Rebecca Gratz:​ Philanthropist, Educator… Romantic Heroine?

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Rebecca Gratz helped to shape the vibrant cultural life of Philadelphia after the Revolutionary War. A second-generation immigrant, she supported artists and public institutions, and pioneered co-ed religious and cultural education for American Jewish children. She lived a remarkable life, and lived long enough to be photographed. She is also sometimes credited with being the real-life prototype for one of the nineteenth century’s most popular heroines, Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca.

Host: Lucy

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Further Reading

Dianne Ashton, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.
 
Jonathon Awtrey, “Enlightened Judaism: Polite Sociability and Jewish Migrants' Pursuits of Status in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 110 (2022): 241-258.
 
Emily Bingham, “Rachel Mordecai Lazarus,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.
 
Judith Lewin, “Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identification, and the Portraits of Rebecca Gratz,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 10 (Fall 5766/2005): 178-212.
 
William Pencak, “Anti-Semitism, Toleration, and Appreciation: The Changing Relations of Jews and Gentiles in Early America,” in: The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, 241-262.
 
William Pencak, “Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126:3 (2002): 365-408. 
 
Jonathan D. Sarna, Coming to Terms with America: Essays on Jewish History, Religion, and Culture.
 
Jonathan D. Sarna, “‘God Loves an Infant’s Praise: Cultural Borrowing and Cultural Resistance in Two Nineteenth-Century Jewish American Sunday-School Texts,” Jewish History 27 (2013): 73-89.

​​Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)