"The confidence placed in you is of the greatest magnitude": representations of paternal authority in early Jewish American letters.

ABSTRACT

This essay examines letters from eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Jewish American fathers to their sons for insight into a nascent Jewish American literary patrimony. Father-son letters, whose subject matter clustered around four basic themes--family, business, civic affairs, and Jewish life--enable extended consideration of how the men of one generation sought, through a range of highly stylized and mostly derivative rhetorical performances, to influence their successors against the backdrop of historical change and adaptation to the changing conditions of North American life in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Notwithstanding their occasional use or invocation of a Hebrew word or phrase, these letters spoke in the language of and bore witness to the Anglo-American milieu from which they emerged. In other words, I don't claim them as direct markers of Jewish "difference." Nonetheless, the eagerness with which these letters relayed the writers' strong wishes for their sons' moral development as autonomous individuals and, at the same time, imparted firm guidance for their pursuit of familial business interests prefigures a pattern that will be familiar to readers of twentieth-century Jewish American texts. The letters offer insight into how Jewish men in the early American republic attempted to uphold familial and communal interests while negotiating the larger culture's embrace of an individualistic ethos.

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To his dying day, Judah Hays bore in his pocket a letter written to him by his father, Moses Michael Hays. Hays's message to his son conveyed a fittingly paternal combination of admonition and confidence. "It will be ... incumbent upon you to be very careful and attentive," Hays wrote, "to guard and keep from any reflection on your integrity and the principles of rectitude and honour which I know are fully imbibed in you." Expressing "the hopes and expectations" of its writer, the letter bore a faint and perhaps inadvertent echo of the medieval-era Hebrew ethical will. (1) Its motivating force, however, was the dominant spirit of American entrepreneurialism; Moses Michael Hays was launching his son on an independent career that would take him far from home. He was future-oriented and past-obsessed, affectionate and authoritarian, complimentary and severe. Most important, his letter expressed both a sense of its writer's agency and of his powerlessness. He was hardly alone in this regard--as one recent cultural historian argues, letter writing was a means by which many eighteenth-century American men coped with "the elusive process of trying to reconcile desire and reality--agency and constraint." (2) For evidence of widespread Jewish participation in an integrally Anglo-American literary milieu, we need look no farther than the epistolary record of fathers writing to their sons. Written during a period of American history when "aged persons began to lose much of the respect that they had commanded" (3) and "Jewish families [in America] saw control over their sons diminish," (4) these letters offer unique insight into a developing Jewish American literary sensibility.

Letters have garnered consistent attention over the years from historians and literary critics alike, both within and well beyond the parameters of a recognizably Jewish American canon. "As archival documents," writes William Merrill Decker, "letters have never suffered neglect; they have been read as primary sources of biography, and history, as texts brimming with historic content." (5) Scholars who in recent decades have sought to challenge hegemonic notions of "grand narratives" explore letters as sources of insight into "codes of behavior and language, particularly in social and cultural history" (6) In the hands of Jewish American historians like Jacob Marcus, Jonathan Sarna, Hasia Diner, and others, the letters of early American Jews have been conduits of all manner of valuable cultural and historical information--details about their economic, social, and religious lives, insights into the challenges and rewards they faced in an unprecedentedly tolerant America that willingly guaranteed their individual liberty but often sapped their communal resilience. Literary scholars who have tried to tell the story of early Jewish American letters, whether through the production of critical essays or through the still more deliberate venue of readers and anthologies, have also relied upon these documents as sources of material much in the same way that scholars of early American literature have typically included such documents as the letters of John and Abigail Adams in their treatments of American literary origins. The letters I have examined in this essay allow for extended consideration of how early Jewish American men attempted to deploy their rhetorical authority both in keeping with and in occasional subtle departure from the practices of other American letter writers of their day.

The letters of early Jewish American fathers to their sons contain few literary anomalies or surprises. Nonetheless, the letters' nearly universal demonstration of their writers' tenuous hold on their sons' attentions affords a fascinating glimpse of how Jewish men of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to retain their authority in the very act of negotiating their impending obsolescence. Notwithstanding their status as publically affiliated Jews in an overwhelmingly gentile society, the fathers who wrote these letters and the sons who received them look to have been wholehearted participants in what Konstantin Dierks describes as a veritable "transformation" of middle class American epistolary discourse and, for that matter, commercial communication (2). Whether they were addressing themselves to family matters, business concerns, or civic affairs, the writers of these letters sought to wield power even as they felt it slipping away from them, and they produced a comparatively large body of work, thanks in large part to the increasing reach of the postal service. (7) Their letters offer a telling index of how Jewish fathers, like their gentile counterparts, employed familiar communication as a means of articulating their paternal authority against the backdrop of changing historical conditions. Father-son letters were expressions both of wishful thinking and of assertiveness; their very existence constituted proof of the writers' physical absence even as their content and form made every attempt to be a direct expression of his will.

For better or worse, the letter writers and recipients whose record I examine in this essay were members of a privileged elite, and notwithstanding their identity as Jews, while they all experienced different levels of acceptance in America (and, for their own part, sought different levels of assimilation), they shared certain factors in common. The letters were all produced by twelve individuals during the period between 1743 and 1825, though the bulk of them were written during the latter half of this eighty-two-year period. (8) Each of the letters was written by a merchant or man of means, and the younger recipients of these letters were themselves merchants, or would-be merchants approaching full adulthood. The twelve letter writers were of mixed backgrounds, Jewishly speaking. Eight were Ashkenazim, three were Sephardim, and one was of mixed Sephardic and Askenazic parentage. Their home cities included New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, Savannah, Norfolk, and Boston. Their Jewish affinities seem to have been central not only to their sense of personal and familial identity but to their business careers. With few exceptions, the letters contained at least brief instances of Jewish content (references to imminent holidays, for instance) and an occasional Hebrew word or phrase (usually rendered in English orthography). More frequently still, however, they were full of references to other members of the extended network of Jewish merchants throughout the Atlantic world. Leaving aside the inevitable stylistic differences that arise in a sample whose contents span over eight decades, the degree of continuity from one generation to the next was remarkable. Circumstances and topics shifted over the years from 1743 to 1825, and Jewish life itself underwent a considerable transformation from provisional acceptance to (in at least some states) legal establishment, but the central preoccupations of fatherly counsel remained quite stable. As business partners and confidants, the recipients of all thirty-nine letters I viewed (with a single exception) (9) all seem to have earned their fathers' broad approval even as their actions occasionally provoked their doubt, skepticism, or even chastisement.

Of the twelve letter writers discussed, the only one to produce a significant body of written work (i.e., significant enough to have been taken into account by previous historians) outside of his correspondence was Levi Sheftall, of Savannah, Georgia, who--after copying his father Benjamin's diary for family posterity, went on to maintain his own family record from the early 1760s until his death in 1809. In the main, Sheftall's diary was primarily composed of brief entries recording births, marriages, and marriages within the Sheftall clan and extended Jewish community of Savannah. In his later years, he included as well some reminiscences of memorable weather events he had witnessed during his lifetime, as well as the occasional legend-worthy curiosity. In 1803, for instance, he recounted an unusual visit he paid to a local cemetery:

   I was called on by Wm Stephens to know if I could recoil, whether
   his Grandfather was buried in the Church or were Major Horton was
   buried, I told him that Major Horton was buried on the right hand
   as you went into the Church, but I could not be sure as I was a
   very little boy at the time of his death, he told me that in
   digging the foundation they found part of a Coffin & some bones,
   and wished me to go & see them, I told him that Major Horton was a
   tall man & had red hair, I went, and on Examining the parts of the
   Coffin I found it to be Major Hortons as a W and I the II was to be
   seen, aged 42 years. I examined the skull bone & there found a
   little red hair about the size of a 1/4 dollar, I make this
   memorandum only out of Curiosity, that hair that has been in the
   ground upwards of 48 years Should keep its couler and looke the
   Same as if it never had been under ground.

Such idiosyncratic and artful examples notwithstanding, for the most part, the men who wrote the letters I viewed for this essay probably did not think of themselves as imaginative writers in any formal sense. Several of them, most notably including Moses Michael Hays and Moses Myers, left rather large bodies of correspondence and business records. If we view them today through a literary-critical framework, we do so without any prompting from the authors themselves.

This is not to say, however, that the letters were so completely formulaic as to be lacking in strong sentiment or awkward emotional content. Even letters whose primary purpose seems to have been the conveyance of fairly quotidian content were laced with the occasional reference to the writers' powerful feelings of affection toward his distant addressee. Accordingly, two of the total of thirty-nine letters I read seem to have been written with the deliberate intention of dispensing extended life lessons and worldly advice (Moses Michael Hays's letter to his son Judah was one of these); at their outset, these letters mirrored the genre that Lawrence Fine and other scholars have referred to as the premodern Jewish ethical will, but in their latter portions, the advice they imparted became very particular, and they took on an aspect of "ordinary" correspondence. The remaining thirty-seven letters quite frequently contained "life lessons," at least in small measure. Levi Sheftall's 1805 letter "To My Son that intends to be a Doctor," for instance, consisted entirely of the former's remedies for cancer. The letters were evidently occasioned by a range of circumstances, most of which were fairly ordinary--the receipt of a letter from the addressee was usually the first thing mentioned by the writer, who then went on to outline such topics as family news, business endeavors, and so forth. Lesser themes included political developments, domestic concerns, and items of controversy within the larger Jewish community. In my own reading of the letters as items of interest in the development of an early Jewish American literary tradition, I have concentrated on four specific aspects of their content: personal and familial matters; business concerns, particularly in connection with the extended network of Jewish merchants; political and civic affairs; and Judaic interest. Nearly all of the letters contained material in at least three, if not all four, of these subject areas, at least in some small measure. To the extent that the letters sought to impart some version of fatherly counsel, their consistent sounding of these four subject areas constituted one of their most effective means of doing so. Each of the letter writers appealed to his son to uphold his legacy by invoking such concerns. Concentration on such matters in itself enabled these fathers both to model and explain their paternal selves. As Konstantin Dierks points out in reference to one such (gentile) writer in Petersburg, Virginia, letter writing offered a father the "opportunity not only to affirm his affection for his family, but also to remind them of how he worked" (166). If it achieved its purpose, the letter would present both intimidation and encouragement in roughly equal measures.

Among the most widely known bodies of epistolary material written about by Jewish American historians, none has rivaled in either literary or historical significance the thirty-seven letters that Abigaill Levy Franks, of New York, wrote to her son Naphtali, who had left his place of birth in 1733 to live in London at the age of eighteen. (10) For what it is worth, one of the earliest examples in the provisional canon of Jewish literature in America is that of a mother speaking across the eternal divide of both space and time to her son (Abigaill never saw Naphtali again after his departure for London). As Edie Gelles writes, "Abigaill Levy Franks' letters are powerful conveyances" that "charm" and "inform" They are "irreverent," "opinionated," and--taken altogether--they are should be considered "small masterpieces" (xv-xvi). Most important, the letters' conversational tone reminds us of their power to imagine and project a relationship, to carry the past forward into the present and future, to attempt to instill a legacy. Abigaill Franks's letters also conveyed their speaker's longing, her evident inability to exert her parental will over their faraway recipient. "As time went on," writes historian Doris Groshen Daniels, Abigaill Franks's letters "contained less advice and more complaints about her son's negligence in writing of his activities" (308).

A lesser-known but comparably sized body of early Jewish American letters was written by Gershom Seixas, the hazan of New York's Shearith Israel, to his daughter Sarah Kursheedt, who settled in Richmond, Virginia, after marrying Jacob Kursheedt. (11) Between 1813 and 1815, Seixas is known to have written sixteen letters to Sarah, each of which--like those of Abigaill Levy Franks--proffers a wealth of historical detail and literary interest. Although Seixas was not a formally trained rabbi, he was as knowledgeable a Judaic scholar as might be found in America during his period. Indeed, his son-in-law, whom he often addressed indirectly in the letters to Sarah, may have been his only American rival in this respect. Be that as it may, where Abigaill Levy Franks bore consistent witness to the affairs of New York's small Jewish community and made occasional references to Jewish holidays, Seixas's life clearly centered around Jewish observance, and his letters were rife not only with references to the affairs of the shul, but to matters of Jewish theological interest and, most important, they were marked by extended stretches in Hebrew. (12) Surprisingly, though Seixas's letters were all written during the course of the War of 1812, they made only scant reference to it, and when they were not detailing synagogue matters concentrated almost entirely on domestic affairs, such as the health of family members (including Seixas himself), their financial concerns, visitors to the household, and so forth. The Seixas letters comprise one of the most detailed and sustained bodies of early Jewish American discourse on the subject of Judaism and Jewish practice. As such, however, they constitute an anomaly. Readers in search of a more "typical" early Jewish American perspective will find that their interests are more appropriately served by the letters of more fully "assimilated" merchants whose treatment of Jewish subjects was more perfunctory.

Notwithstanding the rich literary texture of Abigaill Levy Franks's letters to her son and the intriguing historical and theological content of Gershom Seixas's letters to his daughter (not to mention an extensive range of hundreds of other letters that were written among the members of many early Jewish American families), I have chosen to concentrate on father-son letters in this essay because of the particular implications that they bear for the development and direct invocation of an intergenerational legacy. In father-son letters, the performative aspect was overt. Both the writer and recipient were permanent inhabitants of a public sphere that exercised a managing sway over their entire behavior and self-image. Social pressure was so constant a factor in shaping the form and content of these letters that, despite their ostensibly private provenance, they came as close as such documents could ever come to being public. And, as so many of the letters attest, the fathers' power was by no means assured, no matter what their public stature may have been. Nothing is more intrinsic to letter writing than the fact of the physical separation between writer and recipient. As Doris Groshen Daniels points out, "distance diminished authority" among these highly itinerant Jewish mercantile families, "even when sons acted as commercial agents for their fathers" (387-88). The overriding feeling in the letters, even when their subject matter itself appeared to be fairly quotidian in nature, was of the writer's eagerness to achieve a result that was in all likelihood beyond his means to achieve.

Whether or not they felt authority being wrested away from them, these fathers' letters to their sons were expressions of will, or at least of the writers' determinative intentions, and those intentions proceeded from their status as progenitors who felt an urgent need to demonstrate and assert their authority even as it was being eroded in the public, if not the private sphere. In "a time of bewildering geographical mobility, economic metamorphosis, and political upheaval," as Dierks puts it, American elites "turned to letter writing to accommodate themselves to an increasingly mobile society where social bonds were fragile and social position was uncertain" (2). Accordingly, some writers, like Aaron Hart, of Montreal, had a tendency (perhaps in Hart's case, owing in part to his difficulties with expression in English) to compose entire paragraphs in the imperative. As he instructed his son Moses regarding the latter's imminent return to Canada from New York State, he issued commands in halting fashion: "You will write from Burlington [Vermont] and by all apertances on the raod ... for you cane at all times find the time to write if you will write the paper [and] postage will cost no more than a letter with noting But I am in hast." Others, like the apparently more indulgent Moses Myers, of Norfolk, Virginia, sounded more expansive than demanding, frequently asking his son Samuel (then a student at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg) if he needed more funds for his tuition, room, and board. "You must not my dear Sam be surprised if I am overconscious respecting you," Moses wrote on March 9, 1808. "It flows from an unbounded affection & anxiety to experience from you in my old days that blessed happiness which I am certain you will afford me." What choice did the recipient of such letters have except to feel the weight of this familial "anxiety of influence," even when it seemed only to be inviting him to cash his father's checks? The momentous expression of paternal goodwill could be as heavy a burden to bear as the sharpest admonition, and a father's love for his son could be unwieldy in the extreme. At age ninety, when he first learned that John Quincy had won the presidency, John Adams employed similarly weighty phrasing in writing to his son: "The multitude of my thoughts, and the intensity of my feelings are too much for a mind like mine." (13)

Nowhere was the delicate balancing act between affection and expectation more apparent than in Isaac Moses's 1797 letter to his son Solomon, which was written on the eve of the latter's departure on a merchant voyage to the remote destination ports of Madras and Calcutta (American merchants were just beginning their South Asian trade at this historical juncture). Moses's commands to his son, which he numbered in the order of their apparent importance, each spoke to one element or another of these preoccupations with personal behavior and family life, business, civic matters, and Judaism. He urged his son to maintain his sexual composure ("6 Be cautious of Wooman, in the Country to which you go"), to avoid being taken advantage of financially ("8 the People you are Going Amongst are Reputed the Keenest in the world all your foresight is Requisite"), and to make all necessary efforts not to make impolitic statements of all sorts ("3 Avoid Disputes, never mind with Relegion or Politicks--enjoy your Own opinions and let every One do the same"). For this particular father, Judaism held the key to all of the other considerations, and it is in Isaac Moses's letter that we encounter the single most explicit pronouncement on this theme: "1st Let me recommend to your attention the Relegion of your Fathers House, and keep to every Ceremony as you Possibly can, place a strict reliance on the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and you will do well it is our first & only Solace."

At its outset, like Moses Michael Hays's letter to his son Judah, Isaac Moses's letter reads more like an ethical will than an ordinary family letter (its recipient was about to leave for India, after all). Until it reached its very practical conclusion, in which the writer provided a list of important business connections in India and detailed instructions for what to buy and who to buy it from, Isaac Moses's letter comprised a list of general injunctions to good behavior. As Lawrence Fine points out, ethical wills of the medieval era conformed to a similar pattern and often resembled the sorts of teachings ordinarily presented in hanhagot; in place of "speculative, theoretical, or analytical concerns," ethical wills and letters like that of Isaac Moses "comprise[d] lists that, in a terse format, enumerate[d] practical behavioral standards and expectations" (5).

Whatever their central content might have been, these letters sought to remind their addressees that, as distant as they were in space, they were still members of a family, and that the mutual ties of family connection could and should not be lost to them. Because the news in a given letter was being conveyed by a father, the centrality of his example, or authority, was the chief element and focus of attention. In 1811, Moses Myers, a highly successful Norfolk merchant, was attacked in public by a former (gentile) business associate of his, Richard Bowden. When the news of his father's public humiliation reached Moses's son Samuel, the latter hastened to the scene and killed Bowden with his revolver. Samuel was imprisoned, though only, as it happened, for a relatively short period of time. (14) Moses, meanwhile, sent a series of letters to his younger son John, who at the time was representing the family's business interests in London. "Several of our friends have written to you I presume the whole of the most unfortunate business which has caused us so much heart felt Grief as experienced for the last 10 days," Moses wrote on June 4, 1811. Since John had evidently already been told of the affair, Moses's writing was apparently an effort to impart a distinct message of another sort. The father was writing, so it seemed, in order to reinforce the bonds of familial duty and loyalty that had given rise to his elder son's sacrificial act, as well as the devotion of the Myers's (mostly gentile) friends in the community: "Life cannot be affected as we trust to the ultimate favorable [result]," he wrote. "Dear Sam has all the comfort and consolation that numerous friends can give. The feelings of sympathetic friends has been shown to such a degree as will astonish you." Moses Myers's letter outlined further acts of kindness on the part of family friends, as well as a few brief references to the state of the family's business ventures. A letter written one week later by Moses conveyed similar news, invoking once again in detail the degree of devotion that had been shown Samuel by the family's friends: "Indeed he is an astonishing favorite of all classes save a few Petifull beings."

In upholding and praising the acts of the older son to the younger one, Moses Myers was upholding not only family honor but, more specifically, his own paternal authority and centrality. And yet he had already admitted, in his comment that "life cannot be affected," that he was powerless to shape events. Moreover, in this particular episode, he himself had been unable to attend to his own defense. Samuel's act had in itself constituted direct evidence that the elder's authority, at least in the wider community, had its limits. Paternal agency, in other words, had relied entirely on its affirmation by the next generation. In his letters to John Myers, Moses dramatized his sense of himself as the patriarch and, at the same time, gave evidence of his having ceded that role to a younger player. His letters articulated aspiration, not only in their salutary expressions of hope that God might "bless and Protect" his son but in their invocations of "expectations," "wish[es]," and entreaties--in particular, Moses implored his returning son not to speak of the affair involving his elder brother to anyone upon his arrival in America. Moses Myers's correspondence with his son John gave voice, in other words, to a tightly wrought combination of self-assurance and insecurity. The recipient of these letters was an inadvertent witness to the complex construction of a literary precedent that by its very design was invoking its certainty and articulating its powerlessness to exercise influence, much less shape future events.

A deeper, more divisive family crisis, in which the threat to the collective was both external and internal, arose among the members of the Franks family of New York City. Our primary window into this central occurrence is Abigaill Levy Franks, whose morale was shattered by the outmarriage of her daughter Phila to Oliver Delancey in 1743. Phila had concealed her act of desertion for several months, remaining under her parents' roof for six months after the marriage itself had already taken place. For Abigaill, the daughter's act gave rise, as Edie Gelles puts it, to "an upheaval at her very core" (xxxvi). When Phila's father, Jacob Franks wrote to their son Naphtali in November of 1743, his expression was less heartbroken than Abigaill's had been but no less indicative of how momentously the daughter's actions had affected him. Jacob Franks did not readily admit defeat; in the face of Philas evident betrayal of both family and the Jewish faith, his letter maintained an equilibrium and composure that, once again, spoke to his eagerness to uphold his paternal authority and, at the same time, to his inability in practical terms to do more than hope for the best outcome. Where Abigaill spoke unequivocally--in her communication with Naphtali, she spoke of "the Severe Affliction I am under on the Conduct of that unhappy Girle" (123)--Jacob's apparent self-assuredness belied the fact that he was straining against the tide of reality. Like other (male) eighteenth-century letter writers in America, Franks's performance of paternal authority hinged on what Dierks calls "terms of personal agency"--the need, in his case, to avoid ceding control (6). "Am told Phila writes you by this shipe," he told Naphtali. "I have hardly had ye sight of her since she Left ye family am assured she heartily Repents what she has Don & Therefore often am Inclined to see her & give her Liberty to come to see us, but can Not Bring yr. Mother to come to it Therefore Desire ... to answer her Letter & to write yr. Mother ab[ou]t her." Phila may well have "Repented" of her action privately, but as Abigaill's letters to Naphtali and her own subsequent history attest, the daughter's regret for her actions would not to extend to her returning to Judaism or raising Jewish children. Perhaps out of his own reluctance to cede his own patriarchal agency, Jacob would not voice, at least in the one letter of his to Naphtali that survives, anything more than a mild form of distress. Instead, his letter enunciated whatever misgivings he may have had in the form of concern for Abigaill, and his entreaty to Naphtali, that he might serve as a mediator between the estranged mother and daughter, who were never to be reconciled or to see one another again.

An apparent impasse in family affairs also provided Aaron Hart with strong motivation to write his eldest son Moses in the 1780s. Aaron, who ran a trading post in Three Rivers, Quebec, had himself been born in London, of Ashkenazic parents. His letters were written with evident strain, but their halting quality only made their content and delivery seem the more urgent. Moses was evidently somewhere in the northern portion of New York State and contemplating a return north for a Passover holiday. Aaron was doubtful that his son would be able to complete the difficult journey in time, and instructed him instead to spend "the Pasach" with his Uncle Harry, whose own trading post was in Kingsbury, in the Hudson Valley south of Lake George. Doing so would obviate the need for the younger Hart to prepare his own matzah. While he was at it, however, Moses was to attempt to tie various loose ends with his uncle. Aaron Hart's apparent lack of facility with English did not hinder him from articulating his demands; if anything, it only served to invigorate his already aggressive mode of address: "You will take down all answers in writing concerning his affairs, as well as mine, and any thing else he is willing to communicate to you. You will tell him I shall be glad to see him and Mrs. Hart next summer, but should his coming here be any hindrance to him, he may appoint any certain day and I will meet him at St Johns [bury, Vermont]." Hart's reliance on his son to relay his wishes for retention of family contact did not end with unalloyed generosity of spirit, however. Underlying the extension of hospitality on his part was his own apparent bewilderment at Harry's having chosen to leave Three Rivers in the first place. One wonders how his son Moses might have felt as the recipient of these more pointed instructions: "You will ask your Uncle Harry in my name what he meant by moving from here to New York [State], as he must know very well that this place has supported a large family for years. I would be glad that he would send me his meaning." A few short lines later, after issuing another set of seemingly unrelated business instructions, Aaron repeated his earlier query for Uncle Harry, this time attaching to it an even more pointed indictment of his brother, and an even sharper charge for his son: "And you will ask him to let me know the reason he did not settle in New York [City] instead of his moving among the worst sett of Men of the out cast parts of New England." (15) Such a query would undoubtedly have put the younger Hart in an awkward position with his uncle, if he were in fact bold enough to convey it. Be that as it may, Aaron's letter bore a burning charge, and enlisted the assistance of the younger generation in the work of exercising the will of one brother toward another. The father's questions for his somewhat estranged brother were sharply rhetorical, and they gave voice to their sources' annoyance and apparent helplessness to change his brother's mind.

Aaron Hart's letters to his sons also bore witness to how closely related familial concerns were to the preoccupations of business. The actions of Samuel Myers, Phila Franks, and Harry Hart, at least as they come to light in the letters written by these three fathers to their sons, all took place against the backdrop of family business ventures. Samuel Myers shot Richard Bowden over the latter's accusations that his father had taken advantage of him. Phila Franks's elopement came to a head when Jacob Franks anticipated her husband approaching him to ask for her inheritance. In his letter to Naphtali on the subject, Franks had written, "If you concedor wee live in a Small place & he [Delancey] is Related to ye best family in ye place"; unlike his wife Abigaill, he could ill afford to snub the Delanceys. Harry Hart's apparent removal of his family from Three Rivers had evident business ramifications with which his brother Aaron was all too willing to burden his own son. Financial subject matter presented these letter writers with a range of opportunities to express their deepest familial concerns. Not surprisingly, fathers asserted (or attempted to assert) their authority over their sons and their families at large in financial terms, often by counseling them, sometimes by chiding them, and occasionally by confiding in them.

Discussions of financial subject matter revealed the father's access to and ability to wield power and his susceptibility to the whims of marketplaces, business partners, and ill fortune. "All mercantile writing" during this period, according to historian Toby Ditz, was "overtly preoccupied with the problematics of display among men."'6 As Ditz writes, letters about financial matters, even as written by fathers to their sons, offered powerful insight "into the construction of the male subject" (53). Even their expressions of confidence in their sons gave rise to singularly fraught results. Moses Myers's 1808 correspondence with his son Samuel (who was a student at the College of William and Mary at the time of the letters' composition) offered a case in point. The letters presented an almost unending torrent of parental admiration. "I am most passionate in my Children," Moses wrote on March 19, 1808. "I know not of any family like them & hope that the almighty will indulge me with long life to enjoy the blessings." According to the reports that made their way back to Moses in Norfolk, Samuel was a model student--a solid investment, in other words. Myers may well have been the first in a long succession of Jewish American fathers to speak in such terms to a child away at college. The sentiments to which he gave voice in his 1808 letters bore a startlingly modern tone that would be echoed through succeeding years. "Let me know what you owe at Colege," Moses

wrote on March 29, 1808, "that I may send you the Amot I wish itt done." Several other letters in succession made reference to Samuel's debts for tuition, room, and board. Still, despite his eagerness to have "itt done," the father offered consistent counsel as well as a profligate generosity of spirit.

Moses Myers's delight in his son's successes was tempered, in nearly every letter, by his quiet issuance of another sort of will. "Never lose sight of the very best company," he wrote to Samuel on March 5. "Improvement is to be found with men of science with whom you are surrounded & when you can be properly invited those are the places you ought most to frequent." In a letter written several weeks later in anticipation of Fourth of July festivities, Moses counseled his son to avoid drinking to excess. "Do not suffer yrself to be overcome with wine. We are all apt to be elevated on such occasions, However know you too well not to be perfectly on your Guard & not suffer the least stain on that Character which you have so handsomely established." Moses Myers's remarks would be echoed in 1825 by David B. Nones's advice to his son Joseph, whom he had evidently placed in the temporary care of a guardian: "Be careful my dear son of what company you keep[,] avoid frolicking, there is some friend always to carry such news to Mr. Howe [and] beware of Drink it is the ruin of many I trust you never have that curse on you." A son who was studying away from home was a bet on the future, in other words, and a father would certainly be eager to protect this wager against any undue spoilage. The letters these men wrote bore both freely bestowed blessings and weighty admonitions. "More is expected from your Judgments than others that have been out," wrote Isaac Moses to his son as he launched him on his overseas career as an East India merchant. One wonders what Solomon had done to warrant such especially high regard, as well as how he might have felt upon receiving such extraordinary but also burdensome praise. The rhetorical weight of such statements was their most salient feature.

On financial matters, Mordecai Sheftall's letter to his son in Georgia on August 10, 1792, contained still firmer counsel. To take a son on in business was to entrust him to make proper and profitable choices, but doing so entailed risks. "To what purpose," he pointedly asked his son, "do you keep such a considerable sum of money as you must have in your hands, idle?" While the letter's general tone was evenhanded and while its writer went on to offer less sharp commentary on other matters, Sheftall expressed concern lest his son squander valuable investment opportunities:

   Had I directed the money to be sent to Europe, I should by this
   time have been furnished with an assortment, and you, that are so
   near at hand, cannot finde any thing to invest the money in that
   will turn to an advantage. Your orders where [were] in a great
   measure discretioned, so that you might have invested it in such
   articles as would have afforded a small profite, if you could not
   get such as would have yeilded a large one. You certainly ought, at
   this time of life, to know that small profits and quick returns
   make a heavy purse, but money laying in a man's chest will not
   afforde a gaine, but may waste away.

Mordecai Sheftall's words to his son sounded a familiar theme in father-son discourse--having learned the ways of the world at my feet, the writer said, you must now act in such a way as to show that you know the ways of the world. The thematic key to Mordecai Sheftall's pronouncement was his reminder that he had given "discretioned" orders--he had counted upon his son to act the proper part and use his best judgment. The letter enunciated a father's double-edged gift of trust, his wholly internalized expectation that as he did his part, his son would do his. Until such time as your actions confirm your use of best judgment, the father said, my words will it to be so. As Isaac Moses had written to his son in 1797, "The Confidence placed in you is of the Greatest Magnitude" (emphasis original). The writer expressed faith in his addressee even though the addressee had not quite earned his faith. The father staked the future on his son, even though he was likely to be--prepared to be--disappointed. The rhetorical versatility that could be brought to bear in these letters was impressive. As Lawrence Fine points out in assessing the style of one medieval-era Jewish ethical will, the writer's eagerness both to flatter and intimidate his son could result in "just about every psychological strategy" being deployed (13).

Most of the business correspondence we find embedded in these letters was intended, at least, to communicate actualities rather than judgments, and Sheftall's reference to discretionary money was the exception to the rule. When sons were assigned the task of executing their fathers' orders, the orders tended to be given directly. In the same letter in which he took his brother to task for having abandoned the family's common trading post in Three Rivers, Aaron Hart enumerated a list of commands to his son: "You will see what is to be done with Paper money," "You will also ask if Mr. Price Hay, Mr. Simon Nathan, and Captain William Goforth have paid him some time ago, and the amount paid to him," and "If you fall short of money ask my brother for money." As Hart was one of several late eighteenth-century Jews who was a slave owner, his orders for his son made regular mention of this subject as well. Hart had previously written to Isaac Judah on this matter, telling him "I had lost my Negro wench and I beged of him to purchase a good wench for me in the House." When Judah failed to deliver (or even answer Hart's request), Hart shifted the burden of this task to his son. "Should that kind of People be low priced, and a Negro man offered also who understands something of farming, can handle an Ax and work in a Garden, you will bring him," he wrote Moses, as well as the order that his son "use [his] best endeavors to get a good wench."

Aaron Hart's instructional tone with regard to the return of the "lost" slave captured a presiding spirit of comradeship that we encounter in many of these father-son letters--the idea that the grown son was, or was becoming an equal--a competent business partner, a reliable member of the family, and a companion in civil affairs. His actions, whether as dictated directly by the father or as the result of his own discretionary choices, marked him as an extension of his father's will. Despite the tensions inherent in any intergenerational endeavor, and perhaps in defiance of a growing climate of youthful restiveness, these sons could and would have to be trusted to exercise the will of their elders, whose own experience and wisdom constituted the strongest basis for a secure future. It had, after all, been an alliance of fathers and sons who had fought the Revolution against Britain and collaborated to fashion the American republic out of a set of self-interested colonies and states. When the letters invoked the legacy of the Revolution, for instance, they did so in a spirit of camaraderie, willing a unity of purpose with their words. The writers found common cause with their sons, almost as if to counteract the Revolution's apparent parricidal implications. On political matters during the period following the Revolution, these Jewish fathers addressed their sons in similarly collaborative tones, positing a present and future state of political affairs in which young and old would labor in common to achieve the sort of ease and stability for which they had struggled in the war against England.

No letter achieved such a spirit of common purpose as that written by Samson Levy on July 16, 1776, to his son Moses, who was at that time enlisted in the Continental army, headquartered in Trenton, New Jersey. "Let us hear from you as often as possible," wrote Samson Levy to his son in one of a few aspirational pronouncements that occur in the letter. In addition to expressing his sincerest wishes that Moses "divert [him] self as much as possible" in order to make his "Absence agreeable," the elder Levy devoted significant attention to relaying the war news he had heard, fragmentary as it was. "I fear ye News I wrote you of Burgoin is not true," he said at one point, referring perhaps to some by then discredited news that the British general was not on his way to help overpower the American force that had been trying to seize Quebec. "9 or 10 hundred Men of Maryl[an]d Lodged last Night at Chester. ... Hope [they] will soon form ye flying Comp [any] as you return for these men are to be part of it." While Levy's letter contained no overt statement of patriotic sentiment, its note of cheer and encouragement was addressed not only to the recipient but to all of his comrades in arms as well: "I am with my compli[men]ts to all of my acquaintances in your comp[an]y." The writer sought in this case not to bind his addressee to his own aged authority but, in the opposite sense, to find common cause across the span of generations with his son the enlistee, whose youth had made him eligible to serve the American cause. Levy's letter linked the generations by ceding all of its paternal authority to the young man to whom its writer was issuing his blessing. The letter offered unmitigated expression not only of fatherly affection but confirming approval because it was the son, in this case, who had evidently acted the part of leader.

In April of 1779, Mordecai Sheftall, who in his fatherly capacity as the orchestrator of business operations for the Sheftall clan would not hesitate to direct harsh criticism at his son Sheftall's shortcomings as a financial strategist, had written that same young man a letter full of unequivocal praise and approval. Mordecai was the chief commissary officer for the Georgia militia and his son, a captured enlisted man from that same army, was imprisoned on the British ship Nancy, afloat in Savannah harbor. "Present my Compliments to all our friends in the Cabbins & on Ship board tell them their friends here are well," wrote the elder Sheftall, whose only wish, as he put it, was for God's "continuance of your Health," that "he may arm you with fortitude to bear your Confinement with patience." The letter made only one begging demand of its recipient--"I approve of your writing to your mother hope you continue to do so by Every opp[ortunit]y that may offer, also write one as often as possible as [it] will be a comfort to me here that you are well." Sheftall's separation from his family had had a disruptive effect, but there was no question that it had been unavoidable and, furthermore, in his father's mind, an appropriate result, fully deserving of the paternal imprimatur. Fathers and sons, acting in common cause, or fathers writing in such a way as to represent common cause with their sons, were laying the groundwork for a discursive bridging of the intergenerational gap.

In 1783, as a final peace was being concluded with Great Britain to mark the close of the Revolutionary War, Mordecai Sheftall had further occasion to write to his son in the voice of a comrade-in-arms. I quote the letter at length in order to showcase the full effect that the elder Sheftall achieved in his effort to declare rhetorical allegiance not only to the newly triumphant American cause but to the prospect of a common American future with his son and generations to follow:

   What my feelings are on the Occasion is easier imagined than
   described, for it must be supposed that Every ... well wisher to
   his Country must feel himself happy, to have lived to see this
   longe and bloody Contest brot to so happy an [end] more Especially
   as we have obtained our Independence, instead of those threats, of
   bringing us with submission to the foot of that throne, whose
   greatest [illegible] to America was nothing but one Continued Scene
   of Cruelty of which you as well as my self have Experienced our
   shares.

The letter's most salient feature was its note of mutuality--Sheftall invited his son to imagine how he felt about the great achievement, and then referred to the "Experience" in which both men had had their "shares." The letter referred to a common past in order to point to a promising future. Perhaps it was fitting that at this exact point that Sheftall invoked the God of his fathers. "Thanks, to the almighty it [the war] is now at an end"--before going on to speak once more about the intergenerational alliance that had made such a result possible. "I sincerely Congratulate you and all my friends," he wrote, at which point he pointed prophetically to a rebirth, of sorts. "An intier new Scene will open it self, and we have the world to being Againe."

The triumph of American independence presented Mordecai Sheftall and others with an ideal opportunity to declare their own familial triumphs. Perhaps this felt especially important to do in the context of what had, after all, been a civil war between British authorities and their rebelling subjects, a conflict that in many cases (most notably including Benjamin Franklin's) divided so many sons from their fathers on opposite sides of the battle lines. The war, like many of the divisive political events that both preceded and followed it, presented Jewish families with a delicate opportunity either to shore up their common legacy or to give way to partisanship and fragmentation. Letters from fathers to sons offered a stage upon which these dramas might be played out rhetorically. The letters had by necessity to balance the newness of the occasion--"an intier new Scene"--with an extended invocation of continuity with the past, not to mention a common familial currency.

Nothing was better suited to facilitating such a balancing act as mention of Jewish tradition. Adherence to Judaism and wholehearted participation in the development and sustainment of an extended Jewish community was a means by which the writers of these letters sought to assert traditional paternal authority and, at the same time, to project a common future. The division of America into warring camps of patriots and loyalists or, eventually, Republicans and Federalists, could be counteracted through the retention of Jewish tradition and a sense of common lineage. Mordecai may have been motivated by just such an ideal as he concluded the letter he wrote to his son on the occasion of the war's end. No sooner had he pronounced the opening of a "new Scene" than he made mention of the upcoming Passover holiday to his son, inviting Sheftall to return home as soon as the festivities would be concluded. Perhaps the elder Sheftall had noted the parallel between the liberation of the Hebrews from Egyptian bondage and the Americans newfound achievement of independence from Britain.

Jewish interests were consistent fare in the letters of other fathers as well. The writers' own commitment to Jewish observance was varied--all twelve of the men whose letters I have included in this sample had some affiliation with one or more Jewish congregation, but none of them were sufficiently versant in Hebrew (or confident that his son would be), for instance, to employ that language in any more than an absolutely salutary way in his correspondence with his son. The Jewish content of the letters was commensurate with their writers' typical reluctance to resort to what Fine calls "expository or discursive" modes (5), their occasional attention to quotidian features of Jewish worship. So, for instance, at the end of his 1743 letter to his son Naphtali in London, Joseph Franks made brief reference to an earlier request he had made that his son, with greater proximity to a much larger Jewish community than that of New York or any other New World settlement, send him two etz hayim, or silver rimonim, (17) most likely to be procured from London, Amsterdam, or the Hague. Mordecai Sheftall made a similar request to his son. The younger Sheftall had left Savannah for New York after the Revolution, which brought him as well into closer proximity to a greater population of Jews than his father and family had known. Sheftall mentioned his interest in procuring prayer books from his son after outlining the prayers that had just been said in the "Snogau" for his daughter Lolly, who had nearly perished from some unspecified bouts of "fits." In the course of the same letter in which he had called his son to task for failing to invest his "discretionary" funds appropriately, as well as asking his son to attempt the recovery and return of the escaped Haitian slaves, Mordecai asked his son to send him "the Kippur" and "the Succoth," both of which were volumes from David Levi's Forms of Prayer. Not surprisingly, he expressed a particular eagerness to add them to his synagogue's collection because "they may be very usefull books, especially for a person not well versed in the Hebrew."

Jacob Franks and Mordecai Sheftall's requests to their sons for Jewish ritual objects and prayer books were also of a piece with their less spiritually significant detailing of business undertakings, family developments, and ordinary chatter. Jewish practice and Judaism was not the focus of these men's lives but a small element within it. Their inclusion of such talk gave testimony to how seamlessly Jewish affiliation fit into their lives. The appeal to the younger generation was not that they should rededicate their lives to Jewish practice but, rather, be instruments in the fathers' own continued, albeit possibly perfunctory, practice. Asking the son to produce the Jewish supplies was an indirect and unobtrusive way of inviting him too to participate in the furtherance of the faith. The son was being asked to enable his fathers practice, after all--no special demand was being made of him regarding his own worship according to the dictates of the ancient faith. Like the blessing that serves as well as an admonition, these requests for assistance in Jewish practice were expressions that presented the obligatory as merely volitional.

On a less subtle level, Aaron Hart's direct instructions to his son Moses regarding observance of a range of Jewish holidays bore a graver aspect. In March of 1786, with his son sojourning in New York, Aaron presented unequivocal directions. "If you find that you cane not be hear Pesach you will according to my instructions Go to New York and keep Pesach." Should he need money or clothes with which to observe the holiday properly, Moses was to go to his "Unkil's" house. If this wasn't clear enough, the father repeated the injunction: "You most Remain Pesach in a Jues House." Four years later, on a similar theme, Aaron was instructing Mo to make his way from his outpost at William Henry (at Lake George) to his father's house in Montreal. "Than you neat not due ... anything to your house to get the hamez out." Life on the Canadian frontier offered fewer Jewish possibilities than just about any other inhabited section of North America. On the assumption, perhaps, that his son might not have shared his first-generation immigrant's determination to retain the old ways, Aaron appended to the end of one of his letters a calendar of Jewish holidays--"F[e]ast of Ester Monday 10th March ... F[e]ast of Pasach Wednesday 12th April." The instructions and lists represented the most unequivocal injunctions to the younger generation to uphold Jewish tradition in the New World. As it happens, of the early letter writers whose work I examined, Aaron Hart was one of three who himself had been born in the Old World (the other two were Jacob Franks and Benjamin Nones).

Neither the recovery of Jewish ritual objects nor the observance of Jewish holidays in themselves could ensure that the young men receiving these letters would themselves pursue a Jewish future. Jewishness was no more central to the composition of these letters than any other element in them, and its overt mention proves to have been a relatively minor, though consistent, facet of their writing. Letters written in the decades on either side of 1800 by somewhat assimilated members of the Jewish merchant elite, even if they include an occasional Jewish reference or even a Hebrew word or two, can hardly qualify as bearers of significant Jewish content, and the language in which they were written, notwithstanding the occasional halting English phrase, was the language of Anglo-America. The salient "theme" in these letters, to the extent that one can be identified at all, is that of father-son continuity, and while paternal lineage is certainly a Jewish theme, it is hardly an exclusively Jewish theme.

As Toby Ditz writes, it was "the precariousness of manly identity and reputation" (51) and the "recovery of manly honor" (73) that shaped mercantile correspondence for American men of the long eighteenth century. Prosperous white men, including a handful of Jews, pulled many of the strings in this world, but they hardly maintained exclusive control over its vicissitudes. The key to retaining a solid hold upon their immediate purview--their families, their economic standing, their personal reputations--was the cultivation of an able son as protege. In this regard, despite a post-revolutionary status quo in which Old World filial succession had been all but abolished, the writers of father-son letters were seeking to perpetuate a mentality and a social order whose days were numbered. As money and influence passed into new hands, and as sons grew restive to pursue untethered futures, a father could not help but note the ebb of his authority. For Jewish fathers and sons, this shifting dynamic might well have felt more palpable; in the short span of a few decades, even the most westernized Sephardim and Ashkenazim had completed an even more momentous cultural and social transition than that of their English counterparts. Fathers writing to their sons were unwitting conduits of a profound ambivalence regarding the dawning of this new era.

Insofar as each of these letters offers insights into the odd combination of retrospection and futuristic projection that is intrinsic to the development of a written tradition, the letters set before us a rich assortment of prescient possibilities, and in their composite form they invite us to consider both their writers and their recipients as participants in a delicate intergenerational exchange that highlighted the tenuousness of the past's purchase on the present. We see fathers whose communication with their sons veers continually from expressions of gratification and praise to firmness and impatience. We see writers eager to impart lessons of stability and wisdom that are continually compromised by a sense of brooding haplessness. If the furtherance of patriarchy and the upholding of tradition constituted the central objectives of these letter writers, it is their opposite or, perhaps more properly, the delicacy of their very articulation, that we actually experience most fully as we read them. As Moses Michael Hays had written in his undated letter to Judah Hays, his choice of a penultimate word negating the power of the very admonition he was issuing, "You will find traps, snares, and allurements, momently; avoid them ... as you would inevitable destruction."

MICHAEL HOBERMAN, FITCHBURG STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

I would like to thank the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati for awarding me the Joseph and Eva Dave Fellowship for May and June 2012, which enabled me to complete the research for this article. I am also grateful to Laura Leibman and the members of the English department at Reed College who invited me to Portland to give a presentation on this topic in October 2012. I am deeply appreciative of the help I received from Michael Kramer, who read and offered substantive responses to several drafts of this article. Finally, I am pleased to acknowledge the assistance I received from archivists at the AJA, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Seminaire St. Joseph in Three Rivers, Quebec.

(1.) Lawrence Fine, "Introduction" to Hebrew Ethical Wills, ed. Israel Abrahams (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006), 1. Hereafter cited by page number.

(2.) Constantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communication in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 164. Hereafter cited by page number.

(3.) Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 342. Hereafter cited by page number.

(4.) Doris Groshen Daniels, "Colonial Jewry: Religion, Domestic and Social Relations," in American Jewish History: The Colonial and Early National Periods, 1654-1840, ed. Jeffrey Gurock (New York: Routledge, 1998), 388. Hereafter cited by page number.

(5.) William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunication (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 4.

(6.) Caroline Bland and Marie Cross, "Gender Politics: Breathing New Life into Old Letters," Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750-2000 (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004):

(7.) By 1816, as Gordon Wood points out, the United States boasted a postal system that was larger than those of both Britain and France. Its 3,300 officers constituted nearly 70 percent of the entire federal work force (478).

(8.) In fact, only one of the documents I read--Jacob Franks's 1743 letter to his son Naphtali--predates the American Revolution. Despite the early date of its composition, I chose to include it in my reading for two related reasons: first, it was the only letter written by Jacob Franks to have been found among the several letters written to Naphtali by his mother, Abigaill Levy Franks, and the Abigaill Levy Franks letters constitute the most important and written-about collection of colonial-era Jewish American letters. See Edie Gelles, The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733-1748 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 7-8; hereafter cited by page number. Second, its form and content present a noteworthy contrast to Abigaill's letters. As Jacob Franks was one of the three letter writers in the group whose work I considered who had been born overseas, his letter resounds with phrasing that seems both more formal and, at times, more halting than that of most other writers whose work I explored. In other words, his letter supplied an intriguing exception to the norm that I found difficult to resist. Only two of the letters (Benjamin and David Nones's letters, from 1823 and 1825, respectively) were written after 1811. Thus, thirty-six of the thirty-nine letters were written in the thirty-five-year period between 1776 and 1811. The documents I consulted in my research were written by Jacob Franks (1688-1769), of New York; Samson Levy (1722-1781), of Philadelphia; Samuel Jacobs (?--1786), of St. Denis, Quebec; Aaron Hart (1724-1800), of Three Rivers, Quebec; Ezekiel Hart (1770-1843), of Montreal; Mordecai Sheffall (1735-1797), of Savannah; Isaac Moses (1742-1818), of New York; Moses Michael Hays (1739-1805), of Boston; Levi Sheftall (1739-1809), of Savannah; Moses Myers (1752-1835), of Norfolk; Benjamin Nones (1757-1823), of Philadelphia; and David Nones (1783-1837), of New York The letters are archived as follows: American Jewish Historical Society (Franks, Levy, Mordecai Sheftall, Moses, Benjamin Nones, and David Nones); American Jewish Archives (Aaron Hart, Ezekiel Hart, Mordecai Sheffall, Levi Sheffall, and Moses Myers); Virginia Historical Society (Moses Michael Hays); and Seminaire St. Joseph, Three Rivers, Quebec (Aaron Hart and Samuel Jacobs).

(9.) Samuel Jacobs Jr. of St. Denis, in Canada, appears only to have disappointed his father. As Jacob Rader Marcus explains, the son had been sent away to study in Quebec but had a penchant for "running wild" (United States Jewry [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993], 24). Eventually, he left the North to seek his fortune in Jamaica, but in his late teens he had merited unmitigated paternal censure and at least verbal disownment: "I was your father and did my duty," wrote the elder Jacobs in a letter dated Feb. 15,1782. "Your conduct has made it void and null."

(10.) The letters were written between 1733 and 1748.

(11.) Kursheedt had studied Talmud in Germany and then immigrated to the United States in 1796. Jacob Rader Marcus referred to him as "one of the most erudite Hebrew scholars in the country" (273).

(12.) See David de Sola Pool's article, "Gershom Mendes Seixas' Letters, 1813-1815, to His Daughter Sarah (Seixas) Kursheedt and His Son-in-Law Israel Baer Kursheedt," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 35 (1939): 189-205. The letters themselves can be found in the Seixas Papers at the American Jewish Historical Society, in New York.

(13.) John Adams (1825), qtd. in The American Enlightenment, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York: Braziller, 1965), 235.

(14.) With the help of a future U.S. attorney general, Samuel Myers was actually acquitted of manslaughter but chose all the same to leave Norfolk in the aftermath of his trial. He eventually returned to his hometown, where he resumed his career in his family's tobacco business.

(15.) The decades immediately following the American Revolution saw the accelerated settlement of northern and especially central and western New York. Many of the emigrants who moved to these areas were, indeed, New Englanders who had been priced out of purchasing or retaining land in their home states.

(16.) Toby Ditz, "Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representation of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia," Journal of American History (June 1994): 80. Hereafter cited by page number.

(17.) In Askenazic parlance, the etz hayyim were the metal ornaments placed over the wooden staves at either end of a Torah scroll.

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Author:	Hoberman, Michael
Publication:	Studies in American Jewish Literature
Article Type:	Essay
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Mar 22, 2014
Words:	10830
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