The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition by Stanley Mirvis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition by Stanley Mirvis Trevor Burnard (bio) The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition. By Stanley Mirvis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 285 pp. The old saying is that you wait for a bus for ages, and then two come along at once. For scholars of Jewish history in the Caribbean, two buses have just arrived, both superb and thought-provoking. In Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1925 (2020), Aviva Ben-Ur has written a compelling social and religious history of Jews in colonial Suriname, focusing on the twin themes of autonomy and creolization. Stanley Mirvis's extensively researched analysis of the history of Jamaican Jews in both seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica (the title, along with being off-puttingly narrow in conception, is misleading in its chronology) examines similar themes for the Jews in Jamaica. Together, these books extend our knowledge of this remarkable subcommunity of Jews in the Caribbean. Mirvis's book is extremely valuable not only for the light it sheds on a still little-understood aspect of Jewish history but also for demonstrating the heterogenous and diverse [End Page 447] nature of Jamaica during the period of slavery. He shows, in particular, how Jews generally thrived and prospered in Jamaica despite living in a fiercely antisemitic society in which Jews were distrusted for their commercial acumen and forced to endure political ostracization and economic discrimination. Mirvis's Jewish community was both part of and separate from the white Protestant society that ruled Jamaica and which subjected enslaved Africans to perhaps greater oppression than anywhere else in the Atlantic world. The easiest thing for Mirvis to have done in this study would have been to show a religious and ethnic community that became incorporated through ideologies of whiteness into the dominant minority ruling class. One noticeable characteristic of Jews in both Suriname and Jamaica is that their religious adherence was often skin deep—an adherence to rituals and ceremonies but not much of an engagement with faith. It is also noticeable that Jews were as devoted to the institution of slavery as the white population in general. They were seldom numbered among the biggest slave holders, as they tended to congregate in Port Royal and Kingston and engage in commerce, largely with Spanish America but also drawing on their contacts in Europe, notably and remarkably with the Jewish community of Bayonne in France. But Jews frequently owned slaves, disposed of enslaved people regularly in their wills to their families, established irregular unions with enslaved women and free women of color, and showed little to no antislavery inclination. Mirvis is especially good on what is sometimes a sensitive topic: Jews and Caribbean slavery. He shows the extent to which Jamaican Jews' acceptance of the slave system contributed to their creolization within white society without succumbing to the tendency to see Jamaican Jews solely through a prism of slavery. What fascinates Mirvis most is how Jamaican Jews maintained and shaped community life. It is this area where wills are extremely useful, as they show family patterns in great detail and sophistication, if explored with the skill which Mirvis deploys in this book. A particularly valuable section of the book is a lengthy appendix which outlines testamentary dispositions and shows the variety of inheritance practices possible within a rather rigid institutional framework. He pays a lot of attention to women and has some penetrating insights into the role of women in fostering Jewish customs over the generation. His analysis might have been helped by comparing Jews more explicitly to other Jamaican populations. What strikes me most about Jamaican Jews is that they did not suffer as much as Blacks and white Jamaicans from demographic disaster. They, alone of groups in Jamaica save perhaps free people of color (to whom they are often compared as communities that achieved [End Page 448] creole identities in the face of legal discrimination), were demographically self-sustaining. From a tiny base population, extensively interrelated family groupings of mostly Portuguese Jews increased in numbers and in...