As part of this history, very few Jews inhabited England in Mendes da Costa’s day—about two thousand Sephardim by the end
of the eighteenth-century, and perhaps somewhat more Ashkanazim, or Jews of German and eastern European origin. In a potentially prejudiced society, just a few folks from an alien culture may appear exotic and fascinating, rather than threatening and despised—and the rarity of Jews seemed to work in Mendes da Costa’s favor, as he often encountered philo-Semitism among his noble and gentleman correspondents.
Emmanuel Mendes da Costa was trained in law, but chose to devote himself to natural history. He built a fine collection and published several articles, leading to his election as a fellow of the Royal Society (England’s premier association of scientists) in 1747, and to the Society of Antiquities in 1751. But his troubled and shadowy side also surfaced amid his successes. The
Dictionary of National
Biography
remarks: “Although he early obtained the reputation of being one of the best fossilologists at his time . . . his life appears to have been a continual struggle with adversity.” He was imprisoned for debt in 1754. After his release the next year, he began to prepare, and finally published in 1757, his major treatise
The Natural History of Fossils.
Mendes da Costa received his biggest
opportunity in 1763 when he became clerk of the Royal Society, in charge of their collections and library, then in a state of neglect and disrepair. He wrote to a friend in September 1763:
I immediately proceeded to work, but such was the state of the said libraries and museum, that I am inclined to think the Augean stable was but a type of them [a reference to Hercules’ most unpleasant labor,
far more taxing than killing the Lernaean Hydra, of clearing thirty years of manure from the stable of Augeas, King of Elis] . . . After many weeks’ work, amidst the repeated curses of myriads of spiders and other vermin, who had held peaceable possession for a long series of years, I accomplished, so that, thank God, now both libraries and museum are accessible, and in a state fit to be consulted
by the curious.
Nonetheless, Mendes da Costa took great joy in the good fortune of his new job. He wrote to another friend: “Whenever you come to town, pray let me see you. Our Museum here, I assure you, has many fine things, and our library is very numerous and scientific. I am very happy in my places, and henceforward my whole life will be devoted to study.” But four years later, in December
1767, he was dismissed for “various acts of dishonesty,” arrested at the suit of the Society, and committed to the King’s Bench prison, where he remained until 1772. His library and collections were also seized and sold at auction.
Mendes da Costa continued his work under confinement, aided by the support and patronage of several well-placed friends. On January 3, 1770, he wrote to a Dr. Francis
Nicholls:
I received your much esteemed letter, which honors me with an invitation to your house at Epsom, to review some fine minerals you have lately collected in Cornwall . . . But I am so unfortunate at present as not to be able to embrace the much desired and respected offer you make me; as I am under confinement in this King’s Bench . . . However, the Almighty who had afflicted me with
the confinement, has through His mercies granted me the call of my reason, and I apply myself as much as ever, and assiduously to my studies.
Four years later, Nicholls still remembered, and wrote:
It is with pleasure I hear you are restored to liberty and philosophy; and that you should like to see my collection of Cornish fossils . . . My son will come down next Sunday morning; so, if you
will be at his house in Lincoln’s Inn-fields by nine, he will bring you down, and render your journey less tedious.
Mendes da Costa soldiered on, writing increasingly more obsequious letters in hopes of selling specimens or delivering lectures for a fee. His worst debacle and embarrassment occurred in 1774, when his petition to deliver a series of lectures at Oxford was not only summarily rejected,
but scorned with the overt politeness often used by powerful patricians before they squish a plebeian favor-seeker like an insect. Apparently, Mendes da Costa made the mistake of submitting a formal proposal, when he needed to work through channels and secure the verbal permission of the Vice-Chancellor (the boss of the university). (I doubt, in any case, whether a Jewish jailbird would have
received such sanction under any circumstances at the time.) Mendes da Costa did finally prevail upon a professor to visit the Vice-Chancellor, who promptly spurned the idea: “The course of lectures proposed to be read by Mr. Da Costa could not be read here with propriety. I hope the disappointment will sit easy upon Mr. Da Costa.” In fact, the rejection weighed most heavily, as Mendes da Costa
wrote to the professor:
I am very certain my attempt has not succeeded by means of some unfriendly and sinister misrepresentations, as well as through mismanagement on my side, for want of proper advice how to proceed. I unluckily had not a friend who chose by a single line to set me right, or inform me what to do . . . Thus left forlorn, absent from the scene of action, and ignorant how to
proceed, I became shipwrecked, and my hopes were blasted.
But Mendes da Costa never gave up. He published his conchology book in 1776 to good notices, rebuilt his collections, kept up his correspondences, and died in reasonable honor.
Throughout this various life, one theme keeps circulating in constancy: Mendes da Costa’s Judaism, and the fascination thus inspired among his philo-Semitic
Anglican friends. Mendes da Costa must have become a semiofficial source on Jewish matters for the British intelligentsia, at a time when very few English Jews could have traveled in these circles, neatly balancing enough assimilation to find acceptance with sufficient practice of Judaism to be regarded as authentically exotic. In 1751, a physician inquired of him “whether there is extant any where
a print or drawing, or any account of the dress and arms of a Jewish soldier, or whether the Jewish Soldiers did not wear the same dress as the Roman Soldiers.” Mendes da Costa replied that he did not know, since Jewish sources do not permit representation of human images:
In regard to any drawing,
etc.
, we never permitted any in our books, apparel,
etc.
, it not being agreeable to the religion
. . . yet I do not find that drawings were at all used in books,
etc.
, even by the Greeks and Romans.
In 1747, Mendes da Costa had to forgo a ducal invitation in order to celebrate the High Holidays at home. But His (philo-Semitic) Grace understood very well and hastened to reassure poor Mendes da Costa, who greatly feared that he had offended a high potential patron. The Duke’s secretary wrote:
His Grace is very sorry the duties of your religion, which every good man is well attached to, prevent your coming hither just at this time . . . The Duke being the most humane and the best man living, you need be in no difficulty about your eating, here being all sorts offish, and every day the greatest variety of what you may feed on without breach of the Law of Moses, unless the lobsters of
Chichester should be a temptation by which a weaker man might be seduced.
In 1766, Mendes da Costa hears of some Hebrew inscriptions at Canterbury, and he writes to an acquaintance there:
In a MS of Dr. Plot’s dated June 10, 1674, I find this notice: ‘Antient inscriptions on ruinous buildings—such as the Hebrew exquisitely written on the old walls of the Castle of Canterbury.’ Is there such
a Hebrew inscription now extant? If there is, can a copy be procured? or can I have permission to employ some Jew (of Canterbury) to copy it, and decypher it.
His friend passed the request to an Anglican scholar who knew Hebrew, for a Jew would not be able to gain access. This scholar wrote directly to Mendes da Costa:
The Hebrew inscription you inquire after was written on the walls of one
of the stone stair-cases in the old castle at Canterbury, in the 13th century, by the captive Jews, during their imprisonment there, and contained some few versicles of the Psalms . . . It is, I do suppose, no very difficult task to get admittance to this inscription, by any gentleman of the County, or one supported by proper recommendations; but I think they would make great objections to admit
a stranger and a Jew to search for it.
Amid these signs of both philo- and anti-Semitism, we may also complete the gamut with purely benevolent ignorance. A correspondent writes to Mendes da Costa in 1755, offering payment in goods for services rendered in identifying specimens of natural history: “It is said by most people that Yorkshire hams are very much admired, and if you should think
so, will send you some up.” The editor appends a telling footnote at this point: “Mr. Knowlton seems not to have recollected that he was writing to a Jew.”
Most telling for the history of science, we learn from the correspondence how Mendes da Costa stood on the cusp of a transition between two great sequential worlds of natural history—from the baroque passion for gathering oddities, to the
classical urge to order and classify in a single comprehensive system. The quest for oddities certainly emerges in this offer from a correspondent on December 9, 1749:
I have some natural curiosities to present you with . . . I have the tooth, or tusk, of the sea-lion, . . . part of a young elephant’s tooth, in the section of which is an iron bullet, which had been shot into it when younger,
and the ivory grown over the bullet; a hair-ball, found in the stomach of a calf; and a fossil or two; which shall all find their way to your Cabinet if you think them worthy a place in it.
But Mendes da Costa’s own requests mostly record his concern for completion and order. He asks a Jewish friend in Bath to collect as may kinds of fossils as possible, and to send them to his local coffeehouse—a
striking example of different services rendered by public places before the days of home mail delivery:
In regard to fossils, see if you could get me any
ammonitae
, or snake-stones, as they are vulgarly called, as also impressions of plants on a kind of coal slate, which abound in the collieries. At Lincomb and Walcot are stone quarries which afford very fine petrifactions of shells,
etc.
Could
you procure any of these things, and send me a box full directed to the Bank Coffee-house, I shall cheerfully repay all charges whatsoever.
Mr. Schomberg, presumably a German Jew by name, knew what he wanted in return: “Send me a small pot (of about three or four pounds) of sour-crout, . . . and take care it is well secured, so as not to be broke.”
Over and over again, Mendes da Costa begs
his correspondents to pack carefully and label properly:
Of whatever is collected, let each specimen be carefully wrapped up and numbered, and a catalogue made with answerable numbers to each specimen, wherein specify what it is, what is vulgarly called, where found, whether in plenty or rare, at what depths, among what other fossil bodies, and all the other curious particulars you can be informed
of to elucidate the natural history of them. I beg pardon for troubling you thus, but I am greatly obliged to you for this great piece of friendship.
Mendes da Costa’s most assiduous correspondence dates from the 1740s and 1750s as he collects, and beseeches friends to procure, as many “fossils” as possible for his forthcoming comprehensive treatise
The Natural History of Fossils.
Following
contemporary custom, Mendes da Costa secured subscriptions to this book before publication (a favored fund-raising device for expensive works). His substantial list, published after the preface to his work, includes six bishops and five lords, further testifying to his acceptability among the Anglican upper classes. (Mr. Joseph Harris, “assay master of the Tower,” also signed on for a copy.)
Mendes da Costa published a first substantial volume of his treatise in 1757, but never proceeded any further. This work is, nonetheless, his masterpiece—and a superb example of the passion for fully comprehensive order that so motivated eighteenth-century natural history. In Mendes da Costa’s time, “fossil” (from the past tense of the Latin
fodere
, to dig up) referred to any natural object taken
from the earth, not only to the remains of organisms. In fact, rocks and minerals were the quintessential “fossils” of eighteenth-century terminology, since they belong to the mineral kingdom—as natural products of the earth—whereas remains of ancient plants and animals must be introduced into rocks from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus, the bones, shells, and leaves, now exclusively honored
with the term
fossil
, were called “extraneous fossils” in the eighteenth century—while rocks and minerals represented essential fossils. Mendes da Costa therefore intended to cover all products of geology in his treatise—rocks, minerals, and remains of ancient organisms. But his first and only volume did not proceed beyond rocks and earths. (If he had completed the full design, and had followed
the usual classifications of his time, he would probably have written a second volume, on minerals and crystals, and a third, on remains of organisms.)
Mendes da Costa may have been disgusted at Linnaeus’s sexual terminology for clams, but the great Swedish naturalist still reigned as the prince of order. We know that Linnaeus’s binomial system persists in largely unaltered form as the basis
for giving scientific names to organisms today. This system has served us so well (despite recognized limitations) that we forget the fallacies of its original overextended application—an amnesia also abetted by our tendency to view the history of science as a list of growing successes, with errors buried into a conventional metaphor: “the ash-heap of history.”
But Linnaeus’s original application
of binomial nomenclature suffered under the common eighteenth-century fallacy of grandiosity in attempting to encompass all possible kinds of natural diversity in one system of classification. For Linnaeus didn’t apply his binomial system only to plants and animals (where the procedure has always worked well, for reasons discussed below), but also, in essentially unaltered form, to minerals,
and even, in his
Genera morborum
of 1763, to diseases, which he grouped by their symptoms into classes, orders, and genera.