Review: Once We Were Slaves

American academic Laura Arnold Leibman spent ten painstaking years investigating the material that now makes up this compelling study of a multi-racial Jewish family. She focuses on Sarah and Isaac Brandon, the grandmother and great uncle of Blanche Moses a descendant of one of the most prominent Jewish families to arise after the American Revolution.

Blanche was a reclusive heiress — and an obsessive genealogist. In 1942, at the age of 82, she set out, determined, to uncover her family history.

She believed that her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees, and was consequently extremely surprised to discover that Sarah and Isaac had begun their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados.

Leibman traces Sarah and Isaac’s extraordinary journey by examining artefacts they left behind in Barbados, London, Philadelphia, New York and the small South American state of Suriname.

She also explores the challenges they faced regarding racial identity. Once labelled “mulatto” by their own relatives and by the Anglican church in Barbados, by 1820 and now living in the USA, Sarah and her children had been re-categorised as white in the New York census. Isaac was also accepted as white by the New York Jewish community, who helped him gain citizenship.

Although it came as a shock to her granddaughter Blanche, Sarah’s and Isaac’s partial African ancestry was well-known among their peers. Their ability to change their lives and their identities shines a light not only on the history of race in the Atlantic world but also on that of other multi-racial Jews, who, in some of the places where the Brandons lived, may have made up as much as 50 per cent of early Jewish communities.

Leibman’s extensive research is supported by almost a hundred pages of acknowledgments, family trees, notes and bibliography. But the book is never dry. Once We Were Slaves is clearly a labour of love. 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, At quite an early point in her research, Laura Arnold Leibman considered making a documentary film about Isaac Brandon, but sadly that never materialised.

This is a shame because the material is so enthralling, vibrant, and of universal interest; and is alive with social history and human endeavour. And therefore I would urge Leibman to get in touch with Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Hamilton fame, to propose they collaborate on a new Broadway musical about the Brandon-Moses family.

Sipora Levy is a freelance reviewer