Samuel Nunez - Escape To London

Escape To London

Dr. Nunez hit upon a brilliant, bold idea. He arranged a Banquet and Ball to which he invited all of the important people of the city. His guests included many high-ranking officials.

One evening he was host to the captain of a British brigantine anchored in the Tagus River. When the party was in full swing, the captain invited the guests and the Nunez family (accompanied by their unsuspecting Inquisitor keepers) to visit his ship.

What the guests did not know was that a surprise awaited them. About an hour or so after they had boarded the ship, they suddenly became aware that they were moving! Yes, they were, in fact, sailing away from the shores of Portugal at full speed, heading for the friendlier shores of England. Dr. Nunez had every detail arranged with the help of his relatives, the Mendez family, one of whom married Zipra, one of the lovely daughters of Samuel and Rebecca Nunez. Dr. Nunez secretly had succeeded in selling part of his estates and possessions and had transferred the money to England through secret couriers. Thus, he had been able to enlist a British captain to bring his brigantine to the Tagus River on the night of the banquet for the surprise voyage to London in August 1726.

Once in London, Samuel and his sons underwent circumcision to identify themselves as Jewish. Diogo and Gracia remarried in a Jewish ceremony and changed their names to Samuel and Rebecca. Early in 1727, Rebecca gave birth to their seventh and last child, a son who died as an infant.

A few years later in 1733, the Nunez family was among several mainly Sephardic Jewish families from Portugal who left London for the colony of Georgia. Also joining them on the William and Sarah was a small group of Ashkenazi Jews with German origins.

London Jews had been contributing liberally to the Oglethorpe scheme, providing new homes for impoverished Christians in the new colony of Georgia. In 1732 there were 6,000 Sephardic Jews living in London having lived as Crypto-Jews, publicly practicing Roman Catholicism and secretly preserving their Jewish heritage, prior to their departure from Portugal. The Bevis Marks Synagogue, still a Sephardic Jewish congregation in London today, helped finance the trip of their congregants.

All but eight of the original 42 Jewish colonists to Georgia were among these Spanish/Portuguese Jews who had arrived in London seven years earlier. They chartered two boats and sent a total of 90 Jews to Savannah in one year. Sailing on the first of these boats was Dr. Nunez and some of his family. On their voyage, an infant died and the ship nearly wrecked off the North Carolina coast. They arrived in Savannah on July 11, 1733 - five months after General James Oglethorpe and his first 114 colonists. The other boat arrived on November 12, 1733, according to the Sheftall Diaries, a primary source document with entries from Mordecai Sheftall, a German Jewish passenger on the William and Sarah.

These Jewish colonists were the largest group of Jews ever to sail on one vessel for North America in colonial times, wrote Jacob R. Marcus in his study of The Colonial American Jew. They brought with them "a sefer Torah, with two cloaks, and a circumcision box, which were given to them by Mr. Lindo, a merchant in London, for the use of the congregation they intended to establish." Their first order of business was to establish Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah, the third oldest Jewish congregation in America. They also established a Jewish cemetery on Bull Street on the northern end of downtown Savannah.

When Dr. Samuel Nunez arrived in Savannah, Georgia, there was an outbreak of yellow fever and many people were dying. After this ship landed, Captain Thomas Corain, one of General Oglethorpe’s aides, wrote, "Georgia will soon become a Jewish colony." Captain Corain feared that if this news leaked out, rich Christians would not support the colony and poor Christians would not settle there. The London Trustees urged Oglethorpe to remove them. They had no legal basis for this request as Georgia’s charter permitted all persons “liberty of conscience in the worship of God” except Catholics.

General Oglethorpe almost did not allow the Jewish immigrants to land. Dr. Nunez assured Oglethorpe that he was a doctor of infectious diseases and could help the colony. The Georgia colony had lost their doctor in April of that year, William Cox, and were much in need of a physician. Oglethorpe realized here was an opportunity for good help during this epidemic in Savannah, and he let the Jewish families remain. He also knew some of these Jews had a knowledge of agriculture acquired in Mediterranean lands. He wanted to use them as tools to create in Georgia a "Mediterranean colony of wine, olive oil, silk and indigo."

Dr. Nunez’s arrival was very timely as there was an uncontrolled epidemic of "bloody flux" and "malignant fever" raging. Of the original 114 settlers, three more had died in June after their doctor's passing in April followed by four more in early July prior to Dr. Nunez's arrival. Although ten more died during July, those numbers rapidly diminished to two in August, four in September and one each during the last three months of that year.

The formal remedies at his disposal were limited and soon exhausted, but Dr. Nunez's training in botany helped him make use of indigenous plants and with great success. He used laudanum (opium) to control the "bloody flux" and lemon extract to treat the scurvy which appeared in debilitated patients. He employed ipecacuanha (emetine) empirically without knowing that it had a specific action on the amoeba histolytica. With infusions of cinchona bark (quinine), Dr. Nunez treated the "malignant fevers" considered in the medical texts of the period to originate from the evil night miasmas of the marshes (malaria =mal aria= bad air). When his supply of chinchona bark was exhausted, Dr. Nunez used as substitutes the bark of white oak, red oak and dogwood. He used tartar emetic to produce vomiting in patients with food poisoning, jimson weed smoked in a pipe for asthma and sassafras root tea as a "purifier of blood."

The epidemic subsided, the colonists returned to their work, and Dr. Nunez at 65 built his home and settled his family. General Oglethorpe sent to the Trustees of the Colony a report of the help rendered by the first active practitioner of medicine in Georgia who also formed Georgia's first pharmacy. The Trustees instructed him not to give the Jews land grants, but Oglethorpe ignored them. One of Dr. Nunez's sons-in-law, Abraham De Lyon who was married to his daughter Esther, was experienced in "cultivating vines and making wine." Also a farmer who grew peas, grain and rice, De Lyon used his training as a viniculturist to raise "beautiful, almost transparent grapes" in Savannah from choice cuttings he brought with him from Portugal. He and the other colonists helped develop a 10-acre (40,000 m2) tract as a Botanical Garden (Trustees Garden) near the southern end of Broad at Bay Streets near the Savannah River. They introduced to the colonists foreign plants with valuable medicinal properties and developed herbs which were native to Georgia.

Most of the Jewish able-bodied young men, needed in the militia. Oglethorpe appointed one, Benjamin Sheftall, a lieutenant in the militia.