Early American Graveyard Rabbit

Jewish Atlantic World Database Live on the Web!

The Jewish Atlantic World Database is now open and free to use! In the collection, you will find over 5,000 images related to Jewish life in early America including nearly 3,000 photos of gravestones.  You will also find other types of of material culture (ritual baths, synagogues, houses, furniture, etc.) and archival documents (probate records and land evidence) from many of the key ports where Jews settled in North America and the Caribbean, as well as several crucial ports from which they immigrated (Amsterdam, London, Hamburg).  Also included in the database are samples of non-Jewish (and later Jewish) artifacts to allow students to better assess what made Jewish life distinctive.  Keywords allow visitors to connect artifact to other items related to the same individual, family, ethnic group, location, port town, or theme.  Right now you can browse or search, or look for gravestones by the individual's name or by cemetery.  Soon we hope to have a complete list of family names to browse as well.  You will also find resources to help you analyze the objects in the database or to use in the classroom.  Looking for something or someone and can't find it/them?  Let me know, as we are still adding items to the database each week!  Here are some important colonial Jewish families you will find in the database: Lopez, Henriquez, Senior, Curiel, Gomez, Hoheb, Hart, Rivera, Maduro, Seixas, and many many others.

This collection began when I was doing research for Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life.  In this book, I am interested in the ways in which colonial American Judaism was as much an embodied religion as it was a textual or faith-based practice.  That is, I argue that we should think of colonial American Jews as a “people of the body” as well as a “people of the book,” and I look to the ways that everyday objects helped define and create Jewish identity. By sharing the images used to create this book, I hope to enable students, scholars, and family historians to trace the paths that early American Jews (and their objects) took, as well as to gain a richer sense of their everyday lives.

If you would like to learn more about the religious life of early American Jews and the objects they used, please feel free to order a copy of Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life from ISBS or Amazon.com. Purchase of the book is optional, however; this website is freely available to the public as an educational, not-for-profit tool for teaching and learning.

Landhuis Klein Santa Marta (ca. 1700), Curacao. Home of Aaron Levy Maduro (1709-19); Jacob Joshua Naar (1819-56), and Joseph Jacob Henriquez (1856-62)

Home is Where the Heart is...

In the Hunts Bay Cemetery in Jamaica, there is a small fragment of a gravestone, belonging to Esther ("De Ester"). The rest of the fragment reads "fil...," probably filha, daughter in Portuguese. The size of the stone and the identification of the deceased as a daughter (rather than wife) suggests this was probably a child's gravestone. What intrigues me most about the fragment, however, is the house inside of the wreath at the top.

It is unusual to find gravestones with houses carved on them either in the Jewish Atlantic World or in colonial American cemeteries more broadly. On some level this is surprising. In Hebrew, the euphemism for a cemetery is "Beth Haim" (house of life). Also many scholars have noted that the traditional upright markers of colonial cemeteries look like doorways. Usually this is understood as a symbol of the grave as a portal into the afterlife. An actual house is a different matter, though, as it symbolizes the family and protection, not the world to come. Some argue that the house is an inherently feminine space: it is not only the domain of women, but also a place of security and shelter. It interests me that the house also appears on the stone of Esther de la Pena (Amsterdam 1697), a detail of which is shown below.

This exquisite stone from Beth Haim Ouderkerk features the family coat of arms at the top; below is an inscription and a depiction of the family's country estate shown above with sailing ships in the background. (Esther's husband Daniel was a shipping magnate, and surely it is trade that bought the beautiful estate.) At the very bottom of the stone is a reference: Psalm 128:3 ("Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine, in the innermost parts of thy house; / thy children like olive plants, round about thy table"). On one level, the country house seems like a status symbol; on another level, however, it is a moving metonym for the deceased wife: she is like the "innermost" part of the house, a private, familial space.

The house motif is more commonly found in American women's poetry than on gravestones; however, here too graves, houses, and women are conjoined. Emily Dickinson made analogies between poems and houses, not only because of the associations of houses with femininity and domesticity, but also because both are about enclosure or restriction. For Dickinson, being in the house was similar to the suffocating "constriction" of a tomb. Literary critic Leslie Wheeler argues that for Dickinson, possessing a body ultimately became so restrictive that death signified a welcome release, and that "the narrowness of the tomb yields a paradoxical freedom" (The Poetics of Enclosure 15). I somehow think this is not what the carvers of these stones meant: Both the Pena house and the house on young Ester's tomb face outward, windows open. The Pena house is surrounded by five vibrant trees (the children?); although it faces away from the bay (mercantile life) towards a more private vista, it hardly looks like a mausoleum. Rather it is a prosperous, sheltering space, reassuring in its solidity.