Grace Aguilar

Grace Aguilar was born in the northeast London suburb of Hackney, London, on 2 June 1816.[1] She was the oldest child of her parents, who were both descended from Portuguese Jews. Her family settled in Jamaica and eventually in England in the 18th century following the Portuguese Inquisition. Emanuel, her father, was the lay leader of London's Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and her mother Sarah was active in the city's Jewish community as well. Her religious background and illnesses, both hers and her parents', were major factors in her life and influential on her work.[2][3]

For her first eight years, Aguilar was an only child. During this time, Aguilar suffered from a chronic long-term illness that led her parents to educate her at home.[4] She was tutored in the classics at home and (even in adulthood) was not permitted to move outside of her family circle. Her mother, in keeping with post-Inquisition practice among Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, educated the young Aguilar in her religion and its tenets. Her condition did not stop her from learning to dance and play the harp and piano, common pursuits for middle-class English girls of that era, or traveling. After her brother Emanuel was born in 1823[5] the family went on an extended tour of Gloucestershire.[6]

When Aguilar's father contracted tuberculosis, the family moved to Devon. While Grace was taking care of him, her father taught her the oral history of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, complementing her mother's earlier instruction in Judaism. He may also have taught her Hebrew, which was extremely unusual for a Jewish woman to know at that time. Both her religious and literary interests date to that time of her life; she began indulging them both by making her first efforts at poetry and fiction and attending some Protestant services. A collection of conch shells she found on a Teignmouth beach spurred her to attempt a scientific paper on the subject.[6][7]

Sarah Aguilar's health took a turn for the worse during this period, as she recovered from surgical treatment for an illness that has not yet been identified from the records available, and Grace spent time taking care of her as she had her father.[8] In 1835, at the age of 19, Grace was again taken ill herself, with measles. She never completely recovered.[9]

The family moved to Brighton afterwards, perhaps to be closer to London's Jewish community. The two Aguilar boys had been sent to boarding school, but with her parents' health declining, Grace began to think about her responsibilities to not only them but her brothers as well. She decided to try making a living as a writer, and that year was able to get her first book of poems published. Her first book was successful enough that a second run was printed in 1839, and she began writing in earnest.[8]

Much of this work was published posthumously, with one exception. In 1838 Aguilar's father prevailed upon her to translate Isaac Orobio de Castro's Israel Defended, an apologia for Judaism, from the original French for private distribution among Brighton's Jewish community. She added a preface that, albeit with some ambivalence, explained that she had softened Orobio's castigations of Christians as a result of the tolerance she felt Victorian England had shown to its Jewish population compared with Catholic Spain and Portugal. Two years later the family returned to London.[10]

There, Aguilar befriended the young Benjamin Disraeli, whose father Isaac was a well-known author. The older man was able to help her find a publisher. He declined, but on her own she was able to persuade Isaac Leeser, editor of The Occident, an American Jewish magazine, to publish her theological tract The Spirit of Judaism as the initial volume of a new series of books he was bringing out. The original manuscript was lost at sea, but Aguilar was able to recreate it from her notes, and it was published in 1842. When she received her copy, Aguilar was angry that Leeser had added a preface detailing his differences of opinion with Aguilar.[11]

The book was nevertheless well-received, and Aguilar began publishing poems in small English journals. Isaac D'Israeli now chose to help her, possibly introducing her to Edward Moxon, his own publisher. Moxon in turn introduced her to R. Groombridge & Sons, the large publisher that would eventually bring out most of her work in Britain.[12]

Despite her anger over the preface he added to The Spirit of Judaism, Aguilar continued to publish her poetry in Leeser's journals. She befriended Solomon Cohen, the first Jewish state senator in Georgia and his wife Miriam, which contributed to the success of her work in the South as they distributed her books widely there. In England, her domestic fiction drew readers and acclaim. However, she still needed to run a boys' Hebrew school with her mother to make enough money to live on, an obligation she complained about bitterly and repeatedly in her letters to Miriam Cohen, since she felt it took away from the time she had to write. She also anguished over the fate of her brother Henry, who had chosen a career as a sailor.[13]

The last years of her life were busy. In 1841 she joined with Charlotte Montefiore writing the periodical "The Cheap Jewish Library, Dedicated to the Working Classes", which has been described as "providing a context in which female authors corresponded and encouraged one another in publication, and thus [...] contributing to the beginnings of a Jewish women's movement in England."[14] Aguilar turned to nonfiction, producing Women of Israel, an account of the lives of Jewish women that was recognized as her masterpiece. In 1845, the family was able to move again, to a house on Hackney's Clapton Square, where she tended to her father until his death the following year.[15]

In 1847 Aguilar came down with a spinal paralysis; in spite of the illness she went ahead with a planned trip to Europe. Before her departure some Jewish women of London presented her with a gift and an address recounting her achievements in behalf of Judaism and Jewish women. She later visited Emanuel at Frankfurt, where he had become a successful musician. At first she seemed to benefit by the change of scene and climate, but after a few weeks she went to the baths of Schwalbach for treatment. More symptoms led her return to Frankfurt, where she died on 16 September 1847. Aguilar was buried at the Frankfurt Jewish cemetery in Hessen, Germany. The epitaph of her tombstone was taken from Proverbs 31, the section of the biblical work on the "woman of valor":"Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her at the gate".[16]