Amplified whispers
Trivial objects fill some blanks in the stories of N.Y.’s earliest Jewish women.
The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects by Laura Arnold Leibman (Bard Graduate Center; May 2020)
In what’s variously dubbed “streetlight effect” and “drunkard’s search,” hunts commence not in the most strategic, but the easiest spots—say beneath a lamp.
Facing near-complete silence from and about early Jewish American women, scholars pivot to tell stories about men, whom documents better illuminate, and archives favor evidence that stifles women and enshrines powerful men in historic annals. These biases, per this new volume, define mid-18th to mid-19th century histories of Jewish women in New York, largely rendered in invisible ink.
Laura Arnold Leibman, Reed College English and humanities professor, approaches from the opposite side, zeroing in on five objects—none particularly transcendent—associated with five Jewish New York women. The enterprise surpasses making lemonade of a hopeless situation; Leibman coaxes a great deal out from archival gaps.
Even before spending several hours with the volume, I worried it would flirt with a problematic kind of logical induction. I’ve long admired writers who choreograph nonfiction to dance like novels—who can describe innermost thoughts of those who lived centuries ago. (Mike Rowe’s “The Way I Heard It” stands out.) But the more one leaves Joe Friday behind for the benefit of more-engaging narrative voice, the trickier it gets.
Book cover (slightly cropped)/Bard Graduate Center.
This is a deeply-researched book and surprisingly-fun read. It doesn’t invent inner monologues and is very cautious about what the author is in a position to know and what has been lost to history’s dustbins. At one point, she tells us at that she “use[s] the records that do remain to make educated guesses” about one woman’s background, and of uncertainty surrounding another, “I have let trends during the era tip the scale.”
There’s a danger of inferring too much from the general to these five particularly women. It takes just a few pages to understand that this book represents an ambitious approach to wrestle with an impossible task, even as it claims that calling the task impossible “silences” women anew by “reproducing these erasures.”
“I have sought to use the fragments that do exist to think about the very active process of creating an absence of early Jewish women’s lives in the historical record and the structural factors that silenced certain Jewish women in early New York,” Leibman writes, “particularly the work of poverty, secular laws, poor social services for the mentally ill, slavery, racism, and unequal access to education.”
By focusing on “quotidian objects” first, and then allowing those objects to lead her to the women’s lives, Leibman suggests that stories of Jewish women and men of the era emerge more completely.
To illustrate the point, she presents two paradigms: a c. 1800-40 teacup (Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum) decorated with secular scenes, and an 1803 ritual kiddush cup (Jewish Museum, London) made of a coconut shell and adorned with religious content and inscriptions.
Coconut Shell Kiddush Cup (1803). Coconut shell, rosewood, silver gilt. Jewish Museum, London. JM 401.
“The teacup represents an alternative way of thinking about Jewish identity,” Leibman explains, “that more accurately reflects Jews’ daily struggles to understand what it meant to be Jewish in an era when legal restrictions against Jewish men were increasingly eliminated and Jews were often asked to cleanse themselves of Jewish difference in order to become citizens.”
Throughout the book, Leibman strives to shift conversations from Jewish men to women, and from synagogue to the home. Instead of calling upon objects used in Jewish rituals to tell Jewish stories, she pores over objects which Jews used, often completely outside of any religious context. Those stories too are Jewish, she suggests, and access Jewish experiences that can be more telling than the ones centering on houses of Jewish worship.
Leibman centers five chapters (each of which ends with a helpful conclusion) on the following objects:
Three charity-appeal letters that Hannah Louzada penned (1750, 1761, and 1770), which Leibman locates within inheritance law, mental illness, marriage rates, and writing styles. This chapter gives voice to “charity disenfranchised” women.
Three late 18th-century, Myer Myers-designed silver beakers, which Reyna Levy owned and are now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much wealthier than Louzada, Levy and her story teach us about the role of silver in Jewish life, family heirlooms, and experiences of single Jewish women in New York.
Watercolor portraits on ivory, including of Sarah Brandon Moses, emphasizing whiteness, indicating wealth and power, and introducing marriage partners. Born slaves in Barbados, Moses and her brother—with their portraits’ help—came to be viewed as so fully “white” in New York that even her granddaughter, Blanche Moses, didn’t know Sarah (whose dowry was $30 million in today’s currency) was mixed-race.
A commonplace book—a highly-social “archetypal early American genre … like yearbooks, social media, scrapbooks, Pinterest, or vision boards”—of poems and drawings, which Sarah Ann Hays created (1823-1894). Hays is the book’s only protagonist known to have married for love, and this object reveals a lot about 19th century views of love and marriage. Her story takes us 160 miles north of Manhattan, to the army town Watervliet.
A full-length silhouette of Jane Isaacs and her family by Augustin Edouart. The work, whose form was very fashionable and more public than were ivory miniatures, highlights the family’s orthodox Jewish values (ritual head coverings abound) and “women’s role in Jewish traditions.” Jane, and not her husband, occupies the silhouette’s central position.
The chapters, taken in order, present two simultaneous stories, one optimistic and one troubling, according to Leibman. The New York in which Isaacs arrived as an immigrant in 1839 offered poor women much better prospects than it had a century prior when Louzada begged the all-male board of her synagogue for charity.
The Sara Brandon Moses ivory portrait. Source: shearithisrael.org
“Not only had the city’s population skyrocketed, but the Jewish community was also over 23 times larger,” Leibman writes. “Moreover, women’s roles in that community had changed dramatically.”
Female-run ladies’ benevolent societies helped poor women, for whom free education was available, and Jewish schools increasingly had women on faculty. At the same time, deep inequalities remained, and Isaacs’ was the rare rags-to-riches story, while most immigrants remained poor and powerless.
There is optimism in this social media era for archives, Leibman believes, and objects that are little known are being digitized and shared. One of the ivory portraits in the book fits that bill, she writes.
Although the book answers quite a few questions I wouldn’t have known to ask, it leaves me with others. How ought we, with contemporary eyes, think about what it meant to men and women, both wealthy and powerful as well as poor and vulnerable, of these periods to create lasting records and to be knowable in the future?
The discussion about heirlooms scratches the surface (literally, in the case of names cut into silver cups), but I’m left wondering what these silent archives would have meant to many people at the time. Even today, when we churn out voluminous content on our phones and computers, most of us—I think—aren’t weighing what these records will mean and what they will say about us.
If many of those whose silence Leibman laments would have preferred remaining hidden from prying eyes, that doesn’t make their neglect any more palpable than does the notion of an artist trying to destroy work that doesn’t measure up to a personal standard, but which scholars preserve at all costs. But it would be good to know more about how the book’s characters would have felt on the matter.
I’m also left wanting to hear more about orthodox Jewish women. Orthodoxy in general receives cursory treatment in the book. We’re told that much of what many orthodox Jews think of as traditional was actually—to the author—reactionary and modern, and that something like wearing a kippah, skull cap, was a modern phenomenon responding to other Jewish denominations. But citing a source or two from legions of rabbinic statements over-simplifies.
For the orthodox populations in particular, the critique differentiating between masculine synagogue and feminine homes could be a lot more complicated. Put another way, although there’s great nobility in giving voice to the disenfranchised, there must be a way to account for possibility that different people had varied comfort levels with and interest in speaking loudly and publicly across time.
Finally, I think there’s also a danger of downplaying the significant ways that the wealthy and powerful did leverage their stations to impact communities in broad ways. Leibman notes she’s telling stories that start with several unexceptional objects (with the exception, perhaps, of the silver cups), but she thinks the five objects are uniquely positioned to tell stories of forgotten women.
The book argues that well, but it’s not clear that other objects—including those she assigns to the synagogue—don’t also provide the kinds of clues she seeks about the lives of early Jewish New Yorkers. Household objects often crossed the threshold into religious spaces, and vice versa, just as people who spent most of their lives outside sanctuaries could still make their own mark on those sacred spaces.