Editor’s Introduction

It is often useful and instructive to take a fresh look at fields of study that involve topics and data that have lain fallow for some time. In this issue, two scholars offer new analyses, insights and perspectives on elements of American Jewish history that have seldom garnered attention before. The third takes a new look at Jewish humor.

Howard B. Rock explains the extraordinary significance of the 1913 Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, forerunner to our current journal. That year’s volume printed the minute books (1727–1786) of the first Jewish congregation in New York City, Shearith Israel. Rock’s analysis reveals the richness of those early minutes and the dynamic changes the congregation underwent as its members lived through the tumultuous years from colonial to early republic New York. His essay is the second offering in our new feature, called “Signposts,” that reflects upon the journal’s long history.

One man in a family noted by Rock, Abraham Mendes Seixas, is the focus of Carla Vieira’s exploration of the Portuguese roots of New York City’s influential Seixas family. Looking at records of the Portuguese Inquisition along with family and business correspondence, she unmasks the identities of Sephardic families whose travels and business enterprises extended from the Iberian Peninsula to England, the Caribbean and North America, sometimes under different names in each locale. As she explains, the family’s memories of Jewish identity played a key role in later decisions about those travels.

Jarrod M. Tanny explores the presentation of Jewish-Gentile relations in the work of three controversial Jewish humorists — Lenny Bruce, Larry David and Sarah Silverman. As he argues, “Jewish humorists continue to see Christianity through the lens of collective memory — a renegade child who turned on his theological parent.” Cultural moments of philosemitism only complicate this perspective; they do not overturn it. For these comics, controversy allows their humor to become “acts of self-preservation.”

These three articles highlight the subtlety and dynamism of the many ways Jews found to engage with the larger cultures in which they lived in three very different milieus.