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The Covenant of 1796
Judith Bolton-Fasman

A multi-generational history of a proud American family reveals volumes about the lives of Jewsin the country�s first century

At the end of Emily Bingham�s important and detailed history of an early-American family, she concludes that the Mordecais� story "reveals the human drama of a family forging a myth. Their project was in many ways that of the nation�s story writ small."

The project, as Bingham records it, began in the 1780s in a fledgling Jewish community taking its place in a young but otherwise monolithic nation. By 1790 George Washington had assured the Jews of America of their equal status. In a letter to the elders of Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, he wrote: "For happily the Government of the United States... gives to bigotry no sanction."

Washington�s words must have been particularly poignant for Jacob Mordecai, who felt marginalized by his own Jewish community. His mother was a Protestant convert to Judaism. As a teenager, she had married the much older Moses Mordecai, a British ex-convict who came to America as an indentured servant. After he paid his debt, the elder Mordecai peddled buttons and buckles in Philadelphia. As a young man, Jacob made a series of poor business decisions that only served to reinforce the Mordecais� low status in Jewish society. Bingham writes that these circumstances created "an irony difficult for the Mordecais to accept or overcome. [I]t was from fellow Jews that they felt -- or perceived -- the most stinging anti-Semitic stereotyping."

In 1784 Jacob married Judy Myers, the daughter of a well-to-do New York silversmith (the prominent financier Haym Solomon signed the couple�s marriage contract). Despite protests from Judy�s father, the newlyweds moved to Virginia and then Warrenton, North Carolina, a small town 50 miles north of Raleigh. As matriarch of Warrenton�s first and only Jewish family, Judy "made a point of bending religious practice to suit their lives..." She forged a way of life that evolved into a covenant that sustained her husband and seven children even after her early death in 1796.

In Bingham�s view, the covenant, which Jacob laid out in a letter to the couple�s children, served as a family "road map to virtue." Adapting the notion of Jews as the chosen people and applying it to an American family who happened to be Jewish, it consisted of a "commitment to aim for the highest levels of intellectual cultivation, family solidarity and dedication to useful work." Rachel, Jacob and Judy�s eldest daughter, upheld the covenant for her younger siblings, whom she schooled at home. After another of her father�s business ventures failed, she was instrumental in helping him financially regroup. When he later opened an academy for girls, Rachel acted as headmistress.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the promise of religious tolerance in America, most of the Mordecais were on a trajectory toward assimilation. Much of the first generation intermarried, and children of Jewish-gentile couples were almost always brought up as Christians. But even with two Jewish parents, assimilation could be erosive, as in the case of Rachel Mordecai, who married Aaron Lazarus relatively late in life. The couple lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, where their upwardly mobile social circle consisted of wealthy Christians.

The Lazaruses bought a pew at St. James Episcopal Church the same way they might have taken out a membership at an exclusive country club. Their Judaism was domestic -- an American version of the converso experience -- with the Sabbath and holidays observed in private. It was a time when a religious revival brought on by the Second Great Awakening was sweeping the South. And "the sweet but powerful tie of Christian affection" that Rachel�s acquaintances offered her eventually led to her deathbed conversion. Jacob painfully endured all of this while strengthening his own ties to Richmond�s Jewish community, where he and Becky had retired.

Bingham�s narrative becomes even richer when she recounts the Civil War years. Many of the Mordecais were slaveholders and subscribed to the mores of polite Southern society. The agonizing movement toward secession also played out within the Mordecai family. Jacob�s youngest son, Alfred, was one of the few Jews admitted to West Point, and he graduated at the top of his class in 1831. But, in 1864, forced to choose between the Union and his Southern family�s covenant, he resigned his commission and went to live with his wife�s family in Philadelphia. "Alfred violated the covenant," writes Bingham. "That his choice seemed an abdication of these ideals meant that, to his Southern family, his was the most egregious act of apostasy yet." Specifically, Alfred violated his family�s tacit agreement to remain united, in this case by remaining loyal to the South.

Bingham�s history of the Mordecai family ends in the 1880s. Caroline Myers Cohen, a granddaughter of Jacob�s, self-published a family history in which she noted that among the hundreds of Jacob Mordecai�s descendants, "only five persons profess[ed] the Jewish faith." One of the cornerstones of the original covenant, family unity, had all but disintegrated.

Emily Bingham, who is not Jewish, is herself a member of a prominent newspaper family and has an intimate understanding of the way family myths originate and evolve. A self-described independent scholar, Bingham worked on the book for a decade, basing it on the trove of Mordecai letters and diaries. While Bingham effectively presents the Mordecais� history as akin to a Biblical drama, she also opens a window on the American Revolution and Civil War through the lives of an American Jewish family before mass immigration from Eastern Europe. Though most of them converted to Christianity, the Mordecais experienced many of the trials and tribulations of their Biblical forebears. Like those ancestors, they were a patriarchal family, in which women still played a crucial role, proving their essential equality.

The Mordecai women were pivotal in handing down their history through their prolific letter-writing. These women, many of them intent on thoroughly assimilating, adapted the most Jewish of traditions in America: documenting their lives in a new Promised Land.