The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Aaron’s second wife proceeded to present him with nine children and when, one by one, the members of this voluminous family reached marriageable age, suitable partners had to be found among the Sephardim of Newport and New York, who, at this point, were nearly all relatives already. The web of intramural marriage drew even tighter. One Lopez daughter married a Touro, and two of Aaron’s daughters married Gomez boys—who were each other’s first cousins, and both nephews of Daniel Gomez—and another married a Hendricks (who were already related to Gomezes) and still another became Rachel Lopez-Lopez when she married her own first cousin. Two other Lopez girls married the same man, Jacob Levy. This happened when Mr. Levy, widowed by one Lopez girl, married her younger sister. This marriage was not so much dynastic as dizzying in the extent to which it crossed up various Levys. Since Levy had children by both his wives, his marriages made his various children first cousins. To further confuse the tangled Lopez-Gomez-Rivera bloodline, one of Aaron Lopez’ daughters, Hannah, married her uncle. With this union, Aaron’s brother-in-law became his son-in-law as well, and Hannah Lopez became her mother’s sister-in-law.

  An inevitable result of these marriages was that the two family heads, Aaron Lopez and Daniel Gomez, had close ties—family as well as business—even though they did not see eye to eye on pre-Revolutionary politics. Over the years, the two men corresponded between New York and Newport, and much of this correspondence survives. Though Daniel was more than thirty years older than Aaron, the two had much in common. Each wrote to the other in a formal, courtly style, the older man addressing his younger Newport friend as “your grace,” referring to “the lady your wife,” and extending best wishes to others of “your noble house.”

  Both Gomez and Lopez liked to gamble, and much of their correspondence concerned Gomez’ purchase of lottery tickets in New York for Lopez. Neither man had much luck. In August, 1753, Gomez wrote Lopez: “According to your order, I bought in your name two lottery tickets, Nos. 1190 and 1192, which may please God to be venturous and that by that way you may obtain something of consequence. I have charged to you their cost which is £3. Your Grace orders me to send you the tickets, but I do not see fit to do it until a second order arrives because in case they are lost Your Grace will lose what they provide.” Alas, a few weeks later, Daniel Gomez advised: “I sent my son to find out about the lottery tickets, but because of our sins both your tickets and mine came out blank.… I assure Your Grace that I am sorry that they have had such little fortune. God may please to give us a better one.” Their prayers, however, seem to have gone unanswered. Years later, Gomez was writing: “According to your request I have bought, in your name, a Lottery ticket number 77 which will please Your Grace to be fortunate.” And, a short while later, he was advising: “Enclosed is your lottery ticket which I am sorry to say came out blank. God may give you a better fortune next time.” Gomez’ system seems to have been to buy tickets containing double numbers—1190, 77, 881, 544, 311, 2200, etc. It was as good a system as any.

  The two kept each other posted on family news. When Daniel’s young wife, who had been ill for many months, died, he wrote to his friend movingly: “I cannot express in words the great grief and sorrow that accompanies me as Our Lord has served to free from my company, and from this to a better life, my esteemed and loving wife, who offered her soul to the Creator on the 31st of May.… May the Great Majesty receive her soul with kindness and place her with the just and good … and that she is enjoying eternal Glory as her good heart and her being a good Jew confirm me in that certainty.” And learning of the death, in infancy, of one of Aaron Lopez’ children, Daniel wrote to him: “You stated your hopes that your little angel would improve in health, but [I have been informed] that God has received him and I assure you that we are in grief as if he were of our own, and I send Your Grace, the lady your wife, and the rest of the family, our sympathy, and pray to God that the life the little innocent lacked will be increased in yours.”

  For all his deferential manner toward Aaron Lopez, Daniel Gomez was not hesitant to give him business advice when he felt this was in order. He had little use for Lopez’ candle business, which was something of a sideline, and told him: “I am sorry there is no better way in which Your Grace may occupy himself other than by making candles. My brother David invested £240 last year in green wax and tallow, his negroes made candles which he sent to all the islands, and there they stand, with no sales, and at a very low price. All of this I inform Your Grace of.… You will suffer great losses and if you could sell the candles I advise you to proceed.” Either Lopez failed to receive this letter or he simply ignored Gomez’ advice because, a few weeks later, Gomez complained because Lopez had sent them on to New York for Gomez to sell instead of selling the candles in Newport. He wrote testily: “acknowledging six boxes of spermaceti and candles which you have sent me by Captain Morrow’s schooner, which I received, and am sorry you sent such merchandise to be sold here, and to exchange for tallow, when you know and everybody knows that it is very difficult to sell here and that tallow is cash money. I would appreciate your ordering me to return them to you, as I offered them to different merchants and not one is interested. I am willing to serve you in what I can, but I cannot do the impossible.” His anger was quickly spent, however, for a few paragraphs later in the same letter he wrote: “Today is the last day for the Lottery.… I wish God is willing to give you some prize.…”

  At the same time, the labyrinthine bloodlines that bound the Sephardim of both Newport and New York together were capable of producing weighty problems. When people are tied together by blood as well as money, the two elements fuse and cross in ways that can be painful, and already the Sephardim were showing signs of the strain. There were whole branches of certain families which—often for the most trifling reasons—no longer spoke to other branches, and the little band of Jews, who had first approached the vicissitudes of the new world with a certain unity of purpose, had spread and dispersed into touchy factions. Nearly always it was money—what some relative had done with his money, which displeased some other relative—that lay at the heart of the dispute. The more relatives there were, the more complex were the relationships.

  Not only each new son, but each new son-in-law, had to be given some sort of position in the interconnected family enterprises. And, alas, not all these sons and sons-in-law possessed the talents the older generations might have wished. Both Daniel Gomez and Aaron Lopez faced this problem. Daniel’s son Moses married Daniel’s brother’s daughter, Esther—first cousins again—but neither of their two sons (two others died in infancy) displayed any ability in the fur trade. Isaac, Jr., was always getting “stung” by the Indians. “Stung again!” he would write the patriarch, almost gaily, each time it happened. There is a suggestion that Isaac had taken to imbibing some of the firewater used in the Indian trade, a practice his grandfather had abstemiously avoided. Isaac married one of the Lopez girls.

  An even more ticklish situation existed in Aaron Lopez’ family. Aaron’s oldest daughter, Sally, had married a young man named Abraham Pereira Mendes, a member of an old and distinguished Sephardic family that had settled in Jamaica. At the time of the engagement, Abraham Mendes’ elder brother wrote to Aaron Lopez: “The choice of my brother Abraham to your daughter Miss Salle, for his consort, has merited much our Abrobation [sic], as also that of my honoured Mother. The Amiableness of your daughter, the Bright Character and honour of your family’s, as much in these parts, as those of ancient, in Portugal, cannot but give us in general the greatest satisfaction.… From my brother repeated expressions of their reciprocal love must make them happy, and pleasing to you, and beg leave to return my congratulating you and all your good family, on this joyfull occasion, wishing them all the Happiness they can wish for, and pray the Almighty may crown them with his Blessings.…” There were other reasons for rejoicing. Sally Lopez was a rich man’s eldest daughter, and the Mendeses of Jamaica, though they bore an ancient name, were sorely in need of
an infusion of money. Leah Mendes, Abraham’s mother, had been widowed with several children, and was described by her son as being “reduced very low, owing to the great Losses she has met with … the condition I found her in shocked me to the highest degree.”

  Abraham’s brother added that he was sure Aaron had found in Abraham “such Bright Qualitys which few of his age are endowed with.” He added that while Abraham’s education might leave something to be desired, considering the sort of formal education available in those days on the West Indian island, his intellectual abilities were “those of Nature.” He was sure, he said, that “with cultivating in your good Advice must make him a Bright Man.” This, however, turned out to be wishful thinking.

  Aaron decided that his new son-in-law’s acquaintance with the island would make him an excellent candidate for the job of overseer of the Lopez enterprises in Jamaica, a task that up to then had been performed by a series of non-family firms. From the very beginning there were difficulties. For one thing, Abraham Pereira Mendes appears to have enjoyed poor health. A great deal of the business correspondence between father and son-in-law concerns the state of the latter’s stomach, feet, or head. Abraham and Sally were married in Newport, and soon after their return to Kingston, to take up his duties, Abraham was writing Aaron: “I must now acquaint you of my safe arrival in the place.… I can’t say agreeable being sick all the passage, and was reduced very low. At my landing I could hardly keep my legs.…” A few days later he was no better, writing: “My hands with weakness tremble in such a manner I can hardly write.” The next year, he was complaining of “A surfeit and a fit of the Gout, which has laid me up three weeks and am now in a most deplorable condition and cannot mount my horse, which has put my business backward.”

  This, of course, was the most irritating result of a sickly son-in-law—business, inevitably, was put backward, and Abraham’s letters back to Aaron are full of apologies and excuses for his poor performance. The news is nearly always gloomy: “We lost 10 sheep.… The black horse looks very bad.… Stepped on board to view the slaves … the major part of them are small things, and those that are large has age on their side.… The poor success I had in receiving your Outstanding Debts and not getting cash for the cargoes have not enabled me to remit until March.… I am much afraid your Out-Standing Debts will not be collected, not for want of my care, but the people being incapable.” His father-in-law warned him about a certain slave captain named All, whom Aaron Lopez distrusted. Abraham met the man and, “To my great Surprize,” found him quite satisfactory. The result was disastrous. The man turned out to be an utter scoundrel. By making private deals with Slave Coast governors, Captain All bilked Aaron Lopez out of a full year’s profits.

  One of Abraham’s problems, in addition to his health, was his lack of education. His letters are full of eccentric spellings, their sentence structure is erratic, and at one point he apologizes: “You’ll excuse the Writing being oblige to gett a Young Cousin to scrible over.” It is possible that a “Young Cousin” wrote most of his letters.

  His devotion to his young wife was, despite his brother’s assurances, something less than complete. During the early days of his Jamaica sojourn she remained behind in Newport, and it would seem as though Abraham missed her rather little. Writing to her father, at one point, he mentioned that he had had a letter from “my dear Sally,” though he has yet “not received the Sweet Meets she had promised to send.” He added that he would have “no time” to write her, and quaintly urged her father to “embrace her in my behalf with all the love of a Loving Husband.” His attitude may have disturbed Sally because, about a year later, she sailed to Jamaica to join him. He was probably less than happy to see her. A few months after her arrival, he did a thing that was shocking news to eighteenth-century Newport as well as to Jewish society in the West Indies. He ran off with another woman.

  Obviously, this was a situation requiring delicacy and a certain firmness. Aaron Lopez was disgusted with his son-in-law’s delinquency and poor performance, and he was ready to wash his hands of him. The same was true of Abraham’s brothers. His father was dead, and it fell to his mother, Leah Mendes, to put her child’s household in order. There was, after all, much at stake—not only Abraham’s job, but the family’s reputation, the possibility of future children. She set about single-handedly to repair the marriage. It wasn’t easy, and took her many months, and once she had exacted her son’s promise to return to his wife it was next necessary to appease his angry father-in-law. It is possible to envision this aristocratic old lady, who had been born in Spain, who had watched many of her Marrano relatives die in the Inquisition, writing this poised and elegant letter to Aaron Lopez announcing the success of her mission and begging him to forgive her son:

  HONOURABLE SIR,

  It is with great pleasure and joy I now write you acquainting of the dutifulness of my son Abraham in complying to our request to return home. He has insured me of never disobliging nor never to cause you and his wife any more grievance, and will always be bound to your obedience, and he has acknowledged his fault of being so long absent, and it is with no doubt it gives him great concern in reflecting on his follies, but you are fully sensible that youthness and bad advisers are always of great prejudice, and much so when they won’t be ruled. But all his transgressions will be an example for his better amendment, and I make no doubt that he will fulfill his promises to me, and he goes overjoyed to your feet to crave pardon, and which I hope you’ll grant for the sake of a poor widow’d mother, who will always receive great satisfaction and contentment in knowing of his good proceedings and dutifulness to you. And as God (the best exemplar of the whole world) forgives mankind, so I hope you’ll be so pleased as to pardon him, and in granting me this favour I shall forever acknowledge.

  LEAH MENDES

  Abraham seems to have been incapable of speaking for himself, so his mother wrote to his wife also:

  LOVING DAUGHTER,

  It is with great pleasure I now acquaint you of Abraham complying to our request in returning to enjoy your sweet company, and I beg of you that you’ll forgive him of his misbehaving and his absence from so good a wife as you, but he has promised of never causing any more grievance, but always to be the instrument of seeking for to give you pleasure and content, therefore hope that all will be forgotten, and shall always be pleased to know of both your happiness, and remain craving you health and prosperity from, Your Loving Mother,

  LEAH MENDES

  All, however, was not forgotten, and the marriage continued on an unsteady course. There were a number of other separations, each of them painful for all concerned. Two years later, his brother David visited Abraham in Kingston, found him parted from his wife, and wrote to Aaron Lopez: “I found my Brother Abraham in a very poor state of health. He is just come out of dangerous fit of sickness. He seems to be very anxious of seeing his wife, and throwing himself at your feet. I shall dispatch him by the latter end of next month, in the manner I promised you, and shall write you by him more copiously on that subject.” But at that point Abraham’s name drops from the family correspondence. He was “dispatched” to Newport, his brother succeeded him in Jamaica, and Abraham’s wife followed him home a few months later.

  Aaron Lopez, meanwhile, continued to prosper until he was counted among Newport’s richest men. In March of 1762 he had attempted to be naturalized but had been refused by the Newport court. His Tory leanings were making him unpopular. Since he also maintained a summer home in Swansea, Massachusetts, he petitioned the superior court of Taunton to make him a citizen of that state, and on October 15, 1762, he became the first Jew to be naturalized in Massachusetts. At his request, the words “upon the true faith of a Christian” were deleted from the oath.

  He had also joined a club, established a year earlier, which was purely social and exclusively for the use of gentlemen of Newport’s Jewish elite. It was the answer to Newport’s Fellowship Club, which had no Jews as members. Aaron took his cl
ub with great seriousness, and was nearly always present at its gatherings, on Wednesday evenings “during the winter season.” The others in the club, it might be noted, were nearly all, in one way or another, Aaron Lopez’ relatives, members of the Lopez-Bivera-Mendes-Levy-Hart complex of families. The club operated under strict rules. From five to eight, members were “at liberty to divert at cards,” and in order that the club not gain the reputation of a gaming club, stakes were set at “twenty shillings at whist, picquet, or any other game.” If a member was found guilty of playing for higher stakes, he was to be fined “four bottles of good wines,” to be enjoyed by the club at its next gathering. At eight, the rules noted that “supper (if ready)” was to be brought in. No card playing was permitted after supper, and members were to depart for their homes at ten. If any member had a matter of club business to discuss, he had to wait “till the chairman has just drank some loyal toast.” The club was an excellent diversion from home, wives, children, and attendant problems. The club bylaws also specified that there should be no “conversations relating to synagogue affairs” during club evenings. Again, the punishment for mixing synagogue and club life was “four bottles of good wines.”

  Aaron had not joined in the nonimportation agreement, according to which a number of New England merchants had pledged to import no further goods from Britain. He could not afford to. A good standing with the British was important for business reasons. At heart, he was probably not an outright Tory. He was not as Tory as, for instance, his neighbor and fellow clubman Isaac Hart, and several other Newport Jews—a state of affairs that had begun to split Newport’s Jewish club down the center. Lopez found himself in a difficult situation when the British attacked and seized Newport in 1777—moving 8,000 troops onto the island, destroying 480 houses, burning ships in the harbor, devastating fields and orchards, and in general sacking and looting the city. At this point, Aaron deemed it wise to move his large family elsewhere, to secure them, as he put it in a letter to a friend, “from sudden Allarums and the Cruel Ravages of an enraged Enemy.” He chose the considerably safer inland town of Leicester, Massachusetts. All the Lopezes—including his father-in-law, Mr. Rivera—moved there in the autumn of that year.