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