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Once We Were Slaves tells the story of a brother and sister who were born enslaved Christians in Barbados yet ended up among the wealthiest white Jews in New York. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic world, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind, family heirlooms, and official documents to show how this transformation was possible. Though their affluence was exceptional, 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 the New World and challenges current notions regarding Jews and race in early America.
List of contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Chapter 1: Origins (Bridgetown, 1793-1798)
- Chapter 2: From Slave to Free (Bridgetown, 1801)
- Chapter 3: From Christian to Jew (Suriname, 1811-12)
- Chapter 4: The Tumultuous Island (Bridgetown, 1812-1817)
- Chapter 5: Synagogue Seats (New York and Philadelphia, 1793-1818)
- Chapter 6: The Material of Race (London, 1815-17)
- Chapter 7: Voices of Rebellion (Bridgetown, 1818-24)
- Chapter 8: A Woman Valor (New York, 1817-19)
- Chapter 9: This Liberal City (Philadelphia, 1818-33)
- Chapter 10: Feverish Love (New York, 1819-1830)
- Chapter 11: When I am Gone (New York, Barbados, London, 1830-1847)
- Chapter 12: Legacies (New York and Beyond, 1841-1860)
- Epilogue
- Appendix: Family Trees
- Abbreviations
- Bibliography
- Notes
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 Indian Converts (U Mass Press, 2008) 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, and was selected as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. 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).
Additional text
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.
