4 - Myer Myers: Silversmith in the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Ledger

Summary

Abstract

Myer Myers (1723–1795) was the foremost silversmith in colonial New York. A member of the oldest synagogue in New York City, nearly all we know of his life is contained within the pages of Congregation Shearith Israel's Holy Sedakah or Ledger whose entries date from 1733 until the end of the eighteenth century. Myers created only 7 or 8 objects of Judaica out of an oeuvre of 380 works or more. This chapter focuses on one type of Jewish ceremonial art made by Myers, silver rimmonim or finials for the Torah scroll, their use and symbolism, and on the Ledger, which is analysed both for its content and as a material object.

Keywords: Touro synagogue; Myer Myers; Shearith Israel, New York; bells (finials for the Torah scroll); silversmith

In August 2014, I was engaged as an expert witness by Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in New York, indeed the only synagogue in the city until 1825. Its Board of Trustees sought to prevent the sale by Jeshuat Israel – the congregation of the Touro synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island – of a set of Torah finials or bells created by Myer Myers (1723–1795) in the 1760s or 1770s (Plate 4.1). This essay is the result of my research tracing the provenance of the work, that is, the history of the finials and of their ownership.

Although individual Jews had come to New York earlier, the arrival of a greater number in 1654–55 led to the establishment of a congregation known as Shearith Israel (the Remnant of Israel), a name that recalled the travails and wanderings of Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. The first groups of Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam in 1654 and 1655 came from the West Indies and Recife, Brazil. One impetus to the formation of the congregation was the arrival in New Amsterdam of a Sephardi merchant, Abraham de Lucena, in 1655 with a Torah scroll he had borrowed from an Amsterdam synagogue.

In the early years of Congregation Shearith Israel, its members met in a private home on Mill Street in lower Manhattan.