Reviewed by Pamela S. Nadell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Pamela S. Nadell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Pamela S. Nadell, American University

The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733–1748. Edited by Edith B. Gelles. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 186 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
In 1968 Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer published The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Colonial Correspondence. Though subtitled Letters of the Franks Family, thirty-four of the thirty-seven letters were penned by Abigaill Levy Franks. Writing well before the burgeoning of women's and gender history refocused scholarly vision of the past, Hershkowitz and Meyer conceded that "perhaps, Abigail was not a particularly important person, — few colonial women were." Their hope that these letters would spur another scholar to pursue the story of the Franks family's and colonial Jewry's "rôle as importers and exporters during the age of mercantilism" attests to their particular interests. Nevertheless, Hershkowitz and Meyer praised "the richness of [Abigaill's] literary legacy to posterity." Yet, perhaps indicative of their own ambivalence, they also wrote: "The reader may either like or dislike Abigail, who was remembered as the 'amiable consort of her husband.'"¹	1
Now Edith B. Gelles, who has already given readers a splendid biography of another colonial Abigail (Adams), turns her estimable talents to Bilhah Abigaill Levy Franks, not only restoring her preferred orthography but also reintroducing a woman who was indisputably an actor and an agent in her own right. This edition of Franks's letters appears just in time to join the slew of books published to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in America.² Gelles builds on Hershkowitz and Meyer's work, letting stand their prodigious footnotes, a testament to their enormous knowledge of the worlds of colonial Jewry, and she integrates their bibliography into hers. Her new edition also includes another of Abigaill's letters, more recently discovered and subsequently published by Hershkowitz in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly.	2
But Gelles's edition departs from the earlier work significantly. First and foremost these are no longer the letters of the Franks family. They have become what they always were: a one-sided view of the fifteen-year correspondence between Abigaill Levy Franks and her eldest child Naphtali, who left New York to make his fortune in England, and whom, to her deep regret, she never saw again. In Gelles's hands the additional letters—two written to Naphtali by his brother David and one by his father Jacob—do not displace Abigaill from her rightful place in the title. Gelles punctuates the letters, making them far more accessible to students and a broader readership. Building on a generation of scholarship in women's history, she has written a masterful introduction that reveals the richness of Abigaill's life, proving her to have been far more than the amiable consort of her husband.	3
Born in London in 1696, Bilhah Abigaill Levy, the eldest of the five children of Moses Raphael and Richea Asher Levy, came to New York City with her family around 1703. There she dropped the name Bilhah, which recalled Rachel's handmaiden, the mother of two of Jacob's twelve sons. A few years later, Abigaill's mother died, leaving her eleven-year-old daughter, the only female, to care for her younger brothers until Moses wed again. Perhaps the tensions that erupted between the children of this first marriage and their new stepmother propelled Abigaill to marry Jacob Franks at the age of sixteen, which was uncommonly young for colonial Jewish women. Jacob came from London from a large, thriving Jewish merchant family, yet Abigaill's letters display little interest in her husband's business affairs other than that of the naturally concerned wife: "I never knew the benifit of the Sabath before, but Now I am Glad when it comes for his Sake, that he may have a Little reLaxation from t[ha]t Continuall Hurry he is in" (91).	. . .

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