Reprinted from the New York Times. Photo above by Mark Kauzlarich for The New York Times.
-By Joseph Berger
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.
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.
If you need another reason to plan a trip to New York, read our story about the Jewish Museum and how one Memphis sponsor arranged for free tickets to tour it, available to all Memphians.
Read the full story in the Times.