Reviews of Books

Exchanging Faiths: An Experimental School in Small-Town North Carolina

Reviewed by Eve Kornfeld, San Diego State University

In Ways of Wisdom, Jean E. Friedman examines an unusual educational experiment and family drama set in small-town North Carolina during the early republic. The book tells the story of the Warrenton Female Academy, opened in 1808, and of the Orthodox Jews—Jacob Mordecai, his daughter Rachel, and her siblings—who ran it on enlightened principles of pedagogy amid a society stirring with evangelical Protestant piety. At the heart of this volume is the diary kept by Rachel Mordecai (Lazarus) from 1816 to 1822, which traces her efforts to tutor her younger half-sister Eliza as the girl developed from age seven to thirteen. Friedman introduces the diary and sets it in context, drawing on family history, literary criticism, child development theory, and theology. Her emphasis on the ethnic and religious dimensions of moral education promises to deepen and complicate our understanding of republican motherhood and sisterhood, the American Enlightenment, generational tensions, and cultural borderlands in the early republic.

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Rachel Mordecai led a fascinating life. Her father, Jacob, raised in a German-Jewish merchant family in Philadelphia, picked up stakes at the close of the Revolutionary War and at age twenty-two embarked with his wife Judith on a new life in rural North Carolina. Orthodox Jews in a Christian society, merchants in a plantation economy, the Mordecai family nonetheless won acceptance in the community. Rachel, born in 1788, was the second child and first daughter in a family that would eventually grow to six children. Her mother died in 1796, when Rachel was eight; Jacob married his first wife's half-sister two years later and fathered seven more children. Business troubles came a few years after. As the American economy sputtered in the wake of Jefferson's Embargo, Jacob Mordecai failed in trade and sought a fresh start in the field of education. The Warrenton Female Academy was the new family business, in which nineteen-year-old Rachel and her siblings were enlisted as teachers. The school succeeded thanks to its innovative plan of moral instruction: it employed the enlightened pedagogy pioneered by the Anglo-Irish educational reformer Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his novelist-daughter Maria and publicized through their many publications. Rachel also put the Edgeworths' methods to work, along with Orthodox Jewish traditions, in educating Eliza, the mixed results of which are recorded in her diary. The ambitious instructor saw herself as part of transatlantic community of reformers; in this effort, she actively corresponded with Maria Edgeworth about pedagogy, family, and other moral issues. That career ended in 1821, when she married the widower Aaron Lazarus of Wilmington, North Carolina, and devoted the rest of her days in that town to caring for and educating his seven older children and four more born to the couple between 1822 and 1830. Yet her spirit remained restless; despite outward faithfulness as an Orthodox Jewish wife and mother, Rachel grew increasingly attached to Wilmington's community of evangelical Protestant women and, to the dismay of her husband and family, converted to Christianity on her deathbed in 1838.

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