Journal Article

Jewish Convict Servants in the American Colonies

Marx, Jeffrey A

2024

Overview

“James Revel,” The Poor Unhappy Felon’s Sorrowful Account, ca. 17801 In 1955, exactly seventy years ago, Jacob Rader Marcus first called attention to the existence of Jewish convict servants among the “scoundrels and petty villains” who had been transported from England to serve as indentured workers in the North American colonies.2 In 1970, he named four of them, and, in 1974, he explored the story of fifteen-year-old Feibel Filemann, who was tried in London in 1771 for stealing a linen handkerchief and shipped to the North American colonies.3 Five years later, Todd Endelman compiled aggregate figures for the number of Jews sentenced to be transported to the British colonies from 1730 to 1779, based on Old Bailey court records. [...]in 1993, Eric Goldstein compiled the first list of Jewish convicts sentenced in England to transportation, arriving at a total of 169 names, and traced the history of a small number of them who arrived in Maryland.5 There the matter has rested in relative obscurity. Early historians of American Jewish history, anxious to fete the contributions that Jewish settlers made during the colonial period, might have refrained from telling the story of these low status Jewish convicts for filiopietistic reasons, but the silence of more recent historians is likely due to the fact that there was little of their story to tell.7 Unlike the port Jews, the successful Jewish merchants and trader families of the time—Frank, Levy, Gratz, Sheftall, and Lopez, to name but a few—who settled in Charleston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and Savannah, the Jewish convict servants scattered throughout Virginia and Maryland had no kinship networks and formed no Jewish communities or even loosely configured groups.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Interpersonal relations / Jewish Americans / Jewish people