Becoming Imperial Citizens: Jews and Freemasonry in the British Caribbean (Early Nineteenth Century)

Jansen, Jan C.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_9

Jan C. Jansen³

333 Accesses

Abstract

Historians have discovered recently the considerable colonial history of freemasonry, a central element of cosmopolitan sociability in Enlightenment Europe. Jews—and especially Sephardim—played a major role in masonic lodges popping up throughout the imperial Atlantic world beginning in the 1730s. Based on empirical evidence from the major masonic and Jewish hubs in the British West Indies (particularly Jamaica), this chapter sets out to explore this relationship more thoroughly. It argues that freemasonry functioned as a locus of a “transitory sociability” (Eric Saunier) in a period of fundamental transformation for the Jewish diaspora in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Caribbean. With the gradual weakening and dissolution of transimperial diasporic ties, Jews turned toward an institution that promised to support their becoming “imperial citizens,” while at the same time allowing them to retain and refashion certain diasporic ties beyond the British imperial realm.

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Notes

1.
Joseph Glock d’Obernay to the Duke of Sussex, January 7 and January 8, 1820, United Grand Lodge of England [UGLE], 1991 HC 14/E/9–10. On Glock and his itinerary, see A. C. F. Jackson , “Joseph Glock (alias Chevalier Joseph de Glock d’Obernay),” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum [AQC] 94 (1981): 43–60; Alain Bernheim, “Further Light on the Masonic World of Joseph Glock,” AQC 100 (1987): 33–60. I would like to thank the editors for their insightful comments and suggestions. Special thanks go to GHI interns Till Knobloch and particularly Sabine Hanke for their research assistance, and to Susan Snell at the library of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) for her important support during my research.
2.
Joseph Glock d’Obernay to the Duke of Sussex, January 8, 1820, UGLE Library, 1991 HC 14/E/10.
3.
Ibid.
4.
For an overview, see Frederick William Seal-Coon, An Historical Account of Jamaican Freemasonry (Kingston: Golding Print. Service, 1976) and, most recently, Jackie Ranston, Masonic Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, vol. 1 (Hersham: Lewis Masonic, 2017).
5.
Jacob A.P.M. Andrade , A Record of the Jews in Jamaica (Kingston: Jamaica Times, 1941), 118–21.
6.
Still the most substantial survey on this is Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
7.
See, for instance, Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew 1492–1776 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), vol. 3, 1168–72; Marcus, Early American Jewry (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1953), vol. 1, 99, 125, 187–90; vol. 2, 81, 151, 189, 193, 328, 476; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 98, 115–16; Andrade , Jews in Jamaica, 118–21; Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), vol. 1, 478; Laura A. Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), 249–74; Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 76–78; David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 194–208; Aviston Downes, “Freemasonry in Barbados, 1740–1900: Issues of Ethnicity and Class in a Colonial Polity,” The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 53 (2007): 50–76.
8.
Samuel Oppenheim, The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810 (New York: The American Jewish Historical Society, 1910).
9.
See Katz’s often-cited description of freemasonry as harbinger of a more tolerant “neutral society.” Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 210, 214.
10.
Eric Saunier, Révolution et sociabilité en Normandie au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: 6000 francs-maçons de 1740 à 1830 (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 1999), 39.
11.
For a similar argument for the early-twentieth-century Ottoman context, see Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1–19, 191–96.
12.
The literature is by now immense. See especially the landmark publications such as Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800 (New York: Berghahn, 2001); Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jonathan Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Jessica V. Roitman, The Same but Different? Inter-Cultural Trade and the Sephardim, 1595–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Stanley Mirvis, “Sephardic Family Life in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013). For a discussion of recent historiography, see also Jonathan Schorsch, “Sephardic Trade: Early Modern Atlantic Style,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 483–503.
13.
See, in particular, Georges Odo, La franc-maçonnerie dans les colonies, 1738–1960 (Paris: EMDF, 2001); Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire; Jessica Harland-Jacobs, “Freemasonry and Colonialism,” in Handbook of Freemasonry, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Jan A.M. Snoek (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 439–60.
14.
Jonathan Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3.
15.
For overviews, see Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora; Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2002).
16.
For a detailed analysis of different legal situations within the Dutch Empire, see James Homer Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland and New York,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 369–93; in comparative perspective Jessica V. Roitman, “Creating Confusion in the Colonies: Jews, Citizenship, and the Dutch and British Atlantics,” Itinerario 36 (2012): 55–90.
17.
For the French West Indies, see Mordechai Arbell, “Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cayenne) and the ‘Black Code,’” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 287–313. Officially banned from the French colonies, there is evidence of Jewish presence in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, see Zvi Loker, “Were there Jewish Communities in Saint Domingue (Haiti)?,” Jewish Social Studies 45 (1983): 135–46; Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et Juifs au XVIIIe siècle: Le racisme au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Tallandier, 1984), 91–115; John D. Garrigus, “New Christians/‘New Whites:’ Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–1789,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 314–32, esp. 316–20. For the two major cases in the British West Indies, Jamaica, and Barbados, see Stephen Alexander Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750 (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1984).
18.
Adam Sutcliffe, “Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 27–29.
19.
See Leibman, Messianism, 301–5; Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews,” 17; Adam Sutcliffe, “Jewish History,” 29.
20.
On debates over the origins, see David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), ch. 1; Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, La République universelle des francs-maçons: De Newton à Metternich (Rennes: Editions Ouest-France, 1999), 23–52.
21.
Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 471.
22.
Daniel Jütte, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). For an excellent discussion of the functions of secrecy in masonic sociability, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Eliteanspruch und Geheimnis in den Geheimgesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Aufklärung und Geheimgesellschaften: Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmut Reinalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 63–86.
23.
Mary Ann Clawson, “Fraternal Orders and Class Formation in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1985): 689; Nicholas Terpstra, “Deinstitutionalizing Confraternity Studies: Fraternalism and Social Capital in Cross-Cultural Contexts,” in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 264.
24.
On the dynamics of masonic expansion, see Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, L’Autre et le frère: L’étranger et la franc-maçonnerie en France au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 19–212; Beaurepaire, L’Europe des francs-maçons XIII^e-XXI^e siècle (Paris: Belin, 2002), 13–99; Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 21–63.
25.
Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 279–80.
26.
On the “plasticity” of freemasonry, see Pierre Chevallier, La première profanation du temple maçonnique: Ou Louis XV et la fraternité 1737–1755 (Paris: Vrin, 1968), 34; Beaurepaire , République universelle, 24, 76, 167, 170.
27.
Vahid Jalil Fozdar, “Constructing the ‘Brother:’ Freemasonry, Empire, and Nationalism in India, 1840–1925” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001), 375–76.
28.
On the history of this stereotype, see Armin Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythus in der Weimarer Republik und im NS-Staat (Vienna: Braumüller, 1993).
29.
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Fraternité universelle et pratiques discriminatoire dans la Franc-maçonnerie des Lumières,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 44 (1997): 195–212.
30.
See Katz, Jews and Freemasons; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Brothers or Strangers? Jews and Freemasons in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” German History 18 (2000): 143–61; Jean-Philippe Schreiber, “Introduction: Judaïsme français et franc-maçonnerie,” Archives Juives 43, no. 2 (2010): 4–14.
31.
Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ch. 4.
32.
Beaurepaire , L’Autre et le frère, 565–66.
33.
Leibman, Mysticism, 274–75.
34.
Hackett , Religion, 196.
35.
Leibman, Mysticism, 254.
36.
Bernard Kusinitz, “Masonry and the Colonial Jews of Newport,” Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes 9 (1984): 183.
37.
Emmanuel, Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, vol. 1, 478; Downes , “Freemasonry in Barbados,” 55; Seal-Coon, Jamaican Freemasonry, 11.
38.
For example, William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 92, 96, 112–13, 123, 182; Hackett , Religion, 192; Faber, Time for Planting, 98; Karl Watson, “Shifting Identities: Religion, Race, and Creolization among the Sephardi Jews of Barbados, 1654–1900,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 210–11.
39.
Leibman, Mysticism, 249.
40.
Jütte, Age of Secrecy.
41.
On the numbers, see Mordechai Arbell, The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica (Kingston: Canoe Press, 2000), 36–37; Jane. S. Gerber, “Introduction,” in Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 6.
42.
See the lists provided by Seal-Coon , Jamaican Freemasonry, 67–112; Ranston, Masonic Jamaica, 247–51.
43.
On freemasonry in Barbados, see Downes , “Freemasonry in Barbados.”
44.
Union Lodge, List of members, June 24, 1795, UGLE Library, Annual Returns, 1166 Union Lodge, SN1166/vii; Ranston, Masonic Jamaica, 127. For a survey of how the schism between “Antients” and “Moderns” played out in the British Empire, see Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 21–63.
45.
Solomon Morales to Robert Leslie, Grand Lodge Secretary, June 17, 1797, UGLE Library, Lodge Files, SN1303, Provincial Grand Lodge no. 1, Kingston, Jamaica, no. 301 (1796–1816). See also Emmanuel X. Leon, History of the Friendly Lodge, No. 239, District No. 2 (Kingston: Mortimer DeSouza, 1898), 20.
46.
George W.J. Palmer , Montego Bay: Its People and its Lodge: A History of the Friendly Lodge 383 Montego Bay Jamaica 1818–2000 (Jamaica: George W.J. Palmer, 2000), 63.
47.
See Seal-Coon , Jamaican Freemasonry, 79.
48.
UGLE, Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, pre-1813–62, UGLE Library; several new members had already been members of other Jamaican lodges—for example, D.N. Nunes (joining in 1815), Moses Morales (1816), Simon Adolphus (1816), or Jacob Joseph Adolphus (1820).
49.
UGLE, Membership Register of Mount Horeb Lodge, Bridgetown, 1804, UGLE Library.
50.
Palmer , Montego Bay, 63–65.
51.
UGLE, Membership Register of Cornwall Lodge, Montego Bay, 1813–36, UGLE Library.
52.
See the list of officers provided by Seal-Coon , Jamaican Freemasonry, 11, 54–56.
53.
For example, David Jan Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112–16.
54.
Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 555–56.
55.
For an overview see Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
56.
See the groundbreaking work by Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Treating different historical concepts of imperial citizenship, see Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
57.
Over the past decades, this has been emphasized, particularly for the French imperial context, in studies by Frederick Cooper. For a broader picture, see his Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
58.
Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Campos , Ottoman Brothers; Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). On freemasonry and imperial citizenship in the late-nineteenth-century British Empire, see Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 240–81.
59.
See, citing different cases, Stephen C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 198–219; Roger Burt, “Freemasonry and Business Networking during the Victorian Period,” The Economic History Review 56 (2003): 657–88.
60.
Beaurepaire , L’Europe des francs-maçons, 13–42.
61.
On the declining role of Jewish confraternities in Barbados, see Marcus, Colonial American Jew, vol. 2, 124.
62.
Karl Watson, “The Sephardic Jews of Bridgetown,” in Beyond the Bridge: Lectures Commemorating Bridgetown’s 375th Anniversary, eds. Woodville K. Marshall and Pedro L.V. Welch (St. Michael: Barbados Museum & Historical Society, 2005), 54; Marcus, Colonial American Jew, vol. 2, 137–38.
63.
“A List of the Members of Friendly Lodge No. 324/438, Kingston, Dec. 1813–Dec. 1816,” UGLE Library, Annual Returns, Friendly Lodge, 1814–32, Box A17. Out of the 32 members, 21 (=66%) were merchants/traders and 4 (=13%) mariners; other professional groups were: 3 clerks (9%), 2 jewelers (6%), 1 planter and 1 administrator (3% each). The share of traders/merchants remained at a high level in the following years, with clerks and professionals becoming the second important groups. See, for example, “A List of the Members of Friendly Lodge No. 324/438, Kingston, March 21, 1821,” UGLE Library, Annual Returns, Friendly Lodge, 1814–32, Box A17.
64.
The places of residence were: Panama (6 members), Cuba (3), Cartagena (1), Riohacha (1), Maracaibo (1), Santa Fe (2), St. Thomas (1). On the role of trade and smuggling with Spanish colonies, see Jackie Ranston, The Lindo Legacy (London: Toucan Books, 2000), 31.
65.
“A General List of Initiations, Passings and Raisings of the Friendly Lodge no. 180, held at Montego Bay from its commencement in July 1818 to 31 December 1821 inclusive,” UGLE Library, Annual Returns, Friendly Lodge, 1818–28, Box A30; UGLE Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, Montego Bay, 1818–36, UGLE Library. A total of 12 out of the 27 new members with known residence were nonresidents. Their places of residence were: Grand Caymans (4), United States (3), Curaçao (2), Cuba (1), Cartagena (1), England (1).
66.
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Sea, 67; Studnicki-Gizbert, “La Nación among the Nations: Portuguese and Other Maritime Trading Diasporas in the Atlantic, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 98.
67.
On the status and the political struggles for emancipation, see Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith Hurwitz, “The New World Sets an Example for the Old: The Jews of Jamaica and Political Rights 1661–1831,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55 (1965): 37–56; Holly Snyder, “Rules, Rights and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British Atlantic Port Towns, 1740–1831,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 147–70; and the essays in Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); in comparative perspective: Roitman , “Creating Confusion.”
68.
A good documentation of the conflict with the congregation’s leadership and the trial is A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Jews in their Attempt to Establish their Right to the Elective Franchise in Jamaica, to which is Added a Correct Report of the Action Brought by Levi Hyman, Esq. Against Samuel Joseph Geoghegan, Esq., Returning Officer, for Refusing His Vote. In a Series of Letters, from a Gentleman of Kingston, to His Friend Off the Island (Belfast: A. MacKay, Jun., 1823).
69.
UGLE, Membership Register of Friendly Lodge, pre-1813–62, UGLE Library.
70.
On Brandon, see Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 86; Laura A. Leibman and Sam May, “Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation,” American Jewish History 99 (2015): 1–26, esp. 4, 8.
71.
UGLE, Membership Register of Concord Lodge, Spanish Town, 1813–36, UGLE Library; on Delgado’s role, see Snyder , “Rules, Rights and Redemption,” 163.
72.
On Beaumont, see William H. Maehl , Jr., “Augustus Hardin Beaumont: Anglo-American Radical (1798–1838),” International Review of Social History 14 (1969): 237–50.
73.
The text is reproduced in Ernest Henriques de Souza, Pictorial: Featuring Some Aspects of Jamaica’s Jewry and his Community Activities (Kingston: Author, 1986), 47.
74.
Souza, Pictorial, 292.
75.
The five members elected to the vestries in the early 1830s were: Alexandre Bravo, Jacob dePass, Jacob Alvarenga, Jacob Adolphus, Barnett Isaacs; members of Friendly Lodges among the first Jewish members of the Assembly were Alexandre Bravo, Robert Nunes, Jacob Adolphus, Barnett Isaacs, and Jacob dePass. On the prominent place of masons among the first postemancipation generation of Jewish politicians, see Ranston, Masonic Jamaica, 181.
76.
For example, Stephen Kantrowitz, “‘Intended for the Better Government of Man:’ The Political History of African American Freemasonry in the Era of Emancipation,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 4 (2010): 1004, 1011–12, 1020, 1026. See also on this point on freemasonry in Colonial British American Jewry, Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD. diss., Brandeis University, 2000), 406–11, 438.
77.
Leibman and May, “Making Jews.” See also Kay Dian Kriz, “Belisario’s ‘Kingston Cries’ and the Refinement of Jewish Identity in the Late 1830s,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 163–77.
78.
These debates played out in the local press. See, in the early phase 1820–21, especially the Kingston Chronicle. For an overview, see A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Jews.
79.
On the fundamental tension between universalism and particularism in freemasonry, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 13; Hoffmann , “Colonial Civil Society,” De Negentiende Eeuw 32 (2008): 143–47.
80.
Leibman and May, “Making Jews,” 17–23. On the admission and non-admission of women in freemasonry, see Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 120–42.
81.
See for example Royal Gazette (Kingston), May 13, 1820, and Kingston Chronicle, May 16, 1820, as reproduced in A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Jews, 13, 18.
82.
At the turn of the century, for example, the costs for being admitted to Montego Bay’s Friendly Lodge as a simple member (apprentice) alone amounted to roughly 4 months of the income of a skilled estate worker. See The By-Laws of the Friendly Lodge no. 383, Montego Bay, 1875, revised 1912 (Montego Bay: Warrington & Co., 1912), 46.
83.
Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 215–20; Cécile Révauger, “Freemasonry in Barbados, Trinidad and Grenada: British or Homemade?,” Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism 1 (2010): 79–91, esp. 85–86.
84.
On Overton , see Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Cécile Révauger, and Susan Snell, Art. “Oviton [Overton], Lovelace,” in Le monde maçonnique des lumières (Europe-Amérique et colonies): Dictionnaire prosopographique, eds. Charles Porset and Cécile Révauger (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013), vol. 3, 2137–39.
85.
James Cummins, Albion Lodge, Bridgetown, to Thomas Harper, United Grand Lodge, January 8, 1823, UGLE HC 23/B/23.
86.
Testimony by James Stewart Junes, November 21, 1823, Minutes of the Secret Committee of the House of Assembly, British National Archives, Colonial Office, CO 137/174, fol. 13–15.
87.
Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), 73; Hurwitz and Hurwitz , “The New World.” For an apparently less conflictive setting in neighboring French Saint-Domingue, see Garrigus , “New Christians.” For the broader historical and geographic context, see Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
88.
Hurwitz and Hurwitz , “The New World,” 46.
89.
See the bill “to entitle Jews, born within the legiance of the king, to the rights and privileges of other natural-born British subjects,” assented to on Dec. 22, 1826, in Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica, 1826: 190, 194, 230–31, 233, 284–85, 312; petition “on behalf of their white fellow-subjects professing the Jewish religion,” Dec. 4, 1827, Votes, 1827: 115–16; Royal Gazette (Kingston), Dec. 1–8, 1827. These tensions would, in the first post-emancipation decades, give way to a multitude of political collaborations on a local level, see Swithin Wilmot, “Jewish Politicians in Post-Slavery Jamaica: Electoral Politics in the Parish of St Dorothy, 1849–1860,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 261–78.
90.
For an account of the ceremony, see The Jamaica Tribune and Daily Adviser (Kingston), August 16, 1864.

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Jan C. Jansen

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University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Sina Rauschenbach
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Jonathan Schorsch

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Jansen, J.C. (2018). Becoming Imperial Citizens: Jews and Freemasonry in the British Caribbean (Early Nineteenth Century). In: Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (eds) The Sephardic Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_9

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