One good read begets another is the bookworm’s version of שכר מצוה מצוה (The reward of performing a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself). In this case, historian Jonathan Krasner starts his recent article on day school archives in HaYidion with a reference to Laura Arnold Leibman’s book The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects. I recommend this book highly for its novel approach to historical method as well as the author’s masterful storytelling. I would argue that it also has lessons for our pedagogical approach to the material artifacts of Jewish history.
The author begins with the challenge that we know very little about most people in history, with the exception of a small circle of the rich and powerful, overwhelmingly men. How can we learn more about women in particular, about whom we have so little material evidence? Leibman’s approach is to take objects that five American Jewish women, active between 1750 and 1850, produced or possessed, and to investigate and explain what these objects tell us about these women. Normally, we would expect chapters about these women to be something like biographies, revealing the individual stories of each one’s lives, activities, and accomplishments. In these cases, however, where many–in some cases, nearly all–such information is missing, a different approach is needed.
The women under discussion differed dramatically in their financial status, origins, education. All of them lived in New York for a significant part of their lives, and they all had a relationship with Shearith Israel, the first synagogue in New York and the only one for more than one hundred and fifty years. Most of them were part of Western Sephardic culture, Jews originally from Spain and Portugal who settled at various times in Amsterdam, England, Recife in Brazil, New York and elsewhere. The first subject, Hannah Louzada, we know about solely from a letter that is preserved in the synagogue archives. She was a poor widow who writes to ask the parnasim, the directors of the synagogue’s charity, for her usual allotment, since she “ben desebled [,] my legs heving swelds [swellings].” Leibman discusses the laws that deprived widows at the time of inheritance when their husbands died, the institutions of almshouses and the policies of Shearith Israel to sustain their poor members. She also examines the letter, its penmanship and spelling, to adduce Hannah’s likely educational and personal background.
Similarly, Leibman centers her analysis on objects associated with the four other women. Silver beakers produced by famed Jewish silversmith Myer Myers for the wedding of his niece; a portrait on ivory of a young woman; a “commonplace book,” a kind of scrapbook of sayings, writings, drawings, articles etc., by a daughter of a famous family; a family silhouette, produced by the leading New York artist in that medium, setting the wife in the center of her traditional family. Each object has multiple layers of associations, based upon materials, references, iconography, expense; each has much to reveal about these particular women in relation to other women of the time and the larger web of New York society and Jewish relations from London to Suriname.
The most interesting chapter, I found, was the ivory portrait of Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born as a slave in Barbados to a Jewish man and woman of color. Her mother and her children gained freedom (how is not specified/known?); although the parents never married–such a marriage was, according to the author, not socially sanctioned in Barbados–the father fully supported the children, who were given the father’s name. Sarah and her brother Isaac traveled to Suriname to undergo a Jewish conversion there, and later they traveled to study in London. There, they had ivory portraits made, which are among the first known portraits of Jews of color. She subsequently married a rich trader in New York, and (as was common) died young, leaving nine children.
Among many other aspects, the book is rich in pedagogical interest. How do we incorporate historical objects–“realia”–into our teaching of Jewish texts and history? One work that is a pioneer in this area is the Steinsaltz Talmud, which abounds in the display of archeological finds that illuminate objects and practices referenced in the text. But that work takes the text as the starting point and sees the objects as secondary, “proof” or a fascinating sidelight. What if we start with the objects themselves: what can they teach us?
Such an approach might work with family heirlooms that schools often ask students to bring in at certain points in their education. Instead of starting with what students know about them, we might start with questions they generate: What don’t we know, what would we like to know, about the object, its materials, location of production and sale, history of ownership? Did the student’s family always own it, receive it as a gift or purchase it somewhere? How was the object displayed and used over time? Where has the object been?
Other questions might seek to uncover meanings of the object in its original location. Who were its original owners, and what can the object tell us about them? Was the object meant to be used in the synagogue, family setting, or somewhere else? Would the owners have had to be well off in order to purchase it? Was it a gift, and if so, for what event? What meanings did the object have to its first owners and/or creators? Are there decorations, and what might we learn from them?
Addenda:
The museum at the Liberty Bell currently has an exhibit about some Jews active in the American Revolution: https://www.jewishexponent.com/2021/12/16/revolution-era-museum-adds-jewish-exhibit/.
Loebjewishportraits.com contains an online gallery of paintings, silhouettes and photographs of Jews in the Colonial and Antebellum periods.
Relatedly, a recent award-winning book, All That She Carried by Tiya Miles, tells the story of a Black slave and her descendants through her sack that is on display at the Smithsonian.