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?
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| 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.
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| 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 |
