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by Emily Bingham
New York; Hill and Wang, 2003 A
Book Review by Matthew Schwartz
The Unjudaizing of a Colonial American
Family
Emily Bingham's Mordecai: An Early American Family recounts the history of a
Jewish American family through three generations from the time of the American
Revolution to the Civil War. Both the extent and depth of the research are
remarkable, although the author can be faulted on several minor inaccuracies on
matters of Jewish law. An educated clan, the Mordecais left a great many letters
and other writings, and author Bingham has used these wisely and sensitively.
Nevertheless, the Mordecais were neither great nor famous and they made little
mark on history. They probably do not quite merit a book of their own. If they
hold an interest for today, it is because their history in many ways reflects
the currents of their times and also because we can observe so much of their
times through their own writings.. Their great challenges were maintaining their
Jewishness and earning a living, and in neither did they meet great success.
Jacob Mordecai, the patriarch of the clan was born to a mother whose conversion
to Judaism was suspect. He moved his growing family in 1792 to Warrenton, NC,
where they set up a fairly successful school. However, there were few Jews in
the entire young U.S.A. then and nothing of Judaism in Warrenton. Jacob had his
own period of serious leaning toward Christianity, and although he turned fully
back to Jewish observance, a number of his children became Christian and with
almost missionary fervor. By 1900, only a handful of the large family were still
Jewish.
The family letters offer an account of the tensions as family members married
Christians and/or converted outright to Christianity. The shifting of ideologies
combined with the efforts to acclimatize into the general society, along with a
series of family business failures raised constant problems.. Finding one's
place could be difficult. Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, a grandson, earned a medical
degree, but suffered from mental illness and went on to devote himself to
off-beat utopian social doctrines like Fourierism and to some even stranger
ideas about human sexuality. These latter he expressed in two books entitled
Love Vs. Marriage and Involuntary Seminal Losses.
Some of the most interesting sections in the book describe family members
dealing with historical events. Perhaps the best remembered Mordecai was Alfred
(1804-1887), who graduated from West Point and served with distinction in the
U.S. army. As the Southern states formed into the Confederacy in 1861, Alfred
was commandant of a military post in upstate New York. He had married a Jewish
woman from Pennsylvania, and their oldest son had likewise graduated from West
Point and entered the army. Alfred had been invited by Jefferson Davis to become
head officer for Confederate artillery. At the same time, Alfred's relatives,
almost all living in Virginia and North Carolina, and including his aged mother,
wrote him demanding that he return south and join the rebellion. The documents
reveal the pressures on Alfred and the stages of his indecision until he finally
resigned his commission. However, instead of going south, he moved to
Philadelphia where he opened a school.
Emma, Jacob Mordecai's twelfth child, wrote of her experiences in Richmond in
the closing days of the war. Lieutenant R.J. Moses came to her farmhouse with
the news that Lee's army was leaving Richmond. The house shook from the
explosions as the arsenals were set afire, and Confederate gunboats in the river
were blown up. Emma tried to go into town to retrieve some valuables but had to
turn back. Returning later to the city she heard the noisy volley of gunfire
that greeted President Lincoln's arrival in Richmond, and she cursed him as "ill
bred."
There are indeed interesting moments in this book even on so minor a subject. We
hope that Ms. Bingham will apply her considerable talents to bigger subjects in
future writings.
Dr. Matthew Schwartz is a professor of history at Wayne
State University in Detroit.
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