From Holy Land to New England Canaan

Laura Leibman Reed College

From Holy Land to New England Canaan Rabbi Haim Carigal and Sephardic Itinerant Preaching in the Eighteenth Century It was late Thursday morning, 28 May 1773, and Rev. Ezra Stiles, minister of the Second Congregational Church, was attending Synagogue. It was not the first time Stiles had been to the Newport Esnoga; in fact, he was present on Chanukah 1763 (5524) when the magnificent building of Yeshuat Israel was dedicated.1 Today, however, was special. It was the first day of Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of Torah at Sinai, and Turkish Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal was going to give a sermon. Carigal entranced Stiles, who had already convinced the synagogue’s Hazzan to teach him Hebrew.2 Stiles had spoken with Carigal numerous times and had asked him probing questions about Carigal’s hometown in Hebron and his extensive travels throughout the Jewish Diaspora (Literary Diary 1.357–58, 360–61, 368, 370, 373–74, 386–89, 398–400). Six rabbis visited Newport in its heyday between 1759 and 1775 (Gutstein 146–56), but Carigal seems to have interested the omni-intellectual Stiles the most. Carigal’s fluency in a large range of languages and his deep scholarly training made him more than a match for Stiles, the would-be cosmopolitan. Stiles took advantage of their time together to ask Carigal probing questions that had been weighing on him about Jewish mysticism, Jewish law, and biblical tidbits, such as whether one could still see the pillar of salt that had once been Lot’s wife on the shores of the Dead Sea (Literary Diary 1.370). In May of 1773, Stiles took copious notes when he came home from Synagogue services on what he had seen and heard: Carigal’s Turkish robes and hat fascinated him, as did the sermon, although he only caught snatches of the text, as it was given in “Spanish” (Ladino), which Stiles did not speak (Literary Diary 1.354, 362–63, 376–77). Stiles continued to admire the Rabbi from afar after this momentous day; after Carigal left Newport for Barbados, Stiles exchanged letters with the Rabbi, often in Stiles’s rudi{ 71

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mentary Hebrew. Stiles also had a portrait of the Rabbi painted for Yale College after Carigal’s death. When the sermon was translated into English and published in 1773, Stiles kept a copy (Literary Diary 1.375, 399, 423, 426, 427, 589, 591, 631; 3.94; Itinerancies, 31 May 1781, 3.466). Since so few Jewish sermons were published in the colonies, the translation and publication of Carigal’s text bears some scrutiny. The sermon was translated, printed, and advertised less than two months after it was delivered.3 Carigal appears to have approved of the publication: in fact, he later sent a second sermon from Barbados in 1775 to “Messrs Rivera and [Aaron] Lopez” that he hoped the men would also translate into English. Unfortunately, this sermon has not survived (Friedman 19–20). Although the translator of the first sermon was Abraham (“Miguel”) Lopez,4 the driving force behind the publication was undoubtedly the two men who Carigal hoped would translate his second sermon: Abraham’s wealthy and influential younger half-brother, Aaron Lopez and Aaron’s father-in-law, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera. Indeed, it was to Aaron Lopez and Rodriguez Rivera that Ezra Stiles turned in 1782 when he wanted funding for Carigal’s portrait (Rivera, 20 Dec 1782). Carigal also wrote to Stiles about helping with the translation and publication of his second sermon (Friedman 22); thus, it is likely that Stiles had similarly helped with the publication of Carigal’s first sermon in 1773. For Stiles, the Jewish law discussed in Carigal’s first sermon had crucial ramifications not only for the Jews of Newport but also for Christians. As Stiles explained in a letter to Carigal, when the Messiah returned, “We will also see re-established the Priesthood,” sacrifices, “all of the service of the sanctuary,” and a “Revival of all the Statutes of the Law of Moses” (Letter, 19 July 1773, 19). Carigal’s sermon, then, provided essential religious information, particularly since Stiles and Carigal both believed the Messiah’s arrival was eminent. While the sermon probably interested some Protestants who, like Stiles, saw a connection between the Jewish law and the messianic age, advertisements for the sermon suggest that the primary audience was other Jews in the British colonies. Ezra Stiles’s own sermons were advertised to predominantly Protestant communities in newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Packet, Connecticut Journal, the New-Jersey Journal, and the Middlesex Gazette (America’s Historical Newspapers). In contrast, Carigal’s publishers advertised his sermon only in Newport and New York, both of which were home to significant Jewish communities. Moreover, the advertisement for

Sephardic Itinerant Preaching { 73

Carigal’s sermon used terms that would primarily resonate with other religious Jews, such as the description of Carigal as a “venerable Hocham” (sage, scholar) and the use of the Hebrew month of Sivan.5 The translation of the sermon into English corresponds to a linguistic shift within American Judaism during the 1760s to 1770s. Although in the 1740s and 1750s, most of Newport’s Jews were Iberian immigrants, by the 1770s the community also contained a second generation, who were either born or raised in the colonies, and hence grew up with English as their primary language.6 Moreover, while early American Jewish communities followed the Sephardic rite, by the 1770s these communities had an increasing number of Ashkenazi Jews in their midst who would not have spoken Ladino. For both of these reasons, in the 1760s Isaac Pinto of New York translated the elevated Spanish of the London’s Sephardic prayer book into English. Thus, whereas a generation earlier, Curaçao’s Rabbi Samuel Mendes de Sola had published his 1750 sermon in Amsterdam in Portuguese (Freidman 14), Carigal’s audience was primarily English-speaking American Jews. Carigal’s message was explicitly religious. Although 1773 was a tumultuous year politically in Newport, advertisements frame the sermon’s appeal in religious, not political, terms. For example, they emphasize the Jewish holiday at which the sermon was performed, as well as the Rabbi’s status as a visitor from the “HOLY LAND” (The New-York Journal, 9 September 1773: 1; emphasis in the original). Indeed, while the editors of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology suggest that Carigal’s sermon is meant to be an “object lesson in obedience to the crown,” this reading is highly unlikely. In fact, the men behind the sermon’s publication were openly anti-Royalist. Loyalists regularly (and rightly) attacked Stiles for being “seditious”: in the years leading up to the war, Stiles regularly argued in his own sermons that only independence from Britain could save the colonists from becoming slaves (Crane 130–31). While Lopez and Rodriguez Rivera were less fervent, they, too, cast their lot with the Whigs. All three men fled Newport with their families during the British occupation (Chyet 156–58, 185–86). Carigal did not stay in Newport long enough to make his political leanings clear. On 21 July 1773—just two days after the first advertisement for his sermon appeared in the Newport Mercury—Carigal left Newport for Suriname and Barbados (Friedman 10, 15; Newport Mercury 776: 3). Both of these southern ports had larger and longer-standing Jewish communities that offered Carigal more financial and spiritual support.


For Stiles, Rabbi Carigal’s brief sojourn in Newport fit easily within his understanding of itinerant preaching with the era. Stiles’s fascination with the visiting rabbi can easily be explained by Stiles’s own intellectual voracity and his messianic obsession with all things Jewish and Hebraic. Stiles, also, saw Carigal as a somewhat less threatening part of the wave of itinerant preachers that swept through Protestant New England in the eighteenth century, and likewise as a sign of the end times (Literary Diary 1.17, 19). Stiles was mindful of the Newport Jews’ own messianic tendencies—for example, he is intrigued when the Jews opened windows during a thunderstorm to welcome the messiah (Literary Diary 1.19); however, Stiles was also watchful for ways that Carigal might undercut the authority of Stiles’s Hebrew instructor, Hazzan Isaac Touro. Stiles had found he preferred Carigal’s Hebrew pronunciation to that of Touro, and he saw Carigal’s public correction of Touro’s pronunciation of the Torah as evidence that Carigal had superseded Touro’s authority (Literary Diary 1.374, 377).7 The issue of the relative authority of visitors and resident ministers was intimately known to Stiles: although Stiles’s congregation had passed a vote in 1745 forbidding George Whitefield to preach in their meetinghouse, when the famous itinerant preacher came to Newport in 1770, Stiles found himself at the mercy of a change in public sentiment. The governing board of the congregation overturned the earlier decision, and Stiles found himself asking Whitefield to “preach for me tomorrow.” Even some of Newport’s Jews were swept up in Whitefield’s enthusiastic style (Literary Diary 1.61). Many of New England’s Protestant clergymen regarded the practice of itinerant preachers as “a threat to the foundations of social order” (Hall 2), and Whitefield challenged Stiles’s exceptional standing not only within Stiles’s own community but also in the eyes of other Newport residents who mattered to him most. Although Stiles saw much in common between the wave of Jewish and Protestant itinerant preachers that swept New England in the middle of the century, I would like to use Carigal’s Shavuot sermon to call attention to two key differences between Jewish and Protestant itinerancy during this era. First, while Stiles was correct that itinerant preaching, particularly among Sephardim, was a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century religious practice, both Carigal and his audience were more deeply transnational than most of their white Protestant equivalents.8 Thus, any analysis of Carigal’s sermon needs to reach beyond the colonies to understand fully the religious


and cultural context. Second, whereas Protestant itinerants often disrupted local hierarchies (Hall 2), Jewish preachers like Carigal cemented far-flung communities to a tribal center and reinforced rabbinic privilege. The first key difference between Carigal and Protestant itinerant preachers of this era is the significance of the transnational context for Carigal and his Jewish audience. Carigal and Newport’s Jews saw themselves as a people apart from other Newporters: this difference was theological, ethnic, and national. Although members of Newport’s Jewish community had immigrated to the colonies from a variety of countries, the largest group were members of the Naçao ebrea, the Portuguese Jewish nation. While many Newport Jews gave up their political allegiance to Spain and Portugal in order to become naturalized, the cultural designation lingered. This was true throughout Europe and England: Sephardic synagogues often limited full membership to members of the Naçao, who were perceived as being more aristocratic than their Eastern-European Ashkenazi brethren. Thus, prayer books, Bibles, and synagogue records were often kept in Portuguese even centuries after members of the Naçao had left Portugal (or been forced to convert) in 1497. Transnationalism informs not only the sermon’s structure and themes, but also the cultural and religious work the sermon seeks to accomplish. Newport’s Jews belong to a category that David Sorkin and others have called “Port Jews.” That is, they were primarily Spanish-Portuguese Jews who resided in port towns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and who were connected to Port Jews of other cities through migration and commerce (Sorkin, “Port Jews” 31). Like other Port Jews, the Jews of Newport were voluntarily affiliated with the “Jewish collectivity” (Cesarani 2–3). Thus, the terms of Newport’s Kahal (Jewish community) were less predetermined than that of Kehillot in Eastern European and Middle Eastern cities with long-standing Jewish populations. Carigal draws upon the sermon tradition of the Naçao ebrea in order to create an idealized community for Newport’s congregation Yeshuat Israel. While European congregations like the Portuguese Talmud Torah in Amsterdam unified their community by denying privileges to Ashkenazim and banning deviant members of their own community,9 Newport’s Jewish congregation was too small to draw such clear lines. The community was divided politically, ethnically, and religiously. Politically, the community was about evenly split between Tories and supporters of the revolutionary war; eth-


nically, it was comprised of both members of the Naçao and Eastern European Ashkenazim; religiously, it contained both people who had spent their entire lives as Torah-observant Jews affiliated with Rabbinic Judaism, and a large number of conversos—that is, descendents of forced converts who had been raised as Catholics and who had returned recently to Judaism. While many of Newport’s conversos went to great lengths to adhere to rabbinic rulings, their lack of education in Hebrew and Torah law made it almost inevitable that their practice would differ somewhat from that of long-standing Sephardic communities in Europe and the Middle East. Carigal’s sermon seeks to address these very different ideas of who and what is a Jew in order to heal the community’s rifts. Carigal represents a specific strain of Judaism that was shared only by a select number of congregants in Newport’s Yeshuat Israel. Like many Newporters, Carigal was a member of the Naçao ebrea (Pitterman and Schiavo 590).10 Unlike many of the Naçao in Newport, however, Carigal was raised firmly within the tradition of Sephardic Rabbinic Judaism. Carigal’s family had immigrated to Palestine via Salonica11 in the seventeenth century (Pitterman and Schiavo 590). He was the son of a rabbi, was yeshiva educated, and was raised among some of the greatest Torah sages of his era (Pitterman and Schiavo 590). Thus, unlike the Jews of Newport, who were mainly self-taught and often had been raised as Catholics, Carigal represented the center of traditional Sephardic thought and practice. Moreover, Carigal had ties to the Jewish community (Kahal ) in the Holy Land and Turkish Empire that most Newporters lacked. While Carigal had briefly lived and taught in England, it is unlikely that he shared the colonists’ interest in political debates between Tories and “Patriots.”12 All told, while some of Carigal’s religio-cultural allegiances overlapped with Newport’s Jewish community, there were many affiliations that he did not share. I argue that one of the goals of Carigal’s sermon is to meld the disjunctures between the communities’ fractured identities and alliances. Notably, Carigal insists that the identity that unites all of the community (the Kahal) is that of Rabbinic Judaism that supports the Jewish community in the Holy Land. Moreover, given that the sermon was delivered in Ladino—a blending of medieval Spanish and Hebrew that was the lingua franca of Sephardim and the Naçao—Carigal firmly locates the authority of this rabbinic strain within the Sephardic tradition and the Portuguese Jewish Nation. The style and content of his sermon reflect this new, unified


vision of the Yeshuat Israel. While the translation of the sermon into English widened the audience to the second generation and to Ashkenazim, the structure of the sermon and the role of secular culture in the sermon are still distinctively Sephardic. By creating this ideal community, Carigal seeks to reinforce the traditional Sephardic hierarchy, not to undermine it. Carigal was sent to America as a rabbinic emissary on behalf of Hebron, one of the four “holy cities” in the land of Israel. Carigal’s status as an official emissary and the warm welcome he received in Newport stands in marked contrast to Protestant itinerants John Wesley and George Whitefield, who even at home in England were “frequent targets of mob hostility,” particularly from local magistrates and those allied with the King and the Church of England (Endelman 46; Hall 2). Carigal’s association with the Sephardic center in Israel is typical of the larger pattern of Jewish itinerancy during this era. Although most Sephardic itinerant rabbis traveled through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, at least five other itinerant rabbis visited Newport between 1759 and 1775 (Gutstein 146; Stiles, Literary Diary 2.77). Carigal seems to have had the greatest status of all of these travelers, and indeed his 1773 sermon is the first American rabbinic address printed in New England.13 Yet in spite of his status at the time, Carigal’s sermon has largely been ignored. I will argue that Carigal’s sermon helps us better understand how the themes and structures of colonial sermons need to be read in a transnational context that explores the multiple audiences and traditions at play. In making the argument that Carigal’s text is dependent upon this larger Sephardic context, I aim to correct what I see as two basic errors in previous readings of Carigal’s sermon: the misconception that Carigal’s presence in America was primarily financially motivated and the notion that sermon is a cautionary polemic about the political turmoil of the British colonies.14 By focusing on economic and political contexts, earlier studies have ignored both the way Carigal works within eighteenth-century Sephardic sermon styles and how his sermon and visit reflect the larger role of itinerant preaching in eighteenth-century Sephardic life. By taking Carigal’s sermon out of this context, we have lost our sense of what is both innovative and traditional about Carigal’s text. In the remainder of this essay, I unpack the way Carigal’s sermon links the Newport community back to Sephardic Rabbinic Judaism through an overview of eighteenth-


century Sephardic itinerancy, a discussion of the ritual content of sermon, and, finally, a discussion of the sermon’s themes and structure. I close by discussing what the sermon can tell us about how we should read other colonial American Jewish sermons. While earlier historians are clearly right to note that Carigal was sent to America to raise funds for the Jewish community in Hebron (Pitterman and Schiavo 588–89; Marcus 1046–47), ignoring the religious dimension of his mission is a little like saying the Puritans came to the Americas mainly to succeed in business. Sephardic itinerant rabbis who traveled from the Holy Land to the Diaspora during the eighteenth century had two intertwined missions: to raise funds to support Torah scholars and Jews in the Holy Land and to ensure normative Sephardic religious practice in the Diaspora in the wake of the failed messianic movement of Shabbatai Zvi and the ongoing return of conversos to Sephardic life. Fundraising and ensuring normative practice were deeply interconnected in the minds of the Sephardic emissaries: many Sephardim were convinced they were living in a messianic era in which the “birthpangs” of the messiah could be felt. Redemption in general, and the bringing of the messiah in particular, was deeply dependent upon the return of Jews to the land of Israel, the learning of Torah by scholars, the building of synagogues in England and America, and the correct implementation of Jewish law (halacha) in both the Diaspora and Israel.15 Sephardic luminaries accomplished all of these goals by sending emissaries from four Holy Cities in Israel (Safed, Hebron, Tiberias, and Jerusalem) to the four corners of the globe in order to establish and regulate Jewish law and collect funds to support yeshivot in the Holy Land.16 The ritual context of Carigal’s sermon is intrinsically tied to redemption and the social order the sermon aims to create. This context is at least partially determined by tradition, but is also confirmed by the diary of Ezra Stiles (Literary Diary 1.376–77). Carigal’s sermon was given on Shavuot, a holiday that is deeply entrenched within the yearly cycle of redemption and is associated with tikkun olam (the repairing of the world).17 As the title page of and advertisements for Carigal’s sermon note, Shavuot is the “Anniversary of the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai.” The giving of this law seals the covenant God creates with the Jews: if the Jews follow the commandments, God will “work wonders” for them (Exodus 34.10). The


name of the holiday “Shavuot,” as Rachel Elior remarks, can be vocalized in two ways: Shavuot (weeks) or shevuot (oaths or covenants). Thus, the name of the festival alludes not only to the seven weeks engaged in counting the Omer (the communal grain offering) that end with the holiday itself but also the covenant that the Jews sealed with God on Mount Sinai through the keeping of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) embedded in the Torah (Elior 137). While Carigal gave sermons on other occasions, Shavuot would have been particularly resonant within the Newport context. Other Jewish holidays had been more important to crypto-Jews while in hiding,18 but the holiday of Shavuot helped transform conversos back into Sephardim. Although many conversos attempted to practice Judaism secretly under the watchful eye of the inquisition, the lack of Jewish books meant that almost the “entire post-Biblical rabbinic tradition became inaccessible” (Gitlitz 40, 218, 425–26). In particular, the lack of copies of the Talmud or Jewish law meant that crypto-Jewish communities on the Iberian Peninsula often created their own version of Jewish law based on Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Gitlitz 40). When conversos escaped Spain and Portugal and returned to normative Judaism, one of the main goals of Sephardic rabbis was to reinforce the importance of the 613 commandments explicated in the Talmud and their inherent connectedness to the Ten Commandments generally recognized by Catholics and conversos.19 The liturgy of the Shavuot reinforces the supremacy of the 613 commandments by insisting that the Torah given at Sinai included the Oral Torah as well as the written Torah. Eighteenth-century Sephardic commentators explain that while the Torah portion read on Shavuot recounts only the giving of the Ten Commandments, these are to be understood as a metonym for the 613 mitzvot explicated in the Oral Torah (Culi 6.161). The author of Me’am Loez, for example, explains that “each of the ten commandments includes a large portion of the commandments as a whole” and uses the numerical value of the letters contained in the Ten Commandments to reinforce this connection (Culi 6.161, 165).20 This connection is further reinforced in the Sephardic Shavuot liturgy, which recites the Az’harot, a poetic enumeration of the 613 commandments (Toledano 315). Carigal’s sermon reinforces this liturgical message by arguing that keeping the Oral Torah will bring about redemption of both individuals


and the Jewish people as a whole. Thus, Carigal’s sermon provides a means for re-envisioning the community as one drawn together through the Oral and Written Torah. Rabbi Carigal also reinforces his vision of community through his use of traditional Sephardic sermon structures. As a Turkish rabbi from Hebron, Carigal not surprisingly relies on eighteenth-century Sephardic models for his sermon structure, rather than the typical triadic structure found in Protestant sermons in the British colonies.21 During the eighteenth century, Sephardic sermons in the Diaspora and Israel underwent a shift from an older derush form to a newer “catenary” style (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 78). Carigal’s sermon largely adheres to the older derush structure to ease the listener into his text and pay respect to the community, but it also propels the audience forward into a newer Sephardic homiletic practice. Rabbi Moses Haim Luzzato22 argued that in the classical Sephardic derush “the preacher chooses one subject, and makes his entire discourse focus on explaining what needs to be explained and proving his point in various ways.” In contrast, in the newer catenary style the “discourse meanders over various different subjects, but they are linked together in one way or another. For example, they may all be pertinent to the weekly lesson from the Torah, or one point may lead to another” (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 78). The structure of the derush was determined not by an explication of a succession of biblical verses but by the subject matter (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 75). The derush form can be traced back as far as the late fifteenth century and consists of five essential parts: (1) a nose (the text or “theme”);23 (2) an aggadic passage24 called the ma’amar; (3) The thesis or conceptual problem (the derush) along with an “appeal for help to God”; (4) a stylized introduction with two typical components: (a) “a justification of the sermon itself, with reasons for the preacher to remain silent and then stronger reasons for preaching” and (b) a formal statement that the sermon was being delivered by permission (reshut); and (5) the sermon proper (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 75–77; Your Voice 111–15). I would like to analyze each section of Carigal’s sermon briefly with an eye towards this structure. This comparison is also summarized in figure 1. Like Protestant sermons, rabbinic addresses are often linked to a text. Beginning in the fifteenth century, usually this text or nose was a small selection from the weekly Torah portion (parasha),25 although prior to this it was more common to use a selection from the Ketuvim (Writings), par-


ticularly Proverbs, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 64–67). While the nose for Rabbi Carigal’s sermon follows the earlier model by using a selection from Psalms (68.9), his choice is deeply connected to the day’s Torah lesson, which consists of three parts: a lengthy passage from the Torah, a maftir, and a haftorah selection. In order to understand the work done by Psalm 68 in Carigal’s sermon, we must first understand it in the context of the three passages that would have been read just prior to the sermon’s delivery. The Torah portion, maftir, and haftorah for the first day of Shavuot circle around four interconnected themes: the covenant, the giving of the Torah at Sinai, the legal basis of Shavuot, and the divine revelation of God himself. The Torah portion read for the first day of Shavuot is Exodus 19.120.23. This selection is an excerpt of the parasha known as Yithro (Jethro), a portion that is read once earlier in the year, in this case on Saturday, 13 February 1773 (the 20th of Sh’vat, 5533). One of the key figures in the parasha is Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law. Jethro is a crucial figure for conversos as he is a righteous convert with pure motivations who helps Moses prepare for the revelation (Culi 6.14). Thus, in many ways, Jethro serves as an idealized mirror for the newly returned conversos of Newport. Exodus 19.1–20.23 in particular tells of the signing of the covenant and the giving of the Ten Commandments. By speaking this passage aloud during the Shavuot service, Newport’s Jews reenacted their commitment to the covenant and the commandments. The covenant based on law stands in direct opposition to the Christianity many of Newport’s conversos had practiced publicly as children and young adults. Indeed, early commentators used Exodus 19.1–5 to emphasize that God’s covenant was based on physical, not spiritual, circumcision. That is, the passage has been traditionally used to reject Christian revisions of the Torah (Agudat Br’eishit 17).26 The Torah reading would have been concluded with a maftir from Numbers 28.26–31. This passage gives the description of Shavuot from the Torah and, thus, insists upon the holiday’s divinely ordained and halachic status. A haftorah reading would then follow the day’s Torah portion and maftir. The haftorah for the first day of Shavuot is Ezekiel 1.1–28, 3.12. The book of Ezekiel is best known for the prophet’s vision of the third heavenly or messianic temple; in particular, Ezekiel 1.1–28 contains the merkavah or “throne-chariot vision.” The merkavah is mystical text describing Ezekiel’s encounter with God. The content is highly esoteric and the Mishnah warns against teach-

82 } EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME 4 4, NUMBER 1 Classical Sephardic Derush

Carigal

(1) Nose (“theme” or text) (Saperstein, Your Voice 111).

Psalm 68:8 [9]: “the earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: Even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel” (Karigal 3)

(2) Ma’amar (dictum): aggadic passage from the Talmud or one of the midrashim that usually had no obvious connection with the Torah verse (Saperstein, Your Voice 112).

Talmud Tractate Succah 5 (52b): “if there arise within thee an evil desire, the best remedy . . . is to proceed directly with it to the sacred colleges (synagogues or house of instruction) Where . . . it would be consumed” (Karigal 3)

(3) Thesis or conceptual problem (the derush), the introduction to this section “always ends with a brief summary of the sermon subject, and an appeal for help to God in a language that succinctly recapitulates what has preceded” (Saperstein, Your Voice 112–13).

“What is the principal bread that we are obliged to work for?” (Karigal 5) “our restoration depends upon ourselves, if with a true contrition . . . and renewal of the observance of those precepts again” (Karigal 10) Plea for assistance from God (Karigal 5)

(4) A stylized introduction with two typical components: (a) “a justification of the sermon itself, with reasons for the preacher to remain silent and then stronger reasons for preaching” and

Newer Catenary style “discourse meanders over various different subjects, but they are linked together in one way or another. For example, they may all be pertinent to the weekly lesson from the Torah, or one point may lead to another” (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 78).

Sephardic Itinerant Preaching { 83 Classical Sephardic Derush

Carigal

(b) “a formal statement that the sermon was being delivered by permission (reshut)” (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 76–77)

(b) Respectful address to Parnass Aaron Lopez (Karigal 5)

(5) The sermon proper: the “preacher chooses one subject, and makes his entire discourse focus on explaining what needs to be explained and proving his point in various ways” (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 78).

Demonstrates what is the true and principal bread by (1) “pointing out some errors that have been introduced”; (2) “prove calamities suffered were not casualties, nor accidents” (Karigal 5)

Newer Catenary style

figure 1: Eighteenth-Century Sephardic Sermon Structures and Carigal’s Sermon

ing about it in public (Chagigah 2.1). These three passages—the giving of the commandments, the description of Shavuot, and the throne-chariot vision—serve as the texts for first day of the holiday and the backdrop for Rabbi Carigal’s sermon and his nose. Given these texts and themes, Carigal’s choice of Psalm 68 for his nose is ingenious. Psalm 68 is considered the linchpin that connects the thronechariot vision (the haftorah) with the giving of the law at Sinai (the Torah portion). Psalm 68.18 reads, “The chariots of God are twice ten thousand” (Jerusalem Bible). Midrash Tanhuma Yitro explains that this passage is “related” both to the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20.2), and to the merkavah (Ezekiel 1.1–28). Through Psalm 68.18, Midrash Tanhuma explains, we understand that twenty-two thousand chariots came down with God from Sinai, and “Each and every chariot was like the chariot which Ezekiel saw” (Yitro 5.14; Townsend 107). Thus, the psalm is read as insisting that the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai was simultaneously a national, legal revelation and an individual, mystical revelation for all Jews.27


Psalm 68’s messianic overtones and its role in the Shavuot liturgy likewise make the Psalm a powerful choice for the nose. Psalms in general are deeply connected to the holiday of Shavuot. Shavuot is traditionally considered to be the nachala (anniversary of the death) of King David, to whom the book of Psalms is attributed and who is seen as the progenitor of the messiah. Psalm 68 has particular liturgical significance for Shavuot: in the Sephardic rite, the Psalm is read aloud in both the Arvit (Evening Prayer) service and Shacharit (Morning Service) for Shavuot (Toledano 36–40). Psalm 68 has both messianic and redemptive overtones, both of which are crucial for Carigal’s sermon, which links the true “bread” (Torah) to redemption, as symbolized by God’s chariot. Carigal’s selection from the Psalm for the nose emphasizes the earth-shattering nature of the arrival of the Torah and redemption: “[T]he earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: Even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel” (Karigal 3; Psalm 68.9). Jewish New Englanders, like their Protestant neighbors, were inclined to read natural signs typologically, and Carigal’s earthquake reference helped remind those who had fled Portugal following the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that the physical rumblings were only a sign of the spiritual redemption to come. In typical Sephardic fashion, Carigal immediately follows the nose with the ma’amar—an aggadic passage from the Talmud or one of the Midrashim that usually had no obvious connection with the Torah verse (Saperstein, Your Voice 111–15). No commentary or connection is given between the texts; rather, the sermon relies on the active listening of the audience. As the sermon continues, the audience learns that the key concept embedded in the ma’amar passage is the redemptive potential of the Torah and Torah study: the audience is told, “[I]f there arise within thee an evil desire, the best remedy . . . is to proceed directly with it to the sacred colleges (synagogues or house of instruction) Where . . . it would be consumed” (Karigal 3; Succah 52b). The ability of Torah study to erase sin is a key message for the largely Catholic-raised converso audience, who had been raised to believe Christ—not Jewish law—was their redeemer. By giving this message through aggadah, Carigal reiterates for the conversos in the audience the binding authority of the Oral Torah. This, as well as the Written Torah, is the redeeming word of God. Having introduced the theme indirectly through the nose and ma’amar, Carigal proceeds to state his conceptual problem (or derush) directly:


“What is the principal bread we are obliged to work for?” (Karigal 5). Carigal’s interest in bread and labor is poignant for his Newport audience, many of whom were wealthy merchants. The Torah repeatedly identifies “bread” as a metonym for sustenance, though Deuteronomy 8.3 reminds Jews that the word of God, not bread alone, sustains man. The New Testament identifies Christ as the “bread of God” that will save and sustain man (John 6.32–33), a concept that is played out liturgically through the Eucharist. Thus, by using bread a metaphor for sustenance, Carigal skillfully replaces both literal bread and communion bread with the true bread his audience should desire: the Torah.28 Indeed, grain and the Torah are implicitly connected in the Shavuot festival. Shavuot is the culmination of seven weeks of counting the grain offering, and it is frequently referred to as “Hag HaKatzir,” the Feast of the Harvest (Exodus 23.16; Toledano xix). Throughout the sermon, Carigal similarly argues that the true bread is the Torah and commandments. Using Proverbs 9.5, Carigal explains that when King Solomon says, “eat my BREAD & drink my wine,” the bread signifies “the holy law” and the wine “the divine tradition [of the rabbis] which instructs in the true way of living” (Karigal 6). For Carigal, redemption is dependent not only upon repentance but also upon observation of the commandments: “[O]ur restoration depends upon ourselves, if with a true contrition . . . and renewal of the observance of those precepts again” (Karigal 10). Carigal includes in the derush section the ritual plea for assistance from God that uses the language of Psalms (Karigal 5). This plea reiterates that language depends on God, just as the Torah is God’s redeeming word. The derush is followed by a stylized introduction. While Carigal does not provide the typical “justification of the sermon itself, with reasons for the preacher to remain silent and then stronger reasons for preaching,” he does include a respectful address to the lay-leader, the Parnass Aaron Lopez (Karigal 5). This address to Lopez emphasizes that the sermon is delivered by permission (reshut) of the local authorities (Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 76–77; Karigal 5). This reshut marks a crucial difference between itinerant Sephardic preachers and their Protestant equivalents: Carigal reinforces rather than disrupts traditional and local hierarchies. Carigal’s introduction is followed by the sermon itself, the structure of which he outlines for the audience: he will demonstrate what the true and principal bread is by (1) “pointing out some errors that have been


introduced” and (2) proving “calamities suffered were not casualties, nor accidents” (Karigal 5). The primary errors that Carigal identifies are finding fault with tradition, defiling “the fundamental principles of the law” by altering it, using “new methods” to comment upon the “sacred scriptures,” and the lack of fear of the Divine (Karigal 7–11). These “errors” are the hallmark of the maskilim, or proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). Although the Haskalah derives its origins in the first part of the seventeenth century (if not earlier), debate over the course of modernity became more heated in the 1770s (Sorkin, Transformation 41–60). It is unclear whether Carigal had encountered any maskilim in the Americas, but he was undoubtedly familiar with their ideology from the time he had spent in London in the late 1760s and early 1770s (Pitterman and Schiavo 594). The maskilim attacked traditional Jewish society in general, and traditional scholarship in particular. They emphasized the role of layintellectuals (rather than rabbis), and they explicitly attacked the scholarly elite—the talmidei hakhamim (Sorkin, Transformation 45–60). Yet the talmid hakham is exactly the model for redemption Carigal holds up for his audience: the talmid hakham is the man studying in the “sacred colleges (synagogues or house of instruction)” and upon whose behalf Carigal is collecting funds (Karigal 3). Notably, Carigal’s audience identified Carigal himself with this type of sage: the title page and advertisements describe Carigal as a “Hocham,” as does the Hebrew portion of his tombstone inscription in Barbados (Karigal 1; Emmanuel 480). Carigal’s sermon defends traditional Judaism and its values against modernist incursions associated in his day with Ashkenazi Jews from Germany. Carigal’s negative response to the Haskalah, however, does not mean he rejects secular culture in general; in this way, he follows a trend noted by Lois Dubin and others. In the Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste, Dubin argues that unlike for Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe, for Port Jews in Italy “both Judaism and general culture had long occupied legitimate and accustomed places; neither had to yield to make room for the other” (Dubin 136). Although Turkish, Carigal seems to have had a similar comfort with referencing non-Jewish texts. Thus, during the calamities section of his sermon, Carigal quotes at length classical histories, particularly Cassius Dio’s Roman History. Carigal displaces the idea of punishment onto Roman examples, particularly the emperors Hadrian (“Adrian”) and Titus (Karigal 13–15). Other Sephardic sermons of this era similarly use


Rome as an emblem for Christians (Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam 472– 74). For Carigal, the Romans serve as a useful emblem of a previous life (Catholicism) that the conversos give up in favor of the redeeming power of the Oral and Written Torah. Although the Romans do not serve as positive exempla in their deeds, Latin texts do contain useful and important information. Thus, we see in Carigal the general willingness by Sephardic rabbis to locate things as “valuable and worthwhile knowing” in secular texts and materials. His sermon should be seen as standing in contrast to the Ashkenazi patterns of modernity in which secular studies and rabbinic authority were seen as in opposition with one another (Stillman 16).29 Although Carigal’s sermon generally follows the structure of the classical Sephardic derush, it does borrow some of the looseness of the structure of the newer catenary style. For those of his parishioners who had lived in Amsterdam, London, or the Caribbean before coming to the colonies, the older sermon structure would have been easily recognizable and would have given his sermon a cohesive feel that some of the newer truly catenary sermons often seem to lack. Carigal’s sermon serves as a bridge between the older and new worlds of the Sephardim. Even more crucially, it bridges the varieties of Judaism found in the Newport community and unites them under one central authority. As I have sought to explain, reading Carigal’s sermon within the eighteenth-century Sephardic religious climate and sermon traditions helps us better understand both his message and his artistry. For Carigal, Shavuot served as an important means to reiterate the rabbinic covenant that tied conversos in the colonies both to God and to other centers of Sephardic life. The sermon directly responds to the greatest threats to Rabbinic Judaism in his era: the Catholicism of the conversos’ past and the maskilim who sought to change Judaism’s future. Although Carigal was not the last rabbi to visit Newport during its heyday, his message was of lasting importance to the small community. After leaving Newport, Carigal continued to exchange letters with members of the congregation and with Stiles. Indeed, most of what we know about Carigal’s work in Barbados after he left Newport comes from these letters. Sadly, no other sermons by the Rabbi have been recovered. Even so, there is much work remaining to be done on other Jewish sermons in early America: many remain buried in archives in manuscript form. Because British colonial communities such as the one in Newport were so deeply connected through patterns of immigration, mar-


riage, and trade to the Sephardic communities in the Caribbean, England, Holland, Western Europe, and the Ottoman Empire, any sermons we find need to be read alongside the existing corpus of other eighteenth-century Sephardic writings.

Notes 1. Yeshuat Israel literally means “Salvation of Israel.” Today the building is called the Touro Synagogue. Carigal’s name is transliterated from the Hebrew as either “Karigal” or “Carigal” in both the colonial era and today. Similarly, his first name is transliterated in various ways: Chaim, Haim, and Haijm. 2. Although today “Hazzan” usually refers to the Sephardic equivalent of a cantor, in the colonial era, most of the men who led congregations had this title. The Newport Hazzan during this era was Isaac Touro of Amsterdam. As a rabbi, rather than a Hazzan, Carigal would presumably have more training and expertise than Touro. 3. The first advertisement appeared in the Newport Mercury on 19 July 1773 (776:3). 4. Migel Lopez (1713–1775) was born in Portugal but had immigrated to Newport in 1767 where he was circumcised and changed his name to Abraham (Rodrigues Pereira 569; Cheyt 106). Although Abraham’s brother Moses Lopez also had a son named Abraham Lopez who lived in Newport at the time, the younger Abraham was not born and educated in the Iberian peninsula (Stern 175); thus, translating the sermon would have been a much more awkward enterprise for him. Stiles presumably helped fix the English in the translation, as when Carigal writes Stiles about his second sermon he “beg[s] the favour [sic] of you to assist him with your usual Goodness; in the Translation and Correction thereof, at the Same time, begging favour of my dear Friend, to Excuse the Trouble” (Friedman 22–23). 5. See the Newport Mercury on 19 July 1773 and 2 August 1773 and the New-York Journal on 2, 9, 16, and 23 September 1773, and 14 October and 11 November 1773. America’s Historical Newspapers. 6. This generation gap can be seen in the language used in their personal and business letters. When immigrant Aaron Lopez corresponds with other immigrants, they use Spanish or Portuguese: for example, Iberian languages are used in the letters between Lopez and his cousin James Lucena and also between Lopez and Rabbi Carigal. In contrast, letters from James’s son Charles to Aaron Lopez are in English. 7. Here Stiles’s limited experience in Synagogues does not serve him well: even experienced and learned men make pronunciation errors when reading a Torah scroll, as the text lacks vowel markers (nekudot). It is normal practice for another member of the congregation to read silently a printed text with vowels and make

Sephardic Itinerant Preaching { 89 corrections aloud to ensure that the reading is precise. The person who makes corrections does not have a higher status or authority than the person actually reading the Torah scroll. 8. While clearly many itinerant Protestant preachers came from England or Western Europe, they were more likely to share national affiliations with the people to whom they were preaching or even the colonial population at large. In contrast, Carigal himself had multinational affiliations: he was a member of the Portuguese nation (Naçao), but was raised in Hebron in the Ottoman Empire. As an adult, he lived in and traveled throughout the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean, and North America (Stiles, Literary Diary 1.360–61). This is an issue that Carigal and the Newporters shared with many Native American preachers, such as Samson Occom, and their audiences, who also would have had belonged to both tribal and colonial communities. As I have argued elsewhere, Occom’s sermons often navigate competition between national, tribal, and religious identities (Arnold 106–10). 9. This process is called placing people in cherem. Cherem is similar to excommunication. I have not seen any examples of cherem being used in Newport, although there are numerous example of Jews in Curaçao being placed in cherem for violating community norms, and Shearith Israel in New York used somewhat less severe measures for censuring unwanted behavior (Marcus 925–26, 964). 10. For more on the concept of the Naçao, see Swetchinski’s Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 165–67. 11. The Jewish community in Salonica, Greece, was a stronghold of Torah learning and had many important yeshivot up until WWII when the Nazis decimated it. 12. Indeed, there is no evidence in Stiles’s diary or in letters from Carigal to support the claim that he had any interest in British colonial politics. 13. Friedman notes that in 1758 a rabbinic address originally given in Berlin was published in Boston and New York, and in 1750 a sermon preached in Curaçao was published in Amsterdam (14). Stiles comments at length about Carigal’s learning and religiosity. After Carigal left Newport, he went on to become the leader of the Jewish community in Barbados (Literary Diary 1.357–70; Friedman 19). 14. Most early scholars who paid attention to Carigal have merely summarized his sermon (for example, Gutstein, Kohut). Others remark on the financial aspect of Carigal’s visit (Pitterman and Schiavo 588–89; Marcus 1046–47). Perhaps most egregiously, the sermon has been read as an “object lesson to the crown” by the editors of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, who edit the sermon in a way that severely distorts it (Chametzky 26). This misunderstanding of Carigal’s sermon reflects misreadings of other colonial American Rabbinic sermons. In “Hear O Israel”: The History of American Jewish Preaching, 1654–1970, Robert Friedenberg argues that “the motivation for delivering sermons from Jewish pulpits during the colonial period often did not come from within the Jewish community. Rather, colonial Jewish sermons were often motivated by the civil

90 } EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME 4 4, NUMBER 1 authorities” and were often connected to pan-religious “days of thanksgiving, humiliation, or fasting” (5–6). While it is true that many colonial Jewish sermons were given in this context, significantly the community in Newport chose not to publish such a sermon, but rather one that arose out of a religious and internal impulse. Carigal’s sermon is a useful reminder that not all Jewish colonial sermons were “secular.” Friedenberg’s emphasis on the paucity of religious sermons in colonial America lies in part with his somewhat hazy sense of the European sermon tradition and the demographics of the colonies. Friedenberg argues that with the exception of in Holland, sermons were “not part of the normal Sabbath holiday service” (2–3). Work on Jewish sermons by Marc Saperstein since the publication of Friedenberg’s work challenges this assumption. Moreover, most of the communities in the British colonies and Caribbean were connected to the community in Holland. Work needs to be done to reassess the relationship between European and Jewish colonial sermon practices. 15. Manasseh ben Israel and other Sephardic rabbis saw the building of synagogues in far-flung places such as England and America as a sign of the messianic age. See Manasseh ben Israel’s Mikveh Yisra’el (1652). 16. It is difficult to translate the term yeshiva. It appears in Carigal’s sermon as “sacred colleges (synagogues or houses of instruction [beit midrash]).” The yeshiva is an education facility where students and scholars studied Jewish texts and law, primarily the Talmud. As I discuss later in this essay, it is associated with traditional Judaism and the figure of the talmid hakham. 17. Shavuot was originally one of the pilgrimage festivals that linked the Jewish nation to the temple in Jerusalem. It occurs in the spring on the 6th–7th of Sivan, and the holiday commemorates and reenacts the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and hence marks the spiritual redemption of the Jewish people. It is the apex of three other ritualized holidays: Purim (which recalls the redemption of the Jews from Persian enemies), Passover (which recalls the redemption of the Jews from Egypt and their physical and spiritual bondage), and the counting of the Omer (Sefirat haOmer). 18. Queen Ester is often seen as herself a converso (Gitlitz 470), and the story of Passover, which commemorates the escape from slavery in Egypt, is often an occasion to reaffirm that conversos will be redeemed from exile and degradation (Gitlitz 380–90). While Shavuot is of great importance to Rabbinic Judaism, evidence suggests it was not very important to conversos (Gitlitz 391). 19. According to Rabbinic Judaism, Moses received the entire Written Torah (the five books of Moses) on Mount Sinai along with the Oral Torah, which identified and explained how to keep the 613 commandments embedded in the Written Torah. Of these 613 commandments, 365 are negative commandments (thou shall not . . .) and 248 positive (thou shall . . .) commandments. According to midrash, the negative commandments correspond to the days of the year and the positive commandments to the number of bones and significant organs in the human body. Thus, the body of the Israelite was literally being remade through

Sephardic Itinerant Preaching { 91 the law. Without access to the Oral Torah, it would be virtually impossible to maintain Jewish law according to the standards of Rabbinic Judaism. 20. Me’am Loez was written in Ladino and was intended for Sephardim who were largely uneducated in Jewish law. Rabbi Culi (1689–1732) was born in Jerusalem, but wrote Me’am Loez in Constantinople. This particular volume was written between 1730 and 1732. Me’am Loez was one of the most popular Torah commentaries of Carigal’s day. 21. Doctrine, Reason, Use (Davies 82). 22. Also known as the Ramchal. He is one of the most important Sephardic luminaries of the eighteenth century. 23. Edited versions of Carigal’s sermon (such as that in the Norton) that excise this introductory material lose much of the meaning of the sermon. 24. Saperstein notes that “the aggadic passage was chosen from the Talmud or one of the midrashim” (Your Voice 112) 25. The Torah portions are read in chronological order throughout the year from the five books of Moses, except on festivals, which have their own portions that are usually related to the festival itself. 26. I would like to thank the anonymous EAL reviewer of my article for this insight, as well as Meir Schechter, who compiled a list of sources. 27. The psalm is also cited in Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 41 (56B.i) in conjunction with this parasha: “And Moses went forth and came to the camp of the Israelites, and he aroused the Israelites from their sleep, saying to them: Arise ye from your sleep, for behold, your God desires to give the Torah to you. Already the bridegroom wishes to lead the bride and to enter the bridal chamber. The hour has come for giving you the Torah, as it is said, ‘And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God’ (Ex. xix. 17). And the Holy One, blessed be He, went forth to meet them and to give them the Torah, as it is said, ‘O God, when thou wentest forth before thy people’” [Ps. Lxviii. 7] (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 322). It is possible that Pirke Eliezer is one of Rabbi Carigal’s sources as it also quotes Succah 5a, which Carigal uses in the opening of his sermon (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 318 [56B.i]). 28. The use of bread as a slang for money does not appear in the United States until the twentieth century (OED). 29. Carigal’s ultimate rejection of the Haskalah is perhaps doubly important as the maskilim often cited the Sephardic emphasis on the Bible, Hebrew, grammar, and natural sciences as a model for the Haskalah (Sorkin, Transformations 54).

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