Book review (2nd part in comments)“Once We We’re Slaves”Laura Arnold Leibmanhttps://www.amazon.com/Once-Were-Slaves-Extraordinary-Multi-Racial/dp/0197530478This book follows the lives of Sarah Brandon Moses and Isaac Lopez Brandon, siblings born on Barbados in the late 1790s. They were the “reputed children” of a Jew, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, and Sarah Esther Lopez Gill, a multiracial Barbadian woman with whom he maintained a relationship over several decades. Born enslaved and defined as “colored” and Anglican, they ended their days in the elite neighborhoods of New York City, free, white, and Jewish.Overall the book is a real “yesh mi’ayin,” creating a detailed biography of a family that had not been written about extensively before. Their journey to white status had necessarily involved concealing their origins, so even some of their descendants were not fully aware of it. And while Jewish historiography has been covering Jewish enslavers since the early 1970s, it is only in the past 10-15 years that it has begun to truly explore the phenomenon of what Ben-Ur calls “Eurafrican” Jews. For both reasons, there was poor prior awareness of the significance of this family to Caribbean and American Jewish history.Leibman became aware of Isaac Lopez Brandon in an interview with Barbadian historian Karl Watson, while working on her book “Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism” (published in 2012). At the time, she called the story “interesting but not really relevant,” but came back to it while writing her next book, and she slowly began assembling the research materials that would yield “Once We Were Slaves.” Essentially it was a constant back burner project for her: while she was working in various archives around the Atlantic for other projects, she devoted some time to the Brandons, and even published parts of the story along the way. Eventually she took those chapters and wove them together with new material into a larger book, which is the subject of these brief thoughts.