Jewish History Archives - Not Even Past

When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

(All photos are courtesy of the author.)

The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, like many other Jews, was forced to wear the yellow star. In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered at age 67.

Rosalia’s brief life story is registered in the Identification Card #1847, found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, founded in 1983 in Washington, D.C. Her IC is one of thousands that can be find in a shelf near the venue’s second floor elevators, that take you up to the main floors of the permanent exhibit. Before starting the tour, visitors can take an identification card like Rosalia’s, to go through the display with an actual target of the Nazi regime in their hand. The idea is that every person who enters the exhibit will get to know at least one victim. The short biographical information found in these cards are the only data we will ever know of many of the casualties of the Nazis, aside from the fact that they were one of the approximately 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Once on the main exhibit floors, people can see the atrocities of the Nazi regime against Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and other minority populations. One of the main purposes of the curators of the United States Holocaust Museum is to encourage and promote the audience to keep asking “Why?” There is plenty of evidence of the torture and brutality committed by the Germans against their target populations but the basic question, why? still remains unanswered. The need to elucidate responses, find more explanations, and ignite further discussion fuels the intention of the museum professionals. This is evident at the very entrance to the building where vistors see two big posters that state: “This museum is not an answer but a question” and “What`s your question? #AskWhy”

As basic as these inquiries may seem and despite the myriad answers they have produced, there is something missing for the victims and their families. The basic Why? is still hovering in the back of the minds of those who endured and survived the Holocaust.

It is a question that the curators, employees, and researchers of the museum use to create historical memory narratives that include the victims, remember and honor them, and counteract versions that deny that these violent events did actually happen.

Raising awareness of the past to understand contemporary issues is one of the bridges built by memory museums because they demonstrate with facts, testimonies, documents, and images that atrocities like the Holocaust occur. In this sense, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is considered a pioneer in display and representation of difficult topics. Another of the main objectives of the professional team of the museum is that the world will not allow the repetition of these brutalities. In the current political climate not only in the United States but in Latin America, for instance, where racism, discrimination, and exclusion are acquiring strength, to know that genocide is real and can happen is key. To deny or distort the Holocaust or other violent conflicts invalidates the victims’ voices, and prevents people like Rosalía and many others from finding justice.

This museum, as most memory sites, however, generates polemics. Should the past be relived in a setting like a museum? Do the survivors feel retraumatized by the displays? Is it not better to forget what happened? Apparently not since during the last decades there has been a huge proliferation of memory museums and displays, which demonstrates that diverse communities want to know what happened in order to restore the social fabric of their societies, to decide what to pass on to future generations, and to attempt to prevent atrocities from happening once more.

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle. The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in a specific watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed. He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”

Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.

History Revealed in a Very Small Place

This is the first article we posted about Texas on Not Even Past. Historian, photographer, and Professor Bob Abzug takes us on a short tour of the intersection of Jewish and African American History in one small town in Texas

by Robert Abzug

Our family knew Luling as a town one passed through quickly on trips from Austin to the Gulf coast, noticing only banners for the next “watermelon thump” and gaily decorated oil pump jacks. Recently it became my unlikely entry point into a visual appreciation of Texas Jewish history and more. I have taken photographs for about fifty years and, for the past twenty-five years have recorded signs of sacred life on the landscape, a project I call “religion by the side of the road.” Mostly, my writing and photography have engaged Protestantism in its myriad forms, though I myself am a Jew. However, in the spring of 2007, Dean Randy Diehl of the College of Liberal Arts asked me to become founding director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and the private project took on a form more integrated with my new task. I decided to learn more about Texas Jews.

Jews in Luling? It is hardly Vilna on the San Marcos–there is no synagogue and perhaps no longer any Jews among its 5500 inhabitants. Yet, an online listing of a small Jewish Cemetery (80 graves) in the town piqued my curiosity. My wife and I set out one weekend morning in search of the site and found ourselves amid an old, modest, almost rural African-American neighborhood. Some of the small houses looked as if they had been built in the late nineteenth century. We couldn’t find the cemetery and searched an open lot, thinking–a romantic notion–that its graves had crumbled from neglect, lost under the leaves and dirt.

Instead of Jewish headstones, however, I found a concrete marker commemorating what was once the location of the community’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. At about the same time, a large man in his 50s and his aged mother noticed us and came by. We told them what we were looking for, shared the discovery of the plaque, and learned a bit about the history of the black community. It turns out Jews and African-Americans came to Luling in the 1880s, soon after the town was founded (1874) as a railroad junction for cotton growers. The mother was part of one of the founding families, as were many who still lived there. The Jewish families had since moved to San Antonio, Houston, and other big cities, following a well-worn pattern across the state. We asked after the Jewish Cemetery, and the man noted that just down the street there was a “white graveyard.” I thanked them, and asked them if I could take their picture at the site of the church. We warmly said our goodbyes and walked down the road. (Illustration 1)

Photograph of an African American couple standing next to a marker showing where the Bethel A.M.E. church used to be

We found a small, well-tended cemetery filled with stones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all bearing the signs of tradition–Hebrew texts and Jewish names–and of acculturation. (Illustration 2)

Grave stones from a "white" graveyard in Luling, Texas

Places of origin varied from Germany to Poland to Russia, as well as some noting Texas birthplaces (sadly, numerous infant deaths were marked as well). Anglicized names abounded as well, and one was quite striking in its noting the departed as a member of Woodmen of the World fraternal organization. My favorite stone was that of Harris Rednick, just one letter shy of redneck, whose stone featured what almost certainly was a Texas Star. (Illustration 3)

Gravestone of Harris Rednick from a graveyard in Luling, Texas

We hoped to top off the day with BBQ at the City Market, but alas they had unexpectedly sold out all their brisket and ribs to a passing tour bus! Still, this half-day in Luling became a short course in Texas, Jewish, and African-American history in one place.

all photographs by Robert Abzug

American Zionism and Soviet Jews

By Michael Dorman

During the early 1960s American Jews began realizing the severity of the anti-Semitic policies under which the 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union were living. This sparked an organized effort across American Jewish communities to raise awareness about the human rights violations being faced by Soviet Jews. Throughout the decade the White House frequently received letters from Jewish organizations and leaders requesting that the President use his influence to persuade the Soviets to rethink their anti-Semitic policies. Jewish organizations also wrote directly to the Soviet government pleading for it to ease its discriminatory policies targeted at Jewish culture and religious practices. Letters sent to the Kremlin were often asking the Soviet government to merely follow its own laws, citing cultural freedom as a right that was granted to all Soviet citizens in the 1917 Declaration of Rights. Another common request sent to the Soviet government was that Soviet Jews, who had been separated from family members as a result of the Holocaust, be allowed to reunite. Many organizations, especially those with an underlying Zionist agenda, used such arguments with the Soviets (and the White House) in hopes that it would provide a convincing pretense for a mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In response to Zionist efforts to use the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to increase the population of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists leaders began writing to the White House expressing their concerns. During his time in office, President Johnson, a strong and vocal supporter of Jewish causes, received numerous letters from anti-Zionist rabbis and Jewish organizations asking him to take their views and solutions into consideration. These letters were primarily aimed at explaining to the Johnson administration that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, thus supporting a Zionist approach in the Soviet Union should not be thought of as supporting a Jewish approach. These letters often point out that the vast majority of the American Jewish community at that time was either not supportive of the Zionist movement or outright anti-Zionist.

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Via Wikipedia.

One letter in particular, sent to President Johnson by The American Council For Judaism, an organization of Anti-Zionist, reform rabbis, was quite explicit in expressing opposition to Zionism. In this letter the Council attempts to draw the White House’s attention to the fact that Zionism is not the humanitarian rescuing of the Jews, nor should it be viewed as a movement that is particularly inline with the tenets of Judaism as a religion. The letter explains to the president that, from the Council’s perspective, the aim of Zionism is not to create a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, emphasizing ethnicity over religion.

The letter goes on to point out that Zionists have worked hard to make it so that criticism of Israel (especially by non-Jews) has become synonymous with criticism of Jews as a whole, and sometimes unjustly labeled anti-Semitism. According to the Council this is an intentional way to not only deflect criticisms of Zionist ideologies, but also to make criticism of the State of Israel and its legitimacy completely off limits. As a result of this, many American Jews and non-Jews shied away from speaking out against the Johnson administrations’ whole hearted support of Zionism and the solutions it offered in efforts to ease the plight of Soviet Jews.

As the decade progressed, Jewish special interest groups would continue to work with the White House in the battle to end the state imposed hardships on Soviet Jewry. Ultimately the Israeli voice would prevail, and during the 1970’s a noticeable trickle of Soviets emigrants to Israel would begin. This is perhaps to be expected, as every Prime Minister Israel has ever had was either born in the Russian Empire or born to parents born in the Russian Empire, thus the connection to the region’s Jewish population runs deep among Israel’s elites. Over the next several decades more than a million Jews would leave the USSR (and the post-Soviet territories) to settle in Israel.

The documents cited in the essay are held in the LBJ Library and Museum, “White House Central File; RM (Religious Matters) Box #7. They include a letter from the American Council For Judaism to Jack Valentini on December 18,1963, a letter from the American Council For Judaism to President Johnson on January 25, 1967, a letter from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to Bill Moyers on December 8, 1966, a letter from Richard Korn (president of the American Council For Judaism) to President Johnson on June 16,1966, and a letter from the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and Rabbi S. A. Berkowits to President Johnson on September 23,1966.

Diasporic Charity and Salonica’s Jewish Community after the Fire of 1917

By Joseph Leidy

The minutes of a 1922 meeting of the Council of the Jewish Community of Salonica, today’s Thessaloniki in Greece, recorded a cordial but contentious discussion. Two guests joined the councilmen: Frank Rosenblatt and Walter Montesor, both representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee, an American Jewish charity established to provide relief for Jewish victims of the First World War. Two days earlier, the Council had submitted a report to the JDC representatives requesting five loans for different charitable projects totaling to just under a half million dollars. Rosenblatt and Montesor were to examine these proposals before forwarding their recommendations to the organization’s authorities. That thousands of Jewish families in Salonica were in great need was clear. Nonetheless, whether and how the JDC should intervene remained uncertain.

Jewish Family in Salonika in 1917. Via Wikipedia.

A massive fire had rampaged through the city in August of 1917, destroying the Jewish quarter and leaving tens of thousands homeless. Were these “fire-sufferers” also “war sufferers,” the target recipients of JDC relief? The Chief Rabbi of Salonica had earlier stressed to Rosenblatt that “the calamity which befell the Jewish Community in 1917 was a direct result of the war,” even though Salonica had long suffered from catastrophic fires. In the meeting, Rosenblatt emphasized that the JDC was “prepared to render aid to the war orphans in the true sense of the word, and not those orphans whose fathers died during the course of the war.” The war did not directly cause the fire, and therefore the JDC representatives seemed to have felt that direct relief should be limited.

The Great Fire of Thessaloniki in 1917. Via Wikipedia.

In 1921, however, the JDC had begun to focus on reconstruction rather than direct relief, particularly devoting themselves to the tasks of increasing employment opportunities and improving sanitary conditions. Wartime restrictions on movement to and from Salonica’s port had hindered various efforts to reconstruct after the fire. Thus loan requests for reconstruction projects in Salonica, as opposed to direct relief, better fit the JDC’s mission to help Jewish communities’ general post-war recovery. Along these lines, the Council in Salonica requested funding to re-build trade schools destroyed by the fire. They also proposed the construction a new communal living quarter to relieve congestion and disease in neighborhoods of Jewish “fire-sufferers.” In both cases, the loan requests appealed to their American visitors’ social visions of enlightened charity by emphasizing economic self-reliance and proper urban hygiene. Rosenblatt and Montesor, with some minor caveats, responded positively during the meeting and indicated their willingness to recommend the loans to their superiors.

Low-lying districts, where a majority of Jews lived, were seriously affected by the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917. Via Wikipedia.

Despite these points of harmony, Rosenblatt declared that “there must have been an error in translation” with regard to one item on the evening’s agenda: a $300,000 loan for “the construction of profit yielding buildings for the Community, the revenues from which will help to increase the resources of the communal institutions.” The fire had wiped out all but a handful of previously lucrative communal properties. Rent from these properties, accumulated under Ottoman structures of communal ownership, had traditionally financed the bulk of Jewish medical, educational, cultural, and charitable organizations in the city. The Greek government’s plan to appropriate and re-design Salonica’s urban center after the fire prevented the full recovery of these assets. The community had, however, been able to purchase new plots of land at some distance from the port and city center, relatively cheap due to their proximity to malarial swamps. This loan would bankroll profitable construction on these and other plots.

Rosenblatt was skeptical. The following conversation between Rosenblatt and two council members reveals the misunderstanding at work:

Mr. Rosenblatt The principal aim of the Joint Distribution Committee is to render economic help to those communities which have suffered directly from the war […]

Mr. Cazes If the community which has suffered through the war is not helped, how will it in turn be able to help its poor people? Have not all its institutions been created to help these same people?

Mr. Benveniste In asking for this money we have the aim in view of helping our institutions who already own their profit yielding buildings, but which have disappeared on account of the war.

Mr. Rosenblatt Our desire is to help the community to rehabilitate its population, but you ask to be helped in order that you can rehabilitate the community itself in the truest sense of the world. This is quite different from our point of view.

Rosenblatt saw the JDC’s duty as being towards the individuals and families of a population. The community “in the truest sense of the world,” its legal and political governing institution, was the responsibility of its members to maintain, its wealthy ones in particular. Yet the Council’s report to Rosenblatt had already noted that “most of those who formed the rich class of Jews have emigrated, either after the fire of 1917 or on account of the economic conditions in the city.” The Council, representing the remaining Jewish elite, could not solicit enough voluntary donations during such tough times. Instead, they hoped the JDC would subsidize “profit yielding buildings” constructed on cheap land to rescue the viability of communal institutions.

These meeting minutes depict Salonica’s Jewish community at a critical juncture in its incorporation into the Greek nation-state, which annexed the city from the Ottoman Empire in 1912. The document highlights the environmental forces and understandings of nature that shaped the city’s Jewish communal life and its interactions with an American Jewish charity in the interwar period. Fire decimated much of the property that formerly sustained the organs of the community; disease then shaped the spatial arrangement of the Jewish population throughout the city by making cheap plots of land available for purchase and re-settlement of its poor. The Jewish Council sought the JDC’s help in rebuilding communal self-sufficiency on their own terms, but the JDC’s concern for sanitary conditions and their focus on combat as opposed to natural damage influenced what kinds of charitable work they would sponsor in Salonica. For Salonica’s Jews, then, the transition from Ottoman communal autonomy to Greek national citizenship was not only a question of changing identities, but also of changing relationships between local and transnational societies and the environment.

JDC Archives, Record of the New York Office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1921 – 1932, Folder # 209: “Minutes of the Meeting […],” 7 Sep 1922, “Report on the Needs of the Jewish Community […],” 8 Sep 1922, “Minutes of the Meeting […],” 9 Sep 1922, “Letter from Dr. Frank F. Rosenblatt to European Executive Council of the J.D.C. Vienna, Subject: Report on Saloniki,” 26 Sep 1922.

Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books on women and gender for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month.

A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Since they don’t fit into our usual geographical categories –and raise interesting questions about those categories — we are lumping them together here in Crossing Borders.

Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

Lina del Castillo recommends:

Magical sites: Women Travelers in 19th century Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agonsin and Julie Levison

This collection brings together several travel narratives written by women brave enough (and wealthy and educated enough) to travel through different parts of Latin America. Some of these writers, like Mary Caldecott Graham and Flora Tristan, found a measure of liberation from a feminine imperial mindset that justified their prescriptions for reform of the societies they encountered. Others, like Nancy Gardner Prince (a free born African American woman who traveled to Jamaica and Russia) tell their experiences from very different perspectives. The narratives these women wrote about the places they moved through show them as women who both threw off the chains of domesticity and convention and nevertheless, were in many ways still bound by them.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family. Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg. And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving. Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.

Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends:

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War. Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18. The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict. It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism. I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends:

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back. Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

A Hidden Jewish “Archive” in the Azores

By Miriam Bodian

Some of the most important documents for historians of Jewish history are documents that haven’t been saved at all. In fact, they’ve been discarded – into a closed storage space known as a geniza. This custom has its origins in Jewish law, which prohibits Jews from simply throwing away worn out or unneeded texts that contain the Hebrew name of God. To the great benefit of scholarship, Jews have often extended the precept to include all kinds of texts, sacred and profane.

The greatest treasure of this kind is the Cairo geniza, an enormous cache of some 300,000 documents or fragments discovered in 1896 in a synagogue in Old Cairo and brought to the attention of the great Judaica scholar Solomon Schechter. For a thousand years, Cairo Jews deposited texts and documents here that were no longer of use. Aside from the sacred texts – Hebrew Bibles, prayer books, tractates of the Talmud, etc. – there were shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, leases, secular poetry, philosophical and medical works, business letters, account books, and private letters. Examining these documents has allowed scholars to paint a vivid and dynamic picture of Jewish society in the medieval Muslim Mediterranean. Today, anyone can go on line and see how scholars have dealt with the mass of material from this geniza, with photographs and translations of examples.

Fast-forward to 2014, when I joined my colleague Jane Gerber of CUNY Graduate Center to study material from another geniza, one that was far less important than the one in Egypt, but that had the attraction of never having been examined. With the indelible image of the two Scottish sisters in mind, we traveled to an abandoned synagogue in the Azores – an archipelago of nine islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, far from the historical centers of Jewish life. The trip was part of an effort organized and financed by the Azorean Heritage Foundation, whose mission is to bring to light the history of the now extinct community of Sahar Asamaim (Sha’ar Ha-Shamayim, or “Gate of Heaven”) that was established in the town of Ponta Delgada in 1821 by a group of Moroccan Jews. The community’s small synagogue, which has lain for years in disrepair, is now being restored, and the geniza materials – filling about 50 large filing boxes – have been recovered and deposited in the Municipal Archives of Ponta Delgada.

Documents in the Geniza archive in the Azores

Map of the Azores. The geniza archive is stored in the Municipal Archives of Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel

It’s too soon to know just how much the fragile, sometimes worm-eaten, occasionally mildewed material we found in this cache can tell us, but even at this early stage, the contours of the community have begun to emerge. Communal documents and commercial letters we examined confirm that this was a mercantile community dominated by a few wealthy families. It was quite traditional: the materials include many well-used Jewish sacred books, as well as phylacteries, prayer shawls, mezuzah scrolls, and other religious items. It was a distinctly North African community: the boxes contain documents signed by rabbis in the ornate Magrebi style, and members of the community had names like Bensaude, Zagorey, Bozaglo, Azulay, Zafrany, and Biton.

Professor Bodian examining documents in the Azores geniza

Miriam Bodian examining documents in the Azores geniza

Yet the community was strongly oriented toward Europe. A commercial letter discussing trade in textiles mentions Liverpool, Bahia, Lisbon, and Hamburg as cities that were part of the author’s trade network. Hebrew books whose remains are in the geniza were imported or brought from Livorno, Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. One of our favorite finds was a set of wrapping labels from packets of matzah (unleavened bread for Passover) imported from Manchester. The labeling, in Hebrew letters, had been carefully cut from the wrapping and placed in the geniza.

Jane Gerber holding the matzah wrapper

Among the materials we found were a number of appeals from the Holy Land, seeking funds for Jews living in the four cities Jewish tradition held to be holy – Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed. These petitions attest to the strength of the ties the Azores community maintained with a Jewish center that had no commercial importance but immeasurable spiritual significance.

Request for funds to support Talmud study in Tiberias

The community thrived for generations, but by the 1940s its numbers had so dwindled, through emigration and conversion, that the synagogue did not have a minyan, or quota, of ten adult men for Sabbath prayer. Today, there is only one person left from the community, Jorge Delmar, who holds the key to the Jewish cemetery. He has carefully saved Jewish documents and ritual items preserved in his family, though he has little idea of what they are. He showed us, for example, a set of three tiny Scrolls of Esther. An undated note left with the scrolls by their owner, for the benefit of whoever might come across them, offered poignant testimony of the disappearance of a community and its culture. The note explained that these were “Meguilot [scrolls] that they were accustomed to read in the synagogue on the eve of Purim. They are written on parchment and they are very old and for this reason they are of great value to the Israelites.”

Scrolls of the Book of Esther.

Note left with the scrolls describing the meguilot

Note left by the owner of the Esther scrolls.

Passover 1934: An American Jewish Family Story

by Joan Neuberger

As historians, most of the time we tell stories about strangers. But I come from a family of story-tellers and, in our family, Passover was a special occasion for telling family stories. So, today I’m writing a story about a beloved family photograph.

This photograph is famous in our family. It shows the Passover seder that took place when the Rittenberg family met at my great-grandfather Louis Rittenberg’s apartment at 525 West End Ave in 1934. A professional photographer was hired for the occasion (judging by the light along the upper right wall). We think that Louis’ daughter, Bea, bought the gray Hagadahs that we used for many years afterwards for the seder this evening.

Louis (at the far end of the table on the right) was born in Lithuania in 1861 (or 62) and emigrated to Massachusetts as a teenager with his father Wolf in 1878. They supported themselves peddling brooms and novelties. Wolf was described as “refined” but not “practical,” (I imagine him a dreamy, scholarly rabbi’s son, happier reading than selling brooms). He returned to Lithuania, leaving his wife, “Mutter,” and son Louis, who made enough money peddling to open a store that sold dry goods and peddling supplies in Springfield in 1887. Louis married Lillie Marks in 1884 and, when children began to arrive, they moved, first to a two-family house and later to their own house, described very proudly years later by his oldest son, (and our first family historian), my great-uncle, Newman Rittenberg.

Lillie and Louis in 1924.

Louis founded a synagogue in Springfield, became President of the “Sons of Benjamin,” and joined the Masons. As his business grew, he helped bring over, support, and educate family members from Lithuania and other Jews struggling to get started in and around Springfield. On Sunday mornings, Jews from all over came to Louis’ “open house” for advice. His first store failed but Louis was remarkably ambitious and benefited from the growing regional textile industry. One day, when he was looking around a storehouse in nearby Holyoke, he learned that he could buy the cloth left over from making suits in New England and sell it to manufacturers making caps in New York. It would take a while, but this discovery, and the middle-man “jobbing” business it generated, would make him rich. In 1908 Louis moved the family to the Bronx and went to work on Canal St in Manhattan where his brother Ike had a similar business. Louis continued to buy and sell cloth, prospering and suffering with the ups and downs of the economy. In the 1910s, the business took off for good and the Rittenberg brothers were soon supplying many of the largest clothing manufacturers in the country with cloth they purchased from New England mills. In around 1912, the family moved to Central Park West and then, after Lillie died (far too young), they moved to the apartment on West End Ave. Louis’ distrust of the stock market meant that they survived the 1929 crash far better than most.

Louis Rittenberg

The family histories that recorded these stories leave out the social and political context that made it possible for a young, determined, white man from eastern Europe to succeed here, but Louis and Lillie were universally described as generous and principled and cultured and funny. Louis was famous for saying things like “Kind words never hurt anybody.” And: “There are 112 million people in this country and they all have to wear clothes.”

Newman Rittenberg

Uncle Newman reports that the extended family gathered every Friday night and, of course, every year on Passover. Newman described Louis’ religious sensibility this way: “He was very learned in Hebrew but departed from the very strict rituals, as he felt that the modern times should alter the strictness of the old customs. He approached his religion most seriously but with a knowledge of the American condition…”

At the far end of the table in the Passover photograph, you can see the top of the silver wine cup stand (poking up between Louis and my grandfather, Willie). The children in the picture include my mother, Lillian (named after Lillie), her sister Ann and their first cousins, Joan, Peggy, and Lynn Gross, and Bob and Ann Bry. When I was growing up, we used the same wine cups and and same Hagadahs every year when Joan’s and Lynn’s families came to our house for seder. My sister Lois and I polished the antique silver wine cups each year and set the table with the same hagadahs, rituals we always enjoyed. Now the silver cups live with us in Austin. I wish we knew more about their history, but you can see them in action here when our own kids were still living at home.

The family photograph itself often provided an occasion for my mother, who seemed to know something about everyone in every generation of the family, to tell us stories about growing up in New York surrounded by our interesting relatives. But mostly we liked looking at it for that uncanny sensation of the past in the present — seeing everyone in our parents’ generation as children.

Lillian “Mickey” Rittenberg Neuberger, around 1947

This week, Joan, Peggy, and Lynn gathered for seder with their families at Lynn’s house in Mamaroneck, NY. Lynn’s son Phil Straus, a wonderful photographer, recreated the photograph with their own children and grandchildren and even a few great grandchildren.

Photos and stories connect us with people, whether we knew them or not.
From generation to generation….

For more stories from my family archive: Braided History and Fathers and Sons.

Hannah Adams: Historian of American Jews

by Allison Schottenstein

After World War II, American Jewish history emerged as a significant field of study. Historian Hasia Diner has argued that the subfield actually began to emerge as early 1892, but if we consider pioneering texts about Jews composed by American writers during the nineteenth century, the work of Hannah Adams suggests that it began far earlier. A Christian, Adams discussed Judaism in two works, The History of the Jews, From the Destruction of Jerusalem to the Present Day (1812) and A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations: Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan, Christian, Ancient and Modern (1817). Adams’ work is largely disregarded by contemporary American Jewish historians, who are skeptical of her motives as a Jewish historian, in part because she was a founder of the 1815 Female Society of Boston and the Vicinity for Promoting Christianity. Historians such as Howard Sachar, Arthur Hertzberg, and Leonard Dinnerstein suspected that if her goal was to convert Jews, her scholarship could not be trusted. Sachar and Dinnerstein are especially critical of Adams because they feel it was a reflection of America’s “fascination” with the Jewish rejection and supposed murder of Christ. Hertzberg recognized that Adams genuinely wanted American Jews to have equal rights in early nineteenth-century America, but like many other historians, he does not want to accord Adams the status of Jewish historian. In 1963 Salo Baron and Joseph L. Blau, were the first scholars to recognize Adams for publishing “the most useful contemporary general review of the position of the Jews in America,” but they too dismiss her Dictionary for having “only a superficial acquaintance with its subject.”

Jewish historians may have perceived Adams’ work as lacking substance, but a close examination of her work shows that she did indeed offer a valuable overview of what was known in the early nineteenth century about the Jewish religion in America and perceptions of early American Jewry. In the newly revised “Introduction” to Adams’ Dictionary, Thomas Tweed argues that “even though Adams clearly favored Christianity, she did not merely separate religions and sects into the true and false.” Tweed proposes that scholars consider the period in which Adams lived — a time when American Jews comprised less than one percent of the population (around 2,500). The first Rabbinical school had yet to be founded, Hebrew Schools had not been instituted, and there were no Jewish newspapers in the United States. Unlike in Europe, the U.S. had not undergone a Jewish Enlightenment — that is, a time promoting the academic study of Judaism. In this new “Christian nation,” Jews were seen as mysterious and were vilified for their rejection of Christ and their ancestors’ supposed role in Christ’s death. In this religious climate, Adams’ contribution to Jewish history, even while writing as a Christian in a Christian population, was innovative and significant. Adams’ discussion of Jews in her Dictionary initiated the study of Judaism in America even before Isaac Leeser published his English translation of the Hebrew Bible in 1853.

Touro Synagogue, Newport, RI. Oldest synagogue in the US still in use (Wikimedia)

Adams began her account by chronicling the history of Jews under Roman rule — namely, during the time of Christ. Adams could have used the New Testament as her only source, but instead she referred to the findings of ancient Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus to explore the complex historical position that Jews occupied in the Roman Empire. Jews were able to govern themselves, but at the same time they were forced to adapt to both oppressive Roman rule and Jewish leaders like Herod who did not represent Judaism. By pausing to explain this early history, Adams was able to convey how the Jewish position during the time of Christ was more complex than that pictured in the New Testament — a move that arguably dismantled the inflammatory image of Jews as Christ-killers.

First Hebrew Bible pulished in the US, 1814 (Library of Congress)

At the same time, her definitions provided insight into the Jewish religion to an otherwise uninformed American audience. For instance, her definition of “Cabbalists” (Kabbalah) discussed its connection to occultism, but also explored the Kabbalah as a methodological tool used to provide a higher level of interpretation of the Torah: “Jews extract recondite meanings from the words of scripture.” She traced the origins of the Kabbalah to the Oral Law, which enabled her to articulate the difference between the Torah (“written law”) and the Talmud (“oral law”). It is also interesting to note how Adams acknowledged the various terms associated with Jews, such as “Hebrews” and “Pharisees.” In her definition of the former, Adams made the radical move of explaining how the Apostle Paul was Jewish, thereby contextualizing Christianity’s Jewish roots. Her definition of “Pharisees” is of equal interest. Considering that the English vernacular uses Pharisees to mean “hypocrites,” and that the New Testament monolithically portrays them as the main opposition to Christ, Adams discussed their role as “celebrated” Jewish lawmakers who were devoted to preserving the law before, during, and after Christ. By providing a fuller picture of ancient Jews like the Pharisees, Adams provided an alternative perspective on Judaism’s historical legacy to a Christian-centric country.

Adams’ pivotal definition of “Judaism” was multifaceted, drawing attention to various aspects of Judaism. Paraphrasing the “Thirteen Principles” of Maimonides (1138-1204) — one of the most influential Jewish scholars — Adams explored Jewish prayers and kosher practices, showing their roots in the Talmud. Her insights demonstrated to a Christian-centric audience how complex and sophisticated Judaism was. Moreover, she did not refrain from describing in horrifying detail Jewish persecution by Christians throughout the ages: “[I]n Christendom, [Jews] have been despised, calumniated, oppressed, banished, executed, and burned.” By accusing her own religion of Jewish persecution, Adams not only historically anticipated America’s position as a future bastion of Jewish freedom, but helped to legitimize a marginalized faith.

First synagogue in the US (Charleston, SC) by John Rubens Smith, 1813

Adams’ History of the Jews predominately discussed Jewish experiences in the ancient world and in modern Europe, but towards the end of the book Adams briefly discussed the experiences of early American Jews. Significantly, Adams’ study precedes the two waves of Jewish immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe, which would eventually increase the population of American Jews from mere thousands to over a million. Remarkably, Adams was able to determine that the first wave of Jewish immigrants consisted of “Spanish Jews” — Sephardic Jews — who had emigrated because of the Spanish Inquisition. Though Adams recognized this as the starting point of the Jewish community in America, she determined that Jewish involvement with the Dutch East India Company was the pivotal point of the Jewish community’s arrival in the United States. Adams made the historically significant point that the Dutch East India Company was the first to allow Jews to remain in America.

Aware that she was an outsider to the Jewish faith, Adams understood that she needed to look outside of her own environment in order to complete her history of American Jews. In History of the Jews, her readers must have appreciated the manner in which she conducted research on religious practices, on family, and on social life in various Jewish communities (Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia). In Adams’ footnotes, she made a point of acknowledging how prominent Jewish figures like Rabbi Seixas had provided her with the information to give her readers the most complete perspective possible for her history of Jews in America. The neglected Adams was not just a scholar, but a pioneer and forward thinker.

In sum, both Adams’ Dictionary and History of the Jews are significant contributions to the study of American Jewish history. The Dictionary presented insight into Jewish religious practices, while The History of the Jews offered its audience an early glimpse of Jewish American history. Though Adams’ perspective was biased because of her Christian beliefs, she deserves to be recognized for enabling us to more thoroughly understand the Jewish position in early American history.

You might also like:

Allison Schottenstein won the Perry Prize for the best Master’s Thesis in 2012. An abstract of her thesis can be found here.

David Crew’s review of Saul Friedlander’s major book on the Holocaust can be found on NEP here and his article about wedding photographs from the Nazi imposed ghettos can be found here.

Miriam Bodian writes about an unusual Jew interrogated during the Inquisition, in “A Dangerous Idea”

Historians mentioned in this article:

Hasia Diner, “American Jewish History” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (2002)

Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (1992)

Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America(1994)

Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, eds., The Jews of the United States, 1790-1840: A Documentary History (1963)

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