Laura Arnold Leibman
Jews and Religion
Summary
A presentation on Jewish religious life in colonial America, focusing on Western Sephardic Jewish communities in port towns. These communities had thriving synagogues with ritual complexes and were deeply connected through networks across the Atlantic. They held a messianic hope for redemption, and their distinct religious style influenced their dress and synagogue architecture.
Laura Arnold Leibman
Laura Arnold Leibman is a professor of english and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA) and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (2020), which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Centre. Her second book, Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012), uses material culture to retell the history of early American Jews and won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent book is Once We Were Slaves (2021).
Shearith Israel is the oldest Jewish congregation in the US colonies. Whereas the Touro Synagogue is the oldest synagogue building still standing in the United States. So there’s often a little qualification that’s missing. But I think there is something really interesting about different congregations still seeing something important about being part of this lineage, of how they’re part of these networks and what it means to be part of an American tradition that continues over time.
The synagogue complexes were funded because Jews in the area belong to the Jewish congregation, which charges a tax. It’s proportional to how much money you have and how much property you have. And then that money goes to distributing to the Jewish poor and to paying for the school and to paying for the hassan or the rabbi. So that’s really where the money’s coming from.