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was accepted by his neighbors.
- Or had Pollock been abroad, and
was it this he wished to conceal?
But foreigners were hardly resent
ed in America; foreigners who
had flocked here to support the
American cause — Kosciusko, the
Marquis de Lafayette, General
von Steuben, among others — had
seen to that.
Had Pollock been trying to es
cape debts contracted in civilian
life? One wonders then why he
resumed his true identity after
the war — or, if this is what mo
tivated him, had his creditor*
meanwhile died heirles. 1
Whatever it was that prompted
this early American Jew to seek
the obscurity of a name like “Jo
seph Smith” during his soldier
ing years and then to become
Elias Pollock again in civilian life,
it has defied historical inquiry.
It remains a mystery, one of the
numerous curiosities of the Amer
ican JewTsh past to be found in
the files of the American Jewish
Archives on the Cincinnati campus
of the Hebrew Union C'ollege-
Jewish Institute of Religion.
Glimpse Into 19th
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Century Publications
What were Jews publishing—
and what was being published
about them—in America during
the third quarter of the nineteenth
century? This is the intriguing
question explored by one of the
latest publications of the Amer
ican Jewish Archives, the research
center for American Jewish his
tory on the Cincinnati campus of
the Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion.
In “An American Jewish Bibli
ography,” the second in the series
known as “Monographs of the
American Jewish Archives,” new
ly-ordained Rabbi Allan E. Le
vine has compiled “A List of
Books and Pamphlets by Jews or
Relating to Them, printed in the
United States from 1851 to 1875,
which are in the possession of the
Hebrew Union College-Jewish In
stitute of Religion Library in Cin
cinnati.”
Though representing “hardly
more than five per cent of all ex
tant materials,” writes Dr. Jacob
R. Marcus, director of the Ar
chives, in a foreword to the work,
Rabbi Levine’s bibliography “re
veals the rich source materials
available for study of the Jew’s
impact on American culture.”
In addition to a number of long-
forgotten obscurities, a parade of
well-known personages marches
through the more than 700 entries
listed—famous rabbinical leaders
like Isaac Mayer Wise, David Ein-
horn, Isaac Leeser, Bernhard Fel-
senthal, and Morris Raphall; fa
mous writers like Bret Harte,
Crace Aguilar, Emma Lazarus,
Henry Longfellow, Ernest Renan,
and Charles Dickens; and public
figures like Judah P. Benjamin,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin
Disraeli, and John C. Fremont.
The colorful Warder Cresson, a
convert to Judaism, is represented,
as is also the even more colorful
Adah Isaacs Menken, nineteenth-
century America’s “femme Fatale”
a la Monroe-Taylor-Mansfield —
unlike Marlyn, Liz, or Jayne, vo
luptuous Adah somehow found
time in 1868 to publish a volume
of poems, “Infelicia” (“Misfor
tunes”). Though not all the indi
viduals mentioned were them
selves Jews, all had Jewish an
tecedents, were associated with
Jews, or wrote about Jews. All of
them, if writers, found American
publishers—or, as was sometimes
the case, were their own publish
ers in America.
Many of the works mentioned in
Rabbi Levine’s Bibliography re
flect not only the Jewish life of
the time, but also the general cli
mate of opinion. Isaac M. Wise, for
example, in 1852 published in New
York a twenty-page pamphlet, en
titled “The End of Popes, Nobles
and Kings; or, The Progress of
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32
The Southern Israelite