Book Review by Prof. Ira Robinson,
Academic Fellow, CIJR
Department of Religion,
Concordia University
Liebman, Laura Arnold. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life. (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012). xxviii + 388 pages. ISBN: 978 0 85303 833 7.
This book reacts strongly to the way early North American Jewish history was conceptualized by American Jewish historians of the last century. Concentrating her special criticism on Jacob Rader Marcus, one of the most distinguished historians of the field in that era, Laura Arnold Liebman asserts that Marcus “argued vociferously against mysticism and religious enthusiasm of any kind” on the part of the first Jewish settlers in North America, and that, for him, “mass migration—not religious practice—was at the heart of American Jewish history”. (282) In their treatment of Judaism, these historians often did not care to go too far beyond the statement of the eighteenth-century American Jew, Haym Salomon, who famously noted in a letter home to Europe that there was “wenig Yiddishkeit” [very little Judaism] in America.
Liebman argues to the contrary. She proceeds to retell the story of the earliest North American Jews and gives it an entirely new perspective. In so doing, she is inspired by the recent work of Jonathan Sarna, which emphasizes the religious history of North American Jewry. The author reframes her account of these Jews in several important ways. In the first place, she rightly broadens the stage so that the reader is confronted by important evidence not merely from the generally miniscule Jewish settlements in seventeenth and eighteenth century North America, but also from the generally better populated and more prosperous Jewish communities in Suriname, Curaçao, Jamaica, and Barbados. She also brings us to the European centers, Amsterdam and London, which furnished the New World settlements with their spiritual and material sustenance. She speaks, in other words, of a relationship between key port cities in the Atlantic World of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was crucial for the development of Jews and Judaism in the Western Hemisphere.
The author brings to bear a wide variety of evidence, both documentary and material, to interpret the lives of these Jews. She analyzes the physical evidence of mikvehs and argues for their ubiquity in Jewish settlements made up largely of mercantile families that could afford the expense of creating these ritual pools. Contrary to previous understandings, she strongly argues that “the needs of the mikveh drove the location of the synagogues, rather than vice versa, in the Jewish Atlantic World.” (50) She speaks of the synagogues that were built and the spiritual significance of their architecture. Once again, she argues against the commonly held idea that the synagogues of this era were architecturally derivative from contemporary church architecture and posits a reverse influence. She depicts extended Jewish families, which often included African-American slaves, whose complex and ambivalent relationship to Judaism is given considerable emphasis. She carefully interprets the Jewish cemeteries and the intricate religious symbolism of their tombstones, the ways in which these Jews manufactured and imported kosher food, and much else.
In all her analysis, the leitmotif is Jewish spirituality, and how contemporary Jewish religious concerns were internalized and expressed by the early North American Jews. Her basic argument is that one cannot understand these Jews and the communities they built without paying close attention to the theological issues of the era. It was in this era, for instance, that kabbalistic ideas became truly popular and exercised tremendous influence on ordinary Jewish men and women. Why should this not be true of Jews in America? The great religious conflict in Judaism of that era was the seventeenth century messianic movement of Shabbetai Zvi and its eighteenth century aftermath. What indeed must Jews in America have thought of this conflict?
As one can tell from her title, Liebman thinks of these Jews as oriented toward Messianism, though she cannot always satisfactorily define what that means. She also often calls them “kabbalists”. It is here that the author somewhat overreaches. Not everyone influenced by popularized Kabbalistic ideas is a “kabbalist”. While Liebman makes the case that there was considerably more Judaic learning in the New World in this era than most historians have assumed, the only direct link to the elite intellectual tradition of kabbala is the three volumes of the Zohar in the possession of the eighteenth century itinerant rabbi Hayyim Carigal.
Despite this caveat, Liebman’s rereading and reframing of early American Jewish history is an important contribution to a reorientation of our understanding of the origins of American Judaism.
Ira Robinson
Academic Fellow, CIJR
Department of Religion, Concordia University
