A Visit to New York Historical Society’s The First Jewish Americans

This semester in my course, “New World Encounters: Narratives of Discovery and Conquest from Columbus and Beyond” my students have been delving into the earliest accounts of the European encounter with the Americas: Columbus, Pané, Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the codices compiled by teams of Christian missionaries and native scholars and Cabeza de Vaca and his tale of shipwrecks and ten years wandering throughout the American South. We spent time thinking about how the experience of travel and exploration in the Americas was recast into narrative and what sort of political, economic, religious and ethical issues were at play in these retellings of experience. We looked at three films that try their hand at telling the story of the American encounter: Ridley Scott’s 1492: the Conquest of Paradise, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (shot entirely in Mayan!) and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre the Wrath of God.

As counterpoint to these narratives and films we finish with a reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In both subtle and more overt ways, Shakespeare provides a space for many of our central themes to unfold: the sense of wonder at the newness and strangeness of the Americas (Miranda --the one who is marveled at- declares “O what Brave New World!” after seeing the Neapolitan and Milanese nobles walk into her father’s chambers), the ethics of colonization (“This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,/ Which thou takest from me” cries Caliban in chains) and the mixed blessing of “civilization” (Caliban tells Miranda that: You taught me language, and my profit on ’t/ Is I know how to curse).

We spent the semester shuttling between history and art, between experience and narrative and its cinematic and dramatic projection. Normally the semester ends with The Tempest but this year we went one step further.

With the generous support of The Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought of Yeshiva University and its Kapito program in Early America and the Jews we went to “The First Jewish Americans” a gem of an exhibit at the New York Historical Society. The exhibit picks up where we end off in our course and amplifies our lens to see how the wider colonial project, especially the Dutch and British colonial system transformed the western world and the role of Jews and conversos in that “brave new world.” 

When we discussed Columbus we noted the ways he invokes Biblical imagery to describe the beauty of the Caribbean islands and the almost prelapsarian innocence of the American Natives. Columbus also explicitly links the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on Iberian soil and the expulsion of the Jews to his epic voyage. Cortés viewed himself as a modern day Joshua overturning the depravities of the Aztecs and winning souls for the True God. Cabeza de Vaca finds his own burning bush in the desert.  But what of the Jews and Judaism in these new promised lands?

The opening lines of Luis de Carvajal's autobiography

The exhibit gave us a chance to explore this essential and often misunderstood part of American and Jewish history. We began with the lives of the secret Jews, the conversos who maintained their Jewish beliefs in secret as they lived under the eye of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. The first glass case contains the elegantly penned booklets of prayer, autobiography and spiritual nourishment compiled by the Mexican crypto-Jew Luis de Carvajal, aka Joseph Lumbruso, the Enlightened.  The original manuscript of Carvajal’s diary was stolen from the Mexican National Archives by a mysterious visiting scholar in 1932. The text only resurfaced last year and was identified by Leon Milberg a collector of Americana who arranged for its repatriation to Mexico and its inclusion in the show. It anchors the story of open Jewish life in the Americas in the parallel experience of Converso and crypto-Jewish life in the Iberian Atlantic world. The students marveled at the tiny script and we discussed how Luis and his family treated these books as sources of inspiration and would carry them close to their hearts wherever they went- thus the tiny size.

We then looked at pieces of open Jewish life in the Caribbean and North America: Torah scrolls, Hebrew books penned by Rabbis in Curaçao, Suriname and Barbados, a certificate ensuring the kashrut of meat sent from New York to Curaçao, a ketuba from New York. In the top left corner we find an image of a worried merchant with a globe at his feet. He is hard at work at his desk with his cargo ships far off in the distance as his wife lovingly takes care of a baby. Close by there is a Spanish Bible, originally translated in Ferrara but printed in Amsterdam, its title page had an exquisite image of the Israelites being carried on eagles wings out of their exile which must have had a powerful resonance for this society of former refugees that wandered the ports of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in search of religious freedom and economic opportunity.

A student noticed the prayer for circumcising a slave which led us into a discussion of New World Jews and slavery. Another student wondered what a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and an Indian chief were doing in the exhibit only to discover that the artist of these two canvases along with many wonderful western landscapes and an eerie but beautiful interior of a synagogue was the intrepid explorer of the American frontier, Samuel Nunes Carvalho a native of Charleston and a member of  that port city’s Kehila Kedosha Beth Elohim.

This is an exhibit about Jews as Americans, and the Americas as a haven for Jews.  The Americas afforded these individuals the opportunity to remake themselves, to express their faith and make their fortunes in freedom and dignity in ways unimaginable back in the old world.  Our time at the New York Historical Society offered us a moment to reflect on this complex story and to find our place within this brave new world that is still busy being born. 

Here are looking at Isaac Mendes Belisario's painting of the Synagogue at Bevis Marks in London as well as some of the Jamaican artist's images from carnival in his native Jamaica

Periphery and Center, reading Natalie Zemon Davis at Stern College for Women

Catalan Atlas by Judah Crescas

I am teaching a new course this semester at Stern College: Wanderers, Exiles and Merchants: Jewish travel writing, medieval and early modern.

We start with the Radhanite merchants and their global trade-network as described by a contemporary Muslim geographer and then move on to Eldad the Danite’s tale of the lost tribes, strong and free, in the Indies.  Benjamin of Tudela’s Itinerary gives us a picture of Jewish life throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond but tells us very little about the famous traveller (much to our regret); Yehuda Halevi’s poems imagine his journey to Zion and stand as a rich counterpoint to his poems written from tempest-tossed ships or while admiring the beauty of the Nile delta- KeGan Hashem/Like God’s Garden! We read these Jewish writers in light of Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta. We explore the world of the Cairo Geniza and its intrepid merchants, European Jews on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, David Reuveni the messianic messenger from beyond the Sambatyon river who comes to Rome with a message from his brother the King of the lost Tribes and then we see how a century later the Portuguese converso merchant Antonio Montezinos arrives in Amsterdam telling of his journey to the kingdom of the Reubenites hiding in the heart of the Andes.  It’s a wild ride!

During one of my first classes I was looking out at the room filled with bright and curious students, all women, and the reality hit me: there are no women in this entire syllabus! Not only are there no women authors, the texts we will read almost consistently elide any mention of women in their travels with just a few exceptions scattered in this vast sea of texts. I reached out to a friend and colleague who has thought about this felt absence both in her scholarship and her teaching. Sarah Pearce suggested I think about the Geniza as a resource because so many of the letters between husbands and wives refer to the spouses’ travels. We read a great article by Joel Kraemer weaving together a rich “itinerary” of letters and other personal documents that opened up the world of Middle Eastern Jewish women and pointed to the frenetic movement of people and goods throughout the Mediterranean. The students were energized by this reading and it inspired some excellent essays. Sarah also referred me to an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis where she discusses her methodology and the challenges and opportunities at stake in capturing the voices of those who left no clear testimony behind for historians to unravel. In “’Being speculative is better than to not do it at all’: an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis.” The ground breaking historian of the early modern period talks about the challenge of reading the lives of people who left behind a scant paper trail with two other historians of the early modern period Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black.[1]  Zemon Davis reflects on her own approach to listening in on the past and of filling in the empty space around marginal figures who would otherwise be forgotten: women, the enslaved, Muslims, Jews, peasants, etc.   I paired this theoretical piece with a short essay Zemon Davis wrote about the Surinamese Sephardi man of letters David Nassy, his daughter and his (eventually freed) slave Mattheus. The article follows Nassy from Suriname to his 3 year furlough in Philadelphia in the 1790’s. Zemon Davis weaves archival documents with what we can know about the places that Nassy and his household travel: the members of Congegation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia that he befriended, the rich intellectual culture of Philadelphia that Nassy enjoyed and participated in, the abolitionists and vibrant community of freed blacks that his manumitted but still indentured slave Mattheus would have encountered on the streets. Without any scrap of autobiographical material about Mattheus she tries to recreate the world he inhabited and she charts out the contours of his intellectual and social orbit. In the absence of reading his own words NZD paints the details and texture of the possible interactions and experiences he would have had. NZD discovers that Nassy and his servant held the ropes when the visiting French avionist Jean Pierre Blanchard launched himself into the sky in a hot air balloon on January 9 1793- we can only imagine what a strange and wondrous sight this might have been for both Mattheus and Nassy and how this extraordinary event and so many other things particular to Philadelphia might have influenced master and slave as they returned to the Caribbean. 

One student found the project something of a swindle.  Zemon Davis presents conjecture as fact! Most women in class rejected this view. They were drawn in to her story telling and appreciated her caution and careful erudition. I believe that they were also inspired by her indefatigable curiosity. We discussed her long career and her interest in the marginal as a way for better understanding the center. I mentioned hearing her give a talk at NYU last spring. At 88 she is clear, focused and energizing. She is a great listener and mediated a very fiesty group of professors and graduate students with elegance. She seems to feed off her discoveries and the connections she finds. My students and I fed off that energy! One was taken by the Zemon Davis’ excitement at finding a Creole dictionary. Another found magical the way she tied disparate pieces together, with care and self-awareness of the pitfalls and possibilities of this reconstruction. The original nay-sayer was not persuaded but I thanked her for providing a spark to our discussion of the essay.

I teach at a university where Jewish studies is not marginal, it is at the center. However, to a great extent it is through my students’ exploration of Jewish history that they discover world history. Starting with themselves they move outwards. They encounter Christianity and Islam as they trace the development of Jewish culture and society from the late classical into the modern age. They encounter the harsh realities of the slave trade by meeting a New World Sephardi who owns slaves and who wrestles with the economic realities that make slave-owning so tempting at the same time that he is moved b the ideals of abolition. We also read the grand narratives against their grain to find the stories of the marginalized and forgotten, the poor, women, heretics and misfits. So center and periphery shift and the particular and the universal are ineluctably tied. Reading the other is no simple matter because inevitably it brings us to see our selves in a new light. History should return us to this imbalance, this frenetic and generative dissonance between our comfortable assumptions and the yet unknown and strange which can lead us to new knowledge and a deepening awareness of our ever changing place in the world.  Natalie Zemon Davis is a great guide to this hermeneutical dance.

Jodensavanne, the “Jews’ Savannah” where Jews had large farms and employed slaves to cultivate the land. The synagogue was the tallest building in the center of the town. It can be made out in this image drawn from across the river.

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[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0165115315000108

Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black (2015). “Being speculative is better than to

not do it at all”: an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis. Itinerario, 39, pp 3-15

doi:10.1017/S0165115315000108

New and Old Worlds at the Hispanic Society of America, Fall 2016

Visit to the Hispanic Society of America, November 18, 2016. 

Over the years I have had the great pleasure of taking my students at YU to the Hispanic Society of America on 155^th and Broadway (http://hispanicsociety.org/).  My graduate students from Revel, as well as my undergrads from YC and Stern have visited this unique space in Harlem. Most years we come in the context of our study of Jewish life in Medieval Spain or the Inquisition. I bring them to this dusty gem of a museum and library for several reasons. I want them to get a feel for the wider Iberian culture where the history we are studying unfolded. I want them to see the mudejar cabinets and pottery next to the Virgin and Child, el Grecco’s electric yet somber saints, and of course the commanding Duchess of Alba that greets all visitors to the museum with her sly insistence that “solo Goya”! (She is currently on loan and so did not greet us this time.) The texts we study together all semester were written and read on the Iberian and American soil that was the stage for these paintings and furnishings and I hope to give my students a taste of a taste of that world. The museum was designed to evoke “Iberianess”, and it is transporting. Ultimately, however, it is a manicured simulacrum. We are not in a patio in Córdoba, or a church in Burgos or Oaxaca, we are in Harlem and that is the wonder of it all. Just 3 miles from my classroom at Yeshiva we can enter a well crafted time machine and make connections between the geometric patterns of a Nasrid-era door from Granada and the delicate shapes adorning the margins of a medieval Bible.

http://hispanicsociety.org/

The highlight of most visits is our time with John O’Neill, the chief librarian of what is probably the best collection of Spanish rare books outside of Spain. He is funny, down-to-earth and in love with the books he brings up from the vault to share with us. He generally chooses a variety of medieval and early modern texts that link Jews and Judaism to the wider Iberian context: a manuscript copy of the Alfonso X’s legal code, the Siete Pártidas, with a special oath for Jews to recite during legal proceedings; a 14^th century copy of the legal code, Arba’a Turim, written by the German Rabbi R’ Jacob ben Asher who along with his father, the “R’Osh” found refuge in Toledo in the late 13^th century; a book of genealogy proving the “blood purity” of a nobleman eager to shed his converso past; an inquisitorial trial transcript against a bunch of Portuguese Judaizers living in México.

This time I took my students from my “New World Encounters” class. We have been studying the ways Europeans conceived of the New World with a focus on the first century of European exploration- Columbus, Cortés, Bernal Díaz, Cabeza de Vaca, Shakespeare’s the Tempest with some indigenous counterpoints where available. O’Neill began with an incunabula copy of Ptolmey’s geography from the 1480’s –no Americas in sight! We saw the municipal log book of Santiago de Guatemala with the signature of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the loquacious chronicler of the conquest of Mexico and a prominent resident of Guatemala; a pictographic census of a small Mexican town a generation after the Spanish conquest with a pull-out map of the town indicating its resources and population along with small portions of Nauhatl text written in Latin characters. 

These are fascinating old books and manuscripts and the students seemed to appreciate the magic of seeing and touching something that is centuries old and that connects to the history they have been studying. (They had good questions and “ooed” and “ahhhed” at the right moments!) However, what really got their attention was when O’neil brought out a big box and revealed an exquisite illuminated 15^th century Hebrew Bible. Until this visit I have only seen this Bible in the wonderful facsimile that O’Neill generously gave as a gift on previous visits. Up close the colors were more vibrant, nuanced. They were rich and textured. All of my students “popped-up” to see the colorful decorations on the borders of the words which were written so elegantly many generations ago. We tried to make out the comments written around the margins in a tiny but clear script, often curving into geometric micro-graphic patterns. Did the rabbits or monkeys in the marginalia “mean anything”? Was there a connection between the Biblical passage and the coat of arms festooned on the opposite page?

I am consistently struck by the care that went into one of these manuscripts- the preparing of the parchment, the writing of the text, the layers of craft and creativity that go into the ornamentation. Seeing my students’ excitement deepened my gratitude for all those who have preserved these books, reading them, smuggling them out of lost homelands, caring for them under a host of good and bad times.

The Hispanic Society will be closing for renovations for about two years beginning December 19^th. I cannot urge you enough to go for a visit to this wonderful space and I encourage you to take in the sights and sounds of the surrounding neighborhood. And don't forget to spend some time with this devil who has been hanging out in storage for a while!

Sephardiphilia: Peter Cole at YU

Sephardiphilia: Peter Cole at YU: After a long hiatus the Sephardiphilia blog is back. I have been awaken to write anew in this forum by the arrival of Peter Cole to Yeshiva ...

Peter Cole at YU

After a long hiatus the Sephardiphilia blog is back. I have been awaken to write anew in this forum by the arrival of Peter Cole to Yeshiva University last week. As the other posts in this very infrequent blog show, his writings have inspired me on multiple levels. His writings have helped me enter into the world of the medieval poets armed with nuance and rigor and at the same time an appreciation for the scholarly structures framing and illuminating (pardon the mixed metaphor) the complex world within which these poems were written.
Cole gave an electric reading of his translations and some penetrating thoughts on the poetry and the poets. He also gave the room packed mostly with students- both undergrad and grad- an inkling of the living soul of this poetic tradition. Cole's own passion and dedication to language is palpable and contagious. He is also a mensch. After talking to many students after the presentation there was one student who had some specific questions that he hoped Cole could answer- they were deep, pressing questions partially enmeshed with the student's readings of Cole's "The Invention of Influence". This was at the end of a long day. Cole needed to still catch a train back to New Haven but he gave this young man the time he needed, with patience and grace.
Below are the remarks I wrote down as an introduction to Peter Cole. I welcomed Cole with a rough version of these lines.

Welcome to Peter Cole- November 3^rd

From my first semester at YU in the fall of 2009 Peter Cole has been here- his “Dream of the Poem” was a cornerstone of my courses on medieval Spain

The inclusion of poetry into the course came much to the delight and dismay of my students—“why are we reading so much poetry in a history class”?

While others quietly expressed relief: “Finally some poetry”- they were the minority

By the end of the units on Hispano Hebrew Poetry, however, most students felt like they just visited a hitherto unknown continent of Jewish culture.

Peter Cole’s translations transform the poems of Hanagid and Ibn Gabirol into accessible- contemporary mirrors reflecting back into our lives

At the same time that his careful and layered scholarly annotations lead the reader back into the world that produced the poetry

Aesthetic vibrancy and historical and linguistic nuance,

sophistication and depth

All at once!

With the “Dream of the Poem” we were able to shuttle between our own contemporary search for meaning – what the past can say to us- do for us

And at the same time, assume the humility and curiosity necessary to engage the past on its own terms

And with this it is my deep honor to welcome Peter Cole to YU

His wide ranging publications cover everything from a history of the Cairo Geniza- Sacred Trash co-authored with his wife Adina Hoffman, to translations from the medieval Hebrew poets- from Yanai and Kalir to the sweet singers of al-Andalus- to his own award winning poetry.

There is a reason he is a sought after lecturer internationally and a Mac Arthur and Guggenheim fellow

Without any further delay, lets explore “Angels in Al-Andalus” with Peter Cole