Colonial Jewish roots in America take center stage
A recent bequest to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and a record-breaking Sotheby’s auction illustrate growing appreciation of Judaica
Reporter at The Times of Israel
BOSTON — Fewer than 2,500 Jews called the American colonies home in 1776, but today they are more alive than ever in US museums and universities.
From North Carolina to Boston, early American Jewish artifacts are “moving out of the ghetto,” according to American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna. Aspects of the phenomenon include new academic research about colonial Jews and recent high-profile auctions of private Judaica collections.
At the end of April, Sotheby’s of New York held “the most valuable auction of Judaica ever,” selling the 500-piece collection of philanthropists Michael and Judy Steinhardt for more than $8.5 million. Museums in New York, Ohio and North Carolina purchased auction lots, bringing once privately held Judaica into top cultural institutions.
The transition of Judaica from “the ghetto” to mainstream America is well illustrated at Boston’s Museum of Fine of Arts (MFA), where Sarna helped launch a campaign to enlarge the museum’s Judaica collection.
During the coming years, MFA curators will expand Judaica holdings from just one-dozen items to more than 100 ritual objects and artworks. Reflecting the trajectory of American Jews themselves, the 143-year old museum chose not to devote a specific gallery to Judaica. Instead, Jewish items will inhabit spaces throughout the museum’s sprawling new Art of the Americas Wing.
‘I am pleased the art here won’t be ghettoized in one section, and will be integrated’
“I am pleased the art here won’t be ghettoized in one section, and will be integrated,” Sarna told museum stakeholders.
According to MFA Judaica curator Marietta Cambareri, a significant bequest from Jetskalina Phillips of Winchester, Kansas, will enable the expansion. Phillips, a retired elementary school teacher, had no history with the MFA before leaving the bulk of her estate to the museum for the acquisition and study of Judaica. Phillips did, however, live in Boston for several years while converting to Judaism at Temple Israel, just blocks from the museum.
The MFA’s most prominent Judaica item is a pair of 18th century silver Torah finials, or decorative bells, crafted by Jewish master silversmith Myer Myers and on loan from the Touro Synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island. Known as the “rimonim,” or pomegranates, Myers’ exquisite finials and other works place him in the company of master craftsman Paul Revere, many of whose works inhabit the MFA.
Though not as famous as Revere, Myers was the most accomplished Jewish silversmith to work in both Jewish and secular themes. He zigzagged between Jewish and colonial high societies as easily as he made the switch from the Anglo-Dutch tradition to a new colonial style, called Neoclassicism.
Alternating between non-Jewish surroundings and private religious space has long characterized the Jewish experience in America. The pattern started with the arrival of Jewish traders to New World port cities, where Jews eventually achieved a level of acceptance unknown in the Diaspora.
Both “Jewish and worldly,” early American Jews sought to blend into Christian surroundings while rigorously maintaining certain aspects of Judaism, including circumcision.
Colonial Jews built just two synagogues, the Touro in Newport (1763) and New York City’s Mill Street Synagogue (1730). Designers of both edifices conformed to modest Protestant standards on the outside, but the shul interiors were ornate and reminiscent of Europe’s finest synagogues.
To thrive in non-Jewish society, colonial Jews did more than alter design aesthetics. Protestant women went to church with their husbands, so Jewish women started participating in synagogue rituals as well. Jewish communities shed traditional practices of communal taxes and punishment in adapting to a new American context.
Recent scholarship focuses on the everyday lives of colonial Jews, including Michael Hoberman’s study of Jews and Puritans in his book, “New Israel/New England.”
According to Hoberman, “Puritan fascination with Jews and with Jewish history was a primary means by which they articulated both their aspirations and misgivings.”
‘Puritan fascination with Jews and with Jewish history was a primary means by which they articulated both their aspirations and misgivings’
In Timothy Ballard’s “The Covenant,” published last year, the lineage from Old Testament prophets to the US founding fathers is meticulous traced. Ballard explored the hope of Christopher Columbus that his 1492 journey would result in the restoration of Jews to Israel.
For Ballard, a former CIA agent, the United States is the end-result of biblical prophecy, a topic also probed – from a secular bent – by one of Harvard University’s youngest historians, Eric Nelson.
When taking into account their ill-fated 1654 arrival in New Amsterdam (now New York), Jews experienced a dramatic character arc.
Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant had no use for Jews, and tried to expel them from the New World. Calling them “deceitful and repugnant,” Stuyvesant forced a European-style living tax on New Amsterdam Jews. After years of appealing to colonial courts and with intervention from prominent Jewish traders in Holland, Jews became the colonies’ first officially recognized non-Christian religious group.
The city Stuyvesant sought to expel Jews from became New York, international symbol of pluralism and home to more Jews than Tel Aviv. Jews continued to help expand the boundaries of religious freedom and civic inclusion for all Americans, including the right for non-Christians to vote and run for office.
Just as Jews haltingly made their way onto the larger American scene, their religious art and ritual objects have taken generations to be assimilated by prominent art collections.
Leading US museums began integrating Jewish pieces into galleries only in recent years. The Detroit Art Institute displays Jewish objects in Islamic art galleries, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art placed some Judaica in its cavernous medieval halls. Simultaneous to this integration, the role of Jewish-specific museums is shrinking, with notable downsizing at institutions in Chicago and Washington, DC.
As mainstream museums embrace Judaica’s relevance to their permanent collections, Jewish museums have reinvented themselves as tellers of the American story.
At Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History, an exhibition called “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow” examines Jewish scholars who fled Nazi Germany to teach at historically black colleges in the segregated south. The century-old Jewish Museum in New York will launch exhibitions to profile Marc Chagall and Art Spiegelman later this year, illustrating the tumultuous Jewish century and those artists’ iconic responses.
For scholars and curators, the experience of Jews in America has become the American story writ large. Whether on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall or the streets of “New Jerusalem” in Boston, interest in American Jewry’s roots shows no sign of abating.
The Times of Israel Community.