The Oldest American Synagogue
by David Bernstein
An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel 1654-1954. By David and Tamar de Sola Pool. Columbia University Press. 595 pp. $15.00.
Shearith Israel—the “Remnant of Israel”—is the oldest Jewish congregation on the mainland of North America. Born in remote Colonial days when the first Jewish settlers worshipped together in a candle-lit room of a New Amsterdam home, it is now, three hundred years later, a symbol of the continuity of the Jewish attachment to America.
What Shearith Israel began in 17th-century New York was something new—a forerunner, in a sense, of the Jewish “melting pot” that has broken down in this country the barriers Jews had carried with them from Europe, not only between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, but between German and East European Jews, between Lithuanian and Galician Jews, dissolving the old strictures which kept them apart socially, in their worship, and sometimes even in pursuit of their livelihoods. This breakdown, which we now take for granted, was consummated only in the past half century, after the arrival of the majority of Jewish immigrants. But the evidence that it was inevitable in the American environment is to be found in the earlier experience of Shearith Israel.
Most of the original Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam are assumed to have been Sephardim, although the best-known, Asser Levy, must certainly have been Ashkenazi. Beginning in the early 1700’s, however, the Ashkenazim progressively outnumbered the Sephardim. From 1728 to 1776 Shearith Israel had twenty-five presidents who were Sephardim (twenty of them members of a single family, the Gomezes) and forty-seven who were Ashkenazim. And the Pools observe: “The integration of Sephardim and Ashkenazim and frequent marriage between them was a hallmark of life in the New World, in sharp contrast with the Old. However, Sephardi tradition dominated the union, and the resulting offspring almost invariably considered themselves Sephardi.”
But such adjustments did not occur without a few upheavals. “With each new generation, there arrived new congregants from overseas. The more free and easy deportment to which they had often been accustomed in their European synagogues had in each generation to yield before the hidalgo Sephardi tradition, usually with good grace and gladness, but now and then reluctantly.” It was the reluctance rather than the gladness which brought about the founding in 1825 of New York’s second oldest congregation, Bnai Jeshurun, by English and German Ashkenazi Jews who could not take the Sephardic accent, the unfamiliar prayers, and the exotic chanting of Shearith Israel’s services.
“It must not be thought,” say the Pools, “that there were no problems of personal feelings in this unprecedented development. Alongside the legitimate claims and useful purpose served in the creation of a second congregation, there was one trivial, and from the distance of a century and a quarter completely inconsequential, incident which contributed to the formation of the new congregation. This was a misunderstanding of Shearith Israel’s requirement at the time that anyone at a religious service who was called to the reading of the Torah was required to make an offering of at least two shillings. Barrow A. Cohen, an English Jew, ignorant of this requirement, failed to make the required offering when called to the reading of the Torah on the eighth day of Passover. In order to show that he had meant no disrespect, later in the service he made the required offering before the open Ark. But this altogether trifling incident emphasized the special needs of those who desired a congregation conducted in keeping with their own traditions, and it hastened the birth of the new congregation as an outgrowth of the parent congregation.”
On many occasions before, Shearith Israel had had to cope with violations of tradition. In 1757 the Parnassim and Elders announced in the synagogue “that several of our Brethren, that reside in the Country have and do dayly violate the principles of our holy religion, such as Trading on the Sabbath, Eating of forbidden Meats and other Heinous Crimes.” What was involved now was schism, stemming from the growth and change of the community. The disputes must indeed have been stormy; it would have been instructive to have details of the less peaceful episodes of Shearith Israel’s history. But, aside from the affair of the two shillings, the chroniclers tend toward a uniformly placid account, which unfortunately robs their work of much vitality and perhaps even meaning.
It is understandable that Dr. and Mrs. Pool should have avoided the heavy going of social history. The present members of the congregation will be delighted with the voluminous recital of names, dates, resolutions, removals, plumbing and heating problems, lathes’ aid societies, and the like. But the general reader, seeking a deeper understanding of how American Jews came to be what they are, might ask for a bit more than he will find in this book.
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Shearith Israel has, in its centuries, served as the spiritual household for some of the most curious and interesting personalities in American Jewish history. The few glimpses we are given of the way these people behaved as Shearith Israelites serve only to whet the appetite.
There is, for instance, the merest mention of a young lawyer named Benjamin N. Cardozo, who in the 1890’s made a long address, “impressive in ability and eloquence,” opposing the idea that men and women be allowed to sit together in the new synagogue that was to be built.
There was Moses Levi Maduro Peixotto, hazan from 1816 to 1828, “a dark-featured, square-built, middle-sized man, greatly addicted to snuff-taking,” whose musical gifts were so limited “that at points in the service where the congregation had to chant a hymn he would often stop and wait for some members of the congregation to give the key and the melody.” When one congregant complained, he remarked, “Please remember that it says in the Torah that the Lord said to Moses or He spoke to Moses, never that He sang to him.”
There was David Haim Nieto, assistant hazan from 1878 to 1886, of whom the Pools say only this: “There was no doubt as to his fine vocal gifts, his masterly reading of all services, and his gentlemanly bearing within the congregation. But when he took off his white tie, his social bearing was not always in accord with the standards the congregation expected of a minister of religion. In May, 1886, his resignation was unanimously accepted.”
The poet Emma Lazarus, the fur trader and friend of the Indians, Hayman Levy, the flamboyant Mordecai M. Noah, might each have warranted chapters to themselves—along with Uriah P. Levy, who sought to assure the immortality he has achieved anyway by directing in his will that a monument be erected in the congregation’s cemetery, “to consist of a full length Statue, in Iron or Bronze of the size of life at least standing on a single Block of Granite sunk three feet in the ground, and in the full uniform of a Captain of the United States Navy and holding in its hand a Scroll on which shall be inscribed ‘Under this Monument’ or ‘In Memory of’ Uriah P. Levy, Captain in the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States. The said Monument and its fixtures is to cost at least Six thousand dollars and I direct that my body be buried under it if possible.” In accordance with Orthodox tradition, the trustees denied the request unanimously. Yet the congregation stands in the Commodore’s debt to this day, for in the 1850’s, while commanding a naval vessel in the Mediterranean, he picked up a wagon-load of soil from Palestine and brought it back to Shearith Israel to be used at funerals; the supply has not yet been exhausted.
In 1795 a Shearith Israelite named Solomon Simson asked a sea captain to carry a letter to the Jews in China. Trying to explain what life in this country was like, Simson wrote: “We here in America in New York and other places live in great tranquility. Jews sit in judgment in civil and in criminal cases just as do gentiles. Here are about seventy-two heads of families, and we have a synagogue named Shearith Israel. There are other places also with synagogues and in all Jews live in great security.” More than a century and a half later, we might expand the facts a little and interpret them a lot, but we would not be likely to change the point at all. That is the real meaning of Shearith Israel’s story.
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