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A Gallery of Jewish Colonial Worthies
Some Loyalists, Some Patriots: II
- Abstract
A traveler attended divine service at New York’s Shearith Israel in September, 1744, and described his visit as follows: “I went in the morning . . . to the Jews’ sinagogue where was an assembly of about 50 of the seed of Abraham chanting and singing their doleful hymns, (they had 4 great wax candles lighted, as large as a man’s arm, round the sanctuary where was contained the ark of the covenant and Aaron’s rod), dressed in robes of white silk. Before the Rabbi, who was elevated above the rest, in a kind of desk, stood the seven golden candlesticks transformed into silver gilt. They were all slip shod. The men wore their hats in the synagogue and had a veil of some white stuff which they sometimes threw over their heads in their devotion; the women, of whom some were very pritty, stood up in a gallery like a hen coop. They sometimes paused or rested a little from singing and talked about business. My ears were so filled with their lugubrous songs that I could not get the sound out of my head all day.”
Some of the Jews in colonial New York, in the 18th century, were practicing a handicraft. The Jewish freemen of the city—“freedom of the city” included the right to engage in a handicraft and sell at retail—numbered a peruke-maker, a tailor, a cordwainer (shoe-maker), a saddler, a baker, a distiller and tobacconist, a watchmaker, a worker in brass, and a silversmith. Myer Myers (d. 1795), a native of New York, became chairman of the “Gold and Silver Smiths’ Society.” The sacred scrolls of the Torah in the synagogues then at Newport, New York, and Philadelphia have ornaments he made. Most of the Jewish freemen, however, were just plain merchants, and some were listed as “shopkeeper,” “chandler” (probably a retailer of provisions and groceries), “vendue master” (auctioneer), or “retailer.”
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