A Jewish Exodus to a New Nation

By Joseph Berger, NYT

IF such events can be said to have an upside, the Inquisition had one for Spanish and Portuguese Jews: It propelled them to the Americas, where they largely found the tolerance and opportunities denied them in Europe.

The story of the havens Jews established in the New World is the focus of an exhibition opening on Friday at the New-York Historical Society. With rare manuscripts, Bibles, prayer books, paintings, maps and ritual objects, “The First Jewish Americans: Freedom and Culture in the New World,” chronicles how Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal after being driven out in earlier centuries from England and France, established thriving communities in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Newport and, even earlier, on Caribbean islands and in South America.

In the United States, they, like their fellow Americans, were tossed about in history’s currents, finding themselves on both sides during the American Revolution, the movement to abolish slavery and the Civil War. And their welcome was sometimes short-lived or illusory.

The exhibition’s most arresting artifact is a threadbare 4-inch-by-3-inch, 180-page memoir and prayer book handwritten by Luis de Carvajal the Younger in colonial Mexico in 1595, where the Inquisition had extended its sinister reach of torture and execution.

De Carvajal was a converso, forced to adopt Catholicism but suspected of clandestinely practicing Jewish rituals. At trial, he was pressured to denounce 120 Jews who secretly followed their faith, including his relatives. Then he was burned at the stake.

“They broke him down,” said Debra Schmidt Bach, a curator of the show.

The de Carvajal book mysteriously disappeared from Mexico’s national archives in the 1930s. Not long ago, however, Leonard L. Milberg, an American businessman with a major Judaica collection, learned that the document was for sale at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan, and he arranged to have it returned to Mexico. It is on loan for the show.


A 180-page memoir and prayer book handwritten by Luis de Carvajal the Younger in colonial Mexico in 1595.Mark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

The exhibition features documents chronicling the vagaries of early Jewish settlements: an edict expelling Jews from France’s American colonies; a rabbinical paper certifying as kosher food shipped to Barbados; an 18th-century service for the biblically mandated circumcision of slaves and a list of circumcisers in Curaçao and Suriname; and a Christian missionary’s treatise speculating that Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel. There are two nostalgic paintings of Caribbean scenes by Camille Pissarro, the French Impressionist who was born on St. Thomas to a Jewish mother. Seventy-two of the 170 items in the show are from Mr. Milberg’s collection.

Though the Dutch colony in New Amsterdam, now New York, became a significant haven, its embrace of Jews was stinting. The outpost’s flinty governor, Peter Stuyvesant, recoiled when 23 refugees from Portuguese-ruled Brazil arrived in 1654. But the Dutch West Indies Company told Stuyvesant that business was business and Jews should remain as long as they could contribute to the outpost’s commercial well-being.

Those Jews established the first North American congregation, Shearith Israel — Remnant of Israel — and built a synagogue in 1730 on what is now South William Street in Lower Manhattan. The congregation endures on Central Park West, where it moved in 1897.

Shearith Israel lent the exhibition a charred Torah scroll rescued from a fire set by British soldiers in 1776 and a pair of exquisitely crafted silver rimonim — belled ornaments for a Torah scroll — fashioned by the esteemed silversmith Myer Myers. There is also a ketubah — a marriage contract — illustrated with a bride and groom under a chuppah.

Abigaill Levy Franks, a prominent woman of old New York, is saluted with a portrait. Her letters, the exhibition text informs visitors, confided her upset at her daughter’s marriage to a Christian, Oliver Delancey. Interestingly, he was a scion of the family for whom Delancey Street was named; the street later became the spine of the Lower East Side’s Jewish quarter.

Like other colonists, Jews were conflicted about ending British rule. Haym Salomon, a Polish immigrant, helped finance the Revolution. But Abraham Gomez and 15 other Jews were among 932 signers of allegiance to King George III.


A Torah scroll from Shearith Israel, rescued from a fire set by British soldiers in 1776.Mark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

Other documents chronicle the tug of war over slavery. Account books record the purchase of five slaves by Matthias Lopez in 1787, while Jacob Levy Jr. is mentioned in an abolitionist society’s papers as having freed four slaves in 1817.

Philadelphia; New Orleans; Charleston, S.C.; and Newport, R.I. The show does not have George Washington’s famous letter to the Newport congregation expressing the hope that everyone “shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree.” But it has letters from congregations in Newport and Savannah, Ga., thanking the new president for being so welcoming.

Alexander Hamilton, the lionized founding father of today’s Broadway, makes an appearance too. The show tells us that his mother had been married to a Jew and that he was fluent in Hebrew and maintained close professional ties with Jews.

Several documents establish that it was at Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston where the American version of Reform Judaism took root in 1824 through young mavericks who “wanted to modernize Judaism so it wouldn’t die,” said Dale Rosengarten, director of the Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston. Ms. Rosengarten was a curator of a similar exhibition at Princeton.

“It didn’t spring out of whole cloth but sprang out of our native soil,” she said.

Jews made important contributions to 19th-century science and culture, along with other fields, but as the exhibition says, “despite the nation’s ostensible commitment to religious tolerance, stereotypes of Jews persisted on the American stage.” One gallery has a portrait and the sword and scabbard of Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, a naval hero of the War of 1812, and paintings by Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who accompanied John C. Frémont, the explorer, on a cross-country expedition.

Inevitably, said Louise Mirrer, the New-York Historical Society’s president, the story of the New World’s Jews has resonance for immigrants, refugees and religious minorities today. “Seeds had been planted early on for a place where you could practice your religion,” Ms. Mirrer said, because the New World had drawn Europeans like the Puritans seeking religious freedom.

But at times, she added, there were anomalies: “In the exhibit, we see the kind of religious fervor that promotes a kind of violence against certain groups.”

“The First Jewish Americans” runs through Feb. 26 at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street; 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org.

October 30, 2016 | 11 Comments »
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  1. @ yamit82:
    Josephus wrote quite a bit about Berenice. I don’t remember it all, but she came into different parts, and I think even in his WAR, as well as Antiquities. I have them both but in storage and haven’t seen them for many years. I DO recall that she took a vow, hoping to placate Florus and save Jerusalem and the Jewish People, and went to Jerusalem , had her hair cut off, and walked barefoot to see Gessius Florus, the last Roman Governor who actually egged the Jews into the Revolt.

    There are several mentions of her in some of the Roman historians, one of whom I think is Seutonius, in his “12 Caesars”, which I also have not looked at for many years. He was the Secretary of Hadrian I think, and had access to all the records and documents he would need, although there are many critics who wrote that he was partial, and not wholly accurate. But the same has been written about just about all the Roman Historians, and, considering that History is written by the winners, it should not surprise anyone.

    As for her supposed incestuous relations, it is all speculation, as she and her brother had been very close always. They supported one another when one was in distress, perhaps because they were the last two direct descendants of the kingly House of Herod. I think she was even regarded by the people, who loved Berenice, as a co ruler with Agrippa.

    We nearly always forget that we are reading the accounts written by those of the winning side….

  3. A very interesting article here

    Columbus employed peculiar dates and phrases unique to the Hebrew people also. Instead of referring to the “destruction” or “fall of Jerusalem,” he used the phrase “the destruction of the second house.” He also employed the Hebrew reckoning of A.D.68 instead of A.D. 70. A marginal note dated 1481 is immediately given its Hebrew equivalent of 5241, etc. He boasted that he was related to King David, and some of his letters were described as written in an “unknown script” (Hebrew?).
    Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold with which to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jew’s Holy Temple. It was believed that the Messiah would not come back until the Temple was re-established.
    https://www.khouse.org/articles/2012/1070/print/

    Also where does Julia Berenice come from? From Syria to Rome? or how did she end up in Rome? Should this prompt us to investigate just what is Syria in history?

  4. @ Austin:
    You know more than I do. I have the vague impression that there were only a couple of lines about her in Josephus. The novel makes her the central character and presents her as a heroine. I forget the details. Not sure how much he made up, it’s a historical novel, after all, historical novels fill in whatever historical evidence doesn’t supply. It’s for entertainment and inspiration. I want to read novels about Jewish heros and heroines. In fact, I read somewhere that Leon Uris wrote Exodus because he wanted to read a heroic Jewish novel; he was sick and tired of the self-deprecatory or even self-hating style of what often passes for Jewish literature.

  5. Sebastien Zorn Said:

    c)Agrippa’s Daughter – about Queen Berenice (“Berenice of Cilicia, also known as Julia Berenice and sometimes spelled Bernice (28 AD – after 81), was a Jewish client queen of the Roman Empire during the …” google)

    I remember reading about her in Josephus, and to my recollection Berenice wasn’t much of a queen, marrying a cousin, a petty ruler of Chalcis, then her uncle, also a minor king somewhere in Syria, each for a short time. Both were subject to Rome. She spent much time with her Brother Agrippa 2, with whom she had always been close, in between the marriages. Scandal rumoured that they were lovers. Then when the War burst out, she became the lover of Titus, followed him to Rome, where he would have married her, even though she was much older, but the Romans objected, so after that she more or less moved into the shadows.

    She must have been very beautiful and intelligent also, and would have done much for the Jews if they’d married. A very very sad life I’d say.

  6. @ Ted Belman:

    You have neglected a most important fact. It was NOT that there was difficulty in getting Spaniards to go to the Americas, they wanted to go and become rich. It was the fact that the Spaniards enslaved the native Indians and treated them like animals, indeed, not nearly as well. If you read the Diary Account of Bartoleme De Las Casas, a missionary some time in the early-mid 1600s and later appointed the Bishop of the Americas, who documented clearly that deplorable and monstrous treatment of the Indians, to whom Las Casas was “ministering”, you would see that the difficulty was that the Indians died off so fast from the treatment they received, that gold production, which was what the Spaniards were all after, was severely reduced.

  8. He added that Inquisition officials included “a lot of people of Jewish descent,” such as the grand inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada.

    http://www.timesofisrael.com/when-the-spanish-inquisition-expanded-to-the-new-world/

    Howard Fast is thought of as mainly first a Communist and then an Ex-Communist author and, of course, of “Freedom Road” but he didn’t write Communist books. He wrote a number of novels about Jewish History. Wonderful, moving, inspiring novels.
    For example:
    a) Torquemada
    b) Haim Solomon, Son of Liberty
    c)Agrippa’s Daughter – about Queen Berenice (“Berenice of Cilicia, also known as Julia Berenice and sometimes spelled Bernice (28 AD – after 81), was a Jewish client queen of the Roman Empire during the …” google)
    d)My Glorious Brothers – about the Maccabees

  10. Was Columbus secretly a Jew?
    By Charles Garcia, Special to CNN
    Updated 2:32 PM ET, Thu May 24, 2012
    http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewish/

    “…In Simon Weisenthal’s book, “Sails of Hope,” he argues that Columbus’ voyage was motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their expulsion from Spain. Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews’ holy Temple.
    In Columbus’ day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to be liberated and the Temple rebuilt for the Messiah to come…”

    From the article:

    “IF such events can be said to have an upside, the Inquisition had one for Spanish and Portuguese Jews: It propelled them to the Americas, where they largely found the tolerance and opportunities denied them in Europe.”

    My response: Bull. The Inquisition had no upside. See:

    http://www.timesofisrael.com/when-the-spanish-inquisition-expanded-to-the-new-world/

    “At the New Mexico History Museum, a new exhibit shows how hidden Jews fled to the colonies after 1492, but still couldn’t escape persecution BY RICH TENORIO August 16, 2016,”

    Well, maybe one: Mel Brooks “The Spanish Inquisition” from “History of the World Part I”
    https://youtu.be/5ZegQYgygdw

    Or 2:

    ‘Spanish Inquisition’ Compilation – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
    https://youtu.be/Nf_Y4MbUCLY

  11. Jack Golburt comments

    This is a remarkable exhibition.

    About Luis Carvajal,there is much to tell.

    By way of background, there is a common theme in Jewish history, repeated many times in many places: A king wants to develop his country and sees that the Jews have the skills, knowledge and determination that he needs and that their existence is precarious where they are. So he invites the Jews to settle his land and encourages them to engage in their businesses and trades and to succeed. Then, when his native people learn to do what the Jews do, the Jews are dispossessed and exiled (or worse).

    Spain conquered enormous territories in the Americas and had trouble getting Spaniards to settle them. Life was difficult at the frontiers, where the available land was. There was nothing but what the settlers could bring with them or make for themselves. In many places, there were hostile Indians. So, in the latter half of the 18th Century, the king came up with a plan. He would make of the Jews the “soldiers for Christianity.” He made the following offer, in essence: you can remain in Spain and wait until someone denounces you as a crypto-Jew and the Inquisition burns you as a heretic and maybe your family with you and takes your property. Or you can go and settle the remote territories of the Americas, I will give you land and horses and cattle and tools. You will be hidalgos (roughly translated, aristocracy). Many Jews went and settled the frontiers.

    Later, when “civilized” life had been established, real Spaniards, i.e., Cristianos viejos, were willing to go and settle. The original meaning was fourth generation Christian or more, but the definition kept expanding. This was 250 years after the forced conversions but descendants of the conversos were still called “Cristianos nuevos,” new Christians. The categorization more or less merged with pureza de sangre, “purity of blood,” meaning someone not descended from converts of the 14th Century and onward. Once real Spaniards were willing to settle, they brought the Inquisition in to eliminate the Jews.

    Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva is only one example. He was the conquistador who led the expedition to found Nuevo Leon, which originally included what is now Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Texas and other territories. Carvajal was a Portuguese Jew who converted. Many in his expedition were also “nuevos Cristianos.” Requirements that people who go on such expeditions be limited to “Cristianos viejos” were eliminated precisely because the king could not get enough real Spaniards to go and settle the frontiers of the Americas.

    Once settlement was successful and real Spaniards began to arrive and settle and Carvajal was becoming powerful, he was denounced as a crypto-Jew (or was discovered to be a crypto-Jew or was known all along to have been a crypto-Jew or was not a crypto-Jew at all but the king decided that that was the expedient moment to take him down). He was imprisoned by the Inquisition, where he died. His 19-year-old daughter or sister (not clear to me) was taken to Mexico City where she was burned as a heretic. His story is not atypical. Some of the facts about Carvajal and Nuevo Leon are here.