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Reviewed by:
  • Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life by Laura Arnold Leibman
  • Holly Snyder
Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life Laura Arnold Leibman . London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012. xxviii + 388 pp.

Although the bland title of this work suggests another generic approach to Jewish history, it is in the structure of the volume that the author's particular interest in the material culture of Jewish practice is unveiled, with chapters covering the mikveh, synagogue structures, tombstone iconography, food practices, sermons and, finally, the links between Jewish and masonic ritual. Overall, Laura Leibman asks new questions, provides a fresh perspective, and provides an insider's view on areas of Jewish religious practice that may [End Page 146] seem arcane to those who don't practice them but are nonetheless important for understanding early modern Jewish history.

Yet at the same time, some of Leibman's choices lack rudimentary background explanations of the sort that would allow the reader to situate them within a historical context. She has a concerted tendency to make broader claims than her research can support, declining to acknowledge the exceedingly narrow range of her evidence. Her theoretical analysis further obfuscates the geographical and temporal particularity of her sources—which come almost exclusively from just five sites (Rhode Island, Surinam, Curacao, Barbados and Amsterdam)—eliding significant historical differences in the Jewish experience between, and even within, imperial hegemonies of the various European powers who contested for control of North America and the Caribbean, as well as internal conflicts over the cultural differences in religious practice between ex-Converso Sephardim—who had, in effect, been raised in two religions—and Ashkenazim with roots in Central Europe who had been raised from birth as Jews.

The issues with her application of primary sources are many. For a work that attempts to tell the story of Jewish religious practice in North America, her focus on Newport—where the surviving synagogue records are spare, at best, seems curious, especially when the synagogue records for New York are more complete for the same period. She claims to cover the Atlantic world, but mentions London, Jamaica, New York, and the mainland South (Charleston and Savannah) only in passing. Montreal, whose earliest congregation spun off from the New York community in the mid-eighteenth century, and the Pennsylvania frontier, around Lancaster, where a handful of highly religious Jewish traders set up a community early in the eighteenth century, do not even merit a mention. These choices might well have a valid rationale, but in the absence of an explanation for how she developed the shape of this study, Leibman leaves the reader wondering whether her selection privileges a "good story" over an account that would have provided a more representative general truth. They also betray Leibman's background as a specialist in literature, as well as her more recent predilection for archaeology. A trained historian she is not.

This is not to suggest that the often rather calcified approach to Jewish historical writing on early North America isn't fully deserving of a good poke with a sharp stick. Some of what has been accepted for historiography on Jewish practice in early America has come from the pens of writers who fearlessly propounded twentieth-century notions about the nature of [End Page 147] Jewish ritual practice as an approach to understanding the past. But this material is slowly being superceded by serious new attention from a number of scholars of early modern Judaism and the Jewish experience, producing new writing that has direct application to Leibman's work in this study. Leibman's pokes, lacking reference to specific works or authors, thus have all the effect of a blindfolded person striking at a piñata she can't see—that is to say, more miss than hit. Her repeated whacks at "historians" would certainly carry more weight if her critique demonstrated familiarity with some emblematic works in the field. Instead, Leibman puts herself in danger of merely propounding new theories that don't fit the historical data much better than the old ones she seeks to depose. Despite her stated intention (17) "to expose...

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