Letters.
[Gratz, Rebecca]. Philipson, David, Edited by. Letters of Rebecca Gratz. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929.
8vo.; with frontis portrait and three additional plates; original brown cloth; two tiny spots on right upper corner of front cover; spine just a bit faded; all in all a near fine copy.
First edition. Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), pioneer Jewish charitable worker and Sunday school founder, was a noted beauty. Her innate goodness, no less than her beauty, led Sir Walter Scott to model his heroine, Rebecca, in Ivanhoe after her. The daughter of German Jewish immigrants, her father was actively associated with the Philadelphia synagogue, Mikveh Israel. Both sides of her family were affiliated with the Sephardic Jews, who established the colonial Hebrew congregations. She was painted by Edward Malbone and Thomas Sully among others, and these portraits attest to the beauty of Rebecca Gratz. Although her home was the center of fashionable life in Philadelphia, she was not content to be a society woman of leisure. At the age of twenty she helped organize the pioneering Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances and served as their first secretary. She was among the founders of the nonsectarian Philadelphia Orphan Asylum, serving as secretary for over forty years. She created the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society (1819) and the Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum (1855). She led in the establishment of the Fuel Society and the Sewing Society, all the while raising nine children of her sister Rachel who had died in 1823.
Her most significant achievement was the establishment of the Hebrew Sunday School Society of Philadelphia (1838), based on the model of the Christian Sunday school movement which she had learned of through her friendship with several Protestant ministers who were active in it.
Although there is no written documentation, members and friends of the Gratz family maintained that Washington Irving, an intimate friend of Rebecca Gratz, described her to Scott on a visit to Abbosford and that Scott built his heroine from this description. Further, tradition maintains that Rebecca Gratz had refused to marry Samuel Ewing, son of the president of the University of Pennsylvania, as he was not of her faith. Her great charm combined with her spinsterhood offer circumstantial evidence for this version of her life, so similar to the experiences of Rebecca in Ivanhoe. The maintained tradition that Rebecca Gratz would not marry out of her faith was indeed a strong one in Mikvah Israel. It prevented Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach (1876-1952), the greatest antiquarian bookseller of all time, from marrying his companion of many years, Carrie Price. “The Doctor” was a noted Jewish scholar and so major a donor to the American Jewish Historical Society (especially of the autograph letters of Rebecca Gratz) that he made this institution the major repository of early American Jewish archives. Autograph material by this important American woman is scarce indeed. One wonders if “The Doctor” made it his personal quest to purchase every autograph of Rebecca Gratz he could find—and with his considerable resources, that would be nearly all. His donation of the Gratz letters was made in the name of his mother, who had attended the Rebecca Gratz Sunday School and was “examined” by Miss Gratz in 1841.
NAW II, pp. 75-76.
Rosenbach, by Edwin Wolff and John F. Fleming, pp. 21, 59, 356.
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