Early American Graveyard Rabbit

Keep This Classic Cemetery Open to the Public!

Beth Haim Ouderkerk is the most magnificent and important of the historic cemeteries in the Jewish Atlantic World. It is the birthplace of the unique Sephardic sepulchral tradition that spread throughout Hamburg, London, Newport, New York, and the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.


The recent economic crisis is also hitting Beth Haim Ouderkerk. The lack of donations have created a situation where the annual municipal subsidies may be withdrawn. The lack of these funds will halt maintenance work and make it difficult to keep the cemetery open to the public.

You can help! As this tax season ends and you consider making charitable donations, keep Beth Haim Ouderkerk in mind. You can also support the cemetery by purchasing books about the cemetery. All proceeds go to the Beth Haim.

To learn more about this classic cemetery, please enjoy the most recent newsletter (Thank you to Dennis Ouderdorp for being willing to share it!):
De Castro Newsletter 17-1

All photos from Beth Haim Ouderkerk by Laura Leibman, 2009.

Transcolonial Gravestone Trade

Occasionally there is a gravestone you having been waiting months to see. I just got back from a research trip in Barbados. One of the gravestones I had been most eager to visit while I was there was the stone of Samuel Hart (1773) in the Nidhe Israel Jewish Cemetery in Bridgetown. It was a classic New England stone displaced in a tropical paradise.

I had seen a tantalizing detail of Hart's stone on Evan Millner's Jewish Barbados blog and had recognized it as the work of William Stevens, a famous carver from Newport, Rhode Island. Many of Newport's early Jews came via Barbados, and throughout the eighteenth century, exchange between Newport and Barbados was crucial part of the circuits of the triangle trade. The triangle trade is usually thought of as focusing on sugar, rum, and slaves. Until my recent visit to Barbados, I hadn't fully appreciated to what extent that trade had also included gravestones. I knew that many Jews in the colonies imported tombstones from Amsterdam, London, and Venice. Hart's stone revealed that gravestones also traveled between the colonies.

Hart's stone is a wonderful example of the way in which colonial carvers tailored their stones to meet different markets. On the one hand, Hart's stone closely resembles the carvings made by Stevens on the 1775 table stone of Martha Malbone in Newport's Anglican cemetery. On the other hand, it also had some distinctively West Indian (and Jewish) features. Like some of the stones in Newport's Jewish cemetery, the inscription is in three languages: Hebrew, English, and Spanish. The way these languages were arranged on Hart's stone, however, had a distinctively West Indian flair. Like many Jewish gravestones in Barbados and Jamaica, the English inscription is used as a border around the stone, a feature not found in Newport's Jewish cemetery (see stone below from Jamaica that also uses the English border motif) .


Hart's stone highlights his membership in both the New England and West Indian Jewish communities. Although Hart died in Bridgetown Barbados of a "Purtrid Fever," Hart was a member of an important Newport Jewish family. The Spanish portion of the inscription underscores Hart's Newport connection: it tell us Hart is "de la Ciuda[d] de Newyork /Mercador quien havia Nuevamente Arrivado de New Port en la Colonia de Rhode - / Island en Nueva Inglaterra / America del Norte" [from the city of New York, Merchant who has recently arrived from Newport in the colony of Rhode Island in New England, North America]. When members of Newport's Jewish community died in Boston New York, or the Southern Colonies, their extended family often shipped their bodies back to Newport to be buried with their kin. Although Hart was not shipped home (probably to prevent the spread of whatever caused his putrid fever), his family drew connections to him through using a Newport carver. At the same time, the West Indian style of the English border embedded him within the funerary tradition of the community with which he was buried.

Hart was not the only New Englander to die in Barbados and be commemorated with a New England slate stone. While I obsessed over Hart's stone, Barbados historian Karl Watson pointed out that there were several other New England stones in the nearby Anglican cemetery of St. Michael's Cathedral. At St. Michael's, the oldest stones have been moved onto walkway that skirts the edge of the church. Once upright markers, the stones now lie flat with their once buried jagged edges exposed like the roots of teeth. Sometimes the tops of the stones are now buried partway under the church's thick walls. Like Hart's tombstone, these markers often explicitly emphasize the deceased's connection to the New England. They are also a poignant reminder of how family members sought to tie the dead to their homeland, even when they were buried thousands of miles away.

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.

Graveyard Cats

This post is dedicated to the felines of the Atlantic World: those sun-loving souls who spend their days (and nights) lounging in the cemeteries that grace the Atlantic Rim. This week I feature two cemetery cats: Wunzie (Newport) and Iyar (Ouderkerk aan de Amstel) as well as their sepulchral companions, the lions carved onto Beth Haim Ouderkerk gravestones.

Cat Number One: Wunzie. Officially, Wunzie lives down the street from the Trinity Church Cemetery in Newport, RI. Last time I was in Newport, however, Wunzie spent most of her time sunning herself on table stones and chasing bugs among the upright markers. A black and white DSH (domestic short hair: veterinary speak for "cat mutt") with a sparkling personality, Wunzie likes to ham it up for the camera. Here are a few shots of her in her favorite haunt. If anyone in Newport knows how Wunzie is doing, let me know!

Gravestone Symbols: the Hand of God

According to Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, belief in the corporeality of God is a heresy. Why then do gravestones from the Jewish Atlantic World often feature the hand of God cutting down the tree of life? In even more extreme cases, God was presented on gravestones as a fully anthropomorphized figure, such as on the gravestone of Samuel Senior Teixeria (Amsterdam 1717), and the gravestones of Yosiyahu Raphael Castillo (Barbados, 1698) and Esther Hana de Meza (Cassipora Cemetery, Suriname 1745).

The Hand of God has a long history in Jewish art. One of the earliest examples has been found in the wall paintings of the Synagogue at Dura Europos. Created around 244 CE, the synagogue at Dura Europos (Syria) was uncovered by archaeologists in 1932. The rich wall paintings were remarkably well preserved, because the synagogue had been filled in with dirt in an effort to protect the town from a Persian attack in 256 CE. Although at first the artwork made archaeologists skeptical skeptical that the structure was Jewish, today the wall decorations are considered one of the most famous examples of early synagogue art. Many of the frescoes are widely reprinted, particularly a Purim Procession featuring Mordechai. Less commonly reprinted, and perhaps more troubling, is the Akeidah (binding of Isaac) scene from above the Torah niche which features the hand of God staying the sacrifice (figure above at right).

Whereas the hand in the Dura Europos fresco prevents a death, the hands featured on the tombstones from the Jewish Atlantic World usually represent a life being ended. The motif can also be found in Kabbalistically-influenced Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe from the same era, though more commonly a flower is being picked, rather than a tree cut down. This is probably an illustration of the verse from Shir haShirim (Song of Songs) 6:2, “My beloved has gone down into his garden…to gather lilies.” Ruth Ellen Gruber provides an example from the Sadagora Cemetery in the Ukraine of the flower motif. The cut flower motif can also be found on gravestones in the Jewish Atlantic World, usually for those who died young, and occasionally the hand of God is replaced either by a putto (as in the example at the left from the gravestone of Marius Penso (1889, Beit Haim Berg Altena, Curacao; photograph Laura Leibman) or the angel of death (see example below)

Although cut flowers also represent a life cut short, the cutting of the tree has a slightly different resonance. As scholar Aviva Ben-Ur notes, the tree of life has particular importance in Jewish mysticism. As "an ancient, widespread symbol representing the `promise of immortality and everlasting youth,'" the tree of life "variably signifies in Jewish tradition Judgment, the return to Edenic paradise, the future Temple, and Messianic Jerusalem" (Still Life: Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and West African Art and Form in Suriname’s Jewish Cemeteries, 56).

Jewish Themes: The Story of Esther

The book of Esther was particularly popular amongst conversos on the Iberian Peninsula. Many conversos kept the fast of Esther even when they kept few other Jewish holidays or traditions. New Christian women tended to identify with Queen Esther: like the Queen, many conversas had to submit to a gentile husband, either literally or figuratively (Catholic Spain).

Once conversos left the Iberian Peninsula and were free to practice Judaism openly, Purim remained an important holiday. The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam contains many fine examples of richly illustrated Megillot, one of which is featured in the video below. The reading is from the Portuguese Esnoga.


Gravestones from the Jewish Atlantic World also feature scenes from the story of Esther. It was not uncommon for stones to feature Biblical scenes, particularly ones related to the name of the deceased. The detail of the stone at the top of the page is from the gravestone of Mordechay Hisquiau Namias de Crasto (1716) Beit Haim Blenheim, Curaçao. For the full stone and the inscription, see below. A similar scene appears in Beth Haim at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel on the stone of Moses de Mordechai Senior (1730) (left).


Classroom Resource:
Gravestone of Mordechay Hisquiau Namias de Crasto (1716) Beit Haim Blenheim, Curaçao. This is one of the finest examples of gravestone art from the Jewish Atlantic World. Ask students what they think the different images mean and why they belong together on one stone. Why do you think the carver (or the family who requested the stone) chose this particular scene from the book of Esther?
Questions for Readers:
Do these stones surprise you, and if so how?