Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [114]
In this climate, New York Jews flourished. Nathan Simson made his mark in the West Indian trade and retired at the end of the 1720s with an estate valued at sixty thousand pounds. His son Joseph was one of several Jewish merchants who did so well marketing kosher beef in the islands and elsewhere that by the 1740s the stamp K. Sh.I., kasher (Congregation Shearith Israel, kosher) was recognized throughout the colonies. The marriage of Jacob Franks to Bilah Abigail Levy in 1712 not only ensured Franks’s success in trade but was also the beginning of a mercantile dynasty that would be renowned in London and Philadelphia as well as in New York. Luis Moses Gomez shipped New York wheat to Lisbon, used the profits to import wine from Madeira, then expanded his operations to include furs, slaves, rum, and English manufactured wares. In addition to such families, who ranked among the city’s wealthiest residents, Jews occupied positions as peddlers, candlemakers, butchers, watchmakers, goldsmiths, and shopkeepers.
The community was not without its internal divisions. The immigration of more and more German speakers in the early eighteenth century—by 1730 a majority of the 225 Jews in New York were Ashkenazim—stirred resentment among the Sephardim. Proud, socially conscious families like the Gomezes resisted intermarriage with “Tudescos” (i.e., Germans), even wealthy ones like the Franks, and tensions between the two groups were reflected in their tendency to live in different parts of town: Sephardim in the East Ward, Ashkenazim in the Dock Ward. When the congregation decided to erect a new synagogue on Mill Street (South William) in 1728, the Sephardim made no secret of their apprehension that it would adopt Ashkenazic liturgical practices. By the midthirties, however, Ashkenazim and Sephardim came up with an arrangement that enabled them to present a more unified front to their sometimes hostile neighbors: henceforth the president of the congregation would normally be an Ashkenazi, while services continued to follow Spanish-Portuguese ritual under the leadership of a Sephardic hazzan. The use of Portuguese in congregational records and on tombstones nonetheless slowly but surely yielded to English; before the middle of the century it had disappeared altogether.
Bilah Abigail Franks. “Still it Gives me a Secret pleasure to Observe the faire Character Our Family has in [this] place by Jews and Christians,” she once wrote. {American Jewish Historical Society)
Despite New York’s reputation for allowing “perfect freedom of conscience for all, except Papists” (as one Dutch dominie put it in 1741), the attainment by some Jews of social and economic standing stirred resentment. On one occasion, in 1743, a mob attacked a Jewish funeral cortege, seized the corpse, and subjected it to a mock conversion. A less clear-cut case of anti-Semitic violence would occur half a dozen years later, when Oliver De Lancey organized a mob to attack the home of a recently arrived Jewish merchant. They smashed all the windows, broke down the door, wrecked the interior, and threatened to rape the man’s wife—on the grounds, De Lancey allegedly said, that she looked like the wife of Governor George Clinton, “and if he could not have her, he would have her likeness.” Oddly, De Lancey’s own wife was Phila Franks, daughter of Jacob and Bilah.
AN EPITAPH FOR DUTCH NEW YORK
As New York grew ever more integrated into the English empire, and trade with Holland ever more attenuated, the position of the city’s Dutch declined accordingly, more so than met the eye. Well into the second decade of the eighteenth century, travelers continued to marvel at the tenacity of Dutch speech, Dutch dress, and Dutch architectural conventions in New York. Sarah Kemble Knight, in 1704, was astonished at how different its Dutch women looked. “The English go very fashionable