New Israel / New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America

Chapter 2. “New-England is Seldom Wholly without them”: Boston’s Frazon Brothers and the Limits of Puritan Zeal

51 chapter two “neW-enGlanD iS SelDoM WhollY WiThoUT TheM” Boston’s Frazon Brothers and the Limits of Puritan Zeal  On November 22, 1705, the Boston News-Letter’s correspondent in barbados received word that Samuel Frazon, a boston merchant of Sephardic parentage who was initially “feared to be lost in coming from on board a Man of War” while sailing to antigua from boston had in fact survived his ordeal. The story that appeared in the March 11, 1706 edition of the paper offered readers the full scope of Frazon’s adventures. caught by a storm in the caribbean, he and his black slave survived six days without food or water and eventually washed ashore on the island of St. Vincent, “where the indians stripped him naked as soon as he landed.”1 The merchant and his slave lived through their captivity, but the two sailors accompanying them perished. eventually, although Frazon was evidently unable to ransom the slave, he was able to pay for his own freedom for the price of “17 or 18 Pistoles.”2 From the West indies he made his way back to boston by way of Martinique, “ready,” according to Jacob Marcus, “to do business again” in partnership with his brothers Joseph and Moses. Frazon’s story was remarkable as an adventure on the high seas, but it was no less fantastic for its dramatization of the extreme itinerancy of the Sephardic merchant class. The Frazon brothers’ participation in the new england economy was a fleeting one, but it represented a cosmopolitan and integrally Jewish incursion nonetheless, and—as the Boston News-Letter’s coverage suggested—it did not go unnoticed. The presence of unapologetic and self-identified Jews in the Massachusetts bay colony also helped to inspire a renewed Puritan discourse on the legacy of Judaism, particularly 52 chaPTer TWo as it related to the question of whether or not church members ought to take active steps toward achieving new england’s salvation. The man likely to have been the boston merchants’ grandfather, Samuel Frazoa, had himself been born in the new christian community in Portugal, made his way to the large Jewish enclave in Dutch brazil in the early1640s, and served that community as a teacher of hebrew. at some point between the family’s flight from recife in 1654 and the settlement of the younger Samuel and his brother Joseph in boston in the late 1690s (Moses was their consistent business partner but seems never to have come to new england), the Frazons (or Frazoas) became members first of the Jewish congregation in london and later were affiliated with the Jewish community of barbados, where they were endenized in March 1693. Joseph is thought to have been buried in newport, rhode island, in the Jewish cemetery that had been purchased in 1677 by Mordecai campanal and Moses Pacheco. Samuel, whose official residence at the time of his prematurely announced death was noted as “boston, new-england,” actually died in Jamaica in 1706. both Samuel and Joseph Frazon were residents of boston for “at least a decade,” according to Marcus’s accounting, from about 1695 to 1705.3 For the Frazons, like many other Sephardim, itinerancy functioned as a mode of economic advancement. Their collective experience, which included ship-ownership, captaincy, slave-trading, and the proprietorship of a warehouse, was a testament to the trans-oceanic versatility of colonialera Jews. The british atlantic, with its many economic and cultural enticements , offered endless possibilities for reinvention. Free from the shadow of the inquisition, whose oppressive influence nonetheless inspired an invigoration of extended kindred ties among the members of la nacion, the Frazons and their ilk might easily have surged headlong into the commercial fray with minimal regard for their previous ties to Judaism. For better or worse, however, they seem not to have been overly eager on this account. instead of severing their ties to the old World, the Frazons did their best to make the most of their Jewish connections on both sides of the atlantic, as well as between new england and the West indies. how important Judaism itself was to them is difficult to ascertain on the basis of what scant evidence we have, but their identity as Jews was of more than incidental interest to at least three prominent new englanders who wrote Boston’s Frazon Brothers and the Limits of Puritan Zeal 53 about them during...