The Jews in America Trilogy (72 page)

From the very beginning, a tight pattern of intramural marriages was formed. Today the intermarriages between members of the Jewish first families present a dizzyingly labyrinthine design. Amelia Lazarus, for example, nee Tobias, had six brothers and sisters, no less than four of whom married Hendrickses. One brother married a Hendricks first then, for his second wife, he chose another Tobias. The Hendrickses, meanwhile, were every bit as loyal. Uriah Hendricks, whose first wife was a Gomez, and whose second was a Lopez, had ten children, two of whom married Gomezes. In the next generation, the thirteen children of Harmon Hendricks married, among others, two Tobias sisters, two Tobias brothers, a Gomez first cousin, and two Nathans. And consider the descendants of Abraham de Lucena, one of the earliest arrivals. In the first American generation of the distaff side—his daughter married a Gomez—there were three Gomez-Hendricks marriages; in the next, there were four Hendricks-Tobias unions, two Hendricks-Nathan marriages, two Gomez-Dreyfous marriages, and one Gomez-Nathan marriage. Meanwhile, Gomezes were marrying other Gomezes, and a disturbing pattern of insanity—clear from Dr. Stern's book—that began to appear did not seem to discourage these close unions.

A measure of the intricacy of the interrelationships may be grasped by considering that the 25,000 individuals listed in Malcolm Stern's book are all grouped under a little more
than two hundred family dynasties. It is no exaggeration to say that, today, all the descendants of the early Jewish families are, in some way, related to one another. The late Lafayette Goldstone, a retired New York architect, was so fascinated with his Sephardic wife's elaborate ancestry that, suspecting that she was indeed related to everybody else, he attempted to plot all the American Sephardim on one large, all-encompassing chart. Years, and hundreds of charts, later, he was forced to admit that the tightly inter-knotted families had presented him with a task that could not be executed.

Dr. Stern's book also reveals how, through the long corridor of years, the Sephardic Jewish community in America—from the tight-knit, proud entity it once was—has steadily lost members as Sephardim have turned from Judaism to Christianity. The Book shows that prior to 1840 more than 15 percent of the marriages recorded were between Jews and Christians, and that of the total number of mixed marriages only 8 percent involved the conversion of the non-Jew to Judaism; members of only another 5 percent showed any indication of wishing to remain identified as Jews, or as members of the Jewish community. At the same time, as the years pass, and the Sephardic family trees stretch their branches downward into the present, one begins to see another phenomenon. The old Sephardic names with their Spanish and Portuguese musicality—Lopez, Mendes, Mendola, de Sola, de Silva, de Fonseca, Peixotto, Solis—begin gradually to be replaced by the somewhat harsher-sounding Ashkenazic, or German, names, as the old Iberian families feel the influx of the Germans throughout the nineteenth century, as the Sephardim and Ashkenazim intermarry and the Germans—as the Sephardim complain—try to “dominate” with their stiff-necked ways.

But the processes of Germanization and Christianization have by no means been complete. The old Sephardic
families continue to compose a tight-knit, proud, and aristocratic elite who know who is “one of us” and who is not; who see each other at weddings, coming-out parties, and funerals; and who worship, with their own particular variations in the orthodox Jewish service, at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogues such as New York's Shearith Israel, the oldest in the United States. They lead lives of wealth, exclusivity, privacy, a privacy so deep and so complete that few people remember that they still exist—which is just what the Sephardim prefer, for the Sephardim have by nature been shy, reticent, the opposite of showy.

2

WHO ARE THEY?

How much each person knows and understands about the past is one of the great preoccupations of the Sephardim everywhere. With some, it is a hobby; with others, an obsession. This is very Jewish. After all, the concept of
zekhut avot,
or ancestral merit, is said to provide the spiritual capital of the Jewish people. In this is embodied the idea that the past must be correctly interpreted in order that it can be passed on to enrich future generations. But there are also strong overtones here of a belief in predestination—that meritorious ancestors offer a kind of guarantee that their descendants will be meritorious also.

When one is dealing with hundreds of years of family
history, and when family history relates to political and religious history, confusions and contradictions are bound to arise. And when family histories interconnect and tangle in such a variety of ways as they do within the Sephardic community, and as they have done for centuries, there are bound to be jealousies and rivalries and no small amount of bickering. This makes the Sephardic community a lively place. Where everyone professes to be an expert on the past, and where everyone wants to claim the best ancestors—and where there are many claimants for the same people—everyone must be on his toes.

Take New York's Nathan family. The Nathans are indirectly descended from Abraham de Lucena, one of the first Jews to set foot on American soil in 1655, and, in the process of their long history in this country, the Nathans are now “connected,” if not directly related, to all the other old families—the Seixases, the Gomezes, the Hendrickses, the de Silvas, the Solises, and Philadelphia's distinguished Solis-Cohens. Like Massachusetts Adamses, Nathans have managed to produce men of stature in almost every generation. These have included such figures as the late New York State Justice Edgar J. Nathan, Jr., who was also Manhattan borough president under Mayor La Guardia, and United States Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, and—looking further back—Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas, called “the patriot rabbi,” who was the spiritual leader of Shearith Israel during the American Revolution. During the war, he closed his synagogue in New York and moved the congregation to Philadelphia rather than ask his flock to pray for George III. Later, he assisted at George Washington's inauguration. His niece, Sarah, married a cousin, Mendes Seixas Nathan, a banker who was one of the little group who gathered one day under a buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan to draw up the constitution of the New York Stock Exchange. Annie Nathan
Meyer, the founder of Barnard College, who was a granddaughter of Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan, once wrote: “Looking back on it, it seems to me that this intense pride, accompanied by a strong sense of
noblesse oblige
among the Sephardim was the nearest approach to royalty in the United States. The Nathan family possessed this distinguishing trait to a high degree.” As a child, she recalled, the subject of cheating at school came up. She never forgot her mother's clipped comment: “Nathans don't cheat.”

Nathans are also proud to assert that “Nathans have never been poor.” The first Nathan arrived in New York with a comfortable amount of money given him by his father, a prosperous merchant in England. So it has been for as far back as Nathans can trace their lineage, which, according to some members of the family, is a long way indeed. Once a Nathan was asked: “Is it true that your family traces itself to King Solomon?” The reply was: “At the time of the Crucifixion, it was said so.”

Today, nearly two thousand years later, there are still prominent and active Nathans. Emily de Silva Solis Nathan is an attractive, Spanish-looking woman with an oval face and olive skin, and an air of quiet cultivation and scholarly efficiency. She heads a New York public relations firm which represents such distinguished clients as Washington's Smithsonian Institution. Her brother was Justice Nathan, a cousin was Justice Cardozo (the family law firm was Cardozo & Nathan), and another cousin was Emma Lazarus, who wrote, among others, the poem (“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses …”) that is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. A nephew, Frederic Solis Nathan, also a well-known New York lawyer, is first assistant corporation counsel to Mayor Lindsay. Nathan men, quite clearly, favor the law. Emily Nathan lives in a large, airy apartment filled with antiques and the quiet feel
of “old money,” overlooking Central Park. A few blocks to the north, she can see the handsome colonnaded façade of Shearith Israel, which her ancestors helped found.

Emily Nathan's growing-up years were properly private schooled, governessed, servant tended. The Nathans were a large and—rather typically of the Sephardim, who tend to feel most comfortable when in each other's company—extremely close family. With the Nathan children and their parents in the big old brownstone in West Seventy-fifth Street lived not only a grandmother, Mrs. David Hays Solis (whose maiden name had also been Nathan), but also a maiden aunt, Miss Elvira Nathan Solis. Aunt Ellie, as she was called, was a sweet-faced, blue-eyed, fragile-looking lady who dressed with spinsterly restraint and always smelled of sachet. The children loved the smell of Aunt Ellie's closets and played hide-and-seek there among the neatly hung rows of dresses. Aunt Ellie was of indeterminate age, either older or younger than her sister, the children's mother—they never knew. Age was a taboo subject in the Nathan household; the children were told it was bad form to ask people how old they were and, as Emily Nathan says, “There were no drivers' licenses in those days.” (Not even Dr. Stern was able to uncover Aunt Ellie's birth date for his book.)

Aunt Ellie was a great favorite of the children. In the evenings, while the children were being given early supper, she would often leave the adult company in the drawing room to join the children in the dining room and tell them stories. They were tales of Revolutionary heroes and heroines—of brave soldiers who plotted to blow up British ships in New York Harbor, of a woman who slipped through enemy lines to carry food to Revolutionary troops, of a sailor imprisoned at Dartmoor during the War of 1812 who later rose to occupy the highest rank in the United
States Navy, though he started as a cabin boy sleeping on a folded sail. Aunt Ellie's stories were rich with the smell of gunsmoke, the slash of cutlasses, colored red with blood spilled in patriotism's great cause.

In those days, the Nathan family portraits were arrayed in the paneled dining room of the Nathan brownstone, where the children ate, and only gradually did Emily Nathan begin to relate Aunt Ellie's stories—“which at first seemed to me to be nothing more than wonderful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fairy tales”—to the faces on the dining room walls.

“Was that a relative?” Emily Nathan would ask in the middle of one of the stories.

“Yes, we are connected,” Aunt Ellie would reply.

The sense of history, and the sense of a certain long continuity between family past and family present, gradually began to give the little girl a sense of pride and a sense of security. “Later on,” Emily Nathan says today, “when certain things happened to me as a Jew that might have upset some people—when I encountered prejudice, for instance, or heard of acts of bias and anti-Semitism—I was able to view them with a certain understanding. Things that would bother other people didn't bother me because I knew, thanks to Aunt Ellie's stories, where I fit into the scheme of things. I was able to rise to occasions.”

Gradually, as Emily Nathan grew up, the dining room portraits seemed to grow until they loomed not only over the big room but over the entire Nathan family. Implacable, with, for the most part, stern and unsmiling faces, the old pictures seemed to dominate the Nathans' lives, reminding them daily of what it was to be a Nathan. Some of the ancestors, Aunt Ellie reminded the children, had not always been on the best of terms with one another. One of Aunt Ellie's whimsical little jokes was to say, at breakfast, looking up at the portraits: “I see your great-great-
grandfather has a black eye this morning. He's been quarreling again with your cousin Seixas.”

For years the Nathan children, and eventually the grandchildren, clamored for more of Aunt Ellie's stories. She seemed to have an endless supply, and could hold them spellbound for hours. Backward and backward she went, back into the Middle Ages, back into Moorish courtyards that dripped with bougainvillea and the splash of stone fountains. For now she was telling of Nathans who had flourished in Spain and Portugal during the centuries of Moorish rule, and of Nathans who had struggled to survive after the Catholic Reconquest. There were Nathans who had seen their synagogues desecrated, who had stood trial for “Judaizing” before Inquisitional courts in the
plazas mayores
of Seville and Toledo during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who had gone to the stake proudly rather than relinquish their faith. There were other Nathans who had pretended to accept Christianity, continuing to worship as Jews in secret places, and there were others who had escaped—some to Holland, some to England, whence the earliest American Nathan emigrated in 1773.

The children liked Aunt Ellie's Spanish stories best, for they were more colorful, peopled as they were with beautiful ladies wearing tall combs and mantillas, royal courts with armored knights in swords, horse-drawn chariots pulled through the night on desperate missions, dukes and princes sighing for maidens' hands. She also told of doubloons being buried by moonlight in a garden, of men thrown into dungeons to be forgotten for years, only to make brilliant escapes; of a man warned by cryptic messages from his king that the Inquisition was at hand; of another whose servants were able to smuggle him to the safety of his ship by hiding him in a sack of laundry. On and on Aunt Ellie's stories went, weaving a vast, rich tapestry of gold and royal purple threads, heroic in size and wonder, spanning
more than a thousand years of time, filling the minds of the little Nathans with visions of, quite literally, castles in Spain.

“Yes, we are connected,” Aunt Ellie would assure them. “We are connected.”