The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Well. A good lawyer must have seen that Audler had a cause for action after being subjected to that sort of public abuse. But Audler, at this point—perhaps aware of the amusement the word battle was creating up and down the eastern seaboard—chose politely to withdraw with the calmly worded announcement that “after a long residence in this city (I flatter myself without reproach) … my reputation cannot suffer in the opinion of an impartial public, by the slanderous and unfounded accusations of such a worthless fellow as Levy.” Therewith the battle ended, as both parties withdrew to their tents to lick their wounds.

  At the same time, when an Ashkenazic Jew married one of the Sephardim, there were almost certain to be troubles, as happened in New Orleans to Samuel Jacobs (German) and his wife, Rosette (Sephardic), a Spanish-tempered lady who spoke sneeringly of her husband’s “peasant” ancestry, even though Germany’s Jews were somewhat worse off than the peasants. It was not long before readers of the Louisiana Gazette were titillated to see the following paid notice:

  CAUTION. Whereas my wife Rosette has left my house without any just cause whatever, this is to caution the public not to trust her on my account, as I will not pay any debts contracted by her.

  A month later, Mr. Jacobs published a retraction to the above, saying that it had all been “merely through a mistake,” and adding, “I have the pleasure to let the public know that we live in perfect harmony.” Despite this claim, however, the marriage continued to be a stormy one and, in less than a year, the couple were granted a legal separation, one of the first in Louisiana history and a great rarity in its days—particularly in a Jewish marriage.

  When word of these scandalous goings-on in New Orleans reached the ears of Jews in such staid northern cities as New York and Newport, the reaction was one of shock and dismay. The fabric of Jewish life in New Orleans seemed to be flying apart, and this was something that Jews in the North could not accept with equanimity. Many of the New Orleans Jewish families were the northerners’ close relatives. A close tie between Newport and New Orleans, for example, lay in the person of Judah Touro, the man whose celebrated will has made him something of a legend among American Jewish philanthropists.

  The Touros were an old Spanish family who came to Newport by way of the West Indies, and Isaac Touro—the first to arrive—was immediately taken in by Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez, and made a member of Newport’s exclusive Jewish club. Isaac Touro, along with Lopez and Rivera, was among those who drew up the plans for Newport’s famous synagogue in 1759, and Isaac was the one selected to perform the dedication of the building when it was completed four years later. The building (which has since been renamed the Touro Synagogue and designated a national historic site) contains an architectural detail that is a haunting reminder of the Marrano past of its builders, and the dangers their ancestors faced if they wished to practice their faith in Inquisitional Spain. The plans call for “a few small stairs which lead from the altar in the center, to a secret passage in the basement”—for escape.

  Isaac Touro married a Hays, another old Sephardic family,* and their daughter married one of Aaron Lopez’ many sons, thus bringing the Touros, who had been merely friends, into the Lopez-Gomez-Rivera family complex.

  Just what brought Isaac Touro’s son Judah to New Orleans is something of a mystery. Since Judah Touro has become a legend, his life has suffered the fate of so much that is Jewish legend—distortion, and expansion out of all proportion to the facts at hand. Since he did indeed become a very rich man, and since he did write a famous will, leaving a fortune to different charities, Jewish legend makers have tended to have it that he was one of New Orleans’ best-loved figures, that the entire city went into mourning when he died, and so on.

  The facts indicate that Judah Touro was actually not well liked in the southern city, that he was an odd little man who may not have been even very bright, a recluse, a string saver, a nineteenth-century Collyer brother. It has been said that he left his native Newport because of blighted love, that he loved a beautiful cousin, and that his stern old uncle Moses Hays (his mother’s brother) refused to let his daughter marry such a close relation. One version of the tale has it that he left Newport because of the death of this cousin, Rebecca Hays. Actually, Rebecca died nine months after he left.

  Another version insists that the cousin was not Rebecca but her sister Catherine, and that Uncle Moses would not let them wed. And yet Uncle Moses Hays died a few days after Judah Touro arrived in New Orleans. With the opposition out of the way, wouldn’t this have been the moment for him to hurry home and claim his love, or for her to run to him? It is true that neither Catherine Hays nor Judah ever married, and that they never set eyes on each other again. A romantic story exists that, throughout their lives, the two corresponded in a long series of love letters, and that in these letters the lovers never aged, that they wrote to each other as if they were both still teen-agers, even in their seventies speaking of “your tiny dancing feet and glancing eyes.” It may be true, but no one has ever discovered this remarkable correspondence. It is said that in the delirium of his last illness Judah Touro “talked of walking in a beautiful garden with Catherine Hays, his first and only love.” Perhaps, but just to whom he spoke these words is not recorded. He did, it is true, leave her a small sum of money in his will, apparently unaware that she had died a few days before he signed this document.

  In any case, he did indeed, as a young man, move permanently from his native Newport to New Orleans. There may have been a falling out with his uncle Moses, because Judah did not come, as might have been expected, to represent his uncle’s business. He came independently, as a loner, and set himself up in business as a loner. He became a commission merchant, and his earliest advertisements show him dealing in such diverse merchandise as beer, herring, lobster, butter, cigars, candles, soap, nuts, and Holland gin. He prospered, in a modest way.

  The man who may have known Judah Touro best, an executor of the famous will, considered him a most peculiar man. He wrote, “Mr. Touro is the very impersonation of a snail, not to say of a crab whose progress (to use a paradox) is usually backward.… I must be very careful to humor him … he is very slow.… You know he is a strange man.” In business Judah Touro was hesitant, indecisive, never adventuresome or imaginative. And yet he was successful. He was by no means the most successful commission merchant in New Orleans. He was not even the most successful Jewish commission merchant. And yet, little by little, he was becoming very rich, and, little by little, the rest of New Orleans began to suspect this fact and to study him with new interest. What was his formula to riches? It was simply that he didn’t spend. The fortune Judah Touro was amassing was coming to him penny by hard penny, and he was squirreling it away in banks. As a rabbi acquaintance explained it:

  Mr. T. was not a man of brilliant mind; on the contrary, he was slow and not given to bursts of enthusiasm, as little as he was fond of hazardous speculations; and he used to say that he could only be said to have saved a fortune by strict economy, while others had spent one by their liberal expenditures … he had no tastes for the wasteful outlay of means on enjoyments which he had no relish for. He had thus the best wines always by him, without drinking them himself; his table, whatever delicacies it bore, had only plain and simple food for him.…

  His existence was solitary. For most of his life he lived in a series of cheap rooming houses on the wrong side of town, at a time when other New Orleans rich men were trying to outdo each other by building elaborate mansions. Only late in life did he permit himself the luxury of buying a small house. When he bought real estate, it was as an investment. He never sold anything, and his real estate, in a growing city, tended to appreciate over the years. He was a hoarder, but only of the barest necessities of life. He shunned possessions to such an extent that, when he died and his estate was appraised, only $1,960 was assigned to personal property. This included silverware valued at $805 and $600 worth of wine—wine seems to have been his sole personal indulgence—an
d $555 worth of crockery, glassware, office furniture, his carpets, hat stand, bedspread, and chairs. His personal estate was valued at $928,774.74—doubtless an extremely low appraisal. Though the sum is not staggering by today’s standards, there were probably only ten Americans in Judah Touro’s day who were worth as much.

  Judah Touro, according to the legend, gave away a fortune in private philanthropies during his lifetime. If true, he must have given anonymously, adhering to the Talmudic exhortation that “Twice blessed is he who gives in secret.” He also, according to the legend, gave away the entire $80,000 fortune he inherited from his sister, Rebecca Touro Lopez, who died before him. This appears not to be true since no record of any such bequest exists in the various papers pertaining to Mrs. Lopez’ estate. The plain fact is that, during his lifetime, Judah Touro evinced no interest in philanthropy whatever, and seemed obsessed only with the making and saving of money.

  What prompted him, in the end, to give it all away remains another puzzle. But two weeks before his death he sat down and wrote his famous will. In sixty-five separate bequests, Judah Touro gave away money, in sums ranging from three thousand to twenty thousand dollars, to a long list of charitable causes throughout the eastern United States, from the orphans of Boston to the Ladies Benevolent Society in New Orleans. The Jewish congregations of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, Montgomery, Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Saint Louis, Buffalo, Albany—and, of course, New York and Newport—all received bequests.

  In Boston, Touro’s name is now associated with Massachusetts General Hospital, the Asylum for Indigent Boys, the Female Orphan Asylum, the Humane Society, and many other charities. To New Orleans he left funds to combat yellow fever, which was in those days endemic, and a hospital—the Touro Infirmary—was established in that connection. A bequest to Newport’s “Old Stone Mill,” also known as the Newport Tower, saved that venerable structure from demolition by the city fathers, and he also left funds to the City of Newport for a public park to be laid out around the tower. This plot is now known as Touro Park.

  All in all, a grand total of $483,000 went to charities. It was, indeed, the greatest display of philanthropic largesse the new world had ever seen. Thus, his death being the most significant act of his life, Judah Touro entered history, and legend.

  The balance of his estate, after all the charitable bequests were paid, was directed to go to “my dear, old and devoted friend,” Mr. Rezin Davis Shepherd. When serving in the Louisiana Militia during the Battle of New Orleans, Judah Touro had been wounded in the thigh by a shell, and it was Shepherd who carried him off the field to a doctor, and whom Touro always credited with saving his life. Shepherd, whose great-great-grandson is Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, received between $500,000 and $750,000 under Touro’s will—again a huge sum at the time—and this windfall is one of the cornerstones of the Boston Saltonstalls’ family fortune.

  One of the elements of the Judah Touro legend is that he was an early pioneer for civil rights, and frequently bought Negro slaves only to set them free. Alas, there is no proof of this, either, although there is evidence that he did not trade in slavery as extensively as his southern contemporaries, and that he had a genuine aversion for the trade in which his sister’s husband’s family, the Lopezes, had made so much money. On the other hand, a timid trader, he didn’t trade in anything extensively.

  There are, however, two quite intriguing pieces of information in this regard that turned up after Judah Touro’s death. One was the discovery that a certain Ellen Wilson, identified as an “F.W.C.” (Free Woman of Color, in southern parlance), had had a house purchased for her in Judah Touro’s name. Among his effects, a note to this same woman in the amount of $4,100 was found. Ellen Wilson, who may have already died, never came forward to claim her inheritance, and has never been identified.

  The second fact is that Pierre André Destrac Cazenove, appointed by Judah as one of the executors of his will, and one of its beneficiaries—Cazenove received a $10,000 gift—was a mulatto. Little is known about Cazenove, except that he was some forty-eight years younger than Judah Touro, that he had once worked for Judah as a clerk and was described as a great “pet” of Mr. Touro’s. At the time of Touro’s death, young Cazenove was reportedly worth some $20,000, quite a lot for a black man in the antebellum South. By the time of the Civil War, Cazenove and his four sons were operating a funeral parlor and livery stable, and were said to be worth $100,000. The Cazenove family were described as “Quadroons—Creoles, more properly now called colored persons.”

  It is astonishing that when the contents of Judah Touro’s will were made public—and made headlines in newspapers all over America—no mention was made of the startling fact that Touro had named a “colored person” as one of his executors, yet none was. Was this a fact deliberately suppressed, in order that the good Judah had done through his bequests should not be sullied by some sort of interracial scandal? Was Ellen Wilson actually Judah Touro’s mistress? Such alliances were certainly not unheard of, but would have been considered by the press unsuitable for public consumption. Was the romantically named Pierre André Destrac Cazenove, then, of whom Judah Touro was so fond, one of the few men he could trust to execute his will, actually Judah Touro’s son? And who was John Touro, who appeared in New Orleans between 1855 and 1865, not long after Judah Touro’s death? None of his known relatives ever followed him there. All these questions can now be only the subject of speculation.

  With all the embellishments of the legend that have grown around this odd little man, Jews today proudly point out to their children that America’s first philanthropist on any important scale was a Jew. Sephardim today remind their children that Judah Touro was a Sephardic Jew, “one of us,” with all his credentials in order. Judah Touro rests, along with all the puzzles and questions about his life, in the Jewish cemetery in his native Newport, with all his relatives. But what the purveyors of the legend do not tell their children—what many of them, in fact, do not know—is that many of Judah Touro’s benefactions were to Christian causes. At one point, for example, when the First Congregational Church of New Orleans was having financial difficulties, and was about to be torn down, Judah Touro bought the church for $20,000 and then gave the building back to the congregation.

  But Congregationalism was never quite his cup of tea. Quite early on, after his arrival in New Orleans, he rented a pew at Christ Church, and became an Episcopalian.

  Meanwhile, farther north, in Philadelphia, another Sephardic Jew was becoming the center of a storm of controversy and the basis of a legend. Haym Salomon, his family and other admirers were claiming, had actually “financed the American Revolution” by presenting General George Washington with a large personal loan at a crucial moment. Salomon’s detractors, meanwhile, were saying in loud voices that he had done no such thing. Once more, as in the case of Judah Touro, the extent of Jewish contribution to the course of American history was under examination.

  From the beginning, of course, the spirit that guided the American Revolution had strong Judaic overtones. The Old Testament had become, in many ways, a Revolutionary textbook. For one thing, the Puritans of Colonial New England considered themselves the spiritual offspring of Old Testament characters. Like the Jews, they gave their children Old Testament names. It was to the Old Testament that the Puritans turned to find God. They regarded the New Testament as merely the story of Christ. In England, the Puritans had been called “Jewish fellow travelers,” and they had compared their flight to America with the Jews’ escape from Egypt. They called the Massachusetts Bay Colony “the New Jerusalem.” There was a proposal that Hebrew be made the official language of the Colonies (it was on the regular curriculum, along with Latin and Greek, when Harvard was founded, a knowledge of the language being considered part of the equipment of a cultivated man). John Cotton had suggested that the Mosaic Code be used as the basis for Massachusetts laws. There is a manifestation of the Code, meanwhile,
in the wording of the American Constitution.

  Under the oppression of George III, the American colonists likened themselves to the Jews, and the king to the pharaoh. They quoted Samuel, who, when the people of Palestine came clamoring to him for the creation of a Hebrew royal family, raised strong objections to this notion, and the colonists found in his arguments a Biblical authority for their refusal to submit to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. In 1775, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, a Boston preacher, announced from the pulpit—the most effective medium of communication of the day—that the American colonists were like the people of Israel who resisted the unjust taxation of Solomon’s successor, and the Reverend Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard, preached that just as ancient Israel was wrong to take a king for itself, so were the colonists wrong to accept a king who was a tyrant. Aaron Lopez’ friend President Ezra Stiles of Yale delivered a sermon in which he traced the evolution of the democratic form of government from Palestine to America. He called America “God’s American Israel,” and George Washington “the American Joshua,” called forth by God to set His people free.

  The first Independence Day was something very close to a Jewish holiday. On July 4, 1776, the day that the great Declaration was officially published, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of three—Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—and asked them to prepare a seal for the United States of America. The design chosen by the committee depicted Pharaoh, crowned, in an open chariot, with a sword in his hand, passing through the divided waters of the Red Sea in pursuit of the Israelites. On the opposite shore stood Moses bathed in light from a pillar of fire, extending his hands toward the sea and bidding the waters to close and swallow Pharaoh. The legend emblazoned upon the seal was: “Rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God.” The theme, of course, was freedom, and this first Great Seal of the United States seems somewhat more appropriate than the present, more warlike seal, with its fierce eagle clutching a handful of arrows.