Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik Heather S. Nathans (bio) Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York allan amanik New York University Press, 2019 272 pp. "How best to organize the dead," Allan Amanik queries in the first chapter of Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York (16). Questions of organization, based on geography, law, money, politics, family, and faith, thread through Amanik's richly researched study and inform his nuanced exploration of the development of Jewish burial practices and traditions in New York from the time of the earliest Jewish settlement to the turn of the twenty-first century. As Amanik argues, studying the abiding quest for control of cemeteries and rituals for the dead or dying can offer significant insights into the challenge so many struggling Jewish communities faced in establishing or maintaining control against the pressures of a predominantly Gentile American culture. Amanik divides the study into five chapters, plus an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue. As he notes in chapter 1, "A dedicated Jewish graveyard not only represented the first communal and public space that Jews created in North America but counted among several legal, social, and religious privileges that paved the way for long-term settlement in the colony" (19). Amanik uses the struggle to establish the first Jewish burial ground to wrestle with the dream of permanent settlement in the young Dutch colony. He describes the reluctance of the Christian Dutch rulers to grant the 1655 petition of three Sephardic Jewish merchants to purchase land for a graveyard, even though no Jews had yet died in New Amsterdam. As Amanik astutely observes, the Dutch leaders denied the petition, "likely hoping to discourage permanent settlement" (19). But despite the efforts of the Dutch and then the British authorities, Jewish families began to establish themselves in New York City, and the controversy over burial practices shifted to reflect internal debates within the Jewish community. Those ranged from disputes over family burial versus chronological burial (many early congregations maintained that burials should be organized by date of death, rather than family name), to how or whether to bury the Christian spouses of those who had married outside the Jewish community, but who had not converted to Christianity. Additionally, synagogues faced hard financial realities in trying to maintain their activities among [End Page 895] comparatively small populations, and as Amanik notes, burial practices and the access to sanctioned burial spaces provided leverage for synagogue leaders to shore up their scanty resources by requiring that regular dues be paid (or be paid retroactively at the time of a loved one's death) in order to provide access to these all-important sites. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which death rituals and funerals helped to shape a new system of "grassroots Jewish burial societies" that pushed back against the authority of synagogue leaders and the community's wealthiest families (46). If the burial regulations of the colonial and early national era had defined who was "inside" and who was "outside" centers of power in Jewish New York, the rising fraternal organizations demonstrated that Jewish citizens were willing to establish their own structures based on "collectivism and mutual regard" (49). Perhaps not surprisingly, these emerging organizations mirrored the national rhetoric as it shifted toward a more sentimental concept of citizenship. While American Jewish communities might have gotten a later start in creating burial societies than some of their European or colonial counterparts, their post-Revolutionary activity shaped them into "transitional institutions" (55). As Amanik argues, the increasing schisms among late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century synagogues decentralized the synagogue's collective influence just as fraternal organizations began to demonstrate that they could offer more effective (and less restrictive) opportunities for Jewish philanthropy and community. In chapter 3, Amanik focuses on the "Rural Cemetery Movement," as a watershed moment in the history of Jewish American burial practices. The movement marked a trend toward establishing cemeteries outside of crowded city centers and making them resemble lavishly landscaped gardens. Moreover, in a reversal of earlier policy, the new Jewish cemeteries traded on being...