Commenting here on David de Sola Pool’s erudite parish history, Portraits Etched in Stone, recently published by Columbia University Press (543 pp., $10.00), Mr. Reznikoff—by blood, as far as he knows, pure East European Ashkenazi; moreover, of the Brooklyn settlement—evokes for us the memory of Manhattan’s Sephardim of an earlier age, those Jewish “aristocrats” who on their transplantation to America became simply a normal and unassuming part of the small and close-knit Jewish community of 18th- and early 19th-century New York. 

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It is somewhat of a surprise to a plain Ashkenazic Jew, reading David de Sola Pool’s new book about early Jewish settlers in New York, to learn how early the Jews from Central Europe (Ashkenazim) outnumbered the Jews originally from Spain and Portugal (Sephardim). Perhaps less striking to an American Jew, who takes democracy for granted and is unacquainted with the ancient hidalgo pride of the Sephardim in London¹, say, or Amsterdam or Bordeaux, is how democratic the “aristocratic” Sephardim in New York always were—in life and in death.

To write about early days is to haunt cemeteries and to read gravestones, if one can, as well as books. Dr. Pool’s book is accordingly, to begin with, a history of the older cemeteries of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese congregation in New York. It is particularly a history of the second cemetery—now facing the New Bowery. No one is as well qualified as Dr. Pool to write this book, for he has been the rabbi of Shearith Israel since 1907 and has gathered his material for many years from the records of the congregation and the city and from the broken and worn tombstones.

It is a troubled history: of difficulties with the ground of the old cemetery’s bill that kept sliding and exposing coffins and bones, and then of the ordinances of the growing city forbidding further burial and of land taken for streets until the cemetery on the New Bowery remains, as Dr. Pool observes, practically “the little hook of land” that was granted the Jewish community of New Amsterdam for its first cemetery. In the cemetery facing the New Bowery the dead were buried in, a row, as they died, without distinction of place. As late as 1829, thirty-five members of the congregation wrote the trustees: “. . . each person should be Buried in the Row . . . for whatever destinction [sic] exists in Life, there is none in Death. . . .” The gravestones, too, are modest: they have as a rule no symbolic figures because of the Jewish tradition against “a graven image”; here are no elaborately carved gravestones as in the cemeteries of the Sephardim in Europe, no coats-of-arms or scenes from the Bible. There are, however, the Cohen’s hands outstretched in blessing, the ewer and basin of the Levite, the hand of the Angel of Death cutting down the Tree of Life.

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Judging from the names and languages on the tombstones: before 1725 the Sephardim outnumbered the Ashkenazim in New York; from 1726 to 1750 the proportion of Ashkenazim “increased markedly”; after 1775 the Ashkenazim outnumbered the Sephardim in an ever greater proportion. But conclusions based on tombstones, Dr. Pool warns us, may be misleading: the names of women may show only the names of their husbands; tombstones would show only the older members of the community; the more expensive tombstones would very likely outlast others; the flat tombstones of the Sephardim in any case would outlast the upright stones of the Ashkenazim; and many tombstones, as well as graves, are lost.

Dr. Pool, however, has other evidence. Of the twenty-nine who in 1728 contributed to the purchase of a new burial ground, sixteen clearly have Ashkenazic names and twelve Sephardic; in the same year, of the list of contributors for building the new synagogue, thirty-four have Ashkenazic names and twenty-nine Sephardic. But the twelve Sephardim who subscribed to the cemetery fund gave more than the sixteen Ashkenazim. The subscriptions to the synagogue fund show the same proportion of donations. The earliest regulations of the congregation to be found, also dated 1728, are signed by nine with Sephardic names and by six whose names are Ashkenazic. From all this Dr. Pool concludes that by 1728 the Ashkenazim in New York were somewhat more numerous, more recent immigrants and therefore probably younger, and not as prosperous as the Sephardim, but that the Sephardim were still the more influential. Finally, he cites a letter of about 1729 from a member of the Jewish community of Curaçao to two Sephardim of New York: “. . . the asquenazum or Germans,” says the writer about New York, “are more in Number than Wee there . . . .”

Now all this is not merely of interest to a local historian or an antiquarian; for it was a notion held for a long time, and perhaps still held by many, that the Jews who came here before the American Revolution were almost all Sephardic. It is of interest also in showing the influence of a democratic America that in New York, unlike European communities, Sephardim and Ashkenazim got along very well together. The Sephardic ritual was accepted by all until 1825 when Bnai Jeshurun was organized, but until then, as Dr. Pool points out, of the presidents of Shearith Israel from 1729, forty-two had Ashkenazic names and only ten Sephardic, and of these ten, eight were members of the Gomez family. Although the first generation of Sephardim and Ashkenazim rarely intermarried—not Sephardic pride so much as different backgrounds of language and culture—afterwards intermarriage between Sephardim and Ashkenazim was not uncommon.

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In writing of the old cemetery now facing the New Bowery, Dr. Pool had to write of those who lie in the graves or did lie there once. And he has brought before us not only the members of the congregation from 1682 until 1831 but the Jewish community of New York during that period, because until 1825 Shearith Israel was the only congregation of Jews in the city. He has tried, Dr. Pool writes, to bring the dead from the “dust of their burial ground . . . into the brightness of their homes, their families, and their lives.” In this he has been as successful as a man of his learning and sympathy for his fellow men can be. Perhaps only the “dew of the Resurrection,” as the rabbis have construed a verse in Isaiah, will be more so.

We hear, for example, the complaint of Joseph Isaacs who, according to his petition for relief, “willing to do their Maj’tys all the service he could in these . . . troublesome times, listed himself” as a soldier in King William’s War (1691). “Att wont for a Gunn,” he was supplied with it by Captain William Merritt. But the gun was taken from his lodgings by a certain Thomas Clark. Isaacs discreetly adds “for what reason he . . . knows not.” And Captain Merritt wanted his gun back or five pounds for it and “dayly threatened” the unlucky Isaacs.

Another unlucky Jew may have been the Benjamin I. Jacobs who in 1784 was in love with a young woman—not a Jewess but who wished to become one, for love of him, perhaps, “and to live in the strict observance of all our Laws and customs.” He petitioned the president of the congregation that they eloped and he would not pay any debts she and custom of the Jews.” This may have been the very Benjamin Jacobs who advertised in 1786 that his wife Elizabeth had eloped and he would not pay any debts she might contract. Elizabeth advertised in reply that no one who knew him would trust him with a shilling.

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Then, too, there was Walter J. Judah, “student of physic,” youngest of twelve children. His father died when he was three and, as the family established themselves more or less, his mother and elder brothers decided to make a doctor of him. He went to college and attended “Doctor Hosack’s lectures” and another doctor was paid a fee of $100 for teaching him. In 1798 there was an epidemic of yellow fever in New York—more than two thousand died that summer of the fever—and Walter, then a young man of twenty, ran “swiftly as a hart to bring healing” (so the Hebrew of his tombstone reads) and bought medicine “from his own purse.” But he, too, fell sick of the fever and died. “May they prepare for him his canopy in Paradise,” the tombstone adds. (It is the only stone in the cemetery that has a somewhat elaborate picture: this shows New York from the East River in 1798 and an angel with a sword over the city and a hand from Heaven cutting down the Tree of Life.)

On a night in August 1789, Hayman Levy, merchant, patriot, and president of Shearith Israel when it was reorganized after the American Revolution, was suddenly taken sick. (He was the man for whom John Jacob Astor once worked for a dollar a day beating furs.) His family sent for Gershom Mendes Seixas, minister of the congregation, who lived on Mill Street in back of Hayman Levy’s house on Duke Street. The minister “found Hayman Levy sitting in a chair with a written paper in one hand and a pen without ink in the other. The hazan (Seixas) asked him what was the matter. Hayman Levy answered earnestly, ‘I want ink. This is my will and they won’t give me ink.’ He again called for ink, but in the confusion the family was unable to find any.” Levy then began to say the prayers of the dying and Hazan Seixas prayed with him. The doctor who had also been sent for came in and the hazan left the room. When he returned a few minutes later, Hayman Levy was dead. His family offered the unsigned paper as his will but the court refused to admit it as such.

One of the last to be buried in the old cemetery on the New Bowery was Grace Nathan (d. 1831), the younger sister of Gershom Mendes Seixas. She could write a vigorous prose and Dr. Pool quotes from one of her letters during the War of 1812: “I cannot for the life of me feel terrified. Besides I am so true an American—so warm a Patriot that I hold these mighty Armies—and their proud-arrogant-presumtious and over-powering Nation as Beings that we have conquered and shall conquer again. . . . And may the Lord of Battles grant that it may be so.” Among her many distinguished descendants was Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo.

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It must not be supposed that discussions as found in the records of the congregation were always, for all their formality, about important matters. Dr. Pool tells, for example, of a difficulty that began when Jossie Hays (Jossy Pinto, d. 1808) and another young woman wanted the same seat in the synagogue. The parnassim (presidents of the congregation, for a Sephardic congregation had two—the parnas presidente and the parnas residente) and the elders ordered both young women to take the seats they had formerly. But Judah Hays (d. 1764), Jossie’s father, was not satisfied with this decision. So, at the next meeting of the elders (July 17, 1760), it was decided, according to the records of the congregation, that “by lengthening the bench on which Mrs. Hays sets in Synagogue, there might be a seat found for Miss Hays . . . (and the) bench was prepared accordingly. . . .”

Mr. Hays was still dissatisfied or more likely, although Dr. Pool thinks him merely stubborn, a mouthpiece for the dissatisfaction of his daughter and, perhaps, his wife. “Thereupon the whole Congregation was summoned, and met accordingly, who, unanimously voted, that the Seats given by the Parnassim were well Given and should Continue.” Judah Hays, it seems, still protested. The electors of the congregation met again and it was resolved for his “Contempt, in not doing as he was directed by the Parnassim, and still insisting not to Comply with their Order, That he be fined forty Shillings, and until he pays said fine and causes his Daughter to be seated as they directed that he may not be looked upon as a member of our Society, but be Excluded from the Rights and Ceremonies of the Synagogue. And as they would not be thought to act with Rigour, Ten Days is allowed him to consider thereon. . . .” This, as far as the record detailed by Dr. Pool goes, ended the matter. It may be of some interest, however, to note that his daughter’s tombstone in listing her father’s virtues describes him as “humble.”

Certainly, even in those days, children were a source of worry. Dr. Pool quotes a letter written in 1769 to Joseph Simons, the Indian trader of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by the father of the distinguished Gershom Mendes Seixas (d. 1816), patriotic minister of Shearith Israel for almost fifty years. Gershom Mendes Seixas was then twenty-four years old and had been minister of the congregation for a year (elected unanimously). “Permit me, Sr,” wrote Isaac Mendes Seixas, “to Recomend my Son to your particular notice, he has never been so far from home, and if you find anything amiss in his behavior, impute it favourably to his want of Experience, & Kindly admonish him for it, & Excuse my freedom, our old acquaintance is my only apology.”

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¹ For a discussion of that group, see “The Hidalgos of Bevis Marks,” by Mark Raven in the November COMMENTARY.