The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  For none that visit the Indian’s den

  Return again to the haunts of men.

  The knife is their doom, oh sad is their lot.

  Beware! Beware of the blood-stained spot!

  All this served to depress local real estate values, and to Daniel Gomez’ advantage. He had learned that the “blood-stained spot” also marked the convergence of a number of well-traveled Indian trails, and he selected the Indians’ den as a strategic place to establish a trading post.

  Attempts had been made since earliest Colonial times to identify the American Indians with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and long lists of similarities between Indian and Judaic ritual had been drawn up, in an effort to prove this thesis. It was pointed out that, like the Jews, the Indians tabooed certain animals as “unclean.” Like Jews, they had a sense of personal purity; they worshiped a great spirit called Yohovah; they had high priests; they had puberty rites. The Indians had important holy days in spring and fall, corresponding to Passover and Succoth, and a two-day fasting period corresponding to the Day of Atonement. The Indians had a lunar calendar, a similar counting system, and there are superficial similarities between the Hebrew and Indian tongues (both Hebrew and Indian languages make use of hyperbole and metaphor, and possess no comparative or superlative degree). Anthropologists have since dismissed these likenesses as coincidental, but in Daniel Gomez’ day they were the subject of serious study. In the early Sephardic community of New York, these matters were discussed at the synagogue. Just in case they should turn out to be distant brethren, the rabbis had enjoined their congregations against mistreating or exploiting the local Indians. In any case, Daniel and the Indians got along famously right from the beginning. “I am able to understand the Indian thought,” Daniel wrote to a friend.

  For his post, Daniel Gomez selected a site that was near a spring where the gathering tribes regularly stopped for water, and he began, in 1717, to construct a massive stone blockhouse. Trading with the Indians was not without certain obvious hazards, and his trading post was also a fortress. The walls were two feet thick in the front and in the back, from which direction an attack was considered likelier, they were three feet thick. The house contained two vast cellars which were to serve as vaults to store the goods—knives, hatchets, trinkets, and of course guns and whiskey—that Daniel intended to sell, as well as the furs he intended to acquire.

  He was building in the middle of virgin forest, seven miles from the nearest hamlet, Newburgh, which had been settled only eight years earlier. Trees had to be felled for timber, and stones had to be lifted from the ground for walls. The house took six years to build, but when it was finished Daniel Gomez had built an oasis of strength and also of comfort in the wilderness. In the main parlor Daniel had placed a huge fireplace, eight feet wide and six feet deep, designed for business entertaining during the winter months. Twenty to thirty Indians could gather around the fire’s warmth to trade and haggle over the prices of lynx, beaver, otter, black fox, mink, and muskrat. In a smaller room, another fireplace, equally large, had the same hospitable and commercial function. Contemporary reports describe Mr. Gomez’ house as furnished in “the ultimate luxuries which Gomez brought up from New York.” Here he and his two sons—and eventually his second wife—spent the winter fur-trading season. It must have been a lonely life, but Gomezes had always been self-sufficient types, more interested in deeds than in words.

  The lonely fort became known as “the Jew’s house,” and local records refer to Daniel only as “Gomez the Jew.” Until recent years the stream that ran by Daniel Gomez’ house (and that was once navigable, and doubtless transported some of Daniel’s goods for barter) was designated on local maps as “Jew’s Creek.” For thirty years, Daniel Gomez operated his trading post, at the same time keeping close personal and business ties with New York. Like his father, he was elected parnas of Shearith Israel, pledging the then lordly sum of fifteen pounds a year to the synagogue. As early as 1727, he was listed among the “freemen” of New York, but though the title of freeman, or burgher, permitted its owner certain rights, there were others—including the right to vote—that could be obtained only through naturalization.

  In 1737, in a notorious contested election, the right of Jews to vote for the general assembly had been challenged. Daniel Gomez was among the Jewish voters whose rights were in question, and the outcome was later called by William Seward “a stain in the annals of New York which the friends of rational liberty would wish to see effaced.” The objection was upheld, and the Jews’ rights were denied. Three years later, however, a Naturalization Act was passed. Daniel Gomez was among the first to take advantage of it and become a voter.

  At the outbreak of the Revolution, with the arrival of British and Hessian troops in New York, Shearith Israel closed its doors and most members of the congregation moved to parts of the East held by the Revolutionary cause. Only a few Tory-minded Jews remained. These did not include the Daniel Gomezes. Daniel took his family to Philadelphia, the center of the American patriotic movement. He was an old man now, but he nonetheless became one of the founders of a new Sephardic congregation, Mikveh Israel.

  He continued to keep track of his affairs in Newburgh, where one of his sons held the fort. It wasn’t long before his son was able to write Daniel that he had hired a teenage German immigrant as an apprentice, and was teaching the youth to pound the pelts of beaver, otter, and mink that were making their way down Jew’s Creek in Indian canoes. The young man’s name was John Jacob Astor—then spelled Ashdor—and the Gomez firm was paying him a dollar a day. Certainly this early association with the Gomezes accounts for the recurring rumor in New York that the Astors are of Jewish descent. There is no proof of this, but there is plenty of evidence of what young Gomez thought of young Astor—a butcher’s son with a heavy south German accent, a wildly indecipherable handwriting, and atrocious manners (after meals, Astor would wipe his hands on his shirt). Moses Gomez was, after all, a third-generation American and had no taste for this vulgarian. Soon Moses Gomez could take no more of him and, in dismissing him, explained to his father in a letter: “The fool has no head for this business absolutely”—a remarkably poor appraisal of the man who would found the American Fur Company, and become America’s first monopolist.

  The Newburgh house still stands. Far from seeming haunted by evil spirits, the house and the lands around it have, over two and a half centuries, had a happy history. There have been a number of owners since the house passed out of the Gomez family, and all have treated it tenderly. One added a second story of brick which contrasts handsomely with the gray stone walls Gomez built—built without mortar, fitted so perfectly that even today the walls stand straight and smooth. Now, though the acreage around it has been reduced to only twenty-seven, the blockhouse is still an elegant country home furnished in “the ultimate luxuries.” The present owners, who have lived in it for over twenty years, speak of it with affection. In 1968, Mrs. Jeffrey Starin, wife of the owner, told a reporter from the New York Times: “The children talk about the house as having great roots. It gives them a feeling of strength and security. It has stood up in all kinds of weather and, a few years ago, when there was all that talk about bombs and shelters, they used to say, ‘Our house will still be standing.’”

  But alas, the Gomez name—which withstood so many generations in Spain—has died out in the United States. It decorates, of course, the higher branches of many Sephardic family trees, including the Nathans’, but the last male Gomez, we learn from Malcolm Stern’s extraordinary book, died in Franklin, New York, in 1926, without issue. He, Joseph Edwin Gomez, Jr., would have been Daniel’s great-great-great-nephew. He was one of five children, and Dr. Stern notes above their names: “Children converted with mother, Feb. 3, 1871.” If Daniel’s ghost was pacing the house in Newburgh when this news was received, there must have been outraged noises in the night.

  8

  “MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE WINDWARD COAST OF AFRICA”

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nbsp; Even after it became a British colony, New York remained very Dutch in feeling. The brick and tile with which the houses were built, the architecture, the machinery, the utensils—everything had been imported from the Netherlands until a replica of a Dutch dorp had been created on the tip of Manhattan, a miniaturized Amsterdam. The British had arrived and taken over things, but the Dutch families refused to change their quiet, cultured ways. They continued to live with their mahogany furniture, their Oriental rugs, their delft ornaments, their fine brass and silverware, their paintings by Dutch masters. They continued to worship at the Dutch church, and to speak the Dutch language. So resolutely did they cling to their old-world roots that Dutch was spoken in the Dutch Church of New York right up until the time of the Civil War.

  The Dutch were scornful of the British arrivals, and considered them boorish and uncultivated. The people who counted were still the Dutch families—the de Peysters, the Bogarduses, the Lockermans, the Van Cortlandts, the Kierstedes, the Van Rensselaers, the Phillipses, and the Beekmans. The Jews of New York, with their affinity for things Dutch, felt similarly about the British. (England had, after all, had anti-Semitic pogroms, which Holland had never had.) As Revolutionary sentiments were marshaling themselves, there was no question of where most of the New York Sephardim would stand: squarely against the British.

  But as the trickle of Sephardic arrivals continued—along with a much smaller trickle of Jews from central Europe, who joined the Sephardic congregations when they got here—Jews were scattering to cities other than New York, establishing little settlements in Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans to the south, and in New England to the north, following the pattern of expansion of the American colonies along the eastern seaboard. A particularly important Sephardic community had been established early in the eighteenth century in Newport, where sons and grandsons of the Twenty-Three, along with their later-arriving cousins, had settled and were taking part in Newport’s booming trade. By 1750, Newport had outdistanced New York as a commercial seaport, and Newport’s Sephardim were getting even richer than New York’s. There were strong ties between Jewish Newport and Jewish New York. The famous Touro Synagogue in Newport was built as—and continues to be—a branch of New York’s Shearith Israel, and is owned by the New York congregation (it pays rent of a dollar a year). But in terms of eighteenth-century politics, Newport and New York were somewhat unlike. Newport, after all, was a New England city. There was more pro-Tory feeling about. Writing to his young Newport cousin, Aaron Lopez, Daniel Gomez frequently chided him for failing to support the Revolutionary cause. But young Aaron, though he respected his New York relative, had different ideas. On his arrival in America he had sworn in his naturalization oath to “be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty George the Third.” And Aaron had business reasons for remaining on good terms with the British. He had extensive dealings with them in Newport’s flourishing slave trade.

  Aaron Lopez was a very determined young man. He had arrived in Newport from Portugal—where his family had been successful Marranos—in 1750 at the age of nineteen, and he had already acquired a wife, another cousin, five years older than he, named Abigail (Anna had been her Christian alias in Iberia), and a tiny daughter, Sarah (alias Catherine). In Newport the little family immediately resumed their Old Testament first names, and Aaron and his wife were remarried in the Jewish rite.

  Men of Aaron’s generation had a distinct advantage over the earliest pioneers such as the Twenty-Three. There were other Jews, many of them relatives, to welcome them and help them set themselves up in business. In Aaron’s case, there were his Gomez and de Lucena connections in New York, and, in Newport, an older half-brother, Moses Lopez, and still another cousin, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera, who had both become successful merchants. For several years, Aaron Lopez worked for Jacob Rivera while he saved his money so as to get into something on his own. Mr. Rivera was credited with having founded Newport’s spermaceti industry, dealing in the whitish, waxy substance that could be separated from the oil of the sperm whale and was the principal ingredient of candlemaking. Between spermaceti and the town’s “other” industry—slavery—Newport’s harbor was one of the busiest in America, where as many as 150 ships lay at anchor at a time.

  Slavery, and their part in it, has understandably become a sore point with the Sephardim, who tend to play down their ancestors’ role, or to insist that Jewish merchants who took part in the slave trade did so “only on a very limited scale.” Looking at it in historical perspective, however, and bearing in mind the attitudes that prevailed at the time—and remembering man’s limitless capacity to overlook his own folly—it is possible to view slavery as it was viewed in the eighteenth century, as just another business. No one questioned the morality of the slave trade. Whether it was right or wrong was something not even considered. It was not in any way a Jewish preoccupation. All the “best people” were involved in it, and a great many of New England’s oldest, finest, and most redoubtable fortunes are solidly based on human cargo. (One should not point to the Jews and overlook the Christians.)

  In New England, slavery was not only tacitly approved. It was actually touted as an institution of great benefit to the black man, in that it brought him out of the heathen jungle into the civilized land of Christian godliness. A certain elder of the church in Newport would, according to one historian, go to church the Sunday following the arrival of a slaver from the Coast and “thank God that another cargo of benighted beings had been brought to a land where they could have the benefit of a Gospel dispensation.” In a volume called Reminiscences of Newport, an idyllic picture of slavery is painted, and the attitudes prevalent in Aaron Lopez’ day are perfectly defined. “If we look at the relation of master and slave at that time,” the author writes, “we must own that the attachment between them was stronger, and the interest manifested in the welfare of each other far greater than anything in our days between employer and employee.” He adds, “Few were the complaints of the servitude exacted.” True, there were some who regarded slavery with distaste or even horror, but these were regarded as harmless eccentrics. Ministers such as Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins ranted against slavery from their New England pulpits, but to little avail. Every man of substance owned slaves. The Episcopal Church itself owned a plantation in Barbados, and from time to time had to purchase fresh slaves to keep it in operation. And slavery had become such an immensely profitable business that those men engaged in it had no difficulty whatever in turning deaf ears to their scattered critics.

  Newport’s first human cargo from Africa arrived as early as 1696, and soon afterward began that interesting triangular trade route which the slavers followed for the next hundred years. A ship would set sail from Newport to the west coast of Africa loaded with hogsheads of New England rum. In Africa, the rum would be traded for slaves, who would then be carried to the West Indies, where the third major transaction would take place—slaves traded for sugar, which was then brought back to Newport, where no less than twenty-two stills waited to turn the sugar into rum, which would then make its way back to Africa to be exchanged for more slaves.

  The rum, in part, stayed in the African coastal colonies, where it was simply another form of currency, and of course a small portion of it went into the interior of Africa, where tribal chieftains accepted it in payment for their people. But most of the rum eventually went to Europe—to England, France, Holland, Portugal, and Denmark—for all these countries were then engaged in what amounted to an international business. And these were the countries, too, that needed slaves to provide labor in their expanding colonies.

  There were opportunities for sizable profits at each corner of the triangular slave trade, and from a great variety of other goods that were bought, sold, and traded along the way. But slaves produced the tidiest yield—between £1,500 and £2,000 profit per shipload being about average, at a time when, to get an idea of comparative prices, a hundred-gallon cask of Madeira wine sold for something
like £6. At the height of the slave trade when Aaron Lopez was active, as many as 184 vessels were involved from the state of Rhode Island alone. In the United States, only South Carolina exceeded this figure. This meant that Newport saw the arrival or departure of a slave ship every single day of the year.

  Of course it was easier for the men who owned the slaving fleets to justify their curious occupation. Most owners never set foot aboard their ships. They had never seen a slave ship being unloaded or watched the sick and filthy men and women—and children, too—emerge with their black skins gone gray from hunger and confinement below the decks. The same was true of the rest of commercial and social Newport. Slavery was invisible. Slaves were nearly always disposed of in West Indian or southern ports. As Jeremy Belknap, an old Newporter, once recalled: “Very few cargoes ever came to this port.… I remember one, between thirty and forty years ago, which consisted almost wholly of children … sometimes the Rhode Island vessels, after having sold their prime slaves in the West Indies, brought the remnants of their cargoes hither for sale.” Mr. Belknap then wistfully added: “Since this commerce has declined, the town of Newport has gone to decay.”

  Out of sight was out of mind and, meanwhile, an altogether different sort of character was required for the man who captained a slaving ship, who anchored off the African coast and engaged in the actual barter of human bodies in exchange for hogsheads of rum.

  Of a different caliber, too, was the “governor” who operated the coastal “castle” where slaves were herded and corraled until sold. At the height of the eighteenth-century slave trade, as many as forty of these stations were strung along the so-called Slave Coast, the low-lying delta country that stretches for 700 miles between the mouth of the Volta River and Mount Cameroon. Here, those blacks “deemed to make the best slaves” were brought for 350 years. Of the forty castles, fourteen were English, three were French, fifteen were Dutch, four were Portuguese, and four were Danish. But from the figures of a single year of trade—38,000 slaves sold by the British, 20,000 by the French, 4,000 by the Dutch, 10,000 by the Portuguese, and 2,000 by the Danes—it is quite clear that more than half the trade was in British hands.*