Laura Arnold Leibman
Jews in Colonial America
Summary
A portrait of Jewish life in the American colonies, including variations and adaptations of Jewish cultures in the colonies, and the various factors that pushed Jews to the colonies.
Laura Arnold Leibman
Laura Arnold Leibman is a professor of english and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA) and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (2020), which won three National Jewish Book Awards. 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 back to life. She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Centre. Her second book, Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012), uses material culture to retell the history of early American Jews and won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent book is Once We Were Slaves (2021).
Part of the reason is that Jewish men, in particular, often know multiple languages that tie them across different ports. Women, however, were often not educated in the local language. So instead, they would often speak the local Creole languages, leaving widows at a huge disadvantage and limiting their ability to succeed in business.
Jews did not own slaves in greater proportions than others. In certain places like Barbados, there were restrictions on how many enslaved people Jews can own. These restrictions were intended to push them out of plantation work.