In the preface to Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, self-identified "lapsed Jew" Douglas Rushkoff explains that his nephew's circumcision ceremony started him on a quest to discover whether Judaism "might... already have dealt with some of the questions I seemed to be facing for the first time." Well, Rushkoff's book gave me the opportunity to experience a number of first times as well, although I'm not sure they were quite what he had in mind. I will list them in the order they occurred:

First Time Wondering What The Author Could Have Been Thinking: seeing the book's subtitle in Barnes & Noble. "The" truth? As a test, I asked my parents what they would think of a book subtitled "The Truth About Judaism." My father, the history teacher, said that he'd be suspicious of any single-truth theory (see where I get it?), and my mother, the kind of not-terribly-self-conscious Jew who probably gets on Rushkoff's last nerve, said that she'd wonder if it had been written by a Nazi. But I do try not to judge a book by its cover, so I skimmed through the preface, reminding myself that people always make sweeping generalizations in prefaces, and began Chapter One.

First Time Wincing: the epigraph. Joan Rivers? Several millennia of tradition to play with, and we get an epigraph from Joan Rivers? And it's not the famous description of Marie Osmond as being "so pure Moses couldn't even part her knees"?

First Time Feeling Vaguely Offended On Behalf Of My Entire Religious Tradition: "Most Jewish institutions offer little more than the calcified shell that once protected the spiritual insights at its core" (p. 1). So most Jewish institutions are not only meaningless and dead, but meaningless dead shellfish? He couldn't've chosen a kosher metaphor?

First Time Wondering Just How Some Of These Theories Are Going To Be Supported: "The Jewish tradition stresses... assimilation of the foreign" (p. 2). Okay, this I have got to see.

First Time Looking In Vain For Footnotes: "The Jews' unique position as perpetual outsiders led them to adopt and promote a wide range of cosmopolitan and inclusive business strategies and ethical standards.... Jews were middlemen, whose job was to promote fair and open trade among other peoples." (p. 6). Funny, I thought the Jews' "unique position as perpetual outsiders" ("unique" except for lepers, women, Christians in the Muslim world and vice versa, that sort of thing) led them to adopt and promote a wide range of cosmopolitan and highly exclusive business strategies based largely on the fact that their math skills stayed several centuries ahead of the rest of Europe for most of the Middle Ages and that they had a ready-made secret language in Hebrew. What Rushkoff should be citing here is not the latest monographs on Jewish finance in medieval Ashkenaz (since that is clearly the place and time to which he refers); instead, he owes this flight of romanticized history to a tradition beginning somewhere around Moses Mendelssohn and flowering in the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums.

First Time Questioning An Interpretative Strategy: "It must be understood that the legend of Israelite captivity and escape from bondage is not a historical record, but a symbolic emergence from the death cults of Egypt" (p. 17). My concern here is not with historical records -- although I understand the archaeological evidence to be more nuanced, indicating some clear Egyptian cultural influences (in pottery and so forth) spreading from south to north but calling into question the likelihood of a massive slave break-out on the level described in Exodus. My concern is with the phrase "it must be understood." Rabbinic Judaism is, happily, devoted to reading any given sacred text on multiple levels -- and it has considered the problems inherent in a strictly literal reading of the Exodus narrative in considerable detail for centuries (e.g. Ibn Ezra).

First Time Really Regretting The Absence Of Footnotes: I know there's a lot of debate about what the cherubim atop the Ark might have looked like, but "huge, scary, faceless monsters" (p. 21) is an option that had somehow passed me by -- and this is a pity, because I welcome anything that makes teaching the last four parashiyot in Exodus more entertaining. Cherub #1 as The Blob and Cherub #2 as The Thing From Outer Space sounds like a great starting point.

First Time Wondering Whether We Are Actually Talking About Jewish History In An Alternate Universe: "The emerging talmudic law stressed that God was experienced differently by everybody. ... There was no longer any official doctrine on what God was" (p. 28). See, I didn't realize that "emerging talmudic law" mean "Kierkegaard." Silly me.

First Time Realizing That I Should Stop Trying To Read This As A Work of History Altogether: "Let's push the envelope just a little further, along with the existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century. ... In this light, abstract monotheism is not the process by which a people find the one true God, but the path through which they get over their need for him" (p. 29). Whew! Good thing we got that settled. Er, what does this have to do with Judaism again?

First Time Feeling Personally Offended: "Today, the synagogue is one of the last places healthy, successful people go to engage in the kind of cultural analysis that the modern experience requires of us" (p. 52). I only let this bother me until I realized that I have hay-fever allergies and am therefore not healthy. It's such a relief to have my synagogue-going habits explained.

First Time Using A Four-Letter Word (And Not The Tetragrammaton, Either) Proceeded By "What The" Out Loud While Reading: "Jewish mysticism finds its origins not in the ancient, pre-Judaic era its promoters claim, but in a myth developed by a medieval rabbi named Isaac Luria. Addressing a Jewish constituency in the throes of exile and inquisition, Luria created an allegory for the exilic experience" (p. 59). It can't help that Rushkoff defines "Kabbalah" as "the Kabbalah Learning Center" but has apparently read nothing published on Jewish mysticism in the past thirty years. But how he draws a straight line from the early modern Inquisitions to Luria to Madonna is pretty much beyond me. And while I can and will argue for the applicability of the term "medieval" to sixteenth-century Safed, I get the sense that Rushkoff is using it as a value judgment rather than an historical cateogory.

First Time Feeling Sorry For The Author: "On Rosh Hashanah, we repeatedly recite that God is busy choosing who will live and who will die in the coming year. Who honestly wants to say things like this, particularly as one's most profound spiritual practice?" (p. 66) Honestly? If Rushkoff thinks the Unetaneh Tokef (or, more generously, attendance at RH services) is the "most profound spiritual practice" available in all of Judaism, he's missed a lot.

First Time Deciding That, Actually, I Have Better Things To Do Than Feel Sorry For The Author: Immediately after using the above-mentioned rhetorical question in place of an argument, Rushkoff asserts that "thoughtful Jews looking for a spiritual practice that reflects their innermost beliefs end up turning elsewhere [than the synagogue] or nowhere. Their honesty and integrity demands it" (p. 66). So now I'm not only unhealthy, unsuccessful, and/or incapable of cultural analysis; I'm also unthoughtful and/or dishonest? It's possible that Douglas Rushkoff is a lovely human being, but on balance I think I'll skip inviting him over for Shabbat dinner.

First Time Deciding That I Needed A Stiff Drink To Finish A Book: the Enlightenment did what? Which Enlightenment? And since when did Reform Judaism have anything to do with scientific racism? Huh? Was that six or seven centuries of history we just compressed into -- oh, wait, I'm not supposed to be reading this as history. Bad Naomi. (I should state for the record that I have read everything from On The Jews And Their Lies to Totality and Infinity without alcoholic assistance. I got through grad school on chocolate, not booze.)

First Time I Realized It Probably Wasn't Worth Finishing A Close Reading Of The Whole Darn Thing: yesterday. I had skimmed through the rest of Nothing Sacred, and Rushkoff has some well-chosen turns of phrase, but none of them strike me as particularly original. When it comes to ideas for Jewish renewal, he is at best channeling Mordecai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel (who are good choices to channel, but whose ideas have been fairly well accepted into mainstream liberal Judaism) and at worst reinventing the Talmud wheel. I did enjoy his discussion of the "virtual" nature of Judaism, where he does a nice job of synthesizing what some other recent commentators have said -- and I have the feeling I might like to read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. But Rushkoff's apparent ignorance of what contemporary Jews think and do -- that is, apart from himself, his friends, and some test cases so spectacularly ill-chosen as to raise suspicion that he wasn't really trying -- makes it tough for me to take him seriously.

First Time I Realized I'd Spent Too Much Time On This Post: today, when I checked comments to my last post (which have a couple of excellent links to more detailed reviews of Nothing Sacred). I clicked over to Rushkoff's blog and found the following explanation about the projected readership of Nothing Sacred: "this is a book for all the people like me who, in certain respects, don't really care so much about Judaism, at least not about that thing happening in synagogues." Well. My mistake.

First Time I Have Had Occasion To Look Into Barnes & Noble's Book-Return Policy: just now. I wonder where I put the receipt?

I have been busy lately -- catching up in my classes, having fun with services, and discovering that the trick to hosting impromptu dinner get-togethers has to do with ordering the right take-out -- but I've also been asking myself a lot of questions, and I have decided to run them by my readership to see what sorts of answers I get. Here are some of them, sorted by category, in no particular order:

Lawnmowers

Am I imagining things, or is your average yank-the-cord gas-powered lawnmower basically designed to be started much more easily by someone who is at least 5'8" and who lacks breasts? Also, didn't self-starters on gasoline-powered engines become more or less standard on automobiles by 1925? And why does my father keep telling me that I have a "perfectly good lawnmower" when, in addition to the above problems, it leaks oil all over my garage floor and blows grass clippings out the back and onto my legs? Is this some kind of illness, perhaps linked to the Y chronosome? If I am going to jolly along a machine with an engine, it is going to be something I can drive. Fast.

And speaking of Y chromosomes, what is it about being female and mowing the lawn that causes every male within 100 yards to offer me advice, thus forcing me to turn off the lawnmower in order to hear whether they're saying "your kitchen's on fire" or "hey, little lady, do you know your lawnmower door's propped open"? (Yes, I do, because it's one foot away from my legs and I fixed it that way. Although now that I think about it, allowing wet grass to collect inside the machine and hopefully burn out the motor would be a great reason to get a new one. Did I mention that the bag doesn't attach properly?)

Literature

Can Harold Bloom possibly fail to realize just how pathetically jealous he sounds? And can he simultaneously be unaware of the growing literary scholarship on penny dreadfuls and other forms of genre fiction? I don't care for most of Stephen King's work, and I don't think it's ground-breaking literature by and large, but it's actually very difficult to write something entirely devoid of literary value, and I seem to recall that King's early novels -- by most reasonable standards -- definitely featured "aesthetic accomplishment" and quite a lot of "inventive human intelligence." Finally, does Bloom really think that nobody will turn the phrase "anxiety of influence" against him?

In related news, who first decided to use masturbation as a metaphor for supposedly unfruitful (and now by extension almost any) intellectual activity? (I suspect Rousseau's Confessions of being instrumental, but am willing to be corrected publicly by total strangers rather than subject myself to rereading Rousseau's Confessions.) I am hard-pressed to decide whether this metaphor is more irritating for what it implies about masturbation or what it implies about intellectual labor, but either way I find it profoundly offensive -- and when I find something profoundly offensive, I go look up its history.

Finally, is it just me or have Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" books become thoroughly unreadable? I mean, the earlier books featured fifteen to twenty pages of reasonably interesting character action serving as a buffer between two-to-three-page sex scenes and two-to-three-page chunks of information on Neolithic botany or weaponry or religion or zoology or weather. One could flip through to the sex scenes (I am not knocking this; The Mammoth Hunters was sex ed for our entire third-grade girls' lunch table), one could flip through to the macrohistory, or one could read the book through for the characters and easily skip any of the other parts as desired. Unfortunately, the latest one seems to have cut down the dialogue to the same proportion as the sex scenes and the Neolithic infodumps, which means that occasionally the sex scenes and the infodumps are in disturbingly close proximity, and reading through produces the literary equivalent of watching TV while switching every thirty seconds between the History Channel, the Lifetime Channel, and the Spice Channel. I will probably never be able to utter the phrase "spear-thrower" without blushing.

Judaism

Well, first off, who did the market analysis for Douglas Rushkoff's book Nothing Sacred? Because I've been reading it on and off over the past weekend -- I was a tiny bit busy reading Torah, giving a d'var Torah, rehearsing for High Holy Days choir, and singing at the Selichot service, but I managed -- and I note that Rushkoff takes as given that all forms of semi-traditional synagogue-going Judaism have failed. I'm going to blog about the book separately -- sometime after I go grocery-shopping for the ingredients I'm going to assemble into baked goods for the Erev Rosh Hashanah oneg next weekend -- but what I really want to know is: who exactly is the intended audience for this book? I mean, are people who've given up on Judaism planning to shell out twenty-mumble bucks to buy it in hardcover? And are people who haven't given up on Judaism, and who don't have a professional interest in the subject, going to refrain from feeling deeply insulted by the end of Chapter One? Rushkoff might as well be taking lessons from the Harold Bloom School of Readership Alienation.

Also -- and this is especially for my rabbinically-minded readers -- is it just me or is the ideal time not to tell long sentimental stories off one's email during a service when (a) it is 11:30 pm, (b) the service started half an hour late, and (c) everyone is holding lighted candles (d) above the new carpet in the sanctuary? Oh, well. The rest of the service was lovely, and besides, I go to Selichot services in large part so that I can belt out the alto line to the Lewandoski arrangement of Avinu Malkeinu, because that is one of my personal signs that the holiday season has Officially Begun.

Etiquette

After a second visit to my nearby library branch and the self-checkout machines there, it has dawned on me that simply mocking the setup to my mother and the larger weblogging community does not fulfill my civic duty. Those suckers were purchased with my tax money, and they are not yet (thank goodness) common throughout the system. Hence my question: given that the sort of person who thinks those machines are a good idea is obviously very easy to impress with surface appearances, am I justified in using my (completely irrelevant) Boondoggle University departmental letterhead and (equally extraneous) title for my polite letter of complaint to the director of the library system?

Also, why do elementary schools, Scout troops, etc. seem to think it effective to solicit donations by forcing their students to sell junky trinkets from door to door? I mean, sending the kids to my door is obviously effective, but I would, if it comes to it, prefer a piece of genuine second-grader artwork and/or the satisfaction of knowing that most of my money is actually going to the school. (I bought a candle in a tin. I can always put it in the emergency kit I've never bothered to assemble.)

Finally, at what point does a blog post degenerate into a completely self-centered ramble... oh, wait, that's a question I can probably answer for myself, right? I'll just remind everyone to celebrate Banned Books Week. My post from last year pretty much covers my views on the matter, but I'd love to hear any more banned-book recommendations. If I can just get the dratted lawn mowed, I'm going to celebrate by curling up with some books.

Okay, I'm tired of hearing myself nattering about religion and grief and Big High Personal Melodrama, and I figure that's nothing to how all of you must feel. So for, an abrupt change in tone and content -- well, okay, I'm still nattering about religion. Sort of. I was trying to talk about Barbie dolls, but these things happen.

You see, I'd already noticed the story about how Saudi Arabia's religious police are cracking down on illegally imported Barbie dolls, identifying them as "Jewish." Because, you know, Judaism is all about molded plastic boobs and revealing clothes (those being the Saudis' concerns; I don't think the persistence of stereotypical gender relations in the Barbie world is keeping them up nights). But yesterday one of the LiveJournalers I read without knowing personally -- she goes by Tzikeh -- pointed out that a Jewish Barbie offers some really wonderful playset possibilities: Frum Ken with tefillin, the Barbie Masada Construction Set, and so forth.

My first, virtually kneejerk response -- and what I posted in comment over on LJ -- was that I'd rather Barbie have the tefillin. Preferably in darling little pink leather boxes: in the World of Barbie(tm), there is undoubtedly a kosher animal with a naturally pink hide. But then I started mulling over the possibilities from the standpoint of a religious educator (which I very, very occasionally play on TV). We are obviously missing an opportunity here. For better familiarity with the less-frequently-televised portions of the Hebrew Bible, we could have Sotah Barbie (complete with ashes; High Priest Alan sold separately) and Barbie as Jael in the Book of Judges (complete with tent peg; Ken as Barak and Midge as Deborah also available).* Then there's the Second Temple, and Cast-off Foreign Wife Barbie (add Samaritan Kelly and some random kids from one of the family playsets), plus Queen Esther Barbie for the nifty clothing sets (poor Midge gets stuck as Vashti in that one). Barbie would be a natural as Queen Salome Alexandra, easily the most successful of the Hasmonean monarchs and a stellar example of the Barbie (tm) motto of my youth, "We girls can do anything."

Continuing into the rabbinic period, there's Beruriah Barbie with Ken as Meir -- and were it not for the fact that nobody in the World of Barbie is over age 30, I'd suggest throwing in Chanina ben Teradyon with a wrap-around Torah scroll that changes color when exposed to heat. For the Middle Ages, we could have the Crusade-Massacre Barbie Playset -- c'mon, Barbie always plays to stereotypes! -- complete with Forcibly Baptized Chelsea, some dead kids. and a slaughtering knife (Survivor Ken would wind up composing piyyutim about how great a woman she was). I would love to own a Maid of Ludomir Barbie, or Barbie as Gluckel of Hamelin; on the other hand, the Fiddler on the Roof cast would be inevitable (although the over-30 age clause would cause some problems), and before long we'd be safely back in the contemporary world with some nice Rabbi Barbies and Zionist Barbies and -- whoops, the Saudis would start having problems again, wouldn't they?

As a Jewish feminist, I've got to say that I'm really starting to like the history of Judaism as told through Barbie & Friends. My cousin A.J. has just started ninth grade at a Jewish day school, and he's taken to calling me for help with some of his Jewish history homework. Said homework has not, so far, mentioned a single female figure. It has, however, included my hero Yochanan ben Zakkai, so I'm trying not to bother A.J. about deficiencies in his curriculum about which he could frankly care less. I'll give it till Hanukkah. when I will -- okay, continue to refrain from traumatizing A.J., but instead post here about Salome Alexandra. After all, I have to find something nice to say about the Hasmoneans sooner or later.

Or I could just teach a class, because I came within a hair of writing a syllabus there. Huh. It's amazing what I'll do to avoid sitting down and writing thank-yous for condolence notes. But it's probably just as well that my childhood Barbies are safely stashed in an attic five states away, because I can think exactly how one would go about making tiny fake tefillin.

* -- You think I'm kidding? There is currently an entire line of Barbie & Friends As the cast of Swan Lake (I just looked at the Wal-mart site). Tell me the Book of Judges wouldn't be more fun to act out with Barbie dolls than Swan Lake. Go on, tell me.

I already posted in the comments to my last entry, but thanks to everyone who's offered condolences on my grandmother's death.

The funeral took place at my grandmother's church, the one where she ran the United Methodist Women for decades, where my father is still listed as a member (I understand he once taught Sunday school), and where I'm related to a good third of the people in the pews on any given Sunday. As someone who is quite obviously not Christian, I'm startled to realize that I've attended that church on and off all my life -- Sunday school and services when I stayed overnight at Grandmother's as a child, barbecue suppers for obvious reasons, one of my cousins' baptisms for reasons I cannot recall, Mother's Day every year with my parents because the church gave a potted plant to the mother with the most children present (Grandmother always won), and senior Bible study and services when I shuttled Grandmother there sometimes after she'd moved into assisted living. It's a tiny place; our family took up half the pews at the funeral. After the funeral, the church ladies put together lunch for seventy (chicken pies, cold ham, dozens of vegetables, and a tableful of desserts) in the Fellowship Hall. The continuity comforted me, and maybe them, too; after all, they said, Grandmother had always been the first one in the kitchen while she was able.

One of the less-trumpeted advantages of being a Child of Intermarriage is that -- provided you wind up with mostly sane family on both sides -- you can grow up feeling perfectly comfortable in both churches and synagogues. But this particular little church is the only one where I have ever felt I belonged. And the funeral was lovely. Most of the Christian funerals I've attended have made me feel uncomfortable, because after a certain amount of talk about "going home to Jesus" even the most well-adjusted Child of Intermarriage starts imagining a big scarlet I-for-Infidel affixed to her forehead. But this funeral just made me feel, on the whole, peaceful. Dad gave the eulogy, one of the church ladies I've known since my Sunday-school days sang a solo, and the nice young minister did a good job of making me believe wholeheartedly in John chapter 14 for the space of the reading. That aside, since Grandmother spent her life convinced that she would go home to Jesus, I can't imagine that she hasn't. These last few years, she'd also taken to asking where my grandfather had gotten to -- he died when I was four -- and telling everyone that she was waiting for him to come pick her up. I can't imagine that he hasn't, either.

The sensation of peace was transitory, unfortunately, as was the enjoyment of catching up with some family members I don't often get to see. I've spent the last few days playing in the kitchen (why has nobody brought us a casserole?), reading novels I liked in high school (I've gotten a lot pickier), wallowing in occasional bursts of self-pity (all the things I really want for my birthday are unattainable, too expensive, or both), not being able to cry when I'm fairly sure I want to, and picking fights with whoever's available. I must say that it would help if my father would stop reading my copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and pay a little more attention to me. On the other hand, it's useful to know that my habit of hiding in books when I'm upset might just be inherited.

Meanwhile, my mother claims that she will be baking me a birthday cake tomorrow, and I am torn between the undeniable fact that birthday cake tastes better when I do not make it myself and the equally undeniable fact that Mom will very probably take my request for a traditional layer cake with icing (precise types and flavors of each at baker's discretion) and ignore it in favor of whatever supposedly healthy dessert-like thing she's in the mood to make. What I sort of secretly want is a kind of cake Grandmother used to make all the time, but Mom dislikes bananas and just doesn't do maple icing, so I'll save it for whenever I get back to Boondoggle and resume my, uh, life. Right now that life seems incredibly far away, but that might just be because I don't want to start grading reading quizzes.

Tomorrow morning is Sunday, of course. I don't ordinarily do anything more exotic than sleep in on Sunday mornings. I don't have an excuse to go to church, and I don't even necessarily want to go to church in the abstract. Various of my cousins who still regularly attend the family church have mentioned that I'm welcome at their Homecoming weekend next month, and I could stroll in anytime and run into some of them (as well as some church ladies who remember me from Sunday school). But this week was the first time I'd ever been in that church without Grandmother, and somehow I don't think I'm likely to go back much at all. I also think that my cousins and I are going to be changing from "dinners" to "reunions" and from "family" to "relatives." But we have a new baby coming in December and a shower for his mother next month, so maybe... not quite yet.

As Paul very carefully did not say to the Corinthians, the idea of "being changed" is a damn sight more comforting when you have some say in the change.

The Jewish tradition is characteristically sensible in marking off a period between the death of a loved one and the burial: it's called aninut, and a person in this state is (among other things) neither expected nor permitted to pray. There are two traditional reasons for this last prescription: either the person is already engaged in the mitzvah of arranging for burial and should not stop to perform the different mitzvah of prayer, or a complete focus on burial proceedings is necessary to adequately convey one's respect for the deceased.

Me, I prefer the explanation -- it's probably somewhere in the tradition as well, I just don't have the heart to search for it at the moment -- that, in the immediate aftermath of a loved one's death, most people are too angry at God (and anyone else who gets in the way) to do even an adequate job of prayer. I also like the wordplay which connects aninut, "mourning," to anan, "cloud." Aninut is, after all, a state of cloudiness -- somewhere between numb and cold.

My grandmother died earlier today; I will be teaching classes (or a reasonable facsimile) tomorrow morning, then leaving for the airport. The funeral will be on Thursday, and sometime when I'm feeling a little less numb I must remind myself that the universe does not hate me personally and that lots of other people probably also have family funerals on their birthdays which happen coincidentally to be national days of disturbingly overtelevised mourning. Well, one or two other people, at least. (If I turn into one of those women who refuse to admit to having a birthday, you'll all know it's not out of vanity -- possibly megalomania, but not vanity.)

I may or may not be posting over the next week: I'm currently feeling the urge to go consecutive days without checking email, but that might just be because I spent three hours canceling meetings and catching up on professional correspondence so that I could go consecutive days without checking email. Meanwhile, I'm just... cloudy.

I have been busy -- I have, if it comes to that, been busy on one of those rare occasions when I think the "service" category of academic evaluations is not a dead letter -- but that's really no excuse for missing the Arrival Day blogburst. "Arrival Day" refers to the storied arrival of the first permanent Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam in September 1654. I had forgotten the precise date of their arrival, but I once had occasion to research the history of colonial Judaism for a side project, and although this is far from being my area of expertise, I think I can manage to tell a story in the remaining few hours of Arrival Day.

Once upon a time, twenty-three Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, or so the story goes -- but if the story is true (and some part of it must be, as we shall see), I don't think anyone is entirely clear on why the twenty-three Jews wound up in New Amsterdam in the first place. The Jews in this story would have been not Dutch but Portuguese, as we reckon such things; Portugal had required its Jewish population to leave or convert to Christianity back in 1497, but some of the converts became Christians in name only, waiting for the chance to be able to practice their religion openly. Remarkably, the tradition passed down through generations. Some of these secret Jews joined other Portuguese colonists in the new settlements of Brazil, and not long after the Dutch took over the port city of Recife in 1630, a group of its inhabitants revealed themselves as Jews. More European Jews emigrated to Recife, and they established two synagogues. For perhaps a decade, Recife (then Mauritsstad) was the undisputed center of Jewish culture in the New World.

Unfortunately, after a quarter-century of near-constant fighting, the Portuguese recaptured Recife in January 1654 and ended the Dutch presence on the Brazilian coast. The terms of Recife's surrender were fairly liberal and stipulated that Recife's Jews could return to Holland or travel to other European colonies where they would be welcomed. (Jews were still not permitted to reside in Portuguese colonies, and the Portuguese Inquisition -- then active in other Brazilian cities -- could in theory have tried the ex-crypto-Jews as apostates, since they had been baptized as Catholics.) Some of Recife's Jews moved inland and went back underground, masquerading as Catholics once more. But most of them had had enough of hiding, so they liquidated what possessions they could and left the Portuguese settlements behind.

The logical places for them to go were the Dutch West Indies -- thriving centers of the Atlantic slave and sugar trades -- or the established Jewish community in Amsterdam. New Amsterdam was a Dutch colony, certainly, but it was barely a village, a starter colony already menaced by British settlements to the north and south. There are records of a few Jewish travelers in the area, one or two of them probably in New Amsterdam, but there was nothing like a Jewish community. In short, it was not at all the place a (relatively) cosmopolitan Jew from Recife would likely have chosen. How one boatload of Recife's Jews wound up in New Amsterdam -- and the sources all agree that they came from Recife -- is therefore, something of a mystery. A late (and rather unreliable) source claims that their Amsterdam-bound ship was blown off course, captured by a Spanish ship, then recaptured by a French privateer who accepted a generous sum to drop the Jews off at what was by then the nearest Dutch settlement, New Amsterdam.* I gather that historians think this version unlikely, but it captures the arbitrariness of the choice as well as any other.

At any rate, we can be certain that Jews arrived in New Amsterdam out of some combination of choice and chance, because Director General Peter Stuyvesant greeted the unexpected influx with something less than glee but more historically verifiable than legend. He promptly prohibited what he termed the "abominable" Jews from purchasing homes, practicing crafts, selling at retail, trading with other settlements or with Indians, joining the local militia, holding public religious services, voting, or holding office. Meanwhile, he dashed off a letter to his superiors at the Dutch West India Company asking that the "deceitful race -- such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ -- be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony." Even worse, Stuyvesant added, "giving them [the Jews] liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and Papists."

Luckily for the refugees from Recife, the Dutch West India Company decided to risk the Lutheran/Papist threat and permit the Jews to join fully in the life of the colony, requiring only that their poor and indigent be supported by the Jewish "nation" instead of the colony at large. (Stuyvesant's plea failed to allow for the fact that Holland's Jewish community was not only powerful but included several of the Company's investors.) A British fleet "took" New Amsterdam in 1664 -- indeed, Stuyvesant had made himself so unpopular with the colonists that the Duke of York's forces went virtually unopposed -- but by then the Jews were as well-established as anyone else on the island. More to the point, England had itself allowed Jews back into its precincts in 1655: while the Jews of Recife could not have found shelter in Jamestown in 1654, they could join the British colony of New York a decade later.

I am not descended directly from the Jews of Recife, but I enjoy telling their story -- even, or perhaps especially, the parts of it which are more legend than history -- for several reasons. First of all, the story of Arrival Day reminds me that events we now take for granted -- Jewish settlers arriving in North America being given the same grudging religious freedoms as other religious minorities** -- were both novel and unpredictable at the time. Whether or not one happens to be American, or Jewish, one can still appreciate the complicated network of ideas and influence, war and waterways which led to the acceptance of Jews as colonists in North America. Another important reason to tell this story is because I am an American Jew: I am not sure whether to view these long-ago developments as coincidental, providential, or both, but I am sure that they make me pleased (and somewhat relieved) to be what and where I am. Finally -- for now -- the story of Arrival Day is a good one, full of twists and turns, and it has a happy ending. Those are always worth telling.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go put up a mezuzah. Seems like a good day to do it.

* -- This blogburst post offers more detail about the legend. For an historian's attempt to sort truth from fiction, cf. Leo Hershkowitz, "New Amsterdam's Twenty-Three Jews: Myth or Reality?" in Shalom Goldman, ed., Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries (Hanover, 1993), pp. 171-83.
** -- In most of the British colonies (Rhode Island and Pennsylvania are the usual exceptions), Jews were prohibited from holding public office and sometimes from voting, as both pursuits usually required a Christian oath. They were also required to pay taxes in support of the established church where applicable. However, some of these rules were clearly observed in the breach -- see Jonathan's notes on Jews in 18th-century American politics.

I'm well aware that things tend to get misplaced during a move. It's happened to me from time to time, and the intervention of about eight weeks between the move and the unpacking hasn't helped this time. But I am simply baffled as to how I could've lost a mezuzah scroll which should've been inside the mezuzah case. The case is unquestionably empty -- I even shone a flashlight in there to check -- and my father, who was housesitting, denies having fooled around with it. ("That little piece of paper costs how much? Are you serious?") I hadn't checked the case before packing it, and I had it on the front door of an unsecured apartment building, but it seems to me that the sort of person who would know the respective values of the scroll and case (it's quite a nice one) would also be disinclined to steal. So... well, I need a new mezuzah scroll.

I need more mezuzah scrolls in any case -- I had been gradually creeping up from one (which worked fine when I was living in a dorm room in college; I stuck it on the doorpost with Fun-Tak) to two (only one came with my last apartment, so I left it there) to three (which is all I can afford at the moment, given that I apparently need three new scrolls). I like mezuzot, and not just because I live in a neighborhood with a statue of a certain nice Jewish girl in every other backyard; I'm fond of old-school Judaica, probably because I grew up with so little of it.* Sure, mezuzot are thinly disguised magical amulets, but I like those too. I have never really been able to decide, in my own mind, whether or not the scroll absolutely has to be kosher, but in the absence of countervailing evidence (and the presence of a small bit of disposable income) I prefer to go with tradition.

Two weeks ago, as part of a string of errands which took me way the heck into Outer Suburbia, I managed to swing by the Boondoggle metro area's last remaining Judaica shop. Having just conquered the forces of darkness registered my car for another year, I thought I deserved a little consumer therapy, and I did need mezuzah scrolls. Unfortunately, as the Judaica Shop Lady told me, they were out of scrolls, and what scrolls they got in tended to get snapped up right away; I could leave my name, number, and quantity desired and she'd let me know when the next shipment came in. So I did, and I got the message yesterday, along with the happy news that the shop has Sunday-morning hours. So I called back and told the Judaica Shop Lady to set my three scrolls aside.

Not long aftewards, I came home and flipped on the TV. I can't quite justify paying for cable when I get all the basic broadcast channels just fine, so I'm down to seven vaguely normal channels and two scary religious ones. Those of you who've been reading Baraita for awhile will probably have guessed that I am the sort of person who, every now and again, watches scary religious channels while uttering MST3K-influenced commentary on their exegetical techniques. (Yep, I make my own fun.) On this occasion, I was actually trying to find a weather report from one of the local channels, but somewhere in between Yugi-Oh! and the commercial break for the News At Five I heard: "...and then you roll up the scroll and slide it in....."

I had flipped past it before the sentence registered, and at first, I thought I was having mezuzah-related auditory hallucinations, which is about the most boring religious mania I can think of offhand. But I flipped back, and sure enough, there was the Scary Protestant Channel in all its glory, with the usual Distinguished White Guy sitting there demonstrating... yes, a mezuzah. Or, as he put it, a "me-zu-ZAH." In the minute or so before the commercial break, I managed to deduce that (a) either the Scary Protestant Channel or just the Distinguished White Guy's "ministry" was having some kind of fundraiser or pledge drive**, and (b) the me-zu-ZAH (with mass-produced scroll) was a Free Gift With Donation. The whole exercise was laden with references to returning the Jews to the "kingdom of Israel" and, of course, sponsoring the monarchical candidacy of one J.C. (Funny, I thought he'd turned down that job. Of course, if they're able to get people into the kingdom of Israel, I want to buy their time machine, not a fake mezuzah. I've always wanted to know more about the eighth century B.C.E.)

Now, see, I've always thought it was only polite not to play with other peoples' religious doohickeys in public -- that's the only reason I don't have a statue of the Virgin Mary in my backyard wearing a tasteful little tallit and kippah. (After all, the apocryphal literature suggests that she was a woman ahead of her time; I just choose to extend the metaphor.) But I can't quite manage to be offended -- well, not much; the political implications disturb me, of course -- because this is just so fascinatingly weird. I almost regret that I've never gotten to watch a Scary Jewish Channel -- I'm sure they must have one or two in the state of Israel -- just to see what they hand out as pledge-drive gifts. (At a guess: not crucifixes.) And I really do regret, deeply and profoundly, that I am unable to entirely rid my brain of the disturbing mental image of Jerry Falwell wearing tefillin. Urgh. But. Still. Ain't American religion grand? Especially on TV. I'm fighting the urge to watch Joan of Arcadia this fall to see how long CBS can go without screwing up one of the show's self-proclaimed Ten Commandments for the depiction of God.

Okay, maybe I should get cable after all. But I could buy, like, one mezuzah scroll a month for that amount -- plus, I want DSL more.

* -- This isn't at all old-school Judaica, but I've been telling my mom that I want a paper model of the Temple (whether First, Second, or Third is not specified) for my birthday. She's been ignoring me. Someone reassure me that it's a perfectly reasonable investment for me to make in my office decor, so my little wooden-block Mayan temple has company.
** -- Turns out it was a Praise-A-Thon. See here? I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.