Arnold and Deanne Kaplan collection of Early American Judaica,
Consider also an unusual record of Jewish entrepreneurial activity in the form of handwritten baptismal certificates from Pennsylvania, dating from the 1850s. These Taufscheine, written in Gothic roman letters and signed in Yiddish, are further "Judaized" with a Star of David. They were in...
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| Summary: | Consider also an unusual record of Jewish entrepreneurial activity in the form of handwritten baptismal certificates from Pennsylvania, dating from the 1850s. These Taufscheine, written in Gothic roman letters and signed in Yiddish, are further "Judaized" with a Star of David. They were inscribed by Martin Wetzler, the Jewish scrivener hired by a Christian to produce the text. One truly extraordinary find in the Kaplan Collection is the passport of Sabato Morais, issued by the Italian Consulate in London in 1854. Morais, a Sephardic intellectual born in the Italian port city of Livorno in 1823, came to Philadelphia from London in 1851. He is best known as the principal founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary and was widely recognized as the leading voice of enlightened observant Judaism in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Morais' son Henry, before his father left London for Philadelphia he gave his passport to Giuseppe Mazzini, the exiled leader of the Risorgimento then living in London, so Mazzini could travel under the cover of the name of a Jewish man from Livorno back to the Continent. While this passport does not decisively confirm that story, its very existence does support the claim implicitly: Morais clearly did not have a passport on his return to Italy via London in 1854. Found in the Kaplan Collection is this finely printed new one, completed by hand, issued to him so he could return to his native home for what would turn out to be the last time The heart and greatest part of the Kaplan Collection is focused on Jewish commercial life in North America during the nineteenth century. This business history corpus consists of manuscript ledger books, account books, trade catalogues, merchant tokens, especially from the Civil War era, and thousands of bill heads, broadsides, receipts, and commercial letters, invoices, contracts, and deeds. We find trade documents related to the slave trade and slave holding by Jews as well as documents concerning enslaved Jews and indentured Jewish servants. One conflicted Jewish merchant ship owner whose ships were used to transport slaves donated $200 in 1829 to a society to aid freed slaves. Indeed, in the Kaplan Collection we face uncomfortable evidence about Jews in the slave trade as slave holders not only during the colonial period but well into the nineteenth century. As during the American Revolution, when some Jews remained loyal to the Crown and others embraced the Republican cause, so too do we find evidence of the divided loyalties, both geographically and ideologically, of Jews on opposite sides of the U.S. Civil War. These sources will make it possible for scholars to chart multiple constellations of complex economic, social, religious, racial, and intercommunal relationships. The collection is especially strong, and deliberately so, in material from Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. There are biographical reasons for this collecting emphasis. Arnold and Deanne Kaplan themselves hail from Pittsburgh and lived for many decades near Philadelphia. More important, however, is the fact that this mid-Atlantic breadbasket state and its historic port city functioned since colonial times as a major center of Jewish life. Philadelphia, once considered the "capital" of Jewish America, holds a special place in the Kaplan Collection because so many of the basic patterns of Jewish institutional life were born there. 2 Yet it is worth re-emphasizing here that the Kaplan Collection is hemispheric and continental in scope. It contains many important documents about Jewish life in Canada and the Caribbean and about pioneer Jewish communities and business in the western United States. Indeed, primary sources trace the growth of Jewish communities in the U.S. South, Midwest, and Far West throughout the nineteenth century. Among the noteworthy sources, for example, are a set of five trade cards advertising the Levi Strauss clothing business, which supplied the pants worn by miners during the California gold rush. Perhaps no single figure better embodies the local, national, and international scope of leadership that emanated from Philadelphia than Isaac Leeser (1806⁰́₃68). Leeser, who was born in Westphalia and spent his teens in Richmond, Virginia, lived the majority of his life in Philadelphia. In his role as editor of the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, the first American Jewish monthly newspaper (1843⁰́₃69), he was in regular contact with subscribers around the continental United States, in Canada and the Caribbean islands, and across the Atlantic. Widely regarded as the most important antebellum American Jewish leader, Leeser pioneered many of the religious publications and institutional forms of Anglophone Jewish communal life. These include English translations of the Pentateuch ( Humash) and complete Hebrew Bible ( Tanakh), as well as the founding of the American Jewish Publication Society, the Hebrew Education Society, the Jewish Foster Home, the United Jewish Charities, the Jewish Hospital, and a rabbinical seminary called Maimonides College. There are over four hundred autograph letters mostly sent to and some from Isaac Leeser in the Kaplan Collection. This is the largest private collection ever amassed. These manuscript sources have been inaccessible to scholarship for decades and now have the potential to change the way the history of American Judaism has been written. Leeser's story above all is about the advancement of an enlightened, observant form of Judaism in the Americas. While most histories focus on assimilation, secularization, or reform, the Kaplan Collection paints a different picture of constellations of religious renaissance and revival. There also is a discrete corpus of over four thousand exquisitely illustrated Victorian trade (or advertising) cards, mainly dating from the 1870s through the 1890s, which advertise Jewish-owned businesses. This subcollection, which was the special passion of Deanne Kaplan, constitutes another unique body of research material. The only prima facie evidence for claiming the Jewish identity of the business advertised on the card is the name of the owner. Rather than merely (and erroneously) assume the Jewish identity of a name, whenever possible Arnold Kaplan painstakingly researched and verified the Jewish identity of the business by careful comparison with the records (synagogue membership lists, burial records, etc.) of Jewish organizations in the local communities in which the businesses existed. The Kaplans took a keen interest in all types of artistic expressions, visual as well as craft, of Jewish life in the Americas. Their collection includes original oil paintings that date from the eighteenth century, most from the nineteenth century, some in their original frames, as well as textile samplers, pastels, watercolors, handwritten sketches, and lithographs. There are three-dimensional, museum-quality artifacts, including presentation silver. The collection contains rare flatware with the stamps of Jewish silversmiths, and silver bowls of historic significance, such as one inscribed and given to a member of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites (the first Jewish lobbying/defense association, established in New York City in 1859). There also are examples of the first American glass ever blown to make bottles with raised Hebrew lettering. Among the unusual three-dimensional artifacts is a Civil War⁰́₃era pistol owned by Jonas Levy, an officer in the U.S. Navy and the younger brother of Uriah P. Levy, the nation's first Jewish naval commodore. This pistol, as well as an oil painting of a naval ship, and a shaving mug, were owned by Jefferson Monroe Levy, the son of Jonas Levy, and were kept at Monticello. Jefferson's uncle Uriah Levy had purchased Monticello in 1834 During the Civil War, Monticello was seized by the Confederacy and sold but afterwards was reclaimed by Jefferson Levy after a lengthy court battle. On repossession, Monticello was in a state of terrible disrepair. Jefferson Levy then undertook to restore the historic home at great personal expense. The Kaplan Collection has numerous documents relating to the Levy family and the fate of Monticello. The Kaplan Collection holds what may very well be the largest collection of early American Jewish photographs. These include photographs made by Jewish-owned photograph businesses, by Jewish photographers, or of American Jews themselves. Among the noteworthy photographs are Civil War-era photos, for example, of the devastation in Richmond, cartes de visite, portrait (or studio) photos, and dozens of stereographs, the nineteenth-century version of 3-D glasses. The collection extensively covers the career of Solomon Nunes Carvalho, a portrait painter and daguerreotypist who was one of the first commercial Jewish photographers in the United States and perhaps in the world. His career and adventures included accompanying Colonel John C. Fremont on a government-sponsored expedition across the Rocky Mountains to chart the potential for a transcontinental railroad. Carvalho also became famous for his oil painting of President Lincoln. While that painting is not in the Kaplan Collection, there are two oils by Carvalho as well as an exceptionally rare lithograph depicting the interior of the Beth Elohim Synagogue of Charleston, South Carolina, which had been destroyed by fire in April 1838. The lithograph was used to raise funds for rebuilding that house of worship. Though mainly focused on original manuscripts and unique fine and folk works of art, the Kaplan Collection also contains approximately three hundred and fifty volumes of rare printed books, serials, and pamphlets. Among them are a remarkable variety of landmark first edition imprints of Judaica Americana, such as Judah Monis's Hebrew grammar Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet [Ivrit, i.e., Hebrew]. Printed in Boston by Jonas Green in1735 with Hebrew font imported from London, this grammar is regarded as the first Hebrew textbook in colonial America. The Kaplan Collection also holds the second such grammar, authored by Samuel Sewall and printed in Boston in 1763, which is the only other Hebrew grammar published in North America before the nineteenth century. The grammars of Monis, a convert to Christianity, and Sewall, a Christian Hebraist, bear witness to the early Protestant American interest in the language of the Old Testament. In fact, students were required to study Hebrew as part of the early standard curriculum at Harvard, where both men taught. Also found in the Kaplan rare print collection is the Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo [Suriname], 1788) by David Nassy, which contains the first history of the Jewish settlement of that Dutch colony. Nassy, a physician who came to Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, was able to treat the city's inhabitants successfully, defying the bloodletting methods of Benjamin Rush. The printed record of how he did it, based on his experiences treating the disease in tropical Suriname, is also in the collection: Observations on the Cause, Nature, and Treatment of the Epidemic Disorder, Prevalent in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Parker & Co. for M. Carey, 1793). Also noteworthy is the first children's book by a Jewish author (Isaac Gomez), which is accompanied by a printed approbation from former President John Adams pasted inside its cover; the first Jewish almanac ( lu'ah), printed by Moses Lopez (the Kaplan copy once belonged to Rebecca Gratz and contains her handwritten notes); and what is, according to Jonathan Sarna, probably the first bar mitsvah sermon printed in the United States. The collection of rare early American newspapers includes reprintings of the famous letters of congratulations sent by the Jewish congregations of the new republic to George Washington on the occasion of his inauguration as the first president of the United States. Found here is perhaps the most important exchange in American Jewish letters, that between Moses Seixas, representing the Jews of Newport, and Washington, in which he famously echoes Seixas' phrase "to bigotry no sanction." The phrase heralded a new epoch for Jews as citizens of a republic entitled to the same rights and privileges as all other (male) citizens. Remarkably, the Kaplan Collection holds copies, some in mint condition, of the contemporary newspaper reprintings of the letters from all six cities (Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah). The Kaplan Collection also has the first printing of Benjamin Nones's "I am a Jew, I am a Republican, but I am poor" speech. In what is perhaps the most famous speech in the history of early American Jewish oratory, Nones, the French-born Revolutionary War patriot and veteran who fought under the command of the Polish General Pulaski against the British, inverts the scathing epithets hurled at him by his Federalist enemies to defend the dignity and constitutional rights of Jews in the United States. Not only is this printed version in the collection, but so too is the original court petition, written on vellum, and signed by Nones's creditors. In it, Nones attests that he is not bankrupt and had paid off the very debts that he references in that speech. Other newspaper accounts, pamphlets, and broadsides bear witness to painful episodes of resistance to Jewish civil rights such as occurred during the legislative debates over the Maryland Jew Bill to rectify the exclusion of Jews from serving in that state's assembly, political infighting during the Jacksonian era, and in other moments of anti-Jewish antagonism, both social and political, such as the Mortara Affair in 1858, an international uproar caused by the Vatican's defense of the secret baptism of a Jewish infant who later was taken from his parents to be raised as a Catholic. There are also numerous volumes and individual issues of important Jewish periodicals such as Leeser's Occident as well as the American Israelite, edited by Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of the American Reform movement of Judaism, and Leeser's principal adversary in the battle over the character of Jewish religious practice in the United States. 1 Jonathan Sarna, "An Eighteenth Century Hebrew Lu'ah from Pennsylvania," American Jewish Archives Journal 57 (2005), 25-27. 2 Murray Friedman, ed., When Philadelphia Was the Capital of Jewish America (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1993). Scope and contents note originally appeared in a slightly different form in: Arthur Kiron, "Introduction," in Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History, 1555-1890: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica, ed. Arthur Kiron (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica contains more than eleven thousand items. These items range in date from the sixteenth century to 1977, with the vast majority of the collection consisting of items from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Geographically, the collection encompasses the entire Western hemisphere in the period before mass migration at the end of the nineteenth century. This fact alone sets it apart from most professional American Jewish historiography, which has focused on the social history of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European immigrants and their descendants who propelled Jewish population growth in the United States after 1882. The Kaplan Collection's earliest documents date from the sixteenth century and relate to Spanish American colonial settlement in Lima, Peru, as well as the establishment of the Inquisition in Mexico City. Among the most noteworthy holdings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are original maps and engravings illustrating Jewish merchant settlement in Dutch Surinam, the Caribbean Islands, and the British Atlantic. A number of critically important eighteenth-century political documents, print and manuscript, tell how colonial Jews first were offered naturalization under the British Crown and later acquired citizenship with the establishment of the United States. One finds, for example, the original printing of a landmark document of Jewish emancipation passed by the British Parliament in 1739 that granted the same rights to Jews living in the British colonies, or "Plantations," as to subjects living in England. The passage of the so-called Plantation Act was motivated in part by the need to populate the empire's overseas colonies. Notably, colonial Jews, as well as Quakers and other dissenters, received these rights well in advance of their co-brethren in England. Religious or social prejudices were overruled by the mercantile exigencies of an empire built on profit. In 1753, by contrast, when Parliament passed another act extending the opportunity for naturalization to Jews living in England itself, non-Jewish merchants heatedly protested this "Jew Bill," as it was called. A year later the act was repealed. The Kaplan Collection holds the original printings of the most important pamphlets for and against the Jew Bill. One related yet hitherto unstudied document in the Kaplan Collection is an issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette in which Benjamin Franklin saw fit to reprint a letter in favor of the Jew Bill that first appeared in the English periodical The Gentlemen's Magazine. The letter prominently appeared on the front page of the Gazette and occupied a column and a quarter of it. But the Kaplan Collection crucially provides a far broader context for appreciating and interpreting these debates. The collection amply documents the web of eighteenth-century colonial British, French, and Dutch merchant trade spanning the Atlantic and the continental interior. For example, there are autograph letters and documents related to the Gratz family, including Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), the founder of the Hebrew Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838. Rebecca's father Michael came to Pennsylvania from Prussian Silesia with his brother Bernard in the 1750s. The Kaplan Collection holds one of their most treasured heirlooms: a Bible in which the Gratz family kept its handwritten records of births and deaths, most of which are in Rebecca's hand; a poignant exception is the one noting her own passing. The Gratz brothers made their fortune through the establishment of a trade network that stretched from New Orleans to Quebec via the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Seaboard. When the French & Indian Wars put their maritime commerce in jeopardy, they shifted their trade inland to the western frontier in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kentucky. After the defeat of the French, the British Parliament imposed a series of intolerable taxation burdens upon the colonists to pay for the Wars. In response, the Gratzes joined merchants, including other colonial Jews, to sign the Non-Importation Resolutions of 1765 in protest. During the Revolutionary War, the Gratz brothers supplied the Continental Army. Dozens of original commercial receipts, legal documents, and personal letters illustrate the extent of their business interests and the complex web of relationships, Jewish and non-Jewish, in which they were bound up. A 1765 correspondence between a colonial merchant named Moses Hays and Michael Gratz, for example, illustrates the complexity of the family and commercial ties that linked Jews along the Atlantic Seaboard. It concerns Hays' sister Caty and her husband Abraham Sarzedos, who had become a freeman in New York City in 1753. Sarzedos began farming independently somewhere in Georgia in 1764 and later would settle in Savannah, Georgia. The letter also mentions Isaac DeCosta, a merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, and another merchant named (Elias) Miranda from Curacao, who had formed a business partnership with Bernard Gratz. An upcoming business journey to Curacao via these British Atlantic port cities by Michael Gratz occasions Hays to enlist his friend's help in forwarding letters to the relevant parties. These kinds of interlocking relationships are also extensively documented in the ledger book of David Salisbury Franks, a colonial merchant from Philadelphia who lived in Montreal in the years leading up to the American Revolution. The Franks business ledger not only records his transactions with hundreds of merchants throughout eastern Canada and the upper Midwest but also discloses the fact that Franks paid nuns who ran his lodgings for the week in 1775 in which he was imprisoned by British forces for publicly protesting in favor of the colonists. Isaac de Pinto (1717-87), by contrast, strongly opposed the colonial rebellion and published in 1776 in the Hague what may be the earliest printed response by a Jew to news of the Revolution: Reponse de Mr. J. De Pinto, Aux Observations d'un Homme Impartial. These kinds of original manuscript and printed sources, in short, document vibrant commercial, political, and personal relationships from Canada to the Caribbean during the eighteenth century and indeed across the Atlantic. One of the most significant early Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts in the Kaplan Collection is an eighteenth-century Jewish calendar ( lu'ah) inscribed by Abraham ben Eliezer Ka"ts, during the American Revolution, and given to a Jewish woman named Rachel for her use. As Jonathan Sarna explains, 1 the calendar enabled Jews to keep track of their lunar cycle of monthly worship even amidst the dislocations of war that sent Jews fleeing to Lancaster when the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777. The lu'ah attests to the enduring manner by which Jews were able to mark time and thus preserve the regular cycles of their distinctive ritual practices. Another seemingly mundane item is a commercial receipt signed by "Lady [Martha] Washington" and dated 1790 in New York City, then the first capital of the United States. Apparently, this is the only extant commercial record between a Jew (Solomon Levy) and the first family of the United States. Other outstanding items document early Jewish merchant life. These include the apprentice license issued by Benjamin Hart to Samuel Judah in Montreal on March 3, 1778, and a 1726 estate inventory, one of the earliest in existence, signed by a Jewish woman. When she submitted the inventory to the British colonial court, Rachel De Lucena was allowed to swear her oath on the Pentateuch rather than on the full Christian Bible because, as the document explains, she is a member of the "Hebrew nation." Also found in the collection is the correspondence of Ezekiel Solomons, a fur trader whose business network in the early nineteenth century stretched from Upper Michigan to Montreal |
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| Physical Description: | 65 linear feet |