Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America’s First Intentional Jewish Community

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover The Sephardic Atlantic

  • 357 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter revises the traditional analysis of the Jews of colonial Savannah, who first arrived in 1733 and constituted the first intentional Jewish community of North America. These Jews, most of whom descended from forced converts to Catholicism, have generally been appraised as free people indigenous to Portugal and Spain, as refugees from religious persecution, as largely ignorant of the British colony, and as either wealthy or relative newcomers to impoverishment, who embraced an opportunity to create a new experience for themselves as public Jews. Based on the application of a transimperial Atlantic History approach, coupled with recently unearthed archival evidence, this chapter argues that Savannah’s Jews were quintessentially Atlantic Jews, to whom Portuguese Jewish heritage, slavery, poverty, and mobility were central. This enhanced understanding of Savannah’s Jews is achieved through a consideration of other more sizeable Atlantic Jewish communities that left behind a much richer archival legacy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 139.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The exact number varies in the sources but mostly ranges in the forties. See, for example, Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000), 46–47; AJA, Small Collections, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book, p. 26 (44); Malcolm H. Stern , “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52 (March 1963): 169–99, 176 (41); Abram Vossen Goodman, American Overture: Jewish Rights in Colonial Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 175 (43); George Fenwick Jones, “Sephardim and Ashkenazim: Jewish Settlers in Colonial Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly (henceforth TGHQ) 85, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 519–37, 520, 522, 524–25 (20, 39, 40, 43).

  2. 2.

    Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire; ou Métier d’historien (Paris: A. Colin, 1949), 5. In the first year of the town’s founding, nearly one sixth of the white population was Jewish. Harold E. Davis, The Fledgling Province: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, 1733–1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 15. Other scholars argue that Jews constituted more than 25% of the settlement’s population: B. H. Levy, “The Early History of Georgia’s Jews,” in Forty Years of Diversity: Essays on Colonial Georgia, eds. Harvey H. Jackson and Phinizy Spalding (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984), 163–78, 167, misattributed to Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1:354. General treatments of early Savannah (which either fail to or scarcely mention Jews) include Hugh McCall, The History of Georgia: Containing Brief Sketches of the Most Remarkable Events Up to the Present Day (1784), 2 vols. (Savannah: William T. Williams, 1811, 1816); William Bacon Stevens, A History of Georgia: From its First Discovery by Europeans to the Adoption of the Present Constitution in MDCCXCVIII, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1847–1859); James Etheridge Callaway, The Early Settlement of Georgia (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1948); Trevor Richard Reese , Colonial Georgia: A Study in British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1963), William Harden, A History of Savannah and South Georgia, 2 vols. (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913); Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976); George Fenwick Jones, The Georgia Dutch: From the Rhine and Danube to the Savannah, 1733–1783 (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1970) and The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans Along the Savannah (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984); Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001); Paul M. Pressly, On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). On Jewish Savannah, see Charles Colcock Jones, “The Settlement of the Jews in Georgia,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (henceforth PAJHS) 1 (1893): 1–10; Leon Hühner, “The Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” PAJHS 10 (1902): 65–95 and “The Jews of Georgia from the Outbreak of the American Revolution to the Close of the 18th Century,” PAJHS 17 (1909): 89–108; W. Gunther Plaut, “Two Notes on the History of the Jews in America,” Hebrew Union College Annual 14 (1939): 575–85; Malcolm H. Stern , “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (March 1963): 169–99, “Errata: New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 4 (June 1963): 390, “The Sheftall Diaries: Vital Records of Savannah Jewry (1733–1808),” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (March 1965): 243–77, and “Growing up in Pioneer Savannah: The Unfinished Memoir of Levi Sheftall (1739–1809),” Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 3 (1975): 15–22; Marion Abrahams Levy, “Savannah’s Old Jewish Burial Ground,” TGHQ 34, no. 4 (December 1950): 265–70; Richard D. Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro and the Settlement in Georgia,” in Migration and Settlement: Proceedings of the Anglo-American Jewish Historical Conference Held in London Jointly by the Jewish Historical Society of England and the American Jewish Historical Society, July 1970, ed. Aubrey Newman (London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1971), 63–100 and “Zipra Nunes’s Story,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram W. Korn (Waltham, Mass: American Jewish Historical Society, 1976), 47–61; David T. Morgan, “The Sheftalls of Savannah,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62, no. 4 (June 1973): 348–61; B. H. Levy, “Savannah’s Old Jewish Community Cemeteries,” TGHQ 66, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–20; Saul Jacob Rubin, Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry, 1733–1983 (Savannah: Congregation Mickve Israel, 1983); Levy , “The Early History of Georgia’s Jews;” Mark I. Greenberg, “Becoming Southern: The Jews of Savannah, Georgia, 1830–70,” American Jewish History 86, no. 1 (March 1998): 55–75, “Savannah’s Jewish Women and the Shaping of Ethnic and Gender Identity, 1830–1900,” TGHQ 82, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 751–74, “A ‘Haven of Benignity:’ Conflict and Cooperation Between Eighteenth Century Savannah Jews,” TGHQ 86, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 544–68; Holly Snyder, “A Tree With Two Different Fruits: The Jewish Encounter with German Pietists in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 58, no. 4 (October 2001): 855–82 and “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000); and Kylie Louise McCormick, “Father and Servant, Son and Slave: Judaism and Labor in Georgia, 1732–1809” (M.A. thesis, University of Nebraska, 2016).

  3. 3.

    Snyder , “A Sense of Place,” 36–40; Paul Masserman and Max Baker, The Jews Come to America (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1932), 80, 82n5; Hühner , “The Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” 66; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:354 (“economic opportunity lined with […] religious freedom”). Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro.” Barnett does acknowledge the endemic poverty of the refugees.

  4. 4.

    Snyder , “A Sense of Place,” 42.

  5. 5.

    For transnational or transimperial alternatives to the traditional narrative of American Jewish colonial history, see Robert Cohen, “Jewish Demography in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of London, the West Indies, and Early America” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1976), and Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991); Snyder , “A Sense of Place;” Judah Cohen, “Trading Freedoms? Exploring Colonial Jewish Merchanthood Between Europe and the Caribbean,” in American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience?, eds. Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), 47–63; Noah Gelfand, “A People Within and Without: International Jewish Commerce and Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Dutch Atlantic World” (PhD diss., New York University, 2008); Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012); Barry Stiefel and David Rittenberg, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014); and Aviva Ben-Ur, “Atlantic Jewish History: A Conceptual Reorientation,” in Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History, 1555–1890: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica, ed. Arthur Kiron (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 25–46 and Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

  6. 6.

    For standard overviews see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Deanult, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Philip D. Morgan and Jack P. Greene, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  7. 7.

    Albert B. Saye, ed., Georgia’s Charter of 1732 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1942), 19.

  8. 8.

    Miles Lane, “Introduction: General Oglethorpe’s Georgia ,” in General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743, ed. Miles Lane, 2 vols. (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1975), 1: xiii, xvi.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., xvi.

  10. 10.

    Trevor R. Reese, The Most Delightful Country of the Universe: Promotional Literature of the Colony of Georgia, 1717–1734 (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1972), vii.

  11. 11.

    Stern, “New Light on the Jewish settlement of Savannah,” 172–75, 177–79.

  12. 12.

    Lee J. Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1932), 94–95 (for quotes); Abram Vossen Goodman, American Overture: Jewish Rights in Colonial Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 168–81; Goodman, American Overture; 176; Hühner , “The Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” 66; and Masserman and Max Baker, The Jews Come to America, 80–82.

  13. 13.

    Goodman, American Overture, 178–79; Edward J. Cashin, ed., Setting Out to Begin a New World (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1995), 29–30 (James Oglethorpe to the trustees, letter of August 12, 1733).

  14. 14.

    For these ideas see Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, 6–7.

  15. 15.

    For recent critiques of the term “Sephardic” see Miriam Bodian, “Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: The Ambiguous Boundaries of Self-Definition,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (2008): 66–80, 72; Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), xii; Tirtsah Levie- Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare Among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 5.

  16. 16.

    David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

  17. 17.

    Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 92.

  18. 18.

    Dave Verdooner and Harmen Snel, Trouwen in Mokum: Jewish Marriage in Amsterdam, 1598–1811 (The Hague: Uitgeverij Warray, 1991), 1:37 (for Sara Castanho, who was born in “Guyana” in 1634 and wed David Montezinos in Amsterdam in 1651).

  19. 19.

    James A. Williamson, English Colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon, 1604–1668 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 154; David Cohen Nassy , Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo: n. p., 1788), part 1, 20.

  20. 20.

    NAN, NPIGS, inv. nr. 416, Alfabetische staten van geborenen over 1662–1723 en 1723–1777; Robert Cohen, “The Misdated Ketubah: A Note on the Beginnings of the Suriname Jewish Community,” American Jewish Archives (April 1984): 13–15, 14–15.

  21. 21.

    James Edward Oglethorpe to trustees, August 12, 1733, in General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743, ed. Miles Lane, 2 vols. (Beehive Press: Savannah, 1975), 1:19–23; Goodman, American Overture, 188–89. For general lack of access of Jews to medical training in European universities see Richard Barnett, “Dr Jacob de Castro Sarmento and Sephardim in Medical Practice in 18th-Century London,” Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 27 (1978–1980): 84–120, 85, 97n17, 111, 113; Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 97 and Robert Jütte, “Contacts at the Bedside: Jewish Physicians and Their Christian Patients,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, eds. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137–50, 142.

  22. 22.

    Cashin , Setting Out to Begin a New World, 44 (account of Francis Moore, 1735). The New Christian background of this Jewish individual is my inference.

  23. 23.

    Hühner , “Jews of Georgia in Colonial Times,” 80, 89. The proclivity also extended to an Italian Jew, Joseph Ottolenghi, who converted to Christianity and whose parents had been engaged in the silk industry (91n5).

  24. 24.

    A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia, vol. 1 (London, 1742), 48–50; An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (London, 1741), 21–22; Cashin , Setting Out to Begin a New World (Journal of William Stephens, 1737), 61. The description of the mammoth grapes may be an allusion to the Israelite spies’ report on Canaan, as recounted in Numbers 13:23.

  25. 25.

    Patrick Tailfer, et al., A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia, ed. Clarence L. Ver Steeg (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1960 [1741]), 62.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 27, 150 (“having vines ready to transplant”).

  27. 27.

    For evidence of other local doctors see George Fenwick Jones and Paul Martin Peucher, “‘We Have Come to Georgia with Pure Intentions:’ Moravian Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg’s Letters from Savannah, 1735,” TGHQ 82, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 84–120, 93. For knowledge of silk culture among Swiss and Scottish immigrants see John Pitts Corry, “Racial Elements in Colonial Georgia,” TGHQ 20, no. 1 (March 1936): 30–40, 39–40; Savannah Unit, Federal Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration of Georgia, “Mulberry Grove in Colonial Times,” TGHQ 23, no. 3 (September 1939): 236–52, 239–40; and Lane , “Introduction,” xxvii. For such expertise among the Salzburgers see Jones, The Georgia Dutch, 221–23, and among the Amatis brothers of Savoy, Italy see Amos Aschbach Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 136.

  28. 28.

    For an early historiographical example of Jews as uniquely valuable see Stevens, History of Georgia, 1:103–104.

  29. 29.

    Saye, Georgia’s Charter of 1732, 10. Italics added; the origin of the confusion is my interpretation.

  30. 30.

    Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” 173.

  31. 31.

    SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, “Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America;” Reese, The Most Delightful Country of the Universe, xvi–xvii.

  32. 32.

    SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, “Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America,” p. 3.

  33. 33.

    Ibid. The tract is transcribed in Reese , The Most Delightful Country of the Universe, 69–73.

  34. 34.

    The summary does not specifically refer to Martyn’s tract, but more generally to the immigration scheme. The common lack of English knowledge among Portuguese Jewish leaders can be inferred from SAA, 334, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 66a, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, Antonio da Costa to David Mendes da Silva, October 17, 1732.

  35. 35.

    Lane , “Introduction,” xxii (for these metropoles as transit stations for persecuted Protestants).

  36. 36.

    SAA, 334, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 66a, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, “O Resumen do Papel adjunto.”

  37. 37.

    SAA, 334, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 66a, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, “O Resumen do Papel adjunto;” SAA, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, inv. nr. 1029 II, p. 784.

  38. 38.

    SAA, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, inv. nr. 1029 II, proposal of January 1733, pp. 778, 787, 794. The proposal was apparently the brainchild of David de Pinto.

  39. 39.

    NAN, NPIGS, inv nr. 25, The Directors of the Society of Suriname, Amsterdam, July 3, 1733, pp. 298–99; SAA, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, 1029 II, Parnassim & Gabay of kk de TT Amsterdam to Beraha VeSalom parnassim, June 19, 1734, p. 816.

  40. 40.

    A. J. A. Quintus Bosz, “Geschiedenis van het Fort Nieuw Amsterdam in het verdedigingsstelsel van Suriname,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 43 (1963–64): 103–48, 113; SAA, 5.2.11, Bemoeingen met andere Gemeenten, inv. nr. 1029, Stukken betreffende joodse gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, 1748, p. 710.

  41. 41.

    TNAUK, SP 89/23, Part I, Henry Worsley to James Stanhope, October 20, 1714, pp. 97–98, 98; Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Exceptional and the Mundane: A Biographical Portrait of Rebecca Machado Phillips, 1746–1831,” in Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, eds. Jonathan D. Sarna and Pamela Nadell (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2001), 46–80, 47.

  42. 42.

    LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/02/005, Index to old orders and regulations of the Mahamad and the Elders, p. 9 (undated).

  43. 43.

    A. S. Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community, 1720–1733—Philip Carteret Webb’s Notebooks,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 21 (1962–1967): 39–63, 39.

  44. 44.

    Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 167–71, 168; Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro ,” 78–79; 81, 91–92.

  45. 45.

    Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro ,” 80. According to Diamond (Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community, 40), 1500 refugees arrived directly from Portugal between 1720 and 1733.

  46. 46.

    Endelman , The Jews of Georgian England, 167–71; Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro ,” 78–79, 81, 91–92 and Bevis Marks Records.

  47. 47.

    LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/04/001, Minute Book: the Elders, November 6, 1748, p. 70.

  48. 48.

    Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro ,” 83 (9 Nisan 5492). The Minute Book Barnett consulted is apparently no longer extant.

  49. 49.

    SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, Antonio da Costa to David Mendes da Silva, October 17, 1732. For discussion of this letter see Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “A Study in Intercommunal Relations in the Sephardi Diaspora: London and Amsterdam in the Eighteenth Century,” in Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 41–58, 51.

  50. 50.

    LMA, LMA/4521/A/01/04/001, Minute Book: the Elders, p. 4 (3 Elul 5494).

  51. 51.

    See, for example, Snyder , “A Sense of Place,” 36–47; Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” 173.

  52. 52.

    Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 1, 98 (for 1751).

  53. 53.

    Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia Compiled and Published Under Authority of the Legislature by Allen D. Candler (Atlanta: The Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1904), 1:50.

  54. 54.

    Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008 [2007]), 12, 14.

  55. 55.

    Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 138; Harold E. Davis, The Fledgling Province: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, 1733–1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 148.

  56. 56.

    Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 15.

  57. 57.

    Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Gustavo Acioli Lopes, “Brazil’s Colonial Economy and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Supply and Demand,” in Networks and Trans-Cultural Exchange: Slave Trading in the South Atlantic, 1590–1867, eds. David Richardson and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 31–70.

  58. 58.

    William Moraley, The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, An Indentured Servant, eds. Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, 2nd ed. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 1–72; David W. Galenson, “British Servants and the Colonial Indenture System in the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of Southern History 44, no. 1 (February 1978): 41–66; James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776–1838 (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

  59. 59.

    Gustav Ungerer, The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2008), 11.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 71; A. S. Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community, 1720–1733—Philip Carteret Webb’s Notebooks,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 21 (1962–1967): 39–63, 51. Their status in England hovered between servant and slave.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 90, 92. For examples of slave ownership and the trade in slaves among London’s Portuguese Jews, see Diamond, “Problems of the London Sephardi Community,” 50, 52–53.

  63. 63.

    Ungerer , The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, 93–101.

  64. 64.

    LMA, LMA/4521/A/02/02/001, Circumcicoems feitas por o Sr. Is. Carriaõ De Pabia.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., p. 5 (unpaginated).

  66. 66.

    “The Jerusalem Infirmary alias A Journey to the Valley of Jehosaphat,” reprinted in Barnett, “Dr Jacob de Castro Sarmento,” 84–120, 118.

  67. 67.

    Since the illustration depicts Portuguese Jewish leaders debating the delicate question about which groups would be admitted to the infirmary as charity recipients, the full communal belonging of this “Berberisca” is also implicitly put to question.

  68. 68.

    Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro ,” 84.

  69. 69.

    AJA, Small Collections, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book, July 11, 1733–April 23, 1818, pp. 25–26.

  70. 70.

    Leonore Davidoff, “‘Mastered for Life:’ Servants and Wives in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, ed. Leonore Davidoff (New York: Routledge, 1995), 18–19; Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 12 (for quote).

  71. 71.

    Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 54.

  72. 72.

    AJA, Manuscript Collection No. 99, Bertram W. Korn Papers, Box 13, folder 1, will of Benjamin Sheftall, August 4, 1765.

  73. 73.

    Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro ,” 88.

  74. 74.

    AJA, Manuscript Collection No. 99, Bertram W . Korn Papers, Box 13, folder 1, will of Moses Nunes, October 14, 1785.

  75. 75.

    McCormick, “Father and Servant, Son and Slave.” McCormick asserts that there were “appreciable differences between the slaveholding of Jewish and non-Jewish people” (abstract), but provides no examples.

  76. 76.

    Bertram Wallace Korn , “Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789–1865,” PAJHS 50, no. 3 (1961): 151–201; 199–201.

  77. 77.

    Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, “Financing Poor Relief in the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Community in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture (1500–2000), eds. Jonathan I. Israel and R. Salverda (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 63–102, 67 (her observation of Amsterdam applies broadly).

  78. 78.

    Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 176, 186; Bernfeld, “Financing Poor Relief,” 72–73; Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1978), 10; Bodian, “The ‘Escamoth’ of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Community of London,” 13; Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 52.

  79. 79.

    The centrality of poverty in Atlantic Jewish communities is further detailed in Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

  80. 80.

    Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 90.

  81. 81.

    Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 15.

  82. 82.

    Yosef Kaplan, “Deviance and Excommunication in the Portuguese Community of 18th Century Amsterdam,” in Dutch Jewish History, ed. Jozeph Michman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: The Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, 1993), 1:103–15, 107.

  83. 83.

    Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 19; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 157.

  84. 84.

    Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 167–71; Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 78–79, 81, 91–92.

  85. 85.

    Barnett, “Dr Samuel Nunes Ribeiro,” 80.

  86. 86.

    Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California, 2002), 81.

  87. 87.

    Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Absorption of Outsiders in London’s Portuguese Jewish Community,” in The Sephardic Experience: East and West, eds. Federica Francesconi, Stanley Mirvis, and Brian M. Smollett (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

  88. 88.

    Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 67.

  89. 89.

    Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1957), 171; Jonathan Irvine Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-Seventeenth-Century (1643–1657),” in Menasseh ben Israel and His World, eds. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 138–63, 140–43, 146–47.

  90. 90.

    SAA, Archief van de Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, inv. nr. 334, Ingekomen stukken bij parnassim, 66a, Antonio da Costa to David Mendes da Silva, October 17, 1732, p. 1. The letter is torn and the word “relief” (alivio) is inferred.

  91. 91.

    Goodman, American Overture, 173 (for the colony of Georgia).

  92. 92.

    Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 20.

  93. 93.

    Ibid.

  94. 94.

    Ibid., 20–21; Ariadne Schmidt and Jeannette Kamp, “Excluding the Unwanted? Banishment in Early Modern Cities: Frankfurt am Main and Leiden in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” forthcoming. I thank the authors for permission to cite their work-in-progress.

  95. 95.

    B. H. Levy refers to the Portuguese Jewish “practice of diversion rather than retention of poor immigrants.” Levy, “The Early History of Georgia’s Jews,” 163–78, 165.

  96. 96.

    Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society.

  97. 97.

    No author, “The Earliest Extant Minute Books of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, 1728–1786,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 1–82; 32.

  98. 98.

    Ibid.

  99. 99.

    J. J. L., ed., “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn: Shearith Israel in New York,” PAJHS Society 21 (1913): 83–171; 99.

  100. 100.

    The phrase comes from David Brener, The Jews of Lancaster: A Story with Two Beginnings (Lancaster, Pa., Lancaster County Historical Society, 1979).

  101. 101.

    Zoltán Fejös, “Hungarians in Chicago,” 242–43; 243, section within Inta Gale Carpenter, et al., “Reports of the ACLS-HAS Team Project,” Journal of Folklore Research 21, no. 2–3 (May–December 1984): 239–56.

  102. 102.

    Rubin, Third to None, 3.

  103. 103.

    Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 97.

  104. 104.

    My calculation based on AJA, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book. This calculation is necessarily inexact as the number of family members listed is sometimes indicated as an estimate. The number of arrivals includes 44 individuals listed for July 11, 1733.

  105. 105.

    In that year, three Jews “had received lately some Advice from their Friends in Jamaica inviting them to come thither; which they were pondering upon, and unresolved in […].” Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement of Savannah,” 191.

  106. 106.

    J. J. L., ed., “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn: Shearith Israel in New York,” 128. This is also true for poor Jews circulating elsewhere in the Atlantic World.

  107. 107.

    Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 121, 212.

  108. 108.

    See Nancy L. Green, “The Comparative Method and Poststructural Structuralism—New Perspectives for Migration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History 13, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 13–16, 20.

  109. 109.

    Pressly , On the Rim of the Caribbean, 98.

  110. 110.

    Ibid., 98–99.

  111. 111.

    Natalie Zacek, “‘A People So Subtle:’ Sephardic Jewish Pioneers of the English West Indies,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move¸ ed. Caroline A. Williams (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009), 97–112, 109.

  112. 112.

    Toni Pitock, “Bringing Philadelphia into the Jewish Atlantic World,” paper presented at Port Cities, 1500–1800 conference, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, November 5–7, 2015; Elliott Ashkenazi, “Jewish Commercial Interests Between North and South: The Case of the Lehmans and the Seligmans,” American Jewish Archives 63, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1991): 25–39 and The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840–1870 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988).

  113. 113.

    An exception is Asser Levy, a native of Vilna and tradesman in New Netherland who had dealings with Amsterdam merchant Abraham Cohen Henriquez. Noah L. Gelfand , “A Transatlantic Approach to Understanding the Formation of a Jewish Community in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 89, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 375–95, 385.

  114. 114.

    Eli N. Evans , The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 275, 292.

  115. 115.

    Vinay Dharwadker, “Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, eds. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011): 125–43, 137 (for the quote).

  116. 116.

    Phillip Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 203–33; Jessica Vance Roitman , “‘A Mass of Mestiezen, Castiezen, and Mulatten:’ Contending with Color in the Netherlands Antilles, 1750–1850,” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 399–417, 407 (for the application of Troutman’s principle to free people of African descent).

  117. 117.

    Rubin, Third to None, 55.

  118. 118.

    Jeremy D. Popkin , A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 42.

  119. 119.

    David Patrick Geggus, “Slave Rebellion During the Age of Revolution,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolution, 1795–1800, eds. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV, 2011), 23–56, 23, 42.

  120. 120.

    For one definition see Alex van Stipriaan, “An Unusual Parallel: Jews and Africans in Suriname in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Studia Rosenthaliana 31, no. 1–2 (1997): 74–93, 86.

  121. 121.

    AJA, SC-11308, Sheftall family, Record book, pp. 28, 19.

  122. 122.

    Pressly , On the Rim of the Caribbean, 72.

  123. 123.

    Ibid., 72.

  124. 124.

    Ibid., 73.

  125. 125.

    Ibid., 69.

  126. 126.

    McCormick, “Father and Servant, Son and Slave,” 71; James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America: Constituted at Savannah (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1888), 49.

  127. 127.

    Rubin, Third to None, 56.

  128. 128.

    Lockley , Lines in the Sand, 163 (for the pervasive contact between African Americans and whites of all classes).

  129. 129.

    Anton Hieke, Jewish Identity in the Reconstruction South: Ambivalence and Adaptation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 23.

  130. 130.

    Ibid., 1.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Sina Rauschenbach for her invitation to contribute to this volume and to her and Jonathan Schorsch for their keen editorial insights. Portions of this chapter, which have been abbreviated due to space constraints, are drawn from my unpublished presentation, “South and Further South: American Jewry and the Atlantic World,” Margolis Lecture on the Jewish Experience in the American South, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Duke University (November 2015), researched while a Loewenstein-Wiener Fellow at the American Jewish Archives Marcus Center (2015–2016). I would like to thank Ruth von Bernuth, Yaakov Ariel, and Rachel Ariel for the invitation to speak at Duke University, and Executive Director Gary Zola, the (now retired) Senior Archivist Kevin Proffitt, Managing Editor of Publications Dana Herman, and their colleagues at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives for their assistance. I am also grateful to Honorary Archivist Miriam Rodrigues-Pereira for permission to consult the Portuguese Jewish collection at the London Metropolitan Archives, and the staff of the below-mentioned archives. Abbreviations are as follows: AJA (American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio); LMA (London Metropolitan Archives); NAN (Nationaal Archief Nederland); TNAUK (The National Archives of the United Kingdom); NPIGS (Nederlands Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente, Suriname 1677–1906); SAA (Stadsarchief Amsterdam).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Aviva Ben-Ur

Authors
  1. Aviva Ben-Ur
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Sina Rauschenbach

  2. University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Jonathan Schorsch

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ben-Ur, A. (2018). Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America’s First Intentional Jewish Community. In: Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (eds) The Sephardic Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_8

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation