A Time for Planting
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Review
A short but engaging read, this is the first volume of “The Jewish People in America,” a five-part set released by the American Jewish Historical Society on the 100th anniversary of its founding. Its relevance to the Nação lies in its coverage of what historians have vulgarly dubbed the “Sephardic period” of the American Jewish experience.
Setting the tone for the whole series, Faber advances both a synthetic history of early American Jews and a thoughtful reflection on the places that they sought in their contemporary host society. One of his most significant achievements is to distill more than a century of secondary scholarship into a fairly clear picture of the entire period, so that the narrative flows naturally while the notes are a gold mine of useful cross-references.
The primary weaknesses are revealed by the subsequent presentation of the Port Jewry thesis (Dubin and Sorkin, 1999), which calls for a reassessment of how we understand acculturation in an Atlantic mercantile population that experienced an alternative path to modernity to the Jews of Central Europe. Within the broader series, the “three migrations” periodization neatly shuts out almost any further reflections on Portuguese Jewry in the final volumes. A new treatise covering the American Sephardim of the 19th and 20th centuries would thus make an effective compliment to an earnest beginning.
Setting the tone for the whole series, Faber advances both a synthetic history of early American Jews and a thoughtful reflection on the places that they sought in their contemporary host society. One of his most significant achievements is to distill more than a century of secondary scholarship into a fairly clear picture of the entire period, so that the narrative flows naturally while the notes are a gold mine of useful cross-references.
The primary weaknesses are revealed by the subsequent presentation of the Port Jewry thesis (Dubin and Sorkin, 1999), which calls for a reassessment of how we understand acculturation in an Atlantic mercantile population that experienced an alternative path to modernity to the Jews of Central Europe. Within the broader series, the “three migrations” periodization neatly shuts out almost any further reflections on Portuguese Jewry in the final volumes. A new treatise covering the American Sephardim of the 19th and 20th centuries would thus make an effective compliment to an earnest beginning.
Contents
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Introduction
Origins and Antecedents The Atlantic World of Colonial Jewry Community Fitting In The Jewish Communities of the Early Republic A Second Jerusalem? The Significance of Early American Jewry Notes Bibliographical Essay Index |
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4 27 52 84 107 127 142 145 173 179 |