Reviewed by Lorri Glover | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2

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Reviewed by Lorri Glover | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Mordecai: An Early American Family. By Emily Bingham. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. Pp. x, 346. $26.00 cloth; $14.00 paper.) Reviewed by Lorri Glover , University of Tennessee
Readers of this evocative narrative will find themselves feeling twice blessed: first, that the Mordecais preserved their fascinating, voluminous family correspondence and, second, that historian Emily Bingham so gracefully brings their stories to life. The book is written for a general audience—which it deserves to garner—so analytical frameworks and engagement of historiographical debates receive far less overt attention than does lively storytelling. That said, the book is quite sophisticated. Historians of family, women, religion, reformism, medicine, education, refinement, and the South will see their work delicately interwoven into this family's story. But, mostly, scholars and lay readers alike will enjoy meeting these mesmerizing Mordecais.	1
The Mordecai saga commences with the migration of Jacob and Judy Mordecai from Philadelphia to the South in the 1780s. Jacob Mordecai's shortcomings as a businessman, coupled with his questionable lineage (his mother converted from Christianity to Judaism) left him on the margins of Philadelphia's Jewish community, and the South promised a new beginning. In Warrenton, North Carolina, Jacob and Judy found business success and social acceptance. As their prospects grew, so did their family. But Judy's unexpected death in 1796 devastated Jacob and prompted him to create what Bingham defines as a covenant with his children. According to Bingham, this pledge of cooperation, solidarity, and uplift guided the rising generation of Mordecais throughout their adult lives. Even as Jacob remarried (Judy's younger sister, Becky) and fathered more children, most members of the growing Mordecai sibling set devoted themselves to one another and to the task of establishing the family's respectability. As they spread throughout the South in the early decades of the nineteenth century, letters secured their attachments and perpetuated their vision of family.	2
Family loyalty and duty guided the life of Jacob's favorite daughter, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, whose character and commitment to family put her at the heart of the Mordecai clan. (Rachel's extensive writings make her central to Bingham's narrative as well.) Rachel essentially rescued her father from penury by becoming his able partner in running a female boarding school. Along with several of her siblings, Rachel made the academy prosperous, her family respected, and her father proud. She oversaw the education of her young half-sisters (even keeping a two-volume journal of her efforts with one child) before marrying Aaron Lazarus and starting a family of her own. Although Rachel devoted herself to raising her children, she hoped for fewer pregnancies, attempting to balance her abiding intellectual curiosity against the demands of mothering. She, perhaps thankfully, did not live long enough to see her children Marx and Ellen Lazarus flee the South and all that their kin held dear, taking refuge in New York and embracing radical critiques of middle-class values.	3
Although this third generation completed the unraveling of the Mordecai covenant in the mid-nineteenth century, the process began with the marital and religious choices of Rachel's cohort. As Rachel's siblings took spouses, they evidenced the erosion of deference and the growing emphasis on romantic love long demonstrated in family historiography. They also, often unintentionally, subverted the family's Judaism. The marriages of several siblings to Gentiles and the conversion of others to Christianity tested their loyalty to family and weakened their religious bonds. In her extensive investigation of the Mordecai's romantic affairs, Bingham uncovers an oddly suggestive relationship between siblings Sol and Ellen, which is, unfortunately, not fully investigated. (The Sol-Ellen relationship is one of myriad tantalizing episodes, too numerous to recount in a brief review.)	. . .

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