Studying America’s Earliest Jewish Communities

The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at the New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering an online course on “Freedoms and Challenges: America’s Earliest Jewish Communities, 1650–1840” starting on 2 March.

The course description says:

American Jewish history begins over 100 years before the United States was founded, and the experiences of the earliest Jews lay out the foundational themes of America itself. In this four-part course we will explore the writings, architecture, ideas, and daily lives of American’s earliest Jewish individuals and communities—lives that were vigorous, variegated, and experimental.

Issues they faced still concern us today: desires of individuals vs. communities; the relationships of different communities to one another; how experiences differ by generation, geography, and gender; and the overall strategies, choices, and responses we make in creating and securing our identities in a nation that does not fully define them for us.

The teacher is Ellen Smith, Professor Emerita at Brandeis University. In September 2020 she retired as Director of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program, having taught in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Heller School for Social Management. Trained as a professional historian and a museum curator, Smith has produced over three dozen books, articles, and exhibitions on American Jewish history. She is the co-author and editor, with Jonathan D. Sarna, of The Jews of Boston and was the chief consultant to the Emmy award-winning WGBH television show of the same name. Prof. Smith is a past Curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, and was the Chief Curator in the planning stage of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

There are four classes scheduled, all at 4:00 to 5:30 P.M. on Tuesdays:

• 2 March: Accidents and Opportunities
• 9 March: Promise or Peril?
• 16 March: American and Jewish Revolutions
• 23 March: Beyond the Northeast

Participants will continue to have access to course materials until 30 June. The cost for this class is $85. People can register here.

The photo above shows the gravestone of Judah Monis. Its first part reads:

Here lies buried the remains of RABBI
JUDAH MONIS, MA, late HEBREW
instructer at HARVARD College in
Cambridge in which office he continued 40
years. He was by Birth and Religion a Jew but
embrac’d the Christian faith & was publickly
baptiz’d at Cambridge, AD 1722 and
departed this life April 25, 1764 Aged
81 years 2 months and 21 days.

After that are quotations from five Bible verses, three from the Hebrew Bible and two from the New Testament.

Monis was the most prominent man of Jewish ancestry in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, especially since there was practically no competition. Unlike Newport, Rhode Island, colonial Boston didn’t have enough Jewish people to form a community.

Monis was born in Italy in a family that had converted to Christianity under pressure, but he studied at Jewish academies there and in the Netherlands. He arrived in New York in 1715. Five years later, Monis came to Harvard College, earning an M.A. degree by writing a Hebrew grammar. The college asked him to teach Hebrew but required that he adopt Congregationalism. Monis’s conversion was controversial for both Jews and Christians in America, and he never became a professor, only an instructor connected to the college. Nonetheless, he was respected as the expert on his topic for decades. In his final years Monis lived with relatives in Northboro, where he was buried.

How Natty Martyn Grew Up

Last September, we got a passing glimpse of fifteen-year-old Natty Martyn, youngest son of the minister in Northborough in 1756.

Natty had a bad sore, and his family had begun to despair for him. The Rev. John Martyn took his son to Dr. Ebenezer Dexter in the neighboring town of Middleborough, and he recovered.

Natty Martyn’s father was a Harvard graduate, though he didn’t go into the ministry until fifteen years after graduating. In the early 1760s the family also hosted the retired Harvard Hebrew instructor Judah Monis, who had married Natty’s maternal aunt. But neither Natty nor his older brothers went to college.

Instead, Nathaniel Martyn became a physician, training in the field like most other country doctors of the time. He set up a practice in the town of Harvard, where his father had been the first town clerk and filled other offices in the 1730s. The doctor was assigned “ye Sixth Seat Below” at the Harvard meetinghouse.

On 23 Dec 1765, the twenty-four-year-old Dr. Martyn married twenty-year-old Anna Townsend of Bolton. Their first child, named Michael after one of his paternal uncles, arrived in September, but died within two weeks.

In his diary for 16 June 1767, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough recorded that he “rode by the way of Dr. Martyns to see him—and the fine Farms at Still River Corner.” Martyn had bought the large farmhouse built in 1749 by Moses Haskell. The Massachusetts Historical Commission called this property “One of Still River’s earliest and largest farms.” The house still stands on Still River Road, as shown above, though altered considerably for use as a Benedictine chapel.

When Parkman visited, Anna Martyn was expecting another child. The couple had two before the end of the decade:

• Pamela, born 24 Aug 1767.
• Nathaniel, baptized 13 Aug 1769.

There was at least one other member of the household. In May 1767, the selectmen of Harvard signed a printed form for Boston’s Overseers of the Poor certifying that Dr. Nathaniel Martyn was “a Man of sober Life and Conversation; and in such Circumstances, that we can recommend him as a fit Person to bind an Apprentice to.” On 19 November, those officials indentured a boy named Ebenezer Dumaresque to the doctor. Ebenezer was to come of age on 25 Nov 1781, meaning he was six years old when he moved out to Harvard, most likely to work as a household servant.

Sometime in 1769, it appears from real estate records, Dr. Martyn sold his property in Harvard to Peter Green, a younger physician from the Harvard class of 1766. The Martyn family moved to Bolton, Anna’s home town.

On 16 Aug 1770, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman wrote in his diary:

Dined at Mr. Harringtons, who acquainted me with the proceedings at Bolton and with Mr. Goss’s present Case under Confinement to his Bed, by Lameness. N.B. Dr. Wait has the Care of him. The brief Story of Dr. Wait. Called at Mr. Josh. Townsends by reason of what has occurred lately relative to Dr. Nat. Martyn, who has lately absconded. His wife and two Children at Mr. Townsends.

Anna Martyn was back home in her father’s house. And Dr. Nathaniel Martyn was nowhere to be found.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?