Mordecai: An Early American Family (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 711–715 B O O K R E V I E W S EMILY BINGHAM. Mordecai: An Early American Family. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. Pp. x Ⳮ 346. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the seeds of American diversity blossomed. In no place was America’s heterogeneous culture more evident than in its religious landscape. Religious sects grew into denominations, philosophical ruminations inspired new religious traditions , and denominations divided and realigned. The Mordecai family’s saga, as exceptional as the story may be, is a window into the swift changes in post-Revolutionary America. Economic turmoil, religious revival , and political controversy that would eventually rend the nation into two created the contours of the Mordecai family’s journey toward middleclass identity and respectability. In the midst of it all, the family questioned —and often repudiated—its Jewish identity. Mordecai is a story about how individuals and communities constantly define and redefine themselves through the myths they tell about themselves. Emily Bingham writes this story with clarity and eloquence, bringing a literary flair to historical prose. Born in 1762 to a Jewish family in Philadelphia, Jacob Mordecai inherited the struggles of his parents. His father, Moses, had come over to the United States as a convict from England. Already in his fifties, Moses married young Elizabeth Whitlock, an English-born non-Jew, and although Elizabeth accepted her husband’s faith, even changing her name to Esther, her non-Jewish origins occasionally cropped up as a source of trouble for the family. In 1784 Jacob married Judy Myers, daughter of the famed New York silversmith Myer Myers. Shortly after the birth of their second child, the couple moved to the South, first Virginia and later North Carolina. Although the decision was fueled in part by economic opportunity, it also symbolized an attempt to make a new beginning, to leave the close-knit Jewish communities of Philadelphia or New York and establish an independent home. Judy and Jacob Mordecai conceived of the family as the nexus of Enlightenment ideals: reason, virtue, individual happiness, and social harmony. Bingham introduces the term ‘‘enlightened domesticity’’ to describe Judy and Jacob’s belief that the home was a microcosm for the world; thus family relationships, quarrels, and affairs were of utmost importance. Judy’s tragic death in 1796, the consequence of childbirth, stirred in Jacob the need to codify the purpose and function of family. In the form 712 JQR 94:4 (2004) of a letter to his children—described by Bingham as a covenant—Jacob sermonized that love, reason, and tolerance would continue to guide and nurture the ruptured family. This covenant with his children, like the traditional biblical covenant, represented an attempt to create a new social order out of a fundamentally chaotic universe. The early death of Jacob’s wife was only the most pointed example of the disorder in the Mordecais’ world. Two other factors, the family’s Jewishness and their unmet middle-class aspirations, were ongoing points of instability and insecurity. Jacob and his children reaffirmed often to each other that they were set apart by their solidarity, enlightenment, and liberalism. The myth of the family’s superiority perpetuated its own realities and tensions. After remarrying the younger sister of his first wife, Jacob coupled his determination for economic security with his belief in his family’s intellectual gifts and, assisted by his oldest daughter, Rachel, decided to start a female academy. The school was a success. Rachel’s pedagogical wisdom and dedication earned her the respect of her family, even when that respect, as in the case of her sister Ellen, was besmirched with jealousy and envy. Birth-family ties were powerful and formidable, and Jacob’s six children from his first wife tarried when it came to marrying and starting their own families. Bingham convincingly shows, however, that the children’s uncertain identities in terms of religion and class also hindered marriage. The Second Great Awakening, marked by religious revivals and the growth, particularly , of the Baptist and Methodist churches...