Family Portraits

Portraits of early American Jews tell us a lot about how Jews wanted to be seen and remembered. They also tell us about how Jews dressed and how they thought about family. Who was featured together in portraits? Where were the paintings hung? Over ten years ago, the Jewish Museum in New York featured an exhibit entitled, "Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America," the exhibition book for which is still a landmark in the field. Today, many early American Jewish portraits are available online through the Loeb Database of Early American Portraits at AJHS.
This summer I am teaching a MALS class on material culture in the Jewish Atlantic World. This week we've focused on portraits and representations of Jews between 1640-1840. I like to distinguish between portraits paid for by a patron (who had the power not only to choose his clothes and the painter, but also not to pay for the work if it wasn't to his liking), and paintings of Jews over which the sitter had little or no input or control. Examples of a portrait would be Gilbert Stuart's "Mrs. Aaron Lopez and Her Son Joshua" (1772/73) or Gerardus Duyckinck's "Portrait of Franks Children with Lamb" (ca. 1735). In contrast, an example of an unsolicited representation of Jews would be Pierre Jacques Benoit's "Shopkeeper and Tailor, Paramaribo, Surinam" (1839). Somewhere in between these extremes is Bernard Picart's Etchings of Amsterdam's Jews, an example of which I featured in my post on the House of the Rounds. Comparing these types of representations of Jews can help students understand the differences between how Jews were seen by others and how they wanted to be seen.

Below are some resources for other teachers who are interested in having students analyze early Jewish portraits in class.


Sylvan Barnet’s General Questions Art Historians Ask About Art1. What is my first response to the work? (Later you may modify or even reject this response, but begin by trying to study it.)

2. Where and when was the work made? Does it reveal qualities attributed to the culture? (Don't assume that it does; works of art have a way of eluding easy generalizations.)

3. Where would the work originally have been seen? (Surely not in a museum or textbook.)

4. What purpose did the work serve? To glorify a god? To immortalize a man? To teach? To delight? Does the work present a likeness, or express a feeling, or illustrate a mystery?

5. In what condition has the work survived? Is it exactly as it left the artist's hands, or has it been damaged, repaired, or in some way altered? What evidence of change do I see?

6. What is the title? Does it help illuminate the work? Sometimes it is useful to ask yourself, what would I call the work?
Specific Questions I Ask about Portraits
1. Was the portrait commissioned by the sitter (or the sitter’s family) or was it created without the sitter’s input?

2.Does the portrait emphasize or elide ethnic identity?

3. What social type does the sitter represent? (There may be more than one.) How do you know?

4. What is the class/social rank of the sitter? How does the painter establish the rank of the sitter? Does the social standing of the painter tell us anything about the social rank of the sitter?

5. What objects does the sitter hold or have around him/her? What message do these objects convey?

6. Is anyone else present in the portrait? Do these people help construct a communal identity for the sitter or emphasize the sitter as defined by specific relationships?

7. What is the sitter wearing? How do the clothing help establish the sitter’s identity?

8.If possible, look at another portrait by the same artist of a non-Jewish patron.What differences do you notice? What is the significance of the differences? [For example you could compare Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Sarah and Joshua Lopez to that his portrait of Christian Stelle Bannister and her son John].

9.If a child is in the portrait is (s)he presented as a “little adult” or as a child?

10.If you feel comfortable thinking about styles of art, in what style is the portrait made?


Resources for Finding Portraits from the Jewish Atlantic World

A. ELECTRONIC

• Database of Early American Jewish Portraits (Mainly New York, Newport, but you can also search by colony through the keywords)
• Surinam Mapped Out Collection (Suriname; Try Browsing Keyword "Joden")
• Portrait of Sarah Solis Carvalho by Solomon Nunes Carvalho (sometimes of Barbados) ca. 1856
• Collections of the Jewish Museum, London (England)
• Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam Collections (Amsterdam, Curacao, Suriname)
• Images by Benoit of Suriname (Suriname); Most Famous Example

B. PRINT

• Belisario: Sketches of Character (Jamaica, London)
• Rembrandt's Jews (Amsterdam)
• Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian image in seventeenth-century Amsterdam by Michael Zell (Amsterdam)
• Bygone Barbados (Barbados)
• Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America

Early American Mikvaot (Ritual Baths)

There is probably no less understood element of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jewish life in the American colonies than the ritual bath or mikveh. The ritual bath was an essential part of early modern Jewish society, and indeed remains so today for orthodox Jews today. Over the past several years, I have studied numerous early American mikvaot. The findings from this research are being published this month in the journal Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (AMS Press) in an article entitled, "Early American Mikvaot: Ritual Baths as the Hope of Israel."

I began to investigate early American mikvaot during a research trip focusing upon the early Jewish community in Newport, RI; my fascination with the subject is both academic and personal. As an academic, I am deeply interested in the daily lives of early American Jews, and mikveh provides important insights into the habits and behaviors of early American women. My intrigue with early mikvaot was also arises out of my own experiences as a Jew. As an orthodox woman in a small city, I have sometimes served as a volunteer balanit (mikveh attendant). When I left to do research one summer in Newport, I told the other mikveh attendants I would find out about early mikvaot. This turned out to be more challenging than I'd thought. Although I was told by tour guides in Newport that women in colonial times probably immersed in the ocean, this struck me as incredibly unlikely. In the summer, the Narragansett bay would hardly be the most modest place to immerse; in the winter the temperature drops well below zero, making ocean immersion also extremely uncomfortable if not deadly. Would early American Jews have cared enough to build a mikveh?

Textual evidence suggests yes. Mikveh use by women was required by Jewish law and was seen as essential to the continuance of a Jewish community. As one Jew in eighteenth-century Philadelphia noted, negligence of the mikveh by women was “highly criminal,” and if such negligence was deemed widespread, other communities might not only “pronounce heavy anathemas against us,” but also might “avoid intermarriages with us, equal as with [a] different nation or sect, to our great shame and mortification” (Marcus 1958: 135). From this colonist's point of view, lack of regular use of the mikveh by women had a negative impact on the family as a whole since offspring “born from so unlawful cohabitation are deemed bene niddot [children conceived during the menstrual period], which makes this offense the more hoeinous [heinous] and detestable, in as much as it effects not only the parents, but their posterity for generations to come“ (Marcus 1958: 135). Indeed the mikveh is considered so essential to Jewish life that some Rabbinical authorities gave it higher precedence than building a synagogue or buying a Torah scroll (Lesches 33).

Archaeological evidence also supports the theory that early American Jews built mikvaot. On the downside, there is little evidence from the United States. Although a spring runs under the Touro Synagogue and there are underground cisterns next to the synagogue, most mikvaot from early U.S. Jewish communities were built in what were (or became) dense urban centers. As neighborhoods changed and mikvaot were abandoned, later structures were built on top of them. Not surprisingly then, most remains of early mikvaot in the Americas are in the Caribbean—the most famous examples being in St. Eustatius and Willemstad, Curaçao (right). Other important mikvaot include the first American mikveh in Recife (Brazil), two mikavot in Paramaribo (below), and the recently rediscovered and excavated mikveh in Barbados (image at top). Archaeological digs of the early synagogue in Jamaica may have located a structure there as well that was a mikveh. As I argue in my RAE article, the unique features of these structures should be understood in relationship to the early mikvaot in Amsterdam.

Mikveh at Neve Shalom Synagogue Complex (Paramaribo, Suriname).
Quite possibly the oldest bor al gabei bor (one pit on top of another pit) mikveh in the Americas.
Recently renovated.

Interested in learning more about the Amsterdam mikvaot? There is a great article online by Jerzy Gawronski and Ranjith Jayasena. For more on early American mikvaot check out the first issue of RAE. Interested in supporting mikvaot in some of Americas oldest Jewish communities? Consider Chai Membership for Suriname or donate to the construction of the new mikveh in Newport, RI. In the meantime, enjoy the photos posted here!

Works cited
Lesches, Schneur Zalman.Understanding Mikveh Montreal: Rabbi S.Z. Lesches, 2001.
Marcus, Jacob Rader. American Jewry. Documents Eighteenth Century.

Photo creditsTop photo of the Barbados mikevh by and courtesy of Karl Watson, 2008. Features archaeologist Michael Stoner. Fisheye effects added by Laura Leibman.

Second Image of an excerpt of a letter from Rabbi Karigal (Barbados) to Aaron Lopez (Newport), asking "me advise como está el Baño" (can you tell me how is the mikveh going) suggesting a mikveh was being (re)built in Newport. From the Collection of Menashe Lehman, printed in “Early Relations Between American Jews and Eretz Yisrael.” Algemeiner Journal 3 March, 1992 : B3.

All other photos by Laura Leibman.

Grave Matters: Converso Funerary Art

When Isaac Lopez was buried in 1762, he joined the remains of many of his extended kin and other members of the Yeshuat Israel [Salvation of Israel] congregation. The Hevra kadisha (Burial Society) of Newport washed his body and prepared it for burial. The leader of the burial society then led the men in seven circuits around the body (Emmanuel PRECIOUS STONES 81). These circuits not only embedded the dead into the memory of the community, but also helped transition the deceased from the world of the living to the world to come.In Judaism, seven is a holy number symbolizing God, completion, and the covenant.One sign of this covenant was separation.

Jewish law requires that Jews be buried separately from their gentile neighbors, and in 1677 the Jews of Newport purchased and established a burial ground at the edge of town on the corner of what is now Kay Street and Bellevue Avenue (Gradwohl 20). The cemetery was far from both the town’s Protestant cemeteries, and the houses and businesses of most Jewish residents. After being prepared for internment, Isaac’s body was brought here and buried. A year later a gravestone was erected and “unveiled.”
Like the seven circuits made by mourners around the coffins of the dead, the gravestone laid over the tomb had a redemptive quality: it, like other stones in the cemetery, embedded the deceased in the Jewish community of Newport for all eternity, but also insisted upon the interrelatedness of Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, and Colonial worlds of Isaac’s family. Like many of the Jews buried in the Touro cemetery, Isaac’s father Moses (1706-1767) was a converso or “crypto-Jew”; that is, he was a descendent of Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity and who had for centuries practiced Catholicism in public, and a form of Judaism in private.

Moses Lopez had come to Newport to escape a late wave of the inquisition in Portugal after his New Christian relatives denounced him for “Judaizing.” Moses was the older half-brother of Aaron Lopez, one of Newport’s most famous merchants. When Moses came to the Americas, he gave up his Portuguese Christian name (José Lopez Ramos) for a Hebrew one (Moseh) and its English equivalent (Moses). His wife was his first cousin Rebecca Rodriguez Rivera (? -1793), whose father Abraham Rodriguez Rivera (? -1765) had escaped the Spanish inquisition and fled to England and later Newport (Rodrigues Pereira 568, 579). Moses was naturalized in New York in 1740/41 and most (or all) of his children were born in Newport (Stern 175). Several of Moses and Rebecca’s children died young, but only the stones of Isaac (1762) and Jacob (1763) remain.


Acknowledgments:
This entry is an excerpt from a conference presentation given at the American Studies Association Conference in 2007. Research was funded by NEH and a Ruby Grant.