Great Tangled Cousinries? Jewish Intermarriage in the British West Indies
Natalie A. Zacek, University of Manchester[1]
On the eve of the American Revolution, the gentry of Virginia had, over the course of more than a century ofintermarriage between the sons and daughters of the colony’s leading families, become, in Bernard Bailyn’s much-cited phrase, “one great tangled cousinry,” through which the members of these “First Families of Virginia,”both individually and as a group,were able to increase their resources with respect tomoney, land, slaves, commercial connections, and political offices.[2]This practice was visible as early as the 1650s, when the three Eltonhead sisters chose at their spousesthree of the richest and most politically influential male colonists of eastern Virginia and Maryland, ensuring that formation of a set of first cousins who would reap every advantage from participation in “a tangled skein of relationships” which connected them to everyone who was anyone in the Tidewater region in this era.[3] It would be just as visible a century later, when George Washington’s marriage to the widowed Martha Dandridge Custis transformed him overnight from a shabby-genteel small planter into one of colonial America’s richest men, and linked him to a family which wielded far more influence than his in Virginia politics.These connectionsof kinship, as Michal J. Rozbicki has noted, persisted well into the era of the early American republic, and they “often provided the glue for political party connections” at a time at which personality- and clan-based allegiances were just beginning to coalesce into more permanent, nationally-based party structures.[4]
Although the British colonies in the West Indies were, throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, home to far smaller white populations than that of Virginia, and to a significantly higher proportion of long-term and even permanent absentees, a similar pattern emerged among the leading planter families of these islands. Caribbeana, Vere Langford Oliver’s multi-volume compendium of British West Indian genealogical materials, includes hundreds of pedigrees which show the formation over the course of this era of a web of marital alliances between members of the principal families within, for example, Antigua or Barbados. These links facilitated the emergence of a creole elite which not only dominated political, social, and economic life in these islands, but, in the guise of the “West India Interest,” wielded formidable influence within the metropole.[5]
That such connections would develop is far from surprising; young men and women of this social class would likely have grown up together, as their parents would have been one another’s friends, neighbors,and political allies, and upon reaching adulthood they would have faced a limited number of potential spouses, particularly among men seeking wives, due to the uneven sex ratio which affected the white populations of these islands throughout the period under study.[6] Moreover, the owners of British West Indian sugar plantations, like members of many landed elites,conceived of their own and their children’s marriages as alliances through which they could acquire additional lands, particularly attimes at which it had become a scarce and expensive resource. Why, then, did the Jewish residents of these British West Indian colonies opt not to follow a similar strategy, but rather in most instances chose to marry neither within their own local Jewish communities nor amongst their Christian neighbors, but instead to select wives or husbands from within the Jewish population of another Caribbean island, in some cases one under the jurisdiction of a different European nation? What did British West Indian Jews gain, and what did they lose, by following such a practice?
Before delving more deeply into these questions, it is important to emphasize that, of course, Christian whites were not the only potential marriage partners for Jewish men and women in the British Caribbean. While interracial marriages were both legally and socially discouraged, and in many instances even legally prohibited, in these colonies throughout the period under discussion, in reality relationships frequently developed between black or racially mixed and white inhabitants, and while many of these connections were kept secret, plentiful evidence exists of non-elite white women marrying or cohabiting with men of color, and of white men of all ranks forming long-standing liaisons, and occasionally marriages, with black or mixed-race women. In some instances, the men involved were from the highest reaches of the local elite, and they acknowledged their racially mixed children, sent them to be educated in the metropole, and left them significant bequests in their wills.[7] A comparable example of such a practice amongst Caribbean Jews is that of Isaac Lopez Brandon of Philadelphia and Barbados, the natural son of Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, one of the richest Jews on the island, and a woman of color. Although Brandon’s mother was not Jewish, he had converted to the faith in his youth, and his father acknowledged him as his child and left him a significant amount of money.[8]
Why, then, do so few Jews of the British West Indies appear to have considered free people of color as potential spouses? While initially men and women of this latter group would not have been Jewish, this problem was one which intermarriage could solve, as over generations a population of mixed-race Jews would emerge. But while it may be tempting to imagine a commonality of interests between Jews and people of color, based on their mutual exclusion from Gentile whiteness, in practice it appears that such connections were not seen as advantageous amongst the former. While the majority of British West Indian Jews owned few or no slaves, they were not for the most part opposed to slavery as an institution, or skeptical of the conventional wisdom of the era regarding the alleged inferiority of people of African descent. Moreover, many Jews were aware that their position in colonial British Atlantic society was an inherently liminal one, and thus while relationships between Gentiles and people of color, though not socially approved, were widely known and sometimes acknowledged, rumors regarding similar liaisons between Jews and slaves or free persons of color would likely have damaged the former’s social standing. If even seemingly less controversial links between these two groups, such as Jews’ alleged “trading with Negroes…on the Lord’s Day” or “contract[ing] with the Slaves that carry away the Goods” they sell to Christian islanders, attracted legal censure, more intimate connections might have invited harsher scrutiny from neighbors and authorities.[9] A figure such as Isaac Lopez Brandon might have been able to emerge as a Jew and as the heir to his natural father in the 1820s, at a moment at which the ongoing decrease in the white population of Barbados restricted marital and sexual options for Gentiles and Jews alike, and thus loosened some long-standing inhibitions surrounding these issues, but throughout the eighteenth century such relationships could only damage Jews’ standing both within their own communities and amongst their Christian neighbors. For people whose religion ordained that they would remain outsiders within colonial societies, whiteness was an element of their identity which they felt compelled to protect and uphold, and which, unlike their Gentile fellow settlers, they could not afford to compromise in any way.[10]
That these Jewish inhabitants of the British West Indies would opt to look to other colonies for potential spouses is in many ways unsurprising. If Christian islanders often had relatively few spousal choices within their individual colonies, the possibilities would be still more limited within a Jewish community which might consist of as few as a couple of hundred and at most of a thousand people.[11] A man or woman might face a situation in which there were few or no local Jewsof the opposite sex who were unmarried, age-appropriate, and not too closely related to her or him. Selecting a mate from within the local non-Jewish population was not usually an option, even if a Jewish man or woman were willing to consider such a course of action, and to convert in order to do so. It is true that, throughout the eighteenth century, the majority of the Christian inhabitants of the British West Indian colonies were, in comparison with metropolitan Britons, at least grudgingly tolerant of their Jewish neighbors, and in some instances engaged in legal or commercial relationships with them. On occasion, Christians might even socialize with Jews, as in 1719, when William Smith, a Church of England minister on Nevis, reported in a letter to a friend in England that “Mr Moses Pinheiro a Jew and myself, went to angle in Black Rock Pond.”In Speightstown, Barbados in 1739, the Lopez family, the colony’s principal Jewish merchants, secured as the guest of honor at a family wedding the recently arrived Gilbert Burnet Jr., the son of a former governor of Massachusetts, who had charmed local society with his elegant clothes and courtly manners.[12] Londoners formed themselves into furious mobsand took to the streets in 1753, when Parliament approved the so-called “Jew Bill,” which allowed foreign-born Jewsin the metropole the right to be naturalized as British subjects, but no such demonstrations had broken out in the islandsin 1740, when Parliament’s approval of the Naturalization Act extended these same rights to Jewish residents therein.[13] But despite this climate of relatively amicable relations between the faiths, even in a situation in which spousal choice might be very limited, a Christian planter would have been extremely unlikely to have considered a Jewish man or woman, however respectable and financially successful s/he or his/her family might have been, as a potential husband or wife for himself or for his son or daughter.[14]
This antipathy towards interfaith marriages stemmed not only from the obvious issue of confessional allegiance, but also from the fact that very few Jewish inhabitants of the British West Indian colonies, even those who were extremely wealthy,such as the Barbadian Lopezes, owned plantations or other large tracts of land, and thus a marital alliance with a Jew, even should he or she convert to Christianity,offered few discernible advantages, as it would not serve to increase a family’s land holdings.[15] Moreover, British colonists in the West Indies were intensely aware that metropolitan public opinion held that Caribbean settlers had fallen into irreversible physical and cultural degeneracyas a result of living in a tropical environment far from the ostensibly civilizing influences of the mother country, and acceptance of Jews as marriage partners would only confirm this stereotype of these “Creoles” as being innately un-English.
For their part, many Jews in the British West Indies, and in colonial British America more generally, were as hostile as their Christian neighbors were to the concept of interfaith marriage. When LunahArrobus(or Arrabas), a Barbadian Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity, died in 1792, local Christians refused to take any responsibility for her corpse, as they claimed that her conversion had not been a sincere one, and thus she was not entitled to a Christian burial. Anxious about the public health problem posed by this unburied body, particularly in a tropical climate, the local authorities commanded that Arrobus be buried in the Jewish cemetery at Bridgetown, the island’s capital and the home of nearly all of its Jewish inhabitants. This decision was a controversial one from the perspective of the leaders of the Nidhe Israel temple, established in 1654 and the second oldest Jewish congregation in the Western hemisphere,as it was the usual practice of both metropolitan and colonial congregations to bar the interment in their burial grounds of any Jew who had failed to attend services regularly or to make financial contributions for the support of the synagogue. As the spiritual leaders of a small and sometimes insecure minority population within Barbados, the elders of Nidhe Israel, preferring to avoid open conflict with Gentile authority figures, in the end reluctantly agreed to allow Arrobus’s body to be interred in their cemetery. However, they insisted that her grave had to be dug by slaves or free men of color, rather than by men of the congregation, as was the usual practice, and any pensioner of the synagogue who assisted in this process, or volunteered to participate in the ritual washingof the corpse, “shall be immediately taken off the list of Pensioners,” thus forfeiting the temple’s financial support in perpetuity. Moreover, Arrobus’s grave could only be located in “the Nook,” an irregular corner of the Bet Haim (House of Life), or graveyard, in front of which a door would be installed in order to separate this apostate’s tomb from those of “true” Jews—a costly effort, but one which the Bridgetown Jewish community deemed essential to in order to maintain the purity of their burial ground.[16]
In a similar fashion, the Jewish community of Philadelphia expressed its distaste for Jewish-Christian intermarriage following the death in 1785 of ,”the merchant Benjamin Moses Clava, who had married a Christian womanin a civil ceremony. As withLunahArrobus, MosesClava’s body was permitted to be interred in the local Jewish graveyard, in this case that of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel synagogue, but the Bet Din, a religious court whose members included theleaders of the congregation, insisted that his burial could proceed only if the grave were located “in a corner of the cemetery,”one normally reserved for suicides, and that his body should be placed in the grave without ritual washing, without a shroud and without a ceremony,” or even the recitation of the appropriate prayers. In the end Mordecai Moses Mordecai, a leading member of the congregation, and several other mentook charge of MosesClava’s corpse and interred it with the proper ritual, but the prominent Philadelphia layman and halachic scholar Manuel Josephson criticized them as “impudent, light-minded people,” and most of the other men of the Mikveh Israel congregation agreed that such laxity in upholding communal ritual could only undermine the power of Jewish law in what they considered to be a distressingly“libertine America.”[17] By contrast, in the smaller towns and the backcountry settlementsofBritish North America, if no appropriate Jewish woman was available as a bride, a Jewish man was likely to settle for a Christian spouse, as he wanted a wife and children, and, since he was already living outside of anything that could be referred to as a “Jewish community,” he was likely to place his need and desire to marry over the fear of censure on the part of his co-religionists.[18]
But it is important to understand that Jewish marriage strategies in the British West Indian colonies were more than a practical response to a shortage of locally available partners. In many instances, British West Indian Jews viewed the creation of marital alliances with their fellow Jews elsewhere throughout the British and Dutch islandsin positive rather than negative terms, as a strategy by which they might hope to develop their own variant of the “great tangled cousinry,” rather than merely making the best of a difficult situation. The distinction between this approach and that of Bailyn’selite Virginians stemmed not only from religion and location; their overall aims were quite different from one another. The North American Gentile practice centered on the acquisition of vast tracts of land, primarily in the form of tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations, and on the formation of networks of political patronage and clientage within an individual colony. In order to attain these goals, it was crucial that a husband and wife be from the same colony, and ideally from the same neighborhood or region thereof. But Jews within the West Indian colonies, although they were after 1740 naturalized British subjects, and were allowed to swear oaths without the use of a Bible, did not seek political power, as they continued to be legally proscribed from standing for office, and even from votingfor representatives in the colonial Houses of Assembly.[19] Nor were they hoping to employ marriage as a strategy through which to consolidate extensive land holdings, as the great majority of British West Indian Jews were city-dwelling merchants, rather than owners of sugar plantations.
These individuals were, in the overwhelming majority of cases, “port Jews,” members of a group which David Sorkin has defined as “merchant Jews of Sephardi or, to a lesser extent, Italian extraction who settled in the port cities of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic seaboard and the New World.”[20] Defined by “commerce rather than geography,” they created geographically wide-ranging yet highly durable kinship networks which connected the various island colonies, particularly the Dutch and British possessions in the Caribbean, with one another, and also with North America, England, and the Netherlands.[21]For example, Rowland(or Rohiel) Gideon Abudiente(or Abundiente), born[MH1] in Hamburg or in the neighboring community of Gluckstadtin 1654 and of Portuguese descent, established himself in commerce in St. Kitts in the final third of the seventeenth century, lived and worked in Barbados, Nevis, and Boston, then arrived in 1690 in London, where he was the first Jew to be admitted as a freeman to a company of the City of London. His son Sampson Gideon (1699-1762) became one of the City’s leading financiers and a close associate of and financial advisor to Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, and his son, also named Sampson, was granted the Irish title of Baron Eardley.[22]Louis Moses Gomez, born in Madrid in the late 1650s and raised in France, emigrated to New York, married Esther Marques, whose family had close links to the Jewish community of Barbados, and raised sons who would cement through their spousal choices the family’s business ties with the Caribbean. Benjamin wed Esther Nunes of Barbados, and Daniel’s first wife was Rebecca De Torres, the daughter of a Jamaican Jew, and after Rebecca’s death Daniel married Esther Levy of Curacao.[23] The Pinheiro family was still more far-flung; its progenitor, the distiller and merchant Isaac, was born in Madrid in 1636, grew up in Amsterdam, became a freeman of New York in 1695, and soon thereafter centered his familial and business interests on Nevis. Throughout his travels, he maintained close commercial as well as affective ties with his father and sister in Amsterdam, and with another sister and her family in Curacao. After Isaac’s deathin 1710, his Amsterdam-born widow Esther made frequent visits to New York and Boston in connection with the family’s commercial endeavors, in partnership with both Jewish and Christian merchants, and her son Moses, the Reverend William Smith’s aforementioned fishing companion, moved to Barbados, married Lunah, a woman from that island’s Jewish community,and remained there until his death in 1755.[24]Like many of the participants in these trans-colonial Jewish marriages, Moses and Lunah may well have not known or even met one another prior to their wedding day, in contrast to the youths of the eighteenth-century Virginia elite, who in many cases had been acquainted with one another since childhood. But, as Laura Leibman has noted, while the eighteenth century saw the emergence amongstmany Anglo-American Protestants of the idea that romantic love, or at least established friendship, was the root of a happy marriage, amongst Jews the maintenance of the faith was still considered the primary goal of marital alliances.[25]