The Jews in America Trilogy
Page 52
Willing family, 39, 133
Wilson, Edmund, 290
Wilson, Woodrow, 349, 384
Windsor Hotel, 268–69
Window, Lanier & Co., 253
Winsor, Frederick, 403
Winthrop family, 75
Wolff, Abraham, 21, 197, 208, 217, 221, 263, 406
Wolff, Addie, see Kahn, Mrs. Otto
Wolff, Viola, 17
Wolff family, 20, 68, 278
Woolworth, F. W. co., 363
Wormser, Julia, see Seligman, Mrs. Jefferson
Worthington Pump & Machinery Corp., 360–61
Wright, J. Hood, 255–56
Yiddish language, 319
Yiddishe Gazette, 322
Young, Genevieve, 11
YMHA, 207, 355
YWHA, 207
Zedakah, 321, 353–54
Zinsser family, 149
Zola, Emile, 216
Zorn, Anders, 208, 420
Zweig, Stefan, 357
The Grandees
America’s Sephardic Elite
Stephen Birmingham
For Roger H. Klein, in Memory
Contents
Author’s Note
1 The Book
2 Who Are They?
3 “Not Jewels, But Jews …”
4 The Twenty-Three
5 “These Godless Rascals”
6 Little Victories
7 “Gomez, the Onions Begin to Smell!”
8 “Make Your Way to the Windward Coast of Africa”
9 Allarums and Ravages
10 Misalliances and Misunderstandings
11 First Ladies
12 Legends and Legacies
13 The Firebrand
14 The New Jews Versus the Old
15 The U.S. Navy Surrenders at Last!
16 The Jewish Episcopalians
17 “Nathans Don’t Cheat”—But Do They Kill?
18 “Cardozos Don’t Cry”
19 The Embattled Sisters
20 “Foul Deeds”
21 “An Altogether Different Sort”
22 Small Gestures … and a Hush at Chatham Square
Image Gallery
Sources
Index
Sephardim:
“… Many sufferings, which they had endured for the sake of their faith, had made them more than usually self-conscious; they considered themselves a superior class—the nobility of Jewry.”
—The Jewish Encyclopedia
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are a number of people whom I would like to thank for their gracious and generous help to me in the gathering of information for, and preparation of, this book. I am particularly indebted to Mrs. Lafayette A. Goldstone of New York, who turned over her large—and very comfortable—library to me, as a temporary office, where I was able to study her collection of Sephardic Judaica. I am also indebted to Mrs. Goldstone’s son, Mr. Harmon Hendricks Goldstone, who was also helpful with anecdotes, family documents and reminiscences, as well as a vast amount of genealogical detail. Thanks are also due to Mrs. Henry S. Hendricks, and her sister, Miss Emily Nathan, for insights into the Hendricks-Nathan-Seixas-Solis family complex, and for access to the Hendricks Collection of family papers. In this connection, I am also deeply grateful to Dr. James J. Heslin and his staff at the New-York Historical Society for their courteous assistance.
For their help and suggestions, I am also grateful to Mr. Piza Mendes, Mrs. Leonard J. Wolf, Mr. and Mrs. Frederic S. Nathan, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd P. Phillips, all of New York, and to Dr. Solomon Gaon of London, Mr. Edouard Roditi of Paris, Mr. Ralph A. Franco of Montgomery, Alabama, and the late Mr. Thomas J. Tobias of Charleston, South Carolina. Rabbi Herbert C. Dobrinsky of Yeshiva University deserves a special word of thanks, as do Dr. Jacob Marcus, Director of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Mr. Victor Tarry of New York’s Shearith Israel Congregation, and Mrs. Peter Bolhouse of the Newport Historical Society.
I would also like to add a personal note of thanks to my fellow writers and friends, Geoffrey T. Hellman and James Yaffe, who both took time to offer useful suggestions and to point me in rewarding directions.
It was Mr. John L. Loeb, Jr., of New York who first called my attention to Dr. Malcolm Stern’s extraordinary book, which became in a sense the cornerstone of my book. I am also particularly grateful to Mrs. Godfrey S. Rockefeller for reminiscences and documents pertaining to the Gratz family, and to Dr: Frank A. Seixas for information about the Seixas family. I would also, at this point, like to thank once again my friend and agent, Carol Brandt, who guided the project from the start, and Miss Genevieve Young of Harper & Row, whose editorial taste is as faultless as her eye is finicky. I would also like to thank the librarian and staff of the Rye Free Reading Room, for letting me keep books long after their due dates, thus adding gentle encouragement to the project; and I want to thank Dr. Rachel Dalven for scholarly assistance, Sra. Elena Zayas of Rye, who translated a number of letters from the old Spanish, and Mrs. Mildred Dicker of New York, who typed the manuscript in record time.
While all these people were an enormous help to me, and while the book could not have been written without them, I alone must stand accountable for any of the book’s errors or shortcomings.
S. B.
1
THE BOOK
In 1960, there appeared what must have been one of the least heralded books in the history of American publishing. It was called Americans of Jewish Descent, and was put together—not “written” exactly—by a scholarly New Yorker named Malcolm H. Stern. The book consisted almost entirely of genealogical charts, and represented a labor of mindboggling proportions.
Americans of Jewish Descent weighs close to ten pounds and is beautifully bound and printed on heavy, expensive stock. It is just over three hundred pages long, including an elaborate index, and traces the ancestry of some 25,000 American Jewish individuals back into the eighteenth, seventeenth, and even the sixteenth centuries, under family headings that list everyone from the Aarons to the Zuntzes. It was never intended to be a best seller; a limited first edition of just 550 numbered copies was printed. Nonetheless, though unheralded, unacclaimed by the critics, and unnoticed by the vast majority of the American reading public, the book created an immediate and profound stir among a small group of American Jews who had long considered themselves an elite, the nobility of Jewry, with the longest, richest, most romantic history: the Sephardim. They were the oldest American Jewish families, and they traced themselves back to the arrival of what has been called the “Jewish Mayflower,” in 1654, and even farther back to medieval Spain and Portugal, where they lived as princes of the land. Despite its price—forty dollars—and its size, the book was soon gracing the coffee tables and bookshelves of some of the most elegant and prestigious houses in the country and a second printing was ordered. The book was suddenly The Book, and was being studied for the tiny errors that appeared, almost inevitably, in a volume of this one’s size and scope—three centuries of interconnected family trees.
The Book created no stir at all among Sephardic Jews who lived not at elegant or prestigious addresses but in Sephardic communities in such places as Cedarhurst, Long Island, and The Bronx. These Sephardim had no Jewish Mayflower to trace back to, no ancestors who had fought in the American Revolution. They had arrived in the United States, under quite different circumstances and after a quite different history, during the first three decades of the twentieth century and as refugees from the fires of revolutions in Turkey, the Balkans, and Asia Minor. They had spent the first generation of their emigration struggling to emerge from the ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side. Had they had access to Malcolm Stern’s book, it would merely have confirmed the impression among these Sephardim that the old Sephardim were the ultimate snobs, who treated all Jews of lesser vintage with condescension, aloofness, and utter disdain. Americans of Jewish Descent includes only those Americans descended from Jews who arrived in the United States before 1840. All who arrived since are thereby automatic
ally excluded from the vellum pages and, as it were, the club.
What Dr. Stern had done, intentionally or not, was to compose a curious combination of a Jewish Who’s Who and Social Register—fatter than the former, much harder to get into than the latter. The Book immediately emphasized a distinction which everyone knew existed but which most people preferred not to talk about, between the old, established Jewish families and the Johnny-come-lately arrivals, the distinguished upper crust and the brash parvenus. With its 1840 cutoff date, Dr. Stern’s book eliminates, as he explains in a preface, “the large migration of German Jews in the 1840’s, which achieved its greatest impetus following the European revolutions of 1848.” Dr. Stern says that this date is “arbitrary,” but it isn’t really, because it eliminates those Jews to whom the Sephardim consider themselves specifically and emphatically superior. These are the “upstarts”—Kuhns, Loebs, Schiffs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Guggenheims, and their like—who achieved such importance in banking and commerce in the latter part of the nineteenth century; who, by the sheer force of their money, grew to dominate the American Jewish community; and whom the older-established Sephardim therefore looked down upon and actively resented. The Germans have been not only upstarts but usurpers.
Though he does not make a point of this, the 1840 cutoff also makes it possible for Dr. Stern himself to slip under the wire and into the privileged pages. He descends from one Jacob Stern, who emigrated to Newark in 1837—from Germany, of all places.
With the publication of Dr. Stern’s book, small nuances of Jewish social position were reversed overnight. In New York, for example, there had always been a difference in social weight between the two unrelated Loeb families who headed two rival banking houses—Kuhn, Loeb & Company and Loeb, Rhoades & Company. The former were considered “old Loebs,” and the latter “new Loebs” (they were sometimes labeled “real Loebs” and “not real Loebs”), since one family had arrived perhaps thirty years earlier than the other. Dr. Stern’s book, however, sensationally revealed that the new Loebs were actually older than the old ones, by virtue of a grandmother who was descended from an old, genteel, if slightly impoverished, southern family named Moses. This didn’t make the Loebs Sephardim exactly, but it got them in The Book, and the old “old” Loebs were not admitted. The banker John L. Loeb, of the new “old” Loebs, promptly bought a number of copies of The Book and sent them to friends—including quite a few Christians whom, in his researches, Dr. Stern had discovered to be of Jewish descent. To a few of the latter Dr. Stern’s book must have come as something of a shock.
Who would expect, for example, to find the Rockefellers in The Book? They are there, along with such old-family members of American society as the DeLanceys, the Livingstons, the Goodwins, the Stevensons, the Ingersolls, the Lodges, the Ten Eycks, the Tiffanys, the Van Rensselaers, the Hopkins, and the Baltimore McBlairs.
The Book made it clear that there were also two kinds of Lazaruses—the old and the new. The old, who include the poet Emma Lazarus, and who for many years were among the very few Jews who summered splendidly in Newport, are prominently in The Book. The new, who include the wealthy owners of Federated Department Stores, are not. Similarly, though the name Levy is now a common Jewish name in America, there are certain Sephardic Levys who stem from an extremely old family. One of the first Jews to set foot on American soil was one of these Levys; they went into fur trading, banking, and government service, and had nothing to do with making rye bread.
Barnaby Conrad, the author, was startled to find his name in The Book. His family, socially prominent in San Francisco, had always boasted of its descent from Martha Custis, whose second marriage was to George Washington. Yet one of Conrad’s many-times-great grandfathers was one of those early Levys. Discovering this, Mr. Conrad had his genealogy Xeroxed and mailed to several of his family-proud relatives. His mother’s comment was: “At least we were good Jews.”
In New York society, a rumor had long existed that the Vanderbilts were Jewish. Dr. Stern’s book was no sooner out than it was confirmed that some of them indeed were. Mrs. William A. M. Burden, whose husband had recently been appointed U.S. ambassador to Belgium by President Eisenhower, was in The Book. Mr. Burden’s mother was the former Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, and of course the Burdens were members of a long list of New York clubs that traditionally have been closed to Jews, including the Brook, the Links, the Racquet and Tennis, and the River. Once again, it was those Levys at work high up in Mrs. Burden’s family tree. In 1779, it seemed, Abigail Levy married a Dr. Lyde Goodwin. Was Dr. Goodwin also Jewish? Perhaps, because for some reason one of his sons, Charles Ridgely Goodwin, changed his name to Charles Goodwin Ridgely. He married a Livingston; their daughter married a Schott; their daughter married another Schott; and their daughter married a Partridge, Mrs. Burden’s father. When this was pointed out to her, and that Jewishness is said, by tradition, to descend from the distaff side of a union—as it would appear to do in her case—Mrs. Burden said politely, “Thank you very much for telling me.”
Americans of Jewish Descent is, in a sense, a cross-reference to The Social Register, since whenever names listed in Americans are also listed in the Register, this fact is noted. But Americans contains information that is a good deal more personal and gossipy, and states its facts with much more bluntness, than its non-Jewish counterpart. For example, spinsters are pointedly labeled “Unmarried,” and as deaths have occurred not only the fact but the manner of death is indicated. Next to the name of the deceased one can find such notations as “Drowned,” “Suicide,” or “Murdered.” As listees in The Book have become baptized, this has been noted, but sometimes the information provided is quite arbitrary. Next to the name of Rebecca Franks, for instance, in addition to her dates—“B. 1760, Philadelphia, D. Mar. 1823, Bath, England”—and her marriage to Sir Henry Johnson is the cryptic comment “Meschianza,” which turns out merely to refer to a large party that Miss Franks attended during the American Revolution. Some of Dr. Stern’s remarks seem to verge on the libelous. The word “Insane” appears after a number of names. Again in the Franks family, he notes that Caiman Solomons was “in bad repute with Jacob Franks,” who was his uncle but obviously some family father figure. Referring to Caiman’s brother Moses (a bad strain in the Franks family here, quite obviously), Americans of Jewish Descent advises that he died “in Charleston, S.C. Debtor’s Prison, 1745.” Dr. Stern also makes, or appears to make, social value judgments such as when, in the case of DeWitt Clinton Judah, he notes that Mr. Judah was married, but omits the wife’s name with this comment: “An Irish cook.”
The Book shows that the earliest generations of Sephardim in America were astonishingly prolific, with twelve, fifteen, and even twenty children to a marriage. When Ziporah Levy Hendricks died in 1832, she had fifteen children and no less than seventy grandchildren. Remembering family birthdays was no problem because one occurred nearly every week. Frances Nathan Wolff had, in the Hart-Seixas-Nathan-Hendricks family complex, ninety-nine first cousins. Gershom Mendes Seixas, born in New York in 1746, one of a modest brood of eight children, eventually fathered sixteen of his own. His younger brother, Benjamin, not to be outdone, had twenty-one. As a result, today there are thousands who can claim some degree of kinship to one or more Seixases.
From the very beginning, a tight pattern of intramural marriages was formed. Today the intermarriages between members of the Jewish first families present a dizzyingly labyrinthine design. Amelia Lazarus, for example, nee Tobias, had six brothers and sisters, no less than four of whom married Hendrickses. One brother married a Hendricks first then, for his second wife, he chose another Tobias. The Hendrickses, meanwhile, were every bit as loyal. Uriah Hendricks, whose first wife was a Gomez, and whose second was a Lopez, had ten children, two of whom married Gomezes. In the next generation, the thirteen children of Harmon Hendricks married, among others, two Tobias sisters, two Tobias brothers, a Gomez first cousin, and two Nathans. And consider the descendants of Abraham de
Lucena, one of the earliest arrivals. In the first American generation of the distaff side—his daughter married a Gomez—there were three Gomez-Hendricks marriages; in the next, there were four Hendricks-Tobias unions, two Hendricks-Nathan marriages, two Gomez-Dreyfous marriages, and one Gomez-Nathan marriage. Meanwhile, Gomezes were marrying other Gomezes, and a disturbing pattern of insanity—clear from Dr. Stern’s book—that began to appear did not seem to discourage these close unions.
A measure of the intricacy of the interrelationships may be grasped by considering that the 25,000 individuals listed in Malcolm Stern’s book are all grouped under a little more than two hundred family dynasties. It is no exaggeration to say that, today, all the descendants of the early Jewish families are, in some way, related to one another. The late Lafayette Goldstone, a retired New York architect, was so fascinated with his Sephardic wife’s elaborate ancestry that, suspecting that she was indeed related to everybody else, he attempted to plot all the American Sephardim on one large, all-encompassing chart. Years, and hundreds of charts, later, he was forced to admit that the tightly inter-knotted families had presented him with a task that could not be executed.
Dr. Stern’s book also reveals how, through the long corridor of years, the Sephardic Jewish community in America—from the tight-knit, proud entity it once was—has steadily lost members as Sephardim have turned from Judaism to Christianity. The Book shows that prior to 1840 more than 15 percent of the marriages recorded were between Jews and Christians, and that of the total number of mixed marriages only 8 percent involved the conversion of the non-Jew to Judaism; members of only another 5 percent showed any indication of wishing to remain identified as Jews, or as members of the Jewish community. At the same time, as the years pass, and the Sephardic family trees stretch their branches downward into the present, one begins to see another phenomenon. The old Sephardic names with their Spanish and Portuguese musicality—Lopez, Mendes, Mendola, de Sola, de Silva, de Fonseca, Peixotto, Solis—begin gradually to be replaced by the somewhat harsher-sounding Ashkenazic, or German, names, as the old Iberian families feel the influx of the Germans throughout the nineteenth century, as the Sephardim and Ashkenazim intermarry and the Germans—as the Sephardim complain—try to “dominate” with their stiff-necked ways.