American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (6 page)

Zadoc Staab (center) with Jewish merchants and Kiowa Indians.

Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 7890.

I
can find no record of Julia’s first years in Santa Fe—no newspaper stories, no archived documents, no memories preserved in her hand. I don’t know if she came to love or fear Abraham, or if the marriage came to feel like a home or a prison to her, or if he simply remained a stranger. I don’t know if she always found the roughness of her new city to be a trial, or if there were moments when she relished the adventure and came to appreciate the stark beauty of the place.

There were a only a few other Jewish wives when Julia arrived—mostly spouses of the Spiegelbergs and Abraham’s brother Zadoc. Some of the Jewish immigrants had wedded local women: one merchant, Solomon Bibo, married into the local Acoma tribe and became its governor. But others imported their mates from elsewhere—Jewish wives who had followed their Jewish husbands who had followed their brothers and cousins to America in a chain of family and village migration.

It must have been a comfort to Julia when her younger brother, Ben Schuster, joined that chain, arriving in Santa Fe six months after her and moving in with the family, to work as a “drummer”—a traveling salesman—for the firm. Among family, perhaps she felt less alone. And it must have been a blow when, just months after Julia arrived, Abraham’s brother Zadoc and his wife, Fanny, who had come to Santa Fe as a bride in 1862, moved permanently to New York City, where Zadoc set up as the firm’s official East Coast and European buyer. Julia must have mourned the loss of her Santa Fe sister-in-law, who came as close as Julia could get to replacing the sisters she had left behind.

Perhaps in this time she leaned on the other Jewish merchants’ wives, who also spoke German and bemoaned the dust and the dryness and tried to re-create some semblance of the world in which they had grown up. They paid calls at each other’s mud houses, walking the dusty streets with parasols or traveling by carriage. They took afternoon teas and late suppers.

These women were strangers to each other—all from different villages and cities. But they were German and Jewish in a place where no other women were, and they became their own tribe. The first Yom Kippur service was observed in Santa Fe in 1860, shortly after the first Spiegelberg wife arrived. After the Jewish wives had borne children, a Denver rabbi traveled to New Mexico and “circumcised a large number of children at an advanced age.” The hosts, according to an article
in the Ohio Jewish weekly
The Israelite
, were impressed with “the scientific manner in which the operation was performed.”

This was a ritual that took place across the frontier. Jewish families laid down shallow roots in unwelcoming soil—strangers in a strange land—and hoped that they would thrive.

It would not have been unusual for Santa Fe’s German Jews to feel as if they were strangers. They had always been outsiders. They had lived in Germany, after all. Though Jews had been in the German states since the time of the Romans—“It is terribly cold and the air is thick with the colossal chill” wrote a tenth-century Jewish merchant who plied the trade routes near Lügde—they weren’t at all considered to
be
German. Traders and merchants and moneylenders, they were set apart by their faith and their dress and their mercantile niche and their language—
Judendeutsch
, Yiddish. They were foreigners, an invasive species. It didn’t matter how long they had lived in Germany, which during Julia’s childhood was not yet a country but rather a constellation of feudal principalities ruled by kings, counts, dukes, bishops, lords, and margraves. Jews were tolerated within that constellation only because of their money. “The town of Beeskow” wrote one Prussian tax commissary to King Frederick William I in 1720, “would like to have a wealthy Jew.”

The Jews loaned money to impecunious German sovereigns, bought and sold things that others couldn’t or wouldn’t, and funded and supplied armies—much as Abraham and the Spiegelbergs would later do in New Mexico. These were the things that Jews
could
do in Germany in the years before Abraham left. What they couldn’t do, depending on which principality they called home, was buy houses without special permission; walk on the sidewalks; farm; employ non-Jews; open stores; own stores facing the street; sell meat to Christians; make
cheese or beer; ride in a carriage; trade in wool, wood, leather, tobacco, or wine; or practice a guild craft.

In Berlin, kosher Jews were compelled upon their marriage to purchase wild boars bagged on the royal hunting grounds. Later, newlyweds were required to purchase china from the Royal Porcelain Factory—seconds and other pieces that wouldn’t sell, unloaded by the factory’s manager at above-market prices. It is said that Moses Mendelssohn, the great philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment and the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, acquired twenty life-size porcelain monkeys in this fashion. They were garish, foppish creatures, their paws outstretched as if begging.

In some German principalities, Jews were forced to attend church; in others, they wore yellow “Jew badges”; in yet others, they were required to doff their hats to anyone they met in the street who commanded
“Jud, mach Mores!”
—Jew, show your manners. If a local Jew went bankrupt, the other Jews in the community had to pay his debts. There were separate cemeteries for Jews, of course, and separate gallows.

The rules were different from village to village. Lügde was ruled by the Catholic bishop of Paderborn. The town of Bad Pyrmont, only four kilometers away, was governed by the hereditary prince of Saxony. In Lügde, Jews were tolerated in various trades; in Bad Pyrmont they were forbidden from any business. There were kind sovereigns and brutal ones; good harvests and poor ones; times of health and plagues; moments of quiet acceptance and years of anti-Semitic riots, shop-burnings, and expulsions. “From time to time we enjoyed peace,” wrote Glückel of Hameln, a seventeenth-century merchant’s wife who hailed from a city twenty kilometers from Lügde, “and again were hunted forth; and so it has been to this day.”

The first mention of a Jew in Lügde was in 1598—a man named Salomon, a moneylender in dispute with his debtors. He probably wasn’t
the first Jew to reside in Lügde, however. Jews were often expelled from German villages, and allowed back in, and, when hard times hit, expelled again. They were blamed for plagues and bad harvests, and accused of poisoning wells, stealing Christian babies (to circumcise them), and using Christian blood for sacramental purposes.

A butcher named “Isaac the Jew”—a Schuster ancestor, perhaps—appeared in the criminal records in late 1651 and for many years after that, accused of such atrocities as slaughtering animals fourteen days before Advent, selling veal to a woman “pretending falsely to be pregnant during the fasting period,” beating his wife on Sundays, marrying illegally, and allowing calves to be brought into the city on Palm Sunday. For each of these transgressions, he was issued a fine or thrown in jail (and also issued a fine). Other Jews were docked for similar violations: selling oil, inviting peasants inside their houses, carrying meat outside the city, brawling, mismeasuring, or carrying chalk on Christian holidays.

The German Jews paid taxes, lots of them: they were taxed as Jews when they came to live in a new place, and taxed each year they lived there. When they traveled, they paid an extra “Jew tax” at each town gate they passed. A list of those items subject to customs taxes upon entering the city of Mainz during the eighteenth century included: “Honey, Hops, Wood, Jews, Chalk, Cheese and Charcoal.” In Berlin, Jews passed through a gate reserved for livestock and Jews. And paid a tax to do so, of course. They were taxed at births, weddings, and funerals; taxed to open a house of worship, and taxed to keep it open. Those who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay were “unprotected Jews,” and had no right to stay. Isaac the Jew was allowed to remain in Lügde in the mid-1600s provided he paid two talers every year for his “letter of protection” and eighteen groschen for his wife. The eighteenth-century Schusters would have paid for this “protection,” too—along with the head tax, and the levy to support the church’s sexton and pastor, and the
fee required to keep their businesses open, and a hefty “goat’s-wage” to keep livestock in town. When Lügde’s firefighting equipment fell into disrepair, the two hundred Christians in town supplied the money to pay for four new buckets; the Jews financed fourteen.

Jews in Lügde were relatively lucky, though. They could own their houses there. After the 1740s, they could also own land. But they couldn’t farm, unless they could do so with exclusively Jewish labor, which most Jews couldn’t. They couldn’t practice a craft, like lacemaking or woodworking—this was forbidden by law at first, and later by the guilds, whose charters excluded murderers, thieves, adulterers, blasphemers, and Jews. So they stuck to what was permitted: butchering, peddling goods, trading gold and precious stones, and later, horses. They lent money, but if the amount was more than five talers, they had to make the loan in court under witness, because Jews were known to lie.

By the mid-1700s there were five “protected” Jewish families in Lügde, concentrated in the quarter south of the marketplace. Julia’s grandparents were among them. They weren’t allowed to attend Christian schools, though they all learned to read, regardless of wealth and status. Until the early nineteenth century the Jews of Lügde had no surnames. Jewish men were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or both; women were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or their husbands: Glückel came from the town of Hameln; thus she was known as Glückel of Hameln. Moses was the son of Mendel; he was Moses Mendelssohn. Julia’s father was Levi David Schuster: Levi ben (son of) David. His father was David ben Levi.

The practice was confusing, even for the Jews, so when the royal government of Westphalia granted Jews citizenship rights and duties in 1807, it concluded that Jews should be named and counted—all the better to be taxed. Some were named for their villages, and some for their trades: Kramer meant merchant; Kaufmann, too; Staab was a
term for “rod” or “staff” and indicated a person who held some authority; Schuster, Julia’s family name, meant shoemaker, though there’s no indication that anyone ever made shoes. A family genealogy suggests they were so named because their house looked like a shoe.

Lügde’s Jewish population peaked at 130 in 1863, at the crest of the wave of emigration that swept Abraham and Julia—and many Lügde brothers and cousins—to the New World. By 1871, there were 105 Jews in Lügde. They all left eventually; those who remained would later, of course, be forced to leave.

In New Mexico, the Staabs and Spiegelbergs and Schusters were Jewish by birth but American by choice. If the Jewish community had been small and insular in Germany, it was even smaller in Santa Fe. The dry land in which these ambitious merchants settled was a place of remarkable fluidity as Mexican rule gave way to American governance, a barter economy to capitalism, and community land to fenced plots. Jews had been dark-skinned in Germany. Now they were “white,” at least when compared with the Indians and mestizo Spanish and free blacks and Chinese who lived beside them.