Jews and the Farm-Business Complex in the Southern British Mainland Colonies and Beyond

Abstract

Jews and the Farm-Business Complex in the Southern British Mainland Colonies and Beyond Mark K. Bauman (bio) In 1733, Abigail Minis sailed across the Atlantic with her husband, Abraham, as part of the first contingent of Jews from England to Savannah, Georgia. She juggled raising a family while helping Abraham conduct business. He gave Abigail legal control of his enterprises when he died, and they flourished under her leadership as never before. Because Abigail never remarried, she maintained her agency. She expanded the land holdings she inherited from her husband exponentially. She also ran a popular tavern that served as an important meeting place for businesspeople and political figures. The tavern used products from her plantations, and the plantations also provided building materials for her urban real estate investments. A patriot during the American Revolution, she fled to Charleston while the British occupied Georgia. Yet her political and business contacts shielded her property in Georgia from confiscation. Informed by the important role of women in the family economy over generations, her blending of agriculture and business is an important illustration of key themes in this essay: in a region dominated by a cash-crop farming economy, the Jews who pursued agriculture did so almost always in line with their regular commercial activities. MODELS AND VARIATIONS When historians of transatlantic Jewry discuss Jewish plantation ownership in South America and the Caribbean, they define "plantation Jews" like the Minis family as a social type.1 Before about 1800, Jews in the Caribbean hailed largely from Portugal or descended from Portuguese [End Page 143] Jews. Many brought their experience with sugarcane from their earlier sojourn in Dutch Recife, Brazil and pioneered and served as leaders of sugarcane production in their new home. The Inquisition had previously forced them to convert (New Christians) or outwardly practice Catholicism while secretly remaining Jews (crypto-Jews). The latter frequently renewed their identities as Jews when freed from fear of the Inquisition. They could nonetheless face substantial religious and even racial discrimination as they did in Jamaica, unlike in the American South, where antisemitism was limited. This Portuguese Nación maintained religious, family, and business ties across the globe. Links with Bayonne and Holland proved especially strong, although connections with London increased from the mid-eighteenth century. Although most of these individuals conducted local and international trade, a few not only owned sugarcane plantations but also conducted international trade in products derived from the cane and other merchandise. Some did both and others did one or the other. Still, as Stanley Mirvis observes of Jamaica, "this study of Jews is an urban history of a colony with a largely rural population." Jewish merchants abounded in Port Royal and other Caribbean cities. Mirvis describes a "more nuanced reality that 'merchants' and 'planters' were often one and the same…." As in the American South, only a small number of Jews owned plantations, although far more did so in the islands than in the South. Variations thus exist in the model of plantation Jewry.2 Jews in the American South both conformed to and diverged from this model and its variations. They often immigrated after first undergoing [End Page 144] an adjustment period in England, had more diverse backgrounds, and did not have associations with Bayonne or prior experience in Brazil. None owned sugarcane plantations during the colonial era, and few did so thereafter. Thus Jews in the American South were far from quintessential plantation Jews. So few Jews worked as farmers, for example, that historians of Charleston Jewry assumed that the earliest Jewish settlers purchased plantation land only to qualify for full political rights because they made their livelihood as merchants.3 Yet, in both the Caribbean and America, Jews gravitated to cities; participated in international trade using ethnic, religious, and familiar connections; participated and benefited from slave-based plantation economies; and mixed agricultural with business endeavors. In contrast to Jews in the Caribbean, only a small number of Jews in the American South farmed, and virtually all of these integrated their agriculture and business ventures. Whereas Jews in the Caribbean and South America owned plantations and ran businesses, these enterprises do not appear to have been conjoined in...