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I N T R O D U C T I O N On Writing a Synagogue Narrative In 1953, the pioneering American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus published a pamphlet entitled How to Write the History of an American Jewish Community. Marcus noted in his preface to the work that America’s Jews, buoyed by their country’s rise to superpower status after World War II, were becoming “history-conscious.”1 Facing one of the most optimistic and prosperous environments in memory, they consequently desired to recount the events that had led them to reach such financial and cultural security. Marcus himself had taken part in this rising sentiment, having helped establish the American Jewish Archives two years earlier; the pamphlet was a continuation of his project, providing direction for amateur historians who wanted to chronicle the pasts of their local Jewish communities. To accomplish this goal, he wrote, researchers needed to consider approaches that brought together American Jewry’s “dual past”—“[o]ur sense of identification with our American homeland and our age-old Jewish history and tradition.” Marcus then provided a series of steps toward producing such a history, listing resources to examine, important conceptual categories to consider, and model histories to consult. He also provided a sample outline, inviting writers to arrange their community’s local details within a large-scale narrative of the American Jewish experience. Through these efforts, Marcus encouraged the propagation of a literature that could simultaneously showcase local pride and contribute to larger scholarly discourses of Jewry in the United States. Marcus’s pamphlet helped the local Jewish community narrative become an important form in American Jewish historical writing. Histories were often inspired by a significant congregational anniversary or community event; they were frequently written by a member or close associate of the community; and many were published by a local press. Funding for research and publication tended to come from a synagogue grant or a donation from congregants, and occasionally even from the author him or herself. The local synagogue, in addition to housing much of the archival material, sometimes wielded a great deal of control over the contents and presentation of the publication: Since the work’s main readership would be local, and the publication’s proceeds xix would tend to benefit the congregation, the book needed to be a symbol of the congregation’s legacy. Its main purpose, after all, was a popular one: to tell a success story rather than embark on meticulous analysis. The final product thus presented a unique confluence of “insider” lore, continuous narrative, biography, and cultural observation, couched within a framework of social, local, national, and religious history. To the wider field of Judaic studies, synagogue histories were useful in bringing obscure and highly localized source materials to light. Moreover, each constituted what Marcus called “an important stone in building the story of the Jew in this land,” shedding additional light on an undiscovered part of American Jewish history.2 Potential historians thus came to view their works with an eye toward wider discovery, possibly following Marcus’s instruction : “When you are writing, you are writing not only for yourself and your generation, but also for posterity, for the American people.”3 In some ways, my approach to the history of the Jewish community on the island of St. Thomas, in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands, follows in the same tradition as Marcus’s vision from a half-century ago. It was originally intended to accompany the congregation’s bicentennial anniversary in 1996, and still shares its title with the slogan created for that celebration. The research and publication were funded almost entirely by generous donations from an interested island merchant and from the St. Thomas Hebrew Congregation . Although the congregation had considered hiring a professional historian to complete the job, it ended up giving the opportunity to an unproven college student who had been a member of the congregation as a child. The history itself was intended to move chronologically, more or less from one event to the next. Moreover, there is a decent chance that the book you are reading now was purchased in the St. Thomas synagogue’s gift shop, with proceeds going to assist the congregation’s operating expenses. Yet I did not have to present my research in this form. During the long tenure for this project, I became familiar with the literature surrounding cultural anthropology and critical theory, causing me to bring...

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