Like the people whose complicated history it chronicles, Stanley Mirvis's well-conceived and incisive study of Jewish life in eighteenth-century Jamaica confronts contradictions at every turn. It tells the stories of several memorable individuals, but its primary purpose is to recount a communal history. It does not shy away from relaying the facts of Jewish slaveholding (and assorted patriarchal practices), but it also reveals the patterns by which Jews continually suffered from exclusionary and discriminatory policies at the hands of the island's governing white majority. Mirvis discusses the processes by which Jamaican Jews, by virtue of their local attachments and participation in island-based economic activities (including the ownership of plantations), became “creolized.” At the same time, his study touches on the ways in which Jamaican Jews, as a result both of their own endogamy and of their status as outsiders with cosmopolitan ties, maintained a degree of distance from their non-Jewish neighbors through the entire course of the long eighteenth century. In its methodology, The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica draws a powerful distinction between itself and other recent and not-so-recent studies of early American Jewry. While Mirvis immerses himself in every conceivable form of documentary evidence available to him, including newspaper articles, government proceedings, and personal papers, his primary form of evidence, as the book's subtitle makes clear, is the wills of individual testators.
Mirvis's resourceful and innovative use of testamentary materials constitutes, in itself, an acknowledgement of a contradictory order of reality. As he writes in his concluding paragraph, wills are “deeply personal documents,” and, at the same time, their contents are authored, edited, and publicized “by notaries and bureaucrats.” They are “communal documents written in the first person” (198). As a scholar of the humanities, I must admit that the prospect of reading an entire history whose primary evidence was garnered from boilerplate documents felt daunting to me. Fortunately, Mirvis avoids all of the pitfalls of an exclusively social historical reckoning with his subject matter. For better or worse, he does not include a single chart or diagram in the book. He supplies a readable narrative, according to which the patterns of temporal change become evident to readers through his combination of wide-arc historiography, representative anecdotes, and thoughtful and succinct analysis.
While the argument he assembles and the story he derives from the wills that he examined (all 450 of them!) might easily have been lost had he a employed a strictly quantitative analysis, Mirvis's nuanced consideration of these wills in juxtaposition with so many other forms of evidence enables him to maintain a storyteller's voice throughout. The result is that readers gain insight into a collective experience—individuals within that collective are made visible to us, but we never lose sight of how those individuals, in composite form, conform to (and occasionally resist) a larger set of patterns. What makes wills so useful for Mirvis's purposes is that, as he puts it, each one of them “reveals more about a network of people than about the testator him- or herself” (5). For instance, Mirvis is able to argue, solely on the basis of the wills whose contents he surveyed, that Jamaican Jews’ ties to their counterparts in England strengthened during the period between 1740 and 1770. He does this by noting a rising proportion of bequeathals to beneficiaries in London.
For historians of the Jewish Atlantic, the story of Jamaica's eighteenth-century Jews is worth telling for several reasons. It sheds light on how one particularly close-knit group of Jews (a subset of “Western Sephardim” to whom Mirvis refers, alternatively as “Portuguese Jews,” “crypto-Jews,” and the naçao) managed to assert and maintain dominance for an extended period in one place. As late as the early decades of the nineteenth century, these non-Ladino (or Hebrew-speaking) Jewish “Gentlemen of a Portuguese Nation” maintained their control and authority over other Jews, even as Jewish communities in western Europe, elsewhere in the Caribbean, and especially in North America grew to be increasingly diverse and multifaceted. Nonetheless, as Mirvis argues, for all of their specificity and separateness, the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica were cultural hybrids whose collective historical experience, family and business ties, and legal and civic standing in the world marked their existence as simultaneously Iberian, Jewish, English (and, of course, Jamaican) people. In the wider frame, the book's ability to argue both sides of the “local” and “cosmopolitan” debate testifies to its utility as a model for scholarship on modern Jewish history.
Jamaica was hardly the only slaveholding society in which Jews made their way in the eighteenth century. The story that Mirvis tells of the island's Jewish plantation owners, slave traders, and slave-owning merchants puts to rest any fanciful notions on the part of current-day readers that Jews were appreciably “different” from other practitioners of chattel slavery. True, they owned far fewer plantations than their non-Jewish white counterparts. Among the “will-making elite” whose testamentary history Mirvis explores (who constituted roughly half of the island's Jewish population), only 15 percent were large-scale landowners. That point aside, in their practices of bequeathal, two-thirds of Jewish Jamaicans left enslaved people to their beneficiaries and only 17 percent manumitted the men and women they had in their possession at their time of death. Mirvis puts it succinctly: “Jewish slave owners in Jamaica are indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors” (86). This is not to say that their lives were not complicated by the practice of slaveholding. The “creolization” process by which Jews became Jamaican included and, in many cases, encouraged men to pursue sexual (and romantic) relationships with Black women, and these relationships, of course, led to a shift in the complexion of people of Jewish ancestry who inhabited the island. In certain limited instances, the biracial progeny of these liaisons were accorded the status of Jews, but, for the most part, the island's dominant mode of “industrialized” slave-holding precluded, for instance, the circumcision of biracial “Jewish” babies or any other form of communal recognition on the part of the Portuguese elite that a Jew could be anyone other than a person of “pure” European stock.
The one question that this book leaves largely unresolved is how exactly we are to account for or explain the Jamaican Jews’ “outsider” status. Mirvis points out on multiple occasions that the Jews of eighteenth-century Jamaica were discriminated against. They were taxed unfairly (to a greater degree, he argues, than any other Jewish community in the Americas), subjected to harassment and humiliation at the hands of mobs, government officials, and journalists, and in many instances received officially sanctioned second-class treatment (in the militia, for example). Yet throughout the eighteenth century, Jews possessed land, power, influence, and, most important, other human beings. In other words, they had access to nearly everything to which other more normatively white people had access. Among the many contradictions the book confronts, this one—which, of course, is an ongoing consideration everywhere we look—is proving ever more difficult to fathom.
