Readers of Evolve deserve to know Laura Liebman’s 2021 Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family (Oxford University Press), despite the half decade since its publication. Liebman presents, on the one hand, a geographically panoramic travelogue of the Jewish experience — one which, without exaggeration, spans the globe. But on the other hands, she artfully draws back the curtains on the intimate life of a Jewish family, with Sarah Brandon Moses and her brother Isaac Lopez Brandon, the chief players in this story.
A hidden story
Liebman makes brilliant use of material objects, some as small as cameo broaches and teacups, alongside architectural drawings, maps, newspaper accounts, census and other official records, along with close genealogical materials, all closely read. She uncovers a story hidden from both Sarah and Isaac’s descendants, who were well-off Jews in mid-19th century New York, as well as Jewish historians, and others who think about what being Jewish means and meant.
The story of these siblings begins in the British colony of Barbados, originally the home of an indigenous Carib/Arawak population, whose soil, which produced bumper crops of sugar, could be said to have been soaked with the blood of inestimable numbers of Africans, kidnapped and enslaved. They produced the bounty which handsomely enriched the coffers of the British Empire and a myriad of business families, white people, who benefited from the forced travails of others.
The book is driven by the stories of Sarah and Isaac, both born enslaved and fathered by a Jew, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon. An affluent merchant, Abraham, like other Jews, occupied a visible niche in the Barbadian economy. Liebman, like any number of other scholars before her, spares no punches in placing Jews in the center of the slave economy of Barbados, Suriname, to which the Brandon family relocated, and the other spots in the slave-owning world. They owned slaves, profited from the trade in human flesh and seem to have had no scruples in engaging in sexual relationships with African women, sometimes casually — no doubt, rape — and sometimes, as in the case of the brother and sister’s mother, as concubines, with whom the men maintained lengthy relationships.
Jewish merchants owned slaves and seemed to have had no scruples in engaging in sexual relationships with African women, sometimes casually — no doubt, rape — and sometimes as concubines.
Jewish-African children
For Jewish men like Abraham Brandon, life in the colonies produced the wealth which let them live well and aided in the building and support of Jewish communal institutions. Being in Barbados gave him and other Jewish men access to African enslaved women, and as it generally happens, produced children — mixed race boys and girls who occupied an ambiguous and unsafe position in society and in the Jewish community.
This is the unusual story of his son and daughter who over the course of their lifetimes travelled widely, in every sense of the word. Sarah, in particular, transformed herself into a free, white, fully accepted Jewish woman, who found her place eventually among New York’s Sephardic elite. In generations to come (and herein we see the denouement of Liebman’s story), her slave, non-white and marginally Jewish status faded until no one knew about it. Her descendants, whose experiences in a variety of places Liebman sketches out in the penultimate story, seem to have had no knowledge in her backstory. They had no idea that they, too, could be considered mixed-race, with part of their lineage stemming from Africa.
The experiences of Sarah and Isaac provide the engine that propels this story, and Liebman shows herself a master storyteller. Liebman’s great contribution here — beyond offering a riveting tale that takes readers beyond the Caribbean to England, then the United States, and eventually Mexico, China and elsewhere — lies in exposing the existence of, and exploring the fate, both civically and Jewishly, of these offspring of a Jewish man and an enslaved African woman.
A colored congregation in Barbados
Sarah and Isaac, as the title implies embarked on an extraordinary journey, but as children of a Jewish man and an African woman, they hardly were alone in the Caribbean. Some percentage of them lived their lives as Jews, whether formally converted or not, like our two protagonists here. The fact that Liebman uncovered the existence of a separate, colored congregation in Barbados — Darhe Jesharim, the Paths of the Righteous — makes this book a standout in and of itself, and subverts conventional understanding of the history of the Jews of the Americas. This book drives home that not all the early Jews of the “new world” were white, free, Sephardi and prosperous merchants who, despite their outsider status in predominantly Christian societies, enjoyed all enjoyed the benefits of their color, as defined by the law.
Liebman uncovers the existence of a separate, colored congregation in Barbados — Darhe Jesharim, the Paths of the Righteous — subverting conventional understanding of the history of the Jews of the Americas.
Because Isaac and Sarah star in this drama, we lose sight of what happens over time to the other Jews of African descent in Barbados and the various slave-colony islands. How long did the members of Darhe Jesharim or the other children of Jewish men persist in their Jewishness? Did their Jewish commitments have any staying power? Did it linger in new forms or survive in family narratives? Another book can fill this void.
What a Jew looked like
Once We Were Slaves might easily have been titled something like, “once we were not white.” Liebman ends this strong and powerful book with a call to historians and others interested in Jewish history to rethink their image of what a Jew looked like and what privileges came with being white. In a harsh voice, she all but excoriates white Jews, scholars and others who have ignored the existence of other Jews who, to use a common phrase these days, did not look like them. They, white Jews both in the past and in the present, expunged these individuals from their communal consciousness, although for sure less so recently.
It might have been worth Liebman’s efforts to also talk to historians of the Caribbean and of Black people in North America, the United States, in particular. These scholars have also generated a literature that has failed to acknowledge the reality that in the communities of the enslaved and the recently emancipated, there once had been Jews. The Jews among them — like their Christian kin, literal and figurative — maintained religious institutions and adhered with fealty to religious practices. These Jews endured the harsh trials of enslavement and enjoyed few or no rights because of their African roots, their color and their status as enslaved, or after emancipation, formerly enslaved. They have been erased from the robust and rich literature on Black religion in the Americas.
It is true that white Europeans made up the vast majority of the Jews who came to the Americas and that Christianity did constitute a, or possibly, the, core component of the cultural repertoire of the descendants of the enslaved Africans. The two literatures — the American Jewish and the African American — have reflected this obvious reality. Once We Were Slaves asks Jews to think more broadly. It needs a companion book, to be written by an historian of African religion in the Americas to provide the other half of this story.
