The Diary of Joseph Lyons, 1833-1835 Introduction

Introduction

On a warm April day in 1833, in the city of Savannah, Georgia, a young Jewish man opened the cover of a blank book and entered history. His name was Joseph Lyons, and his diary, presented here in its entirety for the first time, is remarkable for a number of reasons.¹ A native of Charleston, South Carolina, and a recent graduate of South Carolina College, Lyons was a mere nineteen years old and weighed in at a hundred pounds; but what he lacked in material substance he more than made up for in the heft of his intelligence, the strength of his longings, and the vastness of his dreams. His tale is full of human interest and rife with the contradictions and complexities of youth. It is at the same time a visceral account of the struggle between the sacred and the secular that confronted Jewish Americans of Lyons's generation: how to sustain their Judaism in the face of unprecedented freedom and opportunity.

Joseph had recently arrived in Savannah to study in the law office of Levi Sheftall D'Lyon, a successful Jewish attorney, and for the first time in his life he was learning "what it was to be a stranger." Far from his family and without many peers, he had few people to talk to. All he had was the bound volume, and it comforted him. "Though I have never seen this book before," he noted, "I feel as if restored to the Conversation of a sincere friend."²

Lyons began with a recitation of recent events. He had "witnessed more novelty" during the past few months than he had "in all my preceding existence," and he was bursting to tell it. After graduating from college, he had traveled to the port cities of Charleston, Philadelphia, and Savannah, gone on a sea voyage, and undertaken what he thought was going to be his life's work. To make sense of the dizzying whirl, he put his thoughts into words and, once started, he kept "journalizing."

He wrote regularly for two years—from April 1833 until April 1835—using the diary to rehearse his feelings and debate his future. He argued with himself about whether to become a lawyer, doctor, or hazan (cantor who, in early America, often functioned as the religious leader of a congregation). He mulled over bigger issues, such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He reported on day-to-day life, gossip, and politics. He railed against his inadequacies, insecurities, and envy, bared his adolescent angst, and began to devise a philosophy of life. At the back of the book, he noted expenditures and made a list of the books in his library, keeping track of which ones friends borrowed and returned.

"It is such a fireside, winter-evening enjoyment," he wrote of his pastime, but it was not an unmitigated delight. He weighed the pros and cons of the habit, as he would examine both sides of nearly everything he came to write about in his journal. (Only his belief in the right of a state to overthrow federal law, it seems, was impervious to doubt.) Journal writing "gives pleasure," he conceded, but also "a disposition to egotism." It prompts one "to mark down everything about ourselves so minutely that at last, these trifles are constantly recalled and thereby impressed, that we become rather too particular in our observations." Yet the practice "of examining and analyzing our motives and actions" is eminently useful, he thought, "for our confidence in this dumb friend is so great that we do not dread exposure when we spre[a]d our thoughts out as on a dissecting table. I feel as much affection for this book as I could a dog."³

Lyons entered unwittingly upon immortality. He could hardly have predicted that the volume of his meditations would someday become public, and...