Wednesday, December 21, 2016



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

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

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.


[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