Mordecai: An Early American Family (review)

Written with the sweep of a novel and the documentation of a dissertation, Mordecai: An Early American Family is a three-generation saga with suspense, tension, and analysis of Jewish self-identity in America. Author Emily Bingham mines the memoirs and correspondence of Mordecai family members from colonial times to the late-nineteenth century to reconstruct the drama of their lives and to bring a gendered perspective to their family history. Despite the Mordecais' prominence as educators, soldiers, lawyers, writers, and physicians, Bingham portrays them as an insecure family of outsiders, marginalized because of financial failures and their status as Southerners and as Jews. Due to their rural isolation and to the uncertainty of an ancestor's conversion, they also feel rejection and discomfort around other Jews.

Bingham's central premise is that what unites and shapes the Mordecais is a family covenant that Jacob Mordecai wrote to his six children in 1796 upon the death of his first wife, Judy. In this document memorializing his wife, Jacob outlines their shared commitment to intellectual cultivation, hard work, family solidarity, and to their faith. Bingham terms this document a "covenant of domestic enlightenment" (330 ). She sees these shared values and goals binding the family through trials and traumas. She also sees affirmation of this covenant in almost every letter the family writes. As the Mordecai family expands (with Jacob's second marriage) to include thirteen siblings, this covenant sustains the family far more than religion, which pulls them asunder.

Because of the voluminous and vibrant correspondence among the Mordecais, Bingham is able to reconstruct the family history in compelling, narrative form. The story begins in the early 1780 s when Jacob Mordecai of Richmond marries Judy Myers, daughter of a prominent New York silversmith. The couple lives in New York, then in Richmond before settling in remote Warrenton, North Carolina. There, Jacob and his children eventually operate the Warrenton Female Academy, a premier liberal arts boarding school. Tragedy strikes when Judy, weakened during her seventh pregnancy, loses her newborn, then her own life. Judy's final request is that her funeral "omit" Hebrew customs certain to arouse discomfort among neighbors "unaccustomed to our religious rites" (24 ).

Judy's funeral foreshadows a central element of the story: the multigenerational family's gradual assimilation and conversion to Christianity. One by one, most of the Mordecais intermarry or challenge their faith. With each challenge comes evidence of the tension inherent in a nation where Jews have the luxury, as well as the dilemma, of self-definition. Jacob, the family patriarch, flirts with Christianity, then reasserts his Jewish beliefs and becomes a foremost authority on Judaism. Rachel, the eldest daughter, endeavors to serve and please her father, yet undergoes a deathbed conversion to bring peace to her conflicted soul. Following Rachel's death, the second-eldest daughter, Ellen, turns into an evangelizer intent on converting her relatives.

Although the well-educated Mordecais (who pronounce their surname Mor-di-KEE) are proficient in Latin, French, and the classics, Judaism is not part of their rigorous education. They learn the dates of Jewish holidays from relatives and observe Yom Kippur at home, with Rachel reading the service aloud. As idealistic Americans, the Mordecais believe in "religious liberty," "broad fellowship," and an "overarching God" (4 ). They create their own style of Judaism—more rational than ritualistic, devoid of the spirituality some of them crave in their isolation. Judaism, rather than being an integral part of their lives, seems but one aspect of their self-constructed identities, one more subject to cultivate or ignore.

While Bingham's narrative focuses on the evolution of the Mordecai family, her chronological approach provides a contextual grid for social and economic forces. From the Revolution to the Civil War and from the first stirrings of Reform Judaism to the widespread Second Great Awakening, historical currents are illuminated through the Mordecais' experiences.

Conventions of gender...