Mordecai:  An Early American Family.  By Emily Bingham.  New York:  Hill and Wang, 2003.   346 pages. $26.00 cloth.

     Lately, the field of American Southern Jewish history has experienced a renaissance. Beginning in the seventies, scholars researched the history, demographics, religiosity, immigration, and acculturation experiences of Jews from all over the South. Despite an intense initial investigation, Southern Jewish historical studies stagnated over the next two decades. A resurgence in the interest of ethnic studies within the South, a desire to broaden the black/white paradigm that has framed much of the scholarship on the region, and a discovery of new sources have encouraged a renewed interest in Southern Jewry. Most students of Southern Jewry, like their Northern counterparts, have framed their investigations around anti-Semitism and assimilation. While this is a good way to uncover the Jewish experience in the South, recent scholars have discovered that, at times, this approach tends to marginalize Southern Jews from other Southerners.
    Perhaps a statement on increased American tolerance, Emily Bingham’s Mordecai: An Early American Family is not burdened with the politicized discourses often found in American Jewish historical narratives. Unlike earlier scholars, Bingham does not feel obligated to provide a litany of the worthy contributions the Mordecai family made to Southern society. Nor does she actively create a triumphalist narrative, in which the Mordecais overcame opposition, anti-Semitism, and marginalization to gain acceptance by white Protestant Southerners. In fact, Bingham’s work assumes a priori that the Mordecais were Southerners and supports recent conclusions that a single American Southern Jewish experience does not exist. Bingham trusts her sources, and her balanced story effectively chronicles the public and private lives of a Southern Jewish family affected by the changing events and ideologies of the Revolutionary, early Republic, and Civil War eras. To tie the members of the Mordecai clan together, Bingham invents the secular and religious framework of "enlightened domesticity" in which the family "seized upon a protective covenant fusing bourgeois domesticity, intellectual cultivation, and religious liberalism" (5). According to Bingham, this philosophy shaped individual family members’ world views, personal decisions, and approaches to religion and education.
     Fulfilling the project of enlightened domesticity proved to be a difficult task during the first half of the 19th century. In many ways, its concerted emphasis on reason encouraged the questioning of traditional family values. Additionally, increased focus on education, Christianity, gender norms, sentimental love, notions of Southern white middle-class respectability, individualism, and appropriate sexuality created conflicts between notions of respectability among the generations. Consequently, many Mordecais chafed at fulfilling family expectations of domestic enlightenment while carving lives that were personally and publicly satisfying.
      Most of the Mordecai family members had few problems as children fulfilling the precepts of enlightened domesticity, but a they approached adulthood, most rejected their father’s and grandfather’s notions of respectability. Most of the Mordecai men favored newly developed forms of individualism and pursued their public and private goals while barely consulting their fathers and rarely considering the family. Many were successful in trade, law, medicine, and the military. Most did not marry Jews. Because of coverture laws and reigning gender philosophies of the day, the Mordecai women had less freedom to make their choices, but they still exercised their own agency. For example, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, always the dutiful daughter, assisted her father in the academy he founded and helped school several family members, yet converted to Christianity on her deathbed after years of wrestling with her faith. Ellen Mordecai, paled in Rachel’s shadow, also assisted with the domestic upkeep of family homes, farm, and schools, yet converted and maintained a rather successful living by publishing her conversion experiences. Caroline Mordecai Plunkett fell into a deep depression abiding by her father’s refusal to accept a suitor, yet ultimately married Achilles Plunkett, a non-Jew. Only one daughter, Emma, remained faithful to Judaism. The third generation proved to be even more interesting. Rachel Mordecai Lazarus’s son, Marx Edgeworth Mordecai, led a rather unorthodox life as he actively promoted the free love movement. His sister, Ellen Lazarus, became a radicalized feminist and was intent on becoming a physician of alternative therapies.
     Emily Bingham has accomplished something truly amazing. To create such a descriptive composite of the Mordecai family, she examined thousands of 18th-and 19th-century diaries, letters, journals, business logs, and other ephemera. This research was difficult, time-consuming, and laborious. Employing an evocative writing style, Bingham created a work that represents the best of family biography, one in which readers may access the connections between the generations to gain a clearer understanding of the early 19th-century Southern experience.
     Problems within Bingham’s work reflect the genre’s shortcomings and are not the fault of the author. While framing an entire history around anti-Semitism is limiting, the sources Bingham used suggest that anti-Semitism was virtually nonexistent. Elsewhere, scholars of Southern Jewry have argued that anti-Semitism existed in the 19th-century South in social relations and discourse, trading practices, and politics. Bingham’s sources hint at the existence of anti-Semitism but fail to fully flesh out or respond to this anti-Semitism. Enlightened domesticity emphasizes retreat into the home, domestic Judaism, and overcoming perceived shortcomings of the family. The question begs, "What is the family steeling themselves against?" Additionally, biography privileges historical voices and sacrifices overarching context. Contextualizing the Mordecais’ experiences within larger 19th-century social, economic, and political systems would facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the Mordecais as Southerners and Jews. Bingham seemingly anticipates this though, as she provides an extensive bibliographic essay at the end of the book. The essay is divided by topics, making it easy for interested readers to consult suggested readings.
     The shortcomings mentioned are minor, and Mordecai: An Early American Family is a compelling read to all scholars and those interested in a wide range of 19th-century topics, beyond just Southern Jewry. Those less interested in things academic will also enjoy the biography as a first-rate family saga that details the trials and tribulations of one American Southern family.

JENNIFER A. STOLLMAN