Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves

overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and

great-uncle actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados.

Tracing the siblings’ extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines

artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show

how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish,

and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, 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 which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on

the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Laura A. 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).