The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, the Reverend Madison Clinton Peters (1859–1918), in his widely circulated apologetic survey entitled Justice to the Jew: The Story of What He Has Done for the World (1899), listed among America's "numerous writers of verse" nine different Jews: Emma Lazarus, Penina Moise, Miriam del Banco, Nina Morais Cohen, Cora Wilburn, Solomon Solis-Cohen, Mary Cohen, Rebekah Hyneman, and Morris Rosenfeld.¹ Four of these poets—Lazarus, Moise, Hyneman, and Rosenfeld—likewise find mention in the Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. Five of the seven women (but not del Banco or Wilburn) appear in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and on the website of the Jewish Women's Archive. But what of the rest?

Here, I recount the story of one of these forgotten poets, Cora Wilburn (1824-1906). Not just poetry, but also essays and novels flowed from her prolific pen—including the first ever novel by a Jew dealing (in part) with Jews in America, published serially in 1860. Hers, overall, is the largest oeuvre of any nineteenth-century American Jewish woman writer, and her death made news across the United States.² Nevertheless, her name has now completely vanished from the historical record. Why? Difficult as it is to account for historical amnesia of any kind³—particularly in the case of women, so many of whom have been forgotten—hints of an explanation emerge from Cora Wilburn's unusual biography⁴ as well as her writings.

Cora Wilburn was born on December 1, 1824;⁵ her original first name was Henrietta and her family name was probably Pulfermacher ("Powdermaker"). She listed her birthplace, at different times, as either Germany or France; most likely she was born in Alsace.⁶ Fluent in German, with some knowledge of French, Spanish, and Yiddish, she nevertheless wrote the surviving volume of her diary (1844-1848) in English; that, presumably, was her mother tongue.⁷ If, based on the evidence in the diary, we read her novel as thinly veiled autobiography, her birth mother lived and was buried in England.

Cora Wilburn's father, whom she despised and whose name she subsequently discarded, was an unscrupulous gem merchant and con man, as well as an abusive father and husband. He remarried following the untimely death of his first wife, but he never became the kind of person whom the Jewish community would want to remember. In 1837, the London Gazette listed him as an insolvent debtor and prisoner named "Moss Pulfermacher," a self-described "agent for foreign houses in the West Indies, and for Spaniards on the Spanish Main."⁸ Six years later, the Maulmain Chronicle (Burma), in a cautionary article reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald, portrayed the same man as "Moritz Pulfermacher." Under the headline "Tricks of a Traveller," it described how, opulently attired and in the company of his wife and daughter, he claimed to be both a captain in the Prussian Cavalry and a naturalized Englishman. He held himself forth as a "rich diamond merchant," and swindled a sea captain and others by taking loans that he did not repay and by supplying them, in pledge, "false stones," "counterfeit gold," and "German"—faux—silver. Next, according to the exposé, he proceeded under various guises to Muscat (Oman) and to Bushire (Iran), where again he affected "affluent circumstances." This time, he paraded as "an American Jew named Moritz Jackson"—the same last name that Cora subsequently used when she immigrated to America. He also allegedly impersonated Sir Moses Montefiore! Even in an age when "self-fashioning" was something of a social norm, and Jews, in particular, changed their ways and their names in quest of social and economic mobility, the case of "Moritz Jackson" seemed extreme. The Maulmain Chronicle warned readers to beware, and revealed that the con man was en route to "Khorasau" (Curaçao?) to ensnare new victims.⁹

Ultimately, "Moritz" settled some two hundred miles away from Curaçao, in the Venezuelan port of La Guaira, near Caracas, where the "Jackson...