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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family
An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Book Details
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publish Date: Aug 30th, 2021
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.45in - 6.30in - 1.34in - 1.45lb
- EAN: 9780197530474
- Categories: • Americas (North Central South West Indies)• Judaism - General• Slavery
About the Author
Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories to life. She is the author of The Art of Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (BGC 2020), winner of three National Jewish Book Awards, and Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. Known, too, for her scholarship in Digital Humanities, Laura served as the Academic Director for the award-winning multimedia public television series American Passages: A Literary Survey (2003).
Praise for this book
"Once We Were Slaves most definitely "works." It is a book one needs to dive into, step back from, and then reread as the story of this far-flung multiracial family begins to emerge ... Leibman has done a remarkable job of evoking time and place in a vast Atlantic world in which identities were made and remade ... Her discussion of pandemics has an eerily contemporary ring as she reminds us that they are nothing new -- and neither are our responses to them." -- Julie Winch, The Civil War Book Review "Leibman highlights the fluidity of early America's racial boundaries and the multiracial threads of Jewish history..." --Publisher's Weekly"A richly contextual history of multiracial Jews and their travails and triumphs in the New World." --Kirkus "...Once We Were Slaves is an engaging work of historical scholarship that follows a
family through its rises and collapses of fortune and, in the process, strips away damaging misconceptions about the homogeneity of America's Jewish community." --Foreword Reviews"...the research is meticulous, a tour-de-force of historical reconstruction that eventually leads Leibman to present-day descendants of the Brandon-Moses family." --Forward"Leibman's extensive research is supported by almost a hundred pages of acknowledgements, family trees, notes and bibliography. But the book is never dry...The author's passion for her subject is apparent in her engaging style, along with the numerous illustrations that illuminate Leibman's words, including photographs of the Moses family and artefacts of the Brandons." --The Jewish Chronicle"With a tone that is both frank and intimate, Leibman helms a tale of two multiracial Jews and the communities they lived between and among, bringing to light a long and turbulent legacy of multiracial Jewry in the Americas." --The Jewish Book Council2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist"This book is a must read for both academic historians and for those who simply love a good story." -- Jessica V. Roitman, Studia Rosenthaliana"Laura Leibman's essential new biography of two nineteenth-century Barbadian Jews of color marks an important paradigm shift in this scholarly discussion...Leibman is not only an indefatigable researcher but also a wonderful storyteller. She brings to life the various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century locales in which Sarah and Isaac lived through vivid narration that is at times almost novelistic." -- Sarah Phillips Casteel, New West Indian Guide
family through its rises and collapses of fortune and, in the process, strips away damaging misconceptions about the homogeneity of America's Jewish community." --Foreword Reviews"...the research is meticulous, a tour-de-force of historical reconstruction that eventually leads Leibman to present-day descendants of the Brandon-Moses family." --Forward"Leibman's extensive research is supported by almost a hundred pages of acknowledgements, family trees, notes and bibliography. But the book is never dry...The author's passion for her subject is apparent in her engaging style, along with the numerous illustrations that illuminate Leibman's words, including photographs of the Moses family and artefacts of the Brandons." --The Jewish Chronicle"With a tone that is both frank and intimate, Leibman helms a tale of two multiracial Jews and the communities they lived between and among, bringing to light a long and turbulent legacy of multiracial Jewry in the Americas." --The Jewish Book Council2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist"This book is a must read for both academic historians and for those who simply love a good story." -- Jessica V. Roitman, Studia Rosenthaliana"Laura Leibman's essential new biography of two nineteenth-century Barbadian Jews of color marks an important paradigm shift in this scholarly discussion...Leibman is not only an indefatigable researcher but also a wonderful storyteller. She brings to life the various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century locales in which Sarah and Isaac lived through vivid narration that is at times almost novelistic." -- Sarah Phillips Casteel, New West Indian Guide