Read Online American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus - Free Book Online
Authors: Hannah Nordhaus
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Jews were known to lie.
By the mid-1700s there were five “protected” Jewish families in Lügde, concentrated in the quarter south of the marketplace. Julia’s grandparents were among them. They weren’t allowed to attend Christian schools, though they all learned to read, regardless of wealth and status. Until the early nineteenth century the Jews of Lügde had no surnames. Jewish men were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or both; women were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or their husbands: Glückel came from the town of Hameln; thus she was known as Glückel of Hameln. Moses was the son of Mendel; he was Moses Mendelssohn. Julia’s father was Levi David Schuster: Levi ben (son of) David. His father was David ben Levi.
The practice was confusing, even for the Jews, so when the royal government of Westphalia granted Jews citizenship rights and duties in 1807, it concluded that Jews should be named and counted—all the better to be taxed. Some were named for their villages, and some for their trades: Kramer meant merchant; Kaufmann, too; Staab was aterm for “rod” or “staff” and indicated a person who held some authority; Schuster, Julia’s family name, meant shoemaker, though there’s no indication that anyone ever made shoes. A family genealogy suggests they were so named because their house looked like a shoe.
Lügde’s Jewish population peaked at 130 in 1863, at the crest of the wave of emigration that swept Abraham and Julia—and many Lügde brothers and cousins—to the New World. By 1871, there were 105 Jews in Lügde. They all left eventually; those who remained would later, of course, be forced to leave.
In New Mexico, the Staabs and Spiegelbergs and Schusters were Jewish by birth but American by choice. If the Jewish community had been small and insular in Germany, it was even smaller in Santa Fe. The dry land in which these ambitious merchants settled was a place of remarkable fluidity as Mexican rule gave way to American governance, a barter economy to capitalism, and community land to fenced plots. Jews had been dark-skinned in Germany. Now they were “white,” at least when compared with the Indians and mestizo Spanish and free blacks and Chinese who lived beside them.
In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, nobody seemed to care whether she and her husband were Jewish. The newspapers of the territory—most of them, anyway, and certainly the ones in Santa Fe—wrote kindly of the local Jews. This was sometimes because they were advertisers and investors, and sometimes because there simply weren’t enough Jews to seem threatening. New Mexico’s papers marked the Jewish holidays (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith and they will thoroughly enjoy the holiday”), and noted with approval the plans for the Jews to build a synagogue in the booming town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which lay seventy miles east of Santa Fe—“That is right, the more churches the better. Let all the sects berepresented.” Editorials in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe papers applauded efforts in Germany “to break down the last barrier separating Jews from Christians,” expressed dismay at the periodic anti-Jewish massacres in eastern Europe, and chastised any anti-Semitic screeds they came across—“that the Jews are a charitable race,” wrote the New Mexican , “is allowed even by those who have the strongest prejudice against them.”
Abraham cared that he was a Jew. Marrying within the faith appeared to be important to him: he went back for a Jewish wife, after all, as did Zadoc, and Ben Schuster, and the Spiegelbergs. But there were limits—hard limits—to these Jewish merchants’ piety. Their stores remained open on Saturdays, and though most of them closed for the High Holidays, not all did. The Jewish newspaper Die Deborah noted a few years after Julia’s arrival that only eight Jews showed up for Rosh Hashanah services in
By the mid-1700s there were five “protected” Jewish families in Lügde, concentrated in the quarter south of the marketplace. Julia’s grandparents were among them. They weren’t allowed to attend Christian schools, though they all learned to read, regardless of wealth and status. Until the early nineteenth century the Jews of Lügde had no surnames. Jewish men were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or both; women were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or their husbands: Glückel came from the town of Hameln; thus she was known as Glückel of Hameln. Moses was the son of Mendel; he was Moses Mendelssohn. Julia’s father was Levi David Schuster: Levi ben (son of) David. His father was David ben Levi.
The practice was confusing, even for the Jews, so when the royal government of Westphalia granted Jews citizenship rights and duties in 1807, it concluded that Jews should be named and counted—all the better to be taxed. Some were named for their villages, and some for their trades: Kramer meant merchant; Kaufmann, too; Staab was aterm for “rod” or “staff” and indicated a person who held some authority; Schuster, Julia’s family name, meant shoemaker, though there’s no indication that anyone ever made shoes. A family genealogy suggests they were so named because their house looked like a shoe.
Lügde’s Jewish population peaked at 130 in 1863, at the crest of the wave of emigration that swept Abraham and Julia—and many Lügde brothers and cousins—to the New World. By 1871, there were 105 Jews in Lügde. They all left eventually; those who remained would later, of course, be forced to leave.
In New Mexico, the Staabs and Spiegelbergs and Schusters were Jewish by birth but American by choice. If the Jewish community had been small and insular in Germany, it was even smaller in Santa Fe. The dry land in which these ambitious merchants settled was a place of remarkable fluidity as Mexican rule gave way to American governance, a barter economy to capitalism, and community land to fenced plots. Jews had been dark-skinned in Germany. Now they were “white,” at least when compared with the Indians and mestizo Spanish and free blacks and Chinese who lived beside them.
In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, nobody seemed to care whether she and her husband were Jewish. The newspapers of the territory—most of them, anyway, and certainly the ones in Santa Fe—wrote kindly of the local Jews. This was sometimes because they were advertisers and investors, and sometimes because there simply weren’t enough Jews to seem threatening. New Mexico’s papers marked the Jewish holidays (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith and they will thoroughly enjoy the holiday”), and noted with approval the plans for the Jews to build a synagogue in the booming town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which lay seventy miles east of Santa Fe—“That is right, the more churches the better. Let all the sects berepresented.” Editorials in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe papers applauded efforts in Germany “to break down the last barrier separating Jews from Christians,” expressed dismay at the periodic anti-Jewish massacres in eastern Europe, and chastised any anti-Semitic screeds they came across—“that the Jews are a charitable race,” wrote the New Mexican , “is allowed even by those who have the strongest prejudice against them.”
Abraham cared that he was a Jew. Marrying within the faith appeared to be important to him: he went back for a Jewish wife, after all, as did Zadoc, and Ben Schuster, and the Spiegelbergs. But there were limits—hard limits—to these Jewish merchants’ piety. Their stores remained open on Saturdays, and though most of them closed for the High Holidays, not all did. The Jewish newspaper Die Deborah noted a few years after Julia’s arrival that only eight Jews showed up for Rosh Hashanah services in
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