Jews and Free People of Color in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
A Case Study in Experiential and Ethnic Entanglement
STANLEY MIRVIS
Abraham Henriques de Souza was a mid-eighteenth-century Jewish planter in Jamaica’s Saint Catherine parish. In Jamaica he stood at a crossroads of the entangled strands of the supra-imperial Portuguese diaspora with familial connections to both Amsterdam and London. He associated with the Portuguese Jewish community of Saint Jago de la Vega, requested a Jewish burial and a memorial prayer, and supported the Jewish orphan society. Like many of his Jewish and non-Jewish male counterparts in Jamaica, he found an alternative to marriage through a long-term relationship with Phillis, a free black woman, “who has lived with me for many years.”1 Abraham and Phillis had two “mulatto” daughters, Sarah and Rebecca Souza, who inherited their mother’s limited freedom. Abraham died in 1773, and a year later his daughter Rebecca, a baptized Christian, received a personal privileges bill.2
This privileges bill elevated Rebecca above other free people of color in Jamaica by empowering her to testify against white Christians in court and exempting her from “deficiency” fees that penalized planters with a greater ratio of African-descendent over white laborers on their estates. Ironically, exemption from these fees gave Rebecca a slight economic advantage over her Jewish father. This exemption may indeed have been Rebecca’s principal motivation in petitioning for a privileges bill. By 1811, as debates over civil enfranchisement for people like her and her father raged in the Jamaican Assembly, she was in possession of a substantial enslaved labor force of her own.3 Like other free people of color, Rebecca participated in the slave regime perhaps in part to undermine it from within by acting as a patron to enslaved kin and associates. This possibility is supported by her conspicuous manumission of nearly half of her slaves in her will. Still, even with a privileges bill, Rebecca, like her Jewish father and her free black mother, was prohibited from voting in elections, sitting on juries, or holding public office.
Rebecca Souza is the literal embodiment of the experiential, ethnic, and legal entanglements of the Atlantic world. Not only did Jews and free people of color possess nearly identical civil rights in Jamaica, and not only did white Christians stereotypically homogenize the two groups, but in the person of Rebecca and others like her, Jews and free people of color were literally one and the same. Rebecca was baptized as a Christian, and she may very well have been sincere in that faith, but she was ethnically Jewish, and she bore a name marking her as such, indistinguishable from other Jewish women on the island.4
When Rebecca died in the early nineteenth century, mixed-ancestry lobbyists together with the Board of Trade in London and abolitionists at home and abroad were pressuring the Jamaican Assembly to pass greater legal privileges for free people of color. At the same time, the assembly worried about the stagnation of white population growth in comparison to free people of color as well as the potential influence of revolutionary ideals emanating from Haiti. These factors combined to force the assembly to confront the inevitability that free people of color must be incorporated into civil society with full voting rights.5 Jews, who were similarly disenfranchised, feared falling behind free people of color in the march toward suffrage and initiated their own civil rights campaign. So began two decades of acrimonious competition between Jews and free people of color. Despite the undermining obstructionism of this competitiveness there were also some short-lived bursts of unity.
Some historians have argued that Jews undermined free people of color at the moment of Emancipation because of the Jews’ aspirational, and essentially racist, association with white Christian planters. Those same historians assert that free people of color undermined Jews as a result of their own aspirational acculturation in keeping with the expectations of white plantocracy.6 Contrary to this interpretation, this chapter argues that the competitive bid for civil liberties in the early nineteenth century represents a culmination of a century of experiential and legal entanglement between Jews and free people of color. Their competitiveness was the product of their existential commonality rather than their attempts to graft themselves onto white Christian society.
This chapter is a study of interethnic entanglement.7 That is, rather that approaching the history of Jews and free people of color comparatively, or as parallel pasts, it rather identifies points of contact and overlapping experiences. It then assesses the ways those points of contact created the conditions for competitive Emancipation in the early nineteenth century. “Entanglement” as a mode of inquiry challenges ethnic history in isolation, moves beyond the study of similarities in order to appreciate commonalities, and is a methodological refraction of the ethnic and cultural hybridities of the early modern Atlantic world.
Commonality is a term central to this analysis. Did Jews have more in common with free people of color than with white Christian settlers? Did white Christian settlers perceive Jews to have more in common with free people of color? And did free people of color see themselves as sharing more in common with Jews than with other free blacks or the enslaved? Commonality is a matter of perspective or even ideology. Sometimes, when it suited one goal, white Christian writers and lawmakers homogenized Jews and free people of color, and at other times, when it suited another goal, they disentangled them.
This chapter identifies four points of contact shared by Jews and free people of color in eighteenth-century Jamaica: civil liberties, urbanization, militia service, and fetishization. It concludes by describing the entangled competitiveness between Jews and free people of color in their race for civil liberties. But first, this chapter examines the experiences of Jews and free people of color in isolation, as parallel but not overlapping histories, in order to provide a point of reference for their entanglement.
Parallel Paths: Jamaica’s Free People of Color
The knotted chords of entanglement that tied Jews and free people of color together in Jamaica were not inevitable. Their respective paths of migration and experiences upon arrival in Jamaica were decidedly disconnected. It was Jamaica itself, and the hybridity of the Atlantic world more broadly, that intricately entangled their destinies. The most glaring experiential difference between Jews and free people of color is that Jews migrated by choice, had not been enslaved, and had not experienced the irregular process of transitioning from bondage to freedom.8
British Jamaica was a slave society, that is, the majority of the inhabitants of the island were owned. By 1740, as sugar production boomed, Jamaican factors imported over seven thousand slaves a year.9 In 1755, the enslaved made up nearly 90 percent of the total Jamaican population. On the eve of Emancipation in 1834, as the free people of color population grew, that of the enslaved fell to 84 percent, still a staggering majority.10 Unlike in Dutch and Spanish colonies, where there existed some legal gradations of unfreedom, no such distinctions existed in Jamaica.11 However, owners grafted external structural hierarchies onto the enslaved. For example, enslaved domestic servants sometimes held different privileges than enslaved plantation workers, enslaved overseers held authority over enslaved laborers, and children of owners who inherited their mothers’ enslavement often held different expectations of treatment and hopes for freedom.
The enslaved maintained their own internal status distinctions. Most Africans transplanted to Jamaica before the 1770s were ethnically Akan from the highly centralized societies of the Gold Coast in modern-day Ghana.12 In some sites, the enslaved and the Maroons perpetuated conflicts from this war-torn region and entangled those struggles with local Jamaican politics.13 Some among the enslaved looked toward Akan nobility for leadership, especially during Tacky’s Revolt in 1760.14
Freedom, along with all of its contradictions and limitations, was the only legally binding social distinction among blacks and racially blended people in Jamaica. Slavery was governed by the terms of the relatively fixed 1664 Slave Code and its few amendments. An amendment in 1717 provided incentives for owners to indoctrinate the enslaved with Christianity but did nothing to incentivize the enslaved to accept Christianity beyond a vague promise of becoming more “civilized.”15 Indeed, the slave code allowed for only a single path to freedom, manumission, which was achieved either by act of assembly or through the use of the devise in a will.
Manumission was extremely rare in colonial Jamaica, as in other Atlantic slave societies.16 During the 1770s, only around 165 individuals were freed each year from among an enslaved population of 192,787, that is, less than 0.1 percent.17 In addition, most of those manumissions took place in towns even though most of the enslaved lived in rural parishes.18 Despite the low frequency of manumission, Jamaica had the largest population of free people of color in the English Atlantic, by far. In the 1770s there were over 4,000 free people of color living in Jamaica, compared to fewer than 850 in Barbados.19 In absolute numbers, Jamaica’s population of free people of color was comparable to that in Curaçao, although its share of the total population was smaller than in the Dutch island, and surpassed Dutch Suriname, another plantation-oriented slave society, where there were less than 3,000 according to the 1811 census.20 Free people of color were also Jamaica’s fastest growing community. By 1788 the population had grown by over 137 percent to around 9,500.21 Yet, despite Jamaica’s overwhelming presence of free people of color, the population came nowhere close to that in Saint-Domingue, which was home to around 25,000 free people of color at the time of the Haitian Revolution.22
In Jamaica, unlike other parts of the English Atlantic, free people of color were permitted to reside in the colony indefinitely following their manumission.23 Borrowing from similar legislation in New York, in 1774 the Jamaican Legislature required the use of a security bond paid out annually to free individuals, providing a potential path for them to participate in the economy by ensuring a stable, if inadequate, income. This lifetime annuity also served to discourage the frivolous use of manumission.24
Most manumitted people in Jamaica were the children of white owners and enslaved women of African ancestry, generally referred to as “mulattos.”25 Manumission was a rare reward, typically for the “faithful service” of a domestic laborer or compensation for public service, or was purchased by the enslaved individual out of the profits earned from leasing their labor. Manumission was sometimes a manipulative tool wielded by white owners to incentivize obedience and not a recognition of freedom as a natural right.26 By the early nineteenth century, less than 20 percent of freed people were referred to as “negroes,” meaning blacks without European ancestry.27 It is for this reason that Jamaican legislators and writers often used the term “mulattos” synonymously with free people of color.
The rarity of free blacks contributed to a deeply colorist ethos within the freed community that was stratified along lines of wealth and complexion. Those with lighter skin or greater degree of separation from a black ancestor held considerably more social capital. Indeed, many lighter-skinned people and those with white fathers sometimes held an expectation of privileges apart from freedom from slavery as part of a patrilineal birthright.28
Atlantic slave ownership is not synonymous with whiteness. On the contrary, owning slaves was a concrete way for free people of color to actualize their economic agency. Some scholars have suggested that slave ownership among free people of color was used as a way to subvert the slave system and to support their relatives, as much as it was used as an instrument of their economic and social advancement.29 In this way, free people of color exercised the paradoxical role of guardians by enslaving their relatives and associates thereby preventing their sale to white masters.30 For many it was simpler, cheaper, and faster to informally offer haven to enslaved kin rather than negotiate the expensive bureaucracy of manumission.
Parallel Paths: Jamaica’s Jews
Jews in Jamaica had very different origins than free people of color. All Jews in Jamaica came to the island willingly, and none had personal memories of bondage. But Jamaican slave society blurred the lines of their freedom. The blended children of Jewish men in Jamaica inherited the enslavement of their mothers. Jews of color in Jamaica, as in other similar colonies, challenge a binary distinction between Jews and enslaved people, or the association of Jewishness with whiteness. It was among this rather elusive population of Jews of color that experiential entanglement was literally embodied.
The vast majority of Jews in eighteenth-century Jamaica were Portuguese. They had all, at one point, been conversos or direct descendants of conversos, meaning Catholics with Jewish ancestry. They belonged to a transcendent global diaspora consisting of Portuguese-speaking re-Judaized “New Jews” and conversos interlinked throughout networks of trade, patronage, and marriage that extended from the Caribbean to western Europe, Livorno, India, West Africa, and beyond. As such, the Jews of Jamaica existed within a confluence of political entanglement, looking both toward the diasporic mother community of Amsterdam and the imperial metropole of London as sources of authority. Their strong ties to Bayonne in southern France entangled them further into the web of supraimperial politics: they resided in an English colony yet existed in the Atlantic world, transcending the imagined borders separating the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch Empires.
Like other Atlantic diasporas, Portuguese Jewish communities and families were bonded together through networks of patronage.31 Jews, like Irish, Huguenots, Quakers, Moravians, and Mennonites, facilitated the migration of their kin through sponsorship such as offering inheritance, employment, communal membership, dowries, or financial investments. Portuguese Jews in English Jamaica, as in other parts of the diaspora, used these patronal tools to incentivize the migration of their converso kin to “lands of tolerance” and to encourage their adoption of rabbinic Judaism.32 These patterns of patronage represent a parallel, though not intersecting, point of comparison with those free people of color in Jamaica who used slave ownership as a form of familial patronage.
As early as the 1670s, the Crown-appointed governors of Jamaica promoted a policy of religious tolerance. This was a purely mercantile, rather than humanitarian or ecumenical, consideration in an effort to grow the trade economy. Jews in Jamaica without a personal Act of Naturalization from Parliament could purchase a certificate of denization granting them access to the court system and permitting landowner-ship. But whereas children inherited their parents’ naturalized status, denization was not effective in perpetuity nor did it exempt the beneficiary from expensive alien trade tariffs. In 1740, hundreds of Jamaican Jews took advantage of an unprecedented legislation granting them access to perpetual citizenship through residency rather than purchased legislation. Seemingly, the 1740 Naturalization Act should have fully enfranchised Jews, but they were still denied basic civil rights such as holding public office, voting in elections, practicing law, or serving on juries.
These were just some of the roadblocks to the civil integration of the Jews in Jamaica. Anti-Jewish hostilities intensified after a devastating earthquake in June 1692. White Christian merchants continued an aggressively Judeophobic pre-1692 campaign to curtail Jewish trade activity. The assembly extorted Jews with discriminatory taxation until 1740. Late eighteenth-century white Christian pseudo-ethnographers polemically ridiculed, fetishized, eroticized, and stereotyped Jews. And on at least one occasion a mob physically threatened Jews in Kingston’s Portuguese synagogue.33
Jamaica’s Jewish population never grew far beyond a thousand individuals in the eighteenth century and was subject to significant fluctuations. They were never more than 6 to 8 percent of the free population, making them far less numerous than free people of color (keeping in mind that some free people of color also held Jewish identities). They were nevertheless a conspicuous minority and experienced their own growth patterns that proportionally made them one of the most successfully replicated populations on the island. They also significantly contributed to the urban growth of Jamaica through residency in towns and large-scale real estate ventures.34
Like free people of color, Jews sustained their own internal ethnic and class hierarchies. Parallel to the colorist distinctions prevalent among free people of color who sometimes asserted a sense of social superiority over free blacks and the enslaved, the more numerous Portuguese Jews often marginalized German-descendent, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, who comprised a minority of the broader Jewish population. Ashkenazim did not communally separate from their Portuguese coreligionists in Jamaica until the 1790s, much later than in Suriname, and were deferential and even dependent on them. Portuguese Jews embraced a posture of ethnic superiority—even contempt—over the Ashkenazim that strongly manifested in their marriage patterns.35
Four Points of Contact: Jews and Free People of Color
The foregoing survey demonstrates that Jews and free people of color in Jamaica provide numerous points of comparison. This comparative analysis is a point of reference from which to identify where parallel experiences connect, overlap, and entangle. While not an exhaustive list, I identify four points of contact: civil liberties and lobbies, urbanization, militia service and sedition, and alien stereotyping and fetishization.
Civil Liberties and Lobbies, 1692–1760
Jews and free people of color had nearly identical civil rights in Jamaica, with some few, but important, exceptions. Both groups also lobbied for the amelioration of their civil status through aggressively coordinated transatlantic diplomacy, far more so than any other outsider groups. Legally, Jews had far more in common with free people of color than with white Christians, and free people of color shared more in common with Jews than with the enslaved. This was a stark reality especially since other alien and dissenter groups including German Moravians, French Huguenots, Dutch Calvinists, and Quakers had no such legal disabilities, and in any case, intermarried with the white Anglican society within a few generations.36 Historians of Jamaica have frequently commented on this enmeshment. Holly Snyder writes, “Jews occupied their own peculiar place in British America, one which, when seen by a certain light, was more akin to the position of the Indians and those freed people of African background.”37 Similarly, Daniel Livesay writes more bluntly that “Jamaica law effectively put Jews into the same legal category as free people of color.”38 More broadly, in the words of the art historian Nicholas Mirzoeff, “the hybridity generated by diaspora is not just an interaction with the ‘host’ nation, but among diasporas themselves.”39
Successive crises, including the Port Royal earthquake in 1692, the French invasion in 1694, and the Port Royal warehouse fire of 1703, compelled Jews to agitate for greater civil equality in the first decade of the eighteenth century. At this time, Jews gained the support of the Board of Trade in London in their efforts to challenge the assembly’s discriminatory Jewish tax. In 1708 Jews initiated an energetic lobby campaign on the floor of the assembly. Concomitantly, and perhaps motivated by many of the same factors, free people of color also began their own vigorous campaign for greater civil rights.40 The 1708 lobbies succeeded in convincing the assembly to debate the efficacy of, but not to repeal, the Jewish tax and to grant free people of color the right to trial by jury—a right held by Jewish denizens.
After granting these few concessions, the assembly responded to the emboldened lobbies of 1708 by resolving to codify the disabilities of Jews and free people of color so as to formally deny suffrage to both groups.41 This resolution resulted in a 1711 legislation that formally barred nonwhite and non-Christian groups from holding public office and, with the phrase “no Jew, Mulatto, Indian, or negro, shall be . . . empowered to write in,” uncompromisingly prohibited them from casting votes for representatives to the assembly.42 This law entangled the legal status of Jews and free people of color by including them under the same umbrella of disabilities. Such sweeping language was not unique to this act alone, or even to Jamaica, but its impact in Jamaica was staggering. With this law the assembly established a colonial legal precedent through which it could later resist meddlesome metropolitan legal standards regarding alien rights.
The discriminatory 1711 legislation did not diminish the resolve of the lobbyists or their supporters on the Board of Trade. Over the next four years, Jews with the support of the board aggressively lobbied the assembly to remove the Jewish tax. Simultaneously, the board pressured the colonial government to increase civil liberties for free people of color, which the assembly rejected with some limited concessions.43 The Board consistently advocated on behalf of the disenfranchised with the goal of increasing tariff revenues and stimulating population growth. It furthermore supported both lobbies by submitting recommendations to the governor based on key informant interviews demonstrating the deleterious effects of civil disabilities on Jews and free people of color alike.44 Inasmuch as the assembly’s discrimination entangled the legal fortunes of Jews and free people of color, the board’s support did much the same.
Military tensions between the Portland Maroons (autonomous black communities) and the Jamaican militia between 1730 and 1740 reignited debates over the civil liberties of resident aliens in Jamaica. Approaching Maroons as a domestic threat, the assembly feared their possible alliance with disaffected minorities. In 1730 the assembly passed, and later repealed, a highly discriminatory legislation imposing sumptuary restrictions on free people of color, including the requirement to wear a distinctive badge.45 At the same time, the assembly debated imposing higher taxes on Jews.46
In 1733, against the backdrop of the First Maroon War, the assembly voted to grant personal privileges bills to petitioners of color who could prove European ancestry, Christianity, and a certain amount of wealth, including slave ownership.47 Privileges bills grew out of a preexisting “blanching program” through which, theoretically, a person of color three times removed from a black ancestor might qualify to vote.48 The assembly deemed privileges bills necessary during the war as a “civilizing” measure to placate the protests of free people of color, and to also create a bulwark against rebellious slaves and combative Maroons. Some historians argue that privilege bills were meant to reinforce the slave regime by providing former slaves, or their children, with upward social mobility and to encourage population growth through miscegenation.49
These personal privileges bills granted to free people of color were, however, extremely rare and did not offer uniform rights to all recipients. Individuals with privileges generally could testify against white Christians in civil court and were exempted from deficiency requirements.50 This exemption was especially coveted since free people of color, like Jews, were prohibited from holding white Christian indentured labor and therefore had a greater proportion of black labor on their estates. But privilege bills generally did not endow the petitioner with voting rights or the power to serve in elected office. They were also rare, granted to only 128 people throughout the eighteenth century out of around 700 applicants.51
Between 1740 and 1760, as Jamaica’s plantation economy peaked, colonial and metropolitan authorities alike were more forthcoming with civil liberties in response to the growing wealth of Jews and free people of color, along with a greater dependency on these two groups to bolster Jamaica’s trade economy.52 In 1740, Parliament passed the Naturalization Act that seemingly appeared to promise full civil equality to Jews as a reward for residency. In effect, the colonial law of 1711 limited its application. Nevertheless, those who applied for naturalization after 1740 formed a privileged class among the Jews, similar to those few people of color who had succeeded in obtaining privileges bills. The possibility of transcending alien disabilities through applying for naturalization or a privileges bill further entangled the experiences of Jews and free people of color.
The possibility of transcending legal disabilities during this period emboldened a few privileged individuals to assert their civil rights in defiance of the law. In 1750, Abraham Sanches Morao, a Jew naturalized by the 1740 act, brazenly cast a vote for his member of assembly. This defiant performance of civil rights only reinforced the disdainful attitude of the assembly and also drew censure from London Jewish community leaders, who preferred a less confrontational approach.53 Similarly, in 1759, Francis Williams, a celebrated London-educated free person of color, educational reformer, and civil rights activist, impudently wrote a highly circulated ode to the sitting governor of Jamaica calling for social and legal parity with whites.54 This highly public plea was similarly met with aggressive disdain from the white planter class.55
Disenfranchisement is one of the most powerful symbols of entanglement between Jews and free people of color, who were both denied voting rights in the exact same legislation. Their lobbying activities overlapped in time and character. The assembly reacted identically to audacious civil rights activists, free people of color in 1733 and Jews in 1750, by reinforcing the denial of voting rights.56 Furthermore, the association of Jews and free people of color in debates over suffrage fostered a popular perception that they were even racially linked. One anti-Jewish petitioner celebrated the assembly’s denial of Jewish suffrage in 1750 on the grounds that Jews were not only infidels but also “mulatto[s] of the fourth degree,” therefore doubly disqualified.57 From the perspective of this petitioner, Jews and free people of color were more or less one and the same.
Urban Enclaves
Jamaican towns, especially Kingston, were crucibles of ethnic and experiential entanglement. In an island with a mostly rural population, especially among the enslaved, Jews and free people of color were conspicuously urban. In a pattern familiar throughout the Americas, persisting well into the twentieth century, Jews and people of color settled together in the same districts.58 In Kingston, Jews and free people of color dwelled together in the southwestern part of the town near the wharf and the “negro” burial grounds.
Half of the island’s free people of color lived in Kingston. By 1788, it is estimated that free people of color comprised 12 percent of the total—enslaved and free—population of Kingston.59 Jamaican Jews were likewise highly centralized in Kingston. Even the Jews who dwelled on estates in rural parishes typically owned real estate in the town.60 Similar patterns of urban concentration of Jews and free people of color were found in the Dutch Caribbean ports of Paramaribo and Willemstad, which in this regard closely resembled Kingston.61 This clustering was apparent to white Christian observers such as Edward Long who lumped Jews and free people of color together in his descriptions of urban spaces. For instance, Long described the Village of the Cross in Clarendon Parish as an exclusively Jewish and “Mulatto” settlement.62 Similarly, Long’s robust characterization of Jews was folded into his thematic portrayals of Kingston and Spanish Town, as if Jews were fixtures of town life.63
Jews and free people of color in Jamaica had more in common than residency in the same neighborhoods. In the 1790s, hundreds of French-speaking migrants from Saint-Domingue fleeing the Haitian Revolution settled in the southwestern district of Kingston. Most of these transplants also had African ancestry and therefore joined with the town’s free population of color.64 The arrival of French speaking people of color in Kingston represents a further point of contact with the Jews who were also perceived to have been French by virtue of their strong transatlantic connections to the towns of Bayonne and Bordeaux.65
One illustrative manifestation of the entanglement of Jews, urban spaces, people of color, and French character is seen in Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837 lithographic portrayal of Afro-creole Kingston street culture. In one of the scenes, the Jew Belisario—the grandson of the Bordeaux-born and iconically French Alexandre Lindo—complimentarily portrays the elegant and graceful “French Set-Girls,” distinctly dressed French creole dancers who participated in Kingston’s Christmas parade.66 The accompanying description refers to the large-scale migration of people of color from Saint-Domingue to Kingston in 1794. This one scene represents a powerful confluence of the intertwined experiences of being Jewish, French, and of mixed ancestry within Kingston’s urban street culture.
Militia Service and Sedition
Militia service provided Jews and free people of color with one of the few points of access to Jamaican public life beyond the markets. Although excluded from civil society, the colonial government expected Jews and free people of color to participate in the military defense of the island. As such, militia service was often a point of pride for alienated minorities and also a key way for them to leverage amelioration of their civil status.
In 1695, nearly every Jewish male between the ages of fifteen and sixty served in the militia, earning commendation from the governor.67 Jewish lobbyists later leveraged their militia service to combat civil disabilities. Similar to Curaçao and other parts of the Caribbean, colonial administrators held strong expectations of military service for free people of color.68 In 1730, the assembly voted to impress them into active duty guided by the belief that people of color were more fitting than whites as soldiers against Maroons.69 This policy was later overturned. By 1813, free men of color made up as much as 46 percent of the Jamaican militia.70 Jamaica’s governors likewise extended commendations to free people of color for their energetic participation during both the First and Second Maroon Wars.71 Free people of color, in turn, leveraged their military service for greater civil equality.
Militia service was paradoxically a point of both social inclusion and exclusion for Jews and free people of color. Despite earning praise for minority groups, compulsory militia service was one of the starkest markers of ethnic difference in Jamaica. Jewish protests over militia service on their Sabbath—coming from both Jamaica and London—provided fodder to Christian colonists to lampoon Jewish difference, lack of masculinity, and manipulativeness. These anti-Jewish sentiments were at the forefront during Tacky’s Revolt when the sitting governor criticized Jews for supposedly paying their way out of militia service.72 By the 1790s the Jamaican militia was segregated with exclusively “mulatto” and Jewish companies.73
For both Jews and free people of color no amount of faithful military service could diminish the preconceived assumption held by many white Christian observers that they were seditious by nature. The colonial government accused free people of color of supporting the Maroons in the 1730s, even though they also praised them for their service.74 Interrogators similarly accused Jews of providing Maroons with gunpowder.75 During the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, many believed Jamaican Jews to be French collaborators.76 During the Haitian Revolution, the white ruling class expressed anxiety that local free people of color might hold similar revolutionary ambitions. In one case, fears of Jewish-French collusion and free people of color’s revolutionary potential were entangled in the actions of a single individual. In 1799, the colonial government executed the French Jew Isaac Yeshurun Sasportas of Saint-Domingue for attempting to foment revolution among the Portland Maroons.77
Utility, Fetishization, and Stereotyping
Accusations that Jews and free people of color treasonously joined forces with Maroons, despite their otherwise praiseworthy militia service, speaks to a general tendency in colonial Jamaica to essentialize alien minorities. Edward Long, for example, characterized most Jews as unscrupulous and most free people of color as amoral.78 Sometimes Jews were even fetishized as “mulatto.” Long commented that if miscegenation trends in Jamaica were to continue unchecked, “English blood will become so contaminated . . . till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese.”79 Another writer expressed concern over the contamination of English blood and complexion through the “mixing with Jews and negroes.”80 Whereas in metropolitan England Jews were often derogatorily conflated with religious dissenters such as Quakers, in Jamaican slave society they were most closely associated with free people of color.81
Historian Brooke Newman argues that the limited privileges granted to Jews and free people of color rested upon stereotypes about their innate nature.82 Privileges were rewards for utility, not humanitarian benevolence. The colonial government suffered Jewish denization because of Jews’ economic utility to the island and their alleged adoration of profit, believed to be fixed in their nature. Lawmakers extended limited rights to free people of color in recognition of their utility as laborers and because of their perceived natural ability to withstand harsh tropical climates. In other words, Jews were expected to pay for their rights whereas free blacks and people of color were expected to work for them.
White Christian colonists measured the utility of both Jews and free people of color according to their contribution to the slave system. In this, however, Jews and free people of color stood at opposite sides of the spectrum. Whereas policy makers saw free people of color as a necessary bulwark to slavery, they believed Jews undermined it. On the one hand, the assembly hoped that privileges for people of color would motivate the enslaved to work for advancement rather than to rebel.83 On the other hand, white Christian lawmakers sometimes justified Jewish disabilities in light of the accusation that Jews colluded with the enslaved at Sunday markets. Some feared that disloyal Jews and the enslaved might join together if the Jews could be sufficiently enticed with profit.84 Although not enslaved themselves, Jews and free people of color were entangled by and within slave society.
Stereotyped perceptions of Jews’ and free people of color’s slave-owning patterns provides a further point of contact between caricaturing, utility, and the slave regime. White Christian planters accused both Jews and free people of color of being excessively cruel slave owners.85 This canard might be understood as absolution through projection. That is, white planters responded to abolitionist critics by blaming the cruelty of the slave regime on alien outsiders. Historian Gad Heuman, however, takes this lampoon at face value and argues that free people of color perpetrated excessive violence against the enslaved out of a compulsive drive to compensate for their low status.86 Jews were likewise accused of being pathologically abusive slave owners in Jamaica as in other slave societies such as Suriname.87 But for Jews it was their alleged addiction to maximizing profit, rather than a drive to acculturate, that supposedly motivated their violence.88
The 1813 Civil Rights Act: A Competitive Entanglement
A century of experiential and legal entanglement joining Jews and free people of color in Jamaica culminated with the debates over enfranchisement between 1812 and 1831. By lumping Jews and free people of color together, white Christian lawmakers effectively pitted them against each other, adding a competitive edge to the race for Emancipation. In this race, Jews and free people of color measured their successes and failures against one another.
As in other places, Emancipation was a process rather than a rupture. In Jamaica, Emancipation was also entangled in the abolition of slavery. Abolitionists first began to influence colonial policy in the early 1780s by proposing major revisions to Jamaica’s slave code.89 Empowered by this abolitionist support of the enslaved, and inspired by the revolutions in France and Haiti, free people of color throughout the Atlantic world energetically advocated for their own civil rights throughout the 1790s. In Jamaica these passionate efforts resulted in improved privileges for people of color in criminal proceedings.90 This success was a doubled-edged sword. Having approved these modestly expanded civil liberties for all free people of color, the assembly voted in 1802 to abolish the practice of granting personal privileges bills.
In 1813, two decades of lobbying culminated in a partially successful petition to the assembly signed by two thousand free people of color calling for greater civil liberties. The assembly responded with the Civil Rights Edict that normalized free people of color’s rights to testify in court, abolished inheritance caps (in place since 1761), and exempted all free people of color from deficiency penalties.91 The act was interpreted by lawmakers as intended to put free people of color on “the same footing with a very respectable class of inhabitants, the Hebrews.”92 Indeed it did just that. These interpretations of the act made it clear that in terms of civil liberties Jews and free people of color would be considered in relation to each other.
Driven by the energy of free people of color, and their successes, Jews lobbied for greater civil equality around the same time. Their initial efforts, however, were articulated in terms of rivalry rather than solidarity. Both groups laid claim to priority in gaining civil rights, free people of color by virtue of their demographic significance and their Christianity, and Jews by virtue of their wealth and lighter complexion. In the most acute manifestation of this rivalry, in 1812, three Jews confrontationally objected to free people of color’s attempt to seek legal parity with them.93
Historians have explained the 1812 Jewish objection as stemming from a Jewish ambition to be considered together with white Christians rather than free people of color.94 In this reading, Jews were insulted by the assembly’s wording to create legal parity between them and free people of color. The historians Isaac and Edith Hurwitz described the Jewish mentality in 1812 as one troubled by the prospect that “for the first time the possession of a white skin, if by a Jew, carried with it no more privileges than that of a colored citizen of Jamaica.”95 Gad Heuman argues that Jews objected because their wealth and their lighter skin naturally connected them more to the white plantocracy than to free people of color.96 These interpretations ignore a century of inter-ethnic entanglement between Jews and free people of color. They falsely associate Jews with wealth, when in reality most Jews in Jamaica, as in other parts of the Caribbean, were poor. They also falsely equate Jewishness with whiteness.
The historian Holly Snyder expressed discomfort with this polarized interpretation of Jewish opposition to free people of color and argued that such readings overemphasize differences rather than similarities.97 Instead, she contextualized the competitiveness in terms of deep-rooted anxieties over social status and deemphasized the racialized aspects. Taking into account a century of entanglement between Jews and free people of color preceding these events is the next step toward nuancing and building upon this position.
Jews were always more connected to free people of color than they ever were to white Christians. After all, the assembly and other white Christian commentators clearly saw them as inhabiting the same tier of society. To fully understand the Jews’ objection in 1812, emphasis should be placed on their desire to disentangle from free people of color rather than to entangle themselves with white Christians. In other words, 1813 did not mark the start of a trend to artificially homogenize Jews and free people of color to which the Jews objected, but rather it was a culmination of a preexisting legal and experiential parity between the two. Having shared the same social status, lived together in the same neighborhoods, been insultingly stereotyped by white Christian society, and created families together, the success of one group bruised the honor of the other.
The Race for Suffrage
Encouraged by the results of 1813, free people of color, with support from the Crown, renewed their suffrage lobby in 1816.98 Jews followed suit. In July 1820, Levy Hyman, perhaps hoping to gain an edge over free people of color, attempted to vote for his representative to the assembly.99 This was the second time in seventy years that Jews asserted voting rights. But this time was different. Even though Jews were again denied suffrage in 1820, Hyman pressed his claim in court, a bold demonstration of his conviction.100 And free people of color responded to Jewish civil rights efforts by again pushing for their own suffrage in 1823.101 The failures and successes of one lobby mutually reinforced the other—the perfect expression of entanglement.
In October 1826, the Jewish community leader Moses Delgado anonymously authored a “petition of merchants” to the assembly calling for Jewish suffrage. The core of his argument spoke to the competitive character of Emancipation in Jamaica. Delgado suggested that it would be a “great anomaly” for darker skinned people to achieve voting rights before lighter skinned Jews, that is, it would be unnatural “were civil rights and immunities granted to certain persons, who may have been formerly the slaves of Jews.”102 Free people of color in turn countered with their own petition arguing that it would be equally anomalous to grant equality to unfaithful Jews before Christians of color, especially those with light complexions.103
Delgado’s petition bore fruit. The assembly passed an act in December 1826 granting full civil equality to Jews, including the right to vote. Despite this apparent success, however, aggressive lobbying efforts hardened the assembly’s antialien posture. It summarily rejected the earlier petition of free people of color. Jewish success seemed to have come at a cost to people of color. However, the act granting voting rights to Jews was only a symbolic gesture. The assembly obstructed the implementation of Jewish suffrage by first requiring approval from the Crown, effectively delaying its implementation for the next five years.
In February 1830, emboldened by a supportive Whig majority in Parliament, free people of color mounted an aggressive yearlong campaign to secure voting rights against strong local opposition.104 The recalcitrant assembly finally conceded, perhaps hoping to prevent a full-scale revolution in Jamaica.105 In December 1830, the assembly enfranchised free people of color. And this time, unlike in 1812, Jews supported free people of color, believing that the assembly would never extend suffrage to people of color before them.106 But, to the surprise of the Jewish lobby, that is what happened, and the short-lived unity between Jews and free people of color quickly dissolved.
In 1830, with their earlier grant of enfranchisement delayed by colonial power politics, Jews fell behind in the race for civil equality. George IV’s Privy Council argued that monarchical approval of the 1826 bill was unnecessary since voting rights were supposedly included in the 1740 Naturalization Act. The assembly countered that Parliament’s law was nullified by the colonial act of 1711. Sympathetic members of assembly subsequently petitioned the governor of Jamaica pointing out that it was a “peculiar situation” that Jews were now the only free people without suffrage rights and hoped he might press the issue with the Crown.107
Finally, in July 1831, the Crown granted its consent, and the assembly approved the 1826 act along with supplementary legislation intended to prevent further obstruction.108 Given the extensive layers of entanglement between disenfranchised groups and the slave system, it is perhaps no coincidence that five months later the Baptist preacher Sam Sharpe spearheaded an armed revolt calling for an end to slavery, beginning the long-drawn-out process of abolition.
The often-violent encounters of the Atlantic world facilitated ethnic and cultural blending, even among peoples and traditions with little preexisting contact. Such was the case with Jews and free people of color. In some ways their experiences were comparable—their mutual cultivation of diasporic identities and their patterns of patronage, for example—but rarely did those experiences overlap or become entangled. The racialized legal hierarchies of eighteenth-century Jamaica’s slave regime, conceived of by white Christian planters, was one source of external fusion. White Christian lawmakers amalgamated Jews and free people of color into an essentially singular legal category. These same white Christians also stereotyped both groups in nearly identical ways, sometimes even by conflating their complexions and almost always in connection to their utility to the slave system.
Life in colonial Jamaica also engendered experiential, cultural, and ethnic hybridities among Jews and free people of color independent of white Christian pressure. Jews and free people of color inhabited the same urban neighborhoods and created families together, which led to an existential bonding. Urbanization generated commonality, especially by dislocating free people of color from the enslaved population of rural parishes. Most profoundly, sexual relations between Jews and disenfranchised women of African descent, both free and enslaved, gave rise to a significant population of people of color with ethnically or even religiously Jewish identities. Jews of color were a significant enough population in Jamaica for some white Christian polemicists to indiscreetly conflate Jews and “mulattos.” For these individuals, Jewishness and African ancestry were literally and inseparably entangled categories.
During the debates over enfranchisement, lawmakers weighed the cases of Jews and free people of color against one another. Assemblymen and lobbyists alike spoke in terms of creating parity between the two groups in recognition of their shared legal heritage. It was this entanglement that fostered the competition between Jews and free people of color. Having been joined for a century, it was a detriment to the honor of one if the other received civil liberties first. Jews and free people of color undermined each other only because they measured their successes against each other’s failures.
Each of these trends was embodied in the life of Rebecca Souza. She was ethnically Jewish, of mixed ancestry, and religiously identified as a Christian: a powerful symbol of Atlantic entanglement. At birth, Rebecca’s legal status in Jamaica was identical to that of her Jewish father and free black mother. But when Rebecca received a personal privileges bill in 1774, she gained a slight economic advantage. Rebecca’s Jewish father broke the cycle of inherited civil disabilities by producing a racially blended child who was baptized as a Christian. Rebecca’s privileged status, limited though it was, paradoxically legally disentangled her from the Jewish experience even though she qualified for those same privileges by virtue of her father’s European ancestry and lighter complexion. This was but a foreshadowing of the competition that would play out between the two groups for civil rights at the time of her death in 1811.