The Jews in America Trilogy (90 page)

I am almost ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly to you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is impossible to suppress them. The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities, but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he so obstinately rejects all recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a necessitous delegate he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private stock.

Salomon's son claimed that his father also aided the Polish patriots Pulaski and Kosciusko with enormous loans, but there is no proof of this either. He did, however, when the British fleet cut off all communication with Europe, maintain the Spanish ambassador to the Revolutionary government, Don Francesco Randon, out of his own funds. And it can be argued, from this, that a vital service was performed, since, had Salomon not done so, Spain
might
have damaged American prestige—such as it was—abroad. And it is known that he did sell hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of American bonds, which found their way to the bourses of Paris, London, and Frankfurt, and which certainly did much to establish American credit in the world market.

Does the United States government still owe Haym Salomon a huge amount of money? His son, Haym Moses Salomon, always said so, and his many descendants—he had four children, and a multitude of grandchildren—who are scattered about the country in such places as New Orleans; Galveston; Houston; Saint Louis; Ardmore, Oklahoma; and Canton, Kansas, would like to think so, and grow wistful dreaming of the fortune they might split if only they could prove that it existed.

His son's story is this: Between the years 1778 and 1782, Haym Salomon loaned the United States government money in the neighborhood of $700,000, more than half of
which was never repaid. On January 5, 1785, the government sent Haym Salomon a full and complete accounting of all the money it owed him. But it was a Sabbath day and, pious Jew that he was, Salomon refused—though a few years earlier he had supposedly been willing to interrupt high holy day services to help George Washington—to sign the papers until the day of rest and prayer was over. On the next day, Sunday, January 6, before he had a chance to examine the government's statement, he died—a victim of the heart disease he had contracted while a prisoner of the British in New York.

The figure of $700,000, his son claimed, represented money that had gone through Haym Salomon's bank account, payable to the government of the United States, and this same figure has been given authority in such publications as the
Dictionary of American Biography,
in its sketch on Salomon, as the amount he “loaned” the government. It would have been an extraordinarily large sum in 1782. Salomon
can't
have been that rich. If he had—and, on top of that, supported his family and all his European relatives—he would have been by far the richest man in America. In 1778, he had escaped from New York and arrived in Philadelphia without a penny to his name. How, in four short years' time, would he have possibly amassed so staggering a fortune? It is hard to credit, too, that, just a year after his escape, he could personally have come up with $240,000 to loan George Washington. His wife's family, the Frankses, was rich, but Rachel Franks Salomon descended from the poor branch.

How reliable was his son? It was from him, too, that biographers learned that Haym Salomon's parents in Poland were “wealthy.” But still Salomon thought it needful to send them a thousand pounds when at last he became successful, and in his letter he spoke of his “poor father and mother.” In his will, he provided that his mother be
bequeathed a gold chain, and his aged father enough money to purchase a burial plot.

Several years ago, the Federation of Polish Jews of America attempted to have a statue erected in Haym Salomon's memory, citing, among other sources, the
Dictionary of American Biography
account of his services to the Revolution, and saying: “America failed to repay the money he advanced, and now men seek to rob him of his posthumous fame.” What the Federation wanted to demonstrate, of course, with their statue, was that there had been Polish Jews in America long before the Czarist pogroms of 1881, and that they had contributed mightily. The chief “robber” of Salomon's posthumous fame was the late historian Max J. Kohler. Kohler called the Poles' project ridiculous, and there was a great deal of angry talk. Kohler was a German Jew, and the mutual antipathy that has existed between the earlier-arrived Germans and the later-arriving Poles and Russians was at the heart of most of it. The project sputtered, with much acrimony, to no conclusion.

Haym Salomon was, in his own words, a broker, a trader of government bonds, an agent. The $700,000 that may have gone through his account over the four years in question was not his money; it was the government's and represented funds from securities he had sold, deposited, and then turned over to Robert Morris. On these moneys Morris now paid him a tidy commission—½ of 1 percent. Haym Salomon was also a generous man. Even the remote uncles got their guineas. He was generous, too, to his friends in Philadelphia, offering unsecured loans, loans without interest—generous to a fault. After his death, merchants to whom he had loaned money could not pay. His estate was found to be insolvent. His chief creditor was the Bank of North America, Robert Morris' bank.

His son claimed that the United States government owed Haym Salomon $354,000—which today, with interest, would
be worth in the tens of millions of dollars. His son said the government had come with a detailed statement to that effect. True, his son waited decades after his father's death to make this claim, and after all records had inconveniently been destroyed when the British captured Washington during the War of 1812. Mysteriously, the government never came around with that statement again. The money has never been paid. The papers are gone.

But the Polish Americans did get their statue—not in New York, where they wanted it, but in Chicago. And it is a memorial not to one but to three men. Haym Salomon shares the marble pedestal—and perfectly properly, it would seem—with George Washington and Robert Morris. At the time of the statue's dedication, President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to an aide and, in full innocence, asked: “I know who the other two are, but
who …?”

To those of the Old Guard Sephardim who had questioned the importance of Haym Salomon's Revolutionary role, there was always the point that he was “not really Sephardic,” something of an interloper and stealer of Sephardic thunder. Now, however, that his statue stands proudly in Chicago, and in such illustrious company, for all the world to see, most Sephardim prefer to claim him—it seems too bad to give him to the Poles—and Sephardic parents tell their children, “And he was one of us!”

*
The Hayses, through the mazelike tracery of Malcolm Stern's book, over the years became related or “connected” with most of the other old families, down to the recent publisher of the
New York Times,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

11

FIRST LADIES

It comes as a surprise to many people that there are Jewish Daughters of the American Revolution—just as there are Sons—though of course there are. Some of the Old Guard Sephardic families are a little sheepish about being DAR members, to be sure, since that organization has gained a reputation of making members of minority groups feel less than welcome. At the same time, these people keep their little certificates of membership, and show
these
to their children and grandchildren as well.

While men like Haym Salomon were raising and supplying money for Revolutionary coffers, and while Judah Touro was saving his money in New Orleans, a number of Sephardic women were gaining reputations as Revolutionary
heroines. There was Mrs. David Hays, for example. Esther Hays and Judah Touro were second cousins by marriage; that is, Esther's husband, David, was a first cousin of Judah's mother. By the time of the Revolution, branches of the Hays family were well established in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, where they can still be found. Esther Hays was an Etting, of the Philadelphia Ettings—a Sephardic family that had come to that city as early as 1758, and Ettings can still be found
there
(including the painter Emlen Etting, a seventh-generation Philadelphian). Esther Etting had met David Hays through Philadelphia connections, and theirs was the first Hays-Etting union (there would, of course, be others). It was considered an event of great social importance, creating as it did an even stronger tie among the Jewish communities of Philadelphia, New York, and Newport.

David Hays took his bride north to an extensive farm he operated in New York's Westchester County, near what is now the town of Bedford, and here the Revolution found them. The Hayses backed the Revolutionary cause and, one night in the winter of 1779, David Hays received word that a company camped not far from his farm had been surrounded by the British. Food and supplies were running low, and unless help reached them soon, the men would be forced to surrender or starve. With one of his young sons as a helper, Hays volunteered to try to drive a herd of seventy-five of his cattle through the enemy lines to the imperiled troops. He chose a moonless night for his mission. The cows were blindfolded, their jaws tied closed with rope so they could make no noise, and their hoofs wrapped in heavy sacking to muffle the sound of their march through the snow. The greatest risk came from the Hayses' own neighbors, many of whom were Tory sympathizers, and the exploit had to be carried out in utmost secrecy.

Nonetheless, somehow word of what David Hays was up
to leaked out. He and his son had no sooner left the house than a group of angry and suspicions Tories gathered outside it, shouting for his wife. Esther Hays, still weak from the birth of her sixth child, had been in bed with a fever, but she rose and went to the door. When asked where her husband was, she refused to say. Even when the Tory group threatened to kill her small children, she refused to give the mob any information. She was then forced back inside her house; the windows and doors were barricaded, and the house was set afire. Fortunately, the Hayses' Negro slaves, who lived nearby, were able to rescue Esther and her children, and carry them to safety in the slave quarters. But when David Hays and his son returned the next morning—after successfully completing their delivery of the cattle—the farmhouse had burned to the ground.

Esther Hays was a woman not easily daunted. She showed her patriotic zeal on another occasion when she calmly walked through enemy lines in broad daylight. Ostensibly on a routine shopping errand, she was actually purveying a vital commodity to the Revolutionary soldiers. Her plump petticoats were heavily quilted with salt. Before the war was over, both Esther's husband and her eldest son had fought at the front, as had her brother, Reuben, who died as a prisoner of war of the British. A volunteer the moment he learned of the first shot at Lexington, Reuben Etting had left his bank clerk's job to join the American forces. After his capture he refused to eat pork, which, of course, was the chief staple supplied. He must have been as strong-willed as his sister, for his death was attributed to starvation.

A gaudier Revolutionary role, though more social than military, was meanwhile being played by the women of Philadelphia's Franks family, into which the entry—by marriage—had been such an important step for Haym Salomon. It had, in fact, by the time of the Revolution
begun to seem as though Philadelphia's Sephardim were taking themselves even more seriously than their relatives in New York and Newport, even though the Philadelphia community was newer than—and in many ways an offshoot of—the other two. Philadelphians generally had begun to think of themselves as superior to New Yorkers, as, of course, they still do. New York and Newport were looked down on as “commercial” cities; Philadelphia was a city more devoted to culture, the arts and graces. Sephardim in the more northerly cities had already begun to speak with a certain awe of their Philadelphia kin, and on one occasion Mrs. Aaron Lopez wrote one of her daughters a long letter (or memorandum, since the girl was living at home at the time) on how to behave: “Not to forget yr. curtsies, how d'you dos and thank-yous,” when meeting “our Philadelphia cousins.”

The Franks family had settled in Philadelphia early in the eighteenth century, along with the Levys, to whom they were distantly related. The family, during its passage from fifteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Philadelphia, had been prominent elsewhere. Aaron Franks, grandfather of the first American Franks, had been a banker in Hanover, and, under the aegis of George I, who discovered his talent there, was brought to England as the king's personal financial adviser. He was known as “the Jew Broker of London.” The Levys, meanwhile, could trace their lineage back to a number of prominent early American Jewish families. The two families became even more tightly entwined with each other when, in what was considered a dynastic union, Abigail Levy married Jacob Franks in 1712, and both families moved with great ease (certainly with more ease than the Jews of New York and Newport, who, socially, still kept to themselves) into the purlieus of Christian Philadelphia society. Both David Franks and his cousin, Samson Levy, were on the
original list of the Assembly, Philadelphia's most exclusive social event and one of the oldest balls in America, when it was composed in 1748.

By the 1750's, Philadelphia's Jewish elite had added the Gratz family, along with the Ettings, and of course the Philadelphia branch of the Hayses. The Gratzes, like the Ettings and the Frankses, had come from Inquisitional Spain by way of Germany. In Spain, the name may have been Gracia, or Garcia. It was Philadelphia's large German-speaking population that attracted these Sephardim with German-sounding names, who had taken the German route out of Spain, and knew the language. By the mid-eighteenth century, no good Philadelphia club was without its Gratz, Etting, Franks, Levy, or Hays. They were members of the Philadelphia and the Rittenhouse clubs, the Union League, the Racquet, the Rabbit, and the City Troop, and their names decorated the membership lists—and the lists of officers and directors and sponsors—of such august institutions as the Historical Society, the Philosophical Society, the Academy of Art, the Academy of Science, and the Atheneum.