Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination

1 Playing Indian, Becoming American

f 21 f 21 (1) Playing Indian, Becoming American Two Doomed Peoples Ben Katchor’s 1998 graphic novel The Jew of New York: A Historical Romance begins in 1830, five years after the sovereign Jewish nation of Ararat envisioned by diplomat, journalist, and playwright Major Mordecai Noah in upstate New York failed.The New York City in Katchor’s graphic novel, like his contemporary renderings of New York in such strips as Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, is peopled by Jewish dreamers, visionaries, and entrepreneurs. Katchor’s urban Jewish businessmen include Isaac Azarael,“a middleman in the oriental button trade”;Yosl Feinbroyt,who sells kabalistic designs to a handkerchief embroidering company; Abel Marah,“importer of religious articles”; Enoch Letushim, a Jew from Palestine peddling soil from the Holy Land; and the“impresario”Hershel Goulblat, who exhibits Elim-Min-Nopee, a Hebrew-speaking Indian.The actual historical figure of Mordecai Noah reigns over the novel as its model of Jewish entrepreneurial utopian dreaming. I begin here with Katchor’s postmodern narrative because it serves to introduce interlocked themes of Jewish-Indian masquerade and theatricality, travel, and encounter that drive the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts that are the subjects of this chapter. I begin with a brief discussion of James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, in addition to Katchor, to introduce the ways in which Jews and Indians could be yoked together in the service of literary nation-building. I then discuss Mordecai Manuel Noah and Solomon 22 f chapter 1 Nunes de Carvalho, two nineteenth-century Jews who both adopted and challenged the rhetoric of their contemporaries. I continue with a discussion of turn-of-the-century Jewish representations of Indians both on the stage, with vaudeville entertainment in both Yiddish and English, and in the popular press, concentrating on the frequently reprinted story of Nahum Blanberg, the Jewish Indian chief. Katchor’s novel, like the texts I discuss in this chapter, meditates on wandering and rootedness, performance and identity, and the dream of a New World homeland for the Jews. The Jew of New York begins with a play, also called The Jew of New York and planned by the New World Theater Company, which is a “thinly veiled burlesque” of Major Noah’s life written by a notorious anti-Semite. At the same time, Nathan Kishon, a refugee from Noah’s failed nation, disembarks in Manhattan after having spent the last five years wandering in the wilderness of upstate New York. Kishon has in fact “gone native”: wearing only a bedsheet and sleeping outside on a patch of grass, he is mistaken for an Indian by the residents of the city. The novel constantly references and plays with ten-tribist theories, quoting both Noah himself as well as other nineteenth-century texts, real and imagined. A character called only “the Man in an India Rubber Suit” walks through the city, reading aloud from a ten-tribist tract that catalogs the similarities between Indians and Jews. Hiram’s Museum on Broadway features Elim-Min-Nopee, the Hebrew-speaking Indian: “a rare, living member of one of the 10 lost tribes of israel! rescued from the wilds of upper new york state.”1 As one character observes of this Indian masquerading as a lost Jew, “The idea of a New Jerusalem discovered in the wilds of New York State is irresistible to the casual Sunday school student of the Old Testament. . . . By comparison, we, the Jews of the old world, appear to have been thoroughly corrupted by European culture and are Jews in name only” (59). However, Noah’s proclamation that Indians, descendants of the lost tribes, should join his new Jewish nation is resisted by Indians in the novel. A band of Indians invited by Noah to participate in his dedication ceremony declare that they “cannot be subsumed by Major Noah’s tribe of Jews. . . . What proof has been offered of their descent from a common mother? They, understandably, suspect trickery and deceit” (15). Impersonation and masquerade are thus central preoccupations of this graphic novel. The character of Moishe Ketzelbourd, called “Maurice Cougar” by the Indians, is a crypto-Jewish fur trader who has adopted “Indian” ways in his travels upstate. When he learns that the beavers whose pelts he trades are becoming extinct, he begins an elaborate mourning process that mimics beaver behavior. Here, Katchor offers a parody of nineteenth-century discourse [18.225.209.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 11:48 GMT...