My dear mother,

I am grateful to hear from you, and I am pleased that you received my last letter. I heard from my brother, and he is in good health. I plan on sending him the estate products shortly. I enjoy practicing my penmanship and keeping in communication with my cherished family and will not forget to write.

I, like my father, continue to mourn the loss of my aunt Coura and wish that he writes soon once his grief eases.

I am, with all the tenderness and sincerity I am capable of, your son,
Pierre

To the great and influential Mahamad, 

I aim to act as a woman devoted to my faith, and I will always share feelings of respect and affection for our congregation. However, after meeting with the council of elders, I feel that my situation has been treated unfairly, especially on the account of my newborn son, who is innocent on all accounts. 

I understand that my actions in abandoning my husband and living with Mr. Castello seem egregious, but I entreat you to consider the many attempts I made to salvage my marriage with Raphael. I admire his commitment to the Jewish faith and believe him to be a deeply respectable man, but after he fell ill, it was difficult to ignore how incompatible we really were as a couple. With Judaism being a faith that focuses so deeply on the importance of kinship ties and community, you must understand that I did not feel that intimate sense of love and commitment towards my husband. Therefore, I think it was only wise for me to abandon my marriage and pursue a relationship where I can truly and authentically project the love that God intended for me to share within our community. Perhaps I found that with Mr. Castello, but I feel affection most strongly when I look upon the face of my son. 

My son is completely innocent in this predicament; his father may not be the man I married, but he had no choice in his conception. Therefore, I find it inappropriate that he should be labelled as a mamzer and an outcast and denied of engagement with our congregation. Circumcision is an integral tradition within our faith, and I want you all to understand that I intend for my child to share in that tradition regardless of whether or not he receives it at the hands of this council. Despite your offensive actions towards me and my family and your consistent policing of my personal decisions, I continue to believe in the goodness and grace of God. Perhaps you will eventually follow His word, forgive me for my misdeeds, and allow my son to fully enjoy all of the privileges this congregation has to offer. If this is not possible, then I fully intend to relocate myself and leave this episode of mine and my son’s life behind forever. 

Sincerely,

Rebecca Valverde Gomes

Hi all,

thank you for your feedback. In light of what people have said and the senate’s request, I am going to go with option #3 and make today completely asynchronous. 

Rafael had asked what were the big takeaways for today. I had three main things I wanted people to get out of today’s selections:

1. One of the primary types of literature written by Jews during this era are letters, and they are part of the rise of what Dierks and others call the “familiar letter” amongst the “middling sort.” they way people wrote was very much driven by convention and letter writing manuals such as this one. (Even schools for the poor during this era taught these manuals.) We saw women using letter writing conventions last week when Hannah Louzada wrote to the Mahamad asking for wood, but also we read letters to loved ones today from Rachel Pereire and Abraham da Costa Andrade. 
2. Primary sources by (and even about women) are scarce from this era and typically fall into what I have referred to as the “triangle of discontent”: either women are mentioned in passing with respect to life cycles, they have allegedly misbehaved, or they are requesting charity. What can we learn from these genres and how do they skew our understanding of women. You might also think about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous comment that “well behaved women seldom make history.”
3. There were a variety of ways synagogues could establish their authority over people in their own ports and in other ports. Some were carrots (e.g. the Hannukiahs) some were sticks (see the adultery letter and the story of Rebecca Valverde Gomes).

I’d love it if people could post a comment/response to at least one of the posts on today’s readings by Hunter, Caitlin, or Jesse. Then come up with a creative response to one of today’s readings and post it as a blog post sometime between now and Monday. You are free to use your imagination, but if you get stuck, here are some ideas:

• Find a buddy in class and have one person pretend to be one of the women in the primary sources for today. Using zoom, record a brief interview with her in which you get at why she choose to “misbehave” and what pressures the Mahamad is trying to use to get her to comply. Or if you use the letter of Rachel Pereire you could be the son responding to his mother’s attempts to influence him from afar.
• Write a letter from Rebecca Valverde Gomes, Sarah Pardo, or Abraham da Costa Andrade to the Mahamad either begging for forgiveness or telling them your opinion of their attempts to control you. Or write a letter from Sarah back to Abraham. Or write a letter from the men of the Mahamad. You may want to use one of the letters in the Ladies Complete Letter Writer (1763) as a model to imitate or satirize. If you do use one as a model, make sure you take a snap shot of the letter you are imitating.
• Shortly after the incident with Rebecca Valverde Gomes, the Hazan who took part in censuring her came down with a venereal disease and was discovered to have impregnated one of the servants in the synagogue compound (he was married at the time). Moreover, then men castigating Rebecca almost all had children out of wedlock by women of color (including the president of the congregation). Write a letter to or from Rebecca that addresses the sexual double standard in the community. 
• Write a poem about or from the perspective of one of the women featured today.
• We don’t have any surviving portraits from these women. Using the style of ivory miniatures, make a fake portrait for one of the people in today’s readings.

Whatever you do, don’t obsess over it or spend more than you would have being in class. Also have fun!

If you want to talk about your ideas or any of the texts, I will be hanging out during class on the usual zoom link.

best,

Laura

Pictured above is the will of Abigail Minis (1701-1794), one of forty-two settlers who traveled from London, England, to Savannah, Georgia in July of 1733. After her husband bequeathed his estate to Abigail, she collected large amounts of property, land, and slaves. Her will represents the ability of colonial widows to thrive without the support of male family members. Lastly, Abigail’s legacy highlights colonial women’s ability to experience significant economic growth through acquiring property in the form of land and slaves. 

Rebecca Valverde Gomes was a woman from the Jewish community of Barbados who left her husband, and began living with another man, Mr. Costello. When her child was born, the Jewish community chose not to perform birth rights, not only marking the child as a child of illegitimate union (mamzer,) who who is forbidden to marry non-mamzers from within the community, but refusing to perform circumcision so as to prevent any future union with orthodox Jews. Below is a selection from a meeting of the council of elders (Mahamad) discussing what action is to be taken about the birth of Rebecca’s child.

The letter pictured above is an example of a familiar letter from a Jewish mother, Rachel Pereire, to her son, Pierre. In describing intimate details of family affairs to her son, Pereire’s writing reflects many of the prime ideals held towards letter composition in the eighteenth century; she uses the letter as an opportunity to not only express sincere love and gratitude towards Pierre but also to urge him to connect with other relatives following the death of his aunt, Coura. This letter holds significance in the sense that it emphasizes the sacredness of kinship ties within Jewish communities and how letter writing was utilized as a means to breed communication and connection. It also feels important to note that this feels representative of how Jewish women were depicted in the few available records from early America; in this case, we see Pereire communicating with Pierre about life cycles.

Now quiz yourself on familiar letters!

Sources:

Loker, Zvi. “Were There Jewish Communities in Saint Domingue (Haiti)?” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 1983, pp. 135–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4467216. Accessed 14 Feb. 2021.

Prior to the English occupation of Jamaica, when it was still under Spanish control, Jews generally self-reported as Portuguese. Following the English takeover, the inquisition lost its hold on Jamaica and practice no longer needed to be concealed. The image below may depict Shangare Yosher, a synagogue built in Kingston in 1787. Much of the Jewish community in Jamaica moged to Kingston following a severe fire that destroyed much of Port Royal, the community’s former center, in 1815.. Kingston quickly became the new center of the Jewish population, and other synagogues soon followed it. In 1831, Kingston jews successfully petitioned the English government for political rights- an argument which was referenced for the successful petition by London Jews in 1832 for the same. The image below was published in Kingston’s “The Jamaica Times” in 1941.

The Nidhe Israel Synagogue located in Bridgetown, Barbados is home to a historic synagogue layout/complex much like others in the Atlantic World, including a synagogue sanctuary, staff housing, school, cemetery (unlike most complexes), and mikveh. Unfortunately, Nidhe Israel went under the process of rebuilding several times due to hurricanes in both 1780 and 1831. Although, the plat of the synagogue grounds c.1806 shows that the current structure precisely follows that of the one that stood in 1654. The Nidhe Israel mikveh, which was at one point built over after one of the natural disasters but then later found and preserved, is the oldest mikveh in the americas. The mikveh was used as a traditional spiritual bath for jewish women who would cleanse themselves after menstruation and childbirth as well as following conversion. However, at one point the keeper of the mikveh allowed women who were not Jewish but involved with jewish men to cleanse themselves, which when eventually caught resulted in great disapproval and the firing of the mikveh keeper. I found this especially interesting considering the fact that non jewish women using the mikveh seems like it could violate the spiritual sanctity in a similar reasoning to having a cemetery on the same grounds as the mikveh. I can understand why there were so many parts to this synagogue complex considering it was the primary Jewish center for the island. However, it is very unusual to have a spiritual bath and cemetery on the same grounds because mikvehs are used to ritually cleanse impurity, while cemeteries are considered places riddled with impurity, so much so that many jewish cemeteries have a water feature so people may cleanse themselves of any impurity as they leave. To my understanding, the juxtaposition of the two could be understood in both advantage and disadvantage. The advantage: having a mikveh close to the cemetery could be seen as an easy means of spiritual cleansing to balance out any unholiness that is associated with the dead. Disadvantage: Referencing to what I implied earlier, having the association of death so close to not only a holy place of worship like a synagogue, but also a mikveh creates a tainted spiritual environment that does not allow the purity/holy aspect (a very important aspect) exist in the jewish community on this island.

Sources:

Nidhe Israel Synagogue Complex & Mikveh (Barbados, 1654-present). Karl Watson, “1806 Plat of the Nidhe Israel Synagogue in Bridgetown, Barbados,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Vol. LXI, 2010.

https://rdc.reed.edu/i/b5ff41cb-304b-4ff6-a546-d2518eb4ee27

https://rdc.reed.edu/i/b5ff41cb-304b-4ff6-a546-d2518eb4ee27