The Jewish Sea Captain And Other Miscellaneous Judaica

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

There are many items in my collection that are intriguing and worthy of exhibit and discussion, but which do not lend themselves to “full article” treatment. This is one of my occasional pieces that presents some of my favorite such items.

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Estimated to have been built around 1170 and one of the earliest extant town houses in England, the Jew’s House has traditionally been associated with the thriving Jewish community in Medieval Lincoln and for the antisemitic hysteria that was fueled by a notorious 1255 blood libel that blamed Jews for the kidnapping and ritual murder of a Christian child, known as Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. When the entire Jewish community was expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, the Jew’s House was seized from its Jewish owner.

Little Hugh of Lincoln (1246–1255) became one of the best known of the Medieval blood libel “saints” when his death became the first time that the English Crown, through the direct intervention of King Henry III, a vicious antisemite, adopted the notion that Jews murdered Christian children for their rituals and practices. Henry’s brutal taxation of English Jews forced Jewish moneylenders to strictly enforce repayment from their debtors, which played no small part in the antisemitic depiction of Jews as rapacious and greedy moneylenders, and he readily implemented Vatican mandates that Jews wear yellow badges.

The great 1255 Lincoln blood libel began when several Jews from across England gathered in Lincoln to attend a wedding, which coincided with the disappearance of the nine-year-old Hugh on July 31^st. When his body was discovered a month later on August 29^th, it soon became “common knowledge” that Jews had imprisoned the child in a “secret chamber”; tortured him for weeks, including scourging him until the blood flowed, crowning him with thorns, mocking him and spitting upon him, and piercing him with a knife; summoning some fellow Jews to Lincoln to witness his crucifixion and sacrifice; and taking him down from the cross and disemboweling him to promote their “magic arts.” Moreover, when they threw his body into the well after burial attempts failed, the widely-believed account was that the earth, sickened by the crime, expelled it.

A Jew named Copin – under torture in which the church reportedly colluded – allegedly confessed to the murder. When King Henry III arrived in Lincoln after Copin’s “confession,” he not only ordered his execution, but also that ninety random Jews be arrested, charged with ritual murder, and incarcerated in the notorious Tower of London. Eighteen of the Jews were hanged when they refused to participate in the sham proceedings, and the rest were also subsequently murdered. The King’s personal interest in the case – which, in the public mind, established Jewish blood libels as fact – spread the fame of the Little Hugh case throughout Europe.

After news spread of Hugh’s death, miracles were attributed to him. He became one of the youngest individual candidates for sainthood, with July 27^th made his unofficial feast day, and “Little Saint Hugh” was broadly acclaimed as a saint, although he was never formally recognized as one by the Church. The Hugh story is referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Christopher Marlowe refers to the story in The Jew of Malta. Even today, antisemites celebrate the well near The Jew’s House as the well in which Hugh’s body was found but, never letting the facts interfere with their hatred, the well has been determined to have been constructed sometime after 1928 to increase the tourist attraction of the property.

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Exhibited here is a reserved seat ticket to the Twentieth Anniversary Celebration of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday, October 21, 1928 at 8:00 p.m.

Incorporated in October 1909, the purpose of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities was to serve as a central organizing body for the collection and disbursement of funding for several Jewish charitable organizations located in Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum, the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, the Hebrew Educational Society, the United Jewish Aid Societies, the Training School for Nurses, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Hebrew Benevolent Association, the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum Women’s Auxiliary, the Jewish Hospital Women’s Auxiliary, the Hebrew Educational Society Women’s Auxiliary, and the Council of Jewish Women. Its offices were located at 774 Broadway in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The Federation was not accepted by the leading Jewish organizations, and the public had to be educated to think in terms of the broader Jewish community rather than a particular society. Though the demands for the needy grew faster than the means to assist them, the community failed to generously respond, making it necessary for the Federation to launch special annual drives. The Federation undertook a 1928 campaign to raise about $1 million, which ran from October 17-24, and the Federation’s 20th anniversary celebration was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday, October 21, 1928. Evidencing the lack of support by Brooklyn Jews for organized charities, the Brooklyn Federation 1928 report cites fascinating statistics regarding Brooklyn Jewry and provides some intriguing insights into Jewish life in Brooklyn in 1928:

There are 52,348 Jewish automobile owners in Brooklyn; 89% of them do nothing toward helping the 246,327 for whom the 25 agencies of the Federation are trying to care. 86,697 Brooklyn Jews filed income tax reports in 1927; 89% of them do not give one cent to the 25 charities aided by the Federation. In 1927, 425,527 Jewish men, women, and children deposited in Brooklyn savings banks close to $148 million – only 1/2 of 1% of this amount was given to the Federation to care for the tens of thousands of needy persons. What has happened to the Jewish tradition of 10% of your surplus (maaser) to charity?

Last year, 66 Jewish Charity Foundations in the U.S. spent $12,592, 384. Brooklyn contains 25% of American Jews. Our needs required the expenditures of $3 million. All we had was only $650,000. To every dollar contributed by Jews to Federations in other cities, Brooklyn Jewry gives only 5 cents . . .

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Exhibited here is a card issued by the District Commissioner’s Office for the Government of Palestine (Eretz Yisrael) in Jerusalem in 1918. Written in both Arabic and Hebrew, it entitles the bearer to obtain one (small) gas mask:

IMPORTANT

Keep this card carefully until it is asked for by the A. R. P. [Air Raid Precaution] authorities. DON’T LOSE IT! It will entitle you to obtain a gas mask if it is decided to issue them. You will be told when gas masks are being issued. Sign the card on receipt of the gas mask.

The first large-scale use of chemical weapons was during WWI, when the types of weapons employed ranged from disabling chemicals, such as tear gas, to lethal agents, like phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas. Gas was unlike most other weapons at the time because it could be defended through the use of gas masks. (The use of poison gas through the Great War constituted a war crime pursuant to both the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare.)

The first instance of large-scale use of gas as a weapon was on January 31, 1915, when Germany fired 18,000 artillery shells containing liquid xylyl bromide tear gas on Russian positions, and the first killing agent was chlorine, used thereafter by the German military. Although most people associate chemical warfare during World War I with the Germans – and, indeed, WWI historiography does focus on the introduction of chemical weapons in the European theatre, mainly on the Western Front – it was also employed during the Palestine Campaign.

In 1915, the political and military leadership in London were troubled by the possibility that the Turs might employ chemical attacks, and they debated at length whether to affirmatively act to pre-empt the Ottomans by initiating the use of gas. In April 1917, during the second battle for Gaza between British and Ottoman forces, the British fired 1,800 shells containing equal amounts of chlorine and phosgene in an attempt to break through the enemy’s fortified line blocking their conquest of Eretz Yisrael, but the chemical attack proved futile, in part because of the weather conditions and the wind. It was under these circumstances that the Government of Palestine began its campaign to make gas masks available to its citizens.

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Exhibited here is a Judenburg (“Jews’ Borough” or “Jews’ Castle”) postcard dated October 3, 1899 with a Judenburg cancel. Also shown are two “Judenburg” Austrian stamps; the 1974 stamp on the left depicts the Judenburg municipal arms which, from 1488 on, includes a head wearing a Jewish hat. Under the Nazis, this was replaced by a seal showing a city gate (1939), but the Jew’s head and head were reintroduced in 1958. The 1989 stamp to the right depicts a Judenburg city scene.

The name Judenburg, a city in Styria in south central Austria, first appears between 1074 and 1087, when there were many Jews in the district who wielded great influence and had virtually complete control of the city’s commerce. The first documentary mention of Jews in the city dates from 1290; an iudex Judaeorum (Latin for “judge of the Jews,” this was an official in medieval Austria who adjudicated conflicts between Christians and Jews) ruling was recorded in 1308; and there is a report of a massacre of Jews in 1312, which the Encyclopedia Judaica – without explanation – characterizes as “probably legendary.”

That Jews in Judenburg made their living primarily as moneylenders may be deduced from several recorded instances of financial transactions between Jews and the clergy dating from 1329. At the beginning of the 15th century, there are reports of 22 Jews, each with a fortune of 100,00 florins, and 38 Jews with 50,000 florins each. In 1467, Emperor Frederick III permitted the city to expel all Jews who failed to pay taxes.

After the expulsion of all Jews from all of Styria in 1496, there was no Jewish community in Judenburg for almost 400 years. Until, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a small congregation affiliated with the Graz community established a prayer room and a cemetery. The Jewish population of Judenburg, a mere 13 in 1869, grew to 92 in 1880 and, by the time of the 1938 Anschluss, 42 Jews (or 16 families) lived there. By February 1939, all Jews had left the city, most for Vienna, and in 1968, there were only three Jewish families left in the entire district. Currently, although the chevra kadisha (Jewish burial society) – which was founded in Judenburg in 1887 – still exists, there is no Jewish community in the city.

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In this September 5, 1930 correspondence on City of New York Department of Public Markets letterhead, Commissioner Thomas F. Dwyer writes to the Union of Orthodox Rabbis:

In as much [sic] as it is the desire of the Department to bring about a strict and rigid enforcement of the State Kosher Food Laws in Greater New York, the co-operation of the Orthodox Hebrews in every section of the city is solicited to assist in accomplishing this purpose.

In order to obtain a representative list of Orthodox Rabbis and laymen who are interested in this worthy cause, we are requesting you to submit to this office at an early date the names and addresses of the officers and members of your organization.

Thanking you in anticipation of your kind co-operation, I beg to remain, very truly yours

The Commissioner of Public Markets, Weights, and Measures of the City of New York was a cabinet-level post appointed by the mayor during World War I, when foodstuffs were in short supply and people began hoarding. The goal was to “set fair prices for meat and fish” and the commissioner had jurisdiction over all public markets, marketplaces, and auctioneers. In 1968, the Department of Markets, as it was by then known, was merged with the Department of Licenses by then Markets Commissioner Gerard M. Weisberg to become the Department of Consumer Affairs. Thomas Dwyer, who served as commissioner 1930 -1932, is best known for his conclusion that the direct rail delivery of food to the Bronx Terminal Market could have saved consumers millions of dollars and, as we see from our correspondence, he had great interest in protecting Jewish consumers and enforcing the kashrut laws.

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Exhibited here is a lovely little British cover cancelled London 1863 (!) and featuring a beautiful and unusual blue seal stamp at the back flap that cites the famous verse from Tehillim (Psalms) 122:6: Sha’alu shalom Yerushalyim (“pray for the peace of Jerusalem . . . may all who love you prosper.”

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In philately, an essay, which is not valid for postage, is a design for a proposed stamp submitted to the postal authorities for consideration but which is not issued or is used only after alterations have been made. Rejected essays – that is, those that do not go on to become postage stamps – are usually destroyed or remain locked up indefinitely in the archives of government or private printing offices and, as such, are rare. However, although they are intended only for internal use by printers and official bodies, they sometimes find their way onto the philatelic market and are eagerly sought by collectors. Essays are of particular interest to some collectors because they show the evolution of the design leading to the final issued stamp and, in some instances, they may be more beautiful and interesting than the officially issued stamp.

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Exhibited here is my favorite Israel essay, a 1953 “test stamp” which has come to be known as “The Nazi helmet” issue. Originally proposed as a stamp to honor Israel’s defense forces, it was rejected because of the similarity of appearance to Nazi military helmets.

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Exhibited here are the front cover and two interior pages from Embroidery Designs of Palestine (circa 1910), published by Melnick, Rosin (Jerusalem), which was designed to be used as illustrations for embroidery work.

This is one of literally hundreds of items in my collection corroborating that, for centuries before the fiction of a “Palestine” as the home of a “Palestinian people” that never actually existed, the historic meaning of “Palestine” was with reference to the Jewish inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael. (See also, e.g., “Palestine Post,” “Palestine Symphony Orchestra,” etc.) Interestingly – and most tellingly regarding where our media are leading us today – all my research on “Embroidery Designs of Palestine” yielded only “from the river to the sea,” “free, free Palestine” designs, and the like.

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Finally, I present an item from my own family history, which I believe will be of interest to readers.

My grandmother’s brother, Sol Schwartzberg – the great uncle for whom for whom I am named – was a ship’s captain who went on to serve as the only Jewish captain in the United States Merchant Marine (established in 1938). During the years between the two world wars, he visited every country in the world that had a port, and he regularly sent postcards and letters to his sister (my grandmother), which included fascinating and unique historical insights into Jewish communities and Jewish life across the world at the time.

One particularly memorable item was a photocard of himself and his crew standing in front of the Sphinx on which he has written “In `Mitzraim’ just at the right time of year; expect to be in Palestine for Pesach.” Besides being of obvious interest to the family, these cards were of great historic interest and would surely have been welcome in museums around the world. Unfortunately, my elderly grandfather decided to “clean house” one day, and virtually all these historical treasures were destroyed. (Their loss hits me particularly hard as a Jewish history collector, about which I think Sol would have been proud.)

Sol was stationed as a young man during World War I in France, and one of his more amusing items that has survived is a hysterical postcard that he wrote to his parents upon his arrival in Europe, a pro forma card denoting only that he had arrived safely. American soldiers were not permitted to disclose where they were stationed but, to get around the censors, my clever great uncle drew what seemed to be a random doodle on the card which was actually the Yiddish phrase “I am stationed in France.”

One treasure that I remember well, and the loss of which I mourn to this day, is a letter Sol wrote from the newly-established Soviet Russia very soon after the Russian Revolution. As an American captain and a man of some status, he was wooed by Soviet officials and propagandized about the superiority of communism to capitalism and the inherent faults in American democracy. One evening, they took him to the opera, where he was seated in the orchestra section among high Soviet officials decked out in their uniforms and medals and with other people of obvious wealth and prestige. When he observed that the “common folk” and plebians were stashed in the nether regions of the balcony – after Soviet officials had bragged to him that everyone is equal under the Soviet regime and that the bourgeoisie no longer had any advantage over the proletariat – he asked his hosts how that obvious inequality came to be. The response, as he described it, was embarrassed hemming and hawing, until one official advised him that tickets had been made available on a “first come, first serve basis” and that the officers and Russian leaders “just happened to get there first.” He went on for several pages about how communism was sheer nonsense and its leaders were shameless liars but, alas, that letter is lost to history.

Exhibited here is a joyous November 12, 1918 letter that Sol wrote to my grandmother from Tours, France in which he provides a first-hand account of the jubilant celebration in the city marking the end of World War I.

Its all over but the shouting, and it will take some time before that is stopped. Despite the fact that I have no idea as to when we will be sent home, I am just as happy as any one human being can be. Last night the celebration was in full swing, and we certainly did whoop it up. Tours only has a population of about 125,000 but it seems that the entire population turned out like one, and with American soldiers here to help them, the crowd has simply gone mad with joy. Everyone was shouting whisling [sic] and laughing, and some tried to do both at the same time. Our Marine Band of fifty pieces played almost incessantly. First it was “The Marseillaise” and then the “Star Spangled Banner” with the English, Belgian, and Italian national anthems in close succession. The end of each one was met with the same round of applause, although during the playing of the different anthems one could hear a pin drop in the vast crown. The solemness that would over take the crown was only broken when the last note was played and then hats flew in the air, and fire-crackers were shot off, and the crowd was in a frenzy again. Suddenly, the band started playing “Homeward Bound” and we all joined in the chorus. Because we had not prepared ourselves with late passes the crowd began to thin down as the Americans were returning to their barracks. One of our boys who had been to Paris to have his eyes treated and was compelled to return this morning told us how Paris had acted that night, but I don’t think I lost much by being here . . .

Tonight I suppose there will be another wild time in the town and I’m going to be there and participate. I have been following up on the casualty lists ever since I left the States, and now that it’s all over I am glad that nothing has happened to either Joe Ehrleich or Sam Franklin and a few other boys that I knew . . .

I hope that everybody at home is well. The reports have it that the Influenza epidemic has been checked, and I feel a certain amount of relief. . .