The American Jewish Historical Society in New York houses millions of documents, books, photographs, art and artifacts that record Jewish presence in America since 1654. On your visit there, you might overlook a tiny, anonymously-painted, ivory, miniature portrait of a light-skinned young girl. Her name is Sarah (Lopez–Gill) Rodriguez Brandon Moses.
Sarah’s sartorial elegance and proud demeanor in the portrait belie her humble origins in the British West Indies. Sarah’s mother, Esther Lopez-Gill and her grandmother were African slaves. Her father, Abraham Rodriguez Brandon, “the most influential Jew in Barbados” descended from the long line of Sephardic/Portuguese Jews, “refugees of the Inquisition”, Brandon was a slave owner.
Imperceptible in the portrait is the long road Sarah traveled from her native Barbados to become a socialite in London and New York and her emergence as an emblem of hope for multiracial Sephardic Jews in America.
But spare yourself the expenses traveling to New York! Instead, read the outstanding work Once We Were Slaves by author Laura Arnold Leibman in which Leibman exhumes the fascinating genealogical history of the girl in the portrait who not only becomes a Jewish mother of ten but ultimately “re-categorized as white.”
Sarah was born in 1798 into the slave-owning Jewish Lopez family. Her enslaved mother, Esther Lopez-Gill was “lent out” to Abraham Brandon for “sexual purposes.” Brandon never married Sarah’s mother, (who also bore him a son, Isaac) though it was not unusual in the 18th century Bridgetown, British West Indies, to have slaves birth children for wealthy plantation owners. The newborn children remained enslaved until they somehow acquired funds or a benefactor left them enough money to buy their “manumission.” (Freedom)
Sarah’s Jewish owner, Hannah Lopez, did not readily manumit her slaves but fortuitously, Sarah’s grandfather, the Anglican George Gill (the man who fathered Sarah’s mother Esther Lopez-Gill) died and left Esther enough money to manumit herself and her children. To assure them the legal right to marry, Esther baptized Sarah and Isaac into the Anglican Church. Once freed, the family left Bridgetown for Suriname, a Dutch colony where they converted to Judaism. Isaac was circumcised at the age of thirteen.
Abraham Rodriguez Brandon, president of the prestigious Nidhe Israel Synagogue in Bridgetown, took interest in his children’s future. He sent them both to London where Sarah and Isaac received an elite Jewish education and attended the finest boarding schools. Eventually Sarah attracted and married her brother’s friend, Joshua Moses, a wealthy American Ashkenazi Jew who whisked her off to New York.
Sarah’s star continued to rise in New York’s elite Jewish society, her legacy tightly woven into the fabric of multiracial American Jewry.
Truly an amazing book about the fluidity and so called purity of race.
