Aaron Lopez
Based on Wikipedia: Aaron Lopez
In 1761, a Portuguese Jewish merchant named Aaron Lopez walked into a Rhode Island courtroom to ask a simple question: could he become a British citizen? He had lived in the American colonies for nearly a decade. He had built one of the most successful trading enterprises on the eastern seaboard. He employed dozens of workers, owned a fleet of ships, and paid more taxes than anyone else in Newport. The court said no.
The rejection wasn't about his qualifications. It was about his religion.
Lopez's story sits at the intersection of several uncomfortable histories: the brutal realities of the Atlantic slave trade, the long arc of Jewish persecution in Europe and the Americas, and the gap between colonial America's rhetoric of liberty and its actual practice. His life illuminates a paradox that still echoes today—how a man could simultaneously be an oppressor in one system while being oppressed by another.
A Secret Identity
Aaron Lopez was born Duarte Lopez in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1731. His family were conversos—a term that requires some explanation, as it unlocks a centuries-old tragedy.
In 1492, Spain expelled all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. Portugal initially welcomed these refugees, but five years later, King Manuel I forced all Portuguese Jews to convert as well. Many did so publicly while continuing to practice Judaism in secret, behind locked doors and shuttered windows. These crypto-Jews, as historians sometimes call them, lived double lives for generations. They attended Catholic mass on Sundays and observed Jewish holidays in hidden rooms. They married in churches and remarried in clandestine Jewish ceremonies. They baptized their children and quietly taught them Hebrew prayers.
The Inquisition hunted them relentlessly. Being caught practicing Judaism could mean torture, imprisonment, or death. The Lopez family had survived this terror for more than two centuries by the time Duarte was born.
In 1750, nineteen-year-old Duarte married a woman named Anna. They had a daughter, Catherine. But the walls were closing in. Duarte's older brother José had already fled Portugal years earlier, settling in Newport, Rhode Island, where he openly reclaimed his Jewish identity and changed his name to Moses. In 1752, Duarte followed.
The transformation was immediate. Upon arriving in Newport, Duarte became Aaron. His wife Anna became Abigail. Their daughter Catherine became Sarah. At the age of twenty-one, Aaron Lopez could finally be himself.
The Whale Oil Cartel
Lopez arrived in Newport with merchant instincts honed by generations of family traders. He started small, running a modest shop. Within three years, he was buying and selling goods across Rhode Island and dealing with agents in Boston and New York.
His first major play was in spermaceti—a waxy substance extracted from the head cavities of sperm whales. Today, we might find it odd to build a business empire on whale byproducts, but in the eighteenth century, spermaceti was precious. It burned brighter and cleaner than tallow candles, didn't smoke, and didn't smell. Wealthy households prized spermaceti candles the way modern consumers prize luxury goods. A single candle could cost as much as a worker earned in a day.
Lopez built a candle-making factory in Newport in 1756. But success attracted competition. By 1760, a dozen rival plants had sprung up across New England, all chasing the same limited supply of whale oil. Prices were climbing. Margins were thinning.
Lopez's solution was elegant and ruthless. In 1761, he joined with eight other merchants to form what we would today call a trust or cartel—an agreement to control the cost and distribution of whale oil. By acting together, these nine men could dictate prices to both the whalers who supplied them and the customers who bought their candles. It was monopoly capitalism before that term existed.
Ships, Slaves, and Sugar
Candles made Lopez wealthy. Trade made him an empire.
By 1757, Lopez had expanded beyond the North American coastline into the West Indian trade. This was the lucrative triangular commerce that connected New England, the Caribbean, and Africa. New England ships carried rum to Africa. In Africa, they traded rum for enslaved people. They transported their human cargo to Caribbean sugar plantations, where they exchanged slaves for molasses. They brought the molasses back to New England, where distilleries turned it into more rum. Then the cycle repeated.
Between 1761 and 1774, Lopez participated directly in the slave trade. The historical record shows he underwrote twenty-one slave voyages. To put this in perspective: during that same period, Newport merchants sent 347 slave ships to Africa. Lopez's involvement, while real and morally indefensible by modern standards, represented about six percent of Newport's slave trade.
This matters because Lopez's name has sometimes been weaponized in modern debates about Jewish involvement in American slavery. Some polemicists have exaggerated his role, claiming Jewish merchants dominated the slave trade. The actual numbers tell a different story. While Lopez was certainly complicit—and wealthy because of that complicity—he was one merchant among many in a predominantly non-Jewish industry. His participation was significant enough to condemn but not significant enough to support sweeping claims about Jewish control of the trade.
Lopez traded in other things too: textiles, clothes, shoes, hats, bottles, chocolate, rum, barrels, and ships themselves. His business interests sprawled across industries the way a modern conglomerate might own stakes in technology, manufacturing, and retail simultaneously. By the early 1770s, he owned or controlled thirty vessels and had become the wealthiest person in Newport. His tax assessment was twice that of any other resident.
Ezra Stiles, the Congregational minister in Newport who would later become president of Yale College, described Lopez as "a merchant of the first eminence" whose commerce was "probably surpassed by no merchant in America." Coming from a Christian minister describing a Jewish merchant, in an era of pervasive antisemitism, this was remarkable praise.
Citizenship Denied
Which brings us back to that courtroom in 1761.
The British Parliament had passed the Naturalization Act of 1740 specifically to encourage immigration to the American colonies. Any foreign Protestant who had lived in British America for seven years could become a naturalized subject. The law explicitly accommodated Jews and Quakers, allowing them to take modified oaths that didn't conflict with their religious beliefs. Lopez met every requirement.
The Rhode Island Superior Court rejected his application anyway. So did that of Isaac Elizer, another qualified Jewish applicant.
Lopez and Elizer appealed to the Rhode Island General Assembly—essentially the colonial legislature. The lower house approved their request but with a poison pill: Jews could become citizens, but they could never vote or hold public office. They would be second-class citizens by design.
The upper house was worse. They punted the question back to the courts, claiming the legislature had no jurisdiction over naturalization.
When the Superior Court heard the appeal in March 1762, the judges offered a creative new excuse. The 1740 act, they reasoned, was intended to increase the colony's population. But Rhode Island had grown quite crowded lately—so the law no longer applied. Besides, a 1663 Rhode Island statute limited citizenship to Christians. Lopez and Elizer would have to remain foreigners.
The irony was thick enough to choke on. Rhode Island had been founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, who fled Massachusetts specifically to establish a colony based on religious freedom. Williams had welcomed people of all faiths. Now, more than a century later, Rhode Island's courts were telling Jews they couldn't belong.
A Massachusetts Solution
Lopez was nothing if not resourceful. If Rhode Island wouldn't have him, perhaps another colony would.
In April 1762, he temporarily relocated to Swansea, Massachusetts—just across the Rhode Island border. He established residency, applied for naturalization, and on October 15, 1762, became a citizen of Massachusetts. Then he moved back to Newport.
Historians believe Lopez was the first Jew to become a naturalized citizen of Massachusetts. He had outmaneuvered a system designed to exclude him, using the fragmented nature of colonial governance to find a jurisdiction that would accept him. It was a preview of how marginalized groups would later navigate American federalism—seeking rights in friendly states when hostile ones refused them.
The Philanthropist
For all his complicity in slavery, Lopez was genuinely charitable in other domains. He purchased books for the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, one of the oldest lending libraries in America. He donated lumber to help build the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations—which later relocated to Providence and became Brown University. He gave land to establish Leicester Academy in Massachusetts.
His most visible legacy stands in downtown Newport today. Lopez was a leading contributor to the construction of Touro Synagogue, completed in 1763 and still standing as the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States. He was given the honor of laying one of its cornerstones.
One contemporary wrote of Lopez that he was "a man of eminent probity and benevolence whose bounties were widely diffused, not confined to creed or sect." This wasn't mere flattery. Records show Lopez supported both Jewish and Christian causes, gave generously to the poor regardless of religion, and maintained friendships across the colony's religious divides.
How do we reconcile this generosity with his participation in human trafficking? We don't, not easily. Lopez lived in a society that treated slavery as a normal business practice. He was kind to his neighbors while helping to destroy families an ocean away. The contradiction didn't bother him, or at least not enough to stop. This moral compartmentalization—being humane in one sphere while being monstrous in another—is disturbingly human. We see it across history, in people who loved their children and tortured their enemies, who built hospitals and burned villages, who freed their neighbors and enslaved strangers.
War and Ruin
By the mid-1770s, the gathering storm of revolution threatened everything Lopez had built. The Continental Association—a coordinated colonial boycott of British goods—undermined his transatlantic trade. In October 1775, a Royal Navy force anchored outside Newport's harbor, and the city began to evacuate.
Lopez fled. First to Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Then to Providence. Then to Boston. Finally to Leicester, Massachusetts, where he had donated land for an academy years earlier. His business empire, dependent on ships and international commerce, could not survive a war fought largely at sea.
Historian Marilyn Kaplan describes his losses during the American Revolution as "monumental." The man who had been the wealthiest merchant in Newport watched his fortune evaporate.
Yet even in exile, Lopez remained generous. He sheltered Jewish refugees from the war in his Leicester home—so many that a friend jokingly wrote that "your family at present are in a number only 99 and still there is room for one more."
A Sudden End
On May 28, 1782, Aaron Lopez was finally returning home. The war was winding down. Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown seven months earlier. Newport was safe again. Lopez loaded his family into a carriage and set out for Rhode Island.
Somewhere along the road, his horse stumbled. The carriage pitched into a pond. Aaron Lopez, fifty-one years old, drowned.
They buried him in the Jewish cemetery in Newport, a few hundred yards from the synagogue he had helped build. The cemetery, like the synagogue, still exists. Visitors can find his grave there today, a weathered stone marking the resting place of a man who was simultaneously victim and victimizer, refugee and oppressor, philanthropist and slave trader.
Historical Echoes
Lopez's story has taken on new relevance in recent years as debates about Jewish participation in American slavery have resurfaced, often in bad faith. Some commentators, seeking to deflect criticism of antisemitism or to construct alternative historical narratives, have pointed to Lopez and a handful of other Jewish slave traders as evidence of disproportionate Jewish involvement in the slave trade.
The historical record doesn't support these claims. While Jewish merchants like Lopez certainly participated in slavery—and profited from it—they represented a tiny fraction of the overall trade. The vast majority of slave ships were owned by Christian merchants, primarily British and Portuguese. Jewish-owned vessels accounted for perhaps one or two percent of the total. Lopez's twenty-one voyages, while significant for him personally, were a statistical footnote in an industry that transported twelve million Africans across the Atlantic.
None of this excuses Lopez or minimizes his moral responsibility. He bought and sold human beings for profit. That is damnable regardless of his religion or his percentage of market share. But accuracy matters, especially when history is weaponized for contemporary political purposes.
What Lopez's life actually illustrates is something more nuanced and uncomfortable: that oppression and participation in oppression often coexist in the same person. A refugee from religious persecution became complicit in racial persecution. A man denied citizenship because of his faith denied freedom to others because of their skin color. He was not a monster—he was human, with all the moral inconsistency that implies.
The synagogue he helped build still hosts services. The graves of enslaved people who died because of his commerce are mostly unmarked and forgotten. Both legacies are his. History doesn't offer us the comfort of simple villains or uncomplicated heroes. It offers us Aaron Lopez: a man who wanted to belong, and a man who helped destroy others' chance to belong anywhere at all.