The Devon House in Kingston is the home of Jamaica’s first black millionaire, George Stiebel. Stiebel was of black and Jewish descent, and made his millions through gold mining in South America. He constructed his home in the late 19th century, and to this day, the interior of the mansion is preserved in the fashion of the time. Since the Devon House was made a national monument in 1990, it has become a cultural heritage site that offers tours, is open to the public, and serves as a nexus of the Kingston community. Among the shops and restaurants that now surround the house is its famous ice cream shop, Devon I Scream, selling its eponymous treat, the Devon Ice Cream.

In Israel’s Shaar Elisha Camp through the lens of Covid-19, Rhona Siedelman revisits the history of quarantine in Israel, and draws conclusions about the potential for the negative social impact of quarantining, through examining the ineffectuality of the Shaar Elisha quarantine camp.     Siedelmen argues that Quarantine’s history of social control, and the divisions the process naturally creates, can point towards its potential to exacerbate divisions and result in a “setting apart” that serves to enable discrimination.  Shaar Elisha quarantined immigrants in a manner that was entirely ineffectual, and that detected no diseases that were cause for quarantine.  Siedelman argues that the Shaar Elisha’s primary function was to segregate immigrants at a time when a significant portion of Israel had misgivings about newcomers, and, like many quarantines, served more to “discriminate against marginalized, vulnerable communities” than to protect the health of the Israeli community.   This history, Siedelman argues, and the potential for discrimination enabled through quarantine that it points toward, must be understood in the era of Covid-19 to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and allowing the fear brought on by potential illness to foment prejudice.

   Siedelman’s argument clearly establishes the potential for quarantine as a method of segregation, and clearly and concisely explains the sort of social othering a quarantine can create through examining the function of Shaar Elisha as a method of segregating immigrants, rather than as a method of effectively protecting Israel’s populace. Siedelman’s argument focuses on the ineffectual and unnecessary quarantining present at Shaar Elisha nearly exclusively, and makes a compelling case for how the “cross-cultural act of separation” was used to assuage the unease of the Israeli population.  In so doing, she demonstrates how quarantine can both exacerbate divisions and be used as a means of social control.  However, by focusing exclusively on the Shaar Elisha ( and briefly on the biblical history of quarantine), Siedelmen fails to demonstrate that this sort of effect happens whenever quarantines are established.  The Shaar Elisha situation is one in which there was truly no disease to control, which makes it notably different from quarantine practice in the modern coronavirus pandemic, where lethality is high.    Presumably, the actual danger potentially posed by a serious illness would exacerbate the sorts of fears and divisions that can be created by a quarantine, but although Siedelman points to the “depressing historical predictability of the social outcomes of the pandemic,” and states that “what we are all experiencing…  … fits predictably within quarantine history,” she fails to establish the exact, specific relationship the self-quarantine demands of Covid-19 have to the sort of physical barriers present in Shaar Elisha- or that between their consequences, leaving it up to the reader to establish more direct connections.  The relationship between the sorts of prejudice enabled by quarantining immigrants and the sorts of prejudice enabled by media portrayal of a pandemic may not drawn be explicitly, but seems compelling all the same, given common knowledge of the sorts of biases that have become prevalent throughout the pandemic’s course, so it is possible this issue is not severe..  It is possible that Siedelman’s argument may have benefitted from briefly employing the social consequences of pandemic situations and pandemic quarantining to better align to  current events, despite her focus being Israel’s history of the matter.

Moses Benjamin Seixas was a key member of the Shearith Israel congregation in New York, as well as the husband of Judith Levy, a Kingston-born jewish woman. The Shearith community, which enjoys continued prominence to this day, has its origins in the Spanish and Portuguese congregation that resided in Kingston. The Seixas family were deeply involved in New York’s jewish community, and their pre-eminence is evidenced by their choice of portrait artist, Henry Inman. Inman was the vice president of the National Academy of Design, was commissioned by the US government to produce portraits for the Capitol, and has work in both the collections of the White House and on display at the National Portrait Gallery. While the ‘Spanish and Portuguese congregation of the Caribbean may have once had to hide their activities, by the time they became the Shearith of New York, they were bumping shoulders with the sorts of creatives who were closest to the center of power in the United States.

Rebecca Valverde Gomes was a woman from the Jewish community of Barbados who left her husband, and began living with another man, Mr. Costello. When her child was born, the Jewish community chose not to perform birth rights, not only marking the child as a child of illegitimate union (mamzer,) who who is forbidden to marry non-mamzers from within the community, but refusing to perform circumcision so as to prevent any future union with orthodox Jews. Below is a selection from a meeting of the council of elders (Mahamad) discussing what action is to be taken about the birth of Rebecca’s child.

Prior to the English occupation of Jamaica, when it was still under Spanish control, Jews generally self-reported as Portuguese. Following the English takeover, the inquisition lost its hold on Jamaica and practice no longer needed to be concealed. The image below may depict Shangare Yosher, a synagogue built in Kingston in 1787. Much of the Jewish community in Jamaica moged to Kingston following a severe fire that destroyed much of Port Royal, the community’s former center, in 1815.. Kingston quickly became the new center of the Jewish population, and other synagogues soon followed it. In 1831, Kingston jews successfully petitioned the English government for political rights- an argument which was referenced for the successful petition by London Jews in 1832 for the same. The image below was published in Kingston’s “The Jamaica Times” in 1941.

The passage below is from ‘Voyage to Pauroma’, a text in which a pair of Jews who journeyed to colonize America in the 17th century recount their journey. In this passage, they detail the frustrations related to disembarking borne from a conflict between the Captain’s schedule and religious restriction. I have added expandable commentary to several sections that seem most relevant for comprehension and discussion.