Death of Mary Shelley, today in 1851. Or perhaps we should say that she did not die, merely that God found a way to reassemble her.
Behind that witticism hangs not one but several tales. The first belongs to the winter of 1815/16, the winter after the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted, and its impact was to reduce the world to so much snow and ice that an estimated million people died of it, with eschatological visions of a world returned to the jurassic depths of the ice age commonplace among writers; not least Mary Shelley, who ended "Frankenstein" in an act of wild pursuit of good versus evil across precisely that terrain.
Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe had gone to visit Lord Byron in Geneva, where Byron's personal physician and close friend John Polidori was also staying - Pollydolly as Byron affectionately nicknamed him. With little else to do on a cold Geneva night except make love - the group was a source of scandal in all the international newspapers for their alleged sexual libertinage and even assertions of incest - they read aloud from a book of German ghost stories, after which Byron issued a challenge to all of them to write one of their own. Byron and Shelley failed to deliver; Mary came up with the idea of Frankenstein, but didn't actually begin writing it until some months later. Polidori alone fulfilled the challenge, writing a tale which he called "The Vampyre", and which he then worked up into a novel, and published three years later. Given that we know this tale as the original scripture of what is now called the "Gothic novel", why is Polidori's name largely unknown and his book more-or-less unread, while Bram Stoker, who wrote his "Dracula" decades later, is regarded as the patriarch of vampire fiction?
1605
When the Portuguese explorer Cabral landed in Brazil in 1500 (see also January 1) , he was accompanied by at least one Jew, who had been captured in India and forcibly baptised. Portuguese "conversos" continued to settle in Brazil for more than a century; then, in 1630, the Netherlands drove the Portuguese and their "Unholy Inquisition" out of the Pernambuco region. By 1632, when the six hundred Portuguese Jews of Recife, augmented by more than four thousand Jews from Amsterdam, felt secure enough to establish a synagogue, the Kahal Kodesh Zur Yisroel, they summoned Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca of Amsterdam to serve as their spiritual leader. Aboab de Fonseca - generally remembered by his first name, not his last - became thereby the first congregational Rabbi in the New World (my thanks to the Jewish Virtual Library for this information).Born in Portugal this day in 1605, he had come as a child to Amsterdam, when his parents fled Portugal by way of France, settling finally in Amsterdam, where he became a student of Isaac Uzziel, and was regarded as something of a prodigy, having become a charismatic public speaker and a respected teacher while still in his teens, and the translator of Hebrew Cabbalistic writings into Spanish, and Spanish Cabbalistic writings into Hebrew, by his early twenties.
Under Aboab's leadership, Recife's Jewish congregation thrived for several years, protected by the same religious toleration that made Amsterdam almost uniquely Jew-friendly among the cities and lands of Europe. That brief list, alas, did not include the Portuguese, who had retained control of the Bahia region of Brazil and were now plotting to recapture Pernambuco. In 1645 a Portuguese Jesuit, Joam Fernandes Vieyra, convinced the King of Portugal to reconquer Recife on the grounds that "that city is chiefly inhabited by Jews, most of whom were originally fugitives from Portugal... they have their open synagogues there, to the scandal of Christianity. For the honour of the faith, therefore, the Portuguese ought to risk their lives and their property in putting down such an abomination."
In 1646, Vieyra himself led the troops who attacked Recife. Hoping to divide and conquer, he offered the Jews protection on the condition that they refrain from participating in the battle. The community unanimously rejected his offer and took up arms with their Dutch comrades. The Portuguese siege of Recife lasted nine years. Later Aboab would write that "many of the Jewish immigrants were killed by the enemy; many died of starvation. Those who were accustomed to delicacies were glad to be able to satisfy their hunger with dry bread; soon they could not obtain even this. They were in want of everything and were preserved alive as if by a miracle." It is the oldest known Hebrew text written in America to have survived to the present day.
In 1654 the Dutch garrison finally surrendered, insisting that the Portuguese spare the Jewish community, a condition which the victors accepted, but only after appending their own condition, which was that the Jews must leave Brazil. Some chose Surinam, others Guadeloupe; the majority preferred to return to Amsterdam, and Aboab went with these. But one boat, with twenty-three Jewish passengers on board, was attacked by pirates as it traveled north along the American coast. Rendered completely penniless and destitute, driven off-course by adverse winds and the absence of maps, that small ship found its way at last to New Amsterdam, the city that would later be renamed New York. So the first Jews in South America became the first Jews in North America as well.
And the first victims of anti-Semitic persecution into the bargain. Because no sooner had they landed than the ship's captain, one Jacques de la Mothe, brought an action against them for failing to pay their passage. What little the pirates had left them was seized by the courts on the orders of the Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant, but it was insufficient, so he jailed two members of the group, and wrote to the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam, asking permission to expel all of them. Jews in Holland petitioned for them to remain, and won that right in April 1655, along with the right for other Jews to emigrate to the colony as well. Not that this stopped Stuyvesant from persecuting them - but you can read the rest of Stuyvesant's anti-Semitic activities here for yourself, if you really must.
In fact, as would become apparent from the passing of this law, they were not the first Jews in North America. Completely unbeknownst to anyone but themselves, a second group of Jews had arrived at about the same time from Europe and settled at Newport, on Rhode Island. They were Sephardim of Marrano background, some from Old Amsterdam and some from London. Only when news of the new law became known did they throw off their Marrano disguises and openly resume the practice of their faith.
As to the first Jew to set foot on the continent... that accolade belongs to Luis de Torres, Columbus' interpreter, who formally converted to Christianity the day before the voyage in order to obtain his license to travel. Where he learned his Iroquois is not explained in the histories.
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| The Esnoga Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam |
Upon his return to Amsterdam, Aboab was re-appointed to his previous position, but now as senior rabbi, as well as teaching in the city's Talmud Torah, serving as Principal of its Yeshiva, and being made a member of the city's Beth Din. It was in this latter capacity that he instigated the construction of the "Esnoga", the Portuguese Synagogue, designed by Elias Bouwman and completed on August 2nd 1675. It was an extraordinary piece of architecture, free-standing though it rests on wooden poles. Its foundation vaults can be seen from boats in the canal that literally pass beneath the synagogue; the floor is covered with fine sand, an ancient Dutch tradition that has the effect of absorbing dust and moisture, scraping the dirt from shoes, and muffling noise. Only five synagogues in the world have such a floor; the others are all in the Caribbean.
Aboab de Fonseca died in 1693, at the age of 88, having served the Amsterdam community a full fifty years after his return from Recife. The one blot on his record - though it is possible that the event had already occurred by the time he reached Amsterdam - was the cherem, the writ of excommunication issued by the Talmud Torah authorities against the philosopher Baruch Spinoza on July 27th 1656, for his "evil opinions and acts" - the Jewish equivalent of "heresy".
"Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him."A form of Jewish nastiness whose origins lie in Rabban Gamliel's despicable prayer "Ve La Malshinim", still recited daily as part of the "Amidah" (and valiantly, guiltily, but still completely disingenuously defended here). Even if Aboab had not yet returned, was not yet a member of the Beth Din that issued the cherem, he still had fifty years as their senior rabbinical authority to rethink it, to withdraw it, to rephrase it; but he did not. So America's first Rabbi also has the distinction of being the last Rabbi in Europe to excommunicate one of his own congregation.
For more on Baruch Spinoza and the reasons for the cherem, go to my blog entry for February 21:
1709
Selkirk built two huts, but there is no evidence of a Man Friday. Twice, ships anchored by the island, but Selkirk managed to hide, and had already managed to hide traces of his being there before they had a chance to spot them; both ships were Spanish privateers, and a Scotsman would have been unlikely to outlive their visit. But today in 1709 another of Dampier's ships, the Duke, passed by, captained by one Woodes Rogers, and the calm, rural idyll of life in the natural environment of the Juan Fernández archipelago came to an end. Selkirk returned to that hideous barbarity the human world, and died of yellow fever off the west coast of Africa, on board HMS Weymouth, on December 13th 1721.
While modern scholars now argue among themselves over whether or not Selkirk really was the source, or only a source, for Robinson Crusoe, no one disputes the splendidly ironic syllogism created as a philosophical parable by Franz Kafka, and which I played with in a piece about Selkirk in my collection of parables "The Captive Bride". The Kafka goes as follows:
"Had Robinson Crusoe never left the highest, or more correctly the most visible point of his island, from desire for comfort, or timidity, or fear, or ignorance, or longing, he would soon have perished; but since without paying any attention to passing ships and their feeble telescopes he started to explore the whole island and take pleasure in it, he managed to keep himself alive and finally was found after all, by a chain of causality that was, of course, logically inevitable."
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RCA Victor unveiled the 45 rpm record, today in 1949
Forces led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over Persia, renaming it Iran, today in 1979
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