the landholding planters of St. Catherine or the more individualized merchants of Port Royal. Although these divisions certainly existed, this polarized view obstructs the more nuanced reality that “merchants” and “planters” were often one and the same, as is so clearly illustrated by families like the Alvareses. Thus, Jewish economic interests were represented across the political spectrum of colonial Jamaica.

The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 49

Were There “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean”? Port Royal was as renowned for its perceived debauchery as for its cosmopolitanism. European observers portrayed the town as a haven for lawlessness, sex work, and piracy. The traveler Ned Ward in 1700 referred to Port Royal as the “very Sodom of the Universe.”10 Similarly, after describing the town’s raucous gaming halls, John Taylor concluded that Port Royal was “allmost impossible to civillize.”11 Partly contributing to the godless image was that Port Royal’s economy and security, before 1680, heavily depended on the activity of privateers. One of those privateers, Henry Morgan, even rose to become governor of Jamaica. However, by 1680, privateering was phased out, as it became more of a maritime nuisance than an economic solution.12 As the English consolidated power in Jamaica, lawmakers scrapped state-­sponsored privateering and prosecuted piracy as a capital offense. Despite the relative marginality of piracy in the eighteenth century, there has been a growing effort in popular literature and communal histories to sensationalize colonial Caribbean Jews as audacious swashbucklers. According to one scandalous yarn, “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean” enacted their revenge against the Spanish by supporting pirate crews bound to harass Spanish vessels.13 While it is certainly possible that some Jewish traders had shared interests with privateers, or even pirates, the reality was that Caribbean Jews were more interested in trade with the Spanish than economic vengeance against them and were more often the victims of piracy than its perpetrators. To the best of my knowledge, only a single Jewish individual with ties to Jamaica is known to have served on a pirate crew, the Ashkenazi diamond merchant Benjamin Franks.14 And, he appears to have been more along for the ride than for the plunder. As an Ashkenazi, he would have had little investment in a Se­ phardi, anti-­Spanish revenge fantasy. A native of Altona, Franks 50 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

built a business in Port Royal, from where he escaped with his life after the 1692 earthquake. En route to New York, Franks experienced his first run-­in with pirates when bandits temporarily seized his vessel. From New York, he joined the crew of the infamous privateer turned pirate William Kidd on board the Adventure Galley, with hopes of gaining passage to India. India was likely the source of his diamond supply. Franks remained in India, from where he submitted a deposition to London in 1697 in which he claimed he had taken no part in piracy while a member of Kidd’s crew. Franks was the exception rather than the rule. The Jewish seafaring traders of Barbados, Jamaica, and Curaçao faced constant threat from Caribbean pirates and especially from Spanish marauders. Capture by these rogues brought with it the added danger for Jews of being held captive in Spanish territory, where they might face trial by one of the American Inquisitions. All Portuguese Jews—whether born Jewish or not—were suspected of having once been conversos. In some cases, the pirates themselves took on the role of both plunderer and impromptu inquisitor. Benjamin Baruh Carvallo, a former converso and a naturalized Jew in Jamaica, set sail with his cargo in June of 1683 to relocate his family from Curaçao to Jamaica.15 The Spanish privateer Augustine Alvarez, acting on behalf of the governor in Havana, boarded Carvallo’s vessel after it had run aground. As a citizen of Jamaica, Carvallo made a valuable captive. He was instructed to write to Thomas Lynch—recently reinstated as governor of Jamaica—requesting a hefty ransom for his release. The governor of Curaçao, Joan van Erpecum, intervened in the negotiations.16 Erpecum unilaterally traded Carvallo’s cargo for a reduced ransom. Over the course of the negotiations it came to light that Alvarez and his crew had tortured Carvallo to elicit a confession of having converted to Judaism. In February of 1684, seven months after Carvallo’s captivity and release, the English The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 51

Navy seized Alvarez’s ship and brought him and his crew to trial in Port Royal, where he was convicted of piracy but later pardoned. Carvallo’s religiously motivated imprisonment and torture was hardly an isolated incident. Extemporaneous pirate-­ Inquisitions were a pervasive threat for Caribbean Jewish seafarers. It was common practice in Curaçao for Jews to file for affidavits attesting to their birth as Jews, to produce in the event of Spanish pirate abduction.17 There are numerous cases of the Jewish communal board in Curaçao, as well as the Jewish communities of Bayonne and Amsterdam, ransoming Jewish captives of pirates in fulfillment of their halakhic obligation of pid­ yon shevuyim (redemption of captives). Piracy in general was bad for trade and Jews had more to gain from its curtailment than from its practice. However, pirates were in some ways the least of Jamaican Jewry’s mercantile worries. The Popular Limits to Port Royal’s Pluralism Jamaican Jews encountered a number of roadblocks to full economic self-­determination in Port Royal. Jews were an easily exploitable minority, suffering frequent abuse from both governmental and popular entities. One of the earliest examples of Jewish social marginality was the seizure of a ship and cargo in Port Royal partly owned by the New York–­based Jew Rabba Couty. The prophetically named ketch Trial brought its perishable cargo from New York to Jamaica in the late summer of 1671.18 After a three-­month journey, the Trial landed in Port Royal, where the future governor, William Beeston, then the chief of Admiralty, confiscated its cargo. Beeston claimed that Trial ’s commercial venture had been in violation of the Navigation Acts because too great a percentage of its owners and crew were not English. A year after the Trial ’s seizure, Rabba Couty for52 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

warded a petition to the Crown defending his rights as a free denizen. He similarly claimed that the governor of Jamaica at the time, the indefatigable pragmatist Thomas Lynch, supported his claim and “showed him much compassion.” The Board of Trade in London ruled in favor of Couty. They agreed that he could adequately demonstrate his status as a free denizen of New York and that the Trial was “English built.” The Board concluded that there were no other grounds to confiscate the Trial ’s cargo other than the “presumption that Rabba Couty, being a Jew, was to be accounted a foreigner.” Governor Lynch upheld the opinion of the Board and in December of 1672 mandated that the Trial be returned to Couty and that he be compensated the value of its cargo. Beeston’s and the Admiralty’s actions in this incident reveal that despite denization, Jews did not easily overcome the stigma of being foreigners. Throughout the late seventeenth century, Jews in English Barbados were similarly beleaguered by numerous protests against their trading activity.19 In the language of these protests, European anti-­Jewish sentiments easily migrated to the Caribbean. Not a year had passed since Lynch extended religious tolerance to Jews in Jamaica, when the Governor’s Council considered a petition from Jamaican merchants in October of 1671—­possibly inspired by the events surrounding the Trial— “against the trading of the Jews.”20 These merchants called for the expulsion of Jews who had not taken an oath of allegiance. Lynch later wrote in defense of Jamaica’s Jews that despite their perceived dishonesty, only the “Jews . . . will adventure their goods or persons to get a trade.” Moreover, Lynch posited that Jews “are not numerous enough to supplant us, nor is it to their interest to betray us.”21 Eight months later, Jamaica’s merchants mounted a second appeal.22 In June of 1672, they addressed Lynch directly, perhaps in this way making clear their disapproval of his earlier defense of Jews. Thirty-­one local merchants claimed that Jews The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 53

formed “a kind of joint stock company,” making it impossible to compete with them. They challenged Lynch’s assertion of Jewish loyalty by resurrecting the old canard that Jewish loyalties are to profit, not to states, as evidenced by their dual allegiance with the Dutch. This petition was summarily dismissed by the Board of Trade in London. The Board’s firm support of the Jews proved quite effective. Twelve years passed before the merchants of Port Royal brought their next organized opposition to Jewish traders. In March of 1684, perhaps having learned from their two previous failures, the merchants abandoned their bid for expulsion and instead presented their anti-­Jewish appeal in the form of a proposed Act of Assembly. That act would prevent “small traders and Jews” who lived close to the docks from “engrossing” trade, that is, driving up the price of goods through preemptive purchasing.23 Again, their efforts did not bear fruit. However, by January of 1692, a series of ineffective governors empowered anti-­Jewish merchants to once again push for the exclusion of Jews by enlisting the help of the president of the Governor’s Council.24 This petition was more vitriolic than any that had come before. The petitioners wrote: “Jews eat us and our children out of all trade . . . we do not want them at Port Royal . . . and though . . . the whole country lay open to them they have made Port Royal their Goshen, and will do nothing but trade.” To make the point clear that this was the official position of the Governor’s Council, they added that this Jewish problem “could be avoided by giving a little more confidence to the council.” In response to this acerbic attack, the London Mahamad intervened for the first time in Jamaican Jewish affairs.25 In July of 1692—seemingly without knowledge that Port Royal had been destroyed by an earthquake a month earlier—they sent a letter to the Jewish leaders of Jamaica informing them that they had interceded on their behalf with the Crown and assured them that anti-­Jewish petitions from hostile Jamaican mer54 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

chants would not succeed. The London regents also mandated that Jamaican Jewish leaders attempt to constrain unethical business practices among the members of their community so as to avoid providing fodder to those that would oppose them. However, it was too little, too late. By the time their letter arrived in Port Royal, the town lay in ruins. The Destruction of Port Royal In what some perceived to be divine punishment for the vice of Port Royal, its primacy as the center of English Jamaican settlement came to an abrupt end with the earthquake and tsunami of June 7, 1692.26 Some estimates place the death toll at more than 2,000 people.27 This catastrophe was exacerbated by the collapsing of rigid English-­built brick buildings unsuited for the seismic realities of life in the Caribbean, followed by riots that left many murdered in the streets.28 Port Royal’s Jews were not spared from misfortune. The Mahamad of London reported the devastating news in a letter to the ḥakham Abraham Galante of Safed in the Holy Land, writing that “[some] of our brethren miraculously escaped [the tsunami], except for twenty-­two dead . . . [and] that many illnesses followed . . . causing much loss to that holy congregation.”29 In addition to these reported casualties, the town’s small synagogue lay in ruins. The eyewitness to the devastation, Rev. Edmund Heath, reported: “I . . . turned into the Jew’s street in order to get home, where the synagogue fell by my side.”30 According to the spurious claims of Dr. Henry Barham, the author of an unpublished history of Jamaica written in 1722, some Jewish survivors interpreted the earthquake as a sign from God to repent for their infidelity.31 Barham remembered that amid the carnage minister Edmund Heath led a terrified group of survivors in prayer as buildings crashed all around: “among them were several Jews . . . and it was observed, that in this The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 55

great extremity were heard to call upon Jesus Christ.” Barham also recalled that Rev. Heath even entered the synagogue to proselytize and pray at the moment of greatest peril. But, miraculously, the building didn’t collapse until immediately after his exit. In reality, rather than mass conversion to Christianity, the Jews of Jamaica and other parts of the English West Indies responded to the calamity by banding closer together. Three months after the devastation, as the Jews were still counting their dead from malarial fever, they joined with the Jews of Barbados to petition Queen Anne for greater enfranchisement: “for by that most terrible earthquake which happened there . . . [they] have lost all they had in the world.”32 Jamaican settlers felt the effects of the cataclysm of 1692 for decades to come. The French—at war with the English since 1688—took advantage of the loss of Jamaican defensive infrastructure and invaded the island in the summer of 1694, capturing valuable slaves and burning farms. Furthermore, efforts to rebuild Port Royal were halted when in January of 1703 a warehouse fire, followed by looting, destroyed the meager remnants of Port Royal.33 This inferno gave rise to months of debate in the Assembly as to whether Port Royal should be rebuilt or simply abandoned for the sake of Kingston. Among the signatories to a petition addressed to the queen calling for the rebuilding of Port Royal were two Jews.34 In the end, the town was reestablished, and in 1719 three Jewish grandees applied for a deed to build a new synagogue in Port Royal.35 Although to this very day a large portion of Port Royal lies under the sea, the town never disappeared. At least sixty-­four Jewish testators made donations to Port Royal’s synagogue between 1721 and 1815. Perhaps the most significant long-­term effect of the earthquake was the rise of the political capital, St. Jago de la Vega, and of the new commercial capital, Kingston. Four months after the earthquake, three Jewish regents of St. Jago de la Vega pur56 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

chased eleven acres in the town for use as a cemetery. In August of 1704 St. Jago de la Vega’s Neve Shalom community acquired a deed for a plot of land on Monk Street upon which to build a synagogue.36 The resulting structure was a marvel of mahogany and brass. Its foundation stood on that site for two centuries, a symbol of Jewish continuity and perseverance on the island.37 Most Jamaican Jews gravitated toward Kingston, where they clustered together in the southwestern wards, near the harbor and the “negro” burial grounds. It is estimated that by 1720, as much as 18 percent of the town’s population was Jewish.38 Kingston likewise attracted free people of color seeking opportunities for social mobility; nearly half of Jamaica’s free colored population lived in Kingston.39 Kingston’s Sha‘ar ha-­Shamayim community completed construction of a modest single-­story brick synagogue on Princess Street around 1707, close on the heels of the completion of the synagogue in St. Jago de la Vega.40 Sha‘ar ha-­ Shamayim established its own burial grounds—­ separate from Hunt’s Bay—in 1714.41 The heaviest concentration of Jewish-­owned property in Kingston was in the area around Orange, Harbour, King, and Princess Streets that intersected with Peter’s Lane, commonly referred to as “Jew Alley.” At least 17 percent of Jewish testators referred to residential property in this southwestern district near the harbor. The Jewish Tax and the Trans-­Atlantic Jewish Lobby The destruction of Port Royal was a watershed moment for Jamaican Jewry for more than just the shifting location of Jewish settlement; it brought about a rapid change in the social status of Jews. The possibility of a Jewish tax, like that in Barbados, was first raised in 1675, when the Assembly proposed higher tariffs on Jewish traders.42 In an effort to raise relief funds in the wake of the earthquake, Gov. William Beeston (1693–1702) imposed a The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 57

collective tax on the Jews in 1693 that was ratified by the Board of Trade.43 Reminiscent of the system of collective taxation of Jewish dhimmī in the Islamic world, the Assembly appointed twelve Jewish officials to collect the yearly sum.44 Though ostensibly an emergency measure, the anti-­Jewish overtones of the collective tax were clear. A similar tax had earlier been imposed on the Jews of Barbados, where there had been no such calamity. Also, the tax’s greatest champion, William Beeston, had a track record of anti-­Jewish positions. Beeston had expressed anti-­Jewish sentiments in his journal, where he wrote that when the first Jewish prospectors arrived in the 1660s it was only a pretense to “insinuate themselves into the country for the sake of trade.”45 It was Beeston, as head of the Admiralty, who spearheaded the efforts to detain the Jewish-­ owned vessel Trial in 1671. And, it was Beeston who, as a member of the Assembly in 1684, signed the petition to obstruct Jewish trading activity. Jamaica’s Jews mounted their first appeal in April of 1695 by brandishing their participation in the defense of the island during the French invasion the previous summer. Even Beeston could not dismiss their contribution, writing to the Board: “it must be owed that when any public occasion has happened or an enemy appeared they [ Jamaica’s Jews] have been ready and behaved themselves very well.”46 Failing to find common ground with the Assembly, Jamaica’s Jews later appealed to the Board in London.47 Beeston responded to these efforts by openly defaming the community, saying: “[ Jews] being a people without any governor or government cannot endure to be taxed by their equals, and there are consequently great quarrels and contentions among them.” Unable to reverse the tax, Jamaica’s Jews turned to London for assistance. In June of 1695, Jewish community leaders in London requested that the Board pressure West Indian governors to veto any bill that included a Jewish surtax and succeeded 58 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

in convincing the Board to abandon their initial support.48 In 1699, the Amsterdam Jewish diplomat Don Manuel Belmonte (d. 1705) also submitted an appeal to the Board where he cast the issue as a matter concerning the entire Portuguese Jewish Nation.49 Belmonte’s appeal convinced the Board to issue a directive that “the Governor may have a general order to use the Jews that are there [in Jamaica] gently, not disquieting them by vexations of any kind.”50 Meanwhile in Jamaica, the Board’s new position forced Bee­ ston’s hand to convene the representatives of the Jewish community.51 While the particulars of this meeting are unrecorded, it seems that Beeston took it as a further opportunity to defame the Jews. He argued that Jews traded at the expense of planting and should therefore be required to pay more. He also suggested that the Jewish presence on the island, especially because they participated in Sunday markets, was a corrupting influence on the enslaved population. He concluded by recusing himself from the issue entirely on the grounds that revenue issues rested with the Assembly and he was therefore powerless, as governor, to reverse the tax. London’s Jews remained aggressive in their attempts to lobby on behalf of their Jamaican brethren, petitioning Queen Anne directly in February of 1703.52 When their initial appeal to humanitarianism failed, they resorted to economic arguments that touched the heart of the Board’s mercantile pragmatism, compelling them to plead with the queen to intercede in the matter.53 The Assembly remained undeterred and so did Jamaica’s Jews. Between 1708 and 1715, Jewish agents, led by the prominent Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, made at least four attempts to lobby the Assembly directly, but to no avail.54 During this period, Jewish social status on the island deteriorated rapidly. In 1711, the Assembly explicitly forbade Jews, along with free people of color, from practicing law, holding public office of any kind, or serving on juries in Jamaica.55 The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 59

During the governorship of Nicholas Lawes (1718–22), a champion of Jewish rights in Jamaica, the debate over the Jewish tax took on symbolic significance beyond its financial impact on the island’s Jews, or even its benefit to the island’s economy. It came to represent the deepening rift between the mercantile-­ minded governor, seeking to protect Jewish rights, and the plantation-­minded Assembly that sought to curtail them.56 Since taking office, Lawes had been at loggerheads with the Assembly over his attempts to fund his many educational and social reforms.57 In June of 1721, Lawes submitted a frustrated recommendation to the Board suggesting that the power to raise tax revenue be stripped from the Assembly altogether. He drew a clear connection between the ineffectiveness of the Assembly and the taxation of the Jews: “I am . . . of [the] opinion that [it] should be left . . . with the Governor and Council [not the Assembly] to tax the Jews.”58 In so arguing Lawes coopted the issue of Jewish taxation in his struggle against the Assembly. Perhaps empowered by Lawes’s support, Jamaican Jews mounted a new series of appeals, enlisting the help of members of his council.59 Between November of 1721 and April of 1728, Jamaica’s Jews sent no fewer than five envoys to plead their case before the Assembly.60 They appear not to have enlisted the support of London’s Jews during this period. Their efforts proved to be in vain when the onset of war with the Maroons dramatically abraded their standing in Jamaican society even further. In the Shadow of the First Maroon War The First Maroon War (1729–40) represented the climax of over seventy-­five years of hostility in Jamaica between autonomous Maroon communities of former slaves, and European settlers. What had been a series of spontaneous skirmishes turned into war in Jamaica’s Portland Parish during the 1730s as a result of increased White settlement, Gov. Robert Hunter’s (1727–34) 60 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

plans to build a naval base in Port Antonio, and the Maroons’ acquisition of firearms.61 In 1730, in an effort to support the war effort, the Assembly debated imposing further taxes on Jews, as well as establishing higher tariffs on the importation of slaves and cattle.62 At this moment of crisis, the Governor’s Council declared that Jews “take the bread out of the mouths of more deserving people.”63 Still, Jamaica’s Jews continued to send envoys to the floor of the Assembly.64 As indicated in the statement of the Governor’s Council, public opinion toward the Jews deteriorated rapidly during the war. In August of 1733, Governor Hunter sent a report to the Board containing testimony of a captured and interrogated Maroon known as “Cyrus.”65 When asked from where the Nanny Town Maroons had acquired gunpowder, Cyrus testified that two White confederates of the Maroons had forged documents with which they purchased gunpowder from one “Jacob a Jew” in Kingston. It is impossible to verify whether an individual Jew supplied Maroons with gunpowder, either willfully or under deception, but the claim was wholeheartedly believed by Jamaican authorities. Without a leg to stand on, Jamaica’s Jews turned again to Europe for support. In January of 1735, ninety-­two English traders with economic ties to Jamaica—including thirty-­three Jews—submitted a petition to the Board against Jewish taxation.66 In this petition, the London merchants argued that Jewish trading was critical for the economic health of the island and defended Jamaica’s Jews against claims that they were in league with the Spanish, dispelling renewed fears that the Spanish would attack Jamaica while its militia was occupied with the Maroons. The Board responded with a series of fact-­finding inquiries from former Jamaican inhabitants. In February of 1735, their Jewish informant, Benjamin Bravo, presented arguments in favor of abolishing a Jewish tax.67 A day later, the Board of Trade considered a letter from Wil­ The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 61

liam Wood, a former Jamaican merchant, tireless pamphleteer, and author of mercantilist treatises.68 Wood’s opinion on the matter would prove definitive. He favored the continuation of the tax as an emergency measure while opposing its discriminatory nature. Wood justified the tax as a necessary evil to raise revenue but not as a Jewish tax per se, writing: “I can truly say that, all the time I lived in that Island, I never heard any better reason given for taxing the Jews, than that they were Jews.” In January of 1737, the Board directed the governor to withhold his consent from any bill including a Jewish surtax.69 The incoming governor, Edward Trelawney (1738–52), weighed the matter for himself.70 The island’s chief justice, Richard Mill, recommended to Trelawney that the tax should stand since Jews were exempt from expensive public service. Mill further argued that since Jews made their own liquor, they avoided import tariffs and therefore, even with the tax, still contributed the same amount to society as everyone else.71 An anonymous member of the Governor’s Council accused the Jews of using their religious particularities, especially dietary and Sabbath restrictions, from fully contributing to society.72 Ultimately, Trelawney fell back on the position of William Beeston, recusing himself on the grounds that the governor had no authority to interfere in the legislative power of the Assembly. But, largely due to the effectiveness of the Jewish lobby in England, the Assembly in Jamaica had already begun to debate abolition of the tax in 1736.73 In November of 1739, under pressure from the Board, Trelawney promised to use his discretionary power to prevent any further taxes on the Jews from passing in the Assembly.74 At the close of the First Maroon War, by peace treaty in 1740, the Board succeeded in imposing its will on the Assembly and the tax was formally abolished.75 It has been suggested that the passing of the “Plantation Act”—making it easier for Jews to become naturalized—around the same time brought on a new 62 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

level of Jewish civic equality, thereby leading to the abolition of the tax.76 However, the tax continued to be debated on the floor of the Assembly. In 1758, the Board of Trade issued a blunt directive to all future Jamaican governors “not [to] give your assent to any act or acts to be passed in the assembly . . . whereby any taxes shall be imposed on the said Jews, over and above what are laid on the rest of our subjects there.”77 This directive was repeated no fewer than four times as late as 1778.78 Conclusion The official policy of religious tolerance promoted by the Crown-­ appointed colonial government had little influence on popular perceptions of Jews in Jamaica. The merchants of Port Royal, threatened by Jewish trading success, and following precedents from Barbados, drew upon medieval anti-­Jewish motifs in their efforts to proscribe Jewish trading activity. After the destruction of Port Royal, these anti-­Jewish sentiments were actualized in the form of a Jewish tax. This Jewish tax had no counterpart in the Portuguese Jewish communities of Western Europe. One of the most concrete ways, therefore, that early Jamaican Jews entrenched themselves in Jamaica, and distinguished their community from others within the Diaspora, was through their efforts to combat local anti-­Jewish sentiments that in many ways exceeded those in Western Europe. The Jewish tax took on political significance beyond simply a prejudicial surtax on a subaltern minority. In colonial correspondences, it came to represent the rift between colonial autonomy, embodied in the Assembly, and the pragmatic mercantilists policies of the Board of Trade in London. Jews sometimes exploited this reality in their efforts to combat the tax. And, Jamaica’s Jews always attempted to contest their disabilities on the floor of the Assembly. They did not defer to the political patronage of their more established brethren in Amsterdam or The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) / 63

London by default, but only by necessity, when local circumstances worked against their interests. During the governorship of Lawes, for instance, when tensions between Assembly and governor were at a fever pitch, the Jews did not defer to intermediaries in London. But, when faced with accusations of treason during the First Maroon War, though they never stopped their own lobbying efforts, they relied more on England for support. Thus, Jamaica’s Jews asserted a local voice and distinct political identity while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of political patronage from Europe.

64 / The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740)

3 The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) Jamaica’s Jews owned and operated plantations, farms, and livestock pens since their first arrival on the island. Some of the pioneering merchant Jews of Port Royal, such as David Baruh Alvares, were also proprietors of plantations. Yet, Caribbean Jews are overwhelmingly characterized, in both academic literature and the popular imagination, as traders and retailers— a community of merchants rather than planters.1 This chapter challenges that prevailing view by focusing on the lives of Jewish planters who were often one and the same or in collaboration with port-­city merchants. Shifting the focus away from port cities and toward plantations also brings into sharp relief the harsh reality of Jewish slave ownership on an industrialized scale. This chapter thus explores both the patterns of Jewish plantation proprietorship as well as slave ownership. The Image of the Jewish Planter The banished Jews of Brazil played an important role in the seventeenth-­century sugar revolution throughout the English, French, and Dutch Caribbean. The former converso and Brazilian sugar planter Benjamin Dacosta D’Andrade was among the largest and most innovative sugar producers in French Martinique during the late seventeenth century.2 Similarly, the physician David Raphael Mercado plied his Brazilian planting expertise in English Barbados.3 During the late seventeenth century, Portuguese Jews built their own semiautonomous plan65

tation community on the Suriname River, Jodensavanne, where they cultivated sugar and other commodities through the use of thousands of African slaves.4 During the eighteenth century, Jewish planters could be found throughout the Caribbean in Curaçao, Aruba, St. Eustatius, St. Thomas, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Barbados. Perhaps the reason “plantation Jews” have received so little attention compared to “port Jews” is because they were such an extreme minority within a minority. During the debates over Jewish taxation in Jamaica, for example, the English Jewish lobbyist Benjamin Bravo approximated that Jamaican Jews owned only fifteen plantations.5 His estimate was not far off. Land registries suggest that Jews never owned more than 3 percent of Jamaica’s plantation land during the eighteenth century. In 1750, for instance, only forty-­one Jews were listed among the island’s 1,567 plantation owners.6 The perception of Jews as being averse to planting is also rooted in hostile eighteenth-­century accusations claiming that Jews chose trade in place of all other economic activities. Critics of the Jewish presence in Jamaica, such as William Beeston, frequently accused the Jews of enriching themselves, rather than the colony, by focusing solely on trade, and they often resorted to that indictment to justify the Jewish tax. These accusatory stereotypes persisted well after the abolition of the tax in 1740. James Knight, a Jamaican chronicler, wrote in the 1740s: “very few [ Jews] have any notion of planting, so that they have not amongst them all more than eight or ten plantations, of which three or four are sugar workes.”7 As one member of Parliament put it in 1753, during the debates to pass a naturalization bill for English Jewry: “[ Jews] are not likely to become great purchasers of land, for they love their money and can employ it to much better advantage in trade.”8 The Jewish support for Gov. Charles Knowles’s (1752–56) controversial project in 1754 to move Jamaica’s capital from St. Jago de la Vega to the merchant 66 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

town of Kingston surely only helped to reinforce these prejudicial attitudes into the following decade.9 Nevertheless, Jewish plantation ownership is a highly conspicuous aspect of Jewish wills. Notaries referred to thirty-­ one testators explicitly as “planters,” although that term—like “merchants”—has broad definitions and can include bookkeepers, attorneys, and estate managers. An additional thirty-­seven testators, mostly referred to as “merchants” in their wills, also bequeathed sometimes extensive plantation property. Planters thus made up 15 percent of Jewish Jamaican testators, more than enough to challenge overly homogenized views of Caribbean Jews as a solely merchant community. Furthermore, in contrast to an overly bifurcated view of early colonial Jamaica as a society divided between the interests of planters and merchants, Jewish plantation owners did not rival “port Jewish” merchants but in many cases were one and the same. By the end of the eighteenth century, Jamaica had the most extensive concentration of Jewish planters in the Caribbean. Jews had been expelled from sugar-­rich Martinique and Saint-­ Domingue as a result of the Code Noir in 1685, and most of those who remained later converted to Christianity.10 As early as 1720, Jamaica far outstripped the scale of sugar production in English Barbados, and plantation ownership is less pronounced in Jewish wills there. Curaçao’s arid climate and frequent drought made it untenable as a large-­scale plantation society. Jamaica’s only rival was Suriname, where Portuguese Jews had a tradition of planting and slave ownership in Jodensavanne. However, tensions with local Maroons and the remoteness of their plantations from the trading capital of Paramaribo, along with the bursting of investment bubbles in Amsterdam, conspired against Surinamese Jewish planters.11 By midcentury, Suriname was simply uncompetitive on the sugar market compared to English Jamaica or French Saint-­Domingue. By the 1770s, Jews had largely abandoned their Surinamese plantations. The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 67

English Jamaica was born as a trading port rather than a plantation society and the sugar industry only began to develop after 1680, when coastal merchants had accumulated enough capital to invest in landed estates, mostly in St. Catherine and St. Andrew parishes.12 Jamaica’s transition to an agricultural-­based economy, however, was fraught with difficulties and delays. Initially, White Jamaican settlers, dependent on indentured servitude, lacked sufficient capital and slave labor to fully develop the “plantation machine.”13 And, early White settlers were too concentrated in southeastern coastal towns to fully develop the agricultural promise of the island. This all changed after 1740, when a peace treaty with the Maroons enabled the expansion of White settlement into the mountainous northeastern reaches of the island. Around the same time, large numbers of slaves started to arrive in Jamaica from West Africa at an accelerated pace.14 Thus, the period between 1740 and 1850, which included the conditional emancipation of slaves in August of 1834 and their subsequent “apprenticeship,” has been described as “Plantation Jamaica.”15 Although sugar was the main source of wealth for midcentury Jamaica, it is inaccurate to refer to the colonial plantation economy as a “monoculture.”16 Jamaican planters produced a large variety of commodities, including livestock, ginger, lumber, and coffee. Political forces also played an important role in the transformation of Jamaica into a plantation economy. The West-­Indian Lobby in England was made up, like the Assembly, largely of St. Catherine planters who pushed for planter-­friendly colonial policies.17 Through their efforts, they secured economic incentives for planting as well as legislation such as the Molasses Act (1733), which placed tariffs on foreign sugar. In 1761, the Jamaican Assembly outlawed the importation of sugar altogether.18 By the mid-­eighteenth century, only French Saint-­Domingue surpassed Jamaica in the scale of its sugar production and the size of its enslaved African labor force. Thus, while African slavery 68 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

had always been an inseparable part of life in Jamaica, by midcentury, it was the engine that drove the colony’s economy. The shift toward a plantation economy in Jamaica occurred concomitantly with a period of Jewish demographic growth and optimism for full civic integration on the island. The Board in London, which had earlier defended the Jews against discriminatory taxation, also made efforts to include Jews more fully in colonial society. It was instrumental in helping to push a naturalization bill through Parliament incentivizing Jewish settlement. This bill was known throughout the colonies as the “Plantation Act.” The Plantation Act The Plantation Act of June 1740 has been described as “the greatest shift in English policy toward the Jews in the colonies.”19 Aided by extensive, and expensive, lobbying from London’s Portuguese Jewish community, the Whig-­sponsored immigration reform passed with relatively little opposition, in sharp contrast to its heavily contested English counterpart of 1753. The act made it possible for non-­Catholic aliens—Jews, Moravians, and Quakers—to become naturalized with only the payment of a fee and a pledge to reside within a single colony for a period of seven years. Those naturalized by the act agreed not to leave their home colony for more than two months in order to qualify for seven years of residency. Before the passage of this act, Jews required a highly expensive and difficult-­to-­obtain act of Parliament to become naturalized, but unlike the more temporary and more available status of denizen, naturalization could be transferred to offspring in perpetuity and exempted beneficiaries from alien tariffs. The Plantation Act targeted Jews and Quakers explicitly by removing the requirement of a sacramental oath of allegiance. These two minorities were therefore the greatest beneficiaries. The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 69

Nearly 200 Jews from North America and the Caribbean applied for naturalization between 1740 and 1750, and those seeking naturalization in Jamaica made up as much as 75 percent of all Jewish applicants.20 The Board required colonial secretaries to send yearly lists of applicants along with signed affidavits by religious or government figures attesting to their intention to remain in the colony. Although staunchly opposed by the Jamaican Assembly, the act gained some support among Caribbean literati. Edward Long, the liberal-­minded chronicler of Jamaica, praised the act as a major step toward remedying the damage caused by foreign journeymen who remitted their profits away from their home colony.21 The passage of the Plantation Act marked a major turning point for Jamaica’s Jews in at least two critical ways. First, it initiated a period of dramatic Jewish population growth in Jamaica. Second, it brought the Jews of Jamaica into closer contact with—and also perhaps greater dependency on—London. After 1740, Jamaica’s Jewish population grew at an accelerated pace along with Protestant minority groups such as Quakers and Moravians.22 Edward Long reported that the Jewish population of St. Catherine during the 1770s stood at around 350 individuals, 3.5 percent of the parish’s total population.23 According to this reckoning, in the town of St. Jago de la Vega, Jews accounted for one-­third of the free population. In 1745, around 188 Jews were taxed in Kingston, rising to 197 by 1769.24 Taking into consideration the families of those taxed, those Jews in St. Andrew Parish, and those in the western settlements such as Lucea, Montego Bay, Savanna-­La-­Mar, and Black River, the Jewish population of Jamaica in 1750 was likely around 600 to 800 individuals. In 1776, around 1,000 Jews lived on the island.25 While the population was small, the rate of growth was rapid. The community had more than quadrupled in size since the earthquake. Furthermore, Long estimated the entire free population of the island in 1774 at 12,737, meaning that Jews 70 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

constituted nearly 8 percent, making them a highly conspicuous minority. Even if they were demographically humble, they were highly noticeable. They were all the more conspicuous because Jamaican Jews were concentrated in towns in a largely rural colony. Midcentury Jewish population growth, like that of free people of color and French immigrants, was more apparent in towns such as Kingston—a population that doubled in size between 1774 and 1788.26 It has even been suggested that Jews of Kingston may have had “the highest rate of urban real estate ownership by Jews anywhere in the world at the time.”27 By 1750, the Jamaican Jewish community was significantly Creole, born and raised on the island. If we make the problematic assumption that testators with parents living on the island were also born there, and considering the young children of Jamaican testators, then easily more than a quarter of the Jewish population was Creole by the middle of the eighteenth century. But, like their European and African counterparts, Jews did not perpetuate their population through reproduction alone.28 Immigration played a crucial role throughout the century. The passing of the Plantation Act, coupled with the abolition of the Jewish tax, provided an incentive for accelerated Jewish migration, especially from England. Thus, the second major effect of the act was a more prominent role of England in the lives of Jamaican Jews. Wills reveal that while there had always been a strong relationship between Jamaica and England, the Jewish community had become increasingly, though of course not exclusively, tied to London by the middle of the eighteenth century. After 1740, 34 percent of testators who included beneficiaries in their wills outside the island remitted those bequests to London to the exclusion of all other places, up from 21 percent of similar bequests before 1740. The circumstances leading to the abolition of the Jewish tax and the passage of the Plantation Act in 1740 required the involvement of the Jewish lobby from London, even though, as The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 71

we have seen, Jamaican Jews did not rely on their metropolitan brethren by default for political patronage but only by necessity. Similarly, the passage of the Plantation Act did not come for free. Though the act was ultimately meant to empower colonial immigrants, it in some ways led to a greater dependency on London. In 1743, the London Mahamad requested that the Jews of Jamaica reimburse them for their expensive lobbying efforts in securing the passage of the act.29 But, just as Jews were becoming more tied to London, they were simultaneously maneuvering for greater civil liberties in their home colony very much independently from the Metropole. The Comfort and the Catastrophe of Midcentury Jamaica The passage of the Plantation Act and the removal of the Jewish tax, along with the resultant population growth, compelled Jews to push for greater civil rights on the island. One man seized upon the opportunity of the feverish election season of October 1750 to advance an agenda of Jewish suffrage. Abraham Sanches Morao, a resident of St. John Parish who had been naturalized by the 1740 act, attempted to cast a vote for his representative to the Assembly, arguing that his naturalization entitled him to all the same rights as freeborn Englishmen.30 Other naturalized Jews in Jamaica supported him by submitting a petition to the Assembly criticizing their “blind prejudice” in withholding Jewish voting rights. The Assembly opened the matter to public debate, receiving anti-­Jewish petitions from St. Catherine and St. Andrew parishes, which the assemblymen published in their proceedings as well as in the local press. The general sentiment of these petitions was that Jewish participation in the civic government of a Christian state was “repugnant” and that Jews would bring down the very foundations of colonial society if allowed to vote. 72 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

These petitions resorted to well-­established anti-­Jewish libels, including a deicide charge and accusations of usury. The anti-­ Jewish firestorm unleashed by Sanches Morao’s bold—and entirely unsanctioned—political bravado compelled the Mahamad in London to once again lobby the Crown in defense of Jamaica’s Jews, bringing them yet another step closer to Jamaican Jewish affairs.31 Despite this setback, Jews were highly involved in the island’s development during the mid-­eighteenth century, joining in the island’s vibrant architectural growth of the period. Between 1744 and 1750, Kingston’s Sha‘ar ha-­Shamayim community significantly expanded the synagogue on Princess Street. The renovated synagogue included a second story to accommodate an elevated seating area for women and portions of the interior were painted to approximate the appearance of marble. Edward Long described the improved synagogue as a “handsome, spacious, building. . . . [with] a gallery, like that in Spanish Town, for the reception of their women, who do not mingle with the other sex in their public devotions.”32 This two-­story structure survived for over a century until the devastating Kingston fire in December of 1882 (which may have started in a Jewish-­ owned lumberyard).33 Kingston’s Portuguese synagogue was described, post mortem, as “one of the finest specimens of art on the island.”34 The 1760s especially was a decade of architectural awakening in Jamaica.35 St. Jago de la Vega underwent significant development of its public, governmental, and recreational structures, including its many theaters and horse-­racing venues. The most ambitious building project was the new governor’s residence known as “King’s House,” completed in 1762, the façade of which stands to this day as a monument to the prosperity of mid-­eighteenth-­century Jamaica.36 St. Jago de la Vega’s Neve Shalom community joined in the building frenzy and renovated the town’s synagogue during the early part of the decade The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 73

to match the refurbished look of the city by emulating their Kingston counterpart in painting the cedar interior to appear like marble.37 During the prosperity of the 1760s, Jamaica was under threat from the French, exacerbated by the global conflict of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Jamaican Jews played an important role in the Caribbean theater of the war, just as they had in Europe and North America, as purveyors of military supplies.38 While Jamaica managed to avoid invasion, the Jamaican colonial authorities authorized a series of preemptive probes into the strength and threat of the French Caribbean fleet. Since Jamaica’s Jews had always been, with good reason, perceived as partly French, they were considered among the colony’s chief informants. In February of 1762, the Jewish trader Moses Pereira Dacosta offered a deposition in Port Royal stating that he had been to Saint-­Domingue, where he had witnessed the French fleet preparing for an invasion of Jamaica.39 Despite Dacosta’s warning of an imminent French invasion—one that never materialized—the greater threat to the island was an internal one. The ostentatious prosperity of the 1760s had been built on the backs of African slave labor. Urban expansion projects only served to highlight the island’s pervasive brutality and inequality. Insurrection was an all-­too-­natural reaction. The 1760s saw one of Jamaica’s most catastrophic conflicts between owners and their slaves and gave rise to a more concerted effort of the Jamaican Assembly to actively legislate the social advancement of whiteness.40 Starting in April of 1760, the slave known as Tacky—rumored to be a member of an Akan ruling family—­ declared war seemingly with the goal of establishing an independent Black republic in Jamaica.41 His insurrection inspired other slaves throughout the island to rise up against their oppressors. Tacky was eventually captured and decapitated with the aid of the treaty-­bound Maroons, but his revolt inspired a number of violent aftershocks over the course of the year.42 74 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

Like other Jamaican slave owners, Jews served in the militia during these years and took measures to protect themselves and their slaves from revolt. By the end of the century, three of the twelve infantry regiments from Kingston were made up entirely of Jews.43 Therefore, while the militia had earlier been a point of entry for Jews into Jamaican society, by midcentury it had become yet another marker of their difference, as regiments during this period had become segregated. Jewish otherness within the militia was highlighted when in September of 1760, Lt. Gov. Henry Moore (1756–60) briefed the Assembly on the progress of the war effort against Tacky’s insurrectionists and the state of the militia.44 While he reportedly praised the “vigilance and bravery” of the militia, he singled out the Jews for criticism, asserting that they “willfully absented themselves” from militia duty on their Sabbath and holidays, preferring to pay a fine rather than serve. This accusation was ornamented with a great deal of anti-­Jewish rhetoric. These accusations against the Jews ran deeper than their perceived unwillingness to serve in the militia on Sabbath. White Jamaican settlers had feared, since the earliest days of the colony, that Jews were a fifth column—variously in league with the Spanish, Dutch, and French—and a corrupting influence on the island’s slaves. White slave owners regularly accused Jews of conspiring with slaves at Sunday markets while they sat in church.45 They worried that, within Jamaica’s highly racialized social hierarchy, Jews might find common cause with slaves and join with them to overthrow the White Jamaican ruling elite. This anxiety had a profound real-­world impact, as we have seen, during the gunpowder accusations of 1739, and it persisted into the conflict known as “Tacky’s War.” Edward Long reported that during Tacky’s War an imprisoned slave awaiting trial at Savanna-­la-­Mar attempted to lure a Jewish guard to aid his escape. According to Long, the imprisoned slave suggested to the Jewish guard that Jews and Blacks The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 75

“ought to consider ourselves as one people. You [ Jews] differ from the rest of the Whites, and they hate you. Surely then it is best for us to join in one common interest, drive them out of the country.”46 The imprisoned man assured the Jewish sentry that such an alliance would not interrupt trade because, as far as merchants are concerned, “Black or White, it is the same to them.” Long’s anecdote quickly descended into anti-­Jewish stereotypes. To entice the Jewish guard, the slave purportedly promised to lead him to a buried treasure. But, when the enslaved prisoner refused to reveal the location of his treasure without first being freed, the Jewish guard thought better of his scheme and “the Israelite was either too honest or too unbelieving to comply.” Leaving the veracity of this tale to the side, in reality, Jews had more in common with slave owners than with slaves during Tacky’s War. Jewish planters commanded large enslaved African labor forces and thus struggled with the same fears of “deficiency”—an imbalance between African slaves and White labor on plantations—that permeated the island at the time, stoking fears about further insurrections. Isaac Furtado, for example, was the proprietor of 963 acres in St. Andrew Parish called “Golden Spring.”47 Two hundred acres of this large plantation were dedicated to growing sugar cane. The remainder was devoted to pen and pastureland for its seventy-­one heads of cattle, along with 602 acres of undeveloped woodland. Typical of other plantations on the island, while Furtado’s “Golden Spring” had only five White indentured servants, it had 135 slaves, a 27-­to-­1 Black-­to-­White ratio. It was exactly this type of racial imbalance on plantations that the Assembly hoped to remedy by regularly passing “deficiency laws” requiring a certain amount of White labor on plantations, although imbalances were easily overlooked with the payment of a fine.48 In other words, Furtado’s “Golden Spring” was indistinguishable from non-­Jewish-­

76 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

owned and -­operated plantations, with the exact same racial imbalances as the colony as a whole during Tacky’s War. Like many White colonists, the ultimate goal for many Jewish planters was to become absentee owners and leave the operation of their plantations to local attorneys and slave managers.49 These absentees included both planters who resided in Jamaican towns—true of most of the Jewish planters found in the probate record—and those who resided in England. One example of a quintessential Jewish absentee who rose to prominence during the 1770s was Abraham Aguilar, who composed a will in London in 1794 (also probated in Jamaica).50 After retiring to London, he continued to live off the profits of his plantation in St. Anne Parish called “Banks.” These proceeds allowed him to live the idyllic life of the genteel Englishman in his London mansion called “Blue House,” surrounded by several acres of pastureland. Despite being embedded in London’s elite leisure culture, Aguilar remained deeply invested in Jamaica. He continued to support the island’s Jewish institutions and his daughter’s family who remained on the island, especially by supplying her with slaves. Because of his beneficiaries and assets on both sides of the Atlantic, he appointed executors to manage his estate in both places. In fact, “Banks” in St. Anne appears to have been a plantation run by a conglomerate of Jewish absentee owners. One of its owners, Jacob Gonsales, drafted a will in 1776 with the expectation that he would die in England.51 Jacob had been married into the prominent trans-­Atlantic Baruh Lousada family in England, to whom he bequeathed his material objects and “reading books.” The proceeds of his portion of “Banks” were intended to support three servant women. However, most of the Jewish planters in Jamaica were absentees only in the sense that they seldom lived on their estates and mostly continued to live in Jamaica’s urban spaces, while leaving the operation of their estates to managers and attorneys.

The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 77

The Gabay Plantation Dynasty and Other Jewish Planters A minority of Jews were planters in Jamaica, but over the course of the long eighteenth century, there emerged a few distinct Jewish planting dynasties. The Gabays were one of the most extensive Jewish planting families on Jamaica, whose founders had been among the Brazilian exiles of 1654. Solomon Gabay, a signatory to the communal minutes of Ẓur Israel in Recife— a trader and a slave owner—was the primary link between Brazil and Jamaica.52 Like David Baruh Alvares, he resided in Amsterdam between his expulsion from Pernambuco and his Jamaican denization of 1672. Solomon, along with his kinsman Abraham Gabay, joined those Jews who signed a deed to purchase land on behalf of the Jews of Port Royal in January of 1677.53 Solomon Gabay likewise joined eleven other Jamaican Jewish planters who signed the petition to the Crown following the earthquake in 1692. There he was described as the owner of a “plantation for many years in Magitt Savana.”54 In the same petition, Abraham Gabay was listed as the owner of a plantation in “White Hood.” A Sarah Gabay was the only woman planter on the list. Three generations of Gabays lived and planted in Jamaica in the half-­century between the earthquake and the watershed year of 1740. David Gabay (the elder), a resident of St. Jago de la Vega, composed a will in 1720 in which he bequeathed his plantation in the parish of St. Thomas in the Vale ( just north of St. Catherine) to his son Isaac.55 Isaac, who also lived in St. Jago de la Vega, continued to operate his father’s plantation. He had much more extensive enslaved assets than his father.56 In June of 1730 he supported both his daughter and his unborn child with slaves, while he bequeathed the family plantation to his son David (the younger). Isaac further requested that two slaves be purchased for his daughter Rebecca from the first “negro ship that arrives after my decease.” David (the younger) was still 78 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

operating the family plantation in St. Thomas in the Vale at the time he drafted his will in July of 1738.57 In 1750, Samuel, Isaac, and Solomon Gabay owned and operated among them nearly 1,400 acres of land throughout the island in the parishes of St. Catherine, St. Elizabeth, St. John, and St. Thomas in the Vale, where Isaac and Solomon Gabay together possessed around 1,000 acres called “Magotty Sugar Works.”58 While their estates were not large, Gabay-­owned plantation property was so widely dispersed throughout the island that other testators bequeathed land in their wills previously owned by the family. The Vere Parish planter Daniel Rodrigues Nunes, for instance, composed a will in December of 1773 whereby, in addition to his beachfront house near Carlisle Bay on the south coast, he bequeathed a 104-­acre plantation in Vere “commonly called Gabay’s.”59 The St. Catherine planter Samuel Gabay died in his early sixties after drafting a will in August of 1747.60 Samuel was more explicitly devoted to the Jewish community than his planter kin. In his will, he made charitable contributions to poor Jews, supported three Jamaican synagogues, and also requested that his executors purchase a tombstone to mark his grave. His will is highly focused on enslaved property. He was the first Gabay planter to manumit slaves: three older women. At the same time as these manumissions, he also bequeathed to his (seemingly second) wife and their infant son two female and two male household slaves along with her choice of one of three houses in St. Jago de la Vega. The Gabay family invested their agricultural earnings in the urban development of the town. In 1754, a “Widow Gabay” owned five properties in St. Jago de la Vega.61 The St. Catherine planter David Gabay composed a will in September of 1760 whereby he made a donation to Neve Shalom in return for a memorial prayer to be recited on the night of Yom Kippur.62 While he supported his pregnant wife Rachel, née Ydana, and three children with slaves and monetary assets, The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 79

he gave his land referred to as “Salt Ponds” in St. Catherine to his married sister, along with four individual slaves. Among the twenty slaves mentioned by name in his will, he manumitted a single woman named Mary and provided her with a onetime token sum of five Jamaican pounds. Marrying into the prominent Gabay family was one path toward joining Jamaica’s Jewish plantocracy. The St. Catherine planter Jacob Henriques—related to the Gabays through marriage—composed a will in August of 1757.63 He resided in that parish along with his wife Rebecca, née Bravo, a daughter, four sons, and a married sister. His will opens with the customary request for burial and a standard donation to Neve Shalom, with a request that the community regents appoint someone to recite a memorial prayer on his behalf, as well as a donation to Sha‘ar ha-­Shamayim in Kingston. He is likely the same Jacob Israel Henriques who served as the parnas, or “presiding warden,” of the Neve Shalom community during the 1750s and was buried in the St. Jago de la Vega Jewish cemetery in February of 1758 at age thirty-­nine.64 Jacob Henriques had inherited a mountain plantation from his father known as “Smokey Hole” that he bequeathed in full to his son Benjamin. At the time he drafted his will, Jacob was also in possession of a deed to a house and some nearby land purchased by his father but promised to a free “mulatto” woman, Catherine Symons; her relationship to the family is not entirely clear. Jacob’s father had asked that this land be divided between Catherine and one Jacob Lewis, who was expected to build a house on the property. To his son David, Jacob bequeathed a livestock farm that he had purchased himself called “Ebony Pen,” which contained “twenty cows & heifers Tenn mares & fillies[,] a score of sheep & a dozen goats,” along with ten slaves. To his second son Joseph, he left yet another house in St. Catherine, along with a “family of negroes”—Katy and her

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four daughters—whom he had inherited from his aunt, Sarah Gabay. His eldest son, Moses, inherited the residuum of the estate. In total, Jacob Henriques bequeathed thirty-­seven individual slaves to his beneficiaries, but the full extent of his enslaved workforce is unknown. Apart from the extensive Gabay dynasty, Benjamin Pereira was perhaps the most prominent Jewish planter in eighteenth-­ century Jamaica, the owner of a large estate in St. Andrew Parish on the border with Liguanea (see Appendix, IV).65 He was the prototypical absentee Jamaican Jewish merchant planter who resided in Kingston. Despite his extensive plantation property, he is referred to as a “merchant” both on his tombstone and in his will. Benjamin died at age fifty-­three, two months after he drafted his will in September of 1774, leaving behind a wife, six daughters, and four sons. His tombstone remembered him in Hebrew as a community leader (ha-­gavir), and he likely served as one of the regents in Kingston around 1760.66 The New York Jewish community addressed their request for a ḥazan from Jamaica to him directly.67 Benjamin began his exceptionally long will with the customary confessional preamble asking forgiveness for his sins and making an unusually large donation to his own community of Sha‘ar ha-­Shamayim (100 Jamaican pounds) in return for the recital of a memorial prayer. He further provided charity to the “poor of our nation” in Kingston to be distributed based on the traditional periods of mourning. He was in possession of several Kingston residential properties on Princess Street, where the synagogue stood, in addition to several others on “Jew Alley” (Peter’s Lane), Duke Street, and King Street, along with a commercial property on bustling Harbour Street. His largest plantations were the adjoining sugar works in St. Andrew called “Shortwood” and “Eagle’s Nest.” Benjamin bequeathed to his wife Sarah, née Henriques, in lieu of her one-­

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third intestate entitlement, a comfortable annuity of 300 Jamaican pounds to be paid quarterly, household furniture, linens, wearing apparel, silver plates, and jewels, along with his carriage and his best horses. He further bequeathed to Sarah residential privileges to his “mansion house,” and full use of his farm and all its buildings in St. Andrew called “Dallas’s Pen,” where Benjamin had been living at the time of his death: all except a small garden and pond on the border of Col. Mark Hall’s neighboring property. Benjamin requested that his executors supply his wife with a sufficient amount of guinea corn (durra) to sustain the farm’s livestock until such time as they would purchase a small adjacent farm in Liguanea called “Barton’s Pen,” intended for the sole benefit of Sarah. Benjamin asked that his executors provide her every year with muscovado sugar, forty gallons of rum from his sugar refinery, and, when possible, 200 plantains a week along with poultry, sheep, cows, and a bull. In support of multiple children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and friends, he bequeathed no fewer than forty-­seven individual slaves. He likely owned hundreds. The above anecdotal examples illustrate that Jewish planters typically owned a number of residential properties in either Kingston or St. Jago de la Vega. Just as planting did not negate the possibility of also being a merchant, it likewise does not challenge the reality that Jews by and large were urban dwellers. It is clear that even the owners of the most rural plantations remained deeply attached to the urban Jewish communities of the island. Planting was therefore not an escape from communal Jewish participation or the inevitable social surveillance that accompanied life in a small Jewish community. And, it is clear that women played a significant role in the management and operation of Jewish-­owned plantations and were just as likely to inherit estates as were their brothers and sons. Benjamin Pereira’s will, like those of the Gabay planters, also helps to illustrate that 82 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

Jewish planters were no exception to the rule that large-­scale slave ownership and planting went hand in hand. The Jamaican Jewish Slave Owner An overwhelming majority, two-­thirds of Jewish testators, bequeathed slaves to their beneficiaries. These testators referred to an average of seven slaves per will, but at times included as many as a hundred individuals. The St. Catherine planter Jacob Gutteres, for instance, specified ninety-­six individual slaves by name in his will of 1759.68 In total, Jewish testators named 1,646 individual slaves in their wills. This is remarkably consistent with the 1,540 slaves cumulatively owned by Jews in Kingston and St. Jago de la Vega as reported in tax records of the time.69 Only 17 percent of slave-­owning testators also manumitted them. That is, a mere 146 of the 1,646 slaves mentioned in Jewish wills were manumitted or provided the opportunity for manumission. According to wills, slaves owned by Jews were thus eleven times more likely to be bequeathed than to be manumitted. Testamentary analysis underscores the observation made by one historian that Jewish slave ownership was entirely “lacking in Jewish particularities.”70 Female slaves made up the vast majority of those individuals bequeathed in Jewish wills: 62 percent. Females were commodified in such a way as to make them more valuable inheritance than males.71 This is because slave owners had possession over women’s bodies as well as over their reproductive futures or “increase.” Some colonial officials also perceived enslaved women as easier to control and understood their possession as a way to mitigate the threat of insurrection. In fact, the 1688 Barbadian slave code temporarily limited Jewish slave ownership—for those Jews without patents of denization—to only a single male slave. While this restriction had the clear goal of economically disadvantaging Barbadian Jews, it has also been suggested that The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 83

it was just as much the product of a dual prejudice: the misconception that male slaves were more likely to rebel than women, coupled with the stereotypical notion that Jewish men were less able to discipline them.72 In the West Indies, mastery over slaves—men and women— very much defined the nature of White Creole masculinity.73 Within that context, the Barbadian law code of 1688 suggests the continuity of a European canard of Jewish male effeminacy in an effort to cast the Jews as outsiders in colonial society. While no such law appears to have existed in Jamaica— and the law in Barbados was quickly repealed—it is possible that the sentiment that Jewish men were incapable of managing enslaved African men found fertile ground in Jamaica as well. Enslaved women were also more likely than men to be found among the household labor and as such were more likely to be victims of sexual assault, exploitation, and rape. Women who worked in the fields lived very difficult lives and were often expected to labor until their third trimester, or throughout the full term of their pregnancies. However, they were not the helpless victims of colonial male imagination. Enslaved women took on leadership roles in insurrections as well as participating in other, less quantifiable acts of defiance, such as refusing to serve or sabotage.74 Resistance to slavery often manifested in intangible forms such as refusing to abandon indigenous languages or simply refusing to compromise human dignity. In one case from 1798, though the full circumstances are not entirely clear, a slave court found the woman called Jenny guilty of attempting to poison the seemingly abusive wife of her Jewish owner, Abraham Nunes Henriques, for which she was sentenced to be banished from the island.75 It is certainly attractive to read this case as an act of resistance to enslavement, even though that is far from a definitive conclusion. Despite the deep inequality and violent reality of “industrialized” slave ownership, household slaves often became integrated 84 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

into the Jewish family to some extent. Slaves in Jewish households synchronized with the ritualistic rhythms of Jewish life and the yearly cycle of festivals and fasts. They acquired a familiarity with Jewish dietary laws. And, they sometimes were regarded as extended kin. In one case, the testator Rachel Nunes, a relatively poor woman dependent on Jewish communal welfare, expressed familial affection for the slave children raised in her home in her will of 1792.76 As a gesture of gratitude for the welfare she received from the community, she donated three enslaved children to the regents. She requested that two of those children not be sold or sent off the island after her death because “I regard them having brought them up from their infancy.” While the language in this will is somewhat obscure it suggests that Rachel Nunes was expressing something like an affectionate attachment to the enslaved children raised in her home. What did the violent reality of industrialized slave ownership mean for Jamaica’s Jews and Judaism? By the eighteenth century, Jews already had a long history of slave ownership.77 But, the Jewish slave owners of the colonial Americas—especially in plantation economies like Brazil, Jamaica, Barbados, and Suriname—were forced to harmonize unprecedented industrial slavery with Jewish cultural traditions that were at times somewhat incompatible. One strand of rabbinic tradition, based on a literal reading of Genesis 17:​12, required, for instance, that all male slaves owned by Jews be circumcised upon their purchase.78 Industrialized slavery, whereby large volumes of enslaved people were regularly bought and resold, made this practice impossible. Starting in Brazil in 1649, followed by similar regulations in Amsterdam, London, and Suriname, Portuguese Jewish communal boards across the Atlantic uniformly banned the biblically rooted practice of circumcising slaves upon their purchase.79 Industrialized slavery thus had an impact on the evolution of Jewish law itself in dialogue with the social realities of life in a slave society. The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 85

Despite some twentieth-­ century apologetic arguments claiming that Jews treated their slaves better than non-­Jewish slave owners—a view informed by an anachronistic sense of religious humanitarianism—Jewish slave owners in Jamaica are indistinguishable from their non-­Jewish neighbors.80 Not only did Jamaican Jews not treat their slaves any better than their non-­ Jewish counterparts, there are a few cases of clear interpersonal or excessive abuse.81 The St. Jago de la Vega shopkeeper Moses Levy Alvares, who composed a will in June of 1765, was among the most religiously inclined testators sampled here.82 He bequeathed an enslaved Black woman named Nanny to his “quadroon” daughter Sally for a two-­year period of service. Nanny had been branded on her right shoulder with the initials “MA”— Moses Alvares. He was not the only Jew in eighteenth-­century Jamaica known to have employed the punitive practice of branding slaves. Esther Laguna, Emanuel Baruh Lousada, Aaron Silveira, and Abraham Lopes Torres all branded their initials onto the shoulders of runaway slaves. Jamaican Jews were not unique in this practice. Indeed, the Berakha ve Shalom community in Paramaribo, Suriname, branded their communally owned slaves with the letters BVS.83 Jews published runaway-­slave advertisements with the same frequency as non-­Jews, relative to the size of their population. Advertisements for runaway slaves, accompanied by dehumanizing caricatures, are found in Jamaican newspapers next to notifications of stray horses and mules. Indeed, the Jewish couple Judith and Isaac Gomes Silva published a single advertisement announcing the theft of their sorrel horse along with the escape of an unnamed “yellow skin Eboe wench.”84 The irony of runaway-­slave advertisements is that, despite their inhumane premise, they provide some of the most elaborate descriptions of enslaved people, as told from the perspective of the perpetrators of their enslavement. The slave named Philip, who ran away from the Jewish shopkeeper Aaron Silveira, for 86 / The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70)

instance, was “remarkable for having a large head and eyes, a fiddler by trade, stammers much in his speech, marked AS and is well known in Kingston.”85 The runaway Cuffe, owned by the Ashkenazi Jew Abraham Myers, “speaks good English, and is well known in both towns was dressed in a check shirt, with a white jacket and ruffia drab breeched and wore a white straw hat.”86 A runaway from Joseph Aflalo, Cudjoe, known also as “George Foot,” was described as “pitted with the small-­pox, speaks good English, and limp in one of his feet.”87 Sawney, who escaped from Emanuel Baruh Lousada, was “a stout well made fellow, of a yellowish complexion, about five feet nine . . . with a blemish in one eye; between 30 and 40 years of age, and is marked on one of his shoulders E, bL.”88 At least one late eighteenth-­century commentator singled out the Jews for excessively harsh treatment of their slaves. In 1791, the former slave manager William Fitzmaurice indicted the Jews as particularly exploitive of their slaves in a deposition intended to expose the cruelty of slavery serialized in the Jamaican press.89 Fitzmaurice accused the island’s Jews of regularly renting out slaves so that they could earn enough for their own subsistence, rather than providing them with the necessities of everyday life. Fitzmaurice wrote: “The old negroes belonging to the Jews in particular, which are paid labour . . . provide for themselves in the best manner they can, and I am sorry to say, they often suffer by hunger, as well as from rough treatment, when they are caught on plantations committing thefts which hunger leads them to.” This allegation cannot be taken at face value for its implicit anti-­Jewish sentiment—Jews were not the only slave owners to adopt the inhumane practice of requiring that slaves support themselves from the proceeds of their own rents—but it is an eighteenth-­century sentiment that stands in sharp contrast to the opposite extreme of some twentieth-­century Jewish historiography apologetically seeking to whitewash the brutal reality The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) / 87

of Jewish slave ownership. The clear conclusion is that as slave owners, Jews displayed no distinctiveness from their non-­Jewish counterparts. Conclusion “Plantation Jews” were a minority within a minority, yet they were often indistinguishable from the port-­Jewish “merchants” of Kingston and Port Royal. Some Jews lived in mansion houses on their plantations in rural parishes alongside their enslaved African and Creole workforces. But most Jewish planters, like the Gabays, invested the proceeds of their plantations into urban properties and Jewish communal institutions. They for the most part did not abandon Jewish communal life in order to live in the rural reaches of the island. Thus, Jewish planters in Jamaica were urban dwellers yet also highly invested in the agricultural health of the colony. They were both merchants and planters. These urban-­based planters suggest that Caribbean Jews are overly homogenized when portrayed as communities of traders. Jewish slave ownership on Jamaican plantations—as well as in other plantation societies of the Americas such as Suriname, Barbados, and South Carolina—was perhaps the most prominent feature differentiating them from their brethren in Western Europe. While Jews of England, the Netherlands, and southern France also owned and interacted with African slaves, they did not live within slave societies, and their slaves were largely limited to domestic labor. European interaction with slavery occurred on an individual level. On plantations, Jews came into contact with slave society and creolized African cultures. Plantations were thus the violent crucible where disparate cultures blended to form new forms of hybrid identities. Jewish slave ownership in “plantation Jamaica” thus significantly contributed to the evolution of Jewish Creole identity.

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4 The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a time of great uncertainty for Jamaica’s Jews. Their hopes for full integration, which had shaped the period between 1740 and 1770, disappeared in the decades leading up to emancipation. In 1773, Parliament reversed the favorable conditions of the 1740 Plantation Act, and anti-­Jewish sentiments and incidents in Jamaica were on the rise. Natural and manmade crises, affecting everyone on the island, exacerbated Jewish insecurities. Atlantic trade suffered due to successive conflicts: the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. Jamaica was also visited by a number of hurricanes during the 1780s that took many lives, devastated property, and disrupted trade. Renewed conflict with the island’s Maroons in 1795 gave rise to a pervasive anxiety among White settlers of a Haitian-­style revolution occurring in Jamaica. The uncertainty of the times brought into sharper relief the confusion about the place of Jews in Jamaica’s racialized social hierarchy. As colonial lawmakers made efforts to reinforce White social superiority on the island in the wake of Tacky’s War, the insurmountable divide between White and Black highlighted Jewish difference. In Jamaican print culture, a contradictory characterization of Jews emerged whereby they were depicted as both White and Black, valuable traders and corrupt usurers, a religious curiosity and a confessional scourge. And, in the shadow of the imperial struggle between France and Great Britain, Jamaica’s Jews were seen as a fifth column. 89

The Ambiguous Place of Jews in Jamaica’s Racialized Social Hierarchy Partially as a result of the calamitous response to Tacky’s War in 1760, “Jamaica had effectively turned itself into a color-­ conscious society where caste overruled class.”1 As White racial belonging became more heavily legislated, Jewish social status on the island became increasingly unclear. In a society where White planters ruled at the top and African slaves languished at the bottom, Jews and free people of color were often lumped together in the gray area in between, although Jews were of European origin.2 Jewish status on the island was precarious because they were neither White nor Black, neither enslaved nor entirely free.3 The inability to clearly taxonomize Jews within a racial hierarchy troubled many White inhabitants. White Jamaicans expressed fear that Jews conspired with slaves at Sunday markets, sold gunpowder to Maroons, and colluded with the insurrectionists during Tacky’s War. While in truth Jews had little in common with slaves or Maroons, Jews and free people of color held many shared interests. They were lumped together in discriminatory legislation such as the Act of 1711 that precluded them both from participation in civil society. They were both urban dwellers in an island with a largely rural population. Both groups tended to live in larger family units than White settlers.4 And, after emancipation, Jews and free people of color formed a cohesive voting bloc against White planters.5 Jewish shared interests and experiences with free people of color helped to confuse their place in society as conceived by White writers and lawmakers. But, from the perspective of Black slaves there was no difference between a White master and a Jewish master; they were both equally the agents of their oppression. Nevertheless, in some colonial depictions of Jews there persisted a medieval anti-­Jewish trope describing Jews as 90 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

Black or “mulatto.” During the debates over Jewish voting rights in 1750, for instance, anti-­Jewish petitioners from Kingston drew clear parallels between Jews and people of color and went so far as to argue that many Jews were themselves mulattoes.6 Another example is found in the ethnography of J. B. Moreton, an English bookkeeper who sojourned in Jamaica during the late 1780s.7 Moreton was particularly hostile toward Jews. When describing the “curiously ill-­looking tawny features” of Jews, he illustrated Jewish complexion with a story of how, when sailing from Charleston to Jamaica, he happened upon a lost letter supposedly written by a Jew to another Jew.8 He claimed to have translated the letter containing a poem with a great many anti-­Jewish motifs. Among the various other Judeophobic features of the poem was a clear perception of Jews as being of color. The fictitious Jewish passenger wrote: My hair they compared to that of a hog, Or the wool of a goat, or the beard of a dog; And said that my mother, when pregnant of me, Was fond of dry’d pork to a longing degree; Which cruel aspersion they only suppose, Because there’s a mark of pig on my nose; I’m deem’d a Mulatto, a cheat, and a knave, And threat’n’d to be sold for an African slave! The ambiguity over the Jewish place in the racialized hierarchy of colonial Jamaican society was not always expressed so bluntly. The chronicler Bryan Edwards, for instance, attempted to package Jamaican society into neatly defined castes in his 1794 history of Jamaica. According to Edwards, Jamaican society consisted of four distinct groups: European Whites, Creole Whites, “Creoles of mixed blood” (that is, people of color), and Blacks.9 Since Edwards had earlier, and erroneously, claimed

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that Jews enjoyed all the same privileges as Whites—with the exception, he admitted, of voting—he found it prudent to “pass them by” rather than attempt to make sense of their place in Creole society. Jews thus complicated eighteenth-­century colonial obsession with social taxonomy. Edwards’s characterization of Jews as White stands in sharp contrast to a comment made by Maria Nugent, the governor’s wife, in 1803. She remarked that in the St. Jago de la Vega theater “the audience were of all colours and descriptions; blacks, browns, Jews, and whites.”10 Unlike Edwards, Maria Nugent clearly did not perceive Jews as White. It is indeed curious why Edwards chose to cluster Jews together with Whites. While in terms of complexion Jews may have had more in common with Whites, socially Jews had far more in common with free people of color. However, sentiments like Edwards’s suggest that by virtue of their lighter complexion, Jews enjoyed a more privileged position in pre-­emancipation Jamaica than free people of color. This perception has even been perpetuated in some modern-­day scholarship. One researcher wrote: “some Jews, perhaps, were in a special position. Like the free coloured they still lacked full citizen rights, but as white people, and men of considerable property, enjoyed a higher social prestige.”11 In reality, Jewish otherness was so conspicuous in late eighteenth-­century Jamaica that it overshadowed any “special privilege” they may have had as “White.” In some cases—such as in Edward Long’s telling of the Jewish guard’s dialogue with the imprisoned slave during Tacky’s War—even the enslaved found it possible to mock Jewish difference. When Maria Nugent, for example, accompanied her husband, the governor, on his routine supervision of the militia in St. Jago de la Vega, she recalled how “it was ridiculous to hear the negroes, who were spectators, laugh at the Jew company when it fired, which it did very ­badly—‘Now Massa Jew! Dat right! dat well, Massa Jew!’ ”12 92 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

Even enslaved Blacks, those most oppressed in Jamaica’s racial hierarchy, felt empowered to mock Jewish difference in the presence of a sitting governor. Jews clearly did have a more privileged position in Jamaican society than these men since, despite their social disabilities, Jews could not be owned. But anecdotes like these demonstrate that there is little to be gained by attempting to assess which disenfranchised group—Blacks, people of color, or Jews—was more oppressed or more privileged within a systemically oppressive and racialized system of difference. In the four decades leading up to emancipation, rather than transcending their otherness, Jews became even more entrenched in it. The Jewish place in Jamaican society in the decades leading up to emancipation can only be described as highly ambiguous. That deep ambiguity was given lasting expression in Edward Long’s chronicle The History of Jamaica. Edward Long’s Jews Edward Long (1734–1813) was born to a family of Jamaican planters and spent his formative years in England. He was an avid collector of manuscripts and is the most cited eighteenth-­ century commentator on Jamaican society. He viewed Creole society—both White and Black—critically through English eyes, refracted through a dogmatically antireligious Enlightenment. His three-­volume History of Jamaica, published in 1774, was the result of his travels throughout the island between 1757 and 1769. He described the places, peoples, and production of the island, and used his History as a platform to promote his vision for the amelioration of what he saw as the debasement of White Creole society. Long flirted with the radical theory of “polygenesis,” the antireligious position that not all humans descended from the same ancestors, espoused in the eighteenth century by writers such as Voltaire and Hume.13 This pseudoscientific belief in racial The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 93

fixity, whereby Africans are an entirely different, and decidedly inferior, species from Europeans, was nothing more than a convenient, if intellectually tortured, justification for slavery. To be sure, polygenesis was a highly unpopular belief in the eighteenth century. It contradicted the creation story told in Genesis, and it ignored certain beliefs, long held from classical antiquity, whereby human phenotypical differences are by-products of climatic variation or postalluvial realities described in the Bible. Through promoting racial taxonomies and categories of predetermined difference, Long saw himself as the savior of an overly blended Creole society. He believed the greatest threat to the survival of White settlement in Jamaica came from the insurrections of African-­born slaves—whom he referred to by the Creole word Coromantees. He criticized the sexual liaisons between White men and women of color—what he called “rioting in the goatish embrace”—that in his view led to an inevitable atavism. According to Long, by recognizing racial fixity and promoting White racial superiority, Creole society could lift itself out of its harmful association with people of color. It is within this distinct worldview that Long caricatured Jamaica’s Jews. Like people of color, Jews in Long’s History are essentialized stereotypes defined by preestablished racial categories rather than empirical renderings. He categorized Jews as “White” yet exploited their otherness when it suited his purpose. Long had two distinct and somewhat contradictory uses for the Jews in his larger narrative. On the one hand, Jews served as living embodiments of Jamaica’s enlightened religious tolerance, celebrated by Long, and therefore fit seamlessly into Jamaican society.14 On the other hand, his essentialized characterizations of Jews, some quite hostile, only served to reinforce their difference. His descriptions of Jews reflect the same sense of racial fixity that permeated the rest of his History, and while they are too extensive to ignore, they are too stereotyped to take seriously. 94 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

Long’s first discussion of Jews joins his description of St. Jago de la Vega. He described the town’s Jewish burial ground and synagogue, where Jews “observe most of their antient feasts and fasts; and marry, circumcise, and bury, according to the customs of their fore-­fathers.”15 Jews had their own abattoirs in the town where they “slaughter and dissect in the Mosaic manner.”16 In their shops—in what was known as the “Jew-­Market”—they sold salt-­butter, herring, beef, cheese, and oil: “a congregation of stinking commodities, which is enough to poison the air of their habitations . . . scented at a great distance . . . with these abominable odours.”17 In contrast to the Jamaican White Creoles, Long complimented the temperance of the Jews who only drank pure water: “a drunken Jew is rarely seen.”18 He attributed Jewish salubriousness, longevity, and fertility to their fondness for eating garlic, chocolate, fish, their abstinence from alcohol, along with their “adherence to Mosaic ritual [and] . . . their religious purifications.” Jewish alcohol consumption and production was a common motif in non-­Jewish ethnographies as well as Jewish self-­descriptions throughout the colonial Americas.19 But, while Long praised Jewish temperance, he also accused the Jews of producing a dangerous moonshine, “new rum,” seemingly so as to evade the high tariffs on liquor.20 They then sold this dangerously inexpensive beverage to the poorest and most vulnerable militiamen who, despite its burning sensation, would consume large amounts sometimes to the point of death. Long’s portrayal of the Jews is often highly contradictory. Acknowledging that Jews faced unfair discrimination in Jamaica, Long placed the blame for those disabilities at the feet of the victims: “it must be owned, that the rascally tricks, for which both antient and modern Jews have always been distinguished, may have served not a little to embitter the popular hatred against them.”21 Still, Long dismissed the early attempts to curb Jewish trade around the time of the earthquake as “whimsical,” motivated only by what he saw as a false belief that Jews killed The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 95

Christ. He portrayed the Jewish tax as irrational, subject to the whim of whatever Assembly sat at the time. Yet, he also accused the Jews of resorting to bribery in order to secure the limited rights they did have by spuriously claiming that Jews would present every new governor with a bribe, sometimes baked into a tart. In the same breath he added that “it must be acknowledged . . . that these people have shewn themselves very good and useful subjects upon many occasions” and praised their contribution to the Jamaican trade economy.22 At certain points Long’s descriptions border on ethnographic by awkwardly describing the differences between Portuguese and Ashkenazi Jews. He referred to the Portuguese Jews in Jamaica as Smous, a Creole word for Sephardim.23 Long perpetuated a widely held—and completely false—belief among non-­Jews throughout the colonial Americas that Portuguese Jews were not as religiously observant as German Jews as a result of the converso experience, whereby their “pure Israelitish blood” had become polluted with the “corrupt streams of the Gentiles.”24 Furthermore, Long asserted that Jews in Jamaica in general—including the Ashkenazim—were less observant than their European counterparts, congratulating them for regularly violating dietary restrictions. The pork of the West Indies was so delectable that according to Long, “if Moses had ever tasted it he certainly would not have been so unkind towards his followers as to include it in his catalogue of non-­eatables.”25 Long concluded his ambiguous descriptions of the Jews with rather clear hostility. He suggested that while the leaders among the Jews ought to be respected for their good conduct and their economic value, these respectable Jews stand apart from “the vices and villainies of the lower rabble.” In describing the Jews of St. Jago de la Vega, he wrote: “some of them are good men, and do many benevolent actions to Gentiles as well as their own fraternity; but much the greater part of them (I fear) are very

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selfish and tricking, fraudulent in their trade, and rigid in their transactions, not only with Christians, but with one another.”26 Long goes on to provide some examples of the worst forms of Jewish “trickery,” especially as the principal perpetrators behind the very real Jamaican problem of coin clipping (debasing currency), writing that the Jewish “fondness for this craft in all ages is remarkable.”27 In this regard, Long may even have transcended popular hostilities against the Jews. In February of 1771, planters and merchants gathered at Harmony Hall in Kingston to debate the critical issue of coin clipping. They proposed to the Assembly harsher penalties for currency manipulators and rewards for those who brought forth information.28 But in this landmark meeting, unlike in Long’s History, the issue of Jewish coin clipping never came up. Long’s caricature of the Jews cannot be disentangled from his greater worldview. Like the conduct of the enslaved and free people of color, Jewish conduct was predetermined by their racial difference. Their strange ritual practices and interethnic divisions served to underline their complete otherness, implying that full Jewish integration into colonial society would be an impossible achievement. While fluid policies might change to help include the Jews, the Jewish character itself was fixed. Moreover, these ambiguous perceptions were not limited to Edward Long but circulated widely throughout late eighteenth-­century Jamaican print culture. These were not empty sentiments or literary abstractions. Printed anti-­Jewish stereotypes accompanied a rise in anti-­Jewish incidents in the late eighteenth century. The Erosion of Jewish Social Status and Security Jews and Judaism were regular curiosities in the pages of the Kingston monthly moral journal The Columbian Magazine

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or Monthly Miscellany. The journal was even delivered to subscribers by the Ashkenazi Jew Elias Levy.29 Every month the Columbian Magazine featured at least one article related to Jews. These articles were widely diverse, ranging from news items and histories to religious polemics. Among these pseudonymous articles and editorials were, for example, a discussion of how Afghans “descended from Jews,”30 references to the Jews of Cochin in India,31 a news report of a Jew who “openly renounced his faith,”32 a biography of the Jamaican ḥakham Joshua Hezekiah Decordova,33 and a short history of the Jews in England.34 Jews also published pieces both as individuals and as a community in the Columbian Magazine.35 The most flagrantly essentializing piece about Jews in the Columbian Magazine was titled “Curious Particulars Relative to the Jews,” a pseudo-­Philosemitic “polemical ethnography” of Jewish practice, probably modeled after similar works of German and English Hebraists.36 The anonymous non-­Jewish author described—with several bizarrely incoherent transcriptions of Hebrew phrases—Jewish marriage and conjugal practices, bar mitzvah rites, holidays, superstitions, cosmological beliefs, and dietary habits. Like so many other early modern Hebraist ethnographers, the author portrayed Jews as credulous and backwards: “There is nothing, however ridiculous, but what this persecuted nation will believe from the writtings of their rabbins.” These ethnographic depictions of Jewish ritual practice, social structures, and dogmas were not motivated by benign curiosity, but rather were intended to highlight Jewish strangeness. The author made the point that Jews are not only completely exotic in their practice but that that exoticism makes them unapologetically unsympathetic toward non-­Jews, which ultimately informs their belief in a vengeful redemption: “They believe, that the resurrection, which is the basis of their principles, will not be general. Gentiles and Christians are to be excluded; as they are classed with beasts, and not with men!!!” 98 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

The real-­world impact this type of literary stereotyping had in Jamaica was quite profound. These sentiments found a receptive audience among those looking for a “scientific” basis upon which to predicate their preexisting prejudices. One reader lauded the piece in a letter to editors that was appended to the ethnographic polemic. The subscriber expressed his or her delight in learning about Jewish “adherence to minutia in every rule prescribed.” But, in a classic expression of Replacement Theology—God’s election of Christians over Jews—the Jews’ continued adherence to Talmudic particularities only served to incriminate them: Jews “deserve the name of infidels and are unworthy of credit or notice.” These hostile, highly essentialized descriptions of the Jews abounded in late eighteenth-­century Jamaica. J. B. Moreton’s ethnography of Jamaica was a virtual encyclopedia of anti-­ Jewish slurs. He referred to Jamaica’s Jews variously as “a numerous tricking tribe,” “Christ-­killing dogs,” “foreskin-­clipped scoundrels,” and “a vile race,” and accused them of encouraging their children to influence Christians toward heresy as well as to regularly debase currency.37 Like Long and other English commentators, Moreton was critical of White Jamaican Creole culture. One of the most unacceptable features of Creole society, as he saw it, was an overly generous inclusion of Jews. Moreton lamented that Jews “are suffered to give evidence among Christians, which I think is a dangerous system, as it is well known they pay no regard to the Christian faith.”38 Moreton’s concerns were highly misplaced in more ways than one. In reality, Jewish social status in Jamaica was then in the process of severe regression. Jews in Jamaica experienced the most violent opposition to their presence on the island on Yom Kippur of 1783. Around the time of kol nidre (the opening services of Yom Kippur) an inebriated mob assembled outside of the Princess Street synagogue in Kingston to threaten and intimidate the Jews assembled The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 99

within.39 Peace officers succeeded in disbanding the mob, but not before one of the would-­be attackers yelled “Fire!,” effectively disrupting prayers. This was a terrifying event for Jamaican Jews, who were probably aware that less than fifty years earlier, in 1739, in a related incident, the synagogue of Speightstown in Barbados had been destroyed.40 Other events during this period highlight the precariousness of Jewish social status on the island. The Jewish solicitor, soldier, author, and adventurer Joshua Montefiore (1762–1843)— the uncle of Moses Montefiore—arrived on the island to practice law in 1787.41 While he had been admitted to the King’s Bench as a solicitor and notary public in England, his attempt to practice as an attorney in Jamaica was brought to court by sixty local non-­Jewish attorneys “stating him to be a Jew, and consequently incapable of acting as an Attorney.”42 After hearing testimony from Jewish witnesses who testified that Jews practiced law in England, the opposing attorneys went so far as to accuse Montefiore of crossing out the word “Christ” on his credentials. In the end, the court sided with the sixty attorneys, effectively rejecting the English precedent allowing Jews to practice as solicitors. The Montefiore case highlights the differences between metropolitan and colonial Jewish social status. In England, Jews had been effectively prevented from practicing law by virtue of having to take a Christian oath (until 1770). In Jamaica, they were explicitly prevented from practicing law by the 1711 Act of Assembly. Thus, Jamaica was, in more ways than one, more restrictive toward Jews than the Metropole. These anti-­Jewish sentiments and incidents severely damaged the Jewish demographic presence in late eighteenth-­century Jamaica. The Jewish population of Kingston, which had earlier experienced a population explosion, is thought to have declined by as much as 15 percent between 1769 and 1795.43 The Jewish population of St. Jago de la Vega likewise may have diminished by as much as half between 1772 and 1820. During the 100 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

1780s, a number of Jewish groups abandoned Jamaica for North American settlements.44 Although Kingston’s Jewish population eventually recovered following emancipation, that of St. Jago de la Vega never did. This population dip was the result of growing anti-­Jewish hostilities, along with a series of other political crises affecting the entirety of the Jamaican population. Jews, like all other Jamaicans, suffered from the disruption in trade during the American Revolution. At the time, a war for independence seemed just as likely in Jamaica as in North America.45 Tensions between the Assembly and governor had nearly brought the colony to the brink of war with Great Britain in 1764.46 On the heels of the American Revolution came successive hurricanes during the 1780s that devastated the island’s agriculture and commerce. The Kingston trader David Pereira Mendes expressed the hardships caused by the hurricanes when he wrote to Aaron Lopez, the famous former converso merchant of Newport, in 1781: “we [ Jamaicans] suffer much by a total stagnation of trade . . . [and since God’s] Providence has been pleased to inflict us with . . . two severe storms in the space of ten months . . . we are [now] threaten’d with a famine.”47 The most devastated areas were the west-­coast settlements of Lucea, Montego Bay, and Savanna-­la-­Mar, each with a small Jewish population. In October of 1780, four Jews were reported dead in Montego Bay among the more than 300 other casualties of the most recent hurricane.48 Savanna-­la-­Mar in the parish of Westmorland was perhaps the most devastated of all the towns with a Jewish population. Savanna-­la-­Mar had earlier attracted a small community of stalwart Jewish planters and traders. By 1759, these intrepid Jews had dedicated a cemetery and held regular prayer meetings, probably in a house, to which a number of testators made donations as a “synagogue.”49 The most prominent Jewish resident of the town, the sugar planter Abraham Lopes Parra, likely The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 101

died as a direct result of the hurricanes in May of 1782.50 The sugar produced on his estate brought him a tremendous fortune that he used to support the Jewish community of the town. Unlike most Jamaican Jewish planters, Parra actually resided on his large sugar estate in his mansion called “Top House.” But, life in the remote parish was difficult for a man with five unmarried daughters. He supported them with rum and muscovado, slave attendants, and monetary assets in excess of a thousand pounds each. He also manumitted a woman named Ruth, with the added requests that a house be built for her and that she be given possession of her choice of slaves. The combination of war, hurricanes, and rising anti-­Jewish hostility led to a dwindling population of Jews, who likely held a bleak outlook toward the future in the decades leading up to emancipation. Despite these serious setbacks, late eighteenth-­ century Jamaican Jews did have at least one saving grace: they benefited from a period of strong and consistent rabbinic leadership. The presence of Rabbi Joshua Hezekiah Decordova in Jamaica during these years brought a sense of security and continuity to what were otherwise uncertain times. Jamaica’s “Principal Rabbi,” Joshua Hezekiah Decordova Decordova, whom Edward Long referred to as the “Principal Rabbi” of Jamaica, was the longest-­serving eighteenth-­century Caribbean rabbi in a single location.51 Before Decordova’s arrival on the island in 1755, Jamaican Jews appear to have been without an Amsterdam-­trained ḥakham for over seventy years since the death of Josiah Pardo in 1684. However, the community did not lack religious leadership during that time. A number of religious functionaries—usually referred to as “readers” or “reverends”— filled the vacuum of rabbinic authority. The planter and “Reverend Haham” Moses Cohen Delara 102 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

served as one of the ritual leaders of the Kingston community for over three decades starting in 1713.52 He was possibly related to the Cohen Delara rabbinic family of Hamburg and Amsterdam. A resident of Kingston, where he was endenizened in 1726, he owned and operated plantations in both St. James and St. Johns Parishes and referred to no fewer than thirty-­three individual slaves in his 1749 will.53 He died at age fifty-­eight in October of 1748, the father of six unmarried children, all born in Jamaica.54 Another “reader” in Kingston’s Jewish community was the ḥazan “RevD” Samuel Gomes Silva, who took up the mantle of religious leadership during the fourteen years between the death of Cohen Delara and his own death in 1762.55 His Hebrew epitaph memorialized him with the formulaic biblical phrase “pleasant singer of Israel” (na‘im zemirot yisrael ), and an accompanying Portuguese poem alludes to his devotion to God with “sweet prayer and harmony.” Among the many material objects bequeathed to his beneficiaries in his 1762 will—including a gold needle case, a gold box inlaid with mother of pearl, a silver snuff box, a gold ring with a sapphire, and silver buckles— was an ornamented megillah scroll (Scroll of Esther traditionally read on Purim) with a silver handle.56 Cohen Delara and Gomes Silva of Kingston were assisted by a number of other cantors, readers, learned men, and unordained functionaries. According to a 1751 tombstone, “The Rev. Haham Jacob de la Penha . . . exercised the office of Hazan for 17 years [1734–51]” until his death at age thirty-­eight.57 Delapenha was from London and had been naturalized in Jamaica as a result of the Plantation Act, where he owned a small retail shop in Kingston.58 The St. Jago de la Vega community, Neve Shalom, similarly employed their own ḥazan, David Shalom de Azevedo, until his death in 1745. His Hebrew epitaph also includes the formulaic attribution “pleasant singer of Israel.”59 Indeed, Jamaica may even have produced a surfeit of religious functionaries by midcentury and outsourced them to smaller communities. The The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 103

teacher and ḥazan Aaron Salom, for instance, who apparently had officiated in Jamaican frontier towns, applied for a position in New York in 1760.60 In 1755, Jamaica’s rabbinic leadership was consolidated under the authority of the ‘Eẓ Ḥayim Academy–­trained ḥakham Joshua Hezekiah Decordova (1720–1797). He supervised the Jamaican Jewish rabbinate for forty-­two years. Like Josiah Pardo before him, Decordova was born in Amsterdam and hailed from a family of exiled Spanish Jews who had settled in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century.61 The Decordovas were a family of printers who first settled in Western Europe during the 1640s. Joshua’s father, Abraham ben Jacob Decordova, worked as a printer for his London-­based brother, representing the family interests in Amsterdam. Furthermore, Joshua Hezekiah Decordova, his children, and his larger family network left a profound legacy in Jamaica. The ḥakham’s grandnephews Joshua and Jacob Decordova founded The Gleaner in 1834; to this day it is still the most widely circulated Jamaican daily newspaper.62 Other relatives of the ḥakham during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became major participants in the Jamaican theater as both actors and producers.63 While studying at ‘Eẓ Ḥayim under the tutelage of R. Abraham Dacosta Abendana—contributor to the pri eẓ ḥayim (Fruit of the Tree of Life) collection of rabbinic responsa and author of a Bible commentary—Decordova began to flirt with the intellectual currents of the European Enlightenment.64 He was a protégé of the Jewish philosophe and controversial economist Isaac de Pinto, the author of a defensive correspondence with Voltaire in 1762, and a staunch opponent of the American Revolution.65 Decordova was a frequent visitor to De Pinto’s library, where he read the classics in the original Greek and Latin and conversed with “the enlightened dead.”66 De Pinto’s house was a “chief resort of the literati of the [Dutch] Republic, as well as all other foreigners . . . of taste and genius. . . . In short, here it 104 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

was that he [Decordova] laid the foundation . . . of those literary and scientific acquirements, which in his future life, rendered him so conspicuous.”67 Decordova moved to Curaçao in November of 1748 to assist the irascible ḥakham Samuel Mendes de Sola.68 In Curaçao, he taught the Bible along with medieval commentaries, offered Talmud instruction to advanced pupils, supervised the youth during synagogue services, moderated public discourse, and delivered eulogies and sermons. He earned a stipend from communal funds and supplemented his salary with a number of private business endeavors. He also became embroiled in the community’s intractable schisms and delivered controversial sermons.69 The Jamaican Mahamad actively courted Decordova in 1755.70 Among his contributions to Jewish life in Jamaica were his attempts to ensure the quality of kosher meat imported from New York.71 Decordova’s tombstone epitaph refers to him as a judge (dayan), suggesting that he officiated in the rabbinic council (beit din) that ruled on questions of Jewish law and internally Jewish disputes.72 In that role he could recommend that the Mahamad censure community members with various forms of fines or excommunication without the intervention of the London or Amsterdam rabbinic establishment or lay leadership. This was a critically important step toward asserting the religious autonomy of the community. Only four years before Decordova’s arrival in Jamaica, the community had sent an offending member, Isaac Henriques Furtado (whose offense is not entirely clear), to London to be disciplined by the beit din there.73 Decordova died in October of 1797, at age seventy-­seven, and was interred in the Jewish cemetery in St. Jago de la Vega. Immediately after his death, his assistant, “Reverend” Yeḥiel Lopes, took up the mantle of centralized rabbinic leadership in St. Jago de la Vega.74 In addition to Lopes, Decordova had a great deal of support in the everyday functioning of the Jewish communities of the towns he oversaw. The “cryer” David Torres helped to The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 105

facilitate synagogue routines in Kingston.75 The Ashkenazi performer, singer, and ḥazan Michael Leoni (Meyer Lyon, d. 1796) came to Jamaica in the 1780s at the height of Decordova’s influence and became a “principal reader” in the Portuguese community in Kingston.76 Already a famous singer, Leoni likely chose Jamaica to take part in the island’s blossoming theater culture.77 Leoni was remembered on his tombstone in English as “one of the first singers of the age.”78 Details of Decordova’s life in Jamaica come to us from a biography published immediately after his death in the Columbian Magazine. The author of the anonymous obituary has been identified as Isaac Dias Fernandes, an erudite Jewish resident of Kingston with strong familial ties to London.79 Although Fernandes’s biography borders on hostility—the author perhaps perpetuating some conflict with the ḥakham—it serves as our only witness to Decordova’s character and temperament. The veracity of its content must, therefore, be measured against the biographer’s clear dislike for his subject. Fernandes described Decordova as physically “much below the middle size, [and] inclined to corpulency, particularly as he advanced in years. His person was however venerable; but his eyes, far from being lively and piercing, were dull and void of animation.” Fernandes praised Decordova for his “uncommon degree of temperance both in eating and drinking,” yet he seems also to have frequently been in poor health, which Fernandes attributed to “too great an unremitted application to his studies; for few men ever led a more sedentary life.” Fernandes is most critical of Decordova’s aptitude as a preacher and, more important, as a conversationalist, writing that Decordova was celebrated for [his] general knowledge and brilliancy . . . [more] than for his courtly manners, pleasing address, affability and hospitality . . . his conversation, on common topics from his not having mixed much with the world, was 106 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

rather dry, unentertaining, and . . . oftentimes bordered on puerility . . . his wit was oftener borrowed than genuine; and his satire, if genuine, was certainly of a nature by no means delicate . . . as to his eloquence . . . he was, to say the truth in this point much below mediocrity . . . nor was his voice agreeable . . . his gestures awkward and graceless . . . but his arguments and reasonings orthodox, forcible, and learned.80 Decordova’s forty-­two years in Jamaica were his most prolific, producing at least three major works. In Hebrew he wrote what he described as “an epic poem in imitation of Job.”81 According to Fernandes, this poem “abounds with learning and illustration, were it published, I will venture to say it would acquire him more fame amongst the learned . . . than the rest of his writings put together.”82 Decordova also published a forty-­two-­ page Hebrew polemic against “heretics and Christians” entitled ẓafnat pa‘aneaḥ, the name given to Joseph by Pharaoh (Genesis 41:​45), written in Hebrew with a parallel French translation.83 His most enduring work, Reason and Faith, a rabbinic counter-­ Enlightenment treatise, was first printed in Kingston in 1788. Reason and Faith was meant, according to its Hebrew subtitle, to explain how to refute heretics, but it also was dedicated to the principle of universal revelation and to promoting a Jewish-­ centric view of history.84 Reason and Faith enjoyed a wide circulation throughout the Americas, reprinted in Philadelphia (1791) and in Richmond (1804) by non-­Jewish printers, seemingly for Christian audiences.85 As indicated in the book’s subtitle, Decordova’s discussion of the universality of revelation in his closing chapters contributed to the volume’s wide appeal among Christian as well as Jewish readers. The book was the product of a vibrant intellectual culture among the Jewish community of late eighteenth-­century Jamaica. It was written in order to promote “the happiness of The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 107

a youth” whom Decordova worried may become corrupted by the deistic trends of the European Enlightenment, or “perverted by . . . modern philosophers, who destroy all principles of faith and virtue.”86 More important, thirty-­three Jewish Jamaican subscribers (and one from Curaçao) financed its publication.87 Through their subscriptions, these individuals were actively engaging in the major philosophical currents of the time.88 The Parallel Lives of Decordova and John Lindsay Decordova was not the only intellectually productive religious figure on the island during the late eighteenth century. His tenure overlapped with that of the chief minister of the Anglican Church in Jamaica, John Lindsay (1729–1788). The Scottish priest arrived in Jamaica in 1759, four years after Decordova. By 1773, he had become the Rector of St. Catherine, a position similar to Decordova’s, based in St. Jago de la Vega, from where he asserted religious influence over the entire island.89 Lindsay held this office until his death in 1788, nine years before the death of his Jewish counterpart. In more ways than one, Decordova and Lindsay had parallel lives and careers, yet with some critical theological and intellectual differences. Both Decordova and Lindsay were ordained in Europe to serve a Creole population of planters and merchants. Their religious authority derived from the Metropole: the Bishop of London and the ‘Eẓ Ḥayim Academy, respectively. They used their pulpits in similar ways. They both, for instance, seized upon natural disasters as occasions to preach repentance to their community by brandishing God’s divine vengeance. In 1760, Lindsay used the occasion of the annual fast of June 7, in commemoration of the Port Royal earthquake, to criticize his parishioners for their insufficient piety.90 Decordova did the

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same on the occasion of an earthquake in October of 1766, as he had done earlier in Curaçao.91 Decordova and Lindsay were both deeply influenced by the Enlightenment. Lindsay had been exposed to the trends of the Scottish Enlightenment while at university in Edinburgh, and Decordova had encountered both the radical and the religious Enlightenment in the Amsterdam library of Isaac de Pinto. Perhaps related to their exposure to the Enlightenment, they both embraced an unorthodox flexibility in their willingness to accept allegorical interpretations of the Bible. It is likely that Lindsay had his counterpart in mind when he wrote that he had conversed with “many a sensible Jew” in defending his allegorical interpretations of Genesis.92 Lindsay went much further than Decordova in his metaphorical readings of the Bible, which sometimes bordered on heresy. Whereas Decordova utilized the language of the Enlightenment and allegorical exegesis—rooted primarily in medieval Maimonidean precedents—in order to bolster a commitment to revealed religion, Lindsay challenged some of the most fundamental principles of revelation. Lindsay’s first commitment was to defend the institution of slavery rather than the sanctity of the Bible.93 In his promotion of a theory of radical polygenesis, meant to justify the enslavement of Africans, he went to great lengths to read against the grain of biblical cosmology, in order to claim that humans have a variety of progenitors. No biblical justifications were needed for either man in embracing the realities of life in Jamaican slave society. Both Decordova and Lindsay were slave owners. Lindsay has been described as a “proslavery priest” and his estate included twenty-­ six slaves at the time of his death.94 Decordova published at least one runaway-­slave advertisement and held a patent for 300 acres of land in St. Thomas Parish, upon which he enslaved African laborers.95 Yet, their intellectual approaches to the enslavement

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of Africans differed in some extreme ways. Decordova never directly mentioned African slavery in his writings. In Reason and Faith, he equated the Akan “Coromantee” civilization with savagery.96 However, this characterization belongs to his general worldview of Jewish cultural supremacy, according to which even the Athenians were comparatively barbaric.97 Unlike Lindsay, Decordova made no distinction between humans when discussing the difference between “brutes” and “men.”98 Indeed, a polygenesis approach to human difference would have undermined Decordova’s underlying commitment to the principle of universal revelation. He wrote: “God is neither Briton, Frank, Hebrew, Turk, or Indian . . . he has created all men, and is willing to save them all.”99 Whereas Lindsay emphasized the extreme differences among humans, Decordova celebrated humanity’s shared destiny under the canopy of God’s universal salvation. It is no surprise that both Jamaican clerics actively addressed issues of human difference. They lived within a system of extreme racial division and at a time, in the late eighteenth century, when their society’s racial hierarchies were becoming even more radicalized. As we have seen, it was during this time that White observers were struggling to make sense of the Jews’ place within that racial hierarchy. But it was also during this time that the Jews themselves were wrestling to define their own internal differences between Portuguese and German. Ashkenazim in Late Eighteenth-­Century Jamaica Ashkenazim—Yiddish-­speaking Jews from German lands and Poland—followed close on the heels of the Portuguese to the Americas. By 1720, they made up the majority of Jews in North America, and they comprised nearly half of the Jewish populations of Dutch Suriname and St. Eustatius by the second half 110 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

of the eighteenth century.100 But, Ashkenazim were an extreme minority among the Jews of eighteenth-­century Jamaica. Of the 450 Jewish testators sampled here, only twenty-­five can be identified as Ashkenazim, 5.5 percent. Whereas the Ashkenazim of Suriname had already established their own autonomous community by 1734, it took the Ashkenazim in Jamaica more than half a century longer to do the same. Perhaps because of their extreme minority, the Ashkenazi relationship with Portuguese Jews in Jamaica was more cooperative than contentious.101 Ashkenazi testators frequently appointed established Portuguese Jews as guardians to their children and executors of their estates. They supported local Portuguese institutions and synagogues alongside Ashkenazi ones in Europe. In 1761, Nathan Abrahams, for instance, bequeathed money to the Ashkenazi synagogue in Altona as well as to the Portuguese synagogue of St. Jago de la Vega.102 Despite sustained commitments to Ashkenazi communities abroad, at least six other Ashkenazi testators bequeathed a portion of their estates to Portuguese synagogues, emblematic of their deep integration into the Jewish majority before the establishment of their own communities in the 1780s. Additionally, Ashkenazi religious functionaries like the ḥazan Michael Leoni served the Portuguese community in Kingston and led prayer services in the Portuguese rite. Ashkenazim were buried in Jamaica alongside their Portuguese neighbors throughout the colonial period, seemingly without any distinction in burial placement and without the use of the Spanish epithet tudesco—a derisive reference to German descent. In 1787, Ashkenazim established their own burial ground in Kingston.103 That same year, Kingston’s Ashkenazim incorporated as Shangare Yosher, or the “English and German” congregation.104 The split was likely motivated by a desire to pray in their own rite and also reflected an effort to raise internal tax revenue for their own social welfare needs. By 1790, The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 111

Kingston’s “English and German” community erected a synagogue on Orange Street, two streets away from the Portuguese synagogue on Princess Street. Testators variously referred to this structure as the “New Synagogue” or the “Dutch” synagogue.105 This structure stood on Orange Street for nearly a century until it was destroyed by the 1882 Kingston fire. In 1790, a second Ashkenazi community incorporated in St. Jago de la Vega called K[ehilah] K[edushah] Mikveh Yisrael. Efforts to erect a synagogue in the town soon followed, spearheaded by the Adolphus family, longtime residents of St. Catherine. The patriarch, Joseph Adolphus, was a planter who owned 1,000 acres of land in St. Thomas in the Vale.106 One of Joseph’s younger sons, Moses, bequeathed a subsidy to build a synagogue in the town.107 That bequest appears to have been the catalyst behind the start of synagogue construction in 1795. In 1802, Moses’s grandson bequeathed a Torah scroll and ornaments to his children that were then in use in the St. Jago de la Vega Ashkenazi synagogue.108 The synagogue remained in use until its demolition in 1895 due to low membership.109 An anonymous, clearly non-­Jewish contributor to the Columbian Magazine, writing under the pseudonym “Q in the Corner,” marveled at the speed with which the St. Jago de la Vega Ashkenazi synagogue was erected: “[it was] raised with a degree of dispatch that evinces the zeal and capacity of its founders, not having been, I think more than twelve months under the builder’s hands.”110 Q in the Corner wrote that the split between Portuguese and Ashkenazi communities in St. Jago de la Vega was the result of “bickering without end.” He criticized the practice, apparently adopted by the town’s Ashkenazim, to place a guard at the door to check tickets: “The principle and policy of this unmerciful exclusion rested solely between Jew and Jew.” This editorial insinuated that by the 1790s, tension had arisen between the two Jewish communities, liturgical or otherwise. Unapologetically indignant toward the town’s Jews, Q in the 112 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

Corner also sought to highlight Christian communal cooperation by comparison to Jewish discord. Like other similar articles in the Columbian Magazine, it was yet another attempt to call attention to Jewish otherness on the island. Some Ashkenazim prospered in Jamaica. Lazarus Aaron was a prominent shopkeeper in Kingston during the late eighteenth century. He frequently published advertisements for at least two embroidery shops in Kingston, one of which was located across the street from the Portuguese synagogue on Princess Street.111 He specialized in the sale and alteration of military uniforms, perhaps in continuation of a German court-­Jewish tradition of supplying standing armies.112 When in October of 1791 the Saint Jago de la Vega Gazette announced the names of the newly elected board of Kingston’s English and German congregation, Lazarus Aaron was listed among them.113 Ashkenazim also established a small enclave in Black River, a southwestern coastal slaving port in St. Elizabeth Parish. St. Elizabeth was the only parish with more Ashkenazi than Portuguese testators. They may have been attracted to the port town as a rival to Kingston’s trade economy, as well as repelled by Kingston’s dominant Portuguese Jewish community. This small Ashkenazi settlement grew around the English-­born planter Ḥayem Cohen, one of the wealthiest Jewish planters of eighteenth-­ century Jamaica, who composed a will in 1803 (Appendix, V).114 Cohen owned 1,300 acres of agricultural property in Black River—­ including a sugar plantation and a livestock pen—­referred to collectively as “Mount Pleasant.” Cohen’s sprawling plantation was a village unto itself, with multiple dwelling houses, an adjacent retail store, outhouses, barbecues, sugar refineries, and mill houses. He was also joint owner of a nearby coffee field. Cohen was a source of support for multiple other Ashkenazim, including his orphaned nephew from Charleston, South Carolina, as well as a major supporter of Jamaica’s cultural development. He not only helped to finance Kingston’s “Dutch” The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 113

synagogue and Wolmer’s Free School, he was one of the first subscribers in Jamaica to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a full copy of which he bequeathed to a close friend. Ḥayem Cohen fully embraced the life of a Jamaican sugar planter, indistinguishable from established Portuguese Jews on the island. He had at least five children by two different women of color, four born of a free “quadroon” woman named Margaret Forbes. Ḥayem and Margaret’s four children—Catherine, Caroline, Alexander, and Henry—all bore the family name Cohen. Ḥayem generously bequeathed to each of these children 4,000 Jamaican pounds. He further invested large sums for each of them in the English market, entrusting the management of those investments to his friend in England. Ḥayem’s relationship with Margaret Forbes extended to her entire family. He paid the enormous sum of 16,000 pounds sterling—valuable English currency—to naturalize Margaret’s “mulatto” mother Patty Pensaid, her sister Rebecca Wright, and her brother Frances Maitland, so that they would possess “the same rights and privileges with English subjects being of white parents under certain restrictions.” This may have been an effort to ensure that his children could be legitimate beneficiaries of his estate. The extraordinarily prosperous Ḥayem Cohen was the pillar of an Ashkenazi enclave in Black River. He referred to three other, nonrelated, Ashkenazim living in his orbit in the southwestern port town. In addition to these three, Black River was also home to Mordechai Marcus, a retailer of dry goods and liquor in partnership with other Ashkenazim. Marcus, one of the extremely few Jews on the island from Poland, left Jamaica in 1781 “for the benefit of my health.”115 But, before his departure, he made donations to the poor of the Parish of St. Catherine, a mother living in London, and his brother in Warsaw. These Ashkenazim in every possible way lived the exact same lifestyle as their Portuguese counterparts. And, in sharp contrast to prevailing misconceptions throughout the Americas, there is no reason 114 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

to think that Ashkenazim were any more observant of Jewish law in Jamaica than were Portuguese Jews. However, Portuguese Jews left a greater cultural and intellectual legacy on the island as a whole. This was especially true because of the many Portuguese Jewish physicians present in eighteenth-­century Jamaica. The Jewish Physicians of Jamaica Physicians occupy a central place in Jewish intellectual life and the Jewish path toward secular modernity. For Jews of early modern Southern and Central Europe, the medical academies of Padua and Frankfurt-­on-­Oder were among the few places Jews could receive a secular education. The Jewish graduates of those academies often became catalysts for social and intellectual change upon returning to their communities. One historian has written: “to be a Jewish doctor [in the early modern period] is to assume the role traditionally assigned to the rabbi: to transform society through his healing powers, his assiduous learning, and his moral example.”116 The Portuguese experience in Western Europe differed in many ways from the Ashkenazi experience in Central Europe. Many of the New Jews who adopted Rabbinic Judaism in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, or Livorno had attended Iberian medical academies as conversos.117 Their path toward modernity was an “alternative” one that took them from the Iberian medical academies, and exposure to Western thought, toward Rabbinic Judaism, whereas the Ashkenazi path toward modernity is often described as a path “out of the Ghetto,” that is, from Rabbinic Judaism toward secular modernity.118 Even though medical knowledge did not exactly break down the proverbial “ghetto walls” among Portuguese Jews, those who attended medical schools often became the most productive and articulate intellectuals of Portuguese Jewish communities. Medical expertise also helped to break down gendered barThe End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 115

riers. Jewish women played important roles as healers and medical practitioners throughout the Caribbean region as they did in Europe.119 At least twenty-­two women interred in the Jewish burial grounds of colonial Suriname are identified on their tombstones as midwives.120 Jewish women often also partnered with their physician husbands and took over their practices upon their husbands’ deaths. The “practitioner of physic and surgery” Isaac Dacosta Alvarenga, the scion of a dynasty of Jewish physicians in Jamaica, for example, bequeathed to his wife, Rebecca, his “stock in trade” in 1810, empowering her to carry on his medical practice after his death.121 Jewish physicians played an especially decisive role in the intellectual life of New World Jewry. Jewish physicians of the colonial Americas were highly peripatetic, thereby helping to cement critical links between the distant Jewish communities of the Western Hemisphere. The Ashkenazi physician Andrew Judah, for example, variously practiced in New York, Charleston, and Suriname between 1760 and 1780.122 At least fourteen men identified as either physicians or surgeons in Jamaica during the eighteenth century are found in the tombstone and probate record. Some of these physicians, like the late seventeenth-­ century doctors of Port Royal Jacob de Castro and Jacob Rodrigues Deleon, were former conversos who likely attended medical academies in Iberia.123 Samuel Barretto da Veiga was perhaps the most renowned Jamaican Jewish physician who truly embodied the transient border-­crossing spirit of New World Jewish physicians (Appendix, VI).124 He was a former converso from Portugal who embraced Judaism in Amsterdam in the late eighteenth century via southern France. Barretto da Veiga likely practiced medicine in Curaçao before his arrival in Jamaica, as he maintained long-­lasting partnerships with the family of the Curaçao doctor Isaac Cardozo (d. 1753).125 Indeed, Barretto da Veiga’s influence extended across the entire Portuguese Jewish Atlantic. Bene116 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

ficiaries to his 1808 will lived in Portugal, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Curaçao, and London. Having fallen ill during the tensions surrounding the Napoleonic Wars, he specified that his bequest to beneficiaries in Bordeaux be made “immediately upon peace being established between England and France.” Despite being a truly pan-­Atlantic individual, Barretto da Veiga was also deeply localized in his West Indian community. His beneficiaries included a “reputed” daughter, Eleanor Davis Barretto, and three manumitted slaves. Through his medical practice, he provided opportunities for younger Kingston Jews to learn medicine, such as his “yeoman” Isaac Mendes Henriques O’Croix, likely a Creole Jew of color. He commanded a great deal of respect among the members of Kingston’s Jewish community and is named as either executor or beneficiary in the wills of six other Kingston testators. He may also have played an important role in aiding the rejudaization of other former conversos in Jamaica.126 As in Europe, physicians such as Barretto de Veiga were intellectual figureheads and conduits of learning and popularizing the Enlightenment among the Jewish communities of the Caribbean. The London Jewish printer and Hebraist David Levi, for instance, dedicated his polemical treatise Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Old Testament to Samuel Barretto de Veiga of Kingston.127 Addressing Barretto de Veiga in his dedication, Levi praised him for “[your] general erudition; your veneration for our most holy religion; and the high esteem you are held in by those that have the happiness of knowing you.”128 The Creole doctor Abraham Dacosta Alvarenga similarly embodied the spirit of popular Enlightenment among Jewish physicians. He was born to a dynasty of Jamaican Jewish doctors in Kingston. He was likely the son of Doctor Isaac Dacosta Alvarenga, a former converso, who had arrived in Jamaica from London in the first half of the eighteenth century.129 Abraham’s son Isaac, mentioned above, further perpetuated the family practice The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 117

of medicine in Jamaica. Though Creoles, Abraham and his son nurtured the strong family and professional ties to London.130 Abraham Dacosta Alvarenga maintained a practice on Water Lane in Kingston, near the Portuguese synagogue on Princess Street, where he dispensed a “fresh Assortment of medicines, lately imported from London.”131 He held great prestige among the members of Kingston’s Jewish community. Some Jewish testators made bequests to him in return for his attendance upon them as a physician at the end of their lives.132 Like Barretto da Veiga, he was deeply localized in the West Indies and invested some of the earnings of his medical practice in a small livestock farm in St. Andrew Parish.133 Alvarenga belonged to the intellectual elite of the island, but he also popularized his love of learning throughout the community as a whole. He was one of the subscribers to Decordova’s Reason and Faith, suggesting he held an interest in the Enlightenment. He also helped to popularize the latest scientific discoveries in his Kingston home. In July of 1792, he invited a French professor of anatomy to speak at his salon.134 By publishing an open invitation in the Jamaican press for this public lecture, he clearly sought to reach beyond his immediate circle of intellectuals and physicians and bring the latest trends of scientific knowledge to the public. It is highly likely that this French anatomy professor was a sojourner rather than a visitor on the island. The French-­speaking population of Kingston had greatly expanded during the period of the French and Haitian Revolutions.135 This growing French presence in Jamaica raised new questions about the French allegiances of the island’s Jews. The French Connection in the Late Eighteenth Century The Jews’ consistent relationship—familial and economic—to France and the French Caribbean marked them as political out118 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

siders and a fifth column in Jamaica. With increasing tensions between the British and the French in the late eighteenth century, Jews came under heightened scrutiny. Jamaican fears were not entirely unfounded. The French had in fact been planning an invasion of Jamaica during the American Revolution, and were only prevented by a series of British naval victories in the region.136 The instability in Haiti during the 1790s led many in Jamaica to fear that the same kind of revolution would erupt in the British colony.137 In the shadow of renewed conflict with Maroons in 1795, Jamaican authorities had reason to think that French revolutionary spies were conspiring to foment a similar insurrection in Jamaica. Jamaican Jews were decidedly French, but at the same time they were becoming measurably more Jamaican in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Their localization in Jamaica is demonstrated by the changing patterns of diasporic connections in their wills. Of the 225 wills (half the sample) composed between 1673 and 1766, 82 include beneficiaries outside of Jamaica. Of the 225 wills composed between 1766 and 1815, beneficiaries outside of Jamaica appear in 58, a nearly 30 percent decline. This decrease suggests that as more Jamaican Jews were born on the island, they sustained fewer familial ties to Europe and other parts of the Americas. The Jamaican Jewish community predictably grew more insular as they became more Creole during the second half of the century. Jamaican wills also reveal some contradictory parallel trends. While they were becoming more measurably insular, Jamaica’s Jews sustained consistently strong ties to London (increasingly so after 1740). Around 15 percent of all Jamaican testators who remitted inheritance outside of Jamaica had beneficiaries living in London both before and after 1766. However, testators with beneficiaries living in Amsterdam declined dramatically by 83 percent after 1766. Diasporic ties to French territories likewise mirrored these larger trends, but connections between Jamaica The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 119

and Bayonne, which were on a par with Amsterdam before 1766, decreased by a less dramatic margin, 33 percent. In other words, the ties between the two peripheries of Jamaica and Bayonne, although elastic, remained far more stable than those disappearing connections between Jamaica and Amsterdam. Suspicions of Jewish ties with France in the late eighteenth century were therefore not unfounded. Some of the most recognizable Jews on the island were avid supporters of French interests. Alexandre Lindo (1742–1812) was perhaps the most notorious Jamaican Jewish slave trader, absentee planter, and moneylender at the end of the eighteenth century. He was among Jamaica’s top four slave traders—in terms of volume sold—as a partner in the firm Lindo & Lake, and the proprietor of Lindo’s Wharf in Kingston.138 Lindo routinely advertised in the Jamaican press for large public sales of slaves.139 Although he strived to be a London absentee, and to that end left Jamaica in 1795, lawsuits and debts compelled his return. Back in Jamaica, Lindo was an important figurehead of the community who regularly attended meetings with the Jamaican governor, seemingly to consult on matters related to French imperial ambitions.140 Like so many other Jamaican Jews, Lindo was from France, born and raised in Bordeaux, and he came to symbolize Jamaican Jews’ collective association with the French. In April of 1798, for instance, an anonymous subscriber to the Columbian Magazine published a short poem entitled “The Use and Abuse of Money” wherein he sought to shame White Creoles for their supposed lack of charitableness by pointing out that even the French Jewish moneylender Lindo opens his hands to the poor: The Christian Cause, e’en Jews uphold; And Lindo gives with grace his gold; Nay, French Perriere, whose birthright’s sold; All indicate their worth141 120 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

Alexandre Lindo’s French allegiances were not exaggerated. Despite his extensive investments and land holdings in Jamaica, he made large—treasonous—donations in support of the Napoleonic cause.142 He chose the wrong side of the conflict and never received a return on his investment. He died in London, dishonored, with only a fraction of his previous wealth and prestige. Lindo was not the only high-­profile French Jew on the island in the late eighteenth century. And, unlike Lindo, some, likely innocent, Jews were also accused of treason on behalf of the French. Isaac Bernal was a Jewish merchant based in St. Jago de la Vega. Although born in Bayonne, he was deeply integrated into a Jamaican Creole lifestyle. In his 1810 will, he supported seven enslaved “reputed” children, one of whom he also manumitted.143 He never forsook his native France, however, and made bequests to his siblings in Bayonne along with a donation to a Bayonne synagogue. In September of 1779, as the French had entered an alliance with the Americans during the Revolutionary War, Isaac Bernal was accused of espionage in Jamaica.144 He took his case to the court of public opinion, arguing that he had been wrongfully accused and that the terms of his interrogation and imprisonment were unlawful. He defended himself by saying he was a naturalized subject of Jamaica but that he had been vulnerable simply because of his rudimentary knowledge of English. Bernal freely admitted to offering humanitarian relief to some French prisoners but maintained that he had not shared any intelligence with them. His appeal did not work. Jamaican authorities seized his property, plunging him into debt, for which he languished in a St. Jago de la Vega debtors’ prison for more than a year.145 Moses Gomes was a French-­born naturalized subject and the owner of a small cargo boat, with which he hauled bananas off the east coast of Jamaica. He was arrested and imprisoned for “high treason” in support of the French only a month after Bernal in October of 1779.146 Gomes’s ordeal began when a The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 121

French vessel captured his boat. Subsequently overrun by the British Navy near Morant Bay, Gomes was placed in prison in Port Royal and accused of conspiring with his French captors. Gomes, however, did not remain imprisoned for long. He was reported to have led a successful escape through forest lands and creeks. The two espionage accusations against Bernal and Gomes are highly spurious, but Jamaican fears that French spies were hiding among the island’s Jews were vindicated in 1799 when Isaac Yeshurun Sasportas was captured in Jamaica trying to reach the Portland Maroon communities in the wake of the Second Maroon War (1795–96). Sasportas, acting under the authority of the newly established Haitian government, attempted to spread the revolution via the disaffected Maroons.147 Sasportas had earlier attempted a similar plot in Curaçao, but Jamaica seemed the better choice since he had family settled on the island and could make a case for fidelity to the British. Informed of the plot, colonial authorities intercepted Sasportas while he was attempting to send his slave Charles to the Portland Maroons to instigate a renewed conflict. But rather than obey his standing orders to confess his plan in the event of capture, he instead lied about coming to Jamaica to trade. At the end of a series of interrogations, Sasportas was found guilty of espionage and hanged in Kingston on December 23, 1799. Signs with the word “spy” were hung on his chest and back as he climbed the ladder to the gallows. The editors of the Columbian Magazine described the public spectacle in dramatic detail: On the handkerchief’s being bound round his head, he followed the executioner up the ladder, and as soon as the rope was made fast. Threw himself off. In the agony of the shock, he clung, by a kind of instinctive motion, to the ladder for a few seconds, until the executioners gently lifted his fingers, when he immediately launched into eternity. 122 / The End of a Long Century (1770–1815)

We sincerely hope that the awful catastrophe of this man will be a warning to those who have come among us for the same diabolical purposes.148 Conclusion The decades leading up to the Assembly’s debates over Jewish emancipation between 1826 and 1831 were fraught with hardships and regressions. It was a time of contradictions. As the local government more heavily legislated the social advancement of White settlers and the social isolation of people of color, Jews existed both within and without colonial society. When it served White ethnographers and lawmakers, Jews were depicted as enjoying all the same privileges and status as White inhabitants. Yet, in reality they had much more in common in terms of civil liberties with free people of color and were essentialized and exoticized by those same observers to the point of virtual expulsion from the social fabric of the colony. However, from the perspective of the enslaved, there was no difference between a Jewish and a White master. In another contradiction, as Jewish demographics and security suffered during the late eighteenth century—on the heels of a series of political and environmental crises—the Ashkenazi minority was on the rise and began to assert its own autonomy. While White commentators struggled to define the place of Jews in colonial society, internally, the Jewish community was amid its own process of self-­definition. As an extreme minority within a minority, the Ashkenazim had been intertwined, deferential, and even dependent on Portuguese Jews, but as their own communal identity took shape, tensions between the two communities led to schism. Perhaps the most palpable contradiction during the late eighteenth century was uncertainty regarding Jewish political allegiances. While, according to testamentary analysis, Jamaica’s The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) / 123

Jews grew more insular during the late eighteenth century, with diminishing diasporic beneficiaries, they were still seen to be in league with the French. And, to a large extent, they were. But, while they became more Creole, their ties to a single Metropole, London, simultaneously grew stronger. They were at one and the same time more English and more Creole; part of a diasporic community and completely at home in Jamaica.

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5 Jewish Communal Life

The Men, Women, and Children of the Nation

By the end of the eighteenth century, Jamaica was home to at least seven separate Jewish communities: Portuguese and Ashkenazi communities in both Kingston and St. Jago de la Vega, and Portuguese communities in Port Royal, Lucea, and Savanna-­la-­Mar. Jews also settled, without communal infrastructure, in other west-­coast towns such as Black River and Montego Bay. Wills are the most abundant sources that have survived from these various settlements. They open a powerful window into the interaction of the individual with his or her community and the confluence of the community with a larger Diaspora. This chapter explores the relationship between the individual and the community through the elements of public piety found in wills. It further examines, through the process of will making, the role that community played in the everyday lives of Jews, the power dynamic between Metropole and colony, and the place of women and children. The Jewish Community Between Metropole and Colony The Jewish community of Jamaica was divided between local and metropolitan spheres of influence.1 It was dependent on the patronage of London, and to a lesser extent Amsterdam, yet over the course of the eighteenth century, the community cultivated its own local and regional autonomy. This was likewise 125

the case with Curaçao, which asserted its own regional authority independent of the Jewish Metropole in Amsterdam. Curaçao has been described as the “mother community of all the Caribbean.” In that role, Curaçao’s Jews assisted smaller communities like New York, Newport, St. Eustatius, and Charleston with synagogue building and disaster relief.2 However, Curaçao’s regional authority did not appear to fully extend to Jamaica. Curaçao seemingly did not make donations to Jamaica until after the fire of 1882. Jamaica was thus far more autonomous than other Caribbean communities—independent from London, Amsterdam, and Curaçao—with a regional influence of its own. As with the Jewish tax, Jamaican Jews never deferred to the political patronage of London’s metropolitan Jews by default, but only by necessity. And, when the Metropole did involve itself in the political patronage of Jamaican Jewry—either by request or through its own paternalism—that involvement often came with a high price tag. This was the case, for instance, when the London Mahamad requested compensation from Jamaica’s Jews in return for their political lobbying to secure the Plantation Act in 1740.3 The Jewish metropolitan relationship with colonial client communities is perhaps best characterized as a cooperative exchange rather than a unilateral paternalism. The most concrete way in which Jewish colonial communities like Jamaica depended on metropolitan patronage was through the supply of credible clergy. This was just as true for the Anglican Church in Jamaica, in that all clergy in the colony were appointed and supervised by the Bishop of London. Neither the Caribbean nor North America produced homegrown rabbinic figures during the eighteenth century. No colonial community developed an advanced Talmudic academy to match the likes of ‘Eẓ Ḥayim in Amsterdam, where nearly all the Caribbean ḥakhamim, including Joshua Hezekiah Decordova, earned their ordinations. As with other American communities, when a gap

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occurred in rabbinic leadership with no local heir apparent, the Jamaican community turned to Europe.4 Jews in Jamaica likewise relied on the Metropole to supply ritual items. London and Amsterdam exported objects like prayer books, circumcision knives, prayer shawls, and tefillin (phylacteries) to the colony. Probate wills make it clear that Jamaican stonemasons, for instance, possessed little or no expertise in Hebrew engraving. Between 1722 and 1808, at least twelve testators made specific requests for tombstones to be sent from England. Tombstones with Hebrew engravings in Dutch American colonies were similarly imported from Amsterdam.5 The dynamic relationship between Metropole and colony was often contradictory; it could be both patronal and exploitive at the same time. This was the case, for instance, regarding the practice of dispatching indigent individuals referred to as despachados to the colonies.6 Between 1759 and 1814 the Amsterdam community dispatched at least seventeen impoverished individuals to Jamaica.7 London dispatched at least 122 individuals to the English Americas between 1676 and 1800.8 This practice was an attempt to empower the poor with the promise of new opportunities across the Atlantic, while also protecting the coffers of local welfare institutions. Portuguese Jews—and many Ashkenazim—often arrived in Protestant Western Europe destitute. During the 1720s and 1730s, a harsh period of inquisitorial activity in Portugal, many Judeo-­conversos arrived, especially in London, having had their property confiscated by the Holy Office. Travel grants were sometimes leveraged as a means of social and religious control. In May of 1727, the London Mahamad planned to send dozens of recent arrivals from Portugal on to the English Americas, but only on condition that these New Jewish men agreed to be circumcised.9 Despachados were highly peripatetic and frequently migrated between multiple American colonies. Communities like New York and Barbados

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were known to redispatch poor people seeking social welfare on to Suriname and other American communities.10 The same was certainly true for Jamaica as well. Those who were dispatched to Jamaica seemed to have had preexisting family ties to the colony. Clara Franco, for example, had been in Amsterdam in 1721 when her brother in Jamaica, Solomon, drafted his will on the island.11 In 1738, she was living in London, from where she was dispatched to Jamaica to join her sisters and cousins living there.12 Samuel Mesquitta, who came to London directly from Portugal, was dispatched to Jamaica in 1766 to join his “relations” on the island.13 The London Mahamad sent the despachado Jacob Sanguinetti to Jamaica in 1790.14 He likely came to join his kinsman, of the same name, who was a “German flute” teacher in his house on Orange Street, near the site of the Ashkenazi synagogue in Kingston.15 Some of those dispatched from London to Jamaica managed to carve out a comfortable life in the Caribbean. Joseph Nunes, sent to Jamaica from London in 1753, married a Creole Jewish woman soon after his arrival.16 While he appears to have been too poor to own slaves or make customary donations to synagogues, he survived on the interest generated by a generous bequest made to his wife thirty-­six years earlier in the will of a wealthy Jewish sugar planter.17 His only dying wish was that the estate he had built upon that bequest be for the sole benefit of his wife. Despachados like Joseph Nunes help to illustrate the multilateral nature of the Metropole–­colony power dynamic. London supplied the colony with people, while Jamaica relieved pressure on metropolitan welfare institutions. Locally, Jamaican Jewish communal boards asserted themselves as patrons in the lives of the island’s Jews. Even Jews living far away from urban centers, in fishing villages or on plantations, remained connected to Jewish communal life through bequests to Jamaican synagogues and regents. In the absence of Jewish communal records from Jamaica, comparisons can be made with 128 / Jewish Communal Life

Barbados between 1791 and 1808, from where limited records have survived.18 The Jewish communal regents of Barbados provided clothing for poor women and children, paid the passage of poor petitioners to other Caribbean communities, including Jamaica, and also rented African slave labor from local Jews.19 Many similarities in Jamaica are evident from wills. The relationship between the individual and the community in Jamaica was mutually supportive. The communal boards often became surrogate families for those without networks of support, especially conversos in the process of transition to Rabbinic Judaism. Abraham Rodrigues, for instance, was a single and childless distiller living on Serge Island, a rural part of St. Thomas Parish in the eastern reaches of the island near Morant Bay.20 Living in such an isolated location may have hindered his ability to build a network of support on the island. In the absence of family and friends, he bequeathed his entire estate, consisting of two slaves and a horse, to the Mahamad of Kingston in his 1734 will. He further appointed the Kingston regents as executors of his estate. Similarly, Deborah Touro (née Alvin), who bequeathed ten slaves in her will to nieces, also donated two slaves, a mother and son, to the Mahamad of St. Jago de la Vega for its exclusive use. Five other Jewish testators are known to have bequeathed slaves to communal regents. Donations to the communal board were not limited to the unmarried, childless, or poor. Abraham Gonsales, a wealthy Kingston merchant with children, grandchildren, cousins, and an expansive social network of friends in Jamaica—along with a brother in London—donated his “chaise horse” and its accessories to the Mahamad in his 1753 will.21 In 1769, Rebecca Pereira Mendes (née Brandon), a Kingston widow with an expansive network of beneficiaries in Jamaica and New York, appointed the Kingston regents as executors of her estate and entrusted them with the distribution of money earmarked for buying “five or six small convenient houses for the receptacle Jewish Communal Life / 129

of the poorest needest and indigent of our Jewish nation as shall appear to them to be objects of charity.”22 Rebecca Pereira Mendes’s donation to the poor helped to define her relationship as an individual to the local Jewish community at large. It was an act of public piety expressed through her last will and testament, or what I will refer to as “testamentary piety.” Jewish Testamentary Piety Religious preambles were the most enduring element of early modern will making.23 Eighteenth-­century Jamaican probate wills employed nearly identical language as their early modern counterparts in England. Jewish religious preambles typically included a bequest of the soul to God, a charitable donation to a synagogue and to poor Jews, a request for burial, and an appeal for the recital of an escava (hashkhavah, memorial prayer).24 They are distinct from their Christian counterparts only in the absence of a reference to Christ and donations to synagogues rather than churches. Although religious preambles are too formulaic to draw conclusions regarding a testator’s personal piety or private beliefs, they suggest a strong attachment to communal Jewish life. There are no references to personal beliefs or convictions of any kind in probated wills. And, there are only rare and inexplicit traces of dogma or theology.25 The only possible theological elements found in eighteenth-­century probate wills are vague references to resurrection of the dead (teḥiyat ha-­meytim), a central tenet of Jewish belief. Naturally, testators reflected on death, burial, and resurrection at the time they composed their wills. In one possible though highly questionable reference to resurrection, Rebecca Lopes Depass (née Cohen Delara), a Kingston widow, elaborated when including a burial clause in her 1760 will: “I recommend my soul unto the hands of my cre-

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ator hoping at the great day of judgment to obtain full pardon of all my sins and to have joyfull resurrection to life eternal.”26 Charitable donations to synagogues and to the poor are one of the most decisive barometers of communal religious engagement and public piety. Sixty-­two percent of testators made donations to Jamaican synagogues. By far, the Portuguese synagogue in Kingston benefited from the most testamentary support, receiving donations from 47 percent of Jewish testators. The Portuguese synagogue in St. Jago de la Vega received donations from around 24 percent, followed by the Portuguese synagogue in Port Royal that received donations from 16 percent. Ten percent of testators supported all three. Donations to the smaller makeshift prayer houses of Savanna-­la-­Mar (six testators), Lucea (two testators), and the two Ashkenazi synagogues (five testators) were extremely rare. Eight percent of Jamaican Jewish testators made donations to synagogues outside the island, including in London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Barbados, New York, Bayonne, and Gibraltar. Charitable donations to the Jewish poor were designated by 38 percent of testators. According to a report submitted to the Assembly in 1825 assessing testamentary donations between 1737 and 1821, Jews appeared to have been responsible for twice as many charitable bequests as non-­Jewish Jamaicans.27 Yet, Jewish charitableness in Jamaica ought not to be exaggerated. The expected standard donation to a synagogue did not usually exceed five pounds. Most donations were made in return for the recital of an escava, and were therefore not motivated by a pure altruism. And, it was uncommon for Jews to make charitable donations to general causes. Indeed, only nine testators, five of whom were Ashkenazi, made donations for the support of the Christian poor.28 Such charitable bequests in excess of five pounds were distributed based on traditional Jewish periods of mourning, one of the few aspects of Jewish ritual life that

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echoed in probate wills: within a week after the death of the testator (shiv‘ah), within thirty days (shloshim), and after eleven months (’avelut). Burial clauses are another common feature of Jewish religious preambles, included by around 55 percent of testators. Burial was perhaps the most important barometer of communal belonging for Jews anywhere in the world. Ḥerem, or excommunication, often meant denial of burial in communal grounds. And, communal boards throughout the Portuguese Atlantic Jewish Diaspora often leveraged burial as a means of social control.29 Therefore it is not surprising that, after synagogue donations, burial was the most common feature of public piety found in probate wills. Jewish burial requests took many forms but, in most cases, expressed a desire to be buried among Jewish brethren or located near the plot of a deceased family member. For example, Isaac Pereira, a Kingston merchant with strong family ties to Bayonne, requested in his 1723 will to be “interred among my brethren the Jews . . . in the burying ground at Kingston and as near as possible to the ground where my late mother [in law] . . . now lyeth.”30 References to tombstones were often appended to burial clauses. Sometimes testators specified a design or other details of their tombstone engravings, making wills an important textual companion to the material resource of surviving tombstones. Some monumental specifications were simple. In 1724, Mordechai Rodrigues Lopes, a former converso with family ties to Bayonne, requested a black marble tombstone in his Spanish will.31 In 1762, Abraham Ydana, a single man from St. John Parish, requested white marble.32 Other tombstone specifications were more elaborate. In 1713, Joseph Cohen Deleon of Kingston requested a tombstone with priestly imagery in his Spanish will.33 In 1722, Isaac Henriques Alvin, a Port Royal merchant with commercial ties to London, made the unusual request that loose bricks from his home destroyed by a hurricane 132 / Jewish Communal Life

in 1722 be used in the construction of his grave, topped with a marble tombstone from London.34 The Savanna-­la-­Mar planter Abraham Lopes Parra expressed in his 1781 will what can be observed on many surviving Jamaican Jewish tombstones—­ multilingual epitaphs. In his burial clause he requested a “decent and genteel marble tombstone . . . [with a] Latin [character] Portuguese and English epitaph to be engraved thereon and cause the same to be fixed over my grave or burial place and which said tombstone is not to cost more than . . . twenty pounds sterling.”35 Jewish testators sometimes included burial instructions along with their donations to the Jamaican burial confraternity ḥevrah kadisha, in charge of all funerary arrangements. As in other parts of the Diaspora, this confraternity employed the island’s poor adults and orphans to help dig graves, wash bodies, and carry coffins. In 1807, Judah Cohen Henriques of Kingston, in addition to bequeathing his Hebrew books to the orphan society, referred to the ḥevrah kadisha as the “sixteen poor men of the synagogue who may be appointed to carry my body upon the Bumba [bimah, reader’s platform] to the place of internment,” each one to receive a single pound for their service.36 Some testators included extremely elaborate requests regarding their burial arrangements. In 1772, Isaac Martins of St. Jago de la Vega purchased tombstones for himself and his family to be placed in the town’s cemetery from the director (Parnas) of the town’s ḥevrah kadisha and asked to be buried in a “white coat jacket[,] breeches, cravatt[,] stockings[,] and cap and a sheet of my own and [in] a plain coffin so that the whole expense may not exceed forty shillings.”37 Similarly, Moses Barnett, a board member of Kingston’s orphan society, after requesting burial in the “Portuguese burying ground,” asked for a “plain deal board coffin covered with black cloth,” and desired that the rabbi (probably referring to Decordova) along with some orphans, sit with his corpse (shomrim).38 He further requested that an orphan Jewish Communal Life / 133

boy be selected to read the kadish (a public funerary prayer) for him during the full eleven months of mourning. Requests for the recital of memorial prayers, so deeply connected to the imminence of death, were a conspicuous feature of testamentary public piety. Around 20 percent of testators included requests for such memorial prayers, escavot. Memorial prayers were critical in ensuring one’s public legacy and communal posterity. In most cases escavot were requested along with a donation, typically of five pounds, to a local synagogue so that the prayer would be recited every Yom Kippur or Hoshannah Rabbah. Some requests for escavot were highly elaborate. In 1748, the Kingston merchant David Bravo—who, the notaries remarked, refused to sign his will until after the end of Sabbath—requested an escava in return for a large donation to the synagogue in Kingston. He pledged one hundred Jamaican pounds—twenty times the standard donation—on the condition that the communal functionaries enter his name into the ledgers so that an escava would be recited for him on every subsequent Yom Kippur. However, his donation came with stipulations. He desired that his name be recited individually after the morning prayers, during the Yom Kippur Torah reading service, so that “no other person or persons name or names shall be named or read in the reading the said [e]scava but my own.” In the event that the wardens read his name together with the other memorial prayers, he instructed that his donation of one hundred pounds be reduced to twenty-­five. Another critical intersection of will making and public piety came in the form of donating objects. Most ritual objects found in wills were private bequests intended for public use. This type of inheritance was quite rare. Ritual objects such as Torah scrolls, their silver ornaments, and Hebrew books were mentioned in less than 3 percent of Jamaican Jewish estates. A few testators made other types of ritual donations to synagogues. For instance, in 1781, Rebecca Rodrigues Deleon, an elderly St. Jago 134 / Jewish Communal Life

de la Vega widow, earmarked a donation of oil to the St. Jago de la Vega synagogue on Monk Street. One exceptional testator, Judith Baruh Alvares (née Aguilar), the widow of Jacob, the youngest son of David Baruh Alvares, embodied all these elements of public piety in her will of 1732 (Appendix, II).39 Judith and her husband Jacob continued the strong Alvares family ties to the humble town of Port Royal, where they raised their children and grandchildren. Judith was clearly committed to the continued survival of Jewish life in the town. She offered a large donation to the Port Royal synagogue of forty pounds, double what she gave to Kingston and St. Jago de la Vega combined. In addition to this donation, she also gifted her “sett of silver bells belonging to the Five Books of Moses,” that is, ornaments for a Torah scroll. She further bequeathed twenty-­five pounds to the wife of “one of the readers of the synagogue . . . in the town of Port Royal.” Judith’s religious preamble included all the aspects of public piety discussed here. She donated a total of sixty pounds to “the poor inhabitants of Jewish nation of the town of Port Royal” to be distributed in twenty-­pound increments based on the traditional periods of Jewish mourning. She asked to be buried “near my late husband” at Liguanea (Hunt’s Bay). Her trilingual tombstone, on which she was referred to in Hebrew as an “honorable, modest, charitable, woman of valor” (ha-­khevodah, ha-­ ẓenu‘ah ve-­ha-­ẓadeket ’eshet ḥayil ), includes the image of a felled tree, a symbol of God’s providence.40 She included an additional donation of ten pounds to the ḥevrah kadisha: “the people of the Jewish Nation who shall accompany my corps [sic] to the grave . . . and such as are employed in digging their graves.” She also made a further donation to the maintenance of Hunt’s Bay Cemetery for making a convenient cause way or walk from the usual place of landing of corps of the parish of St Andrew to the Jewish Communal Life / 135

burial place of the Jewish Nation in the said parish well fenced on each side with pinguins [a hedged fence] in order to [facilitate] the more commodious carrying of my own and other corps to the grave and for the better accommodation of the people of the Jewish Nation who shall accompany my corps to the grave. Judith’s public piety did not stop with her elaborate burial clauses. She also donated to the hospital confraternity bikur ḥolim, the only mention of this confraternity on the island: “the people who usually sett up to watch . . . the sick people of the Jewish Nation.” Judith Baruh Alvares was in many ways an exceptional woman in the extent of her wealth and the scope of her commitment to Jewish institutional life. But, she was far from the only Jewish widow with a public voice on the island. She joined a number of other Jewish women in Jamaica who endeavored to express a public role. The Public Lives of Jamaican Jewish Women As the wills of Rebecca Pereira Mendes and Judith Baruh Alva­ res illustrate, Jewish women in Jamaica found a public voice through their support of communal causes and their expressions of public piety. The process of rejudaization was especially difficult for women. Crypto-­Judaism in Iberia and the Spanish Americas was a largely domestic and woman-­oriented religious practice.41 Crypto-­Jewish rituals were passed down from mother to daughter through domestic traditions such as cleaning linens on Friday and covering the blood of slaughtered chickens. As a result, conversas were among the chief victims of inquisitorial persecution, and denouncements to the Holy Office came largely from disgruntled domestic servants. Despite the highly patriarchal nature of early modern Iberian society, Crypto-­Jewish women were the curators of the continuity of Crypto-­Jewish 136 / Jewish Communal Life

memory and heritage. Therefore, through the process of transition to Judaism and communally oriented, male-­centric r­ abbinic practices, women sacrificed much of their religious agency. Similarly, although New Jewish men may have jettisoned their Iberian Catholicism, they did not always purge their Iberian patriarchy. As a result, the lives of New Jewish women in Amsterdam are often characterized as more sequestered compared to their Protestant, or even Ashkenazi, counterparts. One historian has depicted these characterizations by writing that “Sephardi men kept their wives restrained, essentially as prisoners,” and that these women were “withdrawn, silent, and suppressed.”42 The individualism of colonial life possibly helped to mitigate this reality. It has been suggested that the highly individualized lifestyle of early American Protestant pioneers had a liberating effect for Jewish women, opening up public opportunities unthinkable in Europe.43 This position is not entirely supported by Jamaican wills, nor is a more stereotypical image of the suppressed Portuguese woman. Wills reveal that while Jewish women in the colony did very much pursue public roles, they were nearly always in the shadow of a male family member. Jamaica had its own gender dynamics. Relatively few women came to the island from Europe during the colonial period. In 1673, even though the White female population had grown four times over since 1661, White men still outnumbered them two to one.44 By the mid-­eighteenth century, White men outnumbered White women in Jamaica three to one.45 In the 1750s, over 90 percent of all land holders in Jamaica were men.46 In some parishes, men were an extreme majority. Men made up 70 percent of the White population of Clarendon Parish in 1788.47 In the early years of the colony, very few single women left the relative safety of Europe for the uncertainly of the Caribbean. Most White women came to Jamaica from other parts of the Americas, largely the wives of military officers.48 Colonial policymakers in London adamantly attempted to remedy Jewish Communal Life / 137

this imbalance in an effort to combat rampant miscegenation on the island. Dispatching White women from the Metropole to counter the realities of miscegenation in a slave society was a strategy employed by the English and Dutch throughout the colonial world.49 Colonial officials offered incentives such as land grants to attract women settlers to the island. Sex work provided another avenue of migration for single White women to Jamaica. In the earliest period of English settlement, female sex workers, deemed “criminals,” were recruited from English brothels and sent to the West Indies as a kind of amnesty. This policy contributed to a popular perception of Jamaica’s women— among English men—during the late seventeenth century as being overly “lusty.”50 Jewish women were among the earliest female settlers in English Jamaica. Around 39 percent of the legible tombstones at Hunt’s Bay mark the graves of women.51 At least forty-­four women were naturalized in Jamaica between 1740 and 1750 as a result of the Plantation Act.52 And, the exact same number of Jewish women appeared in the Kingston tax records of 1745, and again in 1769.53 However, despite the fact that women made up only around 22 percent of the taxpaying Jews of Kingston, they accounted for 50 percent of those identified as poor. Jewish women heads of households were thus poor disproportionately to their demographic presence on the island. Only eighty-­five Jewish women left wills in Jamaica between 1673 and 1815, less than 20 percent of all eighteenth-­century Jewish testators. Most of those women testators were widows, 87 percent. The remaining 13 percent were single women. As in Europe and other parts of the Americas, married women did not probate wills. Single Jewish women had a circumscribed public role in Jamaica, almost always dependent on their relationship to a male relative or benefactor. Still, some traces of a public agency for single women echo in their wills. The single woman Hannah de Torres was raised in the home of her sister and brother in 138 / Jewish Communal Life

law.54 When she drafted a will in 1706, she showed her gratitude by rewarding them with her two slaves. She was also part owner, alongside her brother in law, of a residential property in Port Royal. Hannah Cohen Henriques—related through marriage to her executor, the poet Daniel Israel López Laguna—­seemingly came to Jamaica from England by herself.55 In her will of 1718, she bequeathed a mortgaged property in London, possibly an inheritance from her father. In 1788, the single woman of St. Jago de la Vega Rebecca Mendes Gutteres bequeathed 3,000 pounds to her nieces and nephews. She also manumitted her slave Deborah and provided her with inheritance, along with continued, and entirely voluntary, support for a free woman, Polydore, whom she a had manumitted earlier.56 Jewish women like Rebecca Mendes Gutteres were not unique in owning and bequeathing slaves. Women could be just as sexually exploitive and physically abusive of their slaves as their male counterparts. Because of the intestate continuity of primogeniture in plantation economies like Jamaica, there is a prevailing perception that women were more likely to inherit slaves than real estate.57 The Jewish probate record does not entirely support this conclusion. While it is true that more Jewish testators bequeathed slaves to women (42 percent) than bequeathed property (28 percent), this disparity probably only reflects the fact that more testators bequeathed enslaved property in general rather than real estate. The very act of making a will—thereby bypassing intestacy laws—was, in part, motivated by the desire to bequeath real estate to wives and daughters. Edward Long was decidedly more generous in his descriptions of White Creole women than of White Creole men—­ perhaps because his wife was Creole—but his characterizations are still tinged with judgment.58 On the one hand, he praised them as “lively, of good nature, genius, frank, affable, polite, generous, humane, and charitable,” and depicted them as practicing good hygiene, temperate, faithful, pious, industrious, and Jewish Communal Life / 139

diligent.59 On the other hand, he also criticized them for their general lack of formal education and their overreliance on Black nurses and attendants, writing that for White Creole women and girls “from twenty to forty servants is nothing unusual.”60 Long opined that only by developing formal educational institutions in Jamaica that included education programs for girls would they succeed in luring White men away from their “illicit connexions” with women of color.61 Jewish women of means corroborate Long’s statement that the more well-­to-­do Creole women grew up surrounded by enslaved attendants. In 1752, the Kingston merchant Abraham Henriques Quixano, when making designs for the liquidation of his slaves, requested that four slave women “be kept and reserved to attend on my [four] daughters.”62 In his will of 1759, the St. Catherine planter Jacob Gutteres appointed a slave woman “to live with and attend upon” his daughter until her day of marriage.63 In his will of 1766, the Montego Bay merchant Isaac da Silva Fonseca designated “a negro girl or young wench to attend and wait on” each of his two daughters.64 The voices of married Jewish women are more hidden than those of single women. It has been said that “married women . . . usually operated in the background” of the Portuguese Jewish Atlantic.65 Nevertheless, wives clearly played important and authoritative roles within the family economy. Jewish wives were appointed as the executors of 145 estates. In 37 percent of those wills, they were the sole executors. Yet, husbands wielded considerable social control over the public conduct of their wives in Jamaica as in other places. Anecdotal examples of this social control are found throughout the Jamaican press. In January of 1781, the highly public figure Daniel Rodrigues Cardoso, one of the regents of the Portuguese community in Kingston, displayed patriarchal control over his wife in an advertisement intended to prevent her acquisition of credit:66

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THIS IS TO CAUTION THE PUBLIC NOT TO TRUST MY WIFE Mrs. Sarah Rodriguez Cardozo, On any pretence whatsoever, I will not pay any debts she may contract after this public notice. The public are in particular cautioned from giving her credit under the pretence of Wearing Apparel, as she may have what is necessary, by applying to [me] Daniel Rodrigues Cardozo.67 Although overshadowed by their husbands, socially and economically, White Jamaican wives and their Jewish counterparts were “active agents in urban life.”68 Again, this agency is probably best captured in the Jamaican press. In July of 1779, the married Jewish woman Sarah Furtado (née De Castro) published an advertisement to alert the public of the runaway slave Tom, a coachman with ties to other Jews in the community.69 Similarly, in November of 1779, Rachel Mendes called on the public to help return her runaway slaves Sarah and Flora, along with Flora’s eleven-­month-­old baby.70 Esther Corinaldi ran a business out of her home in Morant Bay and used the press to publicly call in all her debts.71 But still, widows had significantly more public autonomy than did single or married women— within limits. “Marry and Bury”: The Limits of Widowhood in Jamaica English American colonies have sometimes been characterized as “widowarchies” wherein, because of the short life spans of their husbands, a large percentage of private wealth—maybe even most of it in some colonies—was concentrated in the hands of widows, endowing these women with unparalleled public autonomy.72 Similar perceptions are found in Jamaica. Edward

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Long, quoting a former governor of Jamaica, wrote: “the female art of growing rich here in a short time was comprized of two significant words, ‘marry and bury.’ ”73 Widows’ principal source of wealth was their intestate entitlement to one third of their husband’s estates. Even through the instrument of a will, husbands could not, easily, deny their wives this entitlement.74 A husband could, and frequently did, provide his wife with inheritance such as real estate, financial assets, or slaves in lieu of her one-­third, but he could not deny her that portion of his estate. Jewish women were furthermore protected by their entitlements to their dowry safeguarded by their ketubot, or Jewish marriage contracts. Jamaican Jewish wills provide abundant examples of widows empowered to carry on their husbands’ businesses or to manage their estates. In his will of 1709, Jacob Brandon, a Kingston merchant originally from London, expected that his wife Rachel would continue the family business together with their son, whom he requested to “carry on the trade of merchandizing with her to the best of his knowledge and be in all respects obedient and dutiful to her commands.”75 Before leaving New York, on a return voyage to Jamaica in 1727, the merchant Jacob Fonseca appointed his wife, Rebecca, as executor of his estate, empowering her to manage his financial assets and to sell his substantial Jamaican property.76 The St. Jago de la Vega shopkeeper Joseph Pinto requested in 1732 that his Jewish bookkeeper continue to live with his wife for a full year after his death to help her make the transition to running his business.77 Esther Levy Barrios became sole proprietor of her husband’s Kingston retail store after his death in 1744, thereby joining the ranks of Kingston taxpayers.78 Jewish widows in Jamaica had substantial public agency in the management of their husbands’ plantation property. In 1777, the St. Catherine planter Solomon Mendes gave his wife, Rebecca, nearly complete autonomy over the operation of his plantation, 142 / Jewish Communal Life

“Rica’s Delight.”79 In 1795, Rachel Fonseca, a St. Catherine widow who had formerly resided in London, was not only entitled to collect the many debts owed to her late husband from London merchants, she also acquired her husband’s valuable shares of East India Company stock.80 Her wealth clearly gave her a great deal of public prestige in Jamaica. It is telling of her remarkable social status that William Lamprière, the chief surgeon of the Jamaican militia, a medical writer, and renowned traveler, was a trustee of her estate. While it is clear that Jamaican widows had considerable public autonomy and control over property, it has been argued that the notion of widowarchy did not apply to colonial Jamaica, where “Jamaican testators were very unwilling to give their wives absolute control over even part of their property.”81 And despite Long’s characterization of widowhood as “the female art of growing rich,” Jamaican widows continued to live more subjugated lives than their North American counterparts. For Jewish widows in the West Indies, the truth may lie somewhere in between. Widows were in the contradictory position of economic and social empowerment, yet still found themselves under the authority of their deceased husbands. Widows with sufficient estates from their late husbands to sustain business and long-­term investments were an extreme minority. Widows were, in fact, the largest group of women seeking social welfare in Jamaica to combat economic destitution.82 And, while the colonial laws of intestacy protected a widow’s right to inheritance, the mechanisms of will making also provided loopholes through which a husband could undermine that principle. A male testator could place limitations on his wife’s inheritance through the use of a “remarriage clause” denying her all claim to his estate—beyond her one-­third entitlement—in the event she remarried. At first glance, these clauses may seem uncommon among Jewish testators—they were used by only twenty-­four of the 198 men married at the time they drafted Jewish Communal Life / 143

their wills (12 percent). But this is nearly 100 percent of the married men who gave their wives inheritance in excess of their one-­third entitlement. These clauses were, therefore, a highly effective and relatively common way for men to assert their authority over their wives from beyond the grave. Remarriage clauses had varying degrees of severity. In a relatively benign example from 1757, Daniel da Silva restricted his wife Rachel’s inheritance to her entitlements of her ketubah alone in the event she remarried.83 This meant that she would forfeit any additional inheritance, including the rents from his various Kingston properties and the proceeds earned from hiring out his slaves. Some remarriage clauses were dramatically more severe. In one extreme example from 1733, the Kingston merchant Jacob de Castro denied his wife custody over their three minor children along with the unborn potential offspring she was pregnant with at the time he drafted his will, in the event she remarried.84 In 1759, David Dias Arias not only denied his wife custody of their minor son, Moses, he also requested that if she remarried, Moses should leave the island and go to live with his uncle in London.85 Men leveraging their wives’ custody over their own children, and specifically David’s request that his child be sent to London, raises questions about the place of children in Jamaica’s Jewish community. Jewish Childhood in Jamaica Jamaica had a frighteningly high rate of child mortality for both its Black and White inhabitants throughout the colonial period. It is estimated that as much as a third of all babies born in Jamaica during the eighteenth century died before their first birthday.86 Jews buried at least 135 children under the age of ten between 1710 and 1879.87 Joseph Dacosta Alvarenga, for example, buried three children between 1684 and 1692, two of them only four days apart.88 In the 1760s the St. Jago de la Vega 144 / Jewish Communal Life

merchant David de Castro buried at least two of his infant children in the span of only three years.89 In the 1780s, the Kingston ḥazan Abraham Rodrigues Lopes buried at least two of his infant daughters in the span of five years.90 Jamaica’s high infant mortality rate continued well into the nineteenth century. In the span of fourteen years, between 1825 and 1839, the Ashkenazi couple Solomon and Rebecca Lazarus buried five children.91 The high child mortality rate certainly contributed to the close birth-­ spacing practices characteristic of the period—­ especially in the West Indies—necessitating the widespread use of wet nurses.92 It was a common practice for Jews of the Portuguese Atlantic Diaspora to use non-­Jewish wet nurses. Moses Cassuto, an Italian Jewish traveler who visited England in the 1730s, remarked that the Portuguese Jews there “have Protestants in their employ . . . even as wet-­nurses, and entrusted to them without any trouble their own little children to be brought up, the suspicion that they might baptize them never occurring.”93 Having come from a Catholic environment, Cassuto was more suspicious of the surreptitious baptism of newborn babies than were the Jews of Protestant England or Holland. Jews in Jamaica likely relied on enslaved and free wet nurses of color, as was the widespread practice among the White inhabitants of eighteenth-­century Jamaica. Edward Long scathingly criticized the practice of White Creole women who in “their disdaining to suckle their own helpless offspring . . . give them up to a Negroe or Mulatto wet nurse, without reflecting that her blood may be corrupted.”94 Long understood this practice as a “shameful and savage custom . . . borrowed from England.” Although Portuguese Jewish parents adhered to local childrearing conventions, important traces of their converso past remained well after their transition into Judaism. One significant holdover from Iberia was the distinct role that godparents (padrinhos and madrinhas) played in Portuguese rituals of childhood. Modeled on Iberian patriarchal notions of familial patrimony, Jewish Communal Life / 145

godparents were respected men and women—often members of the child’s extended family—who not only played a ritualistic role in the circumcision ceremony, but were also expected to support a child materially throughout his or her minority.95 During the seventeenth century, Portuguese godparents helped to sustain trading networks predicated on kinship, even those outside the bonds of blood.96 Godparentage was not an exclusively Portuguese Jewish practice and is similarly found among Ashkenazi families going back to the Middle Ages.97 However, Ashkenazim and Portuguese Jews imbued godparents with different meaning, both ritualistically and socially. For first-­generation New Jews, the ritual role of godparents in circumcision ceremonies was reminiscent of Catholic baptismal rites. Circumcision itself took on Catholic-­infused salvific meaning for Portuguese New Jews.98 In early modern Iberia, godparents were also often family patrons.99 And, patronage of Old Christian godparents was a critical entry point for conversos into Iberian society. Twenty-­eight male and female testators included godchildren as beneficiaries of their estates. The Kingston merchant Abraham Henriques Quixano, for instance, included two godsons as beneficiaries of his estate in 1752.100 To his unrelated godson, he bequeathed money for the purchase of a slave, and to his nephew godson, he bequeathed the much more valuable interest of an investment. In 1776, the Kingston silversmith Abraham de Azevedo’s godson was also his orphaned apprentice, Abraham Massias.101 Abraham Massias’s deceased father had likewise been a silversmith, suggesting that godparentage was one method of ensuring the continuity of a family trade. Godparentage was but one mechanism for support during a child’s infancy, childhood, and adolescence. This type of private support was critical for eighteenth-­century Jamaican Jewry since it appears that the community failed to provide sufficient social support for adolescents. This too may have had roots in a converso past. 146 / Jewish Communal Life

Jamaican Jewish Adolescence One of the greatest challenges for converso men in their transition into open Jewish life was to relinquish their patriarchal prerogative as the sole provider of education and social welfare to their children and wider family networks. The Jewish community subsumed many of those roles traditionally performed by Iberian patriarchs. This was a point of constant conflict between paternalistic former conversos and the New Jewish community and has been described by one historian as the communal usurpation of the “clandestine temple” of the Crypto-­Jewish home.102 Deeply regulated communal involvement in the lives of children and adolescents is evident from surviving communal minutes in places like Amsterdam, New York, and Curaçao.103 In both New York and Curaçao, the communal boards empowered functionaries to be the arbiters of communal decorum through the strict supervision of children. The tension between patriarchal members of the community and the Mahamad was clear in Curaçao, for example, when in 1707, and again a year later, the regents offered fathers the option of making a payment to the community in return for the right to supervise their own children.104 In such a case, to ensure proper decorum, those children would be punished as adults for disruptive behavior. Those same tensions were certainly present in the New-­Jewish community of Jamaica. One way in which communal, or extracommunal, methods of child welfare did not interfere with Portuguese fathers’ own sense of familial privilege pertained to the support of orphans. The orphanage society Aby Yetomim (Father of Orphans) was one of the most consistently well-­operated, privately funded confraternities throughout the entirety of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora.105 The society was modeled, in both structure and function, on the Iberian Counter-­Reformation-­era Padre Jewish Communal Life / 147

de Huerfanos.106 The first Aby Yetomim of the Portuguese Jewish Atlantic was established in Amsterdam in 1648. It took over eighty years for the establishment of a similar organization dedicated to the support of female orphans (mazon abanot) in 1734. A similar organization for orphaned boys was established in London in 1704. The Aby Yetomim of both Amsterdam and London were not freestanding structures or orphanage houses but rather private fund-raising societies that subsidized lodging, feeding, clothing, Talmudic education, and vocational training for orphaned boys. It is uncertain exactly when an Aby Yetomim was officially established in Kingston. The Kingston merchant Abraham Ledesma was the first testator to refer to the confraternity by name in 1750.107 At least one testator before him supported the island’s orphans as a whole—as opposed to individual orphans—suggesting that the Aby Yetomim may have existed in inchoate or unofficial form during the late 1740s.108 It is possible that in 1776 the Portuguese regents in Kingston intended to build an orphanage house on land purchased for the orphans of the community, but no such building had been completed as late as 1818.109 Like its European counterparts, the Kingston Aby Yetomim provided free education for orphaned boys, and some testators even referred to the society as a “yeshiva,” or academy.110 Boys supported by the Aby Yetomim were expected to take part in communal chores such as reciting kadish, watching over dead bodies, and assisting burial preparations. Kingston’s Aby Yetomim was by far the most-­supported confraternity in Jamaican Jewish wills. It received nearly six times more testamentary donations than any other local confraternity. An orphan society for girls did not exist in eighteenth-­century Jamaica. This may be because girls found support in other ways by working as domestic labor in the homes of their extended family in return for dowries. Jewish girls in Jamaica could also apply to Amsterdam’s dowry lottery. However, in an island with such high mortality 148 / Jewish Communal Life

and with so many poor Jews, such an institution was clearly a pressing need. In 1766, the Kingston merchant Jacob Lopes Torres referred to one hundred pounds he had once pledged as an incentive to establish a female orphan society in Jamaica.111 He hoped that such an institution would eventually be established after his death and, to that end, transferred control of his endowment to his daughter to be used if and when the Kingston Mahamad agreed to support the project. Like Portuguese Jewish patriarchs, White Jamaicans in general had deep-­rooted resistance to local educational institutions. Wealthy Jamaican merchants and planters preferred either to hire private tutors for their children or to send them to school in England.112 Edward Long lamented the state of education on the island, writing: “It at once excites our pity and regret, that Jamaica, an island more valuable and extensive than any other of the British sugar colonies, should at this day remain unprovided with a proper seminary for the young inhabitants to whom it gives birth.”113 Contrary to Long’s “pity and regret,” Jamaica did sustain local educational institutions. Wolmer’s Free School was founded in Kingston in 1729 and Beckford School in St. Jago de la Vega in 1735. At first, Wolmer’s provided education at no cost to all free inhabitants of the island. But in 1777, following Tacky’s War and other racialized crises of the midcentury, the directors of the academy resolved to only admit White children for free. The doors remained open to free children of color who could pay tuition.114 Jews, however, were seemingly barred from enrolling in the island’s free schools, and only two Jewish testators made donations to Wolmer’s.115 Like all Atlantic Portuguese communities, Jamaica’s Jews provided primary school education for young children. Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, one of the earliest Jewish settlers on the island, referred to a yeshiva in Port Royal in his 1725 will.116 David Carvallo Ledesma similarly donated to the yeshiva in Kingston in 1731.117 But like the successful non-­Jewish plantJewish Communal Life / 149

ers and merchants, a few wealthy Jews preferred to send their children to schools in England, perhaps fearing that prolonged contact with the enslaved would stunt their academic development. Edward Long criticized the practice of sending children to school in England. He believed that it both damaged the state of education on the island and was a source of corruption for the island’s youth, leading to a lack of self-­sufficiency and bad behavior. According to Long, by remotely supporting children in England, a distant son may “learn the art of squandering from his very infancy . . . [becoming] a disgrace to his friends, and a nuisance to his country.”118 He speculated that, on average, Jamaican planters sent around 300 children a year to England and at least one-­third never returned.119 Jamaican Jewish parents likely relied more on local tutors, rather than sending their children to England.120 Only six testators explicitly mentioned that they desired their children to be sent to England. However, some high-­profile Jewish planters did conform to the elite Jamaican practice. The St. Jago de la Vega–based sugar planter Jacob Gutteres, one of the regents of Neve Shalom, requested in 1796 that his only son, Moses, be sent to London at the age of eight with the hope “that he be maintained and educated there in a genteel and liberal manner at the expense of my estate and be kept there until he attains his age of twenty one years.”121 A year later, the sugar planter David Henriques similarly requested “that my [four] children be maintained and educated in Great Britain out of the interest . . . of my estate that they be severally taught Hebrew English Latin Greek French and Spanish [along with] dancing and my daughter be further instructed in musick.”122 The bigger problem for Jamaican Jewish youth was that very few opportunities existed for continued education after completion of primary school. The community offered very little, if anything, for adolescents without clear vocations, not apprenticed, or not sent to England. This seems to have caused a seri150 / Jewish Communal Life

ous crisis of undereducated and underemployed Jewish youth on the island. Illustrative of the lack of sufficient Jewish educational institutions for older children in pre-­emancipation Jamaica is the fact that in 1826 at least thirty Jewish students were enrolled in St. Jago de la Vega’s Baptist school.123 In 1796 the anonymous author “Philanthropos”—a name making explicit his allegiance to a philanthropic school of pedagogical thought advocating for free schools—wrote a series of editorials titled “On the Schooling of Jew Children,” in which he criticized the state of Jewish education on the island.124 Philanthropos, like Long before him, first claimed that the Jews of Jamaica did not adequately adhere to Jewish law and accused them of “(in too many instances) . . . breaking the Sabbath, by riding and otherwise, eating forbidden fruit, and making profane use of the Sacred Name on trivial occasions.” He then described the public markets in Kingston overrun by disheveled Jewish youths lacking supervision and education: “What a melancholy circumstance it is, to see [ Jewish] boys from ten to fifteen years of age and upwards, lurking about the Vendues in quest of contemptible bargains, at the very time they should be acquiring knowledge of reading, writing, and figures, or learning some useful trade!”125 Philanthropos went on to criticize the Kingston Jewish community for not offering sufficient educational support for the poor, and put forth his own advice on how they might establish their own free school. He recommended establishing a general free school in Jamaica willing to enroll Jewish students. He marveled with an accusatory tone at the seeming incongruity between Jewish wealth and the communal board’s unwillingness to establish a free school for the Jewish poor. In many ways he was echoing sentiments found among the enlightened monarchies of Europe at the time, which hoped to integrate Jews into the general educational system, thereby supporting and encouraging Jewish acculturation. Like those monarchs, PhilanthroJewish Communal Life / 151

pos approached the Jews from a clearly prejudicial perspective. Nevertheless, his editorial offers important insight into the lives of indigent Jews in late eighteenth-­century Jamaica. It makes clear that poverty and lack of education among Jamaican Jews was a pervasive social problem about which the existing records are otherwise silent. It also sheds light on the unfortunate limitations of communally operated Jewish schools that, in Jamaica, were woefully inadequate to meet the needs of adolescents who had outgrown primary school education. Conclusion Communal life for Jamaica’s Jews was contradictory. It was at one and the same time dependent on and independent from metropolitan patronage. While they enjoyed religious autonomy, and even had their own regional religious authority, Jamaica’s Jews still relied on the Metropole for ritual items and for the supply of rabbis. The relationship between Metropole and colony cannot, therefore, be described as unilateral patronage, but rather as a cooperative partnership. This view furthers a more nuanced and more democratized portrayal of the interplay between periphery and center in the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Despachados embody this contradictory reality. They represent both the paternalism of the Metropole as well as its cooperation with satellite colonial communities. Despachados also challenge our perception of colonial American Jewry as overwhelmingly rich and propertied merchants. Jamaica was for some a place of extreme wealth derived from trade, sugar planting, or slave jobbing. But for others, it was a place of opportunity rather than prosperity. For many, that prosperity never came. Jamaica was a place of polar extremes in wealth disparity: some accumulated fabulous wealth, while others languished in poverty. It is an unfortunate reality of “testamentary history”

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that the voices of the poorest and most vulnerable are mostly silent in the probate record. Women were most at risk. Unmarried and widowed women in Jamaica were more destitute than men, despite all the legal protections meant to safeguard their claim to property. Herein lies another important contradiction: Jewish and non-­Jewish women alike were both empowered and disempowered by their widowhood. White widows in Jamaica were the most dependent segment of society on social welfare. Jewish widows, while achieving more public agency through their widowhood, were also severely restrained by their husbands’ testamentary freedom to restrict their inheritance beyond one-­third of their estate. While women like Judith Baruh Alvares engaged in communal life through expressions of public piety, the voices of Jewish women from colonial Jamaica, in general, are largely available to use only through sources written by men.

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6 The Ethnic Identity of Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households Early modern Portuguese Jewish identity was largely predicated on a sense of ethnic distinctiveness, even supremacy, rooted in a converso past.1 New Christians were marginalized from Iberian society—denied advancement in universities and military orders—by virtue of their Jewish ancestry or lack of limpieza de sangre. New Jews internalized this Iberian obsession with blood purity. While they jettisoned their Catholicism, they could not purge the converso experience from their psyches. They transformed the very blood-­purity ideology that had excluded them from Iberian society into an expression of their own Jewish peoplehood. This sense of blood purity often informed the exclusion of other Jews from Portuguese Jewish society. When Amsterdam became a destination for Ashkenazi refugees fleeing mid-­seventeenth-­century persecutions in Ukraine and Poland, they were met with discrimination from the entrenched Portuguese community.2 Ashkenazi refugees were excluded from the community, denied social welfare, and deemed as outsiders through their dismissive classification as tudescos or polacos. Conversos and New Jews alike idealized ethnic continuity through endogamous and consanguine marriage. Endogamous marriages advanced family wealth while simultaneously preserving Iberian Jewish blood ties.3 This chapter explores the manifestations of Portuguese Jewish ethnic identity as expressed in their wills. It investigates the process of transition into open Jewish life in a familial rather than communal sphere.

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“Rejudaization” Within the Family The flow of converso refugees from Iberia and South America seeking to transition into their ancestral faith remained steady throughout the eighteenth century. London received its greatest influx of Iberian converts in the late 1720s, during a period of renewed inquisitorial persecution in Portugal.4 Jamaica was also a popular destination for many former conversos. Most of the leading Jewish figures of late seventeenth-­century Port Royal, such as David Baruh Alvares, Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, and Daniel Israel López Laguna, were former conversos. Thirty eighteenth-­century Jamaican Jewish wills were probated in either Spanish or Portuguese, suggesting that those testators were all first-­generation New Jews. Many more Jamaican Jewish wills were originally composed in Spanish and Portuguese, but only the notarial English translations have survived. Curaçao, because of its proximity to the Spanish mainland, its well-­established Jewish community, and its Amsterdam-­trained rabbinic leadership, absorbed the majority of South American converso refugees in the Caribbean.5 The Curaçao Jewish community even institutionalized progressive measures to facilitate transition into Judaism. For instance, the Mahamad controversially allowed circumcision of Christians without consent from local Dutch authorities. And, unlike in Amsterdam, Curaçao’s Mahamad did not mandate a waiting period between conversos’ adoption of Judaism and their participation in the community as taxpayers and recipients of full honors.6 In addition to the communal role in abetting transition into Rabbinic Judaism, incentives and encouragements to flee the “lands of idolatry” (terras de idolatria) and embrace Judaism came privately from within families. It was common for testators in Amsterdam to leverage inheritance so as to embolden their kin to escape Portugal and agree to circumcision.7 This was true throughout the Diaspora. The famous Bordeaux merchant Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 155

David Gradis, for instance, incentivized his Iberian converso family to openly embrace Judaism with promises of inheritance.8 He served as godfather for a young family member and financially supported an older one who was circumcised at age thirty-­ seven. Jose Lopez of Newport supported his half-­brother, the famous merchant Aaron Lopez, to actualize his escape from Portugal in 1752.9 Once settled in North America, Aaron used his considerable fortune and influence to support the escape of other family members. These types of private and familial incentives for rejudaization are similarly found in Jamaican Jewish probate wills. In 1730, the married, but childless, Port Royal merchant Daniel Carvallo, part of the town’s Bayonne cohort, incentivized his three sisters—one with the Christian name Maryann—with inheritance as a reward for adopting Judaism in Bayonne.10 He may have also intended to support other conversos in Jamaica through his donation to Port Royal’s welfare confraternity, gemilut ḥasadim, an institution known to provide assistance to poor former conversos. Similarly, the first-­generation New Jew Isaac Depass Almeyda of Kingston composed a Spanish will in April of 1752 that was later translated into English with the help of a friend.11 After bequeathing household goods, Kingston property, and fourteen slaves to his wife Rebecca, he used the remainder of his estate as an incentive to encourage his sister’s children to leave Portugal and embrace Judaism. Isaac entrusted the regents of Kingston with safeguarding the inheritance of his conversa nieces if and when they arrived on the island and even appointed them as executors of his estate. A month later, the Kingston merchant Isaac Pereira Brandon drafted his will.12 The entirety of his estate, consisting of rents and interests, was allocated to three female cousins living in Port Royal. However, their inheritance was conditional on his unnamed “lawful” wife not arriving in Jamaica in the space of five years; if she came earlier, she would inherit the entirety of 156 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

his estate. Isaac’s wife was then living in “City of Spain,” likely a reference to Spanish Trinidad, implying that she too had remained a conversa. In May of 1766, the first-­generation Jew and Kingston resident Isaac de Mella offered material incentive for his converso relatives to migrate to Jamaica and embrace their ancestral Judaism.13 Isaac’s will was originally composed in Portuguese and translated into English by notaries. After first supporting his wife with residential property in Kingston, he offered a home to his converso nephews and nieces residing in Portugal to encourage them to relocate to Jamaica so that they “shall come and embrace Judaism.” De Mella further expressed the hope that his wife would treat his conversa niece “as if she was her own daughter . . . provided my said niece behaves unto her with that respect and love that is due and . . . I hope she will.” Like Isaac Depass Almeyda in 1752, Isaac de Mella in 1766 also entrusted the property intended for his converso kin to the regents of the Jewish community. Solomon Rodrigues Dacosta, a Kingston shopkeeper, distributed a quite humble estate in his will of April 1786.14 He provided his wife with no further inheritance beyond the legally required one-­third. The remainder of Solomon’s estate was bequeathed to his three brothers and their families, one of whom, Francisco Rodrigues Dacosta, was a converso in Portugal. Though Solomon lived in Kingston alongside two of his Jewish brothers, he made no distinction between them and his New Christian brother in Portugal. The bonds of blood in this case were clearly more determinant than ties of religion in defining familial belonging. New Jews who settled in Jamaica during the eighteenth century, along with the converso family members they supported, perpetuated Judeo-­converso ideologies of family life on the island. Thus, Portuguese Jewish family life in Jamaica, as elsewhere, was contradictorily exclusively Jewish yet at the same Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 157

time confessionally inclusive of Catholic kin in Iberia and South America. Material support shared between Jewish and converso kin was one way to ensure the ethnic continuity of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish family. Incentivizing the migration of converso kin to Jamaica, where they would become open Jews, was also but one way to sustain endogamous marriage patterns by increasing the number of eligible marriage partners on the island. Jewish Marriage in Colonial Jamaica Endogamous marriage was the most effective method by which Portuguese New Jews preserved the ethnic continuity of the nação, but marriage, in general, was relatively uncommon in eighteenth-­century Jamaica. White Jamaican colonists have been referred to as a “failed settler society” by one historian because of their few marriages and limited procreation, which prevented their development beyond a migrant population.15 The rarity of marriage in Jamaica was partially the result of the colony’s extreme gender imbalance and the tacit social acceptance for White men to live in sustained relationships with enslaved and free women of color. These relationships were often preferred by White men in Jamaica, freeing them from all legal obligations to a partner while still providing many of the companionate benefits of marriage. And, the devastatingly high mortality rates in Jamaica often made marriages seem like a “series of fleeting encounters.”16 Those few White Jamaicans who did marry had few surviving children and tended to live within nuclear families surrounded by very few extended kin.17 For these reasons, White eighteenth-­century Jamaica was largely characterized as consisting of transient single men, rather than settler families.18 Although some recent research has suggested that White Jamaicans—and especially free people of color—had more substantial family lives than previously thought, it is clear

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that White settlers were the least likely inhabitants of Jamaica to raise families.19 Jewish families—as depicted in their wills—defy this characterization. Eighteenth-­century Jewish testators are three times more likely to have been married than to have been single: 72 percent of testators were married, widows, or widowers when they drafted their wills. The biggest block of testators, nearly 31 percent, consisted of married—or once married—men with legally recognized children. According to the testamentary rec­ ord alone, marriage and procreation were clearly more common among Portuguese Jews in Jamaica compared to White inhabitants. However, wills are sources that are skewed toward the married and those with children. Poor Jews, such as despachados, were more itinerant, and also more likely to stay single and never become testators. There are a number of explanations for the presumed higher rate of Jewish marriage in Jamaica. First is the economic imperative to sustain family networks upon which were built Portuguese trans-­Atlantic trading relationships. As one historian puts it: “the house formed the fundamental unit of the Portuguese merchant class.”20 Second was an ideological imperative to maintain the contours of Portuguese ethnic identity through endogamy. Third, Jews, generally, had different motivations in migrating to Jamaica than did White settlers. To be sure, some Jews were searching for prosperity with the hopes of later establishing themselves in England, but some were also fleeing inquisitorial persecution in Iberia or South America. As refugees, rather than immigrants, Jews were more likely to settle in large family units. This is reflected in the fact that a majority of Jewish testators, 66 percent, included extended kin (such as cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts, and uncles) as beneficiaries to their estates. While inheritance alone is not a full indicator of familial inclusion, the probate record suggests that Jamaican Jews were

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more likely to sustain larger—more distant—family networks than White Jamaicans. For Jews, marriage not only protected economic ties, it ensured their very survival. There are only scattered references to Jewish wedding rituals in Jamaica. The pseudo-­Hebraist author of “Curious Particulars Relative to the Jews,” discussed earlier, described Jewish nuptial customs prominently among his ethnographic curiosities.21 But, like many other would-­be Christian Hebraists, he exoticized and eroticized Jews beyond all credulity. He claimed that Jewish girls married as early as eleven and then fixated on the sexual customs of young Jewish couples. Certainly Jewish women married young, but likely not much younger than their non-­Jewish White counterparts, who married on average around age nineteen.22 Other scattered references imply that Jewish marriages were often public events that took place within the communal space of the synagogue, a rather modern feature of early modern Jewish life.23 In February of 1802, Maria Nugent, the wife of the Jamaican governor, was invited to attend a Jewish wedding in St. Jago de la Vega but, unfortunately, “after a little debate” decided to wait for the next one.24 While the testamentary record is silent on Jamaican Jewish marriage ceremony, wills help to shed some light on the economy of Jewish marriage. Dowries were the greatest financial security to a young bride as they were protected by her ketubah. In some cases, the groom’s family also made financial pledges to the future financial security of a young woman. The prominent St. Andrew planter Benjamin Pereira (see Appendix, IV), for instance, referred to a nuptial arrangement in his will of 1774.25 Benjamin entered into a contract with Mordechai Rodrigues Lopes of Kingston when his son Isaac became engaged to Mordechai’s daughter Rachel. Isaac was a minor at the time of the arrangement. As a precondition to the marriage, therefore, Mordechai required that Benjamin pledge the sum of 3,000 pounds as security in the event that Isaac died before attaining 160 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

the age of twenty-­one, to compensate him for the cost of the dowry. Benjamin intended to draft a new contract after Isaac reached the age of majority that would absolve him of this obligation. But, since it looked like Benjamin might die before his son’s majority, he was careful to stipulate that his entire estate would be liable to this payment if Isaac were to die prematurely. While it is unusual to find such specific details about a marriage arrangement in wills, it was not at all unusual that the marriage was an endogamous one, that is, enacted between two Portuguese partners. Endogamous Marriage Endogamous marriage was an ideological lynchpin of Portuguese Jewish society. For conversos, too, endogamous marriages were common and often even a point of honor.26 It has been estimated that as many as 95 percent of marriages involving New Christians in Mexico were endogamous.27 However, over the course of the eighteenth century, as a result of demographic changes brought on by the ethnic diversity of the Atlantic World, the rate of endogamous marriage throughout the Diaspora declined. The eventual breakdown of marriage barriers between Ashkenazim and Portuguese, for instance, has been seen as one of the principal symptoms of Portuguese Jewish cultural and social decay in the eighteenth century. In North America and England, where Ashkenazim outnumbered Portuguese Jews as early as 1720, intermarriages between the two were a common occurrence. Jewish marriages between Portuguese and Ashkenazim were controversial throughout the Atlantic and often resulted in social marginalization or even excommunication.28 In 1745, for instance, controversy erupted in London when the Portuguese sexton of Bevis Marks, Jacob Israel Bernal, attempted to marry the “tudesca” Jochebed Baruch.29 The Mahamad gave Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 161

their grudging consent to the union only after Bernal agreed to renounce his position and forgo any future communal honors. When a man of lesser communal status, Asser del Branco, attempted to marry a “tudesca” in 1772, the Mahamad categorically refused to approve the union.30 In New York, when Isaac Mendes Seixas attempted to marry the Ashkenazi Rachel Levy in the 1730s, it sparked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and the New York Mahamad ultimately forced the couple out of the community.31 Intermarriage with non-­Jews challenged the continuity of Portuguese Jewish ethnic identity all the more. The eighteenth-­ century Portuguese community in London had lost some of its most prestigious members, such as the physician Jacob de Castro Sarmento, to intermarriage with non-­Jews.32 The trend may have been greatest in North America. One demographer suggests that in North America, between 1686 and 1840, as many as 15 percent of Jewish marriages involved non-­Jews.33 Still, the most common North American Jewish marriages were between Ashkenazim or between an Ashkenazi and a Portuguese Jew. In North America, “more Sephardic Jews married Ashkenazim than married Sephardim.”34 However, this North American marriage trend did not extend to the Caribbean, where the Portuguese remained highly endogamous throughout the eighteenth century.35 It has been suggested that the New Jews of the Caribbean experienced so little interreligious marriage, compared to their North American brethren, because they had so little to offer in terms of landed estates, but there are certainly more logical explanations.36 Perhaps the simplest is that there was a much more persistent Portuguese Jewish majority in the Caribbean, making it easier to sustain endogamous marriage patterns. With a steady stream of female despachadas and orphans, some even supported by the Amsterdam dotar (dowry) society, as well as a continual flow of first-­generation New Jewish women from 162 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

South America, West Indian Portuguese Jews did not want for eligible marriage partners throughout the eighteenth century. Other explanations include the ideological centrality of endogamy as a cornerstone of Portuguese Jewish identity and the greater social acceptance of living unmarried with women of color in the Caribbean, which offered many of the benefits of marriage with none of the responsibility. According to the testamentary record, marriage between Portuguese Jews and Ashkenazim in eighteenth-­century Jamaica was exceedingly rare. I have identified 329 marriages of Jewish Jamaican testators and their beneficiaries through their wills as well as through advertisements in printed sources. The vast majority of these marriages were endogamous: 84 percent. The rates of endogamy were slightly lower for Ashkenazim, bearing in mind the extremely small presence of Ashkenazim on the island. There appear to be only twenty cases of intermarriage between Portuguese and Ashkenazim among colonial Jamaican Jewish testators or their beneficiaries. In all but three of those cases, the marriage was between a wealthy Ashkenazi man and a seemingly poorer Portuguese woman. These marriages unsurprisingly became more common in the latter part of the eighteenth century as Ashkenazim became more established on the island: 85 percent of marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are known through wills and advertisements from after 1780. At least one Portuguese Jewish testator explicitly prohibited his daughter from marrying an Ashkenazi. The testator Jacob Sequira, a St. Andrew livestock pen keeper with extensive property in Kingston and family ties to Curaçao, threatened his daughter Sarah with loss of inheritance in the event she married an Ashkenazi.37 In Jacob’s 1785 will he wrote that she would forfeit her share of his estate if she were to “marry and take to husband any person . . . of the Jewish nation distinguished by the affiliation of the tribe of Benjamin [that is, an Ashkenazi].”38 His elder daughter Judith had married an Ashkenazi man, Solomon Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 163

Josephs, and therefore Jacob seemingly sought to prevent Sarah from choosing the same path. Endogamous marriages also had their own sets of variations. Nearly 13 percent of Portuguese endogamous marriages in Jamaica occurred between two brothers and two sisters, suggesting that such marriages were occasionally intended to solidify family alliances. In some cases, it was explicit that a marriage was intended to strengthen a business partnership. David Henriques, for instance, married the sister of his business partner, Abraham Bravo, in order to secure the family wealth and ensure it would remain within the family after his death.39 It is inaccurate, however, to consider endogamous marriage as a strategy only used by the wealthy to secure family assets. Often, poor relief and endogamy went hand in hand. The preservation of endogamous marriage patterns was achieved, in part, through providing dowries to needy girls of the nação. This occurred on both a communal and a private level. The major communities of the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, from the Atlantic to Italy, supported privately funded dowry lotteries.40 These dowry confraternities were intended as both a source of poor relief and an incentive to conversas to embrace Judaism. Young women within the ethnic contours of the nation, including conversas in Portugal, Antwerp, and other places, were eligible to apply. A number of poor young Jewish women in Jamaica also benefited from Amsterdam’s dowry society.41 Dowries were similarly provided on an individual level as charitable bequests in probate wills. In some cases, testamentary bequests were intended for the benefit of needy girls of the “Portuguese nation” generally, but in most cases, the testator preferred to support a relative.42 In 1738, Isaac Pereira Brandon provided dowries for specific family members: “four fatherless unmarried young women of my relations.”43 In 1753, Abraham Gonsales of Kingston earmarked funds for the dowries of all “poor female fatherless children” 164 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

but specified that “my blood which are related to me by consanguinity . . . shall be preffered.”44 And just like with private support for rejudaization, the community often played an important role in the distribution of privately donated funds for dowries. The Kingston merchant Jacob Lopes Torres appointed the regents of the community in 1767 as his agents to distribute dowries and charity to people with the same family name.45 These testamentary donations were mostly meant to supplement dowries for related young women, or women from within the community generally. However, some testators bequeathed enough for a full dowry. In support of his daughter’s marriage, the Kingston merchant Abraham Ledesma in 1750 pledged a large house in Kingston (across the street from the “town jail”) along with eight slaves as a dowry when his daughter became engaged.46 But when the young groom died unexpectedly, Abraham amended his will so that that property would be set aside as a dowry for his daughter or granddaughter, in perpetuity. In one lavish case, the famous Newport merchant Aaron Lopez supplied the full dowry for one of his relatives, Sally Lopez, when she married the Creole Jamaican Jew Abraham Pereira Mendes in 1767.47 Toward her dowry he contributed 1,000 milled Spanish coins, underwrote the full cost of her household slaves, and also enlisted his trading partner in Boston to search out all the best silks and brocades. These generous dowry bequests were strategic efforts to preserve the ethnic contours of the Portuguese nation. Consanguine Marriage Sixteen percent of Portuguese endogamous marriages were consanguine—that is, between blood relatives, in most cases, first cousins. In some rare cases—particularly in the earlier part of the long eighteenth century—these marriages were between an uncle and a niece. This was the case, for instance, of David Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 165

Baruh Alvares and his wife Sara Narbaes. David’s sister and mother in law even lived with the couple in their household. Consanguine marriages were not exclusive to Portuguese Jews. They were just as common among Ashkenazim. The St. Jago de la Vega community leader Moses Adolphus, for instance, married his cousin.48 Interestingly, the rate of consanguine marriage did not seem to meaningfully decline over time among Jamaica’s Jews, as one might expect, with the highest rate per decade occurring during the 1760s. The popularity and consistency of consanguine marriage among Jews may have further set them apart in eighteenth-­ century Jamaica. While such marriages were off-­ limits in the Catholic world, they also fell increasingly out of fashion throughout the Protestant Atlantic over the course of the eighteenth century. As companionate marriages grew in legitimacy, consanguine marriages grew increasingly controversial.49 Illustrative of the declining popularity of intrafamily marriages, an anonymous author published an editorial in the Columbian Magazine in December of 1796 called “On Marrying Cousins.”50 “Hymenus” explained that he had fallen in love with his cousin and while she reciprocated his affection, her father prevented their marriage on the grounds that their consanguinity made their union offensive to God. By publishing his editorial, Hymenus brought his case before the court of public opinion, defending the practice with biblical proofs illustrating God’s divine approbation. Although Hymenus found ample biblical precedent, his argument was sealed with a uniquely eighteenth-­ century flourish: that marrying his cousin would further his pursuit of happiness. “There can remain no reason . . . to obstruct such a marriage and thereby render a fellow creature unhappy, by refusing a grant, which may be necessary to the common ease of his being.” Jamaica’s Jews may have found shared cause with Hymenus’s unpopular position. But while Jamaica’s Jews defied popular Jamaican conceptions of marriage by holding to consan166 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

guine marriage patterns, they simultaneously embraced larger companionate trends. Around 34 percent of Jewish testators lived within what can be described as nuclear families, that is, male testators with only wives and children as beneficiaries. On average, there are thirteen such companionate families per decade in the will record, with no significant change over time. Jamaica’s Jews were thus at one and the same time distinct from yet entirely consistent with larger trans-­Atlantic English marriage trends that increasingly favored these types of companionate families. The growing legitimacy of companionate marriages, motivated by affection, and scaled-­down nuclear households presented what might have been the greatest challenge to Portuguese Jewish efforts to preserve the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. Attempts to combat that challenge were articulated through regulations against “clandestine marriage.” “With the Consent of Her Mother”: The Fear of Clandestine Marriage Clandestine marriages took place without the consent of parents or clergy. A pervasive fear among Portuguese Jews was that these marriages were motivated by love—as opposed to the ethnic or economic needs of the family—or, perhaps even worse, by male deception, threatening the perceived purity and chastity associated with young Portuguese women. This fear was not unique to Portuguese Jews. In 1753, a controversial Marriage Act was passed in England that annulled marriages unsanctioned by a guardian or recognized member of the clergy.51 This law may have exacerbated the problem of male deception rather than remedying it, and may have put vulnerable women at greater risk as they could now be deceived into marriage by men, seeking sexual gains, who knew the marriage would more easily be annulled. Parallel regulations were passed in eighteenth-­century Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 167

colonial Mexico.52 The threat of individual choice in marriage partners there required that parents resort to new mechanisms of coercion, such as leveraging inheritance. In the Spanish Americas, the fear of clandestine marriage was also often expressed in the language of Castilian family honor. White Jamaicans, too, expressed anxiety over the threat to traditional marriage. Marriage was already so uncommon in Jamaica that it was even more of an affront to society when young couples bypassed the sanctioned Anglican clergy or a justice of the peace in order to marry. Edward Long described measures imposed by the governor requiring orphans and minors to obtain a marriage license and placing harsher penalties on unsanctioned clergy who illegally performed marriages.53 The law explicitly targeted those, like orphans, who were without parental coercion. Portuguese Jews perceived the danger of clandestine marriage through their own distinct set of concerns, rooted in their converso past, regarding what has been described as the “threat of Eros.”54 Clandestine marriages—whether motivated by love, lust, or deceit—threatened patriarchal honor, the continuity of family wealth, and the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. By the 1730s, clandestine marriage had become one of the dominant concerns of the Amsterdam Mahamad, which issued several ordinances (takanot) intended to proscribe the practice.55 In 1735, Amsterdam’s Mahamad imposed stiff penalties on husbands and their male witnesses who entered into marriage outside approved channels. At this stage, the Mahamad clearly perceived clandestine marriage as an act of male deception. The community leaders did not suspect, or chose not to recognize, that clandestine marriage may have been the result of a mutual expression of love. That perception began to change over time. By the 1780s, the communal boards of Amsterdam and London passed regulations whereby women became equally culpable in cases of clandestine marriage, thus tacitly acknowledging the 168 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

reality that they were not always the passive victims of male deception. The issue of clandestine marriage had likewise been a principal concern of the Jewish communities of the Americas. Curaçao’s Mahamad first addressed the issue in 1726. The regents initially expressed their concern regarding marriages performed under the supervision of only two witnesses. Although such marriages were legally binding according to Jewish law, they threatened the authority of parents, rabbis, and the communal board. The Mahamad therefore required, under the threat of ḥerem, that all marriages be supervised and approved by the communally appointed ḥakham.56 This regulation was repeated in 1749, 1751, and again in 1756, when the Mahamad imposed harsher penalties on clandestine marriages.57 When Curaçao’s Mahamad again addressed the issue in 1768, it is clear that the earlier ordinances had failed to stem the popularity of clandestine marriages. This time, the Mahamad not only threatened excommunication and annulment of the marriage, as well as imposing a fine, it also threatened to garnish the wages of the offending husband. In the 1768 rendition of the ordinance, they touched upon some of the distinctively Portuguese Jewish concerns over clandestine marriage by referring to a sense of Portuguese feminine virtue and family honor:58 As honor and chastity of the daughters of Israel is one of the virtues so highly esteemed in our Holy Law and regarded as the true essence of their beauty . . . the Mahamad . . . together with the eminent Hakham, having remarked the wonton dissipation and unspeakable excess between the young men and maidens of our Nation, their unbridled levity and frivolity which . . . very often results in the girls yielding their honor on the young man’s promise of marriage, and without [thought of ] preserving the glory of their forebears they degrade it by their ugly, filthy, ignoJamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 169

minious deeds and trample upon and disgrace their family honor.59 Curaçao’s Mahamad thus saw clandestine marriage as a threat to the very core of Portuguese Jewish identity and family honor. And, when this ban on clandestine marriage was revised in 1809 they also added the requirement of parental consent for all Jewish marriages enacted on the island.60 Jamaican Jewish communal boards likely also addressed the issue of clandestine marriage in much the same way. But in the absence of communal records, the issue in Jamaica can only be explored on a private rather than a communal level. The most effective coercive tool found in wills was the use of a “consent clause” whereby testators could leverage inheritance by insisting that a beneficiary—whether male or female—marry with the consent of an executor or surviving wife as a precondition to receiving inheritance. These clauses were included by around 14 percent of testators with children. In 1723, the testator Moses Mendes Quixano made the inheritance to all his children, sons and daughters alike, conditional on their marriages with the consent of his brother, who was also his executor.61 In 1744, Abraham Almeyda repeated a consent clause three times, coercing his daughter to marry with the consent of his brothers, whom he had appointed as executors.62 In 1763, Judith Lopes Alvin bequeathed a deed to a valuable property to a young man, David Vaz Martins, on the condition that he agree to marry her niece.63 In the event that he refused, that inheritance was to be divided between her relations in Curaçao. The experience of Rebecca Brandon of Kingston illustrates multiple dimensions and implications of these coercive testamentary clauses. On January 18, 1732, Moses Brandon, a thirty-­ three-­year-­old Jewish merchant living in Kingston, died, leaving behind a young wife, Abigail, and their two-­year-­old daughter Rebecca.64 Six years later, Moses’s father, Isaac Pereira Brandon, composed a will. Isaac not only intended to support the widows 170 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

of his two deceased sons but also to supply the dowries for his fatherless granddaughters. Rebecca, then eight years old, was among the principal beneficiaries of her grandfather’s estate. Isaac bequeathed 2,000 pounds to Rebecca with the stipulation that the money be delivered to her on the day of her marriage to her first cousin David Pereira Brandon: “upon her being . . . bonafide willing . . . and consenting to intermarry [him].” The eight-­year-­old Rebecca was thus presented with a financial incentive to agree to a marriage with her cousin arranged in the will of her seventy-­three-­year-­old grandfather. Inasmuch as Isaac offered a financial incentive for Rebecca to accept the arrangement, he also created coercive conditions that would have penalized her refusal. Isaac threatened to reduce her inheritance by 90 percent, to 200 pounds, if she refused to marry David. However, if David refused the marriage, then upon reaching the age of twenty-­one, Rebecca would inherit the entire sum. In such a case, “the said Rebecca Brandon shall be . . . at full liberty to marry with any other person she shall think fit,” though with one critical caveat: “provided [that her marriage] be with the consent of her mother.” This case is thus illustrative of a variety of issues surrounding Portuguese Jewish marriage in Jamaica: consanguinity, coercion, and consent. In 1795, the nearly eighty-­year-­old Rebecca Brandon, presumably the same, drafted her own will in which she was identified as a “spinster,” implying that, against the wishes of her grandfather, she had not in the end married her cousin David.65 It is unknown if she refused the arranged marriage or if David had refused, thus leaving her with a more comfortable inheritance. If she indeed was the one to refuse, she may have preferred the life of a single woman over marriage to a cousin, clearly perceived as morally reprehensible among some circles in the British Atlantic. She may have refused the marriage on the grounds that it was predicated not on love but on the patriarchal will of her grandfather. She may have also found an alternative Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 171

to marriage, as was the case among many of the men in her community. Though we can only speculate on Rebecca’s emotional reaction to coerced marriage, she seems to have been the exception rather than the rule in not entering the marriage. As with so many other Portuguese Jews in the West Indies, her arranged marriage was an attempt to preserve and perpetuate a sense of Portuguese ethnic singularity. Conclusion Endogamous marriages, between two Portuguese Jews, occurred at an extreme rate in colonial Jamaica, to a far greater extent than in North America, and possibly even London and Amsterdam. The persistent Portuguese Jewish majority meant that there were always eligible marriage partners in Jamaica. Their dogmatic insistence on endogamy brought these peripheral Jews closer and made them more interconnected—­ ethnically, economically, and ideologically—to the Diaspora as a whole. Endogamous marriages ensured that pan-­diasporic familial networks, which were so critical in sustaining the Portuguese nation during the seventeenth century, would continue throughout the eighteenth. These marriages were a manifestation of a shared ideology that contributed to the supranational character and ethnic distinctiveness of the Portuguese nation as a whole. As endogamous marriage brought Portuguese Jews closer to the Diaspora, it paradoxically distanced them from local Jamaican society. Endogamous marriage in many ways prevented creolization. Unlike in North America, Jews in the West Indies did not marry into well-­established non-­Jewish families during the eighteenth century. Failure to intermarry with Ashkenazim and non-­Jews meant that Portuguese Jews remained religious, linguistic, and experiential outsiders, as they perpetuated rather than abandoned their Iberian converso heritage. 172 / Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households

They were always perceived by White colonists as more Iberian than English. But although Portuguese Jews lived in Iberian-­ style extended family networks at a higher rate than their White counterparts, most of their endogamous marriages led to estates shared only within nuclear families, in conformity with larger English trends. They were truly at one and the same time both English and Iberian. Their family lives reflected other local trends. Despite their extreme rates of endogamy, which so set them apart in Jamaican society, the men of the nation embraced the tacit social acceptance of relationships with free and enslaved women of color. Sometimes, men living in endogamous marriages would also have children with mistresses who were included as beneficiaries in their estates. In these cases, they were both ethnically distinct and attached to a broader Diaspora, while at the same time being Creole and embedded in their colonial society.

Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households / 173

7 The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica Living in unofficial blended families of color was a pervasive social reality in eighteenth-­century Jamaica, as it was in other colonial slave societies. Both single and married Jewish men in Jamaica had children with free and enslaved women of color and often voluntarily supported those women and their children in their wills. These blended families provide a critical metric by which to begin to understand Jewish creolization in colonial Jamaica. Jamaican probate wills are highly articulate regarding these relationships compared to those in Europe and even other colonial societies in the English Caribbean such as Barbados. This chapter explores these relationships as described in wills in order to understand where women of color and their children fit within the otherwise highly insular Jewish family and community of Jamaica. Concubinage Within a Slave Society Thirty-­eight Jewish male testators, around 10 percent of men, referred explicitly to their “reputed” or “natural” children in their wills. These were euphemistic terms for children born outside of officially sanctioned marriages. The majority of these Jewish male testators, twenty-­nine, were unmarried without legally recognized children. Four were married without children and another four were married with legally recognized children. One appeared to be a widower with children. A further twenty-­ five male testators made what could have been veiled references 174

in their wills to families of color, by giving an inheritance to a specific woman or child of color. When these explicit and possibly veiled references are taken together, testators referring to family of color may have amounted to around 14 percent of all Jamaican Jewish will makers. Exploitive relationships between Jewish men and socially marginalized non-­Jewish women were not confined to Jamaica or even to the Americas. Jewish men in medieval Christian Iberia often had sexual relationships with underclass Muslim women, and Jewish men in Ottoman lands frequently exploited enslaved Slavic women, sometimes purchased for the explicit purpose of sex.1 However, there is no reason to think that these practices and precedents in any way informed the conduct of colonial New World Portuguese Jewish men. In slave societies such as Jamaica and Suriname these unequal relationships were far more than fleeting affairs; they were often long-­term, cohabitational, and representative of a pervasive social reality.2 White male cohabitation with women of color, and the raising of children with them, was an open secret in eighteenth-­century Jamaica. Unlike in some North American colonies, the Assembly did not explicitly forbid marriage between White men and women of color, and some such marriages did occur, but they were socially anathema and rarely happened.3 While White Creole society turned a blind eye to concubinage, the European perspective was more indignant. The highly Anglicized Edward Long, for instance, saw relationships between White men and women of color as a scourge on the island. Informed by his belief in racial fixity, he thought that miscegenation would bring social ruin to Jamaica, as it had, from Long’s perspective, in the Spanish Americas. He criticized White Creoles “who would much rather riot in these goatish embraces, than share the pure and lawful bliss derived from matrimonial, mutual love.”4 Similar indignation could be found among some Old World Jewish ob-

The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 175

servers.5 But it was not until after the calamitous events of 1760 that the Jamaican Assembly took explicit action to proscribe liaisons between White men and women of color. During the legal backlash to Tacky’s War the Assembly addressed the issue of inheritance to children of color from their White fathers. Jamaica’s Assembly worried that the widespread practice might economically empower people of color at the expense of White settlers. In 1761, the Assembly outlawed all inheritance to nonrelated “negroes” and “mulattos” and restricted the amount that could be bequeathed to children of color to 2,000 pounds.6 Furthermore, the law required that there be four degrees of separation from a “negro” ancestor in order for children of color to receive inheritance. It was the first major attack on testamentary freedom in Jamaica. Probate wills from after 1761 reveal that the act, in all its components, was not strictly enforced. It is impossible to speculate on the motivations behind the pervasive voluntary bequests to children of color and to their mothers. It is possible that in some cases fathers were motivated to support their “reputed” children out of a sense of affection. But, in many, if not most, cases, mothers of “reputed” children were the victims of rape. Those who were not the victims of sexual violence were nevertheless victims of sexual exploitation by virtue of their unequal status within a racially hierarchical slave society. Even a free woman of color who could own slaves of her own had no equality before the law in eighteenth-­century Jamaica. In a slave society, familial affection could not truly exist between owners, the owned, or the formerly owned. As one historian puts it, “no act of ‘kindness’ could mitigate the effects of slavery.”7 The manumission record provides a poignant illustration of the complex interplay between an ethos of sentiment and an ethos of accumulation among Jewish slave owners. In the twenty-­ one years between 1779 and 1799, Jewish owners appeared in the 176 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

manumission record in only 161 cases, representing a total of 150 individual Jews.8 Manumission throughout the Atlantic World was in general a rare occurrence.9 The infrequency of manumission in colonial Jamaica may be explained in part by the high cost. Owners paid a manumission fee in addition to the cost of the administrative stamp.10 The “security bond,” put into law by an act of Assembly in 1774 in order to prevent the “dumping” of unwanted slaves, was an obligatory five-­pound lifelong annuity for the enfranchised person.11 This annuity was typically deposited into the hands of parish churchwardens at the time of manumission and dispensed by them on a yearly basis. Therefore, given the high cost, it is easy to perceive manumission as an act of kindness, a reward for faithful service, or perhaps even an act of affection. But manumission records are notoriously inarticulate and ought not to be taken at face value as acts of kindness.12 Manumission may have even been a coercive tool. It has been suggested that manumission in pre-­emancipation Jamaica and elsewhere was often used as a method of manipulation by dangling the promise of freedom to ensure loyalty and hard work among the enslaved.13 These 150 Jewish men and women manumitted a total of 219 slaves, 95 of whom were children. Eighty-­one percent of those children were identified by complexions other than “negro” and were the property of the one paying the manumission fee. Thus, children of color were far more likely to be freed than Black children. In most of those cases, the freed children also appeared in proximity to a specific woman or with an explicit reference to their mothers. The disparity between the manumission of Black children and those identified as other than “negro,” and the presence of mothers suggests a strong correlation between White paternity and manumission.14 In only two instances of Jewish manumission of slaves between 1779 and 1799 is it stated explicitly that paternity was in fact the motivation.15 The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 177

In March of 1795, the Kingston man Moses Gomes Fonseca—possibly originally from Bayonne—manumitted his three children, Nancy, Sally, and Nelly James, the daughters of a “free Black” woman Eleanor Minol Thomas.16 In an extremely rare formulation, he stated that this manumission was in fulfillment of “the natural love and affection which I have and bear towards my three mulatto children”—an explicit expression of sentiment found only in this single Jewish manumission. Eleanor seems to have received her freedom from her non-­Jewish owner a couple of months before Moses manumitted their children. Five years later, Moses drafted his will, in which he bequeathed nearly the entirety of his estate to Eleanor and their three children.17 Other cases are less explicit but no less clear. In 1782, the Kingston shopkeeper David Gomes Rabello manumitted a “negro” woman named Affey along with five “mulatto” children: Mary, Alexander, Lydia, Sarah, and Sophia Reallo.18 “Reallo” was likely a variation on the name Rabello, or a clerical error. In August of 1786, David bequeathed his entire estate to Affey and their daughter Mary.19 From his will it is known that the four “mulatto” children manumitted in 1782 were David’s grandchildren: the son and daughters of Mary. Cases of Jewish female owners manumitting slaves may also hold clues to manumission motivated by paternity. Most women who manumitted slaves appear to have done so soon after the deaths of their husbands. Seventy-­two percent of Jewish women in the manumission record are identified as widows and were likely settling their husbands’ estates.20 Cases like these may suggest that Jewish wives in Jamaica, as with Jewish wives in Curaçao and throughout Atlantic slave societies, tacitly countenanced the public secret of concubinage with women of color.21 But, most Jewish men who had “reputed” children with women of color in Jamaica were single.

178 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

Unmarried Jewish Men and Their Unofficial Families of Color Some single men in Jamaica lived in unofficial—and entirely unequal—family units with women of color who had no intestate rights of inheritance. While a wife was entitled to one-­third of an estate, a concubine, whether free or enslaved, was entirely at the mercy of a male testator. Wills were the only way to fully ensure inheritance for non–legally recognized family, and even inheritance bequeathed through wills had legal limits. The lack of legal responsibility made such families attractive options to many White and Jewish men. The inequality of slave society made it possible for single men to exploit these women with complete impunity. Additionally, Jamaica’s exaggerated gender imbalance made it difficult for many White men to find wives, although, as we have seen, this was less of an issue for Jews. Non–legally recognized families of color surrounding an unmarried Jewish testator are a conspicuous aspect of Jamaican wills, with many illustrative examples. The single Kingston man Joseph Cohen Delara composed a will in January of 1758.22 His entire estate was bequeathed to his two Jewish nephews and his two “mulatto” children: Esther and Joe, the children of a free woman called Slago who “now lives with me.” He bequeathed his house on Mordant Street in Kingston, along with his furniture and linens, to these children. He further requested that his executors permit Slago “quietly to dwell therein until her daughter Esther shall attain the age of twenty one years.” In December of 1762, the unmarried Ashkenazi testator Elias Lazarus supported the Kingston Aby Yetomim along with the Jewish and Christian communal institutions of St. Jago de la Vega.23 In addition to manumitting a male and female slave, he included bequests to his two “mulatto” children. His daughter, Catherine Freeman, was born of a free woman by the same name. The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 179

Elias bequeathed a slave woman named Lavina along with her two children to his “mulatto” daughter. Elias’s son Davy was born to an enslaved woman, Patience, and therefore required manumission, which Elias granted in his will. In September of 1764, the unmarried St. Jago de la Vega merchant David Henriques Fereira, a man with familial ties to Bayonne and other parts of France, manumitted his “mulatto” children Charles and Octavia, born of two different enslaved women. In an unusual occurrence, after emancipating his daughter Octavia, he bequeathed to her a slave woman, called Nancy, who was possibly her own mother. He stipulated that in the event Octavia died before her mother then in such a case Nancy should receive her freedom from the proceeds of his estate. Abraham Henriques de Souza was an unmarried planter based in St. Jago de la Vega who drafted a will in May of 1770.24 He largely devoted his estate to the benefit of his Jewish nieces and nephews living in Jamaica, Amsterdam, and London. Although Abraham made no mention of his enslaved property, he bequeathed all of his household furniture along with fifty Jamaican pounds to a free “negro” woman called Phillis “who has lived with me for many years.” Abraham and Phillis had two “mulatto” daughters, Sarah and Rebecca, who both bore the name de Souza. Rebecca and Sarah were already young adults when their father drafted his will. Indeed, Sarah Souza drafted her own will four years later, in May of 1774, when she had become “convinced of the certainty of death.”25 There is no evidence from her will that she had a Jewish identity. She included a religious preamble in which, with “reverence and humility,” she resigned her soul to “almighty god,” language somewhat dissimilar from Jewish wills. She left no donation to a synagogue and made no request for Jewish burial. However, her tenuous social status as a “mulatto” woman was more evident. The notaries referred to her as a “spinster,” yet the bulk of her modest estate 180 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

was devoted to her own daughter, Rebecca Colt, seemingly born out of wedlock. She also supported her “spinster” sister Rebecca Souza along with Rebecca’s daughter, Mary Vallet. Thus, both the “mulatto” daughters of Abraham Henriques de Souza ended up within non–legally recognized families of their own. The Ashkenazi man Solomon Abrahams came to Jamaica from London to join his brother Nathan, where he became a planter in St. Jago de la Vega and composed a will in January of 1772.26 Solomon had been naturalized in Jamaica as a result of the Plantation Act in May of 1746.27 He remained unmarried but continued to support his family in Hamburg. Solomon died at age fifty-­nine on a return voyage to Jamaica from Philadelphia and was buried in Lucea.28 He bequeathed five slaves along with his house in St. Jago de la Vega to his “mulatto” daughter Mary Garden. Those bequests were further intended for the benefit of Mary’s children, Robert and William Garden. Solomon also bequeathed another house to the free “negro” woman called Diana Thomas, along with a onetime sum of one hundred pounds. Diana may have been Mary’s mother. Solomon concluded his will with substantial bequests to three other “mulatto” children whom he did not recognize as his children. Daniel Rodrigues Nunes was a single planter in Vere Parish on the southern coast of the island (now part of Clarendon Parish) and the owner of a beachfront property who composed a will in December of 1773.29 He divided his estate between his four siblings on the island and his five “reputed” daughters from two different women. With a woman called Mary Osborne he had Leah, to whom he gave slaves and a small amount of money for her upkeep. With another woman, baptized as Ann Warner, he had four daughters: Sarah Nunes, married to a Kingston sailor, along with Esther, Rebecca, and Rachel, to whom he equally divided his house in Carlisle Bay along with the remainder of his slaves. It is implied in his will that all four of his daughters by Ann Warner were, like their mother, baptized. The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 181

The single Kingston silversmith Abraham de Azevedo composed a will in December of 1776.30 He dedicated his estate for the benefit of his two married sisters on the island along with his apprentice. He lived for a long time in Kingston with a free “quadroon” woman, Lydia Wood, to whom be bequeathed his household goods, furniture, clothing, and linens. He gave his working tools, silver, and jewels, along with all the debts owed to his business, to their son Francis Gale. He not only devoted the largest share of his estate to Lydia and their son Francis, but also appointed them as joint executors of his estate. David Rodrigues Silva, an unmarried Kingston merchant, drafted a will in November of 1795 in which he supported his four siblings living on the island.31 He gave to his six “adopted natural” children born of his housekeeper, Elizabeth Stevenson, the rents of a house on Temple Lane in Kingston, along with the rents earned from hiring out his slaves. David referred to these children as both his “natural” and “adopted” children, seemingly making an extra effort to emphasize their familial inclusion. He bequeathed the remainder of his slaves to Elizabeth, empowering her to sell those whom she deemed to be disobedient. David’s wish was that the earnings from hiring out his slaves would be put toward the education of their children. The unmarried man David Cohen lived in the Ashkenazi enclave of Black River. He composed a will in July 1797 in which he bequeathed a large portion of his estate to his partner Leah Wright, “a free black woman now resident with me,” and their son, also named David Cohen, in excess of one thousand pounds sterling (valuable English currency).32 He stipulated that in the event any of his brothers or sisters contested his will or laid claim to any part of his estate, at his son David’s expense, he would offer the conciliatory sum of a single shilling sterling to each of them. The Savanna-­la-­Mar planter Abraham Tavares composed a will in February of 1802 with which he supported a large net182 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

work of extended family living on the island.33 In Savanna-­la-­ Mar he was likewise the head of a large family of color together with the free “black” woman called Elizabeth Shibald, with whom he had seven “natural” children and five grandchildren. His sons all bore the family name Tavares. His daughter and granddaughters were legally married and respectively had the surnames of Dunkley, Lopes, Chambers, and Hyman. He stipulated that his monetary bequest to his daughter Rachel Dunkley could not be used for the benefit of her seemingly non-­Jewish husband. The St. Jago de la Vega merchant Jacob Cohen Deleon composed a will in May of 1805 in which he supported the children of his siblings living on the island with assets and material objects, including a valuable gold watch.34 At the time he drafted his will, his six “quadroon” children, each with the family name Deleon, were enslaved to his sister, Judith Cohen Deleon. He requested that his executors purchase their freedom from the produce of his estate and also provided the funds for their manumission and the payment of their security bond. He further attempted to prohibit his sister from selling his children. These cases are all of unmarried Jewish men, mostly living outside of Kingston, who found in Jamaica an alternative to marriage. They all chose to live in legally unrecognized blended families. In some cases, their “partners” and their children were enslaved. In other cases, they were free. Some of these relationships were clearly long-­term, possibly monogamous, and in some cases the beneficiaries included several children from different women. But, in each case, the single Jewish male testator took it upon himself to voluntarily support his children. It is possible that the men felt some obligation toward their children, as if they were their legal Jewish family, motivated by a sense of responsibility or even sentimentality. Possibly, they were motivated by guilt or by some other arrangement with their disenfranchised “partners.” In all cases, these relationships were unThe Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 183

equal. While Jewish men were also marginal in Jamaican society, they, unlike their mistresses, could never be owned. Cases of married Jewish men with children of color also appear in the probate record. In some cases, relationships between married Jewish men and women of color were clear cases of surrogacy. Surrogacy, Married Jewish Men, and Their Mistresses There is ample biblical and rabbinic precedent sanctioning the practice of surrogacy for childless Jewish couples. Some early modern rabbinic authorities even allowed for a shifḥah kushit, a Black female maidservant, to act as a surrogate for childless Jewish couples.35 It was not always clear if the surrogate of African descent was first converted to Judaism but, in some cases, she clearly was. It is conceivable that married Jewish men in Jamaica relied on these rabbinic precedents, but in a slave society where concubinage was a widespread social reality, little need existed for halakhic justification. There are several possible cases of Jewish surrogacy with women of color in the probate record. Of course, not all cases of Jewish married men who acknowledged their relationships with concubines in their wills were cases of surrogacy. In these cases, we must also be cautious about anachronistically projecting twenty-­first-­century values onto the past. These married men not only had plenty of rabbinic support to pursue sexual relationships with mistresses, they also lived in a society where such practices were relatively normalized. Religiosity and sexual infidelity for these men were not necessarily incompatible qualities. As we will see, married men who recognized their relationships with mistresses usually also described strong religious ties to Jamaican Jewish communities. Likewise, it must not be assumed that Jewish wives in all cases withheld their consent to these relationships or did not have similar relationships of their own. 184 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

The married St. Jago de la Vega shopkeeper Abraham Rodri­ gues Deleon composed a will in February of 1760.36 He was Creole, born on the island, and died at age forty-­four.37 Abraham supported a number of Jewish communal institutions on Jamaica and bequeathed a Torah scroll and its ornaments to the Neve Shalom community. He had two daughters by his legal wife, Rebecca, and also lived alongside his sister and several nephews on the island. In addition to his legally recognized children, Abraham gave inheritance to his “natural” son Jacob Hill, the son of a woman named Amy Hill. He bequeathed to Jacob thirty acres of land across the river from St. Jago de la Vega, along with a male and a female slave of his own. The St. Jago de la Vega shopkeeper Moses Levy Alvares was married to a Jewish woman, Esther, possibly his second wife, yet he made no mention of surviving legally recognized children in his will of 1765.38 He was naturalized in Jamaica in February of 1742 as a result of the Plantation Act and was buried in St. Jago de la Vega after his death at age fifty-­one.39 His estate included a number of ritual objects, including a Torah scroll, a prayer book, and two unspecified Hebrew books with ornamental silver locks. In lieu of surviving children, he intended that his estate be for the benefit of his wife and his brother’s family in Bayonne, whom he supported with an annuity. It is suggestive of surrogacy that his only daughter, a “quadroon” girl called Sally, was born to an enslaved “mulatto” woman, Elsey, who at the time belonged to a non-­Jewish planter. Moses bequeathed to Sally an enslaved “negro” woman, Nanny, for a ten-­year period of service. Nanny was branded on her shoulder with his initials, MLA. In 1768, the St. Jago de la Vega planter Moses Martins drafted a will supporting his wife, Leah, along with his four sons, three grandchildren, and two “reputed” daughters: Esther and Rebecca Martins. Moses was also naturalized in Jamaica as a result of the Plantation Act in November of 1740 and was The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 185

buried in the St. Jago de la Vega cemetery after his death at age sixty-­four.40 It appears that his two “reputed” daughters only received inheritance by default. After first giving a choice of slaves to his wife and earmarking individual slaves for his sons, he bequeathed the remainder of his estate, including material objects such as wearing apparel and firearms, to his three grandchildren. Moses stipulated that only in the event of the untimely death of his legal grandchildren would his “reputed” daughters receive their share. In this case, which was unlikely one of surrogacy, “reputed” children had a clearly circumscribed role within the family. Judah Cohen Henriques, a Kingston “gentleman,” composed a will in November of 1807 with which he provided inheritance to his Jewish wife, Rebecca, with whom he appeared to have no surviving children.41 Judah generously supported Jewish institutions on the island, including the Aby Yetomim, Ḥevra Kadisha, and three Portuguese synagogues. He donated unspecified Hebrew books to the Aby Yetomim in order to support the religious education of orphans. Judah also made donations to both a Protestant church and the Portuguese synagogue in London. He gave a sixty-­pound annuity to his wife, along with a house on Wharf Street in Kingston. In a likely case of surrogacy, he had three “reputed” children with “a free black woman” called Perina Maria Garcia: Clara, Gerard, and Isaac. Perina and her three children inherited the use of Judah’s residential property on West Street in Kingston. He further instructed his executors to keep his commercial stable in operation for the support of Perina. Additionally, Judah provided Perina with two separate annuities for rent and medical expenses: “the Doctors bill for medicines furnished and attendance on the said Perina Maria Garcia.” It is implied that Perina was pregnant at the time Judah drafted his will. Judah’s three “reputed” children are listed in his will alongside members of his extended family network, which included two cousins and two nieces. Indeed, Judah’s cousins 186 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

received a substantially smaller inheritance—twenty pounds each—than his “reputed” children. Though monetary value alone is not a reliable reflection of familial affection or belonging, it does provide at least some sense of how “reputed” children of color shared an estate alongside Jewish family members. Daniel Rodrigues Cardoso, an absentee pen keeper from St. Andrew Parish, composed a will in London, where he died in August of 1815.42 During his sojourn in Jamaica Daniel had been one of the regents of the Spanish-­Portuguese community in Kingston.43 In addition to his legal wife, Abigail, he supported several unrelated beneficiaries in Jamaica, including the two non-­Jewish clerks who were in charge of his “Spring Garden Pen” in St. Andrew Parish. He appeared to have no surviving children with Abigail. Daniel bequeathed the largest portion of his estate, including two Kingston residential properties on Tower and Orange Streets, along with Spring Garden Pen itself, to his six “reputed” “mulatto” children and their apparent mother called Sarah Pallor. In each of these cases it is clear that children of color were to some extent integrated into the families of married men— some alongside legally recognized children—through the distribution of inheritance. There is little or no indication to what extent non–legally recognized children of color held a Jewish identity or what their place was in the Jewish community. However, some wills do provide some clues that shed light on these questions. The Place of People of Color in the Jewish Family and Community Partly what made Creole Jewish communities like Jamaica so distinct from European communities in the eighteenth century was the rapidly changing complexion of the people who identified as Jewish. It is clear from the above examples—such as the The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 187

case of Sarah and Rebecca Souza—that not all, and probably most, “reputed” children of color did not identify as Jewish regardless of whether they had a Jewish surname. But some clearly did. In places like Suriname and Jamaica, Jews with darker complexions in the eighteenth century were fast becoming a major segment of the community. The inclusion of people of color into the Jewish community was a divisive issue throughout the early modern Jewish Atlantic, and Portuguese Jewish communities from Amsterdam to Paramaribo actively marginalized these individuals as they increasingly conceived of themselves as White.44 The Surinamese Mahamad in Paramaribo, for instance, made explicit attempts to define the social status of “mulatto” Jews in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.45 Modeled on its mother community in Amsterdam, this communal board stigmatized “mulatto” Jews by making it impossible for them to obtain the status of yeḥidim and by restricting their choice of synagogue seating and burial plots. This racial schism eventually erupted into a communal conflict involving the Dutch colonial authorities when the “mulatto” confraternity of Paramaribo, Darhe Jessarim, challenged their proscribed roles. Their ultimately abortive protest began in 1790, when they were asked to register with the community as “congregants” of a lesser status and one of their members was relegated to burial in unseemly swampland.46 Despite the best efforts of the colonial Surinamese community to marginalize Jews of color, there was little question about their Jewishness.47 In Suriname, a strong imperative existed to convert blended children of Jewish men to Judaism. Three leaders of the Paramaribo community wrote to the local governor in 1794 in response to the crisis of racial belonging in the community that “several among the Portuguese Jewish Nation, out of private affection begot children with some of their female

188 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

slaves or mulattos. Out of particular love for the Jewish religion the boys were properly circumcised and the girls instructed by a teacher.”48 Jews of color who embraced Judaism ethnically or culturally, if not fully halakhically, played a decisive role in the continuity of Jewish life in Suriname, where, over time, the discourse on communal legitimacy became increasingly deracialized as Jews of color became more integrated into Jewish communal life.49 Despite the lack of communal sources, there can be no doubt that Jamaica’s Jews approached the issue in much the same way as their sister community in Suriname. Some circumstantial evidence illustrates the complexity of the issue in Jamaica. Burial patterns at one of the Surinamese Jewish cemeteries in Jodensavanne (Cassipora Creek) reflect the social marginality of “mulatto” Jews through their segregated placement.50 But no such burial patterns are evident at Jamaican Jewish cemeteries. Seemingly desegregated Jamaican cemeteries may suggest that burial in communal grounds was denied to Jews of color entirely. If that was the case, then it can be assumed that the elite communal status of yeḥidim was similarly denied. Alternatively, the lack of an apparent marginal section for people of color at Hunt’s Bay may also suggest the opposite conclusion—their complete lack of social distinctiveness. Conversion, communal belonging, marriage, and burial are, however, not the only measures of communal absorption. Absorption could and did take place in the West Indies through the incorporation of children of color into the Jewish family, even when there is no evidence of active conversion. The place of people of color in the Jewish family was not unambiguous, and they struggled with many of the same anxieties about race, class, and status as are found in Suriname or Amsterdam on a communal level. But in Jamaica, the question of absorption must be explored on a personal and familial level rather than through

The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 189

communal class distinctions. Several wills provide insight into the complex place of people of color within the Jewish family and community. Joseph Ydana, who composed a will in 1704, was one of the earliest Jewish planters of St. Catherine Parish and the progenitor of a family of planters who nearly all encouraged Jewish identities for their “reputed” children.51 One of Joseph’s six sons, Samuel Ydana, resided in St. Catherine, where by the time he composed a will in 1717, he had become a major sugar planter and pen keeper in his own right on his estate referred to as “Maggotty Sugar Works.”52 Samuel was not married, nor did he have legally recognized children at the time he composed his will, but he lived with a free “mulatto” woman called Grace Hazlo and their daughter, Leah Ydana. Grace Hazlo and Lea inherited the largest share of his estate, including the right to live on his plantation for the duration of their lives, fifteen slaves, and all of the farm’s “meat cattle sheep & other stock.” Samuel further provided a twelve-­pound annuity for Leah’s education. It is clear that Samuel intended to impart a Jewish identity to his daughter because he appointed his brothers Isaac Ydana and David Ydana as executors and guardians of Leah with the hope that she would be brought up as a Jew: “I do desire & request them to take care that she be taught & instructed in the Jewish faith.” Samuel Ydana’s nephew, Abraham Ydana, may have had similar, though less explicit, designs for the Jewish identity of his non–legally recognized children in his 1762 will.53 Abraham Ydana resided in the Parish of St. John, now part of St. Catherine. He seems never to have married and devoted the majority of his small estate to his siblings and their children. Perhaps in lieu of a legal family, he had two “natural sons” with an unnamed woman: Benjamin and Daniel Abrahams. Their last name, Abrahams, may imply a Jewish identity. Converts to Judaism commonly took the biblical names Abraham and Sarah. Their Jewishness is further suggested by the fact that Abraham 190 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

Ydana placed Benjamin and Daniel under the care of his Jewish nephew Mordechai Aflalo. Although certainly not as clear of a case, Abraham Ydana may have been following the example of his uncle Samuel in imparting a Jewish identity to his “natural” children. By the time the childless St. Jago de la Vega merchant Jacob Baruh Yzidro composed a will in Jamaica in 1730, his wife had been deceased for over twenty years and he requested to be buried next to her.54 Jacob had family ties to both Amsterdam and London. Likely after the death of his wife, he had a “natural” daughter with a woman called Mary Blackburn; known also as Sarah Baruh. Sarah Baruh received inheritance of an enslaved woman and child to be her attendants during her minority. Jacob further desired that Sarah Baruh receive an education until the age of fourteen and specifically requested that she “shall not be maintained or educated by said Mary Blackburn her mother.” Jacob Baruh Yzidro’s wishes that his “natural” daughter hold a Jewish identity is evident by the fact that Jacob did not want her non-­Jewish mother to have any involvement in her education. The possibility that Sara Baruh had a Jewish identity is further implied by her father’s inclusion of a consent clause coercing her marriage choice. She was required to marry with the consent of his executors, Jacob’s two Jewish friends, possibly with the hope that she would not marry outside the Jewish community. The merchant and planter David Aboab Furtado lived in St. Elizabeth Parish, near Black River, where he drafted a will in November of 1760 (see Appendix, III).55 Although married to a seemingly childless Jewish woman, he had a longtime parallel relationship with Mary Blagrave, a “free mulatto woman now living with me.” Mary likely converted to Judaism, as she was also known by the name Sarah Israel. This appears to be the clearest case of surrogacy found in the Jewish probate record. David bequeathed to his wife Esther his house along with its adjacent structures, his household furniture and linen, and seven The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 191

slaves. He gave to his surrogate Mary—that is, Sarah Israel— nineteen slaves and also appointed her as the sole executor of his will. Since Mary had no status as a wife, she had no claim to one-­third of David’s estate and therefore forfeited all inheritance in the event she elected to “marry or live with a man.” David had six “natural” children by Sarah Israel, each with the surname Aboab Furtado: Isaac, Abraham, Samuel, Benjamin, Leah, and Rebecca. Their names make them indistinguishable from other Jews on the island, and they clearly were fully identifying Jews. David Aboab Furtado’s seemingly eldest son, Isaac Aboab Furtado, composed his own will twenty-­six years after his father, in March of 1787, in which he made the standard five-­ pound donation to the synagogue in Kingston, requested an escava, and took an oath on the Five Books of Moses.56 The unmarried Ashkenazi man from St. James Parish Michael Levy bequeathed the most substantial portion of his estate, including financial assets, household furniture, and slaves, to his “friend and housekeeper” called Frances Warren in February of 1766.57 While Michael maintained his family connections to Germany, the biggest portion of his estate was for the benefit of his two children by Frances, Abraham and Sarah Levy. Again, their names are highly suggestive of a Jewish identity. Michael’s bequest of one thousand Jamaican pounds to his daughter Sarah was granted on the condition “that she is educated and brought up in the Jewish faith.” He further requested his children be sent to England, where he hoped they would be taught the fundamentals of Rabbinic Judaism. He likely believed that Frances Warren would be unable to provide them with an adequate Jewish education. Emanuel Baruh Lousada was one of the most distinguished Jewish public figures of eighteenth-­century Jamaica and a critical part of the powerful trans-­Atlantic and trans-­Caribbean Baruh Lousada family.58 Although born in Jamaica, he was heavily invested in Great Britain, where he had substantial fi192 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

nancial assets. Emanuel owned at least four plantation properties throughout the island: “Carlisle” and “Knights” in Vere Parish, along with “Sunvale” and “Clear Walk” in St. David Parish. He was one of the subscribers to the 1786 edition of the Laws of Jamaica and acted as the executor of at least thirteen estates of his fellow Jews.59 The famous eighteenth-­century Jamaican artist, composer, and Renaissance man Samuel Felsted (1743–1802) even painted Emanuel’s home on Duke Street in Kingston. Emanuel died in September of 1797 at age fifty-­ three and was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Kingston.60 He composed a will two and a half years before his death in March of 1795.61 Emanuel divided inheritance between his wife, Esther, and his four sons, Jacob, Daniel, Aaron, and Isaac, along with his daughter, granddaughter, son in law, and several cousins and nieces. To his four sons he left an equal annuity of 140 pounds, later amended to 200, to finance their clothing and education. Individualized lump sums for each of his sons are recorded in Emanuel’s will as having been established as a legacy entrusted to him by his cousin Grace Lopes Torres, who died only a day before Emanuel drafted his will.62 By far the largest portion of Grace’s legacy went to Emanuel’s son Aaron, who was allotted 1,000 pounds. Though in the original draft of his will Emanuel made no distinction between his sons, eight days later, he attached a codicil stipulating that although Aaron was his “reputed” son, anyone who contested his share would in turn forfeit their own, which would instead be given to Aaron. The life of Aaron Baruh Lousada provides a crucial case study of the extent and limitations of familial and communal inclusion for non–legally recognized children. On the one hand, Aaron appeared to be completely absorbed into the family. His father originally listed him as a beneficiary without any distinction among his three brothers. It was only in a codicil that Emanuel singled him out. Interestingly, unlike most “reputed” children The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 193

in Jamaica, Aaron’s complexion is never mentioned, suggesting that he may have been the offspring of a White or Jewish mistress, or alternatively that his darker complexion was irrelevant to his father, Emanuel. It is also likely that Aaron had been absorbed into the Jewish community. He appears to have been buried in the Jewish cemetery of St. Jago de la Vega after his death at age twenty-­five in February of 1808.63 Burial in a Jewish cemetery is a clear indication of communal belonging. On the other hand, Aaron was not integrated seamlessly into the family. Emanuel clearly anticipated that some of his beneficiaries would challenge Aaron’s right to inheritance. Aaron also lived apart from the Lousada household. His aunt, Grace Lopes Torres, referred to him as her “adopted son” and raised Aaron in her home.64 Aaron’s larger share of inheritance had indeed come from her rather than from his father. Aaron Baruh Lousada’s story is representative of the general place of people of color in the Jamaican Jewish family. It was extremely rare in wills for fathers to explicitly express a wish that their “reputed” offspring identify as Jews, as with Samuel Ydana. It was likewise extremely rare for testators to coerce a Jewish identity through withholding inheritance, as in the case of Michael Levy. Most Jews of color likely had experiences similar to Aaron Baruh Lousada’s. He was both a part of and apart from the Lousada family. He stood both within and without Jewish family and society. Still, he represents the possibility that Jews of color participated in the Jamaican Jewish community with the same level of marginality as is seen in Suriname. Conclusion The families described in this chapter represent the Creole Jews of Jamaica. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as more Jews were born on the island and more Jewish men embraced the sexual freedoms available in a slave society, the commu194 / The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica

nity’s complexion began to change. Given the absence of communal sources in Jamaica, it is unknown under what conditions “mulatto” Jews were integrated into the community. The probate record suggests that, as in all other aspects of eighteenth-­ century Jamaican Jewish history, the place of Jews of color in the community was contradictory. Wills evince both the tendencies to incorporate Jews of color and to marginalize them. On the one hand, it appears that the “mulatto” children of Jewish men had no Jewish identity at all. Such was the case with Sarah Souza, described above, and numerous others. Apart from their names, there is nothing to distinguish them as Jews. On the other hand, testators such as Samuel Ydana and Michael Levy actively coerced a Jewish identity for their children of color through leveraging inheritance. Although it is unknown in what ways “mulatto” Jews were marginalized in the community as they were in Suriname, those same sentiments certainly prevailed within the family, as demonstrated by the case of Aaron Baruh Lousada. This, too, was a contradiction, inasmuch as they were segregated within the family by appellations such as “reputed,” and likely within the community, they were nevertheless recipients of inheritance alongside legally recognized Jewish family.

The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica / 195

Conclusion The Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora transcended local communities. Whether residing in Curaçao, Suriname, Barbados, London, Amsterdam, Bayonne, New York, or Jamaica, Portuguese Jews all inhabited the same ethnically and culturally specific Diaspora. They perceived themselves as transcendent of any one empire and were likewise perceived as such. In both the English and Dutch Caribbean, local governments and merchants believed Jews to be in league with the Spanish. In both the Spanish and the English Atlantic, Jews were often referred to as “Hollanders,” calling attention to their association with the Dutch. While Jewish life in the French Caribbean came to an end in 1685, French associations continued to inform perceptions of Jews in other parts of the Caribbean. Portuguese Jews perpetuated their ethnic distinctiveness through endogamous marriages that solidified familial and economic ties across imperial borders. Portuguese Jews throughout the Atlantic World experienced the same dislocations, confusions, and traumas associated with the process of transition from Crypto-­Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism. Despite the supranational nature of this Atlantic Diaspora, Portuguese Jews were equally anchored to their local communities. Colonial policies governing Jews were not uniform across the Atlantic. While the Jews of the English Caribbean combated discriminatory taxation, for instance, no such tax existed in European Atlantic communities and such a tax was imposed irregularly in Dutch colonies. Despite the anti-­Jewish hostilities of local assemblies in the English West Indies, colonial Jews were in some ways more emboldened to push for civil liberties 196

than in England and indeed achieved emancipation before Jews in England. Dutch colonial authorities asserted far more control over the internal workings of local Jewish communities than did the English. The Jews of the English West Indies enjoyed a more defined path toward limited citizenship than in the Dutch colonies, especially after 1740. Creole Jews—born and bred in the colonies—similarly grew apart from shared diasporic cultural expressions as their rituals and languages became blended with those of African Creoles. Their changing complexions, resulting from relationships with enslaved and free people of African descent, further distinguished Jews in slave societies from their European counterparts. Jamaica’s Jews were thus simultaneously diasporic and transcendent, as well as Creole and localized. This contradiction captures the very essence of Atlantic cultural, social, and racial hybridity. The Portuguese Atlantic Jewish Diaspora was one in transition over the course of the eighteenth century. As colonial Jewish communities asserted their indigenization and regional authority, particularly in Curaçao and Jamaica, metropolitan communities lost much of their political and religious influence. Testamentary analysis suggests that Amsterdam’s role in the lives of Jamaica’s Jews essentially disappeared in the eighteenth century. This did not signify a diasporic decline but rather a transition. New centers of regional authority emerged, especially London, that played a more dominant role in the English West Indies than did Amsterdam. Perhaps more important, the connection between diasporic peripheries remained remarkably consistent over time, as demonstrated by the strong ties between Jamaica and Bayonne. Lobbying efforts against the Jewish tax, for example, demonstrate that Jamaica’s Jews deferred to the political intervention of London’s metropolitan Jews not by default but only by necessity, yet they benefited just as much from their patronage. The numerous contradictions of Jewish life in Jamaica defy Conclusion / 197

attempts to characterize or generalize the community as a whole with terms like “enfranchised,” “traders,” “prosperous,” or “White.” Jamaica’s Jews experienced a great deal of freedom as they could trade without restriction, practice their religion openly, arbitrate disputes in court, and own land. Yet, they faced some of the most hostile discrimination anywhere in the Atlantic World. They were a community of traders who were also invested in agriculture. Some Jews in Jamaica became wealthy through trade and planting, but the community was largely poor and included a significant population of despachados dependent on social welfare. Jewish widows were both economically empowered and disadvantaged at the same time. Jews were usually perceived within Jamaica’s racialized hierarchy as White but existed entirely outside the White colonial elite. Jewish social status resembled more closely that of free people of color. Yet, as much as they stood apart from White society, they were indistinguishable from White inhabitants in their patterns of slave ownership. While they married almost exclusively among themselves, they simultaneously embraced relationship with people of color. This book has attempted to identify and appreciate these contradictions rather than resolve them. In so doing, it approaches the Atlantic World as both a unified regional entity as well as the sum of its parts. I have furthermore not attempted to reconcile these contradictions because they manifest through the wills that stand at the heart of this study. Wills are themselves inherently contradictory. They are deeply personal documents that are narrated by notaries and bureaucrats. They are communal documents written in the first person. Through their wills, eighteenth-­century Jamaican Jews unwittingly provided a substitute for their lost communal records. These wills thus tell the stories of individuals as well as the stories of families, communities, and of a Diaspora in transition.

198 / Conclusion

Appendix Excerpts from the Wills of Selected Jamaican Jews

These transcriptions are reproductions of the notarial texts as found in the Island Record Office of Jamaica. I have preserved all the original spelling, but I have not retained the arbitrary capitalizations. In some cases, I have applied modern standards of capitalization for proper nouns. I have added some light punctuation and indentation in order to make the texts more readable. I have included a qualifying “sic” in brackets only when the word as it appears in the eighteenth-­century spelling has a different meaning in modern English.

I. Bayonne, Brazil, and Port Royal: David Baruh Alvares

Will of David Baruh Alvares: November 20, 16871 David Baruh Alvares was born a converso named Martim, likely in Spain, and adopted Rabbinic Judaism in French Bayonne. During the 1640s, he was a trader in Dutch Brazil and, following the expulsion of 1654, fled to Amsterdam, where he was married. He took the oath of allegiance to become a free denizen in Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1678. In Port Royal he was a shipper, landowner, and the head of the town’s largest Jewish household. He died five months after the earthquake and tsunami of June 1692, likely as a result of the calamity. In Port Royal, David also played a diplomatic role as a liaison between the English and the Spanish. His Spanish will, translated here, sheds light on the paths of migration, endogamous and consanguine marriage patterns, and economic activity of Jamaica’s earliest Spanish-­Portuguese Jews.

In the name of almighty God Amen. I David Alvares declare, having made an account of what I possess in this island of Jamaica and outside of it, and in consideration of the uncer199

tainty of life, being healthy of mind and of perfect judgment, I have found it fitting, with the aid of blessed God, to prepare these stipulations for the dispensation of my property so that in my final days it may be completely fulfilled as my last will and testament, presenting it before the required authority as if made in the presence of a notary. First, I recommend my soul to almighty God so that he may have mercy on it and that my sins may be forgiven and I ask that my body be interred in the earth among my brethren. Next, I order the payment of all my legitimate debts after the validity of the claims have been verified. To my son Abram Alvares, seeing that I already gave him five hundred pounds sterling when he married, I leave him another eight hundred pounds sterling. And to my son Jacob Alvares I leave eight hundred pounds. And to my daughter Rica Alvares, I leave for her dowry another eight hundred pounds sterling so that [her marriage] be with a good man. And to my daughter Judica Alvares I leave another eight hundred pounds sterling, and in addition she [should] be given in my name a jewel [worth] two hundred pounds sterling on the condition that she marry an honorable and God-­fearing man . . . . Likewise, I leave to one daughter of Francisco de Ledesma [who is] called “macho” two hundred pounds tornesas2 for [her] first daughter who will be married. And to my sister Sara Narbaes, the mother of my wife, who currently lives with me, I ask her lovingly that that she always remain with my wife, and in the case the day [shall come] that my said sister be with her daughter, I leave a hundred pounds sterling for her sustenance and if at the end of her days she give [unreadable] to leave for my sons and this is my will.3 In case I should die in Jamaica, [then] on the first vessels [leaving for France] an order should be sent to Bayonne for the distribution of general alms and again eleven months after my decease. And similarly for [that is, charity should be sent on be200 / Appendix

half of ] my sister Sara Narbaes, that God grant her a good and long life . . . . Before [any bequest] is delivered and divided there must be an attempt to collect anything that is owed to me so that each [beneficiary] shall have his part. And I appoint as my executors and guardians my beloved wife Raquel Alvares and my son Abram Alvares, and in case for any of them there be acrimony [desaborimiento, literally bitterness] [between] my son and my said wife [then] I declare my wife Raquel Alvares to be the sole administrator of this testament and I charge my friend señor Moseh Yeserun Cardosso to assist and protect her however he can and to counsel her as to what is correct and what is true. And likewise, I charge and request that my said wife will not by any means be with any son or daughter so as not to live together to avoid any dissention [unless if ] my said wife [requires], in her old age, [she] may be with one of her daughters for assistance . . . . Similarly, I leave for the assistance in [erecting] a fence [cerca] around my grave five pounds sterling for the said fence at the [time of ] burial of which [a certain] twenty shillings are to be used at that time which I am uncertain has already been paid to Meser Cardosa. In the case that there be more property than [what has been listed] in my will, not including jewels and silver, I give to my wife as a sole beneficiary whatever she may find without her having to account for it and that [this property] should then be given to my children after her decease according to her will. I leave my house in this place [Port Royal] that I purchased from Jacob de Tores to my son Abram Alvares. And my share of the ship called Joseh of which Jan Bruks is the captain I leave to my son Jaco Alvares and in case, may God not permit it, something happens to the said ship, then the said house should be divided into equal parts, if this occurs before the end of my days, so that there should be two [beneficiaries] . . . .

Appendix / 201

II. Testamentary Piety: Judith Baruh Alvares Will of Judith Baruh Alvares: September 12, 17324

Judith Baruh Alvares (née Aguilar) was the wife of Jacob, the youngest son of David Baruh Alvares. Jacob and Judith remained committed to the town of Port Royal well after the majority of Jamaica’s Jews relocated their commercial activity to Kingston. Her will portrays a woman deeply committed to the religious development of Jamaica. She was just as much connected to the wider Diaspora, with donations to religious institutions and family in Amsterdam and London. Her familial networks, including those of her late husband, suggest that she came to Jamaica via Amsterdam.5 Her will was also probated in London. Judith’s will illustrates the intersection of an individual with communal life and is a model of testamentary piety and the communal autonomy of widows. Her many bequests include a Torah scroll and ornaments, donations to the three major synagogues, support of communal functionaries, charitable donations, an endowment for the improvement of Hunt’s Bay cemetery, and support for a number of confraternities. Her will also suggests some familial mistrust in the distribution of her estate.

In the name of God Amen I Judith Baruh Alvares of the parish of Port Royal in the island of Jamaica widow being in an ill state of health but of sound mind and disposing memory thanks be to my eternal creator do make this my last will and testament hereby revoking all wills by me at any time heretofore made. Imprimis my body I committ to the earth to be decently interred at the common burial place of the Jewish Nation in Liguanea as near my late husband Jacob Baruh Alvares as possible according to the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish Nation. And as for all the worldly estate wherewith it has please Almighty God to bless . . . me I give and dispose thereof in manner following first my will and desire is that all the just debts which I shall owe to any person or persons whatsoever at the time of my death together with my funerall expences . . . be duly satisfied and paid . . . . 202 / Appendix

Item I give and bequeath to the poor inhabitants of the Jewish Nation in the town of Port Royal the sume of twenty pounds of current money of Jamaica to be distributed amongst them immediately before and at the time that my body is carry’d out of my house in order to the interment thereof by my executors herein after named . . . . Item I give and bequeath to the churchwardens . . . of the synagogue of the Jewish Nation in the town of Port Royal the sume of forty pounds of current money of Jamaica together with a sett of silver bells belonging to the Five Books of Moses6 the said sett of bells being of the value of sixty pounds sterling prime cost and now in my possession for the use of the synagogue of Port Royal aforesaid . . . . Item I give and bequeath to the churchwardens . . . of the synagogue of the Jewish nation in the town of St Jago de la Vega in the island aforesaid the sume of ten pounds like money . . . . Item I give and bequeath to the churchwardens . . . of the synagogue of the Jews in the town of Kingston in the said island the like sume of ten pounds . . . . Item I give & bequeath to the poor of the Jewish Nation inhabitants of the town of Port Royal aforesaid the sume of sixty pounds like money . . . within seven days after my decease the further sume of twenty pounds thereof to be paid and distributed in like manner within one lunar month after my decease and the remaining sume of twenty pounds like money to be paid & distributed in like manner within eleven months after my decease . . . . Item my will is that my executors herein after named and the survivors or survivor of them do expend the sum of one hundred pounds of current money of Jamaica for making a convenient cause way or walk from the usual place of landing of corps [sic] of the parish of St Andrew to the burial place of the Jewish Nation in the said parish well fenced on each side with pinguins7 in order to the more commodious carrying of my own and other corps to the grave and for the better accommodation Appendix / 203

of the people of the Jewish Nation who shall accompany my corps to the grave.8 Item I give and bequeath to the people who usually sett up to watch with the sick people of the Jewish Nation9 and such as are employed in digging their graves the sum of ten pounds like money to be paid to the church wardens of the synagogue of the Jewish Nation in the town of Kingston for the use of the said persons within convenient time after my decease. Item I give & bequeath to Aaron Lamego of the city of London merchant the sum of thirty pounds sterling for the use of the Hebrew College or college of the Jewish Nation in the city of London to be paid or the use of the said college in London within twelve calendar months after my decease. Item I give and bequeath to the Churchwardens of the synagogue of the Jewish Nation in the city of Amsterdam in the province of Holland for the time being fifty pounds sterling to be paid to them for the use of the said synagogue within twelve calendar months after my decease . . . . Item I give and bequeath to Ester Alvin one other of the daughters of the said Jacob Lopes Alvin twenty five pounds like money to be paid to her likewise on the day of her marriage and my will is that if either of his said daughters shall depart this life unmarryed that the legacy to her so dying bequeathed shall be paid to her two surviving sisters equally to be divided share and share . . . . Item I give and bequeath to my executors herein after named and the survivors and survivor of them the sume of one hundred pounds like money in trust for and to the use of my poor relations of Amsterdam in the province of Holland to be equally divided between them by my executors or the survivors or survivor of them according to several and necessitys of which I have my said executors or the survivors or survivor of them to be judges no ways doubting their discharging the trust by me in them reposed uprightly and with good conscience but my will 204 / Appendix

and meaning is that none of the legacies above mentioned shall be reputed or be looked upon to be of the number of my poor relations aforesaid or be entitled to any part of the said one hundred pounds by me so bequeathed as aforesaid . . . . Item it is my will and pleasure and I do hereby order and direct that all my household goods furniture whatsoever and wearing apparel whereof I am possessed or whereunto I am or shall be any ways intitled at the time of my death my plate rings and jewels excepted be given to and distributed amongst my poor relations in this her Majesty’s island of Jamaica according to the discretion of my executors herein after named or such of them as shall happen to be in this island shall think fit such distribution to be made within three months after my decease . . . . III. Creole Jewish Family: David Aboab Furtado Will of David Aboab Furtado: July 11, 176010

David Aboab Furtado was a shop owner and the proprietor of a large estate in Black River on the southwest coast of the island. His brother Moses’s family lived alongside David in the small port town. David specified in his will his intention to establish a burial ground on his property for the use of the Jews of St. Elizabeth Parish. His will sheds light on the extent of familial inclusion of people of color into the Creole Jamaican Jewish family. At the time David drafted his will he was legally married to a Jewish woman, Esther, with whom he appears not to have had any surviving children. David’s simultaneous relationship with the free “mulatto” woman Mary Blagrave was almost certainly a case of surrogacy. It is clear that Mary adopted Judaism, as she was also known by the name Sarah Israel. David and Sarah’s relationship, one predicated on inequality, manifested in every practical way as polygamous. David included a “remarriage clause” directed at his unofficial wife, limiting her inheritance in case she married after his death, and he even appointed Sarah as the sole executor of his estate in place of his legally recognized wife, Esther. David and Sarah’s six children were a perfect reflection of the hybridity of Jamaica’s Creole Jews as they bore three names: “Blagrave,” the name of their “mulatto” mother; “Israel,” their Jewish name of conversion; and “Aboab Furtado,” the name of their Portuguese Jewish father.

Appendix / 205

In the name of God Amen, I David Aboab Furtado of the parish of Saint Elizabeth in the county of Cornwall of the island aforesaid merchant being at present in good health of body and of sound and disposing mind and memory for which I bless God but considering the uncertainty of this transitory life do make and ordain this my last will & testament in manner following that is to say . . . . First I will & desire that twenty four feet square of land (being part of five acres and a half of land by me hereafter devised to Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel of the parish of Saint Elizabeth aforesaid a free mulatto woman now living with me for life with remainder over) which I have already marked out and allotted be constantly kept and made use of for a burying place to bury the dead of the Jewish Nation and for no other use whatever and I do also will and desire that whenever I shall happen to depart this life if in this parish or in any other place that it can be conveniently done I may be buried in the said burying ground among my brethren and no where else. Item I give devise and bequeath unto my wife Esther Aboab Furtado all that my messuage11 tenement or dwelling house with the outhouses, buildings and appurtenances to the same belonging wherein my wife the said Esther Aboab Furtado now lives and resides erected and built on part of the land (formerly part of the glebe lands12 belonging to the said parish of Saint Elizabeth) which I purchased of the honourable John Morse Esquire and others the commissions appointed by an act of the Governors council and assembly of this island for to sell and dispose thereof and also one half of an acre of land circumjacent to the said messuage and buildings being part of the said lands so purchased by me . . . situate lying and being near Black River Bay in the parish of St Elizabeth aforesaid and also the use and occupation of all the household and kitchen furniture place and linen of all kinds whatsoever . . . in any shape whatsoever and likewise all those negroe and mulatto slaves following (that is to say) 206 / Appendix

one negro man slave named Simon, three negroe women slaves named Mary, Hannah, and Philah, one mulatto woman slave named Bathsheba one mulatto boy slave named Johnny and one mulatto girl slave named Nancy with the future issue offspring and increase of each and every of the said female slaves to have to hold all and every the said messuages tenement houses buildings land negro and mulatto slaves with their future issue and increase household and kitchen furniture plate linen hereditaments and premises with their and every of their appurtenances unto and to the use of my said wife Esther Aboab Furtado for and during the term of her natural life in full lieu barr and satisfaction of all dower or thirds which she my said wife Esther Aboab as well real and personal as mixt or any part thereof. . . . in case my said wife Esther Aboab Furtado shall happen to have issue of her body by me lawfully begotten and all such issue shall happen to depart this life without leaving any issue of his, her or their bodies lawfully begotten then and in either of the said cases I do hereby give devise and bequeath the said messuages, tenements, houses, buildings, land, negro and mulatto slaves with their future issue and increase household and kitchen furniture plate linen hereditaments and premisses with the appurtenances above by me given to my said wife Esther Aboab Furtado unto Isaac Aboab Furtado alias Isaac Blagrave alias Isaac Israel, Abraham Aboab Furtado alias Abraham Blagrave alias Abraham Israel, Samuel Aboab Furtado alias Samuel Blagrave alias Samuel Israel, Benjamin Aboab Furtado alias Benjamin Blagrave alias Benjamin Israel, Leah Aboab Furtado alias Leah Blagrave alias Leah Israel and Rebecca Aboab Furtado alias Rebecca Blagrave alias Rebecca Israel children by me begotten on the body of the said mulatto woman named Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel to be equally divided between them and their heirs share and share alike provided also nevertheless that in case my or either of my children above named by me begotten on the body of the said mulatto woman named Mary BlaAppendix / 207

grave alias Sarah Israel as aforesaid shall happen to depart this life without leaving any issue of their respective bodies lawfully issuing then my will and mind is and I do in such case hereby give and devise the part or share of him her or them so dying without lawfull issue to the survivor or survivors of them and his her or their heirs forever to be equally divided between them. Item I give desire and bequeath unto the said Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel all that messuage tenement or dwelling house with the outhouses buildings lands and appurtenances to the same belonging or in any wise appertaining and wherein she now lives and resides which I purchased of aforesaid John Morse situate lying and being in Black River Bay in the parish aforesaid and also all those two acres and a half of land (excepting the twenty four feet square of the said land by me above given for a burying place) being the residue of the land (formerly part of the glebe land as belonging to the said parish of Saint Elizabeth) which I purchased from the said John Morse and others the commissioners appointed as aforesaid for to sell and dispose thereof situate lying and being near Black River Bay in the parish aforesaid and also the use and occupation of all the household and kitchen furniture plate and linen of all kinds whatsoever now being in and belonging to the said messuage and buildings last above said or made use off [sic] therein in any wise howsoever and likewise all the negro slaves following that is to say ten negro men slaves named Portugueso, Hector, Cromwell, Louman, Oure, Jack, Cuffee, William, Hannibal and King five negro women slaves named Fidelia, Chloe, Philes, Quous,13 and Clarinda three negro boys slaves named Adam, Prince, and James and one negro girl slave named Candy with the future issue offspring and increase of each and every of the said female slaves to have and to hold all and every the said messuages, tenements, lands, houses, buildings negro slaves with their issue & increase . . . .

208 / Appendix

Item I give and bequeath unto the said Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel all my good wares merchandizes and effects whatsoever of what nature or kind soever (not herein before given and bequeathed) which shall be at the time of my decease with the shop now by me kept impart of said messuage or tenement situate on Black River Bay aforesaid and by me devised to her for life or in the storehouses or either places adjoining to or belonging to the said messuage or tenement to have and to hold the said goods wares, merchandizes and effects unto and to the use of the said Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel and her assigns for ever . . . . All the rest residue and remainder of my whole estate as well real and personal as mixt and of what nature or kind soever or wheresoever the same is or may be (not herein before given devised or bequeathed) to have and to hold the said rest residue and remainder of my whole estate as aforesaid and every part thereof unto and to the use of my said children above named by me begotten on the body of the said Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel as aforesaid provided always nevertheless that if any of my said children above named by me begotten as aforesaid shall happen to depart this life without having any issue of their respective bodies lawfully issuing then and in such case my will and mind is and I do hereby give devise and bequeath the part or share of him her or them so dying without such issue as aforesaid to the survivor or survivors of them and his her or their heirs for ever to be equally divided between them share and share alike. Item I do hereby nominate constitute and appoint the said Mary Blagrave alias Sarah Israel sole executrix of this my last will and testament and guardian to my children above named until they shall attain to their respective ages of twenty one years . . . .

Appendix / 209

IV. Jewish Plantocracy: Benjamin Pereira Will of Benjamin Pereira: September 5, 177414

Benjamin Pereira was one of three men in the eighteenth-­century probate record with the same name. His is the longest Jewish will on record, consisting of twenty-­two notarial pages, derived from eight original folios in the testator’s own hand. Benjamin Pereira was principally a planter and pen keeper, as well as one of the communal board members of Sha‘ar ha-­Shamayim in Kingston. His estate included at least three agricultural properties: “Dallas’s Pen” in St. Andrew, an eight-­acre livestock farm called “Barton’s Penn” in Liguanea, a small enclosed mountain farm, and two adjoining St. Andrew sugar estates, “Shortwood” and “Eagle’s Nest.” He refers to extensive enslaved property in his will, with at least forty-­seven slaves mentioned by name. The disposal of his plantation properties occupies the vast majority of this extensive will. Despite his investment in sugar cultivation and livestock breeding, he was referred to as a “merchant” both in his will and on his tombstone illustrative of the elastic meaning of that term. He was also a major investor in Kingston real estate, referring to no fewer than seven residential properties. He died in November of 1774 at age fifty-­three. His will sheds light on the synthesis of plantation investment and urban development. He was at the same time rural and urban, a planter and a merchant. His will further includes illuminating references to Jewish marriage contracts and the public role of Jewish women.

In the name of God Amen I Benjamin Pereira of the parish of Saint Andrew in the county of Surry and island of Jamaica merchant living in perfect health mind memory and understanding, thanks be to Almighty God for the same; but considering the uncertainty of this transitory life do therefore make publish and declare these presents to be and contain my last will and testament in manner and form following that is to say, first and principally I recommend my soul unto the hands of Almighty God who gave it imploring of him forgiveness of all my manifold sins and transgressions which I have comitted in this life, and which I hope through his great mercy to obtain. My body I commit to the earth to be decently buried amongst my breth210 / Appendix

ren the Jews, and in the Kingston burial place and with respect to such worldly estate wherewith it hath pleased the almighty God to bestow on me, I give and dispose of the same as follows. Imprimis it is my will and desire that all my just debts and funeral expences shall be first paid and satisfied as soon as possible after my decease. Item I give and devise unto the poor of our nation the sum of twelve pounds current money of Jamaica to be distributed in the following manner, that is to say the sum of three pounds thereof on the day that my body shall be carried to be buried the sum of three pounds thereof on the compleating of the seventh day after my decease, the sum of three pounds thereof on the compleating of the month after my decease, and the sum of three pounds thereof on the compleating of the eleventh month after my decease. Item I give and devise unto the wardens of the Jews synagogue for the time being the sum of one hundred pounds current money of Jamaica to and for the use of a certain prayer commonly called by the Jews (Escaba) and generally read on the Great Day of Atonement termed by the Jews (Yom Kipur). Item I give and devise unto the wardens of Aby Yetomim (signifying father of orphans) for the time being the sum of ten pounds current money of Jamaica for the use of the aforesaid prayer generally red on the night of Hosanna Raba so termed by the Jewish Nation. Item I give and devise unto my sister Rebecca Rodrigues Lopes the sum of ten pounds current money aforesaid for mourning . . . .15 Item I give and devise unto my nephew Menasseh Pereira the son of my late brother Daniel Pereira deceased, the sum of ten pounds current money aforesaid to be paid him when he shall attain the age of twenty one years, as also one pair of gold shoe buckles and two gold finger rings which were pledged to me by his father the said Daniel Pereira deceased, and to be delivered to him when he shall attain his said age of twenty one years but in case of his death before his attaining his said age of Appendix / 211

twenty one years, that then and in such case, I give and devise the said pair of gold shoe buckles and two gold finger rings to his brother Joshua Pereira when he shall attain the age of twenty one years . . . . And whereas I am possessed of a certain mortgage executed to me by my brother Aaron Pereira and his wife of a parcel of negro slaves which are at present in the possession of my neice Esther Pereira, it is my will and desire that my said neice the said Esther Pereira shall continue in the peaceable possession of the said negro slaves, and receive the rents issues and profits thereof for and during the term of her natural life without any molestation or trouble whatsoever on account of said mortgage from my heirs executors or administrators and in case she should at any time intermarry, my will desire and meaning is that the said mortgaged negro slaves be absolutely given to her free and clear of and from said mortgage as in part of her marriage portion, and also the sum of one hundred pounds current money aforesaid to be paid to her on the day of said marriage . . . . Item it is my will and desire that my executors herein after named do forthwith after my decease give unto each of my sons-­in-­law Abraham de Moses Deleon and Abraham of Jacob Deleon a receipt for the sum of ten pounds current money aforesaid to each of them either in my account current with them or in part of the interest that shall or may appear to be due and owing for on account of their certain deed of mortgage to me in order that they may apply the same for mourning . . . . Item I give and devise unto my loving wife Sarah Pereira in lieu and bar of dower, ketuba, or thirds, or any other instrument in writing which she the said Sarah Pereira shall or may claim under or out of any part of parcel of my estate either real or personal in law equity or otherwise the following legacys and bequests herein after mentioned that is to say the sum of three hundred pounds current money aforesaid per annum shall be paid her in four quarterly payments, that is to say, the first pay212 / Appendix

ment thereof to be made three months after my decease; the second payment thereof six months after my decease, the third payment thereof to be made nine months after my decease, and the fourth and last payment thereof to be made twelve months after my decease and so to continue every year for and during the term of her natural life as aforesaid, making and binding my whole estate both real and personal subject and liable for the payment of said annuity but in case it should not be in the power of my executors to pay the said annuity quarterly then to be punctually complyed with yearly. Item I give and devise unto my said wife Sarah Pereira in lieu and bar of her dower, ketuba, or thirds as aforesaid, all my household and kitchen furniture sheeting and apparel which I shall die possessed of upon a certain penn, situate lying and being in the parish of Saint Andrew and commonly called and known by the name of Dallas’s Penn: also my chariot with harness compleat, and a pair of my best chariot hoses. Item I will and desire that my said wife Sarah Pereira during her widowhood shall have the free liberty of dwelling in the mansion-­house of the last mentioned penn, and have the free use and occupation of the out-­buildings thereon belonging without any manner of interruption whatsoever from any person or persons whomsoever, and without having any communication with any part of the land belonging to the said penn, save the use of a finall garden adjoining to the pond which is situate near the land of colonel Mark Hall, and that my said wife Sarah Pereira shall be supplied by my trustees and executors herein after named, with as much guinea and great corn as well support her small stock until such time as my executors herein after named can conveniently purchase from the stones a piece or parcel of land which is adjoining to my small penn, called and known by the name of Barton’s Penn, then and in such case, I direct my executors to put the said piece or parcel of land in good order and that the same be and remain as part of parcel of the said penn called Appendix / 213

and known by the name of Barton’s Penn, which I do hereafter devise to my said wife Sarah Pereira for and during the term of her natural life and it is my will and desire that after the said last mentioned piece or parcel of land is put in good order, and made a part of the premises last aforesaid, then that my said wife do quit the use and occupation of my mansion-­house, and the buildings thereto belonging hereinbefore particularly mentioned, and reside on the said small penn called and known by the name of Barton’s Penn or rent it as she shall think proper. Item I give and devise unto my said wife Sarah Pereira the sum of one hundred pounds worth of silver plate and jewels such as she shall chuse out of all or any of my silver plate or jewels of what kind or quality soever, as also all the silver plate and jewels that she the said Sarah Pereira possessed in her own right at the time of her intermarriage with me all which are also in lieu and bar of dower ketuba or thirds as aforesaid. Item I give and devise unto my friends Benjamin Dias Fernandes and Abraham Aguilar both of the parish of Kingston county of Surry and island aforesaid gentlemen and to the survivor of them and to the heirs executors and administrators of such survivor, in trust to preserve the contingent remainders . . . to wit, my penn in Liguanea commonly called or known by the name of Barton’s Penn containing by estimation eight acres, together with all and every the messuages tenements or dwelling houses and other the appurtenances thereunto belonging and which I purchased from William Gray esquire, and also two pieces or parcels of land situate lying and being in the said town and parish of Kingston the first piece or parcel thereof is situated in [blank] alley16 on the back of my two houses which I lately sold to Milbee Johnson and which are situate in Princess Street, the second piece or parcel thereof is situate lying and being in [blank] alley adjoining to a messuage or tenement belong to [blank] Lane17 and also the following negro slaves to wit, Flora, Patience and her daughter Fanny Quamina, Eboe 214 / Appendix

Molly, Eboe Celia, and her daughters named Lucia and Mary and a mulatto child named Bessey the daughter of Lucia, Grace, Nanay, Sabella, Esperanza, and her child Ruthy, Delia, Amba, Mimba, Dido and her two sons named Dickey and George, Alvin, Patience, Monimia and her daughter Lucey and her son Adam, Phibby, Cornelia, Phiba, Fidelia, Nelly, Daphney, Nanny, Quaco, and Jack with all and every the future issue offspring and increase of the said female slaves, to and for her to receive and take for herself the rents issues and profits thereof, for and during her state of widowhood, provided my said wife should intermarry then in trust for her to receive and take to herself the rents issues and profits arising from six of the said negro slaves such as she shall chuse, and those only for and during the term of her natural life, and from and immediately after her decease, that then the said six negro slaves shall sink into the residue of my said estate and remain as part and parcel thereof. Item it is also my will and desire that my sd executors herein after named, do allow my said wife Sarah Pereira yearly and every year five hundred weight of muscovado sugar and forty gallons of rum from my plantations or sugar works called Shortwood or Eagles Nest: as also, when my mountain polinks18 is in plenty of provisions, two hundred plantains per week and I do also direct my said executors to deliver unto my said wife a score of sheep cows and one bull immediately upon my death. Item I give and devise unto my loving daughter Leah Deleon the wife of Abraham of Jacob Deleon the sum of one hundred pounds current money aforesaid to be paid her one year after my decease; as also the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds current money aforesaid per annum for and during the term of her natural life . . . for the support and education of my grand-­children and his children until they arrive to the age of twenty one years or days of marriage and no longer. I further give and devise unto my said loving daughter Leah Deleon immediately after my decease the following negro slaves which are now in her possesAppendix / 215

sion, to wit. Benneba, Franky, Fanny, Cuba, Quashiba and a boy named Gift, with the future issue offspring and increase of the said female slaves for her and her heirs for ever. Item my will and desire is that my executors herein after named, shall not at any time or times hereafter charge the said Abraham Deleon, the husband of the said Leah Deleon with any rents hire profits for all or any of the said negro slaves or the future issue offspring and increase of the said female slaves so bequeathed to the said Leah Deleon as aforesaid, for or on account of his having had possession of the said negro slaves for a time past . . . . Item I give and devise unto my said loving daughter Rachel Pereira immediately after my decease, the following negro slaves which are now in her possession namely Mimba, Pheba, Celia, Franky, Eve, Pamilla, Present and Cornelia, together with their future issue offspring and increase, to her and her heirs for ever . . . . Item I give unto my said daughter Leah Deleon after the death of my said wife Sarah Pereira, [the slaves] Patience and her daughter Fanny, to her and her heirs for ever. Item whereas I now stand and am lawfully seized of a good sure perfect and absolute estate of inheritance in fee simple to me and my heirs, without any matter cause or thing whatsoever to alter, change, charge or defeat the same or any part or parcel thereof, of in and to two several messuages lands hereditaments and premises situate lying and being in the said town and parish of Kingston with their each and every of their appurtenances, to wit, a house with the appurtenances in Harbour-­Street, now in the possession of Abraham Bosier another house with the appurtenances in Princess-­Street which I purchased of David Cohen Delara, I do therefore give devise and bequeath in trust unto my said trustees Benjamin Dias Fernandes and Abraham Aguilar . . . to and for the use and benefit of my said daughter Rachel Pereira and her husband Menasseh Pereira senior, for and in order that [they] may have use receive and enjoy all and 216 / Appendix

every the rents issues hire and profits of the said two several messuages tenements, lands and all and singular other the premisses above mentioned for and during their respective natural lives and from and immediately after their respective decease . . . for the use and benefit of the lawful issue, begotten on the body of my said daughter Rachel Pereira by Menasseh Pereira senior her husband . . . . Whereas I have duly executed a certain contracted [sic] of marriage to Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes of the Parish of Kingston aforesaid gentleman for and on the behalf of my said son Isaac Pereira at the time of his marriage with Rachel Rodrigues Lopes the daughter of the said Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes, in consequence of the said Isaac Pereira being under the age of twenty one years, and in order to settle and secure the sum of three thousand pounds current money aforesaid to the said Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes for and on behalf of his said daughter Rachel Rodrigues Lopes as aforesaid, signifying that in case my said son Isaac Pereira should depart this life before the said Rachel Rodrigues Lopes, that then and in such case I should stand liable to the said Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes for the said sum of three thousand pounds current money aforesaid to the said Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes for and on behalf of his said daughter Rachel Rodrigues Lopes as aforesaid, signifying that in case my said son Isaac Pereira should depart this life before the said Rachel Rodrigues Lopes, that then and in such case I should stand liable to the said Mordechai Rodrigues Lopes for the said sum of three thousand pounds current money aforesaid, and for which settlement and security thereof, I have by the said contract made my whole estate both real and personal subject and liable for the same for and during and until such time as my said son Isaac Pereira shall attain the age of twenty one years and no longer and also upon the special provision that when my said son Isaac Pereira doth attain the age of twenty one years, that then he shall execute another such instrument of writing Appendix / 217

to the said Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes for and on the behalf of his said daughter Rachel Rodrigues Lopes as aforesaid binding himself therein in the same manner as I have done in the before mentioned contract and in compliance of the same the aforesaid contract shall be void and of no effect, any thing therein contained to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding. But if it shall so happen that I shall depart this life before my said son Isaac Pereira shall execute such an instrument of writing, and my said estate in consequence of the said contract remains subject and liable for the payment of the said sum of three thousand pounds current money aforesaid, that then and in such case I will and desire that the said sum of three thousand pounds current money aforesaid, so payable to the said Mordecai Rodrigues Lopes as aforesaid for and on the behalf of his said daughter Rachel Rodrigues Lopes, shall be secured to my said estate by my said son Isaac Pereira out of the sum of four thousand pounds current money aforesaid which I engaged on the day of his marriage to pay desiring thereof that my said son Menasseh of Benjamin Pereira one of my executors herein after named and appointed, shall see my said estate freed and discharged of and from the security or said sum of three thousand pounds current money aforesaid, and until my said estate is cleared and discharged of and from the said security or sum of three thousand pounds current money, that then the said sum of three thousand pounds shall be and absolutely remain unto my said estate as and for a collateral security to and for the said sum of three thousand pounds as aforesaid that then whatever sum or sums of money as shall or may appear by my books to be due and owing unto my said son Isaac Pereira for or on account of the said sum of four thousand pounds current money aforesaid, so as aforesaid engaged to him, shall and may be paid to him as soon as possible after my decease, subjecting my said estate both real and personal for the payment thereof, if my personality should not be sufficient for discharging the same . . . . 218 / Appendix

Item whereas I am lawfully seized and possessed (besides the houses already mentioned) of a good sure pure perfect and absolute estate of inheritance in fee-­simple to me and my heirs, without any matter cause or thing whatsoever to alter change charge or defeat the same or any part thereof, of in and to a certain messuage tenement or dwelling house with the appurtenances situate lying and being in the said town and parish of Kingston to wit., in King-­Street, now tenanted by Bartlet Hodges and which I purchased from Thomas Swigle and Nathaniel Philips esquire, I do therefore give and devise in trust and chargeable as aforesaid [unto my trustees] . . . for the sole use benefit and behoof of my said son Isaac Pereira . . . and immediately from and after his decease, then my will and desire is, and I do hereby give devise all and every the said last mentioned premisses [to my trustees] . . . towards the maintenance education and cloathing of all my said grand-­children (the sons and daughters of my said son Isaac Pereira) for and during their and each of their minoritys, till they arrive to their ages of twenty one years, or days of marriage, and from and after the determination of their marriage, or arriving to the age of twenty one years, which shall first happen, then I give the said last mentioned premisses with the appurtenances thereunto belonging unto my said grandson Benjamin Pereira son of my said son Isaac Pereira, . . . but in case my said grandson Benjamin of Isaac Pereira should happen to depart this life before he attains the age of twenty one years, and without lawful issue that then and in such case my will is, and I do hereby give and devise the said last mentioned premisses [to my trustees] . . . for the use benefit and behoof of any other the son or sons of my said son Isaac Pereira lawfully begotten, to be equally divided between them share and share alike to hold to them their and each of their heirs for ever but in default of such son or sons lawfully begotten of my said son Isaac Pereira, or their not living to the age of twenty one years, or their not having issue lawfully begotten, that then and in either of these Appendix / 219

cases my will is and I do hereby give and devise the said last mentioned premises [to my trustees] . . . for the use benefit and behoof of all and every the daughter and daughters . . . . And whereas I now stand and am also lawfully seized and possessed of a good pure, sure perfect and absolute estate of inheritance in fee-­simple, to me and my heirs, without any matter cause or thing whatsoever to alter change charge or defeat the same or any part thereof, in and to divers other lands messuages tenements negro and mulatto slaves with their and every of their appurtenances, situate lying and being in the parish of saint Andrew aforesaid namely, to wit, two certain plantations or sugar-­works commonly called or known by the names of Shortwood-­ Plantation and Eagles Nest-­ Plantation, and abutting and bounding by whatsoever buttings and boundings the same respectively are together with the negro and mulatto slaves thereunto respectively belonging with the future issue offspring and increase of the female slaves; as also all and every the dwelling-­houses, messuages, tenements mill-­houses, boiling-­houses, burning-­houses, edifices, erections and buildings thereon respectively erected and built, and all and singular other the premisses thereon respectively belonging, and all and every the cattle, mules, sheep, goats, and all and every other the stock utensils that shall or may belong at the time of my decease, to the said several plantations and sugar-­works, and also a mountain-­polink and two penns, the one commonly called and known by the name Barton’s-­Penn, and the other generally known by the name of Dallas’s Penn (formerly called Newton’s Penn) together with all and every the houses, outhouses and buildings whatsoever on the said mountain-­polink and two penns now standing erected and built or that shall or may be erected and built; and all and every the stock and all and singular other the premisses thereunto belonging, or in any wise appertaining, I do therefore by these presents give and devise

220 / Appendix

unto [my trustees] . . . for the uses intents and purposes following, that is to say in trust that my said two sons Menasseh of Benjamin Pereira and Isaac Pereira and each of them shall and may be permitted to receive and take to themselves an equal share or moiety of all and every the yearly produce profits and interest arising from all and every the said last mentioned prem­ isses for and during their respective natural lives, and from and immediately after the decease of either of my said sons Menasseh of Benjamin Pereira and Isaac Pereira, leaving lawful issue, then I do hereby give devise the said equal share or moiety of the said last mentioned premisses of him so dying unto [my trustees] . . . towards the maintenance education and cloathing of such lawful issue male and female during their respective minoritys, and in case of any overplus arising out of the said equal share or moiety during their said respective minoritys, that then the same shall be placed out at interest to and for the use of such lawful issue as aforesaid share and share alike upon their attaining their respective ages of twenty one years, if males and if females, their respective days of marriage or ages of twenty one years, which shall first happen . . . . And lastly I do hereby nominate constitute and appoint my said two loving sons Menasseh of Benjamin Pereira and Isaac Pereira, executors of this my said last will and testament, hereby revoking and making void all or any former will or wills by me at any time or times heretofore made or done: declaring this only to be my last will and testament in witness whereof I have to this my last will and testament contained on eight sheets of imperial-­paper, to the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, I have set my hand and to the eighth and last sheet, my hand and seal this fifth day of September in the year of our lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy four . . . .

Appendix / 221

V. Ashkenazim in Jamaica: Ḥayem Cohen Will of Ḥayem Cohen: June 24, 180319

Ḥayem Cohen was a figurehead of a small community of Ashkenazim in Black River, a southwestern Jamaican port town in St. Elizabeth Parish. Although he seems to have been involved in shipping, via a nearby wharf, the bulk of his will is dedicated to the distribution of his landed estate, its adjacent coffee field (“walk”), and its many structures that included a retail store, collectively referred to as “Mount Pleasant.” He was a merchant, a planter, and a shopkeeper. It is likely that Cohen hailed from England as he maintained strong economic ties and investments in Great Britain. His estate included executors in both places. His brother settled his family in South Carolina. Ḥayem Cohen was never officially married in Jamaica. His estate is devoted to the support of his Creole children of color from two different women. He also heavily invested in an Act of Naturalization for his “partner,” Margaret Forbes, and her family. Like so many other Jamaican planters of his status, he apparently intended to send his children to England for their education. His will includes some unusual bequests, such as a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a donation to Wolmer’s Free School in Kingston. In terms of monetary bequest alone, Cohen was possibly the wealthiest Jew on the island. However, he seemed rather disassociated from the Jewish communities on the island. The only element in his will echoing the religious content of other contemporary Jewish wills is a bequest to the Ashkenazi “Dutch” synagogue of Kingston. He died in July of 1803 at age fifty-­one.

This is the last will and testament of me Hyem Cohen of Black River in the parish of Saint Elizabeth in the county of Cornwall and island aforesaid merchant I give and bequeath unto my friends Abraham Goldsmith of the city of London merchant Isaac Aguilar of the city of London merchant, and David Samuda Senior and David Samuda Junior both of the city of London merchants their executors administrators and assigns the sum of eight thousand pounds current money of Jamaica aforesaid to be raised and paid to them out of my estate as soon as conveniently may be after my decease and to bear and carry lawful interest from my death untill such payment upon 222 / Appendix

the trust nevertheless and to and for the intents and purposes following that is to say, upon trust to and for the use and benefit of Catherine Cohen, Caroline Cohen, Alexander Cohen and Henry Cohen my four children by Margaret Forbes of the parish of Saint Elizabeth in the said island a free quadroon woman equally to be divided between them share and share alike . . . the said eight thousand pounds current money shall be invested in the funds of Great Britain as hereinafter mentioned after the same shall be remitted to the said trustees, and I direct that my said children shall after the said sum of eight thousand pounds shall be so invested in the funds, have power by their last will and testaments to be by them respectively signed and published in the presence of two or more witnesses to give and dispose of their respective shares to such person and persons and in such manner and form as they shall respectively think fit, in case of the death of my said children or any of them before their respective shares shall become payable, then in such case any or all of my said children shall happen to die before the said sum of eight thousand pounds shall be remitted to my said trustees and invested in the funds or living to that time shall die before their respective shares shall become payable without making such will as aforesaid then I will and direct that share and shares them, her, or them so dying shall sink in and become part of my residuary estate herein after disposed of . . . . And whereas under and by virtue of the will of the said Margaret Forbes and of a deed or gift or trust executed by Rebecca Wright or other deeds or conveyances on record in the secretarial office in the island aforesaid or otherwise the said Catherine Cohen, Caroline Cohen, Alexander Cohen and Henry Cohen or such of them as shall attain to live full age are or is entitled to certain negroes slaves employed or used by me on my estate and to certain horses mares and mules which have been sold and the produce paid to me and also a sum of five hundred pounds currency paid into my hands for their use by the said Rebecca Appendix / 223

Wright now I do hereby direct my executors hereinafter named with as much speed after my death as may be to pay the said sum of five hundred pounds currency so received by me from the said Rebecca Wright as aforesaid and all such monies as I shall be indebted for the hire or use of the said slaves at the rate of twenty pounds currency per annum for such slaves from the period they came into my possession and as I have received myself or by attorney on the sale of cattle stock or other item belonging to my said children and all other monies belonging to or appearing to the credit of my said children in my books such monies to carry interest at the value of six pounds per cent per annum from the time of my death untill the payment thereof. And I further direct my said executors to continue the said negroes in employment on my said estates as long as their labour shall be considered useful thereto untill my said children by attaining their respective full ages or otherwise shall become entitled to the said slaves or if my said executors shall at any time in the meantime conceive the said slaves as no longer useful to my estate then I direct and require the said slaves shall be let out to hire by my said executors upon the most advantageous terms they can reasonably procure and also remit or pay to my said trustees so long as the said slaves shall be employed on my estate an annual rent for each of the said slaves equal to the value of their labour and also to pay or remit to the said trustees such sum and sums of money as shall be received by my said executors for the hire or labour of the said slaves in case they shall let out the same . . . . And in such other shares as my said children or their respective issue are or shall be respectively intitled to the same and in case it can be legally done but not otherwise under the publick laws of this said island or under and by virtue of a private Act of the said island passed in and about the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty four entitled an act to entitle Patty Pensaid of the parish of Saint Elizabeth a free mulatto woman Rebecca 224 / Appendix

Wright and Margaret Forbes her daughters and Francis Maitland the son of the said Rebecca Wright and Elizabeth Littlehales the daughter of the said Margaret Forbes to the same rights and privileges with English subjects born of white parents under certain restrictions (and which said Catherine, Caroline, Alexander and Henry Cohen are the children of the said Margaret Forbes named in said Act) I do hereby give and bequeath unto the said Abraham Goldsmith, Isaac Aguilar, David Samuda Senior and David Samuda Junior their executors and administrators the sum of sixteen thousand pounds sterling with interest for the same after the rate aforesaid from my death untill the same shall be raised and paid upon such and the same trusts nevertheless and to and for such and the same intents and purposes and to and for the benefit such and the same persons and in such shares and proportions and in such way manner and form in every respect as is and are hereinbefore limited declared given and provided with respect to the said legacy or sum of eight thousand pounds currency except only as follows that is to say that three thousand pounds & part of the share as respective shares of my said daughters or the securities where on the same shall be invested shall be paid and transferred to each of them my said daughters at their respectively attaining the age of twenty five years or day of marriage shall first happen . . . . I give and bequeath unto the several persons hereinafter named the following legacies, that is to say unto the said Abraham Goldsmith, Isaac Aguilar, David Samuda Senior and David Samuda Junior the sum of one hundred pounds sterling each unto Mary Thompson of the parish of Saint Elizabeth a free woman of colour the sum of one thousand pounds currency, also my chaise and a pair of horses named Rattle and Campbell, unto my son Charles Cohen by the said Mary Thompson the sum of two thousand pounds currency to be paid him on his attaining the age of twenty one years and I direct that interest for the said sum from my death untill the same be paid at the rate Appendix / 225

of six pounds per cent per annum shall be paid half yearly by my executors to the guardians of that said Charles Cohen or otherwise be applied by my executors for and towards his maintenance and education during his minority and in case of the death of the said Mary Thompson or her son Charles before received their respective legacies the legacy of her or him so dying shall lapse and sink into my residuary estate unto Rebecca Cohen of Charlestown in the United States of America widow of my brother Gershon Cohen and such children of Gershon Cohen as may be living at the time of my decease the sum of four thousand two hundred pounds currency to be equally divided between them share and share alike except Abraham Sarzedas20 Cohen hereafter otherwise provided for unto Catherine Freidberg daughter of my sister Harriot Freidberg the sum of one thousand pounds sterling and it is my will that interest for the same (untill it shall be remitted her) be remitted her annual by my executors for her maintenance and education . . . . Unto Gotchel Levien of the city of London merchant, his executors administrators and assigns the sum of one thousand pounds sterling to be remitted him for the purpose after mentioned that is to say, upon trust as soon as the same shall be receive to place the same out at interest in the public funds of Great Britain for the separate use of Henrietta Levys wife of Philip Levys esquire of Black River in independent and apart from her said husband and not to be subject in any way to the control debts or engagements of her said husband. Unto Lyon Levy of London merchant the sum of two thousand pounds sterling in consideration of my attachment to him and of his friendly attention to my children under his care and in case of his death to be divided amongst his widow and children or the survivor or survivors of them share and share alike, and it is also my will and desire that my monies due him at the time of my decease for the support and education of my said children

226 / Appendix

under his care be remitted him by my executors immediately after my decease . . . . Unto the wardens or trustees for the time being of Wolmer’s Free School in the city of Kingston the sum of two hundred pounds currency to be by them applied to the use and benefit of the said school. Unto the wardens for the time being at the Dutch Synagogue in the city of Kingston21 aforesaid the like sum of two hundred currency to be by them laid out and applied for the use and benefit of the said synagogue. Unto my nephew Abraham Sarzedas Cohen the sum of three thousand currency and it is my will and desire that he have a preference of purchase of the whole of such goods as may be in my store at the time of my decease payable in three equal and annual payments at a valuation of seventy five per cent upon the sterling to it of said goods and also my will and desire that he have the free and entire use of my dwelling house and store at Black River without charge of rent for twelve months next after my decease together with the several negroes named Joe, Princess, Cecelia and Big Fanny I also give and bequeath unto my said nephew Abraham Sarzedas Cohen such household furniture and plate as may now be in my said dwelling house or at the time of my decease provided always as for as respects the free use of the house and store and negroes and the bequest of the household furniture and plate that my said nephew Abraham Sarzedas Cohen shall enter into business and become the purchaser of the goods aforesaid and not otherwise anything herein to the contrary nature notwithstanding. And it is also my will and desire that in case my said nephew Abraham Sarzedas Cohen shall continue in business twelve months next after my decease and be desirous of purchasing my said dwelling house and store, that he be indulged with renting of it of such rent as my executors shall think its value for the

Appendix / 227

space of two years previous to his making such purchase that he may be the better enabled from his own treasures to pay for it. And it is my will and desire that Joseph Hall my present clerk should be continued and employed as a clerk in the settling of my affairs and that my executors do allow him for the same salary of five hundred pounds currency per annum and at the expiration of two years next after my decease (should it be necessary to employ him so long) it is my will and desire that my executors do pay unto him the sum of five hundred pounds in addition to his said salary provided he shall continue his usual good conduct. Unto my worthy friend the Honbl Joseph James Swaby the set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from my library. In consideration of the faithful services of my two negroe slaves named Joe and Thomas I do give and devise them the said Joe and Thomas unto my executors the Honbl Joseph James Swaby, John White, and William Kettle Hewitt esquires their heirs and assigns upon trust in by such acts and deeds of manumission as shall be necessary to manumise and set free the said Joe and Thomas and thereby direct my residuary legatees to pay unto the said Joe and Thomas the sum of five pounds sterling annually to each of them during their respective lives towards their support and do charge my residuary estate with the payment thereof accordingly. And I do hereby will and desire that my executors do retain out of my estate the sum of one hundred and twenty pounds currency with interest from my decease for the purchasing the freedom of a certain negroe woman slave named Sally belonging to the estate of Margaret Forbes deceased or some or one of her children and that they do procure such freedom as soon as a proper title can be obtained. And I do hereby give devise and bequeath unto the said Joseph James Swaby, John White and William Kettle Hewitt esquires to such of them as shall qualify and act as executor under this my will their executors, administrators and assigns all that 228 / Appendix

piece and parcel of land called Mount Pleasant containing one hundred and fifty acres and also a piece of land purchased from David Shakespeare containing five and a quarter acres adjoining thereto and also five hundred acres of land being part and parcel of thirteen hundred and six acres purchased by me from David Fyffe which said five hundred acres including the coffee walk thereon be measured off after my decease and to be of that of the same piece of land which lies contiguous to and adjoining Giddy Hall, the Forrest Estate, David Shakespear and Hodges Penn and also the lease of a road from David Shakespear which said road entersects the aforesaid two runs of land together with the dwelling house, outhouses, mill house, barbecues, stores, edifices, erections and buildings with all and every the appurtenances and all and singular negroes and stock thereon and thereto belonging, which said sums of lands being hereto considered as Mount Pleasant Mountain advantageous to each other on account of the coffee walk buildings and barbecues. And also the residue and remainder of the land purchased of the said David Fyffe and which after the said five hundred acres with the coffee walk thereabout eight hundred acres and which I consider as the penn land . . . of that part which adjoins partly on the Forrest Estate Shrewsbury Penn and Williams and Walker together with the houses, outhouses, edifices, erections and buildings thereon and all and singular the negroes and stock thereon and thereto belonging. And it is my will and desire that untill an advantageous sale can be made that my executors do conduct and carry on both the properties of Mount Pleasant Mountain and Mount Pleasant Penn in the same manner as they are conducted at the time of my decease for the benefit of my said estate and that the plain furniture of Mount Pleasant Mountain house be continued therein and sold with said property if agreeable to the purchaser, but that the plate and ornamental furniture therein be sold immediately after my decease by my executors for the benefit of my Appendix / 229

said estate and also all and every the houses, wharfs, lands, hereditaments and premises at Black River and all and singular my real and personal estate not herein specifically mentioned upon trust that they my said trustees do and shall as soon as conveniently may be after my decease sell and dispose of that same by private contract or otherwise as may appear most for the advantage of my estate . . . . VI. Itinerant Portuguese Jewish Physician: Samuel Barretto da Veiga

Will of Samuel Barretto da Veiga: September 20, 180822 Samuel Barretto da Veiga is the most frequently mentioned physician in late eighteenth-­century Jewish wills. He appeared as a beneficiary in at least six Jewish wills. Given his continued family connections to Portugal, it is likely that he was born a converso and, in such case, may have attended the academy of Coimbra or another Portuguese medical school. Da Veiga embodies not only the learnedness and communal prestige of New World Jewish physicians, but also their itinerancy, border crossing, and supranationalism. His will contains diasporic connections to Portugal, Amsterdam, London, France, and Curaçao (corroborated by other testators). Indeed, he states that he composed his will because he was leaving Jamaica. Da Veiga was a man of his times, making frequent reference to the Napoleonic Wars. And, he was a man of his place, fully embracing the slave-­owning ethos of Jamaica, making provisions for the manumission and support of three slaves and providing inheritance to his Creole daughter of color.

In the name of God Amen I Samuel Barretto da Veiga of the city and parish of Kingston in the county of Surry and the island aforesaid doctor of physic being of sound and disposing mind memory and understanding and in order to prevent any disturbances that shall or may arise about the distribution of my estate and effects and for divers good causes and considerations me especially moving do make and duly publish my last will and testament in manner and form following that is to say: 230 / Appendix

I recommend my soul to almighty God hoping for a full pardon for all my sins and my body I commit to the earth to be decently interred at the discretion of my executors hereinafter named as to all my estate and effects both real and personal I give and bequeath in manner and form following that is to say, I give and bequeath unto and among my poor brethren of the Portuguese Jewish nation that reside in and belong to the town of Kingston in the island aforesaid eighty pounds current money of Jamaica to be distributed among them by my executors in their discretion and it is my will and desire that they proceed in the distribution the day after my body is interred. Item I give and bequeath unto the wardens of the yesiba Abby Yetomim or orphans society in the said town of Kingston and island aforesaid the sum of fifty pounds current money of Jamaica to be applied unto such purpose and in such manner or form as they the said wardens may think fit. Item I give and bequeath unto the wardens and treasurer of the time being of the Portuguese synagogue in the city of Amsterdam the sum of one hundred pounds sterling money of Great Britain for the use of the said synagogue to be applied to such purpose and in such manner as they the said wardens and treasurers may think most advantageous. Item I give and bequeath unto the wardens and treasurer for the time being of the Portuguese synagogue in the city of London the sum of one hundred pounds sterling money of Great Britain to be distributed and divided and applied as they the said wardens and treasurer shall think proper for the use of said synagogue. Item I give devise and bequeath unto the widow, sons and daughters of Isaac Mendes Almeyda of Bordeaux in the Kingdom of France deceased fifty pounds sterling money of Great Britain to be equally divided by and between them share and share alike in equal proportions and that no distinction or difference be made between the male and female but each to par-

Appendix / 231

take and participate of the said sum alike and which I am so bequeathed ordering my executors to remit them immediately upon peace being established between England and France. Item I give and bequeath unto Isaac Mendes Henriques otherwise O’Croix of the parish of Kingston and Island aforesaid yeoman the sum of fifty pounds current money of Jamaica and in case of the death of him the said Isaac Mendes Henriques otherwise O’Croix this my will that the sum of fifty pounds so bequeathed be equally by and between his son and daughters share and share alike divided I give and bequeath unto Abigail Aboab Cardozo of the island of Curaçao but now of Kingston and who formerly resided in the house of Mr. Daniel Mendes Pereira deceased the sum of twenty five pounds current money of Jamaica . . . . Item I give and bequeath unto Raphael a free mulatto man formerly the property of Emanuel A. Cohen deceased the sum of twenty pounds like current money. Item I do hereby order and direct my executors or either of them within one month after my deceased to manumize and for ever set free from all bondage and slavery what soever the following slaves male and females and the offspring of such females at present my property and to enter into the security in such cases required namely a negro woman named Chloe another negro woman named Rosa and a negro man named Fortune or any other slave or slaves that I may purchase at any future period after the execution of this my last will and testament and of whatever name or names such negroes or other slaves may be called and known by being my property at the time of my decease. I give devise and bequeath unto my executors hereinafter named or the survivors of him or them shall qualify and act under this my last will and testament the sum of two hundred pounds current money of Jamaica in trust that they or the survivor of them or the heirs executors administrators or assigns of such survivor to put the said sum of four hundred pounds out 232 / Appendix

at interest on good and sufficient security and pay and apply such interest that may be due or which may grow due annually . . . amongst and between such of my slaves aforesaid when manumized in equal shares and on the death of one or more of my said slaves the other survivors to benefit in the division of said interest and in the event of only one of such slaves should outlive the others then to pay to him or her the sum of eighteen pounds current money annually and the surplus to retain and causeth be added to the principal sum of four hundred pounds for the uses hereinafter set forth that is to say that in the demise of the last surviving slave as aforesaid then to deliver and pay over the said sum of four hundred pounds with such interest as may have accumulated unto the wardens and treasurer for the time being of the Portuguese Synagogue in the city of Kingston and island aforesaid for the uses of the said synagogue to be applied unto such purposes as they the said wardens and treasurer shall think proper. And whereas I the said Samuel Barreto da Veiga have and at this time stand possessed of divers sums of money which for safe custody did deposit in that part of Great Britain commonly called and known by name of England in government securities and in order to prevent any disturbances arising and taking place after my decease respecting the said sums and the interest thereof be due or which may grow due do declare and it is my intention that it be divided by and between such of my relations and friends in manner and form following that is to say, I give and bequeath unto my nephew Abraham Furtado of Bordeaux in the Kingdom of France merchant the sum of one thousand pounds sterling money of Great Britain in trust to my executors and which sum I desire my executors to remit him immediately upon a peace being established between England and France . . . . I give devise and bequeath unto my nephew Joseph Furtado of Bayonne in the said Kingdom of France merchant one thousand pounds sterling money of Great Britain in trust to Appendix / 233

my executors and which sum I desire my executors to remit him immediately upon a peace being established between England and France . . . . I give and bequeath unto my niece Abigail Furtado de Castro of Bayonne in the said Kingdom of France one thousand pounds sterling money of Great Britain in trust to my executors and which sum I desire my executors to remit her immediately after peace being established between England and France . . . . I give and bequeath to my niece Bertis Joaquina of the town of Covilliao23 in the Kingdom of Portugal one thousand pounds sterling money of Great Britain and the proceeds thereof for and during the full end and term of her natural life and from and immediately after her decease to such of her legitimate children as shall be living at the time of her death share and share alike in equal portions and proportions and that no distinction or difference be made between the male and the female elder and younger . . . . I give devise and bequeath unto my niece Leonor Bernardu of the city of Guiardu24 in the said Kingdom of Portugal one thousand pounds sterling money of Great Britain for and during and to the full end and term of her natural life . . . . And whereas I have a demand against the late firm of Alves Rabello and Company late of the city of London merchant but who became insufficient and their effects delivered over to sundry persons as trustees or assigns for the benefit of their creditors at large now it is my will and desire that all or any part of the said demand which shall or may be recovered from the said insolvent estate by my executors or any one of them shall immediately become part of my residuary estate and I the said Samuel Barreto da Veiga taking seriously into consideration the situation of my affairs and in order to liquidate settle and dispose of all my property that there may be no suit or suits at law in equity or any litigation whatsoever do declare in manner and form following that is to say all the remainder of interest due or to grow due by virtue of my estate that is in government security 234 / Appendix

together with all my rights to the claim and demand whatsoever of in or the said stock in security that is or are kept in Threadneedle Street . . . .25 I do declare and my will is that all the remaining interests after having paid the legacys be before mentioned or any other account or accounts whatsoever be the same of what or kind soever that shall or may arise or may hereafter become due by virtue of any public security or in any manner accumulate or that may continue in the said annuities or stock or otherwise upon the faith and credit of the Kingdom of Great Britain government and legislature thereof and the balance of any monies in their hands from the sale of my effects or otherwise shall go to and be the absolute interest and property of my nephew Francisco Barretto da Veiga Pinto of the city of Guarda in the city of Portugal . . . . And I the said Samuel Barreto da Veiga in order to prevent any disturbance arising as aforesaid my will is and I do declare in manner and form following that is to say I do hereby give my executors hereafter named and every of them full power liberty license and authority immediately after my decease to sell or cause to be sold all my plate, furniture and effects whatsoever that I may have at the time of my decease and be in possession to pay off satisfy and discharge the above mentioned legacies and all debts whatsoever be the same of what nature or kind soever and that no person or persons shall call them to an account for so doing save and except as is hereafter mentioned . . . . And I do hereby give and bequeath unto Eleanor Davis alias Eleanor Davis Barretto of the parish of Kingston and island aforesaid a free woman of colour said to be my reputed daughter the sum of one hundred pounds current money of Jamaica and I do hereby confirm my said last will and testament and my former codicils in every particular in witness whereof I have to this my third codicil my hand and seal this ninth day of July one thousand eight hundred and ten. Appendix / 235

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Notes

Introduction 1. “Minute Book of the Mahamad, 1912–1941” [item not catalogued], archives of the Sha‘are Shalom Synagogue of the United Congregation of Israelites, Kingston, Jamaica. On the loss of communal records in Jamaica as a result of the 1882 Kingston fire and the 1907 earthquake see Jacob Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica: From the English Conquest to the Present Time (Kingston: Jamaican Times, 1941), 48–49, 83, 89. 2. Studies utilizing these sources include: Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010); Aviva Ben-­Ur and Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Essays (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, 2009); Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991). 3. “Minutes of Adjuntos, Barbados, W.I., 1769–1794,” The London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), London, England, LMA/4521/ D/01/001; “Minutes of Meetings of the Mahamad and Adjuntos, Barbados, W.I., 1791–1808,” LMA, LMA/4521/D/01/002. 4. Christopher Marsh, “In the Name of God? Will-­Making and Faith in Early Modern England,” in The Records of the Nation: The Public Records Office, 1838–1988, ed. Geoffrey H. Martin and Peter Spufford (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1990), 215–49, 240. 5. Lee J. Alston and Morton Owen Schapiro, “Inheritance Laws Across Colonies: Causes and Consequences,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 2 (1984): 277–87. 6. Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970); Marsh, “In the Name of God?” 217. 7. For Jewish “ethical wills” see Israel Abrahams, ed., Hebrew Ethical Wills (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1926, repr. 1954). 8. Marsh, “In the Name of God?” 216. 9. On Jewish “ego-­documents” see Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-­Fashioning (Seattle, WA: University

237

of Washington Press, 2012); Jeffrey H. Chajes, “Accounting for the Self: Preliminary Generic-­Historical Reflections on Early Modern Jewish Egodocuments,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 1 (2005): 1–15. 10. See Alessandra Veronese, “La prassi giuridica applicata agli ebrei dello stato fiorentino attraverso alcuni casi volterrani,” in Storia economica e storia degli ebrei: istituzioni, capitale sociale e stereotipi (sec. XV–XVIII), ed. Marina Romani (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2017), 81–97. 11. On religious preambles in early modern wills see Marsh, “In the Name of God?” 12. See for instance the “Will of Isaac Deleon, 1799,” Island Record Office (hereafter IRO), Twickenham, Jamaica, lib. 66, fol. 12. Isaac’s will was composed in November of 1769 and not registered in the probate record until September of 1799. 13. “Will of Moses Massias, 1766,” IRO lib. 37, fol. 303. 14. Richard D. Barnett and Philip Wright, The Jews of Jamaica: Tombstone Inscriptions, 1663–1880 ( Jerusalem: Ben Ẓvi Institute, 1997), 86, no. 1013. 15. This possibility is supported by the fact that his tombstone contains only Portuguese, to the exclusion of either English or Hebrew, suggesting he knew only Portuguese. 16. “Will of Moses Touro, 1724,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 99. 17. “Will of Moses Adolphus, 1798,” IRO lib. 64, fol. 56. 18. “Will of Isaac Pereira Brandon, 1740,” IRO lib. 22, fol. 83. 19. “Will of Sarah Riz, 1798,” IRO lib. 65, fol. 67. 20. “Will of Alexandre Lindo, 1813,” IRO lib. 86, fol. 168. 21. “Will of Benjamin Pereira, 1723,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 40. 22. “Will of David Gomes, 1673,” IRO lib. 1, fol. 73. 23. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 24. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-­Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 220–21. 25. Stanley Mirvis, “Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Colonial Jamaica (1692–1796),” in A Sefardic Pepper-­Pot in the Caribbean: History, Language, Literature and Art, ed. Michael Studemund-­Halévy (Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2016), 109–23. 26. For a critical study of last wills and testaments in the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora see Gérard Nahon, “Pour une approche des attitudes devant la mort au xviiie siècle: sermonnaires et testateurs juifs portugais à Bayonne,” Revue des Etudes Juives 136 (1977): 3–123. 238 / Notes to Pages 5–11

27. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 178–93; Samuel Oppenheim, “Lists of Wills of Jews in the British West Indies Prior to 1800,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (hereafter PAJHS) 32 (1931): 55–64. 28. Jacob R. Marcus, “The West India and South America Expedition of the American Jewish Archives,” American Jewish Archives Journal 5, no. 1 (1953): 5–21. 29. Henry P. Silverman, “The Hunt’s Bay Jewish Cemetery, Kingston, Jamaica, British West Indies,” PAJHS 37 (1947): 327–44; Henry P. Silverman, “The Jews of Jamaica: A Historical View,” Caribbean Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1967): 46–53. 30. Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3 vols. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970). For examples of will analysis see 3:1409, n. 48. 31. David M. Zielonka, “The Study of the Life of the Jews in Jamaica, as Reflected in Their Wills, 1692–1798,” American Jewish Archives (hereafter AJA), Cincinnati, OH, SC-­13489. 32. Leo Hershkowitz, The Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704–1799 (New York, NY: The American Jewish Historical Society, 1967). 33. Ẓvi Loker, “Caribbean Jewish Wills: A Historical Source,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies Division B, vol. 3 (1993): 296–302; Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity, and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2000), 234–39. 34. Alston and Schapiro, “Laws Across Colonies,” 279. 35. Trevor Burnard, “Inheritance and Independence: Women’s Status in Early Colonial Jamaica,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 48, no. 1 (1991): 93–114. 36. On “rejudaization” see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 96–131. For a qualification of this model see David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 37. For a survey of the “Western Sephardi” Diaspora see Yosef Kaplan, Ha-­pezurah ha-­sefaradit ha-­ma‘aravit (Tel Aviv: misrad ha-­bitaḥon, 1994); Yosef Kaplan, “The Sephardim in North-­Western Europe and the New World,” in Moreshet Sepharad/The Sephardi Legacy, 2 vols., ed. Ḥaim Beinart ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 2:240–87. 38. See David Graizbord, “Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-­Building in Seventeenth-­Century Notes to Pages 11–14 / 239

Bayonne and Peyrehorade,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 1 (2006): 147–80; Gérard Nahon, “From New Christians to the Portuguese Jewish Nation in France,” in Moreshet Sepharad/The Sephardi Legacy, 2:336–64; Cecil Roth, “Immanuel Aboab’s Proselytization of the Marranos: From an Unpublished Letter,” Jewish Quarterly Review 23, no. 2 (1932): 121–62. 39. On the diasporic centrality of Amsterdam see Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-­Century Amsterdam (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004). 40. Cecil Roth, Doña Gracia of the House of Nasi (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969, repr. 1992); James Nelson Novoa, Being the Nação in the Eternal City: New Christian Lives in Sixteenth-­Century Rome (Peterborough, ON: Baywolf Press, 2014), 97–123. 41. See Mercedes García-­Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 42. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 6–13. 43. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550– 1750 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985, repr. 1991), 247. 44. For a discussion of periphery and center in the Portuguese Jewish Diaspora see Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-­ Jews and the World of Maritime Empires (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Evelyne Oliel-­Grausz, “Patrocinio and Authority: Assessing the Metropolitan Role of the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Gérard Nahon, “Amsterdam and the Portuguese Nação of the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 67–83. 45. For an Atlantic studies approach to the study of the nação see the essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-­Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). See also the articles in the special issue of Jewish History 20 (2006), “Port Jews in the Atlantic.” 46. See the classic study Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971); the conference proceedings volume, Okwui Enwezor et al., eds., Créolité and Creolization: Documenta11_ Platform3 (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003). For discussions of Jewish creolization see Vink, Creole Jews, esp. 5–10; Aviva Ben-­Ur, “Purim in the Public Eye: Leisure, Violence, 240 / Notes to Pages 14–18

and Cultural Convergence in the Dutch Atlantic,” Jewish Social Studies 20, no. 1 (2013): 32–76. 47. For a foundational study of Portuguese Jewish family life see Yosef Kaplan, “Familia, matrimonio, y sociedad: los casamientos clandestinos en la diáspora sefardí occidental (Siglos XVII y XVIII),” Shazar 2, no. 2 (1994): 18–38. See also the essays in Julia R. Lieberman, ed., Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011). 48. Daviken Studnicki-­Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). Studnicki-­Gizbert’s model has been qualified by Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diasporas, Livorno, and Cross-­Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 1. The Promise of Port Royal (1655–92) 1. For recent discussions of the religious and political context of the English conquest of Jamaica see Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 119–33. 2. On converso society in Brazil see Anita Novinsky, Chritãos novos na Bahia (São Paulo, BR: Editora Perspectiva, 1972); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Nome e o sangue: parábola familiar no pernambuco co colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2000); Geraldo Pieroni, “Outcasts from the Kingdom: The Inquisition and the Banishment of New Christians to Brazil,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2001), 242–51. 3. Ernst Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators and Traders in the Portuguese Atlantic, 1450–1800,” in Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 485–500, 487. 4. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1500–1835 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 266. 5. See Angelo Adriano Faria de Assis, “Inquisição, religiosidade e transformações culturais: a sinagoga das mulheres e a sobrevivência do judaísmo feminino no Brasil colonial,” Revista Brasileira de História 22, no. 43 (2002): 47–66; Novinsky, Chritãos novos na Bahia, 103–40. Notes to Pages 19–22 / 241

6. Arnold Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (New York, NY: American Jewish Historical Society, 1954), 1. 7. Bruno Feitler, “Jews and New Christians in Dutch Brazil, 1630– 1654,” in Atlantic Diasporas, 123–51. 8. Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1960), 67–68. 9. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 69–70; Pijning, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators,” 491. 10. Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989, repr. 2004), 110. 11. Ḥayim Shabtai, Sefer she’elot u-­teshuvot torat ḥayim, ed. Yonatan Bel‘iyar ( Jerusalem: zikhron aharon, 2015), 3:4–5. 12. Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74–79, 219–26; Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Community, 69. 13. Wim Klooster, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: The Found­ ers of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America, 1650s and 1660s,” in Atlantic Diasporas, 33–49, 37. 14. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 142. 15. Leo Hershkovitz, “By Chance or by Choice: Jews in New Amsterdam 1654,” American Jewish Archives Journal 57, nos. 1–2 (2005): 1–13. 16. On the Spanish period of Jamaican history see Francisco Morales Padrón, Spanish Jamaica (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1952, repr. and trans. 2004). 17. See Irene A. Wright, “The Early History of Jamaica (1511–1536),” The English Historical Review 36 (1921): 70–95. 18. Studnicki-­Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 151–74. 19. James Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–2000 (Kingston, JM: Ian Randle, 2005), 19, n. 51. 20. Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, 66. 21. On the activity of the Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias see María Christina Navarrete Peláez, La diaspora judeoconversa en Columbia siglos XVI y XVII: incertidumbres de su arribo, establecimiento y persecución (Santiago de Cali: Programa Editorial Universidad de Valle, 2010), 107–55. 22. Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, 72. 23. Anna Maria Splendiani, Cincuenta anos de inquisición en el tribunal de Cartagena de Indias, 1610–1660: documentos inéditos procedentes del archivo histórico nacional de madrid (AHMN), sección inquisición, cartagena de Indias (Cartagena: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 1997), 4:121–28.

242 / Notes to Pages 22–26

24. J. W. Fortescue, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies (London, UK: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1898) (hereafter CSP), 5:48–49. For the original document see “Petition of Jacob Jeosua Bueno Enriques, 1661,” The National Archives of England, Kew, England (hereafter TNA), CO 1/15, no. 74. See also the reproduction of this text in Herbert Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews of the British West Indies,” PAJHS 5 (1897): 45–101, 65–66, and in Ẓvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times ( Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, Institute for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, 1991), 164. 25. Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews,” 66. 26. CSP, 5:210–12; Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews,” 48. 27. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare Among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 56. 28. CSP, 5:284; Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews,” 49; Meyer Kayserling, “The Jews in Jamaica and Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna,” Jewish Quarterly Review 12, no. 4 (1900): 708–17, 708–9. 29. See Gary C. Grassl, “Joachim Gans of Prague: The First Jew in English America,” American Jewish History 86, no. 2 (1998): 195–217. 30. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 2. 31. “Annual Accounts (1676–1693),” LMA, LMA/4521/A/04/01/ 001–011. 32. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:151; CSP, 9:258–59; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972, repr. 2000), 157. 33. Jacob R. Marcus and Stanley F. Chyet, eds. Historical Essay on the Colony of Surinam, 1788 (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 1974), 32. 34. CSP, 9:282–87. 35. On the Jews of the French Caribbean see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:85–94; Mordechai Arbell, “Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cayenne and the ‘Black Code’),” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 287–313; Ẓvi Loker, “Were There Jewish Communities in Saint Domingue (Haiti)?” Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 2 (1983): 135–46. 36. For a recent survey of seventeenth-­century Jamaica see Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of

Notes to Pages 26–28 / 243

English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 33–42. 37. For the early development of Port Royal see Michael Pawson and David Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975, repr. 2000); Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 177–87. 38. “Census of Port Royal, 1680,” TNA, CO 1/45, 96–107; reproduced in Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998), 53, 186. The census figures were earlier reproduced in Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 179–80. See also Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 135. 39. David Buisseret, ed., Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of Jamaica (Kingston, JM: University of West Indies Press, 2010), 238. 40. Agnes M. Whitson, The Constitutional Development of Jamaica—1660 to 1729 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1929), 15–19. 41. See David Cesarani, Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950 (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2014). 42. See David S. Katz, Philo-­Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982). 43. CSP, 7:145–47. 44. Buisseret, Jamaica in 1687, 240. 45. On Jewish citizenship in the British Atlantic see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:480–90; Jessica Roitman, “Creating Confusion in the Colonies: Jews, Citizenship, and the Dutch and British Atlantic,” Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012): 55–78, 60; Holly Snyder, “Rules, Rights, and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British Atlantic Port Towns, 1740–1831,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 147–70; James Homer Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherlands, and New York,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 369–93. 46. James Knight, The Naturall, Morall and Politicall History of Jamaica: And the Territories Thereon Depending; From the Earliest Account of Time to the Year 1748, 2 vols. 1748, British Library, London, England (hereafter BL), 12415–16, 2:101. 47. Loker, The Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times, 173–76; “The Jamaican Militia, 1695,” TNA, CO 137/3. 48. CSP, 7:297–300. 49. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 136. 50. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 52–53; Stephen A. Fortune, 244 / Notes to Pages 29–31

Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650– 1750 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1984), 48. 51. CSP, 21:​226–27, no. 384, i. 52. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 49; Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 48. For a comparison with Barbados and Martinique see also Robert Cohen, “Early Caribbean Jewry: A Demographic Perspective,” Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 2 (1983): 123–34. 53. Vink, Creole Jews, 26. 54. On the role of Protestant dissenters in the English Caribbean and their connection with Jews see Natalie Zacek, “ ‘A People So Subtle’: Se­phardic Jewish Pioneers of the English West Indies,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Caroline A. Williams (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 97–112. 55. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 183, n. 47. 56. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 40. 57. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, x. The Jewish representatives, Daniel Carvallo and Jacob Gonsales, had begun the process of purchasing the land in 1724; see Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 252–53. 58. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 5, no. 12. This tombstone was confirmed as the oldest extant Jewish tombstone by Rachel Frankel and the Caribbean Volunteer Expedition of 2008; see Rachel Frankel, “Testimonial Terrain: The Cemeteries of New World Sephardim,” in The Jews of the Caribbean, 131–42, 133, n. 5. 59. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 182–83. 60. Knight, The Naturall, Morall and Politicall History of Jamaica, 2:166. 61. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 50–51. 62. Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 26, 53. 63. Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 1:53–56, 60–61. 64. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews in the Netherlands Antilles, 1:58–59. 65. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 7, no. 22; Stanley Mirvis, “The Alvares Family Patriarchs and the Place of Pre-­1692 Port Royal in the Western Sephardic Diaspora,” American Jewish Archives Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 1–46, 9–11. 66. David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682–1831 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1952), 443–48, no. 141. Notes to Pages 31–35 / 245

67. See Yosef Ḥayim Yerushalmi, “The Re-­education of Marranos in the Seventeenth Century,” Annual Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture Series 3 (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati, 1980), 6–13. 68. Ruth Fine, “The Psalms of David by Daniel Israel López Laguna, a Wandering Marrano,” in The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, vol. 3: Displaced Persons, ed. Kevin Ingram (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 45–62, 59–60. 69. Kayserling, “The Jews in Jamaica,” 714. 70. Ronnie Perelis, “Daniel Israel López Laguna’s Espejo Fiel De Vidas and the Ghost of Marrano Autobiography,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, 317–28. On Marrano autobiographies conceived in inquisitorial prisons see Ronnie Perelis, Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 15–20; Fine “The Psalms of David,” 60. 71. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 64–104. 72. Translation from Perelis, “Daniel Israel López Laguna’s Espejo Fiel De Vidas,” 324. 73. Translation from Perelis, “Daniel Israel López Laguna’s Espejo Fiel De Vidas,” 322. 74. Mirvis, “The Alvares Family Patriarchs,” 1–46. 75. The Alvares tombstones and wills are all in Spanish, to the exclusion of Portuguese. 76. David’s residence in Brazil is known from a denouncement to the Lisbon Inquisition from the Brazilian Marrano martyr Isaac de Castro Tartas; see Elias Lipiner, Izaque de Castro: o mancebo que veio preso do Brasil (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco Editora Massangana, 1992), 155; José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da nação: judeus residentes no brasil holandês, 1630–54 (Recife: Publisher not identified, 1979), 54; Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, Dicionário biográfico: judaizantes e judeus no brasil, 1500–1808 (Rio de Janeiro: do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 1986), 22. 77. De Mello, Gente da nação, 54. 78. “Naturalization of David Alvarez, 1678,” Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica (hereafter JA), 1B/11/1/7, fol. 99. 79. “Census of Port Royal, 1680,” TNA, CO 1/45, 102. 80. Holly Snyder, “English Markets, Jewish Merchants, and Atlantic Endeavors: Jews and the Making of British Transatlantic Commercial Culture, 1650–1800,” in Atlantic Diasporas, 50–74, 53–57. 81. “The Humble Petition of Jews Late of Jamaica, 1692,” TNA, CO 137/2, no. 112.

246 / Notes to Pages 36–40

82. “Naturalization of Abraham Alvares, 1684,” JA 1B/11/1/10a, fol. 74. 83. “Land Patent of Abraham Alvares, 1685,” JA 1B/11/1/10a, fols. 182–83. 84. For a discussion of the dating of David and Abraham Baruh Alvares’s tombstones see Mirvis, “The Alvares Family Patriarchs,” 42, nn. 57 and 62. 85. “Naturalization of Rachel Alvares, 1696,” JA 1B/11/1/12, fol. 277. 86. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 9, no. 35. 87. On sepulchral art throughout the Portuguese Jewish Atlantic see Michael Studemund-­Halévy, “The Persistence of Images: Reproductive Success in the History of Sephardi Sepulchral Art,” in The Dutch Intersection, 123–47. 88. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 6, no. 17. 89. For early nonoperative freemasonry see David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The symbol of a crossed pickax and shovel appears often in the eighteenth-­century iconography of freemasonry; see examples in W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: Symbols, Secrets, Significance (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 84, 98, 202. 90. On the Jewish involvement in early nonoperative freemasonry in the Americas see Samuel Oppenheim, “The Jews in Freemasonry in the United States Before 1810,” PAJHS 19 (1910): 9–11; David S. Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-­Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 161–62; Marsha Keith Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabbalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 547. 91. For more on Jewish mysticism and Messianism in the colonial Americas and its relationship to sepulchral art see Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), 123–80. 92. Taylor’s full description is found in Buisseret, Jamaica in 1687, 297–305; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 151–54. 93. Buisseret, Jamaica in 1687, 303. Emphasis mine. 94. For a description of the symbol of the shovel and its association with Royal Arch freemasonry see Albert G. Mackey, A Lexicon of Freemasonry (London, UK: Richard Griffin & Company, 1860), “Royal Arch,” 298–301, and “Shovel,” 317. 95. Buisseret, Jamaica in 1687, 238, 284. 96. “Will of David Baruh Alvares, 1693,” IRO lib. 7, fol. 130. 97. “Will of Abraham Baruh Alvares, 1693,” IRO lib. 7, fol. 171. 98. Listed in order probated: “Will of David Alvares, 1693,” IRO lib. 7, fol. 130; “Will of Joseph Dacosta Alvarenga, 1700,” IRO lib. 9, fol. 102;

Notes to Pages 40–43 / 247

“Will of Joseph Ydana, 1706,” IRO lib. 11, fol. 37; “Will of David Lopes Narbona, 1707,” IRO lib. 11, fol. 77; “Will of Moses Yeshurn Cardoso, 1726,” IRO lib. 17, fol. 104. 99. Joseph Dacosta Alvarenga to London; David Alvares and Moses Yeshurun Cardoso to Bayonne. 100. “Will of Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, 1726,” IRO lib. 17, fol. 104. 101. “Will of Jacob Yeshurun Cardoso, 1752,” IRO lib. 28, fol. 227. 102. “Will of David Nunes, 1714,” IRO lib. 14, fol. 164. 103. “Will of Moses Mendes Quixano, 1723,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 57. 104. “Will of Diego Luis Gonsales, 1726,” IRO lib. 17, fol. 94. On Diego Luis Gonsales’s commercial activity see Eli Faber, “Letters from Jamaica, 1719–1725,” American Jewish History 91, nos. 3–4 (2003): 485–91. 2. The Peril of Port Royal (1670–1740) 1. Studnicki-­Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 67–89. 2. Wim Klooster, “Contraband Trade by Curaçao’s Jews with Countries of Idolatry, 1660–1800,” Studia Rosenthaliana 31, nos. 1–2 (1997): 58–73. 3. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, 194–223. 4. Nuala Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1986): 570–93; Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-­Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-­Century Trade (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1978), 25–66; Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 130–50; Nélida García Fernández, “Interacciones mercantiles entre los imperios del Atlántico: el comercio directo del añil colonial español hacia Bristol, vía Jamaica,” Caribbean Studies 34, no. 2 (2006): 47–98. 5. Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998), 90–104; Snyder, “English Markets,” 53–54. 6. See for example CSP, 7:297–300. 7. Allan D. Meyers, “Ethnic Distinctions and Wealth Among Colonial Jamaican Merchants, 1685–1716,” Social Science History 22, no. 1 (1998): 47–81, 75. 8. Meyers, “Ethnic Distinctions,” 76. 9. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 177. 10. Edward [Ned] Ward, A Trip to Jamaica: With a True Character of the People and Island (London, UK: J. How, 1700), 16. 11. Buisseret, Jamaica in 1687, 240. 12. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 33–44; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 154–65. 248 / Notes to Pages 43–50

13. Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom, and Revenge (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2009). 14. Matt Goldish, “The Strange Adventures of Benjamin Franks, an Ashkenazi Pioneer in the Americas,” in Jews in the Caribbean, 311–18; Samuel Oppenheim, “Benjamin Franks, Merchant, and Captain Kidd, Pirate,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 229–34. 15. CSP, 11:​482. There had been earlier incidents of Jewish trading vessels from Jamaica being attacked by Spanish pirates who abused the crew; see CSP, 7:297–300. 16. CSP, 11:​482–83; see also Lynch’s letter to the Lords of Trade and Plantation from September of 1683 in CSP, 11:​489–94. 17. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:223–26. 18. On the Rabba Couty affair see CSP, 12:​434–36, 453; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:482–83; Snyder, “English Markets,” 54–55. 19. Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 45–46. 20. CSP, 7:268, 276–77. 21. CSP, 7:297–300. 22. CSP, 7:366–67. 23. CSP, 11:​609–10. 24. CSP, 13:​593–94. 25. Richard D. Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of London During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England (hereafter TJHSE) 20 (1964): 1–50, 10–11. 26. For descriptions of the earthquake see Edward Long, The History of Jamaica: or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island, 3 vols. (London, UK: Printed for T. Lowndes, in Fleet-­Street, 1774), 2:141–44; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 165–72; Frank Cundall, Historic Jamaica (London, UK: Institute of Jamaica, 1915), 53–54; Ward, A Trip to Jamaica, 15. For a recent analysis see Matthew Mulcahy, “The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders in Seventeenth-­ Century Jamaica,” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 391–421. 27. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 166, n. 10. 28. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 166. See also an analysis of English building methods in Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 63. 29. Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad,” 11. 30. Quoted from Mordechai Arbell, The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica (Kingston: Canoe Press, 2000), 20. Notes to Pages 50–55 / 249

31. Henry Barham, The Civil History of Jamaica to the Year 1722, BL 12422, fol. 92. 32. “The Humble Petition of Jews Late of Jamaica, 1692,” TNA, CO 137/2, no. 112. 33. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:144; Cundall, Historic Jamaica, 60. 34. Frank Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (London: West India Committee, 1937), 30–32. The Jewish petitioners were Abraham da Silva and Moses Gutteres. 35. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 194. 36. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 40, 195, 259. Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 76. An informal prayer house was in use in St. Jago de la Vega as early as 1699; see “Will of Jacob Dacosta Alvarenga, 1700,” IRO lib. 9, fol. 102. 37. Barry Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 236–37. 38. Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 46. 39. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 62. 40. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 46; Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World, 238. 41. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 30. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 256–57. 42. George Fortunatus Judah, “The Jews’ Tribute in Jamaica: Extracted from the Journals of the House of Assembly in Jamaica,” PAJHS 18 (1909): 149–77, 149. 43. Assembly of Jamaica, Acts of the Assembly of Jamaica Passed in the Island of Jamaica from 1681 to 1737, Inclusive (London: Printed by John Baskett, 1738), 58; Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews,” 87–89. 44. Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews,” 88. 45. Interesting Tracts Related to Jamaica (St. Jago de la Vega: Lewis, Lunan, and Jones, 1800), 279; Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 87. 46. CSP, 18:​223–27; “Answer of the Governor and Council to Lord Bellmonte’s Memorial About the Jews, 1700,” TNA, CO 137/5, no. 19 and CO 138/10, 76–90; Charles Gross, “Documents from the Public Records Office (London),” PAJHS 2 (1894): 165–70. 47. CSP, 14:​455; “Governor Beeston to the Lords of Trade and Plantation, 1695,” TNA, CO 138/8, 21–33. 48. CSP, 14:​521; “Order of the Lords Justice of England . . . Referring to the Petition of Anthony Gomes Serra, 1695,” TNA, CO 138/8, 24–26; CSP, 14:​540; “The Lords of Trade and Plantation on the Question of Jews in Jamaica, 1695,” TNA, CO 138/8, 27–28. 250 / Notes to Pages 55–59

49. CSP, 18:​18, 23 (text not reproduced); “Baron de Belmonte to the King on Behalf of the Jews, 1700,” TNA, CO/137, no. 6; Gérard Nahon, “Amsterdam and the Portuguese Naçao,” 71, 78–79; Frank Cundall, “The Taxing of the Jews in Jamaica in the Seventeenth Century,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 31–35. On Belmonte’s diplomatic career see Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 133–37. 50. CSP, 18:​29; “Council of Trade to the Earl of Jersey, 1700,” TNA, CO 138/10, 4. 51. CSP, 18:​187–89; “William Beeston to the Council of Trade, 1700,” TNA, CO 137/5, no. 18; Gross, “Documents from the Public Records Office,” 167–70. 52. CSP, 21:​226–27; “Petition [on Behalf ] of the Jews of Jamaica to the Queen, 1703,” TNA, CO 137/5, no. 98. 53. CSP, 21:​242; “Mr. Pereyra to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 1703,” TNA, CO 137/5, no. 100; CSP, 21:​255; “Council of Trade and Plantations to Sir Charles Hedges, 1703,” TNA, CO 138/10, 418. 54. Judah, “The Jews’ Tribute in Jamaica,” 21–22. 55. Assembly of Jamaica, Acts of the Assembly of Jamaica, 141. 56. See Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 350–93. 57. Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 74–103. 58. CSP, 32:​334–35; “Governor Sr. N. Lawes to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 1721,” TNA, CO 137/14, 6–7. 59. CSP, 32:​489; “Petition of the Jews of Jamaica to the Lords of Committee Council, 1721,” TNA, CO 137/14, 50; Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 88. 60. Judah, “The Jews’ Tribute in Jamaica,” 22–23; Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 131. 61. See Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988); George Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 1729–1783 (London: Royal Commonwealth Society, 1965), 33–57; Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666–1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1983), 197–215. 62. Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 47–55. 63. CSP, 38:​371–78; “Representation of Council of Jamaica to Governor Hunter, 1731,” TNA, CO 137/53, 412–35. 64. Judah, “The Jews’ Tribute in Jamaica,” 24. 65. CSP, 40:​40, 172–73; “Confession Made by Scyrus a Negro BelongNotes to Pages 59–61 / 251

ing to Mr. Geo. Taylor, 1733,” TNA, CO 137/20, 178–83; CSP, 40:​212–16; “Further Examination of Sarra alias Ned, 1733,” TNA, CO 137/21, 30–31; James Robertson, “The ‘Confession Made by Cyrus’ Reconsidered: Maroons and Jews During Jamaica’s First Maroon War, 1728–1738/9,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, 241–59. 66. “The Humble Petition and Representation of Several Traders to Jamaica, 1735,” TNA, CO 137/22, 30–32. 67. “Benjamin Bravo’s Answers to the Board of Trade and Plantation, 1735,” TNA, CO 137/22, 34; Joseph R. Rosenbloom, “Notes on the Jews’ Tribute in Jamaica,” TJHSE 20 (1959–61): 247–54, 250. 68. “Memorandum of William Wood on the Jews of Jamaica, 1735,” TNA, CO 137/22, 35–36; Rosenbloom, “Notes on the Jews’ Tribute in Jamaica,” 249–50; J. M. Treadwell, “William Wood of Jamaica: A Colonial Mercantilist of the 18th Century,” Journal of Caribbean History 8 (1976): 42–63. 69. “Additional Instruction from the Board of Trade to Edward Trelawny, 1737,” TNA, CO 137/22, 178. 70. CSP, 44:4; “On a Petition Against Extraordinary Taxes Laid upon the Jews in Jamaica, 1738,” TNA, CO 137/22, 177–79. 71. Edward Long similarly suggested that Jews in Jamaica refrained from trade in alcohol to avoid the high tariffs: Long, A History of Jamaica, 2:30. 72. CSP, 44:​163–65; “Reasons Relating to the Jews, 1738,” TNA, CO 137/56, 111–19d. 73. Albert Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951 (London: The Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, 1951, repr. 1991), 254. 74. CSP, 45:​67; “Lords of Council to Edward Trelawny, 1739,” TNA, CO 137/23, 16–17. 75. Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 179. 76. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:108. 77. “Instructions of the Board of Trade to the Governor of Jamaica, 1758,” TNA, CO 138/20, 321–27. 78. TNA, CO 138/22, 106–7; TNA, CO 138/22, 444–45; TNA, CO 138/23, 226; TNA, CO 138/23, 473. 3. The Jews of Plantation Jamaica (1740–70) 1. For a fuller discussion of the homogenized perception of Caribbean Jewry as merchants see Stanley Mirvis, “The Gabay Dynasty: Planta252 / Notes to Pages 61–65

tion Jews of the Colonial Atlantic World,” in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Western Sephardi Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 565–80. For a classic expression of Jamaica’s Jews as traders at the expense of planters in modern scholarship see Thomas G. August, “An Historical Profile of the Jewish Community of Jamaica,” Jewish Social Studies 49, nos. 3–4 (1987): 303–16, 305. 2. Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao: Curaçaon Jewry, 1656–1957 (New York, NY: Bloch, 1957), 200–201. 3. Wilfred S. Samuel, “A Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados in the Year 1680,” TJHSE 13 (1932–35): 1–111, 17–20. 4. On Jodensavanne see Vink, Creole Jews, 37–44; Ben-­Ur and Frankel, Remnant Stones, Essays, 29–35; Aviva Ben-­Ur, “ ‘Jerusalem on the Riverside’: Jewish Political Autonomy in the Caribbean,” in A Sefardic Pepper-­ Pot, 30–54. 5. “Benjamin Bravo’s Answers to the Board of Trade and Plantation, 1735,” TNA, CO 137/22. 6. “List of Landholders and Quantity of Land Occupied in Jamaica, 1750,” BL, BA Add. MS 12436. 7. Knight, The Naturall, Morall, and Politicall History of Jamaica, 2:166. 8. Hollander, “The Naturalization of the Jews,” 108. 9. Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 89; for the Jewish support of the project see “Memorial of the Merchant Factors to the Board, 1754,” TNA, CO 137/26, 176–87. 10. John D. Garrigus, “ ‘New Christians’/‘New Whites’: Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-­Domingue, 1760–1789,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 315–32. 11. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 71–72; Vink, Creole Jews, 47–48. 12. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 177–87; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 43. For a statistical analysis of property ownership in St. Andrew parish see Jack P. Greene, Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 72–109. 13. Verene A. Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (Kingston, JM: Ian Randle, 2009), 14–23; Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Kingston, JM: Canoe Press, 1976, repr. 2007), 208–60, 415–45. 14. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 38. 15. B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston, JM: University of the West Indies Press, 2008). 16. Greene, Settler Jamaica, 69. 17. On the West Indian lobby see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Notes to Pages 65–68 / 253

“The Formation of a Commercial Lobby: The West Indian Interest, British Colonial Policy and the American Revolution,” Historical Journal 40, no. 1 (1997): 71–95. 18. Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 495. 19. On the Plantation Act see Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 62–69; quoted from James Homer Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights,” in Jews and the European Expansion to the West, 369–93, 388. 20. J. H. Hollander, “The Naturalization of Jews in the American Colonies Under the Act of 1740,” PAJHS 5 (1897): 103–17; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:103, 483–89. 21. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:300–301. 22. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:297–99. 23. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:28. 24. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 58, 188–94. 25. The North American and the West Indian Gazetteer (London: G. Robinson, 1776), “Jamaica.” 26. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 249. 27. Quoted from Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 65. For an analysis of Jewish property ownership in Kingston see also Greene, Settler Jamaica, 159. 28. Trevor Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 1 (1994): 63–82. 29. Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad,” 12. 30. On the Sanches Morao affair see Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 197–98; Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith Hurwitz, “The New World Sets an Example for the Old: The Jews of Jamaica and Political Rights, 1661–1831,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1965): 37–56, 42–45; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 64; Snyder, “Rules, Rights, and Redemption,” 158–59; Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 109–12, 138. 31. “The Sexton of London to the Holy Community of Jamaica, 1751,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/03/002; Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad,” 12. 32. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:116. 33. “Details of the Devastation Wrought in Kingston, Jamaica,” Jamaican Creole, December 13, 1882. 34. Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World, 253. 254 / Notes to Pages 68–73

35. Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 116–17. 36. Marion D. Ross, “Caribbean Colonial Architecture in Jamaica,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 10, no. 3 (1951): 22–27. 37. Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 116–17; Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 41. 38. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:669–70, 712–14. 39. “Deposition of Moses Pereira Dacosta, 1762,” TNA, CO 137/32, 108. 40. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 137–63. 41. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 122–36. 42. Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 113. 43. Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 55, n. 1. 44. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:459. 45. For various instances of this accusation see CSP, 18:​187–89; “Wil­ liam Beeston to the Council of Trade, 1700,” TNA, CO 137/5, no. 18; “The Humble Petition and Representation of Several Traders to Jamaica, 1735,” TNA, CO 137/22, 30–32. 46. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:460. 47. “Quantity of Land Cultivated, St. Andrew Parish, 1753,” TNA, CO 137/28, 170–76. 48. Neville Hall, “Some Aspects of the ‘Deficiency’ Question in Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century,” Caribbean Studies 15, no. 1 (1975): 5–19. 49. Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 41–91. 50. “Will of Abraham Aguilar, 1794,” IRO lib. 59, fol. 78. 51. “Will of Jacob Gonsales, 1776,” IRO lib. 47, fol. 5. 52. Wolff and Wolff, Dicionário Biográfico, 82–83. 53. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 40. 54. “Petition of Port Royal’s Jews to the Crown, 1692,” TNA, CO 137/2, no. 112. 55. “Will of David Gabay, 1720,” IRO lib. 15, fol. 267. 56. “Will of Isaac Gabay, 1732,” IRO lib. 18, fol. 165. 57. “Will of David Gabay (the younger), 1762,” IRO lib. 34 fol. 9. 58. “List of Landholders and Quantity of Land Occupied in Jamaica, 1750,” BL, BA Add. MS 12436; “Will of Solomon Gabay, 1743,” IRO lib. 23, fol. 193. 59. “Will of Daniel Rodrigues Nunes, 1774,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 27. 60. “Will of Samuel Gabay, 1751,” IRO lib. 28, fol. 86; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 91, no. 1046. Notes to Pages 73–79 / 255

61. Greene, Settler Jamaica, 113. 62. “Will of David Gabay, 1760,” IRO lib. 32, fol. 186. 63. “Will of Jacob Henriques, 1761,” IRO lib. 32, fol. 215. 64. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 87, no. 1019. 65. “Will of Benjamin Pereira, 1775,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 60. 66. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 44, no. 249. 67. Jacob R. Marcus, Early American Jewry: The Jews of New York, New England, and Canada, 1649–1794, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951), 1:85. 68. “Will of Jacob Gutteres, 1786,” IRO lib. 52, fol. 32. 69. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 87. 70. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 7. 71. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 106. 72. Morgan, Laboring Women, 180; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 47. 73. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-­Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 31–34. 74. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). 75. “Domestic Occurrences,” Columbian Magazine, April 1798: 711. 76. “Will of Rachel Nunes, 1795,” IRO lib. 63, fol. 78. 77. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 70–101; Simḥa Asaf, “Avadim ve-­seḥar avadim ’eẓel ha-­yehudim be-­yimai ha-­beinaim,” Ẓion 4, no. 2 (1939): 91–125. 78. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 74–79. 79. Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World, 69; Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 171, 176–77. 80. For a classic expression of this position see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:79: “slaves employed by Jews were generally treated more humanely.” Notice here the poor choice of the word “employed.” 81. For a discussion of Jewish treatment of slaves in Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century see Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 271–75. 82. “Will of Moses Levy Alvares, 1765,” IRO lib. 36, fol. 9.

256 / Notes to Pages 79–86

83. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 262. 84. “Advertisement, Judith and Isaac Gomez Silva,” Royal Gazette, July 21, 1780. 85. “Advertisement, Aaron Silvera,” Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, March 3, 1780. 86. “Advertisement, Abraham Meyers,” Royal Gazette, July 1, 1780. 87. “Advertisement, Joseph Aflalo,” Royal Gazette, January 20, 1781. 88. “Advertisement, Emanuel Baruh Lousada,” Royal Gazette, September 30, 1780. 89. “William Fitzmaurice’s Deposition on the Slave Trade,” Saint Jago de la Vega Gazette (installments), September 15–29, 1791. 4. The End of a Long Century (1770–1815) 1. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 154. 2. On the racialized hierarchy of Jamaica see Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society, 105–239. 3. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 182–83. For a preliminary discussion of the ambiguous social status of Jews in eighteenth-­century Jamaica see Carol S. Holzberg, Minorities and Power in Colonial Jamaica: The Jewish Community of Jamaica (Lanham, MD: North-­South Publishing Company, 1987), 3–33. 4. Greene, Settler Jamaica, 129–30. 5. Swithin Wilmot, “Jewish Politicians in Post-­Slavery Jamaica: Electoral Politics in the Parish of St. Dorothy, 1849–1860,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, 261–78. 6. Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 111. 7. J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners: Containing Strictures on the Soil, Cultivation, Produce, Trade, Officers, and Inhabitants; with the Method of Establishing and Conduction a Sugar Plantation to which is Added the Practice of Training New Slaves (London: Printed for J. Parsons, Paternoster Row, 1793). 8. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 68. 9. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies in Two Volumes, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1794), 2:2. 10. Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal, 148. Also mentioned in Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 316, and Vink, Creole Jews, 134. 11. Quoted from Philip Wright’s introduction to Maria Nugent’s journal: Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal, xxx.

Notes to Pages 86–92 / 257

12. Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal, 54–55; Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 317. 13. Suman Seth, “Materialism, Slavery, and The History of Jamaica,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 105, no. 4 (2014): 764–72; Roxanne Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-­ Century British Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 209–33; Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 153. 14. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:235, 300. 15. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:18. 16. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:17. 17. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:28–29. 18. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:29. 19. Marcus and Chyet, eds., Historical Essay, 154; Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005), 134. 20. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:30. 21. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:293. 22. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:293. 23. Smous is a term used throughout the Caribbean to refer to Portuguese Jews; see Vink, Creole Jews, 196. 24. This false stereotype is found throughout the Americas; see Vink, Creole Jews, 187–219; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 60. 25. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:295. 26. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:18. 27. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:293. 28. “Resolutions of the General Meeting of Planters, Merchants, and Others Held at Harmony Hall, February 7, 1771,” TNA, CO 137/36, 86–87. 29. “Domestic Occurrences,” Columbian Magazine, December 1796: 404. 30. “On the Descent of Afghans from the Jews,” Columbian Magazine, September 1796: 209–13. 31. “Of the Intelligent Race of Adam,” Columbian Magazine, October 1796: 330–35. 32. “Domestic Occurrences,” Columbian Magazine, April 1798: 711. 33. [Isaac Dias Fernandes], “Biography: Some Account of the Life of the late Revd. Chief Rabbi Joshua Hezekiah De Cordova, of this Town,” Columbian Magazine, October 1797: 267–71. 34. “Historical Circumstances of the Jews in England,” Columbian Magazine, December 1799: 277–82. 258 / Notes to Pages 92–98

35. See for instance “Petition of the Elders of the Synagogue,” Columbian Magazine, November 1796: 395–98. 36. “Curious Particulars Relative to the Jews,” Columbian Magazine, June 1799: 9–14. On early modern ethnographic polemics see Yaakov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 229–58. 37. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 65–67. 38. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 67. 39. “Christian Gentlemen to the Elders of the Nation,” Royal Gazette, October 11, 1783; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 113. 40. Samuel Oppenheim, “The Jews in Barbados in 1739: An Attack Upon Their Synagogue, Their Long Oath,” PAJHS 22 (1922): 197–98. 41. Stanley Mirvis, “The Trial of Joshua Montefiore and the Limits of Atlantic Jewish Inclusion,” in From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Se­phardic Orbit in Medieval to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Jane S. Gerber, ed. Federica Francesconi, Stanley Mirvis, and Brian Smollett (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 243–54. 42. John Grant, Notes of Cases Adjudged in Jamaica from May 1774 to Dec. 1787 (Edinburgh: Printed by Adam Neill and Company, 1794), 345–46. 43. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 106. 44. Faber, A Time for Planting, 108. 45. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided, 160–84. 46. Greene, Negotiated Authorities, 350–93. 47. Quoted from Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 110. 48. “List of People Found Dead and Missing,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, October 21, 1780. 49. The earliest mention of a synagogue in Savanna-­la-­Mar in the will record is from 1759, “Will of Joseph Dasilva, 1760,” IRO lib. 32, fol. 88. 50. “Will of Abraham Lopes Parra, 1782,” IRO lib. 49, fol. 36. 51. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:116. 52. Moses Cohen Delara was referred to as a “reader” in the “Will of Isaac Pereira Brandon, 1740,” IRO lib. 22, fol. 83; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 77, no. 812. 53. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 51; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 189. 54. “Will of Moses Cohen Delara, 1749,” IRO lib. 27, fol. 3. 55. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 31, no. 166. 56. “Will of Samuel Gomes Dasilva, 1762,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 157. 57. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 77, no. 813. 58. “Will of Jacob Delapenha, 1751,” IRO lib. 28, fol. 90; Wilfred S. Notes to Pages 98–103 / 259

Samuel, Richard D. Barnett, and A. S. Diamond, “A List of Persons Endenizened and Naturalised, 1609–1799,” Transactions and Miscellanies Jewish Historical Society of England 22 (1968–69): 111–44, 125. 59. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 89, no. 1034. 60. Israel Joel, Abraham Isaacs, and Jonas N. Phillips, “Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 1–125, 17. 61. Bertram W. Korn, “The Haham DeCordova of Jamaica,” American Jewish Archives Journal 18, no. 2 (1966): 141–54, 145–47, n. 14. 62. Frank Cundall, A History of Printing in Jamaica from 1717–1834 (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1935), 32, 63. 63. Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 32, 141–42. 64. Decordova delivered the keynote eulogy for Abendana in the winter of 1744: Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:238, n. 22. 65. [Isaac Dias Fernandes,] “Biography: Some Account of the Life of the late Revd. Chief Rabbi Joshua Hezekiah De Cordova, of this Town,” The Columbian Magazine, October 1797: 267–71, 267. On De Pinto see Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-­Semitism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1968, repr. 1990), 142–53; Adam Sutcliff, “Can a Jew Be a Philosophe? Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire, and Jewish Participation in the European Enlightenment,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (2000): 31–51, esp. 41–44. 66. [Fernandes,] “Biography,” 268. 67. [Fernandes,] “Biography,” 268. 68. For Decordova’s career in Curaçao see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:237, 238; Yosef Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” American Jewish History 72, no. 2 (1982): 193–211, 203, n. 18, 209–10. 69. On Decordova’s time in Curaçao see Stanley Mirvis, “Joshua Hezekiah Decordova and a Rabbinic Counter-­Enlightenment from Colonial Jamaica,” in Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Christian Wiese and Brian Smollett (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 104–22, 105–7; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:181–230; Jessica Roitman, “ ‘A Flock of Wolves Instead of Sheep’: The Dutch West India Company, Conflict Resolution, and the Jewish Community of Curaçao in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, 85–105; Jeossuah Hisquiau de Cordova, Sermam Moral que neste K[ehilah] K[edushah] De T[almud] T[orah], em sabath bamidbar 5 de sivan anno 5504 (Amsterdam: [Madras Eẓ Ḥayim], 1744). 260 / Notes to Pages 103–5

70. [Fernandes,] “Biography,” 268. 71. Joel, Isaacs, and Phillips, eds., “Items Relating the Congregation Shearith Israel,” 12–13; American Jewish Historical Society, “The Earliest Extant Minute Book of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, 1728–1760,” PAJHS 20 (1913): 1–82, 77. 72. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 95, no. 1068. 73. “Minute Book: The Mahamad, 1750–1775,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/03/002, unpaginated. 74. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 111, no. 1200. 75. “Will of Judith Lopes Alvin, 1766,” IRO lib. 36, fol. 134. 76. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:120; Frank Cundall, “Michael Leoni,” PAJHS 23 (1915): 179–80; Cecil Roth, The Great Synagogue, London, 1690–1940 (London: E. Goldston, 1950), 143–45. It is possible that Leoni came to Jamaica in response to a request from the Kingston community for a new ḥazan in 1779; see Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad,” 13. 77. Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 183. 78. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 79, no. 906. 79. Korn, “The Haham Decordova,” 149, n. 23; “Will of Isaac Dias Fernandes, 1808,” IRO lib. 80, fol. 26. 80. [Fernandes,] “Biography,” 270. 81. For a description of the epic poem in Decordova’s own words see Joshua Hezekiah Decordova, Emet ve-­emunah: Reason and Faith, or, Philosophical Absurdities, and the Necessity of Revelation. Intended to Promote Faith Among Infidels, and The Unbounded Exercise of Humanity Among All Religious Men (Philadelphia, PA: Printed by F. Bailey, 1791), 158. 82. [Fernandes,] “Biography,” 271. 83. Joshua Hezekiah Decordova, Ẓafnat pa‘aneaḥ, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, NY, MS 2509. 84. For a more sustained discussion of the themes in Reason and Faith see Mirvis, “Joshua Hezekiah Decordova,” 111–21. 85. Korn, “The Haham DeCordova,” 142. 86. Joshua Hezekiah Decordova, Emet ve-­emunah: Reason and Faith, or, Philosophical Absurdities, and the Necessity of Revelation. Intended to Promote Faith Among Infidels, and The Unbounded Exercise of Humanity Among All Religious Men (Kingston: Printed by Strupar and Preston, at the cost, and for the use of the subscribers, 1788), iii. 87. For the list of subscribers see Decordova, Reason and Faith (1788), vii–viii. 88. For a discussion of the subscribers see Mirvis, “Joshua Hezekiah Decordova,” 111. Notes to Pages 105–8 / 261

89. On John Lindsay’s career in Jamaica see B. W. Higman, Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729–1788 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2011). 90. Higman, Proslavery Priest, 110–16. 91. [Fernandes,] “Biography,” 270; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:239–40. 92. Higman, Proslavery Priest, 186. 93. Higman, Proslavery Priest, 184–88. 94. Higman, Proslavery Priest, 234. 95. “Runaway from Joshua Hezekiah Decordova,” The Royal Gazette, December 15, 1792; Korn, “The Haham DeCordova,” 148, n. 20; Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 43. 96. Decordova, Reason and Faith (1791), 114; Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 282. 97. On Decordova’s view of history see Mirvis, “Joshua Hezekiah Decordova,” 114–21. 98. Decordova, Reason and Faith (1791), 76. 99. Decordova, Reason and Faith (1791), 160. 100. Faber, A Time for Planting, 58; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:165; John Hartog, “The Honen Daliem Congregation of St. Eustatius,” The American Jewish Archives Journal 19, no. 1 (1967): 60–77, 63; Vink, Creole Jews, 187–219. 101. Stanley Mirvis, “Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Colonial Jamaica (1692–1786),” in A Sefardic Pepper-­Pot in the Caribbean, 109–23. 102. “Will of Nathan Abrahams, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 70. 103. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 30; Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 257. 104. Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World, 264; Arbell, The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica, 64, n. 51. 105. See for instance “Will of Abraham Solomons, 1803,” IRO lib. 71, fol. 93; “Will of Moses Adolphus, 1798,” IRO lib. 64, fol. 56. 106. “Will of Joseph Adolphus, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 88; “Jamaican Land Holders (1750),” BL, BA Add. MS 12436; “Jamaican Land Holders (1754),” TNA, CO 142/31. 107. “Will of Moses Adolphus, 1798,” IRO lib. 64, fol. 56. 108. “Will of Joseph Adolphus (the younger), 1803,” IRO lib. 72, fol. 176. 109. Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World, 267. 110. “New Synagogue in Spanish Town,” Columbian Magazine, September 1796: 256–57. 111. “Lazarus Aaron, Notification of Shop in Harbour Street,” Supple262 / Notes to Pages 108–13

ment to the Jamaica Mercury, September 11–18, 1779; “Lazarus Aaron, Notification of Shop in Princess Street,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, June 9, 1781. 112. The Aaron family was among the most prominent court-­Jewish families of central Europe; Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of Absolutism in Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1950, repr. 1985), 52–53; Shlomo Eidelberg, “Abraham Aaron, a Court-­Jew of the Seventeenth Century,” Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 2 (1973): 9–15. 113. “Officers of Kingston’s English and German Congregation,” Saint Jago de la Vega Gazette, October 20, 1791. 114. “Will of Ḥayem Cohen, 1803,” IRO lib. 71, fol. 135. 115. “As I Intend to Leave the Island,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, April 7, 1781. 116. David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 306. 117. Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, 200–205; Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 273–309. 118. Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 1–28; Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973). 119. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:278. 120. Aviva Ben-­Ur and Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2009), 645. 121. “Will of Isaac Dacosta Alvarenga, 1811,” IRO lib. 83, fol. 194. 122. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:545–46. 123. “Will of David Baruh Alvares, 1693,” IRO lib. 7, fol. 130; “Will of Jacob Rodrigues Deleon, 1703,” IRO lib. 10, fol. 47. 124. “Will of Samuel Barretto de Vega, 1811,” IRO lib. 84, fol. 144. 125. “Will of Jacob Cardoso, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 73; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:418. 126. See the “Will of David Silva, 1782,” IRO lib. 49, fol. 66. 127. David Levi, Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Old Testament in Two Parts (London: Printed by D. Levi, Green Street, Mile End New Town, 1796). 128. Levi, Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Old Testament, iv. 129. “Will of Isaac Dacosta Alvarenga, 1755,” IRO lib. 30, fol. 20; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 48, no. 272. 130. Abraham appears to have had professional ties to the London Notes to Pages 113–18 / 263

physician and his kinsman Jacob Alvarenga; see “Will of Jacob Delmar, 1790,” TNA PROB 11/1188/244. 131. “Stock and Trade,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, March 24, 1781. 132. “Will of Rebecca Pereira Brandon, 1801,” IRO lib. 67, fol. 216; “Will of Isaac Mendes Pereira, 1807,” IRO lib. 77, fol. 147. 133. “Will of Abraham Dacosta Alvarenga, 1809,” IRO lib. 81, fol. 10. 134. “Monsieur La Roche, Professor of Anatomy Will Be Speaking at Dr. Alvarenga’s,” Postscript to the Royal Gazette, July 21, 1792. 135. Colin G. Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692–1962 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), 11. 136. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 212; O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided, 232–37. 137. Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal, xviii–xxii. 138. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 117. 139. See for instance “Stock and Trade of Alexander Lindo,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, September 2, 1780. 140. Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal, 99, 108, 144. 141. “The Use and Abuse of Money,” Columbian Magazine, April 1798: 702. 142. Jackie Ranston, The Lindo Legacy (London: Toucan Books, 2000), 29–66. 143. “Will of Isaac Bernal, 1810,” IRO lib. 83, fol. 28; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 110; Snyder, “Rules, Rights, and Redemption,” 159–61; Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 91–98. 144. “A True and Faithful Narrative of the Hard Case and Sufferings of Isaac Bernal,” Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, September 21, 1779. 145. “Notice to Creditors from Isaac Bernal,” Jamaica Mercury and Kingston Weekly Advertiser, November 13–20, 1779. 146. “Moses Gomes . . . Apprehended at Port Royal,” Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, October 2, 1779; Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 95–96. 147. Ẓvi Loker, “An Eighteenth-­Century Plan to Invade Jamaica: Isaac Yeshurun Sasportas—French Patriot or Jewish Radical Idealist?” Transactions and Miscellanies of the Jewish Historical of England 28 (1981–82): 132–44. 148. “Domestic Occurrences,” Columbian Magazine, December 1799: 310–11. 5. Jewish Communal Life 1. Oliel-­Grausz, “Patrocinio and Authority,” 149–72; Gérard Nahon, “Amsterdam and the Portuguese Nação,” 67–83. 264 / Notes to Pages 118–25

2. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:165–68. 3. Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad,” 12. 4. Barnett, “The Correspondence of the Mahamad,” 13. 5. Vink, Creole Jews, 154. 6. On despachados in the Caribbean see Kaplan, “The Sephardim in North-­Western Europe and the New World,” 269; Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 18–25; Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 13–60. 7. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 25. Most of those dispatched from Amsterdam were sent to either Curaçao or Suriname. 8. “Annual Accounts, 1676–1798,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/04/01/001–117. Only nineteen despachados could be identified as having been sent specifically to Jamaica. After 1760, London’s communal ledgers no longer specified the exact point of destination, only that they had been sent “to America.” 9. Yosef Kaplan, “ ‘This Thing Alone Will Preserve Their Nation Forever’: Circumcision and Conversion in the Early Modern Western Se­ phardic Communities,” in The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, 218–43, 226. 10. “Minutes of Mahamad of Barbados: 1791–1808,” LMA, LMA/4521/D/01/01/002; American Jewish Historical Society, “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn. Shearith Israel in New York,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 83–171, 91. 11. “Will of Solomon Franco, 1721,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 176. 12. “Annual Accounts, the London Mahamad, 1738–1739,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/04/01/050, fol. 40. 13. “Annual Accounts, the London Mahamad, 1766–1767,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/04/01/086, fol. 5. The Port Royal merchant David Rodrigues, with sisters living in Bayonne, included Mesquitta, “who calls himself a relation,” as a beneficiary in his 1774 will. “Will of David Rodrigues, 1774,” IRO lib. 41, fol. 304. 14. “Annual Accounts, the London Mahamad, 1766–1767,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/04/01/110, fol. 7. 15. “The German Flute Taught,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, February 10, 1781. 16. “Annual Accounts, the London Mahamad, 1753–1754,” LMA, LMA/4521/A/04/01/073, fol. 11; “Will of Joseph Nunes, 1760,” IRO lib. 32, fol. 119. 17. “Will of Jacob Correa, 1724,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 111. 18. “Minutes of Mahamad of Barbados: 1791–1808,” LMA, LMA/4521/D/01/01/002. Notes to Pages 126–29 / 265

19. “Barbados Sedaca, Account Book, 1796–1813,” LMA, LMA/4521/D/01/02/001. 20. “Will of Abraham Rodrigues, 1735,” IRO lib. 19, fol. 248. 21. “Will of Abraham Gonsales, 1753,” IRO lib. 29, fol. 108. See also Faber, “Letters from Jamaica.” 22. “Will of Rebecca Pereira Mendes, 1770,” IRO lib. 39, fol. 126. 23. Marsh, “In the Name of God?” 217–22. 24. “Escava” is a Portuguese inflection of the Hebrew word hashakva, memorial prayer. 25. For representations of theology in funerary tradition see Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism, 123–80. 26. “Will of Rebecca Lopes Depass, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 77. 27. Discussed in Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 233–34. 28. “Will of Aaron da Silva, 1720,” IRO lib. 15, fol. 274; “Will of Jacob Gutteres, 1726,” IRO lib. 14, fol. 32; “Will of David Bravo, 1749,” IRO lib. 27, fol. 27; “Will of Nathan Abrahams, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 70; “Will of Elias Lazarus, 1762,” IRO lib. 34, fol. 35; “Will of Solomon Abrahams, 1776,” IRO lib. 43, fol. 8; “Will of Lipman Levy, 1778,” IRO lib. 45, fol. 73; “Will of Mordechai Marcus, 1785,” TNA PROB 11/1135/410, “Will of Judah Cohen Henriques, 1808,” IRO lib. 79, fol. 30. 29. See Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 108–39; Kaplan, “ ‘This Thing Alone Will Preserve Their Nation Forever,’ ” 218–43. 30. “Will of Isaac Pereira, 1725,” IRO lib. 17, fol. 14. 31. “Will of Mordechai Rodrigues Lopes, 1743,” IRO lib. 24, fol. 8. 32. “Will of Abraham Ydana, 1762,” IRO lib. 34, fol. 22. 33. “Will of Joseph Cohen Deleon, 1713,” IRO lib. 14, fol. 122. 34. “Will of Isaac Henriques Alvin, 1722,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 28. 35. “Will of Abraham Lopes Parra, 1782,” IRO lib. 49, fol. 36. 36. “Will of Judah Cohen Henriques, 1808,” IRO lib. 79, fol. 30. 37. “Will of Isaac Martins, 1779,” IRO lib. 45, fol. 146. 38. “Will of Moses Barnett, 1805,” IRO lib. 75, fol. 100. 39. “Will of Judith Baruh Alvares, 1732,” IRO lib. 18, fol. 200; Holly Snyder, “Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British America,” in Women in American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, ed. Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 15–45, 31. 40. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 12, no. 53. 41. Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-­Jewish Women of Castile (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 166–74.

266 / Notes to Pages 129–36

42. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, “Sephardi Women in Holland’s Golden Age,” in Sephardi Family Life, 176, 183. 43. Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 15–45. 44. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 155. In 1673 there were 4,050 White men listed on the census and 2,006 White women. 45. Trevor Burnard, “European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 53, no. 4 (1996): 769–96, 772. 46. Greene, Settler Jamaica, 45. 47. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 249. 48. Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, ed. Hilary Mcd. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 3–40. 49. Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 29. 50. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 57, 76. 51. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 4–29. 52. Hollander, “The Naturalization of the Jews in the American Colonies,” 112–15. 53. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 188–92. 54. “Will of Hannah de Torres, 1706,” IRO lib. 11, fol. 23. 55. “Will of Hannah Cohen Henriques, 1718,” TNA PROB 11/566/167. 56. “Will of Rebecca Mendes Gutteres, 1788,” IRO lib. 54, fol. 13. 57. Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 132. 58. Higman, Proslavery Priest, 117. 59. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:280–81. 60. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:281. 61. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:330. 62. “Will of Abraham Henriques Quixano, 1753,” IRO lib. 29, fol. 105. 63. “Will of Jacob Gutteres, 1786,” IRO lib. 52, fol. 32. 64. “Will of Isaac da Silva Fonseca, 1767,” IRO lib. 38, fol. 181. 65. Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 101. 66. Daniel Rodrigues Cardozo was referred to as one of the Kingston Parnasim in the “Will of Moses Orobio Furtado, 1794,” IRO lib. 60, fol. 39; “Will of Daniel Rodrigues Cardozo, 1815,” TNA PROB 11/1572/476. 67. “Caution to the Public,” Royal Gazette, January 20, 1781. For another example see “Public Cautioned Against Giving Credit to Rebecca Rodrigues da Costa,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette, May 27–June 3, 1780. 68. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 72.

Notes to Pages 137–41 / 267

69. “Runaway from Subscriber, Sarah Feurtado,” Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, July 30, 1779. 70. “Runaway from Subscriber, Rachel Mendes,” Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, December 4–11, 1779. 71. “The Subscriber to Decline Business at Her Home in Morant-­Bay,” Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, December 4–11, 1779. 72. Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-­Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 34, no. 4 (1977): 542–71; Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-­ Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Burnard, “Inheritance and Independence,” 94. 73. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:286. 74. Carole Shammas, “English Inheritance Law and Its Transfer to the Colonies,” American Journal of Legal History 31, no. 2 (1987): 145–63, 158. 75. “Will of Jacob Brandon, 1710,” IRO lib. 13, fol. 32. 76. “Will of Jacob Fonseca, 1729,” IRO lib. 18, fol. 24; Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 44–46. 77. “Will of Joseph Pinto, 1733,” IRO lib. 19, fol. 4. 78. “Will of Joseph Levy Barrios, 1744,” IRO lib. 24, fol. 106; See also the Kingston tax list of 1745, where Esther Levy Barrios was referred to as a single woman shopkeeper; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 188. 79. “Will of Solomon Mendes, 1777,” IRO lib. 44, fol. 186. 80. “Will of Rachel Fonseca, 1796,” IRO lib. 58, fol. 182. 81. Burnard, “Inheritance and Independence,” 105–6. 82. Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 36. 83. “Will of Daniel Dasilva, 1757,” IRO lib. 31, fol. 24. 84. “Will of Jacob de Castro, 1739,” IRO lib. 22, fol. 36. 85. “Will of David Dias Arias, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 84. 86. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 17. 87. Based on tombstone inscriptions found in Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica. 88. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, nos. 37, 38, 39. 89. “Will of David de Castro, 1767,” IRO lib. 36, fol. 168; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 107, no. 1149. 90. “Will of Abraham Rodrigues Lopes, 1788,” IRO lib. 54, fol. 17. 91. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, in chronological order of the date on the tombstone, nos. 756, 778, 776, 742, 772. 92. Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World: From Black Death to the Industrial Age (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 121–24. 268 / Notes to Pages 141–45

93. Richard Barnett, “The Travels of Moses Cassuto,” in Remember the Days: Essays on Anglo-­Jewish History Presented to Cecil Roth by Members of the Council of the Jewish Historical Society of England, ed. John M. Shaftesley (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1966), 73–121, 103. 94. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:276–77. 95. Richard D. Barnett and Miriam Rodrigues-­Pereira, eds., The Circumcision Register of Isaac and Abraham de Paiba, 1715–1775: From the Manuscript Record Preserved in the Archive of the Spanish Jews’ Congregation of London (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1991), 21; Lieberman, “Childhood and Family Among the Western Sephardim,” 146. 96. Studnicki-­Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 43. 97. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 79–83. 98. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 98. 99. Jaime Contreras, “Family and Patronage: The Judeo-­Converso Minority in Spain,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 141–42; Darlene Abreu-­Ferreira, “A Status of Her Own: Women and Family Identities in Seventeenth-­Century Aveiro, Portugal,” Journal of Family History 34, no. 3 (2009): 3–24, 11. 100. “Will of Abraham Henriques Quixano, 1753,” IRO lib. 29, fol. 105. 101. “Will of Abraham de Azevedo, 1777,” IRO lib. 44, fol. 103. 102. Paraphrased from Kaplan, “Familia, matrimonio y sociedad,” 134–35. On the conflict between parental and communal authority see also Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 125–27; Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 222–23. 103. American Jewish Historical Society, “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn. Shearith Israel,” 89, 164; Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:553–57. 104. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:554–55. 105. Julia Lieberman, “Adolescence and the Period of Apprenticeship Among the Western Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century,” in El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture, vol. 4, ed. Tamar Alexander, Yaakov Bentolila, and Eliezer Papo (Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2010). 106. Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 105–6. 107. “Will of Abraham Ledesma, 1756,” IRO lib. 30, fol. 135. 108. “Will of Moses Pereira, 1748,” IRO lib. 26, fol. 135. Jacob Andrade Notes to Pages 145–48 / 269

suggests that Kingston’s Aby Yetomim was established in 1737, a claim unsubstantiated by the will he cites, Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 101. 109. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, 101. 110. See for instance the “Will of Abraham of Daniel Pereira Mendes, 1760,” IRO lib. 34, fol. 64. 111. “Will of Jacob Lopes Torres, 1768,” IRO lib. 37, fol. 367. 112. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided, 19–27. 113. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:246. 114. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 152. 115. “Will of Ḥayem Cohen, 1803,” IRO lib. 71, fol. 135; “Will of Isaac Rodrigues Dacosta, 1805,” IRO lib. 74, fol. 80. 116. “Will of Moses Yeshurun Cardoso, 1726,” IRO lib. 17, fol. 104. 117. “Will of David Carvallo Ledesma, 1732,” IRO lib. 18, fol. 210. 118. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:247. 119. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:246–50, 510–11; O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided, 19, 259, n. 45. 120. For the use of non-­Jewish tutors among colonial West Indian Jews see “Account Book of Mathias Lopez, 1779–1789,” The New York Historical Society, New York, NY, MSS Collection BV Barbados, W.I. The planter Matthias Lopez of Barbados recorded quarterly payments to a non-­Jewish tutor for his son between 1779 and 1789. 121. “Will of Jacob Gutteres, 1797,” IRO lib. 63, fol. 129. 122. “Will of David Henriques, 1797,” IRO lib. 62, fol. 149. 123. Shirley C. Gordon, God Almighty, Make Me Free: Christianity in Preemancipation Jamaica (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 94; Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, 154. 124. Philanthropos, “On the Schooling of Jew Children,” The Columbian Magazine, September 1796: 244–45; October 1796: 320–21, 393–98. 125. Philanthropos, “On the Schooling of Jew Children,” 245. 6. The Ethnic Identity of Jamaica’s Portuguese Jewish Households 1. David L. Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity Among ‘Men of the Nation’: Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 15, no. 1 (2008): 32–65; Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 132–51; Miriam Bodian, “Men of the Nation: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 143, no. 1 (1994): 48–76. 2. Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 78–107; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 125–31. 270 / Notes to Pages 148–54

3. Yosef Kaplan, “Bom Judesmo: The Western Sephardi Diaspora,” in Culture of the Jews, vol. 2: Diversities of Diaspora, ed. David Biale (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 2002), 337–67. 4. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 242; Kaplan, “ ‘This Thing Alone Will Preserve Their Nation Forever,’ ” 226. 5. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1:118–20. 6. Kaplan, “The Curaçao and Amsterdam Jewish Communities,” 200–202. 7. Kaplan, “ ‘This Thing Alone Will Preserve Their Nation Forever,’ ” 227. 8. Richard Menkis, “Patriarchs and Patricians: The Gradis Family of Eighteenth-­Century Bordeaux,” in From East and West: Jews in Changing Europe, 1750–1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1991), 25. 9. Faber, A Time for Planting, 19. 10. “Will of Daniel Carvallo, 1733,” IRO lib. 19, fol. 83. 11. “Will of Isaac Depass Almeyda, 1758,” IRO lib. 31, fol. 133. 12. “Will of Isaac Pereira Brandon, 1753,” IRO lib. 29, fol. 1. 13. “Will of Isaac de Mella, 1768,” IRO lib. 38, fol. 36; Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 69; Arbell, The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica, 8. 14. “Will of Solomon Rodrigues Dacosta, 1786,” IRO lib. 52, fol. 65. 15. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society,” 64. 16. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 67. 17. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society,” 73. 18. Burnard, “European Migration to Jamaica,” 792. 19. Greene, Settler Jamaica, 129, 201. 20. Studnicki-­Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 76. 21. Anonymous, “Curious Particulars Relative to the Jews,” 9–10. 22. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society,” 74. 23. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:18. 24. Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal, 63. 25. “Will of Benjamin Pereira, 1775,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 60. 26. Ḥaim Beinart, “The Conversos in Spain and Portugal in the 16th and 18th Centuries,” in Moreshet Sepharad, 60. 27. David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-­Jews (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, repr. 2002), 246. 28. Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 188–89. 29. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England, 171. 30. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England, 173. Notes to Pages 154–62 / 271

31. Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, eds., The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Colonial Correspondence: Letters of the Franks Family, 1733–1748 (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968), xx, no. 9. On tensions between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in colonial North America see Faber, A Time for Planting, 60–66; on the issue of marriage specifically see 65–66. 32. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England, 106–9. On intermarriage with non-­Jews in colonial North America see Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 27. See also Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:1225–31. For the abandonment of traditional marriage patterns in eighteenth-­century England see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1979, repr. 1999), 144–45. 33. Malcolm Stern, “The Function of Genealogy in American History,” in Essays in American Jewish History: To Commemorate the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 1958), 69–97, 76–85. 34. Quoted from Jonathan D. Sarna, “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 213–19, 215. For a similar statement see David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654–1954 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1955), 463: “The integration of Sephardim and Ashkenazim and frequent marriage between them was a hallmark of life in the New World, in sharp contrast to the Old.” 35. Faber, A Time for Planting, 66: “fewer marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim occurred in the Caribbean, underscoring the uniqueness of the amalgamation of two groups in English North America.” 36. Natalie A. Zacek, “Great Tangled Cousinries? Jewish Intermarriage in the British West Indies,” in a Sefardic Pepper-­Pot in the Caribbean, 155. 37. “Will of Jacob Sequira, 1785,” IRO lib. 51, fol. 77. 38. According to a Sephardi legend, Iberian Jewry is descended from the tribe of Judah—thus all Sephardim hold a claim to messianic status— whereas Ashkenazim descend from the other surviving tribe of Benjamin. 39. “Will of David Henriques, 1797,” IRO lib. 62, fol. 149. 40. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 136; Miriam Bodian, “ ‘Portuguese’ Dowry Societies in Venice and Amsterdam: A Case Study in Communal Differentiation Within the Marrano Diaspora,” Italia 6, nos. 1–2 (1987): 30–61; Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 103–5. 272 / Notes to Pages 162–64

41. For women in Jamaica who received dowries from the Amsterdam dotar society see Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Dowries and Dotar: An Unbroken Chain of 400 Years: Essay Written on the 400th Anniversary of the Amsterdam-­Based Portuguese Jewish Bridal Society Santa Companhia de Dotar Orphas e Donzellas (Amsterdam: The Menasseh ben Israel Institute and the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, 2015), 21, n. 46. 42. For examples of testators donating to the general need for dowries for women of the “Portuguese Nation” see “Will of Abraham Almeyda, 1744,” IRO lib. 24, fol. 180; “Will of Benjamin of Joseph Pereira, 1769,” IRO lib. 38, fol. 46; “Will of Abraham Rodrigues Cardoso, 1791,” IRO lib. 56, fol. 24. 43. “Will of Isaac Pereira Brandon, 1740,” IRO lib. 22, fol. 83. 44. “Will of Abraham Gonsales, 1753,” IRO lib. 29, fol. 108. 45. “Will of Jacob Lopes Torres, 1768,” IRO lib. 37, fol. 367. 46. “Will of Abraham Ledesma, 1756,” IRO lib. 30, fol. 135. 47. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:994. 48. “Will of Moses Adolphus, 1798,” IRO lib. 64, fol. 56. 49. For a study of companionate family in the Atlantic see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008). 50. Hymenus, “On Marrying Cousins,” Columbian Magazine, December 1796: 461–64. 51. See Eve Tavor Bannet, “The Marriage Act of 1753: ‘A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex,’ ” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 30, no. 3 (1997): 233–54. 52. Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts Over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 96–157. 53. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:237–38. 54. Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 280–300. 55. Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 290–91. 56. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:565. 57. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:578–602. 58. On feminine virtue in the Castilian Americas see Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey, 61–74. For the Sephardi context see Hannah Davidson, “Communal Pride and Feminine Virtue: ‘Suspecting Sivlonot’ in the Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Sephardi Family Life, 23–69. 59. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:611. Notes to Pages 164–70 / 273

60. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:602. 61. “Will of Moses Mendes Quixano, 1723,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 57. 62. “Will of Abraham Almeyda, 1744,” IRO lib. 24, fol. 180. 63. “Will of Judith Lopes Alvin, 1766,” IRO lib. 36, fol. 134. 64. “Will of Isaac Pereira Brandon, 1740,” IRO lib. 22, fol. 83; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 56, no. 318. 65. “Will of Rebecca Pereira Brandon, 1801,” IRO lib. 67, fol. 216. 7. The Creole Jewish Families of Jamaica 1. For the Aragonese context see Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327 (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997, repr. 2008), 265–67; Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 165–75; For the Ottoman context see Ruth Lamdan, “Heḥzakat shifḥot be-­ḥevrah ha-­yehudit be-­ereẓ yisrael, suriay, u-­miẓrayim be-­meiah ha-­shesh-­‘esreih,” in Yimei ha-­sahar, perakim be-­toldot ha-­yehudim be-­imperiyah ha-­‘otam’anit, ed. Minna Rozen (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1996), 355–71. 2. Rudolf A. J. Van Lier, Frontier Society: A Social Analysis of the History of Surinam (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 77–78, 158; Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 228. 3. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 68. There is evidence of some marriages between White men and women of color; see Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society, 188–89. 4. Long, The History of Jamaica, 2:327–28, 331. 5. Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 57; Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 271–80; Ḥayim Yosef David Azulai, Sefer ma‘agal tov ha-­shalem, ed. Aron Freimann ( Jerusalem: mekiẓei nirdamim, 1921), 137. 6. Assembly of Jamaica, Acts of the Assembly of Jamaica Passed in the Island of Jamaica from the Year 1681 to the Year 1769, Inclusive, 2 vols. (Saint Jago de La Vega: Printed by Lowry and Sherlock, 1771), 2:60–63. For a comprehensive justification of the bill presented to the Assembly see L. Stanhope, “Reasons in Support of the Bill to Restrain Exorbitant Grants to Negroes,” TNA, CO 137/33, 34–42. For an analysis of this law see Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar, and Slavery, 84–85; Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 151.

274 / Notes to Pages 170–76

7. Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar, and Slavery, 86–87. 8. “Manumissions, 1779–1799,” JA IB/11/6/15–24. 9. Robin Blackburn, “Introduction,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-­Shute and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 2–3. 10. See “Laws of Jamaica, 1792–99,” JA, 1B/11/1792–99. 11. “Laws of Jamaica, 1760–92” JA, 1B/11/1760–92. 12. Rosemary Brana-­Shute, “Sex and Gender in Surinamese Manumissions,” in Paths to Freedom, 185–89. 13. John F. Campbell, “How Free Is Free? The Limits of Manumission,” in Paths to Freedom, 143–59. 14. Trevor Burnard, “ ‘Do Thou in Gentle Phibia Smile’: Scenes from an Interracial Marriage, Jamaica,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 82–105, 83, n. 10. 15. For the second case see “Daniel Almeyda’s Manumission of Abigail Almeyda, 1798,” JA, Manumissions, 1B/11/6/23,103. 16. “Moses Gomes Fonseca’s Manumission of Nancy James, et al., 1795,” JA, Manumissions, 1B/11/6/21, 125–26; On his possible connection to Bayonne see Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2:1050, 1066. 17. “Will of Moses Gomes Fonseca, 1800,” IRO lib. 67, fol. 58. 18. “David Gomes Rabello’s Manumission of Affey, et al., 1783,” JA, Manumissions, 1B/11/6/15, 49–50. 19. “Will of David Gomes Rabello, 1786,” IRO lib. 52, fol. 62. 20. Ten women (21 percent of women) appear in the record as deceased with their estates being settled, and only three women (7 percent) are identified as “spinsters” likely manumitting slaves on their own accord. 21. Eva Abraham-­Van der Mark, “Marriage and Concubinage Among the Sephardic Merchant Elite of Curaçao,” in Women and Change in the Caribbean: A Pan-­Caribbean Perspective, ed. Janet H. Momsen (Kingston, JM, and Bloomington, IN: Ian Randle and Indiana University Press, 1993), 38–49; Aviva Ben-­Ur, “Peripheral Inclusion: Communal Belonging in Suriname’s Sephardic Community,” in Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-­Modern World, ed. Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 200–201. 22. “Will of Joseph Cohen Delara, 1759,” IRO lib. 31, fol. 223. 23. “Will of Elias Lazarus, 1762,” IRO lib. 34, fol. 35. 24. “Will of Abraham Henriques de Souza, 1773,” IRO lib. 41, fol. 171. 25. “Will of Sarah Souza, 1775,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 207.

Notes to Pages 176–80 / 275

26. “Will of Solomon Abrahams, 1776,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 27. 27. “Persons Possessing the Jewish Religion, 1746,” TNA, CO 137/24, 172. 28. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 122, no. 1404. 29. “Will of Daniel Rodrigues Nunes, 1774,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 27. 30. “Will of Abraham de Azevedo, 1777,” IRO lib. 44, fol. 103. 31. “Will of David Rodrigues Silva, 1796,” IRO lib. 63, fol. 95. 32. “Will of David Cohen, 1797,” IRO lib. 62, fol. 200. 33. “Will of Abraham Tavares, 1803,” IRO lib. 71, fol. 20. 34. “Will of Jacob Cohen Deleon, 1805,” IRO lib. 74, fol. 146. 35. Howard Adelman, “Servants and Sexuality: Seduction, Surrogacy, and Rape: Some Observations Concerning Class, Gender, and Race in Early Modern Italian Jewish Families,” in Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, ed. Tamar Rudavsky (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1995), 88–89 and 92–93. 36. “Will of Abraham Rodrigues Deleon, 1761,” IRO lib. 33, fol. 81. 37. See the will of his remarried mother, “Will of Esther Pereira Brandon, 1750,” IRO lib. 28, fol. 9; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 87, no. 1022. 38. “Will of Moses Levy Alvares, 1765,” IRO lib. 36, fol. 9. 39. “Persons Possessing the Jewish Religion, 1742,” TNA, CO 137/23, 167; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 86, no. 1012. 40. “Persons Possessing the Jewish Religion, 1740,” TNA, CO 137/23, 117; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 85, no. 1002. 41. “Will of Judah Cohen Henriques, 1808,” IRO lib. 79, fol. 30. 42. “Will of Daniel Rodrigues Cardoso, 1815,” TNA PROB 11/1572/476. 43. Daniel Rodrigues Cardoso is referred to as one of the parnasim of Kingston in the “Will of Moses Orobio Furtado, 1794,” IRO lib. 60, fol. 39. 44. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 166–216; Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 51–77. 45. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 156–72; Ben-­Ur, “Peripheral Inclusion,” 185–210; Vink, Creole Jews, 221–43. 46. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 163–74; Vink, Creole Jews, 229–37. 47. Vink, Creole Jews, 223–29. 48. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 159; Vink, Creole Jews, 231–32. 49. Aviva Ben-­Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community,” in Atlantic Diasporas, 152–69, 164–65. 276 / Notes to Pages 181–89

50. Vink, Creole Jews, 156–57; Ben-­Ur, “Peripheral Inclusion,” 191–93; Rachel Frankel, “Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne: The Synagogues and Cemeteries of the First Permanent Plantation Settlement of New World Jews,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 422–23. 51. “Will of Joseph Ydana, 1706,” IRO lib. 11, fol. 37. 52. “Will of Samuel Ydana, 1717,” IRO lib. 14, fol. 259. 53. “Will of Abraham Ydana, 1762,” IRO lib. 34, fol. 22. 54. “Will of Jacob Baruh Yzidro, 1730,” IRO lib. 18, fol. 92. Jacob’s wife Leah had died in 1709 and was buried in the St. Jago de la Vega cemetery; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 103, no. 1125. 55. “Will of David Aboab Furtado, 1764,” IRO lib. 35, fol. 130. 56. “Will of Isaac Aboab Furtado, 1794,” IRO lib. 60, fol. 67. 57. “Will of Michael Levy, 1767,” IRO lib. 36, fol. 187. 58. See the wills of his mother Rachel, née Mendes Dacosta, “Will of Rachel Baruh Lousada, 1790,” IRO lib. 65, fol. 8; and of his father Aaron, “Will of Aaron Baruh Lousada, 1768,” IRO lib. 37, fol. 436; Hyamson, The Sephardim of England, 27, 422–54. 59. Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews in the British West Indies,” 57. 60. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 52, no. 299. 61. “Will of Emanuel Baruh Lousada, 1797,” IRO lib. 62, fol. 185; Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 52–53, no. 299. 62. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 94, no. 1066; “Will of Grace Lopes Torres, 1795,” IRO lib. 61, fol. 105. 63. Barnett and Wright, The Jews of Jamaica, 109, no. 1161. 64. “Will of Grace Lopes Torres, 1795,” IRO, lib. 61, fol. 105. Appendix 1. “Will of David Baruh Alvares, 1693,” IRO lib. 7, fol. 130. A transcription of the original Spanish is found in Mirvis, “The Alvares Family Patriarchs,” 25–28. 2. “Tornesas” refers to a form of French currency, possibly from the city of Tours. It can be assumed here that Francisco de Ledesma and his daughter are in France. 3. The implication here is that the hundred pounds for living expenses should be rolled into David’s son’s inheritance if his wife and sister die before using it. 4. “Will of Judith Baruh Alvares, 1732,” IRO lib. 18, fol. 200. 5. “Will of Jacob Baruh Alvares, 1723,” IRO lib. 16, fol. 55. Notes to Pages 189–202 / 277

6. A Torah scroll. 7. Referring to a type of leafy-­hedged fence or shrub barrier. 8. Referring to the confraternity ḥevra kadisha. 9. Referring to the confraternity bikur ḥolim. 10. “Will of David Aboab Furtado, 1764,” IRO lib. 35, fol. 130. 11. Dwelling houses. 12. Referring to lands owned by the parish church wardens. 13. Name not clear in manuscript. 14. “Will of Benjamin Pereira, 1775,” IRO lib. 42, fol. 60. 15. Referring to the non-­Jewish custom of purchasing a “mourning ring” worn in memory of the deceased, usually inscribed with his or her name. 16. Likely a reference to “Jew Alley” or Peter’s Lane. 17. Likely a reference to Peter’s Lane. 18. An enclosed vegetable garden or grove. 19. “Will of Ḥayem Cohen, 1803,” IRO lib. 71, fol. 135. 20. Spelling of name is unclear. The name appears to be a reference to Sarzedas, a town in eastern Portugal, implying that he may have had Portuguese ancestry through his mother’s side. 21. Referring to the Ashkenazi synagogue of the “English and German” congregation of Kingston, on Orange Street, known as Shangare Yosher. 22. “Will of Samuel Barretto de Veiga, 1811,” IRO lib. 84, fol. 144. 23. Likely referring to the city of Covilhã in eastern Portugal. 24. Likely referring to the city of Guarda in western Portugal. 25. The historic site of the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange.

278 / Notes to Pages 203–35

Index

Aaron, Lazarus, 113, 263 n. 112 Abendana, Abraham Dacosta, 104, 260 n. 64 Absentees, 77, 81, 120, 187 Aby Yetomim, 147–49, 179, 186, 211, 231, 270 n. 108 Adolphus, Moses, 8, 112, 166 Aguilar, Moses Raphael de, 23 Albemarle, Duke of, 42 Alcohol Consumption, 95, 106 Alvarenga, Abraham Dacosta, 117–18 Alvares, Abraham Baruh, 40, 43, 44, 200, 201 Alvares, David Baruh, 39–43, 65, 78, 155, 165–66, 199–201 Alvares, Jacob Baruh, 135, 200, 201, 202 Alvares, Judith Baruh, 135–36, 153, 202–5 Alvares, Moses Levy, 86, 185 American Jewish Archives, xii, 11–12 American Revolutionary War, 10, 89, 101, 119, 121 Amsterdam: diasporic connections with, 13, 117, 119–20, 131, 180, 191, 197, 202, 204, 230, 231; metropolitan patronage of, viii, 2, 17, 45, 59, 63, 125–26, 127, 164; migration to and from, 23, 24, 27, 46, 48, 128, 154; Portuguese community of, 14–15, 23, 39, 116,

137, 148, 155, 188, 189; rabbinate, 23, 33–34, 35, 36, 102, 104, 105 Andrade, Jacob, 11 Ashkenazim, 10, 11, 16, 96, 106, 110–115, 127, 146, 154, 161–65, 179, 192 Assembly of Jamaica: posture toward Jews, 44, 57–63, 70, 72–73; racialized legislation, 74, 90, 100, 177; tensions with the Crown, 29–30, 60, 101 Azevedo, Abraham de, 146, 182 Baptist School, 151 Barbados: Jewish presence in, 3, 26, 27, 31, 51, 53, 57, 58, 100, 128, 129, 131; planters in, 29, 65, 66, 67, 88; slavery in, 83–84, 85, 174 Barham, Henry, 55, 56 Barrios, Miguel Levi de, 36 Baruh Lousada Family, 77, 192– 94. See also Lousada, Emanuel Baruh Bayonne, France: diasporic connections to, 43–45, 120–21, 131, 132, 180, 185, 200, 233, 234; diasporic periphery, viii, 17, 46, 197; rejudaization in, 14, 21, 32, 37–39, 43, 156, 199 Beckford School, 149 Beeston, William, 52, 53, 57–58, 59, 62, 66 Belmonte, Don Manuel, 59 279

Bernal, Isaac, 121, 122 Bikur ḥolim, 136, 204 Black River, 70, 113–15, 125, 182, 191, 205–6, 208–9, 222–30 Board of Trade, London, 27, 49, 53–54, 57–63, 69, 70 Bordeaux, France, 9, 14, 117, 120, 155, 231, 233 Brandon, Isaac Pereira, 8, 164, 170 Brandon, Rebecca, 170–72 Bravo, Benjamin, 61, 66 Brazil: connections to Jamaica, 39, 78; converso and Jewish planters in, 22, 65; expulsion of Jews from, 23–24; Portuguese conquest of, 21–22; Ẓur Israel community, Recife, 23, 78 Burial, 132–34, 188, 202, 206, 210–11, 231 Cardoso, Daniel Rodrigues, 140, 187 Cardoso, Moses Yeshurun, 44, 45, 59, 149, 155, 201 Carvallo, Benjamin Baruh, 51 Carvallo, Daniel, 156, 245 n. 57 Cassuto, Moses, 145 Cemeteries: Hunt’s Bay/Liguanea, 32, 35, 41, 135–36, 138, 202–4; Kingston (Ashkenazi), 111; Kingston (Portuguese), 57, 211; St. Jago de la Vega, 105, 194, 277 n. 54 Charleston, South Carolina, 88, 91, 113, 116, 126, 222, 226 Childhood, 144–46 Circumcision, 23, 85, 95, 127, 146, 155, 156, 189 Code Noir, 28, 31, 67 Cohen Delara Family, 102–3, 130, 179, 216, 259 n. 52

Cohen, Ḥayem, 113–15, 222–29 Cohen Deleon Family, 132, 183 Coin Clipping, 97 Colonial Autonomy, 17, 125–30, 197 Columbian Magazine, 97–99, 106, 112–13, 120, 122–23, 150, 160, 166 Concubinage, 140, 158, 174–78, 179–84 Consent Clauses, 170–72, 191, 192 Conversos: in the Americas, 21–23, 24, 51, 65, 101, 161; blood purity (see Limpieza de Sangre); conversion to Judaism (see Rejudaization); Iberian, 13–16, 115, 116, 146, 199, 230; within the nação, 13, 19, 48, 132, 156–58, 164, 189, 234–35; persecution of (see Inquisitions) Coromantees, 94, 110 Court Jews, 113 Couty, Rabba, 52–53, 58 Creolization, Africa, 88; indigenization, 17–18, 20, 21, 124, 128, 165, 172, 173; racial blending, vii–viii, 2, 94, 117, 121, 174–75, 179–87, 94–95, 205–11; White, 84, 91, 93, 99, 108, 120, 139, 140, 145 Cuba, 24, 25, 48 Curaçao: communal regulations in, 52, 147, 169–70; diasporic connections with, 1, 35, 108, 116, 117, 163, 196, 230, 232; planters in, 66, 67; rabbinate, 34–35, 105, 109; rejudaization in, 155. See also Colonial Autonomy; Eẓ Ḥayim Academy Dacosta Alvarenga Family, 116–18, 144

280 / Index

D’Andrade, Benjamin Dacosta, 65 Darhe Jessarim, 188 Debtors’ Prison, 121 Decordova, Joshua Hezekiah, 15, 98, 102–10, 126, 133 Deficiency, 76 Denization, 30, 31, 40, 53, 69, 78, 83, 103, 199 Despachados, 27, 127–28, 152, 159, 162, 198, 265 nn. 7, 8 Diamond Trade, 44, 50, 51 Dowries, 142, 148, 160–61, 162, 164–65, 171, 200, 212, 273 n. 41 Earthquakes, Kingston (1907), 2–3, 237 n. 1; Port Royal (1692), 21, 47, 51, 54, 55–57, 200 Education, 147–52 Edwards, Bryan, 91–92 Emancipation: of Jews, 10, 89, 90, 93, 101, 102, 123, 197; of Slaves, 68, 90, 92, 151, 177 Encomienda, 24 Encyclopedia Britannica, 114, 222, 228 English Conquest of Jamaica (1655), 21, 25 Enlightenment, 93, 104–5, 107–10, 117–18, 151 Enriques, Jacob Jeosua Bueno, 26 Erpecum, Joan Van, 51 Escava, 6, 79, 80, 81, 130, 134, 211, 192, 211, 266 n. 24 Ethical Wills, 4, 237 n. 7 Eẓ Ḥayim Academy: Amsterdam, 14, 35, 104, 108, 126; Curaçao, 34 Felsted, Samuel, 193 Fernandes, Isaac Dias, 106, 107 First Maroon War, 60–63, 68. See also Maroons

Fitzmaurice, William, 87 Fonseca, Isaac Aboab de, 23, 33 Fonseca, Moses Gomes, 178 Forbes, Margaret, 114, 223, 228 Franks, Benjamin, 50–51 Free People of Color, vii, 57, 71, 90, 97, 123, 149, 176, 187–94 Freemasonry, 41–42 French Jews in Jamaica, 9, 26, 28, 31, 43–45, 118–23. See also Bayonne, France; Bordeaux, France Furtado, David Aboab, 191–92, 205–11 Gabay Family, 78–81, 82 Galante, Abraham, 55 Gans, Joachim, 27 Gemilut ḥasadim, 34, 156 Gender Ratios ( Jamaica), 137–38, 267 n. 44 Gleaner, The, 104 Godparentage, 145–46 Gomes, Moses, 121–22 Gonsales, Abraham, 129, 164 Gonsales, Diego Luis, 44, 248 n. 104 Governor’s Council, 30, 54, 61, 62 Gradis, David, 156 Haiti. See Haitian Revolution; Saint-Domingue Haitian Revolution, 89, 118, 119 Halakhah, 34, 36, 52, 184, 189 Hamburg/Altona, 14, 30, 50, 103, 111, 115, 131, 181 Heath, Edmund, 55–56 Heirlooms, 8 Henriques, David, 150, 164 Henriques, Judah Cohen, 133, 186–87

Index / 281

Ḥerem, 23, 105, 132, 161, 169 Hershkowitz, Leo, 12 Ḥevrah Kadisha, 133, 186, 204 Hispaniola, 21, 24, 25, 48 Hollander, 48, 196 Hoshanna Rabbah, 6, 134, 211 Hunter, Robert, 60–61 Hurricanes, 89, 101–2

Knight, James, 32, 66 Knowles, Charles, 66

Inquisitions: Cartagena de Indias, 25–26, 51; denouncements to, 136; Lima, 25; Lisbon, 22; Mexico, 25; Spanish, 37 Intestacy, 4, 12, 82, 139, 142, 143, 179 Island Record Office, xii, xiv, 3 Israel, Menasseh ben, 33, 36 Israel, Sarah/Mary Blagrave, 191– 92, 205–11 Jodensavanne, 35, 66, 67, 189. See also Suriname Ketubah, 142, 144, 160, 212–13 Kidd, William, 51 Kingston: Ashkenazi synagogue (Orange Street), 112, 113–14, 128, 131, 222, 227; capital controversy, 66–67; Jew Alley (Peter’s Lane), 81, 214, 278 n. 16; Portuguese synagogue (Princess Street), 57, 73, 99–100, 131, 203, 233; Sha’ar ha-Shamayim community (Portuguese), 57, 73, 80, 81, 103, 105, 125, 129, 140, 151, 156, 157, 210; Shangare Yosher community (Ashkenazi), 111, 125, 227, 278 n. 21; Urban growth of, 56–57, 70–71, 100–101, 118, 186 Kingston Fire (1882), 2, 73, 112, 237 n. 1

Ladino, 15 Laguna, Daniel Israel López, xi, 35, 36–39, 45, 139, 155 Lamprière, William, 143 Land Registries, 66, 76 Lawes, Nicholas, 60 Ledesma, Abraham, 148, 165 Leoni, Michael, 106, 111, 261 n. 76 Levi, David, 117 Levy, Michael, 192, 195 Limpieza de Sangre, 16, 154 Lindo, Alexandre, 9, 120–21 Lindsay, John, 108–10 London: absentees in, 77; diasporic connections with, 43, 71, 119, 222–29; education in, 149– 50; Jewish migration from, 27; Jewish social-cultural exchange with; 37, 103, 105, 125–30; political patronage; 54, 59, 71–72. See also Board of Trade, London; Despachados Long, Edwards, 70, 75, 93–97, 102, 139, 141–42, 145, 149, 150, 168, 175, 252 n. 71 Lopes, Mordechai Rodrigues, 132, 160, 217–18 Lopes, Yeḥiel, 105 Lopes Torres Family, 40, 44, 86, 149, 165, 193–94 Lopez, Aaron (Newport), 101, 156, 165 Lousada, Aaron Baruh, 193–4, 195. See also Baruh Lousada Family Lousada, Emanuel Baruh, 86, 87, 192–94. See also Baruh Lousada Family Lucea, 70, 101, 125, 131, 181

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Lynch, Thomas, 30, 31, 51, 53, 54, 249 n. 16 Mahamad/Regents, 23, 34, 72, 81, 105, 126, 128–29, 140, 147, 148, 155, 168–70 Manumission, 6, 23, 79, 80, 83, 102, 117, 139, 176–79, 180, 228, 230, 275 n. 20 Marcus, Jacob Rader, 11–12 Maroons, 28, 60–61, 67, 74, 90, 122. See also First Maroon War; Second Maroon War Marriage: clandestine, 167–72; companionate, 16, 166–67; consanguine, 40, 165–67, 200; endogamous, vii, 48, 154, 161–65, 172; exogamous, 162, 163, 175, 274 n. 3; in Jamaica, 158–161 Martinique, 24, 28, 46, 65, 67 Massias, Moses, 6–7 Mercado, David Raphael, 65 Mercantile Trade, 10, 43, 47–49 Mesquita, Benjamin Bueno de, 27 Militia, 30–31, 61, 75, 92 Mill, Richard, 62 Montefiore, Joshua, 100 Montego Bay, 70, 101, 125, 140 Moore, Henry, 75 Morant Bay, 122, 129, 141 Morao, Abraham Sanches, 72–73 Moreton, J. B., 91, 99 Morgan, Henry, 29, 50 Morteira, Saul Levi, 33 Mulatto Jews, 188–94 Nação, 1, 19, 22, 25, 46, 158, 164, 240 n. 45 Napoleonic Wars, 11, 89, 117, 230, 232 National Archives of England, xii

Naturalization, 26, 27, 30, 62, 66, 69–70, 72, 114, 222, 223–25 Navigation Acts, 40, 47, 48, 52 New York, 24, 35, 52, 53, 81, 104, 105, 126, 127, 129, 131, 142, 147, 162, 196 Newport, Rhode Island, 8, 126, 156 Nieto, David, 38 Nugent, Maria, 92, 160 Nunes, Daniel Rodrigues, 79, 181 Ottoman Sephardim, 10, 15–16, 23, 104, 175 Pardo, Josiah, 33–35, 102 Parnasim. See Mahamad/Regents Parra, Abraham Lopes, 101–2, 133 Pen Keepers, 1, 163, 213–14 Pereira, Benjamin, 81–83, 160, 210–21 Petitions, 40, 43, 55, 78 Physicians, 37, 115–18, 230–35 Pinto, Isaac de, 104, 109 Piracy, 50–52 Pisa, Abraham Israel de, 26 Plantation Act, 62, 69–72, 103, 126, 138, 181, 185 Planters, 22, 40, 49, 65–69, 76, 78–83, 102, 113, 142–43, 150, 190–91, 210–21, 222–29 Poland, 110, 114, 154 Polemical Ethnography, 96, 98–99, 160 Political Lobbies: Jewish, 2, 31, 44, 54, 55, 57–63, 71; West-Indian, 68 Polygenesis, 93, 94, 109, 110 Port Royal: anti-Jewish sentiments in, 49, 52–55; census (1680), 29, 40; cosmopolitanism/religious tolerance in, 28–30; destruction

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Port Royal (continued) of (see Earthquakes); prominent Jews in, 37, 39–45; synagogue, 32, 56, 78, 131, 135, 203 Portugal, 13–15, 116, 127, 155–56, 157, 230, 234–35 Portuguese (language), 1, 7, 32, 103, 155, 238 n. 15 Privateers, 29, 50 Probate, xii, 4–7, 12–13, 139, 238 n. 12 Prospectors, 26–27 Protestant Dissenters, 29–30, 32, 69 Quixano, Abraham Henriques, 140, 146 Quixano, Moses Mendes, 44, 170 Racial Hierarchy, 90–93, 94 Redemption of Captives, 51 Rejudaization, 14, 23, 36, 37, 115, 127, 136–37, 146–47, 154–58, 172–73, 239 n. 36 Religious Functionaries, 102–06, 126 Religious Preambles, 5, 130, 238 n. 11 Remarriage Clauses, 143–44, 208 Reputed Children, 117, 121, 174, 176, 178, 181, 185–90, 194, 195, 205, 235 Ritual Objects, 8, 103, 112, 127, 134–35, 185, 203 Runaway Slaves, 86–87, 109, 141 Saint Jago de la Vega Gazette, 113 Saint-Domingue, 28, 67, 68 Sanguinetti Family, 128 Sarmento, Jacob de Castro, 162

Sasportas, Isaac Yeshurun, 122–23 Savanna-La-Mar, 70, 75, 101–2, 125, 131, 133, 182–83, 259 n. 49 Second Maroon War, 89, 119, 122. See also Maroons Security Bond, 177 Seixas, Isaac Mendes, 162 Sentimentality, 8–9, 85, 176–78 Sephardic Diasporas, 15–16 Sermons, 34, 108–9 Seven Years’ War, 74 Shabtai, Ḥayim, 23 Silverman, Henry P., 12 Slavery, “Industrialized,” 23, 66, 68–69, 84–85, 207–8; Jewish slave ownership, 23, 40, 83–88, 109, 129, 139, 179–84, 214–15, 256 n. 80; slave trade, 40, 68; violence, 84, 86–88, 176, 185 Smous, 96, 258 n. 23 Sola, Samuel Mendes de, 105 Solicitors, 7, 100 Souza, Sarah, 180, 188, 195 St. Eustatius, 66, 110, 126 St. Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town): architecture, 73–74; Ashkenazi synagogue, 8, 112–13, 131; Jewish population of, 70, 95, 100–01, 139; Mikve Israel community (Ashkenazi), 8, 112, 125; Neve Shalom community (Portuguese), 56–57, 73, 79, 103, 105, 125, 129, 150, 185; Portuguese Synagogue (Monk Street), 57, 111, 131, 135, 203; theater, 92, 104 Sunday Markets, 75, 90 Suriname, 3, 27, 32, 85, 86, 110, 111, 116, 128, 188–89. See also ­Jodensavanne Surrogacy, 184–87

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Tacky’s War, 74–77, 89, 90, 92, 149, 176 Tartas, Isaac de Castro, 246 n. 76 Tax on Jews, 57–63, 66, 71, 126 Taylor, John, 29, 30, 32, 42, 50 Terras de idolatria, 155. See also Portugal Terras de libertad, 22 Testamentary Freedom, 4, 176 Testamentary Piety, 8, 130–36, 202–5 Thomas, Eleanor Minol, 178 Tombstones, 32, 35, 41, 81, 103, 127, 132–34, 135, 245 n. 58, 247 n. 84 Touro Family, 8, 129 Trelawney, Edward, 62 Tudescos, 111, 154, 161. See also Ashkenazim

Veiga, Samuel Barretto da, 116–17, 230–35 Ward, Ned, 50 Wet Nurses, 145 Widowhood, 41, 141–44, 153 Windsor, Thomas, 29 Wolmer’s Free School, 114, 149, 222, 227 Women, public lives, 38, 136–44 Wood, William, 61–62 Ydana Family, 132, 190–91, 194 Yeḥidim, 14, 188, 189 Yom Kippur, 6, 79, 99, 134, 211

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