The Gomez Family and Atlantic Patterns in the Development of New York's Jewish Community
By Noah L. Gelfand
On November 1, 1750, Mordecai Gomez, a member of one of North America’s most prominent Jewish mercantile families, died in New York City. According to a notice a few days later in the New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy, the 62 year old Gomez was “esteemed a fair Trader, and charitable to the Poor” who passed away “with an unblemish’d Character;” and who would be “deservedly lamented” by his large family and all his acquaintances.[1] Details of his will, dictated earlier in the year, underscore some of the material success that Mordecai Gomez had achieved in the colony. In addition to involvement in transatlantic trade, he operated two snuff mills and owned numerous properties on Manhattan Island, as well as a significant number of slaves. At the same time, he was deeply committed to Judaism, instructing that he “be buried in the Jews Burying ground according to Jewish Custom” and leaving his treasured Torah and silver ornaments to one of his sons.[2] While he might be considered unusual in terms of the degree of his financial success, Mordecai Gomez’s life and the history of his family’s settlement in New York was in other ways quite typical of the Jewish experience in the Atlantic world.
Jewish settlement and community formation in the early modern Atlantic world followed a strikingly consistent pattern. Jewish merchants utilized far-ranging extended-family networks, along with linguistic skills and special competences, to make themselves economically invaluable to Dutch and English colonial projects. In turn, Jewish merchants leveraged their significant contributions to negotiate special privileges for their religious communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Perhaps the most famous example of this pattern occurred in Amsterdam. During the last decade of the 16th century and first half of the 17th century, New Christian and crypto-Jewish merchants of Iberian ancestry moved to Amsterdam and supplied that city with products from the colonial empires of Portugal and Spain. Appreciating the important economic contribution of this population, Amsterdam’s magistrates turned a blind eye to the growing practice of Judaism within their city. Eventually, Amsterdam blossomed into the center of western European Jewry, with both a Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogue publicly dedicated during the 1670s.
Interior of Mikvé-Israel Emanuel Synagogue, Willemstad, Curacao. Photo taken by Noah L. Gelfand, May 28, 2018.
When the Dutch West India Company founded an Atlantic empire, Jews flocked to Dutch colonies in South America and the Caribbean. Jewish settlers, in places like Curaçao, were granted “the free exercise of their religion” in anticipation of their help in facilitating economic development.[3] They did not disappoint the Company’s expectations, trading European commodities and African slaves to Spanish America, the French and English Caribbean, and English North America in exchange for tobacco, cacao, coffee, sugar, indigo, logwood, and many other new world products, which they often shipped back to Amsterdam.[4] As their population grew, and Curaçao became the seat of Caribbean Jewry, with Amsterdam-trained rabbis and normative Jewish practices well-established, the Jews of the island built a series of ever larger houses of worship, culminating in a new synagogue for Congregation Mikvé Israel in Willemstad that was dedicated on the first day of Passover, 1732.[5] It remains in use today and is the oldest synagogue building in the Americas.
Menasseh ben Israel by Rembrandt, 1636 (etching) from collection of the National Portrait Gallery (UK)
In North America, New York City’s Jews helped link that port to the developing Atlantic world and Congregation Shearith Israel became the hub of North American Jewry during the 18th century. Crucial to this development was the 1655 journey of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel from Amsterdam to London to meet with Oliver Cromwell about readmitting Jews to England.[6] Cromwell, who was interested in promoting overseas commerce and believed the widespread trade connections of Sephardic Jews would be as beneficial to England as they had been to the Dutch Republic, was receptive to the idea.[7] In the decades following this meeting numerous Sephardic merchants moved to England and at least 90 of them received denization status by 1680.[8] These men would form the nucleus of a Sephardic community that would dedicate the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London in 1701, and grow to around 1,000 people in 1720.[9]
Print of the Mill Street Synagogue (now South William Street), dedicated in 1730. Copyright Congregation Shearith Israel.
While Jews had not intentionally migrated to New Netherland in significant numbers — Asser and Miriam Levy were apparently the only Jews in the colony when it fell to English invaders in 1664 — they did slowly make their way to English New York.[10] Here they created networks with co-religionists in London, Amsterdam, and the Americas. By the 1680s, a permanent community formed in New York City. Significantly, it is from this period that the oldest Jewish tombstone survives in New York.[11] Moreover, according to a leading historian, New York’s Jews were renting a building for a synagogue off of Mill Street and about 20 Jewish families called the city home by the turn of the 18th century.[12]
The Gomez family, headed by patriarch Luis Moses Gomez, was among this small but growing Jewish community in Manhattan at the beginning of the 18th century. Like hundreds of other members of the Sephardic diaspora, who undertook similarly long and circuitous spiritual paths to Judaism and physical journeys to the new world during the early modern era, the details of Luis Moses Gomez’s pre-New York biography are sketchy and incomplete. Born to New Christian parents Isaac and Esther Gomez in Madrid, Spain, sometime between 1654 and 1660, his family relocated to France when Luis was an infant, apparently to escape prosecution from the Inquisition.[13] Eventually, Luis and his family moved to London, where they were able to outwardly proclaim their faith in Judaism. At some point in the late 1680s, Luis migrated to the West Indies, living for a while in Jamaica and possibly Barbados, before settling in New York. While in Jamaica, Luis married Esther Marques. The couple had four sons in the West Indies — Jacob, Mordecai, Daniel, and David — while two more sons — Isaac and Benjamin — were born in New York.[14]
On April 18, 1705, Luis Moses Gomez, who had been in New York City since at least 1703, was officially declared a denizen.[15] Less than a year later he was listed in the records as a freeman of the City.[16] These designations were important markers, which served to identify Gomez as a resident with privileges to participate in the economic and political affairs of the city and colony. For Luis Moses Gomez, acquiring these privileges must also have provided him with a feeling that he and his family had found security and permanence in a home from where they could pursue business ventures and practice their beliefs in relative peace among a growing community of co-religionists.
In New York, Luis Moses Gomez initially set up a retail shop that sold goods from Europe and the Caribbean. Over the course of the first half of the 18th century he and his sons expanded their operation by opening additional stores and handling commodities from all over the world that were imported on ships that they owned.[17] By 1714, New York governor Robert Hunter wrote that the Gomezes were all “persons of Considerable trade and commerce” in the colony.[18]
Gomez Mill House. The bottom level of the house is the original part of the structure.
The Gomez family sustained their success, in part, by continuing longstanding Jewish mercantile practices. Like their Jewish predecessors involved in the Atlantic trade, they typically conducted their commercial transactions in distant ports through networks of co-religionist brokers, some of whom were relatives.[19] For example, Daniel Gomez sent over 100 ships from New York City to Curaçao all consigned to Jewish correspondents there.[20] Luis Moses Gomez also utilized the time-honored practice of cementing business ties through marriages between his family and commercial families in strategic locations. Daniel Gomez, for instance, first married Rebecca de Torres of Jamaica and then Esther Levy of Curaçao, while David, Isaac, and Benjamin bolstered the family’s connections in Barbados with marriages to brides from that island.[21] The Gomezes expanded on these traditional methods of building and securing wealth by also embracing unique opportunities available to them in their base of operations in 18th century New York. They participated in the fur trade with Native Americans in Albany and real estate investment throughout the colony. Perhaps to gain easier access to supplies of beaver, Luis Moses Gomez and sons purchased approximately 4000 acres of land in the mid-Hudson Valley in the 1710s and 1720s. This property served as the family’s base of operations in the region, where they also established mills and gathered commodities for their provisioning business. Their original blockhouse, which was expanded upon by subsequent owners, is today listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Gomez Mill House.
The Gomez family was also extremely active in the affairs of New York’s Jewish community. Luis Moses Gomez was parnas (president) of Congregation Shearith Israel in 1728, when the congregation raised subscriptions to build a synagogue on Mill Street. In that same year, Luis Moses Gomez purchased a plot of land for a burial ground for the congregation.[22] His sons Daniel and Benjamin would later serve as parnassim of Shearith Israel as well, while the family continued to support the congregation financially. Mordecai Gomez, for example, pledged £25 to the synagogue in his will. His brother Daniel arranged for £15 per year to be given to Shearith Israel.[23]
The Gomezes did not limit their leadership, aid and services to just the Jewish community, though. Like Jewish settlers before them in Dutch Brazil and contemporaries in Newport, Rhode Island, the Gomezes distinguishing themselves in assistance to the entire city and colony. New York’s Assembly met at Mordecai Gomez’s Greenwich Village home due to a smallpox scare in New York City in 1746, and in 1753 the Assembly awarded Daniel Gomez £30 “for translating and interpreting several letters, papers and other Spanish writings for the Governor and Council of this colony for the year 1734 to the year 1751.”[24] By the time Luis Moses Gomez’s youngest son, Benjamin, passed away in 1772, the family had a well-known reputation for its “upright character” and “benevolent disposition” to all peoples and denominations in New York City.[25]
Ultimately, Jewish merchants, like the Gomez family, utilized their trade networks to transcend colonial boundaries and bridge empires. These efforts, along with their willingness to provide other services in the interests of the colonies in which they resided, like translating foreign language documents, endeared Jewish settlers to authorities and enabled them to carve out spaces for their religious communities. Significantly, their actions helped to shape the development of the Atlantic world and in the case of 18th-century New York, made that city the center of North American Jewry.
Noah L. Gelfand received his PhD in Atlantic history from NYU and currently teaches US history at Hunter College.
[1] New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy (New York, New York), no. 407, November 5, 1750: [3]. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANX&docref=image/v2%3A10D34AE6B0969558%40EANX-10DAABD2E4634EC0%402360543-10DAABD34ECFDEC0%402.
[2] Lee M. Friedman, “Wills of Early Jewish Settlers in New York,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (hereafter PAJHS), No. 23 (1915): 153-154.
[3] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam: The Place of Curaçao and the Caribbean in Early Modern Jewish History," American Jewish History 72, no. 2 (1982): 189.
[4] Wim Klooster, “Curaçao and the Caribbean Transit Trade,” in Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817, ed. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003), 213-214 and Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 1: 70.
[5] Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 1: 123.
[6] Edward I expelled Jews from England in 1290.
[7] Cromwell also hoped that allowing Jews to return to England would help facilitate their conversion to Christianity, which was an essential precursor to the Second Coming of Christ.
[8] Holly Snyder, “English Markets, Jewish Merchants, and Atlantic Endeavors: Jews and the Making of British Transatlantic Commercial Culture, 1650-1800,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 54.
[9] Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain: 1656-2000 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 41.
[10] Twenty-three desperate Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil arrived in New Amsterdam in late summer 1654. They were joined by a few intrepid Jewish entrepreneurs from Amsterdam during the remainder of the decade. But all of them, except the above-mentioned Asser and Miriam Levy, had departed by summer 1664.
[11] Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita died in 1683 and was buried in the cemetery he purchased near Chatham Square. Asser Levy died in 1682, but it is not known where he or his wife were laid to rest.
[12] Historian Jonathan Sarna believes New York’s Jews rented a space for a public synagogue sometime between 1695 and 1704. See Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 9-10.
[13] Gomez family tradition holds that Luis was added onto his original given name (Moses) in honor of the king of France, who granted the family asylum. See David De Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682-1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 218. In records pertaining to Congregation Shearith Israel Luis is referred to as Luis Moses Gomez and Moses Gomez.
[14] Piecing together the Gomez genealogy is difficult. One source is the published transcription of a Gomez family Bible belonging to Isaac Gomez, Jr. (1768-1831). Isaac Gomez, Jr. wrote his family’s history in this Bible. See, N. Taylor Phillips, “Genealogy of the Gomez Family in America,” PAJHS, vol. 17 (1909): 197-199. Jacob, Mordecai, Daniel, and David Gomez’s petition for denization in 1714, indicate that their births occurred outside of New York, while testimony in 1715, by midwife Judith Bourdet regarding Isaac and Benjamin establish their birthplace as New York City. See in Samuel Oppenheim Collection, Box 4, American Jewish Historical Society (hereafter AJHS), New York, NY.
[15] Depositions in Liber of Conveyances indicate that Luis Moses Gomez was in New York City no later than August 1703. See Liber 25 of Conveyances, page 233, October 17, 1704, in which Luis Moses Gomez testified about goods he received from the London ship New York Merchant in August of the previous year. Liber 25 of Conveyances in Oppenheim Collection, Box 4, AJHS, New York, NY.
[16] Luis Moses Gomez was made a freeman of the city on February 12, 1706. See Leo Hershkowitz, ed., Wills of Early New York Jews (1704-1799) (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1967), 62.
[17] The commodities that the Gomezes imported for sale in New York City were regularly advertised in The New York Mercury and The New York Gazette.
[18] Governor Robert Hunter wrote papers on behalf of the Gomez family in 1714 to certify that “Lewis Gomez of the City of New York, merchant, and Mordecai Gomez, Jacob Gomez, Daniel Gomez, and David Gomez sons of the said Lewis Gomez, inhabitants of the said city are all persons of Considerable trade and commerce within the said Province of New York.” See “Robert Hunter to all to whom these presents shall come, June 9, 1714,” S.P. Dom. Geo. 1, vol. 74, p. 72 , in Oppenheim Collection, Box 4, AJHS, New York, NY. The November 12, 1750, inventory of the estate of Mordecai Gomez reveals the extraordinary wealth which the second son of Luis Moses Gomez accumulated in New York: specie and currency totally over £238, gold and silver jewelry, seven houses, six slaves, undivided property lots, numerous notes and bonds, furniture, clothing, household cooking implements, and much more. See Gomez Family Papers, AJHS, New York, NY.
[19] Daniel Gomez’s ledger shows, for example, that in locations with Jewish communities – Jamaica, Newport, RI, and Charleston, SC – his trade correspondents were overwhelmingly Jewish. See PAJHS, vol. 27 (1920), 244-245.
[20] Wim Klooster, “The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 345.
[21] “Gomez Family Genealogy” in Gomez Family Papers, AJHS, New York, NY.
[22] PAJHS, vol. 27 (1920), 1-2.
[23] Friedman, “Wills of Early Jewish Settlers in New York,” 154.
[24] Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 84 and Journal of the General Assembly of New York, Vol. II,1743-1765, 346.
[25] From Benjamin Gomez’s obituary in The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, August 8, 1772, in Oppenheim Collection, Box 4, AJHS, New York, NY.