The Jews in America Trilogy (82 page)

It is an indication of the persistence of the Gomez family that they had been able to survive nearly a century and a half of Inquisition since the Expulsion Edict as secret Jews. It is also clear that the king, and probably others of his court, knew the Gomez secret. In any case, it suited Philip to protect Gomez from the Inquisition, and in return Gomez honored his king in faithful fashion. When Philip's sister married Louis XIV of France, Isaac Gomez named his firstborn son Louis Moses Gomez, in honor of his monarch's new brother-in-law. Though Philip's own son would one day preside over one of the most ferocious autos-da-fé in history, Philip himself was of a gentler nature, tortured by self-doubt, convinced that his adulteries and promiscuity—over which he felt he had no control—were to blame for the ills that beset Spain. He once wrote: “These evil events have been caused by your sins and mine in particular. I believe that God our Lord is angry and irate with me and my realms on account of many sins, and particularly on account of mine.…”

King Philip had promised Isaac that if the officers of the Inquisition ever seemed to have come too close for comfort, and if the king heard of it before Isaac, the king would issue him a coded warning. At dinner he would say to him, “Gomez, the onions begin to smell.”

The day came. Unfortunately, by the time the king's
message reached him, there was time only to get Isaac's wife and son smuggled out of the country. Remaining behind to wind up his affairs, Isaac was arrested and thrown into prison. It was several years before he was able successfully to bribe his way out, and by then his friend the king was dead. He was forced to take a familiar route, over the Pyrenees into France, where he joined his family.

In 1685 the Edict of Nantes was revoked, there was an outbreak of religious disturbances in France, and a new mood of reaction was spreading across the Continent. Isaac prudently decided to move on to England, where he also had friends and family. In London, thanks to his connections, Isaac Gomez was granted a “letter of denization,” which literally made him a denizen, or free man of the country. It was an important document for an alien to have, and one not customarily given to Jews. It indicated that Gomezes were persons of privilege, with full rights of British citizenship, except that of holding public office. Despite these advantages, however, Isaac's son Louis—a young man now—decided that he wanted to seek his fortune in America.

When word reached New York that a member of the exalted Gomez clan was on his way, there was a considerable stir within the little community of Sephardim—particularly among the mothers of unmarried and eligible daughters, who immediately began receiving instructions on how to treat a Gomez. It was said that the Gomezes were so grand that they still used their titles, and had to be addressed as “your grace,” and “your ladyship.” (This was true; they did.) Young Louis Gomez, however, disappointed the mothers by stopping enroute in Jamaica, where he met, by a prearrangement with her family, the daughter of another high-placed Sephardic family, Esther Marques, and married her. The young couple arrived in New York in 1696.

Louis Gomez (in America he anglicized his first name to Lewis) set himself up in a small store in lower Manhattan
selling general merchandise. But soon he saw how important wheat was becoming to the young colony. Wheat, grown in what is now suburban Westchester County, as well as in the West Indies, was being traded back and forth across the Atlantic and was a highly profitable item. Concentrating on the wheat trade, Louis was soon able to write back to his father in London that he was trading wheat “on an enormous scale.” He was becoming a rich man.

In 1705, Louis Gomez was numbered among the freemen of the city, and in 1710 a “memorial,” which may of course have been in some ways a bribe, from Louis Gomez persuaded the New York City Council to give him permission to ship wheat to Madeira, even though a number of petitions by others had been denied. In 1728, he was elected parnas of the Shearith Israel congregation, an unusual honor since he was, after all, an immigrant and newcomer to the community, among families that had been in New York for two and three generations. It was under his presidency that funds were raised to build New York's first synagogue, in Mill Street. Louis Gomez was as broad-minded in his philanthropies as the Levys: his name also appears on the list of those who contributed to the building of the steeple on Trinity Church. When Louis Gomez died, in 1740, he bequeathed “a pair of silver adornments for the five books of Moses, weighing 39 ounces,” to his oldest son. The bequest has become a tradition in the family, and the silver ornaments, worn smooth by age, have been passed from eldest son to eldest son through seven generations.

Daniel, the third of Louis Gomez' six sons, was even more enterprising than his father. At the age of fourteen, Daniel joined his father in the wheat business and West Indies trade, and in the course of his wanderings he, like his father, met and married a member of an ancient and redoubtable Jamaican family, Rebecca de Torres. When she died in childbirth five years later, Daniel married another West Indian lady, Esther Levy of Curaçao.

From Daniel's first entry into it, business was good. Starting with such commodities as wheat and West Indian sugar, he expanded into other goods and commodities. Soon he was trading not only with Madeira but also with Barbados, Curaçao, London, and Dublin. In 1751, an advertisement in the New York
Gazette
offered a new shipment of Daniel's wares from Liverpool, including:

… earthenware in casks and crates, Cheshire cheese, loaf sugar, cutlery ware, pewter, grindstones, coals and sundry other goods too tedious to mention.

The blasé tone of the last phrase is an indication of the advertiser's success.

The list of names of men with whom Daniel Gomez did business reads like a
Who's Who
of Colonial America, and his customers included George Clinton, Walter Franklin, Robert Livingston, Myndert Schuyler, Isaac Sears, John de Peyster and Cornelius Ten Broeck of Albany; the Vallenburghs of Kinderhook; the Kips of Dutchess County; the Abeels, Brinckerhoffs, Beekmans, Barrons, Bogarts, the Rutgerses, the Van Cortlandts, the Van Wycks. His correspondence and bills went to such then-remote towns outside the colony as New Town, New Rochelle, Brunswick, Goshen, Huntington, Bushwick, Albany, the Hamptons, and Oyster Bay. He traded with other colonies as well, and his dealings extended to Boston, New Haven, Norwalk, New London, Allentown, Lancaster, Philadelphia, Princeton, Maryland, and South Carolina.

Though he concentrated on wheat, Daniel bought, sold, and traded nearly every other imaginable commodity, including stockings, suspenders, ginger, buttons, nightshirts, gunpowder, swords, preserved goods, silk, and sailcloth. But through all this diversity of business he still seems to have been searching for some product, some area of trade, that would consume him utterly, to which he could devote himself single-mindedly. Suddenly, in 1710, he found it.

Most people know that the great Astor fortune in America is based upon the fur trade. Only a few people know, however—the few including the old Sephardic families—that the first John Jacob Astor was preceded in the fur trade—and by many years—by a Sephardic Jew, Daniel Gomez. Daniel was, in fact, one of the very first to consider the vast wilderness of the continent that lay on all sides of him, and the numbers of fur-bearing animals that lived there. Daniel was an American pioneer in a business that has consumed adventurers and merchants since the days of the Golden Fleece. He was also the first in America to see how the native Indians could be used in this trade as trappers and skinners.

When, in 1710, Daniel Gomez began buying land in what is now Ulster County, his friends thought he was crazy. He was buying wilderness. Before long, he had acquired nearly 2,500 acres, including most of what is the present-day city of Newburgh, on the west bank of the Hudson River. He was able to buy this land cheaply only because no one else wanted it. It was also said, of all things, that the region was haunted. At the northwestern head of Newburgh Bay there is a rocky point of land which thrusts craggily into the river, and on a misty evening this peninsula, in profile, can indeed acquire an eerie look, as if possessed by spirits. And on this point, for untold hundreds of years before the arrival of the white man, the Algonquin tribes of what are now the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania regions would meet at certain seasons of the year to worship, dance, and commune with their tribal gods and with the Great Spirit. This was a sacred place to the Indians, and before any hunting expedition, or any war, they traveled here in great numbers, often over hundreds of miles, to conduct the ceremonies that, they hoped, would improve the outcome of whatever task was at hand.

It has been said that when Henry Hudson sailed up the
great river in 1609 he anchored off this point and watched the Indians performing one of their mystic ceremonies, dancing around a tall fire. In the minds of the Dutch settlers, the point quickly became associated with all sorts of dark deeds and, as Christians horrified at the heathen and mysterious evil rites that were said to be performed on the rocky headland, they renamed it
De Deful's Dans Kammer
(The Devil's Dance Chamber). An old ditty, designed to frighten adventuresome children from visiting the area, went:

For none that visit the Indian's den

Return again to the haunts of men.

The knife is their doom, oh sad is their lot.

Beware! Beware of the blood-stained spot!

All this served to depress local real estate values, and to Daniel Gomez' advantage. He had learned that the “blood-stained spot” also marked the convergence of a number of well-traveled Indian trails, and he selected the Indians' den as a strategic place to establish a trading post.

Attempts had been made since earliest Colonial times to identify the American Indians with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and long lists of similarities between Indian and Judaic ritual had been drawn up, in an effort to prove this thesis. It was pointed out that, like the Jews, the Indians tabooed certain animals as “unclean.” Like Jews, they had a sense of personal purity; they worshiped a great spirit called Yohovah; they had high priests; they had puberty rites. The Indians had important holy days in spring and fall, corresponding to Passover and Succoth, and a two-day fasting period corresponding to the Day of Atonement. The Indians had a lunar calendar, a similar counting system, and there are superficial similarities between the Hebrew and Indian tongues (both Hebrew and Indian languages make use of hyperbole and metaphor, and possess no comparative
or superlative degree). Anthropologists have since dismissed these likenesses as coincidental, but in Daniel Gomez' day they were the subject of serious study. In the early Sephardic community of New York, these matters were discussed at the synagogue. Just in case they should turn out to be distant brethren, the rabbis had enjoined their congregations against mistreating or exploiting the local Indians. In any case, Daniel and the Indians got along famously right from the beginning. “I am able to understand the Indian thought,” Daniel wrote to a friend.

For his post, Daniel Gomez selected a site that was near a spring where the gathering tribes regularly stopped for water, and he began, in 1717, to construct a massive stone blockhouse. Trading with the Indians was not without certain obvious hazards, and his trading post was also a fortress. The walls were two feet thick in the front and in the back, from which direction an attack was considered likelier, they were three feet thick. The house contained two vast cellars which were to serve as vaults to store the goods—knives, hatchets, trinkets, and of course guns and whiskey—that Daniel intended to sell, as well as the furs he intended to acquire.

He was building in the middle of virgin forest, seven miles from the nearest hamlet, Newburgh, which had been settled only eight years earlier. Trees had to be felled for timber, and stones had to be lifted from the ground for walls. The house took six years to build, but when it was finished Daniel Gomez had built an oasis of strength and also of comfort in the wilderness. In the main parlor Daniel had placed a huge fireplace, eight feet wide and six feet deep, designed for business entertaining during the winter months. Twenty to thirty Indians could gather around the fire's warmth to trade and haggle over the prices of lynx, beaver, otter, black fox, mink, and muskrat. In a smaller room, another fireplace, equally large, had the same
hospitable and commercial function. Contemporary reports describe Mr. Gomez' house as furnished in “the ultimate luxuries which Gomez brought up from New York.” Here he and his two sons—and eventually his second wife—spent the winter fur-trading season. It must have been a lonely life, but Gomezes had always been self-sufficient types, more interested in deeds than in words.

The lonely fort became known as “the Jew's house,” and local records refer to Daniel only as “Gomez the Jew.” Until recent years the stream that ran by Daniel Gomez' house (and that was once navigable, and doubtless transported some of Daniel's goods for barter) was designated on local maps as “Jew's Creek.” For thirty years, Daniel Gomez operated his trading post, at the same time keeping close personal and business ties with New York. Like his father, he was elected parnas of Shearith Israel, pledging the then lordly sum of fifteen pounds a year to the synagogue. As early as 1727, he was listed among the “freemen” of New York, but though the title of freeman, or burgher, permitted its owner certain rights, there were others—including the right to vote—that could be obtained only through naturalization.

In 1737, in a notorious contested election, the right of Jews to vote for the general assembly had been challenged. Daniel Gomez was among the Jewish voters whose rights were in question, and the outcome was later called by William Seward “a stain in the annals of New York which the friends of rational liberty would wish to see effaced.” The objection was upheld, and the Jews' rights were denied. Three years later, however, a Naturalization Act was passed. Daniel Gomez was among the first to take advantage of it and become a voter.