Sex with Slaves and the Business of Governance
The Case of Barbados
AVIVA BEN-UR
This chapter focuses on an extremely small Jewish community that numbered at its peak in the mid-eighteenth century a few hundred individuals. Yet, as I will argue, paradigmatic things happened there, and one mandate of Atlantic Jewish history is that one must consider both large and small communities. Moreover, the Jewish community of Barbados was very long-lived, dating from the 1650s through the early twentieth century, and left a variety of serial, narrative sources behind. Finally, as John Dixon suggests, it is perhaps at the microlevel that we are most likely to loosen what he calls the “strangle-hold” of U.S.-oriented narratives.1 His comment—which refers to the story of full citizenship attainment by Jews—can arguably be applied to the emerging field of Atlantic Jewish history more generally.
In September 1810, Moses Belasco, cantor of the Jewish community of Barbados, entered his home, which abutted the synagogue, and sat down for his Sabbath evening meal. Religious services had just ended. It was Elul, the Hebrew month designated for the daily penitential prayers that lead up to the holiest days of the calendar, the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement. After he had dined for about twenty minutes, Belasco spotted two female laborers peering through one of the sanctuary’s windows and laughing. Stepping outside, he overheard them discussing the scene transpiring within the synagogue. Belasco quickly adduced that Isaac Massiah, the beadle charged with the upkeep of the building, was “having improper connection” there with “a black woman.”2 The Mahamad, the lay body of Jews charged with overseeing Jewish community affairs, convened an emergency meeting the following Sunday and a congregational trial immediately ensued. Several Jewish witnesses appeared, including one who testified that some months previously Massiah had unsuccessfully solicited an enslaved woman, belonging to one Mrs. Brice, for paid sex within the house of worship. The congregation’s leaders were horrified, citing Massiah for “unprecedented vileness” and characterizing his acts as “heinous in the extreme.” They unanimously resolved to remove Massiah from his position and declared a general fast upon the entire community, to take place the following Monday.3
Barbados, whose enslaved population on the eve of abolition in 1833 peaked at eighty-two thousand individuals or almost 80 percent of the total inhabitants, was a slave society, numerically dominated by people of African heritage.4 Centering race is unavoidable when writing about any hemispheric American slave society. Studies that do so remain essential to historical understanding and interpretation. Yet, in overlooking class as an essential category of analysis, a particular problem in Atlantic Jewish historiography, scholars have all too often neglected economically disadvantaged whites and their multimodal intersections with the majority population. In Barbados, the presence of working-class whites was sizeable and consistent over time, so much so that the society cannot be bifurcated into white authorities (planters, managers, overseers) and enslaved or free people of African ancestry. Moreover, as historical archaeologist Matthew Reilly observes, lower-class whites and slaves arguably “had more in common with each other than either group did with the plantocracy.”5 Racial hierarchies and disparities, he points out, in no way prohibited or inhibited “frequent interactions between poor whites and Afro-Barbadians.”6 These interactions were both commercial and sexual, despite narrative primary sources that largely overlook this reality in both arenas.7 One important reason for this neglect is the dearth of diachronic records created by white ethnic groups with any meaningful longevity in the colony. For that reason, a focus on the Jewish communal documents of Barbados offers an important lens for exploring relations between destitute Jews and their African-descended counterparts. This chapter argues that even when race acted as the explicitly deciding factor in framing such relations, class consistently trumped race.
FIGURE 9.1. The synagogue building of Congregation Nidhe Israel of Barbados, with its adjacent cemetery. Photo Credit: D. Ramsay, EPG Caribbean, Barbados (2017).
At first glance, the conduct of the misbehaving synagogue caretaker Isaac Massiah seems to have been exceptional in its extremism, and therefore not representative of either the island’s Jewish community or of broader society. A diachronic examination of the communal minutes, however, suggests that the deed was far more mundane than communal authorities would admit. Indeed, the synagogue grounds constituted a focal point for a wide range of “connexions” extending from the Jewish community into the heart of slave society. Located in the hub of Bridgetown’s commercial district, properties owned by the congregation constituted the work- and dwelling-places of some of the most impoverished residents of the island, from synagogue functionaries and their family members to enslaved caretakers.8 Bound together by penury, these individuals periodically breached the mandated borderlines between Jew and non-Jew and slave and free. In doing so, they also inadvertently exposed the hypocrisy of the community’s wealthy leaders, whose norm-defying sexual behavior did not typically come under public scrutiny.
Their European origin qualified Barbadian Jews as free persons, while their religious nonconformity circumscribed both their civic and political status. Jews were permitted to earn their living as planters and merchants and to enter the petty trades, but were subject to heavy, discriminatory taxes (sometimes five times as high as those of Christians) and were limited in the number of slaves they could own, a prohibition a few Jewish landowners were able to circumvent.9 The white, Anglican-dominant government banned Jews from holding civic or political office, restrictions that generally remained in place until the 1800s. The Jewish community of Barbados was somewhat smaller than its Jamaican counterpart, ranging from 250 individuals in the seventeenth century to perhaps 800 by the mid-eighteenth century, and constituting some 3 percent of the white population.10 By the close of the century, the Jewish population was on the downward curve, dropping to under one hundred members in the first decades of the nineteenth century, at which time leaders began to refer with angst to their dwindling congregation.11
Record keeping was an essential practice of the Barbadian Jewish lay leaders (parnassim), whose principal tasks included managing their poor, administering the synagogue and its officials, and serving as a political liaison between their community and the colonial authorities. These records include an unusually rich testament to sexual engagement between Jewish synagogue functionaries and women of African descent. Such “improper connections” were omnipresent in slave societies like Barbados, but were very rarely documented anywhere in writing. The surviving communal minutes, dating from 1791 through 1905 and heretofore never diachronically mined, are peppered with both oblique and explicit references to sex with enslaved and manumitted women of African descent. These records indicate that many such sexual encounters, some of them paid, took place on synagogue grounds in the few decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in 1833. Mortifying to Jewish communal leaders, these incidents reveal the division between expected public and private behavior of Jewish men, the effects of venereal disease on individuals and families, and the claims enslaved women made for material resources and privileges, including legal belonging in the Jewish community.
In the long eighteenth century, most Jews living westward of the Atlantic Ocean lived in slave societies where unfree laborers of African descent constituted the cornerstone of the economy and formed either significant minorities or overwhelming majorities. Insofar as it has focused on entanglement, the emerging field of Atlantic Jewish history tends to emphasize the conversion of select slaves to Judaism and the consequent ethnogenesis of Eurafrican Jews, individuals born as Jews and legally incorporated into the Jewish community, most notably in the Dutch colony of Suriname. Studies have affirmed the “race-blind” nature of Jewish religious law, Jewish secular regulations assigning Eurafrican Jews a second-class status, and the active religious and political participation of Eurafricans within the Jewish community.12 By focusing on the progeny of slave–master encounters, however, scholars obfuscate the broader historical reality of the sexual use of enslaved women by Jewish men and the historical and economic contexts in which this behavior manifested.
The sources hereunder considered speak to the emotional reaction of servile non-Jewish women (the laborers who peered into the synagogue and laughed) and affective relations between the samas and the enslaved women who reportedly competed for his attention. These aspects suggest we are dealing with something more than just “sexual use,” but the absence of sources from these women’s perspective impedes meaningful analysis in that direction. We stand on firmer ground if we understand these relations in practical terms. Echoing the insights of historians Stephanie Jones-Rogers on the U.S. South and Jessica Marie Johnson on the Franco-Atlantic world, the cases herein discussed suggest that the “close body work” enslaved women performed for Jewish and other men in Barbados constituted income-producing labor that was just as much a part of the island’s economy and commercial negotiation as the work carried out by slaves on plantations or by hired-out laborers.13 Within the context of the Barbadian Jewish community, sexual interactions also reflected strategic alliances forged by females of African descent, rather than simply the forced provisioning of sexual services that masters and other free men generally expected of owned women. As such, enslaved women constituted a hidden labor force and potential conduits for their children to access the material and political advantages of the Jewish community, including group membership.
Secondary sources on the enslaved population of Barbados, including works that focus on the experiences of women, make little or no mention of the local Jewish population, much less Jews’ interactions with the majority society. Nor are they concerned with the possible or ascertained membership of African-origin people in the Jewish community.14 This is unsurprising, given that only 3 percent of the island’s white population was Jewish. Moreover, scholars often regard Jewish communal minutes as the exclusive purview of Jewish studies scholars. Yet, in a colony with a relatively high ratio of whites to nonwhites, where the population of European origin ranged anywhere from 44 to 50 percent in the colony’s first decades, Judaism and ethnic Jewishness were a distinct potentiality and in some cases a verified actuality for slaves and their free descendants.15 As such, an investigation of the cases herein explored serves as a corrective to an imagined world order where variants of Christianity or African creolized spiritual traditions, and to some extent Islam, were the only “religious” options available to people of slave origin in the Americas.16
Sex in the Synagogue
The initiative of Isaac Massiah to engage enslaved women in sexual intercourse violated a number of communal norms. One level of Massiah’s offense was carrying out a commercial transaction on the Jewish Sabbath, a deed strictly forbidden in rabbinical law. But this paled in comparison to the nature of the offense itself. Houses of worship were sacred spaces synonymous with upholding the public morality of the time, as well as the power of the planter class, as Katharine Gerbner has shown in the Christian context. The legislature of Barbados recognized taverns, ale-houses, victualling-houses, and other similar buildings as places where “lewd and debauched Company” frequented, but did not suspect sanctuaries as potential brothels.17
For Jews, a sanctuary additionally bore the burden of the community’s reputation. Nidhe Israel, Hebrew for “The Scattered of Israel,” was the island’s only synagogue, and also among the oldest institutions of Barbados, having been founded in the 1650s. Its communal leaders played an important diplomatic role in regulating the political, economic, and social status of Jews vis-à-vis the colonial and metropolitan authorities and the local white Christian population. Keeping scandal out of the Jewish community was a foremost concern of the Mahamad. Massiah’s key misstep was to bring what was arguably a very common activity into the most public spotlight of the local Jewish community.
As we shall see, lack of discretion was a manifestation of Massiah’s class. Synagogue functionaries like Massiah were salaried employees who barely eked out a living. True, they benefited from a number of perquisites, namely no-cost lodging on the synagogue grounds and the possibility of receiving periodic freewill offerings from the congregation on Sabbaths and holidays. But these perks masked the low pay scale and heavy demand on their time that made holding a second job generally illegal, according to the bylaws, and also pragmatically impossible. Synagogue functionaries frequently shirked their duties to pursue additional income, left their positions, or departed the island because they could not make ends meet.18
Although their place of employ was the symbolic seat of the community’s wealth, salaried employees merely subsisted, if at all. This stark reality was openly acknowledged by Jewish lay leaders themselves, who were unsalaried and whose wealth qualified them for their position. In a letter to the London Portuguese Jewish agents in 1805 requesting their aid in finding a cantor, the parnassim sought a candidate who could “be content to live well as a poor man in the West Indies.” Three years later, when the office was once again vacant, the Mahamad described the position to their London agents as an opportunity for “a genteel living for a man who cannot better himself in England.”19 By the early 1800s, the community was so diminished in number that the position packed three duties in one. The successful candidate would serve not only as cantor (hazan), but would also substitute as ritual slaughterer (sohet) and ritual meat inspector (bodek) in the case of the delinquency of the former. The cantor was also expected, at no additional pay, to teach the Hebrew language to the “poor of our nation.” Anticipating the temptation to seek a secondary income, the parnassim explicitly forbade the cantor from keeping a shop of merchandise there, which had been the “delusion” of the former cantor and had prevented him from fulfilling his duty.20
If the pay was commensurate with the economic class of potential office-holders, so was their behavior. As a result, the Mahamad spent much of its time reprimanding neglectful employees or recruiting reputable men, preferably single, to replace vacant offices. In 1798, the parnassim had advertised the position of synagogue caretaker after the previous employee had departed the island penniless. The two applicants were Isaac Massiah and Judah Massiah, perhaps siblings. The Mahamad selected the latter man for the job, but over the next dozen years or so, each was alternately hired and fired amid periodic outbursts against the congregation’s leaders and the usual reprimands for the shirking of duties. At the time of his hire, Judah Massiah was a paying member of the congregation (a yahid), but his annual synagogue tax (finta) lingered at the very bottom of the lowest tax bracket at £1.10 per year.21
The synagogue caretaker was expected to sleep rent free in the house provided him in the synagogue yard, a policy designed to both facilitate his timely arrival for work and bind him to a dependent relationship with the congregation. Records hint at the presence of an extended Massiah family living in the synagogue yard, penurious and reliant on the congregation as a source of income. Sarah D. Massiah, likely a close relative, had been tending to the Jewish ritual bath for an unspecified time by 1809, when she asked for a “small pittance annually as Banyadeira” (supervisor of the mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath) and was allotted £15. She was still a pensioner in 1822.22 Two other women, Sarah Massiah and Angel Massiah, no doubt also close relatives, evidently had no active source of income, both receiving an annual pension of £1.10 in 1810.23 In the next decade, both women successfully petitioned for an increase to their allotment.24 Abigail Massiah was also a longtime pensioner.25
These Massiah family members were all implicated in “improper” connections. Had the lay leaders of the Mahamad paid more attention (or had they wanted to), they would have noticed something amiss on the synagogue grounds years before Isaac Massiah’s public dalliances. In 1804, some years before Sarah D. Massiah assumed directorship of the Jewish ritual bath, she accepted an unremunerated position to maintain the cleanliness of the “banyadeira’s house” adjoining the mikveh and was given the key on condition that she not allow “any improper person [to] make use of the bath or any men to lodge in the [adjoining] house.”26 At some point thereafter, the key came into possession of Isaac Massiah, who was then serving as synagogue caretaker. In 1806, a complaint was lodged with the Mahamad about “the impropriety of a man keeping the key of the bathing house,” a possible indication that Sarah D. Massiah, in connivance with Isaac, was providing local slaves with access to the ritual building. The lay leaders ordered Isaac to return the keys.27 However, he refused to comply, and an illness conveniently prevented him from appearing before the Mahamad to explain his recalcitrance.28 The Mahamad solved the dilemma by striking two additional keys for the front door and bathing house and giving them to the cantor, directing him that that “no improper person be permitted to visit or bathe in the bathing house.”29 Like other similarly underscored words in the communal minutes, the word “improper” signaled an ineffable public secret, most likely that women of African descent were observing the Jewish laws of ritual immersion incumbent upon married women.30 This interpretation is strongly supported by a description of public synagogue offices written in 1821 and stipulating that the “keeper of the bath . . . not permit any persons but those of the Hebrew nation to use the bath.”31
But bathkeeper Sarah D. Massiah was not always supportive of Isaac Massiah’s deviant sexual behavior. Under oath as a star witness in his trial in 1810, she testified that she, too, had spotted two hired laborers peering into the synagogue and laughing at what was transpiring within. It was her deposition that revealed Isaac Massiah had solicited in the gallery of the synagogue the sexual services of a “black woman belonging to Mrs. Brice,” going so far as to hand her money.32 There are other suggestions, too, that the Massiah family was implicated in sex work among slaves. By the mid-nineteenth century, one Hannah Massiah, identified as a “mulatto,” was a noted hotel proprietor on Cumberland Street in Bridgetown catering to “merchants and colonial gentlemen.”33 Tavern keepers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were typically “black, or mulatto” women who had obtained their freedom through a sexual relationship with “some backra man.” Proprietress Hannah Massiah was likely a madame and perhaps herself a former sex worker.34 A slave census from the 1810s indicates that Hannah owned four slaves, Lubbah and Molly, both fifty years of age, and Statira and Kate, seventeen and twenty, respectively. They are all described as domestics and black, save for Molly who is listed as “coloured.”35 These women may have helped Hannah operate the tavern, their housekeeping duties perhaps overlapping with the provision of sexual services. By at least the early eighteenth century, taverns or inns, most of them located in Bridgetown, were places where locals and travelers alike could purchase food, lodging, and sex, as Marisa Fuentes’s work illustrates.36 One observer noted euphemistically in the 1790s, “A bed may be had for half a dollar per night . . . and, for an additional sum well understood, the choice of an attendant to draw curtains.”37
FIGURE 9.2. The Jewish ritual bath (mikveh), located near the synagogue building of Congregation Nidhe Israel of Barbados. Photo Credit: D. Ramsay, EPG Caribbean, Barbados (2017).
Members of the Massiah family were also at the center of the community’s next sexual scandal, in 1812, when the heat shifted to Rafael Abendana. Three years previously, Abendana had been selected by the congregation’s Portuguese Jewish agents in London to serve the Barbadian congregation as cantor.38 Though also indigents, cantors earned twice as much as synagogue caretakers. Abendana’s impecunious status is apparent in a number of petitions he placed before the Mahamad. Shortly after his arrival, for example, he requested of his superiors a lying-in bed for his heavily pregnant wife, who then possessed only a mattress.39 In 1811, he was granted a new cloak in which to preside during the upcoming High Holy Days.40 A petition he submitted the following year for financial support was rejected.41 But less than two months later, Abendana’s application to assume the additional office of synagogue caretaker was granted.42 Thus, as he approached the High Holy Days of 1812, Abendana had passed three levels of scrutiny: once when London’s Portuguese Jewish agents recommended him for office, again when the Barbados parnassim hired him as hazan, and a third time when he was approved for the office of samas.
Abendana’s world turned upside down three days before the Jewish New Year, in September 1812. At a special meeting of the Mahamad, the presidente announced that he had suspended the cantor following confirmation of a medical report that Abendana had contracted venereal disease. A private inquiry revealed that the cantor had approached one Dr. Richards, complaining of “stricture in the urethra,” and had dispatched a young man to purchase medicine for the alleviation of his condition. The ensuing trial, organized by the Mahamad, confirmed that Abendana had “defiled himself by intercourse with others, besides his wife,” possibly a “hired negress” who apparently left Abendana’s service in a “state of pregnancy for him.” By this time, Abendana had spent all of his salary on medication and perhaps also on sex workers and could not borrow additional funds. The Mahamad resolved to present his wife and their offspring with £40, one half to be proffered immediately, the other after the delivery of their fourth child, an implicit gesture of sympathy for her in her now complete destitution.43 Perhaps, too, the funds were explicit recognition that Abendana might have transferred “cupid’s disease” to both his wife and newborn.
Abendana’s trial began the following week. The first witness was Sarah Massiah. She testified that she had observed a “negro woman constantly following” Abendana around the synagogue yard and had overhead conversations “among Negroes” that verified a “connection” had taken place between the cantor and the woman in question. The next to be deposed was Moses Belasco, who confirmed that he had “heard the same talk among Negroes of such an improper connection.” Another witness was Judah Massiah, who two years earlier had been sworn in as the new samas after Isaac Massiah had been suspended for “improper connections” with enslaved women in the synagogue. He testified that he had eye-witnessed “such instances of familiarity” between the defendant and the enslaved woman and had no doubt “that a connection existed” between them. Judah Massiah further testified that he had overheard the woman in question engaged in a jealous dispute with another enslaved woman over Abendana’s affections. The witness had learned from one Betty Massiah that this second enslaved woman had also fallen “pregnant by her master,” none other than Abendana. Judah Massiah also mentioned that an unnamed white woman had confided to him that she had been compelled to leave Abendana’s service after he attempted “to take improper liberties with her.” Standing before the Mahamad, Abendana could offer nothing in his own defense.44
Together, the intelligence gathered from witnesses demonstrated that Raphael Abendana actively initiated sexual contact with a number of lower-class women, both enslaved African and white, at least two of them in his employ. At his trial, he very nearly admitted to the accusations, conceding that “such an act would be a great sin” and promising “in future to behave better & endeavor to give more general satisfaction.” Later in October, with the High Holy Days behind them, the Mahamad resolved to grant Abendana $20 a month for the support of his family for one year in addition to £75 for his dispatch to London with his family of six.45 The communal minutes do not mention Abendana again, an indication that he soon left the island. We next hear of Abendana in 1826, when he was hired as a watchman at the cemetery of London’s Portuguese Jewish community.46 His semicoerced departure from the island was conducted via the despacho, a Portuguese Jewish institution operative all over the Atlantic world to rid local communities of indigent and scandalous Jews.
During his term as cantor of the Barbados Jewish community, Abendana had evidently engaged in sex solicitation that ranged from patently predatorial (in the case of his white servant woman) to “consensual,” or at least “transactional.” Class- and race-based power dynamics, as well as the absence of extensive first-person testimony, make it difficult to properly assess either his behavior or the responses of the women in question. Jessica Marie Johnson, in her analysis of black women of the French Atlantic, uses the felicitous phrase “the spectrum of coercion and what passed for consent in a slaveholding society.”47 Still, the Jewish communal minutes suggest that those solicited could possess some degree of agency, whether the ability to flee sexual advances or the power to either refuse or negotiate a relationship that could bring material and social advantages. The reference to a jealous dispute between two enslaved women, one of them impregnated by Abendana and both vying for his attentions, again suggests the overlap between paid sex and family formation.
There is evidence that the power of negotiation was pivotal in the creation of Jewish families that straddled the boundary between free and enslaved, Jewish and African. In 1826, the Barbadian congregation hired yet another synagogue caretaker, a man named Jacob J. de Meza. Like his predecessor, Isaac Massiah, Meza also provoked the Mahamad’s ire for indecent behavior on synagogue property. The complaints came soon after the devastating hurricane of 1831, which leveled the synagogue, as well as many other buildings, and claimed two thousand lives. The greatest impact was felt by the impoverished masses. One year after the hurricane, the Mahamad realized that Meza was harboring a “coloured family” in the synagogue yard. Communal leaders demanded that Meza remove “the nuisance” immediately, or else be fired.48 This “nuisance,” as the Jewish leaders explicitly acknowledged in their minutes, was Jacob J. de Meza’s “wife & family.”49
Jacob J. de Meza had arrived in Barbados from Suriname, where he had been a member of an extended free Eurafrican Jewish clan, some of whom were laid to rest in the “mulatto” row of a cemetery located in the Jewish village of Jodensavanne.50 One member of this family, also called Jacob de Meza, had been a signatory of the 1793 petition that Eurafrican Jews in Suriname presented to the local governor to protest their marginal status within the Jewish community.51 The route synagogue caretaker Jacob J. de Meza had traveled from Suriname to Barbados reinforced a long-standing relationship between the two colonies, which continued to exchange populations long after Suriname transitioned to Dutch rule in 1667. An island-wide plantation census carried out in Barbados in 1817, for example, lists a number of slaves as originating in that Dutch colony, as does the local newspaper.52
Whether Jacob J. de Meza had brought his enslaved family with him to Barbados from Suriname or had formed a new one upon arrival, his insistence on harboring them in the synagogue yard asserted the belonging of unfree relatives within the Jewish community. The Jewish leaders of Nidhe Israel, however, were not sympathetic, and Meza’s surly behavior did not help. Two of them cited Meza for “abusive language and ungentlemanly conduct,” while another noted he was in arrears to the synagogue for two months’ salary he had borrowed.53 When another community member, E. R. Miranda, applied for the position of synagogue caretaker during the proceedings, the Mahamad seized upon the opportunity to expel Meza and company from the synagogue yard, making Miranda’s hire contingent on the Eurafrican family’s removal.54 By November 1832, the leaders noted with satisfaction that “Mr. De Meza & his family” had left the synagogue yard.55
The Sexual Behavior of Wealthy Men
So far, we have considered the sexual behavior of lower-class Jewish men who served their community as salaried employees. Of course, wealthy Jewish men also carried out sexual relationships with enslaved women, impregnated and formed semi-official families with them, and were infected with and spread venereal diseases. But arguably, these relations were less openly acknowledged, at least in written sources, similar to the pattern observed for the Jewish community of Suriname. In keeping with the nature of public secrets, everyone knew about these relations, but it was considered indecent to speak about them openly.
What difference, then, did class make in the integration of mixed-status families in the Jewish community? Again, the communal minutes of Barbados suggest some answers. This chapter opened with the anecdote of cantor Moses Belasco witnessing the use of the synagogue as a house of ill repute by the caretaker Isaac Massiah. As it turns out, Belasco himself had once been accused of similar behavior. In 1806, while serving as ritual slaughterer, Belasco was reprimanded by the Mahamad for “living with a coloured woman, in the synagogue yard.” The parnassim resolved to demand that Belasco “remove the nuisance from the yard” or be fired, and Belasco promised to comply with the resolution.56
Moses Belasco’s life trajectory is a clear indication that upward mobility was possible in the Jewish community of Barbados. In 1801, the congregation’s agent in London had recommended Belasco as “a lad of good character” and engaged him at a starting annual salary of £65 as both ritual slaughterer and ritual inspector of meat for the island’s Jewish congregation. Acknowledging Belasco’s “indigent state,” and in accordance with synagogue policy, the leaders offered Belasco the use of one of the synagogue’s houses so long as he remained unmarried. Belasco’s recommender in London characterized him as having “no talents, or ingenuity for any other but his present profession” and projected that the young man’s “savings will produce little[,] as living here as now in all other countries is rather expensive.”57 But over the years, Belasco strategically positioned himself for an ascent up the community ladder, offering himself for higher positions of authority and remuneration, including as cantor, as soon as they became vacant.58 Over the years, he was reprimanded for neglecting his duties, a hint that he had undertaken commercial interests on the side, as did so many other synagogue functionaries before and after, out of sheer necessity.59 But unlike those who left the island destitute, Belasco prevailed, coming into ownership of two domestic slaves and securing a salary of £220 (more than double that of the samas) by 1831.60
As this chapter has argued, discretion was the major factor that distinguished the extralegal sexual behavior of upper- from lower-class Jewish men. But a watershed is detectable in the 1810s. Whereas previously “sex with slaves” among wealthy Jewish men had been a public secret, now it was discussed more and more openly, both orally, in communal meetings, and also as recorded in the minutes themselves. In 1821, during a discussion about revising the communal bylaws, Benjamin Elkin, chief leader of the Jewish community, openly questioned the custom that accorded to married men the honor of opening the Torah ark during formal worship. Elkin could not discover any rationale for this practice, other than “a presumption that married persons led a more virtuous and moral life than unmarried ones.” This rationale, he continued, was patently erroneous, given the fact that many married men and widowers in the community were “living in the ‘hideousness of vice’” and leading a “more irregular life than . . . even single men!” A lively discussion ensued. No one opposed the proposal to extend the ritual honor to single men, but two leaders moved that the embarrassing discussion should not appear in the communal minutes as a motion. The motion for censorship did not carry, but the proposal to abolish differential treatment did, with only two dissenting votes. The “gentlemen” present agreed that theretofore the ritual honor during services would be “given indiscriminately” to all adult male members of the community, regardless of their marital status.61
The changing discourse was occurring during the waning years of the slave regime, when the collective consequences of sexual exploitation increasingly blurred the boundaries between white and black, free and enslaved. By the 1820s, people of color constituted almost one quarter of the free population of Barbados. I argue that the increasingly open acknowledgement of sexual relations between wealthy Jews and their social inferiors of African origin was due not only to the growth of a free population of slave origins, but also to their emboldened demand for equal rights in the 1810s and 1820s. Largely because of this demand, the legislature passed a law in 1817 allowing free people of color to provide evidence in court against whites. In accepting this new privilege, as Melanie Newton shows, activists of African origin expressed support for white supremacy, explicitly recognizing the superiority of whites over them and acknowledging that where slavery exists, there must necessarily be a distinction between white and free people of color.62 This privilege, which culminated in 1831 in full civil rights on par with whites, may have given Jewish elites license to speak more openly about their ties with free people of color.
In communal governance, too, race became less of a dividing factor in the Jewish community of Barbados during the waning days of slavery. This idea is reinforced by the case of Isaac Lopez Brandon (1795–1855). Brandon, as the research of historian Karl Watson first showed, was the Barbadian son of a slave and an affluent Portuguese Jewish sugar planter, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon (1766–1831).63 Isaac Lopez Brandon was the second child of the union between Abraham and an enslaved woman named Sarah.64 In 1801, Isaac’s father Abraham manumitted him along with his younger sister Sarah Brandon (1798–1828).65
Abraham Rodrigues Brandon is a dramatic example of a Barbadian Jew whose economic status improved over time. In 1796, five years before he manumitted two of his children, Abraham was made a yahid of the Barbadian Jewish community.66 At that time, his income must have been modest, as he paid the nearly bare minimum of £1.10 as his annual finta.67 The following year, when the synagogue opened a subscription for funds supporting the British king in his fight against revolutionary France, Abraham had sufficient means to contribute £7.10 to the cause, alongside twenty-nine other men and women from the congregation who donated £10 or less.68 Abraham’s leadership status in the community began to change in the early 1800s, when he was twice elected to serve as hatan, an honorific position enacted during synagogue services on the Simhat Torah holiday, and typically a pathway to communal leadership. He refused to accept both times, a common response among yehidim who wished to avoid the mandatory charitable donation associated with the role.69 In 1805, he was considered for the trusted position of gabay (treasurer). He once again declined, but only because of his plans to temporarily leave the island.70 By the following decade, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon showed himself much more committed, perhaps due to his rising fortunes. His annual finta climbed from £5 in 1810 to £30 in 1819, by which time he owned 168 slaves, making him one of the largest slave owners of the island.71 Beginning in 1810, he was sequentially elected as parnas, parnas presidente (the highest leadership position in Nidhe Israel, synonymous with the Anglophone term “warden”), and a member of the ajunta, a body of Jewish communal elders composed of former parnassim.72 His consecutive stints as parnas presidente coincided with the turbulent 1820s, when an internal schism nearly put an end to the organized Jewish community.73
Abraham’s son, the Eurafrican Isaac Lopez Brandon, formally converted to Judaism on a trip to Suriname in 1812. When he returned to Barbados the following year, he was officially a Jew, eighteen years of age, and on the path to first-class membership in the local Jewish community. In April 1813, the Barbadian Mahamad added him to a list of yehidim, the paying members of the synagogue, and assessed him an annual synagogue tax of £30.74
The internal schism of the 1820s concerned the so-called Hebrew Vestry Bill, which the Jewish leaders presented before the Barbadian Assembly in 1819. The bill sought to accomplish two tasks. First, it aimed to legally transform the Jewish congregation into a vestry, on par with its Christian parallel. Second, it intended to empower Jewish communal leaders to assess taxes among their constituents, and to enlist the colonial government to enforce payment of those taxes on pain of excommunication and heavy fines. The Hebrew Vestry Bill was a feisty effort to reinforce the rather arbitrary power the Mahamad controversially executed over its constituents.75 If passed, it would have compelled every Jew resident on the island to be a member of the Jewish community and, if they were sufficiently solvent, to pay their assessed taxes to the congregational coffers. In brief, the Hebrew Vestry Bill sought to achieve for the Mahamad the same authority the Christian vestries of Barbados’s eleven parishes enjoyed.
The Hebrew Vestry Bill provoked a backlash in the form of a counterpetition presented to the Barbadian Assembly by seven Jews, at least three of them slave-owning.76 This faction argued that the power of Jewish leaders to arbitrarily assess taxes and enforce payment, under pain of excommunication and fines, was contrary to Jewish law, unconstitutional, and historically unprecedented in the British metropole and its overseas possessions. Jews, they argued, did not possess a territory of their own, as did Anglican churches in their respective parishes, and metropolitan laws banned religious nonconformists, including explicitly Jews, from holding public office. Metropolitan law also barred any “foreign state or potentate” from possessing any ecclesiastical or spiritual authority in the English realm. In referring to this law, the counter-petitioners implicitly cast Jews as strangers in the land. The dissenters regarded mandatory taxation by the Mahamad as a form of oppression, since they were already saddled with paying parish and other colonial taxes. They requested the privilege of belonging to the synagogue only if they desired to do so.77
From the start, the controversy between the Jewish communal leaders on the one hand, and the small Jewish faction on the other, took on both racial and class overtones. The counterpetitioners claimed that the Hebrew Vestry Bill was signed by “a parcel of apprentices and shop-boys,” even as they accused the Jewish communal leaders of nepotism, “tyranny . . . and persecution.” They also accused one of those leaders, Abraham, father of the Eurafrican Jewish Isaac Lopez Brandon, of desiring to tax the “Hebrew nation” in order to “send money to America to build a synagogue” for his son’s “colored connexions.” This barb was a reference to a trip Brandon senior had recently undertaken to Philadelphia and his involvement in fundraising for the purchase of a new building there for the Portuguese Jewish congregation Mikveh Israel, which had been founded in the 1780s.78
Not to be outdone in the arena of racial innuendos, Jewish leaders also deployed racially derogatory puns, implying that the faction was besmirched by association with people of African descent. Communal leaders accused the faction of attempting to “blacken and defame” them “in the eyes of the Christian community.” A “Jew’s heart must be black to the very core,” they continued, to “inspirit Christians with additional hatred and prejudice against his brethren.” They also referred to the “black envenomed malignity of these men.” Thus, it would seem that both proponents of the Hebrew Vestry Bill of 1819 and its schismatic detractors regarded Jews of slave origins as fair rhetorical targets. For this reason, Abraham’s son Isaac Lopez Brandon was thrust into the spotlight. As the only Barbadian Jew explicitly acknowledged in communal records as having slave origins, Brandon is an important marker for how the local Jewish community reckoned with upper-class members of an ambiguous legal and ethnic status.79
Interestingly, the Eurafrican Brandon had also been a signatory of the Hebrew Vestry Bill. His support of this bill clearly positioned him alongside the most conservative of the congregation’s members, yet another indication that class trumped race in the Barbadian Jewish community.80 Unfortunately for Brandon, the General Assembly that considered the Hebrew Vestry Bill in 1820 added a clause “to prevent persons descended from Negroes participating in the privileges of the said Bill.”81 The bill passed, forcing the Mahamad to rewrite its communal bylaws, which now included a clause that banned Jews of “negro” origins from acquiring yahid status, voting, and being elected to office. In 1821, Jewish communal leaders voted to remove Isaac Lopez Brandon from the list of first-class members.82 But the vote, which passed with a 3–2 margin, was extremely controversial. Many additional Jewish communal leaders publicly opposed the ejection of Brandon from the community. At this moment, in 1821 and 1822, race seemingly became central to the Jewish community’s internal rupture. But it is not that simple.
The timing of the Hebrew Vestry Bill was likely not coincidental. The 1810s were a decade when a variety of marginalized groups in Barbados sought to challenge the existing order. Among them were a group of middling planters of more recent wealth than the old, landed aristocracy. They organized the first Barbadian political party, the “Salmagundis,” a word denoting a “general mixture” or a “miscellaneous collection.” The Salmagundis allied themselves with lower-class whites to protest the oppression of the planter elite and swept most of the big planters from the House of Assembly in bitterly fought elections in 1819. They ultimately won control over the House of Assembly in the 1820s.83
Another marginalized group clamoring for political empowerment were free people of African descent. As Melanie Newton notes, these individuals tended to be politically conservative. Like Isaac Lopez Brandon, who inherited dozens of slaves from his father’s estate, these free people were not abolitionists. Only after Emancipation did many begin to publicly embrace former slaves as their brethren, in the face of white racism.84 Newton convincingly argues that free people of African ancestry did not constitute a well-defined group, since they were fragmented by class, gender, competing claims to authority, and conflicting stances on slavery.85 The same might be said of the Jews of Barbados, whether planters, merchants, pensioners, or unaffiliated Jews—white and Eurafrican alike—who lived on the margins of the community, appearing in the communal minutes only when in need of occasional financial assistance or burial. The Hebrew Vestry Bill and its fallout, therefore, highlighted no ideologically clear factions within the Jewish community. But it did reflect the broader political turmoil in Barbadian society. Despite the Eurafrican Brandon’s ejection from the Jewish community, ultimately class triumphed over race, just as it did in broader society. By at least 1837, Brandon had rejoined communal governance, regularly attending meetings and even sitting in the same vestry room as a fellow Jew who had once voted to ban from the Mahamad all Jews of “Negro” origins.86
Let us now review the findings of this chapter. First, the communal minutes offer us a rare glimpse of the sexual behavior of lower-class Jewish men in Barbados. It opens up a view to the underclass, reminding us that most Jews of the Atlantic world were not the wealthy businessmen at the center of Alexander Fortune’s book Merchants and Jews.87 Primary sources heretofore discussed by scholars indicate that poor whites never or rarely “intermixed” with “enslaved or free Afro-Barbadians.” As Matthew Reilly notes, this idea has “seeped into recent scholarship.”88 Reilly’s own archaeological studies are strongly suggestive of close trade relations and shared material culture among poor whites and free and enslaved people of African descent. The communal records of the Barbadian Jewish community offer more concrete evidence that these relations not only occurred, but were in fact central in many ways to the operation of the Jewish community and both the public and private lives of its constituents. Thus, the cases herein discussed offer a counterpoint to the dominant historiography that would minimize the “inter-mixture” of poor whites with “enslaved or free Afro-Barbadians.”89 The evidence we have considered in fact demonstrates that the synagogue, synagogue yard, and its abutting properties served as the dwelling places of mixed-status Jewish families (or, from another perspective, mixed-status African families), whose reach extended from the organized Jewish community into the heart of slave society. These anecdotes further suggest a continuum between sexual exploitation, the quest for patronage, and family formation.
Second, by the 1810s, with the free population of African descent expanding and clamoring for enfranchisement, it was increasingly challenging for the Jewish community to perpetuate the public secrets of its elites. Island politics forced even Jewish leaders to openly acknowledge that “improper connections” were widespread not only among the poor, but also among the rank of the privileged. Finally, let us consider how Jewish these stories are. In every hemispheric American slave society, widespread sexual exploitation of women of African descent was the norm. In our anecdotes, the context (that is, the Jewish community), the place (that is, the synagogue, synagogue yard, and the homes of Jewish religious functionaries), the sexual initiators, and the judges are all Jewish. But not much else in this story is Jewish. This affords an important lesson for the burgeoning field of Atlantic Jewish history, one that gives scholars permission to find significant patterns and insights that are not uniquely or even intrinsically Jewish. On the other hand, perhaps there is indeed something specifically Jewish about this story. As Salo Wittmayer Baron reminds us, the pattern of Jewish history is not lachrymosity—not a relentless litany of persecution and resistance to persecution. Rather the overall norm of the Jewish past is integration into broader society.90 The cases explored above thus allow us to normalize Jewish history by considering the integration of Jews in their Caribbean abodes. This integration affirms that the presence of enslaved and free people of African descent was absolutely central to the Jewish community’s governance, if not its existence.
This chapter is an expanded version of a keynote address delivered at the “Atlantic Jewish Worlds, 1500–1900” conference, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, in partnership with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, April 7–8, 2021. I would like to thank Honorary Archivist Miriam Rodrigues-Pereira for permission to consult the Portuguese Jewish collection at the London Metropolitan Archives and, for their generous assistance, the staff of the archives cited in this chapter.