| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mordecai: An Early American Family. By Emily Bingham. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. xiv, 346 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-8090-2756-9.)

Emily Bingham's book Mordecai traces the history of a Jewish family in the early nineteenth-century American South. Bingham's focus is on Jacob Mordecai and his family, including two wives and thirteen children, as they strove to improve their fortunes in Virginia and North Carolina. After various false starts in business, Jacob and his family launched a successful school for females in Warrenton, North Carolina, that afforded them a measure of prosperity. Established in 1808, the school absorbed the energies of several of Jacob's children, but none was more important to the effort than his daughter Rachel. Indeed, Bingham's book centers on Rachel Mordecai (Lazarus) and her children to such a degree that it might be called a biography wrapped inside a family history. Settling eventually in Wilmington, North Carolina, Rachel married Aaron Lazarus and raised four children of her own, two of whom (Marx and Ellen) headed north where they participated in a variety of reform movements, including water cures, vegetarianism, free love, and Fourierism. The book concludes with a view of the Mordecai family during the Civil War.

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