18th-Century American Jewry
American Jewry: Documents, Eighteenth Century.
by Jacob Rader Marcus.
The Hebrew Union College Press. 492 pp. $8.50.

 

Most of the Jews of the 18th century in North America were engaged in trade, but their business letters to one another also touched on religious and personal matters, so that Dr. Marcus’s collection of such letters and other documents—with brief explanatory introductions by himself—has much of their day to day life. The hasty reader who skips through Dr. Marcus’s collection of documents may wonder impatiently if they were worth all the trouble it took to resurrect them. Here, for example, are the scolding of parents, the banal endearments of young people trying hard to be in love—much like the conversation we overhear in the streets—and, worse yet, here are the intricate letters and documents of lawyers and great merchants. And yet, whoever reads Dr. Marcus’s collection with some attention will find anxieties and ambitions not unlike his own. We are inclined to think, for example, that those were days of leisure, or at least without the hurry and tension we suppose peculiar to our times, but letters end with the apology: “Excuse hast,” “In haste,” “Excuse brevity for want of time.”

Dr. Marcus has a particularly interesting comment on a petition of James Lucena, dated 1761. Lucena was a Marrano who fled from Portugal but, as Dr. Marcus points out, “the fact that he fled did not necessarily mean that he wished to live as a Jew.” Lucena, in fact, wished to live as a Christian—but a Christian not subject to arrest by the Inquisition on a false charge of Jewish practices, made plausible by his Jewish origins. No doubt many a former Jew fled from the power of the Inquisition for such a reason.

The attitude of these Jewish merchants toward slavery was no different, it seems, than that of their non-Jewish neighbors. Two letters, however, show that to be a master was not without its troubles, too. Meyer Josephson, who had a country store in Reading, Pennsylvania, wrote to Michael Gratz in Yiddish (1762): “. . . The [Negro] wench I now have has two virtues, both bad ones. First, she’s drunk all day, when she can get it, and second, she is mean, so that my wife cannot say a word to her. She is afraid of her.” Naturally he was anxious to sell her, but that was not always easy. In a letter to Barnard Gratz (Michael’s brother), another correspondent writes, also from Reading (1772): “About a week since, I put him [Gratz’s ‘negroe George’] up at public sale at Christopher Witman’s tavern, where there was a number of persons who inclined to purchase him. But he protested publicly that he would not be sold, and if anyone should purchase, he would be the death of him, and words to the like purpose, which deterred the people from bid[d]ing. I then sent him back again to the gaoler to keep him at hard labour, which he refuses to do, and goes on in such an insolent manner that’s impossible to get a master for him here. . . . He’s now almost naked, and if not furnished soon with some cloaths, I fear he’ll perish. . . . He’s now chained and handcuffed on account of his threats.”

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Among the letters by non-Jews, one by Daniel Boone, addressed to Jacob I. Cohen in 1784, has in its few sentences the flavor of the frontier: “Mr. Jacob Cohons, Merchant in Richmond,” it reads, “No doubt you are desireous your land bisniss should be dunn but that is a thing imposible without money, and yours and Mr. Isaacs’ will amount to a smart sum. . . . Now, sir, you will pleas to show this bill to Col. Henry or Capt. Chapmon Auston [Austin], who has ben out here a survaying, and see if I am right or not and send the money by the first opertunety. Mr. Samuel Grant, my sister’s sun, will lykly hand you this later [letter]. If so he will be a good hand to send by, and I will bee accountable for any money put into his hands inless kild by the Indins. . . . Your land lyes on Lickeng Rever, on the south side, a bout 50 milds from the Ohigho [River] by water, and a bout 20 by land. Large bouts [boats] may come up to your doore. . . . N.B. Sir: Pleas send me 3 or 4 quire of paper by the bearer, Samuel Grant, if he will bring it.”

The very first item in the book appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Gazette of March 13, 1753, and was taken from a New York newspaper. Briefly it runs as follows: a Jewish peddler offered a woman as a present a piece of calico “upon condition of her giving up her charms to him.” The condition was performed and the present made. Later, the peddler met the woman’s husband and told him that he had sold his wife a piece of calico on credit. The husband was enraged that his wife had run him into debt and went right back to his house with the peddler and ordered his wife to return the calico. She did but hid “a coal of fire” in it. The peddler took the calico and went off, quite pleased with the entire transaction until, asked where he had come from, he answered, “From hell!” and at that very moment his pack burst into flames.

Dr. Marcus, to be sure, points out that the story may be fiction (it seems incredible that the “coal of fire” would not have made its presence known at once by smoke if not by flame), but he thinks the item should be used—under the general heading of “The Personal Life”—because “young Jews peddled their wares (and occasionally their charms!) in colonial days.” He cites the case of Jacob Lucena, who was convicted in 1670 in Connecticut for “lascivious dalience and wanton carriage and profers to severall women.” I know of no other case, though Dr. Marcus may, and we cannot even be sure from the text itself that Lucena made all the “profers.” The story should have been included, of course, as a document of the times, but the stress in the introductory note, it seems to me, should have been on the fictions that constantly renew the atmosphere of ill-will in which the Jews have had to live to this day. Benjamin Franklin, incidentally, contributed to the sum solicited by Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia in 1788 for the purpose of saving its synagogue from foreclosure, and Dr. Marcus has its appeal in his book. [A selection from this volume appeared in our Cedars of Lebanon department in January 1959: “A Jewish Watchmaker in Old Virginia.”—Ed.]

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