The Jewish Atlantic World Database is now open and free to use! In the collection, you will find over 5,000 images related to Jewish life in early America. The database includes both photos of material
culture (gravestones, ritual baths, synagogues, houses, furniture, etc.) and
archival documents (probate records and land evidence) from many of the
key ports where Jews settled in North America and the Caribbean, as well as
several crucial ports from which they immigrated (Amsterdam, London,
Hamburg). Also included in the
database are samples of non-Jewish (and later Jewish) artifacts to allow
students to better assess what made Jewish life distinctive. Keywords allow
visitors to connect artifact to other items related to the same individual,
family, ethnic group, location, port town, or theme. Right now you can browse or search, or look for records by the individual's name. Soon we hope to have a complete list of family names to browse as well. You will also find resources to help you analyze the objects in the database or to use in the classroom. Looking for something or someone and can't find it/them? Let me know, as we are still adding items to the database each week! Here are some important colonial Jewish families you will find in the database: Lopez, Henriquez, Senior, Curiel, Gomez, Hoheb, Hart, Rivera, Maduro, Seixas, and many many others.
If
you would like to learn more about the religious life of early American
Jews and the objects they used, please feel free to order a copy of Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life from ISBS or Amazon.com.
Purchase of the book is optional, however; this website is freely
available to the public as an educational, not-for-profit tool for
teaching and learning.
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| Landhuis Klein Santa Marta (ca. 1700), Curacao. Home of Aaron Levy Maduro (1709-19); Jacob Joshua Naar (1819-56), and Joseph Jacob Henriquez (1856-62) |
Although Carigal lived for several years in London and Barbados, he is most famous among American Jews for having visited Newport (RI) in 1773, where he delivered a Shavuot sermon that became the first published Rabbinical address delivered in what would become the United States. He also became life-long friends with Ezra Stiles (affectionately known by me as the "Harriet the Spy of the Colonial World"), who took copious notes on their visits together and transcribed their letters back and forth. Today Carigal's sermon, along with Stiles' records comprise the two main textual resources we have on the Rabbi, his thoughts, and his life. We also have his will, written in Barbados shortly before his death at the young age of 48 (see below). These written sources are complemented by two objects that round out our sense of the Rabbi: a portrait commissioned by Stiles from artist Samuel King (above), and Carigal's elaborately carved gravestone that rests today in the Nidhe Israel cemetery in Bridgetown, Barbados (below).
Like many Jewish gravestones in the West Indies, the inscription for Carigal's stone is in three languages: Hebrew, Portuguese, and English. The Portuguese and English portions read:
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
The book of Esther was particularly popular amongst conversos on the Iberian Peninsula. Many conversos kept the fast of Esther even when they kept few other Jewish holidays or traditions. New Christian women tended to identify with Queen Esther: like the Queen, many conversas had to submit to a gentile husband, either literally or figuratively (Catholic Spain).
Once conversos left the Iberian Peninsula and were free to practice Judaism openly, Purim remained an important holiday. The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam contains many fine examples of richly illustrated Megillot, one of which is featured in the video below. The reading is from the Portuguese Esnoga.
Gravestones from the Jewish Atlantic World also feature scenes from the story of Esther. It was not uncommon for stones to feature Biblical scenes, particularly ones related to the name of the deceased. The detail of the stone at the top of the page is from the gravestone of Mordechay Hisquiau Namias de Crasto (1716) Beit Haim Blenheim, Curaçao. For the full stone and the inscription, see below. A similar scene appears in Beth Haim at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel on the stone of Moses de Mordechai Senior (1730) (left).
Looking for a way to reinforce students' understanding of key vocabulary words? Try a crossword puzzle! (Or you may just want to try it yourself to test your own knowledge!)
Download the puzzle here or make your own at The Teachers Corner.net.
Answer Key:
One of the goals of this website is to make more resources on early American Jews easily available to classroom teachers.
Recently I visited the class of Holly Litwin at Portland Jewish Academy. Her fifth grade students were studying the American colonies. Holly was noticing how few resources there were for young students on Jewish life in the colonies. One of the activities we did while I was there was an analysis of gravestones from Jews in the colonies. I choose three stones: one for a small Jewish boy (Isaac Lopez), one from a slave owned by the boy's uncle (Aaron Lopez), and one by a man from Curacao (Gabriel A Levy).
I included an example of a slave's stone because slavery had come up as a topic in their general studies of the colonies. Years ago the Nation of Islam proposed that Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This allegation is clearly false. It is important for students to understand, however, that almost every aspect of the economy in the colonies was tied to slavery either directly or indirectly: Jews often were prohibited from selling slaves, but some men (like Aaron Lopez) did have slave ships. You can read more about this issue in a wonderful book by Eli Faber called Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight, that clears up a lot of misconceptions about Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Holly's students were interested in the fact that some Jews owned slaves, and some students were sad about it. I wondered if I was right to bring it up at all?
One of the things that makes gravestones from the Jewish Atlantic World so fascinating is that they often contain "graven images"; that is, images traditionally considered forbidden by Jewish law. We talked about what the second commandment said, and why Jews in the colonies might have wanted to make gravestones with these images anyway. We also talked about colonial diseases. Students broke into groups and answered the questions on the first page about one of the three stones. Then we got back to together as a class and talked about each one of the stones in turn.
Here is the Gravestone Handout we used. Feel free to use it in your own class.
If you are interested in learning more about why scholars are interested in gravestones and how to analyze them, see my Gravestones Study Guide on my Indian Converts Collection website.
Question: If you teach young students about early American Jews, would you bring up the issue of slavery? Why or why not?
