Once We Were Slaves

May 24, 2021
Reed College English professor Leibman (Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism) uncovers in this exhaustive chronicle the lost history of a prominent New York City Jewish family. Though heiress Blanche Moses (1859–1946) obsessively collected family records, she “drew an uncharacteristic blank” when it came to the maternal line of her grandmother, Sarah Brandon Moses (1798–1829), and great-uncle, Isaac Lopez Brandon (1793–1855), whose father was the “wealthiest Jew” on the island of Barbados. Leibman reveals that Sarah and Isaac were actually born “poor, Christian, and enslaved”: their mother was a multiracial woman owned by another Jewish family on the island. After their father helped purchase their freedom, the siblings left for the Dutch colony of Suriname in 1811, where they joined “the largest Afro-Jewish community in the world, outside of Africa.” Sarah eventually married the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, and she and her children were categorized as white in the 1820 New York census. Meanwhile, Isaac made a new start in Philadelphia’s thriving Jewish community. Leibman highlights the fluidity of early America’s racial boundaries and the multiracial threads of Jewish history, but readers may struggle to keep the branches of this complex family tree straight. Those with a genealogical bent, however, will be rewarded by this painstaking deep dive.

July 1, 2021
An intricate genealogy of a family of Sephardic Jews and their slaves who branched out from Barbados to embrace new opportunities in the early American republic. In her latest deep excavation of Jewish history, Leibman--a professor of English and humanities at Reed College and winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism (2012)--focuses on two children of Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, a prominent member of his Bridgetown synagogue who, during the early 19th century, became "the island's wealthiest Jew." Abraham's concubine, Sarah Esther Lopez-Gill, who became the mother of his children, Sarah and Isaac, was an African woman enslaved in the neighboring household of the Lopez family, a branch of the Sephardic immigrants who came to Barbados after expulsion from Spain. Sarah and Isaac were both born as slaves and were christened. In 1801, upon the death of their grandfather, who left them an inheritance, they were able to buy their freedom and live in his house. Such circumstances were hardly the norm. "For enslaved people, the death of owners and white kin was an anxious business," writes the author. "One cross word, and lives could be ruined. Whites were often un-predictable in their affections." From this time, Leibman follows Sarah and Isaac through their lives, first to Suriname, where Isaac was circumcised and they became "na��o, Jews of the Portuguese nation." Sarah was sent to be schooled in London, and she eventually married New York merchant Joshua Moses. "Their romance," writes Leibman, "would spawn a new dynasty." Isaac also journeyed out of the Caribbean, and the ensuing tangle of genealogy is both telling and mystifying, as the family struggled, fought for civil rights, and joined the thriving Jewish communities in New York and Philadelphia, leaving a lasting legacy. The author includes relevant artifacts, such as photos of the intertwined families. A richly contextual history of multiracial Jews and their travails and triumphs in the New World.

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