Great Tangled Cousinries? Jewish Intermarriage in the British West Indies

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

7^Cecily 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].

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].

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.

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 notably

dissimilar 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 life

for 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 as

large as a thousand (in 1780s Curacao), but it is important to keep in mind that

census data may not in these instances accurately reflect reality, as many West

Indian Jews frequently relocated throughout the region, rather than making their

permanent 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).

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.

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].

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).

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.

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].

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].

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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, 2^nd.ed. New York 2011, pp. 90-91. Jon Butler suggests that Oliver’s secrecy about the marriage reflected his anxiety that 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.

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.

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.

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].

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

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 with

her, his friend and father figure Dr Stevens, the arbiter of bourgeois

respectability, 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.