Eldest child of Moses Raphael Levy and his first wife, Richea Asher, Bilhah Abigail Levy was a well-read, literate Jewish woman whose letters provide one of the most complete and dynamic portraits available of the lives of Jewish women in early America. Abigail, as she was commonly known, frequently wrote to her absent eldest son, Naphtali, to discuss matters political, social, familial, American, and Jewish. The numerous surviving letters of this correspondence of the 1730s and 1740s provide valuable insights into Jewish life in the British American colonies.
Born in London, where she spent her first eight years, it was nevertheless in New York that she would spend the bulk of her life–although after a painful incident later in life she would write of her desire to leave that city behind. Abigail’s parents provided her with a classical education, evidenced by the references to mythology and classical learning found peppered throughout her letters and by the strong engagement she maintained with contemporary literature—Fielding, Dryden, Montesquieu, and Pope were among her favorites. In 1708, when Abigail was twelve, her parents took in a young boarder recently arrived from London named Jacob Franks. Four years later, when she was sixteen, Abigail would wed this young merchant.
Abigail and Jacob would have nine children together, of whom seven survived to adulthood. It was these children who served as the primary focus of her attention. Abigail sought to provide her children with an education close to what she herself had received. At the same time, it was equally important to her that her children move in the right circles of New York society while maintaining an essential commitment to Judaism. She prided herself on her own observance of the Sabbath, as well as her frequent attendance at synagogue services and the strict level of kashrut she maintained at home. She would send kosher meat to her son Naphtali in London and advised him against eating in her brother Asher’s house because of his carelessness about kashrut. Yet, despite her best efforts, two of her children married non-Jews and this caused her acute pain. When it finally came to light in the spring of 1742 that daughter, Phila, had secretly wed Oliver DeLancey in September of 1742, Abigail quit town and, avoiding even the family’s country home in Harlem, left for Flatbush. There she composed a pained letter to Naphtali, so overcome with grief that she complained, “I can hardly hold my Pen whilst I am writing.” Abigail never again spoke to Phila. As for her son, David, who married Margaret Evans, she wrote, “for my part, if I can’t throw him from My heart I Will by my Conduct have the Appearance of it[,] it’s a Firey Tryall.”
Nevertheless, although she disapproved of intermarriage with Gentiles and embraced certain forms of religious observance, Abigail had little patience with conformity for the sake of appearance. “I must Own,” she wrote in 1739, “I cant help Condemning the Many Supersti[ti]ons we are Clog’d with & heartly wish a Calvin or Luther would rise amongst Us. I Answer for myself. I would be the first of their followers for I don’t think religeon Consist in Idle Ceremonies and works of Supperoregations.” The society of the small Jewish community of New York around Congregation Shearith Israel was frequently not to her taste. “And Indeed I don’t often See her,” Abigail wrote to Naphtali, gossiping about a member of the community, “Nor any of our Ladys but at Synagogue for they are a Stupid Set of people.” Yet she was very much at the center of this community, with both her father and her husband serving the synagogue as parnas. When she died in New York in May 1756, six months shy of her 60th birthday, she was blissfully unaware that her children would eventually abandon the America she staunchly defended against her son Naphtali’s affected air of English superiority for a return to England.
