Great Tangled Cousinries? Jewish Intermarriage in the British West Indies

Natalie A. Zacek, University of Manchester1

On the eve of the American Revolution, the gentry of Virginia had, over the

course of more than a century of intermarriage between the sons and

daughters of the colony’s leading families, become, in Bernard Bailyn’s

much-cited phrase, “one great tangled cousinry,” through which the

members of these “First Families of Virginia,” both individually and

as a group, were able to increase their resources with respect to

money, land, slaves, commercial connections, and political offices.2 This

practice was visible as early as the 1650s, when the three Eltonhead

sisters chose at their spouses three of the richest and most politically

influential male colonists of eastern Virginia and Maryland, ensuring

that formation of a set of first cousins who would reap every

advantage from participation in “a tangled skein of relationships”

which connected them to everyone who was anyone in the Tidewater

region in this era.3 It would be just as visible a century later, when

George Washington’s marriage to the widowed Martha Dandridge

Custis transformed him overnight from a shabby-genteel small

planter into one of colonial America’s richest men, and linked him to

1 Many thanks to Aviva Ben-Ur and Barry Stiefel, whose perceptive comments have greatly improved this essay, and to Michael Studemund-Halevy for his support and enthusiasm for this project.2 Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in: James M. Smith (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America. Chapel Hill 1959, pp. 90-115 [here: p. 111].3 Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750. New York 1984, pp. 48-49.

a family which wielded far more influence than his in Virginia

politics. These connections of kinship, as Michal J. Rozbicki has noted,

persisted well into the era of the early American republic, and they “often

provided the glue for political party connections” at a time at which

personality- and clan-based allegiances were just beginning to coalesce

into more permanent, nationally-based party structures.4

Although the British colonies in the West Indies were, throughout the late

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, home to far smaller white

populations than that of Virginia, and to a significantly higher proportion

of long-term and even permanent absentees, a similar pattern emerged

among the leading planter families of these islands. Caribbeana, Vere

Langford Oliver’s multi-volume compendium of British West Indian

genealogical materials, includes hundreds of pedigrees which show the

formation over the course of this era of a web of marital alliances

between members of the principal families within, for example, Antigua or

Barbados. These links facilitated the emergence of a creole elite which

not only dominated political, social, and economic life in these

4 Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America. Charlottesville 1998, p. 36. On the relationship between kinship and political alliances in the early American republic, see Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven 2001, and Catherine M. Allgor, Parlor Politics: How the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville 2000.

islands, but, in the guise of the “West India Interest,” wielded

formidable influence within the metropole.5

That such connections would develop is far from surprising; young men

and women of this social class would likely have grown up together, as

their parents would have been one another’s friends, neighbors, and

political allies, and upon reaching adulthood they would have faced a

limited number of potential spouses, particularly among men seeking

wives, due to the uneven sex ratio which affected the white

populations of these islands throughout the period under study.6

Moreover, the owners of British West Indian sugar plantations, like

members of many landed elites, conceived of their own and their

children’s marriages as alliances through which they could acquire

additional lands, particularly at times at which it had become a scarce

and expensive resource. Why, then, did the Jewish residents of these

British West Indian colonies opt not to follow a similar strategy, but

rather in most instances chose to marry neither within their own local

Jewish communities nor amongst their Christian neighbors, but instead

to select wives or husbands from within the Jewish population of another

5 Vere Langford Oliver, Caribbeana: Being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies , 5 vols. London 1910-1919. The classic study of this group’s activities in England is Lilian M. Penson, “The London West India Interest in the Eighteenth Century,” in: English Historical Review 30 (1921), pp. 373-392.6 Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776. Cambridge 2010, p. 170; Robert V. Wells, Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776: A Survey of Census Data. Princeton 1975, pp. 201, 244.

Caribbean island, in some cases one under the jurisdiction of a different

European nation? What did British West Indian Jews gain, and what did

they lose, by following such a practice?

Before delving more deeply into these questions, it is important to

emphasize that, of course, Christian whites were not the only

potential marriage partners for Jewish men and women in the British

Caribbean. While interracial marriages were both legally and socially

discouraged, and in many instances even legally prohibited, in these

colonies throughout the period under discussion, in reality

relationships frequently developed between black or racially mixed

and white inhabitants, and while many of these connections were

kept secret, plentiful evidence exists of non-elite white women

marrying or cohabiting with men of color, and of white men of all

ranks forming long-standing liaisons, and occasionally marriages,

with black or mixed-race women. In some instances, the men

involved were from the highest reaches of the local elite, and they

acknowledged their racially mixed children, sent them to be

educated in the metropole, and left them significant bequests in their

wills.7 A comparable example of such a practice amongst Caribbean

7Cecily Forde-Jones, “Mapping Racial Boundaries: Gender, Race, and Poor Relief in Barbadian Plantation Society,” in: Journal of Women’s History 10 (1998), pp. 9-31 [here: pp. 19-21]; Daniel Livesay, “The Decline of Jamaica’s Interracial Households and the Fall of the Planter Class, 1733-1823,” in: Atlantic Studies 9 (2012), pp. 107-123 [here: pp. 109-110].

Jews is that of Isaac Lopez Brandon of Philadelphia and Barbados, the

natural son of Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, one of the richest Jews

on the island, and a woman of color. Although Brandon’s mother was

not Jewish, he had converted to the faith in his youth, and his father

acknowledged him as his child and left him a significant amount of

money.8

Why, then, do so few Jews of the British West Indies appear to have

considered free people of color as potential spouses? While initially

men and women of this latter group would not have been Jewish, this

problem was one which intermarriage could solve, as over

generations a population of mixed-race Jews would emerge. But

while it may be tempting to imagine a commonality of interests

between Jews and people of color, based on their mutual exclusion

from Gentile whiteness, in practice it appears that such connections

were not seen as advantageous amongst the former. While the

majority of British West Indian Jews owned few or no slaves, they

were not for the most part opposed to slavery as an institution, or

skeptical of the conventional wisdom of the era regarding the alleged

inferiority of people of African descent. Moreover, many Jews were

aware that their position in colonial British Atlantic society was an

8 Laura Arnold Leibman and Sam May, “Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation,” in: American Jewish History 99 (2015), pp. 1-26 [here: pp. 10-11].

inherently liminal one, and thus while relationships between

Gentiles and people of color, though not socially approved, were

widely known and sometimes acknowledged, rumors regarding

similar liaisons between Jews and slaves or free persons of color

would likely have damaged the former’s social standing. If even

seemingly less controversial links between these two groups, such as

Jews’ alleged “trading with Negroes…on the Lord’s Day” or

“contract[ing] with the Slaves that carry away the Goods” they sell to

Christian islanders, attracted legal censure, more intimate

connections might have invited harsher scrutiny from neighbors and

authorities.9 A figure such as Isaac Lopez Brandon might have been

able to emerge as a Jew and as the heir to his natural father in the

1820s, at a moment at which the ongoing decrease in the white

population of Barbados restricted marital and sexual options for

Gentiles and Jews alike, and thus loosened some long-standing

inhibitions surrounding these issues, but throughout the eighteenth

century such relationships could only damage Jews’ standing both

within their own communities and amongst their Christian

neighbors. For people whose religion ordained that they would

remain outsiders within colonial societies, whiteness was an element

of their identity which they felt compelled to protect and uphold, and

9 Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Nevis, from 1664, to 1739, inclusive. London 1740, p. 12; “The Petition of the Merchants and other Inhabitants of Barbados,” Virginia Gazette, 16 November 1739, p. 1.

which, unlike their Gentile fellow settlers, they could not afford to

compromise in any way.10

That these Jewish inhabitants of the British West Indies would opt to

look to other colonies for potential spouses is in many ways unsurprising.

If Christian islanders often had relatively few spousal choices within

their individual colonies, the possibilities would be still more limited

within a Jewish community which might consist of as few as a couple of

hundred and at most of a thousand people .11 A man or woman might

face a situation in which there were few or no local Jews of the opposite

sex who were unmarried, age-appropriate, and not too closely related to

10 A clear counter-example to this trend can be observed in the history of the Dutch colony of Surinam, where a sizable Afro-Jewish population developed in the eighteenth century. But the Jewish community in this settlement was notablydissimilar to that of the British West Indian colonies; not only were many Jews therein plantation owners, mostly in the region which became known as the Jodensavanne, but, as Wieke Vink has emphasized, “the Surinamese Jewish community was not a religious minority in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish environment (Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname. Leiden 2010, p. 28). The combination of the greater frequency of interactions between Jews and people of color and the fact that Jews were more integrated into plantation society appears to have allowed for the relaxation of some of the taboos regarding interracial relationships which typified social lifefor Jews in the British plantation colonies. See also Aviva Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community,” In: Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800. Baltimore 2009, pp. 152-169.11 Jewish populations within the individual West Indian colonies in the eighteenth century may have been as small as seventy individuals (in 1720s Nevis) or aslarge as a thousand (in 1780s Curacao), but it is important to keep in mind thatcensus data may not in these instances accurately reflect reality, as many WestIndian Jews frequently relocated throughout the region, rather than making theirpermanent homes in the communities in whose censuses they were listed . See Zacek, Settler Society, p. 140, and Linda M. Rupert, “Trading Globally, Speaking Locally: Curacao’s Sephardim in the Making of a Caribbean Creole,” in: Jewish Culture and History 71(2004), pp. 109-122 (here p. 110).

her or him. Selecting a mate from within the local non-Jewish population

was not usually an option, even if a Jewish man or woman were willing to

consider such a course of action, and to convert in order to do so. It is

true that, throughout the eighteenth century, the majority of the Christian

inhabitants of the British West Indian colonies were, in comparison with

metropolitan Britons, at least grudgingly tolerant of their Jewish

neighbors, and in some instances engaged in legal or commercial

relationships with them. On occasion, Christians might even socialize

with Jews, as in 1719, when William Smith, a Church of England minister

on Nevis, reported in a letter to a friend in England that “Mr Moses

Pinheiro a Jew and myself, went to angle in Black Rock Pond.” In

Speightstown, Barbados in 1739, the Lopez family, the colony’s

principal Jewish merchants, secured as the guest of honor at a family

wedding the recently arrived Gilbert Burnet Jr., the son of a former

governor of Massachusetts, who had charmed local society with his

elegant clothes and courtly manners.12 Londoners formed themselves

into furious mobs and took to the streets in 1753, when Parliament

approved the so-called “Jew Bill,” which allowed foreign-born Jews in the

metropole the right to be naturalized as British subjects, but no such

demonstrations had broken out in the islands in 1740, when

Parliament’s approval of the Naturalization Act extended these same 12 Unfortunately for the Lopezes, “Burnet” turned out to be a confidence man named Tom Bell, who stole a large sum of money from the Lopez house in the course of the celebrations. William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis. Cambridge 1745, p. 10; David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill 1997, p. 275.

rights to Jewish residents therein.13 But despite this climate of

relatively amicable relations between the faiths, even in a situation in

which spousal choice might be very limited, a Christian planter would

have been extremely unlikely to have considered a Jewish man or

woman, however respectable and financially successful s/he or his/her

family might have been, as a potential husband or wife for himself or for

his son or daughter.14

This antipathy towards interfaith marriages stemmed not only from

the obvious issue of confessional allegiance, but also from the fact that

very few Jewish inhabitants of the British West Indian colonies, even

those who were extremely wealthy, such as the Barbadian Lopezes,

owned plantations or other large tracts of land, and thus a marital

alliance with a Jew, even should he or she convert to Christianity,

offered few discernible advantages, as it would not serve to increase a

family’s land holdings.15 Moreover, British colonists in the West Indies

were intensely aware that metropolitan public opinion held that

13 See Dana Rabin, “The Jew Bill of 1753: Masculinity, Virility, and the Nation,” in: Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006), pp. 157-171.14 For a discussion of harmonious Jewish-Christian social relationships in colonial British America, see Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity, and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654-1831” (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 2000).15 By contrast, many Jewish inhabitants of the Dutch colony of Curacao, as well as that of Surinam, were landowners; see Jonathan Schorsch, “Transformations in the Manumissions of Slaves by Jews from East to West,” in: Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks (eds.), Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World. Columbia 2009, pp. 69-96 [here: p. 83].

Caribbean settlers had fallen into irreversible physical and cultural

degeneracy as a result of living in a tropical environment far from the

ostensibly civilizing influences of the mother country, and acceptance of

Jews as marriage partners would only confirm this stereotype of these

“Creoles” as being innately un-English.

For their part, many Jews in the British West Indies, and in colonial

British America more generally, were as hostile as their Christian

neighbors were to the concept of interfaith marriage. When Lunah

Arrobus (or Arrabas), a Barbadian Jewish woman who had converted to

Christianity, died in 1792, local Christians refused to take any

responsibility for her corpse, as they claimed that her conversion had not

been a sincere one, and thus she was not entitled to a Christian burial.

Anxious about the public health problem posed by this unburied body,

particularly in a tropical climate, the local authorities commanded that

Arrobus be buried in the Jewish cemetery at Bridgetown, the island’s

capital and the home of nearly all of its Jewish inhabitants. This decision

was a controversial one from the perspective of the leaders of the

Nidhe Israel temple, established in 1654 and the second oldest

Jewish congregation in the Western hemisphere, as it was the usual

practice of both metropolitan and colonial congregations to bar the

interment in their burial grounds of any Jew who had failed to attend

services regularly or to make financial contributions for the support

of the synagogue. As the spiritual leaders of a small and sometimes

insecure minority population within Barbados, the elders of Nidhe

Israel, preferring to avoid open conflict with Gentile authority

figures, in the end reluctantly agreed to allow Arrobus’s body to be

interred in their cemetery. However, they insisted that her grave had to

be dug by slaves or free men of color, rather than by men of the

congregation, as was the usual practice, and any pensioner of the

synagogue who assisted in this process, or volunteered to participate

in the ritual washing of the corpse, “shall be immediately taken off

the list of Pensioners,” thus forfeiting the temple’s financial support

in perpetuity. Moreover, Arrobus’s grave could only be located in “the

Nook,” an irregular corner of the Bet Haim (House of Life), or graveyard,

in front of which a door would be installed in order to separate this

apostate’s tomb from those of “true” Jews—a costly effort, but one which

the Bridgetown Jewish community deemed essential to in order to

maintain the purity of their burial ground.16

In a similar fashion, the Jewish community of Philadelphia expressed its

distaste for Jewish-Christian intermarriage following the death in 1785

16 Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800. Philadelphia 2010, p. 241; Eli Faber, A Time For Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820. Baltimore 1992, pp. 57, 81; E.M. Shilstone, Monumental Inscriptions in the Burial Ground of the Jewish Synagogue at Bridgetown, Barbados. New York 1956, xii. See also Derek Miller, “A Medley of Contradictions: The Jewish Diaspora in St. Eustatius and Barbados” (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2013).

of ,”the merchant Benjamin Moses Clava, who had married a Christian

woman in a civil ceremony. As with Lunah Arrobus, Moses Clava’s body

was permitted to be interred in the local Jewish graveyard, in this case

that of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel synagogue, but the Bet Din, a

religious court whose members included the leaders of the

congregation, insisted that his burial could proceed only if the grave

were located “in a corner of the cemetery,” one normally reserved for

suicides, and that his body should be placed in the grave without ritual

washing, without a shroud and without a ceremony,” or even the

recitation of the appropriate prayers. In the end Mordecai Moses

Mordecai, a leading member of the congregation, and several other men

took charge of Moses Clava’s corpse and interred it with the proper

ritual, but the prominent Philadelphia layman and halachic scholar

Manuel Josephson criticized them as “impudent, light-minded

people,” and most of the other men of the Mikveh Israel congregation

agreed that such laxity in upholding communal ritual could only

undermine the power of Jewish law in what they considered to be a

distressingly “libertine America.”17 By contrast, in the smaller towns

and the backcountry settlements of British North America, if no

appropriate Jewish woman was available as a bride, a Jewish man was

likely to settle for a Christian spouse, as he wanted a wife and children, 17 Seeman, Death in the New World, p. 246; Beth S. Wenger, “Did North American Jewry Have an Early Modern Period?,” in: Richard I. Cohen (ed.), Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman. Pittsburgh 2014, pp. 319-330 [here p. 326]; Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America. Bloomington 2009, p. 40.

and, since he was already living outside of anything that could be referred

to as a “Jewish community,” he was likely to place his need and desire to

marry over the fear of censure on the part of his co-religionists.18

But it is important to understand that Jewish marriage strategies in the

British West Indian colonies were more than a practical response to a

shortage of locally available partners. In many instances, British West

Indian Jews viewed the creation of marital alliances with their fellow Jews

elsewhere throughout the British and Dutch islands in positive rather

than negative terms, as a strategy by which they might hope to develop

their own variant of the “great tangled cousinry,” rather than merely

making the best of a difficult situation. The distinction between this

approach and that of Bailyn’s elite Virginians stemmed not only from

religion and location; their overall aims were quite different from one

another. The North American Gentile practice centered on the acquisition

of vast tracts of land, primarily in the form of tobacco, rice, and cotton

plantations, and on the formation of networks of political patronage and

clientage within an individual colony. In order to attain these goals, it was

crucial that a husband and wife be from the same colony, and ideally from

the same neighborhood or region thereof. But Jews within the West

Indian colonies, although they were after 1740 naturalized British

18 Herman Lantz and Mary O’Hara, “The Jewish Family in Early America,” in: International Journal of Sociology of the Family 7 (1977), pp. 247-259 [here p. 251].

subjects, and were allowed to swear oaths without the use of a Bible, did

not seek political power, as they continued to be legally proscribed from

standing for office, and even from voting for representatives in the

colonial Houses of Assembly.19 Nor were they hoping to employ

marriage as a strategy through which to consolidate extensive land

holdings, as the great majority of British West Indian Jews were city-

dwelling merchants, rather than owners of sugar plantations.

These individuals were, in the overwhelming majority of cases, “port

Jews,” members of a group which David Sorkin has defined as “merchant

Jews of Sephardi or, to a lesser extent, Italian extraction who settled in the

port cities of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic seaboard and the New

World.”20 Defined by “commerce rather than geography,” they created

geographically wide-ranging yet highly durable kinship networks which

connected the various island colonies, particularly the Dutch and

British possessions in the Caribbean, with one another, and also with

North America, England, and the Netherlands.21 For example, Rowland (or

Rohiel) Gideon Abudiente (or Abundiente), born in Hamburg or in the

neighboring community of Gluckstadt in 1654 and of Portuguese

19 Heather Shawn Nathans, “‘O my ducats, O my daughter’: Seductions and Sentimental Conversions of Jewish Female Characters in the Early American Theater,” in: Toni Bowers and Tita Chico (eds.), Atlantic Worlds in the Eighteenth Century. New York 2012, pp. 115-133 [here pp. 120-121]. 20 David Sorkin, “The Port Jew: Notes Toward a Social Type,” in: Journal of Jewish Studies 50 (1999), pp. 87-97 [here: p. 88].21 Jonathan D. Sarna, “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts,” in: Jewish History 20 (2006), pp. 213-219 [here: p. 216].

descent, established himself in commerce in St. Kitts in the final third of

the seventeenth century, lived and worked in Barbados, Nevis, and

Boston, then arrived in 1690 in London, where he was the first Jew to be

admitted as a freeman to a company of the City of London. His son

Sampson Gideon (1699-1762) became one of the City’s leading financiers

and a close associate of and financial advisor to Prime Minister Sir

Robert Walpole, and his son, also named Sampson, was granted the

Irish title of Baron Eardley.22 Louis Moses Gomez, born in Madrid in

the late 1650s and raised in France, emigrated to New York, married

Esther Marques, whose family had close links to the Jewish

community of Barbados, and raised sons who would cement through

their spousal choices the family’s business ties with the Caribbean.

Benjamin wed Esther Nunes of Barbados, and Daniel’s first wife was

Rebecca De Torres, the daughter of a Jamaican Jew, and after

Rebecca’s death Daniel married Esther Levy of Curacao.23 The

Pinheiro family was still more far-flung; its progenitor, the distiller and

merchant Isaac, was born in Madrid in 1636, grew up in Amsterdam,

became a freeman of New York in 1695, and soon thereafter centered his

familial and business interests on Nevis. Throughout his travels, he

maintained close commercial as well as affective ties with his father

and sister in Amsterdam, and with another sister and her family in

22 Shilstone, Monumental Inscriptions, x; Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination. New York 2016, p. 125.23 Faber, A Time for Planting, pp. 47-48.

Curacao. After Isaac’s death in 1710, his Amsterdam-born widow

Esther made frequent visits to New York and Boston in connection with

the family’s commercial endeavors, in partnership with both Jewish and

Christian merchants, and her son Moses, the Reverend William Smith’s

aforementioned fishing companion, moved to Barbados, married Lunah,

a woman from that island’s Jewish community, and remained there until

his death in 1755.24 Like many of the participants in these trans-colonial

Jewish marriages, Moses and Lunah may well have not known or even met

one another prior to their wedding day, in contrast to the youths of the

eighteenth-century Virginia elite, who in many cases had been

acquainted with one another since childhood. But, as Laura Leibman

has noted, while the eighteenth century saw the emergence amongst

many Anglo-American Protestants of the idea that romantic love, or at

least established friendship, was the root of a happy marriage, amongst

Jews the maintenance of the faith was still considered the primary goal of

marital alliances.25

The connection of a male Jew to a female Jew, resulting in the birth of

Jewish children—procreation was, after all, mandated in contemporary

24 Zacek, Settler Society, pp. 144, 147; Shilstone, Monumental Inscriptions, p. 151; Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713. New York 2011, p. 192.25 Wenger, “Did North American Jewry Have an Early Modern Period?,” p. 320; Leibman, “Love Affairs: Marriage, Romance, and Race among Early Caribbean Jews,” paper presented to the Early Caribbean Symposium, Kingston University, London, July 2014.

religious doctrine as a commandment for all observant Jewish men—

may have been the immediate goal of marriage within the religion. But the

forging of marital connections between members of the Jewish

communities of the various port cities and towns of the British and Dutch

Atlantic had the wider effect of bolstering commercial connections

between these various Jewish enclaves. These links helped their

participants to profit from the exchange of commodities, funds, and

information which was central to transatlantic commerce throughout

the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which allowed

individual communities to serve as places of temporary or permanent

refuge for their co-religionists in times of economic contraction (as with

the Jews of late eighteenth-century Nevis, who relocated throughout the

West Indies in the face of their island’s experience of natural disaster and

commercial decline), communal persecution, or slave uprising.26 Such

connections helped Jews to feel that, even if they resided in very small

Jewish communities which in many instances lacked a rabbi, a synagogue,

a cemetery, and other human and material resources central to the

practice of the faith, they could still imagine themselves to be “of ye

Nation of Jews,” like their co-religionists in Europe. Bequests from a

Jewish inhabitant of one island to the synagogue of another testify to the

vitality of these connections, as in the case of the shopkeeper Haim

Abinum de Lima of the British colony of Nevis, who in his will of 1765

26 Michelle M. Terrell, The Jewish Community of Early Colonial Nevis: A Historical Archaeological Study. Gainesville 2005, p. 55.

made bequests of money and religious books (“Sephers”) to the Mikve

Israel congregation of the town of Willemstad, the capital of the Dutch

colony of Curacao, which had been the birthplace and was now the

residence of his wife Rebecca.27

In order to fully appreciate the foundational role of the institution of

marriage in the preservation of Jewish identity in a physically and

culturally challenging colonial environment, it may be helpful to look at

two counter-examples of interfaith marriage, one from the West Indies

and the other from North America. In 1678 Solomon Israel appeared

within the list of “Jewes” enumerated in the first census of the island of

Nevis. By the end of the century, his name could be found throughout the

legal and commercial records of the island’s Gentiles; in 1699 he and

Azariah Pinney, one of Nevis’s richest merchants, were appointed as the

co-executors of the estate of one Bernard White, and throughout the first

quarter of the eighteenth century he served as a witness to a number of

wills, as the foreman of a jury, as the clerk of the island’s House of

Assembly, and as the legal guardian of several Christian children, all of

which were responsibilities normally forbidden to Jews. In court, he

took his oaths on the “Holy Evangelists,” not on the “Five Books of Moses,”

or Pentateuch, as other colonial British American Jews did, and his only

27 Will of Isaac Pinheiro, 1710, in Leo Hershkowitz, ed., Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704-1799. New York 1967, p. 21; Zacek, Settler Society, p. 141.

connection to the local Jewish community in this period seems to have

been his service as one of the executors (the others being Christians) of

the will of the aforementioned merchant Isaac Pinheiro. Regardless of

how sincere Israel’s conversion to Christianity may or may not have been,

it appears that he was accepted within the Gentile world primarily

because his wife, Catherine, was a Christian, as was his son Shakerly.

Israel’s “forsaking [of] the overt signs of the Jewish faith” allowed him “to

move within the upper social, political, and economic classes of Nevis,” but

it does not appear to have gained him any great additional wealth or

prestige, but rather to have involved him in a lot of tedious, unpaid

administrative work, and thus is unlikely to have served as an example

to his fellow Jews that marriage to a Christian was a particularly

advantageous choice for them.28

The marital alliances of the Franks family of New York and Philadelphia,

by contrast, allowed this Ashkenazic clan to gain admittance to the highest

levels of colonial North American society, as well as to those of the

metropole. The merchant Jacob Franks, who arrived in New York

28 Terrell, Jewish Community, pp. 46-147; Cecil Headlam (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. 23. London 1916, p. 79. Israel appears in the 1707 census of Nevis as the owner of thirteen slaves, the largest number of bondspeople possessed by any of the six Jewish heads of households enumerated in the document, and is referred to in court documents of this time as a “planter,” but based on the number of his slaves the estate is likely to have been a small one, and not a sugar plantation. See Malcolm H. Stern, “Some Notes on the Jews of Nevis,” in: American Jewish Archives 10 (1958), pp. 151-159 [here p. 154], and Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York 2000, p. 102.

around 1709 as the representative of his London-based mercantile

family, helped to found and served a term as the parnas, or president, of

the city’s Shearith Israel congregation, but although his wife, the former

Abigail Levy, the daughter of one of the city’s richest merchants, led a

group of wealthy Jewish women in raising funds for the synagogue, at

the same time she rejected traditional Jewish dress in favor of the latest

styles from London, socialized extensively amongst local Gentiles, and

read widely in philosophy and other subjects of fashionable

discourse. But despite following a lifestyle that was in many ways

more similar to that of New York’s elite Christians than it was to

traditional Jewish ways, and maintaining close friendships across

religious lines, Abigail was horrified when, in 1742, her and Jacob’s

daughter Phila admitted that she had secretly married Oliver DeLancey,

the son of a prominent New York mercantile family of Huguenot

background, and that she had been baptized as a Christian. Abigail

vowed that she would entirely sever all contact with “that unhappy

girl” for the rest of their lives, insisting that she “never will see nor let

none of the family goe near her,” and that she would “never have that

serenity nor peace within I have soe happily had hitherto.”29 Although

29 Wenger, “Did North American Jewry Have an Early Modern Period?,” p. 328; Helene Schwartz Kenwin, This Land of Liberty: A History of America’s Jews. Springfield, N.J., 1986, p. 11; Holly Snyder, “Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British America, 1700-1800,” in: Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (eds.), Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives. Hanover, N.H. 2001, pp. 15-45 [here p. 40]; Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, January 1743, in: Jon Butler et al [eds.], Religion in American Life: A Short History, 2nd.ed. New York 2011, pp. 90-91. Jon Butler suggests that Oliver’s secrecy about the marriage reflected his anxiety that

the DeLancey family was rich, politically influential (three generations of

DeLancey men, including Oliver, had been appointed to the governing

council of the colony of New York), and eminently respectable, and

Oliver and Phila were apparently happy together, Abigail’s rage and

disappointment are nonetheless not surprising. Owing to the matrilineal

nature of Judaism, Jewish women who took Christian men as their

husbands would, if not disinherited, remove their dowries from Jewish

families and, by extension, Jewish communities—the exact opposite of

what the British West Indian Jews were trying to accomplish through

their endogamous marital alliances. But worse still, these women had

“abdicated their prospective roles as mothers to and guardians of a new

generation of Jewish Americans,” thus contributing to what many

American Jews so dreaded, the diminution of what the Ashkenazim

termed Yehudishkeit (Jewishness) in an uncertain and religiously

heterogeneous new world, epitomized by the occurrence of interfaith

marriage even amongst the leading families of New World Judaism,

such as the Frankses.30 It is likely that Phila’s marriage, though it

contributed to the Franks family’s overall wealth and prestige,

caused Abigail to feel that she had failed in her roles both as a mother

and as a Jew.

his parents, too, would be dismayed by his exogamous marriage. New York Huguenots frequently married Protestants of English or Dutch descent, but non-Christians lay beyond the boundary of acceptable spouses. See Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society. Cambridge, Mass. 1983, p. 189.30 Nathans, “’O my ducats’,” p. 125; Lantz and O’Hara, “The Jewish Family in America,” p. 251; Faber, A Time For Planting, p. 93.

Abigail Franks’s agony over Phila’s marriage, and her ostracism of her

daughter and her family, did not forestall either her son or her

granddaughters from following Phila’s example of exogamous marriage.

David Franks married a Philadelphia Gentile named Margaret Evans and

allowed their children to be raised in their mother’s faith. Yet he

professed Judaism throughout his long life, and in all legal matters took his

oath as a Jew, on the Five Books of Moses, unlike, for example, the

Nevisian Solomon Israel.31 Why, then, was he content to raise his children

outside his religion, and to see his daughters marry Christians? At least

some of this confessional flexibility appears to have been due to the

Franks family’s position at the apex of colonial North American Jewish

society; as Jacob Marcus has observed, “there were in America no Jewish

social worlds whose conquest could bring him [David Franks]

satisfaction,” and Franks was too materially and socially ambitious to

wish his children to select their spouses from amongst American Jewish

families “of lesser social station and affluence” than his.32 So David was

apparently not at all displeased when his daughter Abigail, named for

her grandmother, married Andrew Hamilton, the son of a rich and

politically influential Philadelphia family, or when her younger sister

Rebecca, a noted local belle who was crowned the “Queen of Beauty” at

31 Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492-1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), vol. II, pp. 1152, 1245.32 Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. II, pp. 1246, 1230.

the Meschianza, married British Army Lieutenant Colonel, and later

General, Sir Henry Johnson. It was not surprising that the Franks

daughters would choose husbands from among the ranks either of

Philadelphia’s Christian elite or of the officers of the British Army, as their

father was a member of such socially exclusive local organizations as the

Dancing Assembly and the Mount Regale Fishing Company. A leading

Loyalist, like his brother-in-law Oliver DeLancey, David played the

gracious host to the most socially elevated men of the British Army which

occupied Philadelphia in 1777-1778.33

In terms of the preservation of Jewish religious and cultural identity in the

New World, the Franks family’s history was a tale of cultural suicide, in

which three elite young women and their descendants were lost to “the

Nation,” and a significant share of the fortune which their brother/father

had amassed passed beyond the bounds of the Jewish community. But

such occurrences were to some extent overdetermined in the context of

colonial British America and the early national United States. This was

an environment in which “traditional European constraints were no

longer present” on the part of either Jews or Gentiles, a situation which

made the preservation of Jewish marriages and family lineages

33 Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. II, p. 1152; Morris Jastrow,”Notes on the Jews of Philadelphia, from Published Annals,” in: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 1 (1893), p. 54. The Meschianza was a lavish festivity which British Army officers staged for their Loyalist friends before the former departed Philadelphia in 1778.

tremendously important, because in the absence of traditional markers of

community, such as Jewish neighborhoods, synagogues, schools, and

social organizations, these familial connections were the principal

guarantors of the persistence of Jewish identity. But simultaneously, the

lack of these constraints made interfaith marriage both more likely and

more accepted than it could have been in England or continental

Europe in this era. A society in which Jews and their Christian neighbors

were in frequent contact, and in which Jewish and Christian men might

forge business relationships and social connections, even in some

instances participating together in the rites of Freemasonry, was one in

which the combination of constrained spousal options within an individual

Jewish community and frequent and generally amicable contact with local

Christians was likely to generate mixed marriages. Malcolm H. Stern

estimated that, as a result, ten to fifteen percent of colonial American

Jews married outside their religion.34 As Michael Hoberman has noted,

these men and women inhabited “an unprecedentedly tolerant America

that willingly guaranteed their individual liberty but often sapped their

communal resilience.”35

34 Lantz and O’Hara, “The Jewish Family in Early America,” p. 249; Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840. Chapel Hill 1996, p. 59; Malcolm H. Stern, “The Function of Genealogy in American History,” in: Jacob Rader Marcus (ed.), Essays in American Jewish History. Cincinnati 1958, pp. 82-97 [here: pp. 84-85].35 Michael Hoberman, “’The Confidence Placed in You is of the Greatest Magnitude’: Representations of Paternal Authority in Early American Jewish Letters,” in: Studies in American Jewish Literature 33 (2014), pp. 63-83 [here: p. 64].

Other than Abigail the elder, the members of the Franks family were

apparently untroubled by the practice of intermarriage; even the devout

Jacob Franks came to accept his daughter Phila’s marriage, and to value

his family’s connection with the well-placed DeLancey clan. Through their

choice of socially elite and politically influential Christian spouses, the

Frankses rose in wealth and prestige far above any other family of Jewish

heritage in colonial or early national American history. David became

not only a rich merchant but a leader of Philadelphia society, Abigail the

younger was the chatelaine of The Woodlands, one of colonial North

America’s grandest estates, and Rebecca became Lady Johnson, the wife

and mother of baronets. These achievements appear to have

compensated the Franks family for the fact that “by the end of the

eighteenth century, none of them remained Jews.”36 But in a sense, the

Franks story is the exception that proves the rule in terms of explaining

why the Jews of the British West Indies, the experiences of a few

individuals such as Solomon Israel notwithstanding, did not even

attempt to forge similar marital connections amongst the Christian elites

of their individual islands. Island Jews, whose Sephardic heritage made

them rather more exotic, or bizarre, within Anglo-American culture than

the Ashkenazic Frankses, did not grow up socializing regularly and thus

forming friendships and romantic connections with rich Christians, and

36 Butler, The Huguenots in America, p. 206.

rare examples of interfaith marriage, such as that of Solomon Israel,

might have encouraged them to see it as a strategy of limited efficacy in

terms of elevating the economic or social status of an individual or a

clan.37 Because British West Indian Jews were almost entirely unlanded,

plantation-oriented local Christians saw little to be gained in forming

marital alliances with them, whereas the commercially-oriented Frankses

were fully integrated into the business community of Philadelphia, which

in David Franks’s time was the financial capital of North America. And

both Christians and Jews feared that intermarriage would lead to a form

of cultural degeneracy: Gentiles saw at least minimal adherence to the

rites of the Church of England as testimony to their status as

“Englishmen overseas,” rather than as outlandish colonials, and Jews

centered their personal and communal identities upon their membership

in “the Nation” and were determined to do all that they could to

preserve Jewish identity in the New World. For these reasons, the Jews of

37 For a negative example of the perceived exoticism of Sephardim in the early national United States, see the novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s depiction of Ascha Fielding, a character in his Arthur Mervyn (1799). Although Ascha is described as being rich, intelligent, and philanthropic, when Mervyn, the novel’s protagonist, realizes that he has fallen in love withher, his friend and father figure Dr Stevens, the arbiter of bourgeoisrespectability, tries to dissuade him from espousing a “dark and sallow” “foreigner” who is “unsightly as a night-hag, tawney as a Moor…[and with] less luxuriance than a charred log” (Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1799. Kent, Ohio 1980, p. 432). In a similar vein, the Portuguese Jewish physician Jacob Lumbrozo, who arrived in Maryland in 1656, was referred to in a court proceeding as a “blacke man,” and was sexually rejected by a number of white women, even those of low status, because he was an olive-complected Jew from the Iberian peninsula. See Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.New York 1996, p. 269.

the eighteenth-century British West Indies chose to form their own,

transnational variant of the “great tangled cousinry,” one whose goals and

practices were highly distinct from those associated with that of colonial

Virginia and the rest of British North America.