A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820

by Eli Faber

Book Overview

Volume I: A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820

In the autumn of 1654, twenty-three Jews aboard the bark Sainte Catherine landed at the town of New Amsterdam to establish the first permanent Jewish settlement in North America. In A Time for Planting, Eli Faber recounts these earliest days of Jewish life in America, as Jews from Lisbon to Amsterdam to London extended the wanderings of their centuries-old...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801851203
• ISBN13: 9780801851209
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Amazing; Great Book, Great Story

A great history of an ethnic group includes a great general history. In this book, the reader learns about the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal; Jewish life in Brazil and Barbados; the struggle for religious liberty in America; and how Jewish life in America differed from Jewish life in Barbados, Holland and even England. This book is about all of America, and every American should read it. In this book, historian Eli Faber discusses the diverse origins of the earliest Jewish settlers in America. Faber describes the innovative response of Jewish-Americans to the unusual political and social circumstances of colonial America. These first Jewish-Americans, Faber informs us, established community life based on voluntary association, in a free and an open country. More striking than the changes Jewish-Americans made of necessity, however, are the many remarkable adapatations that Jewish-Americans made voluntarily. Faber describes an innovative community of pioneering Jews. Faber is a scholar who has done considerable research. However objectively written, this story is unavoidably compelling. You will love the people and the country described in this book. The optimism of the Americans in this book is contagious. Teachers will, and should, recommend this book to high school and college students. Therefore, I hesitate to divulge too many details. So many stories and so many individuals in this book make the book worth reading. The lives of Jewish-Americans in colonial and revolutionary America, and the lives of the non-Jews who were their compatriots, make a story worth reading and telling. Other books on the origin and establishment of immigrant communities in colonial America include David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed," a history of four large regional cultures established in colonial British North America; and Richard S. Dunn's "Sugar and Slaves," about the establishment of planter culture and servant and slave life in the British West Indies. "A New World Gentry," by Richard Waterhouse, and a chapter in "The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies," by Jack P. Greene, tell the story of the merchant-planter class in South South Carolina, while "Rice and Slaves," by Daniel C. Littlefield, tells of the origin of many of their slaves.