The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  A particularly close friend of Rebecca Gratz’s was Matilda Hoffman. It was in the office of Matilda’s father, Judge Ogden Hoffman, that Washington Irving studied law, and presently Miss Hoffman and Washington Irving became engaged. But before the pair could marry, Miss Hoffman became ill with “wasting disease,” a common affliction of the day, and Rebecca went to live at the Hoffmans’ to help nurse her friend. Rebecca was there to close Matilda’s eyes at the end.

  This devotion of one young woman to another impressed Irving. When he went to England to try to forget his sweetheart’s death, Rebecca Gratz and her kindness to Matilda became almost an obsession with him. He could talk of little else but the Jewess’ services to her Christian friend. One of the people he told the story to was Sir Walter Scott, and from this the legend has deseended that Scott—who never met Rebecca Gratz—used her as his model for the character Rebecca in Ivanhoe. It is probably true, but the evidence is not as clear-cut as it might be. It has been said, for example, that when Ivanhoe was published, Scott sent Irving a first edition inscribed: “How does my Rebecca compare with yours?” Actually, Scott wrote Irving a letter saying, in somewhat different words: “How do you like your Rebecca? Does the Rebecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern given?”—a small, possibly insignificant, difference.

  Rebecca Gratz, meanwhile, was clearly pleased to think that she and Rebecca in Ivanhoe were the same person. She read the novel in 1820 and immediately wrote to her sister-in-law: “Have you received Ivanhoe? When you read it tell me what you think of my namesake Rebecca.” A few weeks later she wrote again:

  I am glad you admire Rebecca, for she is just such a representation of a good girl as I think human nature can reach. Ivanhoe’s insensibility to her, you must recollect, may be accounted to his previous attachment—his prejudice was a characteristic of the age he lived in—he fought for Rebecca, though he despised her race—the veil that is drawn over his feelings was necessary to the fable, and the beautiful sensibility of hers, so regulated yet so intense, might show the triumph of faith over human affection. I have dwelt on this character as we sometimes do on an exquisite painting until the canvas seems to breathe and we believe it is life.

  In later years, when asked—and she frequently was—whether she was Rebecca of Scott’s romance, she would merely smile primly and change the subject.

  One aspect of Rebecca Gratz’s story that must have appealed to Scott’s sentimental nature—so much so that he may easily have been tempted to borrow it for his tale—was that Rebecca, in life, like Rebecca in fiction, had had an unhappy love affair with a Christian. He had been young Samuel Ewing, the son of the Presbyterian provost of the University of Pennsylvania. He had escorted Rebecca to the Assembly ball of 1802. But Rebecca’s parents, and Rebecca herself, had always opposed intermarriage with non-Jews. Rebecca’s and young Ewing’s love was star-crossed from the beginning. Faith, as she put it, had to triumph over affection.

  Rebecca Gratz was nearly forty when she read Ivanhoe. She could look back on events of twenty years before with equanimity. In time, Sam Ewing had made a proper Philadelphia wedding, to one of the Redman girls. But it was not a happy union, and he died young. When he was lying in his coffin there was a sudden hush in the church as the heavily veiled figure of Rebecca Gratz appeared in the doorway. She moved swiftly to the coffin, placed a small object on his breast, and just as swiftly departed. The object was a miniature portrait of herself. With it were three white roses, crossed to form a six-pointed star.

  She never married. She devoted her life to good deeds. She founded the Philadelphia Orphan Society, in 1815. She became secretary of the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances. She founded the Hebrew Sunday School Society, the first of its kind in America. She helped found the Jewish Foster Home. She began and ended each day with prayer. When her sister, Rachel Gratz Moses, died in 1823, Rebecca helped raise Rachel’s nine small children. Her spirit showed in her face. After painting her, Thomas Sully said that he had “never seen a more striking Hebraic face. The easy pose, suggestive of perfect health, the delicately turned neck and shoulders with the firmly poised head and its profusion of dark curling hair, large, clear black eyes, the contour of the face, the fine white skin, the expressive mouth and the firmly chiselled nose, with its strength of character, left no doubt as to the race from which she had sprung. Possessed of an elegant bearing, a melodiously sympathetic voice, a simple and frank and gracious womanliness, there was about Rebecca Gratz all that a princess of the blood Royal might have coveted.” What better description of a heroine of fiction?

  The religious school she founded still operates, and Rebecca Gratz foundations continue to dispense funds in Philadelphia. In later Gratz generations, family strictures against marrying Christians relaxed considerably. Collateral Gratz descendants today are named Wallace, Rowland, Taylor, Brewster, Marshall, McClure, and Gillette. Her brother’s great-granddaughter is the present Mrs. Godfrey S. Rockefeller of Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Helen Gratz Rockefeller is a handsome, cheerful woman in her sixties who recalls, of the Gratz relatives whom she knew: “We were a rather tempestuous, almost violent family. Life was hardly ever placid. My grandfather, Henry Howard Gratz, had a terrible temper and was something of a despot. He used to terrify us. He’d do things like throw his cane at you if he caught you eating an apple. He had three wives. The third one he married when he was seventy, and she was only thirty. She adored him, but when he was cross with her he’d throw all of her flowerpots out the window. But we had a terribly strong sense of family obligation. We stuck together through thick and thin.”

  Mrs. Rockefeller says: “The Gratz family fortune was pretty well diminished by the time it reached my grandfather’s generation. My father, Benjamin Gratz III, left home with two dollars and fifty cents in his pocket when he was in his early twenties. The two dollars was stolen, but with the fifty cents he built up a whole new fortune for himself, and took care of everybody in the family—aunts, uncles, relatives from miles around. We all lived together in Saint Louis. There was a great deal of singing together and reading aloud.” Though Mrs. Rockefeller is proud of her Jewish heritage, the Gratzes she descends from have been Episcopalians from her grandfather’s generation on, if not from even before. It strikes her as quaintly ironic that her collateral ancestor Rebecca Gratz should have remained unmarried for life because she loved a Christian, whereas Gratzes in subsequent generations have displayed a tendency to marry several times—her grandfather three times, and her father twice. As a child, growing up in Saint Louis, she recalls her parents as stalwart churchgoers, and Bishop Tuttle of Saint Louis was a regular guest at the Gratz Sunday dinner table. Mrs. Rockefeller remembers her mother asking the deaf old bishop, “Do you like bananas, Bishop?” and the bishop cupping his ear to inquire, “What was that?” “Do you like bananas, Bishop?” Mrs. Gratz asked in a louder voice. “No,” the bishop replied, “I prefer the old-fashioned nightshirt.”

  There is no question that the social distinction, and the charm, of early American Jewish women, as well as the financial assistance and business probity of the men, all helped George Washington—who, after all, was an aristocratic Virginian and something of a snob—to look with favor on Jews as a whole, as a people, as a valuable part of the new nation. Jewish officers, including two cousins of the Franks sisters, served on his staff. Colonel David Salisbury Franks—Haym Salomon’s brother-in-law—was Washington’s emissary to Paris, where he carried dispatches between Washington and Ambassador Benjamin Franklin; he also delivered copies of the 1784 treaty of peace with England to the American embassies in Europe. Colonel Isaac Franks, called “the boy hero of the Revolution” (he was only sixteen when he enlisted), rose in the ranks until he was attached to headquarters as General Washington’s aide-de-camp.

  But at the war’s end, the still relative minority of Jews in the country looked at their new government with a certain apprehensiveness. After all,
not all had backed the Revolutionary cause. And for three hundred years, under a variety of monarchs and colonial leaders, under many flags, these ancient, proud, and highly bred families from Spain and Portugal had received treatment that had been, at best, uneven and, at its worst, calamitous. Which way would the winds blow now?

  When George Washington was inaugurated as first President of the United States of America, the heads of the Jewish communities in Philadelphia, New York, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah all wrote cautious letters to the new chief executive. They reminded him, as politely as possible, of the kind of country they hoped the United States would be. Moses Seixas, head of the Newport congregation, put it best. Would the world now see, he asked, “a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, but generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, deeming everyone of whatever nation, tongue and language, equal parts of the great government machine?”

  Seixas’ letter obviously impressed the President, for he actually borrowed some of Seixas’ rhetoric in his reply:

  GENTLEMEN:

  While I receive with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.

  The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are passed is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.

  If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government to become a great and happy people.

  The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

  It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural right, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection shall demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

  It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.

  May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

  May the Father of all Mercies scatter light, and not darkness upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way, everlasting happy.

  G. WASHINGTON

  In his sometimes jawbreaking prose, he was uttering almost dreamily noble sentiments, painting a picture of America’s future that was close to utopian. But the heart of “G. Washington” was in the right place.

  * Alexander Hamilton, a frequent traveler, wrote in the summer of 1744: “At twelve o’clock we passed a little town, starboard, called Greenwiteh, consisting of eight or ten neat houses, and two or three miles above that on the same shore, a pretty box of a house with an avenue fronting the river belonging to Oliver De Lancey.”

  † Kin, though distantly, of the Paris couturier Pierre Balmain.

  * The Willings, partners of Robert Morris, apparently had big feet.

  12

  LEGENDS AND LEGACIES

  Each of the old families has its favorite legend, and Aunt Elvira Nathan Solis knew them all. Some of the most romantic, to be sure, involved members of the Solis family who, through the vellum pages of Dr. Stern’s book, can be seen to have evolved into present-day New York and Philadelphia Solises out of a series of dynastic marriages in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberia. It all began when a certain Marquesa Lopes (undoubtedly a distant ancestor of Aaron Lopez) married Fernao Jorge Da Solis and, at roughly the same time, Beatrice Pinto married Duarte Da Silva. The Da Silvas’ son married the Da Solises’ daughter, bringing the two houses together, and from then on—making use of the Spanish practice of appending the mother’s name to the surnames of the children—the family fell heir to the double name of Da Silva Solis or, as it was used in certain branches, Da Silva y Solis. This was all in the sixteenth century, and is remarkable in that the practice has been continued to this day. (Emily Nathan’s full name, for instance, is Emily Da Silva Solis Nathan.)

  Dr. Stern’s book reveals such peripheral information about the Solis family as the fact that one Joseph Da Silva Solis, a London gold broker, was so good at his job that he earned the admiring nickname “El Dorado.” In one branch of the family, for several generations, the male heirs bore the hereditary title of Marquis de Montfort. Next to another name in the voluminous Solis family tree, Dr. Stern has made the sinister notation: “Murdered at Murney, Friday, October 17, 1817.”

  The Solises, Aunt Ellie Solis liked to remind the children, were noted for producing strong-minded ladies. A number of Solis women, through history, have let their husbands retire to intellectual pursuits while the women ran the family business—or the country. A fifteenth-century example of this breed was Isabel de Solis, otherwise romantically known as “Zoraya the Morning Star.” Isabel, or Zoraya, was captured as a slave by Suley Hassan, the Moorish sultan of Granada, who made her his concubine. But so strong was her will, and so powerful was her allure, that she was soon running both the sultan and the sultanate. All American Solises also descend from Dona Isabel de Fonseca, a daughter of the Marquis of Turin and the Count of Villa Real and Monterrey, and Solomon da Silva Solis. In a plan masterminded by Dona Isabel, the pair escaped from Portugal disguised as Christians and were married as Jews in Amsterdam in 1670.

  By the time Jacob da Silva Solis arrived in New York from London in 1803, the family fortunes were somewhat diminished. Jacob made an auspicious in-the-group marriage to David and Esther Hays’s daughter Charity, and took her with him to Wilmington, Delaware, where he opened a store. Jacob’s theory was that Wilmingtonians were doing too much of their shopping in nearby Philadelphia, and would save time and money by buying their dry-goods nearer home. Apparently he was wrong, for five years later, when this venture failed, he himself was in Philadelphia, looking for a job. He applied to one of his wife’s relatives, Simon Gratz, for the humble position of shohet, or ritual slaughterer, and was rather summarily turned down by Mr. Gratz. Leaving his wife and children behind, he went south to New Orleans, where an earlier Solis, Joseph, had made a fortune developing Louisiana’s sugar cane industry. But Jacob, alas, had no such luck. One of the stories Aunt Ellie Solis used to tell was that in the spring of 1827 in New Orleans, Jacob da Silva Solis was so poor that, unable to purchase matzos for his Passover festival—and horrified that New Orleans Jews seemed to care so little for Passover that they had none to give him—he sat down and ground the meal and made his own. As other good orthodox Sephardim had before him, Jacob deplored the laxity, when it came to religious matters, of the New Orleans Jews. He determined to establish his own congregation, and at this he was successful. Though Jacob Solis’ personal congregation never achieved any sort of dominance in the community, it did get a New Orleans thoroughfare named Solis Street.

  Probably Jacob da Silva Solis’ greatest moment came when it was discovered that the Converso line of the House of Solis had become extinct in Portugal. The Portuguese ambassador, himself of Marrano descent, journeyed to New Orleans to advise Jacob that he could succeed to the Solis titles and properties in Europe, provided, of course, that he would become a Catholic. Jacob da Silva Solis gazed stonily at the ambassador for a moment, and declined the offer. The ambassador could not believe his ears. “You fool!” he is said to have
cried. “It is one of the greatest dignities in Europe!” Mr. Solis, secure in his own dignity, replied: “Not for the whole of Europe would I forsake my faith, and neither would my son Solomon.” It was one of Aunt Ellie’s favorite tales. How Jacob Solis’ poor wife back in Philadelphia—she had borne him seven children—felt about this gesture is not recorded.

  Two of Jacob Solis’ children managed to redeem the family name, and handsomely at that. His son David married Elvira Nathan (Aunt Ellie’s mother), and brought the American Solises into the Seixas-Nathan-Mendes family complex. The Nathans, of course, were New York-based. Jacob Solis’ daughter Judith married Myer David Cohen, of Philadelphia, and produced nine children. At Judith’s insistence—she was another strong-willed lady—her children bore the hyphenated name Solis-Cohen, their mother’s name placed first. Solis, she explained, was after all a more important name than Cohen; Mr. Cohen, furthermore, had been born in southern Germany. Solis-Cohens are still prominent in Philadelphia, and continue to be loyal to da Silva when it comes to middle names.

  Both the da Silvas and the Solises are connected with the Peixottos—another old Sephardic family—and the Peixottos are similarly name-proud. The Peixotto family crest depicts two ovals, one containing two fish, the other a hand pouring water from a pitcher into a bowl. The ovals are surmounted by a very regal-looking crown, and the entirety is circled by an elaborate wreath. The word peixotto, in Portuguese, means “little fish,” explaining the first oval. The hand pouring water is the symbol of the Levites, or priests of Israel. Though present-day Peixottos are not sure just how, they are convinced that the crown and the wreath cannot stand for anything less than royalty.